Mary Catherine La Mar
That Night in the Ghost Town of Ashcroft
You see yourself as though from the outside, slumped against the steering wheel like a barely conscious crash victim, concealed inside your thick parka with only the pom-pom of your beanie visible. The abandoned ghost town of Ashcroft surrounds you, the outstretched meadow and silvery vein of the rushing Castle Creek illuminated by stars that punctuate the sky like a chorus of brilliant exclamation points. Mountains swell dark and round in the background. At their feet stand the forsaken remains of mining cabins, wooden frames collapsing beneath their own weight, window glass long shattered, leaving black rectangles like sunken eye sockets of skulls. Except for the creek, all is still. The air is unyielding as ice, as though this Colorado ghost town is holding its breath, awaiting what you might do.
Parked on a snowbank, you have come to the end of the of the winding, 12-mile road. No one will show up at this hour, and in early winter. You, Ashcroft, and the mountains are your only witnesses, none of which explain the voice that breaks through the hush.
“This spirit…has exhausted the possibilities…of this life,” it says. It seems to come from inside your head, but it’s not your voice. Not a voice, either, as in, having a distinct timbre and inflection suggesting it belongs to somebody. Its sound obscures all other thought, like sleet freezing solid on a windshield. Although the words aren’t telling you to do anything, merely stating a fact, what you hear is, “The thing you have to do—the one correct action—is kill yourself.”
~
You haven’t driven twenty miles up the highway and then up the black and desolate country road to Ashcroft at two in the morning to die. You’ve come here because you can’t live your life. Your life, with its wrong turns, missed opportunities, and mistakes, is invisible but palpable soot smothering your furniture and apartment walls; wildfire smoke hanging over your plans, dreams, and obligations; a familiar abuse scorching your thoughts, blackening time itself. You can escape all of this, or pretend to, by moving—on foot, by car, it doesn’t matter. You can escape it all by being outside of time and civilization, moving in the night while humanity—the cruelest-seeming witness to your manifold failures—sleeps.
You expected to be alone, not accompanied by a voice. The voice of the universe, the beyond, the ancient poets, or whatever is speaking to you is irritatingly cryptic. Your tears that have been pooling inside your closed lids spill down your face and into your scarf. Why not just say, “Kill yourself”?
“Kill myself,” you say aloud, clinging to the steering wheel as though it is jail bars, your scarf muffling the words. A fearsome thought, yet not one you haven’t had before. And yet before now you’ve never felt you actually might kill yourself, or wanted to. Before, it was just a thought, delicious and vicious, the way wishing something awful to befall a person who treated you badly gives you a perverse flicker of schadenfreude snuffed hastily by remorse. Now, with this thought delivered to you like an edict—no, more like a prophesy—the sadness you feel makes even breathing heartbreaking. You cry like the creek just beyond your driver’s side window, one sustained cry breaking the ice of you down in sheets, until you’re nothing but water drops merging into the sea.
~
This idea, of killing yourself, is provocative, the way inching out onto a ledge is provocative: invigorating in its danger, compelling in its stakes, which are your entire life and being drawn together into a single point in time and space, a smooth, hard bead, a period at the end of a sentence. The period says more than the words that precede it. “The End,” it says. Nothing nebulous, nothing unexpressed. The end is certainty itself.
You yearn for this darkness within you to lessen. Would it lessen if your spirit were free to find a better life for itself—maybe not a perfect life, but one better than you’ve given it?
You feel your spirit straining inside you like an elated child at the beach, tugging at the hand of its caregiver. C’mon! it exclaims with feet dancing. C’mon! You, your life, and all its circumstances and your failures are holding this spirit back. It’s meant for so much more. You’re an inadequate incarnation. How you long to see this spirit run to the water, kicking up sand with its bare feet, and dive into the waves, laughing as seaweed plasters itself on its skin and sunlight sparkles on waves’ crests. And then emerge with handfuls of seashells, exclaiming over each one, and gifting them to beachgoers with infectious joy. C’mon, c’mon! It pushes against your ribs and the walls of your mind; you sense its perplexity at being unable to move freely—or perhaps it’s your perplexity, at being so lost in life, so ineffectual, so inadequate. A failure, you are. A failure.
I’m so sorry, you whisper. The solution settles like a late-fall leaf on your mind: You contain something bigger than you, this life. And you can release it—and the cost is your life.
You lift your head from the steering wheel. Your breath migrates to the windshield, the way insects, trapped indoors, pace the glass, sensing that “outside” is there yet something incomprehensible is in their way. It has frozen into a film of frost on the glass that makes it impossible to see outside. You fumble to open your car door, stand, and gasp as the cold snatches the heat from your cheeks and replaces your warm saliva and air in your throat with an unpleasant peppermint electricity.
But oh!—the beauty. You can hear every cascade of water over rock in the creek like individual instruments in a symphony. When you shift your weight, your boots crunch the snow while a slow breeze makes the pine branches wave and whisper and the leafless aspens sway. The sky is like a speckled eye looking down on you, the only large mammal—or the only one you can hear or see—stirring at this pre-dawn hour.
~
To how many desperate moments does wilderness bear witness? The deer that falls through pond ice, frantically tries not to sink, and fails. The rabbit that races across the meadow in a futile attempt to outrun the swooping hawk. The drama of the will to live. Could wilderness comprehend the drama of the will to die? Is there, you wonder, even such a thing in nature?
I could die right now, you feel—fall forward and let your atoms flutter up in all directions like a flock of tiny sparrows. If only you could will it so. It isn’t a will to die, it’s a letting die, as though you are the deer that falls through the ice, and instead of fighting its way out simply allows itself to sink and to drown. You look around. You could climb into the creek, submerge your face into the numbing wash, and refuse to come up for air. You could strip down to your pajamas or even your underwear, curl into the fetal position on snow and fallen leaves, and shiver there until you fall asleep, never to awaken. In winter temperatures it might take a day or two…or actually you don’t know how long it will take: until this moment your endeavors always have pointed to sustaining your life, not deliberately ending it.
To make myself die, I have to kill myself. You consider how you’d have to cut, crush, freeze, burn, shatter, or asphyxiate your body. You’d have to be both witness and executor of a violent act; it won’t be a beautiful scene like a flock of sparrows fluttering up and away. Then there would be the scope of it: not just one entity, but billions of cells, each one intricately programmed to protect itself from demise. You’d be forcing death on a system comprised of infinitesimal tiny, separate living things that each would endure its own suffering amid a desperate fight to live in spite of you. I might want to die, you realize, but the rest of me wouldn’t.
The voice speaking to you seems to suggest that the only option you have is to kill yourself. But when you take your imagination through the possible details of what it would require to achieve your own death, you see you don’t want any of that. What you want is to die, so that this spirit you house can fully live. You want to let one life, or idea of a life, go, so that another life, another way of living, can thrive. Alone in the wilderness in the ominous yet unassuming pre-dawn hours, this all makes perfect sense to you, and this fact terrifies you, and you drive the twelve miles down the road toward home thinking only of your warm bed, not crying, hardly breathing, your heart beating so fast you think you might die.
Mary Catherine La Mar lives in Colorado where she's lucky to balance her time writing at her desk with exploring in the mountains and often writing there, too. She's working on a memoir about music and the dark sides of creativity as well as a collection of "children's stories" for adults.
