There’s this very large and populous but somewhat insignificant island far to the north where they don’t let you kill yourself, unless you go to Kill Yourself Cave. It can be very annoying, if you want to kill yourself. They try to make it annoying on purpose.
It’s a well-established thing on the island. They really, really don’t like when people kill themselves — why, well, that’s their own business, but they’ve got their own history and their own reasons for feeling as strongly about this as they do — so a long time ago they invested a ton of resources into summoning a deity that would protect all their citizens from self-harm, forever. (Like forty people had to sacrifice themselves to the deity in order to get it to agree to the deal, which some people found a little self-defeating at the time, but it seems to have paid for itself in the long run.)
Now, well, it’s impossible to kill yourself. If you try to jump off a cliffside, right before you hit the ground, you’ll gently float the rest of the way down. Try and swallow poison, it’ll turn to water as soon as it hits your tongue. Ropes snap, guns misfire, knives instantly rust and vanish into dust before they can pierce your veins. It’s powerful stuff, this magic. They picked a good deity.
Not to say it doesn’t have its problems! The magic only works if you actually do want to intentionally kill yourself, unfortunately. So about once every twenty years or so some kid accidentally does kill themselves while trying to kill themselves without actually killing themselves, just to see the magic in action, and it’s always a tragedy but still, most everyone agrees it’s way better than the way it used to be.
It’s much more comforting for the parents at the funeral when they can say, yes, it’s sad that our little idiot isn’t with us anymore, but at least we know they wanted to be.
But the people of the island did have to carve out an exception, as per the deity’s wishes, so they went ahead and set up Kill Yourself Cave.
It’s not as simple as just going to the cave, and even getting there isn’t easy. That does probably prevent some of it, or so they say. You can prevent people from doing a lot of bad or crazy things just by making it a big enough pain in ass, and the trip to Kill Yourself Cave is a big schlep.
But a lot of people do want to kill themselves. It’s not a terrible place to live, the island, but it has more than its fair share of problems and of people with problems, including you, and one day you decided you’d had enough of it all and finally go to make the journey.
For three weeks, you journey by carriage, and then horseback, and then by the trail, through the cold snow and sloping mountains. More than a few times, somebody asks you where you’re headed, and you tell them earnestly that you’re going to Kill Yourself Cave to kill yourself.
A couple of people your age or younger frown, but close to everybody else just laughs and wishes you luck. They figure they don’t need to waste any time trying to convince you otherwise; after all, almost nobody ever actually makes to the end of Kill Yourself Cave. Everybody knows that.
Once you get there, you find out that there’s a long line — they only let one person in the cave every two hours, as to stagger them — and so you’re given a ticket and a green badge, which is affixed to your forehead, held there by a blue paste you are told will never dissolve until you will to. You’re told that you may not take the badge off even once throughout the process, and that it will prevent you from lying. All of the cave’s staff, men and women wearing green vestments and holding silver clipboards, are wearing similar badges, which they explain do the same thing.
As you wait — about six days, you’re told, though many people change their minds before it’s their turn, so you should expect about four — you are interviewed by the cave staff. At this point, no effort is made to convince you of anything, and you are only asked simple questions: your name, age, hometown, and, only once, if you want to kill yourself. Everyone speaks very sweetly to you, even the stern-looking man asking this question. If there’s any judgement on their end, you can’t detect it.
After you reaffirm that you do, you are asked to say that you do not, even if you know it isn’t the case. You try, but no sound leaves your mouth; as promised, the badge works, and you cannot tell a lie, and neither can they.
The staff explains the rules, even though you already know them. (Everyone on the island knows them.) In Kill Yourself Cave, there are 999 sequential rooms that must be endured, and only if you reach the final room and still desire and have the will to kill yourself, will you be allowed to.
As you wait, you are provided with ample food and drink; it’s nothing special, though every meal is better than any meal you’ve made for yourself in quite a long time.
After two days, you are allowed to enter Kill Yourself Cave.
Very few people are ever allowed to visit or leave the island, owing to complex socio-historical-magical reasons that have surprisingly little to do with the island’s anti-killing-yourself policies. (Had you been able, you and other aspiring dead people surely would have simply swam out to sea and let yourself be pulled down by the waves). A magical boundary surrounding your home only allows for anyone to enter or leave the island if the king specifically allows for it; aside from a small amount of otherwise unobtainable trade goods, and the occasional diplomat, nothing makes it in or out.
The island’s king has made an exception, however, for those wishing to help the poor souls, like yourself, who are tempted to enter Kill Yourself Cave. Kill Yourself Cave has quite an international reputation, you see, and it attracts many people who don’t want to kill themselves, but who, as much as your fellow citizens, don’t wish you to kill yourself either.
So that’s what is in each of the 999 rooms in Kill Yourself Cave: someone in the world, perhaps someone from your rotten little hamlet or trillions upon trillions of miles away — your world is so, so very large, but let’s not get into that here, you have no more interest in the world or it’s treasures or its expanses, that’s why you journeyed this far — has, they believe, an argument or an offer or a solution or a hopeful word or two, that they think might stop you from killing yourself. They all sit in their rooms, perhaps with a book, perhaps with nothing but the anticipation of saving a life, and wait for you to meet them. Most have applied and waited years for the opportunity to be in the cave.
If you can get past all of their words — honest words, because they are required to wear the green badges too — than you can get to the Kill Yourself Room and kill yourself.
It does happen, let me be clear. How common exactly, it’s difficult to say; no surveys have ever been taken, no data collected. It certainly isn’t most of them.
In the first room, one of the staff members, an older woman wearing the green vestments, asks you very kindly if you would please consider not killing yourself.
“I have,” you say. “But I see no reasonable alternative.”
“Might I ask why you want to kill yourself?”
“I have many problems,” you say. You tell her of your dead spouse, and of your failing business prospects, and of your poverty, and of your deep, deep unhappiness, and of the many, many other myriad of material and interpersonal problems you have so long endured.
She offers real, concrete, good-sounding solutions to many of them, some obvious, some slightly less obvious, a few quite novel. You listen to this for some time before leaving. Before you are allowed to proceed to the next room, the door asks you if you still want to kill yourself, and you affirm that you do. It opens.
In the next 99 rooms, 99 different people, judging from their clothes and appearances who have clearly traveled from very far off lands, all ask you if you would like to talk to them about your problems. They are a diverse set, you imagine, selected in the hopes that you might see someone in them reminding you of a friend, a former lover, a parent, a sibling, a teacher.
You can see it in a few of them, and you earnestly give more than a few the chance to talk. They say many of the types of things you’d imagine they say. They offer sympathy and encouragement and implorations to be brave, fierce, hopeful. They say the most meaningful and most trite things you have ever heard. They tell you stories of their sons and daughters and peers and parents who did not live in a country with a Kill Yourself Cave, whom they missed very much. You assume, given the badges and tears in their eyes, that they are being earnest, and you apologize every time you continue forward unmoved.
Sometimes by these types you are guilted, or shamed, or called a sinner or a coward or an idiot or an ingrate. One man points out that there are many in the world who would like nothing else to be saved from their impending fates, as you are now being given the opportunity to do; you consider asking him why he is not instead trying to save those people, but you think better of it and move on.
In the 101st room, a beautiful woman offers to have sex with you. She’ll only do it, she says, if you promise not to kill yourself; a promise you would be unable to make unless you meant it.
In the 102nd room, a beautiful man does the same.
In the 103rd room, both of them reappear to make you the same offer, except simultaneously — though they quickly explain they are the twins of the pair in the last rooms. As you ignore them and walk through the next door, they implore you to take note: things, as you’ve just seen, can always get better.
They certainly can, or at least they want to make you believe it.
For the next eighty or so rooms, you are offered almost every type of sexual fantasy imaginable, some of which seem so unappealing you can barely construe them as being to anyone’s taste. In the 123rd room, a hairy man offers to let you lick every square inch of his body every day for the next decade; in the next, a dragon offers to let you sniff its feet. The twins — actually triplets, they inform you — show up yet again in the 161rd room, this time offering to let you watch in the corner as they have sex with each other and mock you the entire time.
In the 199th room, a man offers to be your slave for life; in the 200th, an entire harem throws themselves at your feet. In the 201st, a goblin asks if you would like her to sit on your face every time you go to sleep.
The chef in the 223rd room, a grandmaster by some culinary schema you’ve never heard of, lets you sample his finest cuts of meat, and offers to be your cook for life, or, if you so prefer, to teach you how to cook as well as he can. He claims that he can teach anyone, regardless of your current skill.
Other offers of apprenticeships and educations follow: professors and wizards and subject-matter experts and carpenters and beekeepers and soldiers and fighters of all stripes offer to teach you all you wish to know from all that they know, for however long you wish.
In the 324th room, a man offers you a creature called a dog, which he says will love you almost unconditionally. In the next, you are offered a creature called a cat, which might love you occasionally, given the right circumstances and a lot of luck. In the next, you are offered a snail, which, you are told, feels no love at all.
In the 419th room, a large man threatens you, and says that if you try to pass him, he will strike you once. When you do, he keeps his word; it hurts immensely, but you continue nonetheless.
In the 484th room, a witch promises to change your body to whatever form you like.
In the 499th room, a warlock offers you vials that can excise all depression and negative feelings from you with his magic vials. (You have tried them all before.)
In the 516th room, an extremely funny and kind man offers to be your friend.
In the 517th room, a different extremely funny and kind man offers to be your rival.
In the 560th room, a banker offers you incomprehensible wealth.
In the 590th room, a famous artist, one of the most famous in the world, offers to paint you and only you every day for the rest of your life, which he says will guarantee you fame and adoration for as long as you live.
In the 658th through 695th rooms, thirty-seven people in a row attempt slightly different variations of the same reverse psychology trick on you. It gets very annoying very fast.
In the 719th room, a wizard says he can banish any thought, compulsion, fear, or unwanted feeling from your soul forever.
In the 830th room, a different wizard from the same clan offers to erase any, or all, or your memories.
In the 843rd room, a woman asks if you would like to marry her and raise a family with her. In the rooms to follow, many others, men and women, ask you the same.
In the 877th room, you are offered perfect safety, a magical charm that will make it impossible for anyone to ever harm you against your will.
In the 904th room, a woman offers to pity you.
In the 990th room, you are asked to join a just and noble revolution against a horrible tyrant. You are almost guaranteed to die, they insist, but it will be a true and meaningful end, and if you survive and win you will be awarded lifelong glory.
In the 991th room, you are told about a man named Achon, living in the remote countryside of a foreign nation. He is 66 years old and lives with his extended family; formerly the beloved patriarch of his clan, he has recently fallen ill with a terrible illness that has claimed all his mental faculties but left his body as healthy as a man almost as young as you. If you agree to it, you may take over his body, allowing his soul to pass on, while giving his family another twenty or thirty years with him. You will never lose your facilities as he did, you will never be discovered for who you truly are, and you will be truly loved for the rest of your days.
In the 992nd room, you are offered the position of a powerful judge of a terrible but powerful country, where you may sentence almost anyone you like to death at any time.
In the 993rd room, a small child asks you to adopt it.
In the 994th room, a really annoying guy dares you to take your badge off.
In the 995th room, a servant of the king offers you a ship willing to take you anywhere in the world, five tons of gold, a contingent of loyal followers, and a magical berry that if eaten will make you live for 500 years.
In the 996th room, a man from the Vaundoan mountains claims that he can teach you to excise all desire from yourself and achieve true contentment.
In the 997th room, no one is there.
In the 998th room, there is only a letter on the floor, along with a note explaining that it contains a message of “no special significance” but that the original sender would be very grateful to whomever can pick it up and deliver it for them, as they can no longer do so.
In the 999th floor, another woman in green vestments is waiting for you. This is perhaps the oldest person you have ever seen.
There is no door beyond her: only a deep, deep hole.
“Why do you want to kill yourself?” she asks, exuding wisdom.
“I have many problems,” you say. You tell her of your dead spouse, and of your failing business prospects, and of your poverty, and of your deep, deep unhappiness, and of the many, many other myriad of material and interpersonal problems you have so long endured.
“But have you not had the opportunity in these caves to have solved many of these problems? If all those were fixed, would you still want to kill yourself?” she asks.
“Is there a different problem that you have, then, that if it were fixed, you would want to live?”
“Yes,” you concede, after a short pause. “But I do not think it is possible to fix it.”
You think about it, and consider that if there is a solution, you would truly wish to hear it, even though you have long, long since given up. So you tell her, the old wise woman, your problem: one that haunts not your society, not your kingdom, not your family, but you, only you.
Part of you expects her to accept it easily, that in her years at least one other soul like you must have come before her, made it all the way here, and told her of their plight, but her face does genuinely, or so it seems to you, twist into one of shock. Her eyes widen; not so dramatically, but enough to tell you that she hasn’t met anyone who has ever told her such a thing about themselves before. She has not been surprised in a very long time.
“Do you know how to solve this?”
“Give me one hour,” she whispers. “My judgement is not flawless, but it is excellent, and I may come up with some inventive creation that allows me to see a path forward. Please, wait.”
You give her one hour. You reflect on your life, and on the problem, which long ago you had accepted as intractable. You expect nothing from her. It’s not a solvable issue, your problem. You already know this.
Eventually, she says this:
“I think there is a solution.”
You stand up and begin to walk to the hole.
“I do not know,” she repeats. “But I do believe it is a solvable problem.”
“You say this in every case, I imagine.”
“No,” she says. “I do not. I have let others fall. I have been presented with those who have convinced me that no timely solution exists for their problems. Many have material needs, many social ones, many of a stripe so specific or strange that it requires an offer as creative as the ones we have attempted to provide. But some cannot be sated by anything. But this… I do believe, in your specific case, that you probably have the means to solve it, even if I do not. I understand, given your situation, why it would be difficult to imagine that. But I truly, truly believe that.”
“Should I toil and suffer in this mode of existence, for a solution that may never come? For the tiniest chance of success? You understand that this is pure misery?”
“I think the chance is not necessarily a small one,” she said. “I think, were I to wager, based on the fact that you made it here, based on the nature of your problem, based on the specific advantages and disadvantages it lays on your back, based on all the magics of the world, so vast that we cannot comprehend them, in your specific situation, the chance of your success, over the rest of your life, were you to put all your efforts consistently into fixing it, are not unlikely. I would say that you are just as likely to succeed as to fail, and given that, suicide is the wrong choice.”
This is, sadly, the best sell that anyone has ever made for your continued existence. It’s the best sell that they can, right?
“If you try, it may get better.” That’s all they can say. There are situations where this phrase is patently untrue. This situation is not one of them. You do have a chance.
You spit in the wise woman’s face even though it does not provide you with the slightest bit of satisfaction, and you turn and walk away, and on that particular day you do not kill yourself in Kill Yourself Cave.
The next day, at an inn, you start to plan in earnest in the dead of night, not the masturbatory stuff of ages past but real, real planning, because now that you have acknowledged the serious possibility of success it all marches out of your mind differently, these great plans of yours, and when you consider the scope of the task lying in front of you, of all the work that must be done, you wither and you cry and cry and cry.
But afterwards you continue to plan in your dreams, and there you start to see it, what might be.
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