Trigger warning. This essay, published in ‘A Listener’s Guide to Cellista’s Transfigurations’ depicts details about a suicide that may be disturbing to readers.
The spring and summer of 2013, before I enrolled at San Francisco State University for graduate school was dedicated to finding my bearings on the cello. It was an instrument that had accompanied me in one way or another during every significant life stages since age eleven. I had quit playing four years earlier during my time as an expatriate in France. As I began performing again, I felt my body and mind resisting every attempt I made to re-learn the instrument. The already existing flaws in my technical foundation grew in magnitude and felt irreducible the more I prepared to re-enter the classical world as a cellist.
I spent the hot afternoons that summer practicing repertoire and excerpts in the loft my husband Nicolas and I share. The building, once a factory, sits next to train tracks that traverse the downtown historic district of San Jose. Peeling paint covers beat-up Victorian houses nestled between bearded palm trees on North 2nd Street. It lies in a sprawling suburb that Taylor, our landlord-to-be, declared to us, as we first stepped inside what would become our place of residence, was an “oasis” where “the trains barely come through.” It remains an oasis even to this present day in 2019, but Taylor was exaggerating, at the least, about the trains.
One afternoon, as I sat practicing excerpts, Luna, my small pug, woke up from her nap. With a shake she bounded to the kitchen where her nails tapped on the cheap linoleum floor as she circled in anticipation of an outing.
Outside, in our backyard, I perched myself on top of the concrete porch where the complex’s dog run was located. Luna played in the yard as my fingers dialed my Dad’s number on my cell phone. A warm wind billowed at my face. The dry air reminded me of the Antibes climate on the Riviera in France that we had recently left behind to move to San Jose. The sun was baking hot on the top step, and my legs jettisoned out to the last step below, where it was cooler. The phone rang several times before my Dad answered.
In the yard below, the trees were rarely trimmed back. They grew all year, obscuring the view of the frequent passing trains that contradicted our landlord’s introductory declaration. The leafy branches offered much needed privacy from the windows of the neighboring orange-painted condos.
The wind stirred the thick overhanging leaves and out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimmer of movement. I paused in my conversation with my dad as I turned my face toward the wind. In one moment; within one glance my life changed.
A man’s body dressed in white dangled from the end of a rope secured to the fifth floor porch. It seemed surreal, as if I had imagined it. I didn’t hear or see him jump. It was as if I had entered some sort of dream. In disbelief I looked away from the image. Before my gaze returned, I expected to look back and see nothing; just a simple optical illusion. In shock-mode, my eyes focused again. It felt like my vision had become telescopic as if I too was suspended in air with him. The sounds around me were hushed murmurs. I reached to touch my neighbor’s greying hair. In the endless moment everything was still.
I came to suddenly, as though I had plummeted from my delusion of shock levitation and re-entered reality. I was still sitting on top of the porch. I began shaking uncontrollably as I again saw my neighbor swinging, suspended by the rope. The white of his clothing was blinding in the yellow rays.
I had gone silent on my father during this time. The phone was at my side, still in my hand. I brought it back to my ear and told him I needed to go. I dialed 911 and asked for help. I then made my way upstairs with Luna. Once I entered the apartment, I drew the blinds and sat beneath the window sill on the floor. Until my husband Nicolas returned, I sat with my arms around my knees, unmoving as the scene replayed over and over again in my head. I wanted nothing more than to be buried under layers of cool earth. It was the first rupture I experienced in the Bay Area.
“Like a lot of people who just want to hold on to their sanity, you find ways of dealing with it,” Storey tells me. “Ways of categorizing it, compartmentalizing it, or something like that, so it isn’t incapacitating to you. On a deeper level, it’s kind of always there. And when it happened repeatedly, as it has with me, you start trippin’. I started thinking: ‘What is this? Why is this something that I just have to accept? Why is this something that I can’t get any details about? Why is this something my relatives don’t want to say a single word about?’ So it gets bottled up.”
— -Barron Storey, in an interview by Gary Singh for Metroactive, October 9th, 2013
Shortly after, I began my masters at San Francisco State University. During that time, I struggled in every capacity to keep up with the demands of music school. I felt myself failing at every step. The trauma of summer and my inability to keep up with my peers was a source of constant and extreme anxiety. Flunking out seemed inevitable. Save for one musicology class, I felt miserable. Compared to playing cello and trying to fit into the classical mould, doing research papers for that class seemed like a welcome break. The research writing provided time to think of anything but the summer incident of suicide, the memory of which I would continue to try to push out of my mind with a combination of exercising and fasting. Running got me out of my mind and its incessant replaying of the scene of my neighbor’s suicide, at least momentarily. Fasting allowed me to think about hunger rather than the phantom noises that continually entered my head like the whispers of my dead neighbor passing through skeleton branches.
I barely managed to get through the first year of graduate school. Running from images of my neighbor, from anxiety and fear, I took too many classes and kept myself worn-out, sleepless, and hungry. I never spoke about it to anyone. Instead, I tucked it within my body, burying it where I could not see it.
During that time, the visual artist Barron Storey exhibited his series of paintings at Anno Domini, an art gallery in San Jose’s downtown arts district. I was asked to perform music at the event by the gallery owner Cherri Lakey and her partner Brian Eder. In an email, she explained Barron Storey’s exhibit to me: It was to be the legendary illustrator’s fifth solo exhibition with the gallery. He had lost several people close to him to suicide: his mother and her brother, his ex-wife, and a good friend. The exhibition was a collection of paintings he created after asking others to share their experience of grief and loss after a losing someone suicide. Storey made pages of drawings of those experiences in his journals. The exhibition was his attempt to understand the decisions of those who lost their life to suicide.
Cherri requested that I perform music appropriate for the event throughout the evening. She wanted each performance to be followed by a moment of silence.
I cried after reading the email before writing back and agreeing to take the gig. My body typed the reply while my mind went on autopilot. Whatever memories I had managed to push within my body were now seeping out from their hiding places. Willing their way out.
The evening of the Suicide exhibition, I chose to perform Out of the Deep, the opening movement from John Rutter’s Requiem. I arranged the choral piece as a duet for cello and soprano. A young singer named Giovanna Hutchinson performed with me. From 7 to 10 p.m., we played it at the top of every hour surrounded by images of suicide affixed to the gallery walls.
Performing at the gallery was unbearable. It was as surreal as first witnessing the suicide the August before. I often found myself disassociating and relying on sheer animal instinct to propel me through each set. Viscerally, it felt like layers of skin and muscle were being torn from my chest. My heart was a heavy, slow thud against my ribcage the entire evening. There was nowhere to hide save for the blanket of sound and “noise” collages I had composed to accompany the evening between Requiem sets. This was the only way to avoid the gaze of Barron’s suicide victims and the spectre of my neighbor.
Barron was there the entire evening with his journal of manic drawings and paintings from which his suicidal sets were derived. The innards of the journal were familiar in form. My own journals were filled with illegible scrawls written during sleepless nights. When I looked over my entries they looked like they had come from a different person; as if I had written the entries from within a trance. At the end of the night, Barron, in his thick glasses and lanky frame, approached me at the little podium where I played. He wore a black leather jacket Cherri and Brian had gifted him. The collar was popped up and he fiddled with it before he sat down on the steps, pressing his back against the last one and extending his long legs in front of him to the concrete floor. I sat beside him, setting my black carbon fiber cello down.
Barron speaks to me as though he has a flurry of thoughts and associations that he puts together more quickly than any other human. To translate the rapidity of his thoughts, his speech comes out paced and pressured. He introduces himself and thanks me for my performance before asking me questions about myself.
I am grateful for the conversation which offers another place to retreat from the faces on the walls. I never mention my neighbor. Instead I share with him some stories I have from graduate school: I tell him about my long break from cello and how hard it has been to begin again. I share that I have fallen in love with musicology and research writing because of a recent discovery I’ve made about the composer Olivier Messiaen and his seminal work The Quartet for the End of Time. I tell him that the piece offers me refuge when the world feels difficult to understand. Barron immediately beams a huge smile as he sits up suddenly.
It turns out we are reading the same book about the Quartet by Rebecca Rischin. We both feel a deep connection to the powerful piece. We chat for a long while about it and for the first time since the beginning of summer I feel light. Barron asks me to share more of my discovery and more of who I am with him on those gallery steps. For those fleeting moments it feels as though it is just Barron and me alone together, completely transported away from the confines of San Jose. Away from painful memories and fresh wounds. I speak and speak, eager to share stories of discovery and art with my new found friend.
Barron is a professor of art. Many of his students have come to see their beloved teacher’s new works. I can sense the educator in him as he settles back to listen to me speak. He listens with his ears and heart. He knows to listen is to teach and to teach is to gently make students pull their insides out.
I am heard.
