Free A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball

turned to him, and that they all knew him, they all knew why he was there, and what he wanted.
    But even he did not know what he wanted.

THEY WERE IN A HOUSE that was being built. She had taken him to the edge of the town, and there, in the skeleton of a house, she took his hand and sat him down.
    —I want you to prove to me, she said. I want you to prove to me that you are not an examiner, that you aren’t part of this Process of Villages! I am sure that something is amiss. They have been doing terrible things to me. I have tried to escape several times, but still they keep me here. First there was a different man, then there was a woman. Now I am forced to live with Martin. He is not my husband. I didn’t even meet him until last week!
    She pulled him to her.
    —Oh, I know you are not one of them. I know that Emma is your examiner. I can tell these things. I know that you will help me.
    She told him that she had woken in a house like the one she lived in, that she had realized immediately she must pretend to be recuperating. She said she had done so, and had passed from one village to another. They move you in the night, she said, while you are sleeping. She said they didn’t think you could remember anything, at first, and so they were constantly changing their stories. She hardly slept once for a week straight, she lay in bed with her eyes closed, just in order to see what was happening, and she had discovered remarkable things. They come in the night—people come into the house. They put everything back. All through the house, they put things back the way they were. And someone goes into the study and unlocks the desk and takes things out.
    —Do you know, she said, that they have a map, a sort of atlas, of your entire life, of the life that you lived before you came here? There is a place in the house where they keep it, and they consult it—they use it to plan the way in which they will control you. I know because it says so in the book. It mentions this atlas specifically. But no matter where I looked in the house, I couldn’t find it.

    She began to cry.
    —I have tried so hard to remember my previous life. I have stared and stared into walls, carpets, clouds, desperately trying to conjure up anything, but it will not come. They took it all away.
    He ran his hand up and down her back. It felt very good. Her hair was very soft and he was touching it. She was talking and talking and the skin of her face was soft and smooth. Her eyes were greedy and bright and full of need. She looked into his eyes as he thought no one ever had, and then first slowly and then desperately, they moved into each other, convulsing and shuddering in joy. She could hardly bear to stop talking long enough to kiss him, but then she did. It was almost too much to have her touch him, but as soon as she had, he could bear nothing else. It was the same with her. He could feel in her that it was the same with her, that they were mirroring each other, that their feelings were springing back and forth. And she kept saying, over and over—be true to me. Be true to me.
    —
    The claimant sat on the porch with the examiner. She was telling him about the weather and how the weather worked. He asked why the seasons could be the same for so long. He said it was contrary to what she had told him about seasons. She laughed and said, we have moved villages four times. How close together do you believe those villages to be? And she had explained that in the first village where they had been, it was winter.
    —The villages are all over. Thus, we can go to whatever season we like, and live the same life.
    She was talking now about the clouds, and naming all the kinds of clouds.

    Meanwhile, he remembered what Hilda had said to him when she left:
    —Meet me, not tomorrow night, nor the next night—but three nights from now. Come to my house, Martin will be away. He will be away. Tell no one!

THE NEXT DAY, it was all he could do to behave the same as