Courage to sleep

A detective may piece together the facts in a suicide case but even as facts they cannot be true if they stop there. If a detective says, "May Zhou had 6 milligrams of Unisom in every liter of her bloodstream and wrote an email giving 'life evidence' to her sister before driving to Santa Rosa Community College, laying in her car trunk, and going to sleep," his detached, disinterested pronouncement made from a telephone desk, may be confirmed by scientific findings, but its inconsideration of the surrounding social life in which the calamity occurred renders his diagnosis ridiculous. Perhaps Zhou is simply a pathological case among many (how many?), but certainly not for her.

And certainly not for her father to whom, along with his family, we extend our condolences for this tragic loss. He has created a website (mayzhou.com) that refers to a second autopsy, unacknowledged by the police, that finds multiple wounds to her head and body. He detects unseen forces, but now they have taken on the form, not of a pathology but an individual. Any explanation other than suicide is sought: a random stranger, an envious friend, a vision from the future, a forgotten ghost, a betrayed lover, a thief, a foul situation, an environment...a place where health itself is pathic and infantilism has been risen to the norm, a state of detachment, an issue of self-honor or respect, an unloved labor, an onlooker. It could be all of these things and that thing they all add up to. We used to call that sum a 'society.' Such an old-fashioned word, it makes one blush when it comes up in relation to violence.

If the competitive lifestyle and isolation of graduate work at the research one university are unrelated to this event, if the campus itself is such a repressed and inconceivable factor in this brilliant woman's death by sleeping pill, than we have surely entered that twilight zone in which "to serve mankind"--the familiar motto of higher learning--ends up being in the last hour the title of the alien's cookbook. One is reminded of the ease with which the university system functioned unchanged during the Nazi rule in Germany. And remember: Dr. Robert Oppenheimer's optimism failed at the very first hurdle. Classes begin anew at Virginia Tech. Is it a stretch to concede that whatever else they do, universities also require and produce an as yet unnamed inhumanity.

It gets harder and harder to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.