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To assume that hanging leads to death by asphyxiation is a mistake only a beginner in the art of suicide could commit.
Dazai was certain he knew this better than anyone – as a certain mutt would say, it takes a particular type of mania to try to off yourself hundreds of times and fail. He was special like that, and not hypocritical enough not to admit to himself that some of his last-minute fixes came from a place borne from bone-deep desperation.
With how much the rope had failed him, it was quite the wonder he was holding one again. But who was he not to try one of the most famous methods of execution?
The actual mechanism went as such: after a drop from a certain height, the force from his fall being stopped by a rope around his neck would be enough to break one or several of his vertebrae and sever the spinal cord in less than a second. He would immediately enter medical shock and would probably experience just an instant of pain (measured in milliseconds) before losing all consciousness and sensation. His body would go limp with paralysis. He would then suffocate due to the lack of oxygen, and end up brain dead in around six minutes and heart dead in around eight.
It was something that required a bit more preparation than his usual attempt. The first step was finding a secluded place to serve as makeshift gallows, with something to tie the rope to and somewhere to fall – by his calculations, someone with his weight required about 2.5 meters. Therefore, the perfect solution: an old, abandoned wooden house on the edge of Yokohama.
The place had several floors and he’d been lucky enough to find in one, below a sturdy enough ceiling beam, a hole which he’d enlarged. (He didn’t want to think about how trying to make one himself would have gone.) The height was a bit greater than he needed, but it would have been worse the other way around – any less force would turn his newest project into a regular hanging.
The second step was preparing the rope. He’d gone to a random tool store to buy some manila hemp rope, around 2 cm thick, along with some paraffin; his source advised melting it and using it as lubricant for the knot. Then, he boiled the rope for around an hour, stretched it while drying to eliminate all spring, stiffness or tendency to coil, and dried it thoroughly.
He figured he might as well go these extra miles – Dazai already knew he was being particularly meticulous with his plan and it could only become more fail-proof, after all.
And so, there he was, walking toward his own execution on that fine night. All was set in place – the only way something could go wrong was if he was found out by someone. Still, the whole ordeal should take no more than 15 minutes, travel time excluded, and he’d made sure that no one knew about the place and he wouldn’t be missed.
Well, mostly. He was certain Chuuya was somewhere out there cursing the life out of him (all the better) for putting a plan in motion for their latest mission and not telling him how it goes, or that it even exists. A shame, really, that he couldn’t also set one last deadly trap for him, but it was too close for comfort to a double suicide – the mere thought of it made him shudder.
He soon arrived at the abandoned house and entered, closing the creaky door behind him. Everything – save for where he’d been – was coated in dust and dirt, and the place had an eerie atmosphere. Fitting, seeing as it would soon be his deathbed and perhaps even his grave, if no one found him soon enough. It was the exact setting a more dimwitted teenager would consider haunted.
Not by his ghost, he hoped. While he did think the life of a non-living entity might be interesting to look into… It made a tiny part of him stutter and writhe. What would then be the point of what he was doing?
Dazai walked up the stairs and crossed the distance to his hole. With movements practiced enough to be muscle memory, he absent-mindedly tied the rope and prepared the noose, then secured it to the wooden beam.
He placed the loop around his head and got into position over the hole, balancing on its edges. Then, after a second of gazing into the drop below him, he jumped.
A few moments after, several things happened almost simultaneously: he felt the rope snap taut around his neck, heard something break as if through a fog in his mind (when had it settled?), went through an instant of nigh excruciating pain, then – everything went black.
Awareness washed over him in bits and pieces as much as it could, through a brain no more than cotton rattling in his skull.
His body was desperately shaking, jolting his insides and his head, which was limply resting in an odd position, at an angle his neck shouldn’t be able to be bent in. And his throat – the unforgiving pressure around it was an old dance partner, just as the gasps for air were, but it had never felt as if someone took to it a chainsaw with a dulled chain coated in vinegar and decided to cut only halfway through.
Something was dribbling from the corner of his mouth, and the bandages and clothes on his neck and torso were soaked in a sticky liquid.
A wave of coldness washed over him.
His body was jolting for air and he could feel his bandages sticking to his skin.
Ah. So he’d failed.
His neck was clearly broken, but his spinal cord wasn’t severed, which shouldn’t have been possible considering the force applied was definitely more than enough to do the job properly. Unless that was exactly the problem and, when the rope reached its end, the noise from his neck breaking covered some other noise, such as the cracking of the beam he was tied to, a beam which he’d checked and was strong enough to withstand a normal hanging, which his wasn’t, since he was breaking his neck with a great amount of force, some of which must have actually gone into damaging the wooden support and therefore leaving behind less for himself.
He was hanging and his spine was fractured and something around his neck was bleeding but he was still fully conscious and gasping and each hopeless attempt at breathing sent pulses of paralyzing white-hot pain through to the very ends of his nerves because despite all odds his spinal cord was still fine and he’d passed out but then he was awake and with thousands of needles brought to boiling point stuck in his throat and he was there waiting to finally suffocate to death.
Success could indeed be built on failures.
Nothing had truly gone his way, but perhaps he could pass out again while waiting for death to release him.
The second time he woke up was, once more, to the feeling of agonal breathing. His head was throbbing and even the cotton in his mind must have left his body through whatever was bleeding out around his throat, for it was empty up there save for a hammer pounding away at whatever was left of him. His neck was still bent wrong and the rope was insistently pressing on it, but the area had gone mostly numb, save for the stabs he got from the trembling of his broken bones.
Small mercies.
The third time he woke up, before acknowledging his still quivering body, he spared a thought for cursing his younger self from some days ago for not properly checking that beam. Yes, it looked like it could hold, but there was a literal hole in the wooden floor, and the place was so obviously old.
That way, he wouldn’t have been spending the longest six minutes in his life suspended and with pain running up and down his body, just because it could. He’s gotten used to the mush which was his brain screaming for oxygen, the unnatural angle his spine was in and the constant pressure on it.
Still, the dried blood soaking the garments around his neck was making them uncomfortable.
Some really long six minutes.
The beam was solid, and the hole looked man-made – the place was old, but not frail. He wasn’t one to usually indulge in self-deception, but he supposed those were rather uncommon circumstances. The situation was one he’d never considered nor planned for.
He’d been blindsided.
He didn’t need to be able to lift his head to know the support hadn’t broken, and that force, perhaps enough to decapitate him, didn’t manage to break his spinal cord.
A rotten ability.
Blood took much more than six minutes to dry to that extent.
He was feeling his fluttering heartbeat slowing down for the third time that evening.
Moments or minutes or hours after, he felt himself slowly come back to be for a fourth time, and the first thing he did was check for movement in his arms.
It was unsteady and maybe a bit choppy, but it could do.
His spinal cord was healed, and so was his wound. His head was sitting in an odd way and couldn’t get the same treatment. He’d been continuously suffocating and dying over and over again.
Meanwhile, he was still in tremendous pain.
He had to pull the other end of the rope back through the loop he made while tightening the noose. Gravity should then unravel the rest.
Dazai began picking at the knot.
He knew it would not be a task he could finish before going unconscious again, so he went on without heeding the breaks for dying his body took.
He thought his fingers were starting to hurt, but most of what he was feeling was overshadowed by already existing aches. The pull from the other side would have been soothing in its own way if it wasn’t also a testimony to how he might never be able to stay there and rest.
Nothing he truly wanted ever went his way.
He kept pulling the end of the rope.
For a moment, despite no longer being properly tied, the noose kept its shape.
Suddenly, gravity took a hold of him, the knot unwound itself and he tumbled down hard, hitting the ground like a rock. Stars burst in his neck and down to his very edges, then everything went black as numbness took over.
He woke up for the hundredth time, lying in an awkward position on the hard floor when the world around him snapped back in place. The sudden rush of air going through his ragged windpipes was overwhelming, and he became aware again of the frantic gulps of air his body had been trying to take for the last whoever knows how long. Clarity took over his mind.
The fall was enough to break his spinal cord again and left him lying in a position he shouldn’t be. The rest had healed, but his vertebrae remained stubbornly broken.
How much longer would he have to go through all that?
He straightened his body and finally settled his screaming spine in the correct position.
It was a good thing he’d used the paraffin – the last ride down would have been even more difficult, otherwise.
He stayed there, counting the spiders on the ceiling and the minutes he’d lost while his bones settled themselves back together. Chuuya should have already finished their joint mission and was most likely at home in a hot bath, scrubbing away the sand in his hair and the oil he’d been drenched in. His livid snarls would have been entertaining to listen to, but he didn’t want to set his spine straight a second time that day.
He carefully tested his neck’s movements, then, confirming everything was functional, got up and started heading to his place.
The day’s exhaustion pierced him down to his bones.
Perhaps some poison could make his rest sweeter, sometime.