Klaus has a secret. His secret is so big not even he knows what it is. He is thirty-eight years old and has just made his third attempt at taking his own life. Twenty years before his family found him in the bathtub with both wrists slit. His mother noticed the rose tinted water seeping into the carpet in the hallway. His father broke down the door, pulling Klaus up just as he began to sink to the bottom like a stone. Had he succeeded, Klaus would have uncomplicated both his life and his family’s. At the moment his father saved him from his near perfect escape, Klaus became the family obsession. They all focused on keeping the secret of the attempted suicide to distract themselves from the bigger secret which had pushed Klaus to the edge of his life in the first place. Their need to keep him alive was more to give their own lives a purpose than it was out of love for Klaus. They all suspected what had made Klaus want to end his life. It was too horrible to even consider in their conscious minds, so they pretended not to know to keep themselves from wishing him dead also. After one year of being institutionalized, drugged and analyzed Klaus was sent back out into the world he had tried to escape. Even in his strongest moments though, he secretly wished he had remembered to turn off the water to the bathtub before he lost consciousness.

His second attempt was eleven years ago, soon after his twenty-seventh birthday. He had swallowed enough pills to kill a horse, but once again left the door open to being saved at the last possible moment. A friend found him on the floor beside his bed with the empty pill bottle still clutched in his hand. He was rushed to the hospital to have his stomach pumped and the whole cycle began again. Klaus was once again put through the ritual of being prepared to reenter a culture which he was willing to die in order to escape. Each time he was put into the hands of professionals trained at sustaining the system at all costs. They very cleverly pushed his secret further inside him while pretending to heal him. He was like a vegetable connected to a life support system for the express purpose of relieving the doctor of responsibility for the death. He was now a pawn in an evil game of self-gratification for the players. Klaus was the only loser, for whether he lived or died the players would benefit. As co-conspirators with his family the professionals devised psycho-therapy and drugs to keep him passive. There was no one to protest the immorality of what was happening for there was no one, except for a severely drugged part of Klaus’s consciousness, who was in a clear position to see the truth. Everyone was involved in the very righteous task of preserving the status quo.

After the second attempt Klaus had gone through some kind of rebirth. In the following ten years he continued the therapy his family paid for. He understood that in order to live in the world he needed the guidance of someone who understood the rules. One year ago he had decided to end the therapy though. The result was a life of seclusion, for it was the only way Klaus knew to survive with his perspective on life. His therapist had warned him that he would not survive on his own. Now, twelve months later Klaus was beginning to unravel his secret. On some level he was beginning to understand that something had been done to him to deliberately deceive him. He had opened a door which allowed his subconscious mind to talk to him in his dreams. For the first time he was gaining the courage to face his own life.

In his first dream Klaus was being pulled from the bathtub by his father who was crying hysterically. His father carried Klaus to his parent’s bed where Klaus then lay bleeding upon the sheets. His father took off his own clothes and climbed onto the bed with Klaus to make love to his dying son. Klaus then found himself awakened in the emergency room in the hospital. When Klaus actually awoke the following morning he wondered if perhaps his dream was telling him he was molested by his father. Perhaps this was the horrible secret he could not bear to remember!

The following night Klaus dreamt he was on a ship filled with men. As he passed through the corridors he saw half naked men standing in the doorways to their cabins. They smiled at him as if they wanted to entice him into their beds. Klaus woke up suddenly with all of the horror he had felt in all of the most difficult moments of his life. This was the first time he had a visual expression of these feelings. He was a homosexual! His family, he thought, could accept his attempted suicides much easier than the idea of a homosexual son. Without the guidance of his therapist Klaus was tempted to take his search further. He was now obsessed with the image of the men in his dream.

Klaus stood in the middle of a small tavern crowded with young men. He was terrified at first until a gentle man about his age, perhaps even more shy than Klaus, struck up a conversation. Klaus found it surprisingly easy to accept the man’s invitation to his apartment for a drink. Klaus found it even easier to accept the man’s invitation into his bedroom. As the two men faced each other in the dim light Klaus felt himself come alive sexually for the first time in his adult life. As he rolled over to kiss his new friend the room began to spin and Klaus could feel himself entering that familiar tunnel of darkness. He could hear his father’s voice and felt painful blows to his skull and his abdomen just before losing consciousness.

This time Klaus awoke in the hospital to find his new friend beside his bed instead of his family. Klaus refused to see his parents who were waiting in the lobby. He told his friend the story of his father beating him unconscious when he was caught at the age of twelve with the ten year old boy next door. Both the therapist and the family assured Richard that this was only another of Klaus’s psychotic delusions. If they could only have control they could increase the dosage of his medications to block out his memory forever. Then they would be consoled once again by all of the good people around them who empathized with the pain Klaus had put them through. Klaus could be reduced to a topic of gossip and the family could feel righteous in their repeated attempts to save his miserable life. Richard was not taken in by their misrepresentation of reality though. This time the game would be stopped and the players forced to leave the table.

Richard arranged for a therapist who would help Klaus to accept who he was. Klaus was invited to live with Richard, and after the first two months of therapy he accepted the invitation. Klaus’s father was forced to go into therapy or face criminal charges for the violence he had inflicted upon his son. X-rays showed the beatings had caused damage to his brain and the family doctor, now deceased, had been an accomplice in covering up the evidence. After all, what father could be blamed in such a situation?

Everyone did not live happily ever after though. Klaus’s "illness" was the glue that had held the family together. His mother was never able to accept her son’s new life, just as she was never able to accept the fact that her husband had almost killed her son at the age of twelve. She convinced her husband to stop his own therapy and Klaus never pushed the issue. He just allowed the distance between he and his parents to become so wide that they each pretended that the other had died. Truth and honesty once again took the backseat to the new illusions each of them needed in order to survive. In a moment of desperation, at the age of fifty, Klaus was finally successful in taking his life. His then aged parents breathed a sigh of relief that they were finally absolved of responsibility for their son’s miserable life. Their friends and neighbors came to offer their condolences while Richard sat alone trying to understand what had gone wrong. Klaus left a short note on his bedside table.

"Now we are all free! "