Chapter Forty
The voices had brought it up and the more they recommended it the more I considered suicide as an alternative. The whole idea started to take me over. Will I be sprinkled on a favourite body of water, I wondered or placed six feet under, disappearing into my cavity for good, accompanied by cool, well groomed soil?
I scolded myself, putting myself down as a loser and a fool. I hit myself. Every time I’d berate myself I could hear amen’s and halleluiahs bandied about, one voice to another. In spite of it all, I was strangely free of anxiety; rather a type of surety possessed me as though what I’d begun planning was the answer I’d been searching for. Over the course of a day or so, I came to believe that my last act should be that of submerging myself in the nearby lake, and then to wait on the shore until I was frozen stiff and no longer drew breath.
The day arrived for me to put my ghoulish plan into action. Brian had returned to the abode but Paul, Joe and Frank were still with their loved ones, though they’d been gone so long, the love was probably wearing a little thin.
It was New Year’s Eve. I walked down to the water, a nondescript person who was out for a stroll on a cold and overcast day. I don’t think any motorist driving by took any notice of me. If anyone did look my way they would have had absolutely no clue that I was going to do something as dismal and purposeless as trying to take leave of the planet before it was finished with me. I like to think that if any of those people had known of my plans they would have pulled to the side of the street and tried to persuade me that it just wasn’t worth it, that I would upset my mother to a terrible degree and that my brothers might end up hating any reminders of me.
I stood by the black fluid, so essential to life, yet more than willing to help me snuff out mine. I smoked a cigarette and thought sadly that I wouldn’t miss much, but that I would miss having a good smoke.
“Go ahead, go ahead.” “It’s painless.” Terrible voices, I thought, suddenly stung by a little resentfulness and mildly reticent, I’ll see you in another life and I’ll have the upper hand. With that I walked into the cold water, up to my shoulders and turning walked back to the shore.
I took off my cowboy boots hurriedly. I was very partial to them and couldn’t dump the water out of them soon enough. I put them back on and lay down to perish. Fifteen minutes passed and I didn’t really feel like I was dying. Two men in conversation walked by, took a quick look and went on their way, their heads inclined to the ground. They didn’t offer to help, after all, there were so many crazies running around courtesy of the insane asylum; anything could be expected and nothing should be taken too seriously.
A half an hour passed and I was cold, nothing else, just crisp and glacial. I wasn’t floating out of my body; there was no bright, white light or warmth that beckoned me to a new and everlasting life of bliss. There was not a whisper of angels or the embrace of a long lost loved one I didn’t even know, a being who’d been waiting for ages to commune.
After an hour I went home. It would just take too long lying there, sprawled out on my back, looking upwards and waiting for my spirit to float away. Just like damned near everyone else of my generation I need instant gratification, especially when it came to offing myself.
After I took a long hot shower I went into the hole in the wall that was my room. There, where I had plotted my own conclusion, I sat on my bed and took a slow look around. A pile of clothes lay on the floor, shirt sleeves entangled with a sweater, socks and underwear peeking out from under an oversized pair of tan corduroy coveralls purchased at the thrift store for two dollars. A book on its spine stuck halfway out from behind the dresser. I reached an ashtray from the bedside table and set it on the mattress beside me. As I was lighting a cigarette my eyes fell on three pill containers, each with a month’s supply of a psychotropic medication within. Without any prompting from the hallucinations, I knew what I had to do. I went and filled two large glasses with water. There were more than three hundred pills in the three jars and I gobbled them up.
Just a few seconds after every last pill and capsule was in my stomach, a voice said, “You’ve been waiting a long time to do that, haven’t you?”
I uttered a frightened sigh as it registered clearly, for a brief moment that I was going to die, that I would be no more. Then for the second time that day, as my moment of clarity passed I lay down and waited to pass on.
Waiting to die is a funny thing. After a few minutes I was like an elephant that had finally found the burial ground he’d been searching for. I had the feeling that I had brought some kind of closure to the problem of my existence. I had solved the problem that nobody had been able to solve and the solution was nothing more than a feeling. Oh, that pretty, blond haired waitress, well, maybe in heaven. Wasn’t Charlie Brown in love with a blond haired waitress? Maybe I’m going the other way from heaven. Ah, it’s too late to worry about that, I don’t feel scared in fact I think I’m happy. It’s true; I was waiting a long time to do this. This world has been showing me the door since I was a teenager anyways.
I started having convulsions, wave after wave that I felt in my head more than anywhere else. I bit my tongue over and over. I struggled off my bed but my legs couldn’t have supported the weight of a fly. I fell hard to the unforgiving floor. I managed to pull myself back onto the bed where I continued to convulse violently. Around this time I lost consciousness.
When I woke, the first thing I noticed were the tubes that seemed to be growing out of my arms. I looked at the rest of my body and it seemed to be okay. I didn’t know where I was but I wasn’t frightened. I noticed a circle over the left side of my chest and I heard a speaker squawk, “Dr. Robertson to room 404 please, Dr Robertson, 404.”
A nurse approached my bed, a pretty nurse with attractive green eyes that were embellished by the way they caught and held the light.
“Hello,” I croaked, “what happened to me?”
“You don’t remember?” she asked, softly.
I adjusted my position in the bed and replied, “No.”
“Well I’ll find someone who can explain it all to you better than I can.” And she was gone.
In a short while a self-important woman walked briskly into the room I was sharing with two older men, one of whom was bald. Wrapped in a sense of purpose and with a file folder under her arm, she walked towards my bed.
“Well,” she said and my ears started to tweak, “we almost lost you.”
Why do we always assume that people like her can explain things better? I would much rather have heard it all from Miss Green Eyes. At least then, as what had happened was coming back to me and I was starting to think that I might possibly be dead, I could have believed I was in heaven.
I growled and scared both of us.
“Just what’s going on?” I shot the question at her, an arrow released from a taut bow.
She flinched, her cheeks turned red and she regained her composure in a barely perceptible millisecond. I found her self-assurance and presumed superiority maddening. She was hard to deal with and I was further vexed when it occurred to me that I was intimidated. Even though I sensed that her act was well rehearsed, I was cowed.
“Well, sir,” she went on, “you came this close to dying of a drug overdose.” She held her index finger and thumb together and rubbed them back and forth. I had to admit I’d never seen that one before and I really believed then that I was dead and in hell.
“What’s this on my chest, this ring?”
It turned out the ring had been left by some device that had been applied hastily, with the purpose of starting a heart that was not beating, that was as dead as the rest of me had been.
“Anything else?”
“No,” I replied. “I don’t want to know any more right now.”
What happened over the next few days was freakish. Throughout the first day I was still overtly psychotic. I could quite clearly see that both of the old men wore crowns. They were obviously royalty. I was being kept against my will. Though I could only swallow fluids due to the damage I had done to my tongue, I refused to ingest the juices, nutritional shakes or any other concoction whose aim was apparently to nourish and hydrate. As an enemy of the kingdom, I was obviously being poisoned.
When I woke on the second day I noticed the crowns on the two kings were fading – I could hardly see them but for the odd twinkle. I was hungry by lunch and drank a few shakes after which I remembered I was being poisoned. Oh yeah, right, I thought and shook my head. By supper I felt like myself when I was medicated.
I told the doctor this, the next day. I was examined and a psychiatrist asked me questions. The head doctor turned to the regular doctor, shrugged his shoulders and said, “He’s fine.” The next day I was transferred to the psychiatric ward.
I had swallowed enough medicine that I was well in three days rather than the thirty or so that it usually took to achieve some type of balance. It was a quick route to sanity, one I wouldn’t recommend to anyone.
I had bit my tongue so hard that I had to live on fluids for weeks. When I got home I was confronted by my bed sheets and pillowcase covered in blood that came from my tongue. The stains seemed to accuse me, of what, though, I was never quite sure. It took some time after my return to the group home before I could fall asleep without my bedroom door being wide open. I needed the light from the living room. I needed the sounds of others and the drone of the TV. I may have been dead and that may have scared me, but, as sure as Neil Armstrong was the first man to do a jig on the moon, I couldn’t shed one salty drop over it.