The Suicide Hotline Voice Says My Feelings Are Normal
Faces scream from the upper floors of the hospital parking structure I’ve just walked by on my way to the grocery store. By the time I turn around, you’ve hit the ground, hard bones crushed against soft soil, landing in the small clearing between a shrub, two boulders and the asphalt driveway to which I’ve somehow conveyed myself. Small-framed in blue scrubs, you’re face up with marionette legs, shiny black hair neatly combed, lips pushing faint moans through broken teeth.
At 9:25 a.m., the emergency dispatch recording tells me to hold and the connection drops. You pant, open-mouthed, quick and shallow, blinking at me in silence.
Dump the heroics, Lady. I want out.
OR
What’s with the staring? Have you never known despair?
OR
When my feet left the wall, I knew I wanted to live. Help me.
The air is faintly beachy. Indifferent clouds amble overhead. Leaves shudder. On a planet with two people, the other one is dying and I’m on hold.
A woman materializes, murmuring O My God O My God O My God. I leave her with you so I can flag down the approaching streetcar, hoping the driver has a better line to the emergency service. The bell clangs, but the streetcar comes no closer.
When I return, you are in a body cast on a hospital bed, relieved to have survived, surrounded by your taut ex-husband, widowed mother, and two co-workers in scrubs, the save-a-life fantasy I’ve carried since kindergarten to repay the debt of being born. Or you curse me through jaws wired shut, for while the hospital will mend your jigsawed bones, it will break you too, collections tailing the rest of your paralyzed, pain-shaken days.
Mirage gone. Comes now the present, fierce and futile: the life that overwhelmed you; the sixth-floor employee parking lot that taunted; the emergency dispatch with which I remain maddeningly on hold; the distant streetcar refusing to budge; a bass beat fading from a passing car; the screamers, now soundless, on the fourth floor and the dogwalker paused on the sidewalk and the child crouched in a window; the lower lip I’m shredding with my teeth.
Your brown eyes glisten. You are leaving us, and we cannot stop you. We are but mourners at your impromptu funeral, recruited by where we happened to be on a Tuesday morning in September. We cannot eulogize, cannot enumerate your personal gifts, cannot cite your childhood precocity or the patients you’ve comforted, cannot testify to your empty place at the table, cannot question the role of debt or discrimination or illness or substance abuse, cannot wash your feet with our tears and dry them with our hair, cannot shroud you in linen or place a coin on your tongue.
Where are the paramedics? Surely, numerous calls have reached the dispatch by now.
I want to get closer, warm your frigid hand, soften the isolation that brought you here. I want to preserve your final untouched moments; violence, witnessed; desperation, documented; departure, attended. Here is no great white light of near-death TV. Here is only terror. Ultimately, I snap a picture, though not with a camera. Your image will return to me when I walk by, when I look down from my dentist’s office on the twenty-first floor, when I fold a freshly laundered blanket into my arms, when pointlessly I beg you to visit me in a dream.
What could possibly be keeping the paramedics, just around the corner from the hospital?
At the grocery store, I’ll hold the horror to my chest, loathe to dilute it with a description over heirloom tomatoes, loathe to release it with tears. Security will not confirm that you died; the police will not confirm; the hospital will not confirm; only the three-day bouquet will confirm. You will be one of nineteen people to jump to their deaths from a building in San Francisco this year, and suicide will be a leading killer for your age group (25-44). I expect your jump to be in the news, but find it nowhere.
On my way to the grocery store every week, I inhale sweet jasmine vines and roasted coffee beans. I walk by the drunken vet who has spent the night outside in his wheelchair. I walk by a chain gang of yellow-shirted four-year-olds in a crosswalk, and the indignant driver who slams his horn at the car that stopped for them. I walk by the open library in a repurposed phone booth, by my neighbor and her haunting stoop. I keep walking and will forget them all until next time. Walking and forgetting, walking and forgetting.
But you and I will not have a next time, so, at 9:26 a.m., when the dispatch calls me back and the streetcar keeps idling to accommodate the ambulance, and we are asked to disperse for the paramedics, I’m afraid already that I’ll keep walking and forgetting. It takes me four years and ninety-nine days to cry.
