The Girl Below(84)

The pizza arrived. On it was pink and yellow goo that had fused with the gray cardboard box it had come in. I wasn’t sure that it was really food. I was out of wine; had three cigarettes left, then two, then one. I emptied the ashtray on top of the fake pizza and the ash stuck to the topping like fine black pepper. I tried not to think of Edward, but he surrounded me. The walls of the room were his skull, and I was sitting inside his head.

I lay down on the bed to go to sleep and that’s when it started. Without prelude, my mind became fixated on a list of ways to kill myself. I thought at first that I must be the one writing this list, but soon after, I realized I wasn’t in control of it, that the list was writing itself. It had invaded my thoughts like a virus.

Whether I had my eyes open or closed made no difference. The list kept scrolling, demanding that I pay attention to its methods, perhaps ten or twelve in all: strangulation by hanging; an overdose of pills; falling from a tall building or bridge, like the one that spanned Auckland Harbor. Nothing very original or creative, just the basic methods, brutal and efficient. These unfolded step by step like the safety instructions at the start of a flight, only the attendant (who was me) had gone rogue and was demonstrating death instead of self-preservation.

As time went on, I found I was no longer simply a passive bystander watching myself carry out the methods, but was experiencing a set of corresponding physical sensations: the vertiginous urge to jump; the long, slow trapeze of falling.

Fifteen feet away, the open apartment window beckoned. From there it was only a matter of stepping off a metal bar, of surrendering to the open arms of gravity. Why had I left the window open? I wanted to shut it but could not risk getting close enough. Instead, I gripped the mattress with both hands and closed my eyes so I wouldn’t be able to see it.

But the list was not so easily thrown off course. Just down the road, it announced, was an open-late supermarket where boxes of aspirin and razors were stacked prettily on the shelves. It reminded me that a speeding bus would also do the trick; or a train if one was at hand.

I tightened my grip on the mattress. I had thought, before this, that when people committed suicide they had done so by choice, that they’d wanted to kill themselves. But I saw now that suicide wasn’t something you chose. It chose you. It was a compulsion, a command, and the margin for survival was narrower than a pin.

In the end, my own probably came down to luck: I was good at insomnia, at wakefulness, at hanging on to consciousness when I should have been asleep. Nodding off or even just zoning out for a minute, in this case, would have been fatal. That’s when the list would have pounced.

Sometimes, when I have gone over the events of that night in the gray box, I have seen another outcome very clearly. I have imagined myself losing awareness for a second or two and walking to the window and climbing up on the cage and jumping off without hesitation. Mid-fall, I come to, and the last thought I have before I hit the pavement is that no one will ever know I didn’t want to jump.





Chapter Eighteen


Skyros, 2003





“Watch this,” said Caleb, crossing the ferry to where Harold was napping on a wooden bench, his head resting on his camera bag, his leg tied to his suitcase by a garish silk tie.

“Don’t,” I said. “He’s fast asleep.”

But Caleb picked up the suitcase and made to run off with it, so that Harold’s leg jerked in the same direction and he rolled off the bench. “Stop!” he called out, landing awkwardly on all fours. “Stop, thief!”

Caleb laughed hysterically, “It’s me, you knob. Can you look after our stuff while we get something to eat? Seeing as how your security system rocks.”

“You little toad,” said Harold, still half asleep, but Caleb dumped his bag there anyway, along with the fish, which had started to reek after basking all day in the Aegean sun.

“Sorry,” I said, and was about to take my suitcase with me, but realized how heavy it was and put it down next to Caleb’s. “Actually, do you mind?”

“Just get me a fucking coffee,” Harold said through clenched teeth.

For breakfast or lunch, or whatever meal it was, we bought cans of thick chocolate milk and a packet of dry, sugary biscuits that tasted, well, foreign. After sucking on diesel fumes for seven hours straight, everyone in the canteen had turned into zombies and stared in our direction without seeing anything.

“I’m still hungry,” said Caleb when the biscuits were all gone, and the ship answered him with a booming honk.

Out the salt-smeared window, a jagged coastline dotted with white cubes and brooding fir trees loomed ominously close. “Come on,” I said. “We don’t want to be late again.”