On the stove, near the front edge, between the two front burners, stood two small glass bowls. Behind them stood a large clear-plastic drinking glass with swirls of orange and yellow on it. In one of the bowls sat ten small orange tablets. In the second bowl were twenty blue gel-caps. The drinking glass held the contents of an entire pint of rum.
The packaging for the pills was nowhere to be seen. Nor was the bottle that had contained the rum. I had already taken all such cardboard and plastic items down the street and deposited it in the garbage can next to the bus shelter. I was now prepared. I was undressed and had turned down the bed. All that remained was to ingest the items that now stood before me on the top of the stove.
I picked up a couple of the orange pills. They were Gravol tablets, intended to prevent me from throwing up any of the materials I was now about to ingest. I put three of them in my mouth and picked up the tumbler of rum. Not being much of a drinker, I imagined that downing an entire pint of rum was going to be an unpleasant experience. So I brace myself and took a swig to wash down the Gravol. The rum was strong, but reasonably smooth. I knew Captain Morgan wouldn't let me down.
By the time I'd swallowed all ten Gravol tablets, my lips were beginning to feel a bit numb from the ministrations of The Captain. I knew I'd better get cracking on the blue gel-caps before the Gravol started making me groggy. So I grabbed two of them (they were larger than the Gravol tablets) and swallowed them with a swig of the rum. The gel-caps went down easily enough, but the rum was beginning to get a bit worrisome.
So I sped up the process a bit.
By the time I had downed all of the Sleep-Eze-D gel-caps, I couldn't feel my lips anymore. Captain Morgan had trod upon them with his hobnail boots and was now chuckling on the other side of the room. I'd thought he'd've been nicer to me than that. After all, I did drink an entire pint of his good wares.
So much for brand choice.
As quickly as I could, I rinsed out both bowls and the tumbler in the kitchen sink and placed them in the dish rack. I then moved from the kitchen into the bedroom, where I lay my naked body down upon the bed and proceeded to wait for the effects of the drugs to kick in.
I didn't expect to be conscious for too much longer.
As I lay there, staring at the rather ugly light fixture attached to the ceiling, I found myself recollecting some of the things that had gotten me to this point. I'd had thoughts of suicide before, but I'd always managed to avoid acting upon them. I'd even taken myself down to the emergency room a couple of times over the past three years, because I'd felt that I might do something, and a certain percentage of my brain was sensible enough to at least seek out help and prevent the minority members from staging a coup and tipping the whole thing on its end.
Not so this time. The last straw had been placed upon the spine of the dromedary. I couldn't allow myself to continue feeling this way any longer.
As I lay there, thinking about the failed business, the failed relationship, the dead parent, and the out-to-lunch parent, I began to feel a chill, so I put my legs under the covers and pulled the sheet up over my stomach. I shifted my position and stared at the ceiling light again for a while.
No drowsiness yet. How long did it take this stuff to kick in.
I tried to imagine what my friends and family might think of what I was doing, but then I stopped that train of thought, because it was depressing, and I was depressed enough as it was. I decided to focus instead upon the reasons for my taking this dire action, the bitterness I held in my heart towards so many people and things, and that gave me some amount of solace. It gave me the strength to continue in my certainty that this was indeed the only thing I could do now.
Jillian was now gone from my life, as was a great deal of my money. It wasn't bad enough that I was a failed writer, a failed musician, and failed son. I was now able to add to that list a failed businessman and a failed lover. I was running out of things to fail at, and I figured I might as well cut my losses and move to another country.
The undiscovered country.
As more of a Star Trek fan than a Shakespeare fan, I actually managed a chuckle. I imagined it would be one of the last things I would do.
——
I regained conscious in an entirely different type of lighting. Whereas there had been sun coming in through the bedroom window when I'd lain down, there was now a harshness above me. The quality of the light was different, the quality of the air was different, and there were noises.
I looked around, confused, even dazed, but recognized that I was in a hospital.
Someone in a pale green uniform stood to my left. She was adjusting something. I glanced to my right, and found someone else there. My eyes were not completely focussed, but I recognized who it was immediately.
Lydia.
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
"Don't try to talk," the woman in the pale green said.
Lydia squeezed my right hand as I looked at her again. I tried to squeeze back, but my muscles were weak, and I was only able to move my fingers a small amount.
"Thank God," Lydia muttered.
"Can you hear me, Mister Richmond?" the green-clad woman asked.
I nodded and grunted.
"Do you know where you are?"
I looked around. After a moment, I nodded.
"Okay. You rest easy. I'll be back in a few minutes, okay?"
I nodded again.
I watched as the woman turned away and headed for the door to my left. I sighed, allowed my neck to relax completely, and plunked my head back down on the pillow. After a moment, I turned to look at Lydia again. She had tears in her eyes and was looking at me like someone who had just been struck in the solar plexus by their best friend.
Well, I supposed that was true, metaphorically.
"You sonofabitch," she murmured. "What the fuck did you think you were doing?"
I looked at her intently, but I did not reply. I didn't know what to say, I didn't know if my throat was working yet. I wondered idly if there'd been a tube down my throat. There was an odd burning sensation on the right-hand side whenever I swallowed, so I imagined that there had been something stuck down there.
They'd pumped my stomach, I imagined.
Lydia wiped her eyes with her sleeve and sniffled. "Do you have any idea what it was like for me to find you there like that?"
A light bulb went off in my head. So that was how I'd ended up here. Lydia had found me. I found that fact simultaneously confusing, annoying, and comforting. Of course she still had a key. She'd always had a key, for as long as I'd known her. Jillian had never been able to understand that. But then, she'd never really understood the kind of relationship that Lydia and I had. In point of fact, I don't think Lydia or I ever really understood it, either. But it was there, it had always been there, and I imagined, now that I was conscious again and mostly aware of the world around me, that it would continue to be there for some time to come.
The door opened, and the pale-green woman returned to my other bedside. I imagined that she was a nurse, so I decided to think of her that way, which was lot less cumbersome than thinking of her as a green-clad person.
"Mister Richmond?" she asked.
I grunted in reply.
"How are you feeling?"
I interpreted that question as an invitation to try out my vocal cords. So I gave it a try.
"Ummm… I guess… groggy… I said."
She nodded. "That's not surprising. Do you remember what you did?"
I frowned. "I'm groggy, not stupid."
She frowned right back at me. "Well, I think that answers the question of your alertness level." She glanced at Lydia with an expression that seemed to combine sympathy with annoyance.
"He's always been like that," Lydia said.
The nurse turned to the monitors at the head of the bed and reached for something I couldn't see. She then checked the tube that was attached to my left hand and absently adjusted the blanket, which was tucked up underneath my armpits.
I began to recognize the smells associated with hospitals, the antiseptic smell that was draped like a shroud over the underlying scents of disease and death. I'd visited so many hospitals in my time, seen so much disease, so much suffering. My gut began to churn as the memories associated with the smells cascaded through my brain.
I put my head back again and sighed.
"This wasn't supposed to happen," I said.
——————–
Later in the afternoon, they sent a doctor in to see me. He was tall and dark-skinned. He looked Middle-Eastern, but I wasn't able to narrow it down any further than that. He pulled a stool over and sat down at the left-hand side of my bed.
"I'm Doctor Choudra," he said. That sounded like an Indian name to me, but still wasn't one-hundred-percent sure. I wondered idly why it even mattered to me. "How are you feeling."
I let out a long breath. "Well, let's see," I said. "You can start with stupid. And add a bit of guilty. Um, a little dash of discouraged. A pinch of depressed. And a heaping tablespoon of tired."
His mouth made a funny quivering movement. He might have been trying to suppress a smile, or he might have had something spicy for lunch. It was hard to say.
"You seem to have your faculties about you," the doctor said. "Have you tried sitting up yet?"
"Yes, and with disastrous results," I replied. "I'm not trying that again any time soon."
"What happened?"
"Well, my head began to fall off, for one thing," I said. "And then my stomach tried to get off the bed by itself."
"I understand." He looked at the clipboard on his lap, the one that all physicians everywhere are required by law to carry with them at all times lest they look unofficial, and flipped a couple of pages.
"Can you tell me what your intent was this morning?" he asked.
I stared at him, incredulous. "My intent?" He nodded. "My intent was to kill myself."
"Can you tell me how you set about doing this?"
I described to him my meticulous sequence of steps, how I had gone to the two separate drug stores so I wouldn't be seen buying both Gravol and Sleep-Eze at the same time. How I had put the pills into bowls and the booze into a glass and had deposited the packing in the garbage can down the street. How I had pulled back the bedclothes and stripped off my own. It was thorough, and it was done with all deliberation.
The doctor nodded. "We're looking at this as quite a serious suicide attempt," he said. "And given that, I don't think we're ready just yet to send you home. I'm recommending admitting you to our Short Stay unit upstairs, where one of our psychiatrists can evaluate your situation more thoroughly."
I let my head slump back again. Finally, somebody was taking me seriously.
"That will be just fine," I said.
He flipped through the clipboard pages again, his officialdom veritably filling the room with each ripple of the paper, and he finally closed the pages, stood up, and left.
As I adjusted my position, I glanced to the other side of the room and was surprised to see a woman standing there, looking at the items in the room's supply cupboard.
"Hello," I said.
She turned, seemingly startled. She looked at me with wide eyes.
She didn't appear to belong there. She was wearing a long coat that covered her from neck to ankles, and boots of a type that I had never seen before.
"Who are you?" I asked.
She frowned, and headed for the door.
A moment later she was gone.
