st-st-storyyyyy!
I’m not here to understand, I’m here to save you. I’m here only to coax you, to tell you it’s okay to take that one more vicodin to end it all, or that one last slash across your wrist with the rusty blade you hide under your bed. Go ahead and do it, I don’t care. I do ask however, that you pull the trigger away from the phone.
Cry to me about that last test you failed, like it really matters. Tell me about your boyfriend who forgot to call you back, yet consistently remembers to his math homework every night. Just remember though, I am not on your side.
Every night as I try to cook dinner, feed my animal, and relax the phone is ringing. Ringing with the sound of your problems, your aches. I pretend to listen to your droning pathetic voice as you spill your soul out to a stranger who just DOESN’T CARE.
Do you know how hard it so to try and cook a fucking decent meal for yourself, while holding the phone away from your ear to avoid the piercing sound of a gun going off? The ringing stays in your ears hours after, no matter what. I haven’t cooked something worth eating, let alone shitting out in months.
I never wanted to do this, it just sort of happened, purely accidental. The newspaper was advertising some crisis intervention program, and got the number wrong. So girl calls me at 3am, and I’m pissed because she woke me up. Whoever she is with is probably pissed too, because she’s screaming to me on the phone. I can’t even understand her, the music in the background is blaring too loud.
So I ask her, what I know she’s waiting to hear.
Is she tired of hurting? I ask if there was one way to end all of her pain, would she do it? I’m yelling at her asking if she’s had enough.
What I don’t want is to sit here and listen to her complain.
It’d be a big waste of time to try and fix her life, because she doesn’t want her life fixed. No one wants their life fixed, because then what is left? We don’t know. And that, is what would slowly kill her from the inside out.
So I tell her, kill yourself. What? I say it again, kill yourself. Try alcohol and anti-depressants as you shove your head into a plastic bag. Now she’s crying, real hard.
I hang up.
On top of keeping my own life straight, these people want me to sort out their lives. I work a typical 9-5 job in this city where no one will give you the time of day, unless you pay them for it of course. Basically. I’m a full time asshole, part time God.
After the mishap with the number, calls came pouring in. Crying with the phone in one hand, and the other holding what they think they want me to rescue them from, they call. Curled in a ball for days, they call. Messiah. They call me. Savior.
Another night, a guy calls me right after I fall asleep, fast asleep. Some loser, calling after the bars have closed saying he’s sitting on his apartment floor. He can’t sleep without having these terrible nightmares where everyone dies. In his dreams he is watching this. It’s so real and no one will help him. He can’t sleep. With the gun tucked under his chin he’s asking for a reason to live. I say, do it. This isn’t a beautiful world you need to stay in and suffer, it isn’t much of a world at all. I tell him, hurry and pull the trigger, I’ve got work tomorrow. I pull the phone away from my ear when I hear the click of the trigger. Then, there is the obituary to look for. A little paragraph about this guy, lets me know it’s real. It’s not just a dream.
It’s a rush, to have that much control. The guy with the gun was named Bailey Stephen’s and finding out that he is a real person is a wonderful feeling. It’s murder, but it’s not; crisis intervention wasn’t even my idea.
After the newspaper got the number right, the calls started to die out. All the people who first called, were either dead, or pissed. No new people were calling anymore.
So I advertised. I was careful though. I made them so that they’d be easy to read at night by someone crying, or on drugs. Or drunk. I use black paper with white text saying: If you had one more chance to try and fix it all, would you do it? Call me. Then my phone number.
My second choice was: “If you are a irresponsible teenager with a drinking problem, come and get help.” Then my number. Word of advice, don’t use ones like this, you’ll get the cops at your door, no later than 10 minutes after you post it. Forever after that you’ll hear the click…click…click of a phone tap.
Take my word for it.
What’s important is to put them where people will see them. In phone booths, dirty old phone booths. Outside of bars where people get kicked out at closing time.
Then you’ll be in business.
So the day after I find the obituary for good old Bailey Stephens I head out. The man I killed last week has to be around here somewhere. What’s left of him at least. With the gun tucked under his chin, crying for a reason to live. I am going to find him somewhere. Bailey Stephens.
Gone, but not forgotten.
Or he is going to find me. That is what I always hope.
I stop looking when my eyes fall upon a tiny black outline against a huge stained glass window. Somebody. What I hope is, she’s dead. My secret wish right now is to be with this dead girl. Any dead girl. I’m not choosey.
The girl has long black hair, and from so far away the thin breakable arms and legs of the girl make me look again, and again and make me wonder what will become of me.
I’m looking for names I know from obituaries. Here forever, are the names of people who took my advice.
Beloved son, devoted mother of three, gentle daughter.
Pull the trigger.
Lost soul.
Here I am. Payback time. Come and get me.
I dare you.
I want to be walking by a crypt, and here something scratching and struggling. I want to be chased by flesh eating-zombies. At night, I flatten my ear against the crypt and wait. That is why I am here.
Not that I am crazy, I just want proof that death isn’t the end. It would prove some life after death. I would die happy. So I wait. Watch. Listen.
No activity in Crypt 7257.
No activity in Crypt 7258.
No activity in Crypt 7259.
The girl is here with a nothing special look on her face, looking for her own sorrow and death.
I have found it. Crypt 3465. Bailey Stephens. My latest victim. I found him. His tomb is high up, on the highest tier, and the only way to get a better look is a step ladder. Up on the ladder, 2 rungs higher than safety recommends, I can see the girl. There is something beautiful about her. Something malnourished. Her skin is pale, and something inside of me is wishing she is dead. Please be dead. Oh please. Oh please. Soon she is walking towards me. Staring up at me while I am on the step ladder. She calls up and asks if I knew Bailey.
Sort of, I say.
That was her brother. Bailey Stephens, brother of fragile Ann Stephens.
She’s holding flowers out at me, an unspoken command to take them up is given. I stumble, and they fall on her, as she giggles slightly.
Oh please, let her be dead.
A rose petal grazes over her cheek bone, and she smiles. Climbing down the ladder, I feel my hands tense, and stomach tighten.
Hi, I say.
She looks at me, curious eyes stare me down. I don’t know what to say, I never knew this kid. The only time I talked to him, he was crying and blubbering about a life he couldn’t take. A life he couldn’t man up to. She senses the awkwardness, and begins to tell a story.
Has Bailey ever told you about the cruise we went on? I shake my head no. She looks up to the ceiling where the music is coming down from speakers near painted on clouds and angels.
First, we took dance lessons. Ballroom dancing. Fox-Trot, Cha-Cha. Rumba. Swing. And of course The Waltz. The Waltz was the easiest.
The angels play their music, telling Ann something and she listens.
She walks closer to me, eye-to-eye and puts her arms around my shoulders.
You do know how to Waltz, don’t you?
Wrong.
She shakes her head, asking how anyone who knew Bailey didn’t know how to Waltz. She is face to face and grabs my hand, and pulls it out away from us. She says, take your hand and put it against my back.
I do.
She shows me how to step forward, and then bring my feet together as she does the opposite. She counts. One, two three. The music goes. One, two, three.
Right now I’m wishing this girl is dead, hoping and praying that at that moment she will look up at me with dead eyes. Dead eyes that can pierce the living with one glance. She stops dancing abruptly, as if the angels above us have instructed her.
She is coming back to the crypt next week, and she would like for me to join her.
Fuck, I hope she’s dead.
That night, calls come pouring in like usual. A guy calls saying he is failing Algebra II. Just as a point of practicing, I say kill yourself.
A woman calls and says her kids won’t behave. Without missing a beat, I say kill yourself.
A girl calls and asks, “Does it hurt very much to die?”
Well sweetheart, I tell her, yes, but it hurts a lot more to keep living.
She tells me, last week her brother killed himself.
Ann Bailey, it has to be. She is rattling off things about her brothers voice, and I am pretending to really care. I ask how she is feeling.
She doesn’t really know how she feels, and says everything is coming to a close. If she was going to kill herself, right now would be a good time.
Doesn’t she have anyone she can turn to, like a friend of her brother?
Nope.
Nobody goes to his grave?
Not really.
Not one person? Nobody else leaves flowers?
No.
It’s clear I made an impression.
Wait, there is this one pretty weird guy.
Great. I’m weird.
I ask her what she means by weird.
She says I remind her of the cult people who killed themselves eight years ago. Me, as in who she met at the mausoleum. Not me, on the phone; hoping this girl is dead and would like to see me again.
I ask about what he was doing there, why was he there? She says he had a big thing of flowers for him.
See, that is just the type of loving person you need to run into in a crisis like this, I say.
She hangs up.
I ignored the phone calls for the rest of the night, and decided to treat myself. Dinner, for once without the interruption of whiny pre-teens who are too weak to handle middle school. I boiled a lobster, and sat down to enjoy it.
And maybe this is just a trick of the light, but I’ve eaten almost the whole lobster before I notice the heartbeat.