Leaving the World

by Douglas Kennedy

  ‘I’ll be a happy camper again?’

  ‘You’ll never be that. What will happen is that life will reimpose itself and force you to re-engage with it. The world will seem larger.’

  Bullshit.

  But I said nothing. I just shrugged.

  ‘In the meantime,’ Dr Ireland said, ‘you would benefit from as much support as you are willing to accept.’

  ‘You mean, once the insurance company kicks me out of here.’

  ‘Your physical condition is very much on the mend. Dr Menzel tells me your eye is going to be near-fully functional in a few weeks – and the orthopedist is also very pleased with your progress. But I do worry that, if you are left on your own, you could psychologically regress . . .’

  ‘As you said, it’s not a simple “fix”.’

  ‘But say your friend Christy took you in for a while . . . ?’

  ‘No sale,’ I said.

  ‘Hear me out, please. Christy told me she has plenty of room at her house in Eugene, Oregon. She is more than willing to drive out here, pick you up, and put you up at her place for as long as—’

  ‘I don’t want to be beholden to anyone.’

  ‘This is not a matter of being “beholden” to anyone. This is – put baldly – trying to save you from yourself.’

  ‘Good luck,’ I said.

  I dug my heels in on this one. Though Christy tried ringing me every day I refused to take her calls. I also informed Nurse Rainier that if she was to show up at the hospital I wouldn’t “receive” her.

  ‘Because Your Majesty is otherwise engaged,’ Nurse Rainier said. ‘Feeling sorry for herself.’

  ‘Think what you like.’

  ‘Believe me, I will. Especially as I know exactly what you’re going through – and how easy it is to think that isolation is the only solution. But, as I learned, if you find yourself in hell, the only thing you can do is keep going.’

  ‘I’ll always be in hell.’

  Nurse Rainier just shrugged.

  ‘You can think that – and if you want easy answers, I can get five different men of God in here within the next half-hour and they’ll sell you a bill of goods about the paradise to which you’re bound if you accept that telephone call from Jesus. They’ll probably tell you that once you get to the other side, you’ll meet up with—’

  ‘Why are you doing this?’

  ‘Been there, done that – that’s why. I can’t give you bromides, Professor. I can’t give you much in the way of hope. Except what I told you before: if you’re going through hell, just keep going. Though if I were you, I’d also think about staying with my friend in Oregon for a while.’

  Christy continued to ring the hospital on a daily basis – I continued to refuse her calls. Just as I also wouldn’t speak again with Mr Alkan – though he too phoned regularly.

  If you’re going through hell, just keep going . . .

  Until you decide simply to reject the act of self-persuasion – of telling yourself the agony will, in time, be manageable – and bow to the inevitable.

  So I counted off the days. I took my pharmaceuticals and had my sessions with Dr Ireland and did even more intensive physio once the cast came off, and readjusted my damaged eye to life without a bandage. All the while I prepared myself for the denouement that could not be sidestepped.

  And so it came to pass – exactly twenty-eight days after my ‘accident’ – that I was turned loose from my convalescence. On the morning of my departure I had one last talk-fest with Dr Ireland. It was clear that she feared for me.

  ‘I regret having to discharge you, Jane. Should you feel at any time, day or night, that you cannot cope, you must call me and talk things through.’

  ‘Sure,’ I said.

  ‘I wish I could believe you . . .’

  ‘Believe what?’

  ‘Believe that you won’t give in to despair. We all have to travel hopefully . . . even when events dictate otherwise.’

  ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

  I organized a taxi to pick me up at the hospital. Nurse Pepper insisted on giving me one last bath – and telling me that she hoped I would find ‘the benevolent hand of a higher power’ guiding me wherever I went. Nurse Rainier insisted on escorting me out to the waiting taxi. As the driver loaded up my suitcase and helped me into the back seat, she thrust a plain wooden cane on me.

  ‘Brought this along as a little goodbye gift. Something to lean on.’

  ‘Thank you . . . for everything,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t want your thanks. I just want you to survive.’

  I asked the cab driver to take me to a Holiday Inn on the edge of Mountain Falls. En route to the motel, I asked the driver to stop at a pharmacy. There I bought a bottle of one hundred and twenty Tylenol PM tablets. Then we continued on to a liquor store, where I scored a fifth of vodka.

  The guy insisted on helping me in with my bag, even holding my arm as I leaned on the cane and I hobbled towards the hotel reception.

  ‘How many nights are you planning to stay?’ the woman behind the desk asked me.

  ‘Just the one,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t have a vehicle?’

  ‘No.’

  The Holiday Inn was a motel arrangement – you drove right up to the door of your rented room. The cabbie – a guy in his forties with thinning hair, wearing a check hunting shirt – again insisted on bringing me to its portals and helping me inside. It was a classic Holiday Inn with shit wallpaper, shit carpet, shit bedspread. I peeled off two twenties from my small wad of cash and handed it to him.

  ‘The fare’s only twenty,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you deserve forty.’

  He looked unsettled as he said goodbye to me – as if he had a premonition of what I intended to do and was fearful on my behalf. As soon as he was gone I called the front desk and asked them if they might have a roll of duct tape behind the counter, as I needed something to repair a torn handle on my suitcase.

  ‘You’re in luck,’ the woman said. ‘We had an electrician doing a job for us here a couple of days ago and he left a roll behind.’

  Using my cane I limped back to reception and picked it up.

  ‘Can you get it back to me before you check out tomorrow?’ she asked. ‘Just in case the guy comes back looking for it.’

  ‘No problem,’ I said.

  I returned to the room. I put the pills and the tape in a bedside drawer. I found a plastic laundry bag in a shelf in the closet. I pulled out the pills and the plastic bag and the tape.

  Do it fast before you can think about it. Pour yourself three fingers of vodka to steady your nerves, then take the pills – ten at a time, all chased with more vodka. Once they’re all ingested, place the plastic bag over your head. Seal it tightly around your neck with duct tape – by which time the Tylenol/vodka cocktail will have done its chemical work and you will begin to drift off into . . .

  I found a plastic cup in the bathroom. I returned to the bed. I spread all the pills out on the bedside table. I half-filled the cup with vodka. I took a long sip. The alcohol burned as it slipped down. I raised the cup again and downed its contents. The vodka went straight to my head. I grabbed a notepad by the bed and scraped half the pills into my left hand. But just as I was raising them to my mouth, I heard a woman’s voice. A shrill woman’s voice, raised in anger.

  ‘You little bitch . . . you ever fucking sass me again . . .’

  Then I heard the distinctive sound of a slap, followed by a howl from a little girl.

  ‘No, Mamma, no . . .’

  Another slap, another howl. Then: ‘You get that look off your face, you little . . .’

  Suddenly I was on my feet, throwing the pills to the ground and hobbling to the door. As I yanked it open I saw the shrill woman – large, overweight, a shock of black hair – slapping a little girl across the side of the head. The girl couldn’t have been more than five – and, like her mother, she was already oversized. Without thinking what I was doing I grab
bed the woman’s hand just as it was about to land again on her daughter’s head.

  ‘You stop that,’ I heard myself yell.

  ‘Who the hell are you?’ the woman screamed back at me, struggling against my grip.

  ‘You stop that right now.’

  With her free hand she punched me right in the abdomen. It landed with full force, doubling me over, making me retch up vodka.

  ‘You’ve got some nerve, lady,’ she said, pulling the little girl into a car. I tried to get up. I couldn’t.

  ‘You can’t do that to a child.’

  The woman doubled back on me.

  ‘You tellin’ me how to treat my daughter?’ she screamed. ‘You givin’ me parent lessons, Miss Fancy Pants?’

  With that she kicked me right in the ribcage. I fell to the pavement and was sick again. There was the sound of an engine starting up. Over this: ‘See what you caused, you little bitch?’

  The girl begged her mother to forgive her. Then, with a shriek of rubber, the car pulled away and they were gone.

  The entire incident couldn’t have lasted more than a minute and it was witnessed by no one. I spat out the toxic bile that was now swimming around my mouth. Picking myself up I staggered back into the room. As I walked inside, my shoe landed on top of all the pills I had scattered on the floor. All at once I was crying and sweeping the remaining pills off the bedside table and crushing them with the heels of my shoes, and grabbing the bottle of vodka and racing into the bathroom and smashing it in the tub, and finally collapsing on the bed, sobbing wildly, feeling beyond lost.

  When the sobbing eventually subsided I lifted myself up off the bed and went into the bathroom and picked up every shard of glass in the bathtub. Then I found a dustpan and brush in the closet and swept up all that now-powdered Tylenol, thinking: Even when you’ve been assaulted and have botched another attempt at suicide, you have to tidy up. Because you’re a bad girl. And bad girls who want to be good girls always try to clean up the mess they’ve made, even though they know that they still won’t feel better about themselves. Because . . .

  How could that woman do that to a child? Her child.

  I felt another sob lodging in my throat. But I caught it and wouldn’t let it escape. No more of that. Nurse Rainier was right: crying in the face of hell was just crying in the face of hell. And another failed suicide was just . . . pathetic.

  I stood up. I went into the bathroom. My ribcage hurt and my mouth was noxious. Before splashing water on my face, I stared at my red eyes, the small lingering abrasion across my forehead, the lips now free of stitches but still marked by scars. As I turned away in disgust, a question formed in my addled brain.

  When you can’t self-destruct, what is the only other option open to you?

  The answer arrived without much in the way of rumination . . . because it was so damn obvious.

  You leave the world.

  Four

  IT TOOK AROUND twelve hours to divest myself of myself. It was fast work. After telling the woman at the front desk of the Holiday Inn that I would be staying there for the next two nights I used my cane to limp across the road to a grim little strip mall. There I bought a $20 telephone card, some cold cuts and bread, a pair of scissors and a few bottles of water.

  Back in the room I started to work the phone. I called American Express, Visa, Discovery and MasterCard and cancelled all my accounts. All four of the ‘customer services agents’ I spoke with professed horror at my decision to end business with their companies, the Amex woman actually asking me: ‘Have we done anything to upset you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve just decided I don’t need your card anymore.’

  ‘But we’d hate to lose you.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll get over it.’

  I phoned the telephone service of my bank in Boston to transfer the necessary funds to clear what remained on these accounts, then cut the cards in half. I did keep one piece of plastic: the debit card for my checking account, which, at close of business today, had a balance of $23,863.84. Enough to keep me going for a while – especially as my salary from New England State was still being paid into it monthly.

  New England State. That was, so to speak, my next port of call. Opening my laptop, I found the wireless connection for the hotel and went online. I hadn’t opened my mailbox since running away from Boston over five weeks ago. There were 338 messages. I deleted them all without reading a single one, even though I noticed many from Christy and from colleagues and even from old classmates, someone evidently having supplied my email address to everyone in the wake of. . .

  But I couldn’t bear reading words of condolence now, any more than I could deal with my best friend and her tough-love stance about getting me installed at her house. I counted eighteen emails from her. Click, click, click . . . and they were consigned to oblivion.

  After also emptying the Recently Deleted folder of my server, I wrote Professor Sanders an email. It was short and to the point: in the wake of recent events in my life, I felt I had no choice but to resign my position at the university, effective immediately. And I thanked him for the support he showed me after . . .

  Fifteen minutes after sending this, a reply came bouncing back to me.

  Dear Jane

  I’m online right now – hence the immediate response to your email. Everyone here has been naturally worried about you and were very relieved to hear that your automobile accident, though horrendous, didn’t prove life threatening or crippling. As to your letter of resignation, the university is very much committed to keeping you on staff. Your post is currently being covered by a graduate student, Tim Burroughs, who is talented, but is not you. The President himself wants you to know that you are a valued member of our department – and has assured me you will remain on full pay until, hopefully, you return for the fall semester. That ‘hope’ is shared by all your colleagues in the department – especially by me.

  Given what you’ve been through I can fully understand why you might want to sever ties with everything to do with the recent past. But do know this: for all the complexities of your time at New England State – and I do appreciate that it often hasn’t been easy for you – you are much respected here and enormously liked by your students. In short, we don’t want to lose you.

  I don’t know if you read the letter I wrote to you after the accident. When my sister lost her nine-year-old son to cancer some years ago she couldn’t bear to read a single letter of condolence. But I want to re-emphasize what I said in that note: a tragedy like the one you have suffered is so awful that you must give yourself the necessary time to somehow find a way forward. So – for the time being – I will not accept your letter of resignation. We have three or four months in hand before having to act on filling your position, should you not change your mind. But I sincerely hope that you will return to us in the autumn.

  In the meantime, if you would like to discuss any of this – or simply feel like talking – please call me at any time.

  Sincerely

  Without pausing to reconsider I clicked the Reply button at the end of this email and wrote:

  Dear Professor Sanders

  I greatly appreciate your kind words and your support. However, my decision is final. I will not be returning to New England State in the autumn as I am resigning my post with immediate effect. There is no need to continue to pay me for this term.

  Sincerely yours

  Around a minute after sending this, there was an instant reply from Sanders. I deleted it before it could be opened. Then I sent an email to Mr Alkan.

  I presume the insurance payment has been handed over to the nominated charity. I presume the contents of the apartment have been given away and that the apartment itself is on the market. There will possibly be an insurance payout for my totaled car. Please also give this sum away. I don’t want it.

  In closing, this will be my last email to you. I am now vanishing from view. As you have power of attorney over my assets I leave you to
administer their disbursement and deduct any fees that you incur in doing so.

  I thank you for all the good counsel and kindness you have afforded me.

  Over the next few hours I also cancelled all health insurance premiums, all pension plans, all monthly saving schemes. Then I spent over two hours stripping the hard drive of my laptop computer of every file, email and software program. Before doing so I also canceled my email account with AOL. I wouldn’t be using email again for a very long time.

  By the time I had completed all these tasks it was midnight. I took a long bath. I climbed into the stiff, rough Holiday Inn sheets. I popped a Mirtazapine and turned on the television and watched crap until the pill did its work and I faded into nocturnal limbo.

  I slept straight through until nine the next morning and woke with a curious sense of disengagement. The dreaded instant still arrived when sleep gave way to consciousness and the world rushed in. But today, accompanying that ‘each dawn I die’ moment, was a grim resolution to get through the day . . . and to do so with the knowledge that my former life was just that: a part of a now-eradicated past. The laptop had been stripped clean. I had no instruments of credit, no debt, no material possession, a modest sum of money in the bank, $2,000 in cash, $1,800 in traveler’s checks, no job, no family, no dependents, no obligations. Had I been of a philosophical bent I could have described my current condition as one approaching existential purity – a state of complete individual freedom, devoid of responsibility to anyone bar myself. But I knew better. I was engaged in the act of wiping the material hard disk of my life – with the bleak cognizance of the fact that I would never erase its emotional content.

  Still . . . keep busy, keep busy. So I rang the front desk and asked them if they knew the number for the bus depot in town. They did. I called them up and found that there was a bus which left Mountain Falls tomorrow morning at nine a.m., crossing the frontier into Canada at one p.m. and then continuing non-stop to Calgary, arriving there around four p.m. One-way $47 – payable at the depot in town.

  Why Calgary? It was the nearest city that was not in the United States. And if I was in the process of deleting the past, then the act of geographically detaching myself from my country had a certain logic to it. Had I been in Texas, I would have headed south to Mexico. As I had crash-landed myself in the higher reaches of Montana, there was only one place to go from here: up. Calgary was the first big city due north of where I now found myself. There was the extra bonus of having a Canadian passport (courtesy of dear old Dad). So Calgary was the obvious destination. I didn’t care what it turned out to be. It was there – and there was where I was heading.