Starling Days

by Rowan Hisayo Buchanan

  He bought the next round. Somewhere into the third, he was listening to Theo complain about how the dog had chewed up his Gibson.

  “Do you still play?” Oscar asked. Back when they’d lived in dorms, he’d often seen the guitar lying across the bed, like a beautiful woman.

  “Not as often as I’d like.” Theo stretched under the table, his loafers gleaming lazily in the sticky light. “Not with that infernal dog back.”

  “Back? Phoebe’s been away?”

  “To give her credit, she tries to stay out of my hair. Well, you know, she was crashing with Mina for a bit. And then she vanished for, like, two weeks. New boyfriend, I assume, but they must’ve had a falling-out.”

  Someone scored a goal and a cheer rose around them, as loud as waves crashing against a rocky shore.

  She had taken a shower in an attempt to feel clean. Thwock, thwock, thwock, came the noise from the bathroom. She must not have rotated the nozzle all the way shut. Mina shivered. She patted the pillow that belonged to Oscar or Phoebe. They’d both let her sleep closest to the door. They’d both known she needed that. Now she felt the emptiness at her back. If Phoebe were here, they’d be sleeping back-to-back, their spines aligned. If Oscar were here, his long arm would be draped over her. Greedy, she thought. She’d been greedy. But was it greedy to cram food into your mouth when hunger shredded your stomach? Was it greedy to eat so much you were sick all over yourself? Dogs ate like that. Seagulls. Fish. They ate and ate with a hunger that didn’t stop.

  “I am a dog. A fish,” she said to the room. She thought of running upstairs to say it to him. She thought of asking for his love back, as if it were a muffin tray she had once borrowed and needed again. Pathetic. She did not deserve Oscar or Phoebe. But even as she thought that, she thought, Deserve? You did not deserve? Do you think you’re on some TV interview? Do you think you can fool anyone by sounding so pathetic? So irresponsible? You don’t deserve? It’s as if you think just by claiming guilt you’ll make yourself unguilty.

  Mina closed her eyes, as if by doing that she might shut out her mind. But the thought came anyway. It’s as if you think you’re on stage. It’s as if you think, by lying there in the fetal position, someone is going to feel sorry for you.

  She opened her eyes again. The lights were off and she could just see the outlines of the room. The furniture had blurred into slabs of shadow. What would it be like to be your own shadow? To follow yourself around, making human gestures but never making any decisions? To grow and shrink but to have no control? Would it feel that different from being a person?

  Phoebus Apollo granted the Sibyl as many years of life as grains in a pile of sand. But she forgot to ask for eternal youth so she was doomed to age and age. Her body scraped away until she became so small she was just a voice in a jar. When asked what she wished for, all she said was I want to die. Mina sounded out the Greek: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω. The words stumbled in her mouth. She said it again, more confident now of the flow.

  Mina imagined her death and the pan out to sky and rain. Or sky and sun. Sky. And herself gone. Just gone. Not even knowing she was gone. The pan out would belong to someone else’s eyes. Phoebe getting off the Tube at Angel, or Oscar looking out of the window, pausing as he boxed away her things.

  They were both going to think it was about them. Perhaps she should leave a note—It’s not your fault. My brain is broken.

  Would her denial seem like an insult? They’d think she was being passive-aggressive. But could she be responsible for their assumptions? It might be a good thing. Maybe their lives would feel more purposeful afterwards, like I’m so wonderful, someone died for me.

  A Swedish study had found that women whose siblings committed suicide were 1.5 times more likely to commit suicide themselves. But Mina had no sisters. Her dad would be upset. He’d worked so hard for their small family. But how much worse to throw herself on him because she couldn’t cope with something so simple as life? She’d save him from her living failure.

  There was the problem of how. There was always the problem of how. The statistics were easy enough to get. Guns were the best. Guns were by far the best. But she didn’t have a gun. She didn’t have a gun here and she didn’t have one in America either. She just hadn’t been able to imagine herself driving out to Virginia, flashing ID, and returning with portable death. She’d easily imagined Dido forcing steel through her own skin and the funeral pyre’s smoke smudging the sky. She’d imagined abandoned Ariadne’s body dancing on the end of its rope. But Mina couldn’t imagine swiping a credit card a few states over. So it had been pills that first time. Pills were easy to picture, so she’d gone with them. Idiot. Idiot. And then the bridge, where she had done nothing at all, just looked into the same river tourists snapped selfies in front of. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.

  The decorators had splashed paint on 5B’s floor. If only he’d noticed earlier, he could’ve bought sandpaper.

  His phone began to buzz, and singing up from the screen was the +1 that indicated the number was American. Trust Americans to have made themselves the number-one country in the world.

  “Hi?” he said.

  “It’s your dad. Well, no, this isn’t your dad, this is Ami. Hi. Sorry.”

  “What’s wrong with Dad?”

  “He’s okay now.” Ami was talking quickly, and the line buzzed loudly as if a wasp were trapped in the wires.

  “Now?”

  “We’re in the hospital.”

  “What?”

  “A few hours after you left, he doubled over. It was bad. He couldn’t stand. They think it might be an infarction.”

  “An infarction? That’s a heart attack.”

  “Yes. He told me not to call you. He didn’t want you to worry, but I thought if it was my father . . .”

  “So what’s going on? Should I come back?”

  “He’s getting fitted for a stent.”

  “A stent?” He must have read about it, but right now a stent sounded like a gardening tool, something his mother would use to tie roses to a trellis. “I should’ve stayed.”

  “I’ll keep you updated, but they’re saying it should all be routine.”

  “I can turn around, go to the airport.”

  “It’d all be over by the time you got here. Get some rest, Oscar. Look, sorry, I have to go. I’ll let you know as soon as it’s done.”

  The small of his back ached. He punched it with the ball of his fist. He thought of his father in a hospital bed. He realized the bed he was picturing was Mina’s post-suicide-atempt hospital cot. And then he thought of Mina in bed downstairs, the slick of drool dried to her face.

  Exercising, he could always tell the difference between good and bad pain. Growth and damage were distinct in a way he couldn’t describe but his tendons understood.

  Oscar stripped off his coat, then his shirt, his shoes, socks, trousers, until he was down to his boxers and the draft tugged on his chest hairs. The pigeons watched from the window. Their heads were hunched into their puffy grey shoulders. Their orange eyes stared. He began his shoulder rolls. Then hamstring stretches. Then press-ups. Then squats. Then star jumps.

  Mina had found what she was looking for. Oscar’s dressing-gown cord was too short for the fairy-tale thirteen loops. She made a simple noose of only three. It took a few tries. It was hard to remember when to loop under and when over. The first time, it looked wrong and she had to begin again. The second, she made the head loop too small. The third was okay. She ran a hand around the inside of the noose. It was fluffy. She slipped it over her neck and it hung, innocent as a scarf.

  There were no rafters and no beams. The door hooks were tiny brass beaks that looked unready for her weight. The only choice was the bathroom and the shower rail. She considered herself in the sink’s mirror. Normal woman, in the middle of her life. Her skin faintly imprinted by the years. Dark eyes, the pit of the pupil just visible in the iris. Chin a little softer, a little more rounded than she would have liked it. Some
tattoos, but everyone had tattoos these days. On the whole, nothing special. Noose around her neck.

  She moved aside the swishing curtain. She climbed onto the edge of the bath. It was wet. The shower rail had a good diameter. It seemed made of the same stuff they used for subway handrails. Had anyone ever hanged herself on the subway?

  There was no point in tying herself to the rail if it would just break. It would be better to test it. She tugged hard on the rail. It didn’t seemed to move. Both hands wrapped tightly around the bar, she let her feet slide off the edge of the bath. She felt the weight leap straight to her fingers. The shower rail gave a metallic sigh. Her elbows hurt. She swung for a moment more, like a kid on the monkey bars, then placed her feet back on the bath’s edge. The rail had held her weight. This place would do.

  Mina looked down at her bare feet. Her nails needed cutting. A callus had formed on the left big toe. Her baby toes had never fully straightened out. They looked so strange. Giant jelly beans. She lifted her right foot up in the air experimentally. She curled her toes around the bath’s cliff-edge. Her mother had died in a bath like this, unceremoniously and alone. Like mother like daughter, she thought.

  “So, I guess this is goodbye,” Mina said to the bathroom. The bathroom ignored her. She laughed for no reason. It wasn’t that she thought this was funny. But everything around her was so ordinary, so boring, and yet here it was, the place she was going to die. A farce to spend so long going back and forth only to end up here.

  She thought of the way a neck breaks. The way, without oxygen, the brain wilts and withers.

  She strung the cord over the shower rail and stood on tiptoe. Her lump of a brain had stopped generating death wishes. It should be singing now. It should be cackling and dancing, pleased that it had finally won. Instead, she felt blank. If she got down now, no one would know. She would not be signed into anyone’s custody. But at the same time, wasn’t this the only logical course of action? She’d been complaining about wanting to die all this time. If she’d lost Oscar and the ferrous flicker of Phoebe, if she no longer loved the city she grew up in and had failed to find a new home, what else was there to do?

  She made a simple knot. Oscar would be upset. But he’d get over her. People did. People moved on. She knotted it again.

  In the silence of the bathroom, she heard—thump, thump, thump. She turned, the cotton straining against her neck. No water was coming from the faucet or the shower. Perhaps it was the radiator then.

  She wrapped her hands around the shower rail, feeling its width and its strength. Her toothbrush reclined on the sink. A pool of toothpaste had calcified around the head. Phoebe’s hairbrush lay flung in a corner. Red hair was clumped in the bristles. Mina wondered what other people looked at before they died. She doubted many had a sea view. What did a beautiful view matter if just moments after the memories were etched in, they were erased?

  Thump, thump, thump. It was distracting. She needed to concentrate. The sound was relentless. It was like someone smacking the floor again and again. Pipes? It was coming from above her head. Thump, thump, thump. Was Oscar hanging pictures up there? Building a fort? Should she have written him a note?

  Get on with it, said her brain. Oh, she thought. You’re back. She checked the knot with her fingertips. The key to a painless death was to break the neck. Otherwise the suffocation would be slow, her brain losing air, her face turning scarlet, then purple, then white. She should jump with force. She bent her knees and felt the knot shove against her throat.

  Thump, thump, thump. Was it so much to ask, to die in the quiet? She didn’t need waves or Wagner, just the peace of a bathroom at night. She had lived three decades and she was going to die chafed by the crash and wallop above her. She wanted some peace and a long quiet. She wanted not to think about pipes, hammers, thumping. She closed her eyes.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Why wouldn’t it just shut up?

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Was it getting louder? What was it? Were these really her last living thoughts? There was nobody to record them, but she’d thought they’d be better. She’d thought she would die thinking of the antimatter black of death. Or that she’d die thinking of the clowning eyebrow wiggle her grandmother had made when Mina told her about the mean kids at school. But she was going to die wondering whether the plumbing was malfunctioning. Every day, she had tried to force herself not to think about death. And now, when she was trying to die, life rushed in to distract her.

  She thought, Get on with it. Get on with it. This is exactly why you need to just jump. Just jump and all of this will be over. There won’t be a You to have these thoughts. They’ll be gone. None of this will matter.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  What if it was Oscar? What could he be doing that would make that noise? Did he hate her so much that he was just punching and punching the floorboards, pretending they were her face?

  She couldn’t die distracted. The bathroom would be here later. She could still jump. She could leave this earth in peace. She would just go, find out what the fuck was going on upstairs and come back down.

  She spread her legs to stabilize herself. With one hand she held the bar above her head. With the other, she found the tail of the knot. The knot undid. But as the cord flopped down, her foot slipped, and her body slammed into the tiled wall.

  “Fuck.”

  She stood in front of the mirror with the dressing-gown cord hanging from her throat. The noose was as tough to undo as it was to do up—harder, perhaps. She had not practiced the motions needed to escape. She wormed a finger under the fattest loop. An uncomfortable choking sensation caught her breath and she winced. The cord came free.

  With the noose gone, her neck looked just the same as it always did. There was not even a rope burn to record those few minutes. She ran a hand over the side of her neck, feeling no difference. Lying on the tiled floor, the cord looked like any other bit of laundry. The thudding continued above her head.

  She stepped out of the bathroom. In the hallway, she shoved her feet into the sneakers that she’d thought she’d never see again. She felt oddly weightless. Her key turned 5B’s lock. The thumping was louder as she opened the door. Oscar’s suitcase loitered in a corner. She didn’t bother taking off her shoes. The sound was coming from the main room, and she followed it, her steps matching the beat.

  The table had been pushed against the wall. In the center of the room, Oscar was jumping rope. The rope flipped over Oscar’s head and under his feet, skimming the floor, becoming an O encircling her husband. His feet bounced again and again. Thump. Thump. Thump. The jumps were slow, almost clumsy. “Oscar?”

  He kept jumping. His arms were sleeved in sweat. His eyes were shut. And they stayed shut. Oscar’s face had gone an odd purple color. He was flushed from hairline to neck, apart from two startling dots of white on his cheeks. He shone with so much sweat that she couldn’t see the individual droplets.

  This, she thought, was what he’d look like if he were drowning. As his head bobbed over the waves, he would gasp like that. His arms would flap up and down. Up and down beat his arms. How long could he have been jumping? She knew her husband enjoyed testing his body. She had stood at the end of the New York Marathon applauding. But this felt different.

  “Oscar?”

  He did not stop. He gulped air. He sniffed. It occurred to her that her husband might be crying. It wasn’t certain. It might just be sweat and snot and air. It might have been a trick of the bulb that hung from the ceiling with not even a puff of paper to cover it. The light bulb swayed on its wire.

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  Quietly she began,

  “Fortune teller please tell me

  what my husband’s name will be:

  A?

  B?”

  He dropped the rope with a final thud.

  She stepped towards him and touched his chest. Sweat slid against her palm. His body was hot. For the first time in months, Mina was sure w
hat to do. Her body understood. Her bones and her skin and her stomach and her liver all understood.

  She lifted his sticky arms up and around herself. Oscar said something, but it came out as a gust of air. His sweat slicked the side of her face. She let it run into her mouth and down her neck. Salt. The heat of him was uncomfortable, but she leaned into that too-warm body.

  “I know,” she said. “I know. Breathe. Breathe.”

  He did. His chest ballooned against her.

  “You’re okay,” Mina said. “You’re okay.” She was sure they were the right words, the only words that mattered. “Close your eyes,” she said. And he did. Jaw hanging open, he chugged air. Mina pushed herself up onto her tiptoes. She kissed his left eyelid. She kissed the right. She felt his eye move under the skin. What did he see back there? Just blood and heat? Or something else?

  “You’re okay,” she said. “I’m here. You’re okay.”

  As his breath slowed, Oscar let himself be held. His wife’s body was familiar. Her head tucked under his chin. Each small expansion of her ribs pressed against his own. It was good to breathe beside her breath.

  Once a bat had flown into his dorm. It knocked itself against walls and ceiling until finally it had scrabbled onto Oscar’s duvet, just between his knees. He’d captured it in his palms. Its toothpick claws had left scratches, but as he’d walked to the window he’d been aware only of the heartbeat. The beat had filled his fingers, going faster than he’d thought possible. Theo had opened the window and Oscar had stuck his hands out into the night. Before letting go, he’d waited, holding the beat: a whole life in his hands.

  *

  Mina moved to step back, but Oscar’s arms stayed tight across her shoulders. She leaned into her husband’s damp shirt and let his hands move through her hair.

  “Wait,” Oscar said. He gulped another breath.

  “You’re okay,” she said.

  Eventually, they sat on the floorboards, their backs pressed against the pale walls. Mina’s face was sticky with his sweat. His arm and hers stayed touching. Their shared shadow stretched across the floor.