Soul Survivor

The mother is doing her best not to resemble a mother—her hair is slashed with highlights even gaudier than mine, her face is a chemical bronze, and her behind is glittering with cheap rhinestone-y material in patterns meant to accentuate what curves she has. But there are signs. She wears a pretty loud rock on her left hand, which is either zirconia or she has too much money to live in this school district willingly. Her eyes are pouchy and she drinks. I can smell it sometimes.

“I’m just concerned,” she says, “that Audrey doesn’t seem to be making friends.”

I’m not a counselor; that would be rich irony indeed. I teach sixth grade. I know kids have a tough time at this age, but I can barely keep them focused. But I am, let’s say, a maternal looking woman, so moms quickly drop their guard. Willing myself to stop wondering if mom is projecting, I say, “She works well with the other students in here.”

It’s lame, it may even be defensive. But I’ve learned what I can say and what I can’t. My words are objective, drawn from what I observe.

“Does she really eat by herself? She tells me she eats by herself.”

Shrugging is about the worst thing you can do, but sometimes it’s all you can do. Audrey is both terrified and smug, not a great combination. It’s been only a few months since she arrived. I’ve met with her mom three times. The girl gets good grades, probably among the smartest students I have at the moment. Her intelligence isn’t the problem.

“Lunch, well, lunch is not something I see much,” I say.

“I thought you all took turns working lunch,” she says. Her tone, her posture—all accusation. I have summers off, you know, I want to say. “Don’t they do that anymore?”

“We have resource personnel who monitor lunch,” I say. They tell us not to say cops. They tell us lots of things that I shouldn’t say. I live in a cloud of shouldn’t say. 

*

I think about suicide every day—if you really want me to use that word, that cheapening of an ideal. I know about what people think that means. I read. I know you’re supposed to talk to someone if you’re thinking about it, if you’re having thoughts about harming yourself, as they say. But it’s not like I’m obsessed.

My thoughts are more practical. I think about the mechanics. For instance, I think that people who shoot themselves make it difficult for everyone. Since it has to be cleaned up, it’s hard on whoever finds you. They probably make that mess as some kind of violent statement, hoping a certain person finds them, and they cause the person to have to think about it, and maybe they have a breakdown. That’s more of a gotcha slap.

I don’t want to be that way. I’ve wondered: if I go for the shooting thing, I’d be better off going into the woods and somehow letting the police know where to find me. It’d be neater—and I know that’s weird to say, but I wouldn’t want my actions to inconvenience somebody who just happened to get in the way.

I don’t have a family who would find me. Just neighbors who’d hear the shot or, after a few days, notice a stink. They seem like nice enough people. It’d be bad to do that to them.

I’ve spent my life trying not to do bad things to people, despite having plenty of bad things done to or happen to me. This isn’t a complaint, just a desire to register the balance of things, how it works out. I intend fully that my ideas about this be read by someone, to be a reflection on the practical matters associated with a measured approach to removing oneself from an unsatisfying world, one which is beyond redemption, at least by any actions of my own. Therefore, my removal should cause very little harm, very little or no labor, and leave a reasonable explanation so that people (again, I’m not sure who those people would be) can understand.

*

“Is there a file?” she asks. “Does someone keep track of that kind of thing?”

Is it co-curricular? I think. Well, lady, don’t believe the hype. Not everything lines up with a learning goal. Sometimes lunch is just lunch.

She balances bravado, care, and fear—I can see it all.

“What brought you to the area?” I ask.

She blinks twice, then shakes her head as if to dislodge a mosquito from her nose. “It was—it was my job. But that’s not—is there a file?”

“Sure,” I say. “There’s a file, but it really only concerns the classroom. Lunch isn’t something we observe. You’ve read the report cards, right? She is socializing. Children know her name. She works in groups.”

She turns to the window and after a long silence looks back at me. It may be the sun. It may be allergies. Or it may really be that this woman is getting emotional.

“Kids do a lot that seems normal when people like you are looking,” she says.

*

The woman in the apartment next door lived in a polio hospital from the time she could walk until about 11 years old. She saw her family every two weeks, and got to go home for a day at Thanksgiving when she got older. She is the happiest person I know. Her husband is pushing 90 but still goes to his weekly wine tasting club where they play bridge. She tells me he’s immensely proud to be the only person there who can still see his cards without wearing glasses.

The man on the other side is divorced and evidently very happy about it. He has few furnishings, wears the same basic clothes every day—a white shirt, black blazer, grey dress pants. He teaches somewhere, and I am not sure if it is at the college or a high school. It’s not my district. He doesn’t say much, and isn’t around on weekends, but he has a clean shaven face that never appears troubled. I wonder if he is at all like me, looking to disappear even while in plain sight.

Both are cordial, and even generous neighbors. I shouldn’t trouble them.

*

I hold the eye contact. For whatever reason, I feel like I need to—not sure if it’s combative, if it’s support, if it’s a sizing-up, but I do it. Against expectation, I win. Perhaps it’s the desk.

“She won’t tell me, but something’s going on,” she says.

“Honestly, I just have not seen anything that would suggest—”

“That’s the way it is, though,” she says. She leans forward, elbows on her knees, her shoulders contracting into herself. “You went to school once. Come on! We’re about the same age, you know what it was like.”

*

Disappearing is related to control—I’m smart enough to know that. Maintaining options for how I exist in the world, and on what terms I leave it, are important to me.

I’ve considered pills, but I see several problems. First, they’d take a while to get into the blood stream, and while I was nauseous, and probably in pain, would my body override my mind? Would I throw up, work to live somehow, fight against what I knew was coming? Is there such a thing as a physical will to live?

So then I consider whether or not it would be good to drink a lot first and then take the pills. The problem is the likelihood I would vomit, the system would purge itself, and I would be left with a bad hangover. Worse, it’s occurred to me that they might only partially work, and then I’d be compromised. With my luck, it’d end up that I’d need some kind of care, and then my loving parents would be only too happy to bring me back into the fold with no means to protect myself.

A girl in the high school had that happen—she took sleeping pills, washed them down with high-proof rum, passed out in her car and then threw up most of the contents of her stomach. The police found the car, she was hospitalized, and I learned from her best friend’s younger sister—a poor girl who walked around grey-eyed and sullen for months afterward—that her parents stuck her in a home and that her speech was no longer very good. That is my nightmare—not continuing in the state I am, certainly not death itself—but losing the little control I have in navigating what’s before me.

The clichés are the worst. I knew a girl in high school who claimed to slash her wrists. She wore band-aids on her wrists, across them even though at that point everyone in America knew that if you were serious, you slashed up your arm, and didn’t saw crosswise where you wore a watch. We were cruel. We told her she was either dumb or not serious enough. I’m sure the mockery gave her warped satisfaction: she had attention, even of a horrible kind.

Wrist-slashing doesn’t work for me. It makes me worry about the will-to-live thing kicking in after you’ve done it. And if you watch crime shows or true life stories of celebrities, you learn that a warm tub helps with blood flow, which seems too luxurious, almost decadent. You shouldn’t be fancy.

I knew a guy once who worried about decadence all the time. Worried is the wrong word. He chased it. As a musician, he tried to live the life a musician would live—while still doing shit jobs, since he was, in the end, a pretty terrible musician. But he talked about it a lot. Like wallowing was as important as the music itself. That somehow creativity came out of a mess, out of being lazy enough that ideas and the sensual are something you attract. It never made sense to me. But sometimes it could be a lot of fun hanging around with a boy with that kind of mindset.

*

The next set of parents look in the door. I give them the just a few more minutes wave. He is in a blazer, she is in an A-line skirt. I imagine their car is either silver or black, unadorned with any bumper sticker. The woman in front of me probably has a line of stick figures on the back windshield, and even one for the dog. The stick-figures’ smiles are burnt into the windshield by years of sunlight and the heat of black glass.

I lower my voice. “Yeah. I know how it was. And the thing about it today is that it’s never in plain sight. It happens in places we can’t see. Does Audrey have a phone?”

Her eyes narrow. Parents get that defensive, lurking wolfish look when you so much as mention technology or phones or television. The people who enforce screen limits are the worst.

“So you do know something, right? Or at least you suspect something?”

How do I tell her everything I worry about for these kids? I have no impulse, other than what I know. They could all be troubled, or damaged, or whatever word you want to use. I don’t know anything other than myself. I want to tell her, if you had been around me back in the day, you’d have never guessed.

“Like I said, I see her in class. In here, nothing alarms me.” I shrug and hold my hands up. “I don’t know enough about the rest of her life to make any statement, any judgment. But I can tell you that I’ll absolutely be on alert, and will focus on her.”

She gazes through me as though she understands the scars within me, and she expresses neither comfort nor hope.

*

For a long time, I thought I’d be a jumper. That way, even once you’re into it, it’s not like you can stop. In fact, if you brace or scramble, the impact breaks more bones, and your likelihood of dying increases. When I lived outside Philly, I had tall buildings right nearby. Everyone knew the Adelphia building had no protections on its windows and balconies. The owner was too cheap to bother. He was too busy ripping people off for their cable boxes.

But think about jumping for a second—or, think about the poor person on the ground who happens to be walking by, or driving by, or in an office window, or whatever. You jumping just ruined everybody’s day. Or traumatized them. Or brought back Vietnam or 9/11 or something. Everybody’s losing it, the police are coming, and it’s a big expensive thing, and who knows who you splashed on, what you broke on the way, and if somebody’s pushing a stroller around the corner just as you come hurtling down.

And what’s worst is that this one, too, seems perfect, even if you don’t care about who you take out or drive to insanity, until you think about the moment when you look over the edge. You can be there, looking to make sure it’s clear, and then your fear bursts, that cowardly will to live, and there you are, up in space, dislocated in clouds that don’t give a shit about you, and you realize you’re in even less control than you thought. Why? Because now your weak body is making you back away, find the door to the roof or close the window, and march yourself back down in a fog of humiliation that only you and God know, but that you know.

*

She swallows hard and blinks fast. “I feel like I’m losing her. I need your help.”

“We have a school counselor,” I say but let it trail off as her mouth tightens.

“You have one counselor for—what? 350 kids? 400 kids?” She crosses her arms and a tear gets loose. “And the student has to probably ask to be seen?”

I inhale slowly. “We can make referrals. We work as a team here—”

She snaps out a hand and flattens it on the table. “I need you to work with me as a team.”

I picture Audrey—long eyelashes make her look perpetually languid. She’s angly, but the kind of girl who will grow one day into limbs that will make her strong and beautiful in ways that will surprise people. Her father must be tall because her mother is an aging version of cute but not the beauty that Audrey will be. Audrey will struggle yet more. She’s unusual, displaced from wherever they left. I know she likes dragons, Harry Potter, mermaids. There are other kids who also do, but sixth grade is not the time to mention it, not in this school. Her life will waver for a while, and her mother, despite what she’ll try to do, will make it worse.

“I will help you as much as I can,” I say. It’s not a lie, but it’s nothing like what she hopes will happen.

*

I’ve never been in control. Which sounds funny, because I’m a teacher. But ask any teacher how they feel about their ability to manage their class, to help their students, to deal with parents. Ask about their financial stability. Ask them.

And I know very well the kind of woman I’ve been. The only calls I get are late at night. I go. I know what someone might think. But I go. I don’t mind it. I never have. I like being a refuge. I don’t like the attitude, how preachy some people get. Or my mother who asks if I want a stable relationship, something that will grow with me. When she does, I work hard to suppress the sigh, the fatigue, the cliché of it all.

The last lover I took for an extended period—we were together for about a year—left me when I shared my thoughts about controlled departure. I thought he was ready, but I guess part of me knew he wasn’t. I chose to tell him while we waited for our sushi orders to arrive. The place was quiet, a reclaimed former Pizza Hut now trimmed in bamboo and polished gold chrome, employees hovering and waiting for you to make a decision. I found myself hovering, too, as his face went through dynamic twitches and brow furrows.

“You have a kind of sick stoicism about self-harm,” he said.

I said, “Is it really harm if, first, you decide it and, second, you’re not around to feel the harm—to use your word—that you inflict?”

*

She nods a few times and shakes her head. “That’s all I ask,” she says. “I imagine you understand what is happening here.”

I imagine she and I were very different people when we were in school. But it’s not about her, nor is it about me. She has a chance to raise someone different, better, more whole than either of us.

“Let’s just say I do, and leave it at that,” I say.

*

Crosswalks. You can just step out in front of a big enough vehicle and be done. But it has the same problems as jumping, depending on who is nearby. Plus, you want to time it right so they can’t apply brakes. If you’re too soon, they hit the brakes, they slow down enough to paralyze you or give you brain damage, and there you are, surrounded by nurses the rest of your life. Plus, you traumatize the driver. I knew a guy who worked mowing lawns with a man who had t-boned a bus while driving a roofing truck. The ladders hadn’t been fixed properly to their mounts, and one shot through the bus and decapitated two kids. The guy had a form of Tourette’s after that, and when they cut people’s lawns, they had to put him on the crews that mowed places where the people weren’t home, because he would shout filth the entire time he mowed, and then wouldn’t talk otherwise.

*

Her purse gapes, leather and rivets, bits of gold and chunky buckles, and she pulls out a vial of Visine. When she thrusts her head back, I see the waiting parents look in with narrowed eyes. She squeezes drops into one eye and then another, batting her eyes afterwards. When she looks at me, she smiles like a conspirator.

“I feel better,” she says. “I feel like you’ll do what you’re saying, like you understand me.”

I feel for her, suddenly. I feel for her daughter. I hear this kind of worry every year, but today it’s more raw than I’ve seen it in some time. This woman is unfinished in a way, like she is a person still becoming and, as she is unfinished but raising a girl in puberty, she doesn’t yet see where it will go.

There’s no way to tell her, even to warn her, where it might go, how far aside or underneath it could go. But I’ll watch out for Audrey, as long as I can. 

*

I’m not going to tell you what you might be waiting for. There’s a story about my old man but it’s just a story—it changes every time I tell it because I can hardly tell for real how it goes. Night visits, my mother’s denial. You’re used to reading people talk about and describe this kind of thing, and while I have told all number of therapists about it, I’m done with the details. Telling them is salacious, like a car wreck or pornography or a little of both.

He’s the one who makes me think about slashing wrists, but for reasons connected to the parts of ourselves. When I imagine revenge—revenge I’ll never be able to take, revenge that’s only a part of my dreams and not how I’m able to deal with the man who, despite warped reality, is still biologically my father—I imagine cutting off his hands. My therapist says, that’s interesting. Well, it’s not hard to figure out. Hands are where the control has always been.

When I imagine cutting his hands off, for some reason I imagine a wood saw, the long metal ones you use to saw boards, and a slow, quiet back and forth, bloodless, until they fall to the ground and thud like a bag of sand.

*

When the mom leaves, she doesn’t make eye contact with the other parents. They are gracious; he holds the door, she nods.

Audrey walks out of some part of the hall. She takes her mother’s hand—and maybe I am imagining this, or maybe not—leads her away.

*

Sometimes, when I’m feeling punchy or stupid or just raucous, I imagine dumb ways. Standing in the woods during hunting season, in full camo, waiting for the inevitable. Peeing on an electric fence. Drinking Drano, which is just a sloppy mess.

Or how stupid the whole car exhaust thing is. There are so many ways to chicken out. You can stop the car, you can back out of the garage, you can open the windows for new air. It takes forever, from what I understand, and it’s one that people constantly mess up. If you fail, I heard they can take your license, you can get brain damage, and more. 

*

Halfway through the meeting with the next set of parents, a man bursts into the room, head jerking from side to side. He calls, Audrey? Audrey?

“Can I help you?” I say. The parents with me turn to him with the pinched friendliness of civilized people being interrupted.

The man is wearing a very nice shirt—Brooks Brothers or something—and pants that make sense with it. His watch looks like it weighs eight pounds. As if to highlight its significance, he looks at it.

“Shit,” he says, without any context. The mother in front of me smiles down at her daughter, using refined ESP.

“Are you Audrey’s father?” I say.

His head snaps up. “Fa—? No. No. I’m her uncle. Her father, well—” He looks me up and down, somewhat frankly. The two other people register. “I guess I missed it. Or am I early?”

“They left a few moments ago.”

He breathes in and stretches his torso, gaining height as he does so. “OK. Uh, so you know—” he eyes the other parents and they instinctively distract their daughter. “Dad’s very recently out of the picture. Be careful.”

I nod.

“Tragic,” he says. He makes what I guess he thinks must be meaningful eye contact and holds it long enough that it’s awkward.

The tidy parents convey a refined sense of being appalled.

The uncle is suddenly self-conscious. “It’s tragic, really, let’s just say that,” he says. “Anyway, thank you. Bye.”

He leaves, and we resume, like a puddle surface closing after the violence of a bike wheel or booted foot.

*

I’ve told my therapist lots of things. I like her—I like that she has pottery on display in her office, that she always smells faintly of marijuana or incense, that she favors turquoise. She’s a bit of a cliché—well, she is a total cliché—but I find her a comforting one. I admire how she volunteers time helping women who are domestic abuse survivors, but I find it a little annoying when she always says they are “surviving domestic abuse, since it takes effort and is never really done.” That’s the only time when I wonder about it. If you’re never done, you always have to pay her, or some other therapist. On my good days, I know she doesn’t see it that way. She tells me all the time that she’s giving me equipment to work on my own. I think she’s sincere. But I remind myself: being used comes in many forms.              

She and I have come to agreement on some things, and I’m very comfortable talking with her about my identity as we have agreed to describe it. I say it that way because there are things I can say about myself that I know, intellectually, with her help—like that I am comfortable being the girl who gets called late at night, that I know my father is a problem, that I feel better alone—even though in my core, much of the time, my instinct keeps telling me those labels are wrong. It’s as if therapy lets me have a means of acknowledgment, even as some deeper part of me retreats and stands its ground.

For that reason, probably, I haven’t spoken with her about how removing myself from the world is my control plan. Well, that, and the fact that she is a little happy with the prescription pad. I have been on a few antidepressants. They’ve helped, in some cases quite a bit. But I can say this, which gives me some comfort in how I use what clinicians call “suicidal ideation”: regardless of my moods, the thinking and planning about taking control of my own end is always there. 

This is why, when it happens, she’ll be surprised, but you shouldn’t be. I want you to know why it happened, that when it does—and it will, whether next week or decades from now—it will be because I decided to take control back.

*

When the family leaves, my last for the day, I start my usual routine of placing everything in position for the next day. I sharpen pencils and enjoy the smoky scent of their shavings. I plug the district-granted iPads into their stations, note the grubby moons of fingerprints on their surfaces. I refill the paper towel dispenser and swab down the smart board. Mine is nothing if not an organized space. I like nothing to be lost here.

*

One of my lovers, the one who would ramble on about decadence, used to idolize the Rolling Stones. Idolize is probably not a strong enough word, but deify sounds too virtuous. He always had them playing and would debate anyone about supremacy to the Beatles. I don’t understand why he—and all the people willing to have that fight—cared. I heard the music, lots of it, and it is dated, irritatingly smug, derivative, and focused primarily around the monstrous egos of its twin suns.

I mention them, though, because from their vast catalog of songs I took a phrase that motivates me. On their Exile on Main Street album—the bible to men like Mr. Decadent—the song “Soul Survivor” put some things in my head. It wasn’t Jagger’s whining, or the idea of drowning that keeps coming up in the song. It’s that I have a soul that can survive, that it’s something different than what I inhabit day to day. I can exist outside of it. I’m not sure they meant it that way. To them it was probably a stupid pun.

For me, it has long been a statement of aspiration. Whatever else I do, whatever else happens to me, a soul floats above and takes from my body’s actions what it can learn, what it can love, and what it wants to be, leaving the baggy flesh and limbs and stupid weight to flounder and rot as it will. 

I envision it now, after lots of deliberation, as simple, elegant, and as free of harm to others as I can make it. One evening, I head to a beach, a rocky one, perhaps off Long Island Sound, or in southern Maine, where the spits of rock into the ocean aggravate undertows. I time it for the peak of changing tides, when things are at their most aggressive out there. I strap ankle weights and a weight belt around myself. I get a life vest and replace the foam and padding with heavy stones, as many as I can find. Before heading out to sea, I take a solid handful of sleeping pills, not enough to make me vomit, but enough to really get things going. Then I paddle on a surfboard, laying on it like a seal. I am all those depictions of human shark bait, silhouette of manatee, as I push myself out as far as I can go. I will already have left the note somewhere, in my apartment, in my office, wherever I think, by that time, will be the first place people will look. I’ll label it clearly, in a strong hand. I’ll let them know what I’ve done, that I thought about it, that it’s not sad. It is decisive. They should be happy at my ability and my strength in devising a plan. Further, they should appreciate that I took pains to ensure there is no mess, no worry, no bother about a body.

They may imagine what I do next, how I paddle out so far that I’m too tired to go further. If I have succeeded, the shore is no longer distinct. I cannot see sand, just perhaps the lights winking on in the houses. There will be no people to be seen, because I will not want to be visible in what I am doing. I’ll slip off the board, and if I have the strength and desire to tread water for a moment, I’ll push the board as far from me as I can. It will not take long for the cold to affect me, and I will begin to sink. I can imagine the sting of my lungs as I hold the last of this world’s air inside me, knowing that if I fight at that point, it will not last long. I have read many times that drowning is a peaceful death (though how anyone knows this for certain I am not sure). It is a darkness I will receive, the only one I have ever chosen.