A Thousand Naked Strangers - Kevin Hazzard Page 0,76

next morning by joggers. One woman drops a month’s worth of medicine—dozens of giant horse pills popped loose from blister packs—into a blender. She turns it into a slurry and downs the whole thing. I don’t know what kind of death she had, but when we arrive, she’s blue and bloated on the couch, a long, angry suicide note at her side. Then there’s the teenager who hangs himself from a tree in his front yard. His dangling body is so eerie and grotesque—a horror film at the break of dawn—that none of us thinks to knock on the door until his startled grandfather wanders out to stand beside us.

Some people try suicide and fail. Some fake suicide and fail at that, too. This last kind, the unconvincing fakers, we find alive, angry, flopped out on the floor in their own approximation of a death pose.

• • •

It’s raining when we pull up to the house—a split-level ranch built in the seventies as part of an ambitious in-town development that, long ago, lost even the pretense of promise. The whole area has been left to whoever will claim it, in this case a family of five unruly girls and their aging and eternally put-out grandmother. The front steps are cracked, the railing has rusted and been bent out of shape, and the yard is nothing but a bowl of wet clay. The driveway is hidden beneath three abandoned cars waiting patiently for help that will never come. I pull up my jacket hood as I step out into the rain. A pack of young girls—frantic and beyond consolation—scrambles down the steps, screaming that their sister has killed herself.

I nod. “Where is she?”

They point toward a set of narrow and unlit stairs. An old woman meets us at the bottom; unlike everyone else in the house, she’s calm. My partner and I wait, in this very small hallway, for this very old woman to speak. After a few seconds, she spits a stream of tobacco juice into a plastic cup and opens a bedroom door. Inside there’s nothing but dirty laundry and old take-out boxes, never vacuumed carpets, the Sheetrock marinated in decades of mildew and smudged brown by dirty hands. At the far end of the room, our patient is flopped out on a sheetless queen-sized bed. There are roaches everywhere. The old woman shoots out another stream of tobacco juice and says our patient, motionless on the bed, has gone and killed herself again.

“Again?”

“Yup.”

My partner picks his way over and takes a look. I turn to the old woman, but before I can say a word, she sums up our patient’s life as a series of bad decisions punctuated by the occasional suicide. By now my partner has assessed our patient and found her to be alive and merely faking death. Our attention can be turned to the tricky art of raising the dead.

There are a number of ways to do this, none medical. Sometimes I use shame. Perhaps the patient, feeling underappreciated, has gone limp during Easter Mass, slithered out of her pew and died, rather auspiciously, under Jesus’s watchful eye. Sometimes just mentioning how much stress this has placed on Nana’s aging heart will bring her back. Other times I’ll flick the eyelids or squeeze the fingertips between a pen and my thumb. If the faker is truly hard-core, I’ll slide an airway device into the right nostril, which tends to wake her in dramatic fashion—think Uma Thurman in Pulp Fiction.

Before I can decide, the old woman shoots a stream of tobacco juice through her front teeth. “There’s usually a suicide note,” she says.

Well, I’ll be damned. I scan the dresser, the nightstand, the floor. No note. I step back and take a good look at the patient, who’s on the bed, eyes closed, mouth open. Her left arm extends at an unnatural angle, pointing toward a shelf. Sure enough, that’s where I find the note.

I grab it and crouch beneath the one working light and start reading. It’s a train wreck. Bad penmanship, misspellings, run-on sentences, non-sentences—the whole thing is an unintentional non sequitur. Finally, we reach the how. In bold script accented by a large arrow pointing toward the shelf, the note reads, And so I swallowed these bullets and them pills.

I scramble across the bed and find four Tylenols and three .22-caliber bullets. It should be mentioned that a .22 doesn’t shoot large bullets. We aren’t talking shotgun shells. The dreaded .22 fires a