I’m so weak from holding down nothing but Cheerios in the last twenty-four hours, I’m beat. I’m cracked from fifteen push-ups. But I feel something in the bed. I feel my heart beating. It’s beating against the mattress, amplified, resounding not only in the bed but in my body. I feel it in my feet, my legs, my stomach, my arms. Beating everywhere.
I get on my palms again. One, two, three . . . My arms burn. My neck crinks; a bed isn’t the best place to do push-ups; you tend to sink in. This set is tougher than the last. But when I get to fifteen I keep going, to twenty. I strain and hold back a grunt on the final one and discharge myself to the mattress.
Badoom. Badoom. Badoom.
My heart is ramming now. It’s beating everywhere. It hits all the spots in my body, and I feel the blood pressuring through me, my wrists, my fingers, my neck. It wants to do this, to badoom away all the time. It’s such a silly little thing, the heart.
Badoom.
It feels good, the way it cleans me.
Badoom.
Screw it. I want my heart.
I want my heart but my brain is acting up.
I want to live but I want to die. What do I do?
I get out of bed, glance at the clock. It’s 5:07. I don’t know how I got through the night. My heart radiates badoom, so I stand and shuffle into the living room and pick a book off my parents’ shelf.
It’s called How to Survive the Loss of a Love; it has a pink and green cover. It’s sold like two million copies; it’s one of these psychology books that people everywhere buy to get through break-ups. My mom bought it when her dad died and raved about how good it was. She showed the cover to me.
I looked at it just to see what it was about, and the first chapter said, “If you feel like harming yourself right now, turn to page 20.” And I thought that was pretty silly, like a Choose Your Own Adventure book, so I turned to page 20, and right there it said to call your local suicide hotline, because suicidal thoughts were a medical situation and you needed medical help right away.
Now, in the dark, I open How to Survive the Loss of a Love to page 20.
“Every municipality has a suicide hotline, and they’re listed right in the government services section of the yellow pages,” it says.
Okay. I go into the kitchen and open up the yellow pages.
It’s a pain in the ass to find those government listings. I thought they were marked with green pages, but the green pages turn out to be a restaurant guide. The government listings are in blue at the front, but it’s all phone numbers for where to get your car if it’s towed, what to do if your block has a rat problem . . . Ah, here, health. Posion control, emergency, mental health. There are a bunch of numbers. The first one says “suicide” near it. It’s a local number, and I call.
I stand in the living room with my hand in my pants as the phone rings.
sixteen
“Hello.”
“Hi, is this the Suicide Hotline?”
“This is the Brooklyn Anxiety Management Center.”
“Oh, um . . .”
“We work with the Samaritans. We handle New York Suicide Hotline calls when they overflow. This is Keith speaking.”
“So the Suicide Hotline is too busy right now?”
“Yes—it’s Friday night. This is our busiest time.”
Great. I’m common even in suicide.
“What seems to, ah, be the problem?”
“I really, just . . . I’m very depressed and I want to kill myself.”
“Uh-huh. What’s your name?”
“Ah . . .” Need-a-fake-name, need-a-fake-name: “Scott.”
“And how old are you, Scott?”
“Fifteen.”
“And why do you want to kill yourself?”
“I’m clinically depressed, you know. I mean, I’m not just . . . down or whatever. I started this new school and I can’t handle it. It’s gotten to a point where it’s the worst it’s ever been and I just don’t want to deal with it anymore.”
“You say you’re clinically depressed. Are you taking medication?”
“I was taking Zoloft.”
“And what happened?”
“I stopped taking it.”
“Ah. That’s probably, you know, a bad idea.”
Keith sounds like he’s just getting started with this whole counseling thing. I picture a thin college-age guy with wire-rim glasses at a desk lit up with a small reading lamp, looking out the window, nodding at the good deeds he’s doing.
“A lot of people run into problems when they, y’know, stop taking their medication.”
“Well, whatever the reason, I just really can’t handle it right now.”
“Do you have a plan for how you would kill yourself?”
“Yes. I’d jump off the Brooklyn Bridge.”
I hear Keith typing something.
“Well, Scott, we aren’t the suicide hotline, but if you like, we have a five-step exercise for managing anxiety. Would you like to try it?”
“Um . . . sure.”
“Can you get a pen and a piece of paper?”
I go to the drawers in the dining room and get a pencil and paper. I take it to the bathroom and sit on the toilet with Keith. The light’s on.
“First, okay? Write down an event that happened to you. That you experienced.”
“Any event?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay . . .” I write on the piece of paper Ate pizza last week.
“Do you have it?” Keith asks.
“Yes.”
“Now, write down, ah, how you felt about that event.”
“Okay.” I write: Felt good, full.
“Now write down any ‘shoulds’ or ‘woulds’ that you felt about the event.”
“Like what?”
“Things that you regret about it, things that you feel would have made it go better.”
“Wait, uh, I don’t think I have the right kind of event.” I furiously erase my first statement, which is marked I. Instead of Ate pizza, I put down Threw up Mom’s squash and then for 2, I write Felt like I wanted to kill myself, all the while telling Keith to hold on, I messed up.
“Just put down ‘shoulds’ and ‘woulds,’” he reassures me.
Well, I should have held down the squash and I would have been full if I had. I put that down.
“Now put down only what you actually had to do in the event.”
“What I had to do?”
“Right. Because there are no such things as shoulds and woulds in the universe.”
“There aren’t?” I’m starting to suspect Keith a bit. For someone in Anxiety Management, he’s giving me an exercise that is fairly confusing and anxiety-provoking.
“No,” he says. “There are only things that could have turned out differently. You don’t have any shoulds or woulds in your life, see? You only have things that could have gone a different way.”
“Ah.”
“You never know what truly would have happened if you had done your shoulds and woulds. Your life might have turned out worse, isn’t that possible?”
“I don’t see how it’s really possible, seeing as I’m on the phone with you.”
“What you really have in life are needs, and you only have three needs: food, water, and shelter.”