“Hey,” I said.
We were getting somewhere now.
THE RIVER TRICK
Upstairs Jack uses knives, Mrs. Murmur prefers pills, and Lloyd drops electrical appliances into his bathtub. We all have our vices. I, for one, drink heavily. I try not to on the job though, because timing is everything with suicides.
Patricia and I moved into this apartment complex four months ago. We had been having a hard time making it in the city, and after I lost my job driving subway cars, we could no longer afford the rents. It isn’t so bad on the outskirts. We have a nice building made out of solid brick. There’s a small garden in the back, and we can take our cats, Spick and Span, outside to dig around in the flowers. Patricia has a longer commute, but I get to work from home.
My various neighbors try to kill themselves at least twice a month. They’re not very good at it. Upstairs Jack’s kitchen is stocked with plastic utensils. Lloyd doesn’t bother plugging in the toaster and sometimes doesn’t even fill the tub. Mrs. Murmur fails to realize you can’t overdose on sugar pills; the placebo effect just doesn’t reach that far.
In the mornings, I saw a grapefruit in half and pour a bowl of cereal. If I can, I exercise. Twenty push-ups, twenty pull-ups, and a twenty-minute run. It’s easier to remember that way. Afterwards, I check the queue from the Apartment Wellness Committee website listing the who/what/when/where. I lay out my schedule, squeeze my neighbors into their proper slots.
Of course, sometimes the clerk forgets to log an appointment, or else I sleep through my alarm and rush down the hall to find Tina Okada crumpled on the floor with a broken piece of twine around her neck, glaring angrily at me.
Mix-ups, complications; these are the inevitable kinks in the hose of human operations. Yesterday, Patricia burned my toast while talking on the phone with her sister. I understood.
It isn’t anything sexual, the suicides. I feel I should make that clear. I was raised in the country, a full-fledged farm butting right up against our backyard. When I visit my family, they ask about this.
“We hear people in the city do weird things in bed,” they say.
“We hear they’re perverts, every last one.”
“We hear of acts that aren’t right to speak about in proper company.”
“Well,” I say, “it’s a crazy world every which way you look.”
But as far as I can tell, the suicides are not part of this. My customers don’t seem to be in any erotic throes. I don’t find them with wet latex hanging from their limp organs or flecks of fake blood dotting their exposed nipples. They’re always properly dressed, with faces curled in pain, not pleasure. I know there are people who believe sex is an extension of death, but I’ve never experienced this. Things are what they are and not other things.
I’m not here to judge anyway. I do my job, and afterwards I live my own life. If I see my neighbors when I’m swapping my wet laundry into the dryer, I make the necessary small talk. I don’t think of them lying in their bathtubs, beds, or on their living room floors. I try not to even speculate as to their reasons.
And yet. Abusive boyfriend? Failed acting career? A mother who refused to hug them as a child? It does make you wonder. Patricia calls them “cries for help.” I don’t know. Sometimes it’s just something to do on a Friday night.
My Fridays are fairly laid-back. I cook spaghetti with garlic bread, and after Patricia gets off work, we eat and stream a movie on TV.
Patricia and I don’t make love too often these days. Our schedules are out of sync. She leaves in the morning when I’m still groggy in bed, and if we talk it’s only to fight. This morning it’s about the new flatscreen I bought. Something popped in the old one, and the upper left corner was turning everything green. Patricia wasn’t around to discuss it. She works late hours as a cultural advisor to the mayor, deciding which artists to shake hands with at press conferences and the like. It doesn’t pay as well as you’d think.
“Can’t you think about us, not yourself?” she says.
“We both watch TV,” I say, but she’s already out the door.
I chew my grapefruit and do my push-ups. Spick claws at my calf, and Span stares out the window at the birds chirping in the trees.
Afterwards, I put on my tie and walk downstairs to Earl’s apartment. It’s a bright day, and the sun pours into the hallway. Earl’s door is partly open.
“Earl,” I say, walking in, “I’m trying a new Thai recipe and was wondering if you had any sweet paprika that I could — dear god!”
Earl is standing on the kitchen table, beer cans rolling around his feet. An extension cord has been tossed over the revolving fan. The end is tied around Earl’s neck.
“What the devil are you doing?” I ask.
“I’ve decided to end it all,” he says. “I can’t just keep waiting for nature to do it for me.”
“No, Earl, you can’t do this! Think of your family. Think of the butcher and the barber who depend on your patronage. Think of your dogs, the happy wagging of their tails.”
“Yes, there are those considerations, but is that enough? Life is so very hard.”
The revolving fan twists slowly with the weight of the orange cord, pulling it tighter around Earl’s neck. He’s standing on the toes of his leather boots. He looks ready to drop off the table.
“Life may be hard,” I say. “Yes, life might be a rash on your anus, but there are always things on the horizon to wait for. There are balloons and candy bars, if you like candy bars. There are cloudless days and bottles of sunscreen. There are many things I’ve forgotten about but will tell you later. And then there’s love in the end, yes? The great hope? Love in the end.”
Earl’s face is contorted in shame. I think I see tears peeking from the edges of his eyes. “I never thought about it like that,” he says.
He gets down and slips a five-dollar tip into my hand, asks me if I want some coffee. Earl is one of the ones who likes to talk afterwards. We discuss the weather, the recent home team’s victory against the visiting team, politicians and the interiors of their bedrooms.
The routine varies.
In bed, Patricia tells me how the people in the city aren’t happy, and the mayor is nervous. The election is only months away. The mayor spends his days shouting into the red telephone.
“Paul, you have to get me out of this one!” he says. “Stephanie, you’re my spin queen. Spin it for me, baby, please!”
Patricia says she commissioned a study that reached a tentative conclusion: the people in the city feel detached from their surroundings. “More and more, people are sticking to themselves and only staring into their screens,” Patricia says.
“The city is an alien thing,” I say. “If it weren’t for my job, I wouldn’t even know my neighbors’ names.”
Patricia clicks off the light, and we go to sleep.
Soon the mayor creates a plan for “aesthetic interactivity” to bring people closer to their city, their home. Patricia sets up the whole thing. She orchestrates a network of cameras and projectors to display the images of the people on the street onto large screens draped between the buildings. This way, people can’t help but view themselves as part of the city’s ecosystem.
I don’t leave my apartment much, yet I wonder how the people take it. Do they like watching themselves as they go about their chores? Do they wave and perform? Do they see their images in the sky and think of themselves as stars? Most are probably caught unaware.
At night, our cats meow out the window. The image of a young woman angrily hitting her lover with a handful of flowers is projected from the street onto a screen right outside. Autumn has begun, and leaves disrupt the picture as they fall.