by Tim Curran
“You tried to kill yourself over a woman?” Billie said with a hint of a grin in her voice. “That’s pathetic.”
Good, keep her talking, joking, anything. Frank thought. “Yeah, I know that now, but at the time I was in a very dark place. Who knows, it might have been a cry for help, attention, I don’t know. My shrink thinks I was trying to guilt my ex into staying with me, and if so, I can say now that was pretty lame on my—”
“So...” Billie interrupted and then stayed quiet for a long time. “When you did it... when you were dying, did you see anything? Like a light or something?”
Frank’s stomach became a cold, hollow pit as unwanted memories came flooding back to him. “What?”
“A light? A color? Anything?” Then in a monotone devoid of any humanity, Billie added, “I would give anything to see some color. Everything is so damn gray now...”
Frank heard a clunk and recognized it as the phone being put down on a table or counter. He called out to Billie, but got no answer. He heard metal scraping on metal and the sounds of whipping wind. Another memory rose to the surface of Frank’s mind, something Billie had offered on one of her first calls into the hotline: she lived on the ninth floor of an apartment building. “Billie!” Frank shouted into his headset as his finger jammed the panic button. Then a scream came over the phone. It was high-pitched, full of fear and tinged with anguish. As Frank listened to it, yelling the girl’s name into his headset, he heard it fall away and then suddenly stop.
Afterwards it was about how Frank always guessed it would be, should something like that happen. First the police had come and asked a bunch of questions. Chief among them: they wanted to know if he recorded the call. When he told them no, they wanted to know why not. Having to explain the law to cops was always weird, and they never liked it, but Frank had to tell them that if they recorded the call, they would have to let the caller know that they were right at the start. When other suicide hotlines had done that in the past, most of the callers hung up. So no, it hadn’t been recorded.
Next came those that ran the hotline. Two together in person, lanky, always smiling Matthew Carpenter and pretty, red-headed Lacy Dwyer, who together had co-founded the hotline, and two others, Jamie and Amber, individually on the phone. None of them blamed Frank for what happened, or if they did, they didn’t say it to him. They were sure he had tried his best and had done everything by the book. They asked if he wanted to talk to a counselor about “the incident,” as they all called it. That was such a nice, neutral phrase they were no doubt instructed to use whenever this happened. The hotline even offered to pay for the therapy. Since Frank was already seeing a shrink every other week, he politely declined. That didn’t stop them from pressing the issue. Someone even told him that “an incident” like this happened to another hotline volunteer just last week, and she found the counseling very comforting. Still, Frank said no.
That night, after everyone had gone and he was alone again, the bad dreams started. He was expecting them. After all, he had just heard a young girl kill herself, and despite what the hotline people told him about not feeling responsible, he did. How could he not? He supposed that was a good thing. A very emotional, human way to feel, but that didn’t make it suck any less.
Thankfully he didn’t remember the dreams. He just kept waking up all through the night feeling uneasy and sick. He would then toss and turn in his bed for an hour or more before drifting back off to sleep, only to wake up after a few more fitful minutes to start the cycle all over again. The one thing he did recall from his failed attempts to sleep was something Billie had said: “When you were dying, did you see anything? Like a light or something?” That was the thought he woke up to every time, because yes, he had seen something back when he slit his wrists. However, he had spent more than a year convincing himself that what he saw that night was nonsense. Just synapses misfiring in a dying brain, isn’t that what the doctors and scientists said about all near-death experiences? Still, the memory was there, itching in the back of his mind.
Three days after “the incident” and the weather outside had changed to match his mood. Gone were the famous blue skies of L.A. In their place was a dull, dripping, gray more suited to Seattle.
Frank sat at his desk, a cold can of beans with a spoon sticking out of its open top to his left, a piss-warm can of Mountain Dew to his right, with plenty of the soda’s empty brothers lying scattered around his feet. A new addition to his desk was an ashtray already filled to overflowing with crushed-out butts. He had quit that nasty habit three years back when his apartment building had done the very Californian thing and gone totally smoke free. It was now easier for him to buy and smoke marijuana in this city than tobacco, and that was a thought that would have caused him to laugh just a week ago.
Tonight was Frank’s return to the hotline. The people who ran it had originally told him to take some time off after “the incident,” a couple of weeks at least, but today Matthew from the hotline had called. After a few awkward moments of “How you doing?” he sheepishly asked if Frank could cover a shift tonight. One of their volunteers had taken some unscheduled personal time yesterday and another simply didn’t report in for her shift tonight. That left the hotline in a lurch, and so if Frank was feeling up to it...
More to prove something to himself than out of any loyalty, Frank now had his headset on and was staring at the open laptop. Dread slithered around in his guts like an eel, and his recent diet of whatever he could find in a can sure wasn’t helping matters. Then the first call came in. It was Martha, a retiree and prisoner – to hear her tell it – at an old folks’ home. She was much like Billie had been: a lonely soul looking for some kind of companionship, no matter how brief and impersonal it was. Thankfully, that’s where the similarities between Martha and Billie ended. The call lasted twenty-two minutes and ended without incident.
Thank God, Frank thought as he leaned back in his chair with an almost forgotten expression on his face: a smile.
Eleven minutes later he got a second call.
The man called himself Tyler and he sounded young, maybe still in his teens, and right from the start, Frank had a bad feeling about it.
“They took it all away,” Tyler mumbled into the phone after Frank got his name and asked how he was doing.
“Took what, Tyler? And who?”
“The colors, man. Everything bright is just... gone. It’s all gray now. Everything and everyone is gray. Even the textures. Whatever I touch is cold, lifeless, and filthy. Whatever I eat or drink is flavorless. I’m stuck in a fucking world of gray.”
“Okay, Tyler, I’m going to ask you something, don’t take offense, but I have to ask: are you on anything right now?”
“None of that shit works anymore,” Tyler wailed in despair. “Man, I’ve taken every sort of upper I could get my hands on and nothing changes. I still feel like I’m all used up inside and I’m just too stupid to lay down and die. And everyone I see around me is just like me: a hollow, rotting shell. Ashes, man, ashes and dust everywhere. Because everyone’s already dead—you, me, everyone, but nobody gets that.”
Frank’s hand shot up and hit the panic button. Keep him talking, don’t let this one slip past you, he thought. “Alright, I hear you. So tell me how all this started. When did you notice—”
“I just want to see something bright again, it doesn’t have to be beautiful. I just want to feel... something. Shit, even my blood is just cold, gray sludge and there’s no pain... no pain....”
“What?” Frank’s voice croaked out.
“I’ve been looking up how to do it online for days, and everyone says that if you’re going to slit your wrists, do it in a tub of cold water to numb the pain. Fuck that. I wanted the pain. I wanted to feel something, damn it. So I did it right here on the couch. I got my left wrist good, cut it right to the bone, and I did it right: up and down, none of that sideways, sissy-shit for me, m
an. Hell, I did it so good that I can’t use that hand no more, so I had to put the knife in my teeth to do the right wrist. That one’s not as deep, but it’s still bleeding good. And you know what, I didn’t feel nothing. Not a goddamn thing. So I know for sure that I’m already dead, dead and gone, just like he told me.”
“Jesus Christ,” Frank whispered as both of his wrists started itching again.
“No, not him. I’ve been praying to him for days and the fucker never returns a call,” Tyler mimicked a laugh totally devoid of joy. “No, it’s that other guy, the yellow bastard. Been watching me for days. Whispering to me. Showing up in my dreams. He’s the only bright thing left in this shitty world, so I figured, why not join him? I mean, anywhere has to be better than here, right?”
“Who, Tyler? Who told you that?” Frank said and thought, could someone have talked him into doing that to himself? That’s murder or manslaughter or something, right? Got to find out who, the police will want to know that for sure.
“It was the king. The one in yellow. The one...” Tyler’s voice trailed and Frank noticed the sluggish, sleepy sound to it. “...who waits at the end....”
Frank’s finger mashed the police alert button again and again. He knew that like an elevator call button, all he had to do was press it once, but that didn’t stop him. “Tyler!” he shouted into his headset. “Come on, stay with me!”
“Have... have you sss...” The voice on the other end of the line was a slurred whisper.
“What?”
“...seen it? Have you seen the yellow... the yellow... sssss...”
Frank next heard the clunk of the phone hitting the floor, and no matter how loud he screamed, no one answered him.
Repetition followed.
First came the police with the same questions as before. Frank answered them, only with more grunts and nods of the head than words this time. He didn’t bother to tell them about the mysterious “yellow king” Tyler had mentioned. It very well could have been the kid’s dying mind playing tricks on him. Frank knew that much from firsthand experience. Besides, without any real info on the mysterious monarch, it all seemed pointless. So goddamn pointless.
Then came the people from the hotline, but this time they called on him only by phone and there were just three of them, pretty Lacey had quit a few days before. According to Matthew, she took off without saying anything to anyone. No one had heard from her since. Matthew thought it must have been all the stress, and he hinted that things were not going well with the hotline, but he kept the specifics to himself. Also no one bothered with euphemisms this time. The incident was referred to as a suicide.
And of course, there were the nightmares, which were always the same. He was in a dark tunnel with only a feeble glimmer of light at its end. Even Frank’s slumbering mind recognized what that light was supposed to represent, and part of him remembered seeing it before, but it wasn’t the warm, welcoming brightness he associated with heaven. It wasn’t even the fearsome, fiery glow he expected from hell. It was wan and sickly, a creeping, seeping light. It was joyless, lacking any comfort or warmth, the color of an old bruise and jaundiced flesh. As he got closer to the end of that tunnel, he could see something moving in that cold light, a tall figure in a tattered robe with something on its head and a beckoning hand.... That’s when he would wake up, always with a scream, and once with blood on his hands after he had scratched his wrists so much during the night that he had split the scarred flesh.
The days that followed fell one into another and another until each was indistinguishable from the next. Frank would wake, eat something, lay on the couch and watch TV, eat something else, then go back to bed. Since he didn’t go out, bathing seemed pointless, as did cooking. He stayed on his strict all-canned diet, and food became an indiscernible paste he would force himself to swallow only when his stomach growled its loudest.
The phone rang a lot for the first few – days? weeks? – but he figured it was either that special slice of cubical hell he called a job or the hotline, and since he didn’t want to talk to either, he didn’t. The phone was now mercifully silent, as was his constant companion, his television. He had kept it on night and day, but it had been mostly a white-noise generator, a flashing and hissing rectangle in the background; something to keep his mind sedated and away from unpleasant truths. He did recall something from the dull images and monotone drone, the word epidemic. Frank never thought he would see that word linked to suicide, but that’s what all the talking heads on TV were calling it. The same dead-eyed faces spat out different reasons behind it all, but Frank could not bring himself to give much of a damn. He did remember snippets of the various stories, the cold details of a young life cut short here, some parents crying for the cameras there. The only thing that still flickered with any light in Frank’s memory was the video that showed Amanda Dwyer killing herself. The one that YouTube kept trying to take down, but nevertheless kept popping up on the web, as if the fifteen-year-old’s death had taken on a life of its own. In the phone-captured video, the cute, chubby girl was standing in front of a coffee shop, already wet with gasoline. “I always wanted to be famous. Do you think this will do it?” She said through a sad, twitchy smile. She added, “I hope the fire will be bright. That would be nice,” before flicking the lighter and immolating herself. The thing that made Frank remember the video was the fact that he was sure he had seen the girl before. More than that, he knew her from somewhere.
Wait, isn’t Lacy’s last name Dwyer? Frank came to a half-formed conclusion, one he had reached several times before but always let slip away. However, this time his mind spiraled in a new direction, and that wasn’t on TV, I saw that on the computer.
With that thought, he looked across his dark apartment, past the empty cans and crusty rags he used for his itching wrists, through the cloud of cigarette smoke and buzzing flies, to his open laptop. The screen was dark, gone was his exotic island wallpaper, but the monitor wasn’t completely dead. Not yet. Not like everything else. In the upper right corner, something amber flashed. It was the icon telling him that he had a call waiting for him on the hotline.
“God damn it, leave me alone,” Frank grumbled, picking up an empty tuna fish can from his lap and tossing it at the computer. He missed by a mile, but the action did make him feel the slightest bit better for the briefest of moments. He looked for something else to throw, but all the other cans were at his feet, and that realization murdered the thought of more missile fire. Leaning back onto his sweat-soaked couch, Frank’s eyes went back to the flashing yellow light on his laptop screen. Just like a bug, now I get it, he thought as he was drawn to the dull flicker. More memories stirred in him, a scream that faded and then suddenly stopped, the thunk of a dropped phone, the woosh of a sudden eruption of flame, a voice whispering, “Come and see what awaits....”
Frank shook his head to clear his thoughts and found himself sitting at his desk, in front of his hotline-provided laptop. He looked back at his couch, confused and half expecting to see himself still lying on it. Instead all he saw was the dark room and the cold, gray light outside the window on the opposite wall. The ceaseless rain was still coming down, leaving dirty streaks everywhere, and Frank could not bear to look at it anymore. So he turned to the computer and pressed the button to accept the call.
“Yeah?” he croaked out in a voice that had gone days without talking to anyone.
Static hiss was the only sound that answered him, so Frank stretched out a hand to hit the disconnect button, but froze when a lifeless, sexless voice mumbled into his ear, “It’s the alignment, you know....”
“What?” Frank said, and then remembered some of his hotline training, and added, “Who am I talking to and how can I help you?”
“Alignment,” the voice repeated, “the angles, phases, stars and all that shit. Aldebaran is ascendant and things have lined up so that right here, right now, two kingdoms border each other.
That event allows the huge falsehood we call reality to be washed away for a little while, so that we can see the truth of things. No, not everyone can see what really lies behind reality, but we can, because we’re sensitive to it. We’re special. We’ve either tasted it before, or longed for it in our deepest dreams. We’re the chosen, lucky few.”
“I’m not following you...,” Frank said, but he knew that somehow, in some way he didn’t understand, he was lying even before the voice called him out on it.
“Bullshit. You know exactly what I mean. You’ve been there, you’ve seen it, I know, you’ve told me as much, so no more bullshit, okay?”
A memory sparked to life inside Frank, “Billie?” he whispered.
There was a brief silence and then the caller continued. The tone of the voice remained the same, but something about it had changed. The cadence? Pitch? “He told me all about it, man, the Monarch of Carcosa, and he’ll tell you too, if you’ll only listen to him.”
“Tell me what?” Frank said, his left thumb starting to rub his right wrist.
“He tried to tell you before, don’t you remember? But you wouldn’t listen to—”
“Shut up,” Frank pleaded.
“This life,” that second word came out a mocking hiss, “is a lie. Death is reality. It’s all ’round us, the very air we breathe is loaded with dead things. Everything you eat is dead. Man, everyone you see is slowly dying, decaying right before your eyes. They’re all just hollow, rotting shells, nothing more. That’s not all. The building you live in, the clothes on your back, the computer before you, all of it, everything, is rotting, falling apart, breaking down, becoming heaps of ash and dust in a meaningless world of gray. Even the cosmos, since it first exploded into being, has been dying, aeon by aeon and minute by minute. Entropy is the only universal constant. Deep down, everyone knows that, but only a few have the courage to admit —”