by Ada Uzoije
“Why Doug,” she purred, “how sweet of you.”
He felt his heart jump and said, “Sweets for the sweet, Ms. Grace,” thinking himself quite the suave gentleman. But she was far too smart for the boys in her class. A woman this smouldering had her fair share of such attempts and she could, by now, see those coming a mile away. Suddenly she held up the cup as if to toast and from the corner behind the door of her classroom, hulked a menacing figure with lamb chop sideburns and a very hairy chest that could stop a truck in its tracks.
“This is Vince,” she declared, and Doug’s stomach churned at the sight of the sauntering muscle mass that reached for the cup of coffee. “Vince, this is Doug, one of my favourite students,” she teased and looked deeply into the bewildered boy’s eyes with no small measure of satisfaction and guile.
“Hey there,” the deep voice of the monster in the tight jeans rang in Doug’s ears.
The boy didn’t know what to do. All his sex appeal went down the toilet and he could hear his cunning plan shatter like broken glass.
“Umm, hey,” he stuttered and watched in horror as the bulked boyfriend swallowed down the entire cup of coffee, crushed the cup in his hand and threw it effortlessly into the small paper bin on the far side of the classroom like a pro shooter.
Of course he wouldn’t miss, the enamoured boy thought with scorn. The striking looking man leaned over and gave Ms. Grace a deep, delectable kiss that lasted far too long according to Doug. Then the tall Adonis walked over to the cowering teenager and with his thumb, wiped his woman’s lipstick from his mouth.
His other massive hand extended to Doug’s throat and the boy could already feel the deadly constriction, pinching his eyes shut, but Vince simply fisted Doug’s collar in his hand. He wiped the lipstick onto his own shirt and tugged lightly at the boy’s collar to bring him closer, within earshot.
“Don’t be crushing on my fiancée, pal,” his raspy voice whispered in Doug’s face, “this shade of lipstick doesn’t come in ‘Loser’.”
Doug scoffed. In his opinion, Vince belonged in some X-Men comic as a mutant gone wrong, or a zoo. What could she want with that rodent? What on earth did she see in him? Doug couldn’t imagine those lips kissing that freak.
But those lips told him to study his English assignments with a hint of discipline and a splurge of sexuality. This had Douglas taking time out from “Game of Thrones” to study English, an astounding feat on the part of the luscious Ms. Grace. The tale was not dull, at least.
As Icarus struggled to rise above the city below, he flew too close to the sun and his waxen wings began to melt, leaving him, eventually, flapping only his arms and finally he plummeted from the sky into the sea and drowned. Doug fully embraced the poem and the story, imagining what it would be like to soar above the expectations of all who knew him, but he also considered the sun of his perceived abilities perhaps blinding him to his weaknesses and he suddenly nurtured darker possibilities of his wings being clipped by the heat of his positive outlook, leaving him to fall.
“What the hell?” he suddenly said out loud to himself in the midst of the loud mess of punk rock that oozed out of his computer speakers. What surprised him most was how such misery, such unkind doubts, could suddenly cloud his normal state of mind without warning. He was not thinking of anything in particular. He was just reading the story, so how on earth could its negative subtexts infiltrate his subconscious and steer it, once more, towards the falling, the failure and the death of it? Even in context, it appeared as thought something subliminal would use the most trivial matters to remind him of people killing themselves. He knew at once that this was a brand of demon he would not easily be rid of, no matter how he wandered in sunlight and happiness.
He shut the thick book his hot teacher had given him the second week of the new semester and stared into space as the blaring riffs of the unknown bootleg CD pounded his ears. Doug baffled his parents. He could study to a fault and score the highest marks in class while studying in the chaos of heavy metal or punk rock at its loudest. This was the only reason why his folks allowed him to murder the beautiful sounds of birds and wind chimes outside with his unholy taste in music, on occasion. It was as if the cacophony locked out the world and its distractions and truly enabled him to focus. Ludicrous, but true. Now was such a moment. His mind filled with the similes of Icarus, he realised something profound – the thought of suicide in general, its causes, its victims and its hold was not going to stop.
“Well I may as well study it, then,” he said with conviction, agreeing to let the stalking mind demons have their day. If they were going to plague his thoughts, he may as well get to know them and he put down the book to log into the Internet.
Where else could he find unlimited knowledge on a subject? Certainly not in books. On the World Wide Web, he could not only study the phenomenon, but actually interact with others like him. Of course! Why had he not thought of this before?
And this is where it all started. Day after day, he would lock himself in his room after school and seek out like-minded individuals. He’d rush his homework, finish his assignments with as little possible time being devoted to them, as long as they were acceptable for a pass rate. His parents got along a bit better now that Doug refrained from constantly mentioning the stupid man who killed himself on the bridge and they had a stronger income with the project Norman had been involved in. The house had become a bit lighter in atmosphere and things had returned to normal.
When Thompson called to borrow his Call of Duty game, Douglas told him that he had lost it when he went to visit his grandparents. When Thompson had old Mick call Doug, he was “too busy studying for the exams” to get together. Days became weeks and his friends faded into the background of his busy online life. Just like with the nightmares, he didn’t tell anybody about his new occupation. His mother noticed that he was spending a lot of time on the computer and when she enquired what he was doing, she would get the typical teenage generic response, “Nothing, Mom!” Jean wondered if he was watching pornography, but didn’t like to pry, so she just left him to it, hoping whatever it was, he’d grow tired of it long enough to beat her at a chess game again. Whatever it was, she thought, it would be a passing phase.
He found sites that explored the psychology of suicide, sites that gave data on its prevalence in different areas, demographics and age groups. He was amazed to find out on one of the research sites that suicide was the second most common cause of death among American teenagers, the first being vehicle accidents. He found several sites that tried to acquaint parents with the signs of impending suicide in their children and the behavioural deviations that accompanied the illness.
One of the most interesting sites was one called Suicide Witness, a type of social media site where people who had seen suicide could share their feelings about the events and their takes on it, scrutinizing it from all angles they needed to make sense of it. He was surprised to discover that there were as many different experiences as there were people. Some people commented that it was actually a positive experience in that it really made them feel good that they were happily alive; others said that it made them appreciate life more. Others were seriously traumatized and remained obsessed with what had happened, sometimes for months on end, suffering from night terrors, insomnia and even cultivating eating disorders to cope. The more unstable ones wanted to share the gory details while others avoided that entirely, finding it utterly distasteful. A lot of what he read proved that a staggering amount of people were furious with the person who had committed suicide, especially if they were friends or relatives. There didn’t seem to be much of a common thread – except, of course, that everyone on the site wanted to talk; that’s why they flocked here.
Doug found one woman particularly interesting. He liked how she called a spade a spade, how she was brutally honest and made no excuses for how she felt. He also found her sub-surface kindness and genuine concern for her fellow users delightful and somehow safe, if t
hat was a state of mind anyone could have on such a site. Doug felt attracted to her, not in a romantic way, but as an accessible and knowledgeable person he could easily relate his story to. Her screen name made no secret of her past transgressions or what she had endured at the will of other suicides.
She called herself “The Suicide Queen” because not only had she tried to commit suicide by overdose of sleeping pills in her attempt not “to get messy”, as she so aptly put it, but had also had the misfortune of seeing two suicides. One was of a teenage boy who hung himself after his girlfriend had left him and the other a very elderly uncle of hers who had suffered immensely from a long bout with cancer, a man in perpetual pain. Suicide Queen hinted that she had helped him take his life because she loved him so much and couldn’t bear watching the doctors keep him suspended in hell for the ego of their profession. Doug understood.
She was normally online early in the morning before she went to work, and soon Doug was getting up early to chat with her. They had long conversations about suicide and how to cope with having seen one. Suicide Queen felt that people had every right to commit suicide if they wanted to, and didn’t feel at all guilty that she had attempted it. Her opinion was that she had good reason, at least to herself, for doing it and that what one feels comes before the opinions of others who did not share your pain, though she did admit that, in hindsight, she was now glad that she’d failed, no matter how deeply disappointed she was to wake up two days later in hospital.
“Yeah, I guess it was a foolish thing to do, but I was very young and very hurt – in pain. You know, in a way I was like my uncle. I couldn’t bear it, and hadn’t the maturity to know it wasn’t permanent,” her words ran over the screen as she typed in obvious certainty.
Eventually, Doug felt comfortable enough to share his nightmares with her.
“My God, dude, that’s just creepy,” she answered in her green cloud on the instant message screen. “How long had you been having them?”
Doug told her that it had been weeks since they started.
She paused for a few seconds and then advised her new young friend on it.
“You should go see your doctor and just tell her about it, just so she knows, right?”
“I get your point, but going back to Dr. Lamaskaya means I’d have to tell my parents and there’s just no way. I can’t talk to them about it, especially my dad,” Doug explained.
“Okay, then just go with it, Icarus” she said finally, “and you never know, maybe if you stop fretting about it, it’ll finally go away, ya know?”
Ah, the wisdom he so loved! She always made him feel better.
A few days later, while chatting, Doug decided to tell her otherwise, though. He did not want to talk about the nightmares anymore.
“And how are we doing, Doug?” Krista joked in her caring way.
“Good, I’m good,” Doug replied, trying to be glib about it all.
“Hey, by the way, how are you dealing with the bad dreams?” she asked.
“Oh, they’re gone now,” he lied to sound stronger and healthier.
“Gone? That’s great!” she cheered his progress. “You know, it’s no cause for alarm, really. You just keep taking your meds and soon you’ll forget you ever had them.”
“I know,” said Doug.
“After I assisted my uncle, you know, to leave, the guilt was killing me. I’d dream bad things too, about how I cut off his oxygen and the horrible sounds he made just before the end and such…” she paused a moment, “…I blamed myself for his decision to die and to tell you the truth I had nightmares for months after. My future was uncertain and I had all this guilt.”
“But you got over the bad dreams. They disappeared, right?” Doug fished for approval.
“Totally.” Krista typed back.
“Yeah, I haven’t had them for a few days now, so that’s off my back as I predicted,” he fibbed and felt the responsibility of his nightmare report disappear from their discussions, hopefully for good now.
Doug figured that he was coping well enough, despite the nightmares. His obsession with suicide was much greater than obsessions he’d had before with learning about something new that had caught his interest, he had to admit. He remembered that once he’d spent a week trying to learn everything he could about selenium - its use as a preventative substance and a cure for cancer and many other conditions.
They’d had a talk at school about mercury poisoning and how the increase in mercury in the environment was a very serious problem. The guest speaker mentioned that increasing selenium intake could combat poisoning, and with that young Douglas embarked on his first obsession, intensive research and a ridiculous amount of scrutiny, but nowhere close to the obsession he was nurturing now. Perhaps if he studied psychology this time, he thought, he could discover the root of his obsession with obsessions. The thought amused him greatly.
CHAPTER TEN
Softly he prodded down stairs in the dark, minding the noise he made so that he would not rouse his parents. Doug ran his hand along the wall as he descended the stairs and it felt wonderfully cold against his palm. His mind being fraught with devilish things of late, the cold smoothness of the painted staircase wall conjured thoughts of what could be lurking just under the surface. Every second step he would expect some sharp claw with long nails darting from the wall and cutting up his fingers, or a face protruding to take a snap at him like a demonic dog. In the dead of night he could hear everything so clearly it made him wonder if things even made a sound during the day, when there were dogs barking, phones ringing, blenders, lawnmowers and passing cars hooting. Or did they wait to creak or moan only during the night when they could be heard. He had just had another shocking nightmare and he was going downstairs for coffee, strong coffee. In his chest his heart still raced and his pyjamas clung uncomfortably to him from the perspiration of his disturbing slumber and its denizens.
Norman always hated it when his son walked around in the house after bedtime. Things like snacking and coffee were reserved for ”up hours,” as his dad put it, and after bedtime Norman did not want to have to worry about suspicious sounds in his house which he would have to investigate – only to find that it is his son, snooping about. He used the fridge light to see in the dark kitchen as he carefully filled the pot without opening the tap too big and risk the pipes making too much noise. From the dark cupboard he pulled the coffee can and the sugar. Normally he would have preferred percolated coffee, especially now that he has declared war on sleep, but for now it was imperative that his parents were not woken by the smell of morning caffeine and the gurgling sound of the coffee machine which in itself, would make his skin crawl in the eerie darkness.
While he waited for the kettle to boil the water, Doug looked out the window and pulled his night shirt away from his skin to alleviate his body from the awful moistness and heat.
‘Now I have to take another shower… oh, I can’t. They’ll wake up,’ he lamented in his mind. Perhaps he could just run some water in his basin and wipe off his body with some warm water. After the water had boiled he poured and listened to the hum of the big old fridge. It was rather comforting to hear it humming when the sound of the kettle died down and left him all alone in the empty bowels of the house. Quietly he prepared the coffee and braved the hot water to take a huge gulp to quench his thirst. It was a by-product of his night terrors, waking up so thirsty he could drain a lagoon.
The fridge dialled down and switched off, as fridges do between hums, but this time he was appalled by the audacity of the appliance to simply switch off its hum and leave him in the uncertain solitude of complete silence. He drank more as he looked out the black window, where he could hardly see anything outside, save for a few trees and flower bushes that the street light could reach. Other than those, the rest of the garden was hidden in darkness as the atmosphere in the house now floated in silence. He could hear himself swallow and he loathed it.
Then he saw something in the window. Fro
m behind the ice cream bush in his mum’s garden a figure emerged, moving only an inch or so. It was of no specific shape but it stretched as high as his dad would if he stood behind the brush, and it held no colour either. It toggled between brown and black and the boy narrowed his eyes to sharpen his view. It appeared to be wearing a hat, but then the hat would fade and become hair. Doug cupped his hands against the window and peeked though to see clearer and found that the apparition had disappeared. As soon as he stepped back again, it would reappear in the garden. It bent slightly to one side and Doug jumped to his right to get out of sight, but he knew the man must have seen him by now. Gradually the curiosity compelled him to check again and he snuck back to the window in the faint light of the open fridge.
It was still there!
It had not moved or bothered to take cover. Again Doug pushed his face up against the window and cupped out the kitchen light and once more the figure disappeared and it was then that the shocking truth hit him – it was not standing outside, it was a reflection from behind him.
The frightened boy swung around and there it stood in the lobby, against the wall, confirming his fearful suspicions. He yelped inadvertently from fright and quickly put his hand over his mouth, afraid that his cry may have woken his father. Frozen, the teenager stood in the dead quiet dismal light, staring stiffly at the figure which confronted him from the dark corner next to the front door. Now it seemed to be made of smoke, black smoke which rippled in the atmosphere like water on a wind-driven lake. It moved its arms, but they melted into its body and again the perceived hat rose from the head and disappeared. Doug’s entire body quivered from the ghastly sight and his palms seethed with sweat. He dropped his eyes and saw a briefcase in the thing’s hand. There was that feeling in his throat again, that dry burning like when he was drowning in his dream and his eyes widened as the shape in the lobby stretched to over seven feet tall and snapped its own neck to the side.