May 2002, Berkeley, California

By Tony Lee

It is the day after my 21st birthday when my phone rings, waking me up.

It’s a friend. He tells me that Kay is in the mental hospital. My hangover is brutal, and I’m still trying to piece together what had happened last night, but the holes in my memory are plentiful and vast.

Did I see Kay last night? Yes, I did. I had rejected her simply for being nice to me on my most hated of days. And now she was in the mental hospital.

The gravity of this finds it way past the scar tissue around my heart. Self-loathing washes over me. My existence has become too vile; I must die.

I refortify my emotional barricade and consider this logically. Not a man of faith, I am prepared to admit that if I die, there could be a God/Deity/Divine Being waiting for me on the other side. Or if there is no God, I would be reduced to nothingness.

I am prepared for either outcome, but I pray for the former, hoping that God will grant me understanding after death. I consider a suicide note and reject it. I don’t care to say anything, and it doesn’t matter, for I’m nearly gone already.

I dig through my closet and pull out a filled (yet old) bottle of prescription tranquilizers. In my early teens, I was diagnosed with Tourette’s Syndrome and was medicated to control the symptoms. Knowing that I have a brain disorder was a constant knife twisting in my side, but once I left home for college, my symptoms disappeared, and the pills became unnecessary - until now.

It is late afternoon, and I start swallowing little orange pills with tap water. I sit in a chair, and by the light of the setting sun, resign the last of my time reading from the final cantos of Dante Alighieri’s Paradisio. I find it hard to concentrate on Dante’s words as my own miserable life continues to invade my thoughts.

I hate the girl who broke my heart. I hate the girl who was locked in a padded room. I scorn my parents for failing their son. But more than anyone else, I hate myself. I find myself repulsive in every aspect of caustic life.

I drop the book and try to stand up, falling into my desk so as not to topple to the floor. My coordination is gone, but I manage to stumble into the bathroom. I see my own reflection in the mirror and go into a rage.

Screaming, I repeatedly punch the mirror, shattering it. But not content that I can still see a cracked version of myself, I tear the mirror off the wall and smash it on the ground. My hand is a bloody ruin, painting the sink red as I lean on it.

The anger is gone, and with it goes the ability to hold myself up. On the bathroom floor, I begin vomiting uncontrollably. I pour my insides out until there is nothing left. Yet still my body tries to give more, heaving again and again with no effect, unless my soiled soul is escaping.

I crawl back to my room, a slug’s trail of vomit and blood behind me. For the first time, I realize that I am afraid and begin weeping. I don’t want to die. Breathing is a struggle. The sun has set. I lose consciousness.

My eyes slowly open and find the ceiling. I am dying. I pass out again and begin to dream.

People are racing all about me. I see my mother in front of me, laughing and crying. I reach out my hand toward her, but the crowd pushes and pulls me away. I try to yell, but no sound comes, and my mother doesn’t even open her eyes to see me as I’m pulled away.

I wake up again. I try to move, but I am paralyzed. It is still night, and I am still dying, is all I can think before I sink into dream again.

I stand at the bank of a slow moving river, looking out at peace on the other side. Fireflies light up and disappear around me. This is my only memory of my grandparents, having only visited them once as a toddler. I turn and see my father down the bank, playing with me as a small child, both laughing softly. And then a distant echo of surprise: this wasn’t my father and me, but rather me and my son.

I want try to move closer. I want to see my son, to know his features. What color are his eyes? But I can get no closer, and just like that echo, whose sound comes back fainter and fainter, my son’s face becomes fuzzier and more indistinct, reflecting a future that I am falling away from. Falling until I am swallowed whole by the darkness.

No time passes in this void. There is only eternity.

I open my eyes and stare up at the white walls of my sepulchre. The muted light of an overcast dawn illuminates my room. I am alive. I am weeping again, all anew. I thought I had reached the bottom the night before, but a whole new depth had opened up beneath me. I am a failure at even killing myself.

I continue to cry, and for the first time, I truly give up. I give up trying to figure out the answer. I give up trying to end it all. I give up ego, what I had always demanded was mine and mine alone. I give up everything.

And then, between one sob and the next, with no other way to explain it, I am reborn. From deep inside, I begin to feel warm. Then outside, I feel warm too. I feel as light as a feather. I smile for the first time in ages. I don’t question why I feel this way; I am just thankful to feel it.

I clean the mess in my apartment and go for a walk around town, thinking. For a month, I just walk, think, then go home and sleep. I barely eat. I do not answer my phone. I do see friends while walking, and I wave and smile, but I don’t go talk to them. I feel like a ghost still on Earth but unwilling to interact with it.

For that month, I am content to take in the sights and sounds of the world, a specter in the wind, until I pass through a park and encounter a graying, sun-aged old man. A man of letters, he always speaks in verse or in prose. And whenever he speaks, his eyes look far away.

For three days, I return to the park, and he is there, and I listen to him speak. And on the third day, I break my silence and speak. I tell him the story of the night of a month past. He sits and listens gravely. After I finish, he looks up slowly and says, “What you experienced was mercy, the mercy of God.”

I was spared. Spared a punishment I deserved. And with grace, I reveal this to you.

A natural Adonis, Tony Lee spent most of his life in the grips of athletic blood, sweat, and tears. After college, he spent a few years bouncing in and out of rock ‘n’ roll bands before settling down to begin his writing career. He is using a pseudonym.

Posted by Elizabeth Armstrong Moore on Friday, July 27th, 2007 | Email This Post

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