Mortification

I'll never forget the date - it was Sunday, September 14, 1997: the day I accidentally handcuffed myself to one of my uncle's kitchen chairs.  Of all the people who were there that day, I'm probably the only one who remembers that it happened at all; I'm not sure the others would even know what I was talking about if I brought it up.  I'm certain I'm the only one who remembers the date.  That part wouldn't surprise any of them; my memory for dates is somewhat legendary in my family.  I don't think any of them know, though, that if everything had gone according to plan, they would be the ones who could never forget.

I was a couple of months shy of my fifteenth birthday, and not the least bit interested in living that long.  It was in January of that year that I'd first felt that extremity of despair rise up in me, the urgent and unequivocal certainty that I wanted to die.  Suicide was an idea I'd tossed around in the privacy of my thoughts since childhood, but that was the first moment I'd honestly craved it and believed I was capable.  It was a moment that passed; I continued on in the same profound misery, but the energy that might have spurred me to action was gone.  The depression eased up a bit around the time spring arrived, but as the new school year started, it came down heavy again.  By then, I'd put a lot of thought into the best solution I knew.  I had a plan.

In choosing a method, there were two criteria that mattered.  First of all, it had to look like an accident.  I wasn't a spiteful teenager out to punish my family and my indifferent schoolmates for letting me down.  My death, by my reckoning, was a settling of accounts, not of old scores.  I knew it would be a painful thing in any case for those who had loved me - but substantially more so if they knew I was the orchestrator of my own demise.  My mother's grief would be terrible enough, losing her firstborn, her only daughter.  I could not compound that agony with unnecessary guilt.

Second of all - and I'm ashamed to say that if push had ever come to shove, this consideration would surely have taken priority over the other - my suicide must be painless.  It was terror that had kept me alive so long: terror of the process of dying, and of what I might find on the other side.  (I wasn't particularly interested in the afterlife at that point - in fact, I earnestly hoped there wouldn't be one - but it was hard not to think about it when I realized it was something I might be confronted with presently.)  I thought I could overcome these fears, but I knew I didn't have the willpower to set in motion events that would result in my confronting the unknown in solitary convulsions of physical agony.  I'd never be able to drag a razor across my wrist, or tighten a noose around my neck.

I decided to go with sleeping pills.  I seemed to recall my mother offering me one out of a big jar at some point.  I didn't know where she kept the jar, but it had to be in the bathroom or kitchen, like all the other medicines.  I'd find it, and I'd swallow pills until the jar was empty.  I knew I could force myself to do that, and then I'd get rid of the jar.  We'd been living in our current house no longer than two months, and I was the only one in my family who suffered from insomnia with any frequency; it would probably be a long time before anyone went looking for the pills, and then they would most likely assume the jar had been misplaced in the move.  Afterwards, when the fear of death really hit me, it would be too late, and on some level I knew I would find that comforting.  It wouldn't be too bad, anyways, because the warm languor of sleep would come over me before I could work myself up into too much of a panic.  I would know, as I closed my eyes and let it take me, that I was descending this time into a silent abyss from which I would never return, but by then, I would be too tired, too seduced by that sweet promise of oblivion, to care.

Before I took the pills, I would change into my swimsuit.  It was late summer, still hot; the backyard pool was still so inviting. . . . When they found me, they would assume I'd foolishly decided to go for a dip alone.  Accidental drowning, the death certificate would say.  They would mourn, and then they'd get on with their lives, and all my pain would still be over.

Looking back, I find myself wincing at the sheer naïveté of this plan.  For one thing, although I later searched the cupboards and medicine cabinets  more than once, I never found any sleep aids at all, let alone a big jar of them.  Assuming I had found the pills, however, and assuming there had been enough of them to overdose on (several dozen, at least, and to underestimate what it takes is to risk waking up in the hospital the next day with permanent liver damage), there's a good chance I would have found myself vomiting as my body rejected the noxious invasion.  If I had managed to keep them down, I still would almost certainly have failed in my purpose of protecting my loved ones from the fact of my suicide.  An autopsy is standard procedure in the case of an unwitnessed accidental death - and even if I actually had drowned, slipping into a coma and falling facedown into the water before the poison could finish me off, the truth would surely come out in the tox screen.

It didn't seem like a perfect plan, even at the time.  But it was the only way out I had.

Talking to my parents wasn't an option.  I knew they wouldn't understand.  My father didn't care what I did or how I felt, as long as I stayed out of trouble and got my chores done.  He hardly ever had anything nice to say about me anyway - if I told him how I'd been feeling, he'd probably laugh, or he'd think I was making it up to get sympathy, as he'd accused me of doing before when I burst into tears during one of his lectures about my stupidity and incompetence.  I thought my mother might take me seriously, at least, but I knew she'd tell me to pray about it, and I wasn't ready to tell her - because I hadn't yet admitted to myself - that I no longer believed in her God.  And suppose I did talk to them, and convince them I needed help?  I'd be getting it on their terms.  I imagined my mother and some starched-syrup professional working together to "cure" me of what little I found in my own nature to love: my introversion, my eccentricity, my darkness.  I imagined my father telling the doctors how lazy I was, how disrespectful and rebellious; he'd known me all my life and still didn't have a clue who I was.  By the time they all were through with me, I'd be dead for sure, even if I was still alive.

Perhaps just as importantly, that wasn't the way my story was supposed to go.  I wasn't supposed to be one of those troubled teenagers.  I was a brilliant student.  I was a talented writer - just a couple of months earlier I'd written a letter to the editors of the Los Angeles Times, and they'd chosen it for publication without knowing it was the work of a fourteen-year-old.  My mother assured me that I had what it took to succeed in competitive debate; she'd insisted I join the high school debate team, even though what I really wanted was to act, and although all I'd done so far was sit in the meetings and watch other students practice their speeches, she was sure I would love it if I only made a little effort.  That was the sort of person I was supposed to be: driven, hardworking, ambitious.  I was supposed to be making friends, maybe even wanting to date, and at the very least I should be packing my days with activities that would look good on a college application.  After all, college was only three years away, and I'd already begun to suspect that that wasn't as much time as once it might have seemed.  I wasn't sure I would really like college.  I loved to learn, but I had a notion that institutions of higher education might not be the ivory-tower havens I dreamed of.  From what I'd heard, most college students were at least as interested in partying as in their studies, and many of them were there because their future earning potential would be higher with a degree, not because they were consumed by a passion for knowledge.  It sounded a lot like high school, actually, but without the structure of a tightly organized schedule of daily classes.  I was supposed to be looking forward to it.  I was supposed to be a success, tackling one challenge after another with verve and aplomb.  How could I bring myself to admit that I felt on the verge of collapse most days, that I didn't know what I wanted anymore, and the future was closing in on me too fast?

It was better, I thought, not to have any future at all.  All I needed was a day alone in the house, when I could carry out my plan undisturbed.  When my mother announced one day in early September that we would be going the next Sunday to visit my uncle, I thought I'd found the perfect opportunity: all I'd have to do was not go.  By some poetic twist of fate, the date would be September 14.  I remembered that date all too well from the previous year.  My father had been yelling at me again, consciously lording his parental authority over me, and he had called me "inferior."  A great tide of something more heady than anger surged up in me then, and I ran out into the yard, utterly uncontrolled, and threw myself down in the grass.  The feeling needed to expend itself in destruction, and I was all that I had; and before I knew what I was doing, I was digging my fingernails savagely into my arm and tearing them through the flesh, as hard as I could bring myself to do.  It was thirty seconds or a minute at most before it passed, abandoning me bewildered in its wake, my arm sore - but also leaving me feeling hollowed and cleansed, chastened.  It seemed somehow fitting that on the anniversary of my first foray into self-injury, I would finish the job.

"I don't really think I want to go," I told my mother casually.  "I have a lot of homework this weekend.  I should probably stay here and work on it."

"You're going," my mother said firmly.  "You can do your homework on Saturday."

"It's going to be so boring," I complained.  "It's not as if any of you are going to want to talk to me anyway."  I saw my uncle and his family a couple of times a year, at most, and I didn't particularly care for any of them.  I was too old to bring a book along to lose myself in while the adults conversed about uninteresting things.  The occasion was certain to be dreadfully dull, and I would secretly have wanted to skip it even if it hadn't posed a scheduling conflict with my suicide.

"You're going," my mother repeated, in a tone that brooked no refusal.

I thought about deliberately dawdling over my homework.  Education was a priority in my family; surely they'd leave me behind if my grades were at stake?  They wouldn't let me leave it undone, and I doubted they would have me take it along to my uncle's.  I could even lie and say I had something big due on Monday, like an essay or report.  No - it was only the second week of school.  I didn't even have that much homework yet, let alone the sort of project I'd need all weekend to finish.  I could pretend I was sick; I'd never been much of a malingerer, so my mother probably wouldn't suspect I was faking now, especially if I started on Thursday night saying I felt a little under the weather and I thought I would go to bed early . . . but no, if I'd stayed behind sick, there was no way they'd believe I'd spontaneously decided to go for a swim.

I won't pretend there wasn't a streak of relief in me that Sunday morning when my mother packed us off to church as usual, and then on to my uncle's place.  Unless I had that heavy energy searing through me, I wasn't sure after all that I had the courage to go through with something so . . . immense.  I didn't know whether it terrified me more that I might do it if I had the chance, or that I might not.  I didn't really want to live, and yet . . . How cruel it was that I'd had to be born at all.  I'd never had a chance not to be faced with this dilemma: to suffer or to die . . . to be or not to be, except that I already was.  In a way, the day's outing seemed like a nasty circling microcosm of my own life: dragged away from plans I didn't really want to make, to go somewhere I didn't really want to be.  Conveyed, carried forward, swept on ahead, life pounding relentlessly on to the next thing before anything previous had been resolved.

We went out that afternoon to explore some cute little gift boutiques in my uncle's town.  The adults pretty much ignored me, which suited me fine.  I browsed a little and found a small framed wall hanging depicting an antique-style world map, the kind with "TYPVS ORBIS TERRARVM" across the top and sea monsters frolicking in the ocean beside an illustration of the Four Winds.  It wasn't expensive at all, and I decided to buy it.  I wondered if it was foolish, spending my money on something I wasn't planning to be alive long enough to enjoy - but then, I wouldn't need money either when I was dead, would I?  Still, it seemed like a betrayal of my intentions to make any kind of investment in the future, even so small an investment as the ownership of a beautiful and fascinating object.

We went back to my uncle's house after that, and it was about as dull as I had expected.  I don't remember anything else in particular until that evening when we happened to go into the kitchen.  I don't even remember why we were there - surely the living room would have been more comfortable?  What I do remember is that there was a pair of handcuffs on the back of one of the chairs.  It was a wooden kitchen chair with a slatted back, and one of the cuffs was closed around the top between the slats; the other cuff hung down loose and open.  When I pointed them out, my uncle explained how they'd come to be there; I think they'd been part of a costume, and someone had put them on the chair for a joke.  I stood behind the chair and fiddled with the cuffs while the conversation went on around me.  It wasn't hard at all to sink into my own private, brooding sphere, a bubble of dark thought.  I slipped my right wrist into the open cuff, just testing the feel of it.  I wasn't supposed to be here at all, I was supposed to be home, I was supposed to be dead -

"We don't have the key to those," my uncle said, and somehow the words penetrated my haze.  I looked up, and saw that he was staring at my arm, where I'd just closed the handcuff around my wrist.  I remembered doing it, remembered the satisfying click, but I couldn't quite process how it had happened.  My actions had been deliberate but without thought.  For a moment reality hovered around me, quivering, as if there were a thin, thin veil between now and thirty seconds ago, and all I had to do to make this go away was step through it.

Then it hit me.  There was no going back.  I was really and truly handcuffed to this chair.  "I thought they were a toy!" I protested, as if I could argue my way out of this.

"Oh, they're real," my uncle said.  "Not police-issue, but they're real."

I couldn't believe I'd been so stupid.  It had never occurred to me that these were real handcuffs, or that there wouldn't be a key.  It would have been bad enough if there had been a key, and I'd had to stand there chained to the chair until someone found it and released me.  But what on earth was I going to do now?  I tugged, but the heel of my hand was simply too wide to fit through the circumference of the cuff.

"We might have to go to the hospital," someone said.  Probably my father or my brother.  "They have tools there that can cut metal."  (Strangely enough, no one ever suggested calling a locksmith.)  I wondered if they'd really be able to cut the metal without cutting my skin.  I imagined climbing clumsily into the backseat of the car while someone pushed the chair in after me, walking into the emergency room while it dragged behind me, and if I'd been much for prayer, I think I would have prayed the floor would open up and swallow me right then and there.  Chair and all.

By now, everyone had gathered around me, focused on my wrist and the cuffs and the chair.  I felt strangely dissociated from my own arm, as if I were a pushy spectator at the scene of an accident, getting in the way of rescue efforts.  "Let's see if we can break the chain," someone said.  I honestly don't remember what happened next; I was too busy cursing my thoughtlessness, and my stupidity, and my existence.  I do remember my relief when whatever they did succeeded, and the chain linking the cuffs broke.  It wasn't a much better situation - I still thought I would die of shame if I had to go to the hospital and explain how I'd come to have a cuff locked around my wrist, but at least I wouldn't be going in with the chair in tow.  I pulled on the cuff again, but I couldn't get it off no matter how I twisted my hand.  The metal dug painfully into my skin and I had to abandon the attempt.

"Soap," someone said.  I think it was my mother this time.  "Maybe we can get it to slide off, and if not . . ."  I wondered if removing the cuff would still be considered a matter of urgency now that I wasn't attached to my uncle's chair.  Maybe I'd have to go to bed tonight with it still on, and then to school tomorrow.  I wondered if I would be able to convince my classmates it was a statement of some kind.  Anyway, we all went over to the sink then, and someone found a bottle of liquid soap and started slathering it over my arm, and someone else tugged at the cuff.  The tightness of the metal biting into my hand was terrible, and I kept jerking and crying out, forcing them to abandon one attempt after another.

I'm not sure how long it was that we struggled there - five minutes perhaps, but that's really only a guess.  It seemed much longer at the time, but was probably really much shorter.  I do remember the moment the cuff slipped tightly over the thickness of my knuckles and I was free.  For a few seconds I was just dazed.  To be in possession of my own unencumbered arm again was so precious as to be strange.  Then a wave of relief that I wouldn't have to go to the hospital at all swept over me, existing alongside, rather than mitigating, the humiliation of the ordeal.

It wasn't quite over yet.  After I washed the soap from my hand and arm, my father picked up the cuff, the closed, locked circle of stainless steel resting on the counter where it had fallen.  I never wanted to see it again.  I never wanted to think about this incident again.  I didn't want to hear anyone mention it ever again, but instead of tossing the horrid thing away, my father rinsed it in the sink and held it out toward me.  "Take it," he urged.  "You can keep it as a souvenir."

"Um, I . . . don't really want -"

"Go on!  Take it!  You can show it off someday when you look back on this and laugh."  For some reason I suspected the only one who would ever look back and laugh about this would be him.  I could imagine him telling his clients the story of his stupid daughter who accidentally handcuffed herself to a chair.  If I happened to be around, he'd probably ask me to go get it and show it to them.  This humiliation was never, ever, ever going to go away.  I didn't have the energy to fight.  I took the cuff from him and slipped it into my pocket, where I could feel its metal heaviness against my leg for the rest of the evening every time I shifted position, as if it were still holding me.

At home, I considered throwing it away, but I could just imagine someone - probably my father - pulling it out of the trash and pressing it back upon me.  Or demanding I produce it so he could have a good laugh with his clients, and then getting angry when I had to admit I didn't have it anymore even though he'd told me to keep it.  Instead, I just shoved it under a pile of laundry in my closet.  Out of sight, out of mind . . . eventually . . . maybe.  I listened to the silence of the house around me, imagined my parents and brother coming home, my mother coming to knock on my door, and only the silence answering. . . . I wondered how long it would have been before anyone thought to look in the pool.

I had been humiliated as only an adolescent - self-conscious, self-absorbed, and unsure - can be, and of course I overestimated just how important the whole thing was.  After that night, no one ever mentioned it again.  "Remember the time Truth handcuffed herself to that chair?" was never a topic of discussion at family gatherings, and my father never asked me to bring out the cuff to show to one of his clients.  There was no reason why I shouldn't have thrown it away, but to do that I'd have to go into the closet and dig it out.  I'd have to see it again.  I'd have to remember that awful day, acknowledge that it had really taken place.  Better just to leave the cuff under the clothes and junk at the bottom of the closet.

Every now and then, over the course of the next three years, I'd be looking in the closet for something, and I'd turn over a shirt I hadn't worn in months and there it would be, still locked shut, staring up at me like a wide silver eye.  I hated it, but something perverse and punitive in me wouldn't let me get rid of it, even when the opportunity presented itself naturally, and I would bury it again, pushing it deeper under the pile of clothes like a shameful secret.

Years later, after I went off to college, my father and brother packed up my bedroom.  I suppose the cuff turned up when they were going through the closet, and got stored away with the rest of my belongings, to which I have had no real access since then, even after I ended up hospitalized with suicidal depression halfway through my first semester and had to come home in what felt like disgrace..  When my family moved into our current residence, my mother found it necessary to "downsize" my stored possessions, but she assured me that all she'd given away was a few boxes of paperback books, which means the cuff might very well be at this moment in a box in our storage shed - and in a few months or years, when I get a chance to go through my old things, I'll see it again for the first time in over a decade, unchanged by the passage of years: still locked shut.

It doesn't have the power to hurt me anymore.  I've suffered worse humiliations since then, over the course of the years I've spent in the mental health system.  My emotionally abusive father no longer has any power over my life.  Through all the aching awfulness I have never been crushed entirely, and I continue to astonish myself with my own resilience.  I wouldn't say I look back and laugh now when I think of that night in my uncle's kitchen, but I have perspective enough merely to shake my head and sigh.

This time, when it turns up, I won't feel compelled to keep it, by my father's command or by my own denial or self-loathing.  I'll finally be able to throw it away.  The funny thing is, I'm not actually sure I will.  It's just an artifact now, a steel-hard memory.  There's something almost pathetic about it, this single useless cuff clenched tightly shut holding on to something that slipped away long, long ago.

Requiem

The moment I knew for sure;
the contorted grimace of your face
as rigor drew back the corners of your mouth:
such memories I can endure.

The biology of decay;
the physics of the crematorium:
I can live with such knowledge.

Theology?  Such questions
as concern the stuff of death
have always been the stuff of life for me.

What writhes in my heart like a tapeworm
is yesterday your being, and today not.
Such a thin film, thin as the glaze
of tears, yet impenetrable as the faraway look
in an unseeing eye. . . .