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I. The Girl (Get Off)
My phone rings.
I answer, “Hello?”
Silence.
“Hello?” I say it again hoping for a response. Or maybe I’m not, maybe I am just wanting to hang up. “Hello?” I say it again. I don’t really know why.
Finally a woman’s voice says, “Hi.”
I realize I have no idea who it is one the phone. I wonder if someone saying one word is enough to recognize who is one the other side of the invisible closeness through distance.
“Who is this?” I say.
“Does it really matter?” She says. “Do you have to know me to talk to me?”
This question is odd. I’ve never thought of it like that. I wonder if she has some point in her question. Maybe it’s a tele-marketer setting me up for some sales pitch. Something about how I can save on long distance by switching to AT&T.
All of a sudden, me still not speaking, this woman, this unknown in my life, says, “I’m thinking of killing myself.”
She says it just like that. A dread fact with no emotion in her voice.
I still don’t know what to say, while I’m thinking she says, “I have a gun in my other hand. It’s held against my head.”
Again no emotion. No anything. Just her stating fact.
She sounds young I realize. I put her some where in her mid teens. Fourteen, maybe close to sixteen. Who knows.
Either way my impression of her being a woman is taken away. She’s young.
A girl.
“I mean it,” she says.
I can’t help but think, What did I do to deserve this?
Selfish.
“It’s really loaded. Bullets and everything.” This strikes me as funny. I don’t laugh. I just think about how young she is.
A girl, I think again.
“So what you’re just gonna let me kill myself on the while I’m on the phone with you?” Her voice creeps me out. It’s like she isn’t really real. Like a voice you would hear when you left your phone off the cradle for too long telling you, if you’d like to make a call please hang up and try again.
I almost hang up at this.
“Do you not care? Are you just gonna let me kill myself? Do you get off on that sort of thing?” This I think is the worst thing I have ever been told on the phone, and I still can’t say anything. Still can’t respond. I’m frozen.
I think to myself again, trying not to, What did I
II. Why (Do I Care?)
“do to deserve this?”
“What did you to deserve what?” She says.
Then I realize I spoke. Said that I didn’t deserve this to a girl who wants to kill herself.
“You didn’t do anything to deserve this.” She says in her press zero to talk to talk to an operator voice.
“Why do you want to kill yourself?” I say this to change the subject. To get away from the fact that I don’t care about this. I wonder if that makes me a bad person. I wonder if it makes me evil in a way.
Silence for a while. Who knows how long. Just silence, and I think to myself whether or not she pulled the trigger. Would I have heard it?
The BOOM!
Ka-BOOM!
Bang!
Whatever sound a gun makes, and how ever you would put that sound into words. I wonder if I would have heard it.
Finally out of the silence, and thus taking me out of my thoughts of comic gun shot word balloons, she says, “No one cares about me.” Stated as fact again. Dreadful. Unemotional.
I think whether or not something could be dreadful but be unemotional.
My head starts to hurt. I don’t tell her this. Don’t want to be accused again. I say, “Why do you think that?”
“They just don’t. I’m ugly. People say I’m a bitch. My parents say I’m turning into a tramp. A tramp? A tramp? What do they still live in the eighties or something? Either way, I know they mean slut. They mean that I’m turning into a slut. I’ve had one boyfriend. He cheated on me. He fucked this other girl, a real slut. But my parents don’t look at it that way, my parents think I’m a slut.” She says this in a rush, and finally I hear something in her voice. Anger. Sadness.
Depression?
Maybe a hint of madness?
“So what your parents think makes you think you should kill yourself?” I ask. I have to, I don’t know what else to say to this invisible person. This girl.
“Yes.” Back to the operator voice. Back to the un-emotion. The non-emotion. “They don’t give a fuck.”
Silence again and I think, why does she think I care?
This time, thankfully, I don’t say it.
III. Gun (Where are you?)
“They just don’t care what happens to me,” she says this again. It’s starting to sound like some sort of chant. Maybe in some odd way it is reassuring her. Giving her a reason for her cause. “They just don’t pay attention. They're never around. My mom is always just gone. Where to? Who knows? Shopping. Cheating on her husband. Something. My dad is always working. Even when he is at home, he is always working. It's him who is the slut, always working. Always gone. No part of my life. Either of them. Unless it’s when they have to see me to call me their little slut.”
For some reason this strikes me. Makes me sad. I don’t know why. “I’m sure they care,” I say. It shocks me to here the sympathy in my voice.
No, that’s not right. The sadness. After all I have a daughter of my own.
“They don’t,” she says. Again, like a mantra.
I reach over to the small desk radio on my desk, turn it on, and Billy Joel’s Only The Good Die Young comes out of the radio.
Classic rock from KLOS. It’s a Tuesday. Two-for-Tuesday. I can’t help but wonder if this is the first or second of Billy’s songs they are playing.
As the ending chorus comes up, Joel singing, “you know that only the good die young/ onnnnnlllly the gooooood dieeeeee young”, followed by ohhs and ahhs, I hear the girl say, “Are you even listening?”
I say yes, and I realize it isn’t a lie.
“I need to let them know. Show them that there are more important things than work, money, whatever it is they are gone for so long to get.” She says this and this time her anger, which was once the operator voice, is tinged with a deep sorrow. A misery.
I think then that I will never forget what the feeling of being alone sounds like. What I hear in her voice is a sense of alone-ness.
I barely hear the DJ on the radio announce that Pearl Jam is next on this two-for-Tuesday.
It’s at this point she says, “My dad is even here right now. Right down the hall. He won’t even know until I pull the trigger.”
It’s at this point I wonder why she called me. Where she got my number.
Minutes pass.
Pearl Jam’s Alive ends, and the DJ says that Daughter is next.
Again I’m struck with a sense of sadness.
“Alone…Listless…
I tune it out. Realization strikes me then, the girl, I hear her breathing. Everything in the room is magnified but nothing is clear.
I realize that my eyes are watering as I say, “Where are you?”
Silence.
Breathing.
Silence.
I hear Eddie Vedder’s voice as I look at a faded picture framed on my desk, “…The picture kept will remind me…”.
I say again, this time looking in my desk drawer where I keep a lockbox that’s never locked and inside a Kimber 1911 Compact, “Where are you?”
I take the box out.
I know what I will see. I pray I’m wrong.
I open it.
Nothing.
On the radio, Eddie Vedder’s deep, somewhat, grating voice singing, “the shades go down, the shades go…go…”
I go.
IV. A Slow Single Thought
Everything is going in slow motion.
I feel my legs moving.
I know I’m running.
So slow. My daughter's room is too far.
I’ll never make it.
I have this sense of tears on my face.
Falling, falling.
My mind goes to a single line of thought.
A single sentence.
A single dreadful sentence.
A slow single thought.
I’m going to kill my daughter.
V. I Love You (I Love You)
I get to her door. It feels as if I had been running for hours, sweat is running down my face, mixing with my tears.
I open the door.
She is sitting there, tears running down her face.
I see her and all I can think is, what have I done?
She looks over at me, she is still holding the phone to her ear and the gun is pointed to her head. I know it’s loaded. After all it is my gun.
I always thought that having an unloaded gun defeated the purpose.
“Please.” It’s all I say. It’s all I can say.
She continues to look at me, her tears coming harder. She starts to sob, her shoulders hunching up and down like she had hiccups.
She continues to looks at me when she says it, says what I couldn’t say myself, “I love you.” She says this and I watch her finger press harder on the trigger. Watch as the knuckle of her index finger turns white.
I’m frozen. Frozen. I can’t say it back even though I think it again and again in my mind, I love you I love I love you I LOVE YOU. My own mantra.
Nothing comes out of my mouth.
Her finger presses down more.
Finally something snaps inside me, loud, deafening, like the shot of a gun, “I LOVE YOU!” I scream. I’m crying harder than I have ever cried now. “I love you.” I say it again.
She is looking at me. She looks at me and I see a glint of distrust in her eyes. I bit of doubt.
My heart breaks.
She presses harder.
Then all I hear is nothing.
I see everything.
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