Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [45]
He placed the noose about his neck and tightened it down. He felt no reservations. But when he put his hands on the rail, to haul himself up and fling himself off . . .
“Hey! You up there!”
Gerold was appalled when he looked down.
“Don’t do it!”
“Aw, shit, man!” Gerold yelled. Just down below, some old guy with a splotch on his head like that guy from Russia was walking his Jack Russell. “Nobody walks their damn dog at three in the morning!”
The dog yelped up at him, tail stump wagging. The old man had his cell phone out. “I’m calling the cops—”
“No, please, man! Gimme a break!”
“Don’t do it!”
In seconds, it seemed, he could hear sirens.
Quick! Now! Gerold grabbed the rail, his muscles flexing.
“What’s going on up there?” said the old biddy from the balcony below. She looked up, curlers in her hair. Across the way, lights snapped on in various apartments. Figures appeared on balconies.
“That young man above you is trying to hang himself!”
Gerold had himself half propped up on the rail, when he heard pounding at his front door.
You’ve got to be shitting me . . . He knew he didn’t have time now—the door exploded open and hard footfalls thunked toward him.
Disgusted, Gerold lowered himself back in the chair, and took off the noose. This is so FUCKIN’ embarrassing! Why can’t people mind their own business? He unraveled the noose and untied the other end just as two police officers barged out onto the balcony and jerked the chair away from the rail.
“It’s all right, buddy,” one of them said. The other cop, a sergeant with a pitted face, grumbled, “So much for a quiet shift.”
“Look, it’s not what you think,” Gerold bumbled. “I was just . . .”
“Come on. We’ll get you taken care of.”
Another siren approached, an ambulance, no doubt.
“Life ain’t that bad, pal.”
As Gerold was rolled backward into the apartment, he saw that a crowd of spectators had gathered down below. Shit, shit, shit, shit! he thought, and then they took him down and out.
His face turned red. Were fifty people in pajamas and nightgowns congregated outside? It looked it.
Can’t even fucking kill yourself without other people butting in, he thought, humiliated. He’d probably be in the papers tomorrow. His boss would see it, his landlord, the neighbors. They’d all think he was nuts. As they put him in the ambulance, he could see the headlines: DISTURBED VET TRIES TO KILL SELF BUT POLICE INTERVENE.
In the back of the ambulance, two EMTs said nothing as he was driven away. They were eating doughnuts.
I guess I just can’t do anything right, Gerold thought, feeling like the perfect ass.
They took him straight to the local hospital, where a silent intern took his vital signs; then another intern wheeled him to an elevator and took him up. The first thing he saw upstairs when the doors opened was a sign: PSYCHIATRIC UNIT. He felt like a putz as a drab-faced admittance nurse rolled him down stark halls. Eventually an abrupt turn took him past blue-painted metal doors with chicken wire windows. Faces appeared in some of them. Voices bled from others. “Abandon hope, ye who enter here,” someone said, and another: “Where’s my cake?”
A dark-haired woman in a white lab coat eyed him from behind a desk when he was wheeled into an office. She looked tired and displeased. Probably on call, Gerold figured.
“Well, well, well.” Her eyes were bloodshot when they scanned a computer screen on her desk, no doubt his records sent over from VA. “Gerold, I’m Dr. Willet. My, what an inconvenience you are.”
Gerold was outraged. “Sorry about the inconvenience.”
“Suicide is the coward’s way out. There are patients in the quadriplegic ward who would sell their souls to be you.”
“I know that,” Gerold said. He wanted to spit. “I’d trade places with any of them. The fact is, I’m sick of living. I feel I have the right to kill myself.”
The woman scowled. “Oh, but you don’t. Life is a gift, Gerold, and suicide is a crime. It’s a form of homicide, and you can be prosecuted for it.”
“Come on,” he scoffed.
“Not in this day and age, of course. Everyone