Your Voice in My Head Read Online Free PDF

room?
Take me there. Take me there
.

CHAPTER 5
    MANHATTAN BEARING DOWN ON ME , I walk home from
Ghost Dog
, hand in hand with the thought of suicide. The thought of suicide is masculine energy, with manicured nails, like a mafioso. It wears a warm jacket that it drapes across my shoulders, and it doesn’t feel the cold itself. Do you remember the scene in
Goodfellas
where Robert De Niro keeps telling Lorraine Bracco, “There’s a dress for you in that warehouse room. That one. Go on. Just go in there”? And she knows she’s about to be killed, so she doesn’t go in there? The thought of suicide tricks you in there with sweet talk, and even though you know you’re being sweet-talked, and you know what lies in store for you, it’s a room you want to go to anyway.
    The well-groomed Thought of Suicide holds the door to my building for me. In the warmth of my apartment, we pick up my razor and cut together, like taking friendly shots in a bar.
L’chaim!
I look again and TOS is a manager taking me through important documents as I draw the blood frommy skin with a razor pen. “Sign here. And here. And once more, here.”
    The Thought of Suicide is a big flatterer. “You’re very pretty,” it says, and I blush but I also believe it, the light of the thought bleaching out my imperfections. Later GH will say, “You’re a great shag and very beautiful, but you don’t care about such things,” and internally I laugh and laugh because I think it is my vanity the Thought of Suicide played hardest on.
    I lie down on the bed. There are papers all over the queen-size mattress, books, newspapers, a bottle of water, pills. Pills tucked in there already, just waiting, just more. The pills begin to kick in. This is very pleasant, I think, like the moment you step into a warm bath, or the moment he slides inside you for the first time.
    And then the tide pulls back and there are things on the seabed I didn’t know were there: rusty cans, empty Coke bottles, seabirds choked in plastic. And it isn’t pleasant anymore.
    Somewhere in there is a bell, maybe a child playing a triangle. I reach for the triangle to make it stop. It’s the phone. “Hello,” I say from the ocean.
    It’s my mother. “Emma? Emma? EMMA! What have you done?”
    How does she call an ambulance? She doesn’t. I have dropped the phone and wandered into the suitcase to pass out and am now unconscious. She hears my roommate walk in. Mum is still there and hears everything. She hears my roommate scream. She hears her call 911 on her cell. She hears the ambulance men arrive. She stays there. She doesn’t go anywhere. My mum is here with me, for all of it.
    Eventually she hangs up to book a ticket so she can fly to be with me that evening. She flies through the night and I fly through the night and the next day we are in a hospital room together. I peel open my sticky lids. An IV leads from my arm to a drip. I’m in a bed and she’s on a chair and there’s someone else there with us—suicide watch—is it the Haitian or is it the drunken volunteer nun those first hours?
    E-mail to Dad from Mum:
    Subject: This and That.
    It’s midnight my time and I’ve been cleaning for several hours just so that I could breathe. Nothing changes.
    At the moment, nobody quite knows what to do about Emma. Tomorrow morning she will be assessed by the psych resident at St. Vincent’s. They may want to keep her but I think I will try to get her out. I don’t know what it’s costing but I will find out for certain tomorrow morning. They don’t know her, they’re going by the rules, and I’m not impressed. I’m much more interested in her being assessed by her own therapist and by the pharmacologist who has prescribed her meds which seem to have helped over the past eighteen months. We want to get some fix on what caused this. I’ll know more during the day tomorrow.
    She is insisting that she must get on with her work. She’s physically OK.
    It might be good if you can