Desperation, part 1
But hasn’t the brilliant end come, you wonder,
And isn’t the world still burning?
-Gwendolyn MacEwen
Calliope flings herself over the parapet.
The bridge across the river is high, and before hitting the cold water, she tries – as far as she’s able within this fragment of time she has left - to review any remaining possibilities, narrow as they now have become:
First, if she crashes onto one of the thick pans of ice floating downstream, there’s a good chance she’ll break her neck. Death in that case may be instantaneous.
So!
No more worries.
If, on the other hand, her usual bad luck has her striking open water, the outcome is less certain. Her winter clothing, a heavy woollen overcoat and scarf, her boots, warm hat and gloves, could all absorb water at a fairly fast rate, dragging her under and drowning her.
But not quickly enough. It would take more than a minute or two.
A disagreeable prospect.
Not only that! Some do-gooder passing by on the busy commuter route, instead of ignoring what is after all a very banal tragedy, might call instead for a paramedic. Setting in motion the elaborate emergency apparatus of fire department racing to the scene, police rescue unit launch, all of these rigorously trained and experienced professionals making themselves useful by keeping her more-or-less alive. Even when she has so obviously chosen for herself a slightly different alternative.
Is it possible, Calliope asks herself in freefall down to the river, I’ve made another mistake?
Instead of going public with my decision in this overly dramatic fashion, should I have done what most of the others do, quietly and discretely offing themselves behind the trash bins in a back alley, with a massive hit of whatever deadly shit is going around? But then the authorities always pronounce that kind of fatality accidental...
As another way to encourage a critically underinformed citizenry in their hopeful belief that mostly, maybe, thing’s are alright. I wouldn’t mind if at least a few decent folk realized how the super-conducting kool-aid of progress we’ve all been forced to drink is not at all what it’s influencers, pushers and it’s more intoxicated victims claim it to be...
The irony is, of course, rescuing me will take up precious police time away from their real job of protecting the rich from people like me: the average, the expendable, the chronically marginal. The men and women in uniform may think it’s worth their while to save the lives of ordinary folk, but further up the food chain, a lot of this kind of stuff has to be considered a waste of police resources - since protection of property is the name of the game, not people.
And property, Calliope reminds herself, doesn’t even have to belong to anyone anymore. It exists now as an immaterial force, a financialized abstraction, inhabiting it’s own synthetic power base, much as the more old-fashioned sort of god used to sit on a throne in heaven, beyond the reach of merely mortal intent. Property digitized is both transcendent in relation to transient human life, and as well, omnipotent in terms of how much damage it will do to you if you don’t obey it’s inflexible and draconian codes of conduct.
Until this moment, Calliope had managed to persist on her own, outer, eroding edge of this pervasive unfairness, existing as a hard-to-digest anomaly to it’s metabolic needs. Through her own neuro-divergent waywardness, in her music she’d managed to sustain a semblance of survival within that liminal space: a redoubt built against the coercive attacks of the corporate agenda, aimed at all to keep their own oppressive shit-show of laissez-faire graft flying.
Then it didn’t help that Marcus broke her guitar.
Now, for Calliope, the challenge of how to cope with so many fatal flaws in the fabric of life-as-it-must-be-lived, is past tolerating. The cold, dark water now rushing up to meet her falling face, will act as a quick anaesthetic, numbing all sensation of loss, hope and desire. So her death, even if it takes a little longer than she’d originally imagined, and far from ideal, will never-the-less be almost painless.
A life which had never amounted to much anyway.
Except when it hurt.
Calliope Dove, average.
An urban pigeon, too lame to fly. Too insignificant to lose sleep about.
So...
So no one, she asserts as she completes her fall through the frosty air, Is going to miss me. No one will mind.
Because.
I always got it wrong anyway.
Wrong career, wrong lover, wrong response to almost everything...
When I ran out the door with blood on my face, no one wanted to know.
She’s done it again, they must have been thinking, She’s said the wrong thing.
Again!
Her guitar smashed. She should know better than to say anything to Marcus. He never listens. Marcus Rigg! She should have known better than to move in with that man.
But she never does learn, does she:
Why will Calliope not learn?
A falling star, born under the wrong sign, hatched in the wrong nest, a changeling who can’t be returned, the receipt’s been mislaid. Possibly a technical malfunction, but why did my parents have me at all, given the portents of climatic calamity and World War Three all our responsible legislators are doing not a single useful thing to stop: what were they thinking of?
Nothing much it seems. And the nullity – what this freezing cold water feels like - if anyone bothers to consider it, this is the only thing left in the end anyway. So by deleting myself, by pissing out like a cigarette in a beer can, at least I’ve proved myself right...
Right?
No...
It proves nothing...
I’m only doing this out of desperation.
As she slowly opens her eyes, a man’s face comes within Calliope’s view, which introduces itself as the psychologist, Dr Johanssen, employed by the hospital to find out one or two things more about her, and, if possible, to help her in her need.
I’m here three days a week, the man then says, as if this makes things easier to understand.
Shit, she mumbles.
He smiles.
Take your time , he says.
She frowns.
Calliope tries to sit up a little in the bed, but can’t manage it. So the doctor presses a button on the console and tips her head-end up a little. She can now see his face better from the pillows.
It’s almost invisible, this face, blending into it’s surroundings the way the wings of a mottled moth do on the bark of moth-eaten tree. All the same.
She blinks and this hurts, her face and her skull are sore, but whatever chems they’ve pumped into her blood, she feels better than she’s felt for years.
No wonder, she thinks, We’re all addicts.
I don’t need help, she says to the politely-disguised doctor.
Dr Johanssen takes his time answering.
You jumped off a bridge, he finally offers, pronouncing the words somehow in the same way a frog will reach out with it’s tongue and catch a fly.
She watches Dr Johanssen’s throat bob as he swallows.
You should too, Calliope answers with a more deliberate hostility.
Should...?
Jump.
Well, I have no reason to, so...
No need.
Well, logically, one expects there should be a reason for... And...
No, Calliope interrupts, Go see.
See what?
No reason. It hurts.
He smiles faintly. She’s angry:
What sort of idiot are you that you don’t hurt?
He waits. A patient moth. Or frog.
Everyone hurts, she adds.
The Medtronic monitor she’s wired to emits a discrete beep or burp.
The Earth hurts...
A nurse passes in the corridor, busy, brisk, efficient.
The Earth? Dr Johanssen’s sticky tongue leaps out, How do you mean?
Calliope looks at him with her bruised face.
This is nothing, she says, touching swollen, purple skin, To what we’re doing to her.
The doctor nods his head and writes something down.
You think I just project my own problems onto the planet, Calliope says, covering with one hand her black eye, But we sit here talking while men kick the living shit out of her.
He smiles. Patiently.
We’re fucked, she concludes.
Calliope closes her eyes.
You are a caring person, Calliope, the doctor says in his calm and well-modulated voice, Can you tell me more about what you care about?
But Calliope’s mind is already wandering away from the conversation, the predictably up-beat trend the doctor is trying to bend the curve into, away from her own ignorant, doom-scrolling conclusions, offering her another glimpse of how wrong she’s always been. Wrong to jump, when life has so much to offer. So much to hope for.
It’s not the Earth that’s hurting, he might be implying. It’s you. It’s something in your mind that makes you imagine it. We can fix that. There is so much we can do...
Pills to take, books to read.
Podcasts too: just listen. Learn!
The doctor would like her to go back to living too much inside her own head, subsisting on an intellectual concept of hope. The statistics of optimism assembled to buttress a deferred but much promised joy: instead of the burning flames, the floods and storms of her own experience. He’d prefer her not to recognize any parallels between her own insignificant anguish and the vast vandalism, torture and rape men inflict on Planet Earth. He insists, there is no entirely rational reason to jump.
But having jumped, Calliope can’t now get what it is people are hoping for. She can smell the hospital all around her, it’s mechanized life-support system humming in her ears, and the whole cultural fixation with stayin’ alive feels to her deeply fraudulent.
An urban pigeon, she’s watched from her own grimy concrete ledge above the streets, the amazingly beautiful phenomenon of life morph into a YouTube video, WOW LOOK AT ME I’M SO FUCKING GREAT!!!! and while all that any thoughtful person may want to do is mute it, this psychologist suggests I should hear and enjoy. Smile.
Buy into it.
You prefer to pretend, Calliope says, opening her eyes, This never happened?
I’m not sure that’s entirely the best thing you can do, Dr Johanssen hastens to answer, Don’t you think it’s better when we acknowledge what we’ve done first?
I’m OK with what I did, she answers, But what’s been done to me...
You can tell me.
You already know, Calliope says, Everyone knows.
Possibly you could try to describe...?
But Calliope is now smiling a not-entirely drug-induced smile. Because the most vividly free and perfect moment of her existence was that brief nanosecond as she decided to jump.
She remembers this.
She was happy.
For a moment.
One unforgettable moment.
And it wasn’t that doing such a terrible thing made her feel better. It wasn’t that.
There was something else, hard to shape into thought, let alone words.
The moment. No reflection. No thought.
A drop of water.
Calliope glances at the doctor: does he understand what it is to be free in this way?
And I do understand... Dr Johanssen is saying.
She shakes her head.
He stares for a moment, then looks away.
He writes something down.
Calliope smiles, feeling the analgesics, or opioids, or barbiturates, or whatever the stuff is, swimming painlessly and inanely through the coral reef of her brain, a school of happy parrot fish.
Like water, she says, and the doctor, slightly mollified, continues writing:
The patient’s desperation appears contained and must be considered now non life
threatening. But I’d really like to know who hit her.
[End of Part 1. Desperation, Part 2 will follow.]