Brood XIX

The Generosity of Strangers

A Short Story

"I'm going to kill myself."

That was how it began. Five simple words arising from the empty static.

Jared didn't know what he had expected when he rolled over and snatched the phone from the cradle, but that string of words was the furthest thing from it.

What in the world time was it anyway?

Groaning beneath the weight of his disrupted slumber, Jared rolled to his right and squinted to bring the red numbers of the digital clock into focus across the room.

3:16 a.m.

Silence hummed into his left ear.

"I think you must have the wrong number," was all he could think to say.

"No," a man's voice said. There was nothing familiar about it. "There's no one else I can talk to."

"Look...it's quarter after three and I've got class in the morn---"

"Would you rather I hang up?"

Silence.

"No," Jared sighed, rubbing his palm into his eye. He rolled onto his back and stared up into the ceiling. He hated this old room. It was, after all, the same dormitory his grandfather had lived in fifty years prior. The walls were made of cinder block painted a chipping white, and the plumbing ran along the ceiling directly above his bed. Every time someone flushed one of the communal toilets down the hall, water pinged through the pipes, rattling them in their brackets against the ceiling. "I guess not."

Breathing from the distant end of the line.

"Do I know you?" Jared asked.

"I doubt it."

"Then why did you call me?"

"I dialed your number at random."

Jared rubbed the crusted sleep from the corner of his eye.

"I can't talk to any of my friends," the voice continued. "Not that I really have any."

"Is that why you want to kill yourself?"

A dry chuckle.

"If only it were that simple."

"Do you go to school here?"

"Yes."

Jared rolled over onto his stomach and rested his chin on his elbows, staring through the parted curtains into the courtyard outside. The dumpster lid was already covered with a solid three inches of snow. Flakes fluttered against the windowpane like so many moths drawn to a flame. His roommate Matt snored from the bed across the small room. He was going to have to move the phone to Matt's side in the morning.

"What could possibly be so bad?" Jared asked, transfixed by the swirling snow tapping against the pane. "I mean...what happened that you think killing yourself is the only option?"

"I can't say."

"Then how am I supposed to talk you out of it?"

"Do you think that's why I called you?"

"Isn't it?"

Silence.

Jared envied Matt... sound asleep, dampening his pillow with slobber, while he was stuck on the phone with an Abnormal Psychology test in five hours. His graduate thesis was due in less than a month, and he hadn't the slightest clue what he was going to base it on. The prospect of not graduating---of never leaving this damned dorm room---summoned the same kind of thoughts this stranger was sharing with him now.

He needed to formulate his thesis.

"I just wanted to talk."

"Then what do you want to talk about?"

Jared couldn't get a good feel for the person on the other end of the phone. At first he had thought it might have been a prank, but he wasn't sure now. The voice sounded serious enough, but from everything he'd learned about suicide, when the individual reached out for help, they usually turned to someone close...a friend...family...someone who could read into more subtle signals.

Since he didn't even know this person, did this suddenly make him responsible, or could he simply hang up the phone and absolve himself of any guilt whatsoever?

"I'm going to lose my scholarship," the voice said.

"For sure?"

"My parents are going to kill me," he chuckled humorlessly. "I'm the first from my family to go to college."

"Then don't you think they'd understand?"

"My father's working a second job down at the mill to pay for what the grants won't cover."

"Have you talked to him about it?"

"Hell, no!" the voice snapped, and then drifted off into silence again. "He thinks everything is going perfectly."

"But it isn't."

"No."

Jared looked at the clock again. 3:42 a.m.

"What's your name?" he finally asked.

"I'd rather not say."

"All right then," Jared said, pausing to formulate his thoughts. He knew not to push people who were considering suicide, they had a tendency to fall quite easily. "Don't you think it would upset your parents more if you killed yourself?"

"I don't know."

"I'm pretty sure it would."

"You don't know my parents like I do."

"I know them well enough to know that they'd be hurt and upset if you killed yourself."

Hushed breathing in his ear.

"I've got to go," the voice said.

"What?" Jared snapped, looking again to the clock and realizing just how wide-awake he suddenly was. How was he supposed to go back to sleep now? "You call me in the middle of the ni---"

"Can I call you again?" the voice interrupted.

This time it was Jared's turn to be silent. No! he wanted to say, washing his hands clean of the entire mess, but what kind of person would that make him?

"Can I call you again?"

"Yes," Jared whispered, jerking his hand away from his head and pounding his fist into his pillow. He grated his teeth, squeezed his eyes tightly shut, and silently cursed himself.

There was a click from the other end of the line.

Jared pressed the off button on the cordless phone, and stared down at the handset. Finally he turned it back on and dialed *69.

A computerized female voice answered immediately. "The number you are calling was blocked, and cannot be called back using your last call return service."

Click.

He set the phone back down in the cradle.

The burgeoning hint of an idea began to take shape in his mind.

Jared had been thinking about it all day. He could barely even remember sitting through class. It wasn't like he had failed his test, but he certainly hadn't aced it either.

He had sat there in his dorm room for the entirety of the afternoon, scrawling hurried thoughts into his notebook... waiting for the phone to ring.

Waiting.

By the time the phone actually rang, it was 2:42 a.m.

Bolting back to consciousness as he had drifted off against the wall with his chin lolling against his chest, his feet sprawled over the side of the bed, he immediately pressed the "Talk" button on the cordless. He had fallen asleep with it in his hand.

"Hello," he said anxiously, writing the time down in the notebook.

"I didn't think you'd answer," that same voice said.

"I was starting to think you wouldn't call."

Silence.

Jared flipped back several pages and traced his finger across the page---squinting in the wan light trickling in slanted arcs across the room from the window---until he found the string of questions.

"Are you still thinking about suicide?" he asked, poising the pen in the margin he had left beneath.

"Would I be calling if I weren't?"

He scribbled it down quickly, finding the second question.

"How would you do it?"

"Do what?"

"You know..."

"I take it I've piqued your curiosity."

"How can I talk you out of it if I don't know how you intend to do it?"

There was the momentary sound of breathing on the opposite end of the line.

"Is that what you intend to do?"

"Would it work?"

"I doubt it."

"Then what's the harm in trying?"

"If I were you, I don't know if I'd be willing to invest that much of myself knowing the outcome in advance."

Jared smiled and scribbled down the words.

"If the outcome were guaranteed, I don't think we'd be having this conversation."

"Are you challenging me?" the voice asked with a dry chuckle.

"I believe that you're challenging me."

Silence.

"Maybe."

"Do you have a girlfriend?" Jared asking, moving down the line.

"No," the voice whispered and then faded into the barely audible hum of static. "Do you?"

"Not at the moment."

"Is that why you're willing to talk to a stranger in the middle of the night when you could otherwise be sleeping or partying?"

"I like to think of myself as a caring person."

Silence.

"Then maybe I shouldn't call again."

"No!" Jared snapped, and then more softly: "Please."

"Why do you care?" the voice asked in little more than a whisper.

"Maybe I think I can talk you out of it."

"Do think that would make you a better person? Get you into heaven?"

Jared stared down at his notes in his lap.

"I suppose I'll call you again tomorrow then," the voice said.

Click.

Jared turned the phone off and then right back on, and dialed *69 again.

That same tinny voice... "The number you are calling is blocked, and cannot---"

Jared hung up and immediately lunged from the bed and switched on the lamp at his desk, setting the scribbled pages of notes directly beside the keyboard. He turned on the monitor and instantly began to type onto the white page where he had primed the flashing cursor beneath the title:

Senior Thesis

Contemplating Suicide: What Drives Man to Take His Own Life?

He had gone to school the following morning only long enough to sit through a single lecture in his Psychology of Addiction class before stopping in to talk with his faculty liaison, Professor Witt. For the last month and a half he had been dodging the good doctor, as Witt had been demanding to know the thesis to the all-important paper that would be due in less than three weeks.

Jared felt a swell of pride when he walked right into Dr. Witt's office and told him all about his idea.

Witt had lowered his spectacles from the wrinkled crescents beneath his aged brown eyes, and shook his head.

"To know what's going through the mind of someone poised to take their own life, you would have to find a way to get into their psyche," the old man had said dubiously.

Jared hadn't been able to take his eyes off of the stringy white hairs stretched over the top of the man's liver-spotted scalp.

"I've got it under control," he had said.

"If you don't, Mr. Danner, then you will be watching your classmates graduate from the audience," was all the old man had said, dismissing him with a disinterested wave of the hand.

"Oh yeah," Jared had said the moment he pulled the heavy door closed behind him. "Everything is under control."

"Hello," Jared answered in the middle of the first ring. He had been typing his paper with the phone sitting directly beside his right hand.

"That was quick."

"What was quick?"

"You answered the phone before it even started to ring on my end."

"I was expecting your call."

There was a long pause.

"Do you still think you can talk me out of it?"

"Yes," Jared said, thumbing through his notes until he found the spot where he needed to be. Testing their resolve, the header on the top of the page read. "I'm confident that I can."

"Are you?"

The voice sounded amused.

"It's been three days. If you were going to do it, you would have done so by now."

The silence from the other end of the line was sharp and poignant.

The pen shook in Jared's grasp as his lower lip slipped between his teeth to be gnawed.

"Maybe I should just hang up and do it right now."

"No!"

"Tell me why I shouldn't!"

"Because---"

"Because why?"

"Because I don't want you to."

Silence.

"Why not?"

"Because I wouldn't be able to live with myself if you did."

Dead air hung between them.

"You could hang up at any time and never know whether I did or didn't, you know. You could convince yourself that you'd 'saved' me, and never learn otherwise. This is a large campus, and the University certainly wouldn't like the kind of press that would be involved. I'd be surprised if it even made the campus paper."

"I don't even read it."

"See how easy it would be?"

"Is that what you want me to do?"

"Only if that's what you want to do."

Silence.

"I don't want you to kill yourself," Jared said.

"Then I suppose I'll be calling you again."

Click.

Jared turned the phone off and on, and then hurriedly dialed *69.

"The number you are calling is blocked," he repeated along with the computerized voice.

He set the phone back on the cradle.

Jared slept through his alarm the following morning, which annoyed Matt to the point that he had shut it off for him before storming off to the dining hall to get breakfast a full hour earlier than he had wanted.

By the time Jared awoke, all of his classes were through for the day, and students were already beginning to filter into the cafeteria for an early dinner while he was pouring himself a bowl of Apple Jacks.

He sat at the corner table, still only wearing his slippers over his socks, and shorts though it had to have been well below freezing outside. No one tried to sit by him, or even looked up from their meals for that matter. They were coming up on finals week and the tension was so thick that it lingered like a fog over the preoccupied faces of those shoveling their food unconsciously past their lips.

There wasn't a single thing about this school that he was going to miss when he graduated. Not only would his thesis paper be good enough to knock old Professor Witt on his ass, but he'd have the professional journals fighting over the print rights. Maybe he'd experiment a little with practicing psychology before debating the merits of medical school, or maybe they'd be clamoring to pay for his education.

He smiled and milk spilled from the corners of his lips down his chin.

Nobody looked up.

No one even noticed.

Jared stayed up all that night, watching the phone...waiting for it to ring.

But dawn came without the sound of the ringing phone.

Jared didn't sleep at all the following day...nor did he even bother getting dressed for class. He had already missed so much by now that what was one more day?

He made the requisite three trips down to the cafeteria, but had done little more than stare at the cordless phone that he had been unable to leave behind in the room. Minutes stretched endlessly into the hours that never passed as he scrutinized the clock with bloodshot eyes.

Matt came and went, pausing only long enough to deposit his backpack on his bed and tell Jared that he should try getting some sleep because "he looked like shit."

Jared had promised to take the suggestion under consideration, but hadn't even looked at his pillow. He had sat there with his back against the wall, legs stretched across the bed, watching the phone in his grasp.

He didn't even bother to get up to turn on the light when the sun set outside, the line of sunlight creeping across the floor back toward the window until it finally disappeared, leaving him alone in the darkness.

"Hello," Jared answered breathlessly after deliberately allowing the phone to ring twice.

"Two rings this time."

"The phone was across the room," he lied, he had been staring down at it in his hand for the last fifteen minutes, trying to mentally make it ring.

Silence.

"You didn't call last night."

"Did you think that I did it?"

"I'd be lying if I said the thought didn't cross my mind."

"How did that make you feel?"

"Hurt. Angry. Both."

"Good."

"Is that what you wanted?"

"I wanted you to question yourself, to plant the seed of doubt. I wanted you to know that I could actually do it."

"I guess you made your point then."

"Did I?"

"Clearly."

"Good."

Silence.

"I was worried about you last night," the voice said.

"You were worried about me?"

"I know how much of yourself you've invested in this endeavor we share."

Jared shook his head.

"Am I not right?"

"Yes," Jared said, trying to keep the angry edge from cutting through his voice.

"What would you do if I didn't call you tomorrow night? Would you still be sitting there in your room, alone, waiting for the phone to ring to find out for sure whether or not I had decided to go through with it?"

Jared could think of nothing to say.

"Then I suppose I'll leave it at this..." the voice said, and Jared could hear the smile creeping into it. "Perhaps I'll call you later."

Click.

Jared growled through his ground teeth and raised the phone over his shoulder to spike it into the wall.

"Damn it!" he shouted, catching himself before shattering his only lifeline into a thousand plastic shards.

He turned the phone off and then back on again, and dialed *69.

"The number you are calling..." he started to say before the voice had even responded.

"The last number to call your line was..." the voice began. Jared dashed to the desk and grabbed the pen to frantically take down the number. "...three five one, four six eight nine."

Jason hung the phone up again, waited a moment, and then dialed *69 to make sure that everything had really just happened.

He logged his computer onto the internet.

Google.com, he typed at the search option and then hit enter.

Google came up as the number one match, and he clicked the link to it.

At the home screen he typed in the phone number he had lifted from the last call return service, including the area code, and poised the cursor over the "Google Search" box, instead opting for the button directly to the right, labeled "I'm Feeling Lucky."

By the time his finger recoiled from pressing the mouse button, the search yielded its results.

It was a little trick he had learned back in high school. Given any given phone number, Google would provide the name and address of the person to whom the number belonged. It would even offer links to Yahoo!Maps and MapQuest.

Jared printed out the page, tapping his foot anxiously and tugging gently at the paper as it rolled far too slowly out of the printer.

"Room two-sixteen, Kenward Hall," he said, whirling to grab his jacket and shoes. "Scott Nelson or Andrew Cosgrove."

Jared stood ankle deep in the accumulated snow in the field to the west of Kenward Hall. He had no idea what time it was or how long he had been standing there staring up at the side of the dorm. There had only been a half dozen windows with their lights still on when he had arrived, and from where he stood, he could still see three of them.

The falling snow alighted atop his head, forming a layer of frost over his ruffled hair. His body heat melted the snow ambitious enough to make it all the way to his scalp into thin, frigid rivulets.

Droplets of freezing water quivered from his jaw line, threatening to snap free, but holding tightly to the week's worth of stubble that thickened on his skin.

"Scott Nelson or Andrew Cosgrove," he said, studying those lighted windows for even the remote hint of a shadow to move across them.

"Can I help you?" the resident advisor working the front desk called across the lobby.

Jared just shook his head and looked off in a different direction, feigning indifference.

He had found a seat in the back rear corner, partially concealed by one of the tall potted ferns. His damp hair clung limply to his head, and his flesh prickled beneath his drenched clothes.

"I can't just let you sit there all night."

"I'm waiting for a friend," Jared called back, turning his attention to the television bracketed to the wall, staring at the vacant gray screen.

"I could ring his room if you would like."

"I'm early," he called back. "I'm sure he'll be down soon enough."

"Who are you waiting for?"

"Scott Nelson or Andrew Cosgrove from room two-sixteen."

Jared forced a smile.

"I think Scott goes home just about every weekend, but Andrew's generally here."

Was it the weekend? Had he really missed nearly the entire week of class?

"Perfect," Jared said. He smiled to the RA, and went back to waiting for the breakfast crowd to begin rolling through the lobby.

The doors to either side of the front desk were access-controlled by a button beneath the reception desk, though one could easily walk right through if someone were to open it for him and he were to merge into the crowd...

Jared had slowly worked his way across the lobby until he was standing on the far side of a Pepsi machine from the front counter, leaning against the wall.

His eyes were so irritated and red that they hurt to blink.

So he didn't.

Through the window in the middle of the wooden door---the glass crisscrossed with diamonds of wire---he could see a group of girls approaching, flipping their hair, swinging their heads, completely absorbed in whatever conversation held them in such a state of enthrallment.

As soon as the door opened, Jared darted directly for it, pulling it wide and stepping behind it as if to do the gentlemanly thing for them and hold it.

The girls thanked him in chorus, and he slipped past them and into the hallway.

"Two-sixteen," he whispered, heading for the stairs.

From where he crouched behind the door to the stairwell, he could clearly see the golden numbers affixed to the center of the door. One of the guys in room two-eighteen to the right had come and gone several times, as had the people across the hall in two-fifteen, but the knob hadn't even budged to room two-sixteen.

He had discretely walked down the hall and pressed his ear to the door---maybe an hour ago now---to ensure that he could hear noise within, and then rushed back down to take his spot in the doorway. There had been the sound of typing, of frantically hammered keys.

Jared had dumped the contents of his pockets---loose change, his keys, candy wrappers---onto the ground in front of him. Whenever he heard someone coming up or down the stairs, he pretended as though he was merely gathering his belongings to shove back into his pocket.

He knew there was someone in the room, and at some point that person would have to come out. There was a communal bathroom for each wing on each floor, which was down the hall and around the bend to the left. Eventually, whoever was inside was going to have to make a trip to it.

He was counting on that person leaving the door unlocked when he did, as he was only going to be heading down the hall for a few minutes tops.

Jared saw the glint on the round knob the moment it moved.

The door opened inward and a guy strode purposefully out into the hall, allowing the door to swing shut behind him. He had dark hair that was cropped on the top, but other than the fact that he had bare feet a wore a pair of jeans, that was all Jared could determine before he turned away down the hallway.

Jared threw back the door to the stairwell and sprinted toward room two-sixteen, twisting the knob and shouldering his way through.

The room looked just like every other on campus: same painted cinder block walls, same wood-railed beds, same damn pipes running along the rust-stained ceiling.

He needed to find a journal, a diary, something that would offer insight into the voice's psyche. Or failing at that admitted miracle, he needed to find a bottle of prescription painkillers, an overabundance of over-the-counter drugs, or maybe even a gun. Something.

Throwing the drawer of the nightstand open, he riffled through the contents, but there was nothing but a packet of Tylenol and an opened box of condoms. He hurriedly lifted the mattress, but there was nothing stashed beneath but the box-spring.

He similarly scoured the matching setup on the opposite side of the room, yielding nearly identical results.

Both roommates were sexually active. There was no sign of drug or alcohol abuse. Both walls were thick with framed photographs of friends and girlfriends. There was even a little Nerf basketball hoop mounted to the wall.

It didn't fit the profile he had created. There were no moody posters of melancholy musicians. No black fingernail polish or the matching clothes heaped in the corner. The room was in a precise state of order. Everything had its place. It reminded Jared more of his own room than that of someone preparing to end his life.

Surely someone about to die wouldn't give a rat's ass about whether or not the bed was neatly made!

At the back of the room there was a desk beneath the lone window with a computer atop it. The screen was still on...the cursor flashing.

Beside the keyboard was a stack of handwritten notes on yellow legal paper. Atop them rested an old-fashioned looking tape recorder that appeared to have a phone jack that entered to the left side, and connected it with the hand-held unit resting on the cradle to the right. A handful of tapes were scattered across the desk without their cases.

Subject 16, Night 4, the first one read.

Subject 16, Night 1.

Subject 16, Night 5.

Jared snatched the phone from the cradle and the tape recorder immediately began to whir, recording the dial tone.

He slammed the phone down and ripped the cords from the sides, stabbing the "Play" button with his index finger.

"Hello," his own voice spoke back to him.

"I didn't think you'd answer," that same voice responded.

"I was starting to think you wouldn't---"

Jared pounded the machine with his fist, popping the cassette hatch open and jarring the tape loose.

What the hell was going on here?

He leaned forward toward the monitor and dragged the scroll bar on the side all the way up to the top.

Senior Thesis

The Myth of Compassion: The Generosity of Strangers

Jared heard the door to the room open inward with a slight squeal. Through the small gap he had left the closet door ajar, he watched the person pass on their way back across the room to the computer.

He slipped a tie down from the rack beside him, rolling it tightly in each fist. With a snap, he jerked it taut.

"What the---?" that voice he knew nearly as well as his own gasped.

When Jared emerged from the closet, the guy had his back to him. To either side he held out one of the severed phone cords.

"I was a test subject!" Jared snapped.

"Holy Christ!" he spat, whirling around and grabbing hold of his shirt above his heart. "You scared the living hell out of me, man!"

Jared recognized him immediately. He didn't know the guy's name, but he had seen him before. They had shared the same General Psychology class freshman year, Behavioral Evaluation lab only last year.

"All of these nights...talking to you..."

"I'm a psych major. I was just working on my thesis!"

"I was your thesis!"

"Calm down, man," he said, backing away and throwing his hands up in front of him.

"What about my thesis!" Jared railed.

His eyes flashed red and his arms rocketed from his side.

Before he left, Jared gathered the audio tapes and the equipment, and erased the entirety of the paper from the hard drive of the computer. When Andrew's roommate came back after the weekend---finding him hanging from the pipes along the ceiling by one of his own neck ties with his face blue and swollen---he was able to tell the police all about how he had heard Andrew on the phone several nights in a row, talking to someone about wanting to kill himself.

He had thought Andrew was working on his thesis.

Professor Witt had confirmed that Andrew was indeed working on a project where he pretended to want to kill himself, trying to solicit compassion from the person on the other end of the randomly dialed phone. He supposed in his lauded professional opinion that the entire design of the thesis should have been a clue into the inner workings of Andrew's mind, a heavily-veiled cry for help.

Jared received a B minus on his paper, as---after everything Professor Witt had been through in dealing with the tragic suicide of a beloved student---he was of the opinion that Jared's paper didn't capture the essence of the anguish and despair.

"It was too clinical," he had said. "Too clean."

Jared had stared at his feet.

"As a phychologist, Mr.Danner, you can't be afraid to roll up your sleeves and get your hands dirty."

"I'm going to kill myself," the man sitting in the couch across from him said, averting his eyes.

Jared looked up from the yellow notepad sitting in his lap, and offered the man the hollow, placating smile he had groomed to perfection in medical school.