Nobody's Fault... (but my own)
The New Testament
Nobody's Fault (but my own)
Photography: Pavel Danilyuk
The music stops and her mind comes to a halt. Hang cut stab bash – Bash in the head. She squints at the shiny instruments on a tray under harsh lights. I can use some of these to kill myself. The syringe the scissors stab in the throat – cut out the eyes.
The P.A. is young and moves gracefully. With his sandy brown bangs, he looks like Beck on stage. He switches on the examination light and turns off the overhead fluorescent bulbs. Orchestra seating. For a moment, the examination light illuminates him like a spotlight. She listens. What is that instrument? An accordion? This is a different recording. The song is tuned down a whole step from the single. Is this the one he did in London? The young man sits down on a stool next to Amelia, wrapped in her bloody cocoon, blood seeping through the Steristrips and edges of the glue.
“My name is Jason. What’s your name?”
“Amelia,” she says, still guessing which version of the song she is hearing.
“It’s nice to meet you, Amelia. I’m going to take care of you. May I see your arms?” She offers her wounds to him – Taped and glued and bloody. The gawky man sings in her head.
Jason’s eyes go soft with empathy. “That looks like it hurts.”
“It doesn’t.”
He studies her for a moment before turning to the disinfectants and stitching equipment on the tray. Amelia watches as his delicate hands arrange the tools he will use to ruin her dreams. The bitterness of her suicide starts to creep into her thoughts, riding on the back of Beck’s words. Blame the devil.
“Did you do that to yourself?” he pries. The instrument wheezes with despair.
Amelia doesn’t answer. Her aural hallucination is heart-rending. Jason gently removes the blood-soaked tape from her right arm, smearing a staunching agent over the liquid stitches from which blood leaks like a network of spring-fed streams. The ointment smells like the inside of an empty refrigerator.
Jason releases a breath and breaks the silence. “My sister killed herself. I wish I knew why but she didn’t leave a note. She was like you—”
Amelia’s eyes flash. “Was she.”
“I didn’t mean… just, she used the same… method.”
Beck’s harmonium hesitates. The musician inhales. This incidental breath reminds her whose fault it is. Screaming – She screamed. My fault. Her loved ones berate her when she cannot bear it any longer. My fault. Chris. Her gut drops. Beck continues to apologize.
Jason interrupts her song again. “Did you leave a note?”
“Eight letters, plus music for each person.”
“Music? like you took the time to burn mixes?” She nods. “Interesting.” Everybody’s clown. “So you’ve been planning this for a while?”
Amelia feels the hungry crow pecking at her nipple. “I waited as long as I could.” Eight tiny claws scrabbling for purchase on her soft skin.
“You’ve felt this way for a long time?”
“Since I was twelve.” The nipple turns into a worm, grotesquely extended as the bird tries to choke it down.
“That’s a long time to suffer,” says Jason, as Amelia surreptitiously swats at her chest with her other hand, smearing blood across her collarbone. He prepares his stitching equipment. Sew the eyelids shut. Sew the mouth shut. He holds up a syringe. “I’ll just give you this local anesthetic—”
“I don’t want it.” Her voice is calm, sterile.
Jason sighs but does not argue. “Let me know if you change your mind.” He places the stitches, pressing down on the fascia splitting open the hasty repair like maggots struggling to escape a corpse, and pushes her skin together as he sews. It distracts her from the crow. “I’m sorry if this hurts.”
“Don’t worry, I’m okay,” she says, monotone. SEW THE MOUTH SHUT! Be silent, once and for all! A clangorous piano. Make them be quiet. Make them all be quiet. They scream and wail and cry and lash out at her. Stupid fucking retard— you should have researched the nearest hospital! Should have used a sharper knife. Shoulda got a gun. In her mind, Jason straps her to the table and peels her skin off with a scalpel until she is as red and raw on the outside as she is on the inside.
In reality, he leans back and stretches his neck before preparing a new suture. “Now the elbow. Are you sure you don’t want—”
“I’m sure. If it hurts, I deserve it.” Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?
“Ah,” he sits forward. “Is that how you really feel?” Amelia nods. SINNER. The flesh pulls with the thread sliding through her viscera. “I don’t believe that you deserve it. I don’t think anyone deserves this.”
It’s more than I deserve.
Sew the mouth shut! Silence the apostate!
When he is done with the right arm, he moves to the other side of the table. This time he does not ask if Amelia wants anesthetic.
“Somehow, in all this mess, you missed the major arteries and tendons. You’re going to have some scar tissue and numbness that might hinder your dexterity but you’ll be able to write and type with minimal physical therapy. It’s difficult to say because you cut some of the nerves responsible for pressure.”
Amelia chokes out an excuse. “It’s not as easy as they make it look in the movies; you really have to DIG in there. Things come out of you. I never thought of the skin as actually holding in your tissue but it really is the body’s largest organ… What a failure.”
“Is this how you imagined it?” he asks.
Amelia imagines her body, pristine and cold in the afternoon sun. Sew the mouth shut.
“No. I thought I’d be dead. I wish I had died but the ambulance came too quickly. I miscalculated.” We can end this soon – As soon as we get back home if you’d like. “Am I going to have to stay here after you’re done?” He nods. Amelia’s face crumples but she does not cry. KILL IT! KILL the monster – You fucking reeking sack of dog shit cow shit putrid rat infested—
Beck interrupts her train of thought. Reminds her again whose fault this is.
“There are people here who can help you.”
“I don’t WANT help; I want to DIE,” she snaps. Jason speaks softly as the crow pecks at her cornea, stabbing out her left eye with its beak.
“They’re going to keep you here whether you want to stay or not. For at least three days. If you don’t show improvement, longer. So it is in your best interest to get treatment and go along with the program.” This morning, it seemed impossible to wait until after lunch to die. Now another three days. He ties off the last stitch. Beck’s harmonium lulls her into a pain-induced meditative state. “Okay, the worst part is done. Let’s wrap you up.” Jason gets liniment, nonstick pads, gauze and medical tape from a cabinet. He anoints Amelia’s stitches, tapes the pads over them, then wraps them while she considers the best way to get a shotgun in Chicago. I want to be identified by my teeth.
He removes the I.V. and gestures to her inner elbows. “I’m afraid we won’t be able to cover these because of the location, so get them checked once a day for inflammation.”
There is a knock on the door.
“Come on in,” he calls, then turns back to Amelia. “Paperwork.”
A bitch in a skirt-suit, accompanied by a doctor, brusquely enters the room and flips on the fluorescent lights. Tires squealing – Crossing guard whistle. The music stops. She’s holding a clipboard.
“You need to sign this.” The bitch thrusts the clipboard at Amelia on the exam table. The scissors are RIGHT THERE.
“What does it say?” she asks, eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“It says you accept the mandatory treatment duration in the psychiatric ward. Three days, minimum.”
The bitch has her attention.
“I’m not going to sign that,” says Amelia, flatly.
The woman’s lips press the corners of her mouth. “If you don’t sign it, we will Baker Act you for attempted suicide.”
“I didn’t try to kill myself! I’m a cutter and I accidentally went too deep.” A murder of crows flock to me – Feast on the death. Images of her insides pushing up out of her skin flash behind her eyes.
The bitch throws a look across the room. “Jason?”
Jason, with his quiet voice, speaks kindly to Amelia. “It will go on your permanent record if we have to put you in against your will.”
“This is bullshit! I wasn’t trying to kill myself!”
They stare at her in silence. God FUCKING damnit! Shoulda got a gun. STAB in the chest – PULL out the eyes – The crows are feasting – TESSERACT! Stop. Amelia regains her composure and nods at the clipboard. The bitch stabs her finger to two highlighted areas of the paper. Amelia thinks about cutting off those manicured bone spiders with pruning shears.
“Sign here and here.” Amelia signs it with the taste of blood, metallic, in her mouth.
“Is that all?” you fucking cunt-rag.
“No,” interrupts the doctor. “We need your full insurance information: provider, group number, identification number, and account holder.”
“Account holder?” Amelia hesitates. “That’s my father.”
“Do you have your insurance card?” the doctor presses, greedy.
“I don’t have anything! I don’t even have clothes!” Grab the scissors! Stab the jugular NOW!
“Then you’re going to have to call him and get the information over the phone,” growls the bitch.
“No!” Stab the jugular! “I can’t tell him! I don’t have my phone, I can’t tell him, I can’t tell him!” Standing on his feet to dance at Aunt Nickie’s wedding. Teaching him to peck out melodies from the hymnal – A tenor.
The bitch in the skirt-suit hands her a phone, breathing the stink of old smoke into Amelia’s face. “Now.”
::silence::
There is no music to help her. No encouragement or solace. Only an unforgiving silence. Amelia takes the phone, hands shaking, and dials the emergency number she memorized in first grade.
“Dad?” She pauses. “I need my insurance information. I’m at the hospital… Because, because I tried to kill myself.” She cries into the silence on the other end. “I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry, Daddy. Please don’t tell Mom. Please don’t tell anybody… Yes, they’re right here.”
Amelia hands the phone to the bitch, who writes down everything he says in the blanks on the form. Amelia sobs. Softball practice. Canoeing in Goldhead State Park. Driving eighteen hours to Chicago. Shaking hands with the president. Surrounded by the kids at the community center. There is no protection from the assault of good memories, no muting the betrayal she has committed. The only thing he ever wanted for me in life was to be happy. And I failed even at that.
The bitch pushes the phone back into Amelia’s hands. “Here.”
“I’m so sorry, Daddy,” she weeps. “I couldn’t wait any longer—” The word stretches out of her chest like a death rattle. “I love you, too. I’m sorry.”
Amelia flips the phone closed, then breaks down completely.
The doctor checks the information on the form. “Get her to processing immediately. And get her something to wear. No sleeves, no strings.”
Music References:
Nobody's Fault (but my own) - Beck: Live at London Union Chapel
Oh, Amelia 😢
Calling my wife (then of 22, now of 27 years) was my rebreaking point.
I’d stayed late at work, prepared everything, except for my reaction to my boss saying to me, “It’s been a hard year, hasn’t it?” before leaving me to my self-appointed destiny.
It had indeed been a hard one, an exceptionally hard one on top of 40 previous hard ones, interrupted only by a prior aborted attempt at 20, and a similar call to my dear, departed mother, who had done her best to protect us from what haunted me incessantly. And interspersed with joys- my amazing wife, my amazing children - and fruitless efforts to do penance for “my sins” - but never enough to quiet my ghosts and my inner Villain.
But his words connected with what little reserve I had remaining, so I called a hotline, and (somehow!) drove myself to the ER.
“I love you and I’m sorry,” I said.
“I know, I love you, and you don’t need to be sorry,” she replied.
And then I walked inside and fell apart.
It’s been five long years since, with an ever-changing regimen of pharmaceuticals & therapy, one voluntary readmission, and now ECT. But finally the memories don’t haunt me, and putting the rest back together doesn’t seem impossible, and how they ultimately fit no longer seems important.
Just being loved, and loving in return, is enough; everything else is window dressing.
I’m so grateful for this clarity, and for all the support I’ve been given, and for all that your words have meant these last several weeks.
I hope you’ve found your “enough” too. ❤️🩹