Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“Looks pretty from here,” he said.

“Does it?”

“Sure, I’d say so. Makes a man feel at peace with himself.”

“It hasn’t had that effect on me,” the man said. “I was thinking about, oh, the ways a man could find peace for himself.”

“I guess the best way is just to go on plugging away at life,” the cop said. “Things generally have a way of straightening themselves out, sooner or later. Some of the time they take awhile, and I guess they don’t look too good, but they work out.”

“You really believe that?”

“Sure.”

“With the things you see in your job?”

“Even with all of it,” the cop said. “It’s a tough world, but that’s nothing new. It’s the best we’ve got, the way I figure it. You’re sure not going to find a better one at the bottom of a river.”

The man said nothing for a long time, then he pitched his cigarette over the rail. He and the cop stood watching it as it shed sparks on the way down, then heard the tiny hiss as it met the water.

“It didn’t make much of a splash,” the man said.

“No.”

“Few of us do,” the man said. He paused for a moment, then turned to face the cop. “My name’s Edward Wright,” he added. The cop gave his own name. “I don’t think I would have done it,” the man went on. “Not tonight.”

“No sense taking chances, is there?”

“I guess not.”

“You’re taking a chance yourself, aren’t you? Coming out here, standing at the edge, thinking it over. Anyone who does that long enough, sooner or later gets a little too nervous and goes over the edge. He doesn’t really want to and he’s sorry long before he hits the water, but it’s too late; he took too many chances and it’s over for him. Tempt fate too much and fate gets you.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

“Something in particular bothering you?”

“Not... anything special, no.”

“Have you been seeing a doctor?”

“Off and on.”

“That can help, you know.”

“So they say.”

“Want to go grab a cup of coffee?”

The man opened his mouth, started to say something, then changed his mind. He lit another cigarette and blew out a cloud of smoke, watching the way the wind dispersed it. “I’ll be all right now,” he said.

“Sure?”

“I’ll go home, get some sleep. I haven’t been sleeping so well, not since my wife—”

“Oh,” the cop said.

“She died. She was all I had and, well, she died.”

The cop put a hand on his shoulder. “You’ll get over it, Mr. Wright. You just have to hold on, that’s all. Hold on, and sooner or later you’ll get over it. Maybe you think you can’t live through it, nothing will be the same, but—”

“I know.”

“You sure you don’t want a cup of coffee?”

“No, I’d better get home,” the man said. “I’m sorry to cause trouble. I’ll try to relax, I’ll be all right.”

The cop watched him drive away and wondered whether he should have taken him in. No point, he decided. You went crazy enough hauling in every attempted suicide, and this one hadn’t actually attempted anything, he had merely thought about it. Too, if you started picking up everyone who contemplated suicide you’d have your hands full.

He headed back for the other side of the bridge. When he reached his post he decided he should make a note of it, anyway, so he hauled out his pencil and his notebook and wrote down the name, Edward Wright . So he would remember what the name meant, he added Big Eyebrows, Wife Dead, Contemplated Jumping.

The psychiatrist strokedhis pointed beard and looked over at the patient on the couch. The importance of beard and couch, as he had told his wife many times, lay in their property for enabling his patients to see him as a function of such outward symbols rather than as an individual, thus facilitating transference. His wife hated the beard and felt he used the couch for amorous dalliance. It was true, he thought, that he and his plump blonde receptionist had on a few occasions occupied the couch together. A few memorable occasions, he amended, and he closed his eyes, savoring the memory of the delicious way he and Hannah had gone through Krafft-Ebing together, page by delirious page.

Reluctantly, he dragged himself back to his current patient. “... no longer seems worth living,” the man said. “I drag myself through life a day at a time.”

“We all live our lives a day at a time,” the psychiatrist commented.

“But is it always an ordeal?”

“No.”

“I almost killed myself last night. No, the night before last. I almost jumped from the Morrissey Bridge.”

“And?”

“A policeman came along. I wouldn’t have jumped anyway.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t know.”

The interplay went on, the endless dialogue of patient and doctor. Sometimes the doctor could go through the whole hour without thinking at all, making automatic responses, reacting as he always did, but not really hearing a word that was said to him. I wonder, he thought, whether I do these people any good at all. Perhaps they only wish to talk and need only the illusion of a listener. Perhaps the entire profession is no more than an intellectual confidence game. If I were a priest, he thought wistfully, I could go to my bishop when struck by doubts of faith, but psychiatrists do not have bishops. The only trouble with the profession is the unfortunate absence of an orderly hierarchy. Absolute religions could not be so democratically organized.

He listened, next, to a dream. Almost all of his patients delighted in telling him their dreams, a source of unending frustration to the psychiatrist, who never in his life remembered having a dream of his own. From time to time he fantasized that it was all a gigantic put-on, that there were really no dreams at all. He listened to this dream with academic interest, glancing now and then at his watch, wishing the fifty-minute hour would end. The dream, he knew, indicated a diminishing enthusiasm for life, a development of the death wish, and a desire for suicide that was being tentatively held in check by fear and moral training. He wondered how long his patient would be able to refrain from taking his own life. In the three weeks he had been coming for therapy, he had seemed to be making only negative progress.

Another dream. The psychiatrist closed his eyes, sighed, and ceased listening. Five more minutes, he told himself. Five more minutes and then this idiot would leave, and perhaps he could persuade plump blonde Hannah to do some further experimentation with him. There was a case of Stekel’s he had read just the other night that sounded delicious.

The doctor lookedup at the man, took in the heavy eyebrows, the deep-set eyes, the expression of guilt and fear. “I have to have my stomach pumped, Doctor,” the man said. “Can you do it here or do we have to go to a hospital?”

“What’s the matter with you?”

“Pills.”

“What sort? Sleeping pills? Is that what you mean?”

“Yes.”

“What sort? And how many did you take?”

The man explained the content of the pills and said that he had taken twenty. “Ten is a lethal dose,” the doctor said. “How long ago did you take them?”

“Half an hour. No, less than that. Maybe twenty minutes.”

“And then you decided not to act like a damned fool, eh? I gather you didn’t fall asleep. Twenty minutes? Why wait this long?”

“I tried to make myself throw up.”

“Couldn’t do it? Well, we’ll try the stomach pump,” the doctor said. The operation of the pump was unpleasant, the analysis of the stomach’s contents even less pleasant. The pumping had been in plenty of time, the doctor discovered. The pills had not yet been absorbed to any great degree by the bloodstream.