Scott McClanahan - The Collected Works of Scott McClanahan Vol. I

The next thing I heard was this. The gunshot wound wasn’t in the chest. She shot herself in the neck. Someone said it was incredibly unusual for a woman to commit suicide by shooting herself, rather than taking pills.

I tried asking people why would someone want to shoot herself in the neck.

I went through all of the scenarios I could think of.

#1. She was nervous and the gun slipped.

#2. She was in such pain that she didn’t know what she was doing.

#3. Maybe she regretted it at the last second and tried to pull away, but it was too late.

Then finally I came up with this one, “No, she was a good Baptist. She wanted her family to be able to wake her with an open casket.”

Sarah looked at me and said, “Why do you keep thinking about it?”

I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I looked through the paper for her obituary and there was only a short one. There wasn’t even going to be a memorial service, and like most things you forget about them.

So here it was another Thursday, and I was sitting at my desk when I heard a knock at the door. It was a woman I knew whose husband had died a couple of months earlier from a heart problem at the age of twenty-eight. Before it happened, they were having marriage problems, so he went to Florida to stay with his father. His father said he went to bed early one night and the next morning when the father went to wake the kid up, the kid was just dead.

And now here she was not two months later and she still looked shocked.

She said, “I hate to bother you Scott, but do you have a second? I know you have a lot of stuff going on.”

I turned around and even though I didn’t want to — I said, “Yeah what’s going on? What do you need?”

She sat down at one of the chairs in front of my desk and there were tears in her eyes.

She said, “You know how my husband died a while back?”

I nodded my head at the young widow and said, “Yeah, it’s horrible. How are you?”

She just lowered her head and said, “Well that’s what I came to talk to you about.”

And then her face twisted and turned into all kinds of fucked up shapes.

Uh-oh.

She took a deep breath and said, “Well you know how his father told me it was a heart problem?”

I nodded my head yes. She told me that the autopsy came back and it wasn’t a heart problem. She told me the autopsy came back and said something else.

It came back and said, Manner of Death: suicide.

I got up from my desk and went over and patted her on the back.

O Jamie.

O Jamie.

And then she reached into her purse and showed me what she had been given the day before by her father-in-law. It was a note her husband wrote before he took a whole bottle full of pills. It was a note that said,

I’ve had a good life. But I’m not doing any good. Tell my wife I love her. Please don’t feel sorry. But remember all of the good times. I’m going away now. Love, Jesse.

So I kept patting her on the back like I was burping a baby.

I patted her again and again and said, “Well have you talked to anyone about it?”

She cried and shook her head, “No.”

I said, “Well I know Mr. Golden is somebody who is really good to talk with here at work.”

Mr. Golden.

He was this older man who always seemed so strong. He was someone you could talk to and who always made sense. He was someone who had answers and not just bullshit answers — there’s a reason for everything, that kind of shit, but answers you could believe. He was somebody who helped me when I was having it rough. And so I told Jamie she should go and talk to him. I told her Mr. Golden could help.

That evening I went home and just felt like shit. I thought, “What a shitty couple of weeks.” I turned the television on and watched this show about, yep, suicide.

“Good God,” I said and turned the channel. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I turned it back and watched. I watched how in families once a suicide happens, the rest of the family is more likely to commit suicide. Then I thought about my own grandfather’s family. There were eleven of them and five committed suicide. At first it was the father, and then two years later a daughter, and then a year after that another daughter, and then a son, and then another son.

It was like a fever almost. It was like a fever of some kind that you could catch and once you caught it — you couldn’t do anything about it. I started telling Sarah, “We like to think of ourselves as complicated. But we’re not. The whole world is just a virus.”

That night I called my mother on the phone and I told her all about what was going on. I told her about how much things had been bothering me. I told her it had been a rough year and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

My mom just said, “Well maybe you should go and talk to someone Scott. There’s been a lot of bad stuff happening. Maybe you should go and talk to someone and it’ll make you feel better.”

So I decided to go and talk to Golden. I decided to go and talk to Mr. Golden and tell him what was bothering me. I wanted to tell him how it seemed like every Thursday something bad was happening, and that’s just what I did.

I knocked on his door and I said, “Dean, I’m sorry to bother you. But I was just wondering if I could talk to you for a few minutes?”

He turned around at his desk and said just like I always said, “Yeah sure, what’s going on?”

I started, “Well this stuff with Nicole has really been bothering me.”

And as soon as I said it his face looked all different.

He leaned over and his voice started cracking and popping, “You know I was the last one to talk to her before she went home.”

He said, “And I didn’t even realize, but the last thing she said to me was, ‘I wish you the best of luck.’”

He said he didn’t even know what that meant at the time. He didn’t realize.

So I tried telling him something else to make myself feel better. I needed to talk about it. I tried to interrupt him and get it off my chest. But his hands were shaking now and he was crying, “You know she shot herself that evening and they didn’t even find her until the next morning.”

He said, “I just keep thinking of her alone there all night. I just can’t get it off my mind.”

I said, “Well it’s really been…”

But then I stopped, and I knew he couldn’t help me.

He bent over and put his head in his hands. He started rocking back and forth and saying over and over, “But I won’t do it. I won’t do it. I have too much to live for. I have my son. I have my son. I can’t leave him.”

I walked over and patted him on the back.

I whispered, “Now don’t you talk like that.”

He looked at me and I saw he didn’t have any answers. He couldn’t solve anything. He tried to reassure me, “Don’t worry Scott. I’m not going to do it.”

And then he said in another voice, “I’m going to do it. I’m going to do it.”

And then he started laughing a laugh that wasn’t even a laugh but a cackle.

He kept rocking and saying, “I’m not going to do it. I’m going to do it. I mean I’m not.”

So I just slowly started backing away. He kept laughing. And so I left. I walked out of his office and kept on walking. It was a fever. It was a fever, and I didn’t want to catch it.

It was a fever I prayed wasn’t inside me at that very moment.

So I got in my car and went home. That night I tried to keep my mind off of it by checking my e-mail. There was only one — an old e-mail from a friend of mine. It said, Would you please give me a call? Danny and I broke up this morning. He told me we should get different places. I’m feeling really down. Please give me a call. Please. And if I don’t hear from you Scott—