Crispin - The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries

There are two Chicago cops standing in my kitchen.

They are here to take me away, and I am trying to talk them out of it. I dont know if I am doing a very good job, though, as it is hard to form a logical argument when my primary focus is on moving slowly to position myself between the cops and my oven to block their view of my stovetop. I am somehow more embarrassed about the pot of macaroni and cheese from a box, the cheap one with the sickly orange powder, than I am about their reason for being here.

The reason being that I made some threats against my life on the phone with a friend. After that I kind of bailed. It is not that I did not mean themI was in a pretty unwashed and terrified stateits just that saying them out loud was not part of the plan, and I felt like I could avoid the consequences of the confession simply by turning off my phone. When my friend could not get me back on the line, she called my sister, who called the police. The police came to take me to the emergency room. The emergency room doctors would then lock me away in the psych ward for observation.

And I did have a plan. The suicidal brain is good at only one thing, and that is constructing elaborate plans for doing away with itself. My plan included not telling anyone there was a problem, so that they would not interfere. Now that they had, I had to consider them in my decision. That untimely blurt is really messing things up for me.

I try to explain to the cops that I turned off my phone because it was important for me to stand weeping in front of the George Inness painting at the Art Institute, the one where the darkening world dissolves into an orange and yellow blur, not because I was swallowing drain cleaner. I mean, I made dinnerwould I bother to make dinner if I were intent on ending it all? But I knew if they saw what I had made for dinner, they would cotton on to the fact that I had indeed given up on life.

Maybe I could benefit from a short hospital stay, from some time to rest and letting other people take care for a while, Jesus, yes, I am so very tired. But I see too clearly the aftermath of treatment: a hospital bill that would push me further into debt, medications Id have to spend a year slowly trying to wean myself off. Then there is that recurring nightmare I have of being locked away, futilely trying to convince the authorities that I dont belong here, theres been some kind of mistake. I was clear on one thing: I needed a reason to live, a plan, and it had to come from within. I couldnt just let others help me find a new stability or acceptance of my circumstances. It was my circumstances that were killing me, I was sure of it.

This is how I know: no matter how securely I built my sound little structureslowly accumulating income and a respectable writing CV, dating important men with an eye toward marriage, acquiring a varied and stimulating social lifethe thought I want to go home would start termiting through the whole thing. How is this not my home? Is this really my life or did someone else choose it for me? Is any of this really me at all? The questions would eat at my existence until the structure collapsed into despair again and again. Every two years I would be back to this exact same spot, rebuilding my sad little sand castle in exactly the same way, surprised every time when the wave took it out. But I didnt know what else to do.

I could not explain this to the police, so instead I explained that a friend was coming over (a lie) to stay with me until I got better, I explained that I would definitely make an appointment to see a doctor (a lie), I explained that I just got overwhelmed but things were looking up. I showed calm resolve, stability and sanity, until they got the hell out of my kitchen and went away.

Perhaps the suicidal impulse was correct. But it wasnt my physical life that needed to be destroyed, only what I was doing with it.

I would need guidance, but there wasnt anyone in my life I felt I could turn to, not about this. Using my married, employed, insured friends lives as markers for where my life should be was one of my contributing factors. That would have to go, too.

It was the dead I wanted to talk to. The writers and artists and composers who kept me company in the late hours of the night: I needed to know how they did it. Id always been attracted to the unloosed, the wandering souls who were willing to scrape their lives clean and start again elsewhere. I needed to know how they did it, how they survived it. I couldnt do it from here, this haunted little apartment with its collection of insects and rodents, with the neighbor who sometimes goes mad and tries to break through our adjoining wall with a hammer, where the sound of gunfire comes through the window every night. No, if I was going to approach these great men and women, I would need to do it on their territory. I would have to go to them, not expect them to show up here.

Everything that was excess could be leftthe Chicago apartment, the furniture, the books, the men, the social circle. There was only one thing worth keeping, and that was my work: a small literary magazine I had started a decade ago and a handful of regular writing and editing gigs. It wasnt much, but it was enough to fund train tickets and shoddy Central European sublets. And it was all portable: my whole working world existed on my laptop. It was my self that was stuck. I could unstick myself, I thought, if I started flinging the superfluous away. The only things I really needed I could carry with me.

I would take myself to Europe and bring as my offering some spirits and the entirety of my past. Yes, I needed to talk to the dead. Maybe now that I was nearing the end, an end, maybe the dead would talk back.