Chapter Thirteen

Death opens unknown doors. It is most grand to die. - John Masefield

Chapter 13

Although Jane Gardner was not a doctor, she was reasonably certain that she should be dead already. She was nineteen, and in the bathtub with the water running to minimize the mess from all the blood. There were long cuts down each of her wrists, as she’d heard that cutting across one’s wrist just meant you’d end up in an institution getting support and treatment with stitches and bandages poking out of your shirt. Jane didn’t have any time for that, she just wanted to be dead already, without making too much of a mess.

She had already tried hanging herself in the closet. It didn’t work. She’d dangled there for ten minutes according to the Hello Kitty clock she could see next to her bed. It had been very uncomfortable, and she wasn’t exactly sure why she hadn’t lost consciousness since she wasn’t breathing, but that wasn’t going to stop her.

She tried swinging, hoping she might snap her neck. Instead, the rod she was dangling from just ripped out of the wall and sent her tumbling to the floor next to her bed.

One of her neighbors pounded on her wall and yelled “Keep it down over there, asshole!”

I’ll keep it down soon enough, jerk, Jane thought.

She found an almost full bottle of Advil PM in her medicine cabinet. She taken it as advised on the bottle once before, when she’d had an awful ankle sprain that kept her awake. It hadn’t worked that well, so she didn’t bother with it again. She was pretty sure, however, that taking a whole bottle would not be good for her.

She filled a big glass with vodka and started popping pills one at a time, about every thirty seconds. She had heard that if you just took them all at once, there was a good chance you’d throw it all up before it killed you.

Jane had taken forty pills when she realized she felt pretty sleepy and her neck didn’t hurt anymore. She took another pill, then another thirty seconds later. She would have taken one more after that, except she fell asleep face first on the table and was unable to.

She was very cranky when she woke up the following day at two thirty seven in the afternoon. And she had what was possibly the worst headache she’d ever had.

“Ugh, what does a girl have to do to just die?” Jane asked her empty apartment.

And so now she sat in her bathtub, watching the last of her blood trickle down her arms into the water and down the drain.

She poked at the wounds in her arms. They stung like Hell, but no more blood came out. Her arms and legs looked very white to her. She sat back in the tub and stared at the wall. She could feel her heart beating, and a little whoosh of air pushed out of her arms in time with each beat. She suddenly felt very dry inside.

Jane got out of the tub and looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair looked very dark compared to her complexion, which was pale, bordering on blue. She had a nasty bruise all the way around her neck, and huge wounds running down her wrists.

Apart from that, she looked very much alive and normal.

“What. The. Fuck?” Jane said.

She toweled herself off, then walked to her bedroom. She left a few drops of blood on the carpet as she went, but not much. She dressed in a black, long-sleeved tshirt, jeans, boots and a scarf. She checked herself in the mirror, and apart from her ghostly pallor, she didn’t look like someone who had been hung, drugged and left to bleed to death in the bathtub.

Jane left her apartment and walked down to the bus stop. The green line ran every fifteen minutes. She checked her watch and figured the bus would arrive in about five minutes.

Also waiting at the bus stop was an older woman, and a couple of high school kids.

Soon enough, she could see the bus further down the road. She stepped up to the curb to wait for the bus, as did the other people waiting with her. The bus pulled in to pick them up. At the last possible second, Jane stepped out into the street in front of the bus and turned to meet death’s embrace.

What she got was a face full of twenty one tons of municipal steel. The old lady screamed.

The bus knocked her ten feet back, and she landed on the ground like a rag doll. A very, very sore and very much alive rag doll.

“OWWW!” Jane yelled. “Dammit!”

The bus driver put the bus in to Park, and ran out to see if there was anything he could do to help. Jane was on the ground, cursing.

“Are you OK, miss?” the bus driver asked.

“No. I am not OK. That should have killed me, and here I am still alive. Didn’t they teach you how to properly run someone over in bus driver school?”

“OK, well it seems like you aren’t going to die here in the street this second, so I’m going to go ahead and call and ambulance,” the bus driver said. He was extremely confused, but too shocked to contemplate the fact that he’d hit a person with the bus and she seemed, at worst, extremely pissed off and nothing more.

Jane didn’t want to wait for the ambulance to arrive. They would most definitely not help her in her quest to die.

She tried to get up, and that’s when she discovered her left wrist was broken.

“Ow!” she yelled, and laid back down momentarily, clutching her wrist. When she had gathered her resolve again, she tried to get up using her right arm.

It turned out that wrist was broken as well.

“Son of a bitch!” Jane yelled.

“Hey, maybe you should stay down. You might be in shock,” one of the high school kids said. The other one looked like he was going to throw up any second, but said nothing.

“You’re going to end up in shock if you don’t get out of my face,” Jane said.

She tried curling her legs under her in order to get to her knees, and then up on to her feet.

Her plan might have worked if she handn’t broken her left knee and several bones in her feet.

Jane finally gave up. She’d been hung, poisoned, bled and hit by a bus, and apart from being in a great deal of pain, was apparently OK.

She suddenly had a thought which greatly lifted her mood. Maybe everything really was going to be OK.

“I’m a super hero!” she yelled, and started laughing hysterically. She was still laughing when the paramedics arrived.

The paramedics were stunned by the severity of her injuries, including the two arterial wounds on her arms. They noticed a distinct lack of gore on the street surrounding her, which was troubling. However, they were nothing if not professionals, and on the ground in front of them was a seriously injured, but clearly alive, young woman. They got to work stabilizing her, moved her to a gurney, and set off for the hospital.

“I can’t figure out how she’s not dead. These wounds on her arms are clean, and she didn’t bleed at all from the lacerations she got when the bus hit her.” one of the EMTs said.

“I told you, I’m a super hero,” Jane said.

“Did you see that bruise around her neck? How’d she survive that?”

“Hey, super hero here...”

“You’re not a super hero.”

“Well then how am I still alive? I’ve got no blood. I’ve been hanged. I poisoned myself last night with sleeping pills and vodka. And I just got hit by a fucking city bus, and I’m sitting here in the back of an ambulance talking to you.”

“Well, I can’t explain it, but I’m sure the doctors will figure it all out.”

“I’ve already figured it out. I’m a fucking super hero. When I get out of the hospital, I’m going to have to get to work on a costume.”

The EMT gave up. He was reasonably sure there was a logical explanation for her condition, and he was going to ask the doctor to please clue him in as a small professional courtesy.

“What do you have in mind for your costume?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. Something dark and gothic. But not slutty. How come female superheroes always have to wear sexy costumes. It’s not like they’re going to fuck the bad guys into submission.”

“I always figured they wore skin-tight clothes because of the freedom of movement and so they wouldn’t get caught on things when they’re out fighting crime.”

“I never thought of that. I always figured it was just because men are pigs.”

The EMT didn’t quite know what to say to that, so he said, “Say Hi to Batman for me when you meet him.”

“OK.”

They arrived at the emergency room a few minutes later. The emergency room staff had been having a fantastic day. Not one death yet since midnight the night before! Even a couple of mistakes that should have killed the patient dead as a doornail turned out to be perfectly OK. The doctors had all been able to take an entire lunch break with no interruptions.

It was incredible.

The first doctor to see Jane said “So, what do we have here?”

“Repeated attempted suicide,” Jane said.

“She was hit by a bus, has some injuries to her neck, and some very confusing injuries to her wrists. She also claims she took forty OTC sleeping pills with vodka last night.”

“What? Is this a joke?” the doctor said.

“No, I’m a super hero.” Jane said.