| By: Sean Brennan Hallinan |
The first caller was alive, I know that for sure. At the Chicago LifeLine, Chicago's only suicide
hotline, we get all kinds of callers, and we give each one a label. According to the administration,
the training, and the LifeLine Listener's handbook, a caller can be low risk, moderate risk, high risk,
acute risk or medical emergency. More commonly, among the Listeners, every caller is either alive
or dead. You're alive if you're just calling to talk. You're alive if there is virtually no chance that
you're going to kill yourself after ending the call with us. Living callers are people who are lonely
and have no one else to talk to, or are going through tough times and don't want their friends to
know, or who just call all the time. Stressed, yes, and upset, but still... alive.
The calls from the dead are worse. Evan, my Mentor, explained it to me once. “Dead callers
are those who are calling because they feel like they have no hope.” He'd said, his eyes distant.
“They'll probably only call us once and it could be the last time they call anywhere. The dead are
the ones who really want to die, who are just about to jump. We call them the dead because in a
way, that's what they are. Something inside them, maybe their hope, is just that: dead.” The
Chicago LifeLine was one of the first suicide call centers in America. Listeners are the functional
unit of suicide prevention: trained, unjudgemental, sympathetic counselors there just to listen. The
callers aren't often dead. In fact, it's not rare to go an entire shift without hearing from the dead.
Listeners, myself included, dread the call that comes from the dead. Those are the calls that can
go downhill fast. Which is why I was so happy that the first caller was very much alive.
“Chicago LifeLine, how can I help you?” I answered the phone, grabbing a Phone Encounter
Sheet and filling in the date, time and my Listener number.
“Yeah, uh, is there someone there I can talk to?”
“Well, you can talk to me.” was the default Listener response to that question. “My name is
Jack, would you like to share your name?” was Listener option #2 for getting a caller's name.
For each caller, 75% of the questions I ask and the things I say are not my own words. They
are canned responses that have been formulated by my Listener ancestors and forcefully drilled
into my head. They're phrases designed to get the caller to continue talking, to get them to keep up
a mostly one sided conversation in the hopes that they'll be able to “get it off their chest.”
“My name's Dana.” She had a low, trembling, sad voice. Of course, everyone who calls the
LifeLine is sad, but not all of them have a sad voice. Dana did.
Listener conversation starter #4: “Hi Dana, what's going on tonight?” I asked as I marked
down Dana's name, the date, time and my number. I marked her age as 40 to 50, judging by her
voice.
“Well, I've been painting. I do that when I get nervous or scared.”
I sat back a moment and looked out the window. The LifeLine is located on the 8th floor of a
building in the commercial district, next to a large open square. From the Listener room you could
look over the square. During my usual shift, 3 PM to 7 PM, I could look out on the people, the
living mixing unknowingly with the dead, scurrying on their way home. However, this wasn't my
usual shift. Just two weeks before we'd heard the announcement, that the LifeLine was going to be
operating 24 hours. They'd needed someone to work the first Overnight shift. I'd needed some
extra money. My watch told me it was 11:20. Twenty minutes down, 6 hours, forty minutes to go.
All I could see in the square were the streetlights, and a few sleeping vagrants wrapped in tattered
gray blankets, looking like massive patches of mold growing on the benches.
“Did painting make you feel better?”
“Not really. What I painted... it scares me. As soon as I was done I felt I had to call you, to talk
to you about it. I call here pretty often.” She said. I marked FREQUENT CALLER on my form.
“What did you paint?” I asked, with real curiosity.
“I painted a man. You can only see his back, but you can tell he's young. He's sitting at a desk.
He's hunched over it, holding something against his head. His other arm is hugging himself. He's
almost in the fetal position, except he's in a chair. His hair is messy, his shirt is wrinkled. There's
light coming from something on the desk. All around the man and the desk it's dark. But... it's
weird.”
“What's weird?”
“I didn't do it on purpose, but the black paint, the brush strokes, they look like they're swirling in
on him. It almost looks like the darkness is about to swallow him. It looks like it wants to. The only
thing keeping it away is the light on the desk.”
“I can see why that could scare you.” I said. LifeLine callers always have strong imaginations.
“But that's not the part that really frightened me. The part that scared me was that I didn't mean
for him to be holding anything in his hand. I just wanted him to look brooding. But when I was done,
it was there, I don't even remember making it.”
“What's he holding?”
“A phone handset.”
A small tickle ran up my spine, the first of many that night. Every Listener feels an intimate
connection with their phone. It's our tool, our connection to the dead. It's what allows us to listen to
them, to save them.
At some point in every call, a Listener is supposed to assess a caller's risk. Essentially, that
means finding out how suicidal a caller is. We have a procedure that we always follow:
Step 1: “Dana, are you feeling suicidal?”
“Well, the thought has crossed my mind, yes.”
Step 2: “Have you given any thought to how you'd go about ending your life?”
“I have some sleeping pills my doctor gave me, I'd probably take a lot of those. I think that
would be the most peaceful way.”
Step 3: “Are you planning on killing yourself within the next week?”
“The thing is, I don't really want to do it. I've thought about it, but I just couldn't do that to my
daughter.”
I get my encounter form and make checks next to moderate risk and sleeping pills. If she'd
said yes, step 4 would be to ask if she's currently in the middle of an attempt to take her own life; if
she's already started taking pills or is standing on the ledge of a building. If she answers yes to
that, the next step for the Listener is generally to panic. We call those callers medical emergencies,
or the screaming dead. Those are the worst.
“What other paintings have you made?” I asked, trying to redirect the conversation. She took
the bait and started talking about a painting she did of her daughter, who was off at college, and
never called her poor mother.
Listeners are only supposed to give living callers about 10 minutes, but I gave Dana longer
because I was sure no one else would be calling. After 15 minutes, I had to gently cut her off.
“Dana, I'm sorry but I have to go.” I said.
“Wait, Jack, before you go, there's one more thing about the painting. The one I did tonight.”
She replied.
“What about it?” I asked.
“The light, all the light from the painting, it's coming from the phone.”
“What do you think that means?” I asked, suddenly interested.
“I don't know.” She paused. Then, “Anyway, have a good night.”
“You too.” I said. I hung up the phone. I glanced up at the clock. 15 MIN CALL I marked on
the encounter sheet, and put it in the done pile.
After I'd finished with Dana, my eyes traveled lazily around the Listener room. I was in my
favorite cubicle, the one furthest from the window, which spans an entire wall. I enjoyed the view,
but too close and I get vertigo. The Listener room is a nice little office, but it betrays its purpose by
its overly bright atmosphere. Every cubicle is covered with posters and cut-out comic strips, and
construction-paper mosaics hang from hooks in the ceiling. The wall opposite the window is
entirely covered by a collage of pictures, topped by the caption “WE LOVE OUR LISTENERS.”
All in all, the Listener room looks more like a call-center for child-care than for suicide. It's all to
keep us happy, keep us working with the dead.
Thinking about Dana's painting, I studied my phone, sitting on the desk next to my Stephen
King novel. It was a shiny black, not bright at all. The LifeLine phone is an almost mystical item. I
always thought of each phone as a steam valve for Chicago's sorrow. The city builds up so much
pressure, so much emotional torment, every so often the valve has to go off, so it gives a little
ring, and lets out all the anguish for the entire city into our little room. And so the rest of the city
keeps on working.
I can't stand the city sometimes, what it does to these people, to the callers. Sometimes I think
the dead are the only ones who deserve to live.
I stretched and wished there was someone I could talk to. The office staff had already been
home for a good 5 hours before I even arrived and the Listeners I was replacing, Ashley and
Melissa, only stayed around long enough to tell me that it'd been a quiet evening, and good luck on
the first ever overnight.
Cell phones are not allowed in the Listener room, and the phone doesn't make outgoing calls.
It has all the buttons, but they don't do anything. They technically have the ability to dial other
phones in the office, but of course no one was there. There was a good chance the entire 15 story
building was empty, save for me and an ancient, Hispanic security guard on the first floor. The only
way I had of contacting the outside world was a button that sent a page to the mental health staff,
the Listener for the Listeners. She was there for when the Listener on shift got overwhelmed by a
call and needed someone to talk to. Or as Evan put it, “When the dead are so bad they're rotting,
and the stink starts to get to you.”
I picked up my novel. LifeLine reading should be something entertaining and thoughtless, and
Stephen King fit like a glove. My last living caller rang in about 20 minutes later.
“Chicago LifeLine, how can I help you?” Default Listener greeting.
“Hi there, are you a Listener?” The caller asked.
“Yes I am,” I said, grabbing an encounter form and marking down MALE, 20 to 30. I paused
for a second, and then in the notes section I wrote, in my trademark chicken-scratch, Odd voice...
drunk?
“My name's Jack, would you like to tell me your name?”
“I'd rather not, is that ok?”
“Sure, of course it is.” I said. I scribbled out where I'd written “...drunk?” He didn't sound drunk,
just self-assured. His voice was low, confident and powerful, like the sound of a black luxury car,
confidently navigating a treacherous curve. It seemed unusual, given that most callers' voices had
the sound of a car in the midst of a funeral procession.
I waited for the caller to get started, to tell me what was bothering him, but there was silence
on the other end of the phone, so I prompted him. “So what do you want to talk about?” I asked,
Listener starter #2.
“Well, really I called here for two reasons: boredom and curiosity. I'm calling because I'm
bored with life, and curious about suicide.”
I decided to move into the risk assessment. “Are you feeling suicidal?” I asked.
His voice rumbled. “I didn't say that.” He said.
Be firm, the Listener handbook dictates. “But are you?”
“No. I am not technically suicidal. Low risk, I think you call it. I've thought about it, but it's not
for me.” Some people call so often they know all our routines and vocabulary. I marked down
LOW RISK and FREQUENT CALLER.
He didn't say anything, and for a while I waited. I knew eventually he'd start talking about his
Reason for Calling. Most callers have a specific event that makes them call, whether it's getting
divorced or getting the wrong toppings on their pizza. We don't discriminate, we listen to
everyone's sob story, regardless of the amount of sob involved.
A good Listener will try to visualize the caller, both in features and expression. I'd pictured a
large man, but not fat. The word would be massive. Well-dressed, African descent, goatee, big
bushy eyebrows. I'd pictured a bored expression, phone held casually to the ear, eyes wandering
around whatever room he was in.
“Really, I'm just interested in you.” He said, finally.
“I'd much rather talk about what's going on in your life.” I replied. It was a default response,
and it always sounded hackneyed.
“Yeah I know,” he said, brushing my comment away, “but seriously, what makes a person
want to talk to depressed people all night?”
“A variety of reasons.” I said, trying to be vague.
“Like what?”
“I dunno,” I said, “Compassion, a sense of civic duty, guilt maybe.”
Evan, always eloquent, had explained it better: “We're like them, the dead. You can't help it,
listening to them and trying to understand them for as long as we do. We're in a weird spot,
between where they are and where everyone else is. My Mentor, she called us the Living Dead.
That's why we're so good at helping them go from being dead to being alive, because we're right in
the middle.”
“Hmm...” he said. “And why do you do it?”
“I'm really not supposed to answer personal questions.” I said.
“Yeah, but... do it anyway.”
It was not a voice to be refused. There was power in his tone, authority, and a tiny little
undercurrent of a threat. “Guilt.” I said, and I wondered if I could have stopped myself. In my
defense, I did not elaborate.
“I could see that. It reminds me of a lesson I had in anthropology, years ago. Have you ever
heard of the sin-eaters?” He asked.
It sounded familiar. “I'm not sure, what are they?”
“Well, there's this tribe in South America, in the Amazon rain forest. They're completely cut-off
from the modern world, but they had some contact with Christian missionaries. The last one who
came was a Spanish friar in the early 1800s. He used some science to convince them that he was
sent by god. They listened to his every word when he explained sin and hell to them. He was just
trying to teach them about the sacraments when he died of malaria. So here was this tribe that
knew they were all full of these evil deeds that could send them to eternal torture, and they didn't
know what to do about them.
“Now, the only other thing they sort of learned from the missionary was about communion,
turning bread into the body of Christ and all. I say sort of because they didn't really understand it.
They just knew that by this holy man blessing this food, and their eating it, it would confer the
blessing onto them. Are you following me?”
“Yes.” I was fascinated. Where was he going with this?
“So they thought they could do the same thing, or maybe the opposite thing with sin. When a
very old or very sick person seemed close to death, they would surround his body with a
sumptuous feast and he would, I guess, anti-bless it, conferring the sin onto the food. But the sin
couldn't stay there, it had to be put into a person. So they would send the sin-eater. The sin-eater
was an outcast of the village, sort of a cross between a beggar and a prophet, and he would come
into the dying man's hut and eat all the food, thereby taking on all the dying man's sins so he could
die with a pure soul. The sin-eater would be the keeper of the sins for the entire village, sacrificing
his soul for theirs. Or, from his perspective, for a hot meal.”
“That's very interesting.” I said.
“Do you know why I bring this up?” He asked.
“I have no clue.” I honestly had no clue.
“You people, the Listeners, are modern day sin-eaters. You absorb the pain and suffering of
these poor unfortunates, so they can die with a pure soul.”
“I've never thought of it that why.” I'd honestly never thought of it that way.
“How many callers have you lost?” He asked suddenly, interrupting his previous train of
thought.
“I beg your pardon?” I asked, trying to get re-oriented.
“How many people have you talked to have actually gone through with it, killed themselves?
Would you even know?”
“Well, we never really know for sure, it's not like we ever hear gunshots over the phone...” I
said, wondering why I was telling him so much.
“But...” he prompted.
“... but we all read the newspaper, and if we talked to a girl named Jane last night, and Jane's
name's in the headlines, or if we read a story where all the details are far too familiar, we can fill in
the blanks.”
“And how many Janes have you had?” He asked.
Looking back, I can say now that I obviously shouldn't have answered the question. It's clearly
a personal question, and a question about LifeLine policy, both of which are never to be answered.
At the time, I thought I'd just been too disoriented, and his voice too authoritative. Now, I think I'd
been desperate for someone to ask me, just because I was desperate to answer.
“Two.” I said.
I suppose it was a lie. Really, it was three. I remembered all of them. Cathy, Eliza and Randy
in that order. I remembered their calls, their problems, their emotions, their pain. Their reasons.
Eliza had just broken up with her boyfriend. Randy was disabled, and constantly in pain. As for
Cathy, well, I never really knew why she did it.
I was so wrapped up in the past, I barely registered the click when he hung up.
I don't know how long it was before I checked the clock. 11:55. I felt my eyelids starting to lose
the battle with gravity. Listeners were entitled to a ten minute break per hour, so I decided to take
my next two successively, and take a twenty minute nap. I set the phones to go to our busy
message while I set the alarm on my watch. That done I laid my head down on my arm.
At midnight I woke up to the sound of all the phones ringing at once.
It sounded like a machine screaming for help. A calculated, mechanical, unemotional plea for
rescue. The phones aren't supposed to ring when the busy message is on. I jolted up and nearly
fell out of my chair. My eyes darted wildly, blearily around, trying to find the source of the noise.
Meanwhile the phones kept up their emotionlessly panicked cry.
Once I found the mechanical noisemaker I immediately reached out and picked up the
handset, putting it to my ear. My brain was still mostly asleep but I managed to spout out: “Hello?”
The English language is not well equipped to describe sound. How do you explain a violin to a
deaf person? Loud, soft, low, high, constant, punctuated. These don't convey the essence of a
sound. The only way is to use analogy.
What I heard was, I suppose, a scream. Only not quite, since a scream is an exhalation; it
occurs when terror is expelled forcefully from the lungs through the mouth, scraping the vocal
chords along the way. Also, a scream is a human sound. This was no human sound, and this was
no exhalation. This was the sound of a scream inverted. Where a scream blows, this sucked. I
couldn't explain it, but it sounded like an emotion, like fear translated through the ear to the nerves
and spinal chord without the intermediary of thought.
It was then, half-awake, listening to that not-scream, that a thought occurred to me, one that
would haunt me for the rest of the night. I thought to myself: “If there was ever a place that was
haunted, it would be this room.”
The building that houses the Chicago LifeLine was built in the 1940s. In the 1950s, Lana
Martin started the LifeLine, renting out a small room on the eighth floor of a building in the
commercial district. The hotline employed two full time staff members and two hotline counselors.
Over the next 50 years the LifeLine slowly expanded, eventually renting the entire seventh floor.
More staff was added, and more operators, who eventually came to be called Listeners. The
Listeners always worked out of the same room, the original room Lana Martin had rented in the
beginning.
I have no idea how many people have rung in over the last 60 years. Considering we were the
Chicago area's only suicide hot-line, and were operational 17 hours a day, I'm sure it was a lot. An
untold number. We estimate about 40,000 callers per year at this point. Roughly 200 of those
callers per year will go on to kill themselves. As I hung up the phone, I thought about my last caller
and wondered to myself how many people had ended their lives while connected to this room. I
thought about the steam valve of Chicago, releasing the city's sorrow into the room, letting that
sorrow build up until it became solid.
I noticed I was breathing heavily, gasping even. Get a grip, my rational side demanded. What
do you think there are here, ghosts? Ridiculous. That was just the phones resetting, or something.
But my less rational side was insistent. This room, over the last 60 years, has been connected to
the most wretched, wrenching and soul-wrecking deaths imaginable. Suicide... is there anything
that would make a spirit more agonized?
I pulled my head away from the handset, my arm feeling frozen in place. I forced myself to
calm down. I straightened in my seat slowly, oppressively, as though I was being watched, which I
felt I was. I knew it was my imagination. I found the strength to replace the handset on the cradle. “I
have to get my mind off this.” I said aloud, finding comfort in the noise. “These thoughts mean
nothing,” I told myself. When there's nothing to hear, your mind can create noises without realizing
what it's creating. The sound of a human voice, even if it's just your own, can dispel those phantom
sounds. The next noise I heard was the sound of the phone, ringing in my first dead caller.
I let the phone ring a couple of times while my mind raced. I had a nagging feeling that the
phones should not be ringing. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I felt that something was
fundamentally wrong with the fact that the phone was ringing. One way or another, though, I would
have to answer the phone.
Scared and confused Listener answer #1: “Uh, Chicago LifeLine, can I help you?”
“Hey... I just need someone to talk to.”
If misery loves company, paranoia lusts for it, like a junkie. The relief I felt in hearing from
another human being was, I imagine, akin to what a crack addict feels after a long-awaited fix. I
built my mental image of the caller immediately: male, white, muscular... no, strong. Not
handsome, rather plain looking, and short. Ask a blind person, there's a lot you can tell about a
person from their voice.
“Sure, you can talk to me. My name's Jack, would you like to share your name?” I could feel
my confidence growing as I returned to known territory. Nothing to worry about. This would be a
good call.
“No, I don't think I should. You see, I think I'm going to kill myself tonight.”
Confidence out the window. Once I would have said that there'd be nothing to prepare you for
hearing that, but that's not true. If you spend enough time dreading something, you know what to
do when it happens.
I remember Evan: “The dead are just like the living. Just keep talking to them, find out what
croaked them. Don't try to bring them back to life. You can't.”
“Why do you want to do that?” I asked. My tone was steady.
“There's a lot of reasons really. Some good, some not so good.”
My instinct was to say that there is no good reason to kill yourself, but I stayed silent.
“I guess it started with the accident. I'm disabled now, you know, I can't walk. I was working in
const-” the line crackled “and we were always around heavy machinery. One day a-” crackling
again. It was clear he was talking on a cell phone, and I was afraid I'd lost him when he came back,
“-knocked the other guy out of the way. I don't know if I saved his life, but I ruined mine.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Well I can't walk, and I'm-” the interference was too great, I couldn't hear the last part.
There was a procedure for calls like that. It's very simple, we say: “I'm sorry, I'm having a little
trouble hearing you. Could you repeat that please?”
“I said I'm always in pain!” He was speaking louder, but really no easier to hear. I could tell he
was mad at having to repeat himself. Callers, living or dead, are always paranoid that you're not
paying attention. They never believe that it's just a bad connection.
“That must be hard to deal with.” I said.
“And nothing ever helps! They give me these pills and they don't do anything. I dunno, maybe
I'm just doing this so they'll be good for something.” I pictured him holding the pills as he spoke, a
look of disgust on his face.
I'd forgotten about my encounter form. I grabbed one and marked down what I knew so far,
until I reached the risk level. The options were NO, LOW, MODERATE, HIGH and ACUTE. In a
separate box directly underneath was the option MEDICAL EMERGENCY.
“Do you have the pills with you now?” I asked. I couldn't hear what he said, but his tone was
affirmative. “Have you taken any?”
“A few.” He said, but the defensiveness in his voice said just the opposite. Then I heard a
noise that sent a chill down my spine. It would be a perfectly ordinary noise in any other context.
Living in Chicago, I heard it all the time. But coming through the cell phone of a man I knew was
suicidal and overdosing on painkillers, the blaring call of a car horn is an entirely new sound.
“Are you driving?” I asked.
“Yes I am.” He said, “Driving this specially designed glorified shortbus. The cripple-mobile.”
He was getting angry, but I knew I had to get him off the road.
“I think it might be a good idea if you pull over for a little while.” I said, “At least while you're
talking to me.” I knew what to do, I'd taken calls like that before. In fact...
This time, I didn't get the chill down my spine. I got the creepy, panicky, burning-in-the-back-of-
your-skull feeling. I remembered the news story, more of a blurb really, on channel 7. Pictures of
the accident. “The victim, a 29-year-old former construction worker, now handicapped, apparently
fell asleep at the wheel after overdosing on his prescription pain medication. He is survived by a
wife and a young son.”
I remembered the call. Randy, he said his name was. He was mad. Mad at the world. Mad at
me. Mad at his family. But the call had been different. He'd told me his name. He'd wanted me to
talk him out of it.
My mind was spinning, going a mile a minute. We get plenty of calls from crippled people, I
told myself. And almost 60% of our callers call on their cell phones. It's just sheer coincidence, I
thought. This wasn't the first time I'd had a caller remind me of Randy – in fact, I could think of a
dozen times I'd taken calls like this. But, it sounded like him. And I still had the nagging feeling from
before, that the phone should not have rung at all.
“So what do you think?”
SHIT! The caller had been talking the whole time I was thinking. I had no idea what he was
asking me about. Listener rule #1: Pay attention. All of what we do, our entire purpose, is trying to
make the callers feel important, let them know that we care. If we lose track of a conversation, if
our mind wanders, it makes the callers feel worthless, pointless, boring.
“Do you think I should?” He asked, taking my silence for indecisiveness. This was good. I still
didn't have a clue what he was asking me, but at least it was a question with a definite answer: yes
or no.
“It doesn't matter what I think,” I said, trying to buy myself some time. “It's your decision.” Still
not knowing what I was talking about.
“I just want your goddamn opinion. Should I or not?”
There were so many things he could be asking about. A literally infinite number of possibilities.
I tried to remember what we'd been talking about when my mind had started to wander. I'd asked
him to pull over. Is that what he was talking about? No way to know. I remembered Randy. He'd
asked me if I thought there was ever a time to “do the honorable thing” and spare everyone else
the pain of dealing with someone who's a burden. At the LifeLine, we respect a person's right to
die how they wish, even if we prefer they don't. I wanted to say yes, because it was the truth, I did
believe there was such a time. If I lied, he might be able to tell, might become mad. I hoped I'd still
be able to talk him out of it.
Sometimes, as a Listener, you just have to take the plunge.
“Well, maybe...” I mentally flipped a coin. “You should.”
“I thought so, too.” He said, and then the line was cut off, abruptly.
I was startled when I heard the click. He'd hung up, or we'd been disconnected. The nagging
feeling, the thought that the phone shouldn't have rung, had never left. I felt it stronger than ever as
I sat there, staring at the phone. It felt like a flashing in my mind, just like the flashing light on the
phone. The light that told me the busy message was still on. The light that said there was no way
the last caller should have been able to get through.
After a medical emergency call, we're always supposed to page the mental health worker. Just
to let them know. After I'd turned the busy message off I put the handset down and pressed the call
button. She usually calls back in about 5 minutes. The phone rang almost immediately.
“Chicago LifeLine, how can I help you?” I said, trying to remember what the mental health
worker's name was.
“Hi, yeah, is there someone there I can talk to?” a woman's voice said.
My heart sank. It wasn't her.
“Sure you can talk to me. My name's Jack, would you like to tell me yours?”
“I'd really rather not, is that alright?” A bad sign, the dead are almost always nameless.
“Sure that's fine, what do you want to talk about?”
“Well, I'm just going through a rough time.” Her voice was breaking. “I don't know what to do.”
Then came the tears. “I don't know what to do.”
“It's ok to cry, just let it all out.” I said. I filled out her encounter sheet as she wept. She
sounded young, 16 at the oldest. She had a high, energetic voice, which lent itself well to heart-
wrenching sobs. I made a picture in my head, of a pretty... no, cute girl. I pictured sloppy makeup,
put on inexpertly but enthusiastically, now ruined. Highlights in her hair, lots of cheap jewelry. The
young ones could be the hardest. They always seemed so innocent, so undeserving. Only the
good die young.
“I just don't know what I'm supposed to do? What can I do?” She was asking, through the
tears.
“What's wrong?” Listener starter question #3.
She told me her story. We heard it all the time. In fact, I think it was one of the roleplay
scenarios, done during training. She was a quiet, good girl. Not popular, not particularly interesting.
And then there was the boy. In this case, the soccer player. A whirlwind “romance”. One or two
awkward, exciting nights, then he dumped her flat. She's upset already, but soon our sweet girl
hears all her very personal details running all around the school and she feels she can't stand the
shame.
I heard the story like I hear almost all LifeLine stories, almost without interruption, the caller on
or beyond the edge of tears, my only input being, “Mmm.” “Huh.” “Hmm.” and the like. Going
through the old routine.
“I hate it. It's awful. What am I supposed to do?” she wailed.
“What am I supposed to do?” is the most dreaded phrase in the Listener lexicon. We never
give advice. That's Listener rule #5. Instead, we were supposed to say advice response #1: “I'm
sorry, I can't answer that for you.” I chose a different path.
“What am I supposed to do?” She asked again.
I diverted the question, skipping ahead to the risk assessment.
“Yes I'm feeling suicidal, why do you think I'm calling?
“I guess I'd probably use pills. Whatever we have in the medicine cabinet. I'm not picky.
“The sooner the better, I guess. I don't want to live anymore. I can't take the embarrassment. I
mean, what can I do? He was my baby cakes.”
Baby cakes. That's not a phrase a Listener hears very often. Nonetheless, I got an insane
sense of deja vu.
“ELIZA LAWTON, HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT PRONOUNCED DEAD IN HOSPITAL
AFTER SUICIDE ATTEMPT.” It was in the local section. It probably wouldn't even be in there if
it'd been a boy, or if she'd been ugly. The article told about how she was found in her room. One
hand had an empty bottle of pills. The other was empty. The phone handset was neatly in the
cradle, after being hung up violently, angrily. That detail wasn't in the paper.
She'd talked about her “baby cakes”, and she'd asked the same question. What could she do?
“I'm sorry” I'd said, “I can't answer that for you.” The default Listener response, and she'd hung up
on me. I tried not to blame myself, I blamed the LifeLine. They'd told me what to say, gave me the
script, it was their fault it didn't work. It was no use, I felt responsible. I swore never to say that
response again.
Suddenly, I grew angry at the caller for bringing up these painful memories. What did she
expect me to do, solve all her problems for her? I don't even know her. What was I supposed to
do? Before I could think of something to say, I heard myself answering.
“I'm sorry,” I began, “But I can't answer that for you.” My voice said. I was stunned. I tried,
crazily, to look down at my mouth. How could it betray me like this? What had made me say that?
“You can't answer that for me?” she repeated. I heard the devastation in her voice, as though
I'd let her down.
“I'm sorry.” I heard myself saying again. My sense of deja vu grew stronger. I tried to
continue, to explain, but found I couldn't.
“No you're not.” She said. There was no trace of the tears in her voice anymore. No, now
there was a chilling blankness. “You don't care about me.”
“Of course I do, I'm sorry you have to be going through this.” A phrase I'd used so many
times it'd become automatic, so much so that I couldn't tell whether or not I said it voluntarily.
“No you're not. You're just repeating what you've been told to say.”
“I don't know what you want me to tell you.” The words dribbled out of my mouth, like
gibberish from a madman.
“I just want you to care!” she said, and I didn't know if I heard it or remembered.
I felt like I was trapped in a memory. What are you doing to me? I wanted to ask, but all I
heard coming out were the Listener responses: “Of course I care. That's why I'm here, to listen to
you.”
I knew her response before it even came. “Why do you even do this? Did you ever care?”
“Of course I care about you.” I said, as it was written.
“Whatever.”
Redirect the conversation, the handbook and my training would command. My mind screamed
out against what I knew was to come but my voice came out strong and confident. My tone,
always my greatest strength as a Listener, was calm and soothing. “Are you sure you don't want to
tell me your name?” I asked, Listener redirection #13.
“Eliza Lawton!” She shouted, and I heard the sound of a phone slamming.
Objectively, the room was well-lit and spacious. That didn't keep it from feeling like a dark
closet, and getting smaller and darker with each breath. My mind flashed to Dana's painting. I could
almost feel the darkness threatening to engulf me. Listener training had involved a class devoted to
teaching us how to manage panic. Breathe. Focus. Keep things simple. Deep breaths.
I looked down at the phone, my mystical conduit to the dead of the city. “That didn't just
happen.” I thought to myself. “It couldn't.” I pressed the home leader call button again. “I'm tired.
It's...” I looked at the clock. “late, my mind's playing tricks on me.” This time, I didn't dare say it out
loud. I felt as though something was searching for me, and any noise, any movement, and it would
swoop down and take me away.
I stayed very still for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably more like 10 minutes. I
imagined myself remaining like that forever, like a statue. A monument to my failure as a Listener. I
don't know how long I stayed there before my full bladder made movement a necessity.
I stood up slowly, deliberately, as though I had a full audience judging my every move, and
walked stiffly down the hall to the bathroom. I walked carefully, smoothly, feeling that with each
stride I was putting some terrible, unknowable menace behind. Before long I was at the bathroom. I
tried the door. It was locked. I started to march over to the elevators. The bell rang, announcing the
elevator's arrival, and I marveled at the way the noise was still able to echo throughout the
deserted office, how it wasn't swallowed up by the darkness.
The security guard looked up as I exited the elevator. It wasn't the ancient Hispanic man I'd
expected, but an even older man, who seemed to be of American Indian descent. He was a large
man with a puffy, wrinkled face and short, white hair in a crew cut. I imagined that he would give
any intruders little trouble, apart from possibly setting off a silent alarm.
“Hey kid, what's up?” he asked, sitting back in his chair. He seemed like he'd been expecting
somebody.
“Gotta pee.” I said as I passed him, keeping it simple and honest. He giggled and motioned
me to the doors in the corner of the lobby.
The relief I'd felt upon seeing another human being couldn't possibly compare the the relief I
found in the bathroom. I felt like moaning, or cheering.
My euphoria collapsed as I was washing my hands. What had just happened? It didn't make
any sense. I couldn't have talked to Eliza and, let's face it, Randy. I hadn't told anyone about them,
it was against our confidentiality policy. So who could know? I wracked my brains as I walked back
into the lobby.
“Feel better?” The security guard asked, interrupting my train of thought.
“Hi, I'm-” I began.
“I know who you are.” he said.
“You do?” I asked, my heart picking up speed.
“Yeah, you're the Listener who's working the overnight shift. You're the only one who'd be here
this time of night other than me.”
“Oh, right.” I said, as my heart rate slowed.
“What's wrong, kid? Getting the spooks up there?” He asked, a small chuckle in his voice.
“No, there was...” what do I say? I realize how crazy anything I said would sound. “Something
wrong with the phones.” I finished lamely. I should have just said yes, I thought.
The security guard smiled, seeming to read my mind. “Naw, now, you got nothing to be
ashamed of. You're up there, all alone, talking to suicidal people in the dead of night. That'd drive
most people nuts.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Why don't you sit down here with me for a little bit, get your nerves back. Take a breather.”
He gestured at a chair next to his desk.
“Alright.” I said, as I sat upon it.
“Boy, I bet the folks're wild tonight, too, huh?” He said, turning in his chair so he faced me,
leaning back.
“What makes you say that?”
“Full moon.” He said. “Brings all the crazies out.” He chuckled.
“Maybe,” I said. “I always say it depends on how the Sox do.”
“Well, today's a special day for the Wampanoag. My people don't really have holidays, but my
grandfather told me that in the old days, at the end of summer, there'd be a huge celebration. We'd
pay homage to the spirits of those who'd– but no, you don't want an anthropology lesson.”
“No, please go on.” I said, feeling a by now familiar tickle run down my spine. “It wouldn't be
my first for today.”
“Well, it would be a celebration for the spirits of those who'd died in the tribe. Those who died
naturally would come celebrate with us. Those who'd been killed by others would come and seek
revenge, hopefully against another tribe.”
I was leaning forward. “What about those who had killed themselves?” I asked.
He laughed. “Is that all you guys think about? There weren't very many of those among my
people. Not many among any people, really. I guess I don't know what they would do.”
I sat back. “That makes sense.” I realized that was a default Listener response.
“I can tell you what I think.” he said, folding his arms across his chest.
“Please do.”
“I don't think there's any kind of death more tragic, more painful, more destructive to the soul
that suicide. I can't imagine any human action that leaves more of itself behind to linger. And I can't
imagine any fate worse than to have to live their final moments over, again and again, endlessly.
And that's what I think happens to those souls.
“Can you imagine what it would feel like, to reach the lowest point, to think there can't possibly
be anything worse than what you're feeling and to try to end it. But then you find out that you
haven't escaped, you're trapped where you were, eternally, saddled with the greatest amount of
sorrow a human can experience. Literally more than you could stand.”
I thought of my Three. The Listeners never talked about the callers we lost. We didn't have any
names for them, any designations. We weren't even supposed to know about them, but I think we
all did. Only a few of us had them, and I think I had the most.
I thought about Eliza, the poor high school girl, feeling her humiliation, her anger, her sorrow
over and over again. I thought of her taking her mother's painkillers, and finding the sorrow didn't
go away.
I thought about Randy, succumbing to the pain and the frustration, the rage he felt against the
world, driving his car off the highway overpass, screaming on the way down, screaming forever.
And I thought about Cathy.
“I don't think I can do this anymore.” I said, putting my face in my hands and resting my
elbows on my knees.
“Oh, now I've gone and freaked him out.” The security guard said. I heard his chair groan as
he leaned forward. “Come on, kiddo, cheer up. Hey, look at me.” I did. His gaze was piercing.
“Son, I can't think of a single human vocation that is more meaningful than yours. These are the
most miserable people in all the world, and most of the time you're the only one who can help
them. You're the one they turn to for comfort, and you can provide that comfort. You're there for
them, and I think that's the most significant thing in the world.”
“But it's so hard.” I said.
“What's hard? All you have to do is to talk to them and to care. It's no more than the simple,
human thing to do, and it means the world to them. It doesn't matter what you say or do, simply by
your presence and your depth of feeling, you're helping them.”
“But what if I fail?”
“The only way you can fail is by not caring.”
Like I said, silence is a powerful tool for a Listener. It gives the caller a moment to reflect, to
feel. A good Listener uses that moment to try to guess what will come next. I didn't think so then,
but I am a great Listener. I may be the best. The security guard didn't say a thing until I said “Thank
you.”
I took the elevator back up to the LifeLine office. The phone rang almost as soon as I sat back
down in my chair. I picked up the handset.
“Lifeline.” I said, not any one of the default Listener greetings.
“Hi Jack.” She said
“Hi Cathy.” I replied.
On the first of my group training sessions, we all went around the table and told why we were
there, why we'd wanted to be Listeners.
“It's just a worthy cause, and I want to help out.”
“I'm a psychology student; I'm studying depression.”
When it came to me, I wasn't sure what to say. I couldn't tell them the whole truth. I told them
part of it. “Because I want to know what to do if I ever get a call from a friend who's suicidal.” In
my head, I added, “...again.”
It's funny, the things I remember. I remember my cell phone was set to vibrate, and I was
sitting so it was pressed against my hip. I remember that it tickled when it rang. I don't remember
where I was or what I was doing, but I remember the tickle.
“Hello?”
“Hi, umm, Jack... It's Cathy.”
“Oh hey, Cathy, what's up?”
“Look Jack, I'm just calling because I wanted to say I'm sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“You've been such a good friend, and our friendship means so much to me, I'm sorry to do
this to you. I'm sorry to you and I'm sorry to them.” She was crying.
Statistically, the most popular reason for committing suicide is guilt. Of course, I didn't know
that then.
At this point I had started to get worried. I remember wondering what she was talking about. I
remember the terrible, hot feeling I got in the back of my head. “Hey, it's ok.” I said, more to
myself than to her.
“I can't deal with it anymore.” She said, “I feel like I'll do anything to end it.”
I remember casting about for things to say, like a drowning man clutching at shreds of
driftwood. “Where are you? Can we talk about this?”
“I'm on the corner of Forsythe and Huntington.” She said.
I remember running down the streets of Chicago. I wasn't a runner, not even close, but I was
burning those streets up. I remember people shouting, car horns honking. I remember Cathy crying
on the phone.
“Everything's going to be fine.” I'd said, “Sometimes we feel like this, but things'll get better.” I
was saying anything, saying things just to be heard. Verbal diarrhea. Evan once told me, “The
dead don't want to be talked to, they want to be heard.” I wish I'd known that then.
I reached the corner of Huntington and Forsythe. There was an apartment building, probably
15 stories. “I'm here, kid. Where are you?” I said.
“I'm glad.” She said. “I want you to be here for this. I'm sorry.”
I remember two sounds, coming from two different ears. The ear pressed to my phone heard
a buzz, the other ear heard the sound of a scream. I remember a lady pointing up. I remember my
eyes following her finger. I remember a soft, wet, indelicate thud. I remember brakes squealing,
people shouting. I remember the sight of a cellphone, neatly broken along the middle, a few stray
wires connecting the bottom to the top, lying on the sidewalk next to an outstretched hand. I
remember purple nail polish.
It was roughly five years later, and I found I still didn't know what to say. Fortunately, she did.
“I'm so sorry, Jack.” She said. I looked around the well-lit room, reminding myself that I was still
there, not back in school, not dashing madly down Huntington Street.
“Oh God, Cathy, why'd you do it?” I'd found my voice. “What happened?”
“Does that really matter now?” Her voice was like I remembered it, except her happy
exuberance had been replaced by soul-crushing regret.
“Of course it matters.” I said, “Do you know what this did to me, how much it's haunted me?”
“I can imagine.” She said quietly.
“Then what made you do it?” I asked her.
“Nothing made me do it. I wanted to do it. I knew what I was doing. I knew all the way down. It
was my choice.”
I knew she was avoiding answering. The Listener handbook tells us that if a caller doesn't want
to answer a question, don't press them. It could upset them.
“How... where are you calling me from?”
“I can't tell you that. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't understand anyway.”
“How is it there? Are you...” happy? Content? At peace? Burning in eternal flames? “Ok?”
“No,” she said, “Not really. Some people are, here, but I'm not.”
“I'm sorry.” I said. I felt like I wanted to say so much more. “I... miss you.”
“I miss you too. I miss everyone.” She said.
I looked over at the wall by the door. WE LOVE OUR LISTENERS, it reminded me. Glossy
Polaroid pictures of all the LifeLine operators covered the remainder of the wall. I gazed at the
poster, and Cathy's round face, her hazel eyes, her smirking smile gazed back at me. CATHY, it
said below her picture. LISTENER NUMBER 2501.
I found I was back where I was five years ago, answering a call from a dear friend in distress,
without a clue what to say. “I'm sorry,” I said again, then, “Oh kid, I'm sorry I couldn't have gotten
to you. I'm sorry I didn't know what to say. I'm sorry I let you down.” I was hunched over in my
seat, my free hand was wrapped around my body. My hair was a mess, my shirt was wrinkled, I
was practically in the fetal position in my chair. Part of me realized I looked just like the man from
Dana's painting.
“You didn't let me down. Nothing you could say or do was going to save me. All you did was
provide some comfort at the end.”
“I could have-” I began.
“And that was enough.” She interrupted. “That was all I wanted. That was all you could do.
That is all we, as Listeners, are supposed to do. And you do it well.”
“Not well enough.” I said bitterly. “You weren't the only one. There were two others.”
“Those weren't your fault. They didn't want to be saved, they wanted to be heard, to be
remembered.” She paused. I didn't say anything, so she continued. “Do you know how many
callers I lost?” She asked. She didn't wait for my response. “Two. One for both years I worked
there.”
“How did you deal with it?” I asked.
“I didn't.” She said, then paused, significantly.
“Is that why...” I began, then trailed off. I couldn't bring myself to say it.
“Yes,” She said. “Mostly.”
This year, guilt will kill more Americans than SARS, avian flu, and domestic terrorist attacks
put together.
“I couldn't take the thought that those people had depended on me and I'd failed them. I kept
thinking that there was more I could have done. But I was wrong, just like you're wrong now.”
“How am I wrong?” I asked.
“Let me ask you, Jack. Are you feeling suicidal?”
“You know I'd be lying if I said it hadn't crossed my mind. It's all around us here, how can we
help it?”
“How would you do it?” She asked.
“Same way you did.” I retorted.
“Then when? When would you do it?”
“I dunno. Probably another caller in the headlines and I'd just snap.”
I could hear Cathy's sad smile in her tone. “There you go, Jack. You're one of the dead,
yourself. You think you let me die. Well, I killed you.”
“This isn't your fault.” I was getting angry.
“You didn't let those two callers down and you didn't let me down.”
“Why are you calling me? What do you want?” I shouted into the phone.
I noticed that the lights seemed dimmer. The room felt cold. I remember how sympathetic the
older Listeners had been on my first shift. I remember Evan pointing out Cathy's favorite cubicle,
right next to the window. With the view all the way down. “You know,” he'd said, “She showed me
how to talk to the dead. I think she might have coined the phrase.” I imagined she was there, talking
to me from only a few feet away. I didn't dare look to see.
“Jack, for five years I've been tortured by guilt and regret. Only, it hasn't been the guilt that I
thought it would be. I realize now that I did the right thing with my two callers. I did the best thing for
them, with them. My one regret is that I knew what this would do to you, and I still did it.
“I've done an awful thing. I forced you into this work. No one should be made to do what you
do, what I used to do. You can't try to save everybody who calls. You have to be content with
helping them.”
“Do you want me to forgive you?” I asked. “I already have.”
“I want you to forgive yourself.”
I took a deep breath. What could I say? There was no default Listener response. There was
only myself to answer. “I'll try.” I said. I hoped I meant it, which I guess was a start.
“Thank you.” She said, and exhaled loudly. “I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to go.” I almost
laughed. It was Listener Ending Statement #3.
I don't know what I was expecting. Maybe I was hoping she'd appear, maybe I'd have a vision.
Maybe she'd tell me she'd always loved me. But all I heard was a click.
And then the line went dead.
I had a forehead-shaped dent in my arm when the sound of the phone ringing woke me up
almost an hour later. I probably had a matching arm-shaped dent in my forehead. The calls had
stopped, I remembered. Of course, no one knew we had gone 24 hours.
I felt the wetness under my eyes, and I realized I'd been crying. Somewhere between hanging
up the phone and falling asleep, I guess. Had I been dreaming? Surely not. I remembered it. It was
clear in my head. There was no way it had been a dream. But then again, the alternative was that
I'd spent the last hour talking to the dead, the dead dead. Ridiculous? I guess it was. I found myself
questioning how well I remembered it, how real it had felt. Maybe it was all a product of sleep
deprivation, depression and an appropriate setting.
I realized the phone was still ringing. “Chicago LifeLine, how can I help you?” I said, the words
feeling strange in my mouth.
“Hey, Jack, it's Katie.”
The mental health worker- I'd paged her! I'd pressed the call button after the first caller... after
Randy. My mind reeled; it had really happened!
“Oh Katie, you got my page.”
“No,” he said, and my mind stopped reeling so fast it got whiplash. “I'm just calling to see how
things are going. Did you try to page me?”
I wasn't sure what to say. “I... think so.”
“Hmm, we'll have to check that out. Everything cool there?”
“Cool” was so far from my mindset that I simply couldn't handle it. My head, seemingly of its
own accord, nodded. When I realized that the gesture didn't translate well through the phone I gave
a neutral grunt.
“Great. Anyway, enjoy the rest of your night.” She said, and hung up.
I carefully replaced the handset and looked around the room. It looked like any room in any
office that had been decorated by kindergarteners. The phone didn't glow with a malevolent red
light, the lights didn't flicker menacingly. I looked over at Cathy's picture on the wall. Still there. Still
happy. Had it happened at all?
Maybe I'll never know, I thought, until I looked over at my finished encounter sheets. All five of
them.
That doesn't even make sense, I told myself. I knew I had two callers, and then I supposed I
had the three dead ones, but I never made a sheet when Cathy called, why would I?
I picked up the top sheet. MALE, it said, 20 to 30 YEARS OLD. DEPRESSION,
CONFUSION and FEAR were checked off for emotions. JOB STRESS and GUILT were marked
for the reasons of the call. I didn't remember getting any calls like that all night. My eyes stopped at
the box for the Listener number. They stayed focused on that box for what seemed like hours, not
blinking, slowly drying out, pausing only for one moment to glance at the poster on the wall. 2501.
The number in the box matched the number under Cathy's picture. My eyes followed the sheet
down to the notes section of the form.
It said, simply, “Thank you. Love, The Dead.”
hotline, we get all kinds of callers, and we give each one a label. According to the administration,
the training, and the LifeLine Listener's handbook, a caller can be low risk, moderate risk, high risk,
acute risk or medical emergency. More commonly, among the Listeners, every caller is either alive
or dead. You're alive if you're just calling to talk. You're alive if there is virtually no chance that
you're going to kill yourself after ending the call with us. Living callers are people who are lonely
and have no one else to talk to, or are going through tough times and don't want their friends to
know, or who just call all the time. Stressed, yes, and upset, but still... alive.
The calls from the dead are worse. Evan, my Mentor, explained it to me once. “Dead callers
are those who are calling because they feel like they have no hope.” He'd said, his eyes distant.
“They'll probably only call us once and it could be the last time they call anywhere. The dead are
the ones who really want to die, who are just about to jump. We call them the dead because in a
way, that's what they are. Something inside them, maybe their hope, is just that: dead.” The
Chicago LifeLine was one of the first suicide call centers in America. Listeners are the functional
unit of suicide prevention: trained, unjudgemental, sympathetic counselors there just to listen. The
callers aren't often dead. In fact, it's not rare to go an entire shift without hearing from the dead.
Listeners, myself included, dread the call that comes from the dead. Those are the calls that can
go downhill fast. Which is why I was so happy that the first caller was very much alive.
“Chicago LifeLine, how can I help you?” I answered the phone, grabbing a Phone Encounter
Sheet and filling in the date, time and my Listener number.
“Yeah, uh, is there someone there I can talk to?”
“Well, you can talk to me.” was the default Listener response to that question. “My name is
Jack, would you like to share your name?” was Listener option #2 for getting a caller's name.
For each caller, 75% of the questions I ask and the things I say are not my own words. They
are canned responses that have been formulated by my Listener ancestors and forcefully drilled
into my head. They're phrases designed to get the caller to continue talking, to get them to keep up
a mostly one sided conversation in the hopes that they'll be able to “get it off their chest.”
“My name's Dana.” She had a low, trembling, sad voice. Of course, everyone who calls the
LifeLine is sad, but not all of them have a sad voice. Dana did.
Listener conversation starter #4: “Hi Dana, what's going on tonight?” I asked as I marked
down Dana's name, the date, time and my number. I marked her age as 40 to 50, judging by her
voice.
“Well, I've been painting. I do that when I get nervous or scared.”
I sat back a moment and looked out the window. The LifeLine is located on the 8th floor of a
building in the commercial district, next to a large open square. From the Listener room you could
look over the square. During my usual shift, 3 PM to 7 PM, I could look out on the people, the
living mixing unknowingly with the dead, scurrying on their way home. However, this wasn't my
usual shift. Just two weeks before we'd heard the announcement, that the LifeLine was going to be
operating 24 hours. They'd needed someone to work the first Overnight shift. I'd needed some
extra money. My watch told me it was 11:20. Twenty minutes down, 6 hours, forty minutes to go.
All I could see in the square were the streetlights, and a few sleeping vagrants wrapped in tattered
gray blankets, looking like massive patches of mold growing on the benches.
“Did painting make you feel better?”
“Not really. What I painted... it scares me. As soon as I was done I felt I had to call you, to talk
to you about it. I call here pretty often.” She said. I marked FREQUENT CALLER on my form.
“What did you paint?” I asked, with real curiosity.
“I painted a man. You can only see his back, but you can tell he's young. He's sitting at a desk.
He's hunched over it, holding something against his head. His other arm is hugging himself. He's
almost in the fetal position, except he's in a chair. His hair is messy, his shirt is wrinkled. There's
light coming from something on the desk. All around the man and the desk it's dark. But... it's
weird.”
“What's weird?”
“I didn't do it on purpose, but the black paint, the brush strokes, they look like they're swirling in
on him. It almost looks like the darkness is about to swallow him. It looks like it wants to. The only
thing keeping it away is the light on the desk.”
“I can see why that could scare you.” I said. LifeLine callers always have strong imaginations.
“But that's not the part that really frightened me. The part that scared me was that I didn't mean
for him to be holding anything in his hand. I just wanted him to look brooding. But when I was done,
it was there, I don't even remember making it.”
“What's he holding?”
“A phone handset.”
A small tickle ran up my spine, the first of many that night. Every Listener feels an intimate
connection with their phone. It's our tool, our connection to the dead. It's what allows us to listen to
them, to save them.
At some point in every call, a Listener is supposed to assess a caller's risk. Essentially, that
means finding out how suicidal a caller is. We have a procedure that we always follow:
Step 1: “Dana, are you feeling suicidal?”
“Well, the thought has crossed my mind, yes.”
Step 2: “Have you given any thought to how you'd go about ending your life?”
“I have some sleeping pills my doctor gave me, I'd probably take a lot of those. I think that
would be the most peaceful way.”
Step 3: “Are you planning on killing yourself within the next week?”
“The thing is, I don't really want to do it. I've thought about it, but I just couldn't do that to my
daughter.”
I get my encounter form and make checks next to moderate risk and sleeping pills. If she'd
said yes, step 4 would be to ask if she's currently in the middle of an attempt to take her own life; if
she's already started taking pills or is standing on the ledge of a building. If she answers yes to
that, the next step for the Listener is generally to panic. We call those callers medical emergencies,
or the screaming dead. Those are the worst.
“What other paintings have you made?” I asked, trying to redirect the conversation. She took
the bait and started talking about a painting she did of her daughter, who was off at college, and
never called her poor mother.
Listeners are only supposed to give living callers about 10 minutes, but I gave Dana longer
because I was sure no one else would be calling. After 15 minutes, I had to gently cut her off.
“Dana, I'm sorry but I have to go.” I said.
“Wait, Jack, before you go, there's one more thing about the painting. The one I did tonight.”
She replied.
“What about it?” I asked.
“The light, all the light from the painting, it's coming from the phone.”
“What do you think that means?” I asked, suddenly interested.
“I don't know.” She paused. Then, “Anyway, have a good night.”
“You too.” I said. I hung up the phone. I glanced up at the clock. 15 MIN CALL I marked on
the encounter sheet, and put it in the done pile.
After I'd finished with Dana, my eyes traveled lazily around the Listener room. I was in my
favorite cubicle, the one furthest from the window, which spans an entire wall. I enjoyed the view,
but too close and I get vertigo. The Listener room is a nice little office, but it betrays its purpose by
its overly bright atmosphere. Every cubicle is covered with posters and cut-out comic strips, and
construction-paper mosaics hang from hooks in the ceiling. The wall opposite the window is
entirely covered by a collage of pictures, topped by the caption “WE LOVE OUR LISTENERS.”
All in all, the Listener room looks more like a call-center for child-care than for suicide. It's all to
keep us happy, keep us working with the dead.
Thinking about Dana's painting, I studied my phone, sitting on the desk next to my Stephen
King novel. It was a shiny black, not bright at all. The LifeLine phone is an almost mystical item. I
always thought of each phone as a steam valve for Chicago's sorrow. The city builds up so much
pressure, so much emotional torment, every so often the valve has to go off, so it gives a little
ring, and lets out all the anguish for the entire city into our little room. And so the rest of the city
keeps on working.
I can't stand the city sometimes, what it does to these people, to the callers. Sometimes I think
the dead are the only ones who deserve to live.
I stretched and wished there was someone I could talk to. The office staff had already been
home for a good 5 hours before I even arrived and the Listeners I was replacing, Ashley and
Melissa, only stayed around long enough to tell me that it'd been a quiet evening, and good luck on
the first ever overnight.
Cell phones are not allowed in the Listener room, and the phone doesn't make outgoing calls.
It has all the buttons, but they don't do anything. They technically have the ability to dial other
phones in the office, but of course no one was there. There was a good chance the entire 15 story
building was empty, save for me and an ancient, Hispanic security guard on the first floor. The only
way I had of contacting the outside world was a button that sent a page to the mental health staff,
the Listener for the Listeners. She was there for when the Listener on shift got overwhelmed by a
call and needed someone to talk to. Or as Evan put it, “When the dead are so bad they're rotting,
and the stink starts to get to you.”
I picked up my novel. LifeLine reading should be something entertaining and thoughtless, and
Stephen King fit like a glove. My last living caller rang in about 20 minutes later.
“Chicago LifeLine, how can I help you?” Default Listener greeting.
“Hi there, are you a Listener?” The caller asked.
“Yes I am,” I said, grabbing an encounter form and marking down MALE, 20 to 30. I paused
for a second, and then in the notes section I wrote, in my trademark chicken-scratch, Odd voice...
drunk?
“My name's Jack, would you like to tell me your name?”
“I'd rather not, is that ok?”
“Sure, of course it is.” I said. I scribbled out where I'd written “...drunk?” He didn't sound drunk,
just self-assured. His voice was low, confident and powerful, like the sound of a black luxury car,
confidently navigating a treacherous curve. It seemed unusual, given that most callers' voices had
the sound of a car in the midst of a funeral procession.
I waited for the caller to get started, to tell me what was bothering him, but there was silence
on the other end of the phone, so I prompted him. “So what do you want to talk about?” I asked,
Listener starter #2.
“Well, really I called here for two reasons: boredom and curiosity. I'm calling because I'm
bored with life, and curious about suicide.”
I decided to move into the risk assessment. “Are you feeling suicidal?” I asked.
His voice rumbled. “I didn't say that.” He said.
Be firm, the Listener handbook dictates. “But are you?”
“No. I am not technically suicidal. Low risk, I think you call it. I've thought about it, but it's not
for me.” Some people call so often they know all our routines and vocabulary. I marked down
LOW RISK and FREQUENT CALLER.
He didn't say anything, and for a while I waited. I knew eventually he'd start talking about his
Reason for Calling. Most callers have a specific event that makes them call, whether it's getting
divorced or getting the wrong toppings on their pizza. We don't discriminate, we listen to
everyone's sob story, regardless of the amount of sob involved.
A good Listener will try to visualize the caller, both in features and expression. I'd pictured a
large man, but not fat. The word would be massive. Well-dressed, African descent, goatee, big
bushy eyebrows. I'd pictured a bored expression, phone held casually to the ear, eyes wandering
around whatever room he was in.
“Really, I'm just interested in you.” He said, finally.
“I'd much rather talk about what's going on in your life.” I replied. It was a default response,
and it always sounded hackneyed.
“Yeah I know,” he said, brushing my comment away, “but seriously, what makes a person
want to talk to depressed people all night?”
“A variety of reasons.” I said, trying to be vague.
“Like what?”
“I dunno,” I said, “Compassion, a sense of civic duty, guilt maybe.”
Evan, always eloquent, had explained it better: “We're like them, the dead. You can't help it,
listening to them and trying to understand them for as long as we do. We're in a weird spot,
between where they are and where everyone else is. My Mentor, she called us the Living Dead.
That's why we're so good at helping them go from being dead to being alive, because we're right in
the middle.”
“Hmm...” he said. “And why do you do it?”
“I'm really not supposed to answer personal questions.” I said.
“Yeah, but... do it anyway.”
It was not a voice to be refused. There was power in his tone, authority, and a tiny little
undercurrent of a threat. “Guilt.” I said, and I wondered if I could have stopped myself. In my
defense, I did not elaborate.
“I could see that. It reminds me of a lesson I had in anthropology, years ago. Have you ever
heard of the sin-eaters?” He asked.
It sounded familiar. “I'm not sure, what are they?”
“Well, there's this tribe in South America, in the Amazon rain forest. They're completely cut-off
from the modern world, but they had some contact with Christian missionaries. The last one who
came was a Spanish friar in the early 1800s. He used some science to convince them that he was
sent by god. They listened to his every word when he explained sin and hell to them. He was just
trying to teach them about the sacraments when he died of malaria. So here was this tribe that
knew they were all full of these evil deeds that could send them to eternal torture, and they didn't
know what to do about them.
“Now, the only other thing they sort of learned from the missionary was about communion,
turning bread into the body of Christ and all. I say sort of because they didn't really understand it.
They just knew that by this holy man blessing this food, and their eating it, it would confer the
blessing onto them. Are you following me?”
“Yes.” I was fascinated. Where was he going with this?
“So they thought they could do the same thing, or maybe the opposite thing with sin. When a
very old or very sick person seemed close to death, they would surround his body with a
sumptuous feast and he would, I guess, anti-bless it, conferring the sin onto the food. But the sin
couldn't stay there, it had to be put into a person. So they would send the sin-eater. The sin-eater
was an outcast of the village, sort of a cross between a beggar and a prophet, and he would come
into the dying man's hut and eat all the food, thereby taking on all the dying man's sins so he could
die with a pure soul. The sin-eater would be the keeper of the sins for the entire village, sacrificing
his soul for theirs. Or, from his perspective, for a hot meal.”
“That's very interesting.” I said.
“Do you know why I bring this up?” He asked.
“I have no clue.” I honestly had no clue.
“You people, the Listeners, are modern day sin-eaters. You absorb the pain and suffering of
these poor unfortunates, so they can die with a pure soul.”
“I've never thought of it that why.” I'd honestly never thought of it that way.
“How many callers have you lost?” He asked suddenly, interrupting his previous train of
thought.
“I beg your pardon?” I asked, trying to get re-oriented.
“How many people have you talked to have actually gone through with it, killed themselves?
Would you even know?”
“Well, we never really know for sure, it's not like we ever hear gunshots over the phone...” I
said, wondering why I was telling him so much.
“But...” he prompted.
“... but we all read the newspaper, and if we talked to a girl named Jane last night, and Jane's
name's in the headlines, or if we read a story where all the details are far too familiar, we can fill in
the blanks.”
“And how many Janes have you had?” He asked.
Looking back, I can say now that I obviously shouldn't have answered the question. It's clearly
a personal question, and a question about LifeLine policy, both of which are never to be answered.
At the time, I thought I'd just been too disoriented, and his voice too authoritative. Now, I think I'd
been desperate for someone to ask me, just because I was desperate to answer.
“Two.” I said.
I suppose it was a lie. Really, it was three. I remembered all of them. Cathy, Eliza and Randy
in that order. I remembered their calls, their problems, their emotions, their pain. Their reasons.
Eliza had just broken up with her boyfriend. Randy was disabled, and constantly in pain. As for
Cathy, well, I never really knew why she did it.
I was so wrapped up in the past, I barely registered the click when he hung up.
I don't know how long it was before I checked the clock. 11:55. I felt my eyelids starting to lose
the battle with gravity. Listeners were entitled to a ten minute break per hour, so I decided to take
my next two successively, and take a twenty minute nap. I set the phones to go to our busy
message while I set the alarm on my watch. That done I laid my head down on my arm.
At midnight I woke up to the sound of all the phones ringing at once.
It sounded like a machine screaming for help. A calculated, mechanical, unemotional plea for
rescue. The phones aren't supposed to ring when the busy message is on. I jolted up and nearly
fell out of my chair. My eyes darted wildly, blearily around, trying to find the source of the noise.
Meanwhile the phones kept up their emotionlessly panicked cry.
Once I found the mechanical noisemaker I immediately reached out and picked up the
handset, putting it to my ear. My brain was still mostly asleep but I managed to spout out: “Hello?”
The English language is not well equipped to describe sound. How do you explain a violin to a
deaf person? Loud, soft, low, high, constant, punctuated. These don't convey the essence of a
sound. The only way is to use analogy.
What I heard was, I suppose, a scream. Only not quite, since a scream is an exhalation; it
occurs when terror is expelled forcefully from the lungs through the mouth, scraping the vocal
chords along the way. Also, a scream is a human sound. This was no human sound, and this was
no exhalation. This was the sound of a scream inverted. Where a scream blows, this sucked. I
couldn't explain it, but it sounded like an emotion, like fear translated through the ear to the nerves
and spinal chord without the intermediary of thought.
It was then, half-awake, listening to that not-scream, that a thought occurred to me, one that
would haunt me for the rest of the night. I thought to myself: “If there was ever a place that was
haunted, it would be this room.”
The building that houses the Chicago LifeLine was built in the 1940s. In the 1950s, Lana
Martin started the LifeLine, renting out a small room on the eighth floor of a building in the
commercial district. The hotline employed two full time staff members and two hotline counselors.
Over the next 50 years the LifeLine slowly expanded, eventually renting the entire seventh floor.
More staff was added, and more operators, who eventually came to be called Listeners. The
Listeners always worked out of the same room, the original room Lana Martin had rented in the
beginning.
I have no idea how many people have rung in over the last 60 years. Considering we were the
Chicago area's only suicide hot-line, and were operational 17 hours a day, I'm sure it was a lot. An
untold number. We estimate about 40,000 callers per year at this point. Roughly 200 of those
callers per year will go on to kill themselves. As I hung up the phone, I thought about my last caller
and wondered to myself how many people had ended their lives while connected to this room. I
thought about the steam valve of Chicago, releasing the city's sorrow into the room, letting that
sorrow build up until it became solid.
I noticed I was breathing heavily, gasping even. Get a grip, my rational side demanded. What
do you think there are here, ghosts? Ridiculous. That was just the phones resetting, or something.
But my less rational side was insistent. This room, over the last 60 years, has been connected to
the most wretched, wrenching and soul-wrecking deaths imaginable. Suicide... is there anything
that would make a spirit more agonized?
I pulled my head away from the handset, my arm feeling frozen in place. I forced myself to
calm down. I straightened in my seat slowly, oppressively, as though I was being watched, which I
felt I was. I knew it was my imagination. I found the strength to replace the handset on the cradle. “I
have to get my mind off this.” I said aloud, finding comfort in the noise. “These thoughts mean
nothing,” I told myself. When there's nothing to hear, your mind can create noises without realizing
what it's creating. The sound of a human voice, even if it's just your own, can dispel those phantom
sounds. The next noise I heard was the sound of the phone, ringing in my first dead caller.
I let the phone ring a couple of times while my mind raced. I had a nagging feeling that the
phones should not be ringing. I couldn't put my finger on it, but I felt that something was
fundamentally wrong with the fact that the phone was ringing. One way or another, though, I would
have to answer the phone.
Scared and confused Listener answer #1: “Uh, Chicago LifeLine, can I help you?”
“Hey... I just need someone to talk to.”
If misery loves company, paranoia lusts for it, like a junkie. The relief I felt in hearing from
another human being was, I imagine, akin to what a crack addict feels after a long-awaited fix. I
built my mental image of the caller immediately: male, white, muscular... no, strong. Not
handsome, rather plain looking, and short. Ask a blind person, there's a lot you can tell about a
person from their voice.
“Sure, you can talk to me. My name's Jack, would you like to share your name?” I could feel
my confidence growing as I returned to known territory. Nothing to worry about. This would be a
good call.
“No, I don't think I should. You see, I think I'm going to kill myself tonight.”
Confidence out the window. Once I would have said that there'd be nothing to prepare you for
hearing that, but that's not true. If you spend enough time dreading something, you know what to
do when it happens.
I remember Evan: “The dead are just like the living. Just keep talking to them, find out what
croaked them. Don't try to bring them back to life. You can't.”
“Why do you want to do that?” I asked. My tone was steady.
“There's a lot of reasons really. Some good, some not so good.”
My instinct was to say that there is no good reason to kill yourself, but I stayed silent.
“I guess it started with the accident. I'm disabled now, you know, I can't walk. I was working in
const-” the line crackled “and we were always around heavy machinery. One day a-” crackling
again. It was clear he was talking on a cell phone, and I was afraid I'd lost him when he came back,
“-knocked the other guy out of the way. I don't know if I saved his life, but I ruined mine.”
“How so?” I asked.
“Well I can't walk, and I'm-” the interference was too great, I couldn't hear the last part.
There was a procedure for calls like that. It's very simple, we say: “I'm sorry, I'm having a little
trouble hearing you. Could you repeat that please?”
“I said I'm always in pain!” He was speaking louder, but really no easier to hear. I could tell he
was mad at having to repeat himself. Callers, living or dead, are always paranoid that you're not
paying attention. They never believe that it's just a bad connection.
“That must be hard to deal with.” I said.
“And nothing ever helps! They give me these pills and they don't do anything. I dunno, maybe
I'm just doing this so they'll be good for something.” I pictured him holding the pills as he spoke, a
look of disgust on his face.
I'd forgotten about my encounter form. I grabbed one and marked down what I knew so far,
until I reached the risk level. The options were NO, LOW, MODERATE, HIGH and ACUTE. In a
separate box directly underneath was the option MEDICAL EMERGENCY.
“Do you have the pills with you now?” I asked. I couldn't hear what he said, but his tone was
affirmative. “Have you taken any?”
“A few.” He said, but the defensiveness in his voice said just the opposite. Then I heard a
noise that sent a chill down my spine. It would be a perfectly ordinary noise in any other context.
Living in Chicago, I heard it all the time. But coming through the cell phone of a man I knew was
suicidal and overdosing on painkillers, the blaring call of a car horn is an entirely new sound.
“Are you driving?” I asked.
“Yes I am.” He said, “Driving this specially designed glorified shortbus. The cripple-mobile.”
He was getting angry, but I knew I had to get him off the road.
“I think it might be a good idea if you pull over for a little while.” I said, “At least while you're
talking to me.” I knew what to do, I'd taken calls like that before. In fact...
This time, I didn't get the chill down my spine. I got the creepy, panicky, burning-in-the-back-of-
your-skull feeling. I remembered the news story, more of a blurb really, on channel 7. Pictures of
the accident. “The victim, a 29-year-old former construction worker, now handicapped, apparently
fell asleep at the wheel after overdosing on his prescription pain medication. He is survived by a
wife and a young son.”
I remembered the call. Randy, he said his name was. He was mad. Mad at the world. Mad at
me. Mad at his family. But the call had been different. He'd told me his name. He'd wanted me to
talk him out of it.
My mind was spinning, going a mile a minute. We get plenty of calls from crippled people, I
told myself. And almost 60% of our callers call on their cell phones. It's just sheer coincidence, I
thought. This wasn't the first time I'd had a caller remind me of Randy – in fact, I could think of a
dozen times I'd taken calls like this. But, it sounded like him. And I still had the nagging feeling from
before, that the phone should not have rung at all.
“So what do you think?”
SHIT! The caller had been talking the whole time I was thinking. I had no idea what he was
asking me about. Listener rule #1: Pay attention. All of what we do, our entire purpose, is trying to
make the callers feel important, let them know that we care. If we lose track of a conversation, if
our mind wanders, it makes the callers feel worthless, pointless, boring.
“Do you think I should?” He asked, taking my silence for indecisiveness. This was good. I still
didn't have a clue what he was asking me, but at least it was a question with a definite answer: yes
or no.
“It doesn't matter what I think,” I said, trying to buy myself some time. “It's your decision.” Still
not knowing what I was talking about.
“I just want your goddamn opinion. Should I or not?”
There were so many things he could be asking about. A literally infinite number of possibilities.
I tried to remember what we'd been talking about when my mind had started to wander. I'd asked
him to pull over. Is that what he was talking about? No way to know. I remembered Randy. He'd
asked me if I thought there was ever a time to “do the honorable thing” and spare everyone else
the pain of dealing with someone who's a burden. At the LifeLine, we respect a person's right to
die how they wish, even if we prefer they don't. I wanted to say yes, because it was the truth, I did
believe there was such a time. If I lied, he might be able to tell, might become mad. I hoped I'd still
be able to talk him out of it.
Sometimes, as a Listener, you just have to take the plunge.
“Well, maybe...” I mentally flipped a coin. “You should.”
“I thought so, too.” He said, and then the line was cut off, abruptly.
I was startled when I heard the click. He'd hung up, or we'd been disconnected. The nagging
feeling, the thought that the phone shouldn't have rung, had never left. I felt it stronger than ever as
I sat there, staring at the phone. It felt like a flashing in my mind, just like the flashing light on the
phone. The light that told me the busy message was still on. The light that said there was no way
the last caller should have been able to get through.
After a medical emergency call, we're always supposed to page the mental health worker. Just
to let them know. After I'd turned the busy message off I put the handset down and pressed the call
button. She usually calls back in about 5 minutes. The phone rang almost immediately.
“Chicago LifeLine, how can I help you?” I said, trying to remember what the mental health
worker's name was.
“Hi, yeah, is there someone there I can talk to?” a woman's voice said.
My heart sank. It wasn't her.
“Sure you can talk to me. My name's Jack, would you like to tell me yours?”
“I'd really rather not, is that alright?” A bad sign, the dead are almost always nameless.
“Sure that's fine, what do you want to talk about?”
“Well, I'm just going through a rough time.” Her voice was breaking. “I don't know what to do.”
Then came the tears. “I don't know what to do.”
“It's ok to cry, just let it all out.” I said. I filled out her encounter sheet as she wept. She
sounded young, 16 at the oldest. She had a high, energetic voice, which lent itself well to heart-
wrenching sobs. I made a picture in my head, of a pretty... no, cute girl. I pictured sloppy makeup,
put on inexpertly but enthusiastically, now ruined. Highlights in her hair, lots of cheap jewelry. The
young ones could be the hardest. They always seemed so innocent, so undeserving. Only the
good die young.
“I just don't know what I'm supposed to do? What can I do?” She was asking, through the
tears.
“What's wrong?” Listener starter question #3.
She told me her story. We heard it all the time. In fact, I think it was one of the roleplay
scenarios, done during training. She was a quiet, good girl. Not popular, not particularly interesting.
And then there was the boy. In this case, the soccer player. A whirlwind “romance”. One or two
awkward, exciting nights, then he dumped her flat. She's upset already, but soon our sweet girl
hears all her very personal details running all around the school and she feels she can't stand the
shame.
I heard the story like I hear almost all LifeLine stories, almost without interruption, the caller on
or beyond the edge of tears, my only input being, “Mmm.” “Huh.” “Hmm.” and the like. Going
through the old routine.
“I hate it. It's awful. What am I supposed to do?” she wailed.
“What am I supposed to do?” is the most dreaded phrase in the Listener lexicon. We never
give advice. That's Listener rule #5. Instead, we were supposed to say advice response #1: “I'm
sorry, I can't answer that for you.” I chose a different path.
“What am I supposed to do?” She asked again.
I diverted the question, skipping ahead to the risk assessment.
“Yes I'm feeling suicidal, why do you think I'm calling?
“I guess I'd probably use pills. Whatever we have in the medicine cabinet. I'm not picky.
“The sooner the better, I guess. I don't want to live anymore. I can't take the embarrassment. I
mean, what can I do? He was my baby cakes.”
Baby cakes. That's not a phrase a Listener hears very often. Nonetheless, I got an insane
sense of deja vu.
“ELIZA LAWTON, HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT PRONOUNCED DEAD IN HOSPITAL
AFTER SUICIDE ATTEMPT.” It was in the local section. It probably wouldn't even be in there if
it'd been a boy, or if she'd been ugly. The article told about how she was found in her room. One
hand had an empty bottle of pills. The other was empty. The phone handset was neatly in the
cradle, after being hung up violently, angrily. That detail wasn't in the paper.
She'd talked about her “baby cakes”, and she'd asked the same question. What could she do?
“I'm sorry” I'd said, “I can't answer that for you.” The default Listener response, and she'd hung up
on me. I tried not to blame myself, I blamed the LifeLine. They'd told me what to say, gave me the
script, it was their fault it didn't work. It was no use, I felt responsible. I swore never to say that
response again.
Suddenly, I grew angry at the caller for bringing up these painful memories. What did she
expect me to do, solve all her problems for her? I don't even know her. What was I supposed to
do? Before I could think of something to say, I heard myself answering.
“I'm sorry,” I began, “But I can't answer that for you.” My voice said. I was stunned. I tried,
crazily, to look down at my mouth. How could it betray me like this? What had made me say that?
“You can't answer that for me?” she repeated. I heard the devastation in her voice, as though
I'd let her down.
“I'm sorry.” I heard myself saying again. My sense of deja vu grew stronger. I tried to
continue, to explain, but found I couldn't.
“No you're not.” She said. There was no trace of the tears in her voice anymore. No, now
there was a chilling blankness. “You don't care about me.”
“Of course I do, I'm sorry you have to be going through this.” A phrase I'd used so many
times it'd become automatic, so much so that I couldn't tell whether or not I said it voluntarily.
“No you're not. You're just repeating what you've been told to say.”
“I don't know what you want me to tell you.” The words dribbled out of my mouth, like
gibberish from a madman.
“I just want you to care!” she said, and I didn't know if I heard it or remembered.
I felt like I was trapped in a memory. What are you doing to me? I wanted to ask, but all I
heard coming out were the Listener responses: “Of course I care. That's why I'm here, to listen to
you.”
I knew her response before it even came. “Why do you even do this? Did you ever care?”
“Of course I care about you.” I said, as it was written.
“Whatever.”
Redirect the conversation, the handbook and my training would command. My mind screamed
out against what I knew was to come but my voice came out strong and confident. My tone,
always my greatest strength as a Listener, was calm and soothing. “Are you sure you don't want to
tell me your name?” I asked, Listener redirection #13.
“Eliza Lawton!” She shouted, and I heard the sound of a phone slamming.
Objectively, the room was well-lit and spacious. That didn't keep it from feeling like a dark
closet, and getting smaller and darker with each breath. My mind flashed to Dana's painting. I could
almost feel the darkness threatening to engulf me. Listener training had involved a class devoted to
teaching us how to manage panic. Breathe. Focus. Keep things simple. Deep breaths.
I looked down at the phone, my mystical conduit to the dead of the city. “That didn't just
happen.” I thought to myself. “It couldn't.” I pressed the home leader call button again. “I'm tired.
It's...” I looked at the clock. “late, my mind's playing tricks on me.” This time, I didn't dare say it out
loud. I felt as though something was searching for me, and any noise, any movement, and it would
swoop down and take me away.
I stayed very still for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably more like 10 minutes. I
imagined myself remaining like that forever, like a statue. A monument to my failure as a Listener. I
don't know how long I stayed there before my full bladder made movement a necessity.
I stood up slowly, deliberately, as though I had a full audience judging my every move, and
walked stiffly down the hall to the bathroom. I walked carefully, smoothly, feeling that with each
stride I was putting some terrible, unknowable menace behind. Before long I was at the bathroom. I
tried the door. It was locked. I started to march over to the elevators. The bell rang, announcing the
elevator's arrival, and I marveled at the way the noise was still able to echo throughout the
deserted office, how it wasn't swallowed up by the darkness.
The security guard looked up as I exited the elevator. It wasn't the ancient Hispanic man I'd
expected, but an even older man, who seemed to be of American Indian descent. He was a large
man with a puffy, wrinkled face and short, white hair in a crew cut. I imagined that he would give
any intruders little trouble, apart from possibly setting off a silent alarm.
“Hey kid, what's up?” he asked, sitting back in his chair. He seemed like he'd been expecting
somebody.
“Gotta pee.” I said as I passed him, keeping it simple and honest. He giggled and motioned
me to the doors in the corner of the lobby.
The relief I'd felt upon seeing another human being couldn't possibly compare the the relief I
found in the bathroom. I felt like moaning, or cheering.
My euphoria collapsed as I was washing my hands. What had just happened? It didn't make
any sense. I couldn't have talked to Eliza and, let's face it, Randy. I hadn't told anyone about them,
it was against our confidentiality policy. So who could know? I wracked my brains as I walked back
into the lobby.
“Feel better?” The security guard asked, interrupting my train of thought.
“Hi, I'm-” I began.
“I know who you are.” he said.
“You do?” I asked, my heart picking up speed.
“Yeah, you're the Listener who's working the overnight shift. You're the only one who'd be here
this time of night other than me.”
“Oh, right.” I said, as my heart rate slowed.
“What's wrong, kid? Getting the spooks up there?” He asked, a small chuckle in his voice.
“No, there was...” what do I say? I realize how crazy anything I said would sound. “Something
wrong with the phones.” I finished lamely. I should have just said yes, I thought.
The security guard smiled, seeming to read my mind. “Naw, now, you got nothing to be
ashamed of. You're up there, all alone, talking to suicidal people in the dead of night. That'd drive
most people nuts.”
“Yeah, I guess.”
“Why don't you sit down here with me for a little bit, get your nerves back. Take a breather.”
He gestured at a chair next to his desk.
“Alright.” I said, as I sat upon it.
“Boy, I bet the folks're wild tonight, too, huh?” He said, turning in his chair so he faced me,
leaning back.
“What makes you say that?”
“Full moon.” He said. “Brings all the crazies out.” He chuckled.
“Maybe,” I said. “I always say it depends on how the Sox do.”
“Well, today's a special day for the Wampanoag. My people don't really have holidays, but my
grandfather told me that in the old days, at the end of summer, there'd be a huge celebration. We'd
pay homage to the spirits of those who'd– but no, you don't want an anthropology lesson.”
“No, please go on.” I said, feeling a by now familiar tickle run down my spine. “It wouldn't be
my first for today.”
“Well, it would be a celebration for the spirits of those who'd died in the tribe. Those who died
naturally would come celebrate with us. Those who'd been killed by others would come and seek
revenge, hopefully against another tribe.”
I was leaning forward. “What about those who had killed themselves?” I asked.
He laughed. “Is that all you guys think about? There weren't very many of those among my
people. Not many among any people, really. I guess I don't know what they would do.”
I sat back. “That makes sense.” I realized that was a default Listener response.
“I can tell you what I think.” he said, folding his arms across his chest.
“Please do.”
“I don't think there's any kind of death more tragic, more painful, more destructive to the soul
that suicide. I can't imagine any human action that leaves more of itself behind to linger. And I can't
imagine any fate worse than to have to live their final moments over, again and again, endlessly.
And that's what I think happens to those souls.
“Can you imagine what it would feel like, to reach the lowest point, to think there can't possibly
be anything worse than what you're feeling and to try to end it. But then you find out that you
haven't escaped, you're trapped where you were, eternally, saddled with the greatest amount of
sorrow a human can experience. Literally more than you could stand.”
I thought of my Three. The Listeners never talked about the callers we lost. We didn't have any
names for them, any designations. We weren't even supposed to know about them, but I think we
all did. Only a few of us had them, and I think I had the most.
I thought about Eliza, the poor high school girl, feeling her humiliation, her anger, her sorrow
over and over again. I thought of her taking her mother's painkillers, and finding the sorrow didn't
go away.
I thought about Randy, succumbing to the pain and the frustration, the rage he felt against the
world, driving his car off the highway overpass, screaming on the way down, screaming forever.
And I thought about Cathy.
“I don't think I can do this anymore.” I said, putting my face in my hands and resting my
elbows on my knees.
“Oh, now I've gone and freaked him out.” The security guard said. I heard his chair groan as
he leaned forward. “Come on, kiddo, cheer up. Hey, look at me.” I did. His gaze was piercing.
“Son, I can't think of a single human vocation that is more meaningful than yours. These are the
most miserable people in all the world, and most of the time you're the only one who can help
them. You're the one they turn to for comfort, and you can provide that comfort. You're there for
them, and I think that's the most significant thing in the world.”
“But it's so hard.” I said.
“What's hard? All you have to do is to talk to them and to care. It's no more than the simple,
human thing to do, and it means the world to them. It doesn't matter what you say or do, simply by
your presence and your depth of feeling, you're helping them.”
“But what if I fail?”
“The only way you can fail is by not caring.”
Like I said, silence is a powerful tool for a Listener. It gives the caller a moment to reflect, to
feel. A good Listener uses that moment to try to guess what will come next. I didn't think so then,
but I am a great Listener. I may be the best. The security guard didn't say a thing until I said “Thank
you.”
I took the elevator back up to the LifeLine office. The phone rang almost as soon as I sat back
down in my chair. I picked up the handset.
“Lifeline.” I said, not any one of the default Listener greetings.
“Hi Jack.” She said
“Hi Cathy.” I replied.
On the first of my group training sessions, we all went around the table and told why we were
there, why we'd wanted to be Listeners.
“It's just a worthy cause, and I want to help out.”
“I'm a psychology student; I'm studying depression.”
When it came to me, I wasn't sure what to say. I couldn't tell them the whole truth. I told them
part of it. “Because I want to know what to do if I ever get a call from a friend who's suicidal.” In
my head, I added, “...again.”
It's funny, the things I remember. I remember my cell phone was set to vibrate, and I was
sitting so it was pressed against my hip. I remember that it tickled when it rang. I don't remember
where I was or what I was doing, but I remember the tickle.
“Hello?”
“Hi, umm, Jack... It's Cathy.”
“Oh hey, Cathy, what's up?”
“Look Jack, I'm just calling because I wanted to say I'm sorry.”
“Sorry for what?”
“You've been such a good friend, and our friendship means so much to me, I'm sorry to do
this to you. I'm sorry to you and I'm sorry to them.” She was crying.
Statistically, the most popular reason for committing suicide is guilt. Of course, I didn't know
that then.
At this point I had started to get worried. I remember wondering what she was talking about. I
remember the terrible, hot feeling I got in the back of my head. “Hey, it's ok.” I said, more to
myself than to her.
“I can't deal with it anymore.” She said, “I feel like I'll do anything to end it.”
I remember casting about for things to say, like a drowning man clutching at shreds of
driftwood. “Where are you? Can we talk about this?”
“I'm on the corner of Forsythe and Huntington.” She said.
I remember running down the streets of Chicago. I wasn't a runner, not even close, but I was
burning those streets up. I remember people shouting, car horns honking. I remember Cathy crying
on the phone.
“Everything's going to be fine.” I'd said, “Sometimes we feel like this, but things'll get better.” I
was saying anything, saying things just to be heard. Verbal diarrhea. Evan once told me, “The
dead don't want to be talked to, they want to be heard.” I wish I'd known that then.
I reached the corner of Huntington and Forsythe. There was an apartment building, probably
15 stories. “I'm here, kid. Where are you?” I said.
“I'm glad.” She said. “I want you to be here for this. I'm sorry.”
I remember two sounds, coming from two different ears. The ear pressed to my phone heard
a buzz, the other ear heard the sound of a scream. I remember a lady pointing up. I remember my
eyes following her finger. I remember a soft, wet, indelicate thud. I remember brakes squealing,
people shouting. I remember the sight of a cellphone, neatly broken along the middle, a few stray
wires connecting the bottom to the top, lying on the sidewalk next to an outstretched hand. I
remember purple nail polish.
It was roughly five years later, and I found I still didn't know what to say. Fortunately, she did.
“I'm so sorry, Jack.” She said. I looked around the well-lit room, reminding myself that I was still
there, not back in school, not dashing madly down Huntington Street.
“Oh God, Cathy, why'd you do it?” I'd found my voice. “What happened?”
“Does that really matter now?” Her voice was like I remembered it, except her happy
exuberance had been replaced by soul-crushing regret.
“Of course it matters.” I said, “Do you know what this did to me, how much it's haunted me?”
“I can imagine.” She said quietly.
“Then what made you do it?” I asked her.
“Nothing made me do it. I wanted to do it. I knew what I was doing. I knew all the way down. It
was my choice.”
I knew she was avoiding answering. The Listener handbook tells us that if a caller doesn't want
to answer a question, don't press them. It could upset them.
“How... where are you calling me from?”
“I can't tell you that. I'm pretty sure you wouldn't understand anyway.”
“How is it there? Are you...” happy? Content? At peace? Burning in eternal flames? “Ok?”
“No,” she said, “Not really. Some people are, here, but I'm not.”
“I'm sorry.” I said. I felt like I wanted to say so much more. “I... miss you.”
“I miss you too. I miss everyone.” She said.
I looked over at the wall by the door. WE LOVE OUR LISTENERS, it reminded me. Glossy
Polaroid pictures of all the LifeLine operators covered the remainder of the wall. I gazed at the
poster, and Cathy's round face, her hazel eyes, her smirking smile gazed back at me. CATHY, it
said below her picture. LISTENER NUMBER 2501.
I found I was back where I was five years ago, answering a call from a dear friend in distress,
without a clue what to say. “I'm sorry,” I said again, then, “Oh kid, I'm sorry I couldn't have gotten
to you. I'm sorry I didn't know what to say. I'm sorry I let you down.” I was hunched over in my
seat, my free hand was wrapped around my body. My hair was a mess, my shirt was wrinkled, I
was practically in the fetal position in my chair. Part of me realized I looked just like the man from
Dana's painting.
“You didn't let me down. Nothing you could say or do was going to save me. All you did was
provide some comfort at the end.”
“I could have-” I began.
“And that was enough.” She interrupted. “That was all I wanted. That was all you could do.
That is all we, as Listeners, are supposed to do. And you do it well.”
“Not well enough.” I said bitterly. “You weren't the only one. There were two others.”
“Those weren't your fault. They didn't want to be saved, they wanted to be heard, to be
remembered.” She paused. I didn't say anything, so she continued. “Do you know how many
callers I lost?” She asked. She didn't wait for my response. “Two. One for both years I worked
there.”
“How did you deal with it?” I asked.
“I didn't.” She said, then paused, significantly.
“Is that why...” I began, then trailed off. I couldn't bring myself to say it.
“Yes,” She said. “Mostly.”
This year, guilt will kill more Americans than SARS, avian flu, and domestic terrorist attacks
put together.
“I couldn't take the thought that those people had depended on me and I'd failed them. I kept
thinking that there was more I could have done. But I was wrong, just like you're wrong now.”
“How am I wrong?” I asked.
“Let me ask you, Jack. Are you feeling suicidal?”
“You know I'd be lying if I said it hadn't crossed my mind. It's all around us here, how can we
help it?”
“How would you do it?” She asked.
“Same way you did.” I retorted.
“Then when? When would you do it?”
“I dunno. Probably another caller in the headlines and I'd just snap.”
I could hear Cathy's sad smile in her tone. “There you go, Jack. You're one of the dead,
yourself. You think you let me die. Well, I killed you.”
“This isn't your fault.” I was getting angry.
“You didn't let those two callers down and you didn't let me down.”
“Why are you calling me? What do you want?” I shouted into the phone.
I noticed that the lights seemed dimmer. The room felt cold. I remember how sympathetic the
older Listeners had been on my first shift. I remember Evan pointing out Cathy's favorite cubicle,
right next to the window. With the view all the way down. “You know,” he'd said, “She showed me
how to talk to the dead. I think she might have coined the phrase.” I imagined she was there, talking
to me from only a few feet away. I didn't dare look to see.
“Jack, for five years I've been tortured by guilt and regret. Only, it hasn't been the guilt that I
thought it would be. I realize now that I did the right thing with my two callers. I did the best thing for
them, with them. My one regret is that I knew what this would do to you, and I still did it.
“I've done an awful thing. I forced you into this work. No one should be made to do what you
do, what I used to do. You can't try to save everybody who calls. You have to be content with
helping them.”
“Do you want me to forgive you?” I asked. “I already have.”
“I want you to forgive yourself.”
I took a deep breath. What could I say? There was no default Listener response. There was
only myself to answer. “I'll try.” I said. I hoped I meant it, which I guess was a start.
“Thank you.” She said, and exhaled loudly. “I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to go.” I almost
laughed. It was Listener Ending Statement #3.
I don't know what I was expecting. Maybe I was hoping she'd appear, maybe I'd have a vision.
Maybe she'd tell me she'd always loved me. But all I heard was a click.
And then the line went dead.
I had a forehead-shaped dent in my arm when the sound of the phone ringing woke me up
almost an hour later. I probably had a matching arm-shaped dent in my forehead. The calls had
stopped, I remembered. Of course, no one knew we had gone 24 hours.
I felt the wetness under my eyes, and I realized I'd been crying. Somewhere between hanging
up the phone and falling asleep, I guess. Had I been dreaming? Surely not. I remembered it. It was
clear in my head. There was no way it had been a dream. But then again, the alternative was that
I'd spent the last hour talking to the dead, the dead dead. Ridiculous? I guess it was. I found myself
questioning how well I remembered it, how real it had felt. Maybe it was all a product of sleep
deprivation, depression and an appropriate setting.
I realized the phone was still ringing. “Chicago LifeLine, how can I help you?” I said, the words
feeling strange in my mouth.
“Hey, Jack, it's Katie.”
The mental health worker- I'd paged her! I'd pressed the call button after the first caller... after
Randy. My mind reeled; it had really happened!
“Oh Katie, you got my page.”
“No,” he said, and my mind stopped reeling so fast it got whiplash. “I'm just calling to see how
things are going. Did you try to page me?”
I wasn't sure what to say. “I... think so.”
“Hmm, we'll have to check that out. Everything cool there?”
“Cool” was so far from my mindset that I simply couldn't handle it. My head, seemingly of its
own accord, nodded. When I realized that the gesture didn't translate well through the phone I gave
a neutral grunt.
“Great. Anyway, enjoy the rest of your night.” She said, and hung up.
I carefully replaced the handset and looked around the room. It looked like any room in any
office that had been decorated by kindergarteners. The phone didn't glow with a malevolent red
light, the lights didn't flicker menacingly. I looked over at Cathy's picture on the wall. Still there. Still
happy. Had it happened at all?
Maybe I'll never know, I thought, until I looked over at my finished encounter sheets. All five of
them.
That doesn't even make sense, I told myself. I knew I had two callers, and then I supposed I
had the three dead ones, but I never made a sheet when Cathy called, why would I?
I picked up the top sheet. MALE, it said, 20 to 30 YEARS OLD. DEPRESSION,
CONFUSION and FEAR were checked off for emotions. JOB STRESS and GUILT were marked
for the reasons of the call. I didn't remember getting any calls like that all night. My eyes stopped at
the box for the Listener number. They stayed focused on that box for what seemed like hours, not
blinking, slowly drying out, pausing only for one moment to glance at the poster on the wall. 2501.
The number in the box matched the number under Cathy's picture. My eyes followed the sheet
down to the notes section of the form.
It said, simply, “Thank you. Love, The Dead.”
| Ringing in the Dead |
| October 2009 |
| Fiction |
| Copyright 2009 by Sean Brennan Hallinan |
Editor's Note: This story is one of the very best ghost stories I have ever
read. It is with great pleasure that we offer it among our humble pages
for your enjoyment.
read. It is with great pleasure that we offer it among our humble pages
for your enjoyment.