The Eustachian Tubes

Posted on November 26, 2008 in Prose Arcana Suicide

Do not for a minute think that this is factual or autobiographical.

I was the guy people went to talk to when they were sad. They’d go on for a few hours, letting me take it all in. Then, when they were feeling better, they would leave me and never talk to me again. No one ever came back to tell me how much they had helped me. One friend who did this told me that it was because I was “a giver”. And I gave and gave until one day my ears had had enough.

I had a neighbor who was obese from lying on the couch and eating Cheetos. Our comradery never faded because he had no other friends and he was always depressed. If I met him outside my door, he would tell me of his woes, how nobody liked him at his job and there was no use going out because people thought he was too fat. After a while, I began to see him as a parasite.

I was sitting alone and lonely in my studio apartment when the neighbor’s stereo which was always blasting heavy metal stopped for no reason. There was a knock on my door. This was no cup of sugar call: he wanted to talk to me because he was blue.

The knocking persisted for a minute or so. Then I heard the door to his place close. He would be all right in the morning. Except he wasn’t. The smell of gas wafted from the cracks. Firemen came, battered down the door with a ram that looked like a gray fireplug, and found him laying on the couch, his snacks scattered on the floor. They crunched about until the coroner’s men could come and take him away.

Police asked me if I had heard anything. I denied it. Over the next few days, however, the suspicions of my neighbors grew. Some had heard him knocking at my door. I knew that they had hoped that I would take care of the problem, see that he understood that the grave affairs that had brought him to me were just the struggles of the night and that if he persisted in living, he would make it to the next day. I had let them down by not doing the dirty work. When I met them at the mailboxes, they shrank from me. The mail would pass quickly into their hands, they would stop to stare for just a second, and then scurry to their little boxes.

They had never spoken to me in the first place except when they were depressed, but in this case they thought me evil, negligent. For days I suffered this treatment. My helloes would be met with silence and violently passive stares.

So locked into the prison of their custom, I decided, in anger, that I would show them the weight of their cruelty by killing myself. My method was novel. I rented an oxygen tank. My plan was to explode my lungs. Using surgical tape, I taped my nostrils shut, then shoved the hose into my mouth. I secured the hose with more tape, covered the open corners of my mouth, and turned the valve. The air pumped into my gut and my lungs. But I had not reckoned on my eustachian tubes which carried the gas into my ears and exploded my typana. The police came when the neighbors heard me screaming and screaming. I ended up at the hospital writing and signing my needs to the behavioral health staff. I could not hear for weeks.