Suicidologist in Need of a #2 Pencil
"A wickedly provocative attempt at diving into the mind of a psychologist." -- Maya Rose, Reviewer for The Literary Review of Journal for Mindfulness People."
“According to the Delta app, we board in an hour,” Rosalie says to her Aunt Mary, flashing her iPhone, then says looking at her phone, “And according to the meal reminders app, I’m starving. Let’s get after the free food in the sky lounge.”
Shoulder to shoulder, Rosalie and Mary stroll matching spinner carry-ons through the rush-hour terminal traversing oncoming foot traffickers. Rosalie’s stomach cramp speeds her ahead as Mary’s hunger to read people suppresses her pace.
- Well-manicured silver-haired businessman in three-piece = cheater.
- Middle-aged empty nester white lady = about to enter the sexual revolution.
- Expressionless Asian couple with two waist-high kids on leashes = divorce only way out.
- A black and white holding hands = brave and untouchable.
- A white man using a walker, wearing a US Army Veteran baseball hat = dying to be put out of his misery.
Mary’s stereotyping pulsation shoots up her arm. Glorious fulfillment lurks. She stops the Veteran with a gentle touch on his shoulder, smiles, and says, “Thank you for your service.”
His weathered face–crevices, craters, wrinkles, bulbous nose, and blackheads telegraph a battled-tested life. His eyes tell Mary, put me out of misery.
“Aunt Mary, please not another therapy session on the go--I need to eat when the app tells me to.”
“Can I help you find your way?” Mary asks, coming in closer to the Veteran.
“I know my way,” he says, taking a step back.
“Would you like company?” Mary asks leaning in.
“I’m fine.”
“Are you?” She asks, placing her hand on his forearm.
“Am I what?”
“Fine?”
“Ma’am, I have a plane to catch.” He tries to take his arm back. She grips it.
“Let him go, Aunt Mary.” She doesn’t. Rosalie intervenes, giving the Veteran his arm back. “Sir, thank you for your service and safe travels.”
The Army Veteran takes off at a tortoise’s pace.
Standing at the mouth of the Delta Sky Lounge entrance, Mary guesses thirty-nine seats, mostly benches lining the wall with narrow tables and single chairs. It’s one-third empty. The welcome desk is breast-high where four heads, two male and two female, check in guests; a family of five, two business types, and a flight attendant likely deadheading who slides through with a wink by a female head.
Mary and Rosalie step up. The name badge says, Brenda. Mary shows her Delta Sky Miles plastic card. Rosalie tells her to get the app. Brenda clanks on the keyboard, and Mary waits for the computer to dictate Brenda’s demeanor. Brenda forces a smile. On the cusp of reaching Platinum Medallion status, Brenda greets Mary with an additional how’s your day going so far? If Mary were Platinum, there would have been a drawn-out forced conversation about travel plans. Mary asks for a #2 pencil. Brenda offers a pen. Mary asks again. Brenda’s expression is confusion, part disbelief—the clinched eyebrows, slightly tilted head. Brenda looks at her desk in the drawers and invites the other three. There are no #2 pencils.
“I need a #2 pencil,” Mary says. “It’s urgent.”
“I’ll meet you at the table, Aunt Mary,” Rosalie says and walks into the lounge.
“I’m sure one of the guests has a pencil,” Brenda says.
The bar beyond the entrance is occupied by eight lost in their laptops, tablet, or dumb phones as Mary coined. None are worth a read, and there are no dead giveaways for a Veteran. The miffed bartender’s hair is cherry red on the right and jet black on the left. Mary asks checker-head for a #2 pencil.
“They still make those?” she replies.
“They still make those.”
“What’s the point in using a pencil?”
“Crossword puzzles,” Mary says, cocking her head left.
“Use a pen, be decisive.”
“I need a # 2 pencil and a Bloody Mary with extra tabasco,” Mary says, wetting her lips.
“I’ll get your drink. I’m sure one of the guests has a pencil.”
While the bartender makes the Blood Mary, Mary scans the adjacent seating area. Her rising anxiety accelerates the counting. Eighty-two, a mix of two top and four-top tables and benches. It’s half-empty. No one is holding a pencil. She needs a pencil. She needs a crossword puzzle. She needs to calm the fuck down. Otherwise, she’ll kill someone.
Checkerhead delivers the Bloody Mary. Mary drops a ten, takes the drink, and is on the prowl, and every passing hand is preoccupied with a phone or keyboard. Rosalie is one of them, but she’s blood and adhering to her meal app at a two-top near the floor-to-ceiling window with a view of the concourse below.
Mary passes the buffet. The salad bar is impoverished. The macaroni noodles float in orange nuclear waste. Mary takes two oversized heat-lamped chocolate chip cookies and will exercise delayed gratification until she has a #2 pencil.
The seating area must have a closet penciler; nerdish, pre-adolescent (pre-smartphone/tablet), an elderly white male, a middle-aged woman working sudoku, or a crossword puzzle junkie—one of her own. Nothing but laptops, tablets, smartphones, pens, and the worst device ever invented: a stylus pencil.
Mary sits across from Rosalie and wipes her palms on the napkin, turning them into wet golf balls. She takes out last Sunday’s New York Times completed crossword puzzle from her sling bag to soothe, but it only upsets her. Her feet tap. She clenches and unclenches her fists, tightens her quad muscles, and releases the same for her glutes—the progressive muscle relaxation techniques she’s used on hundreds of her Veterans clients aren’t working. She focuses on her breath mindfully. Doesn’t work. She self-talks for a minute. These are only passing symptoms; do not judge them. She repeats in the hopes of avoiding a panic attack. A pencil and a crossword puzzle are the only stop-gap.
“My number one?” Rosalie rhetorically asks Mary as she scrolls through an app on her phone. “NYU,” she says as she looks up.
“Thank you for making eye contact. Your father would be proud.” Mary takes a long sip from her drink.
“Fordham is too gothic, St. Johns, Seton Hall, Rutgers too far from the city. But what’s bothering me is why to take on debt for college when I don’t know what I want to be?”
“College is the process of elimination.”
“Waste of money; how’d you forget your pencil at the hotel?”
“You were rushing me.”
“I’m just not sure college is worth it.”
“When I went to college — “
Rosalie cuts her off, “— there was no internet, no mobile phones, just the library card catalog to learn about the world.”
“Sometimes it took one class or one professor, sometimes a bunch, but I went to NYU to become a political science/pre-law major but took psychopathology as an elective and fell in love.”
“With your professor.”
“She opened my heart to public service.” Mary takes a long gulp from her drink.
“You went into public service because your dad killed himself.”
“One led to the other, yes.”
Mary’s feet were numb from tapping, and it was time to move. Brenda waves at Mary on approach and says, “I asked everyone in the front sitting area. I’m happy to help you find one in the north section, but a few people gave me a dirty look and asked, why do you need a pencil?”
“To jab someone’s eye out,” Mary says.
“I didn’t expect that type of humor to come out of someone who looks like a middle-aged schoolteacher.”
“I didn’t expect that stereotypical comment to come from someone who looks like a former beauty pageant winner.”
“Miss Kentucky 1978,” Brenda says.
“Crosswords helps my Aunt’s severe anxiety,” Rosalie says.
“Take an Ativan,” Brenda says. “Helped me a lot when I flew.”
“Flight attendant on benzos,” Mary says. “That helps my anxiety.”
“Flying can be nerve-wracking,” Brenda says.
“I need a pencil; I’m afraid I’ll hurt someone.”
“You weren’t joking about poking an eye out. Let’s go hunting.”
“Our flight boards in thirty,” Rosalie says.
Mary devours the heater lamp cookies, finishes her drink, and follows Brenda traversing through the seating area, asking each person if they have a pencil — each gazed response from trances on screens, either said no or shook their head no, or the one common thread of bewilderment as if to say, a pencil?
As Brenda keeps going, Mary reads people honing for a Veteran, emoting hopelessness. She can’t help herself: nothing but sad, detached, lifeless people.
Brenda stops at the bar and tells Mary she needs to check in at check-in to see if the others need help checking in.
Checkheard says, “They’re on the brink of extinction, especially in airport lounges. Look around; nothing but gadgets. I’ve been here eight years; no one has ever asked for a pencil until you. I saw a pencil in 2016 or 2017 when a little kid was working on his homework. A simple pen won’t do?”
“It must be a number two pencil.”
“Oh, I see – you can erase easier.”
“So, I can poke easier. I like a sharp number two.”
“I like your sense of humor — very dry, almost satirical.”
“Can I have a shot of Tito’s?”
Checkerhead delivers and then asks, “What do you do for a living?”
Mary takes the shot and says, “I’m a retired lifeguard at the sea of despair.”
“You are funny. Were you a psychiatrist?”
“I was a forensic psychologist and specialized in criminal responsibility or the insanity defense, and then for the last thirteen years of my career, I specialized in suicide and considered myself a Suicidologist.”
“I don’t get the lifeguard reference.”
“I helped people escape tough situations, the undertows in their life. The lifeguard reference is from a New Yorker cartoon.”
“You’re not funny.”
“What’s your name?”
“Josie.”
“Josie, I need a pencil before I have a panic attack. Crossword puzzles are the only intervention to calm me. I’m not feeling well and need a pencil right now.”
“Tito’s doesn’t help?”
“Makes it worse.”
A minute later, Mary and Josie stop at the bathroom in the hall in between the seating area where Rosalie sits and the northern section. Mary guesses a hundred occupancy, and it’s half-empty, not including the gated children’s pen that quarantines germ-infested gerbils. The six seats facing the pen are like the reclining bougie movie theater seats she and Rosalie sat in when they caught the latest Coen Brothers movie, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, at Cinepolis in Chelsea last night. The chairs face the pen, allowing parents, nannies, babysitters, or trophy wives to monitor and maintain the little one’s model behavior. There is a separator between the bougie lazies to cut off neighborly socialization and allow the adult to lose themselves in a screen, and Mary’s hypothesis is spot on.
Mary, on the brink of panic, watches Josie bob and weave, asking each sitter in the northern section if they have a #2, each eliciting a nod no without eye contact, which would jeopardize an interruption of their fixation on the smartphone, tablet, laptop which they can’t hear sucking the life out of them.
Mary sees three exits, not including the entrance: one next to the bathroom, the others in the north seating area, and scans for a Veteran. She can’t resist the hunger to find a Veteran without a pencil or a crossword to lose herself.
Josie goes to Mary, who’s finished her scan, and without a clear penciler, Mary begins hyperventilating and says, “I’m not feeling good.”
A hunched older man sits down by himself and looks at a newspaper, lost among the others. Mary focuses on his camouflage baseball hat.
“Did you ask him?” Mary points.
“Yeah, he’s crotchety. No pencil.”
“I need a pencil.”
Josie missed the children’s playpen. She’s off, and so is Mary — two hunters on two missions, both in a race against the clock.
Mary stands in front of the hunched man. His US Army Veteran camouflage baseball hat is a winner.
Mary says, “Thank you for your service, sir.” He looks at her with bloodshot eyes, raccoon circles, and puffy cheeks. Mary mumbles about steroids secondary to liver disease, chronic alcoholism, and major depressive disorder. He says nothing. “Are you okay, sir?”
“Would you be if you were me?”
“Can I bring you something?”
“A new life,” he tries to joke. “I’m fine. What do you want?”
“A number two pencil.”
“You’re the second person that’s asked me. I told her no, and I’ll tell you the same.”
“Did you look in your duffle?”
“What’s the point? I said no.”
“It would mean a lot to me.”
He looks in his small, tattered duffle bag and, without looking up, says no and goes back to his newspaper, the sports section. He shows an interest in something outside himself—social connectedness, a suicide protective factor.
“What was your unit?”
“I don’t have a pencil—if you could leave me alone to my paper.”
“Which team do you follow?”
“You stalking me?”
“You look like a baseball guy.”
“Mariners.”
“You live in the great Pacific Northwest.”
“I was in the 41st Infantry Brigade Combat,” he says.
“Affectionally is known as Sunset. In ’68, redesignated as the 41st Separate Infantry Brigade, mostly from the Oregon Army National Guard.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You live in Portland?”
“Hell no, downstate near Klamath Falls.”
“You wish you were dead?”
He folds his newspaper and says, “What do you want?”
“I want to help you,” she says and sits in the next chair.
“With what?”
“Have you had thoughts of killing yourself?”
“Yup.”
“How would you do it?”
“Gun.”
“A self-inflicted gunshot is the number one cause of completed suicide in men between forty-five and sixty-four years of age. Seventeen veterans die by suicide each day. 68% die from a gunshot, and 90% of all suicidal acts with a firearm result in death.”
“You’re quite a statistician. I guess I’m on the right path.”
Mary feels calmed and whispers, “You’ll kill yourself with a gun?”
“I own several.”
“Of course, you do, and you’ll use the special one.”
“Luger 09.”
“You were in the Agency?”
“Yup.”
“It’s interesting that you’d use a CIA-issued firearm over your Army-issued firearm.”
“It’s a long story.” The Veteran tears. “My wife would kill me if I killed myself.”
“Any children?”
“Two grown with their own families, and I’m a burden to them both.”
“You have a plan?”
“I came to New York to say goodbye to my older sister who’s in a memory home with Alzheimer’s.”
“My mother passed away from Alzheimer’s.” Mary lied, but connecting is an art. “It’s sad to watch your loved one lose pieces of their life until they become lost in who they are.”
“I’m flying back home. I was going to do it when my wife was at her weekly Mahjong game this Friday.”
“Does she enjoy that game?”
“She likes the company.”
“Don’t do it during Mahjong. Otherwise, she’ll never enjoy it again.”
“She goes to Starbucks in town once a week to meet another set of friends for coffee. That was plan B.”
“When?”
He looks at his watch. “She’s there now.”
“Starbucks would be good, but can you hold out a week?”
“Doubt it.”
“Where are you going to do it?”
“I’m going to put on my Army Greens, walk into the woods, sit down on the big rock overlooking the creek where I’ve taken the dogs. Take a deep breath and shoot me.”
“Messy but a beautiful way to die. You leave a note?”
“Yup.”
“I wouldn’t.”
“How do you mean?”
“Your wife will look for clues in your letter to blame herself.”
“It’s not her fault.”
“You and I know that.”
“The pain I’d cause her is the only thing keeping me from doing it.”
“I wouldn’t leave a note. If you were my husband, I’d spend the rest of my life bereaving and beating myself up, trying to figure out what I could have done to stop him from killing himself. Your wife will never understand something about suicide. You can’t stop anyone from doing it. Here’s the thing. Dying by gunshot leaves a message. You were angry, and it became your legacy. I’d consider another way.”
“How do you know all of this?”
“I worked for the VA as a psychologist for twenty-three years and specialized in suicide.”
“You get me.”
“You feel constricted, you’re having difficulty seeing the point in going on, and you’re a burden to your family. You want to be free.”
Josie waves at Mary and points to a young child near the playpen. He’s holding up a pencil and smiles.
“I’ll be right back, Mr.?”
“Knispel.”
“Please, don’t go anywhere, Mr. Knispel.”
“My plane boards in forty-five minutes.”
Mary approaches Josie, who stands next to a young Middle Eastern woman wearing a hijab holding a newborn in one arm, her son, approximately seven or eight years old, is still smiling, still holding a #2 pencil.
Rosalie calls out for her Aunt from the bathroom door and points to her watch, flashing ten fingers twice. Mary gets it. Twenty minutes.
“This is Noah,” Josie says to Mary. “He’s a genius.”
“Hello, genius,” Mary says, then looks at his mother and smiles.
The mother says, “He’s a fifth grader in tenth-grade math.”
“Pre-calculus?” Mary asks.
“Pre-Trig,” the boy says.
“And you have a pencil,” Mary says.
“I compute in pencil,” he says. “Erase along the way, rework until I get the right answer. I can only do this with a pencil.”
“You’re a math genius because of the pencil,” Mary says.
“Good genes,” he says.
“Can I borrow your pencil?” Mary says.
The boy looks at his mother. She nods yes. “How do I know I’ll get it back?”
“You need to trust me,” Mary says.
“You’re a stranger,” the boy says.
“I am. What do your instincts tell you?”
“You look like my math teacher; she’s a nice lady.”
“Do you trust your math teacher?”
“I like them but don’t trust all of them.”
“And here we are.”
The boy extends his arm. The pencil is within Mary’s reach. He retracts and says, “what will you give me if I let you borrow my pencil?”
“It will be a surprise.”
“I don’t like surprises. What’s your name?”
“Mary,” Mary says, feeling flutters.
“Surname.”
“Plangman.”
Mary slipped. She never divulges her identity to strangers. Josie leaves as the boy hands Mary the pencil. She grips it. She has control. The key motif of a #2 pencil whose role is to emolliate the anxiety and then suppress the hunger. But it was too late. There was no time to calm herself in a crossword. The hunger had arrived in the Delta Sky Lounge at JFK within twenty minutes of boarding. They’d have to identify each traveler and employee in the lounge, and by the time the body was discovered, many of the travelers would be airborne, scattering the world. An airport lounge was a perfect location to fulfill her hunger.
She found the perfect sufferer in Mr. Knispel and now felt obligated to deliver a mutual act of kindness. It would bring them both transcendences, the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, but Mary could only experience it one way. Enable a suicidal Veteran to complete their mission.
With twenty minutes left to boarding, her niece would find her in five, obsessed with being on time for everything.
Mary went to Mr. Knispel, who looked blankly at the sports section. She placed the newspaper in his duffle and led him to two chairs facing the window. Mary and Mr. Knispel take in the runway, planes landing and taking off. The sun sets behind the Manhattan skyline fifteen miles away. She asks him what his favorite drink is. Bloody Mary, extra tabasco. “We are connected,” she says.
Mary speed walks to the bar, thrusting her arms to hit Jocie, a working single guy in the middle of the zombie row. Mary whistles. It gets her attention. Mary orders two Bloody Mary’s with extra tabasco. Mary unzips her fanny pack. Four small brown vials, each marked. Two unmarked small, folded papers. Mary unscrews the C≡N vial in the fanny. Jocie places the drinks on the bar and returns to the single guy. Mary pours half the vial, stirs with its celery stick, watches the ice cubes clank against the glass, and dissolves the white powder. She sips the untainted and tails back to the living dead.
Mary places a Blood Mary on Mr. Knispel’s side table. She raises her glass. He does the same.
“May the memory of Mr. Knispel be a blessing.” They clank. “Have a safe flight home, and again thank you for your service.”
“Thank you for all you’ve done for Veterans, Ms. Plangman. I’m glad our paths have crossed.”
“How’d you know my name?”
“I texted a few of my buddies who get treatment at the Portland VA. You’re a bit of a legend in helping us with PTSD.”
Relief begets a smile. He receives her embrace. They look at one another and hold for a moment in a moment of humanity. She gets up and leaves and goes to the genius boy to negotiate. His mother breastfeeds while he plays a game on his iPad.
“Can I keep the pencil?” Mary says to the boy. “I have a very long flight.”
“It was my last one. I have homework on the plane.”
“You didn’t say I couldn’t keep it.”
“You asked to borrow it.”
“I’ll give you a gold coin from the New York City metro when I get the change. I remember thinking, who would be the lucky person I could give this to? You are the lucky winner.”
“Susan B. Anthony on it?”
Mary takes it from her pocket and says, “nope.”
“Then it’s Abraham Lincoln, the 16th President.”
“How’d you know?”
He lifts his iPad. “The internet. Give me my pencil back, or I’ll let the cops know you poisoned that old man watching the planes.”
Mary has no recourse except to stay calm. “I don’t understand.”
The boy turns his iPad at Mary. She sees a photograph of herself—a dated news clipping.
PERSON OF INTEREST IN MULTIPLE VETERAN SUICIDES. SERIAL KILLER OR NEXT DR. KEVORKIAN?
“I love the internet,” the boy says. “It’s pencil-free.”
Mary hands the pencil back as Rosalie hollers and lifts her iPhone, “According to the Delta App, we need to board, and according to the CNN app, you made late-breaking news courtesy of pencil boy.”
#