“Just a plain old IP from her dorm room.”
I experience a moment’s relief, but only a moment’s. I think of a breathing technique I read about years ago. Breathe in four, hold four, breathe out four, hold four. Karrin picks up a yellow pad upon which she’s scribbled some notes. As she reads them aloud, I get stuck on a hold and don’t remember to breathe out.
“First responders found Jessica unresponsive after serious blood loss. She was rushed to Billman Adventist Hospital and has been admitted. Again, Paige, I’m so sorry to share this upsetting news with you.”
I stare blankly at the desk between me and Karrin. The mess of papers, the yellow pad, that stupid telephone. The latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders lies open on the floor. I wonder, for a strange out-of-body moment, how it would categorize me. I suppose it describes me to a T: Rising heart rate. Tightened breathing. Sudden feelings of detachment.
“I hardly know her anymore,” I find myself saying, my voice growing more pinched with every word. “I only see her once a year. Over the holidays.”
“Even so, this must be a shock,” Karrin says. I try another relaxation technique, making note of the physical objects I see in the room. Lamp. Desk. Chair. Suicide note.
“What’s a shock,” I say stupidly, “is that Consie’s overactive imagination actually did some good for once.” Consie calls 911 in some municipality at least once a week. The dispatchers always tell her they prefer that she is too careful, rather than the opposite. But I’ve seen the statistics. Very few completed suicides begin with a post on social media.
Attempts, on the other hand . . .
“She didn’t really mean it,” I continue to bluster, my voice getting higher by the second. “It must have been a stunt for attention.” I don’t actually believe what I am saying, but I can’t seem to make myself stop. “I’ll start looking at ideations harder. I know I should have caught this. But you know how it is,” I tell her. “So many people use them to try to manipulate internet personalities. And then there are the careerists,” I add, referring to the people who threaten suicide every time they need attention. “And the shock artists.”
“It’s hard to tell which is which,” she agrees. “To be clear, no one believes this is your fault. No one blames you. We’ve trained everyone in S and S to leave their work behind when the day is over. That means you did the right thing.”
“I read it, though,” I tell her. I am breathing in now more than I am breathing out. I need to take a benzo. Right away. I start rustling around in my boxy black handbag. “I read it, and I missed it.”
“It’s just a bad coincidence,” says Karrin. “I mean, what are the odds that you’d get that flag?”
“There are forty people in this office,” I say, fishing around in my purse more. “So around one in forty, give or take.” I find the bottle and pop it open with one hand, still concealed by the leather bag. But it’s empty. Right. I put in for a refill, but my doctor wanted me to come in first. Bureaucrat.
Karrin pauses. “We need more staff,” she says, apropos of nothing. “How are forty people supposed to handle four million users?”
I don’t have the calm necessary to answer this. If Karrin doesn’t know by now that the code handles 99 percent of all daily flags, she’ll never know. Instead, I fall back on distraction. Solve a technical problem, I tell myself. Write some mental code. I wonder if there’s a way to rank these flags based on the users generating them. Demographic risk levels, number of similar posts . . . maybe I could write something that would give ideation flags a danger score of one through ten. “For next time—” I begin.
“Regarding next time,” she says. The words come out very slowly, like the beginning of bad news.
“You’re not firing me over this,” I tell her, and what I could deny before is now obviously becoming full-blown panic. “That doesn’t make sense. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I’m not firing you at all,” Karrin says. “Paige, don’t be silly. You do great work! We love having you as part of the team. That’s why it’s so important to keep you in the best kind of emotional health possible. And a way to achieve good mental health is through support and connection. That means when you have a family emergency, we want to support you.”
For some reason, the words family emergency upset me more. It is because they’ve been used in this context before. “You did support me,” I try to tell her. “Or Consie did. She saved my sister’s life. Problem solved.” Problem not solved. Why didn’t I go in for more Xanax? Why didn’t I find another doctor?
“And we’re proud of that. But there’s more we can do for you. I was thinking of giving you some extra vacation,” she says. “So you can go see your family.”
The penny drops.
“No, no no no no. You can’t do this to me.”
“Give you extra time off of work?” she says curiously.
“I don’t want time off of work,” I tell her. On this I am adamant.
“Don’t you want to be with your family?” she asks.
“They’re not my family,” I say on a hard exhale. “I mean, they are, but we’re not close.” My breathing has a hiccup now. I feel like air isn’t getting into my lungs. I try to breathe in four counts, but I can’t, and I start to cough, and my coughing seems to echo in my body like I’m the inside of a cave.
Karrin replies, but I stop hearing. I squeeze my eyes shut and see the comment. The comment that made me think, Oh, just another suicide threat, and What is wrong with these people? and Why am I even seeing this? And then I see my sister’s username and her pretty little profile pic and her real-life face and hear her always-bouncing laugh, teasing me about my clothes every year since she was eleven in sparkling sneakers and I was home from grad school in all-weather sandals with socks.
My racing mind recalls how rarely I see Jessica, how I never call or visit her at school, even though I know what life can be like with our mom and know the genetic brain chemistry that we very likely share. And I am certain that Karrin is wrong. She said no one blames me for logging off midflag, for ignoring my own sister’s cry for help.
But someone blames me, after all. I blame me.
“Paige? Paige, are you ok? Are you experiencing distress?”
“I feel fine,” I say. But I don’t. My hands are sweaty. I put them to my face. I seem to be dying. That’s what’s happening. I’m back in my mom’s house, I’m shaking and crying, I’m hiding and coughing and choking down pills. I’m falling off the chair and onto the floor, and I’m thinking, The pain will be over soon, and then I’m in that awful place, between the bridge and the water, and I’m trying to gag myself, trying to make myself throw up, but it’s too late, and then I’m back in Karrin’s office, trying to stand up, to get out of here as quickly as possible. And as I stand up, I feel my legs crumple, and I think, so dissociated that it is like I’m watching myself from a great height, I think: This cannot be.
I am rock solid, I think. I am untouchable. The version of myself that could get shaken so easily is long gone. Snuffed out through a careful combination of practice and psychopharmacology. And still, no matter what I tell myself, it’s still happening. Here I go, down a path I’ve been before and I thought I’d never go down again, to a place where everything feels too much and is too loud and too scary and too dangerous.