Feathers
John opened the door of the dark closet where he’d hidden the shotgun. He pushed aside a pile of dirty clothing and grasped it in his hand. The gun seemed heavy for something so simple. He turned, closed the closet door, and walked to the back door of his mother’s house. Outside a warm summer day waited. Sitting down on the wrought iron chair his parents bought specially for the patio years before, he inserted a shell into the back of the gun’s barrel.
Flash! He thought. In an instant the pain will end. Everything will be gone. His life would be over.
He knew there was something wrong. Now he had a name for it. Paranoid Schizophrenia! John’s stomach felt like it had been ripped open. He felt like his guts were pouring out of him. With the haze of the medication he couldn’t focus. It seemed he was living with a continual hangover. He knew enough medicine to know the prognosis for a schiz. What could he reasonably expect from the life that awaited?
He had been under pressure to produce in his job bringing patients into the clinic. The docs all wanted more money and hired John because of his sales experience. Their thinking being: If you need sales, hire a salesman. But there was no budget for marketing materials, no discernable product to sell. John didn’t even have business cards. Still he was constantly asked, “When do we see some results?”
But that wasn’t the worst of it. John’s lover of five years had asked him to leave the apartment they shared. The order was sprung on John when they were out to dinner. He’d had a couple of drinks and said, “I think we should split up or get married.” Clearly, this wasn’t the most romantic proposal on record but they had been together five years. John loved her and thought she loved him. Her response was, “I think we should split up. You have two weeks to find a place to live and get out of the apartment.” After they finished dinner they went “home” and John began sleeping in the guest room.
A few months later he began thinking he heard people talking about her lascivious behavior. The references repulsed and excited him. They never were direct. It just seemed like everybody but John knew what she was doing and talked about it among themselves. It seemed to him that a hush came over a room if his colleagues were talking and he came in. In a few weeks John entered the ER complaining that “they” were doing something to him. When asked, “Who are ‘they’?” He answered, “The CIA.”
He was admitted and given a heavy dose of psychotropic medication that did bring him back to “normal” but made his arms and legs tingle and caused him to gain weight. John put on ten pounds the first week he was on the drug. Before his “break” he had been in peak physical condition swimming several miles a day while working eighty hours a week.
Once the shell was in the gun all John had to do was pull back the hammer and point the gun at himself, pull the trigger. Flash! He thought again. Slowly John pulled the gun’s hammer back and cocked it. Thoughts of his father’s funeral after an untimely death in a construction accident bubbled in his brain. He remembered the small cards of laminated plastic with Psalm 23 printed on them:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death….
Birds sang away in the summer’s heat. The sky was clear and blue. John was trying to find a way to reach the gun’s trigger with the end of the barrel in his mouth. He looked up. There he saw a red-tailed hawk circling. It landed on the roof of his mother’s house in full view of where John sat. This was strange because John had never seen a red-tailed hawk in this suburban neighborhood before. He met the hawk’s eyes with his. They stared at each other transfixed with tension. John started to lower the gun. The hawk flew high into the air and out of sight. The only record of its visit was a brownish red feather that landed on John’s shoulder, then came to rest at his feet.
He started once again to move the gun into place, but began to wonder what the flash would actually feel like. Did anyone really know? John hadn’t heard of anyone killing himself then writing about the experience. He thought of his mother. He was living at her home while recuperating. She would have to find his body on the patio after he did it. Could he do that to her? He thought of the poem he planned to read at his uncle’s funeral though his family had prevented him:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Then it happened. FLASH! John was filled with blinding white rage. Quickly he took out the shell and began swinging the empty gun around his head holding the barrel in both hands. He screamed as loud as he could until his throat was hoarse. He began smashing the butt end of the shotgun on the gray cement slab of the patio. He raised and lowered his arms until there was nothing left of the gun except the black steel barrel he held in his hands.
John didn’t stop shaking until an hour had passed. He then cleaned up the debris from the shotgun and put it in the bottom of the trash can that stood at the end of his mother’s driveway. He covered it with some newspaper. He was sweating. His gaze dropped to the inside of the trash can. There he saw the brownish red feather sticking out from under the edge of the crumpled newspaper. He picked it up, touched its perfect symmetry with his fingers, and ran the sides of it across his upper lip. Feeling the feather against his skin felt good. There was a pleasurable sensation from it. His shaking stopped. He felt relieved. He began to notice the heat, then opened the door to his mother’s air conditioned home and went inside.
Over the next weeks John struggled with the knowledge of his condition. He kept the feather next to the pull-out couch where he slept. Something about that encounter haunted him. The bird’s presence had somehow stopped him. In the hawk’s eyes John thought he could see something, feel something. Now he wanted to live. He still knew he was a schiz, but he hoped for a better life nonetheless. Was the bird a messenger?
On his next visit to his psychiatrist John told him how close he had come to killing himself, his interaction with the hawk and how the feather falling on him made him hesitate just long enough to change his mind.
“You know Doc, I’ve read that the Native Americans believe red-tailed hawks help us discover unused abilities and can lead people on a path to hidden wisdom and insights. I don’t really believe in that stuff, but the hawk was there all the same and I didn’t kill myself. What do you think Doc? Are there mystical forces? Do you believe the hawk had anything to do with me not dying that day?”
“Do you still have the feather?” asked John’s doctor.
