16 - Falling

"Wow, I had no idea that dying was so boring." Cammie said and she looked through the giant Australian Bureau of Statistics Annual, an enormously thick volume that contained, as far as Cammie could tell, just about every fact in existence.

"How do you mean?" Anthony replied, not looking up from his book, called simply: The Complete Manual of Suicide. They were in his apartment, late in the afternoon. She had finished her shift at the cafe an hour earlier, and had come directly to Anthony's to continue the project, as she liked to think of it.

"Well, I always thought the number two ways to die were car accidents and falling off a stepladder in your own home. Nope. Those are waaay down the list."

"What's at the top?" Anthony asked, genuinely curious.

"It's like, diseases, all the way down. Sixty million people died last year, worldwide, and a third of them went thanks to a heart attack. Then comes parasites," she read, running her finger down the list, interpreting data on the fly. "then cancer, that's big, then strokes, infections, various other diseases. Road accidents come in at like, two percent. It's barely a blip.".

"Informative." He said. "It has to be common enough to be believable as an accident, but at the same time not obviously suicidal, either."

"I guess we're all pretty much destined to be done in by a disease of some sort. Odds are, I'm going out with cancer. Maybe getting out early isn't such a bad idea." she said. "You may be on to a good thing!"

He didn't return her smile.

"On the other hand," she continued. "you know you could just stick around and let nature do all the heavy lifting. Bound to happen, according to this." She tapped the page of the giant tome twice with her fingernail. "Maybe you should, y'know, get a job mining uranium or something. That's bound to up your cancer percentages. Or ... hey! You could join the army."

"And the percentages falling off your footstool?" he asked, ignoring her suggestion.

"That would be under 'Unintentional injuries'. Six percent."

"Or in my case, Intentional injuries." He joked without humour.

"Two point eight percent."

"Good enough for me." he said. He stood up and went to the small broom closet that stood in the small corridor between his lounge and his front door, opposite the bathroom door. He opened it and pulled out a small footstool, about three feet high. "Shall we?"

She was alarmed. "Now?"

"When better? We're married, we've signed the pre-nup. What could be more tragically romantic than me accidentally breaking my own neck whilst preparing to go on our honeymoon?"

"Yeah, but, uhm, now? I thought we might, I don't know, do some warm-up exercises or something."

"Uhm ... nope. We can just ... get on with it." He unfolded the stool, metal legs locking into position with a steely sound. He swung it into a place right in front of the cupboard he had just withdrawn it from. With the legs unfolded it had four points of contact with the ground, each on its own little rubber foot to hold it into place.

"So ah, how are we going to do this?"

"Well, I thought it would be rather easy, wouldn't you?"

"Okay, so, run me through it."

"Well, I step up onto this stool." He took two steps and mounted it. He was now standing at the top of the ladder, making him about three feet higher off the ground than he was. Inside the closet, in a small section near the ceiling, were two suitcases. Cammie wondered if anything was inside them. She realized at that moment she'd never even been inside his bedroom.

"Uh-huh. And?" Cammie said incredulously.

"Well, y'know, then I ah, fall off and break my neck."

"That easy, huh?"

"Well ... that's the idea, yes."

"What about this whole, sense of self-preservation thing you keep going on about? Are you sure you're even capable of making yourself fall off the ladder?"

He tipped his head upward slightly, thinking about her question. From below him on the ladder, she could see the little hairs of a five o'clock shadow on his neck. Because she usually encountered him during the mornings, he was usually impeccably shaven. She'd never seen facial hair on him before. On my husband, she thought to herself.

"Actually, maybe you can help me with that." he said after some thinking. Cammie had been giving the matter some thought, and how to kill yourself when you were literally unable to hurt yourself actually did pose quite the conundrum. They'd discussed poison, gassing himself in his car or injecting himself with bleach, but mysterious deaths usually prompted an autopsy, and death by poison was unlikely to be classified as an accident.

"Okay. I'm here to help, after all. Although I was really thinking more of being, y'know, a research assistant than a lab tech."

He seemed confused by her oblique references, and decided to ignore them altogether. "Uhm, okay. So, what I was thinking you could do was, take a rope, or maybe an extension cord if I can't find any rope..."

"Do you have any rope?"

"Ah, I'm not sure." he said, flustered.

"We could buy some rope." she said helpfully.

"I'm sure an extension cord will do."

"Okay, so, extension cord. Hanging yourself with an extension cord is definitely suicide. No way does that happen by accident. It'd never fly."

"Yes, quite." He agreed antagonistically. "Actually what I was thinking is that you tie one end of the extension cord to the bottom of the footstool, another end to the front door handle over there, and then just ..."

" ... just what?" Cammie added when Anthony was not forthcoming.

"Just ... you know. Slam the door."

"Pulling the stool from under you? That's like murder!"

"It's not murder: You'll be on the other side of the door."

"So is someone in a missile bunker!" She said emphatically, unsure of why she chose that particular analogy. "They can still kill people. Doors do not a moral barrier make."

"But I give you my permission. It'll be like ... euthanasia."

Cammie screwed up her face. "That's still a crime. And then I'll have to come in and hide the evidence of my crime while you lie there all broken-necked." She followed the scenario down the timeline in her imagination, her face becoming more and more sour as she played out the implications of what she was involved in. "And then I'll have to call the Police and pretend to be shocked you're dead, and they'll come round and I?ll have to pretend to be all upset that you're dead, and they'll be all like: 'Oh so you just married this guy you barely even knew and one day later he ends up dead and now you're in line for a big payout and isn't that convenient?' and I'll have to play all innocent and upset and unguilty at the same time and you know this really is the dumbest plan, you know that? And also ... "

She was fully intent on continuing with her rant for some time, but before she could, Anthony, in an attempt to calm her down, held out both of his hands in front of him, said the word "Now," and took a step forward, which shifted his balance on the footstool, which immediately tipped to one side, sending Anthony flying forward face first, his arms flailing wildly in front of him, until he hit the ground in front of him with an almighty bang, the footstool flying out behind him into the corridor. Cammie screamed and ran towards him, skidding to her knees on the shag carpet.

"Ow, ow, ow, ow." Anthony lay face-first on the floor, but when Cammie got to him he rolled to slightly to one side and cradled his wrists gingerly.

"Oh my God are you okay?" Cammie said, trying to be close to him but at the same time not wanting to touch him and hurt him further.

Anthony grimaced in pain and continued to hold his wrists, each limp hand ineffectually trying to cradle the other. "Yes." he hissed through pursed lips. "And .. ow."

"What are you ... Christ!" Cammie smacked him hard in the arm.

"Ow!" Anthony yelled, in pain and in surprise.

"You could have killed yourself you bloody idiot!"

"Well, that was the general idea." Anthony said, his voiced still strained in pain.

"Not ... fucking ... funny!" she said, striking his arm with the expulsion of each word.

"Hey, quit it!" Anthony said. "These really hurt- they might be sprained. I think I'll need to go to A&E."

Cammie barked out a harsh, derisive laugh. "Oh yeah, let's go get you all patched up so you can kill yourself! What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"I told you!" he said angrily. "I thought you understood!"

Cammie felt tears coming to her eyes, willed them to begone, but they did not obey. Soon they started to flood down her face.

"But it's just so stupid." She said, her knees giving out from under her as she wept. She flopped down on one side and lay on the floor beside him, her head touching his. His looked up, while she looked to one side. "There's so much you can do in this world. So many people you can help. So many good experiences you can still have! There's no reason to die."

He turned his head to look at hers. His eyes were only a few centimetres from hers, so close that she had trouble focusing on them and they blurred from two to three. "But those experiences won't feel good to me. Helping people won't feel good to me. There's nothing in this world that will feel good to me?"

"Nothing?" She said hopefully, tasting salt in her mouth.

The three eyes moved from left to right and back again in her vision. "I'm sorry." he said.

"God damn it." she said, sitting up sharply. Anthony continued to lay on the ground, on his back. He turned his head back to the ceiling, looked up. "I'm sorry." she said.

"That's okay." he said quietly. "I shouldn't have asked."

"Well if you're going to do it, at least do it right. The odds of breaking your neck by falling from a footstool much be one in ten, if that. Damned fool way to accidentally die if you ask me."

"Yes, that's true." he agreed.

"Too right it is. When it happens, if it happens..." she didn't see, but she could tell he was giving her a look, and corrected herself. "...okay, when it happens, you have to do it right. You could have fallen and given yourself brain damage, you know. You probably would have forgotten all about your retarded self-martyrdom and I would have had to spend the rest of my young life feeding you corn soup with a plastic spoon, and that's a fate I think neither of us want to share in, am I right?

"You're right, of course." he said. "I did rather rush it. I'm sorry."

"Fuckin' A you are. From now on, you're either absolutely dead, or not dead at all, are we clear?"

"Yes."

"For fuck's sake Anthony, is there nothing that can dissuade you from this?"

"I don't think so." he said, although he was looking at her strangely, with large round eyes. She looked away, uncomfortable.

"You'd better bloody know so." What had she gotten herself into, she thought for certainly not the first or the last time. "Okay, let's get you to the A&E."

"Thanks." he said, rolling over and attempting to stand without using his damaged hands, a feat which is harder than it first sounds.

She did not have a licence, but his Acura was an automatic so it wasn't particularly difficult to take him to the A&E. It was sitting in the hospital waiting room, waiting for a nurse to assess him, that Cammie saw an informational poster which answered the conundrum. She turned to Anthony, who was preoccupied with his painful wrists, and excitedly asked him a rhetorical question:

"What's the number one reason tourists avoid visiting Aus?"

Anthony took a wild guess: "Ah, the ... crocodiles?"

"Close." Cammie said, smiling. "The answer to my question is also the answer to yours." she said, gesturing to the poster on the wall.

A guide to spotting poisonous snakes and spiders in Australia was the title of the piece in question.