Untitled WIP

Dispatch relayed a 911 call: a violent woman swinging a shovel, breaking out car windows, and threatening her neighbors. What he happened upon more resembled a horror movie.

Silent neighbors followed him with their eyes as he passed them, arms slowly raising to indicate his objective. Recently strewn debris littered the front of the home. Across the street a small group of adults and children huddled. They watched intently as he approached. Their eyes flicked nervously, expectantly to the house, to him, back to the house. When he finally asked, they broke the silence to confirm that the garbage had indeed been flung by the occupant. She had been throwing items at people, property, and around her home before he arrived.

He neared, straining to ascertain whether the manic voice within was arguing with an unseen subject, or furiously shouting gibberish indiscernible to a passive listener as he made his way down the side yard toward an open door. There he saw various combustible items, all charred to various degrees as if they were failed and discarded attempts. As he continued, he noted the pile of partially burned lumber and was immediately assaulted by the overwhelming stench of gasoline.

She stood in the doorway. Surprised at his appearance, she abruptly slammed the door shut. As she did, the odor of gasoline was overpowering. He shouted to the officers who had arrived at the scene with him not to use tasers lest they ignite the fumes. Through a window to the right of the door, she continued her mostly unintelligible tirade. It was clear she would not be opening that door. She intended to burn herself to death in that house.

He tried the knob. Unsurprisingly, it was locked. The gasoline fumes in that house would only become more concentrated and more explosive the longer that door stayed closed. What he did not know was whether she had more matches like those he had seen amid the debris in front of the house.

When he kicked in the door he was confronted with her hands, contorted, her long nails clawing wildly. She was in an animalistic state, attacking him with everything she had. He tried to grab her hands, to keep her from gouging his eyes. She responded by kicking him squarely in the groin, violently smashing delicate flesh into the pelvis, against the bone. The pain would last for days after, the sharp pang followed by the deep, literally sickening, engulfing pain travelled upward from the testes into the gut, blinding and doubling him over. He struggled to maintain concentration to keep her from freeing her frenetic hands. If he allowed the focus to shift to the pain, a dam would open, letting forth the pain, rendering him unable to see or think of or experience anything else. Anger and rage distract, and that is what he used. The struggle felt endless. Gasoline was slick on the floor, complicating his efforts to subdue her. He dared not use his taser for fear of ignition. All the while the heavy, deep breath of one in the throes of a melee invited the noxious fumes into his lungs. He became impossibly light-headed, his breath raspy, his lungs demanding continually increasing effort to draw air.

There was a seemingly intolerable stretch of time before finally she was handcuffed. The door had been open long enough for the fumes to begin to dissipate, and the melee was over. His head began to clear and he was able to take in his surroundings. As he led her out of the house, he saw it. It didn't immediately register. Is that a car battery? What are those two prongs? It dawned on him. That was an arc welder. She had been trying to ignite an arc welder, failing only because there was no power to the house, denying the welder a power source. He had just escaped the headline "HOUSE IN BAY POINT EXPLODES DUE TO APPARENT SUICIDE." The reality of his close call was washing over him as he saw the perfect Molotov cocktail placed under the gas line that went to the house. Exactly how many people had she intended to kill today?

         He walked her to the patrol car as the crowd looked on. It was still somewhat surreal, registering in his mind in slow motion, as the fight-or-flight response continued to affect his perception of his surroundings. Families. Children. He still could not breathe freely for the fumes. How close had he come to paying the ultimate sacrifice? A resentment stirred. The memory of the person who almost killed him with an intent and purpose stayed with him. What didn't was the emotional aftermath. There was a numbness to his emotional spectrum that pinged black after the event and ate at him until it enveloped his entire being.

          That night he came home late, as he often did when he had a particularly eventful shift. There was much work beyond actual contact with suspects: determining if and what crimes were articulatable, assuring the safety of suspects, victims, fellow officers, and of course himself. He had to secure the scene, collect and log evidence, interview witnesses. Each responding officer had to write a clear, concise, and detailed report of events, making sure that all other officers who wrote reports on the same incident were factual and thorough legal documents. Edits and rewrites could take hours

          That night he had called his wife to explain that he might be late. That he had breathed in fumes and he was feeling ill. After seventeen years of police work, the separation of home and work had been solidly established. He rarely talked about what happened on any given shift and she had long since learned not to push the issue. Clearly whatever happened that day had affected him. She asked him about it, but his monosyllabic answers were as indifferent as they were vague and brief. She let it go and gave him his space.
          But there was something decidedly different about his demeanor. He brought home the burden of murders, suicides, child abuse, and sex abuse cases. This was a seemingly simple failed suicide attempt. Though she tried to light the blaze with him in harm's way, this was not the type of encounter that shook him. Yet there he was, shaken.
          Three years later, he received an email from an associate at the Custody Alternatives Facility. It was regarding a "Detention Report", a report that comes from within the jail, not a police report which is something a patrol cop notices and takes into mind. This was no longer his professional concern.

          The email described at some length the facts of the case, that she had been attempting suicide by setting herself aflame. It went on to describe her incarceration and subsequent efforts to improve her lot. She had become clean and sober and completed a behavioral health program in order to live a healthy, productive life. She was set to graduate the program, and had asked his associate to track down the officer who took the time to help her in order to thank him. And to invite him to her graduation.
          The officer who helped her. The officer who saved her? Who risked his life to protect her neighbors from the inferno with which she threatened them?

          In masculine bravado he typed, "The chick who fought me while trying to blow up her house and gas lines at the neighbor's house. Kicked me in the gonads and then tried to claw my face while we fought in a pool of gasoline." Clearly, the anger lingered.

          Two days later he responded but did not commit an answer to the invitation. He qualified instead with an "I'll try", giving himself an out in the event he could not get himself to go. He reiterated how aggrieved he was.

          Ruminating, it occurred to him that perhaps he proscribed too much specific intent her actions, felt the only victim and did not allow enough credit to how much mental illness was to blame, making her a victim as well. Did he not want to? Was he taking the emotional coward's way out? It is harder to feel empathy emotions than it is to hate. Going meant exposing himself to emotional growth. How could it not? That was difficult. Avoidance was easy. Somewhere inside that ate at him, the lying to himself. Nothing invokes the conscience more than truth.

          He regarded his associate's empathy. A weakness? Years later, he would feel the same abiding empathy dozens of times over. This was the beginning. The tossed the stone into the waters that started him on a path he would not see until years later. Why? Of the dozens of similar cases each week, why, how did this woman toss the first stone? The subtle ripples started silent and deep; the Butterfly Affect.

People in law enforcement are more intimately acquainted with suicide than one might imagine. He had seen more in his years on the job than he cared to remember. There were tragic deaths, unnecessary deaths, even the couple who sought to brush their deaths with a hue of levity by drawing happy faces on the plastic bags they'd secured over their heads after connecting them to helium tanks that had previously been used for a celebration, perhaps a quincenera or birthday party, before holding hands and taking their last deep breaths. He knew some things about people who choose this escape. One of those things is that women don't typically choose particularly violent means.

According to Callanan VJ, and Davis MS. in their article Gender differences in suicide methods in Soc Psychiatry Psychiatry Epidemiol. 2012, statistically men choose methods like firearms, hanging, asphyxiation or suffocation, jumping, moving objects, sharp objects, and vehicle exhaust gas. Women on the other hand tend to choose self-poisoning, exsanguination (such as with cutting the wrists,) drowning, hanging, and firearms, in that order. Exploding one's home and potentially setting the entire neighborhood ablaze is not included in either list. This is an extreme unaccounted for.

She wasn't just ending her life. She was erasing her entire existence. He considered that. She was attempting to annihilate herself, all her belongings, every mark she had ever made on the world. She intended to leave no trace. Had she not given any thought to the others? Had she been so callous and selfish as to mortally endanger innocents, or was it intense pain? The neighboring families, the children, and he were just collateral damage, so desperate was she to never have been.

He received emails: pleas wherein she appealed to his better nature, entreating him to take her hand and walk with her in her journey, forwarded by the colleague who had advocated for her. Maybe she was lying, conning as only a manipulative con can do, trying to convince him to come so that the judge would see a cop advocating for her, increasing the likelihood of a favorable outcome. He could simply choose to forget the date and time and curse the name of the fellow cop who refused to let him off the hook, doggedly begging for empathy for the person who had almost taken his life.

All this he considered.

He wore his suit. He didn't want his uniform to influence the judge at her adjudication before the graduation, and he didn't want to stand out as the cop in the room full of addicts in various stages of recovery at the following ceremony. He sat awkwardly, not knowing the etiquette of such an event. As they rose in turn to speak at the podium, he sat stoic, mindful of his expression, his posture. Not wanting to display inappropriate body language, he chose to show none at all. Part of him must have known that in doing so, he sent a message about his feelings regardless.

He surveyed the room. He knew the look of addicts, as well. The skin, the teeth, the eyes, the hair of an abused body were so familiar to him, that when his eyes fell to her, he was taken aback. She looked healthy, well, clear headed. She looked good. She was good.

The ceremony ended. The formality melted away as refreshments were served. As he awkwardly maintained his stiff posture, she and her therapist sat with him. She had a question about the incident. Her therapist indicated it would be healing for her to hear some of the details. He obliged. At one statement, her eyes grew wide and she was visibly shaken. She had been unaware that she'd been ranting entirely in Spanish. She hadn't spoken Spanish since childhood. She broke her gaze, shaken. Clearly a fight or flight trauma response had been triggered, and her therapist quickly closed in to ground her verbally and tactilely. He recognized something in her. Something he couldn't quantify but that he recognized. In himself? Perhaps but that required an inappropriate amount of self-reflection in the moment. He felt his heart open. The feeling confused him. She recovered and addressed him again.

"I'll fix you a plate." An unexpected kindness, a surprising air of familiarity, a primal sign of caring.

She returned with two plates, setting one on the table in front of him, and the other in front of herself as she sat next to him. The only other time he was this close to her she was fighting him, a cornered wild animal raging against him, trying to kill them both. In this moment they were connected. He found this new interchange soothing, intimate. The cognitive dissonance was disorienting and disconcerting. As they broke bread, he was awash with unfamiliar emotion. They ate lunch together with ease that he didn't know how to digest. The ripples in the pond were about to carry him away into a chapter in his life that he could never have imagined for himself.

In retrospect, he is unsure who saved whom that day.