HOUND

iv

Jack thought about death: a lot.

He didn't find himself to be particularly suicidal, partially because he felt that if he ever did commit suicide, his memory and legacy would be tainted by lies and a victim-mentality that he knew his wife would hold. But in a way, Jack often contemplated the endless "what ifs".

What if he just happened to step out onto the road, amidst the rushing traffic--would someone hit him? Would his body roll under the car, to be crushed by two sets of tires--or would his body slam into the windshield, crushing it, and then fly over the top of the vehicle and skirt onto the pavement behind? Would the car break and barely miss him, would it swerve? Would the driver scream or cry or yell or zoom away? Would the obituary say that his body wasn't even recognizable? Would the newspapers call it suicide, murder, or an accident? Would his wife sob at the funeral, and would he have an open casket or a closed casket? Would he even be buried? What if they cremated him?

The thoughts went like that, with every other hypothetical fatal situation. What if while driving, he swerved into the other lane of traffic? What if he took his wife's sleeping pills? What if he wrote a suicide note, what if he didn't? What if he jumped off a building, or a bridge? What if he lit himself on fire, or drowned himself? What if he cut his wrists or throat? What if he took his gun and shot himself  in the face, sticking the barrel of the gun into his mouth and tasting the cool metal?

But what if he experimented with suicide, and ultimately failed? Would his wife file for a divorce? Would they lock him away in an institution? Would he be arrested? Is suicide illegal?

Death by his own choice wasn't the only type of death Jack imagined. Sometimes he pictured getting a pain in his lower abdomen, and finding out he had appendicitis. A relatively easy condition, if treated--a surgery to remove the appendix and save the patient. But what if the surgeon messed up, and sliced the wrong organ? What if he was allergic to the anesthetic, and died on the table? What if he was misdiagnosed, and instead had terminal cancer?

What if it wasn't a god's providence for him to die by some health condition, and instead he was destined to a true freak accident? Jack remembered an episode of one of those cliche crime TV shows, where a woman was killed by a man miles away. The man had shot a gun straight up in the air, and the bullet had fallen through the roof of a woman's house, shooting her straight through the top of her head. Jack thought this was a glorious way to go: from bullets that rained down from the sky. A deadly rain, he mused.

More often than not, when Jack thought about death, he also thought about life. In a way, he was bitter about how his life had turned out so far; he felt powerless to change any of it. All his dreams were boxed away in the attic with his winter clothes, and deep inside he knew that they had decayed from his absence--since he no longer chased them with the same passion of before. Jack was just over a quarter of a century old, but he already felt dead and corpse-like. He suddenly completely understood a quote by Benjamin Franklin, which read: Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75.

But Jack felt plenty buried, all right. Smothered between the responsibility of this settled life, and the desperate need to escape.