Rescue Me
Debra stood on the narrow parapet outside her apartment window: ten floors up ought to be enough to end it all, she had thought. To think that her life had come to this: standing around waiting to jump off a building. She thought she’d made her mind up to do it, no she’d made up her mind to go out and not go back in again. The rest was a matter of thinking and considering, thinking about her life and the world. She could see it all around her thanks only to her glasses - horrible thick ugly things that she was forced to view the world through: perhaps not forced, but if she wanted to see anything, then glasses were her only option. She’d almost got used to wearing them at times, but then something bad would happen, and all the childish teasing at school would return to haunt her, or someone would reject her because she was a shortsighted woman.
And then there was the deafness: about six years ago she’d had a bad viral infection, and thus one morning had awoken to silence, a soundlessness that never abated, and never would. That’s when the depression seemed to heap up on her, dragging down her life and soul into despair. She now was obliged to look at people to lipread so that she could comprehend them: that was OK when someone wanted to see her ugly gaze, but when they didn’t, and that happened so often, she thought, they looked away and ignored her. Cruel people, cruel world.
Down below was a small group of onlookers, bending their necks for a good look at this tallish, slim woman standing outside and about to jump: the policeman tried repeatedly to talk her down, but he struggled to get through her silent despair, and when he did, he couldn’t begin to untangle her life. He didn’t really comprehend why she was considering suicide, but then he wasn’t myopic or deaf.
And then he came - some ordinary-looking man, middle-aged, tallish but innocuous-looking, seeming as if he hid something from the world, that is if one looked hard enough. He asked of some bystander, ‘what’s going on?’ ‘Oh, I think she’s going to jump.’ He looked up, and saw her immobile, then she turned her head to look at the policeman, who was again vainly trying to persuade to come back inside. He saw sunlight flashing off her glasses for a moment as her head turned. He considered a moment, then went into the apartment block, his heart starting to race a little as he realised what he wanted to do, what he wished to say: things he barely dared admit even to himself. Going up in the lift was a slow torture, but eventually he was up, and soon found the woman’s apartment. The door was open; the other residents were certainly interested, being held at the door by another policeman.
He asked him breathlessly, ’let me try… please.' The policeman on the door looked at him doubtfully, and said ‘I don’t know about that, sir. I don’t think anyone’s going to stop her.’ ‘Let me try. You’ve nothing to lose. Please.’ The policeman called out to his partner, to which he replied that he still wasn’t getting anywhere. He turned back to the man and told him, ‘go on, then. If you think you can help, do it.’
The man walked into Debra’s apartment and went straight to the window. After a moment, she happened to look at him, and saw just another man. Or was he? No, this one wasn’t looking away in embarrassed silence when she turned her gaze on him. He met her gaze, and his knees felt as if they were turning to jelly. He introduced himself, then turned to the policeman, and asked, ‘can we be alone?’ The policeman looked far from convinced, so he said ‘I have something to say to her that might just help, it’s just that it’s personal.’ He shook his head, so the man said ‘I cannot help her then.’ He gave a pained expression, then reluctantly said, ‘very well.’ He went out into her kitchen, and shut the door behind him.
The man waved to her, gaining her attention again. This woman, Debra was her name, was slim, not spectacularly beautiful, but not ugly either, but her glasses were strong enough to give anyone a fright, that’s if you were considered normal. He was not what would usually be considered normal, especially where women were concerned: it was as if the normal rules of “lovely” and “beautiful” were turned upside down and inside out in his brain. He preferred a woman to wear glasses, particularly thick ones as this woman wore. For a moment he simply gazed in wonder at her lovely face, in his opinion much enhanced by those glasses. She blinked in evident curiosity. Then he gathered himself, thinking “here goes…” After a short pause, he began, ‘you are beautiful, Debra, the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.’ Her eyes, shrunken to a ludicrous mockery of their real size by the strength of her glasses, opened wide, for an instant threatening to approach their normal size: he had her attention now, there was no doubting it. She shivered a little, perhaps from a cold gust of air, or from surprise; it was hard to be certain. She said nothing. Nobody had ever called her that before, certainly not while wearing her glasses. She said dubiously, ‘how do I know you’re just saying that to stop me jumping?’
Those were the words he was both expecting and dreading, and he knew he’d have to go into what it meant to be him: an optic obsessive, or OO. So, he thought for a moment, then said the only thing he could, which was the truth. ‘All my life I have been attracted to women who wear glasses. Especially thick glasses, like yours.’ She gaped at him: this was all new to her. Nothing in her whole life had prepared her for this news: that she could be attractive to the opposite sex, not in spite of her glasses, but because of them. After a moment, she stuttered, with a note of derision and disbelief in her voice, ‘you… you mean… you like these things?’ She touched her glasses briefly. He nodded, and said “yes”, just in case she missed the nod.
She shook her head, not quite believing or understanding what he was saying. Suddenly it struck her “what if he was for real? Then if I jump, then…” She told him, ’this is crazy. You are mad. This cannot be. Nobody wants me, not me, not my glasses.' The sad old certainty of her life firmly reasserted itself, then gave way to the nagging doubt again: that perhaps he was saying something she needed to hear. He said to her, ’there are people who would want you, I know some men like myself. It’s just that we aren’t that common, so it seems to me.' ‘Where can I find someone like that?’ ‘You’ve found one now.’
She fell silent, her bespectacled gaze wandering over him, then she looked away for a couple of minutes, evidently deep in thought. Her thoughts wandered around from despair to hope, the new idea of being thought attractive rippling and shimmering from a joke to the truth. She turned back to him, and asked, ’tell me more about this.' ‘You’ll have to come inside, if you want to hear more.’ She began to say “no”, so then he told her ‘I could see you wore glasses from down there. I only came up to talk to you because you wore glasses.’ That struck a hard blow against her old, pitiable self-loathing. Hesitatingly, she seemed to shuffle around a little, then took a small step… toward him.
Moments later he was helping her climb back inside. From outside, cheers and applause drifted up from the ground. She embraced him, looking up at him through her glasses, her eyes filling with tears. Quickly she wiped them away, pushed her glasses up, and then settled them into place with the back of her hand. The policeman came in; distantly the man heard him say, ‘well done, sir. I thought we’d lost her.’ He ignored that; instead he concentrated on Debra as she asked, ’now tell me more about this glasses thing…'