Painless

He never did really remember buying the bottle of sleeping pills, nor did he remember lying on his bed aboard his boat for hours, staring at the label and insert, and making absolutely sure of what those instructions in English said. He never even remembered swallowing however many of the pills in the bottle... although he did have some shadowy memory of the beer he'd used to wash them down.

If just because it was the last beer he was ever to drink, he registered the taste of it, the way the beer fizzled slightly against the pills as they went down, the smokiness of the malt - perhaps he had chosen the Tomislav Pivo because he wanted a last taste of home in his mouth, rather than the weak piss Americans drank and praised. Though he *had* developed an appreciation for their custom of cold beer - Americans were not *complete* philistines, he supposed. After all, the pivo wasn't much colder than what was recommended.

And he was so tired, he just wanted to sleep forever and wake up in the arms of his wife, with their children bouncing on the bed next to them. He missed the baby-smell of his younger son, who had still been in the habit of stealing into his parents' bed in the middle of the night. And his older son, so close to being a young man, almost shaving, imitating his father in the bathroom in the morning, in preparation for having actual hair on his own chin (and Marko *would*, he had been certain, have been plagued with what his wife had called "five o'clock shadow at noon").

And now they were all gone - they had been gone for two years, five months and eleven days. He kept track of the days, in his heart; he was a doctor, why couldn't he make Nadja and Nikol and Marko whole and well again? Why couldn't he fix the evil in those who'd done it? He couldn't even fix *himself*, he still walked with a crutch and a severe limp. He was told he was lucky to still be alive, but his reaction to waking up - alone - in that hospital bed had been to try to pull out his IV. To try to get his hands on a scalpel, and finish the job that sniper had started. It had taken five orderlies to hold him down, screaming, and restrain him. Tie his arms and legs down, like he was some sort of criminal.

And wasn't he? He was responsible for having brought Nadja, Nikol and Marko to this area; he might as well have pulled the trigger that had killed his sons. He might as well have been the one to hold Nadja down for the Serbians to take-- no. Even now, he couldn't force his mind there, although his mind frequently went there on its own as he slept. He took some more pills, drank some more, draining the bottle and setting it carefully down by the bed. Now... if he was very lucky (although he would not remember the thought later) he should simply fall asleep soon. Then there would be no more Luka Anton Kovac. The pain - *his* pain - would be over.

There was that taste of beer, a feeling of lightheadedness, the feel of the mattress against his cheek as he began to slide blissfully away... then suddenly he was lying on a gurney with a tube down his throat as someone shone a light into his eyes. He struggled against the person with the flashlight. His arms and legs, at least, were unencumbered, perhaps he could remedy their attempts to bring him back. He bucked, tried to rise, as somebody fired off questions at him. The questioner was promptly rebuked - he didn't understand any of the words, just the tone of voice. He struck out blindly with his right hand, and knew from the solid impact and pained cry that he'd connected with someone. Now, now he had to try - he scrabbled at the tube and tried to pull it loose before these people could react.

But they were too fast - he felt a needle drive into his leg, followed by a slight burning sensation. Nevertheless, he continued to struggle even as several large men pinned him to the gurney; he couldn't speak, but silently cursed them as his hands and feet were - just as they had been in the other hospital - seized and tied down. Why couldn't they have simply let him to die? There was another needle-prick in his leg, and his movements gradually slowed to a halt.

When he woke again, he found himself in a regular hospital bed; the restraints were still there. And that damned tube. He felt a little better, but that wasn't saying much - he was, he thought, probably feeling the effect of whatever he had been given in the ER. Ah... and whatever was coming into the IV in his left arm. Strangely, he didn't feel the urge to pull this IV out. More medicine, no doubt. His face, he could feel, was wet - he'd probably been crying in his sleep again - and he tried to twist around in the bed to dry himself on the pillow. No success there. The effort exhausted him, and he closed his eyes.

He awoke again, not feeling especially rested (although the dreams had at least not taken him as he slept), his eyes crusty with sleep and old tears. A woman was watching him quizzically; he recognized Dr. Bailey, their chief resident. There was a bruise forming on her left cheek. "How are you doing, Luka? You gave us a nasty scare. Do you know what happened?" That was a good question. What *had* happened? There was a flash of a taste of beer, and something else, then nothing. He shook his head, and eyed her cautiously. "Okay. Now that you're stable and conscious, I'm gonna go ahead and remove that tube. You know the drill. Deep breath in... now exhale." He obeyed her, and the offending tube scraped its way up his throat and out; he went through the indignity of a coughing fit. "Would you like me to get you some ice chips? Bet your throat's feeling a little dry."

At least *she* wasn't treating him like a child, and using the first person plural to talk to him, he thought, and nodded slightly. Dr. Bailey nodded back, decisively, and left the room, leaving Luka to wonder what the hell *had* happened. He resolved to ask at the first opportunity. Bailey was back quickly with a small paper cup. "I was beginning to wonder if you had flown to North Pole for that," he rasped, causing her to smile and offer him a small piece of ice - he took it delicately in his teeth, and crunched it meditatively. "What happened?"

"You were late for your shift, so Nadira went by to check on you. She found you passed out on the bed, and called 911." Nadira Bavic was the young desk clerk he'd been spending the occasional spare moment with in the cafeteria for coffee - she was a fellow refugee. Unfortunately, he'd forgotten that he had, several months ago, given her a key to keep an eye on the place while he was out of town for some conference or other. And he had never thought to ask for it back. Damn. Dr. Bailey hesitated now. "Luka, it appears that you tried to kill yourself - there was a half-empty bottle of sleeping pills next to you, and a couple of empty beer bottles on the floor. She said the glass was still cold when she found you."

"Not at first. When you woke up in the ER, you went berserk and started trying to pull the tube out." Her hand - she was probably not aware of the movement - went to her bruised cheek for a moment, and Luka realized that he must have, at some point, hit her while trying to escape. The thought disturbed and horrified him - he had been raised to respect and protect women, not to deliver right hook to the jaw. "But now, you'll have to stay in them until Psych can make it by to talk to you about it. I know," she said soothingly as he made a little noise that was part distress and part anger. "But at least you have asylum status, you can't be deported for this." Deportation? He hadn't even thought of *that*! He'd been occupied with the immediate matter of the restraints, but he didn't even bother to ask her to loosen them.

The Psych resident who came to see him - a Dr. Phillips - was very nice young woman, even if her eyes did occasionally stray below his face: if he'd been wearing pants, he would have wondered if he was unzipped. And of course, he was used to people mangling his name (even the ones who *didn't* call him Kovak never got the vowels quite right). She asked him questions, spoke with him a few minutes, then wrote some notes in his chart and went away... without removing the restraints. *That* was pointless, he thought.

He had, of course, done a psych rotation as a student, though that had been years ago, and had some idea of where she had been going with her questions. He hoped that she had merely gone to speak with her superior about freeing him. And she did return soon.

"Absolutely not. I don't pretend to have any idea of what you've seen and experienced," she told him earnestly. Good, he thought. You couldn't handle it - I obviously have not. "But what I *have* heard about your war, it's understandable that you've come through it with such severe depression."

"Not all of it, no. But everything you must have seen in the course of it--" He sighed and directed one of his dark looks at her (one of the ones, he thought, that had so terrified students once, though he no longer had that kind of authority).

"You'd be a little 'moody'," he chose the word he'd heard some of the staff use in connection with him, "too, if you'd seen your family die in front of you," he told her, almost calmly. "I couldn't begin to describe what I have had to do to survive since then." Didn't particularly want to think about it, either.

"And yet... after doing all that to survive, you try to kill yourself two and half years later? You've just recently been recertified to work as a doctor in this country, and you... you do this just out of the blue? Did something happen, in your personal or professional life, to upset you?" Everything upsets me, he thought. I just want to wake up, and find that the last three years have been nothing but a horrible dream, but he didn't tell that to Dr. Phillips. He'd never get out of the restraints *that* way. He thought he might say or promise almost anything to get out of them.

"So untie one arm and stay in the room with me. I promise I'll be good." Even drugged, he was... intense, and so she did as he requested. Luka quickly discovered that - in the day he'd gone home and swallowed a lot of pills - he'd had an exceptionally bad day, even for an ER doctor. The child who'd arrived in full arrest, because her babysitter hadn't known that regular M&Ms could also set off a peanut allergy, and had been too stupid or negligent (or both) to call an ambulance until it was too late. The entire family killed by an MVA when a truck blew through a red light and sent their little econo-box car spinning through two lanes of traffic. And yet, incredibly, they had hung on long enough to arrive at the ER... and die within minutes of each other as Luka tried to restore normal rhythm to the mother's heart.

He did remember that case - the youngest child had been clutching a teddy bear in one bloodied fist, with such a grip that nobody had wanted to force the child's hand open. The grip had turned out to be the beginnings of rigor mortis. He closed his eyes for a moment, then forced himself to return to the charts. The only patient he had been able to save in that entire day had been a girl who was nearing the end of terminal cancer anyway. The entire day had been, he remembered he had thought, a monstrous joke from God. God seemed to be fond of these jokes.



	Suicide Is Only Painless If You Succeed Part 1 By EHursh "Dr. Luka Kovac" is the property of NBC, Amblin', Constant C, Warners, et al., and "Goran Visnjic" is the property of Ivana Visnjic. Just sayin'. :-) Category: Gap filler (approximately 1996). No sex. Not intended to be spiritually uplifting. Hanky moment? Beats me. He never did really remember buying the bottle of sleeping pills, nor did he remember lying on his bed aboard his boat for hours, staring at the label and insert, and making absolutely sure of what those instructions in English said. He never even remembered swallowing however many of the pills in the bottle... although he did have some shadowy memory of the beer he'd used to wash them down. If just because it was the last beer he was ever to drink, he registered the taste of it, the way the beer fizzled slightly against the pills as they went down, the smokiness of the malt - perhaps he had chosen the Tomislav Pivo because he wanted a last taste of home in his mouth, rather than the weak piss Americans drank and praised. Though he had developed an appreciation for their custom of cold beer - Americans were not complete philistines, he supposed. After all, the pivo wasn't much colder than what was recommended. And he was so tired, he just wanted to sleep forever and wake up in the arms of his wife, with their children bouncing on the bed next to them. He missed the baby-smell of his younger son, who had still been in the habit of stealing into his parents' bed in the middle of the night. And his older son, so close to being a young man, almost shaving, imitating his father in the bathroom in the morning, in preparation for having actual hair on his own chin (and Marko would, he had been certain, have been plagued with what his wife had called "five o'clock shadow at noon"). And now they were all gone - they had been gone for two years, five months and eleven days. He kept track of the days, in his heart; he was a doctor, why couldn't he make Nadja and Nikol and Marko whole and well again? Why couldn't he fix the evil in those who'd done it? He couldn't even fix himself, he still walked with a crutch and a severe limp. He was told he was lucky to still be alive, but his reaction to waking up - alone - in that hospital bed had been to try to pull out his IV. To try to get his hands on a scalpel, and finish the job that sniper had started. It had taken five orderlies to hold him down, screaming, and restrain him. Tie his arms and legs down, like he was some sort of criminal. And wasn't he? He was responsible for having brought Nadja, Nikol and Marko to this area; he might as well have pulled the trigger that had killed his sons. He might as well have been the one to hold Nadja down for the Serbians to take-- no. Even now, he couldn't force his mind there, although his mind frequently went there on its own as he slept. He took some more pills, drank some more, draining the bottle and setting it carefully down by the bed. Now... if he was very lucky (although he would not remember the thought later) he should simply fall asleep soon. Then there would be no more Luka Anton Kovac. The pain - his pain - would be over. * * * * * * * * There was that taste of beer, a feeling of lightheadedness, the feel of the mattress against his cheek as he began to slide blissfully away... then suddenly he was lying on a gurney with a tube down his throat as someone shone a light into his eyes. He struggled against the person with the flashlight. His arms and legs, at least, were unencumbered, perhaps he could remedy their attempts to bring him back. He bucked, tried to rise, as somebody fired off questions at him. The questioner was promptly rebuked - he didn't understand any of the words, just the tone of voice. He struck out blindly with his right hand, and knew from the solid impact and pained cry that he'd connected with someone. Now, now he had to try - he scrabbled at the tube and tried to pull it loose before these people could react. But they were too fast - he felt a needle drive into his leg, followed by a slight burning sensation. Nevertheless, he continued to struggle even as several large men pinned him to the gurney; he couldn't speak, but silently cursed them as his hands and feet were - just as they had been in the other hospital - seized and tied down. Why couldn't they have simply let him to die? There was another needle-prick in his leg, and his movements gradually slowed to a halt. * * * * * * * * When he woke again, he found himself in a regular hospital bed; the restraints were still there. And that damned tube. He felt a little better, but that wasn't saying much - he was, he thought, probably feeling the effect of whatever he had been given in the ER. Ah... and whatever was coming into the IV in his left arm. Strangely, he didn't feel the urge to pull this IV out. More medicine, no doubt. His face, he could feel, was wet - he'd probably been crying in his sleep again - and he tried to twist around in the bed to dry himself on the pillow. No success there. The effort exhausted him, and he closed his eyes. He awoke again, not feeling especially rested (although the dreams had at least not taken him as he slept), his eyes crusty with sleep and old tears. A woman was watching him quizzically; he recognized Dr. Bailey, their chief resident. There was a bruise forming on her left cheek. "How are you doing, Luka? You gave us a nasty scare. Do you know what happened?" That was a good question. What had happened? There was a flash of a taste of beer, and something else, then nothing. He shook his head, and eyed her cautiously. "Okay. Now that you're stable and conscious, I'm gonna go ahead and remove that tube. You know the drill. Deep breath in... now exhale." He obeyed her, and the offending tube scraped its way up his throat and out; he went through the indignity of a coughing fit. "Would you like me to get you some ice chips? Bet your throat's feeling a little dry." At least she wasn't treating him like a child, and using the first person plural to talk to him, he thought, and nodded slightly. Dr. Bailey nodded back, decisively, and left the room, leaving Luka to wonder what the hell had happened. He resolved to ask at the first opportunity. Bailey was back quickly with a small paper cup. "I was beginning to wonder if you had flown to North Pole for that," he rasped, causing her to smile and offer him a small piece of ice - he took it delicately in his teeth, and crunched it meditatively. "What happened?" "You were late for your shift, so Nadira went by to check on you. She found you passed out on the bed, and called 911." Nadira Bavic was the young desk clerk he'd been spending the occasional spare moment with in the cafeteria for coffee - she was a fellow refugee. Unfortunately, he'd forgotten that he had, several months ago, given her a key to keep an eye on the place while he was out of town for some conference or other. And he had never thought to ask for it back. Damn. Dr. Bailey hesitated now. "Luka, it appears that you tried to kill yourself - there was a half-empty bottle of sleeping pills next to you, and a couple of empty beer bottles on the floor. She said the glass was still cold when she found you." "So the restraints." "Not at first. When you woke up in the ER, you went berserk and started trying to pull the tube out." Her hand - she was probably not aware of the movement - went to her bruised cheek for a moment, and Luka realized that he must have, at some point, hit her while trying to escape. The thought disturbed and horrified him - he had been raised to respect and protect women, not to deliver right hook to the jaw. "But now, you'll have to stay in them until Psych can make it by to talk to you about it. I know," she said soothingly as he made a little noise that was part distress and part anger. "But at least you have asylum status, you can't be deported for this." Deportation? He hadn't even thought of that! He'd been occupied with the immediate matter of the restraints, but he didn't even bother to ask her to loosen them. * * * * * * * * The Psych resident who came to see him - a Dr. Phillips - was very nice young woman, even if her eyes did occasionally stray below his face: if he'd been wearing pants, he would have wondered if he was unzipped. And of course, he was used to people mangling his name (even the ones who didn't call him Kovak never got the vowels quite right). She asked him questions, spoke with him a few minutes, then wrote some notes in his chart and went away... without removing the restraints. That was pointless, he thought. He had, of course, done a psych rotation as a student, though that had been years ago, and had some idea of where she had been going with her questions. He hoped that she had merely gone to speak with her superior about freeing him. And she did return soon. "Dr. Kovac, I had a word with Dr. Evanston about your case. He wants to try you on an anti-depressant." "You're saying I'm crazy." "Absolutely not. I don't pretend to have any idea of what you've seen and experienced," she told him earnestly. Good, he thought. You couldn't handle it - I obviously have not. "But what I have heard about your war, it's understandable that you've come through it with such severe depression." "Hm," he said non-committally. "You understand, do you?" "Not all of it, no. But everything you must have seen in the course of it--" He sighed and directed one of his dark looks at her (one of the ones, he thought, that had so terrified students once, though he no longer had that kind of authority). "You'd be a little 'moody'," he chose the word he'd heard some of the staff use in connection with him, "too, if you'd seen your family die in front of you," he told her, almost calmly. "I couldn't begin to describe what I have had to do to survive since then." Didn't particularly want to think about it, either. "And yet... after doing all that to survive, you try to kill yourself two and half years later? You've just recently been recertified to work as a doctor in this country, and you... you do this just out of the blue? Did something happen, in your personal or professional life, to upset you?" Everything upsets me, he thought. I just want to wake up, and find that the last three years have been nothing but a horrible dream, but he didn't tell that to Dr. Phillips. He'd never get out of the restraints that way. He thought he might say or promise almost anything to get out of them. "I don't know. The last few days are either a blur or non-existent for me. Maybe if I could see my charts, I'd have some idea." "Okay, I'll have those brought up." When the charts for the few days before Luka's suicide attempt were brought in, though, Dr. Phillips tried to open the first one. "Absolutely not. Those charts are none of your business." "And I can't untie you." He sighed. "So untie one arm and stay in the room with me. I promise I'll be good." Even drugged, he was... intense, and so she did as he requested. Luka quickly discovered that - in the day he'd gone home and swallowed a lot of pills - he'd had an exceptionally bad day, even for an ER doctor. The child who'd arrived in full arrest, because her babysitter hadn't known that regular M&Ms could also set off a peanut allergy, and had been too stupid or negligent (or both) to call an ambulance until it was too late. The entire family killed by an MVA when a truck blew through a red light and sent their little econo-box car spinning through two lanes of traffic. And yet, incredibly, they had hung on long enough to arrive at the ER... and die within minutes of each other as Luka tried to restore normal rhythm to the mother's heart. He did remember that case - the youngest child had been clutching a teddy bear in one bloodied fist, with such a grip that nobody had wanted to force the child's hand open. The grip had turned out to be the beginnings of rigor mortis. He closed his eyes for a moment, then forced himself to return to the charts. The only patient he had been able to save in that entire day had been a girl who was nearing the end of terminal cancer anyway. The entire day had been, he remembered he had thought, a monstrous joke from God. God seemed to be fond of these jokes. He didn't share that observation with Dr. Phillips, though. She didn't seem the sort to appreciate it. * * * * * * * * * * To be continued.