Author : Waldo van der Waal

There are people that say suicide is a coward’s way out. But those people don’t know what it is like. Not just the final act of squeezing the trigger or taking the plunge, but what it is like to lose your mind to the point where it finally flits away, just out of your grasp. Reaching the point where you are willing to do anything just to make it all stop is the true horror of suicide. Ask me, I’ve done it many times.

There’s always one thing that triggers the downfall. An argument with the wife, or a financial problem that brings you to your knees. Or you do something so wrong that you know you can’t possibly forgiven. And then it starts. Day by day you regress from a safe mental state. At first you fantasize about solutions, like winning the lottery. But then, as despair grows and time runs out, your mind inevitably bends towards the Final Solution.

Which is exactly why VRPsych makes so much money. You make a deal with them before the treatment starts. You sign your soul over to the devil. They hook you up to some fancy brain programming software that sorts your mental state out. All you have to do is pull the trigger. Think of it as a hard reset. You grip the gun, you press it to your temple or put the barrel in your mouth and then you squeeze the trigger. All of this feels absolutely real to you, including the fear. The weight of the gun, the coldness of the metal and the smell of the cordite. All real. But then you wake up in their recovery room, none the worse for it. And you have a new mind, which is programmed to solve your problems. As you get better, you have to start paying them for their services. But not this time.

***

The trooper nudged the body with his boot. Crime Scene be damned, he wanted to make sure the dude was dead. But then there could be little doubt, as half his head was missing. The trooper turned to his colleague, who was standing a few feet away and said: “Now why would anyone climb over the wall of a psych company, just to blast their brains out in the garden?”

“God alone knows Harry, the mind is a strange thing. Now call it in so we can go on lunch.”