The Woo-Woo Read online

  “The cops said I was the best bridge jumper ever,” Beautiful One squealed to me on the phone when I called her that week to see if she was doing better.

  Normally, I’d be too afraid to phone my auntie and would rely instead on second-hand news via my mother or father. But being away from my family for a month had prompted a change in me—whether better or grotesque, it allowed me to experience a strange sensation. Was it regret? Was it bruising reality? In gloomy Hongcouver, perhaps because I was fully immersed in our spiralling drama, I often refused to believe I was suffocating in so much sadness. But in Paris, peeking in from the outside, I was able to begrudgingly accept the horror as real life instead of make-believe. Perhaps because the suicide attempt was on the news, disassociating was now impossible for me.

  On the phone, it felt terrifying to talk to a manic Beautiful One, but she was thrilled to brag to her “absolute best and favourite niece,” which was what she always said, but now she sounded like a recording of her former self.

  Our conversation sickened me. This is what I learned:

  Poor Beautiful One, completely delusional and communing with an insistent God inside her brain, had squatted on the observatory deck of the vast Ironworkers Memorial Bridge and then tottered on three parallel cables, gripping a cable behind and above her with just one hand. Beautiful One said that she became a big-shot superhero, whooping, as she swung-swung-swung. I imagined Beautiful One, weighing less than ninety pounds, on a major bridge that spanned 1,292 metres across Burrard Inlet, her legs flailing in a convulsive Wonder Woman cancan.

  She had stopped traffic on a crucial part of the Trans-Canada Highway, which families needed to traverse for their Canada Day vacations and picnics and late-night fireworks. But Beautiful One had only cared about swinging and swinging (all that attention!)—she was glad that there was no suicide barrier.

  “What are you doing?” a police officer first asked her around noon.

  “I’m admiring the beautiful view. It’s such a wonderful day, you know?”

  He watched Beautiful One (she was used to people admiring her), so she began to snap pictures with her BlackBerry. The officer might have thought that she was homeless, armed with only a stolen phone, because she hadn’t showered or changed her clothes for a month or so. When her phone ran out of batteries, she wanted more attention from the concerned officer. She threatened to jump.

  “I’m very, very clever,” she trilled at me over the phone. She sounded so pleased and exuberant as she reported the incident: “Don’t you think that I am clever to get attention by jumping? I’m probably the smartest one in this whole family!”

  For six, seven, or eight hours, depending on which talk show or blog or newspaper you followed, negotiators from the emergency response team, the marine unit, and the coast guard wheedled: “Ma’am, please! Ma’am! Please listen! Ma’am! Ma’am! Ma’am!”

  Beautiful One said that she was thrilled to shut down three cities in the Lower Mainland and overjoyed to control the lives of the usual 200,000 commuters, not even counting the additional numbers of those unfortunate families on their way to the Canada Day fireworks. It was the only time in her life when she had so much power. She had even cornered a squad of emergency response workers as her personal hostages to play Mad Hatter word games. This was the best day of her life.

  “Why don’t you come down, ma’am?” the officers said. “You must be very thirsty.”

  “But there’s lots of water down there, sir. Hahaha! What’s wrong with the water down there? There’s enough to drink for everyone! We can all share!”

  “Jump, bitch, jump!” heat-stroked strangers in cars and raging motorcyclists had screamed.

  I imagined most of them dehydrated or just desperate to pee, trapped in traffic in the smothering metropolitan heat. While kids complained of thirst, a few of the elderly fainted, so no one had any sympathy for the unhinged woman. But it was the first time Beautiful One felt so respected and truly happy. She needed the public’s unadorned esteem, the SWAT team’s inexhaustible attention—all because she could not get any from her own damned family.

  “I don’t care if my kids kill themselves because I killed myself,” she had announced when suicide negotiators warned her about the dangers associated with bridge jumping—“Think of your daughters! Your son!”

  “Why would you think I cared?” she said flippantly. Yet I think she was trying to distance herself—or her callousness meant that extreme psychosis had amplified every unkind personality trait that she possessed.

  Flowery Face, who was thirteen, had been put on the phone to plead with her mother to come down, but that didn’t help. “Don’t die,” my cousin begged, because her older siblings were too afraid to talk to Beautiful One just in case she jumped mid-call. Uncle E.T. was still “on vacation” and could not be reached.

  “Do you think I give a fuck what you think?” Beautiful One had snapped.

  I think she felt exasperated by life, bruised by the chilling indifference from a family as insensitive and internally crushing as ours. She must have been truly fed up and sick when she told her daughter: “You’re better off without me. You don’t need me anymore. You should be very happy for me when I die. Bye.”

  Joyously, Beautiful One swung back and forth on the steel cables until two constables distracted her (“Look over there!”) and someone snatched her Q-tip arms. On cue, the emergency response team, leaping out of their black van with safety harnesses secured, plunged behind her and snagged my screaming auntie around the waist.

  “I have the most amazing balancing skills,” she bragged to me in an animated little girl’s voice. And then she repeated herself.

  Our one-sided phone conversation had lasted almost a whole hour, and I could feel my stomach lurch, a hard, choking bubble, a blister of remorse, forming in my throat. But I could not hang up, because it was like watching a car fall off a cliff. I had never had so much one-on-one time with tragedy, except with my mother, and I wanted to see where it led. I had grown up with my mother, whose bouts of madness were extreme, yes, but expected—yet Beautiful One’s breakdown seemed confusing and unbelievable, as if our family insanity could multiply and spread at random. I needed to understand why my aunt had gone insane, and whether by sheer magical thinking there had been a choice or action that could have prevented her madness. I should not have been so shocked, but I had never wanted to believe that Beautiful One could be so troubled and traumatized by her own childhood of poverty and neglect. She was as damaged as my mother, but I never saw it because I did not live with her. For why else would a grown woman sometimes confide in an adolescent on a family camping trip?

  “Oh, Lindsay,” Auntie Beautiful One sang, sighing. “I can balance without my hands and I can perform in a circus act, like the Cirque du Soleil. They said I was the best bridge jumper in BC! And I’m very clever. I’m so smart I told them there’s water down there when they asked me if I needed water! You should be very happy when I die! Don’t you understand that this is good for me? That dying is the best decision I ever made.”

  The family would always wonder if she really meant to jump, or if it was just the Woo-Woo talking. Love and affection, being similar to dirty, repressed stage-four cancer among our tight-knit clan, were never expressed, if they did exist, because of our ghosts, so this was the absolute best it would ever get for poor Auntie, who just wanted to feel adored and cherished for once. Being the best bridge jumper in BC made her feel like a celebrity on reality TV.

  “I understand, Auntie,” I lied, half singing the words (at this point, she would not acknowledge a reply if it wasn’t musical).

  Since no rational explanation was forthcoming, I finally hung up. I felt uncomfortable with the swift, plummeting trajectory of our conversation. Also, I felt an ounce of intense guilt. And I thought there might be a clue to the iPod shuffle of Beautiful One’s brain.

  I wondered if the bridge-jumping incident could have been prevented. I kept wondering: If Beautiful On
e had been given proper psychiatric attention, if she had been checked into a private hospital for treatment right after the wedding, would things have spiralled so completely out of control? Would her firecracker psychosis have spun into the pitiless territory of absolute madness? Was our family mostly at fault for the incident on Canada Day? Was I at fault?

  The answer to my irrational blame mongering, despite my oscillating internal confusion, was maybe eighty/twenty, but only if you factored in culture and superstition, counted missing Uncle E.T., and divided the total by the other seven aunties and uncles. But culpability is easy to assign to other people. Because my family was not profound or stupid enough to consign guilt to ourselves, it was much easier to fault Auntie Beautiful One’s lack of determination. Or, as in my case, horrible luck and genetics.

  In hindsight, I believe that I initially took Beautiful One’s decision to jump as a bratty but personal one. That she tried to jump not only pissed me off but also broke some amazing resolve or crass, elementary belief system in me. At the time, I did not recognize it or understand what was happening to me. I just thought that I was having a simple if fiendish gallbladder attack, not a crabby emotional reaction. I deluded myself into thinking that I did not know why I was reacting so abnormally.

  I felt betrayed in an outsized, abstract way that I could not explain. Like my mother, I couldn’t help but take her psychosis personally.

  Two weeks after the Canada Day bridge-jumping incident, Uncle E.T., who had driven back from his runaway vacation on Hongcouver Island when he heard about his infamous holiday stuntwoman wife, supposedly begged the doctors to please, please, please, put the goddamn Woo-Woo in electroshock therapy and then perform a prompt lobotomy—at least, that’s what Beautiful One claimed, though I wasn’t sure if it was mostly her delusion. Like everyone else in our family, he was horrified and saddened by his wife’s actions, but he could not show it (our ghosts were always waiting).

  At Burnaby Hospital, Beautiful One enjoyed the psychiatric ward immensely, because she could sing all day to the other patients. Unlike our family, everyone in the psych ward liked her take on unconventional musical theatre—most of the patients sang back to her, she said. And Beautiful One became close friends with a patient with bipolar disorder and a crack addiction, who would later always call her house to ask for money. Beautiful One preferred the ward and its residents to her own uninspiring children. For supposed stellar behaviour (despite proudly admitting to finding a way to unscrew her bedroom window), she was given frequent day passes to visit the outside universe, but she was reluctant to leave the psychiatric ward and her stimulating new friends (they were staging a revolt, like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, she said).

  “But I have a chess appointment with Mister X,” she would always wail whenever my mother invited her out for cheap Tuesday dim sum.

  “Isn’t that the fucking homeless bum who keeps peeing in your shoes?” my mother asked over the speakerphone.

  “Yes,” Beautiful One admitted, “but he has an intellect almost as amazing and grandiose as mine.”

  When she was allowed home on a day pass for good behaviour, she printed out internet comments about the Canada Day bridge-jumping incident and stuck them to the refrigerator. She trilled her favourite comments over the phone, screeching at everyone to listen when she read the wittier ones.

  “To seaaaa or not to seaaa,” she quoted, tittering, hehehehe, asking me what I thought. The internet comments were cruel, yes, but they gave her a formidable sense of purpose:

  Posted 01 July 2008 – 06:03 PM

  The female dog should just jump and let thousands of people get on with their lives on a holiday evening.

  I’m trying to feel sympathy for the “distraught woman,” but if you really were distraught, you’d just end it at home somewhere. Pulling sh!t on a major bridge during the afternoon of a national holiday is just a stunt to get attention.

  Happy Canada Day.

  I really don’t think she wanted to kill herself, if you want to kill yourself, you can’t be stopped, and it would be fairly quick. Maybe she wanted attention? I don’t know why people say they want to die, but then just stand there, i’ve seen on this tv.

  I hope this chick is proud. And you know what really sucks? I heard she didn’t even jump.

  Beautiful One said that she was extremely proud of all the commotion she had caused—it seemed that nearly everyone trapped in traffic wanted to personally push BC’s best potential bridge jumper off the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge. The public’s anger was the reason the police and government reassigned Beautiful One to an at-risk age group. The public would be more sympathetic to a senior citizen, so a press rumour spread that on Canada Day an old woman was in a severe economic crisis. With no money, no employment, no housing to speak of, why shouldn’t she jump?

  This of course had made Beautiful One extremely upset, because reporters and journalists had called her “an elderly woman.”

  “Elderly?!” she had shrieked, and I couldn’t help but laugh in a sharp, uncomfortable way. Beautiful One was not old. “An elderly woman?” she said, wounded. “I’m only forty-two!” Beautiful One had been so frantic when she read the newspapers that the nurses had thought she needed to be sedated.

  And she resented the anonymity; she wanted to be known for her famous balancing feat. Vancouver Magazine had lumped her in with “one of the dozen or more people who leap from Metro Vancouver bridges each year,” which meant God had lied—she wasn’t so special after all.

  Police officers even invented a nine-year-old son (in real life, my cousin was nineteen) to gain public compassion for the potential bridge jumper. “We gave that lady another chance at life,” Inspector Chapman said. “We gave her a chance to go home to her family and her nine-year-old son. We saved her life.”

  But Beautiful One was not grateful; she displayed only unadulterated anger. “But I’m pretty!” she screamed, as if that was all that mattered, howling into the phone like a cartoon coyote. “You don’t understand! Like, I’m really pretty! Why didn’t they say that? Didn’t anyone notice?”

  And Beautiful One planned to do it all over again—perhaps Labour Day, perhaps Remembrance Day—just to prove to the media that this bridge-jumping diva was spry and young, “not ooooooold!” She basked in the vindictive outpouring of online attention, and I wondered why she couldn’t just be happy with our family’s criticism of her public behaviour.

  “Why are you so fucking pathetic?” my mother, shrunken and terrified, had screamed at her sister any chance she got.

  Yelling multiple fuck-yous at the demon(s) inside Beautiful One somehow made ugly, abstract things, like our fear and sadness, much easier to manage.

  Something in me crumbled and broke the day I saw Auntie Beautiful One post-breakdown. Paris had made me soft, fattened me with pounds of butter and refined sugar, and then destroyed all my sinewy defences. Cute little pastries and melt-in-your-mouth gelato had mutated me into a corporeal globe of convulsive nerves and jittery human emotions.

  Back in Hongcouver, I missed the carefreeness of Europe, the straightforwardness of food and shopping and C.C.’s friendship. Most of all, I missed knowing someone who wasn’t constantly stuffed with personal misery.

  When I saw Auntie Beautiful One, I suddenly felt as desperate as my mother when she had cried in the basement bathroom at my cousin’s wedding. I could not control the terror and sadness spiralling inside me and felt undisciplined and utterly wrong.

  Nearly a month after her Woo-Woo on the bridge, Beautiful One didn’t seem to recognize anyone. The hospital had declared her mentally fit enough to be a part-time resident, but she was still vacant and restless. It seemed that she only cared about shuffling around her house when I visited. According to our Chinese superstitions, the Beautiful One family were considered contagious, and they were not allowed in anyone’s houses for the next month or so, until their “bad luck” had dissipated. They were in special quarantine, but my mother had ris
ked sending me over so I could check on her sister for her. I didn’t know what medications she was on, but I assumed that she was on a zombifying brew of antipsychotics. Her eyes didn’t seem to flutter anymore, and she spoke in a flat, sloppy monotone. Her voice sounded masculine and machine-like, as if an oversized butterfly were trapped in her throat.

  Auntie Beautiful One was no longer manic, but with her filthy clothes that were too loose and her mangled hair sticking up, she looked as if she had rolled out of a coffin. She had been transformed into a sullen corpse from a horror movie. Her eyes were black and dead and a little sandy. She couldn’t be convinced to brush her teeth; she believed that toothpaste had been specifically designed to kill her.

  “I am the smartest one in this whole family,” Beautiful One had rasped at me in greeting. “I have discovered that you have to be careful of toothpaste. You see, I am so clever that I know there’s poison in it, and we can all die. Pick up this tube and tell me you can feel the stinging in your arm, right? If you can feel the pain, it means there’s poison in it.”

  This seemed like the most deranged thing that Beautiful One had ever said, which convinced me that she was too far gone for anyone’s non-medical expertise.

  I didn’t know what to say to Beautiful One. And the situation got worse when she stopped her frantic pacing and mumbling and tried to give me some money. She opened her wallet, but there was only a ten-dollar bill left. She looked so confused and dejected. Grunting, she tried to make me take the ten dollars, but I couldn’t accept it from this ghost of my former auntie. Beautiful One had been replaced by someone or something else entirely. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. Years of hockey practice and emotion-resistance training from my father made me ashamed to show my sadness. Instead, I pretended to be nonchalant and unaffected.

  “Take money, Lindsay,” Unbeautiful One rasped, stuffing the bill into the front pocket of my hoodie.