Nobody’s going to miss me all that much, however, which is sad if you think about it, so I choose not to.
Once you make the acknowledgment that you’re about to die, a form of letting go occurs that is far more grand and terrifying than skydiving or bull riding or walking a tightrope over burning coals. After that, an equally grand and terrifying window opens that most folks don’t ever have the blessing or misfortune to see.
Final possibilities.
You might call it justice. Or liberty. Or merely opportunity.
Whatever it is, it’s how I happened to be planning to murder a woman I have never met.
I certainly didn’t think this would be my life when I was twenty-nine. As a teen and college student, I anticipated an interesting career, maybe a husband, possibly a child, certainly a bright and burning future. I got the first one, and for a while I also had the last, and maybe it’s just as well that the two in the middle never came to pass.
Because not long ago, I sat across the desk in a generic doctor’s office in an anonymous three-story medical building across from Scripps Hospital in Encinitas, getting a death sentence.
It wasn’t put in those terms, of course, and I was given to believe initially that there was a great deal more hope than actually turned out to be the case, once I pulled myself back together after a few days of hysteria and started doing my own research. I’m a researcher by trade, a writer and editor of web content, and it didn’t take long to discover exactly what the doctor had failed to mention.
It was very, very bad. As in invariably fatal. Palliative measures could extend my life a bit, of course. There was even an upcoming protocol for an experimental drug that I could and did apply for, but that was on the East Coast and only accepting a handful of patients. Also, I’d probably be dead before it began.
The diagnostic process had been going on for so long by then that I was ready for a definitive prognosis, even a bad one. Or so I thought until it happened.
I’d endured what felt like hundreds of needle pricks and biopsies and humiliating procedures. I’d been poked, X-rayed, lasered, MRI’d, biopsied, ultrasounded—everything but dunked in a vat of water to see if I swam or drowned, the way they used to test witches in the Massachusetts Colony.
Sometimes I think it would have been easier if we’d just started with dunking, except that as a native San Diegan, I’ve been in the water all my life and could certainly swim, which would have declared me guilty. Or, in this case, afflicted. Whereas a decision by drowning would have meant that my body actually wasn’t in its final hours, not even close, and that I didn’t need to die at all.
This is way beyond catch-22.
Instant Karma came about because of a dreadful illness contracted by my high school friend Molly Donovan, a young woman whose talents and gifts would have been really depressing and intimidating if she hadn’t been such a genuinely nice person.
Molly died two years ago of a brain tumor. A glioblastoma multiforme, the baddest of the bad in a family of outlaw cells I have always found particularly horrifying. Brain tumors are terrorists who attack your centers of insight and reason, who fly straight into the control tower supporting your motor skills, who reprogram the axis of your body’s global communication systems. And glioblastomas do it really, really fast.
Molly was a lawyer on the fast track at a small but powerful Los Angeles firm that specialized in environmental law and had won a couple of significant cases for the good guys. But being on the fast track meant she was a workaholic with no personal life, and when her health blew up on her, she moved back home, spending her final months in the pool house at her parents’ Rancho Santa Fe estate. I was living just down the coast in Pacific Beach and it felt entirely natural to devote a lot of time to somebody who had once been a good friend.
Also scary as hell. But we became close again, closer than we’d ever been, and had some fine times in those last few months despite everything. I learned a lot about dying with style from her.
I just I hadn’t intended to put it into effect quite so quickly.
Like so many great ideas, ours was born by accident.
Ever the overachiever, Molly had found herself a support group of other young adults facing terrifying diagnoses, facilitated by a La Jolla psychologist with a breathtaking coastal view from her sixth-floor offices. The only glitch was that Molly couldn’t drive because she had the occasional grand mal seizure. So I served as chauffeur and while the group met, I waited in the coffee shop on the ground floor with my netbook and my latte.
Early on, a few of them broke off and continued to hang out when the sessions ended, and I was easily absorbed into that group. The common denominator, beyond age and mortality, was a very black sense of humor.
The default clubhouse became Molly’s place, which offered privacy and space and a reasonably central location. One clear fall evening, with breezes off the ocean, glittering stars, and the occasional cry of a night bird or coyote, five of us sat on the patio outside her pool house. We might have been alone in the universe, nestled in this private little valley with its scents of eucalyptus, night-blooming jasmine, and money. Molly’s parents were probably home, but their Spanish-style hacienda was enormous and whatever wing they might have been occupying at the moment, we couldn’t see or hear them. The housekeeper’s lights were out over the garage, and as for neighbors, the property had been landscaped decades ago to assure that nobody else would ever be visible from Casa Donovan. Yes, that’s what it said on the sign by the locked gate down at the road. Multicultural to the max.
Ours was a pretty motley crew. Kenny Peters, an accountant with a rare and raging form of lymphoma. Adam Hillinger, a born salesman with multiple melanomas and an inability to go more than five minutes without sneaking a peek at his phone. Katherine Connelly, a third grade teacher and terrible exception to the rule that breast cancer doesn’t strike the young. Molly. And me, the token healthy person, at least for the time being.
Kenny picked up the lament he had apparently brought to group earlier, excoriating the insurance company jackasses who had restructured their formulary and denied him the incredibly expensive chemo that appeared to be his best—and possibly only—hope. Kenny always struck me as pragmatic to the point of fatalism, a man whose chest might be increasingly sunken but whose tone remained mild-mannered and calm. However, he and his employer had been paying premiums to this insurance company for his entire career and he was well and truly pissed.
“I want to line those malevolent morons up against a wall and shoot every last one of them,” he announced. Kenny wasn’t eating or drinking anything because the outdated chemo regimen that his insurance did permit had given him a charming blend of nausea, bloat, and hair loss. Food issues were one reason we didn’t meet in restaurants. Those gangbangers and military dudes who go for the cue-ball look would covet Kenny’s slick pate, if they could only skip the part where their internal organs were consumed by rogue cells and random poisons.
“There’d just be more bureaucrats lining up to take their place,” Katherine responded mildly. “Like one of those video games where you kill three aliens and another twelve rise from the dust. A kind of bureaucratic whack-a-mole. Shooting won’t stop them.”
My mind hurtled off in related directions: heads lopped off hydras, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, plants that die at the center and send out a hundred pups or runners at the same time.
Metastasizing cancer cells.
“It would stop some of them,” Kenny said.
It was tough to argue that one and nobody did.
“No reason to limit it to Western Health,” Adam put in suddenly. He was “between fumigations,” as he liked to put it, and had stopped on his way over to get a giant drink featuring caramel, chocolate, cinnamon, pumpkin, a whiff of decaf, and a mountain of whipped cream. He was on a lot of steroids just then and hungry all the time.
“Good point,” Kenny agreed. “My wife was watching Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid the ot
her night and I have to say I liked that ending. Going out in a blaze of glory.”
“You mean having Western Health machine-gun you?” Molly asked. She had lost a lot of weight and was wearing a wig, now that radiation had zapped away much of her gorgeous blond hair, taking her energy along with it. “What’s the point of that?”
“Well, it works better if I’m the one doing the shooting,” Kenny admitted. “But either one would call a lot of attention to the power they abuse. Still. And it would make me feel better, at least for a minute or two. I’m probably going to be dead in six months anyway.”
“Think positive,” Adam the salesman told him, in a touchy feely, support-group tone that made me want to barf and sob at the same time.
“Wiping out Western Health would be very positive,” Kenny insisted.
“Then why not go all the way and really clean house?” Adam asked idly. “Instant karma. I bet every one of us has a list of people who’ve given us trouble. My grandpa always said, ‘Don’t get mad, get even.’”
I had to admit I could see the appeal, particularly now that I was a firsthand witness to some of the insurance quandaries and medical horror stories I’d only read about before. But there were some potential problems.
“Mass murder is frowned on,” I reminded them. “Also, I don’t know you guys all that well, but I don’t think anybody here is a professional hit man or even has military experience. I bet I’m not the only one who’s never fired a gun. I don’t even like it when my cat kills a mouse.”
“But I bet you like having the mouse gone,” Adam said. “That’s the trouble with liberals. You want results with no personal involvement. Or guilt.”
“It’s got nothing to do with liberalism,” I argued, though in fact he had a point. Both about Gwendolyn’s mousing and my desire to avoid guilt. I’ve always felt guilty about pretty much everything and the only good element of that is that I’m not Jewish, which I suspected would tip the scales so heavily I wouldn’t be able to get out of bed.
“Still, Tina has a point,” Kenny said. “Murder is kind of extreme and I doubt any of us would be very good at it.”
“Who knows till you give it a whirl?” Katherine asked. “What are they going to do? Give us the death penalty?”
The five of us kept hanging out at Molly’s pool house after support group meetings as fall moved on and the days grew shorter.
Frequently the concept of instant karma arose, the proactive idea of punishing people now for this life’s moral transgressions, rather than forcing them to wait for an upcoming life in which to suffer. For those among us uncertain about the concept of an afterlife, punishment for its own sake felt both comfortable and sufficient.
The flavor of these conversations varied with the participants; folks with serious illnesses are not always socially available, being prone to all manner of problems related to treatment side effects and opportunistic infections, not to mention the actual deadly disease. And face it, most of the time they’re not feeling at their best to start with. It was hardly surprising, then, that the focus was almost always on players from the health care industry. This was a group of really sick people, with health care at the core of their current lives.
Katherine, the deceptively prim elementary school teacher, knew a surprisingly versatile catalog of dirty automotive tricks.
“I have brothers who love cars,” she explained with a shrug, “and I guess I picked it up from them.”
Picked it up seriously, it would seem, since she drove a red 1968 Mustang convertible, and drove it with panache. I’d followed her in and out of Rancho Santa Fe on dark winding roads several times on nights we gathered at Molly’s, watching her whip around the curves.
“It mostly depends on whether you want to hurt the driver or the car,” she went on. “If it’s the car, then it’s easy enough. There’s all kinds of things you can do. Sugar in the gas tank, nails in the tires, a couple of cans of that gunk that expands and gets hard down around the gas pedal. Shove a potato into the exhaust pipe.”
“Remind me to stay on your good side,” Kenny said.
Molly, a champion shopper during her L.A. legal days—“It was the only social life I had,” she told me once—liked the idea of ordering things in people’s names. Like a few dozen magazine subscriptions from blow-in cards, the kind that say, Bill Me Later. Subscriptions to Hustler and Bootylicious delivered to the home address, or maybe to a neighbor’s address, somebody who’d bring by the mailman’s mistake, with a clothespin on her nose.
“Nice one,” I said. “Or how about this? Mr. Big’s secretary opens the box and an inflatable lady pops open ready for action, like a lifeboat. Or even better, the kid in the mail room opens it and everybody gets to see and hear about it as he carries it down the halls.”
“You could go devious too,” Molly suggested. “Send something that’s allegedly a gift from somebody else. Like, oh, say, some really high-end sex toys delivered at a sanctimonious holy-roller church to the holier-than-thou preacher. As a thank-you gift for marital counseling from”—she hesitated for a moment—“some tight-ass lady who sings soprano in the choir. Labeled Open immediately when you know the guy is out of town for a week.”
Adam laughed so hard that he choked at that one. “Let’s not forget the Internet,” he said, “and everybody’s best friend, Photoshop. Start with a cold cybertrail that dead-ends in Eastern Slobbovia, and you could put together websites that would cause lots of problems for people. Eternal problems, since of course the Internet is forever. Blogs full of intimate revelations and confessions. Political stuff that’s the polar opposite of what the person really believes. Horrible financial information offered as ‘insider tips’ from somebody who ought to know better and will definitely get in trouble with the SEC for it.”
That got accountant Kenny’s attention. “If you were willing to take your time about it and make a nonrefundable financial investment,” he said slowly, “there are all kinds of ways you can cause trouble for somebody down the road. Get enough personal information to set up dummy accounts that would appear to be direct conflicts of interest, for instance. It would be a little complex and require a bit of research, naturally.”
“But for somebody with your skill set,” Molly noted, “no particular problem.”
“I hate to think I’m becoming a cliché,” Molly said at one point, “but I believe this is giving me reason to live.”
It was all terribly hypothetical, of course. But since it was hypothetical, people kept bringing up not-so-hypothetical names. Objects of Attention, we called them. OoAs.
The woman who got the huge bonus from Western Health because she had cancelled coverage for the most insureds who had “lied” on their applications. The cancellations usually occurred right when the customers most needed assistance, and the purported lies often involved a forgotten yeast infection or ingrown toenail.
The health care executives who tried to enlist the aid of doctors in ferreting out similar application omissions so they could cancel coverage. Proactivity 101: Watch the Hippocratic Oath Circle the Drain. We were willing to bet that idea was a nonstarter, though, most doctors being unable to handle the paperwork they were already supposed to produce.
The bozos in San Diego County—elected officials for the most part—who managed to keep medical marijuana unavailable to those entitled to receive it for fifteen years after it was approved in a statewide vote. This wasn’t a problem for Molly or these guys, since the young can always find private suppliers, but it hardly seemed fair to the general public, older people who might not have the savvy or resources to get up to L.A. or Orange County.
But then Katherine pointed out that those San Diego obstructionists also had support from the feds. So we rolled in everybody else attached to this mean-spirited daisy chain—a wretched and misguided mishmash of government lawyers, elected officials, antidrug zealots with personal agendas, and the horses they rode in on.
And some Objects of Attention were mo
re personal.
Like the employer who laid off Sheryl Masterson in a way that she lost her medical benefits through some cockeyed application of the law which maybe wasn’t even legal. This was a long time ago, when I was in high school, and Sheryl was a good friend of my mother’s. She lost her job and her insurance and her husband was already long gone. So she toughed it out through increasingly serious symptoms until by the time she finally saw a doctor, her ovarian cancer had cobwebbed throughout her entire abdomen.
Sheryl died rather quickly after her diagnosis, in terrible pain. I wished I knew the names of the doctors who refused to give her enough morphine for fear that she’d become addicted, so I could add them to the OoA list. Her former employer, who advertised his carpet cleaning service county-wide, would be easy enough to find.
On a more immediate and prosaic note, Katherine nominated a jerk at her pharmacy who bellowed information about her prescriptions and possible unsavory side effects to her entire zip code, even as she begged him to stop.
Making these lists was like eating M&Ms, or chips and salsa. Satisfying, simple, and tough to stop.
“Do you think,” Molly inquired mildly when we were together again a week later, “that perhaps we’ve taken this far enough?”
When we had all arrived earlier and settled around the fire ring on her patio, Molly pulled out and fiddled with her iPod. Moments later John Lennon warned from speakers hanging in nearby trees that instant karma was gonna get us, putting one and all in a relatively jolly mood. For once everyone was present and even feeling reasonably good.
At least until a group discussion of execution methods devolved to a detailed description of the Torture Museum up at Medieval Times in Orange County, a place that so creeped me out in seventh grade I couldn’t sleep for a week. Torture unto death was what Molly referred to with her question about boundaries.
“You mean you’re not gonna let us kill all these people, counselor?” Kenny asked.
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