Kill Me

by Stephen White

  I felt that one. It was a clean touch. Were our sabers not tipped with rubber, it would have drawn a spot of blood.

  Did he know? I wondered. I said, “I don’t really. Control the length of the season, I mean.”

  He spent twenty seconds, maybe thirty, trying to understand what that meant. Finally, he said, “Tell me.”

  “Can you tell that I’m dying?” I asked.

  He shook his head slowly, his eyes never leaving mine.

  He hadn’t known that I was dying. I was glad about that. I’m not sure why, but I was.

  But he didn’t say “I’m so sorry,” or “That’s awful.” He got bonus points for not being saccharine about it. Although my motives for being in his office may not have appeared uplifting to anyone but me, I could most certainly console myself with the truth that I hadn’t flown over the Continental Divide from the Western Slope only to get served a heaping dose of therapeutic pity.

  After we fell into thirty seconds or so of silence, I began to think I realized what he’d known since I told him I was dying: Whatever was said next in that room was going to be of some significance, and that he’d decided that the next significant words spoken in the room should be mine.

  “Well, I am dying,” I said. “The engines are out, and I don’t know how long this plane is going to glide.”

  “My impulse right now is to offer comfort, but I suspect that might be leading you in a direction you wouldn’t choose to go.”

  “It’s not that I don’t have options,” I said, arguing a point he hadn’t made. “I can try to find updrafts and stay afloat as long as the currents will allow. I can storm the cockpit and force the damn thing into a dive. Or, I can even arrange to have somebody shoot it down.”

  “Your flight?”

  “Yes, my flight.”

  He seemed surprised. “That’s why you’re here? The decision you have to make? Choosing exactly how to end your doomed flight?”

  “That’s just about it,” I said.

  “Just about?”

  “Ah, clarification again.”

  “Yes, I suppose. I was thinking you may want to tell me why you are dying,” he said, a slight knowing grin—but not at all an unkind one—gracing his face.

  “Not really,” I said, smiling right back at him, refusing to clarify everything.

  Anything, really. Not yet.

  He didn’t respond.

  I said, “Something ordinary is killing me, unless something extraordinary kills me first. See, there are some complications.”

  “Why am I not surprised?” my therapist said.

  I sighed. “I am a wiseass.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You are.”

  ELEVEN

  It turned out that New York City was the center of the Death Angel universe. That’s where I had my get-acquainted meeting with Jimmy Lee’s contact, his “guy.” The meeting took place in the interval between my tumble in the Bugaboos and that board meeting in Santa Barbara. Late spring, early summer, 2004. My left wrist was still adorned in a cast. The rest of me had healed nicely, thank you.

  Even though I’d been given a hint at what to expect that first time, the reality was disconcerting. In a quick phone call from a taciturn man two days earlier, I’d been instructed to walk slowly down the west side of Park Avenue in Midtown between 53rd and 54th over the lunch hour and to be prepared to be greeted by someone pretending to be an old friend. I should be agreeable, I was told. Jimmy must have warned somebody that I was capable of being less than agreeable.

  The “old friend” who approached me on Park Avenue turned out to be a lovely, sophisticated woman a half-dozen or so years younger than me who called my name and pranced up to me on impossibly high heels. She gave me an embrace of the kind of profound exuberance that is usually reserved for airport terminals or wayward grandchildren being reacquainted with bubbes and zadies.

  But the woman mashed her chest into mine the way few bubbes ever do and ran her hands up and down my back and tenderly down my sides before her long fingers ended up on my cheeks. All my cheeks. First the southern cheeks, then the northern cheeks. She finally planted a not-quite chaste kiss on my lips. As she pulled away she smelled of spices and flowers and something that made me think of crisp sheets that had been dried in the sun.

  I was quite aware that I had just been frisked for the second time in my life, and that I hadn’t really minded it. The first time had been by a razor-burned Oklahoma state trooper on the desolate shoulder of Interstate 35 due east of Enid on a miserably hot July afternoon when I was nineteen years old. My memory’s reflection was that it hadn’t been anywhere nearly as enjoyable an experience as this time had been.

  A black Town Car like ten thousand others in New York pulled to the curb next to us. This woman who was my newest, best, old friend opened the back door, smiled, and said, “In.”

  I obeyed. She followed me.

  “Where are we—”

  “Shhhh,” she said, while she used a compact to check her lipstick and, it appeared to me, to look down the street to see if any other vehicles had pulled over to the Park Avenue curb anywhere behind us. When she was comfortable that we weren’t being shadowed and that her perfectly swollen lips were perfectly edged and perfectly glossed, she scooted her perfectly shaped ass next to me on the backseat, and undid the shoulder belt that I’d reflexively fastened across my chest. In a practiced, sultry, last-call voice, she murmured, “My advice? Close your eyes and enjoy this.”

  If I thought that I’d been frisked on the sidewalk on Park Avenue, then what I got in the backseat of the Town Car that was carrying us downtown was something much closer to a full-body massage. Was there a part of my anatomy that she didn’t trace or palpate with her probing fingers?

  Let me think.

  No, there wasn’t.

  Not a one.

  I took only part of her advice, though. I certainly did enjoy it, but I didn’t close my eyes. She was much too lovely for that.

  When she was done with her examination, I said, “Thank you very much. Is it my turn now?”

  She laughed a laugh that not only clearly told me the answer to my question was no, but also told me that if I ever got to know her I’d probably like her a lot. The laugh told me, too, that I would never get to know her.

  I don’t know why, but I’d already come to the conclusion that she wasn’t my Death Angel. She had a role in all this, but she wouldn’t be pulling any literal triggers. Call it intuition.

  Over the years I’ve spent a lot of time doing business in New York, and I knew the local landscape and mores pretty well, but I wasn’t an honorary native by any means. Without a neighborhood map in front of me I couldn’t just take a quick look outside the windows of a car speeding toward Downtown from Midtown and tell you at a quick glance whether I’d crossed a boundary line between Tribeca and SoHo, or between Chelsea and Nolita, or between the Meatpacking District and the Village. The Town Car finally pulled to a stop on a nondescript block in one of those places, though I didn’t know which one. Nor, I suspected, was I supposed to know which one.

  “You’re here,” she said, and she stepped gracefully out of the car. I followed her out the same door, though not quite so gracefully.

  Not we’re here .

  “Where is here?” I asked.

  She made a disappointed face. She was playfully letting me know she had expected more from me.

  “You’re not joining me?” I said. “My treat. My pleasure.”

  She scrunched up her nose and eyes in a way that she knew was as cute as could be, took my hand, and led me into a crowded restaurant that had a sushi bar on one side. I recognized that she had succeeded in distracting me with her flirtation, which was probably her intent. Admittedly, I’d been paying more attention to the subtle curves of her butt than I had been to the identity of the place I was entering. I didn’t even know what restaurant I was in.

  We strolled past the front desk to a table along the wall beyond the windows.
A deuce with only one empty chair. The empty chair was the one that faced away from the front door.

  “Have a wonderful meal,” she said, offering me one last boob-crushing embrace to remember her by. I couldn’t discern any tactical advantage that she might have gained with the final hug, and I allowed myself the luxury of believing that it was, at the very least, a sincere tease on her part. Pulling back, she air-kissed me on one cheek and then the other, apparently intent on playing out her assigned ruse until the curtain dropped and the house lights came up.

  To the man who had stood as we approached the table, the one who was holding a napkin in his left hand, she whispered simply, and deferentially, “Clean as a baby’s conscience.”

  The man turned to me and said, “Please, have a seat. Thanks so much for joining me.”

  Before I sat, I watched my temporary consort turn at least a dozen heads—both male and female, she was that kind of gal—as she sashayed back out of the room. She’d distracted the attention of anyone who might have inadvertently noted the low-key introduction that had just occurred between my Death Angel and me.

  Was this a guy who had a finger on the literal trigger?

  My instinct said “yes.”

  TWELVE

  I introduced myself. He didn’t. Nor did he apologize for not introducing himself.

  We didn’t shake hands.

  “I hope you’re hungry,” he said pleasantly. “I find this is one of those rare places in New York that consistently live up to the hype.”

  I glanced down for a hint. The menu clued me in that we were at Nobu.

  Cool. “I’ve wanted to eat here. Never got around to it.”

  “Yes,” he said, as though he already knew that.

  How would he know that?

  “May I make a recommendation?” he asked. “I don’t get here that often, but often enough to steer you toward a memorable meal.”

  “Of course.” Why not? I closed the menu. I was thinking. If I can’t trust you with lunch, why would I put my life—or my death—in your hands?

  A waiter appeared. “We’ll both have the tasting menu,” my host said. He looked at me. “Any restrictions?” he asked. “Diet of any kind? Meat a problem? Shellfish?” I shook my head. He turned back to the waiter. “And please bring sparkling water, a Yebisu, and some good sake for the table. Please, you choose the sake. Room temperature, warm—whatever you think will be best. Thanks so much.”

  My mother would call my dining companion portly, or heavyset. My wife, Thea, might not be so genteel. On occasion I’d heard her use the word “rhino” in similar contexts, employing the word in a way that was less than flattering. When she did, she unnaturally overstressed the emphasis on the first syllable.

  Her occasional lapses in decorum about people’s appearances were one of Thea’s few unattractive traits. In those rare moments fashion critiques rolled over her tongue like adjectives from a wine nut.

  The man was about my age, give or take five years. He had a wide nose and unnaturally dark thin lips that reminded me of a matched pair of tinned anchovy filets. His hair, more blond than gray, was shaped into an old-fashioned, longish crew cut, and was thin enough that I could see a mole on his scalp an inch above his hairline. Near his right temple he had a scar that had the size and contour of a bullet hole. I assumed that it wasn’t really a bullet hole—the right temple was one of those places where slugs do enough damage to bone and gray matter that the consequences tend to forever keep people from having leisurely lunches at Nobu, or from making a living as a Death Angel entrepreneur.

  The overall effect of his appearance? If you saw this man on the street, you would pay him absolutely no attention.

  He was just a middle-aged guy in a business suit doing business in a city chock-full of middle-aged guys in business suits.

  Yebisu, it turned out, was beer. Good Japanese beer. I passed on the sake; experience told me that it rendered me sleepy during the day. My host wasn’t drinking anything but Pellegrino.

  “So how does this work?” I asked.

  “The business?” He made a hey-who-can-complain? face. “Surprisingly, it works quite well. No complaints. Thanks for asking.” He rapped on the table with the knuckles of his right hand.

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  “I know it’s not what you meant.” He smiled. “This is serious business we do; I was trying to lighten things up with a little humor. It’s a hobby. Comedy.”

  Although I appreciated his attempt at levity, his humor was drier than the sake, and the truth was that, with his delivery, he was in no danger of earning a standing O at open-mic night at The Comedy Store. My experience is that if someone has to tell you he’s funny, he’s not.

  Over the next few minutes, as we began an extended series of tiny courses of exquisitely presented Japanese food—some familiar, some almost familiar, some absolutely unfamiliar—that seemed symphonic in their careful progression and otherworldly in freshness and quality, he began to explain the nuts and bolts of the Death Angel business.

  “Like any good business, we serve an unmet need,” he began.

  I noted the “we” and wondered what percentage of the company’s employees I’d met already that day. I was assuming that it wasn’t a two-person operation.

  “How many times, by this stage of your life, have you learned of an unfortunate accident, or of a devastating illness that has robbed some dear soul—a friend of a friend, perhaps, or worse, a true friend, or worse yet, a loved one, someone close to your heart—of the capacity to live. When I say ‘live’ I’m talking ‘live’ with a capital L, of course. The ability to enjoy the bounty of the world’s buffet.”

  He allowed the thought to settle while he sipped from his Pellegrino. I thought of Antonio.

  “But say that same illness or injury has not quite robbed the person of what doctors, ethicists, and scientists currently define as life? I’m talking about the clinical definition: the proverbial beating heart, the measurable flow of sufficient electron activity in the brain.”

  He had stuttered, just a little, as he said “sufficient.” My brother had stuttered as a child; I was sensitive to it. He sipped at his water again.

  “And how many times have you heard a friend or a loved one murmur, upon hearing similar terrible news in your presence, or witnessing that same tragedy while standing by your side, ‘If that ever happens to me, I hope, I pray, that I die instead.’ ” He watched my eyes for an extended moment before he added, “Perhaps … perhaps … you’ve even said words to that effect … yourself.”

  In my mind’s eye I saw Antonio again—two images, vibrant at first, vegitized second—and I swallowed. There was nothing in my mouth, but I swallowed. I guessed, of course, how he knew that . About Antonio.

  “The nature of our work, stated as simply as I can state it, is that we are in the business of answering those prayers.”

  Each time a server approached our table—and given the sheer number of small courses that were being delivered to us and then cleared away, the arrival of a waiter was a frequent event—my luncheon companion grew silent and made it clear that he expected me to do the same.

  During the next lull in service, while I enjoyed a selection of tiny fruits that I’d never crossed paths with before in my life, he went on to explain that the structure of his business venture was akin to an insurance company that specialized in indemnifying people against an exceedingly rare, but catastrophic event. The clients of his insurance company didn’t require monetary compensation if and when the rare event actually occurred—every potential client of the company had already been financially vetted and had been deemed wealthy beyond any reasonable standard. What the clients required after the catastrophe was that an action be taken.

  That action?

  “We like to think of it as hastening. Hastening the inevitable,” he said. He was holding his chopsticks near his face in such a way that it would have been possible to convince myself he was doing an intentional
impersonation of a rhino.

  Had she been there, and were she reading my thoughts as she sometimes could, Thea would have kicked me below the table.

  “Hastening the inevitable,” I repeated, mostly because I wanted to see how the words felt in my mouth. They felt, I decided, a bit like the sliver of toro, the fatty tuna that I’d savored so slowly two or three courses before.

  Rich, lush.

  Just right. Almost perfect. Certainly far beyond merely palatable.

  I’d be hiring someone to hasten the inevitable. And what harm, I thought, could there be in that?

  “Yes. We set things right. We cross the uncrossed t . We dot the undotted i . Think about it. Literally, we dot the i . Once a client has determined that his or her health has degenerated beyond a point where, at an objective moment, that individual had already decided that he or she would choose not to continue living, and—” he paused not only for another sip of Pellegrino, but also to emphasize what would come next—“to a point where that person might reasonably be considered too impaired to make a fresh, measured, objective decision about his or her immediate future, and certainly too impaired to do anything about impacting the duration of that future, we step in.”

  I said, “And at that time—when you and your colleagues ‘step in’—that’s when you … hasten … the inevitable?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Here’s the part I don’t understand,” I said. I made a point to use an everyday voice to try to shatter the Rod Serling echoes that seemed to have taken over our exchange. I placed my empty beer glass on the table and he immediately refilled it from the sweating bottle of Yebisu. “How, dear God, do you draw the line? How do you pretend to know your client’s wishes in circumstances that are likely to be impossible to predict?”

  He nodded patiently as I asked my question, like a State Farm guy waiting eagerly to get a chance to explain the difference between whole life and term to some naive newlyweds about to buy their first insurance policy. “We don’t draw the line. The clients do. Positions on those parameters are totally client derived.”