Kill Me

by Stephen White

  “So it’s you?” I leaned closer to her. “You would like me to back out and request a refund?”

  “Yes. I think that would be best.”

  “Are you speaking personally or for your … company?”

  “Both. I think you should withdraw. My associates agree. Your deposit will be returned.”

  “Less the ‘eligibility assessment’ fees, of course,” I added, playfully. Or sarcastically.

  “Of course,” she concurred, much less playfully and totally without sarcasm. “Like any concern, we have bills to pay.”

  “Overhead.”

  “Overhead, exactly. Keeping our sources of information open … is not inexpensive. Hiring the best people isn’t cheap. Anyone with your business experience knows that.”

  Lizzie’s eyes were a deep, careless Scottish plaid, mostly dark, with streaks of kelly green and flecks of golden heather. When she lowered her voice, as she had just done, it was as husky and elusive as the wind through a thicket.

  Insight moment: When a woman causes me to wax poetic, even in the silence of my thoughts, I’m in serious deep water. The nearest shore? Not even in sight.

  “So what’s the problem?” I asked. “With me? What did you learn during your investigation that has given you such pause? Why are you suddenly so eager to dump me?”

  She was ready with an answer. “You can’t cancel us, like life insurance. After the second payment is made, you’re in, Once you’re in, you’re in. There’s no backing out. No second thoughts.”

  “I admit I don’t totally get that part of the deal. It troubles me. Life is unpredictable. One always has to adapt.”

  “Our experience is that clients with doubts tend to be less satisfied. And more troublesome.”

  “That’s so subjective. And I thought this was all about the money.”

  “I can assure you that it’s not,” Lizzie said.

  “That’s easy to say.”

  She said, “Something we don’t advertise: We do a healthy proportion of our work pro bono. To allow people who can’t afford our fees to participate in our services, we serve ten percent of our clients for free. The thing is, they can’t cancel their contracts, either. If we were in it only for the money, we’d let the pro bono clients cancel anytime, right?”

  “That’s something to consider,” I said. “It’s a compelling argument, I have to admit.”

  “Thank you. Thank you.” She performed a cute, little, seated curtsy before she lifted the corner of the napkin with her fingertip, still, I thought, struggling with those impulses of hers. One more fry? Another bite of that dog? I couldn’t be certain what the temptation was, but I liked that it wasn’t easy for her.

  “But then again, you could be lying about the pro bono,” I said. “Marketing is marketing.”

  She acted offended. “Have I lied to you?”

  “Your name is not Lizzie.”

  Her expression grew bittersweet—the face of a mother about to reluctantly admit to her child that there is no Santa Claus. “I do like you,” she said, punctuating the admission with a small sigh that I couldn’t interpret. “I do. Hypothetically,” she continued, “let’s say we allowed clients to terminate their agreements. Just walk away, whenever they wanted.”

  “Okay, let’s say that.”

  “Think it through. We’d be of no help to our clients. Our services would be meaningless.”

  “I don’t get it. Why?”

  “Human nature. When the moment comes—when some doctor who knows your prostate or your colon better than he knows you, says you have six months to live, or a year—everybody will have second thoughts about living and dying. Everybody imagines an end that is much worse than what will probably really happen, or much less horrific than reality will allow. Everybody, at least for that moment, forgets why they hired us, and what we promised to protect them from.

  “If we allowed cancellations, we would be allowing someone facing death nose-to-nose to decide how they want to die.”

  “What’s so wrong with that?”

  “Nothing. People do it every day. Every hour of every day. But we exist to serve a more discriminating client. We’re not in the business of encouraging people who are in the tumult of serious illness or horrific trauma or prospective death to delude themselves into prolonging their suffering; we’re in the business of helping people who are living well decide exactly—exactly—under what difficult conditions they wish to continue to live before they are facing a life that is ending.”

  “Oh, yes. The capital L, that kind of living? I remember that from the seminar at Nobu.”

  “Yes, the capital L kind of living. Don’t patronize the notion. It’s … a special thing.”

  “Huh,” I said, recognizing her passion about the topic, and recognizing that I was losing the debate.

  “So how’s Antonio?” Lizzie asked, also recognizing I was losing the debate, and eager to land a final blow.

  Her casual question felt like a slap. “Don’t,” I said. I was confident that she knew how Antonio was: Antonio was an extension of a hospital bed, a destination for a feeding tube, source material for his waste drain. I had no doubt that she knew that the barely squiggly lines on the EEG said that Antonio had just enough brain function that debate-prone medical ethicists could argue endlessly about whether or not his current state qualified as “living.”

  No capital L .

  And no living will.

  Antonio, how could you fail to sign a living will?

  She leaned toward me and took one of my hands in both of hers. “It’s important work. What we do. I believe in it with all my heart.” She squeezed my hand. “I’m not in this for the money. I made good money in my previous job.”

  I saw them lining up in front of me, so I tried to connect the dots. “I can tell that you do believe. At this moment, I no longer question that. But tell me, are you suggesting to me that Antonio canceled his contract?”

  “Discretion, remember? We don’t kiss and tell.”

  I suspected that she would reveal more if I waited. So I waited. If I hadn’t been determined to wait her out, I would have said something stupid, like “I’m still waiting for the kiss.”

  She said, “All I can really tell you—and I shouldn’t even say this—is that your friend had been made aware of the availability of our services, but at the time of his accident he was not an active client of the firm. Therefore he is … not a client of the firm.”

  Jimmy told Antonio about the Death Angels before he told me, I thought. Huh. Why would Jimmy tell Antonio first?

  I held up my arm and pointed at my cast. “You know about the Bugaboos, don’t you?” I asked, changing the subject, but not really changing the subject.

  She nodded. “You make that fall ten times, you end up hitting one of those two trees at the bottom nine times out of ten.”

  She knew a lot about the Bugaboos. Had she talked to Jimmy? Is that how all this worked?

  “Maybe. I like to think if I make that fall ten times, I get an edge down and ski to a stop eight times out of ten. One time, maybe, I graze one of those two trees. The tenth time I get lucky and thread the needle. I come up laughing.”

  “In your fantasies you never hit the trees? Not head-on?”

  “Never.”

  “I’m dining with an optimist.”

  “Or a fool,” I admitted.

  “Well, there is that. But in my experience with men the two aren’t mutually exclusive.” She sucked hard at her straw to get at the dregs of whatever tropical concoction she’d ordered. The slurping sound definitely got my attention.

  “I actually grazed one of those trees on my way down. That’s how I broke my wrist.”

  “Yes, we know. A few more feet to the left, and …”

  She let the thought linger like an aroma, good or bad, that hangs around a kitchen. In this case, a sour aroma. Too much vinegar for my taste.

  “I’m a lucky guy, I guess.”

  “I guess,” she
said.

  “Well, Lizzie, despite your best efforts, you’re giving me plenty of reasons to enlist your services. Yet you want me to withdraw my application? Why?”

  Her eyes grew rueful.

  “Because of Adam,” she said.

  Dear Jesus.

  Suddenly, I couldn’t breathe.

  EIGHTEEN

  I’d flown back over the Divide for the second day’s worth of therapy sessions, unwrapped my Prius at the airport, and driven northwest down the turnpike to Dr. Alan Gregory’s Walnut Street office in Boulder.

  He didn’t know my real name, or anything about the plane or the airport, or that I’d bought a Prius so that I could drive anonymously to and from his office, or about the friend’s flat I was borrowing so I wouldn’t have to register at a hotel but could still get some rest between our two sessions. He didn’t know much.

  But I’d already decided that I was going to talk with him about Adam.

  “There’re probably a million things I should tell you before I tell you about Adam, but … there really isn’t time for me to warm up to it.”

  “Then tell me about Adam,” my therapist said.

  The moment he said it—Then tell me about Adam —I had to swallow some fury at him. What could he know about Adam, about the feelings that go along with that word for me?

  “And the rest?” I said, trying not to spit the words at him.

  “What ‘rest’? The million things?”

  Was he taunting me? Was that possible?

  “Yeah, the rest. The million things. I should just forget about all of it? Facts are crap?” I said, letting my annoyance out of its cage, and throwing his mantra from my last visit back into his face.

  Why was I so snippy?

  Adam did that to me.

  Not Adam, exactly. Adam made me smile. What was happening with Adam. That’s what did it to me.

  “Tell me about Adam,” Dr. Gregory said again.

  What the hell else was he going to say?

  “Shit,” I said in protest. “Don’t minimize this. How difficult this is. Don’t misunderstand this.”

  “I’ll try not to,” he said, cushioning his voice with something gentle, some offhand kind of touch.

  I was grateful that he didn’t bite back at me, didn’t reply to my annoyance in kind. I told myself to cool it. He’d replied to me warmly, as an invitation, encouraging me to set aside my reservations, my excuses, my rationalizations.

  He had no way to know that I’d never been able to just talk about Adam with anyone but Thea. Some of my friends knew that Adam was out there. But I picked people to tell who I knew wouldn’t ask me how I felt about it all. I’m a coward about some things.

  But this guy across from me was going to ask. I could bank on it.

  I helped create Adam when I was twenty-three years old, though I didn’t meet him until I was thirty-eight.

  In the intervening decade and a half, I had no idea that I had a son. I wasn’t the kind of guy who stayed up late wondering about the ultimate destination of the billions of sperm I’d launched since the fateful day I’d enthusiastically volunteered to slaughter my virginity with a willing young saint-ess on the altar of adolescent hyper-arousal. I hadn’t given a moment’s consideration to the possibility that one of my energetic little swimmers might actually have met a wandering egg and found a warm uterine wall in which to nestle.

  Does that kind of guy exist? The kind who stayed up nights wondering about those things?

  I’ve never met him.

  Never saw him in a mirror, that’s for sure.

  The story of actually meeting Adam sounds trite whenever I rehearse its telling in my head. Beyond trite even, all the way to clichéd. It was 2002. The strange kid on my doorstep. His own plaintive version of “I’m here to see my dad.”

  I could go off on an unkind riff about Adam’s mother—I admit I’m still tempted; God, I hate that about me—or I could come up with a cavalcade of excuses about the muggy autumn night that Adam was conceived. Back in, I think, 1987 his mother and I met at a pre-Halloween party in an ostentatious faux manor house in Buckhead, outside Atlanta, but there is little point in either gilding those memories in shit, or in tarnishing Adam’s mother’s motives or character.

  She wasn’t a remarkable girl, and truth be told, it wasn’t a remarkable night. It was at a time when AIDS was still a disease other people got, and when people like me believed that recreational sex could do nothing worse than make you the kind of sick that a vial of penicillin could cure. A carefree time. Adam’s mother and I had a connection that lasted just a few short minutes longer than it took for her to raise her skirt to her waist and for me to drop my pants to my knees in a laundry room off a butler’s pantry half a dozen steps from the crowded kitchen. Our coupling was illicit and it was exciting more because of its illicitness than because of any particular eroticism, and it was quick.

  Satisfying?

  I was twenty-three; I was never satisfied.

  Same was pretty much true for me at fifteen and at thirty-three, I’m sorry to say, though by the time I was approaching my fourth decade the emblem on the scoreboard was as likely to be a dollar sign as a flashing neon profile of a shapely babe.

  Adam’s mother was one of two that month. Or five. Or more. Some months were better than others. Scoreboard or no scoreboard, I didn’t keep score, but I kept score, if you know what I mean.

  When I think of that night now, something, some memory residue, suggests that she wanted to kiss me when we were done screwing. Not during. After. I doubt if I let her. That wouldn’t have been me.

  By the time she wanted to kiss me I would have been done with her.

  Believe me when I say that every last one of those sorry facts about my few minutes with Adam’s mother say a whole lot more about who I was back then than they do about who she was back then.

  I was twenty-three years old in all the wrong ways. I was twenty-three years old in none of the right ways.

  Adam’s mother may have been a wonderful young woman who got lost in a transient moment of hope and something that she had convinced herself resembled romance or, at least, passion. I didn’t hang around long enough to give her a chance to teach me a single thing about herself, or her dreams, or the bumps and bruises she’d endured that had warped her judgment about love and life until it was so screwed up that she picked the likes of me out of that crowded room of badly costumed, drunken boys. No, I learned none of those things because I was red-eyed on the red-eye out of Hartsfield before she’d even begged a ride home from the party that night, maybe even before she’d had the first of a half-of-a-lifetime of second thoughts about the charming, horny guy with the magnetic smile in the laundry room in the damn mini-mansion in Buckhead.

  A promise: I wasn’t a wonderful young man who got lost in a transient moment of hope or romance or passion. I was a selfish, callous kid looking to get laid before I got out of Dodge. And that night I got what I wanted.

  I also got Adam.

  Life plays its tricks.

  “You have a son,” my therapist said at that point, interrupting my story. He said it without surprise, and with some tenderness that I could appreciate deep in my gut. Maybe he had a son of his own.

  I could find that out. Wouldn’t be difficult. Finding things out has always been one of my specialties. One of my business mantras was “Always negotiate from a position of power.”

  “I have a son,” I said to Gregory, without much more contemplation. “But it’s not that … simple.”

  He processed my response for a moment, or two. “Perhaps I should get out of the way,” he said. “You were doing fine without my help.”

  He was right. I was. For me, about Adam, I’d been doing remarkably well on my own.

  He stayed silent; he stopped working with his strong hand and touched me with his offhand in a way that let me know he was there.

  I married Thea late, in my mid-thirties. I was a mover by then, on the verge of selling
the medical tech brainstorm that would turn me into a certified shaker. Thea was almost five years younger than I and I’d had to invest an inordinate amount of energy into convincing her of the sincerity of my affection. Her skepticism was a good thing for both of us. Our eventual marriage felt like a wondrous change in the direction of my life. Within a couple of years my financial ship came in, and we traded our first house, a cute but battered bungalow in Denver’s Congress Park, for a big quasi-colonial thing on an expansive piece of land in the distant southern suburbs.

  I liked to think that more had changed during that period than my marital status and my net worth. I liked to think that I had changed, too, and wanted to believe that I could quote evidence to support the contention that I was much less of a jerk at thirty-five than I had been at twenty-three. Still, I admit that there were days when I wondered what kind of a recommendation that was for becoming a husband.

  My evidence that I had changed? I was more content. And I gave myself credit for being more mature. How was I sure of the last one? The “more mature” part? It was simple: I didn’t think that my contentedness had anything to do with my wealth.

  If that wasn’t a sign of my maturity, I didn’t know what would be.

  But had I been ready for a wife when Thea and I said “I do”?

  In retrospect, allowing for that generous assessment of my maturational progress, I could argue that I had been getting close to that line in the sand that was marked “ready.” I could also argue that Thea had done me a great favor by making me wait before she’d made her leap of faith.

  What about a family? Was I ready for one of those back then?

  Again, I was getting close. Career or not, money or not, I’d done some growing up.

  Dogs? Certainly, I could handle dogs.

  Children? Almost. Maybe.

  Problem was, unknown to me, by then my son Adam was already twelve years old.

  Thea had delivered us a daughter, Berkeley, eighteen months into our marriage.

  By the day that Adam showed up at the front door of our new house about a hundred-meter dash from the High Line Canal, Berkeley had developed into a high-spirited, high-speed toddler. She had Thea’s eyes, Thea’s long fingers, and Thea’s full lower lip.