Kill Me

by Stephen White

  “My associates and I have reached a determination that you’re an acceptable risk. My role this evening is merely to ascertain that you understand the irrevocable nature of our agreement. Irrevocable, regardless of what happens between you and your son. Since we’re unable to put anything in writing we go to great lengths to be certain we’ve covered all bases. All bases.”

  I’m in? Hurray.

  I didn’t feel all that excited. I was still trying to get over my disappointment that I wasn’t having this drink with Lizzie.

  “I understand,” I said. “How do we proceed?”

  He mentioned the name of one of the big national mobile-phone carriers, a different one than the one I’d used the time before. “Get a new line when you get home. We’ll be in touch.”

  His tongue caught on the roof of his mouth as he formed the t in “touch.” The childhood stutterer briefly revealed, once more.

  “That’s it?” I said.

  “Be frugal. Get a basic phone. It will be used only once. Shortly thereafter, you’ll get directions on how to make the second round of contributions, and we’ll review the client-derived parameters. After that, you won’t hear from us again. We function in the background, like any good security system.”

  He drained the contents of his snifter in one long swallow, shivered at the shock to the back of his throat, and stood up.

  “I have one more question,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “I wasn’t frisked this time. Why?”

  “Review our conversation. I didn’t say anything this time. That’s why. We could have been talking about irrevocable life insurance, couldn’t we? Or disability insurance, even. A new kind. A special kind. The kind that says you never, ever, have to worry about being permanently disabled.”

  Although flirting is a form of recreation for me, infatuation is a force of nature. I flirt a lot. Thea does, too. She’s great at it. Deadly, actually, better than me.

  It’s harmless. It is.

  Infatuation is something else. If flirting is a tease, the first sip of an icy beer, champagne bubbles on the tip of your nose, or the kiss of a cool breeze on a hot summer day, infatuation is a more profound phenomenon—a hurricane, a tornado, a wildfire.

  An avalanche.

  Something dangerous and kinetic. Something too big to hide from. Something too big to trifle with.

  If I’d bothered to look around I would have realized I was already engulfed.

  After the man left the table in the Four Seasons lounge, I waited a few minutes and walked out into the sedate evening choreography of 57th Street. Hands in my pockets, I strolled aimlessly a few blocks until I found myself back in front of the entrance to MOMA on 53rd, and I realized that my ambling had been anything but aimless. Although I’d just made a monumental decision about my health and my future, my thoughts were about Lizzie.

  I wasn’t going to see her again.

  I continued on toward Times Square and allowed the energy of the crowd to swallow me up. I heard words from a dozen languages and saw a thousand faces of a hundred colors on every block.

  But none of them belonged to the woman with the plaid eyes who smelled like fresh laundry.

  If they had?

  I don’t know.

  It’s better that way, I told myself.

  I love Thea. I do.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The next day I took the Acela from Penn Station to New Haven to visit my brother. Connie’s deterioration had accelerated in the six or so months since I’d last seen him, and his body was so wasted that it took my breath away. I suspected that it might be the last time I would see him alive, but I’d suspected that before and I’d been wrong before.

  Connie was a survivor.

  His ALS had progressed to the point that a wheelchair was a necessity and talking had become a chore for him. To inquire about Thea and the kids, he would raise his chin—he could still do that—and say simply, “Family?” The enunciation of a five-word sentence took him most of a minute. Although he’d always been the rare academic who was stingy with adjectives and adverbs, as his disease robbed him of verve he’d begun speaking with Raymond Chandler–like parsimony—almost all modifiers were tossed overboard as needless ballast. For Connie, total inability to speak seemed to be lurking right around the corner.

  Complete social isolation couldn’t be much further away.

  For the previous couple of years, Connie’s care assistant had been a Guatemalan Mayan named Felix. Felix was a short man with a face like a well-tanned moon, and he was patient and kind with my brother. Felix covered his mouth, and his rotting teeth, with his open hand when he smiled, something he did often. In return for Felix’s generosity, Connie was Connie. He spent most of an hour one afternoon telling me about the mistreatment and horror that Felix and his family had endured during the Guatemalan civil war. He described the harrowing escape he’d made from the turmoil and poverty around his home in rural Chocola in the early 1990s.

  Connie paid Felix well, and always included a healthy monthly bonus that Felix sent straight to Guatemala for conversion to quetzals to help his impoverished relatives.

  Connie’s message to me? It wasn’t hard to discern. He was telling me that some things are worse than this .

  Than ALS.

  We talked about the latest travesty in the Sudan, the tsunami orphans in Asia, and the triad of ravages in sub-Saharan Africa—AIDS, poverty, and lack of access to education. We talked about the fate of women with fistulas in Ethiopia, the child sex trade in Asia, and the futility of searching for a solution to the dilemma of the Jews and the Palestinians. Things that were to Connie ever-so-much worse than a privileged guy who had lived a dream life in New Haven who was now burdened with ALS.

  Much, much worse.

  Connie never complained to me about his circumstances. Not once since his diagnosis. During my visit, I considered the possibility of confiding in him about the meeting I’d had the day before in the city, but I didn’t. Why? Guilt was part of it, of course.

  Shame was a larger part.

  Although I’d suffered no qualms about the decision I’d made to throw in my lot with the Death Angels, I nonetheless felt a smidgeon of shame that I was tacitly admitting to myself that I couldn’t handle, or would choose not to handle, the challenges that Connie and a million others like him faced every day. I was confident that one of the “client-derived parameters” I’d have to respond to would ask me whether I would choose to continue to live if routine daily activities required a full-time assistant.

  When my day came to endure the cut of one of life’s sharper arrows, I didn’t want to be one of those who complain, but I knew myself reasonably well. And one of the things I knew was that I wasn’t blessed with Connie’s perspective or his equanimity about fate.

  So, instead, on the train up from New York that day I had reached a decision to go ahead and buy my deluxe do-not-complain insurance policy from the Death Angels. And one of the things I would tell my death brokers was that if I ever got to the point that I was as physically impaired as my brother, yes, I would choose dying over compromised living.

  I had asked Mary to do a few more things for me in New York. When I was done visiting with Connie, she flew to the Tweed New Haven airport, picked me up, and flew me home.

  Somewhere over Ohio she left the controls in the hands of her latest copilot ingenue and joined me in the cabin. I asked her how things had gone in the city.

  “No problem at all. You want a report?”

  “Not now. I’ll tell you when. Keep it to yourself, okay?”

  “Cool.” She made a zip-it motion across her lips and gestured forward. “You want to fly for a while? I’ll give Trace a break, and you can take the yoke.” Mary was—still—auditioning copilots. This was Trace’s second trip with us; he was the first applicant to get a call-back in some time.

  I was a licensed pilot, but not rated to fly the jet on my own. Some days I loved to fly her. That wasn’t one of th
em. “No, don’t think so. Thanks.”

  “How were your meetings?”

  “Fine, you know.”

  “Yeah,” she said, humming along with me. As much affection as I had for Mary, I didn’t feel like chatting. She could tell, and began to leave the cabin for the cockpit.

  “Mary?”

  “Yeah, boss.”

  “I appreciate your help. Everything.”

  She rested a closed fist over her heart. “It’s nothing,” she said. “I have a great job.”

  I nodded. “Is Trace a keeper?”

  She smiled. “Maybe. He’s a great kid.”

  “Let me know when you want me to talk to him.” Mary would choose her own copilot. When she sent the guy or girl for a sit-down with me, it would be only a formality.

  Three days after my visit to the East Coast I was back in the Colorado high country. I sat facing the huge windows in my study—they framed a spectacular chunk of the angular Sneffels Range—while I arranged for the second round of payments to be transferred to the Death Angel overseas charitable fronts.

  Across the Rockies in my Denver office, LaBelle made it perfectly clear how she felt about whatever it was I was doing with my money, but she nonetheless sent every dollar on its merry way overseas.

  The day after the last transfer was confirmed, I was driving the Porsche down the hill from my Ridgway home toward the hardware store in town when I spotted a pickup truck parked, hood in the air, on the shoulder of the two-lane road. The driver was dressed in pressed corduroys and hiking boots that had never, ever seen a trail—he looked like a typical Ralph Lauren wannabe to me—and he waved at me to stop. I pulled over.

  I was thinking the guy had suffered a double-dose of misfortune. In addition to having car trouble, he was lost. The road from my ranch to the picturesque town of Ridgway was far from the well-worn tourist route that looped up the Dallas Divide past Designer Ralph’s sprawling Double RL spread and then toward Telluride.

  “Trouble?” I said after I lowered my window. “Need a lift into town? Can I call someone for you?”

  “No trouble,” he said pleasantly. Then he said my name.

  In a small town like Ridgway almost everybody knows almost everybody’s name. Thing is, when a guy on the road knows my name, I tend to know his, too. But I was sure I’d never seen this young man before in my life.

  For a split second, for some reason, I thought Kidnap! Why? I don’t know, maybe I’d just been going to too many bad movies. He must have seen the alarm in my eyes, because he raised both hands—they were empty—and said, “Nothing to worry about, sir. I’m—”

  Too late. I’d already ignited the volatile rocket fuel mixture of paranoia and adrenaline. I didn’t wait for him to finish his sentence. I pounded the clutch down and reached to force the gearshift into first.

  “A friend of Lizzie’s,” he said. Calmly.

  I dropped the shift lever back into neutral and slowly eased the pressure off the clutch.

  “You scared the shit out of me.”

  “It wasn’t my intention. I apologize. Everything we learned about you said you’d stop for someone needing help on the road if we were out in the country. I didn’t think you would …”

  Totally freak out?

  “What do you want?”

  “I’m here to finish your application, more specifically to ascertain your positions on the client-derived parameters of your policy. That will allow us to complete your file and initiate your coverage. That’s all, sir.”

  He invited me to join him in the front seat of his rented Ford pickup. After chewing for a moment on the question of whether or not I believed him, I pulled off the roadway onto the shoulder in front of his truck, got out of my car, and climbed onto his passenger seat and asked, “Are you going to frisk me?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s quite obvious I surprised you with my visit. What possible reason would you have to be wearing a wire?”

  Decent logic.

  He placed a digital recording device between us on the truck’s center console, and pressed the button marked “record.” A tiny red light next to the switch brightened to the color of fresh blood.

  He said, “I have a series of questions to ask you.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Most of the questions are either to be answered ‘yes’ or answered ‘no.’ A few will require you to choose among multiple choices. Your answers will be recorded. Is that clear?”

  “Yes.”

  “The recording will serve as the agreement between you and us. There will be no written record. No signatures, other than your verbal assent. Understood?”

  “Yes.”

  “I am authorized to tell you that the guidelines that you communicate to me today will be honored as faithfully as we are able. The policy you have purchased will be in effect from this day forward, until your death, whether that occurs naturally or if it occurs after you receive end-of-life assistance.”

  I swallowed.

  He asked, “Do you understand?”

  “I do,” I said.

  I thought that there was some irony that it was the second time in my life that I’d used that particular two-word phrase in the context of “till death do us part.”

  Setting the client-derived parameters involved responding to a long series of questions, only a few of which were more complex than the ones that had been included in the recent review I’d done of my Healthcare Power of Attorney. The man doing the quizzing was, I guessed, in his early thirties. He was physically strong, and intellectually sharp, and not at all rattled by my status, or his own. He was a man unaccustomed to being messed with at any level. He posed the questions to me from memory in an uninspired monotone, the series of queries patiently and methodically elucidating my preferences about the threshold of disability or illness I would be willing to tolerate before my Death Angel benefits kicked in.

  And, the threshold at which the policy became irrevocable.

  As I answered his questions I realized I was setting the bar quite close to the ground. But I’d already acknowledged that my tolerance for disability was low, and felt confident that when the time came, I would be more content leaving this earth a few days too early than a few days too late.

  The entire process took about twenty-five minutes.

  When he said we were done, I waited for him to click off the recorder. He didn’t. He said my name once again, spoke the location, and the date, and the time, and then asked me a series of final questions: “Do the questions I have just asked and the answers that you have just provided accurately and honestly portray your wishes in regard to the services of our company?”

  “They do,” I said.

  “Have you been under any duress or coercion during the course of this interview?”

  “I have not.”

  “Is there anything you wish to modify before we terminate this interview?”

  I thought about it for a moment. I pointed at the recorder and I said, “I’d like a copy of that recording.”

  He smiled warmly, as though he thought I was kidding.

  I said, “I wasn’t kidding.”

  He said, “We don’t permit any outstanding records of any arrangements with our organization. I’m sure you understand the rationale for our policy. We are protecting our clients as well as ourselves.”

  I did understand. My behavior as a young man had convinced me, however, of a universal truth: If you don’t ask her, you rarely get laid. Until I was dead, I was likely to continue to ask.

  “Please state your name, the date, the location, and the time,” he said.

  I did.

  He said, “You forgot the year.”

  I said, “Two thousand and … four.”

  He flicked off the recorder.

  “What happens now?” I asked.

  “Within the hour, I’ll encrypt this recording and enter it into our central storage system via a secure Internet connection. I will then physically destroy the flash memory. Your
policy will be in effect by lunchtime. Congratulations.”

  “Will I be surprised again by any more visits on the side of some road?”

  “No. You won’t be disturbed again after today. I apologize if I startled you earlier. Privacy is paramount. Surprise helps us ensure it.”

  “Wait,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “Is her name really Lizzie?”

  “No,” he said, without hesitation. “But she told me she thought using it would get your attention, should the need arise.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  As strange as it sounds to me now, within days I was able to forget that I’d actually hired the Death Angels to shadow my guardian angel, and I was able to forget that my new, highly paid, lethal angel was prepared to slay my dirt-cheap protective angel the moment that my health deteriorated enough that I had crossed the line of one of my client-derived parameters.

  But nothing really changed about the way I lived my life. I worked when I worked. I tried to be the husband I’d promised Thea I’d be and the father Berkeley deserved. Most nights I rested my head on my pillow content with my efforts. I was a better husband than I’d ever imagined, and a much better father than I’d long feared I was capable of being.

  I also played. I assumed my injuries from the fall in the Bugaboos would heal, so I was still planning to do the Ride the Rockies bike ride that summer with Jimmy, and I made arrangements to give hang gliding a shot while Thea and Cal and I were in Sun Valley that fall. I hadn’t surfed since I was in my early twenties, but the use of Wave Runners had changed everything in big-wave surfing and Thea and I were talking about getting a house north of Kapalua over the Christmas holidays so I could try to catch a really big one. I was still hoping to finagle a way to get invited back to the annual gathering in Bohemian Grove and hang out with the creative and powerful guys who gathered each summer on California’s Russian River.

  I had every intention of returning to the Bugaboos the following spring. And the divers among the boys and I were talking about making a pilgrimage to the grotto that had claimed Antonio’s vitality in the deep water near Belize.