Kill Me

by Stephen White

  I’d stopped by to visit Antonio weekly for a few months after his accident, but the long sojourns by his bed soon seemed pointless and the chronic-care facility where he was existing in Denver—I still considered “living” a way-too-generous description of his lingering state—was too depressing for me to tolerate. I started making my visits to Marilyn, instead.

  After a period of intense grief and some paralyzing confusion, she seemed to be moving on. Her beloved husband wasn’t going to be getting any better. She knew it in her heart.

  His spirit died long before his body would.

  Not too long after I’d completed my business with the Death Angels, I got a call from a mutual friend that Will Durrell had succumbed to his illness, or from complications of the surgery that had temporarily extended his life, or some combination. Thea and I flew out to Chicago for his funeral. I spent much of the service and virtually all of the wake wondering how many of the mourners—many of whom were Will’s peers, and mine—were clients of the Death Angels.

  Was I the last one to hear about their peculiar service, or had I been one of the first?

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  The clock was running out on my second psychotherapy session of the day with Dr. Gregory and my tank was dry. Despite my midday nap and my post-nap shower I was suffering the consequences of all the activity. What had been nothing but fumes in my tank earlier in the day were now mere rumors of fumes. I considered using my few remaining watts of power to stand up and say a definitive good-bye to my therapist, but decided it would take even less of my waning energy to allow the remaining time to simply evaporate into the ether.

  If this were football, I’d be the guy taking a knee.

  Dr. Gregory, I’d already learned, tended to treat silence like fine wine—he consumed it slowly and didn’t jostle it unnecessarily—so I didn’t expect any complaints from him as I allowed the seconds to fritter away.

  He surprised me. After less than a minute of silence and one power yawn—mine, not his—he asked, “There’s another visit to come? Yes?”

  “With you?” I said, surprised that he’d asked. Was I witnessing signs of therapeutic insecurity?

  “With Adam,” he said. “And you. Another story you need to tell.”

  Ah, of course.

  It was clear he had an eye on the clock, too, and that he wasn’t content just to allow the time to expire.

  “Why do you think that?” I said. I admit that I was curious how he’d reached his conclusion, but I also thought it would be easier for me if he was the one who was talking. That way I could continue to practice energy conservation, and I could keep the clock ticking.

  He didn’t answer me. We both knew he didn’t have to.

  I said, “I thought facts were crap.”

  By then we were both aware that I’d adopted his line as a mantra—I did like it—and I expected it to function for me the way it had functioned for him, as an all-purpose conversational trump card.

  He’d been playing this game longer than I had, though, and he had other ideas about my facts-are-crap ploy. “I’m not interested in how long you were in line for the Matterhorn when you took Adam to Disneyland. I don’t care if he snagged a foul ball at the Rockies game, or how many trout he caught when you guys were fly-fishing the South Platte. I’m interested in what Adam’s visit, or visits, meant to you. Or better, mean to you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you’d like me to be interested, or perhaps more to the point, because you need me to be interested. Because I suspect that it’s a big piece of why you’ve come to see me.” Maybe I looked unconvinced. He added, “And because planes don’t glide forever with their engines out.”

  That got my attention.

  “Okay,” I said. “Maybe next time we’ll talk about Adam’s next visit to our house.”

  “You get tired,” he said. “Really tired.”

  I didn’t want to admit it. I considered lying before I said, “Yes. It’s part of what I’m dealing with.”

  “Your … condition?”

  “Yes.”

  “What else?”

  “Nausea. My balance isn’t what it was. The nausea and the balance problems aren’t unexpected. The doctors are puzzled by the fatigue.”

  He nodded a nod of acceptance. He knew I hadn’t provided all the pieces to the puzzle and he wasn’t planning to waste any effort on solving it until I did.

  “Something else, I think,” he said. “I’ll hazard a guess that you’re not accustomed to this. To talking about things that are … important.”

  He’d selected that last word carefully. His choice got an instant rise from me. “Oh, intimacy? Is that what you’re talking about? Shit, now that’s different, that’s fresh. Are you suggesting I have issues ?” I said, parroting a criticism I’d heard flung my way a hundred times by a dozen women over a span of at least a score of years.

  I was kind of sensitive about it.

  “Don’t kid yourself,” he said. His voice had adopted none of my intensity. “This isn’t intimacy, what’s happening in this room between you and me. Openness, maybe. I underline ‘maybe’ because I don’t know you well enough to know that for sure. But I do know that for this to become intimate, it has to include something else, too. At a bare minimum.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” My protest was lame; I was a punch-drunk boxer defending myself against a superior opponent’s agile right cross. But I had to try to mount some kind of protection—if spilling my guts to this guy about Adam wasn’t intimacy, I didn’t have any in me.

  “You could walk a block over to the West End Tavern”—he recognized from my face that I didn’t know what the hell the West End Tavern was—“it’s a good saloon over on Pearl Street—and pick out a seat at the bar and tell some stranger doing tequila shots everything you’ve told me. About Adam, his mom, about dying. Everything. Doesn’t make you intimate with the guy.”

  Point. “Okay. What would? Would I have to wait until last call and invite him home with me?”

  I thought it was a pretty good line. He didn’t seem so impressed. I glanced at the clock and tried to will the seconds to tick away faster. The big, sweeping hand seemed to slow down, of course.

  Choosing to ignore my juvenile sarcasm, he said, “What’s missing is something that Adam had within moments of meeting you that day.”

  By then I was lost. A blind man bombarded by white noise. I forced patience into my voice. “And what is that exactly?”

  “The capacity to hurt you.”

  I wasn’t following him. “Two questions,” I said. “Why would I want someone to have that power? And why is it important?”

  “One answer. It’s a necessary, but not a sufficient, criterion for intimacy.”

  Gregory waited for me to catch up. When it was apparent that I wasn’t able to follow his tracks, he went on. “You were vulnerable to Adam. From his first words to you on your front porch. ‘Is that my sister?’ I think is what he said. From that moment on you’ve been vulnerable to that kid.”

  “I still am,” I said, without any reflection.

  None was necessary. I was vulnerable to that kid. No argument.

  “Yes,” my therapist said.

  “Okay.” My “okay” was a conversational “so what?”

  “Without vulnerability,” Gregory said, “there is no intimacy.”

  I recognized the repetition, and could identify the progression in his thinking. I guessed, too, at the next move he wanted me to make. “And you’re thinking I should become vulnerable to you? That’s your point?”

  “Over fifty years ago, a neo-Freudian named Karen Horney warned against the ‘tyranny of the shoulds.’ It’s good counsel, I think. Anyway, I didn’t say that you should become vulnerable to me, and I didn’t mean to imply it. But I have noticed that when you tell me something that might leave you a step closer to feeling vulnerable with me, you tend to go quickly on the attack.”

  “Then what’s your poi
nt? I’m exhausted. I’m ready to go home.”

  He didn’t reply.

  He was telling me something. I was too tired or too thick to know what. I was almost—almost—as curious as I was aggravated. “What do you say we do this again?” I said.

  “Sounds like a good idea,” Dr. Gregory deadpanned.

  I pulled myself to my feet. In my most sardonic tone, I said, “This is helpful? Right? It’s good for me?”

  “You get to decide,” he said.

  “I decide? What’s your job?”

  “That’s a good question. I’m still at a loss as to exactly what our goals are. I don’t know why you’re coming to see me. Because you’re sick? Because you’re dying? Something else entirely? Something to do with Adam? That’s where I’d put my money—on Adam—but I don’t know, and I readily admit that it’s hard for me to hit a target that I’m not allowed to see.”

  “Yeah, well,” I said. “Welcome to the club.”

  He tapped his watch. “I have more time, if you would like to continue.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.”

  “I thought that was against the rules. I’d always heard you guys were big on ‘Your time is up. Get out.’ ”

  “There are lots of common misconceptions about therapists and therapy. But that’s not one. As a general rule we are a little time-conscious. To a fault, I admit. I do make exceptions sometimes.”

  “I’m exhausted.” I yawned to prove it.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want your pity.”

  “I wasn’t offering you any. From my point of view, your fatigue is a good thing. Your defenses won’t be so flexible or so resilient. I was offering some empathy, however. I’m not asking anything of you right now that you haven’t asked of yourself at other times.”

  My face revealed that I still wasn’t following him.

  “I’m thinking about the story you told me, and the courage—or stubbornness—it took to ski out of the Bugaboos with broken ribs, a separated shoulder, and a fractured wrist. Compared to that, staying with me for another twenty minutes is nothing, right?”

  I sighed. I considered explaining the prostate-exam standard to him but decided against it.

  Jesus.

  “Okay,” I said. “Adam’s next visit.”

  Vulnerability, I was thinking. How the hell does he know this is all about vulnerability?

  TWENTY-NINE

  Adam had come back to Colorado seven months after his first visit. By then, it was 2003 and he was fifteen. He somehow knew he’d find us in our Denver home, not up in Ridgway.

  I’d told myself it was a guess on his part.

  Bella called Thea and warned us that she thought her son was on his way. She couldn’t predict how long he would choose to stay. The mothers of my children mutually decided that we should be surprised about Adam’s imminent arrival at my home, which meant that we had to keep the secret from Berkeley, whose ability to sustain a ruse was questionable at best.

  I wasn’t offered a vote about the plan. The women had already computed, correctly, that their united maternal voting bloc could render superfluous any bias I might possess against the plan.

  This time Adam didn’t get to our house until well after dark. Thea was giving Berk a bath, so I answered the door.

  “Hi, Dad,” he said.

  The words caused me to break into a wide smile, not because they were spoken in any fashion that was particularly heartwarming, but rather because the delivery was so spot-on ironic.

  “Hey,” I said. “Good to see you, Adam. Come on in.”

  Adam carried his daypack over both shoulders. He wasn’t really dressed warmly enough. He followed me inside.

  “Can you stay a while?” I asked.

  “We’ll see,” he said. He studied my face for a few seconds before he added, “Bella called, didn’t she?”

  At times he called his mother by her first name. Other times he didn’t.

  “Yeah. But I’m supposed to pretend she didn’t.”

  “You’re a terrible actor.”

  “Actually, that depends on the role I’m playing. This isn’t one of my best. Come on in.” He joined me inside the house. I said, “I take it missing school’s not a problem for you?”

  “Hardly. I don’t go.” His tone turned puckish before he added, “The world is my campus. Is Broadway asleep already?”

  “Broadway?”

  “My sister. The little drama queen. I want to see her.”

  I laughed and said, “She is a little drama queen, isn’t she?” Adam had Cal pegged accurately; Berkeley was a kid who was born to hit her marks and nail her lines. If the world was my son’s campus, the same world was my daughter’s stage. “Thea’s giving her a bath right now. She’ll be excited to see you. You can read to her before she goes to sleep; she loves it when you do that. Are you hungry?”

  “Starving.” He lowered his daypack off his shoulders, dropped it onto the floor, and preceded me down the hall toward the kitchen. “Don’t worry, I’ll play along with whatever Bella and Thea worked out. You can go ahead and be shocked that I’m here.”

  “You’re so sure I wasn’t part of it?”

  “I know you,” he said.

  You know me?

  I made my son some food. A couple of chicken quesadillas and a big bowl of tortilla chips. I pounded an avocado, a tomato, and a serrano chile into a passable guacamole, and I popped the cap off an icy bottle of blackberry Izze. It felt damn good to watch him wolf it all down.

  We learned over the course of his visit that Adam had been homeschooled since the sixth grade. Bella had recognized his unusual intellectual gifts much earlier than that and had tried to keep him stimulated at various gifted and talented programs near their home until she tracked one down at Johns Hopkins that allowed him to take the SAT when he was twelve. He got a 1460 combined that year and she immediately gave up on the public schools and started homeschooling him. He aced a repeat administration of the test—a perfect 1600—one year later.

  I knew Adam wasn’t a typical teenager, which meant nothing more than that he wasn’t anything like I had been as a teenager. I was no expert on adolescence, but I could make the claim with confidence that my son and I inhabited different teenage galaxies. I couldn’t be sure what was chicken and what was egg—whether Adam’s unusual adolescent demeanor was a factor of his intellectual gifts or whether his social idiosyncrasies were the result of the inevitable differences in influences that come from homeschooling.

  During that second visit to our house he was reading Aeschylus as part of a self-directed adherence to the St. John’s College great-books curriculum. When he tried to engage me in a discussion of The Choephoroe in the context of Aeschylus’s influence on the development of tragedy, he seemed disappointed that I hadn’t read it.

  He would have been even more disappointed had I admitted to him that I’d never even heard of it.

  I didn’t admit it.

  Yeah, that vulnerability thing.

  Adam kept a Rubik’s Cube in his daypack. He pulled it out one morning while we were sitting at the breakfast table and bet me ten bucks he could solve the puzzle in less than a minute. I scrambled it and handed it back to him; he took my ten dollars fifty-five seconds later. “Double or nothing, thirty seconds this time,” he offered, after returning the cube to me so that I could once again scramble it. I twisted it up good. Twenty-eight seconds later we exchanged his ten for my twenty. He immediately offered me back my money. “That wasn’t nice,” he said. “Of me.”

  “What’s your record with that thing?”

  “That was my record. Twenty-eight seconds. But I can almost always get near thirty if I’m not distracted.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “It’s not exactly a cure for cancer,” he said dismissively.

  He was right, but I told him to keep the twenty.

  In response to my question about how he usually got h
old of spending money, he explained that he made good money ridding his mom’s friends’ personal computers of viruses and worms and spyware. He also played poker online. With the limited stakes his mother would let him wager, he averaged about twenty bucks an hour. Bella had set up the account for him. His cyber-poker buddies knew him as “belladonna” and thought he was a thirty-eight-year-old depressed single mother in Cincinnati.

  “How did you get here from Ohio?” I asked.

  “Took the train to Denver. I met somebody at Union Station who gave me a ride down this way. Then I walked.”

  “That’s kind of risky, isn’t it?” I asked, obviously paternal.

  “I’m a good judge of people,” he said. He sounded perfectly confident that he could sniff out a bad guy at twenty paces. Juvenile bravado? With this kid I couldn’t be sure.

  I said, “My dad, your grandfather, was a smart guy. Not as bright as you seem to be, but smart. But I don’t think you got any of those genes from me. Or if you did, they’re recessive. I suspect they’re part of your mom’s contribution to your genetic bounty.”

  “Never,” he said, “underestimate the power of mutation.”

  I swallowed a laugh. Was my son that funny, and that dry, or was the comment a dig at his mother? I couldn’t quite decide.

  THIRTY

  “What are you working on?” he asked me early on in the visit. “At work. Anything I can look at?”

  I caught myself before I muttered “Oh, nothing much,” which is how I would answer the question ninety-nine times out of a hundred with nine people out of ten. “Work” for me was a couple dozen smart people doing research and development on a few—we hoped—revolutionary medical technology concepts. A couple of the ideas were mine, but the most promising weren’t. The R&D was technical and dry; the concepts that were most interesting were also proprietary. But I told Adam the truth. “We’re exploring the development of small implantable nerve stimulators that might help people regulate their appetite. To fight obesity.”

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s early, but it’s promising.”