Kill Me

by Stephen White

  Oh.

  I pulled the roll of cash from my front pants pocket and peeled off three one-hundred-dollar bills. After fanning them open for his appraisal, I asked, “Is what you know worth this?”

  “My personal opinion is that no woman is worth that. Least I never met her. But it ain’t my money, and it ain’t my dick.”

  “This isn’t about my dick.”

  He shrugged. “First rule: It’s always about your dick. Second rule: If you don’t think it’s about your dick, go back and study the first rule.”

  I handed him the money. He slid it casually into his shirt pocket as though he had three big bills in extra cash on him every morning of his life.

  I liked the guy.

  “She packed up a bunch of shit, couple rolling suitcases’ worth, and was gone before midnight. Little later on two guys popped over and loaded even more of her stuff into an unmarked panel truck. A half-dozen cardboard boxes, a’ least.” He handed me a piece of paper. “This is the license number from the truck. Jersey. It’s pro’ly bogus.” He poked at the scrap. “And ’at’s ’at other number. On the side, by the cab. Bogus too.”

  “The guys?”

  “Young and buff. Don’t-fuck-with-’em types. One was carryin’. Big piece of blue steel.”

  “You were here all night?”

  He made a “you crazy?” face. “Need my sleep. Gotta get eight. I’m a mess if I don’t get eight. Night doorman was ’round, though. I gave him some of what you gave me last night, axed him to keep an eye out.”

  “What you give him?”

  He smiled. “Twenty.”

  “I’m overpaying you, aren’t I?”

  “You can afford it, boss. Say we jus’ call it reparation. Your people and my people? What came down? Ya know?”

  I was tempted to hear his version of history, the one about my people and his people and what came down, but it wasn’t the time.

  “I’d like to see her place,” I said. “Inside.” I’m not sure why I said it or what I hoped to find if I made it into Lizzie’s flat, but the moment I said it, I knew that I really meant it.

  He shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Give me half an hour to set that up. Come back by the stand.”

  “Thanks.” I turned to leave.

  “No need to thank me. It’ll cost you,” he said.

  “Everything does, one way or another.”

  “I don’t take checks. You need it, there’s an ATM in the Korean deli.” He pointed over his shoulder. “Careful of the old lady. She be a witch.”

  I walked back to Starbucks and waited in line to use the toilet. Mary called when I was in the middle of everything. I answered one-handed. The signal on my cell was fractured and inconsistent, accurately reflecting my circumstances.

  “Yeah?”

  “Turns out that the store on Park Avenue is closed. Just like that. Totally shut down. Furniture is still there, but the desks are cleared, everything is gone. Laptops, phones. Weirdest thing.”

  I was surprised but I wasn’t surprised. Know that feeling? “See what you can find out about other locations where they might do business. See if their neighbors in the building noticed anything.”

  “Will do.” She hesitated and then she asked me, “Are we in some kind of trouble?”

  I liked the “we” part. Mary saw herself as part of the team, even if she wasn’t sure of the nature of the game. I tried to sound blasé. “We have a bit of a puzzle to solve, Mary.”

  “It’s important, though? It’s about more than money?”

  “Yeah.”

  “More than a girl?”

  I reminded myself that Mary might have seen Lizzie hold my hands at Papaya King. She might have seen how close I came to kissing her.

  “It’s not about a girl, Mary. Not that way.”

  Mary wouldn’t be pleased to play a part in encouraging any infidelities on my part. She liked Thea.

  “Okay.”

  The “okay” was acceptance on her part, not belief. She was waiting to be convinced.

  “It’s about family, Mary. Family. And it’s complicated.”

  For Mary, that was better than me swearing on a Bible.

  “Gotcha,” she said.

  I waited until ten o’clock came before I stepped down the street to my rendezvous with newsstand man. The guy in front of me in line was buying a flesh mag—something about rockets and boobs; don’t ask, I don’t know—the Financial Times, and a Snickers.

  “See, I tell ya, it’s always about the guy’s dick,” the man on the Coke crate said in greeting when I edged up to the counter. He was reflecting on the previous customer. “You got my job, you get to know things. You do.”

  I smiled. “Maybe he’s embarrassed that he’s a broker or an investment banker and he’s only buying the porn to hide his pink sheet.”

  “ ’At’s good. Like ’at one. Got you a discount, by the by. My man inside is Gaston and he’ll be needin’ another hunderd from you. That’s a bargain for what you be askin’. Other ’partments on her floor are empty till lunchtime, at least. People on her side are in Bo-ca Rat-tone, the folks on the back side are all at work. Gaston says one of them owns a titty bar on Eighth that’s open for lunch. He won’t be home; likes to keep an eye on his girls. My man Gaston’s big on rules, so here’s the deal: You got five minutes inside her place, that’s it. Not a second more. If the lady’s phone rings, you lock up, walk out the door, and take the fire stairs. No bullshit. You wait there fi’ minutes before you go back to the lobby.”

  “Alarm?”

  “Nope.”

  “Sure?”

  “Yep. One more thing: You take nothin’ out. I mean nothin’. No panties even. Nothin’.”

  I opened my mouth to protest the insinuation—“This isn’t about my dick” —but realized, why bother ?

  “Deal.” I peeled off another hundred and rested it on his tray. I wanted him grateful and had a feeling I would require his services again. “Thanks for all you help,” I said and turned to walk away.

  “You want a magazine?” he said. “On the house.”

  “What?”

  When I looked back up he was holding the Robb Report up for me and he was smiling.

  “Service door’ll be open in back. You go in that way. You come back out that way. See how you like it.”

  At least he was still smiling.

  Gaston was a skinny guy about my age, a man of indeterminate racial heritage with short nappy hair and buggy eyes. His dark skin had fat freckles and he had a red aura around his nose and ears as though he suffered from some chronic inflammation. Despite his distinctive features he had wise eyes above a jaw that seemed set in concrete. He wasn’t into banter or negotiation. He knew who I was the moment I walked into the lobby from the rear and he assumed that I knew the rules.

  I shook his hand and said, “Hello.” The greeting started with one hundred dollars in my palm and ended with one hundred dollars in Gaston’s.

  “Sixteen oh-two,” he said. He held out his hand to shake mine again. One quick pump and I had a pair of keys—one an old brass, one a modern security type—glued to my sweaty palm.

  In my solo elevator ride up to sixteen, it crossed my mind that it was all a setup, that Lizzie had offered Gaston and the newsstand man a much bigger chunk of change than I was shelling out to deliver me right back into her hands.

  I wondered what would happen were that true. In my head, I saw a very interesting scene with Lizzie and the comic from Nobu, and the black man with the white gloves, and maybe the young MBA type who faked being lost on the side of the road near my house in Ridgway before he’d taken my instructions regarding the client-derived parameters.

  So be it.

  There was no turning back. I’d already pointed the boards downhill. The slope below me was steep—calling it a double black diamond wouldn’t do it justice—and I was aiming at a tight grove of aspen. There was no time to think about when to turn; I had to rely on instinct to fly
between the knobby white tree trunks.

  To stay alive all I had to do was follow the advice of my old friend and keep both skis on the same side of every tree.

  How hard was that?

  I firmly believe that, like the path to any woman’s heart, every lock in every old door has its own set of tricks. It’s one of those rare universal truths about the world. To master quick entry you need to know when to push the key an extra millimeter and when to tug, when to be gentle and when to be forceful, whether to put your weight into it, how to hold the key, and what it all feels like just before it goes click .

  For me, the experience of trying to break into Lizzie’s flat was like being with a woman for the first time; I didn’t yet know the intimate tricks, I didn’t have the touch. With a woman, I usually loved the process of discovery, everything involved in the liberation of the secrets. But that time, alone in that corridor, I didn’t. I felt like a clumsy dime-crook shoplifting candy bars in a corner store, waiting to be caught with my hand down my pants.

  Standing there alone in the hallway of the sixteenth floor, I fumbled to finesse the locks on Lizzie’s door for way too many seconds before I was finally able to ease both sets of tumblers to release at once.

  I forced myself to turn and relock the locks behind me.

  Just in case.

  Then, only then, did I turn and look into Lizzie’s flat.

  I hadn’t allowed myself to have expectations about what I would find once I was inside the door of 1602. Not having expectations means I shouldn’t have been surprised.

  But I was. Oh, I was.

  FORTY-THREE

  I was going to Boulder to see Dr. Gregory whenever I could fit in a trip. I accepted the need to see him. Time was limited. I had to get where I was going.

  Where was I going?

  It all had to do with Adam, of course, and with dying. My daughters would have Thea and all her gifts and strengths to help them cope with the loss of their father. Adam would have Bella and her big heart and her bad judgment. But Adam also had a malignant history to overcome. I understood that much, but not much more. I wanted Gregory to help me do the best that I could with these last few weeks. Adam’s disappearance, his vulnerability, and the possibility of my imminent death made the visits with my shrink more urgent to me. I understood the urgency, but I wasn’t comfortable with it.

  I never felt urgency with a man before. Only with women.

  “Today’s topic is suicide,” I said a moment after I’d settled onto my seat across from him. It had been the last visit with my shrink before my trip east to find Adam. To find Lizzie.

  We’d covered the ways that Adam could hurt me—the vulnerability thing—and now it was time to take my disclosures to the next level.

  My gut told me that this was the reason I was in Dr. Gregory’s office—the real reason—and I’d decided that the time had come for him and me to take at least one step nearer to that truth. We’d been edging ever closer to an answer to that question he’d asked the first day: How can I be of help?

  “Okay” is how he replied to my statement about the topic of the day. He said it without surprise, without even blinking. I wondered whether my overture about suicide was really that banal or whether his years of listening to people like me had caused him to develop calluses to the monumental.

  I knew I’d said it the way I said it—without preamble—to try to get some visible reaction from him, but my ploy hadn’t worked. I could just as well have said that the day’s topic was hemorrhoids or jock itch for all the excitement and concern he showed.

  At least he didn’t yawn.

  “If, hypothetically, I told you I was thinking of killing myself, what would you do?”

  “Depends,” he said.

  The guy had been there before.

  I pressed my index fingertips into the corners of my eyes. God . “That’s not particularly helpful,” I said. Understatement time.

  “I’m not trying to be unresponsive. Nor unsympathetic. I just don’t know enough about your hypothetical situation.”

  Fair. “Let’s say I wanted to end this—my life—before nature takes its course. While I still have some control over how things end. What would you do if I told you that? How would you handle it? With me? Here today.”

  “I’d ask you to talk about it.”

  I faked a smile for him. I was getting exasperated, but blowing up at him would waste time I didn’t have. “No. I mean, what would be your responsibility? Do you try to talk me out of it? Do you try to stop me? Do you have legal or ethical responsibilities that dictate your response? What? I’m trying to understand the rules. You seem like a rules kind of guy.”

  “Yes, I would have obligations. Ethical obligations and legal obligations. If I determine that you’re a danger to yourself, I’m required to take some actions based on my assessment of the situation.”

  I noted that he hadn’t bitten on my rules-kind-of-guy dig. Probably wise. But I could tell he’d been tempted. “Inform somebody, for instance? That might be one of your obligations?”

  “Possibly. More likely I’d evaluate you, and hospitalize you if I thought the risk was real.”

  “Hospitalize?”

  “In a psychiatric facility.”

  “If I didn’t cooperate? Cooperation isn’t one of my characterological predilections.”

  He smiled at that. I felt a small sense of triumph.

  He said, “Again, based on my assessment, I might try to enlist some outside assistance to get you to a safe place.”

  “The police?”

  “Yes.”

  “A ‘safe place’ being a euphemism for the aforementioned psychiatric hospital?”

  “Yes.”

  I counted to five, silently. “Don’t patronize me, please. It’s insulting. More to the point it isn’t necessary. And I only have time for the necessary.”

  He said nothing. He could have reminded me that I wasted much more of our time than he did. Were our roles reversed, I probably would have.

  I hadn’t realized I was leaning forward toward him, but I was. I sat back and in a low, calm voice, I said, “That’s kind of ironic, don’t you think? Putting me in a hospital against my will because I don’t want this illness to develop to the point that I end up confined … in a hospital, against my will.”

  “You asked about my responsibilities. I’m thinking you would like me to reply honestly. In that spirit, I’m acknowledging that my responsibility would be to intervene. The circumstances would determine how I intervene. Obviously, I’m not going to be much help to you if you succeed in killing yourself.”

  “You don’t think so? What if I disagree with that premise? What if I’ve reached a determination that—because of events that have spun out of my control—the only way you will have ended up being of much help to me is if I prove ultimately successful in ending my life on my own terms.”

  “If that’s the case, then I don’t understand my role. Why you’re here. In therapy, I mean.”

  “Why is that so perplexing to you? It seems to me that the only reason a psychologist might be confused by my situation is if he insisted on assuming that the sole reason a man might have to tell a shrink he’s thinking of killing himself would be so that the shrink would save him from the impulse.”

  He didn’t reply right away, but I could tell from his eyes that he had indeed been thinking exactly that.

  “Go on,” he said.

  The sign of an open mind?

  “Suicide is not always irrational; it’s not always pathological.”

  “Yes,” he said. We both knew he wasn’t agreeing with my thesis. “I assume what you’re alluding to is the metaphorical airplane, the one you talked about the first day, the one with the engines out? That’s the helplessness you’re feeling? One option you mentioned was taking over the controls and pointing the nose into the ground.”

  “I don’t ever want to be the guy who can’t perceive any options.”

  “Euthanas
ia?” he asked, though initially my mind’s ear heard Youth in Asia .

  His question seemed sincere. Naive—oh so naive—but sincere. Without any awareness of their existence, he was trying to understand the Death Angels and their little business.

  “Not exactly. In this hypothetical situation I’m wondering about, I’m not talking about looking for a compassionate way to end my … suffering. Euthanasia is choosing death in order to interrupt useless torment prior to an inevitable, near end. This isn’t a Dr. Kevorkian thing. And it’s not a Terri Schiavo thing. I’m talking about something else, about ending my life on my own terms while I’m still well enough to do so, so that I die before I become disabled mentally, or disabled physically, or before I become debilitated by pain. I’m talking about acting before euthanasia becomes necessary. Long before pulling a feeding tube even becomes a consideration.”

  “A lifestyle choice?”

  He made it sound like a nose job or breast enhancement. “In a way,” I said.

  “I’ve never been confronted with this question before.”

  I sighed. It wasn’t a sigh of frustration. It was a sigh of relief that Dr. Gregory was finally realizing the novelty of my situation.

  “Neither have I,” I admitted. “But I feel a very strong need to get it right the first time. That’s why I’m here.”

  He smiled. I can’t tell you how much pride I felt that I’d gotten the guy to smile at that moment.

  “So, are you?” he asked.

  “Am I what?”

  “Considering suicide?”

  “If your professional responsibilities require you to try to thwart plans like the ones I’m curious about, I don’t think it would be wise to reveal to you whether or not I’m considering them.”

  He sat silently for a moment.

  Over our relatively few hours together I’d come to recognize at least two different forms of silence from him. One, the more common one, was the silence of entreaty. It was invitation via patience. It was the silence that said I’m willing to wait a long, long time for you to take us wherever it is we need to go next.

  The other was the silence of cogitation. Although he was blessed with a quick mind, I had occasionally been able to pose an issue or a dilemma that caused him to pause and think.