by Len Vlahos
“Alive?”
“Yes,” the doctor answered, “less alive. You should talk this over with your family.”
Deirdre was ready to support either decision, treatment or no treatment. She was like that, a partner and ally to the very end. She went with Jared to the cancer care center at the hospital, held his hand as he waited for the treatments, and kept the house running as he withered. It made Jared love her all the more. But as nice as Deirdre’s support was, it wasn’t especially helpful for making decisions. Jared needed someone to tell him what to do.
Ethan, the man from the television studio, seemed to think continuing the radiation was a good idea. “If I were in your shoes, I’d want every second I could have with my kids. But it’s your choice, Jared.”
Jared didn’t know why Ethan was so interested in his health—he didn’t even remember telling Ethan about his dilemma—but thought it was nice that the man cared. Besides, it was the only real advice Jared was getting, so he took it.
The treatments continued.
***
Glio was under assault. Searing, blinding streams of fire were slicing through him like Darth Vader’s lightsaber through Luke Skywalker’s arm. That’s just what it feels like, Glio thought, like I’m being attacked with a lightsaber.
With tendrils too numerous to count and stretching simultaneously into different parts of Jared’s brain, Glio had grown large. The lightsaber was managing to cut off small pieces, each one shriveling and dying as it was severed from the central tumor.
The radiation was making the pathways through Jared’s memories feel like an all-night rave gone wrong. Flashing strobes and thundering sounds restricted Glio’s movements; he could hardly get from one neuron to the next without losing his way. And it wasn’t just the focused blast of ionized electrons that were causing distress; Jared Stone’s entire immune system was attempting to wage war against the invader, his corporeal being was at DEFCON 1.
Jared’s brain, Glio realized, was fighting back.
Glio was stunned enough to pause, but only for a second. Jared’s brain had made the classic mistake of bringing a knife to a gunfight.
Steeling his resolve, Glio bared his metaphorical fangs and tore through Jared’s gray matter, unleashing a force more terrifying than hurricanes, earthquakes, or tornadoes, more terrifying than anything in heaven or on Earth. He didn’t know or care that he made his host fall over. The only thing he could do was satisfy his appetite.
And so he did.
***
“A reality series?” Hazel asked the question into the headset tethered to her computer. She had asked for Bluetooth- enabled wireless headphones for her birthday, but her parents, looking for any possible way to discourage the hours Hazel spent playing online games, bought her a wristwatch instead. Hazel, after pretending to admire the delicate chrome braiding on the band, buried it in her sock drawer the minute she was alone in her bedroom, forgetting it was there a few days later.
“Yes, a reality show,” the voice came back through her headphones. Hazel, or rather her character, Guinevere the Glad, was standing on the edge of a sparsely wooded forest deep in the heart of Azeroth. She was talking with a fellow guild member, Kirkadelic, a level fifty-two Night Elf Rogue. “It’s called Life and Death, and it airs next week.”
Despite her stomach-turning worry, the revelation of Hazel’s true identity had turned out to be a nonevent in the World of Warcraft. Three other guild members even drew inspiration from Hazel and confessed their own true identities. In one fell swoop, a policeman became a retired schoolteacher, a sommelier became a sanitation worker, and a nineteen-year-old female college student studying meteorology became an unemployed thirty-seven-year-old man.
“So, what,” Hazel asked, sounding more perturbed than she wanted to, “we sit at home and watch Jared die while we eat Doritos and drink Coca-Cola?”
“Hey, don’t kill the messenger,” Kirk answered, “but yeah, something like that. I’m sure that’s who’s sponsoring it. ‘Enjoy a refreshing Coca-Cola as you watch a fellow human being succumb to the joy that is brain cancer.’ ”
“Ugh. I think I need to go lie down. I’m going to log off for a while.”
“You mean people play this game sitting up?” Kirk asked the question just as Hazel clicked “quit” and whooshed out of the game. She took her headphones off and flopped down on her bed.
“No way am I going to watch that show,” Hazel said with conviction to her ceiling fan. Both Hazel and the ceiling fan knew it was a lie. She was like a drug addict swearing off her next dose. It never worked. And for reasons she couldn’t understand, Jared Stone had become Hazel’s drug.
***
There was only one television at the Sisters of the Perpetual Adoration convent. It was the very same color set the original Mother Superior received as a premium when she opened the order’s first checking account in the mid-1970s. It had a round dial for changing channels and a built-in antenna. The picture was fuzzy, but it picked up the few remaining broadcast channels.
The nuns and novitiates kept the television clean and dust-free, like they kept everything clean and dust-free; to them it was just another piece of furniture. As far as they knew, the set—which lived in a common room away from the dormitory—had never been turned on.
This was true. Except from eleven p.m. to midnight, Mondays through Fridays, and then only for Sister Benedict.
First it was the late news, which kept the Sister informed of all that was wrong with the world. (This was where she had watched Jared interviewed by the local Portland media.) After the news was the real allure of the television, The Duke Hamblin Show, the Sister’s one and only guilty pleasure.
The newest entrant in the flooded market of late-night television hosts, Hamblin had a conservative agenda that expressed itself through stale political jokes, a feigned disdain for the “Hollywood elite” (even though movie-star interviews were his bread and butter), and enough God references to embarrass a camera-hungry professional baseball player.
Hamblin had just finished his monologue and was going to a commercial break when he read a network promo: “Don’t forget to watch Life and Death, the most important reality series in the history of television. Beginning one week from tonight on ATN, you will follow the life of Jared Stone as an inoperable tumor slowly consumes his brain. Our cameras have complete access to his home, twenty-four hours a day. See how he and his family deal with terminal illness and death. This will be a truly unprecedented and transformative television event. We’ll be right back.”
The peanut-butter-slathered cracker that had been in Sister Benedict’s hand fell facedown onto her habit, sticking there for a moment before sliding to the floor. She didn’t even notice she had dropped it.
***
When Sherman Kingsborough saw the commercial for Life and Death, he was drunk. He had been sitting in one of the seventeen rooms of the eight-thousand-square-foot Palm Beach mansion bequeathed to him by his father, the young man’s only company a bottle of Maker’s Mark.
The week after Jared’s auction had been delisted, Sherman slid into a terrible funk. He was frightened at the ease with which he was not only prepared, but eager to slay a fellow human being. And yet he couldn’t get the idea out of his mind.
He had flown from his father’s house in Aspen to his father’s house in Provence to his father’s house in Palm Beach, trying to outrun his own wicked thoughts, but it didn’t work. Now he was trying to drink them out of his head.
He was drunk enough when he first saw the commercial that he wondered if it wasn’t some sort of alcohol-induced hallucination. He was just sober enough to know it was real.
Sherman had only one thought: This is a sign. I must kill Jared Stone.
***
Before Jared got sick, a typical weekday in the Stone house would begin like a typical weekday in any middle-class home.
The first to wake up was Megan. When life is good, when you’re popular, pretty, and fil
led with hope and ambition, you bound out of bed. She would spend an hour primping and prepping for school, leaving no detail untouched. Her assortment of makeup, accessories, and style magazines was more appropriate for a twenty-four-year-old fashionista than it was for an eighth grader.
Deirdre, almost a cliché of a suburban mom with a full-time job, would sprint through her morning routine: take a shower (she had it down to seven minutes), get dressed (each day’s ensemble laid out the night before), check e-mail (always amazed at the two a.m. time stamp on messages from her boss), and cajole Jackie awake (never succeeding on the first try, never failing by the third).
Jackie, once roused, would spend a few extra minutes with her head on the pillow, staring at her phone. When life is bad, when you don’t have close friends, when you shift between apathy and despair, you don’t bound out of bed, you sort of roll out. Her finger would work its way through each of her social media sites, her brain, fresh from a good night’s sleep, absorbing all the news and information it could. She would pick out the least flashy clothes she could find, take her backpack, and trudge down to the kitchen.
Jared, unless he had to be in Salem or at a client or constituent meeting, would stay in his pajamas—ratty flannel pj bottoms and a rattier Trail Blazers T-shirt, make lunches for all three Stone women, and then cook everyone breakfast. He took full responsibility for getting everyone ready for the day, and he loved it.
Megan would chatter through the pancakes, eggs, or Jared’s specialty, Island French Toast, while Deirdre read the paper and Jackie read a book. Jared would walk all three to the door, kiss each good-bye, and, with Trebuchet at his side, watch them go. Then the two of them, Jared and Trey, would go for a walk around the block, come home, and retreat to Jared’s office.
Jared would work on graphic design projects or legislative issues, and Trey would sleep, occasionally waking up and nudging Jared for another trip outside or a scratch behind the ear. If he had no pressing deadlines, Jared would play Tiger Woods Golf on the Wii console that the family had given him for Christmas.
If Norman Rockwell had painted in the early twenty-first century, the Stone family would have been his inspiration.
Jared’s cancer changed everything. The Life and Death crew, having established a beachhead in the Stone house, changed it more. The people coming and going; the not so artfully hidden cameras, cables, lights, and microphones; the constant stream of phone calls from the media—and not just the media, but THE media—with the Today show and Good Morning America scheduling interviews with Jared and his family.
With all their expenses covered by the network, and with Jared’s health in sharp decline, Deirdre took an indefinite leave of absence from work. She didn’t trust the ATN employees alone in her house all day long and wanted to be there for her husband and daughters. Not sure how else to fill her time, she helped Jared with household chores, meaning she took them over completely.
Jared abandoned his few remaining projects and tried to devote what was left of his attention to the television show. He wound up sleeping most of the time instead.
The girls still went to school, but with their newfound celebrity, their days were anything but normal. Megan now spent two hours primping and preening each morning. Jackie, in response to the media attention foisted on her family, shied away from Twitter, The Huffington Post, and The Daily Beast. With the Internet—her one outlet to the world—more or less severed, she retreated further into her shell.
The Stones did their best to adapt to the new normal that had descended on them, trying to make it part of the landscape. But this was different from trips to the mall and family game nights. This was a twenty-four-seven spotlight on the end of their father’s and husband’s life with all the world watching. Their house was being transformed into a cruel kind of fishbowl, and all they could do was pucker and swim.
***
Ethan Overbee spent the week before the Life and Death premiere in Portland. Normally he left the work of producing a show to the hired hands—which is how he thought of the crew—but he was too personally and professionally invested in this particular show to leave anything to chance.
Moving between the control truck and the house with the confidence of a conquering general, Ethan used his considerable charm to win over everyone involved in the project. From the director to the camera people to the sound engineers, Ethan established himself as a benevolent leader, a man who would give their lives meaning and make their careers matter.
He even managed, to Jared’s great relief, to get Deirdre and Megan to feel better about the program. He talked about how what they were doing was important, how it would ease the suffering of so many people who were facing their own battles with terminal illness. Ethan cast himself in the role of hero, and it worked—with two notable exceptions.
Every time Ethan entered a room, Trebuchet left. Though he was adept at fawning over them when he needed to, Ethan hated animals of all kinds, and that was not lost on Trey. Like all dogs, Trebuchet’s vomeronasal organ was fully operational, and it told him to stay away from this human. He didn’t growl at Ethan, but his tail would stop wagging and hang to the floor when the two were in the same room; invariably Trebuchet would find the nearest exit.
The other exception was, of course, Jackie. No matter how hard he tried, Ethan couldn’t get the girl to warm up. She would sit politely and listen as he regaled them with stories of television, Hollywood, and glamour. Then, when attention was directed elsewhere, she would follow the dog out of the room. She just didn’t trust the man. It was like he was selling something her family really didn’t need.
For Jackie, it was all becoming too much to bear. First was the news of her father’s inoperable cancer, then the eBay listing, and now television crews invading her house. Jackie was drifting upside down in the void of space. No direction, no propulsion, no air.
The kids at school had treated her like a leper after they found out her father had a brain tumor. On some level that hurt her; on another, she was happy for the privacy. But now that the Stone family was going to have its own television series, kids went from ignoring Jackie to making her the center of attention. The #LifeAndDeath hashtag and the two-minute trailer, now on YouTube, were trending in a way and manner that Jackie just couldn’t understand. Why did all these people care? She couldn’t get from one class to another without answering a question, overhearing gossip about her family, or deflecting some ill-formed taunt. Worst of all, a particularly vapid girl in the senior class had started a Life and Death Fan Club and was distributing T-shirts. A photo of the Stone family, taken from Jared’s Flickr account and featuring a particularly surly Jackie, was emblazoned on the front of the shirt. How could anyone, Jackie wondered, be so thoughtless, so callous, as to join a fan club to watch her father die?
She begged her parents to let her stay home, but Deirdre insisted that they not give in to the glare of the television lights, that “everything should be as normal as we can manage.” Jared didn’t seem to grasp the gravity of his daughter’s reaction, or he did grasp it but didn’t trust that he really grasped it, and deferred to Deirdre.
The only peace Jackie found in her daily routine was chatting with Max during her computer lab. Turning a blind eye to the Facebook news feed, lest she stumble across a post about Life and Death, Jackie would move her mouse directly to the chat window and click on Max’s name. Other than Trebuchet, he was the one thing in Jackie’s life that was constant and unchanging. Mostly.
Max
Tell me, Solnyshko, what is this euthanasia?
This was Max’s first question in their first chat after she had abandoned him the morning of her crying fit. She had sent him a private message, assuring him that everything was fine and that she just wanted him to forget about it and move on. Max took the request to heart and pretended like it had never happened. But that didn’t stop him from trying to find other ways of getting Jackie to talk about her predicament.
Jackie
Why?
Max
Just something about which I was reading.
Jackie
“Just something I was reading about,” Max.
Max
Yes, that.
Jackie
It’s like when someone is sick and dying and you help them end their life.
Max was silent for a moment.
Max
You mean, you kill them?
Jackie
Well, yeah, but only because they are really sick.
Max
I am not sure this I understand.
Jackie
“I’m not sure I understand this,” Max. Put the noun at the end.
Max
Yes, yes. But tell me, do people do this? Help each the other die?
Jackie
I don’t know. I guess so. But only when they’re so sick they’re going to die anyway.
Max
As with cancer.
Jackie
Yes.
This was hitting close to home, but Jackie, for some reason, didn’t mind. For one thing, it was Max. He was a million miles away. For another, it was good to finally talk about it without really talking about it.
Max
This does not to me seem right. Oops. This does not seem right to me.
Jackie
Max
Smiley face because it does not seem right?
Jackie
No, Max, smiley face because the way you talk is cute.
I cannot believe I just typed that, Jackie thought to herself.
Max
This I like the sound of!
Jackie
LOL!
Max
What?
Jackie
Nothing, Max, don’t worry. But tell me why you think it’s wrong?
Max
To help a person die?
Jackie
Yes.
Max
Because life is … what is the word? Please wait while I look it up.