Kill Me (22 page)

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.”

“Euthanasia?” 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.

What I was observing right then, I thought, was type-two silence, the silence of reflection.

The pause in our conversation grew from seconds to a minute, and then more. Finally, he said, “I misspoke earlier. I said that if I thought you were a danger to yourself, I would be compelled to take some action, based on the circumstances.”

“Yes? But that’s not completely accurate?”

“I omitted a word. The word I omitted is ‘imminent.’ I am only required to take certain actions if I judge that you are an
imminent
danger to yourself. Or to someone else.”

“That allows for some leeway,” I said, seeing his invitation for what it was. “Wiggle room.”

He didn’t exactly nod, but he certainly didn’t shake his head, either. He was agreeing with my assessment.

My doctor had some wiggle room.

“So we can talk?” I said, thinking I was accurately reading the invisible-ink message he’d inserted between the lines of our conversation.

“I think we can talk,” he said. “When we reach unsteady ground — if we reach unsteady ground — I’ll let you know. If I see unsteady ground looming up ahead, I’ll let you know that, too. When I do, you can decide if you would like to proceed any further with me. How is that?”

“You’re asking me to trust you?”

He pondered the question. “I’m … inviting you to trust me. Without it, there’s not much point for you to talk with me any longer.”

“There’s some risk here for me,” I said. “Serious risk. If my trust turns out to be misplaced.”

“For me, as well,” he said.

I saw that was true, too.

He grew silent again, but that time it was most certainly type-one silence, the entreaty silence. I used the void to try to recognize what it was he expected I should be seeing.

I couldn’t see it, whatever it was.
Nada.

“We’ve been talking about vulnerability,” he said, offering me a hint.

Generous of him. “Yes. Yes, yes, yes. That cocktail of self-disclosure and vulnerability I’ve been learning about,” I said. “What is necessary, but is not sufficient? We’re about to get intimate, huh? You and me?”

“Looks like it,” he said. “Looks like it.”

“My first time with a man,” I said. I couldn’t resist the joke. Character flaw, no doubt.

He could.

“Actually, I think the first time was with Adam. But I’m honored to be the second.”

“You may be reluctant to believe what I’m about to tell you,” I began. “But it’s all true.”

“Go on,” he said.

“I’ll deny this if it’s ever repeated to me outside this room.”

“Tell me,” he said.

“There are these people that I call … the Death Angels.”

I felt an electric shock of pain travel from someplace deep inside my skull, into my brain stem and then down my spinal cord, where the agony dissipated into my tissue as though my backbone was a lightning rod buried in loamy soil. I took a deep breath to recover from the shock before I said, “You really can’t tell anybody any of this.”

“I understand. I can feel your vulnerability all the way across the room.”

“That’s kind of you to say, but you can’t understand. Not really. I haven’t told you anything yet. But this is where you’re going to have to trust me.”

“Okay,” he said. “Probably vice versa, too.”

“Yes,” I said.

I was determined to tell him everything but it took me another minute to begin. I tried a number of transition lines in my head. Some cute. Some not. I finally said, “At great expense, I’ve hired them — these people I call the Death Angels — to kill me if I ever get sick or injured in a way that will leave me incapacitated.”

I studied him as I spoke, but could see no reaction from him save an involuntary change in the size of his pupils.

“Recently, I learned that my illness has advanced to the point that a previously agreed-upon threshold has been reached. I’m now fair game for the Death Angels. They are obligated to end my life. There is no mechanism for me to reverse that process.”

“You’re serious?”

“Dead serious,” I said.

“Go on,” he said.

I did. I told him everything.

FORTY-FOUR

I reminded myself that the newsstand man had insisted that I had only five minutes inside Lizzie’s place.

I wasted too much of one of those minutes in a zombied, open-mouthed amble through the flat’s spacious front rooms — the living room, dining room, study, and kitchen — thinking this stupid thought: Thea could have been the person who’d decorated Lizzie’s apartment. That’s how familiar it all felt to me.

The decor was a mix of contemporary and antique styles dotted with a few quirky pieces that fit neither category, along with enough of an Asian influence to make a noticeable difference. Designwise, the place looked like small versions of similar rooms in our Ridgway home.

How weird was that?

The focus and flow of the living room were both directed toward a series of three big windows that faced the Hudson. Later that day the windows would frame the sun as it set to the west, toward Colorado. A lovely chenille chaise — an upholstered altar to solitude and comfort — rested in front of the windows, flanked by a delicate Chinese tea table that supported a reading lamp and a foot-high pile of books.

The books were all novels, mostly genre titles written by popular writers who showed up on weekend morning shows. The whole scene felt quite poignant.

I felt illicit being there, seeing it.

What was I hoping to find inside Lizzie’s place? I didn’t know. I’d decided that I wanted to be able to guess what had been in the boxes that had been carted off overnight by the Death Angel Moving Company. And I wanted to find an indication of where Lizzie might have gone next — a note on the refrigerator with a forwarding address would have been a particularly welcome touch.

I wanted to know what was missing from her home.

I wanted to see photographs of her with her family, or her lover.

I wanted to learn her real name.

I wanted to know what magazines she bought every evening from the newsstand man.

Mostly, I wanted to find something that might give me leverage that would buy me the time I needed to wrap things up with Adam before the Death Angels implemented their end-of-life services plan.

I checked the refrigerator door for that note with her forwarding address. Alas, no luck.

Although it was far from full, the refrigerator hadn’t been cleaned out. Lizzie liked plain yogurt, and the labels on disposable containers revealed that she was disposed to buy takeout from the Whole Foods in Columbus Circle. She drank Sancerre, and had a dozen itty-bitty cans of Sapporo beer on the top shelf next to a four-pack of Starbucks Double Shots and a six-pack of stubby cans of Diet Coke.

Lizzie liked her caffeine.

On the second shelf of the refrigerator sat the clear plastic clamshell of organic raspberries that Lizzie had bought from the Korean grocer downstairs.

She hadn’t eaten any of the berries.

She had indeed been home, though. The newsstand guy wasn’t lying.

Lizzie’s study was oddly masculine. It was a small room, maybe seven or eight feet by ten, with frosted-glass pocket doors that faced toward the living room and the distant George Washington Bridge. The back wall of the study was lined with a long built-in credenza and floor-to-ceiling shelves of a solid dark wood — walnut, I thought, or mahogany. A simple desk — nothing more than a huge piece of lovely old teak on a couple of cast-iron trestles — sat in the center of the room.

Other than one more reading lamp the desktop was a void, but I thought a vague rectangular outline of dust showed where a laptop computer had rested directly in front of the chair. The bookshelves on the opposite wall were packed spine to spine; I figured it was safe to assume that Lizzie’s library hadn’t been disturbed during the impromptu move the night before. The credenzas below the shelves appeared to have solid fronts. I pressed on the wooden panels in a few places, expecting a hidden door to pop open.

Nothing. What a waste of space.

Damn. Who has an office without yesterday’s mail, without files, without unpaid bills?

Who has an office without photographs?

My watch said I’d killed two minutes by then.

Where are all the magazines she buys?

What had I learned? Nothing.

Shit.

A narrow, wainscoted hallway with parquet floors led from the entryway toward a powder room and two bedrooms. I skipped the powder room and turned in to the door of the first bedroom. It was an afterthought room, not a guest room. Lizzie didn’t have frequent guests, or if she did, the guests slept in her bed. The only furniture in the spare room was a pair of matched Queen Anne chairs that I imagined had once been sitting where the chaise currently rested in front of the Hudson River windows.

The closet? Off-season clothes, nothing else. No shoe boxes of canceled checks. No old love letters tied with ribbon secreted on the top shelf.

Her scent, yes. Plenty of that. On those hanging clothes. Spices and flowers and that alluring aroma of fresh laundry that had been dried in the sun.

Three minutes gone.

Off to the master.

I took one step inside her bedroom and the phone rang. The ring was muted, but still distinct enough to cause my heart to jump in my chest.

Fuck.

What was it I had agreed to with the newsstand man? If the phone rings, I was supposed to exit immediately, make my way to the fire stairs, wait five minutes, and then head back down to the lobby.

I stopped dead in my tracks and looked around for the phone, thinking,
Caller ID, have to see the caller ID
.

There was no phone next to Lizzie’s bed.

Had there been one on her desk in the study?

No.

Had there been one in the kitchen?

I didn’t think so.

Huh?

Where were the phones? Had the middle-of-the-night movers packed them up? If they did pack them, why?

Most important, where was the phone that was ringing?

I decided that the ringing noise was in front of me, not behind me. I stepped farther into Lizzie’s bedroom.

I’d entered girl land.

Dream time for Lizzie was a whimsical palace in the French country. Not subtle French country, but biting-into-a-lemon French country, or being-buried-in-lavender French country. There was enough Provençal fabric and toile in front of me to upholster a fleet of Citroëns.

Thea hadn’t decorated that room. Not at all. No way.

Don’t get distracted,
I told myself.
Don’t get distracted.

The phone was still ringing.

Where is it? Where?

I followed the sound to a small walk-in closet. One side of the space was hung with clothes. Plenty of gaps, which told me that Lizzie had packed enough of her things to last her for a while. When she decided to leave, she knew she might not be making only a brief exit. The other side of the closet was lined with two floor-to-ceiling built-in storage units, one that was all adjustable shelves, and another that was a tall stack of drawers topped by more shelves.

Is the phone in one of the drawers?

It sounded that way.

The first drawer I tried was the one that held her panties. It wasn’t luck or happenstance that I opened that one first; it was simply my nature to make that kind of discovery. My peculiar radar. There, right on top of a perfectly folded, tantalizingly delicate pair of pink and purple lace —

Focus!

The caller ID on the mobile phone in Lizzie’s underwear drawer read, “Pay Phone.”

Before I could make the necessary mental and motor connections to reach for it, the phone stopped ringing.

I said, “Whew.”

Perhaps for the first time in my life, I actually said the word “Whew.”

Instantly, I convinced myself that the fact that the phone had stopped ringing meant that I didn’t really have to immediately leave Lizzie’s flat, that I could use my last — what? — minute to finish looking around.

One minute? Shit, shit, shit. I only have one more minute in here. I haven’t found a thing.

I left the phone where I spotted it and opened and shut the other closet drawers quickly. Nothing. I patted down the folded and hanging clothes and opened a couple of purses.

Nothing.

Then I heard some scratching. Or clicking. Some metal-on-metal sound from the other side of the apartment.

I stepped out of the closet, padded across the bedroom, and stood at the entrance to the hall.

Where are her magazines?
I wondered again.

Huh? What’s that noise?

It took me about three seconds to recognize the sound that was so compelling to me: Someone was fiddling with the locks on the front door to Lizzie’s apartment. Someone who didn’t have experience, someone who didn’t know the secrets, someone who didn’t have the touch. Someone who didn’t even know which key went in which lock.

Someone who wasn’t Lizzie.

Behind me, the damn phone started ringing again.

Shit.