Kill Me (4 page)

I’d like to think that if you put me on that cornice ten times, and if it snapped free unexpectedly ten times, seven or eight times out of the ten I would somehow find a way to come down onto the steep slope below in some position that had some resemblance to vertical, and I would manage by luck or by skill to dig in an edge just a tiny bit, just enough to get the smidgeon of control I’d need to regain my balance and bring myself to a stop.

Later that night, I’d end up telling the story of my miraculous recovery from the treacherous fall. I’d tell it once, twice, five times as I drank red wine or cognac and my audience drank whatever it was they were drinking. The perilous drop I’d survived from the cornice to the slope would probably grow gradually from twenty-five feet to thirty to thirty-five.

That’s what I’d like to think.

But that time wasn’t one of the seven or eight and I didn’t come down anywhere close to vertical, and when gravity completed its thing and the ground rushed up to find me, I didn’t manage to get any control with the edge of a ski. What happened instead was that I was thrown too far backward as I fell and came down on the tail of my left ski. From that precarious position all hope of recovery was lost, and I began to careen and bounce down the mountain not like a freestyle skier, but like a child’s jack tossed carelessly onto a playground slide.

The binding on my left ski released with the initial impact, and my right ski, too, popped off obediently as I came back down after the completion of my first full rotation in the air. My poles, tethered lightly to my wrists, flailed wildly as I bounced high off the windswept snow. My mind struggled to sort through the sparse details and the geography and the rushed geometry of my predicament. Somehow, with each rotation, and with each fresh downhill exposure, my eyes managed to lock onto those two trees that were looming large at the bottom of the chute. Right from the start, they seemed to pose the greatest danger.

Or at least the first, greatest danger.

Up above me — high above me — I could hear Jimmy Lee scream my name.

Once, twice, three times, he called me. Each sounded louder than the time before, as though if he called me loudly enough, or persistently enough, I would just stop this foolishness and roll back up that Canadian hill.

The fact that Jimmy was screaming at me meant that he hadn’t fallen with me, though.

As my heels went flying back over my head, I thought,
Well, that’s good
.

SIX

I tucked and tried to roll after that first spread-eagle spin but soon discovered the universal truth that bowling ball-shaped objects bounce downhill much faster than do mannequin-shaped objects. In my current predicament, speed, obviously, was not my friend.

Tumbling out of control down a mountainside didn’t have the same sense of inevitability as that frozen-in-time sensation I’ve experienced at intervals in my life while awaiting the impact of an imminent traffic accident. Each downhill revolution was teaching me fresh lessons about my dilemma, and every few milliseconds I found myself recalculating the trajectory that was carrying me — inexorably? I wasn’t quite convinced — toward those two damn trees that were standing sentry like gateposts to heaven, or hell, at the point where the woods began at the bottom of the chute.

Since I had the camera in my daypack, there would be no video to confirm for me what really happened when I reached the convergence at the end of the funnel, but Jimmy told me later that after some uncountable number of revolutions I eventually bounced high off an incline that was composed of a fallen tree topped with a thick cushion of snow. That mogul-like obstacle was about five yards in front of the trees. Flying again, I caught spectacular air — “hospital air,” Jimmy always called it — and sliced through a long bough about halfway up the tree on my left. I grazed the branch first with my left hand and wrist before I felt a calf-size pipe whip hard across my abdomen. After that brief contact, which flipped me from headfirst to feetfirst and back again, my momentum carried me beyond the two deadly evergreen obstacles. I continued my rotation in space until I came to a thudding, spread-eagled, facedown plop in the waist-deep powder just beyond the two trees.

My helmeted head was resting no more than eighteen inches from the fat trunk of tree number three.

My friends, phenomenal skiers all, arrived at my side within seconds and were digging me out of my powder grave before I’d even begun to process the reality of what had just happened. I suspected I wasn’t dead because I could hear Grant on his satellite phone, arguing with someone about how to get me immediate medical care. And I could hear Jimmy Lee: He was shouting at me not to move.

Not to move.

I was so bereft of air that I wasn’t even able to spit out the words to tell him that I didn’t think I could.

The possibility that I couldn’t move terrified me. Oddly, it horrified me much more than the possibility that I was about to die, because at that moment I also seemed to be unable to find a way to suck oxygen into my lungs. The terror of paralysis was much worse than the sudden panic I’d experienced when the cornice collapsed under my feet, much worse than anything I’d felt as I’d been lolloping down the mountain totally fucking out of control.

My friends argued among themselves for what seemed like most of a month while, avalanche shovels in hand, they continued to dig frantically around me. Jimmy finally managed to forge a consensus that lifting me out of my hole was a medically risky option. They focused first on getting a wide trench open in front of my face so that I could have unfettered access to some of the Bugaboos’s thin air. They were motivated and efficient; it didn’t take long for them to remove enough Canadian powder that a depression had been leveled out all around me to about the same depth as my body. From my awkward vantage, they looked like a crew of arctic gravediggers feverishly trying to reverse a mistaken internment.

Jimmy dropped down into the newly dug pit, put his lips close to my helmet, and said, “Hey, buddy, you there?”

I wasn’t sure I could talk, but I blew some snow away from my lips to prove I could at least do that.

“Good, good, you can hear me. That’s great. Can you move? I don’t want you to, but I’d like to know if you can. Try the fingers on your left hand. Just wiggle them for me, can you do that?”

He had no way to know that my left hand was the one I’d tried to use to stop the tree. And failed. The tree was still standing. I wasn’t.

I felt the pressure of Jimmy’s hand on my glove. Instantly, I also felt a bolt of pain shiver up my arm and down into my fingers.

That was good. I had enough of my wits about me to come to the conclusion that pain was good.

I did try to respond to his touch. I tried. Nothing happened. I tried once more. Nothing happened that time either. I wanted to tell him to check my right hand, that it hadn’t just gone ten rounds with a tree.

But I still couldn’t talk.

So I blew some snow again. My parents had taught me that if I ran into something in life that I couldn’t do, I should always do something I could.

Well, apparently I could blow snow.

One of my other friends, not Jimmy, muttered, “Holy shit. I can’t believe this. First Antonio, and now …”

I’m sure I wasn’t supposed to hear the words that had been muttered, but I did.

My ears were fine.

That’s good,
I thought again.
I can hear.
I’m such a damn optimist.

“Help me up,” I said, surprising everyone, including myself.

“Whoa, whoa,” Jimmy replied, as though I were a spirited horse trying to break out of the corral. “Have to be careful.”

“Help me up,” I said. “I just had the wind knocked out of me. Get me up.”

Jimmy said, “We’re not going to help you. You need to stay still until we figure out what you’ve broken, what you’ve hurt. Don’t make things worse for yourself, come on. Listen to me now. Don’t be stubborn.”

I thought about Jimmy’s counsel for about the same amount of time it had taken the cornice to disappear and me to go topsy-turvy down those few hundred yards of crusty ice chute.

Then I stood up. “There,” I said. “See?”

My parsimonious, yet dramatic, soliloquy would have had a much more profound impact on my friends had I not immediately collapsed back down onto the snow like a marionette after someone had snipped its strings.

SEVEN

It turned out that the collapse was a momentary setback. Though less impressive, my next move was more reasonable; I raised myself to a sitting position, elbows on my knees. My friends huddled together in a semicircle in front of me, as though they were waiting for me to draw the next play in the snow and tell them which one of them was going long.

When I didn’t say anything right away, they all started chatting at me at once. I stopped them by saying, simply, “I want a promise from you. All of you.”

“What?” a couple of them chimed simultaneously. Someone added, “Anything, you know that.”

“Two promises, actually. Grant? Put away your satellite phone. I don’t want anyone to call Thea about this. Not after what Marilyn’s been through today. I’ll do that myself later on. That’s number one.”

“Sure,” he said. “Okay.” Inexplicably, he lowered the phone from his ear and put it behind his back, as though if he hid it from me I’d forget he had it.

“Number two,” I said. “If it had turned out that I couldn’t have gotten up on my own just then — if it ever comes to the point that I can’t get up when I want to — if I ever end up in a hospital bed in anything like the shape that Antonio is in right this minute … illness or injury, it makes no difference … if that ever happens to me, I want your promise, as my friends, my best friends, that one of you will find a way to kill me. Or at least help me kill myself.”

Silence.

“Hey,” Jimmy said finally. The tone of his voice told me that he was imploring me not to be so morbid. “You’re going to be okay. Hey.”

“Drugs,” I said. “I prefer drugs to guns. You all know I don’t like guns. Get some good advice on how to do it right, and then kill me. Got it?”

“Come on,” Jimmy said.

“I’m totally serious about this,” I added. “I’m not cut out to live in the condition I fear Antonio is in. Brain dead, body dead. It’s not for me. This” — I spread my arms to encompass all of British Columbia and Alberta, all of the Bugaboos, all that it represented to me in terms of my personal freedom — “this is what life is for me. When I can’t do this anymore, have days like this with you guys, it’s time for me to leave this earth. Do you understand?”

“I feel the same way,” one of my friends, I think it was Paul, said from behind me. He followed his words with nervous laughter.

“Yeah, absolutely,” someone else added. “I’m in. I’d want someone to kill me, too.”

I knew right then that my sincere wish had become a platitude and I almost regretted having asked.

Almost.

EIGHT

My injuries were nothing compared to what would have happened had I hit one of those two trees head-on.

If that had occurred my body would have been nothing more than a skeletal train wreck with internal organs that resembled a berry smoothie and a brain good for nothing but the amusement of trauma researchers. The glancing blow I’d suffered colliding with the evergreen bough had hurt me, but it hadn’t killed me. I did a careful inventory while skiing under my own power down to the waiting chopper. I was sure I’d broken my left wrist — unsupported, it dangled at an angle that God never intended — and I was guessing that I’d fractured or bruised a couple of ribs. During one of my many tumbles down the snowy chute I’d either separated or snapped something solid in my left shoulder. My collarbone, I was thinking, but maybe something bigger. Internal injuries? Didn’t feel like it to me, but up until then my reckless life experiences had magically spared me from actually knowing what serious internal injuries would feel like.

Concussion? I’d had a couple in my life, and didn’t think I had one right then.

My friends had argued with me for a few futile minutes about how I should get back down to the chopper from the snowy lair where I’d finished my tumbling descent. They were unanimous in opining for the prudence of mounting an emergency evacuation with alpine rescue professionals to get me off that remote mountainside in the Purcells range. One even threatened to withhold my skis, which someone had magically recovered on the way down the chute.

But I wanted no part of an organized rescue. I said it once and then shut up. Jimmy Lee was the one who convinced the others that they were wasting their breath, and wasting valuable time. He had one eye on me and the other, I knew, on Antonio.

Jimmy was a big-picture guy, too.

So I stubbornly insisted on skiing out, remembering the whole time to adhere to the sage advice of an old friend named Hawk, the guy who’d first convinced me of the seductive glories of leaving the marked trails behind and skiing through the wonders that wait in the woods. “The first rule,” he’d told me years earlier, “is always keep both skis on the same side of every tree.”

Hawk had been a wise man.

So that’s what I did on the way to the helicopter: I kept both skis on the same side of every tree.

Worked like a damn charm.

A doctor in the emergency clinic in Banff, an amiable young woman who’d been born in Singapore and spoke English as though she’d been raised in Sussex, confirmed my injuries. She wrapped my fractured ribs, hijacked an orthopod who was just finishing up a surgery in the OR to set and cast my badly broken wrist and to hang a sling for my fortunately only-separated shoulder. The ER doc wanted to keep me overnight for observation, but I promised her I’d check myself into a hospital back home that same evening in Colorado.

She knew I was lying, but I lied with charm, and what the hell could she do, anyway?

The last of the daylight was disappearing behind the Rockies toward British Columbia before we finally got back on board the plane. Mary narrowed her eyes when she saw me, and immediately ordered my friends and her latest copilot wannabe off the plane after they’d helped me up the stairs.

She spent a good five minutes alone with me after I settled onto the sofa in the center of the cabin. She had to convince herself that I was a fit passenger before she would allow the boys on board. Once they were in the cabin, she handed over my care to Jimmy with a stiff warning that she wanted to know about the slightest change in my condition. Jimmy nodded.

Mary said, “I want more than a nod, Jimmy.” She sounded like a cop.

Jimmy said, “I’m as concerned as you are, Mary. Don’t worry.”

Only then did Mary disappear into the cockpit to finish the preflight checks with Stephanie. The jet soon went wheels up from the Calgary airport, heading back home to Colorado’s Western Slope.

By consensus, I was granted sole possession of the sofa in the middle of the plane, and my friends immediately delivered a cocktail — late in the evening, I was cognac and soda — and a bottle of water to my side. I used the water to wash down a couple of the Percocets that the kind doctor from Singapore had provided as part of my Western Canadian care package.

Jimmy Lee sat across from me shortly after we’d leveled off at altitude. In a low voice he said, “You’re an idiot, you know.”

I’d expected that Jimmy would have something to say about what happened on the mountain. Jimmy was the only one in our group whose psyche was weighted more toward superego than ego or id, so if there was a judgment to be made about my escapade, Jimmy would be the one to make it. Anticipating his criticism, I was ready to capitulate and admit to him that I should have recognized that the shelf I was on was a cornice and a not a granite ledge.

But that was as far as my planned mea culpa would go. I was in no mood for regret. I’d survived a legendary fall in the Bugaboos. The key word was “survived.” The words “I’m sorry” weren’t getting anywhere near my lips.

“We’re all idiots, Jimmy. Come on, we were heli-skiing in the damn Bugaboos. Shit happens. I got lucky. Could have been worse. How about some credit for missing those two trees? That was something. Right? You think about what would have happened if I hit those trees? You guys could have brought me home in a to-go cup.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about. The fall? I thought that cornice we were on was rock, too. Could just as easily have been both of us going down. I’m talking about after the fall. First, you should’ve stayed still and let us get a rescue team in to get you out, and second, you should have stayed in the hospital in Banff tonight. You could have blown out your spleen in that fall, or ruptured your aorta. You shouldn’t travel until you’ve been cleared.”

“Doc thought I was okay to travel.” That was a lie, but Jimmy didn’t have any way to know that. “I’m okay, I’m fine,” I argued. “Anyway, Marilyn and Antonio need us back home tonight.”

“That doctor didn’t clear you; she specifically told us that she wanted to observe you overnight but that you were uncooperative with her. I asked her point-blank, and she isn’t a hundred percent sure you aren’t going to start bleeding during the flight.”

I started to shrug but shrugging hurt more than I could have imagined. “If it happens, it happens. Hey, I walked out AMA. It’s not like I’m about to sue her or anything.”

Jimmy, who rarely cursed, said, “Shit.” I think he thought I was making a lawyer joke at his expense.

I persisted in trying to find some humor in my decision. “Jimmy, Jimmy. You know that most women I meet want to observe me overnight. It’s always been one of the burdens I bear in life.”

Jimmy wasn’t interested in playing along. He said, “That little speech you gave on the mountain? Where’s my I’ll-go-first-I’ll-try-anything friend? I never saw this side of you before. Since when are you so fatalistic?”

The cabin phone chirped, the distraction permitting me a moment to construct a reply to Jimmy’s question. I picked up the phone; it was Marilyn calling from Florida with the news that Antonio had arrived in Miami by helicopter and was in a hyperbaric chamber.

“Any … change?” I asked her.

“The doctors are not … optimistic.” She inhaled sharply and started crying. She continued to cry while she said, “I’m begging them for hope. They’re not offering any. None. He was without oxygen a long time. They think maybe he’ll survive. But I don’t feel as good about that as I should.”

I didn’t know what to say. Marilyn spoke and I tried to comfort her for another minute or so. I assured her we would all be by her side, no matter what.

I heard someone call her name. She said, “I gotta go.” The line went dead.

I faced Jimmy. “Maybe since this afternoon,” I said. “That’s when I became so fatalistic. After what happened to Antonio in Belize I’m not sure I want to be saved by modern medicine. Dying on a mountainside in the Bugaboos looks just fine to me if I compare it to what Antonio and Marilyn are going to be dealing with after today. Antonio would give anything for the chance I had after that cornice collapsed. You know as well as I do that given the alternative he’s facing, he’d gladly take that Belize cave as his final resting place.”

Jimmy stared at me for a couple of seconds before he shook his head, I was guessing, at the callousness of my words. Then he stood up and walked to the galley to make himself a drink. I watched him take an inordinate amount of time stirring the ice in his vodka before he came back and sat across from me.

Jimmy usually squeezed a handful of limes into his vodka. Not that time. Cold and straight.

“That wasn’t fair,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”

What wasn’t fair about what I’d said was that Jimmy was the only one of us who had been there before. He’d buried his beloved wife, El, eighteen months before, not too many months after her simple headache became a chronic headache became worrisome double vision became a terrifying tumor became inoperable brain cancer.

On my wedding day, the day I met Jimmy, El wasn’t his date. She hadn’t been Thea’s maid of honor. El was the woman who caught Jimmy on the rebound when the woman who was Thea’s maid of honor dumped Jimmy for a midfielder for the Colorado Rapids.

Yes, the Rapids.

Eloise was from Long Island and didn’t know from soccer. Baseball was her game. She had been a lifelong Yankees fanatic, and found poetic justice that — once her marauding cancer had trumped the chemo and flanked the radiation and had even started sending special-forces cells out on secret missions to run covert ops on her organs — her ultimate demise would come from the bomblets left behind by those infiltrating cancer cells, which she ironically nicknamed “the New York mets.”

As in metastases, not Metropolitans.

El was a funny lady while she was alive. She was a funny lady until a couple of days before she died.

Those last couple of days of El’s life hadn’t been pretty, though. Definitely not funny.

The falling dominoes that led to El’s eventual death knocked each other over with such rapidity that when the last weeks and days came they made Jimmy’s head spin. He ended up with a hole in his heart the size of his wife’s smile, and every morning for months he was shocked all over again that he was waking alone to raise the two boys Eloise had given him.

I watched as he fortified himself with at least half the vodka in his glass before he said, “Listen. I probably shouldn’t be telling you this, especially not right now, but I know a guy.”

“Yeah?”

Although it may have sounded that way, my
yeah
wasn’t simple perfunctory conversation grease. My radar had detected something monumental in Jimmy’s simple pronouncement that he knew a guy.

He went back to his vodka.

“What kind of guy?” I asked.

He dropped his voice another octave or two and leaned forward toward me after stealing a glance aft to make sure our three friends were still distracted with their card game. For at least six months Grant had been trying to get us all as intrigued as he was with the medieval game of Tarot. He carried a deck everywhere. Jimmy went on with me only after he had convinced himself that Grant’s latest cups-and-swords seminar was proceeding uninterrupted. “I don’t actually know him. He’s not like a friend of mine, but you know … Let’s say he’s a contact, okay? Somebody I can … get in touch with. If … you know.”

“Okay,” I said. Jimmy was a bright guy; the sudden absence of eloquence was a sign of something important. Without trying to act too interested, I repeated, “What kind of guy?”

“This is weird,” he said.

“I’ve noticed.”

He finished the vodka and chewed on an ice cube while he stole a glance at the galley, apparently considering a refill of his cocktail. Then: “What you said before on the mountain? Everybody else thought you were joking; I’m sure you know that. None of them took you seriously. But I didn’t … I didn’t think you were joking. I know you too well.”

“Yeah.” I was agreeing that he knew me well.

Too well?
Possibly that.

“I heard about him, you know, this guy and his … his business back when El was sick. Somebody I know back East knew somebody who knew about him, what he does. That kind of thing. At least three degrees of separation. Who knows, maybe more. I talked to somebody who talked to somebody who talked to somebody. Anyway, I’ve been thinking of telling you about him before today.” He paused long enough to assess my reaction to what he’d said so far. “Because of Connie’s situation. Not anything personal with you. Before what happened today, anyway.”

“Connie’s situation is personal.”

Connie was my older brother, Conrad.

He was living in New Haven, where he’d spent more than two decades enjoying his dream life teaching ethics in the philosophy department at Yale. Just shy of three years earlier he had learned that he was suffering the inexorable ravages of ALS, Lou Gehrig’s debilitating legacy illness. Connie’s tribulations as the disease robbed him of control over his muscles — and his freedom — filled me with terror, even from a distance of almost two thousand miles. I didn’t talk about Connie’s condition much, not with anyone. Jimmy was one of those rare people that I didn’t have to share much detail with; he seemed to intuitively know what I was going through with my brother.