Life in a Fishbowl

by Len Vlahos

  There was a long pause while Max consulted his Russian–English dictionary.

  Max

  Because life is sacred.

  Jackie

  Yeah, it is. So then why make a person suffer before he dies if he’s going to die anyway?

  There was another long pause, and this time Jackie wanted to change the subject. Her own feelings on euthanasia were starting to crystallize, but she didn’t want to get all weird and eggheady on Max.

  She was saved by the bell for the next period.

  Jackie

  ’Bye, Max, I have to go to my next class. Next time let’s talk about something fun.

  Max

  Anything for you, Solnyshko.

  Jackie left the computer lab and went to her locker. Someone had taped a news article there.

  Quest for Stone

  (AP) Huntsville, Alabama—When seventeen-year-old Hazel Huck stumbled on the eBay listing for terminally ill Oregonian Jared Stone, something touched a nerve.

  “I don’t know,” said the teenager in a phone interview. “It just didn’t seem right that this guy was reduced to selling his life.”

  Stone, a graphic designer and a member of the Oregon state legislature, was diagnosed with a high-grade glioblastoma multiforme, a usually fatal brain tumor. He claimed to have less than six months to live, and he was selling his life on eBay to the highest bidder.

  Huck, a senior at the Florence Nightingale School for Young Women, turned to her friends in cyberspace to raise money to bid on Stone’s listing. An avid participant of role-playing games like World of Warcraft and Dark Age of Camelot, Huck invited her cyber friends to join her on a quest. Her goal was to win the auction, and to allow Stone to die with his family and his dignity intact.

  “It was amazing how fast people responded,” the modest girl said. “We all sort of got Jared fever.”

  Using her World of Warcraft character, a level sixty-five druid called Guinevere the Glad, Huck created a viral campaign inside the fantasy world.

  “It just took off. Everyone thought it was so cool that we could do something tangible together. You know, instead of just role playing.”

  Unfortunately for Huck, her efforts, impressive though they were, would fall short. Mr. Stone’s reserve—the minimum bid needed to win the auction—was $1 million, $700,000 more than the cyber group was able to raise. And a week later, the auction was delisted for violating eBay terms of use.

  “It’s sad that we didn’t get to help,” Huck said, “but I’m glad we tried, and glad we came together.”

  Someone had scrawled “Your father’s a freak!” across the top in red marker. Jackie took the clipping down and put it in her bag, taking care not to rip it. She thought for a minute about finding somewhere to hide from her classmates for the rest of the day, but she just didn’t have the energy. Jackie slumped her shoulders and shuffled off to biology. The thought of dissecting a frog, once revolting, no longer seemed so bad.

  ***

  Life and Death was scheduled to run from nine to ten p.m., seven nights a week for as long as Jared was alive. Each episode would feature an edited collage of scenes from the Stone household, shot during the previous twenty-four hours, mixed with interviews with Jared and his family. Ethan’s plan was to use the first few episodes to get viewers comfortable with the show’s premise, then introduce viewer interactivity along with celebrity drop-ins.

  The pitch to potential advertisers was simple: If the television network gave people permission to watch another person die, they would tune in, in droves. It wasn’t a hard sell. Car companies, laundry detergents, feature films, and fast-food establishments all bought time, and all created custom spots to run during the program. Each one tried to out-condole the other, with the coup de grâce being a McDonald’s ad that ran thirty seconds of icy blackness with small gray McDonald’s arches in the bottom corner. In the last ten seconds, off-white letters fade in, telling the audience that “No matter what, we all have to eat. McDonald’s, the official meal of Life and Death.”

  The premiere episode ran on a Thursday night, and the Nielsen numbers were through the roof. Nearly 80 million households watched the opening scene of Jared and Deirdre sitting on their front porch, looking happy, healthy, and normal. It was an edited interview conducted by an unseen producer as they answered unheard questions. The cut from answer to answer was intentionally rough, jarring the viewer ever so slightly. Deirdre did most of the talking.

  Deirdre: We’ve been married for twenty years.

  Jared: We met in college [jump cut] NYU.

  Deirdre: It was a physics lab. We were both fulfilling a science requirement, and we both hated it.

  Jared: We skipped one day and went for coffee. We’ve been together ever since.

  Deirdre: I’m originally from here [jump cut] Portland. So we settled here. We wanted to be near my mom. It was great when the girls were young. They got to know their grandmother well, before she passed away. [jump cut] Cancer of the bile duct.

  Jared: We have two kids. Jackie is fifteen, and Megan is thirteen.

  The camera zoomed in and froze on Jared’s face, the pain and confusion in his eyes unmistakable.

  Jared: Or at least I think that’s how old they are.

  The title credits ran, and the show was off and running.

  ***

  Ethan watched the first episode of Life and Death alone in his palatial Malibu living room. The network brass, having bought into the notion that Ethan had stumbled onto the next wave of reality TV, wanted to have a party to celebrate the premiere and the unprecedented amount of advertising dollars it generated. But Ethan declined. He thought that now was the moment to appear introspective, aloof, to start to create the legend of Ethan Overbee in the minds of his peers. Just like Steve Jobs, he thought.

  He watched the show on a custom-made, eighty-inch, Bluetooth-enabled plasma television embedded with video-conferencing capabilities and surround sound. He sat in an armchair made of burnished leather and held in his hand a tumbler of Beefeater gin, with a lime and a splash of tonic for good measure.

  Ethan simply could not believe how well the first show had gone. In a week, all of America would be watching the plight of poor Jared Stone. Hell, even he wanted to see what happened next. It was compelling, heart-wrenching, beautiful television, even if it was a bit morose.

  Melancholy was nothing new to television. Every news department in America feasted on tragedy. When a hurricane hit, they were the first ones in (and the first ones out). When terrorists blew up a domestic target, they provided round-the-clock coverage. When a lone gunman opened fire in a post office, they interviewed every family member of every victim, every relative of the shooter, and every talking head with an opinion or theory, no matter how stupid. Jared Stone was no different. There was even an internal discussion at ATN to run the show out of the news department, but Ethan wasn’t about to let his baby go.

  As he watched the final credits roll beneath a teaser for tomorrow night’s episode, Ethan was so emotional he wept.

  ***

  During the airing of the premiere episode of Life and Death, Glio was feasting on Jared’s memory of his first date with Deirdre. Maybe it was because he and Deirdre had told that story to the Life and Death cameras. Or maybe it was the other way around, and Jared told the story knowing on some subconscious level that the memory would soon be lost forever.

  Glio found himself blowing across a latte to cool it, looking at Deirdre. She had green eyes, a button nose, and dirty blond hair pulled tight in a ponytail. Her long, slender fingers massaged her coffee—which was black, unaltered—in a manner that was something between seductive and provocative. Glio was so nervous as he relived this moment from Jared’s life that he heard little of what Deirdre was saying. The mantra playing over and over again was “She’s out of my league. She’s out of my league.”

  After coffee, Glio and Deirdre walked through Washington Square Park, south into Soho and west into the heart of G
reenwich Village. As the day wore on, Glio felt his confidence grow. His inhibitions dropped as he fell in love. His heart skipped a beat every time he paused to look at Deirdre; then he would dive back into the conversation and lose himself in the bubble that was growing around them.

  When the date came to a close, four hours later, they were standing outside the entrance to Deirdre’s dorm. Glio mustered the courage to kiss her good-bye. He was surprised that when their lips met a snippet of the memory of Jared’s first kiss, consumed earlier, was inserted into the timeline he was watching, was living. Jared, Glio realized, compared every first kiss to that very first kiss.

  He watched Deirdre retreat into the lobby of her dorm, and then he floated away, both in the memory and in Jared’s brain.

  ***

  Sherman Kingsborough didn’t like the man sitting next to him. He had little patience for the hackneyed rhetoric spewing from the guy’s crooked mouth.

  The two of them were parked in the cell phone lot at the Portland International Airport, the radio in Sherman’s Mercedes playing N.W.A’s “Fuck tha Police.” The classic gangsta rap song was Sherman’s half-baked attempt to project an image that he was tough. It wasn’t really working.

  “It’s going to cost you,” the man in the passenger seat was saying. He was dressed in jeans, a brown leather bomber jacket, and very dirty work boots. His name was Bobby—“Just Bobby,” he had told Sherman—and he looked so much like central casting’s idea of a petty criminal that you had to figure him to be anything but.

  “I told you, money isn’t an object. I just need to get into that house.”

  After watching the first episode of Life and Death, Sherman began to formulate a plan. He would break into Jared’s house in the middle of the night, when not very much was happening and not many people were stirring, neutralize any bystanders, and then kill Jared, making sure the deed was captured by one of the television cameras that seemed to be stationed in every room. When it was done, Sherman would remove his mask, revealing his identity. Then he would begin his flight from justice.

  For Sherman, there were precious few ways to push the envelope of existence. Murder and flight were not only new experiences, they were exciting. And the worst-case scenario—capture—only meant that Sherman would get more new experiences: trial and prison. He had become the living embodiment of the cliché that idle hands make the devil’s work. Sherman and Satan were forming quite the partnership.

  The way he lived his life, Sherman had consorted with no shortage of shady characters. Bobby was just another cog to Sherman, a piece to be used and discarded. Still, he thought the guy was so unsubtle that he was kind of funny.

  “There’s a fuckload of security on that house,” Bobby told him.

  “Yes, I know. If there was no security, I would just ring the doorbell.”

  “Okay, okay, Richie Rich, don’t get your panties all twisted up.” Bobby laughed at his own inane joke.

  “Can you help me?” Sherman asked, ignoring the nickname.

  “Yeah,” Bobby said. “Me and my buddies can make sure no one will be awake to stop you from going into the house, and we can make sure the house goes dark.”

  “I don’t need the house to go dark. I just want to get inside unseen, and then be able to get away quickly.”

  “Fine, the house won’t go dark. We’ll make sure no one sees you come in or out. What are you doing in there, anyway? Is this some sort of heist?”

  Heist? Sherman thought. People really say “heist”? “No questions,” he said.

  “Fine. Going to cost you, though.”

  “For Christ’s sake, I told you—”

  “Relax, relax, I’m just fucking with ya. Fifty thousand dollars.” Bobby had a shit-eating grin, thinking he was about to take Sherman to the cleaners and back. It took all of Sherman’s resolve not to laugh in Bobby’s face.

  ***

  The second episode of Life and Death was a master class in editing. As serious as Jared’s decline was, as uncertain as he was about himself, it seemed so much worse on television.

  In real life, Deirdre would ask Jared a simple question—“Does the dog need to go out?”—and Jared would be a beat late in answering. On the show, Deirdre would ask the question, and the editors would cut back and forth between Jared and Deirdre five or six times. The cuts were artificial, and the bewildered and pained facial expressions on both husband and wife were culled from other scenes, reactions to questions or comments that had nothing to do with walking the dog. But television was television. If it was on the screen, it was true. This was particularly difficult for Jared. When he watched the episode back at night, he just assumed he was every bit as confused as the show made him seem. He would shake his head and grunt as he replayed the scene in his own head.

  Jackie Stone wasn’t confused at all; she knew spin when she saw it. The whole thing made her blood boil, and something in her snapped. All of Jackie’s darker impulses bubbled to the surface, and she took action.

  At five a.m. the day after the second episode aired, Jackie quietly barricaded the front and rear doors of the house with small pieces of furniture stacked one on top of the other. Once she believed the doors were secure, she started going through the house with black nail polish, painting the lenses on each of the tiny button cameras hidden in every crevice and corner. It took the crew most of the day to undo the damage Jackie caused. She waited silently in her room all afternoon and evening for a scolding from her parents, or at least a talking-to from the director, but it never came.

  Jackie’s punishment came that night when episode three aired. Her attempted coup was, of course, captured on tape. It was cut together with footage of Jared lying on his office floor, of Megan talking on the phone to her friends, and of Jackie sulking. They showed every inch of Jackie’s bedroom—including a smiling unicorn holding a rainbow in its teeth; the ceramic trinket, a remnant from an earlier phase of Jackie’s life—while the voice-over painted her as a troubled loner with few friends who was having difficulty accepting her father’s condition. Jackie saw it as a secret message from the producer: straighten up and fly right, or else.

  The next Monday at school, where she was alternately cheered and jeered, was the longest of her life.

  Jackie wanted nothing more than to talk to her father, but she knew the conversation would only wind up on television. So she retreated to her room, turned out the lights, and lay on her bed. Let’s see if this makes for good viewing, she thought to herself. The producers didn’t care. Jackie, from their perspective, had been neutralized.

  Where are all the good people in the world? she wondered as she lay there in the dark. Then she remembered the news story that had been taped to her locker.

  Jackie turned on the light, retrieved her book bag, and pulled out the article about Hazel Huck and her efforts to raise money to save Jared. She read it again and again, trying to drown out the reality of the world around her. She wanted to lose herself in that article, in that world.

  ***

  Dappled sunlight fell on Sherman Kingsborough’s face as he walked through the Portland Japanese Garden. He was disappointed that it didn’t have a more lyrical name, like the Morikami Japanese Gardens near his father’s mansion in Palm Beach, but he had to admit, the place was pretty damn nice.

  Sherman had once dated a Buddhist girl who spent her time schooling him in the ways of The Middle Way. He did everything to woo her, including a spontaneous trip to Japan and a tour of Buddhist temples. Of course, none of it made any difference to Sherman. He cared as much for Buddha as he cared for God, which is to say not at all. The things I’ve done just to get me some strange, he thought to himself.

  The only lasting impact of his search for enlightenment—or rather sleeping with a woman in search of enlightenment—was a penchant for Japanese architecture and Japanese gardens. He found them oddly soothing.

  So it was not surprising that Sherman found himself admiring a Japanese maple, a soft carpet of its burgun
dy leaves on the ground beneath his feet, just hours before he was scheduled to embark on his mission to kill Jared Stone.

  The girl he’d dated had taught him a few relaxation techniques—he liked to think of them as tricks rather than techniques—and he tried to employ them as he wandered the garden, but it was no use. His adrenal gland was working overtime, flooding his system with narcotic levels of stimulant. His mind was focused as if all his thoughts were being filtered through a magnifying glass, and his muscles were straining not to burst out of his skin.

  He was ready.

  ***

  Jared was spending an increasing amount of time lying on his office floor with the lights out. The few times he did engage with the outside world, other than his daily interviews with the Life and Death producers and his visits to the doctor, were almost entirely with the right-to-die lobby. He had become their poster child, and something of a cause célèbre in the world of euthanasia advocacy.

  Given his situation, Jared wanted to do as much for the lobby as he could. When he had the strength, he scheduled phone interviews with area newspapers and radio stations, and he had been working on an editorial for the Oregonian, but he couldn’t seem to finish it:

  Death with Dignity: An Insider’s Perspective

  by Jared Stone

  As most readers know, I have a brain tumor. It’s an inoperable high-grade glioblastoma multiforme, and it is killing me. This is unequivocally true; as much as anything can be unequivocally true when you no longer know what “true” means. There are no drugs; there is no surgery; there is no miracle in my future. Within four months, probably less, I will be dead.

  I have decisions to make. Do I allow my family to watch me suffer and wither away? Or do I end my suffering and leave them earlier than I might otherwise?

  Whether I choose to exercise my right to assisted suicide is a choice for me, for my family, and for my health-care providers. There is no reason, no logical reason, the state should involve itself in my personal affairs.