The suicide pill was the answer to the overloaded medical system. It was the answer to poverty, to debtor’s prisons, to unrelenting misery, to overpopulation and the psychological isolation it ironically bred. It was the answer to every difficult question.
Helen looked at the slip of paper that had come with the black pill. It began with words that were well-known and often lampooned:
For termination of life. For the use of the specified patient. You have been prescribed this medication following a diagnosis for a condition for which there can be no recovery.
Tears swam in her vision and she wiped them away. The news was beginning to sink in, and she didn’t want it to. She didn’t want that swallowed-down feeling of newly knowing something awful.
What about Mandy? Who was going to take care of Mandy?
She read on:
Be advised that this pill terminates life within seconds. Death will be painless. Please notify your next of kin before taking the medication. Please check in at your local crematory before taking the medication. Be advised that this medication is irreversible. You may choose to take your medication as soon as is convenient to minimize potential discomfort. Based upon your diagnosis and prognosis, we recommend you take this medication in no more than forty-five days.
Forty-five days.
It was another punch to the gut.
How could she prepare Mandy to live on her own in forty-five days?
She looked around her as if for help, as if someone might rescue her from this new reality.
She recognized suddenly the paper sign that was taped to the wall exactly where she had drifted to the side to make room for the next person at the pharma machine. It said, “Please DO NOT take life termination pills here. A crematory is down the hall in Wing D.”
How many people had decided that the best way to deal with their diagnosis was to go ahead and check out right this very moment, before they started thinking about it, before they got scared? How often had the staff at the drugstore had to call the morgue to take away the bodies? Apparently, a lot, to bother to put up a sign.
Suddenly she realized how precious this one pill would be to her in the coming days. With dementia looming… The one certainty she had at this moment was that she did not want to face the end of this disease process without this pill. Thank God she had it. She clutched it to her chest.
Then, as quickly, fear overtook her. What if she lost it? This one pill ensured she could die without suffering and without being a burden to her daughter. One tiny pill—far too easy to lose.
She went to the girl at the counter. “I just got a life termination pill, but I’m worried that I might lose it, and—”
The girl pointed to a worn, curling sign taped to a stand on the counter: “Life termination pills can be replaced after a twenty-four-hour waiting period. Request the replacement at the pharma machine.”
Helen nodded her understanding and backed away from the counter, still clutching the black pill in its plastic bottle.
She looked around at the dozens of people who still stood in line at the functioning machines, the half-dozen people wandering the aisles of the drugstore, the homeless resting on the benches and floor. Could any of those people look at her and know all that she had just learned? Of course not. She was perfectly calm. It was one of Helen’s strengths to be calm in the face of a crisis.
Did this drugstore carry dog food?
She tucked the pill bottle into her purse alongside the other two and went up and down the aisles. The signs and labels passed before her eyes without meaning. She made three passes before she found the pet food section. She scanned the bag of dog food with her e-paper and walked out with it.
The sky was dark now, and it was raining hard, as it did nearly every day during the rainy season. She used the dog food bag as a makeshift umbrella as she trudged through the crowds over to the parking garage.
Here, by the hospital, where visitors had mortality and sympathy on their minds, beggars threw themselves aggressively on the path, nearly tripping their targets. As always, Helen muttered, “Sorry, I can’t,” and watched them for signs of potential violence as she passed the gauntlet.
This time, she hardly saw them through the opaque fabric of fatigue and devastating truth.
She was going to die.
She was going to get worse and worse until she couldn’t bear it anymore, and then she was going to take a black pill and die. Within forty-five days.
Out of the rain, up the four floors of the parking garage, to her car, the ancient light blue Ford, a luxury purchase she and David had indulged in during their brief flush period before they had Mandy. She kicked the door in the right spot to make the door handle work and yanked it open. The door was massively dented, and David’s attempt to repaint it with poorly matched spray paint left it an eyesore, and duct tape held the quarter glass window in place. But it was old enough to be grandfathered out of the laws against human-driven cars.
She threw in the dog food, climbed in, hit the ignition button, and started toward home.
It had been raining hard while she’d been inside. Since climate change had taken hold, flooding threatened from May through September, and it was early May now. She noted how high the water rose against the car tires in the streets and judged that she’d make it home okay.
The world had been tilted on its axis ever since she stopped sleeping. The volume was lowered on its colors and scents. She looked around at every detail, searching for new relevance or meaning, and found nothing. The thick blanket of insomnia muted it all.
The people who passed by in a steady stream under their umbrellas… how many of them were sick like her? How many carried a black pill in a bottle?
She craned her neck to see the sky. Just blackness behind the light pollution of the city of ten million. The street lamps made halos in the mist.
News came through the radio.
“Hundreds of rioters have struck at the headquarters of Unistar Oil in Orlando after it announced record profits and a fifty-percent increase in executive pay Tuesday, followed by its fifth round of layoffs in six months. Fourteen are dead so far, ten of them rioters and four of them Unistar employees. It is the third such riot in Orlando this month.
“Violent crime is up nationwide by a margin of twelve percent over last year. It has increased eighty percent over five years ago, and two hundred and twelve percent over ten years ago.
“One of the colonists to the American Mars colony has died of complications following a case of pneumonia. The next planned delivery of colonists has been postponed for now.”
The two small moon colonies—test colonies started five years ago—were doing well enough, Helen recalled. They’d sent only prisoners, most of them debtors. The government had thought it prudent to send disposable humans.
The Mars tickets, on the other hand, were prized and outrageously expensive. The waiting list was thousands of people long—most of them millionaires. All the riots and protests demanding a lottery system for tickets had come to nothing. Many believed that the Entitled would take their wealth and leave the mobs of poor behind to rot. And who could blame them? Who would still want to live on planet Earth?
She turned off the radio.
Evening rush hour was in full swing. Sometimes she thought it never ended.
Her mind was detached. Floating around somewhere up in the sky, swirling down with the rain, caught in the halo of a street lamp. It wouldn’t land.
She just needed to get the dog food home. That was concrete. She could do that.
From one parking garage to another. Everything was built up and up these days in an effort to handle the burgeoning population.
Because of the relentless Florida humidity, the hallway leading to her apartment always smelled of mildew. She pushed the key into the lock and shoved the door open, then closed it behind her and locked the three one-sided deadbolts.
When she turned, the minuscule kitchen was immediately to her right and
the tiny living area was in front of her, with worn furniture all rented as a matching package: a loveseat, an armchair, a standing lamp, and one side table, along with two large photos of New York City alight at night, which Mandy chose.
On the dingy white wall to her left was a two-person dining table, then a door that opened to the shared bedroom and half-tub bathroom. Plastic shelves with buckling plastic drawers lined the walls, holding everything else they owned.
Mandy, her eighteen-year-old daughter, sat on the loveseat, chubby legs bent under her body. Blue hair plumed proudly a foot above her head, with thick blue tendrils coming down alongside her temples and jawbones and caressing her round yet delicate face. Black lipstick contrasted with her pale skin, and a silver ornament encircled the bottom lip. A dozen silver bracelets glinted at her wrists, and a dozen or so necklaces obscured the band name on her black T-shirt.
As always, Mandy's clamshell rested on her lap and her Earworm clung to her ear. Helen couldn't fathom how anyone could use two computers at once.
Her daughter didn’t even look at her.
It was always like this.
Every day.
Just the way David had been, after a while. Four beers down his throat and the evening spent locked away inside his Earworm.
Emotion awakened, even through the haze of fatigue. Anger. Resentment. Above all, fear for her daughter’s future. Mandy was about to have to live by herself, on her own, and if she couldn’t even manage to buy dog food…
As the stout, blond dog, Jessie, raced to leap at her knees, Helen slammed her purse, umbrella, and keys down on the tiny dining table. Don’t do this. Don’t be angry.
Her daughter finally looked over.
“Did you get dog food like I asked?” Helen snapped. “Did you?” Stop it. Stop this. The dog jumped up at her. “I have asked you every day this week. Every single day, Mandy!” She couldn’t make the words stop running out of her mouth. “And then I told you he was out of food last night!”
Mandy stared, her face blank.
“You still didn’t do it, did you?” Helen’s anger and panic soared into an entirely irrational height. This wasn’t her—maybe it was the insomnia, or maybe the disease… or maybe just the fear for her daughter.
She threw the bag of dog food onto the dining table. “I knew you wouldn’t. That’s why I got it. Because if it were up to you, Jessie would die. Because you are irresponsible!”
She slammed her hand on the dog food. Jessie backpedaled, confused and alarmed.
Mandy’s mouth opened in protest.
“You have got to get your crap together, Mandy. Get it together!”
“God! You’re such an asshole!” Mandy pulled herself off the loveseat and dashed into their shared bedroom—a trip of three steps—and slammed the door behind her.
Helen moved automatically into the kitchen, the bag of dog food in her trembling hands. The anger drifted and faded into the blur of fatigue. I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have hurt her. Yelling at her doesn’t help. It never helps.
She crouched on the floor, opened the dog food, and poured some into Jessie’s bowl. The dog dug in eagerly, the drama between his humans forgotten.
She sank to her knees and petted the dog mechanically, tears brimming at her closed eyelids. Otherwise, she didn’t feel anything. The world had grown hollow.
44 Days, 16 Hours
The previous night, Helen went into their shared bedroom—a curtain divided the tiny room in half, with Mandy in the back—and found the bottle of the new sleeping pills. She dubiously reread the slip of paper that described its effects as “immediate and profound” and took a dose while she was still dressed and standing by her bed.
The slip of paper was right.
She collapsed to the floor as heavy darkness claimed her with such finality, her last thought was that she had accidentally taken the black pill.
But then… the awful waking up.
At the end of sleep—or perhaps at the beginning of wakefulness—cold, white, clammy, eyeless forms reached out of the ground to drag her down into it. She tried to fight with limbs that wouldn’t move, and she struggled to scream for help with lungs that could barely draw breath.
Whether dreams or hallucinations, they finally passed, and she came to consciousness gasping and clawing at her bedroom door. A drugged, heavy feeling pulled her down like weights would drag a body toward an ocean floor.
She silenced herself, as she didn’t want to wake Mandy on the other side of the curtain, and dragged herself back to her bedside table to find the other pills—the waking pills. She took one and sagged onto the floor in the fetal position. Twenty minutes passed, and then she began to feel something like her old self. The self that used to sleep.
The heaviness fell away.
She went to the living room and pulled back the curtains in front of their narrow floor-to-ceiling window. Blue sky. White clouds. They were beautiful and vibrant.
She could feel again. In fact, she thought she felt more intensely than before. Perceived more vividly than before.
Her heart rate escalated, then escalated again. She held onto the curtains as if they would hold her down as she went buoyant and flew out into the sky.
What a roller coaster ride this was.
Her alarm went off, and she hurried back to the bedroom to shut it off. It was time to go to work.
She laughed quietly as she changed clothes. Why was she going to work? And yet she was. It was a weekday. She would go to work.
Maybe she was in denial. She remembered her diagnosis full well, and yet the greater part of her didn’t believe it.
She picked up her purse and saw, still tucked into it, the bottle that held the black pill. It was too important to leave it sitting in her purse like that.
The locket. One of the few gifts David gave her before the divorce—and before he died suddenly three years ago from a heart attack.
She found the pretty silver locket, along with her wedding ring, under her underclothes in her top dresser drawer. She looked at both artifacts of old, lost love, and the familiar waves of grief and guilt came over her. She’d earnestly tried, with David.
Divorce was the executioner of dreams.
She tried putting the black pill into the silver locket and found that it fit neatly. She slipped the chain over her neck and tucked the locket under her shirt so Mandy wouldn’t notice it.
Remembering their fight last night, Helen rapped hesitantly on the wall next to Mandy’s curtain. It was dark and quiet on the other side, and Helen didn’t want to wake her daughter up, but she had to try to make things better somehow.
Even though it never worked.
“Mandy?”
Nothing.
“I’m sorry about last night,” Helen said. “You were right. I was a jerk. You didn’t deserve what I said.”
No response.
Even if Mandy was awake, she wouldn’t answer. Mandy hadn’t forgiven Helen for the divorce. Probably she never would. Mandy had loved her daddy, and Helen had sent him away to die alone.
An hour of traffic. At least the skies were clear so far. Helen passed slowly from one desolate area of urban wasteland to another. Towering condos, imposing office buildings, much of it under new construction. At one point, Helen turned her head and counted seventeen cranes building high rises. It was all in response to the population pressure after rising sea waters ate away Tampa and Miami and Jacksonville and put the Everglades under the ocean. Climate refugees had flocked to Orlando until the city filled the remaining width of the state.
Up the elevators to work. The state headquarters of Justice for All, an organization devoted to economic and racial justice. Three rooms crowded with twelve people. Her home for the past eleven years. When she started, they had fifteen rooms and thirty people.
The small, cluttered break room with bare white walls marked with scrapes and dings. The smell of fresh coffee.
She poured a cup, then her arm and leg mu
scles spasmed, and she dropped the mug and nearly fell. She caught herself in one of the hard plastic chairs.
The spasms passed enough for her to wipe up the spill with paper towels and get another cup of coffee before anyone else came in. She was grateful for that.
Invariably fatal.
Amid the sounds of her coworkers placing calls—it was phone banking day—she went to her small, rickety desk, turned on her desk lamp, and unlocked the drawer. She took out her clamshell, the device she grew up calling a laptop.
First things first. Her practical side, never far away, commanded her to do what needed to be done. She opened up her clamshell, opened a website for creating wills, and filled out the fields.
Debts—none. When the majority of prisoners were doing time for debts they couldn’t pay, she wouldn’t risk it, not as a single mother. What she couldn’t afford, she lived without, and she lived without a lot.
Assets. She bit her lip. Old Blue, the Ford. Worth a few hundred dollars at best. She wrote it down.
She had about eight hundred in her checking account, only because rent hadn’t come out this month yet. She wrote it down anyway.
Her retirement account—not worth much more than when she’d stopped her contributions twenty years ago. About $5,500. She’d started it before Congress tore away the tax protections that made such accounts relevant and her old employer revoked its matching. No one bothered with these accounts anymore. The ultra-rich didn’t need them.
Helen couldn’t afford life insurance, and anyway, such policies excluded death by black pill, along with all other forms of suicide.
There was nothing else, she realized with a stab of anxiety. All the furniture and appliances in the apartment were rented.
With an inheritance of only a few thousand dollars, Mandy could only get through a couple of months before she would have to get a job. She wouldn’t be financially stable and out of the reach of debt.
When Helen had still had hope that she could better her and Mandy’s situation someday, it hadn’t seemed so bleak. But now… As she faced the reality that $5,500 and a crap car were all she would ever have to show for her life and all she would have to leave to her child, her stomach flipped and sank.
The Robin Hood Thief Page 2
