Point of Balance

by J. G. Jurado

  “No, of course not,” I replied automatically.

  He leaned forward and lowered his voice to a whisper. At that moment, the strains of Joan Baez’s “Hush Little Baby” faded away and her “Battle Hymn of the Republic” struck up. I cannot tell whether that was happenstance or whether White had set it up, as he had everything else in the whole sordid affair, down to the last detail.

  “Nevertheless, my dear doctor, death by natural causes would be perfectly acceptable. The great man checks into the hospital Friday, in complete secrecy. No one knows about his life-threatening illness. He receives the best treatment but dies on the operating table. A brave, tall and dark neurosurgeon faces the cameras. He’s a self-made man, an all-American hero, an example to us all. He breaks the news with tears in his eyes, and the country weeps with him. The vice president takes the oath of office, also in tears, that very night, so help me God. The nation is in mourning Saturday, then Sunday the newspapers are full of praise for the new commander in chief, whom 47.3 percent of the population couldn’t have named two days earlier. By the time Wall Street opens on Monday, everything is back on track. Factories belch smoke, moms take their kids to school and bake apple pie. The free world is safe. God bless America.”

  He clutched his chest in an affected imitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. In that diner, decorated 1950s style in red, white and blue, his patter sounded unreal and demented, but nonetheless entirely plausible. I felt sick to my stomach and gulped as I took in the enormity of the mess I was mixed up in.

  “You’re crazy, White,” I muttered.

  “You surmise most incorrectly,” he said, narrowing his eyes. “I am in fact a thoroughly rational and well-balanced person, who is fully cognizant of the outcome of his actions, and the costs and benefits entailed therein. Are you, Dave?”

  He stared at me long and hard, while he slowly massaged his temples, to gauge the impact of his threat.

  Every fiber in my body was screaming to get the hell out of there and away from that psycho. But I couldn’t.

  “What do you want me to do? I can’t kill him just like that!” I said in an effort to defend myself, to gain time, to explain how impossible it was to do as he wanted. “It won’t be so easy. There’ll be eyes everywhere, watching my every move. At least two other neuro­surgeons will be with me, as well as an anesthesiologist and two nurses. There’ll be cameras recording everything, and half the Secret Service peeping from behind the operating lights.”

  “Details, details,” he said, stretching out his hands, palms upward; seemingly these were petty concerns. “Leave that to me. I’ll tell you how Thursday night. I’m sure it will be to your liking.”

  He spoke with overpowering certainty. He knew he had me by the balls. But like the cornered animal I was, I tried to lash out.

  “Damn it, White, you can’t ask me to kill a human being. I am sworn never to harm anybody. I’m a doctor, for Chrissakes.”

  He sighed, as if taking pains to be reasonable.

  “See here, Dave. I’m a very patient man, believe me. I appreciate your qualms in this matter. I would rather have taken a different approach, offered you a chunk of money and counted on your willing participation, as I have with other collaborators. It hasn’t been so simple with you. You’re straight. Your career’s at stake and you’re compromising the moral strictures by which you have lived your whole life. That I can respect. Nevertheless, allow me to remind you of something.”

  He drew the iPad closer. It was on the tabletop, in an upmarket Louis Vuitton case. He raised the cover and shielded his hands as he typed for a moment. A couple of seconds later, he lowered the cover and turned the contraption around.

  On display was a black rectangle that took up three-quarters of the screen. Underneath were three rows of gray blobs with no visible labels. That was it.

  I couldn’t see why he wanted to show me all that. I gave him a baffled look.

  “Oh, by all means. Let there be light.”

  He tapped three of the blobs in quick succession and the black rectangle swiftly turned white. I blinked as my eyes adjusted to the brightness. So did the lens on the other side of the screen. And then I got the picture.

  It was a webcast, showing some sort of room, hewn out of solid ground. A few untreated wooden props kept the whole shaky construction from caving in. The walls oozed dampness and shone with a sickly glow under the blindingly bright lights. The picture, in HD, displayed every painful detail.

  The dugout was small. It must have measured a scant five feet tall by ten feet wide. How come I worked that out so quickly?

  Because I know how tall my daughter is.

  Groveling in the middle of the pit was Julia. She had her SpongeBob SquarePants pajamas on, with the dark blue pants and the garish yellow top many parents have come to hate. Only the yellow was spattered with dirt, and what looked suspiciously akin to dried blood. She was barefoot, apart from a lone sock on her right foot.

  She cradled her knees with one hand while using the other to try to shield her eyes from the harsh glare cast by the halogen lamps. Her gorgeous blond hair was matted and sweaty. Tears streaked from her little blue eyes and made runnels in her dirt-encrusted cheeks. The lights had woken her up and she was dazed, helpless and frightened out of her wits. She opened her mouth but no sound came from it.

  “Well now, it seems the feed is muted. Allow me, please,” he said in a voice as toneless as that of a RadioShack attendant showing a customer a plasma TV.

  He gave the iPad another two taps.

  The piercing shriek that came from the speakers tore me apart. It was a halting, confused cry. The volume was very low, but an ice pick couldn’t have split my eardrums more.

  I clenched my fists.

  “You’re a smart man, doctor,” White said, reading in my eyes what I had in mind. “Don’t do anything foolish.”

  Slowly, I unwound my fists. They were the sole part of my body that wasn’t as taut as a guitar string.

  “The cubbyhole is underground, in a hermetically sealed room. Six oxygen tanks provide the air supply,” White went on. “They hold twenty-one thousand, three hundred forty-five liters in all. At five liters a minute, that’s exactly enough for a girl of her weight to breathe until six p.m. on Friday.”

  “Does . . . does she have food?”

  “Dave, please. What do you take me for, a monster?” he said, crestfallen. To all appearances my query had deeply hurt him. “Her heat, hydration, food and hygiene needs have all been taken care of. She’ll be a mite uncomfortable, unfortunately, but she’ll be fine. Until the deadline, that is. After that, her well-being depends wholly and entirely on you.”

  “You do realize what it is you are asking me to do?”

  “Naturally, Dave. My employer expects me to perform a neat, quality job for him.”

  “Then he’ll discard the tools.”

  “No. That would be most unwise. After the demise of our commander in chief, you will be in the limelight and you wouldn’t be able to justify the girl’s absence for long. Julia will be home by the weekend and then we shall forget each other’s existence.”

  I didn’t believe that for one second but kept my thoughts to myself.

  “I still don’t understand how you expect me to pull this off,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Leave the details to me, Dave. You keep up appearances and don’t let your feelings show. Regain your, er, well-known sense of humor. Now go home and have a think about our talk. You’ll receive instructions in due course.”

  I lifted a finger to call Juanita. She dropped the check on the table.

  “You weren’t his first choice. Your patient’s, that is,” he said when she went away. “But you were mine.”

  I stood up to leave.

  “Why me?”

  He appeared to be confounded. I don’t think he saw that one coming.<
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  “You could have picked anyone else,” I continued. “An anesthesiologist, a nurse. Why me?”

  He seemed to muse on the question for an instant, studying his perfectly manicured nails at the end of his long, delicate fingers.

  Surgeon’s hands, I thought.

  “Oh, because you know, Dave,” he said airily. “You know death comes to us all and it is acceptable. And because you also know how hard it is to live with the guilt of not having gone the extra mile. What’s unacceptable is remorse, a bitter cup we drink from day after day.”

  I think I ground my teeth and winced after that last barb. I knew that if I stayed there under his icy gaze, I would burst into tears again, and I didn’t want to give that vermin the satisfaction of belittling me once more.

  I made my way toward the door, but his voice halted me.

  “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

  “Like what?”

  I turned back to him, slowly. White smiled and proffered the note Juanita had just brought.

  “Pick up the tab, will you, Dave? And don’t forget the tip.”

  7

  Here on death row there’s a guy four cells down, name of Snow, who plays solitaire all day long. He says that winning is all about getting the right cards. If he deals himself a poor hand, he shuffles the deck and starts again. Outwardly, he has all the time in the world. He doesn’t. Snow has six weeks to go, so before long we’ll see him walk down the row.

  This overarching wish to start again, to clear away the cards life has dealt you, is a treacherous and woeful feeling. We have all felt it sometime, although it is never keener, nor more devastating or lethal, than when it is fed by guilt and self-reproach. Then it is enough to drive somebody crazy. Little wonder that most everyone in this place ends up clinically nuts.

  There is no wiping the slate clean.

  The night I came back from that first meeting with White and lugged myself upstairs, up to Julia’s room, I was almost catatonic. I felt numb, like you do after the dentist leaves half your face frozen.

  I don’t remember stepping on top of the white stool Julia used to get her clothes down from the hangers. But I must have, because at some stage I found myself grasping a heavy-duty, sealed plastic bag of the kind used to store clothes in out of season. I took an old and worn college sweatshirt out of it, held it to my face and breathed in. It still smelled of Rachel, that smell of deodorant mixed with flower-scented soap and scrubbed skin she left behind every time she put something on.

  It was then that it sank in I would never see her again. There would be no more tea in the kitchen before bedtime, no more walks under the trees or knowing winks beside the operating table. The dawning realization ushered in a feeling of closure. All those months of maudlin and guilty grief, which had turned me into a bad-­tempered recluse and workaholic, ended right there.

  Because I understood.

  Rachel Evans, née Rachel Robson, got the results of her magnetic resonance imaging scan forty-eight hours before she took her life. She had been having splitting headaches for days, but played them down, and I had taken little notice. Don’t go judging me for that. I’ve been at it for a while now, and much more scathingly than you. In my defense, I will say that no one is blinder to his own family’s health problems than a doctor. The response to any of your wife’s or children’s symptoms is to give them a Tylenol and tell them to take an afternoon nap.

  Rachel was a woman with a high pain threshold who never complained and gave birth to Julia with no more chemical assistance than a couple of Diet Cokes. So when she found herself gobbling down a jar of painkillers a day, she was worried sick. Or at least that’s what a colleague in Neurosurgery told me. She had consulted them on the sly and they scanned her while I, wholly unaware, had taken Julia to a school play. While I watched our little girl dance in a raccoon outfit, they told Rachel she had glioblastoma multiforme, grade 4. The most malignant and, sadly, also the most common type of brain cancer. More than half of cerebral tumors are GBM, a ruthless killer for which there is little or no known cure.

  “How long have I got?” Rachel asked the neurologist as the tears welled up in her eyes.

  “Without treatment, six or seven weeks. Unfortunately it has branched and I’m afraid it will spread quickly. In a few days it’ll reach the area that controls speech.”

  She understood in a flash. Not only was she a great doctor, but she had also taken part in enough neurosurgery operations to know what lay in store for her. How she would lose her faculties piecemeal until she ceased to be everything she was. And how on the way she would suffer dreadfully and make her family suffer all the more.

  “Maybe David . . . ,” the neurologist ventured.

  “No.”

  “But, Rachel . . . He’s achieved results with—”

  “No! You won’t tell David a thing. Promise me. You’ll keep it under wraps until Monday. This weekend’s our anniversary and I don’t want anything to spoil the party.”

  The way they told it later, shamefaced, when they came clean, they had fallen for Rachel’s story and kept their mouths shut. The same way an anesthesiologist she worked with swallowed another yarn a couple of days later.

  “I’ve got this terrible migraine and am ready to drop. Can you fit me up with a drip? The neuro has prescribed me a mild analgesic every five hours, but I don’t feel like waiting around that long. And you know how I hate needles.”

  He looked at her suspiciously.

  “Can’t your husband do it at home?”

  “David and I won’t overlap there, his shift’s about to start,” she lied.

  So Rachel left the hospital with a drip in her left arm and headed for the Four Seasons, where the evening before she had booked a room with a view. She took an envelope out of her purse, with a handwritten letter in it, and carefully laid it on the bedside table. She scheduled an e-mail to be sent three hours later, to tell the police where to find her.

  Then from the bedstead she hung a cocktail of propofol, fentanyl and Anectine she had secretly prepared in the hospital and mainlined it with the drip kindly inserted by her colleague. Then she sank into a sweet sleep from which she would never wake up.

  In hindsight, Rachel’s planning was flawless. That morning she had mailed me her farewell letter, the one I had never spoken about to anybody. Then she had phoned the school to say Julia would be taking the day off, took her out to play in the park and then to eat pizza, ice cream and other junk that was off-limits midweek.

  I have often asked Julia about that day. What Rachel said to her, whether she hugged her or said anything out of the ordinary. But Julia remembers very little. It’s weird how pure, unadulterated happiness leaves no trace in our hearts, but the murky waters of sadness blight everything. Our little girl simply remembers that Rachel told her she loved her and would be with her always.

  “Mommy smelled like strawberries.”

  When I got home from work, my wife was supposedly about to go on duty. It was usual on such days to steal a couple of kisses between one of us coming and the other going, so it took me by surprise to see her standing barefoot and waiting for me in the front yard.

  “What’s up?” I asked, giving her an inquiring look.

  “I want to feel the grass between my toes.”

  “You’ll be late for work, you slacker,” I objected, not knowing she’d already called in sick.

  “There’s not much going on today. Let’s have some tea.”

  We sat in cozy silence for a bit. When she finally got going, she gave me a big hug and a lingering kiss.

  “I love you so much, Dr. Evans.”

  “And I love you too, Dr. Evans.”

  As she stepped toward the car, I yelled, “Don’t forget to pick up doughnuts on your way back.” She stopped and smiled over her shoulder, her medium-length hair wafting in the breeze. I would li
ke to think her determination faltered then, albeit following such a humdrum request. Or maybe I’m merely kidding myself, to assuage the nagging thought that my final good-bye to her was so corny.

  “I love you,” she said back. “Give Julia a big hug for me.”

  I waved as she drove off, and that was the last I saw of her alive.

  When a burly cop with a bushy mustache knocked on the door, I hadn’t the faintest idea anything was up. His long, hard stare could have cracked mirrors, but I was oblivious at the time. I could only nod, stone-faced, while he told me how a maid had found Rachel when she went to turn down the bed.

  “There must be some mistake,” I answered.

  “Who is it, Daddy?” Julia said from the top of the stairs.

  “Go back to bed, honey,” I shouted. “It’s a man who’s got the wrong house.”

  “I’m afraid there’s no mistake, sir. Do you have any idea why she would do such a thing?”

  “There must be some mistake,” I repeated. I felt my legs buckle and the cop sounded miles away.

  “In her letter she said she was ill. Were you aware of her condition, doctor?”

  “She . . . she . . . couldn’t abide pain.”

  “Was there anything in her behavior to suggest she was thinking of suicide?”

  I remember that I fell to my knees, unable to reply. Denial, shock and a sense of failure held back the answers we both sought.

  Answers which only now, as I hugged her old sweatshirt in our kidnapped daughter’s room, did I finally understand.

  Rachel and I were unique in the world. No one else had what we had, and no one ever would. Ours was a special love, a one-off. All we had spoken about, all the wisdom we had meant to hand down together to our daughter, all the mistakes our parents had made that we would never make with Julia . . . All that had gone up in smoke. She had taken a pain-free way out, to relieve our pain as best she could.