The Euthanist

by Alex Dolan

  “Let’s not even call it a trade. Let’s call it a gentleman’s bet.” He threw up his hands like a coach trying to keep me from stealing a base. “You give me a day in your shoes. I’ll give you a day in mine.”

  “A day in each other’s shoes.”

  “I’ll bet if we do that, we’ll understand each other. And if we understand each other, you’ll want to help us. But if we spend that day and you still don’t want to help us, you’re off the hook.”

  “What do you mean by a day in my shoes?”

  “I come with you to see one of your patients.”

  I reacted. “No fucking way. Absolutely not.”

  “It’s a fair trade. Show me your work, and I’ll show you mine.”

  “Why the hell would you want to do that?”

  Tesmer looked curious as well. This might have been unscripted. Ah, the delights of improv.

  He said, “Because we can’t do what we need to do without outside help. And the only shot at getting you on our side is for us to understand each other. This is me grasping, as a desperate parent.”

  “But I told you I’m not going to kill Helena.”

  “That’s not part of the plan. It never was.” I waited for him to explain more, but he didn’t. If I asked, it would only open us up to more dialogue, and I wanted this to end.

  “You’re tied into the FBI. You must have a network of friends who could help.”

  He pleaded with the weakness of a hungry man. “Didn’t you hear me? They didn’t trust me when Veda was taken.”

  “But Veda came back.”

  “And when he came back, they treated me like I was cursed. I may not have killed my boy, but something rotten clung to me, and no one else wanted anything to do with it, or us. This family is tainted.” He gritted his teeth. “No one at work is going to help.”

  A thousand reasons might have prohibited me from bringing Leland to see a client. The most important was that I didn’t want him to make someone who was already suffering even more uncomfortable. But what I told him was, “You’d be an accomplice if you came with me.”

  “I could live with that.”

  “Honey,” Tesmer insisted, “This is a bad idea.” She had expected Leland to offer a different kind of trade.

  Leland’s grandeur had diminished in a just a few minutes. Now deflated, he fought to keep me interested. Like they’d gone to everyone one else and finally came to me. I was his last chance. Leland might not have idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, but he lived with his own suffering, and my inclination to help those who suffered kept me from shutting down our conversation, even if I hated him.

  “In return, you visit someone with me,” he said.

  I asked, “Who would I have to visit?”

  “I’ll tell you later.” A few weeks ago, this statement would have been a coy remark. Now he was trying not to scare me off. “But it will just be a visit. I won’t expect you to do anything other than accompany me. That I promise you.”

  Not sure why this occurred to me, but after the spider package, I considered what else they might do to terrify me. “You’re not going to make me visit Gordon Ostrowski, are you? Because I’ll walk the fuck out right now, and you can decide whether you want to shoot me in the back.”

  “No,” Leland insisted. “You won’t have to see Gordon.”

  Alcohol streamed in my blood. I felt my jaw loosen up, my cheeks blushed the way they always do when I drink. Tesmer’s face, shaded under the basement lights, sagged sadly the same way Leland’s had. I’d railed against their bullying, and now they’d gotten to me with their hopelessness. All we were talking about was a trade—a visit for a visit. A day in each other’s shoes.

  “What happens if I agree?” I asked.

  “Afterward, if you still don’t want to help us, you’ll never see us again.”

  “My sex offender profile?”

  “Gone like you woke up from a bad dream. If, and only if, you see it through.”

  Something moved into the doorway at the top of the stairs. Emmanuel’s collar jingled. Veda stood up there. From the couch, I could only see his shadow stretch down the staircase. But because of the way his parents looked up at him, I stood to glimpse whatever struck them.

  “The walls are thin. I can hear you talking about me,” Veda said.

  He wore a towel around his waist and nothing else. I saw more similarities between him and his father. The tight, wiry muscles imitated his father’s build, but seemed healthier on the younger Moon. Framed by the doorway, Veda reminded me of when Leland came out of the bathroom in Clayton, towel wrapped and freshly showered. For every compulsion I had to help this family, more things came up that repelled me.

  I thought Veda might have been blacking out, standing there in some sort of waking sleep, but his face seemed to say that the show was intentional and meant for me. He ignored his parents and addressed me. “You want to know what you’re getting into? Take a look.”

  He turned to show us his back. I’ll admit I shuddered. Not that it was profoundly worse than some of what I’d seen in the ambulance, but it surprised me. From his shoulders down to where the towel cloaked his waist, he was marred with the same punctures I’d seen on Cindy Coates. Sets of four dots in Braille. There had to be more than twenty sets on his trunk. The kitchen lights glossed his back so we could see them in full relief, like little mountain ranges dotting his back. After a few moments, he disappeared from the doorway and left us to continue our talk.

  Chapter 10

  There’s an association for anything, if you have an interest. I’m sure if I were obsessed with bending pipe cleaners into miniature grasshopper sculptures, I could find enough like-minded folks out there to form our own club, maybe even an online magazine. For something like euthanasia, the United States has any number of organizations. I found Jeffrey Holt and Gifts of Deliverance largely because he was the most thoughtful. The most fearless. When I had the gumption, I attended a book signing when he came to San Francisco. He could have written me off as a kook, but he invited me to eat with him at an oyster bar.

  Jeffrey Holt was a wizard at empathy. Hence, he was easy to talk to. I told him about my paramedic work and why it interested me in his organization. There’s an expression, “No one ever dies in an ambulance.” That’s because it takes a doctor to officially call a time of death, and there’s never a doctor riding with you in the rig. So even if your heart gives out in the ambulance, official records will state that you died at the hospital. I’d seen enough people suffering in the vehicle that I often considered the legal gray areas of death, and the morality of ending suffering for those who wanted it. Jeffrey had said, “You can’t judge this work based on my morality, but whether you think you’re doing the right thing by your patient.” I tried to keep this in mind as I rode next to a federal agent, remembering that the day’s visit wasn’t about Leland’s approval of my work, but bringing peace to the woman who requested it.

  We drove in the junky blue car Jeffrey Holt had loaned me via some generous member of the Gifts of Deliverance network. No power windows on this baby. Leland had to roll his down so the wind could break over his sunglasses. He looked blissful in the breeze. He might as well have flopped his tongue around like Emmanuel, who was still at the Moons’ house.

  It was a costume day. This time it was a blond Marilyn wig and a leopard-print dress. The faint smears of my parents’ ashes were applied just above my left and right breasts, thus undetectable in this outfit. Leland laughed when he saw me, but my costume made sense for Beatrix, a former model. She’d moved to the States from France in the 60s, and in vintage photos she might have been Brigitte Bardot’s cousin. My ensemble was an homage to her glory years. Leland, on the other hand, looked like Leland. He dressed in a black suit like an undertaker. Only he didn’t wear a tie that day.

  We talked to fill time, but the conversation was uneasy. The two of us didn’t like each other. My sex offender profile was still out there for the world to see, and he s
eemed to enjoy lording the threat of incarceration over me. It was hard to like someone in that position. Out of boredom, I steered us into talking about Veda’s abduction and he divulged more. “When we first figured out someone had taken Veda, we came across someone we thought was the guy.”

  My voice didn’t carry like his. Because of the wind through the window I had to shout. “The dog walker.”

  “A guy named Hamilton Berle. You think dog walker, you usually think of some college kid, but that wasn’t this guy. He was on parole for a liquor store robbery in Bayview. Things got ugly, and he shot the owner in the neck and nearly killed him. He had sleeve tattoos on both arms. When I questioned him, he spat at me. Hit me here,” he dabbed the corner of his mouth. “Anyway, that’s why I hit him. I don’t normally mistreat suspects.”

  “You mistreated me.”

  “I only hurt you when you attacked me.”

  “You drugged me and you humiliated me.”

  “I thought you were a bad person.” Maybe he felt bad about Clayton. I couldn’t say for sure. Like his son, he masked his emotions well.

  “And now?”

  “I think you might be doing work that I don’t fully understand.”

  “That’s an improvement.” A teal ambulance passed us on the left. No sirens, but it was close, hugging a bend in the highway inches away from us. This made me think about medical calls, then Kali’s client calls, and hence the gravity of what we were doing. “We have to set some ground rules.”

  He shouted back through the wind, “Fair enough. You want me to be quiet? Like your manservant?”

  “I don’t want you to be with me at all,” I reminded him. “But if you have to be, I want you to be an observer. But don’t be a mute. That would creep her out.”

  “So what do I do?”

  “Just be respectful.”

  “I can do that.”

  “I haven’t seen it yet.”

  We undulated through the central valley where it gets hot enough to fry bacon on the pavement. More torrid than Mount Diablo. Passing through unambitious brown hills, we cut through the windmills—not the cute Dutch kind, but the industrial turbine kind that looked like Victor Frankenstein had stitched together monsters from airplane parts. The air conditioning was on, but in this junkbox auto it merely generated a hint of chill. Inuit breath. The open window didn’t help much. The baked air felt like it was blowing out of a cracked oven door.

  Two days had passed since my dinner at the Moons. I’d gone back to my apartment in Bernal, but I didn’t feel safe in it. Drawers had been opened, clothing shuffled, and I had the sense that Leland had rummaged through all of my personal items. Leland allowed me to get to the bank, so I could access my own money again. But every other part of my life was still in flux. Jeffrey Holt hadn’t been in touch, and I wish he’d phoned. I wanted to tell him that his family and the organization were safe, or they would be once the Moons and I had completed our trade. But mostly I wanted a friendly voice, someone to make me feel less alone in all of this.

  I found a radio station that played loud guitars over tribal beats, but Leland kept turning down the music. “It’s too hard for me,” he complained. “And it’s the volume you’d use to extract a dictator out of a church.”

  “Fuck, you’re old.”

  “Getting up there. Maybe in a year or two you’ll make me a client.”

  He’d noted the ambulance ahead of us now. “Given what happened with your mom, I assumed you’d seen EMTs at the fire and that’s what drove you into the work. But it didn’t happen like that, because you weren’t there for the fire.”

  I looked at him with a squinty disapproval. “What’s your point?”

  “Just trying to figure you out. Before the fire, what made you run away?”

  It wasn’t easy to talk about, but I’d already confessed the most shameful parts of the story days ago. I was so elated by the prospect of completing our trade and getting Leland Moon out of my life, I didn’t rankle at talking about my mom now. We had to talk about something, and it would make the ride go by faster. I rattled off details. “Gordon burned most of my clothes. He cleaned out my closet and heaped them all in the fireplace and doused everything with lighter fluid.”

  I hadn’t told the police this fact, but it came up in the trial. I couldn’t tell if Leland had researched me well enough to know this. “Crazy evil,” he said. “He tell you why he did it?”

  “I was fourteen. I wore lipstick for the first time. Gordon told me I looked like a whore—he didn’t say whore, he said hooker. Anyway, I refused to wipe it off. To teach me a lesson, he torched my clothes. Since I was becoming a woman, he said I wouldn’t need my baby clothes anymore.”

  “Remind me, how much time did they give him?”

  “He’s serving life plus two hundred and fifty-seven years in San Sebastián. But you know that.”

  “So, after he set your clothes on fire, you took off.”

  “I packed a duffel. I tried to convince my mom to come with me. She was afraid to leave him.”

  “She was afraid of him,” he suggested.

  “Probably,” I considered. “Same result either way.”

  “You think that the house got burned down because you left.”

  “Gordon was unpredictable every day. But he’d never done anything that catastrophic. I’m sure I was the catalyst for it.”

  “You think it was your fault he killed your mom.”

  “I go back and forth on how much guilt I’m willing to accept over it. Some days I do. Some days I think he was just some crazy fuck. Like locusts. Like an act of God.” The guilt he was talking about was part of a more complex web of fears. Gordon hadn’t just given me grief and shame. He gave me the sense that everything could be taken from me at any time, if I only took my eyes off it for a moment.

  “I wasn’t asking a question. I’m telling you. You think it was your fault he killed your mom. I can hear it in you.” He removed his sunglasses and stared at me until I looked back. “You can’t take credit for someone else’s crime.” This was turning into therapy. “Were you ever afraid of fires?”

  “Maybe a little more than the next person.”

  “Joining the fire department. Did that help?”

  “It helped me control the fear.” I was sick of talking about myself. “Why did you become a federal agent?”

  “To prove that I could. To prove that I was good enough, strong enough. Sound familiar?”

  I slowed down as we drove through a small town with a burger drive-in and a worn-wood truss tower windmill, the caveman version of the shiny white giants we’d passed on the way here.

  “Think of a name you want to use when we get there.”

  “Are there going to be any other people there? Family or friends?”

  “It will just be her,” I said.

  “Then what does it matter what name I use?”

  “Do we really have to cover the benefits of anonymity?”

  He assured me, “I’ll think of something. You want me to do anything useful while I’m there?”

  I thought aloud, “I’ve never done this with anyone before. Just try not to distract me.”

  He was already distracting me. I felt like if I didn’t fill the vacant spaces with conversation, Leland would keep prying into my personal history. Whatever would become of our trade, I still didn’t trust him. I asked, “Has Veda ever tried to live on his own?”

  “A few times. It didn’t work out well. He lived with roommates, but he gets night terrors, and the screaming doesn’t go over too well with other people. We tried to subsidize him when he looked for his own place, but he couldn’t sleep alone. Afraid of home invasions. The tiniest little creak can set him off.”

  “Does he see someone?”

  “A shrink? Of course he does. We have a PTSD expert who specializes in kidnap victims. Why do you think we haven’t gotten a new fridge and our basement looks like a wrestling ring? All the money goes to our son.” To his credit,
I didn’t detect any resentment in his voice. “You can’t just cure something like this. It stays with you—you know that. You still think about Gordon Ostrowski.”

  I didn’t appreciate him throwing my stepfather back in my face. “I do, but I still have my own apartment.”

  “Different people heal in different ways.” Now Leland squirmed. We were digging too deeply into his family. He redirected back to me. “Are most of your clients women?”

  “They skew female. Why?”

  “Just wondering.” He stared into the wind. “Men die sooner, so it makes sense there would be more women out there on their own. Men are more likely to kill themselves, so they might be less likely to seek out your services.” I remembered the scars on Veda’s wrists. Suicide was probably top of mind in the Moon family. He wondered, “Why don’t your clients just kill themselves?”

  “A lot of people decide to go that way,” I noted.

  “I know. But your clients don’t. Why don’t they?”

  “The person we’re meeting today is Catholic. It’s against her faith.”

  “What if you don’t have religion?”

  “A lot of my clients are afraid. They’re going to die, and that fear of death brings up other fears. They’re afraid it’ll hurt and afraid they might do it wrong on their own.”

  “You ever try to stop someone from killing themselves?” I thought about the scars on Veda’s wrists and wondered for a moment if he was thinking about his son as well.

  “I have, yes.”

  “What do you tell them?”

  “I listen to them. I pay attention to what they’re telling me. Many of them are lonely and want to make a human connection. They want to be heard. I remind them what they have to live for. Then I refer them to people better equipped than I am to heal that kind of suffering.”

  He processed this and moved on. “Who are we going to see today?”

  “Her name is Beatrix LaCroix. She’s seventy-eight, and she has lung cancer.” She had reached out to me through the Gifts of Deliverance network. Because of my limited access to e-mail in the past few weeks, I’d initially met with her but then dropped contact. Lucky for me, she was still waiting when I got back on my computer.