The Removal Company

by S. T. Joshi

  I was stung. “You can live for me. I love you.”

  I said it with a calmness that even now strikes me as eerie. Perhaps I was already becoming resigned to the inevitable.

  Katharine seemed a bit taken aback; maybe she was expecting me to scream, shout, throw a tantrum. She sat down beside me again and put both her hands on my cheeks:

  “Arthur, dearest, a person can’t live for someone else. Can’t you see that? I have to have my own reasons for living! I’ve done nothing in my life, and don’t see how I ever will. There’s so much waste in the world, Arthur....”

  By now I was getting angry. I was hurt, but more than that, I was deeply insulted. Katharine was making me feel worthless. I shouldn’t have said it, but I did:

  “Katharine, if it’s because of what your father did....”

  It was a mistake. Leaping up from the couch, she turned on me with a rage I had never seen in her before:

  “Don’t you dare bring up my father! He was a far better man than you’ll ever know. What he did was the bravest, most decent...” She became speechless with fury.

  “I’m sorry, Katharine....” I went to her, tried to comfort her by putting my arms around her shoulders, but she shook me off. She’d never done that before. Then she tried to get a grip on herself, taking some deep breaths and looking fixedly at the floor.

  “I told you I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I don’t think there’s been a day in the last ten years when I haven’t thought about it.” That means she had been thinking about this since she was about fifteen. “Do you take me for some flighty, irrational creature who’s come to this decision on a whim? I thought you’d give me more credit than that, Arthur! Can’t you see this is my life we’re talking about?” Her eyes glared at me like a Gorgon’s.

  I thought I’d better take a different tack. I knew that she’d spent much of her life in a depression, and that a lot of people had hovered around her in a futile attempt to make her happy and normal. Probably they’d ended up just irritating her. Although I wouldn’t in the least think of her as argumentative—that would have been so contrary to how she had been taught a lady should behave—I could see she had a kind of quiet, desperate determination that fueled itself upon opposition.

  “All right, Katharine,” I said in a soothing voice that I hoped had no trace of patronage or condescension, “let’s say you want to do...what you want to do. How exactly do you intend to go about it?”

  The response was anything but what I would have expected. Stunned as I was by this whole turn of events, I was even more stupefied by what she now did.

  For she changed her demeanor entirely and became eager, dynamic, even cheerful in an appalling way. She flung herself around, went to her handbag lying on the bureau, and fished around inside. She then drew out a business card and silently handed it to me, with a weird gesture of triumph. It read:

  THE REMOVAL COMPANY

  MUrray Hill 4-3802

  I could hardly utter for a moment. Then: “What’s this?”

  “Dr. Grabhorn told me about it,” she said with that hideous eagerness that was chilling me more and more. “He didn’t really explain what they do, but I think they must...you know, help people who....”

  It was now my turn to dance with rage.

  “Grabhorn! I knew it! That wretch! I knew that witch-doctor was behind all this! If I ever—”

  Katharine interrupted me with the simple gesture of holding her hand calmly in front of her.

  “Arthur, you don’t understand. Dr. Grabhorn has been wonderful to me. He’s helped me so much! If it weren’t for him, I would have done this a long time ago. But even he can’t help me now—not that way. But he can help me this way.”

  Grabhorn was one of those psycho-analysts—disciple of Freud, evidently; had even met the eminent Austrian on a trip to Europe years ago. Katharine had been going to see him for the better part of two years. He apparently had a very exclusive clientele—only the best (that is, the richest) for him. He didn’t come cheap.

  I was rapidly losing control of the entire situation, and also of my emotions. My head was spinning. It was too much to digest—and even if I could digest it, the whole thing was so repulsive that my mind refused to accept even the least part of it.

  “Wait a minute, Katharine.... What exactly does this ‘Removal Company’ do? You don’t mean to tell me that they...that they kill people?”

  She took on a peculiar expression—rather sheepish, as if apologizing for some faux pas. “Well, yes, I guess they do. Dr. Grabhorn doesn’t even know the details himself, and of course it’s all very secret and confidential.... I mean, we’d have to go to New York—that’s where the place is—and I think we’d have to sign some papers, and apparently it’s pretty expensive...they’re taking on an awfully big risk, you know.”

  This was sounding awfully fishy. “Katharine, there’s something funny about all this....”

  “Oh, Arthur, there isn’t!” Again that eagerness, mixed now with impatience. “Dr. Grabhorn wouldn’t get me into anything unsavory! He’s such a dear, dear man. But don’t you see, it has to be a secret.... My God, Arthur, the whole thing’s illegal, you know—at least illegal according to the laws we have...maybe someday it will be different. But there are so many people who need help in this way...so many! I think it’s wonderful that there’s someone who has the courage to do something like this. But I guess the ordinary person would think of it as murder....” She looked pensively off in the distance, with the look of someone pondering an abstract problem in philosophy.

  My whole body was beginning to shake uncontrollably. I couldn’t believe I was talking about this—talking about having someone kill my wife because she wanted to die and apparently couldn’t bring herself to do it alone. I had to sit on the couch. I really needed a drink, but I didn’t want to leave Katharine alone at a time like this. There had to be a way to persuade her out of this crazy plan.

  “Katharine, have you called these people yet?” I could tell at a glance that it was a New York telephone number, even though no address was given.

  “Well, no,” she said, shyly. “I thought you might want to....”

  “Me!” I thundered.

  “Oh, Arthur, please help me! I can’t do this by myself. I need your help!”

  In every other situation except this one, I would have rushed to her aid—would have done so without her even having to ask. But this was too much.

  “Katharine, I won’t do it....”

  “Arthur!” She broke down crying, throwing herself on her bed.

  I felt as if some demon were twisting my insides into knots. I think for a moment that I wanted to die myself.

  What was I to do? How far would I have to go to bring her back from the precipice? Would I fall over the precipice myself? What would be the outcome? Could it be anything, now, but a tragedy?

  I resigned myself to the inevitable—at least for now. I wasn’t giving up; let’s just say I was performing a tactical retreat. I would save Katharine, but now was not the time to challenge her.

  “All right, dearest,” I said, coming over to her and stroking her hair. “I’ll call them. I’ll call the Removal Company.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  We were on the train heading for New York.

  The whole adventure had taken on a dreamlike quality: Loading our baggage (Katharine’s a lot smaller than mine, since—in her view, at any rate—she would only require clothes and accessories for a one-way trip) into our Aston Martin saloon...being driven to the Passenger Rail Terminal on Alameda Street...settling into our private Pullman car...shoving off for the five-day trip—Los Angeles to New York, via New Orleans and Washington, D.C....

  It was the most harrowing and bizarre five days of my life—even more bizarre, I think, than what followed. What made it so was Katharine’s attitude of grotesque cheerfulness. She was as effervescent as a schoolgirl, constantly pointing out novel bits of scenery through the window, taking a childis
h delight in the meals we ate (we had our own private dining car, of course: fraternizing with the other passengers was, under the circumstances, unthinkable, even though they were mostly of our class), and, in essence, enjoying life as I’d never seen her enjoy it before.

  Knowing that the burden of existence was soon to be sloughed off had, it seemed, liberated her in some strange way: the simplest, most mundane aspects of life gained that much more sweetness because she knew that she would soon be rid of them. For a few fleeting moments I thought that maybe she was making the right decision after all....

  No! I wouldn’t let myself think that! What she was contemplating was appalling, immoral—and, fundamentally, selfish. What right does anyone have willfully and deliberately to truncate the life-span they have been given? How could one be so self-absorbed, so heedless of others’ feelings? And yet, the doubts would come.... Was I being selfish? Did I want her to live just to suit my own pleasure, my own needs? And why was it that my own love for her seemed to matter so little in her decision? How could I not feel scorned, humiliated, insulted?

  You can imagine—or can you?—the turmoil of emotions I was undergoing. I could hardly eat, slept badly, and was driven almost out of my mind by watching Katharine so cheerful and lively! (No, that’s a bad word to use....) I think she took pity on me after a while and tried to suppress her eagerness, her vibrancy, her positive thrill at the prospect of self-destruction...self-annihilation conveniently done by another party without trouble or inconvenience to herself.

  Of course, I was still holding out the hope that she would recoil at the last minute. Neither Katharine nor I were under any silly religious delusions about the immortality of the soul or anything of that sort. We went to church, of course, but that was largely to please our parents and because it was a part of our social obligation. But we both knew full well that the only thing that follows death is complete oblivion.

  And there, perhaps, was my last hope. Perhaps that very thought—complete oblivion—might pull her back at the final moment. Try to picture it, Mr. Scintilla: the utter elimination of the self, the total snuffing out of all consciousness. Far, far deeper than the most dreamless sleep, far more permanent than the longest epoch.... Nothingness. It was scarcely any wonder that most people refused to accept so horrible a fate and claimed to believe in that “better life” that they know in their heart of hearts will not come....

  We had to change trains at New Orleans, and again at Washington. With each passing mile my apprehension grew, while Katharine was less and less able to conceal what now became an actual glee at the termination of her own existence. I began to measure every word I spoke to her, wondering how close it was to the last I would ever say to her.

  At New York we checked into the Murray Hill Hotel at Park Avenue between 40th and 41st Streets. It was September 13, 1931. I didn’t know it then, but my wife had two days to live.

  * * * *

  The rest of the episode was in many ways an anticlimax—so mundane on the surface that I could scarcely keep in my mind that Katharine had come here to put an end to her life.

  We had called shortly after we had settled into our room, and made an appointment with the Removal Company for the next day. Even now we were not given the address of the place: they had politely but firmly refused to do so when I had first phoned them in Los Angeles, and now all they said was that we were to meet a black Packard in front of the Waldorf at 2 p.m.

  Sure enough, at exactly that hour a car answering the description pulled up at the kerb. I waved at it tentatively, and it drew up to us. The window was rolled down slowly on the passenger side of the front seat, and the driver—apparently a short, stocky man of middle age with a bullet head and what I can only describe as dead features, no vitality or expression in them at all—craned his neck out the window.

  “Vance?” he said in his flat voice. It was barely a question.

  I nodded.

  He said nothing, but with a head gesture he indicated that we get in the back seat. It was clear he didn’t want company with him in front.

  After we had settled in—Katharine almost leaping in ahead of me, and then bouncing on the seat like a little girl—Bullet Head turned around and glared blankly at us.

  “Put these on,” he said, handing us black silk handkerchiefs.

  I was nonplussed: did he want me to put the handkerchief in my suit pocket—around my hat—around my neck? What? As we both looked stupidly at him, he deigned to clarify, with not a little impatience:

  “Over your eyes.”

  This was too ridiculous. I suddenly felt I was in a vaudeville act, or in a story from some cheap pulp magazine.

  “You can’t be serious—”

  “Put—them—on.”

  His tone was so unexpectedly hostile that we backed away from him. At that, Bullet Head relented a bit.

  “Please....” The word seemed not to come easily out of his mouth, for he grimaced momentarily as if in pain. “Doctor’s orders. Just for... security. We need to protect ourselves.”

  We did as we were told. Katharine complied readily, still smiling broadly as though the whole episode were a game.

  The point, of course, was to throw us off our bearings, to confuse us, to prevent us from knowing where we were going—and it worked. Bullet Head seemed to take far too many turns than was necessary to reach his destination, and in our blindfolded state we quickly became disoriented, even a bit queasy. I clutched Katharine’s hand with a kind of desperation. Mine felt clammy, and I could feel hers tremble a bit. Possibly this grotesque charade was causing the reality of the whole thing to sink into her consciousness at last.

  We finally pulled up to a kerb somewhere—traffic seemed surprisingly scanty, so I suspect we were on a side street. When we had come to a stop I instinctively began to take off the blindfold, but Bullet Head actually reached over the seat and grabbed my hand, squeezing it hard.

  “No...not yet. Keep still.”

  I relaxed my hand, so that he could tell I was prepared to follow his orders.

  I heard him get out of the car, slam the door, and then walk around the car to my side. Opening the door, he took my arm, firmly but not roughly, and drew me out. I stumbled a bit—we were not as close to the kerb as I had thought—but managed to reach what I took to be the sidewalk. Bullet Head let go of me and apparently helped Katharine out of the car. I could hear her utter a faint moan—not, apparently, from anything Bullet Head was doing, but possibly from confusion or nerves.

  Evidently the man was now between us, and he took each of our arms and led us forward. We walked a considerable distance—far too long a distance if we were merely entering some building in front of the sidewalk—so I guessed that we were actually in some alley. It was very silent, only the crunching of our shoes on rough pavement reaching my ears. Strangely enough, I wasn’t afraid: I felt completely passive, and scarcely worried or cared whether I myself would come out of this escapade alive or not.

  After what seemed an eternity Bullet Head tugged our arms as an indication that we should stop. Some keys rattled in his pocket, one key was fitted into a door, then another, and then the door opened. A faint trace of a strange odor—chemicals of some sort—tickled our nostrils. Bullet Head motioned us forward, but stopped us almost immediately with the single word: “Stairs.”

  The stairs were of concrete, apparently. There were about twenty of them, constituting a single flight. At the top we were again asked to stop, while Bullet Head fished for more keys and opened another door. We entered, and, as the door closed behind us, we were finally permitted to take off our blindfolds.

  I initially had difficulty understanding what I saw. The room seemed to be shaped in a perfect hexagon, and everything in it, except one object, appeared to be white: ceiling, floor, walls, even the desk and chair in the exact center of the room. The one thing that was not white looked at first like a head floating in mid-air—until I realized that it was connected to a man, dressed entirely in white,
and standing in front of the desk.

  The man seemed about forty or forty-five. He was tall, slim, his close-cropped hair quite gray. He was clean shaven, and had the most vivid green eyes I have ever seen. His face seemed unusually tanned and seamed, but otherwise there was only an expression of calm, placid intelligence on his countenance. He did not smile.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Vance?” he said in a quiet, modulated voice. At our nod: “Welcome. I am Doctor Sanderson. You have come to the Removal Company.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  It was only when Dr. Sanderson gestured to them that I saw there were two chairs—also in white—directly behind him, in front of the desk. In a kind of daze Katharine and I sat down in them, Sanderson walking with measured pace to sit in the chair behind the desk. For several moments there was complete silence.

  Then Dr. Sanderson made a tent of his fingers and said quietly:

  “My dear sir and madam, I trust you realize why you are here.”

  Katharine suddenly leaned forward and began: “Yes, of course! Isn’t it all arranged? When—”

  She stopped abruptly when Sanderson held up a hand, gently. It seemed he was incapable of any movement that was not calm, quiet, and composed.

  “One moment, Mrs. Vance. There are some...preliminaries.”

  He opened a drawer in the desk and drew out a clipboard. Then he continued:

  “I really know very little about the two of you. I have only spoken once on the phone to Mr. Vance, and have not spoken to Mrs. Vance at all. We need to take care of some things first.”

  Katharine seemed upset—far more upset than at any time since leaving Los Angeles. “You’re not going to try to talk me out of.... Oh! how could you, after we’ve come all this way!”