Levin Exit Man

1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-0-9904029-0-9
Verlag: White Rock Press
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 350 Seiten

Suicide should come with a warning label: 'Do not try this alone.' If you truly need out and want the job done right, you should consider using an outside expert. Like Eli.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Levin, Greg

Leseproben

CHAPTER 1
My client smiles calmly at me as I slip the clear plastic bag over his head. After fastening the bag around his neck using the attached Velcro straps, I take the tube that extends from the controlled-release nozzle of the helium tank that sits beside his armchair and place the end of the tube into the small hole in the bag. I use a couple of pieces of duct tape to make sure that where the tube enters the bag is airtight. “Comfortable?” I ask. Two thumbs up and another smile. I place one of my gloved hands on his knee and smile back. “I’m ready if you are.” Another thumbs up and a nod. I give the valve atop the helium tank nozzle a quarter turn counterclockwise to start the release of gas. “Ave atque vale,” I say. Latin for “hail and farewell,” It’s my standard closing. My client clasps his hands in front of him, smiles again, and mouths “Thank you” through the plastic bag before closing his eyes. I pick up the copy of Arthur Rimbaud: The Complete Works that’s lying on the end table near my client, sit down on the folded chair next to him, and begin reading aloud from page 219, as previously instructed. Rimbaud has never been my cup of tea, but this reading isn’t about me. Besides, I won’t be reading for very long. My client will be sound asleep in less than a minute. Dead within five. Four pages into the prose poem “A Season in Hell,” my client’s right arm twitches and his head falls forward. He could still just be sleeping, though it’s unlikely – I’m a slow reader. Not only that; about one minute in I couldn’t resist giving the valve another quarter turn. It’s always a bit difficult to get a clear read on a pulse while wearing surgical gloves, yet it’s far too risky to remove them in these situations. I check my client’s left wrist and detect nothing. I give it another couple of minutes, which is about all the Rimbaud I can take. After another pulse check reveals no sign of life, I start to undo the Velcro straps of the plastic bag. I turn off the gas valve, remove the tape and rubber tube from the bag and slowly remove the bag from my client’s head. Just to be sure, I check the carotid artery. Not a single blip on the radar screen as far as I can tell. Delivery complete. After executing my client’s exit strategy, it’s time to execute mine. First, I place Rimbaud in my client’s lap, wondering if the latter’s death will be attributed to poetic asphyxiation. I then stuff the helium tank, the plastic bag and the tube into my army surplus duffel bag, which I zip up and leave over by my client’s front door. I go back to the den to retrieve the folded chair and return it to the closet from which it came, and then conduct one final inspection to ensure that I’ve covered all my tracks. All looks good – at least from my perspective. Ask my client’s wife what she thinks when she returns home from work in about three hours, and you’ll likely get an entirely different answer. I snap off my surgical gloves and Lycra skull cap and place them in the duffel bag by the door. I then pull out a pair of regular leather gloves and a Yankees cap from one of the side pockets and put them on. I hoist the duffel bag up onto my shoulder, pull my cap down low over my eyes, and open the front door. Not a neighbor in sight. I step out into the crisp October afternoon and start walking toward my car, which is parked three streets away. I’m now just a harmless guy taking a nice slow stroll, toting a bag, stopping every so often to admire the squirrels, smiling the friendliest smile I can muster at any automobile that happens to drive by. Sure, some overly suspicious neighborhood snoop might be eying me through her kitchen window and wondering who I am, but I look inconspicuous enough. By the time any neighbor gets word of my client, I’ll be nothing but a ghost, a fuzzy figment – if remembered at all. Suicide should come with a warning label: Don’t try this alone. If you truly need out and want the job done right, you should seriously consider using an outside expert. Like me. Nobody sets out to become a euthanasia specialist. It’s the sort of profession one might fall into after years of failure or apathy in more traditional fields. Or after reading too much Nietzsche. Or after carefully evaluating the global parking situation. Or after witnessing an ailing loved one endure lasting physical and emotional suffering. Or, as in my case, all of the above. Though it’s not exactly accurate to say I fell into the profession. More precisely, it found me. Prior to my job that centers on cessation, I had one that centered on celebration. Fact is, I’ve never left the latter. I own a party supply store called Jubilee in Blackport, Oregon. We offer everything from tissue balls and bunting to rentable clowns and bouncy houses. I’ll spare you the full list of products and services; just know that if you ever need anything to help celebrate or commemorate a birthday, anniversary, graduation, homecoming, hiring, promotion, pregnancy, parole, bat mitzvah, bar mitzvah, bar exam, engagement, divorce, or Irish death, then you will almost certainly find it in our shop or catalog. I wasn’t the original owner. Jubilee was my father’s shop. I had intentionally spent the majority of my post-collegiate life far enough away from Blackport, such as to never be pressured into peddling plastic plates and Mylar balloons. It’s not that I was ashamed of my father’s line of work; I was merely ashamed of me doing it. I was an artist, after all, living free of any bourgeois nine to five shackles and well on my way to making it as an assistant glass blower’s apprentice in my late twenties. But biopsies have a way of changing plans. Four years ago, when I was 29 and my father 56, he was diagnosed with stage III non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The chemo quickly wreaked havoc on the man, whose seemingly indefatigable vigor soon succumbed to daily bouts of diarrhea, nausea, and exhaustion. Pain seemed to emanate from his fingers and toes. His hair fell out in clumps. Radiation therapy left him with minor burns across his body. After just a few weeks of treatment, he looked like an angry, elderly skinhead who had fallen asleep in a tanning bed. Not a good look for a man who earned a good portion of his living persuading people with surnames like Goldberg and Horowitz to spring for the jumbo tent at their upcoming event. Thus I had been called on to lend a temporary hand at the shop while my father completed his initial treatment. Six to eight weeks I was told. My parents viewed the whole arrangement as a win-win: They needed somebody familiar with the inner workings of the enterprise (I had worked there as a teenager and during college breaks) and I, in their eyes, needed something to do that didn’t involve me experimenting with molten sand while blitzed on whiskey. Not that I had to be strongly persuaded into helping out at the store. I am Jewish by blood, thus had enough hereditary guilt already coursing through my veins to eliminate the need for any coercive words from external sources. My father was gravely ill and in need of support – end of story. I had no choice but to step up and make some sacrifices. Besides, it wasn’t as if there was much to the life I was being asked to temporarily place on hold. I had been slowly spiraling downward socially and professionally for a few years, with no real prospects for money, love or self-respect on the horizon. I had nothing resembling a career; everything resembling a drinking problem; and a string of short relationships that had each ended in something resembling an Amtrak collision. Who better to run a shop called Jubilee. Things ran surprisingly smoothly at the shop during the first few weeks of my father’s cancer-fighting sabbatical. I quickly got back up to speed on the various party products and services available, and was able to mimic enough enthusiasm to keep customers happy and engaged. Actually, the enthusiasm was real – albeit artificially induced. I had gotten a hold of some Adderall after my third day on the job. It was the only way to reduce the number of naps I needed to take during operating hours and to keep up with the frenetic pace of discourse during conversations with heavily caffeinated soccer moms. One little blue pill in the morning and one after lunch gave me just the jolt of functional euphoria required to carry out my daily duties and keep my father’s business afloat. Where amphetamines lifted me through the days, whiskey got me through the nights. The few friends I had back in high school had all long since moved away from Blackport, so I didn’t have many social options. Not that it mattered. I was busy consoling my mother while the two of us watched my father wilt. I’d sip my Maker’s Mark or my Buffalo Trace before and after dinner and lie to Mom about how everything was going to be okay, how Dad was tough enough to take whatever the gang of angry cells inside him could dish out, how he’d soon be back in the shop selling the hell out of Sweet 16 and Deluxe Pirate Theme party packages. Whatever hope I was able to raise during that first month or so soon plummeted. The head oncologist pushed it off the ledge. The letters and Roman numerals in his file on my father now spelled out: STAGE IV. A.k.a., terminal. Words and phrases such as “untreatable” and “incurable” and the more direct “fatal” soon followed, spoken to my father and us by clean, clinical faces...