“Right.”
“It won’t fall out, because there’s no point in trying radia-tion or chemotherapy. Aw, Jesus, it just seems so . . . I was going to say unfair, but life’s unfair, everybody knows that. What it seems is so fucking arbitrary. Do you know what I mean? God picks your name out of a hat and you’re it.”
“What causes it, do they know?”
“Not really. Statistically alcohol and tobacco seem to be factors. Much higher incidence among drinkers and smok-ers. Seventh-Day Adventists and Mormons hardly ever get it, but they hardly ever get anything. It’s a wonder they don’t all live forever. What else? A high-fat diet may play a role. And they think there’s a connection with coffee consump-tion, but it’s hard to tell because eighty percent of the popu-lation drinks the stuff. Not Mormons, of course, or Seventh-Day Adventists, God bless ’em. All they do is beat their goddamn drums. Well, that’s about all I do, isn’t it? I drank for as long as I could, and I smoked like a chimney for years. And of course I’ve always been a heavy coffee drinker, and that’s one vice that certainly didn’t stop when I got sober. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
“Is that why you’ve been staying away from it lately?”
“Of course. What else do you do once the horse is stolen?
You buy a new lock for the stable door.” She heaved a sigh. “Although I swear I don’t think coffee had a damn thing to do with it. And I think the real reason I stopped drinking it is because that kind of behavior is automatic for people in Twelve-Step programs. What do we do in times of stress? We give up something that gives us pleasure.” She got to her feet. “I’m going to have another cup,” she announced. “Can I bring you some?”
“Sit down. I’ll get it.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I don’t have to conserve my strength. I’m not an invalid. I’m just dying.”
A little later she said, “I don’t want to give you the impres-sion that I’m sick of the world and can’t wait to get out of it. Every day is very precious to me. I want to have as many of them as I possibly can.”
“Then what do you want with a gun?”
“That’s for when I run out of good days. I went over to the library and read up on the subject, and it seems that when the good days run out the bad days are pretty bad. You don’t just turn your face to the wall and expire. It’s apt to be pretty agonizing, and it can go on for a while.”
“Aren’t there things they can give you for the pain?”
“I don’t want that. I missed whole chunks of my life be-cause I was too full of Smirnoff’s to know what was going on. I don’t want to jump out of this world and into the next one with a head all muddled with morphine. I had Demerol after surgery and I couldn’t stand the way it made me feel. I made them take me off it and give me Tylenol instead. ‘But you’ve got breakthrough pain,’ the resident said. ‘Tylenol won’t touch it.’ ‘Then I’ll live with it,’ I told him, and it wasn’t so bad. Do you think I was being a martyr?”
“I don’t know.”
“Because I don’t think so. Dammit, I’ve got too much in-vested in a sober life to settle for anything less than a sober death. I’d rather have the pain than something to cover it up. What the hell, this is the hand I was dealt. I figure I’ll stay in the game as long as I possibly can. Then I’ll fold. It’s my hand, I can fold when I want to.”
I looked out the window. It had grown darker still, as if the sun were setting. But it was hours too early for that.
“I don’t consider it suicide,” she said. “There’s a part of me that’s still Catholic enough to find suicide unacceptable. God gives you your life and it’s a sin to take it. But I don’t see this as a case of taking my life. I’d just be giving myself a gift.” She smiled gently. “The gift of lead. Do you know the poem?”
“What poem?”
“Robinson Jeffers, ‘Hurt Hawks.’ He finds an injured hawk in the woods near his home and he goes on about how he ad-mires hawks, how if the penalties were the same he’d sooner kill a man than a hawk. He brings food to this one and tries to help it, but the day comes when the only thing he can do for the bird is put it out of its misery. ‘I gave him the lead gift in the twilight,’ I think that’s how the line goes. Meaning a bul-let. He shot the hawk, and then it was able to take flight.”
I thought it over, and said, “Maybe it works better with hawks.”
“What do you mean?”
“Gun suicides are messy. And they don’t always work. When I was fresh out of the academy I heard about a guy who put a gun to his temple and shot himself. Bullet glanced off the bone and plowed a furrow up the side of the skull, tunneled underneath the scalp and came out the other side. The poor bastard bled like a stuck pig, deafened himself per-manently in one ear, and had a headache he couldn’t even begin to describe.”
“And lived.”
“Oh, sure. He never even lost consciousness. I’ve known of other cases where people managed to put a bullet in their brain but lived anyway, including a Housing Authority cop who’s spent the past ten or twelve years in a profound vege-tative state. But assuming you’d get it right the first time, is it really the kind of gift you want to give yourself? It’s such a violent physical insult to the body. You wind up with the top of your skull gone and your brains all over the wall. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be graphic, but—”
“That’s all right.”
“Aren’t there gentler ways, Jan? Isn’t there a book on the subject?”
“Indeed there is,” she said. “I’ve got a copy on my bedside table. I had to buy the damned thing, too. I went to the li-brary and there were sixteen people on the waiting list. I couldn’t believe it, I thought I was at Zabar’s trying to buy half a pound of lox. You want to kill yourself in this town, you have to take a number and wait.”
“How do they get it back?”
“How does who get what back? You lost me.”
“The book,” I said. “If it does its job, who’s around to re-turn it to the library?”
“Oh, that’s rich,” she said. “You’d have to make a provi-sion. ‘I, Janice Elizabeth Keane, being of sound mind—’ ”
“That’s your story and you stick with it.”
“ ‘—do hereby request that my just debts and funeral ex-penses be paid, and that my copy of Final Exit be returned forthwith to the Hudson Park branch of the New York Public Library—’ ”
“ ‘—in the hope that others may get as much out of it as I have.’ ”
“Oh, Christ, that’s wonderful,” she said. “And then they call the next person on the list. ‘Hello, Mr. Nussbaum? We have the book you requested. Please get your affairs in or-der.’ ”