Feet apart, hands on trim hips, her gorgeous face imperious. “Let’s go,” she barked to the doctor.
“Sachs, you have no idea how important this is.”
“I won’t let you kill yourself.”
“Let me?” Rhyme snapped. “Let me? And why exactly do I need your permission?”
Berger said, “Miss… Officer Sachs, it’s his decision and it’s completely consensual. Lincoln’s more informed than most of the patients I deal with.”
“Patients? Victims, you mean.”
“Sachs!” Rhyme blurted, trying to keep the desperation from his voice. “It’s taken me a year to find someone to help me.”
“Maybe because it’s wrong. Ever consider that? Why now, Rhyme? Right in the middle of the case?”
“If I have another attack and a stroke, I might lose all ability to communicate. I could be conscious for forty years and completely unable to move. And if I’m not brain-dead, nobody in the universe is going to pull the plug. At least now I’m still able to communicate my decisions.”
“But why?” she blurted.
“Why not?” Rhyme answered. “Tell me. Why not?”
“Well…” It seemed as if the arguments against suicide were so obvious she was having trouble articulating them. “Because…”
“Because why, Sachs?”
“For one thing, it’s cowardly.”
Rhyme laughed. “Do you want to debate it, Sachs? Do you? Fair enough. ‘Cowardly,’ you say. That leads us to Sir Thomas Browne: ‘When life is more terrible than death, it’s the truest valor to live.’ Courage in the face of insurmountable adversity… A classic argument in favor of living. But if that’s true then why anesthetize patients before surgery? Why sell aspirin? Why fix broken arms? Why is Prozac the most prescribed medicine in America? Sorry, but there’s nothing intrinsically good about pain.”
“But you’re not in pain.”
“And how do you define pain, Sachs? Maybe the absence of all feeling can be pain too.”
“You can contribute so much. Look at all you know. All the forensics, all the history.”
“The social-contribution argument. That’s a popular one.” He glanced at Berger but the medico remained silent. Rhyme saw his interest dip to the bone sitting on the table – the pale disk of spinal column. He picked it up, kneaded it in his cuffed hands. He was a former orthopedics man, Rhyme recalled.
He continued to Sachs, “But who says we should contribute anything to life? Besides, the corollary is I might contribute something bad. I might cause some harm too. To myself or someone else.”
“That’s what life is.”
Rhyme smiled. “But I’m choosing death, not life.”
Sachs looked uneasy as she thought hard. “It’s just… death isn’t natural. Life is.”
“No? Freud’d disagree with you. He gave up on the pleasure principle and came to feel that there was another force – a non-erotic primary aggression, he called it. Working to unbind the connections we build in life. Our own destruction’s a perfectly natural force. Everything dies; what’s more natural than that?”
Again she worried a portion of her scalp.
“All right,” she said. “Life’s more of a challenge to you than most people. But I thought… everything I’ve seen about you tells me you’re somebody who likes challenges.”
“Challenges? Let me tell you about challenges. I was on a ventilator for a year. See the tracheotomy scar on my neck? Well, through positive-pressure breathing exercises – and the greatest willpower I could muster – I managed to get off the machine. In fact I’ve got lungs like nobody’s business. They’re as strong as yours. In a C4 quad that’s one for the books, Sachs. It consumed my life for eight months. Do you understand what I’m saying? Eight months just to handle a basic animal function. I’m not talking about painting the Sistine Chapel or playing the violin. I’m talking about fucking breathing.”
“But you could get better. Next year, they might find a cure.”
“No. Not next year. Not in ten years.”
“You don’t know that. They must be doing research -”
“Sure they are. Want to know what? I’m an expert. Transplanting embryonic nerve tissue onto damaged tissue to promote axonal regeneration.” These words tripped easily from his handsome lips. “No significant effect. Some doctors are chemically treating the affected areas to create an environment where cells can regenerate. No significant effect – not in advanced species. Lower forms of life show pretty good success. If I were a frog I’d be walking again. Well, hopping.”
“So there are people working on it?” Sachs asked.
“Sure. But no one expects any breakthroughs for twenty, thirty years.”
“If they were expected,” she shot back, “then they wouldn’t be breakthroughs, now would they?”
Rhyme laughed. She was good.
Sachs tossed the veil of red hair from her eyes and said, “Your career was law enforcement, remember. Suicide’s illegal.”
“It’s a sin too,” he responded. “The Dakota Indians believed that the ghosts of those who committed suicide had to drag around the tree they’d hanged themselves from for all eternity. Did that stop suicide? Nope. They just used small trees.”
“Tell you what, Rhyme. Here’s my last argument.” She nodded at Berger, grabbed the cuff chain. “I’m taking him in and booking him. Refute that one.”
“Lincoln,” Berger said uneasily, panic in his eyes.
Sachs took the doctor by the shoulder and led him to the door. “No,” he said. “Please. Don’t do this.”
As Sachs opened the door Rhyme called out, “Sachs, before you do that, answer me something.”
She paused. One hand on the knob.
“One question.”
She looked back.
“Have you ever wanted to? Kill yourself?”
She unlocked the door with a loud snap.
He said, “Answer me!”
Sachs didn’t open the door. She stood with her back to him. “No. Never.”
“Are you happy with your life?”
“As much as anybody.”
“You’re never depressed?”
“I didn’t say that. I said I’ve never wanted to kill myself.”
“You like to drive, you were telling me. People who like to drive like to drive fast. You do, don’t you?”
“Yes. Sometimes.”
“What’s the fastest you’ve done?”
“I don’t know.”
“Over eighty?”
A dismissing smile. “Yes.”
“Over a hundred?”
She gestured upward with her thumb.
“One ten? One twenty?” he asked, smiling in astonishment.
“Clocked at 168.”
“My, Sachs, you are impressive. Well, driving that fast, didn’t you think that maybe, just maybe, something might happen. A rod or axle or something would break, a tire would blow, a spot of oil on the road?”
“It was pretty safe. I’m not crazy.”
“Pretty safe. But driving as fast as a small plane, well, that’s not completely safe, now, is it?”
“You’re leading the witness.”
“No, I’m not. Stay with me. You drive that fast, you have to accept that you could have an accident and die, right?”
“Maybe,” she conceded.
Berger, cuffed hands in front of him, looked on nervously, as he kneaded the pale yellow disk of spinal column.
“So you’ve moved close to that line, right? Ah, you know what I’m talking about. I know you do – the line between the risk of dying and the certainty of dying. See, Sachs, if you carry the dead around with you it’s a very short step over that line. A short step to joining them.”
She lowered her head and her face went completely still, as the curtain of hair obscured her eyes.
“Giving up the dead,” he whispered, praying she wouldn’t leave with Berger, knowing he was so very close to pushing her over the edge. “I touched a nerve there. How much of you wants to follow the dead? More than a little, Sachs. Oh, much more than a little.”