“I don’t know.”
“Because I don’t think so. Dammit, I’ve got too much invested 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 admires 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 bullet. 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 permanently 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 vegetative 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 library 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 return it to the library?”
“Oh, that’s rich,” she said. “You’d have to make a provision. ‘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 expenses 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 order.’ ”
How we howled.
The problem with the book, she said, was that most of the recommended methods involved ingesting some sort of mood-altering substance. Typically you were advised to swallow a fistful of sleeping pills and wash them down with a glass of whiskey. Since one of her prime motives for suicide was the desire to die sober, such methods struck her as counterproductive.
And suppose it didn’t work? Suppose she woke up twelve hours later with a hangover, and all she’d managed to do was lose her sobriety? My name is Jan and I’ve got one day back and two weeks to live. No, to hell with that.
“They also recommended carbon monoxide,” she said. “You attach a hose to the tailpipe and run it through the window. Tough to do without a car, though. I suppose you could rent one, but what would I do, park it on the street? Just as I was fading out some crackhead would break in and steal the radio.”
So a gun seemed like her best choice. She was going to be cremated anyway, so what did it matter what she looked like? The person who discovered her body might have a bad moment or two, but that was just too bad, and life was full of bad moments, wasn’t it?
She had thought of traveling to some southern state where they’d sell a handgun to anybody who wanted one, but she wasn’t sure just how the laws worked. Could you buy one if you were from out of state? Or did you have to show local ID? Maybe you could establish residence, the way people used to do to get a Nevada divorce. Anyway, how would you go about getting the gun back on the plane? She could always make the return trip on Amtrak, but she hated the idea of spending that many hours on a train. For that matter, she wasn’t crazy about the idea of flying anywhere, either.
“And then I thought, for God’s sake, the city’s full of unregistered guns, and it shouldn’t be that hard to get one. If schoolchildren can get them, if homeless derelicts walk around armed, how tricky can it be? And I asked myself if I had a friend who would know how to get his hands on a gun, and who maybe loved me enough to do it. And you, my dear, were the only person who came to mind.”
“I guess I’m flattered.”
“And thrilled in the bargain, huh?”
Was it raining outside? It looked as though it might be raining.
I said, “You know, I hate all this. I hate that you’re sick. I hate the idea of you dying.”
“I’m not crazy about it myself.”
I said, “I’ll get you the gun.”
“You will?”
“Why not?” I said. “What are friends for?”
Chapter 8
Outside, there was a cold wind blowing. You could feel the storm coming. I walked to the IND station at Canal and Sixth. I must have just missed an A train, because I had to wait fifteen minutes for the next one. The platform was empty when I got there, and almost as empty when the train finally showed up.
I got off at Columbus Circle, and when I hit the street it was pouring fiercely. The few people unfortunate enough to be out in it took shelter in doorways, or struggled with umbrellas, trying to keep the wind from twisting them out of shape. On the far side of Fifty-seventh Street I saw a man trying to cover his head with a newspaper, and another man scurrying along with his shoulders drawn in, as if to present the rain with the smallest possible target. I didn’t bother to adopt any of these strategies. I just resigned myself to getting soaked and walked right on through it.
When I hit the lobby, Jacob looked across the desk at me and whistled softly. “Lord, you better get yourself upstairs and into a hot tub,” he said. “Catch your death walkin’ around like that.”
“Nobody lives forever,” I said.