Jeremiah Healy - Right To Die

"And just what's that?"

"What's that? I'l1 tell you what's that. They want to kill us all."

"Who?"

"The atheists. Like the pagans of old, they believe in human sacrifice. The sacrifice of the unborn and the undead. That's where they start, that's where they always start, down through history. They kill the babies and they kill the elderly, and that's how they get everyone used to the idea."

Playing the card, I said, "I don't get you."

"The atheists have taken over our government. They've maneuvered their people to the point of being in power everywhere. The legislatures, the courts, even the Supreme Court of the land, where they said it's acceptable, it's a woman's right, to kill her own baby. Now they're trying it with the elderly too."

"Explain it to me."

"Look." O'Brien leaned forward, warming up. "We're in a hospital, and someone's Aunt Emma is on the kidney machine. She's basically just being maintained, with some pain, because there is no cure right now for what's wrong with her. Well, Aunt Emma has put aside some money by working hard over her long life, and the only heirs are a couple of nephews. Do you follow me?"

"Yes."

"Now, Emma's doctor is getting a little tired of seeing her on that machine. Oh, Emma can afford it, although she is starting to eat into that money she's saved. But the doctor has in mind this younger patient, who's not on a machine because the hospital doesn't have enough machines to go around. The medical insurance companies would pay for this younger patient to be on a machine if one was available. The nephews see their money, their inheritance, shrinking, so they decide to use her pain. One says, 'Aunt Em, it's so bad to see you hurting like this.' And the other says, 'Aunt Em, I don't know why you've got to go through all this.' And then the first one says, 'Aunt Em, let us talk to the doctor, see if something can be done.' Et cetera, et cetera."

O'Brien's parable sounded like something he'd once heard someone else present. "So?"

"So? So the atheist nephews and the atheist doctors, with maybe some help from the atheist lawyers, get the atheist judge to let them turn off the machine on Aunt Emma. Pull the plug so the patient the doctor wants on the machine can have it."

"Pretty farfetched, isn't it?"

"Read the papers. They do it all the time in Massachusetts and New York. All the time."

"Yeah, I was at a debate up in Boston last night about it."

O'Brien withdrew a little. "Debate?"

"Yeah. That's what they were talking about. This doctor, Eisenberg, I think it was, and – "

"Eisenberg! One of the worst."

"How do you mean?"

"Come on. He's supposed to be this big-time defender of the right to life? Writes books and papers and gives these courses in the med school and speeches all over. But he's in with them."

"With the atheists."

A vigorous nod. "I went to see him a couple of times. At these speeches. And I hung around afterward, to talk to him. I thought, after what his people had been through, over in Germany with Hitler and all, Eisenberg would understand. He'd see what's happening in this country."

"But he didn't."

"He's in bed with them! He gets up and talks about this stuff on the same stage with these people, even has dinner with them. For him it's like this intellectual exercise, like he's just talking about something that's not real instead of fighting something that is real, that's horrible and threatening us all."

"Eisenberg's not fighting like you are."

"Of course not! The things he writes, he told me himself, they get edited by the people at the magazines – or journals, whatever they call them – that print his stuff. And who do you think the editors are?"

"More atheists."

"Finally. They're everywhere, like I said."

"Another speaker at this debate last night. Ever heard of Maisy Andrus?"

"That slut! She killed her own husband! I don't even mean pulling the plug and just letting him die. She took a needle and shot him up with poison. It was all over the papers. She's this big-time law professor, marries a tennis player, thinks people forget. Well, I saved every article about her. She thinks people forget? I'll never forget."

"You feel this strongly, how come you weren't at the debate too?"

O'Brien hunkered down. "I was thinking about it, but I couldn't. Had to work. Our fiscal year ends in a couple of weeks. They need me to check things. All kinds of things."

"Who at work can I call about that?"

His head whipped up. "Why?"

"Because I'm asking you politely, that's why."

"I mean, what does this have to do with my letters to the bishop?"

"Maybe I can just call the personnel manager."

O'Brien cowered. "No. No, call… call Carla Curzone. She's my… our head bookkeeper."

"Give me the number I should use."

He rattled it off, adding the extension as I wrote it down.

"Only…"

I said, "Only what?"

"Do me a favor, okay?"

"What?"

"Don't tell Carla you're from the po1ice."

"Don't worry. I won't."

"Bad pizza?"

Nancy watched me carefully from across the glass coffee table in her apartment. On her haunches, she wore a New England School of Law sweatshirt over denim shorts and grasped a beer mug by its handle. Renfield, Nancy's cat, watched me expectantly from under the table as I picked at the slice on my plate.

I said, "No, the pizza's fine. Just a lousy day."

"How so?"

I summarized it for her, starring Louis Doleman and Steven O'Brien.

Nancy said, "It's no fun to be that close to crazies."

It bothered me that I was probably bumming her out, since she had to deal with crazies a lot more often than I did.

"John?"

"Yes?"

"I found a surefire way to get over that."

"Over what'?"

"Over being around crazies too much." Nancy took a mouthful of beer.

"What is it?"

"You seek out a no-nonsense, normal person and get deeply involved in an absolutely rational discussion."

"The cure sounds worse than the disease."

"No, really. Logic, deduction, P implies Q. It's the secret." I tossed a piece of sausage to Renfield, who played croquet with it until he realized the ball was edible. "Okay. How do we start?"

Nancy set down the mug and made her eyelids flutter. "I'll show you mine if you'll show me yours."

"NOW, JOHN, THE RACE ITSELF IS TWENTY-SIX MILES, THREE hundred eighty-five yards. You can't think of her as one distance, though. Nobody can really handle that. You got to break the course down into chunks. Think of her as four six-mile runs with kind of a victory lap at the end. That should be manageable.

“ Another thing. Talk to yourself when you train, eh? Tell yourself what you want to do and why it's important for you to do it. Concentrate and reinforce those goals and reasons. During the race you're going to be doing the same thing. Don't worry about what people think. Sometimes talking to yourself is the best conversation around.

“ One more thing for today. You're aiming at your first marathon, lots of people'll say, 'Don't make it Boston. Because it's in April, you'll have to train all winter, and the course isn't flat enough.' Well, I say bullshit to that. The beauty of Boston is the crowd. All along the route you've got folks two, even three deep, clapping and cheering. Little kids with card tables, handing out cups of water and orange sections. No, Boston's as good a first marathon as any, and better than most. Drink it all in, John. Remember, you'll never run your first marathon again."

Directory assistance had a phone number for Ray Cuervo in Marblehead, a harbor town about twelve miles north of Boston. Trying it, I got Cuervo's tape message. A silky, sales-pitch voice, the Spanish accent coming across only on certain words, the English idioms perfect. It told me that if I needed to reach him, he'd be at the Sarrey Co-op plant, giving a 603 area code. I took out a map of New Hampshire and found Sarrey just about where I remembered it, a little north of the Massachusetts border. It turned out to be only an hour and ten minutes from Boston up Interstate 93 and a couple of scenic country roads that hadn't yet yielded to suburbia's manifest destiny.