Jonathan Kellerman - Dr. Death

My father had died quietly, fading away from cirrhosis and kidney failure and general breakdown of his body after a lifetime of bad habits. Muscles reabsorb-ing, skin bagging as he devolved into a wizened, yellowed gnome I hardly recognized.

As the poisons in his system accumulated, it took only a few weeks for Harry Delaware to sink from lethargy to torpor to coma. If he'd gone out screaming in agony, would I now harbor any reservations about the Humanitron?

And what about people like Joanne Doss, suffering but undiagnosed?

If you accepted death as a civil rights issue, did a medical label matter? Whose life was it, anyway?

Religion supplied answers, but when you took God out of the equation, things got complicated. That was as good a reason as any for God, I supposed. I wished I'd been blessed with a greater capacity for faith and obedience. What would happen if one day I found myself being devoured by cancer, or deadened by paralysis?

Sitting there, hand poised to strike the ENTER key, I found that my thoughts kept flying back to my father's last days. Strange-he rarely came to mind.

Then I pictured Dad as a healthy man. Big bald head, creased bull neck, sandpaper hands from all those years turning wood on the lathe. Alcohol breath and tobacco laughter. One-handed push-ups, the too-hard slap on the back. He'd been well into his fifties by the time I could hold my own against him in the arm wrestles he demanded as a greeting ritual during my increasingly rare trips back to Missouri.

I found myself edging forward on the chair. Positioning myself for combat, just as I'd done as Dad's forearm and mine pressed against each other, hot and sticky. Elbows slipping on the Formica of the kitchen table as we purpled and strained, muscles quivering with tetany. Mom leaving the room, looking pained.

By the time Dad hit fifty-five, the pattern was set: mostly I'd win, occasionally we'd tie. He'd laugh at first.

Alexander-er, when I was young I could climb walls!

Then he'd light up a Chesterfield, frown and mutter, leave the room. My visits thinned to once a year. The ten days I spent sitting silently holding my mother's hand as he died was my longest stay since leaving home for college.

I shuttered the memories, tried to relax, punched a key. The computer-perfect, silent companion that it was-obliged by flashing a new image.

A site posted by a Washington, D.C.-based handicapped-rights group named Still Alive. A position statement: all human life was precious, no one should judge anyone else's quality of life. Then a section on Mate-to this group, Hitler incarnate. Archival photo of Still Alive members picketing a motel where Mate had left a traveler. Men and women in wheelchairs, lofting banners. Mate's reaction to the protest: "You're a bunch of whiners who should examine your own selfish motivations."

Quotes from Mate and Roy Haiselden followed:

"The storm troopers came for me, but I wouldn't play passive Jew" (Mate, 1991).

"Darwin would have loved to meet [District Attorney] Clarkson. The idiot's living proof of the missing link between pond slime and mammalian organisms" (Haiselden, 1993).

"A needle in a vein is a hell of a lot more humane than a nuclear bomb, but you don't hear much outrage from the morality mongoloids about atomic testing, do you?" (Mate, 1995).

"Any pioneer, anyone with a vision, inevitably suffers. Jesus, Buddha, Copernicus, the Wright brothers. Hell, the guy who invented stickum on envelopes probably got abused by the idiots who manufactured sealing wax" (Mate, 1995).

"Sure, I'd go on The Tonight Show, but it ain't gonna happen, folks! Too many stupid rules imposed by the network. Hell, I'd help someone travel on The Tonight Show if the fools who made the rules would let me.

I'd do it live-so to speak. It would be their highest-rated show, I can promise you that. They could play it during sweeps week. I'd play some music in the background-something classical. Use some poor soul with a totally compromised nervous system-maybe an advanced muscular dystrophy case-limbs out of control, tongue flapping, copious salivation, no bladder or bowel control-let them leak all over the soundstage, show the world how pretty decay and disease are. If I could do that, you'd see all that sanctimonious drivel about the nobility of life fade away pronto. I could pull off the whole thing in minutes, safe, clean, silent. Let the camera focus on the traveler's face, show how peaceful they were once the thiopental kicked in. Teach the world that the true nature of compassion isn't some priest or rabbi claiming to be God's holy messenger or some government mongoloid lackey who couldn't pass a basic biology course trying to tell me what's life and what isn't. 'Cause it's not that complex, amigos: when the brain ain't workin', you ain't livin'. The Tonight Show… yeah, that would be educational. If they let me set it up the right way, sure, I'd do it" (Mate, 1997, in response to a press question about why he liked publicity).

"Dr. Mate should get the Nobel Prize. Double payment. For medicine and peace. I wouldn't mind a piece of that, myself. Being his lawyer, I deserve it" (Haiselden, 1998).

Other assorted oddities, ranked lower for relevance: A three-year-old Denver news item about a Colorado "outsider" artist with the improbable name of Zero Toll-ranee who'd created a series of paintings inspired by Mate and his machine. Using an abandoned building in a run-down section of Denver, Tollrance, previously unknown, had exhibited thirty canvases. A freelance writer had covered the show for The Denver Post, citing "several portraits of the controversial 'death doctor' in a wide range of familiar poses: Gilbert Stuart's George Washington, Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy, Vincent van Gogh's bandaged-ear self-portrait, Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe. Non-Mate works included collages of coffins, cadavers, skulls and maggot-infested meat. But perhaps the most ambitious of Tollrance's productions is a faithfully rendered re-creation of Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson, a graphic portrayal of human dissection, with Dr. Mate serving a dual role, as scalpel-wielding lecturer as well as flayed cadaver."

When asked how many paintings had sold, Tollrance "walked away without comment."

Mate as cutter and victim. Be interesting to talk to Mr. Tollrance. Save. Print.

Two citations from a health-issues academic bulletin board posted by Harvard University: a geriatric study found that while 59.3 percent of the relatives of elderly patients favored legalizing physician-assisted suicide, only 39.9 percent of the old people agreed. And a study done at a cancer treatment center found that two-thirds of the American public endorsed assisted death but 88 percent of cancer patients suffering from constant pain had no interest in exploring the topic and felt that a doctor's bringing it up would erode their trust.

In a feminist resource site I found an article in a journal called S(Hero) entitled "Mercy or Misogyny: Does Dr. Mate Have a Problem with Women?" The author wondered why 80 percent of Mate's "travelers" had been female. Mate, she claimed, had never been known to have a relationship with a woman and had refused to answer questions about his personal life. Freudian speculation followed.

Milo hadn't mentioned any family. I made a note to follow up on that.

The final item: four years ago, in San Francisco, a group calling itself the Secular Humanist Infantry had granted Mate its highest award, the Heretic. Prior to the ceremony, a syringe Mate had used on a recent "travel venture" had been auctioned off for two hundred dollars, only to be confiscated immediately by an undercover police officer citing violation of state health regulations. Commotion and protest as the cop dropped the needle into an evidence bag and exited. During his acceptance speech, Mate donated his windbreaker as a consolation prize and termed the officer a "mental gnat with all the morals of a rota virus."