Page 39 of All the Way to the River

The next morning, while Rayya nodded off in front of the TV, I stole some of her sleeping pills and morphine pills and took them to the park with me.

While my fellow New Yorkers went about their business in the beautiful summer light, I sat on a bench, studying and comparing the two medications in the palm of my hand, trying to figure out how I could make the sleeping pills look like the morphine pills so I could trick her into taking a bunch of them.

I needed her to take the sleeping pills, not the morphine pills—which no longer had much of an effect on her stubbornly resistant drug addict’s nervous system—because if I could knock her out with the sleeping pills, then I could stick a whole bunch of fentanyl patches on her back once she was unconscious, and that would surely kill her.

The pills were different sizes, but they were the same color.

One set of pills was scored, the other wasn’t.

If I got a razor blade and scored the sleeping pills, perhaps I could get her to think they were the morphine pills?

Or would Rayya even notice if all the pills were mixed up together?

She was so blinded by drugs at this point that she might just swallow them without noticing, if I just handed them to her.

But she was also deeply paranoid. She had taken over management of her pill protocol months earlier—fearful, I think, that I would deny her the drugs she wanted.

Her suspicions might be triggered by my giving her a handful of pills and a glass of water and telling her to down them.

I would have to be careful about this murder, I knew—not because I was afraid of the police (I wasn’t even thinking about the police, I was so out of my mind) but because I was really, really afraid of Rayya.

If she woke up and realized I was trying to murder her, I’d be dead.

Literally dead. If I didn’t kill her, she would kill me.

So I had only one chance, I reckoned, to do the job right.

But I believed I could do it—and that I could do it with a steady hand.

Somebody had to do it. Somebody had to put an end to this nightmare.

When I returned to the apartment, my mood was strangely buoyant. I felt quite proud of myself for my courage. Not everyone is clever or brave enough to do what I intended to do that day!

I walked in cheerfully, saying, “Hi, honey! I’m back!”

Rayya looked up at me from her seat by the coffee table—which was, as always, covered with cocaine and pills and booze.

Without even blinking, and in a voice that was dead calm and sober, she said, “Don’t you start plotting against me now, Liz.”

For a long, long time, we held each other’s gazes in silence.

In that moment, it felt as if there were a break in the universe.

It was as if someone had pressed Pause on the outrageous little drama we were acting out, and we had both dropped our costumes and were staring at each other as undefended souls, stripped of our identities, history, and egos.

Here we were again, back in the cosmic boardroom at the beginning of time, recognizing each other once more and deciding to go on this journey together.

How far would we take it?

The moment felt so familiar to me, I almost swooned from déjà vu.

How many lifetimes had we done this? How many times had we gotten to this exact point? How many times had I killed her, or had she killed me? And how did we want to play it out this time?

“Think carefully about what you’re about to do,” Rayya said, in a voice that could not have been more lucid.

Then her eyes glazed over once more, and she returned her attention to the coffee table covered with drugs, booze, cigarettes.

Suddenly I had a glimpse of the Rayya who had survived years living on the streets, years of drug addiction, years of prisons and institutions, years of her own brutal Earth School curriculum.

This was the Rayya who had already outlived her cancer prognosis by more than six months, despite doing nothing that any doctor, nutritionist, or other expert had recommended.

This was the immigrant kid on the Detroit playground, fighting for her life.

This was Rayya Elias, whom I had once witnessed on a trip to Australia taking a swing at a full-grown kangaroo in a petting zoo because it had grabbed at her purse.

(“Back off , motherfucker!” she had barked at the animal, and the kangaroo, visibly impressed, had indeed backed off, with a look that seemed to say, “Game recognize game.”) This was Rayya, whom the Latin Queens gang members on Rikers Island had nicknamed “Harley Loco” because she went stone crazy once, attacking a fellow inmate who tried to steal her Harley-Davidson motorcycle boots.

This was Rayya fucking Elias, who had always been able to read the room, who had died more times than she’d been born, who was frightened of nobody, and who could smell my murderous intent from ten yards away.

Who did I think I was kidding, that I could kill her ?

Nobody could kill her.

Cancer couldn’t even fucking kill her.

What crossroads had we reached here, exactly?

Without saying another word, I gathered myself up again and walked back out of the apartment. I wandered through the East Village for the next several hours in a daze, feeling like I had just suffered a severe head injury—not knowing where to go or what to do now.

Then suddenly I had a really brilliant inspiration!

Maybe I should take the sleeping pills and the morphine!

Wouldn’t that solve everything, with ease and efficacy?

I mean, my life was already destroyed, so why not finish the job?

The pills were right there in my pocket; the deed could be easily done. The only question was where to do it. I didn’t want to die on the streets and bother anyone, or make them have to deal with my corpse. Maybe I should walk to the river and throw myself in …

Then I heard a voice in my head—a voice that pierced my confusion so cleanly and swiftly that it could only have come from God.

How do I know this was the voice of God?

Because I know the voice of God.

I know the voice of God the way a blind, mewling, newborn kitten knows the smell of its mother.

The voice said this: If you have arrived at a point in your life where you are seriously considering murdering yourself or another human being, there is a strong possibility that you have reached the end of your power.

I stopped walking.

I listened harder.

I leaned into the sound of God, offering me wisdom and guidance.

That being the case , continued the voice, perhaps it’s time you called somebody and asked for help .