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Death Wish

Jake

Las Vegas glitters at our feet. We’re on the top floor terrace of a hotel, an exclusive little space for people who can afford two-hundred-dollar cocktails served by contortionists who slink around in gold leotards, while a trapeze artist twirls lazily above our heads on a hoop and a tiger prowls moodily on a lead below. The spectacle never ends.

An updraft lifts Dodi’s hair as she leans over the wall and peers down, and the bloom of light from the street below catches her beautiful face in strange, underwater colors. Her bag rests on the ledge between us, lumpy and heavy, and next to it, the urn. Another server approaches—liquidly crab-walking and then rising up onto his feet without losing balance of a tray of drinks. He sparks a lighter above them, and they burn blue, and Dodi fishes a wad of hundred-dollar bills out of her purse for him. It’s Monopoly money, all of it. It doesn’t seem real.

A queen of diamonds, an ace of hearts, and a jack of spades. Twenty-one. She made blackjack twice in one hand. She’d stared long and hard at her cards, like she was reading a Tarot spread, and then she’d wordlessly taken her winnings and led us out onto the Strip again. We’d walked a long time in silence, the palms and lights and tourists all on the other side of a pane of glass, and I’d looked up at the tall buildings brightly lit against the black sky, taken her by the hand, and brought her here.

“What’s next for you?” she asks. Her voice is quiet and serious. I don’t misunderstand her question.

“Right now it’s just my hands. They go numb and I get clumsy. Now that it’s started, it’ll get worse, quickly.”

“Like your dad. What happened to your mom?”

“Car accident when I was nine. She was a teacher. She—” I almost say more, but there’s nothing more to say, really. She taught at the same school I went to, and so she was always there , all day and night, until one day she wasn’t. It’s never made me happy to think about her, so I try not to.

“And then your aunt and uncle raised you. Will they be helping you?”

“They don’t know I’m sick. My dad wasn’t in the picture, and they don’t know how he died.” It might be the first time I’ve talked about my dad to anyone.

“What was the name of his illness?” She pulls out her phone as if she’s going to look it up.

“It’s probably going to be called Markham’s disease.”

Her brows pinch in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“That’s the name of the neurologist I saw.” Young and ambitious, he was excited when I walked into his office eight years ago seeking answers.

Without genotyping your parent’s illness first, we can’t test for it to see if it was passed on to you. We wouldn’t know where to start looking. We have to wait until symptoms manifest. Peripheral neuropathy first. Clumsiness—maybe you’ll notice it in your hands or when you move around. Everyone’s heard about the big ones like ALS or Huntington’s, but there are others, too, that pop up in a family line, with so few individuals affected that they haven’t been studied properly yet. This might be a brand-new neurodegenerative disease, without a name.

I never went back. Beyond a couple of experimental therapies, there’s nothing to be done, and I’m not some fucking guinea pig. I’m not tempted by a slim chance of prolonging this.

The flames have burned off from our drinks, and she hazards a sip and grimaces. “Why are you so alone in the world, Jake?”

“What?”

“No significant other, no friends, no possessions. How many people have you told your diagnosis to?”

None.

In my head I see Aunt Laura’s sad eyes and Bill’s stooped shoulders. I don’t know how to verbalize it all. That it’s risky, and dangerous, to let someone in.

I find the words. “I don’t want to make any of this harder.”

“You let me in,” she says.

“You hate me.”

She ignores this. “Who’s going to take care of you?”

I think of the picture Bill painted for me. Trapped in his own body. A terrible way to die. “I’m going to take care of myself.”

She looks at me, and I know she knows exactly what I mean. Her husband, sitting there on the ledge between us, knows too.

It’s surreal to finally be voicing any of this, the thoughts that knock around in the night. It feels…exhilarating to let it all out. A genie escaping its lamp. I might not be able to hide it away again. “I can’t control my aunt and uncle stuffing me like a taxidermy raccoon and putting me on display in a casket, or rifling through my personal shit after, but I can control that part. How I die.”

“It’s legal now,” she says quietly. “You can get a doctor to help.”

“That’s true.” I debate telling her the next part, the part that scares me. I think about her husband pouring the milk and cereal onto the counter. “But it will affect me cognitively at some point.”

She gets that too, without me needing to explain it. If my ability to make decisions is called into question, no doctor will let me call the shots.

“You need an advocate to make sure you have a dignified death,” she says. “And…after-death.”

I’d never thought about having an advocate. There’s no one in my life I could ask. Grant’s a narcissist. Andrew’s a Catholic. And Laura…Laura would understand, but I couldn’t do that to her.

I think of how every morning I wake before the alarm goes off. The ceiling materializes above me, the remembrance of what’s ahead returns, and for a minute I can’t breathe. I start every morning like that. I have no control over my future, how it all plays out. The pain and indignity and uncertainty ahead of me. It’s like waking up to find yourself in the seat of a roller coaster at the very top of the biggest peak, already nudging forward inch by inch, and the panic sets in. I haven’t slept right in eight years.

This is where Dodi comes in. My shiny, sparkling distraction, from the moment she stepped onto that elevator.

When she looks at me, I’m the serial killer at work, not that other pathetic, sad Jake Ripper. And right now I’m in Las Vegas on a rooftop with a bag full of money and a dead man in a jar. I’m with the most interesting person I’ve ever met, and she thinks I’m interesting. I think us over. A dull lump of a man gray-rocking through life. A sharp blade of a woman like Dodi bent back on herself over and over again like steel, making her tougher and stronger. And when we met, flint struck steel. A spark. Everything became interesting. We created a fantasy world with each other, for each other.

“How are you going to spend your money?” I ask her, my voice different. Suave, charming, politely interested, while I tug on my strangler gloves and measure her neck with my eyes.

She starts, yanked away from whatever thoughts she was immersed in. “My money?”

I jerk my chin at her bag, and her face goes slack for a moment before it tightens back into its neutral setting: bored with a touch of Fuck you very much . The snarky Black Widow is online again, stropping her straight razor. She’s exactly like that queen of diamonds she was dealt, and all I want to do is keep coming back to slice myself to ribbons on her hard, sharp edges.

“Wouldn’t you like to know. I’ve already spent it,” she says. With a thrill, I realize there’s another secret here. Another body buried closely to the others.

A dry desert breeze rises out of nowhere and lifts Dodi’s hair off her shoulders. She shivers, even though it’s warm.

“Why’d you bring me up here?” she asks.

I pass her the urn, and her face goes blank.

“You’re right. He would have loved this.” She looks out at the city again, glowing, pulsing, alive. She twists the lid off to rest it on the ledge and pulls apart the seal of the liner inside.

“Good-bye, Neil,” she whispers, and she sifts him slowly into the warm wind.

Neil.

I give a minute of silence to faceless, intrepid Neil—the statistician, the gambler, the dead man, who Dolores loved and still loves—burned to ash, billowing down the Las Vegas Strip on a desert wind, clinging to the hair and skin and clothes of a thousand strangers, following them back to their hotel rooms, being rinsed off in the shower, rubbed into the bedsheets, taken home on planes all across the continent—the world. That jar of stardust exploding in a supernova across the globe.

What a way to go.