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I got the idea to this yesterday in class when a girl talked about putting pets to sleep. It's very eerie, morbid, and nihilistic. Fair warning there.
The shrill squeaks as the tap unleashed a torrent over my waiting hands rang in the room. The icy cold water flecked with rust from the faucet, the slick soft soap foam as it dance here and there around my fingers. Just another routine, just another job. I flicked my hand over the basin, droplets of water flying to cling on the metal surface, before donning on latex gloves that were always too tight and too foreign. It felt like I was putting on the skin of another person. Like the man who saw through the eyes of a victim of a fatal car accident or the woman who pumped blood through her body with the heart of a suicide.
After my hands were thoroughly cleaned by the hospital’s standards, I grabbed the handles of the cart and pushed it, enduring the squeals and whines as dry axles and wheels collided. The cart carried only one drug: Dilizpen. A curious compound, it contained hallucinogens, barbiturates, and bromides. The idea was the patient would start to hallucinate before he went to sleep and definitely before his heart stopped beating. Hopefully in that order. I, for one, would not want to be cheated out of my hallucinations.
I passed through doors and corridors, wheeling the cart that continued to wail like an air raid alarm, a sound that seemed all too fitting. I looked down the list, strong black ink on frail white paper, for the names of those whose lives were to be extinguished. Susan Braign, Jonathon Thilson, Gregory Holmes, Herbert Johnson, Howard Johnson. All together, around fifty people. Most of them were listed with neurodegenerative virus, the nasty little bug that attacked the nervous system, causing the patient extreme pain as the nerve cells were hijacked. Funny how everyone kept thinking that one day man will eliminate all forms of disease. But as man advanced, so did the pestilence. I wondered if the scientists and the doctors of the old, whose portraits and plaques and accomplishments decorated the halls that I passed, knew that all they were doing was replacing one killer with a more brutal one, cutting the heads off a hydra. In the end, people still died in hospitals and hospices and the lives sacrificed in the name of medicine and health were stripped of any meaning.
Through this hallway, pass this sign, turn a left after this mark, another left here, and through a door, and I was in the ward, greeted by an eerie silence disrupted by the gasps of facilitated breaths and the regular pulse of a shrill beep that reflected the victims’ last heartbeats. Upon my arrival, a cold tension diffused into the room, doctors, families, nurses, all ceased their activities and stared at me. Then as one, they walked out of the ward, unable or unwilling to witness my cold yet necessary task. The first bed had Susan Braign, a frail aging woman with a tumor growing in her. Neither chemicals nor radiation nor surgery nor technology could stop the unnatural development or alleviate her from her torment. Right now, she took solace in an induced coma, resting oblivious to her pain. There was little life left in this retired schoolteacher and grandmother. I took out a hypodermic needle and extracted the transparent liquid. Approaching my victim, I gripped her hand tight but gently, latex meeting pale skin, and gently kissed her forehead, smelling the bittersweet decaying odor. She did not notice my presence or the quiet diffusion of Dilizpen that now flowed through her bloodstream. I wondered what her last thoughts would be as she journeyed through illusion and sleep before death finally took her, if her students and grandchildren will ever remember her when she lay beneath the cold earth.
Next was Jonathon Thilson, a young politician struck by the damned virus. Once a vibrant and energetic man, he was now a shell of his previous self, all sense of respect and dignity lost as he lied in the hospital bed and his ability to feel ebbing away. Once more, I held his hand and touched his forehead with my lips, the last contact he will ever have before his body descended into oblivion. A passing gasp hinted his departure from life. Only fate would have arranged his death to occur on the day the laws he fought for were contested and most likely repealed. Like the doctors on the wall, their deeds and works were erased from memory, and with them their lives.
And it went on and on through the list. Guiding the patients in agony on their path to eternal rest and peace. Most of them were sleeping before I arrived at them. I only gave them the chance to sleep forever. Then the last one, James Hector. Diagnosed with neurodegenerative virus. Age: 9 years old. He remained awake but greatly weakened as the cart squealed towards him, overcoming the hiss of the respirator and the steady beeps of his monitor. He looked at me and with great effort, raised his head as if to speak to me as I extracted the poison for the last time today.
“Please help me,” he asked laboriously in a soft voice, his bright youthful eyes meeting eyes that have seen too much death and disease. “Make me better.”
I grabbed his hand gently like a father, feeling the warmth of his flesh, and assured, “I will. I will.”
His hand squeezed in reply and a smile slowly appeared on his face, each muscle taking a toll on the boy to contract in order to show his gratitude. “Thank you,” he said.
I leaned over his bed to kiss him in the smooth forehead, my icy lips moistening the burning skin, as I injected the fluid into the boy. I continued to hold his hand as his eyes widened, and then his eyelids fell down, like curtains at the finale.
“Thank you,” he repeated, his voice reduced to a faint whisper, using his last breath to thank me. My hand still covered his, even though his had fallen limp and lost its former warmth. I thought of the deceased child before me and wondered what his life would have been like. All the potential in the boy stolen away from him. He was no different from the young politician or the old grandmother. They were all the same: frail, fragile, mortal. Their lives come and go like flowers in the garden, like fleeting beautiful moments. Leaving back no traces.
Carefully, I withdrew my hand from the boy’s and laid the syringe to rest on the cart. I straightened my tie and smoothed my black lapels before walking away, my footsteps echoing solemnly throughout the ward. When I opened the door, I looked behind me for a minute to see what I’ve done, all the suffering and meaning I took away, and I felt nothing. No remorse, no despair, no sorrow, no guilt. I couldn’t. It was another routine, another job. In thirty minutes, I am due to a war zone in a city in the Middle East. And after that, a site of an airplane crash. After all, everybody dies. Death is always in business.
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I was cured all right.
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