Reddit prompt: An old man with Alzheimer’s Disease pays you to kill his wife, again.
Endlessly
“You there! Boy! Come here.”
Gruff and demanding as usual. At least that much hadn’t changed. I rise from my seat and straighten my coat out of habit. My fingers attempt to brush away the creases compulsively and I try to tell myself that it’s not symbolic. But despite that, I look through the curtain surrounding that bed with apprehension. A pair of fierce eyes stare back.
“Well? Are you coming?”
I can’t leave now so I step forward and approach the bed. The curtain forms a barrier around us, like a cage. I try not to look at the other bed trapped in here with us. It’s funny how a room so pristine white can smell so much like death. It feels like a prison.
“Boy, you have a hard look about you. Seen better times, eh?”
I stay quiet because I know what’s coming. They’re almost the same words every day.
A wheezing rattle punctuates the silence. The sound tumbles down the back of my neck like a hundred thousand cringes, touching me with their cold pallid fingers. But I do not look.
He does though, and for a moment the fierce light in his eyes flares brighter. His wrinkled hand shoots out from under the blanket and grabs me, pulling me closer. The strength and speed still surprise me. It’s as if that sound is a breath of life, as if he cannot pass away peacefully while it still haunts him.
“I’ll give you a job, boy. I’ll pay you everything I have. All of it. Everything I’ve ever earned in my life.” His eyes are wide now and his knuckles white. I don’t think he realises it but he’s starting to shake me. “Just do one thing for me. Kill my wife.”
I can’t help it this time. My eyes flicker to the other bed just in time for another rattling breath. A transparent tube leads my eyes to a mottled arm, and that is how I finally find her. She’s lying there, her tiny body lost in the blankets and pillows. The intravenous line is like a marker so that she doesn’t disappear forever; it sustains her but only barely. Her face is drawn in a grimace, as if pain itself was frozen and carved into her face. Her white hair is thin now, still falling out as it dies, and her pale skin all but blends into the white sheets under which she hides as if she were a ghost. She is all but a ghost already. She’s dying.
“Beautiful isn’t she?” My throat catches and I feel ashamed.
“She is,” I say but my voice isn’t working and it comes out thick and inarticulate. He doesn’t seem to mind my lack of contribution to the conversation. His eyes are far away.
“She’s as stunning as the day I met her. She had the flirtiest look,” he chuckles, and a for a moment he looks young again. “Those eyes … always so mischievous. She was wild and I wanted to catch her but in the end, she was the one who caught me. I’ve been hers for the last 63 years and I’ll be hers again after we both pass away. I will be hers, endlessly.”
I know the answer but I have to say it. There’s nothing else I can do. “So why do you want me to kill her?”
The pained breath wheezes once more, as if in answer to my question.
“Look at her, boy.” He’s hard again. Fierce. Angry. “She’s in pain. She can’t keep living like this and she’s dying already. I don’t want to see her like this but I can’t leave knowing she’s hurting here all by herself. I’m tired, boy. Tired of holding on. I won’t last much longer. Don’t let me leave her behind. Kill her.” I don’t want to hear the next word, but I know it’s coming. “Please.”
Despite how fucked up the situation is, the last word is the one that gets me every time. Please? He never used that word until he’d started asking me to kill his wife. I tremble as a flash of heat rushes across my face, tingling in my nose and blurring my eyes. There’s a soft grating sound as my teeth clench hard against the sounds I don’t want to make.
He hands me a cheque. “There you go. Everything I own. Wrote it up for you already. Will you do this for me? Help us, please.”
Her breath rasps harshly in the air again, stronger as if she is responding to our conversation. As if she is pleading with me too. I know it’s just my imagination, she can’t hear us anymore, but I can’t help but feel it’s symbolic. The sound she makes is so loud, so forceful that it has to be on purpose. It sounds like a train crashing across the tracks, each crescendo of her rattling breath a cry for help, each diminuendo a whimper of pain.
“Ok,” I whisper and take the cheque from him. There’s nothing else I can say.
Even if for the tiniest moment, my offer of help gives him a brief respite. If that’s all I can give then so be it. I just don’t want to hear him say please again. The word sounds like defeat.
“Thank you. You’ve been kind to a stranger.” His fierce expression softens and it looks as if the tension in his body finally leaks away. It’s only now that he looks old. Only now that he can relax.
I put the cheque back on the nightstand next to his bed as his eyes close, balance it between the hopeful flowers and the emotionless off-white of a hospital food tray. He has Alzheimer’s so he won’t realise; he doesn’t remember anything or anyone except her. I put the cheque back every single day and he thinks he wrote it up already. When he wakes, he’ll reach for it and call me over. Again.
I look over to the other bed and my empty promise threatens to crush my chest. My throat feels like it’s being torn out, sucked down into the empty pit of my chest to bleed out with the broken fragments of my heart. Is today the day I’ll do it? The day I finally keep my promise?
The intravenous sways gently, beckoning for me. It’s calling me.
My teeth are hurting now and I can’t see. The sobs I’ve held back are choking me and my tears are blinding.
“I’m sorry grandpa, I can’t do it.”
