Home
This is the page you should bookmark.
Who?
I believe that I think, therefore I am, ergo...
Manifesto
The ritual imperative. Everyone should have one.
Read
I write fiction. You read it. And buy my book!
Great links
Fascinating neural engagements!
Atelier
The writer's art gallery!

Under the Bougainville ©2004 Jon L. Adams
Click here to download the Acrobat PDF or read the story below:

October seventh we shared an outside table at Jimmy’s. Jeff’s face was drawn, wrinkled in places I hadn’t noticed before. He told me he wanted to die in Mexico.

“There’s a good doctor in La Paz, a couple doors from my house.”

My pipe lay on the ashtray. I reached for it and the lady at the next table girded her considerable loins.

“I will mind very much if you smoke!”
Her glare read, “I’ll kill you.”

I smiled and withdrew my hand.

“What about emergencies? Is there a decent hospital close by?”

“I won’t be needing that, Jack. There will be no heroic effort.”

After the diagnosis three years ago, he called and asked me to come down there for a few days. I had no idea what it was about, but I needed to clear my head after Rebecca left and the partnership broke up. I brought in an extra full-time veterinarian and caught a flight.

Jeff met me at the La Paz airport in good spirits. On the way to his hacienda he told me he was HIV positive. When we got out on his patio overlooking the most beautiful little bay in the world, he told me it had already become full-blown AIDS.

It shattered me that I was going to lose my old friend. When I found the words to say that, Jeff told me he was sorry.

“For what?”

“I didn’t listen to you when you warned me about it years ago.”

A veterinarian reads about pandemic disease long before the public. I had been introduced to the virus at a conference in Seattle in eighty-two. Not long afterward I expressed my concerns to Jeff and his roommate. They laughed it off as Reaganist hysteria.

“Don’t apologize.”

The woman next to us shifted back in her chair when a man walked past with a cigarette. Even though we sat outside, the awning trapped his smoke and wafted it across her table. Her companion poured himself more blush wine and talked about taxes. He didn’t seem to mind. I was tempted to light up.

“I’ll have the skewered shrimp, baked potato with sour cream. Salad, with ranch dressing.”

The waiter scribbled while Jeff made his choice, and I reached again for my pipe. The woman exaggerated a coughed and cleared her throat. I pulled out my lighter and lit up.

“The same, please,” Jeff ordered, but it appeared to me his hunger had abated.

“When do you move?”

“Two weeks. I want to sort things out while I’m still able. In a few months it may be too late.”

“It’s going to be quiet around here without you. I’ll call often.”

He slumped a little and brought it up.

“Jack. Why don’t you give me a hand?”

“Helping you move?”

“With the closure.”

“The what?” I stuttered for the first time since seventh grade.

“I don’t intend to suffer. I need your help.”

“How?”

“It could be bacterial, cancer, pneumonia, any number of things. I’ll need you when that comes. You’re a doctor and you know how to do it.”

His eyes shattered my customary reserve. The piercing stare made me exhale. I forgot the pipe. Jeff wanted me to help him die.

“Jack, death doesn’t frighten me. Dying does.”

“Do you realize what you’re asking?”

“I’m asking you as my best friend, and as one who knows how to accomplish it without pain.”

The woman blurted, “Don’t light that again!”

She interrupted us at the wrong time. I even surprised Jeff, who leaned away from our table as if to distance himself from my outburst.

“Lady, you’re in the smoking section!”

My nerves were already ragged from Jeff’s request and the woman’s interference forced me to respond. I grabbed the pipe and lighter. She tore her napkin from her lap and got up. Her fellow sat in shocked silence with his wine to his lips. His eyes were on me. So were everyone else’s.

“Faggots!” She whispered as she fled the table.

“You should really give that up, Jack. As a doctor you should set an example.”

The salads arrived. It didn’t take him long to bring it up again. I resisted.

“It’s against the law and a contravention of my oath. It’s unethical and probably not possible.”

“It’s done all the time. I don’t mean Doctor What’s-his-name in Michigan, either. I had a friend in San Francisco who took the blue stuff in his IV. He was gone in the blink of an eye. There was no pain. That’s how I want it to be.”

“I’d never get away with it, Jeff. What about the autopsy? The stuff remains in the system.”

“Do you seriously believe they autopsy AIDS victims? Not in La Paz, and most of the time, not anywhere. The substance I’m talking about isn’t sodium pentathol. It’s something else. They can’t detect it after a few hours.”

I knew the concoction. In school it had been discussed, even lectured about. I had the ingredients in my clinic. They were common chemicals, and he was correct about the dissipation. It usually took three to six hours for all traces to vanish. The poison was instantaneous, painless and undetectable through normal pathological procedures. Only the best-equipped coroner, knowing what he was looking for, would ever find the residue.

“It’s morally wrong, Jeff. I can’t help you. It could end my career. Besides, my conscience couldn’t take it.”

“Look at me, Jack. Do you see the blotch on my neck? It’s Karposi’s and I could catch and die from anything that’s going around. Flu, pneumonia, even simple strep throat.”

I leaned forward and whispered into his face. “I can’t help you commit suicide. It’s not the same. You’re not a small animal, Jeff.”

“It won’t be suicide. That’s when you don’t want to live anymore. I want to live, Jack. I’m just not able to.”

“I won’t do it.”

“You will. You won’t be able to watch me suffer.” He drank his Scotch and squinted in pain at me. It was a moment I’ve relived many times, a glimpse at what was about to burst into both our lives.

On our way out he tripped on a curb. I grabbed his arm. It was the first time I noticed the weakness in his limbs. He looked up at me, his eyes burned straight into my heart.

“You’ll come when I ask.”

November twelfth, I went to La Paz anyway. He couldn’t make it to the airport. I got a taxi and found him on the patio under the bougainvillea, resting on a chaise lounge. His skin was almost transparent, except for the splotches that had increased in quantity and size. His voice was thin, and he seemed to have trouble with his tongue. I got him a drink.

“Look at me, Jack. How long do you think I have? A month? Two?”

“Shut up, Jeff. You’ve lots of time. How’s the book coming?”

“I’ll bet thirty or forty days. The doctor says longer, but I already made the arrangements.”

“You’ll outlive me.”

“I’m to be cremated. They’ll send my ashes to L.A. and my sister can deal with it. She won’t come down here, you know.”

I presumed that. She never visited Jeff when he was healthy.

Again, “How’s the book?”

“It’s almost finished. The manuscript will be in the mail in a week. I hope they feel like publishing it, with all the changes I had to make. I wrote an epilogue, about dying down here, mummifying one’s self in the desiccating sun. It’s really good. You must read it.”

I promised. Jeff was a great writer and his imagery was as bright as the red flowering bush over our heads. We had been close friends for years and I always marveled at the range and depth of his work. His fiction displayed his vivid imagination better than I could begin to describe. It was part of why I enjoyed his company. He was gay and I wasn’t, but that played no role in our relationship. We respected each other for our minds and our long into-the-morning discourses on Foucault and the French Deconstructionists, blues, winemaking and anything that happened to come up. It hurt to see him fading in yellow Baja.

We had a good late talk and then I helped him to the study. He gave me a peek at the last words he would ever write professionally. Jeff said that he intended to compose a few letters, but nothing more. He was “done with the living muses.”

The epilogue depressed me so that I forced him to go out with me that night. He said he wasn’t up to it, but I dragged him down to his car. I noticed the thick coat of dust on the top and hood, a token of disuse. We went to a local bar and had a beer.

“I’m in pain all the time now. My arthritis is out of control. I need you to help me.”

“You don’t plan to do it while I’m here?”

“No. But soon. Look at me, Jack.”

He was right. Death stared over the cerveza, daring me to deny it. It had Jeff’s eyes, but the rest of it no longer held to his old, familiar shape. I stared back at it and wondered how I could refuse him when the time came. How soon would it be before his eyes died, too?

He was so tired that he didn’t complain when I stopped at a tobacco shop on the way home to buy a dozen Cuban Cohiba Siglos.

I went home in a couple days to the busy holiday season. My mind was on Jeff and the days were spent between visions of the little curve of the bay, the flat stones on his patio and the red bougainvillea where we had sat and talked late in the night. Our friendship had been through so many events that I could not number them. His request that I help him through the dying stretched our bond to the limit and beyond. I still wasn’t sure I could do it.

A few days before Christmas I got another call.

“I on an I.V. I’m hooked up all the time. I need you!”

“Now?”

“Soon. Will you?”

I listened and didn’t know how to tell him I couldn’t help. He told me he had pneumonia. I gripped the phone and tried to find something to say that wouldn’t make me stutter.

A few days later I was in the lab with a tissue sample when the front desk called me on the intercom. Mexico. Line three.

“Come, Jack.”

It had his voice. It came down the line and reached into my gut. It hurt so much to hear him. My heart turned inside out. My elbows found the table and I leaned hard on it.

His silent cry issued from the phone. There were no words, only the pain in his breath.

“I’ll leave right away.”

I went to my pharmacy closet and got the three bottles. Back in the lab, I measured a tiny amount of each and carefully put the liquids in separate sealed vials. Then I washed the things I used and replaced the bottles in the closet. The three vials and a couple sealed syringes were in my pocket when I left the clinic.

I took the first morning flight to La Paz. He was in bed and a private nurse stood beside him. The look on her face said it was almost over. The look on Jeff’s confirmed it.

“Maria knows. I told her. it was our secret… that…”

“Don’t try to say so much at one time.”

His tongue was dark, dry. I found his pulse and counted over his rasp.

“I wrote her… in my will. The lawyer… was here.”

“That means she knows what I brought?”

“No. Asshole… I told her I was… going to hold my breath…”

“How about a beer and a Montecristo, buddy?”

He nodded once and closed his eyes.

We rolled the bed out on the patio and I cranked it up so he could see the Sea of Cortez. We sipped our cerveza and talked while he had the energy. The sun went down behind us. It was very dark when I rolled him and the I.V. pole into the room.

In the morning, I told him that I could not be there. My presence might set off alarms. He would have to find another way. I told him I would leave the stuff with instructions on how to use it, but that I had to be far away when it was done. Jeff shook his head and spit dribbled on his chin. I saw how far he had slipped overnight. He had a bad coughing spasm.

“Now. Today.”

“I can’t, Jeff! For Christ’s sake!”

That made him smile, the eternal atheist that he was.

“Too late. He can’t help, either.” Coughing.

I got my suitcase and mixed the stuff in a clean vial. I drew it into a plastic syringe and then had a second and a third beer on the veranda that looked out on the inland side. Finally, I took it to him.

Maria was there when I came in with my hand in my coat pocket. She smiled and blinked before she got up and said goodbye to Jeff. I realized she was going to leave.

“Don’t go. Please. I don’t want to be alone afterward.”

She nodded and said she would be out in front, and she left.

“Quit… smoking!”

My eyes agreed.

“Take me out. Under the bougainville.”

I rolled the bed out there and stood beside him, watching his sinking eyes soak up the red and green above us. I kneeled and leaned on the bed.

“I don’t know if I ever said it or not, Jeff, but I really love you.”

“You? Finally admit it? Ha!” He grinned a last time.

“When Rebecca left me, she thought you and I were having a fling. How’s that for a laugh?”

He shook but couldn’t curl a smile. The effort was too much. It made him gasp.

“Try not to move your head. Are you ready, Jeff?”

He smiled this time and closed his eyes.

I squeezed his hand. My friend was not going to get up again, and I was the instrument of his destruction and salvation. I was the angel of mercy sent to rob the devil of that final pleasure. His fragile hand in mine, I wept out loud.

It was time.

I found strength. I had no choice, other than to wait with him while he suffocated from his runaway pneumonia. The I.V. had an insert connector. I tested it with a syringe of water. Then I put the sedative syringe into it, and while I talked to him about the bougainvillea, I gave it to him slowly.

I kept talking, softly, about the view, about the contrast between the red foliage and the blue sky, the white watery horizon and the barren rock of the cliffs along the sea. As I spoke I recalled the time a young girl had brought in her tabby, near death from squamous cell cancer that blocked its throat. She held its yellow head against her while I explained how the sedative would allow the cat to rest comfortably before the final act. It was the first time I watched the owner rather than the animal while I did the thing. Her face washed in tears, but she kept her loving arms quiet, reverent, still. When I knew the cat was sound asleep and I gave it the final injection, she broke down holding the pet tenderly all the time.

I never wanted to watch the survivors again.

Twenty minutes later, I put in the last syringe and gave it one quick squirt. His hand was still in mine. I had watched the light go out in an animal’s eyes many times, but I never felt a man put down before. My breath stopped with his. I was alone. The noonday darkness of the shady patio closed around me. In only a minute, the silence mattered. I got up and went for a long walk.

The Mexicans believe in somber propriety when it comes to death. The doctor down the street came to certify that Jeff had died. Men arrived in clean dark suits. They took him away to the coroner’s office. AIDS deaths are seldom given postmortems in Mexico, and he was simply certified as deceased. Agreed in advance, a shiny black hearse soon picked up his remains. In the morning, Maria and I went down to the crematorium as witnesses.
I carried his ashes back to his sister, who refused to accept the paper-wrapped box. Two months later, when I received notice that Jeff had bequeathed me the place in La Paz, I took him back home and mixed him with the soil under the bougainville, where I had buried the vials, the needles and my pipe.

©2004 Jon L. Adams