THE EDITOR
By Terry John Malik
Elizabeth,
By the time you find this note, I’ll be dead. (Odd that I feel compelled to address this to you as “Elizabeth.” It’s always been Becky. Can’t explain that, but there’s a lot I can’t explain anymore). I woke up again this morning disappointed that I didn’t die in my sleep. God doesn’t seem so merciful after all. I’m now convinced that only death will relieve the debilitating back pain that has made my life a living hell and allay the pain yet to come from my stage four cancer. I haven’t seriously considered taking my own life before today because I wasn’t certain how many of my otherwise useless pain killer meds to take to do the job. I was afraid I wouldn’t take enough and turn into a vegetable. Last week at the Club, Doc Allison told me what to do. He had already figured it out. See, he wanted to commit suicide after he lost his license, but he admitted that he lacked the courage to do it. I haven’t had the courage either. It’s fear that motivates me now. Fear that the unbearable pain from the botched back surgery will soon put me in a wheelchair rendering me totally dependent on you. And fear of the painful death that awaits me as the cancer metastasizes to my bones. I can’t handle pain. Never could. You once called me a sissy because of it. What do you know about pain except how to inflict it?
Yeah, you’ve hurt me deeply. Your quotidian sarcastic barbs cut deep. You’ve become cold and distant, ignoring me as if we were strangers accidentally sharing the same space and oxygen in this small condo on the beach. But, Good God, Becky, the sad thing is I still love you—
Ian abruptly stopped writing and leaned back in his chair. Sad! Yeah sad, he thought, that an acclaimed best-selling author can’t write a decent suicide note for himself. “How could I write something so stupid like ‘I still love you,’” he mumbled.
Ian had hit a brick wall. He had intended his final words to be a gift of guilt for her. He was missing the mark.
He took a long pull of his Irish whiskey. Staring at the framed pictures perched on the corner of his desk he lamented those captured moments. Photos Becky had taken of sunsets on her fucking beach (she knew damn well I preferred the hustle and bustle of the city); the black and white picture of me standing next to a strung-up eleven-foot-long marlin I caught off Key West, imitating the iconic photo of Hemmingway (she refused to eat at Sloppy Joe’s that night); and the wedding portrait—Becky wearing a mask of innocence and me with a foolish grin, ambitious for ambition’s sake, and not knowing then that my life stretched ahead of me, empty.
He lifted his glass in a mock toast, “Here’s to you Ian Murphy, you no-talent hack!”
He was skeptical that Doc Allison’s “prescription” of a narcotic cocktail would work and told him so that night. “Okay, Murph,” he replied, “then consider your cancer to be a blessing in disguise. Stop treating it. No more chemo. No more radiation. No more drugs. In hospice, they can administer enough palliative medication that will render you virtually unconscious. That way you won’t feel your back pain or the final throes of the cancer.”
Ian took another pull of his Irish, pushed his chair back, and rose stiffly. With glass in hand, he hobbled to the condo’s small balcony. He awkwardly plopped himself down in his heavily cushioned wicker rocker spilling his drink. It was raining. Raining hard in the deepening darkness of the night. Sheet lightning flashed over the Gulf revealing rolling whitecaps and giving birth to a solution. “Doc was drunk that night. I can’t trust anything he said. My .38! I can trust a bullet to the brain,” he announced to an uncaring downpour.
Ian stood, steadied himself, and angrily threw his glass as far as he was able into the large dark green sea grape shrubs that separated the condo from the beach, the second piece of crystal lost this week to self-loathing.
His gait unsteady and painful, he finally reached their bedroom where Becky lie asleep. He quietly opened the nightstand drawer where he kept his .38. He searched the drawer—the gun was gone.
The nightstand lamp on Becky’s side of the bed snapped on. Becky sat up, the gun in her hand, and asked, “You looking for this?”
Minutes later, Becky strolled to the den, took a seat at her husband’s desk, and studied his unfinished note. “Oh, Christ, Ian! ‘quotidian sarcastic barbs’ Really?” She deleted that passage and a few others and then rewrote the closing paragraph.
The sad thing is that I still love you, Becky—even more than on that ungodly hot August day twenty-seven years ago when we vowed “until death do us part.” I want to free you of sleepless nights when I moan in pain while you faithfully sit vigil with me. I want to spare you from watching me suffer and listening to a string of meaningless curses as I slip in and out of consciousness on my death bed. I know you would selflessly bear those burdens, but you deserve better.
Smiling, she added a final thought: My darling, for some inexplicable reason I am incapable of expressing gratitude. There were so many times I should have thanked you for your help. I never would have sold a single book if you were not my first and final editor.
She printed the note and signed his name to it just as she had on the scores of books she
mailed on his behalf to his faithful readers who had begged for autographed copies.
