The Kill Switch
by Jeffrey Greene
part 1
Jules’s old doubles partner, George Kruschen, told him about it on Thursday at their bi-weekly get-together for drinks at the Forest Park Country Club. They’d both given up tennis years ago, but George still played a few holes of golf on his good days. Jules’s legs hadn’t held up as well, and nowadays he considered a walk around the block a day’s exercise, but then, George was only eighty-two to his eighty-five.
Scrutinizing him through his permanent squint, George had asked, “How much fun is it these days being Jules, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Like a bottomless cup of cold coffee,” Jules replied. “What do you think?”
“Three years to eighty-five,” George said, sucking on his drink. “Might as well be three minutes. We slow down, and time speeds up. Damn, the fizz has gone out of this drink, like it always does. I should complain.”
“What is it with you and the fizz? You should drink your Scotch straight like a man. Screw the bubbles.”
“I wish I’d screwed someone named Bubbles. I’d treasure the memory.”
“Too late now,” Jules said. “Unless you’re dirty rich, which you ain’t.”
“Talk about too late,” George said. “Eighty-five’s kind of the cut-off point, isn’t it? The age when my golf buddy doctor says the old heap really starts to tank.”
“What do you want to hear, Georgie, that I feel like a turd on a stick most of the time? Okay. I can’t eat anything I like, can’t drink worth a damn, and I wake up five times a night to pee. That’s why I come to this overpriced dump, to shoot the breeze with my old pal, not get reminded that I might have eaten my last birthday cake. What’s the matter with you, anyway? You get a bad diagnosis or something?”
“No, no, I’m all right. It’s just really been hitting me lately, the whole death thing. I’m not ready for it. I’ll never be ready.”
“Sure you will. One of these days you’ll feel so bad that dying will seem like winning the lottery.”
“How comforting. Hell, you’d think after nursing Stella through hers, I’d be at least habituated to the idea. But I’m not, Jules. I’m terrified.”
“Can’t say I’m not, George. Maybe I’m better at lying to myself.”
“You know what really scares me? The loss of control. Like one day, maybe next week, a stroke turns me into a bag of crap on a bed and I can’t even say ‘kill me.’ Or I get Alzheimer’s, and can’t remember my own name. I don’t want to go like that, Jules.”
“Who does? I try to think positive, like I’ll just drop dead of a heart attack one of these days.”
“Well, you might get lucky,” George said. “But listen, what if you had a way of making sure you died on your own terms? To decide when and how, I mean. Would you go for it?”
“What, you mean suicide?”
He nodded. “But not doing it stupid, like blowing your face off with a shotgun, or not taking enough pills, and ending up worse off than you were. I mean a foolproof method that’s totally under your control. And most importantly, painless. Would you be interested in something like that?”
“Would I be interested? What is this, George? Are you selling do-it-yourself suicide kits?”
“It happens to be for real. And also illegal, so let’s keep our voices down. I can give you a phone number. If this product ever gets legalized, and the company goes public, that’s an IPO I’d try to get in on, with all the old farts around these days. But right now, it’s strictly word-of-mouth.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“Friend of mine with prostate cancer told me about it. The inventor’s a retired geriatrician who got sick of seeing demented old people dying by inches in nursing homes. So he got together with an engineer and developed the Kill Switch.”
“The Kill Switch? That’s the name he came up with?”
“No, that’s what I call it. He calls it the Thanotone Implant. It’s an office procedure, takes less than an hour to put in. Costs fifteen hundred bucks for the unit plus the implant, which is a bargain, if you ask me. Goes into the soft tissue of your arm or leg, next to a vein. It’s a small metal capsule, containing a tiny syringe filled with a cocktail of drugs that puts you out first, then stops your heart, just like lethal injection. It’s got a little computer inside, and a remote that you can program to the hour and minute when you want it to work. You can program it months, even years ahead. Or you can do it manually, like right now, if you’re having a really bad day. Once programmed, they say it can’t fail.”
“What if I change my mind?” Jules asked.
“Touch of a button cancels the setting. So let’s say your doctor finds a tumor in your lung, gives you three months. You keep that remote close by at all times — actually it’s designed to look like a wristwatch — and when the pain gets so bad that you decide it just ain’t worth it anymore, then you pull the trigger, not the doctor or your next of kin. It’s quick and guaranteed painless. And you’re home in your own bed, not in some filthy hospital. What do you think? You interested?”
“How can they guarantee that?” Jules asked. “The painless part, I mean?”
“Because it’s a massive dose of fentanyl. Knocks you cold. When the potassium goes in, you don’t feel a thing.”
Jules finished his drink, set it down carefully. “Have you had it done?” he asked.
“I’m thinking about it. I’m still a young man, Jules. But when I’m as old as dirt like you, I probably will.”
“Hey, why wait, George? You scared it’ll go haywire and croak you when you’re not ready? How can you expect to sell me on the idea if you’re too chicken to try it yourself?”
“Okay, point taken. Tell you what: we’ll get the implants together. How about it? First me, then you. What do you say?”
He laughed. “I say, I’ll think about it. Well,” he said, getting up from his chair and leaning on his cane, “Louise starts worrying if I’m even five minutes late. You know how it is.”
“Yeah, I know. Knew. But call me if you want it done soon, so I can make the appointments. Obviously, it’s not covered by health insurance, though it seems to me they’d love the idea. Gets you out off their books faster than a can of Raid offs a cockroach.”
“So long, George.”
“See you next time, Jules.”
Jules had been more spooked than he’d let on to George about his health lately, and the idea of a kill switch actually sounded pretty good to him. The next time they got together at the club, they both had healing incisions in the crooks of their left arms. And they each wore a new digital watch thingy. He had to admit, it made him feel more confident, more in charge of what was left of his life.
His body was failing, no argument, and how did he know that Louise wouldn’t authorize feeding tubes and other so-called extraordinary measures if he had a stroke or went into a coma? She wanted to keep him around as long as possible; she’d told him so. And he’d heard that those do-not-resuscitate clauses you put into your will weren’t worth a damn once you were in the hospital. By then it was too late: welcome to the Machine, Jack. But not him; Mr. Jules Rosenstein had his finger on the Kill Switch.
“So, have you programmed yours, yet?” he asked, as they sat having their second drink. They felt a little bolder now that they’d had their implants. Hell, it almost made a guy feel reckless.
“No. You?”
“Not yet. There’s nothing that wrong with me yet. I’m slowly dying of old age, not leukemia.”
“I’m in pretty good shape, myself. I mean, if I set it to go off five years from now, I’d just be picking a number out of a hat, right? I don’t know how much time I’ve got left. Who does?”
“But the point is, George — the point you made two weeks ago that sold me on the whole idea — is that if something like a stroke does happen, you might be too messed up to set it at all. Then you’re out fifteen hundred bucks. And you can’t ask somebody else to do it for you, because that would be against the law. So what’s the deal? What are you gonna do?”
“We’ve already broken the law, Jules. The device is illegal. So, what I was thinking was, maybe you’d do it for me? I mean, we’re in this together, right? We could, uh, maybe exchange our watches. That way if one or the other of us has that worse-case scenario, God forbid, then the other could do the right thing.”
“You’re basically asking me to kill you, George, and that’s murder. I’d go to jail. You want me to go to jail?”
“How could they prove it was you? You just set the thing to go off. Or I could leave a note authorizing you to set it in the event that I wasn’t in possession of my faculties. I’ll do the same for you. We’re in this together, aren’t we?”
“No, George, we wouldn’t be in this together. You’d be dead, and I’d be under arrest. Or vice versa. I didn’t sign up for a deal like that.”
“Yeah, but you could set your own kill switch to go off. They can’t prosecute a dead man, can they? You’re untouchable. The kill switch makes you kind of like Superman.”
“So now I’m supposed to die with you? Nobody said anything about a suicide pact.”
“You’re right, Jules. I’m sorry. It’s wrong to involve a friend in your own death. It’s too personal, too big a decision. We’ll have to figure it out for ourselves. So, how’s life on the home front?”
“Same old. But why are we changing the subject? We’re both sitting here with poison pills sewn into our arms, and we’re suddenly wondering why we did it. Why did we do it, George?”
“Because it was a good idea, that’s why. Okay, so maybe you get a stroke and can’t set it. So what? You can’t expect to prevent every disaster. I don’t know about you, but I feel better for having done it. I really and truly feel like I’ve taken charge of my own death.”
“Well, I’m really and truly feeling like I let you talk me into wasting fifteen hundred bucks.”
“You say that now, Jules. But I think you’re going to come around. You’re going to be glad you did it. Because the time will come, my friend, when your number’s called. ‘Paging Mr. Jules Rosenstein. Pancreatic cancer on line one.’”
“Yeah, yeah. And this little bomb in my arm is supposed to make it all right?”
“Might want to can the B-word, Jules. It scares people.”
“You’re evading my question.”
“I didn’t say it would make you cool, calm and dry. It just puts you in the driver’s seat, gives you the power to decide when and how.”
“So you’re saying I don’t have to soldier on until the bitter end. I can opt for an early check-out and still leave a beautiful corpse.”
“Well, at least a corpse that won’t scare the morgue attendant.”
“Okay, I’m feeling a little better now, George. Maybe we did do the right thing.”
“Damn right we did. Let’s drink to death with dignity.”
* * *
Copyright © 2021 by Jeffrey Greene
