Death's End

Do you wish to terminate your life? For yes, select 3. For no, select 0.

Lao Li selected 3.

Do you wish to terminate your life? For yes, select 5. For no, select 0.

Lao Li selected 5.

The process repeated twice more. And then:

Do you wish to terminate your life? This is your last prompt. For yes, select 4. For no, select 0.

A surge of sorrow made Tianming dizzy, and he almost fainted. Even when his mother died, he didn’t feel such extreme pain and anger. He wanted to scream at Lao Li to select 0, to break the glass window, to suffocate that voice.

But Lao Li selected 4.

Noiselessly, the injector came to life. Tianming could see the column of yellowish liquid in the glass tube shorten and then disappear. Lao Li never moved. He closed his eyes and went to sleep.

The crowd around Tianming dissipated, but he remained where he was, his hand pressed against the glass. He wasn’t looking at the lifeless body lying within. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t looking at all.

“There was no pain.” Dr. Zhang’s voice was so low that it sounded like the buzzing of a mosquito. Tianming felt a hand land on his left shoulder. “It’s a combination of a massive dose of barbitone, muscle relaxant, and potassium chloride. The barbitone takes effect first and puts the patient into a deep sleep, the muscle relaxant stops his breathing, and the potassium chloride stops the heart. The whole process takes no more than twenty, thirty seconds.”

After a while, Dr. Zhang’s hand left Tianming’s shoulder, and Tianming heard his departing footsteps. Tianming never turned around.

He suddenly remembered how he knew the doctor. “Doctor,” Tianming called out softly. The footsteps stopped. Tianming still didn’t turn around. “You know my sister, don’t you?”

The reply came after a long pause. “Yes. We were high school classmates. When you were little, I remember seeing you a couple of times.”

Mechanically, Tianming left the main building of the hospital. Everything was clear now. Dr. Zhang was working for his sister; his sister wanted him dead. No, wanted him to “conduct the procedure.”

Although Tianming often recalled the happy childhood he had shared with his sister, they had grown apart as they grew up. There was no overt conflict between them, and neither had hurt the other. But they had come to see each other as completely different kinds of people, and each felt that the other held them in contempt.

His sister was shrewd but not smart, and she had married a man who was the same way. They were not successful in their careers, and even with grown children, the couple couldn’t afford to buy a home. Since her husband’s parents had no room for them, the family had ended up living with Tianming’s father.

Tianming, on the other hand, was a loner. In career and personal life, he wasn’t any more successful than his sister. He had always lived by himself in dormitories that belonged to his employer, and left the responsibility for taking care of his frail father entirely to his sister.

Tianming suddenly understood his sister’s thinking. The medical insurance was insufficient to cover the expenses for his hospitalization, and the longer it went on, the bigger the bill grew. Their father had been paying for it out of his life savings, but he had never offered to use that same money to help Tianming’s sister and her family to buy a house—a clear case of favoritism. From his sister’s point of view, their father was spending money that should be hers. Besides, the money was being wasted on treatments that could only prolong, but not cure, the illness. If Tianming chose euthanasia, his sister’s inheritance would be preserved, and he would suffer less.

The sky was filled with misty, gray clouds, just like in his dream. Looking up at this endless grayness, Tianming let out a long sigh.

All right. If you want me to die, I’ll die.

He thought of “The Judgment” by Franz Kafka, in which a father curses his son and sentences him to death. The son agrees, as easily as someone agreeing to take out the trash or to shut the door, and leaves the house, runs through the streets onto the bridge, and leaps over the balustrade to his death. Later, Kafka told his biographer that as he wrote the scene, he was thinking of “a violent ejaculation.”

Tianming now understood Kafka, the man with the bowler hat and briefcase, the man who walked silently through Prague’s dim streets more than a hundred years ago, the man who was as alone as he was.

—————

Someone was waiting for Tianming when he returned to his hospital room: Hu Wen, a college classmate.