Straight Cut by Madison Smartt Bell Read Free Book Online

day, appropriately enough, she was gone. I spent the next few years fighting it.
    Lauren once told me that I was the only person she completely trusted, and I believe that this was true. The only problem was that she could never stand to be around someone she trusted for very long at a stretch. I believe the subject first came up on the occasion when she made me promise to kill her.
    A comparatively recent event, about a year before we married. There were circumstances. Lauren, returning by air from some jaunt to somewhere, came down with a prodigious headache. It went on for days without improvement, until friends of hers, including me, drove her to the doctor, who expressed considerable surprise that she was still alive. Lauren had had a stroke, and for three or four weeks she lay in forced immobility, waiting for an operation that might kill her, or blind her, or turn her into an idiot. It was this last possibility that seemed to frighten her the most.
    During the pre-op period I visited her as often as I could, which was almost every evening. It would be tempting to say that I was as terrified as she, but of course I wasn’t the one with the scalpel to my head. Even as a pre-op, Lauren was in intensive care, plugged into a fearsome array of machinery. Tiny television screens displayed the most minute movements of her heart and brain, and Lauren wondered, she told me once, if she would get to watch those bouncing balls stop bouncing, supposing things did take a turn for the very worst.
    But she didn’t often say things like that. For the most part she was a model patient, obsessively cheerful and optimistic. However, there were sometimes moments when she would withdraw completely, turning away from me or whoever, to stare hypnotically at the signals of her life in their regular passage across the nearby screens. Fifteen, twenty minutes might go by like that; then she would resume her conversation at whatever point she had dropped it, so that I would wonder whether she was aware that any time had passed at all.
    Kevin was not much in evidence during those days. Hospitals depressed him. He did send flowers, which were considered insufficiently sanitary to be brought into the intensive care unit.
    I was not fond of hospitals either, but the worst times for me were those long lacunae in our conversations, when Lauren seemed virtually to stop existing. At such times I was perfectly convinced that she would die, so that our subsequent cheery chatter became as eerie as though she had already become a ghost. Then, the day before the operation, she asked me for a promise. I avoid blind promises when I can, but under the circumstances I agreed.
    “I want you to kill me,” Lauren said.
    “What?” I said. I was too surprised to be appalled.
    “If I’m not the same,” she said. “If I’m alive and out but not the same.” She closed her eyes and went on to suggest a method. There was a long straight staircase in the building where she lived. I could push her down it and her death would appear to be an accident. Lauren opened her eyes and held out her hand to me. We shook like business people on the deal.
    Thirty-six hours later we were out of those woods. The operation was a stupendous success, one for the medical journals, and Lauren was neither dead nor blind nor a vegetable. The next time I saw her, her most grave concern was finding some appealing way to cover her shaved head and her scar. She never mentioned our agreement, and in my relief I wondered frivolously if she remembered it, and if not, did that mean she was “not the same”?
    Whatever it meant, she never spoke of it again, not even after our marriage, which like the other arrangement was a deal. That came later, when Lauren had exhausted every loophole and wrinkle in immigration policy, and had either to marry or leave the States. The likeliest choice was between me and Kevin, and I don’t know whether she asked Kevin first, but I do know he never would have