Opt Me Out

If there was a button, Mark would have pressed it a long time ago—if there was a way out. The thing about suicide that made it so off-putting was the actually-doing-it part. Mark tried to explain this to his German Sheppard, but Max clearly couldn't relate.

"A dog's life," Mark said to the soap suds as they disappeared down the kitchen sink drain. He dried his hands on a purple dish towel and flicked off the light switch by the Wusthof knives and the stove. "Kitchen's closed," he said to Max. The dog gave him a tiny, questioning whimper and then let his head slump back onto the cool hardwood of the entranceway.

Guns made a mess, and he had heard stories (hadn't everyone?) about uncooperative trajectories—about people so miserable they couldn't even end their own lives, about eating food through a straw or pushing yourself around in a wheelchair with a blow tube. There were other methods, of course, but none of them seemed ... well ... easy enough. It was a chicken-shit thing to do anyway, killing yourself, no reason to get macho about it. The path of least resistance was best.

This was something Max could understand. To a dog, life is cut and dry. It is crotch sniffs and red meat. It's a good hard sprint, it's a bowl of water in August. It's a bitch now and then if the gonads are still in place.

All of which would have made this easier. Even the bitch part: the idea that "loved ones" were no more attached or unattached than a one-night-stand or a quick ejaculation. That was the other problem: You piss a lot of people off when you kill yourself. You leave behind all that misery and anger and confusion. You make more of what you wanted to leave behind.

The whole thing was a pain in the ass. Mark guessed it boiled down to which was more of a pain: the living thing, or suicide.