The Protocol: A Prescription to Die (10 page)

Chapter 21

“See this?” Barbara moved her pen to a label called Telomere. “This number is a statistical representation of how long a person will live. The longer a person’s telomere, the longer his or her life. Both of your parents have longer than average telomeres, as do you probably. If they were healthy, I’d be congratulating them. However, because they probably both have another twenty years, and they both have medical issues, they will be a cost burden that cannot be justified. They are a liability.”

“They are not a liability to me. I take care of them. I’m happy to do it,” Butch was beginning to get defensive. He would protect his parents at all costs.

“That’s all well and fine. Commendable as a matter of fact. But moot nonetheless.”

“I don’t understand. What’s Protocol U?” his voice quaked. Butch could not follow what she was trying to get across to him. He looked her in the eye. It seemed to have a joyful glint to it.

“Eugenics, Mr. Rheumy. It’s where we have to go. Read up on it. You’ll find it fascinating, I’m sure. And I have the new laws on my side now. Aequalis was designed to distribute health care to those who need it, those who deserve it, and to restrict access to it for those who don’t. Those like your parents. You don’t actually think they want to be a burden on you, do you? Don’t you think they’d rather slip away peacefully, and no longer be a nuisance?”

She didn’t give Butch a chance to answer any of her questions. Barbara took her pen, crossed out the “U” on both sheets, and changed it to a “T.”

“I have the power Butch. I can help you if you help me. I can extend your parents’ lives for the time being just by simply changing the “U” to a “T” on a simple little computer program. Assuming, of course, that you agree to the rules.”

“Rules?” said Butch.

“Yes. Rules. You help me. I help you, within reason, of course.”

Butch was dumbfounded. Did she just tell him that his parents were scheduled to be put to sleep like an old dog?

Her smile tried to replant itself on her face. Butch thought her cheeks would crack from the new movement.

“I completely understand if you don’t want to help. I just thought I’d we may be able to reach a mutual understanding. You can go.”

Butch pushed his chair back, then stopped. He had no idea which way to turn. He had his parent’s life in his hands. He needed to figure things out.

“What will happen?”

“To what?”

“My parents,” he said as he pointed to the papers. “With that?”

Barbara looked at the calendar, referred to the profiles, then, using her pen, clicked across the days of the week. She mouthed her numbers as she counted.

“Using the current schedule, they’ll be dead by the end of the week. Give or take a few days, of course. It all depends upon resource constraints,” she said very matter-of-factly as if she were ordering a burger through a drive-through.

Butch sat down.

“What do you want me to do?”

“There you go. I thought you’d come around to understand my point of view. There are things that I’ll need you to do for me and Aequalis. Small things. A man of your...” she looked straight at him, her eyes scanned him from head to toe. “...persuasive size. It could prove very useful. You’ll be hearing from me.” Barbara turned away and made a few clicks on her laptop.

Butch sat up again and walked towards the door.

“Oh. One more thing, Mr. Rheumy.”

Butch turned around.

“Do you see this? This is your father,” she said as she turned her laptop screen towards the door and pointed to the information shown on its screen. It was the display of his cardiac sinus rhythm, minus the usual beeping.

Butch nodded.

“I assume you understand that if you say a word to anyone about this conversation, all I have to do is click one little button on my screen, and his pacemaker is turned off. His life is in your hands.”

She returned her attention to the laptop and didn’t look up.

“Good night, Mr. Rheumy. We’ll keep in touch.”

Butch turned and walked towards the door.

“Make sure the door closes behind you.”

Chapter 22

Eat didn’t believe words existed in the English language, or any language for that matter, to describe the feeling of learning that your father was likely murdered. To learn that what he believed to be the remains of his father were nothing but concrete mix and chicken bones, melted his circuits and forced his brain into what seemed to be a permanent reset. He sat trancelike on the couch for a good hour after Andy gave him the news, and he tried to grasp words he didn’t believe existed. Eat could make computers sing, but he didn’t know the commands to erase what he’d just learned. Neither of them said much during that hour.

She just held him.

He caressed the pen between his fingers.

Click, click. Twirl, twirl.

Click, click. Twirl, twirl.

It felt good.

At this moment, he needed a security blanket. The motion and repetitive sound helped him think. It had helped him get over technical roadblocks in the past, and he desperately wanted it to help him get over the gargantuan wall in front of him right now.

Click, click. Twirl, twirl.

Click, click. Twirl, twirl.

Andy put her hand on his and tried to calm him, or at least stop the clicking.

“I’m sorry,” she picked up his hand and kissed it.

Eat cocked his head and gave her a perplexed look. What was she apologizing for? He knew she didn’t put the concrete in the box, throw in some masticated chicken leftovers, and tell him it was his father.

“Sorry? For what?”

Despite the tension in the air, she gave a sort of sad, wistful chuckle through her nose. She shook her head, put his face between her hands, and looked into his eyes.

“Oh. Eat. What am I going to do with you?” Andy wiped his wet cheeks dry. She stood up and took his hand. “Come on,” she said. “You need to relax and I know exactly what you need.”

Chapter 23

After the cave troll left, Barbara returned to her spreadsheets and data analysis. There were still a few things to wrap up before heading home.

She clicked the application’s print command, and the profiles of the next ten Protocol U candidates spit from the laser printer on her desk. She picked up the phone, and pressed the speed dial number for Carl Titmueller, the man she’d hired to bring the Protocol U assignments to fruition. After all, she had books to close, and quarterly reports to create. She didn’t have time for the more mundane aspects of her job.

“I have work for you,” she said without a greeting. She looked at the clock on her wall. “Yes. You have thirty minutes. Don’t be late. Remember the rules.”

Barbara assembled the profiles, and then returned to her computer. She scrolled through the page, and clicked the “Administer” button. Within seconds, the machine located in the corner of her office began to hum. It resembled a vending machine, but it didn’t have any front glass, and certainly no Butterfingers, Milky Ways, or Kit Kat bars. Instead, it was now measuring dosages, and preparing syringes for each of the Protocol U candidates that were scheduled for administration. It dispensed her special brand of refreshment.

By the time Barbara reached the machine, it had completed the first dosage package. She picked it out of the dispensing tray.

It was an ordinary syringe with an ID number printed on it, and filled with a dose of succinyl choline appropriately fatal for the candidate. There were no names, just numbers. In this case, 3305-U. Barbara referred to the profiles and scanned the list until she matched the ID. 3305-U: Katie Andrews, Down’s Syndrome, $75,000 costs to date, anticipated savings of $375,000, over the next five years. Of course, that did not include the administration fee paid to Carl.

She nodded, smiled, and crossed Katie’s name off of the top of her list. The numbers for tomorrow looked good.

Very good.

The software was working as designed.

Now, if she could just get the expense column to do the same thing.

The remaining nine dosage packs rolled onto the machine’s tray. Barbara picked each one up, cross-referenced the worksheet, then tossed it into a small box.

Everything matched perfectly.

Barbara smoothed the wrinkles on her dress and turned off her computer. There was a report on her desk that had the latest Aequalis accounting stats on it. She knew they weren’t what anyone was hoping for.

“That can wait,” she said as she opened her desk drawer and threw the report on top of a stack of red pens.

Before she locked her door, Barbara grabbed the box containing the syringes Titmueller would need and an unmarked cross-reference chart he’d use to check-off each completed protocol.

Chapter 24

Barbara sat down on her couch and sipped from a freshly poured glass of chardonnay. When she was alone, she could be herself, and it felt relaxing for a change. She could tell her housekeeping service had been at her condo this morning; the telltale lines the vacuum left on the carpet were a dead giveaway. Plus, even though she’d adamantly told them to ensure they were put back exactly as they found them, they always moved her pictures. Not only were they in the wrong spots, but they were facing the wrong direction.

They just could not listen.

They never have.

They never would.

The first picture, the one at Christmas with her twin, eight-year old nephews hanging around her neck with ear-to-ear grins, was at the wrong angle on the table. She rubbed a fingerprint smudge off of the glass frame, and put it back on the table in its correct position.

The second picture, the one of her and her father taken at the same Christmas, was completely wrong. It was her most cherished picture, and the fact that it was moved made her blood boil. Not only was it at the incorrectly placed at end of the table, it was standing in the wrong direction. Instead of facing the window so her father could see outside, it was set so that he was looking at the television.

Her father hated television.

“Sorry, Daddy,” she said as the corrected the placement of the picture to face the balcony. “Better? I know it’s not L.A., but we’ll be back soon. I promise.”

Barbara rubbed her nose and sneezed.

They’d used one of those pine cleaners again. She could even still smell the lemon cleaner they used in the kitchen, but compared to pinecones, citrus was at least somewhat tolerable. The pine fresh scent was another thing. Not only was the smell nauseating, but, like her father, she was allergic to it. The lingering odor in her bathroom smelled as if she were strolling through a pine forest. On the way to the toilet, her nose would begin to drip and itch before she touched the doorknob. When she interviewed the service, she told them that she didn’t want to smell anything. More specifically, she didn’t want to know that they’d been in her home.

Of course, just like the rule regarding her pictures, they didn’t listen, and always left clues they’d been in her home. The fact that they likely didn’t speak a word of English was probably the root of their problem.

Barbara was certain that there were plenty of other Latinas in Minneapolis who were looking for work and money. She’d just have to make sure they could understand the words, “I don’t want to smell that you’ve been here, period. I don’t want to smell your 409, your Windex, or your PineSol. Don’t use them. Hot water and vinegar only.”

She’d deal with them in the morning and find a new service.

Barbara sighed and drank more wine as she thought about having to add another mundane task to her never-ending list of to-do’s.

Right now, she wanted to relax and forget who she had to be during the day. The evening was hers. Her day-time persona was very tiring. She longed to be the young woman sitting next to her father in that picture again.

But she was gone. As dead as her father.

Barbara gazed at the photo of her father and fondly remembered the wise words of advice he gave her the day she graduated with her Master’s degree: “Net worth, honeybunch. Look at their net worth. Most people aren’t worth the skin they’re in. The fewer of them the better; there will be more for those of us who count.”

He was wise, wise man.

He would have been proud of her accomplishments. She blew a kiss at the man in the picture frame who was now correctly gazing out across the dark balcony towards the so-called mighty Mississippi River.

Barbara looked at her fingernails and clicked a wayward piece of lunch off of her left forefinger. She’d just had her nails done and she didn’t like them being dirty. She downed the remaining wine in her glass, re-filled it to the brim, downed it again, and re-filled it to the halfway mark.

She was thirsty.

And already feeling the wine.

It had definitely been a long and stressful day. The numbers were not progressing as quickly as she’d wanted. The insurance rolls were not thinning fast enough. People from D.C. who watched the numbers even more than she did were calling wondering what was going on. Titmueller wasn’t able to keep up with the Protocols she’d assigned him and the costs were increasing day-by-day.

She’d deal with things tomorrow.

Barbara slowly stood up, grabbed the bottle of wine by its green neck, took her glass, and walked towards her bathroom. The room that now smelled like a Boy Scout Christmas tree lot.

*

Barbara studied herself in the mirror. The lines on her face had definitely deepened during her tenure at Aequalis, even more so since she’d moved to Minnesota. She pressed one of the lines with her fingers, stretched it taut, and cringed. They were more like crevasses than wrinkles.

“They lied to me Daddy. They said it would be stress free with blue skies that go on forever,” she said to her reflection. “Give me smog, culture, and BMW’s over fresh air, weird accents, and Buicks any day. You’d hate it here, Daddy.”

Barbara made a mental note to make an appointment with her plastic surgeon the next time she was in Los Angeles: the knife or Botox. She didn’t care which, she just wanted them gone.

She took another sip of wine, and stripped down to her bra and panties. Unlike the lines on her face, the half-moon line that stretched from the side of her ribcage to her belly button was the intentional result of a scalpel, not stress. Even though the scar was healing, it was still red and somewhat tender. The lotion she used to minimize the scar tissue seemed to be working though. At more than $1,000, Barbara thought the small jar of Le Prairie Cellular Cream should make the scar evaporate. On her meager government salary, she normally wouldn’t be able to afford such an extravagance, but luckily, she approved her own expense reports.

It was good being in charge of the vault where all of the cash was kept and she knew how to hide things.

When she was given the news about her condition, Barbara was able to put things into perspective, to think things through with logic instead of emotion. Her version of logic, of course, as that’s what mattered. After thinking things through, the solution to her medical predicament basically came down to two options.

Option A was to wait for a kidney transplant using the normal methods. She’d likely die while she waited; lingering on the donor list, waiting for her turn, wasn’t a practical consideration.

Option A never had a serious chance.

She was too important. She needed to take things into her own hands if she was going to survive. There was too much she wanted to accomplish, and there were too many people without value who had what she needed: a viable kidney.

The answer was simple and very straight-forward, when it finally revealed itself.

She chose Option B.

She needed to get a kidney from someone who didn’t really matter. Someone without any intrinsic value to society. Someone whose life wasn’t worth living. Someone whose potential death, as a result of the extraction, would be a minor blip in the big scheme of things. Someone who could be bought. And, as her Daddy always advised, someone with little or no net worth.

So that’s what she did.

She listened to her Daddy.

He was always right.

Once the inquiry was made, things moved pretty fast.

Barbara made a few phone calls, and ultimately found an inventive capitalist named Javier in the Philippines. He had contacts within the peasantry who wanted cash more than their kidney. Javier took 98% of her payment for his finder’s fee, and gave the donor the remainder.

Minus expenses of course.

It was still a windfall for the donor. After all, when you have zero, one is always better.

Once a match was made with someone having her blood type, all she did was wire the cash to cover the cost of the transplant surgery to an account in the Caymans, and book a flight to France. Next, she met with the doctor in Paris who would perform the transplant.

Despite the lingering pain, everything worked very smoothly.

The next step towards recovery was modifying her records so Aequalis covered the entire procedure: from initial purchase, to surgery, to recovery and her meds.

That was the easy part. She had all of the access, after all.

In the end, like everything else in life, the resolution to her problem came down to mathematics, control, and access.

Her life had value.

The donor’s did not.

Additionally, she had the control and the access to the data and systems needed to approve her claim.

Now she only had to manage her meds and worry about a big, long scar that stretched across her abdomen. Along with the new lines on her face, the scar was just another item for the plastic surgeon to fix. Something for someone else’s to-do list for a change.

Barbara had become used to the pharmaceutical ritual she was forced to perform twice a day, every day. A procession of seven bottles was lined against the vanity in the precise order in which she was supposed to consume them: Cyclosporine, Azathioprine, Prednisone, Potassium, Valacyclovir, Sulfamethoxazole, and Pantoprazole.

They were a meal of multi-colored capsules and tablets to keep her body from killing her new kidney. Anti-rejection meds. Anti-virals. Blood thinners. Vitamin supplements. Pills to boost the immune system being decimated by the anti-rejection meds. The line of bottles represented a $1,000 per month cache of chemistry engineered to keep her alive.

“I’m worth it, right Daddy?” she asked her invisible father in the mirror’s reflection.

Barbara moved closer to the mirror, inspected a blemish on her nose, then pursed her lips and gave her reflection a kiss.

“You bet you are, Barbie. Every cent,” she said in a deep voice mimicking her father’s.

She liked it when he called her Barbie.

Barbara swallowed each pill with a sip of wine. They were supposed to be taken with food, and since she had a spoon of cottage cheese two hours ago, she figured she was good.

She looked in the mirror again.

“That’s my girl,” she said again in her father’s voice.

*

Barbara finished her regimen of pills, and then quickly washed the taste of the gelatin capsules out of her mouth with another gulp of the chardonnay. As she tilted her head back to drain the dregs of wine, she saw the black, garden-sized garbage bag next to her shower. She could even see the edges of the first bag within the outer bag.

She understood and accepted that he was as dumb as a box of rocks, but even with the chipped front tooth, he was kinda cute underneath everything. He just needed to be cleaned up. Taken through the spin cycle a few times. What was better was that he learned to play by the rules: her rules, of course. He had learned to throw away his clothes before he climbed into her bed. She’d provided him the garbage bags to use. She even gave him new clothes with each clandestine visit. After a few scoldings and cold shoulders, she’d been able to convince him to shower.

“Use two bags,” she’d told him. “Put your old clothes in one bag, tie it up, then put it in another. I don’t want to smell you.”

She pushed the bag with her foot into the hallway towards the kitchen. She didn’t want to be able to smell even a hit of what was contained within that plastic barrier. It served as a reminder for him to take the bag on his way out, and throw it with the other garbage he managed each day.

Ready for bed, she turned off the light, and opened the side door leading into the master bedroom. Barbara sniffed the air before walking further into the room. It smelled both familiar and refreshingly clean. It was much better than the pine scent of the bathroom she was leaving, plus it didn’t make her sneeze.

“You showered. Good.” she said. “Used my shampoo, too.”

“It was there. I know the rules.”

“I put new clean clothes for you on the chair,” she said as closed the door to the master bathroom and headed towards her bed. “New shoes too. Don’t forget the bag when you leave.”

*

Barbara heard a faint click, and the small light next to her nightstand turned on. A dim glow filled the room.

He was on her bed.

Naked.

Carl Titmueller sneered, and pointed at the empty space next to him.

“You’re getting pretty bossy. Now get over here.”

Barbara walked to her bed, knelt on the mattress, and looked down at the man on her bed. The Egyptian cotton sheets melted against her legs.

Titmueller reached up, grabbed her by the front of her bra, and pulled her towards him. He forced his tongue into her mouth, and then bit her lip.

Barbara whined and tasted the blood pooling under her tongue.

Carl let her mouth free.

“You’re late. You said thirty minutes.”

“Busy day,” she said as she wiped her mouth.

Blood smeared across the back of her hand.

Titmueller slapped her, and then threw her face-down onto the bed.