* * *
—
While Brian is out walking the Trolley Trail, a pretty path through the marshes, I’m making sausage and peppers wrapped in eggs for Jack, my dear friend and former student, who prides himself on being handy, helpful, canny, and crafty, with the long-lashed, round, and guileless eyes and pink cheeks that canny and crafty call for. Jack is, maybe, my best bet for advice on Plan B. Jack has fixed things around the house, fixed stairs and cabinets for our friends, and researched for me. I often make him breakfast, suggest things to read, and edit his writing. It sounds much more transactional than it is. I would cook for him anyway. He would fix my wobbly table anyway. It’s a little embarrassing （for me, maybe for him） but we just love each other; we are a happy match of dovetailing foibles and compatible personalities, quirks, and amusements, forty years apart. Brian is very fond of Jack. Since Alzheimer’s, for Brian, trust matters even more than fond, and he also trusts Jack. （Brian’s decided that our electrician, the nicest and most competent of men, is “shirking,” is “not doing things properly.” The man has saved our house over and over for a decade and he’s come to our house multiple times in the last three months because Brian chose to redo, reconnect, or disconnect some crucial bit of wiring.）
I make coffee for Jack and me, one eye on the clock. （Brian is a certain kind of CEO for this project: He doesn’t want to participate in discussions below his pay grade, he doesn’t want to overhear troubling or puzzling discussions, he doesn’t want any bad news, he doesn’t want any unsolved problems presented, and regular progress reports are appreciated. No meeting should last more than ten minutes.） I’d told Jack about Brian’s diagnosis a couple of weeks ago and tried to finish my sentences between gulping tears. I couldn’t understand why I cried nonstop during these phone calls. I was sure that Brian had Alzheimer’s before the MRI; I’d thought, It’s not a surprise. But it was a surprise the way every bad thing, even as you see the flames in the distance, even as the terrible thing is upon you, breathing in your ear, hammering on your narrow bones, is still a surprise.
I begin with a rant about the American healthcare system, our refusal to let people die a dignified and comfortable death, the money made off suffering, the doctors unable to face their limits and meet the needs of their patients. Jack listens and eats. I swear constantly and unimaginatively.
“Nobody can talk about it,” I say. “Nobody seems to know what they’re doing. There is literally no treatment. The most advanced Alzheimer’s research in the world says: Eat fucking blueberries. Get enough fucking sleep.”
Jack nods.
Brian comes home and they both have more breakfast and I think that sexism will exist as long as women give birth, because the two of them, the young man and the not-young man, and me, as well, are all happy as can be with them sitting like paying customers and me turning bacon, toasting bread, and filling mugs.
* * *
—
A few days later, Jack’s in my office, while Brian is at the stained-glass studio. I want to think out loud. I lie on my couch, with my hand over my eyes, the way I do when I’m trying to plot a scene for a novel, and Jack paces and then sits in my armchair. I’ve looked up how much pentobarbital we’d need. The amount is buried in some document for Exit International or Dignitas, but I unearth it （and forget it, twice, and unearth it again—I think Brian’s Alzheimer’s is destroying my memory） and finally write the amount, 20 GRAMS, on an index card. He’s got to take an anti-emetic, I say, so he won’t throw it all up. Then the stuff goes in a blender, to make a smoothie, and I have to wear gloves if I help at all, so it’s only Brian’s fingerprints on it. I say, It’s a crime, Jack.
I know that I want my children with us and I know that if we do this, they would want to plant themselves by my side, but I cannot bear to have any of them, parents all, face any legal consequences. I think that maybe they would come over after, and I can’t imagine where they would all be waiting, or what happens after. I cannot imagine this, and I close my eyes and focus on the smallest, most useless details—what room, what time of day—repeatedly. Jack leaves, quietly.
* * *
—
I research at the public library. Not on the phone, not on my laptop. The internet tells me, again and again, not to search anything from my own computer and that if I need to know something, call, don’t text, and don’t use my own laptop. I understand that if there were ever to be a real investigation, dunking my laptop into a barrel of acid won’t stop the police from finding my search history, if they know how to look for it. I research fentanyl, and every website confirms that it’s fifty to one hundred times stronger than morphine. For legit purposes, people receive it in a patch or an IV and get the steady release of extremely low doses. What’s not promising: The street version’s cooked in some guy’s lab, made into a powder or eye drops or nasal spray or pills or blotter paper, and although I am not current with the street drug circle, I’m pretty sure that it’s still true that the more valuable the stuff, the more likely it is not to be what your dealer says it is. The consequences of lying are negligible; if the stuff is lethally bad, the customer is dead. Problem solved. If it’s just not pure or even effective, the customer can complain but can’t sue and is unlikely to kill the dealer. （I assume that if I was the kind of customer who was likely to kill the dealer, said dealer would have taken precautions.） So, even if I, swanning to the buy in my clogs and Madewell jeans, could get fenty, it might not be fentanyl at all, and even if it was fenty, Brian might experience distressing confusion, agitation, and seizures before his death. I can’t get clear about how long the stuff takes to act, because most of the fenty overdoses recorded are not suicides by large, middle-aged men. Because there were a lot of said overdoses in the last couple of years, fenty is hard to get and therefore hard to buy. No fenty.
* * *
—
I do a close read on Exit International’s website. I try not to get distracted by the Sarco, a person-size capsule for the suicide of the future, designed by Philip Nitschke and a Dutch designer: Where Art Meets Its End…The concept of a capsule that could produce a rapid decrease in oxygen level, while maintaining a low CO2 level （the conditions for a peaceful, even euphoric death）， led to Sarco’s development. Is it art or…？ The elegant design was intended to suggest a sense of occasion: of travel to a “new destination,” and to dispel the “yuk” factor.
I can’t.
* * *
—
I dig into our materials from Dignitas, now that we are at least members and possible candidates. I dismiss a bunch of other options: The turkey-brining bag with helium tube, which is described as painless and looks monstrous. Phenobarbital gotten from not-too-fussy veterinarians in Mexico （or closer to home, if you can find a vet who will believe you have a horse you wish to put down, all by your lonesome）。 But sodium pentobarbital, a common, once very popular barbiturate and central-nervous-system depressant, is the thing. An overdose will certainly kill you and it will kill you painlessly; in less than a minute, you fall into a light sleep, in ten minutes, a deep sleep. In twenty, the heart stops. The lethal dose of sodium pentobarbital is roughly one gram per ten pounds. For Brian, it would take at least twenty grams to be sure. This is a fuckton of a controlled substance. Abbott Labs stopped making it in 1999. Because it is what’s used for lethal injections for executions in America, drug companies are not elbowing one another out of the way to produce a tightly controlled substance with lots of bad press. When the pills are made, they are made in fifty-or one-hundred-milligram tablets. We’d need five hundred. I call our few doctor friends for help. With real kindness, they make it clear that getting pentobarbital is （1） not their jam and （2） really really hard to do. One said, This （a self-administered suicide dose） is something that usually fails. Another, older friend said, Is Brian really sure about this? If it was me, I’d just be selfish and live as much life as I could and rely on my wife to take care of me to the end. I thought that was probably true.