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“Let us begin then, shall we, our lecture on the portable death-kit…”

It’s the interrogator from the secret police again, if that’s what he is, for certainly he cannot be what he is presenting himself as now (oh but can’t he?), which is a professor of medical ethics at a top-ranked university teaching hospital! The “students” who fill the lecture hall, though no doubt meant to play the innocuous role of first-year medical residents, are so obviously trim and hardened hitmen as to make one wonder if they aren’t, indeed, there to learn to be physicians after all; or, perhaps, it’s a curriculum developed for a new sort of hybrid—the physician killer: in other words, a specialized army of Asclepian demigods.

In any event, down at the front of the amphitheater, beside the lectern where the mock (?) professor stands, is a glass bathtub of tepid water in which a girl sits, naked, except for the plastic bag which had been fitted over her head some minutes before, and is now molding itself to her face not unlike the wet, slick skin of a harbor seal—but transparent and sans the white whiskers, of course. (Please note: Neena’s mind is obviously wandering—or, more accurately, escaping into absurd irrelevancies. Is she in shock?).

Using a laser pointer, the professor indicates the three orange-brown prescription bottles, two resting on the edge of the tub, the third floating upside-down in the soapy water. Each bottle is significantly empty. The attentive student can see where this is heading.

“Ambien,” the professor informs the class, “prescribed for insomnia, Xanax for anxiety, one milligram each, sixty-six pills were left, let’s say, only a third ingested…” Hands shoot up around the hall. “Please,” the professor sighs, “this is not a toxicology class. We are not concerned with lethal and non-lethal dosages here; the drugs, in this instance, are merely symbolic.” He points to the small nickel-plated flask lying beside the glass tub in a puddle splashed onto the faux tile floor, “as is the type of alcohol and amount consumed.” The hands drop down, the students who had raised them, red-faced. “What we are concerned with here is the economy and effectiveness of the portable death-kit.”

At this point, he directs the students’ attention to the slender hands of the girl nestled, fetus-like, inside the glass tub. Her blue-tinged, trembling fingers are curled under a thick, putty-colored elastic band in a desperate attempt to hold it, however tentatively, and along with it, the bottom edge of the plastic bag, away from her (as yet) unmarred flesh, thereby keeping the band from snapping snugly against her slender throat, which would, as originally intended, cause said putty-colored elastic band to seal off the bag and whatever access to oxygen (precious little) our pretty victim still might have, thus causing her, ultimately, within the space of three or four minutes, to semi-voluntarily suffocate. 

“It’s quite effective,” the professor says, “nearly fool-proof, even for a fool. Suicide is such a devilishly tricky business, rife with complications, miscalculations, and notoriously suspect to all manner of second thoughts, last minute heroics, attention-seeking melodramatics, vomiting, stomach-pumping, strokes of luck, and acts of (ha-ha) god, so-called. You have no idea how many times people with every good intention of overdosing end up simply falling asleep before they can do themselves any real harm and wake up late the next morning to shelve the whole idea, wondering what the hell they could ever have been thinking, and suffering no more than a dull hangover and a pee-stained mattress for their trouble—and our disappointment.”

The professor shakes his head with faux solemnity, reflecting upon his authentic disapproval of such an unacceptable state of affairs, and the student body of murderers chuckles in anticipation of the joke that’s surely—and shortly—to follow.

“It’s true, I suppose, what they say,” the professor, hardly one to disappoint his audience, continues the jest with a straight-man’s instinct for timing and the delivery of the intended unintended punch-line. “Things really do look better in the morning.”

Ho ho.

For the girl, however, there will be no yuck-yucks, no ho-hos, no more mornings to see things better, same, or different in; unless, of course, she, too, is a student and has merely volunteered her services (perhaps she’s the teacher’s pet, in which case one may reasonably presume she’s earned the general hostility of the rest of the class, or, just the opposite, a poor student in need of extra-credit) to illustrate today’s lesson in the portable death-kit. She may, what’s more, not be a student, per se, but, instead, a teaching assistant or, taking an entirely different approach, she may have no connection to the school at all, being, rather, a local girl, a waitress at one of the local cantinas, say, where the professor has his morning roll and coffee or, in the evening, his lonely meatloaf special, or, without stretching credulity to its absolute limit, she may even be an aspiring actress at the local community theater who has accepted the professor’s offer to earn some extra money for her exorbitantly expensive classes at the famous actor’s studio in the city.

As dodgy as the situation seems to be (naturally all sorts of wild rumors fly about the town as to what really goes on up there at that secluded private university behind the gates; after all, its only to be expected with all the young women who go missing in these parts…), there’s hardly any real danger, even in performing the role of victim while illustrating the operation of a portable death-kit, not with the professor standing hardly any more than three-feet, four-and-one-half inches away (on his “mark,” as it were). Two quick, not even loping steps from the podium and he has but to reinforce with his own her now terminally quivering fingers whose grip on the thick band of putty-colored elastic is faltering beyond recall. That is all he has to do—that is all!—to keep the band from snapping shut against the girl’s oh-so-snowy flesh thereby sealing off her fate and the plastic bag, which, as we mentioned previously (and preposterously), has already molded itself to the features of the girl’s face (like the wet skin of a harbor seal, transparent and sans white whiskers, remember?) soaked with perspiration, saliva, and—yuck!—snot.

Of course, there are several other legitimate possibilities we might just as unreasonably—and enjoyably—entertain. For instance, what if, as previously proposed, the girl were a student, teaching assistant, local girl, waitress, aspiring actress, hell, it really makes no difference does it? She could be anyone, any woman who, for whatever reason—the possible reasons being too numerous to itemize here—actually wants to take her life and has volunteered, so to speak, her life to science, or, in this case, it may be more accurate to say “government service,” since she was only going to throw it away anyhow in some thoughtless, selfish act of self-immolation.

Noble, yes, in a sense, her intentions, even meritorious, indeed, quite possibly, but let’s consider the matter further before we go issuing any Congressional Medals or nominations for Catholic sainthood: the girl gets to end her life not in any old slapdash razor slash, some close-your-eyes-and-let’s-hope-for-the-best gulping of pills, expiring her last breath alone and unappreciated; instead, she is going out in front of an appreciative audience of young scholars and with the full benefit of the expert assistance of the leading authority and practitioner of semi-voluntary suicide in the business—the inventor of the patented portable death-kit himself, the guy with the laser pointer, the professor, who Neena recognizes as the secret police interrogator.

Dammit, every potential suicide should only be so freaking lucky!                        

True enough; but before we abandon this line of specious speculation for good let’s first consider another and one last corollary possibility, which is that the girl—being any of the aforementioned types, waitress, student, etc—had no intention of going through with the suicide at all, either having changed her mind at some point in the formal presentation of the lesson or volunteering from the start (for financial compensation or school credits or to fulfill some court-imposed obligation to perform community service as punishment for some legal misdemeanor or other) with the understanding that she is to play the role of victim exclusively for demonstration purposes (as well as for the unacknowledged—perhaps even to herself— perverse sexual thrill) only to realize, alas, too late, alas, always too late, that she’s been duped, that the professor (secret police interrogator, professor, doctor, etc. they all lie, you know) has no intention, never did, of taking the long ago aforementioned and agreed-upon two quick steps to the side of the glass bathtub and relieving her long faltering, at last faltered, fingers of the growing and finally unbearable tension of the thick, putty-colored elastic band which has snapped closed around her windpipe for at least a minute-and-a-half by now, cutting off entirely her already insufficient (insufficient to sustain human brain function, that is) supply of oxygen, even as her naked body slides smoothly down a little further into the glass tub of rapidly cooling, hardly even tepid anymore water, her consciousness having succumbed easily to the pole-axed slumber that sleeping pills and gin liberally combined are known inevitably to lead, a countdown to sheepless oblivion even the most inept of suicidal Bo-Peeps might reasonably expect to achieve.

In other words, you might as well stop waiting, don’t hold your breath, there will be no dubious last-minute deus ex machina heroics, this isn’t an episode of Dudley Do-Right. Instead the professor keeps right on talking, calmly, methodically, (rather monotonously to be honest) glancing occasionally at his notes, but, all the same, a lively and spirited lecturer by comparison to most, a man who clearly loves his field of study and the rewards of sharing his vast and all-encompassing knowledge with the next generation, a mentor incarnate, molding and enlivening the goop of young minds, infecting them, you might say, with his own infectious love of lethal scholarship, of which he is a-flame, a-blaze, a veritable roaring out-of-control-eat-up-everything-in-its-path inferno in the long lightless night of ignoramuses who make it their business to torture, maim, and kill for a living.

More than a mere businessman, surpassing the scholar and cop, the politician and physician, we are talking here about a priest of arcane knowledge, a hierophant of information, a director of central intelligence, like Thoth, a god of the old school, the very Old School, which, by the way, is his name, at least the name he’s taken, or, at the very least, the name he’s given in the course description in the university catalog and therefore the name a prim, scrub-faced young scholar in the regulation (for females) combat-style black jumpsuit, uses when, raising her hand and, (miraculously) called upon, chosen, as it were, seen, recognized, pointed out like Moses from the clouds above…damn, where were we? Oh, yes, this young scholar says, “Er…Mr. Thoth, I think she’s dead.”

And, indeed, the girl we’ve been making so much about, going on and on about, has croaked, in the time it took to describe the professor and his technique for learned harangue (something between Hitler and JFK channeled through a folksy Bill Clinton, you can only imagine!) his gimlet-eyed passion, some might call it (not one-hundred-percent unfairly) his ‘overwrought hysteria’ for knowledge, and even to discover, unexpectedly, in the course of all this, our interlocutor’s unexpectedly familiar (at least to buffs of Egyptian mythology) assumed name, all in a span of a minute or two, three or four if you include our summation up to this point in the present sentence (which seems now to have been going on for hours, doesn’t it?), the girl, her dim and feeble, somehow “far away” struggles inside the glass tub having (unfortunately) gone in the interim undescribed (more or less), have finally ceased, inevitably, by slow degrees and slower,  as she suffocated/drowned, never entirely waking from her drug-induced slumber, her features comically distorted beneath the condensation inside the plastic bag, which, one can see, by evidence of the great sinkhole in the vicinity of her mouth, she sucked partially down her throat in a desperate attempt to draw a breath beyond her last, her eyes all a-google and a-goggle as if she hadn’t seen it coming until the last conceivable moment, skin a cerulean blue, she resembles no more the aforementioned harbor seal, but a sex doll for alien necrophiles, or, for the more romantically inclined among you, the Sleeping Beauty of fairy tales but with a plastic laundry bag tied around her head and reclining in a giant glass slipper among her floating feces.

And, of course, there’s one other major difference between our Sleeping Beauty and the one of our childish bedtime tales—a long-needed correction to the original text as far as the so-called ‘Mr. Thoth’ is concerned—this “princess” in the tub isn’t ever waking up.

Touché!

Mr. Thoth looks up over the heads of his prize students (is this class being filmed for PBS?) ringed about him in the horseshoe-shaped teaching hall, these shiny-faced idealistic young hopefuls, our most precious resource, the very future of our world, the graduating class of whatever year it happens to be, each of them hanging upon a tenterhook to catch his every wisdom-saturated word…Mr. Thoth looks up and over all this post adolescent adoration towards the special handicap-accessed doorway in which Neena, sitting in her wheelchair (differently-abled), is involuntarily auditing his course. He directs her way a wink of lascivious, not-so-ambiguous intent.

“And the best part of all,” he says, holding up for the class to see it properly, Exhibit 83: a black satin clutch purse the size of an index card, (the 3x5 size card, please note), in which everything necessary for the aforementioned suicide can fit and with room left over for a cell phone and lipstick, “it’s portable!”