I almost agreed to kill someone today. Almost. It sounds bad but it’s kind of my job. The person paying me, my employer you could say, was the guy who wanted to die. I wasn’t going to kill-him kill him, I hardly ever do. I just help people who are committed to doing it themselves. I make sure it reaches completion. The idea is to avoid a messy, half-finished outcome. I have sort of a good reputation in the business.

This is not what I wanted to be when I grew up. I didn’t major in self-actuated demise planning. I didn’t even take the elective. My post-collegiate aspirations were to take my sports marketing major with the international business minor and perform essentially any task offered by the global sports marketing industry. What no one ever told me, not my academic advisor or student loan officer or any of my teachers, was that it would have helped to be an athlete.

A few months after graduation I was jobless, low on money and bored senseless. I decided to plunge into the gig economy. An online ad here, a couple of faked references on a shell website there; flyers on supermarket message boards and telephone poles announced my availability to a needy public. College grad, studious, engaging, talented, not bad looking I might add, willing to assist with all your needs, international sport related or otherwise.

The response was underwhelming. Walk the dog and fetch the dry cleaning for finance grads out making their first million; put the a/c in the attic and provide social media lessons for the granny set. The pay was lousy, work was tedious. The young Wall Street-ers were always trying to screw me and grannies were always trying to feed me. Some of the dogs tried to bite me. Then one day I got a very strange call. The unspecified job that promised to pay a veritable fortune in dog dollars.

The caller insisted on meeting somewhere discreet. Given my back-alley aversion, we met at the local public library. He told me to call him Dan. He looked like a Dan: white, mid- to late-sixties, slim, perhaps, a bit fatigued. He was dressed like Hartford, Connecticut would dress on a brunch date with New Haven.  

We met in the magazine section. He chose The Economist; I selected the much larger Rolling Stone just in case things got rough. He told me the non-essential essentials of his life. He went to college somewhere; worked 40 years in the city somewhere; lived in Westchester somewhere. Or Fairfield. I’m not a good listener. He had two kids, grown, educated and employed. Mr. and Mrs. Dan were married thirty-something years; happy little love birds in their empty little love nest.

He rambled on until I began to wonder how I could escape without having to kill him. Then, finally, he paused. His lips quivered, his throat tensed. I began to pay attention again. The bill for the good times was coming due. Recompense would be painful, financially ruinous and, ultimately, complete. He had a medical transcript describing a debilitating disease resulting in inevitable neurological degeneration. The document said it was incurable. Dan would wither slowly, painfully, and expensively, draining the savings he and his wife had accumulated for their later years. He did not want to burden his family with years of duress as they witnessed his slow demise.

It was a hopeless situation but, like any good businessman, Dan had a counteroffer. He wanted to cut his losses and get out now. He even had a plan; he would venture out on a challenging hike and take what would appear to be an accidental spill. He just needed someone to make sure he didn’t chicken out and to confirm that he didn’t survive and end up in worse condition than what fate promised.

Every instinct told me to say no. It felt wrong. It was wrong. I hadn’t gone to college to help off boomers. I started to tell Dan that I couldn’t do it, I really did but his expression was unbearable. I told him I’d think about it, but he looked so hopelessly defeated that I ended up saying okay. He cried in relief, and maybe from fear. He thanked me, put the magazine back and said he would be in touch when he was ready.

I hated myself before he reached the door. I barely slept for weeks. I tried to rationalize; it was his life; his choice. It was quasi-legal but still legal. Probably. Or maybe not. If it was insurance fraud, I appreciated the irony of his insurance company paying him so he could pay me so I could pay down my student loan. But I decided Dan could find someone. I wasn’t the only broke and jobless college grad in town. Time passed and it got easier to forget about it. It became a quirky story to tell in Tinder chats, “Once this guy wanted me to help him fall off a cliff. Only in Brooklyn, huh?”

Then Dan texted. He was ready. It seemed bad form about my change of heart in a text. Doing so in person was a noble gesture that turned out to be a mistake. Dan was sitting in the magazine section again, waiting for me to arrive. You could see that the illness was progressing. He was thinner; his hair was matted, and face seemed slow to show emotion. He was worried about waiting until it was too late; it had to be soon. Before I could say anything, he said he needed me to see why he was doing this. He cried as he showed me pictures of his wife and his children. They were happy pictures and I found myself holding back tears. “I feel so trapped now; you have no idea how it feels,” he said.

I actually had a pretty good idea what being trapped felt like and a few weeks later I took an early train out of the city to a small town up in the Hudson Valley. I had to walk through the town to reach the trailhead and when I got there Dan was in the parking lot waiting. He acknowledged me with a nod, got out of the car and started up the trail. I stayed back a moment so no one would think we were together. I followed from a distance, keeping him in sight, until all of a sudden, he turned and nodded at me. A second later he wasn’t on the trail anymore.

I peeked over the edge and felt satisfied that he’d fulfilled his wish. “Good luck, Dan,” I whispered.

Dan had chosen a trail where accidents were not uncommon. On the evening news the local police said it was just another unfortunate mishap. “He died doing something he enjoyed,” his wife said through tears. The sight of her needing her children for support evoked intense sadness in me even as I reminded myself that it had been his choice; that he’d done it for her; for them. I considered donating the money he paid me to charity or giving it to his family, but I wasn’t really in the position to be generous. It was difficult not being able unburden myself to anyone but as time passed I pushed the guilt to more distant corners of my consciousness.

I eventually found a day job that enabled me to use my diploma for something besides covering water stains on the wall. The pay was bad but no one tried to bite me and at least my parents were happy. Then one evening when I came home there was a stranger sitting on my front steps. I started to walk around him but there was something familiar in his gaze. He extended a hand and in a voice that was simultaneously amicable and terrifying he said, “Hi, my name Is Dan.”

He was older than Dan the first but his story was similarly tragic. Recently widowed, his wife had suffered with dementia for a decade. He had been her primary caretaker. He confessed to feeling a guilt-laden relief when she passed away, but his respite was short lived. He knew the symptoms when he saw them, even in himself. More importantly, he knew the direness of it. He wanted no part of the false hope of a cure being around the corner. There was only one thing he wanted: the same thing as Dan the First.

The lobby of my building has a security camera, so I told him to meet me at the library. In the magazine section he told me how he’d come to this decision. “The thing about Dan,” he said, “Was that from the moment he made the decision his spirits lifted; even with that disease hanging over his head.” Dan the second wanted that relief.

Dan number three had cancer of the “six months to a year” kind. Number four: different cancer, same sentence. I never asked how they knew where to find me and they rarely asked anything about me. I would just sit in the library and old men would approach me, “My name is Dan,” never Danielle. They wanted an exit strategy and I helped them. I helped them all. Januarys were busy for divorced guys, Mother’s Day for the widowers. I’d listen to them, counsel them against it, remind them of their families; give them brochure’s with alternatives that I’d had printed; tell them about assisted living facilities in Sheepshead Bay, Gravesend, Croton but in the end, if they wanted to go through with it I would help them.

I was happiest when they acquiesced and became No-Dans but it started getting harder to dissuade them. Soon there was another problem. The Dans started getting younger, their diseases treatable. “There’s a cure for that,” I’d say. When it wasn’t about suffering or disease pathology, I wouldn’t help them. Then I started hearing about competitors who were more accommodating. Some offered open-ended contracts; group discounts; gift cards even.

I generally avoided No-Dan clients if I ever saw them again, but I was quick to reciprocate when one recognized me on the street one day. He’d come to me asking about a terminal solution for his pains but the more we probed the more I was convinced he was making a mistake. In the end, I told him I wouldn’t help; his problems, although painful, were manageable. And now, here he was, arm-in-arm with an attractive woman. He looked healthy, happy. We chatted a little and, speaking vaguely in front of his friend, I told him I glad was that he hadn’t needed my services after all.

He blushed a little. “No hard feelings,” he said, “I’m still doing it; I’m just using someone else.”

I reminded him that his condition was manageable. He looked to his friend for reassurance. “The thing is, once I got to thinking about it as an option I couldn’t let go of it.” She hugged him.

“But, you’re young; you’re healthy,” I stammered.

He shook his head. “You can’t imagine the high that comes knowing it can happen at any time,” he effused. “It makes every day so much more meaningful.”

I stuttered, trying to answer, but before I could they walked off, arm in arm.

– T. Francis Curran