Story Excerpts

In murmuring voices, they discuss my murder. And every time they do, Maria comes closer and closer to capitulating. “I can’t,” she whispers. I can hear the swallowed sob in her voice. I can’t.  “You must,” they whisper back. You must. 

My would-be assassins, these jackals in lab coats, these wolves in white scrubs, are as intangible to me as ghosts. Phantom wolves. Disembodied voices in a fog. I may not be able to see them, but I know what these men, these women, these killers look like. From my years on the force, I know that no one discusses murder quite so analytically as someone in a lab coat. A hired gun would show more moral ambivalence at taking a life, wouldn’t reduce it to a set of clinical read-outs.

“He’s in a coma,” she pleads. “People come out of comas all the time.”

“No, they don’t. Not from this.”

Not a coma, they explain, but a “persistent vegetative state.” This is the diagnosis they are using to justify my death. 

“Think of a coma as a deep, deep sleep,” they tell her. “One that you may or may not awaken from. A vegetative state is very different. A vegetative state is permanent.”

They deftly avoid saying “brain dead,” because they must know I’m not. There must be something hooked up to me measuring cranial activity.

“The bullet entered through the base of his skull on an upward trajectory, severing the spinal cord at the back of the cranium, exiting through the front orbital cavity. It’s left him in a state of tetraplegia with a subsequent loss of bodily movement and sensation. He can’t feel cold, heat, human touch.”

But I can feel. 

I can feel the tube at the back of my throat. That’s all, but it’s something, no? It’s not nothing. 

“But I’m holding his hand,” she says. “I know he can feel that.”

I can’t.

I can’t, and I want to weep. But that’s not possible either. I’ve been robbed even of tears.

“Your husband’s somatic nervous system has been permanently—”

“Speak to me like a human being!”

She is shouting through her tears. She always did that, always covered her fear by getting angry. She thought it made her look strong, but it was vulnerability disguised, an attempt at appearing brave when she wasn’t. One of the many reasons I loved her, though never well enough.

You want it in layman’s terms? they say. Fine. “Your husband is gone. He cannot recover and never will. He’s dead in all but name.”

But I’m not. I’m not dead. I want to scream it at them, Don’t kill me! I’m still in here, but no sound comes out. Only the wet gargle of suction in the back of my throat, the hiss-and-fall of a ventilator, the dull thump of my own heart and the bing of a monitor keeping time, counting each heartbeat.  

I want to look my medical murderers in the eye, want to dare them to kill me, but I can’t do that either. I’m lost in the swampy pearl-gray sea of an optic nerve “terminally dilated,” as they put it. With my vision permanently unfocused, I can’t even tell if my eyelids are opened or closed. 

At Mass, the priests spoke often of Purgatory, that state of existence somewhere between salvation and redemption, neither Heaven nor Hell but something else. The priests were wrong, damnably wrong. Purgatory is worse than Hell. In Hell, at least you know you have arrived at your destination, can resign yourself to your fate, can come to accept the horrible finality of it. But Purgatory? That is Hell of a different order.

I am untethered from time. I don’t know if it’s been a day or a week, or even a year since I was ambushed in that tattered apartment on the lower west side. Time has no meaning for me, because time no longer exists in this awful state of now.

Maria’s voice has grown more distant, as though retreating into a mist. Another voice appears, a raspy voice I know well. It’s the last person I saw before my brain was punctured: my partner Vic. He was a silhouette at the bottom of the stairs, shouting up at me, “All good?” And my reply, “All good.” I’d given him a thumbs up in return. Now I can’t even locate my thumb in space, or my hands, my body. 

“Maria,” he tells her. “Don’t cry.”

Tell her, Vic. Tell her not to do it. Don’t let them pull the plug, not on your partner, not on the one who trained you. The stake-outs and bad coffee and long nights. 

But Vic betrays me too.

“You have to let him go,” he tells her. “It’s what he would have wanted.”

The hell do you know, Vic? You trapped in here? No. You’re out there in light. And why? Because I went up the stairs and you stayed below—that’s how cruelly arbitrary it was, little more than the toss of a coin. Could as easily have been you trapped here in Purgatory, buddy boy. 

It cartwheels away from me, those last moments. A routine night shift at the 24th precinct. A young woman, frantic and afraid, a waitress at the Pimento Club clinging to the front desk at the station, and the patrolman on duty waving us over. “Says she knows who killed Nunzia.”

Her name was Tess and she’d been working late the night Nunzia was slain. She’d stayed after closing, was coming down the stairs to the wine cellar when she saw it happen.

“There was money on the table,” she said, her voice wavering, her eyes damp. “Shrink-wrapped. Like a pay-off. Gun was already raised. I saw the killer. He was blond.”

The restaurateur, rumour had it, was deeply in debt to the Mogilevich family and unable to pay, so they’d taken him out as a lesson to others. A single shot through the heart, no witnesses. Until now.