Creatures of Reason

Aristotle said that man is a creature of reason. This thought ran through Frank Bisk’s head and he clung to it as if it were his last faltering connection to sanity, to the world where fathers weren’t forced to kill their children. Where they didn’t have to listen to the labored breathing of their own son trying to force oxygen into his dying system. Frank could still hear Charlie telling him, months ago when he could still walk, when he still had a healthy glow in his cheeks, an illusion shattered by the lesion peeking from underneath his too sharp jaw line; telling him that when he reached a point when he could no longer move himself he wanted Frank to help him die. They called it assisted suicide, but Frank knew better. There was no assisting suicide about it, it was murder. He had been asked to murder his son and he would do it, because he loved him. Frank was not a prejudiced man, he didn’t care how his son had gotten AIDS, all he cared about now was that Charlie was going to die. And he would have to live with the guilt of killing his child.

On that cold day in late November, Frank sent the hospice worker home for the day, telling her that he would take care of Charlie. Then he knocked on the door of his youngest son, Paul, only two years younger than Charlie at twenty, twenty my god Paul is twenty already. He entered Paul’s room at his bidding, hovering uncertainly in the doorway while Paul looked at his father expectantly, book in his lap and Ryan Adams playing on the stereo. Paul’s eyes matched his fathers; they were both rimmed with red, indicative of the tears shed, tears they would never talk about, because Charlie had been the one to bring them together, he had been the one most comfortable talking about his feelings. Paul remembered the times when Charlie would come to him with his problems in a gruff older brother sort of way and talk to him about some relationship, or trouble at work, or, later, with clinical detachment, that his dormant HIV had progressed into full-blown AIDS. Only his brother could hear the waver in his voice when he told them the news, the waver that meant he was scared at hell but didn’t want to show it. Paul never heard that waver again, but he knew from the first time he heard it, with that startling clarity that comes from extreme emotional situations, that it would be new fodder for his nightmares.

Frank recognized the look of pinched, inward suffering on his youngest son’s face, recognized it because he knew it mirrored his own, and opened his mouth, searching for something comforting to say; something, anything to let him know that he was there, too. But Charlie was really their only connection – Frank realized he barely knew Paul at all, and he tried not to think of how their relationship would be, once Charlie was gone. Frank fiddled with the doorknob, unwilling to enter Paul’s room, and said, shortly so he could pretend he wasn’t really saying it:

“It’s time to say goodbye to your brother.”

Paul’s eyes widened and his book slid off of his lap; thudding as it landed on the floor. He shook his head, slowly, and cursed himself for the sneaky, betraying feeling of relief at his father’s words, swallowed quickly by a sharp pang of despair. He rose silently from his bed and went into Charlie’s room, pushing past his father as he went. Frank let him say his goodbye in peace, and flinched when he heard the front door slam a few minutes later.

In the bathroom, Frank fumbled with the syringes, preparing them with the heroin he had bought for Charlie when the pain got too bad and the hospital-regulated morphine wasn’t enough. Back in Charlie’s bedroom, he rolled a rubber band onto his arm, up past the elbow, with trembling fingers. He took a few deep breaths and tried to remember this is what Charlie wants as he guided the needle into Charlie’s protruding vein, grotesquely bloated from the rubber band. He cursed God and cursed himself as he pushed the drug into his son’s veins, dulling his mind for what was about to happen. Frank took a last look at his son’s face; the hollow cheeks and sunken eyes would haunt him, he knew, for the rest of his life. He tried to quell the gibbering voice in his mind god Charlie oh god oh god oh god as he reached for one of Charlie’s pillows. As Frank moved the pillow over Charlie’s face, two tears splashed onto the white linen and Frank stared at them before realizing they were his own. He tried unsuccessfully not to feel Charlie’s hand clench his, and then relax.

Two months later, in a dingy hotel outside of town, Charlie’s face was all Frank could think about. He ran his fingers down the barrel of the gun and thought, in a way, that this was a mercy killing, too. He was a murderer who had smothered his own son. Whether Charlie had asked him to or not didn’t matter – he was still damned. When he had told Paul that Charlie had accidentally smothered himself in his pillow and blankets, Paul had merely nodded. But Frank saw the blame in his eyes whenever he looked at him. Paul would be better off without him, without the man who killed his brother. He was only twenty; he didn’t deserve to have to hate his father. Frank knew the best thing for everyone was for him to disappear. When Frank put the barrel of the cold steel gun into his mouth and closed his eyes, he thought of both of his sons, he thought of Aristotle and his claim that man was a creature of reason, he thought of what being a creature of reason had made him do, and he pulled the trigger.