Kill Me (3 page)

THREE

I was back in Dr. Alan Gregory’s office at 2:30. I’d slept for a while and showered at my buddy’s apartment, and my fatigue had gone from shouting at me to pay attention to humming in the background like Muzak. I managed to tune out the dull torpor the same way I can usually tune out a corporate orchestral rendition of “Sympathy for the Devil” during a long elevator ride.

“And so we meet again,” I said to the shrink.
Lame?
God, yes. But I really said it — for some reason I was discovering that I felt almost possessed in the guy’s office, which of course left me wondering what the hell that was all about.

I handed him some forms he’d asked me to fill out at the end of the morning session. On the patient information form, I’d scribbled in my nickname, a post office box address belonging to my Denver lawyer, and my cell-phone number. I gave him an e-mail address that went only to my BlackBerry.

Person to contact in case of emergency?
Hah! If only.
I left that one blank.

Had I offered it to him, the odds were low that he’d recognize my real name. If he were a player in the medical technology field my name would certainly ring a bell, but outside that small pond and beyond the ranks of the venture capitalists and investment managers who hung around on the sandy banks of Entrepreneurship Lake, my name wasn’t a household word.

I wasn’t Warren Buffett. I wasn’t Bill Gates.

I was an anonymous rich white guy. One of the first epiphanies that went along with becoming an anonymous rich white guy was learning how many of us there are. How many? You’d be surprised; I was. More than enough to make it easy to blend into the crowd.

“I plan to pay cash each day that I’m here,” I said, hoping that would be a sufficient explanation for the absence of any health insurance information on the forms.

“That’s up to you,” he said. “I’ll prepare a bill and hand it to you during our last session of each month.”

“Fine.” Money didn’t interest me. I could have told him that I’d stopped counting money the day that I decided I had enough. That day had taken place quite a few years before when a couple of the big international med-tech giants both decided that they wanted the device I’d designed and the company I’d created to build and sell it.

A bidding war ensued and I happily sold everything for two to three times what it was worth. And it had been worth a lot.

I didn’t tell him any of that.

He sat back. I sat back, too, figuring he was going to wait for me to start the show again. But I was wrong.

He spoke next. His voice was as even as a mother’s love. He said, “Now that I know you like massages, and that you’re predisposed to a little tenderness, how do you suppose I can be of help?”

I smiled at the sardonic timbre of his words. I was pleased — doubly pleased — he had it in him. I didn’t want to spend these precious hours with a slug. Now that I was dying I had little tolerance for tedious people.

Truth, right? Okay — even before I was dying I had little tolerance for tedious people.

He sensed my hesitation.

“Start anywhere,” he suggested. “In the end, it won’t really make any difference.”

He was wrong about that, but he was speaking generally and from his experience. I knew that if I started off by hinting at the end, I might never get a chance to tell him the beginning. I had to do it right.

That’s why I was there with him. In therapy. There was, literally, no one else I could talk to about what was going on, and I desperately wanted to understand the beginning better, so I could make the end different.

Maybe I was wrong, but I thought I had to be sure to start in the right place.

FOUR

Two stories must be told for this to make any sense.

A glance at my 2004 calendar would reveal that the story I tell first actually took place after the story I tell second.

The order was important. God, was it important.

Still is.

The first story:

Late summer.

I loved that boardroom.

The fog bank hovering a quarter mile from shore over the Pacific and the lush green hills of Santa Barbara spreading out below seemed to start abruptly from nothing and nowhere, as if the huge sleek table at which we were sitting was floating in an infinity pool and all of us in the room were just treading water on the edge of possibility. It was an organic space of light and air and water, a room for beginnings.

Not a room for beginners, though.

I’d only agreed to be on the board of this company because many of the other board members were visionaries. I’d long before stopped participating as a director on boards that were full of glorified rubber-stampers who collected exorbitant fees for conspiring with management to squelch creativity, to shirk shareholders, or to thwart risk.

If I wanted to waste my time watching large mammals gallop with blinders on I’d go to Santa Anita.

But this place — this company, this room — was a different animal. And the people with me on the board of directors were different jockeys. That day hundreds of millions, literally, were on the table. A radical change in direction for the company. Huge risks. Possible huge rewards. Likely, in my opinion, huge rewards. I didn’t need the money that would come with the change in course we were contemplating that day — nobody in the room did — but we all needed to be involved in
making
the money that might come, should come, with the change in course.

Why? Ask five of us and you’d get six different answers. Some, just because. Some, to try to fill a dollar-sensitive hole that life’s caprice had dug into their souls.

Some, to hoard.

Some, to give away.

Turning one buck into two, or three, or ten or twenty, was what we all did. As a group we didn’t question it much. Individually, on days when I did pause to question it, I liked to think I did something else, too — something valuable — along the way. I also knew myself well enough to allow for the possibility that that was rationalization.

I was sitting back, letting the discussion around that table above Santa Barbara build to a crescendo, watching brilliant people spark brilliant plans and delighting as the sparks ignited the fuel of ideas like matches torching Molotov cocktails. That day, we were the revolutionaries. My role? I sat poised and ready to make my contribution, to splash the accelerants wildly, eager to stoke any fire that seemed to be damping.

Until that was needed, I was content to warm myself by the heat that came from everyone else’s embers.

My colleagues around the table knew that I was an advocate for rolling the dice. I knew they were watching me, waiting for me to buy in and demand my chance to throw the bones. It was my style in life. And in business.

The dice were truly bouncing that morning.

Sevens? Eleven?

Craps?

It was,
I remember thinking,
no fun without risk.

Life.

And then my damn cell phone started ringing.

I’d thought I’d turned the thing off. Two of my friends on the board laughed at the intrusion of the sound into the room. My ring tone for as long as I could remember was a tinny, almost comical version of “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.” The merry melody was the source of some of my friends’ amusement. Mostly though, my comrades were chuckling that I was the one in the group who’d forgotten to turn off his damn phone.

That I’d forgotten didn’t surprise anyone in the least.

I was a big-picture guy, not a detail guy. Everybody who knew me knew that about me. Call me when you want a strategy. Call me when you need vision. Call someone else when you need to be reminded to tighten the lug nuts on your tires or to change your oil.

Turning cell phones on and off, that was a detail.

“Excuse me,” I said to the room. My right wrist was still in a cast from a skiing accident in the Bugaboos a few months before, and my coordination with my damaged hand was crappy. I fumbled with the tiny phone before I managed to open it up and get it next to my ear.

I said simply, “Yeah?” My tone bore a little aggravation, as though it were the caller’s fault, and not mine, that I’d forgotten to shut down the phone, and that it was the caller’s fault that the Beatles ditty had intruded upon that special board meeting.

The voice I heard on the other end was a complete surprise. Not too many people had my mobile number. I didn’t think she was one of the ones who did.

I listened. She spoke nonstop for half a minute.

Shit, shit, shit.

The room darkened as though a huge cloud had blocked the sun.

But it hadn’t.

Or as though the coastal fog had rolled in and enveloped the verdant hills.

But it hadn’t.

“What?” I whispered, finally. I stood from the table and wandered to the corner of the room, to the wall of glass that faced west, to the place in the room where infinity started and infinity collapsed. Behind me, all of my colleagues disappeared from my awareness. All the creative fires within me stopped burning as though they’d been doused by foam.

This woman on the phone mistook my “what?” for confusion when it was actually an expression of bewilderment.
This can’t be real; I barely know this woman. She can’t be telling me this.
She began to repeat what she had just said. She said it more slowly the second time and dumbed it down considerably in the retelling, as though she sensed that the first rendition had been too sophisticated for me by a factor of two or three.

“You’re sure?” I said after she had finished her elementary-level spiel.

She was. She began to explain in great detail all the safeguards that were in place to prevent false positives.

False positives?
I didn’t want to hear it. “It’s okay,” I said to stop her. “I believe you.”

I didn’t believe her. I just needed her to shut the fuck up so I could think.

“We need to consider —”

I didn’t want to hear what we needed to consider.

I closed the phone, returned to my chair at the big table, gathered my things, and stuffed them into the battered daypack that I had schlepped around on my shoulder for more than two decades of business meetings. I think I mumbled, “I have to go,” to the room. Maybe I managed to say, “Excuse me.”

Maybe someone asked me what was wrong.

I don’t recall any of it.

In twenty minutes I was back on my plane.

My pilot was a friend, a woman named Mary Reid whom I’d met after she’d written me a letter describing how one of my company’s devices had helped save her daughter’s life. I was touched by her note. We corresponded for a while — she was a single mom living in Tucson then — and talked a few times on the phone. I learned that she was ex-Navy and had been an airline pilot flying 737s out of Stapleton, Denver’s old airport, but had become one of the casualties of Continental Airlines’s bankruptcy in the nineties. She’d reluctantly turned her back on flying, moved in with her mom in Arizona, enrolled in the police academy, and had taken a job as a cop with the City of Tucson.

She continued to miss living in Colorado.

I thought she possessed an interesting array of skills. Three months later I hired her to fly my newly acquired plane. She packed up her mom and her daughter and the trio moved north to Denver.

Mary knew me well. She saw the numb look on my face as I climbed the narrow stairs into the cabin. The latest candidate for the copilot’s chair that had been vacant for almost half a year was a handsome, competent man named Jorge who seemed to have less personality than an under-ripe eggplant. Jorge was up front, doing preflight checks.

Mary and I both knew, already, that Jorge wasn’t going to be the one.

She said, “Are you okay?”

I lied. “Yeah.”

“No, you’re not.”

I picked a seat and fell into it.

“We’re leaving now?” she asked. “Destination?”

“Denver.”

“Centennial?”

Mary was asking me what airport I preferred. But I didn’t answer her. That was a detail.

I was definitely more consumed with the big picture.

The big picture wasn’t looking too good.

FIVE

The second story preceded the first. Temporally speaking, at least. It was late March, 2004.

The timing makes a difference in understanding the nature of one man’s fate.

Mine.

The second:

I’d skied the Bugaboos twice before, so I can’t exactly plead ignorance or surprise over what happened that day.

I made a stupid mistake, plain and simple. Let’s leave it at that. If I hadn’t made the mistake, I would probably never have met the Death Angels. And if I’d never met the Death Angels, well …

“Death Angels?”
you ask?

See, Dr. Gregory, it does make a difference where things start.

Montrose, Colorado’s glam index falls somewhere around Omaha’s or Bakersfield’s, and it suffers in comparison with its alluring neighbors, Ouray and Telluride — but it has a consistently accessible airport close to my second home near Ridgway at the foot of the glorious Dallas Divide in the San Juan Mountains on Colorado’s Western Slope. The Telluride airport is technically slightly closer as the crow flies, but its altitude and its location — the runway at Telluride is at 9,000 feet above sea level, is basically about the size of an aircraft-carrier deck, and is surrounded by the vaulting, wind-whipped, sawtooth peaks of the Uncompahgre — render it a dicey routine airfield, so I usually endorsed Mary’s choice of the bland predictability of Montrose.

Originally our ski adventure was going to be a party of six, but one of my best friends — a guy who was the funniest lawyer I’d ever met, and probably the funniest trust and estates guy on the planet — got an unexpected invitation to do a deep cave dive in Belize that he’d been dying to do, and had decided that the Caribbean sun was beckoning him more than were the Canadian mountains.

The rest of my friends — five of us altogether — had convened at my house and stayed up too late the night before, playing cards and telling stories. We were in the jet before dawn as it went nose-up from the runway in Montrose. Mary had the yoke. The copilot du jour was an ex — Air Force pilot named Stephanie something. Mary seemed to like Stephanie. A good omen.

Mary brought us to a gracious stop in Calgary a little after nine in the morning. We almost filled a waiting Suburban and its twin roof racks with all our gear, and after a long drive we made it to our scheduled rendezvous with a chartered helicopter. A few minutes before one o’clock the chopper hovered just long enough to let us toss our gear outside and scramble from the cramped cabin onto a volleyball court-sized, snow-covered flat near the absolute top of the Purcells range, high above timberline in the rugged, sharp, granite and glacier, otherworldly paradise of the Canadian Rockies.

The day was glorious, perfect for skiing. Blue skies, brilliant sun, just enough of a breeze to levitate snow crystals into the air to create halos around the highest of the surrounding peaks. The majesty of the British Columbia high country stretched out below us farther than I could see. Across a valley the harsh beauty of Kootenay seemed so close that I felt that I could ski to it.

We’d heli-skied as a group before and we had a system that worked. One of us went down first on each section and picked a vantage from which to videotape the rest of us from below. We’d drawn straws in the plane; I was going to be the cameraman on the third drop, and I was guessing that my turn would come on the run that would carry us from the sparsely spotted trees just below timberline down into actual woods. Although our rationale for the video-camera procedure was safety — in case of a slide or an avalanche, the footage might provide additional clues about where, precisely, to begin a search — we all knew that the real reason for the video record was our annual Memorial Day — weekend blowout party that always prominently featured a special showing of our digitized exploits from the previous year’s recreational stupidity.

The fact that I was scheduled to be third with the camera that day meant that on the first two runs, the most heavenly ones, the ones in the steepest, narrowest, granite-lined, untracked chutes above or just below timberline, I could simply enjoy what the mountain had to offer.

And I did. The first couple of runs made the entire long journey to Canada worthwhile. Fresh, virgin powder tracks — at times deep enough to tickle my nipples — squeezed between unforgiving rocks leading to almost vertical chutes, cornices, and big air. Lots and lots of thin air everywhere there wasn’t forbidding rock or welcoming snow.

Once we’d crossed over timberline on the second run, we gathered together on a narrow ridge to select the next drop, the one we’d take into the forest for our first true run into the trees.

A phone rang.

Noticing a theme here?

Everybody laughed at the incongruity of the sound. If there is one place that you don’t expect to hear a phone ring, it’s on the side of a mountain in the Bugaboos. One by one, each of my friends looked at me.

Why? I was the designated big shot in the group. I was the guy with the plane, the one who got the calls that couldn’t wait.

But the ringing phone wasn’t mine. No “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”

Grant Jacobs sheepishly slid his daypack off his shoulders and pulled a bulky black receiver out of a zippered compartment on the side. “Satellite phone,” he said apologetically. “Callie’s been sick. I promised Ginny I’d carry it.”

Groans and laughter all around. I had the camera in my hand, so I took some footage of Grant and his phone to embarrass him with at the Memorial Day weekend party. Then I led the rest of the group a little ways ahead along the ridge to scout out a route down into the woods. Grant caught up with us a few minutes later. His dark face was the color of freshly poured concrete.

“Grant, is Callie okay?” I asked.

“Callie’s fine. Her fever’s down. That was Ginny. It’s … Antonio. Marilyn just called her.”

Antonio, a ridiculously handsome native-born Roman, was the lawyer friend who’d chosen scuba diving in Belize over heli-skiing in the Bugaboos. Antonio was the trusts-and-estates guy who could always make me laugh. Marilyn was Antonio’s wife.

“What is it?” someone asked Grant.

I felt as though I already knew. Not the details, but the truth. A pit formed in my stomach.

Grant said, “He got caught in a cave. Something happened with his equipment. His BC, his regulator — something. She wasn’t sure. Then he … banged his head on a rock, some coral. Marilyn doesn’t really know the details. But it’s bad. It’s … bad.”

I could tell from Grant’s robotic recitation that whatever had happened was much worse than the simple facts. “Is Antonio dead?” I asked.

“He’s unconscious. His EEG looks like … crap. They were down pretty deep, apparently — a hundred and ten feet, something like that. He hit his head, he had the equipment problem, he was so out of it they couldn’t get him to take his spare air. They rushed him up to the surface. He swallowed a lot of water before they got him to the boat.”

Someone — one of the divers in the group — asked, “Are you saying they did an emergency ascent? They didn’t do a decompression stop? How long were they down before the accident?”

If Antonio had been down at that depth for any length of time at all, he absolutely had to do a gradual return to the surface with an interval stop to squeeze the accumulated nitrogen out of his body before he surfaced.

Grant wasn’t a diver. He wouldn’t know about the necessity for decompression stops. He shook his head. “Marilyn didn’t say anything about that. Is that important? Is it? What does that mean?”

Without a decompression stop, along with all of his injuries, Antonio might have suffered the horrors, and dangers, of decompression sickness. The bends.

“How long was he down … after the accident?” I asked, dreading the answer. I left two words —
without oxygen
— unsaid.

“Five or six minutes after the accident, they think. Marilyn told Ginny she thought they were guessing. But it took them another minute or two to get him on the dive boat to start CPR and finally get him breathing.” Grant could barely get the details of the story out of his mouth. Finally, he added, disbelieving, “He’s barely alive. Jesus Christ, Antonio almost drowned.”

“No,” I said with disgust. “I think you have that wrong, Grant.”

The picture I had in my head was of a vegetized version of my friend. He would have been flown by a chopper — to keep him as close to sea level as possible — to a facility with a hyperbaric chamber, a tiny tubular cocoon pressurized with pure oxygen. Coarse white sheets and too many plastic tubes, the
hiss/whirr
of a ventilator. Multiple IV pumps, gurgling drains. Monitors that told too much, and way too little.

“Antonio definitely drowned,” I said. “It sounds like he was almost resuscitated.”

After the news about Antonio’s tragedy, on another day in the mountains — a day nearer my Ridgway home with us doing chin-high bumps or floating on waist-high powder through the spindly white aspen trunks at Telluride — we would have found our way down some safe, groomed cruising runs while cutting gentle S-turns in rough formation, descending methodically to the base area, intent on rushing home to hold Marilyn’s hand. But we were in the middle of the Bugaboos in the Canadian Rockies wilderness on the border between British Columbia and Alberta, only halfway to the rendezvous with the helicopter that was our only way back to civilization.

Jimmy Lee was a good friend whom I’d first met through Thea, my wife, on our wedding day. He had been attending my nuptials as the date of Thea’s maid of honor. Jimmy was a law graduate of Boalt, in Berkeley, but had worked in the reinsurance business as long as I’d known him. He traveled for work almost as much as I did, and he traveled for adventure almost as much as I did.

He said, “We have to ski out of here, guys. We can’t get distracted by Antonio’s situation, not yet. We keep our heads on straight, we do this right, we’ll be back home later tonight. For right now? The helicopter is due to meet us in thirty-five minutes. Three, five. We need to get down to it, and we need to get down to it in one piece. To do that, we need to keep some focus. Steady. Aggressive, but not rushed. The hurried-er we go, the behind-er we’ll get.”

Jimmy was right, of course. He usually was. If our gang were a Mafia family and not a group of successful, middle-aged businessmen/ weekend athletes, Jimmy would be consigliere.

Would I be the don? Probably, but not happily.

I liked being in control more than I liked being the leader. In business I’d always seen myself emulating the young Steven Jobs, the one who founded Apple, not the older Steven Jobs, the one who came back to run it. Character-wise, I thought I had more in common with James Caan’s Sonny than I did with Marlon Brando’s Vito.

I was capable of leadership, but it wasn’t my favorite thing. If someone else could run things well — “well” meaning in a manner that didn’t interfere with my interests or my freedom — I let them.

My balance swayed and I felt the horizon jiggle side to side as I pulled my goggles down onto my eyes and cleared the pressure from my ears. I lost a moment wondering if my tears for Antonio would cause the inside of the lenses to fog before I skated down the flat ridge, pulling ahead of the group. I hoped my friends were thinking that I was scouting out the best path to take down into the trees; I knew I was creating some space to try to contain my grief.

“How does this look?” I asked Jimmy a minute later as he pulled up behind me. I’d stopped on a snow-covered outcropping of jagged Bugaboo granite. Jimmy was slightly uphill from me and he was gazing past me at a narrow chute that funneled down about a quarter of a mile into a forest that was treed to just the right density for great wilderness skiing.

The presence of two good-sized evergreens at the bottom of the chute was a reliable indication that this long narrow ribbon wasn’t traditional avalanche terrain. Frequent avalanches would have prevented the trees from ever getting to that size. The snow that was exposed in the narrows appeared crusty from the sun; farther down into the woods it looked invitingly deep and completely untracked.

On a day that I hadn’t just learned that one of my dear friends was near death, I would have been ecstatic about finding this spot and doing this run and being the first in our group to drop into the long ribbon of soft white down between those trees.

That day, with Antonio’s situation so serious, it was just a good path across town.

“It looks fine,” Jimmy said in response to my question. “Perfect. We can start over there.” He pointed to a spot nearer the trees where the initial drop down onto the chute was only fifteen feet as compared to the twenty-five or so it would be if we took off from the outcropping where we were standing. “Hey, guys,” he called back over his shoulder. “Over this way. Let’s keep moving. Come on, we have to get going.”

Just then the horizon jiggled again. But this time, I heard a sharp
cra-ack
and the shelf below my feet disappeared so fast that I felt as though I was suspended in the air like a character in a cartoon. The balcony on which I’d been standing hadn’t been snow-covered Bugaboo granite at all — it had been a simple cornice of snow and ice, and faith.

Bad faith, it turned out.

The cornice had given way, as ice cornices inevitably do, its wintry debris preceding me down the chute, and suddenly I was airborne. My arms flew to the sky to grab for a handhold on what turned out to be nothing, my legs flailed to reach for the security of the snow-covered terrain far below.