Guards and kitchen staff pressed medication on him, but he lay curled on his cot in a wheezing stupor and did not look at them. They spoke in whispers, and it came to him that they were trying to help him die. It was peace they were trying to grant him, and their kindness was a mystery to him. If he had a wish, it was to be relieved of life and of himself as soon as possible. He had proved unworthy of being helped or of being remembered. Obstacles had been placed before him, and he had proven himself unworthy as a human being.
* * *
“These pills will help,” someone said close by.
“It gets bad, you let us know,” the voice said another time.
A doctor, upon a cursory examination, whispered, “Morphine will help, Mr. Hudon, but it can’t be prescribed until they move you to the hospital—which should happen soon. The paperwork’s in.”
Warren asked for nothing, said nothing, continued to suffer from faltering perception, and wanted only to be gone from awareness of the failure his life had been, gone from himself and the crimes he had committed. The doctor sat on the side of his cot and spoke, in a near-whisper, of last-minute intervention, aggressive procedures, unnecessary pain. He spoke of one’s inner life, and Warren believed the doctor knew what he was talking about. Warren regretted that his inner life did not deserve to know peace and tried to indicate no to life being extended. The doctor leaned close. “It’ll be better on the other side,” he whispered, and Warren gave no sign unless it was to shift his pupils, perhaps to blink his eyes.
Being awake was to be in pain in his conscience, and dozing was barely different. Moments awake passed like dirty ice melting in March. He had no way of refusing medications, which paved over the gravel in his throat and let him escape into semiconsciousness. His ability to breathe had diminished to one wheezing breath, then another, and running out of breath was a promise waiting at the end, a sliding into many-colored radiance. Take me unto Thee, O Lord, he prayed in one moment, while feeling undeserving even of the mysterious joy of death.
Wakefulness persisted. His actions with the heavy Colt Python hovered like hallucinations and made his mind swirl with anxiety. He could not speak or give any sign and lay half comatose. Persons clanged into the cell, pressed tablets and a tiny paper cup of water between his lips, clanged out, slid needles into his arm. Still he saw himself firing into Beatrice, grabbing Virgil’s hair, firing into his skull.
“Your move to the hospital is in the works,” a familiar voice whispered.
Then the voice said experimental drugs were available, CPR could be used, asked if he wouldn’t change his mind. Warren wanted only to disappear. Nor did he wish to lie in the ground next to Beatrice, if any such possibility remained, though no one had asked, and he had neither strength nor voice enough to object. His ploy to lie beside her repulsed him in his self-abasement, while he retained no capacity for asking to be cast into the sea and lost to awareness once and for all.
When daylight in the high windows gave way to evening, shadows spread over him and offered a cover within which to lie concealed. All his life he had taken pleasure in day breaking from the ocean, and now it was twilight that afforded pleasure—until fluorescent lights crackled with sudden wavering glare, shattering the early and peaceful close of day. Fluorescent lights and sounds of television suggested eternal hell.
For moments in the dying afternoon, seeing shapes within shadows, there came feelings of serenity. The sun lowering beneath the horizon and darkness following was a work of art in nature he had rarely regarded before seeing it violated here by milk-colored and hissing fluorescent lights. Color, departing the sky, gave way to shadows and shapes of immortality: closing of day on the harbor was a gift he had been too mortal to appreciate. The harbor at dusk, lights wavering from shore, was all he wanted his eyes ever to see again.
It came to him in darkness that in killing Beatrice he had killed himself, had killed in her what she had allowed him, from their earliest days together, to be. It wasn’t justifiable homicide at all, but murder, he admitted to his conscience. From the moment of clearing his boat and hefting the Python, his heart had known what it wanted to do. From that moment on, God had known it wasn’t forgiveness he was seeking but vengeance. And God was the judge before him now.
* * *
The voice came again. “Now and at the hour of our death, may the Lord bless thee and be with thee,” it said. Then it said, “Amen.”
So it was that when death came for Warren Hudon, television sounds hovered above his thin perception. A ballplayer loped bases, entering an increasing roar while fluorescent lights buzzed overall. Heaven and hell. Like a trap sliding from his boat and being left behind, he began cascading away from awareness. Buzzing persisted while his breath missed one beat and another, rattled faintly, disappeared into watery darkness.