The Universe Versus Alex Woods (44 page)

Herr Schäfer nodded. ‘I think this is merely another way of saying that it is not in your nature.’

I thought about this for a while. ‘Perhaps,’ I concluded, ‘but not always. I mean, I’m not being completely honest with Mr Peterson right now. Is that what you’re getting at?’

‘No. I think we both know that this is a different thing entirely. Have you lied to him?’

‘No. I just haven’t told him certain things.’

‘And this is because you want to protect him? Am I right in thinking that?’

‘Yes,’ I admitted. ‘I think if he knew what’s happening back home, it might force him into a bad decision. And he’d be doing it to try to protect
me
, except he wouldn’t be. It wouldn’t be good for anyone.’

Herr Schäfer nodded again. ‘You understand, I’m sure, the possible consequences of your actions? Now that the British police are involved, you may face prosecution when you go home. You will no longer be protected under Swiss law.’

‘Yes, I know. I don’t mind facing those consequences. I just don’t want to put that burden on Mr Peterson. He shouldn’t have to think about those things. Not now.’

‘Okay,’ Herr Schäfer said, ‘so let me ask you another question. You know that there may be consequences, but you still wish to be here? Is that correct? You are not having thoughts about leaving now?’

‘No. I want to be here.’

‘Is that because you feel obligated to be here?’

‘No. It’s because I think what I’m doing is right.’

I dried the last plate and Herr Schäfer gestured to the kitchen table. We both sat.

‘You know, Alex,’ he said, ‘my opinion is that if you’re old enough to want to be here, then you’re old enough to be here. I’m what most people would call a libertarian. Do you understand what that means?’

I considered the term. ‘I think it has something to do with believing in the virtue of the free market,’ I said. ‘Is that right?’

Herr Schäfer smiled. ‘Not so much in my case, no. It means that I think every individual should be free to make their own decisions – without other people telling them what they must or must not do. The only restriction is that people are not free to hurt or exploit other people – and this is where it is quite different from the free market.’

Herr Schäfer poured himself a glass of wine before continuing. ‘In this instance, what I’m trying to say is that you must be free to make your own choices, just as your friend Isaac must be free to make his. No one should interfere with that.’

I let this sink in. ‘Does that mean you’re
not
going to send us home?’

‘That would be against everything I have stood for over the last twelve years. The only reason I ever send people away at this late stage is if I or Dr Reinhardt think they are not here by their own free will or they don’t understand the choice they are making. But in this case we have no doubts.’

‘What about all the stuff that’s been on the news? You’re not going to tell Mr Peterson?’

‘No. I think my duty lies in the other direction. It is not my place to influence him one way or the other. His decision should be free from outside pressure. My mind is very clear on this. I will not tell him anything.’ Herr Schäfer paused and sipped from his wineglass. ‘However, you must understand that your circumstances are not the same as mine. You are carrying a different burden.’

‘Do you mean that
I
should tell him?’

‘No. This is your decision, not mine. All I’m saying is that you should give these matters some extra thought. Tomorrow will be difficult for you. You need to be prepared. You need to be sure in your own mind that you are doing the right thing.’

I looked out across the open-plan living room through the patio doors. ‘I’m doing the right thing,’ I said.

And I knew that this thought and this thought alone had the power to carry me through the next twenty-four hours. Without it, I would have broken down.

The house had no name and no number. Since no one lived there, and no one ever stayed there for more than a few hours, a name would have been superfluous. For the purpose of deliveries, if deliveries were ever made, I suppose they probably got by just referring to it as ‘the house’. There were no other houses in the area with which to confuse it.

It was located on a small industrial estate about twenty minutes’ drive east of Zurich, and the industrial location was required by law. While the majority of the Swiss believed that such a place should, in principle, be allowed to exist, there were few who thought it should be allowed to exist in their backyard.

So the house had been purpose-built out of town and rose incongruously among the warehouses and small factories that buttressed the intersection of two noisy highways. But despite the setting, efforts had been made to ensure that the house appeared as normal as possible. Outside there was a little driveway and hedges and a front porch. Inside there was a kitchenette and a bathroom and most of the domestic comforts you’d expect to find in any house, anywhere: a couple of long sofas, a couple of beds, a round table with four chairs, cushions, lamps. There was landscape art on the walls and large windows and patio doors admitting lots of natural light. There was a stereo for those who wished to listen to music and even a small back garden with shrubs and a trickling fountain. It was fenced off from the surroundings, but you could still hear the traffic along the main road, which hissed rhythmically, like the sea.

After we’d pulled up in the front driveway, Mr Peterson told me that he wanted to leave the wheelchair in the boot.
It’s important for me to walk
, he wrote.

I nodded.

He used a single crutch in his right hand and wrapped his left arm around my shoulder, and in this fashion, we made a slow, shuffling progress up the drive. Mr Peterson had done very little walking over the past week. It took a long time.

My mind was extremely alert – as alert as it had been on the night we’d escaped Yeovil Hospital, although once again I’d had no sleep. Once we’d got back to the hotel, I’d sat up thinking about what Herr Schäfer had said until about two in the morning, and after that, I simply hadn’t felt tired. I drank about five cans of Diet Coke and stayed up reading a fifty-year history of CERN, which I’d bought from the centre’s gift shop. By 6 a.m., I’d reached the creation of antihydrogen in the mid-1990s and still wasn’t tired. I went for my morning meditation down by the lake, just as the sun was coming up. There was hardly anybody else about – just a couple of joggers and a family of swans and cygnets bobbing on the water. The promenade on the lakeside had been planted with lilacs, which were just coming into bloom and fragrancing the air with a cool vanilla scent.

Several doses of marijuana had helped Mr Peterson sleep peacefully until around seven. By that time, I was back at the hotel, where I helped him wash and dress. He wrote that he wanted to look presentable. It was another of those things that felt important to him.

‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

Calm
, he wrote.
Calm and resolved. How about you?

‘The same,’ I said.

Are you sure?

‘Yes.’ I managed a thin smile. ‘I’m resolved too.’

And as I walked him those final few steps towards the front door of the house with no name, my resolve had only strengthened. I had a task to do, and I’d hold out for as long as it took. If there’d been any doubts about whether I should tell Mr Peterson about what was going on back home, these had now evaporated. The crux of the matter was clear as oxygen: if I told him, then, one way or another, whatever decision he made, he was going to suffer. We were both going to suffer, much more than was necessary. Avoiding such needless cruelty didn’t strike me as the kind of thing that required a complex moral justification. It was just common sense.

After she’d made cups of coffee for herself and Mr Peterson, Petra – one of the two escorts who had met us at the house – sat with us at the small round table. Linus, the other escort, did not. The only time I really saw him was when he greeted us at the door. He spent the rest of the time ‘backstage’, preparing paperwork and taking care of other practicalities. Later on, it would be Linus who dealt with the Swiss authorities, registering the death and arranging for the transportation of Mr Peterson’s body to the crematorium. Petra’s role was to be available to us at all times – to talk us through every stage, answer any questions and generally look after us throughout the appointment. When the time came, she would also be the one who prepared and handed over the sodium pentobarbital, but this could only be done at Mr Peterson’s explicit request. No one else was allowed to initiate this action.

My first impression of Petra was that there was nothing to her. She couldn’t have been much more than five feet tall, and she was as skinny as Mr Peterson, but with no trace of the wiry strength he’d once possessed. Her hair was ash blonde and tied back in an efficient ponytail, and her skin would have looked pale in an English winter. Her voice was light and soft, and she was wearing very little make-up, just a tiny hint of eyeliner, and this had the effect of making her appear even paler, smaller and younger than she probably was. But despite her diminutive stature, she carried herself with a brisk self-confidence that put me at ease. It was strange, but except for the calm, reassuring quality she had about her, she reminded me of my mother.

I spent a very long time wondering about Petra and how she’d come to this job – whether there were newspaper adverts and interviews, just like any other normal job. Eventually, I got tired of wondering and just asked her.

Alex likes to know how things work
, Mr Peterson apologized.

‘She did say we should ask questions,’ I pointed out.

‘I did,’ Petra agreed. She spent some time looking at Mr Peterson’s blind-written note – she still found this trick an interesting novelty – and then told us that she’d trained as a nurse before joining Herr Schäfer’s clinic seven years ago; she’d made a ‘speculative application’ having read about his work in a national newspaper. ‘I thought it was important work and something I could do well,’ Petra concluded.

All of Petra’s utterances were like this. She was direct and plainspoken, yet, with her featherlight voice, she managed to project compassion in the simplest, shortest sentences. I suppose this was one of the reasons she was suited to her job.

She had to go through most of the questions that Mr Peterson had already been asked two or three times before, but these questions were now raw and immediate. ‘Do you want to die today?’ Petra asked. ‘Is your mind clear? Is this your own decision?’ After that, there came the repeated insistence that there was no pressure to continue – the decision could be reversed at any point, right up until the poison had been taken. Petra didn’t refer to the sodium pentobarbital as a medicine or medicament. At this late stage, there was no room for ambiguity.

Mr Peterson had to write his answers to all these questions and then sign about half a dozen different documents, reconfirming his intentions and giving the escorts the legal right to deal with the Swiss authorities after his death. After that, I helped him to the bathroom (
I don’t want my last thought to be that I need to pee
,
Mr Peterson wrote), and when we got back, he told Petra that he was ready to take his anti-emetic. This was a standard precaution to ensure that the sodium pentobarbital – which had an extremely unpleasant taste – stayed down. On this point, Petra was typically forthcoming. ‘The pentobarbital tastes poisonous,’ she told us. ‘The stomach’s natural response is to throw it up.’ Anti-sickness medication was always taken first, and it had to be taken at least half an hour before the poison – to allow its full effects to manifest.

And then we had to wait.

And there were a million things I thought I should say, but I couldn’t get any of them straight in my head. I didn’t know where to begin. I suppose I must have looked agitated, because after a while, Mr Peterson passed me a note.

I understand. You don’t have to say anything at all. Just being here is enough.

I nodded. I thought he was right. Sometimes words aren’t needed.

You should put on some music
, Mr Peterson wrote.

‘What would you like to hear?’

Mr Peterson gave a kind of crooked half-smile.
Lots of things. I think the decision’s too big for me right now. You choose.

I thought about this for a minute. ‘I suppose you could do worse than Mozart,’ I said.

Mr Peterson nodded.
Agreed.

So I put on Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major. Mr Peterson closed his eyes and listened. I sat and watched a couple of sparrows through the patio doors as they darted back and forth between the slender saplings of the back garden, their shadows flittering below them like dark puppets. The double-glazing cut out all the noise from the roads and factories. There was no whisper of the outside world, no sound in the room but the shimmering layers of Mozart and the slow rise and fall of my breath.

When the music had finished, Mr Peterson gestured for me to call back Petra from the corner chair to which she’d retired.