How to Kill a Man

It’s easy enough to end a life. Humans are so frail, so weak, so gentle, that just about anything will cut the tender thread of life and leave a breath hanging in the air, as if a sigh. It hangs even in the hottest day as if it was condensing in the coldest winter night, just for a second, and then it is gone—the eyes that just a second prior held all the hope the world has seen glaze over with the peace that life can’t bring. The tightest, most alert muscles recover in an instant the placid softness of earliest infancy. The deepest frown relaxes into peace. For a moment, one might even feel one has done this man a favor—and in fact one just might have.

The hard part is not in the doing, but in the doing well. If one gets them young enough, it is said, the possibilities are endless. Here’s an example.

Let us say we get this child, the oldest son of a roads engineer in a third world country, building roads into the unforgiving jungle, leading from nowhere in particular to nowhere specifically. The engineer, a man who built his meager life from nothing by sheer force of will, has drunk all sense into despair and drowned all but the heartiest sorrows for they refuse to sink. Twelve hour days led to twelve hour nights and sleep came only on Saturdays—Sundays are God’s days. He never was what he’d always hoped he’d grow up to be, and so he sought revenge on the back of that child. But children’s bodies heal quickly, and defying death, he grew stronger.

Life was hard then, and there was never enough money to feed everybody well. Being the bread earner, the engineer got the lion’s share, and the kids and the wife got what was left. In those days, food was the measure of a man’s success, and the engineer was just not that good at it.

At eleven, the child dropped out of school. He didn’t have enough money to buy a bicycle, so he rented one from a man in town, bought kerosene by the 5-gallon tin and balancing two on the sides of the handlebar, he rode around town selling pints for people’s wood-burning stoves and lamps. When he broke his arm and couldn’t ride the bike anymore, he bought onions and sold them at the bus stop where people had make-shift little vegetable stands. When his father told him to stop, he went back to school—but didn’t stop working, only now he did it after school. He did his homework by candle light late at night, out in the back yard, where the light wouldn’t bother anybody.

On his fourteenth birthday, he woke up on a strange bed, beside a whore he’d rented to celebrate. No one else remembered it was his birthday. Back then, one celebrated only the first five years of a child’s life, till the highest danger of death had passed. His youngest sister did not make it long past the third. He was happy enough to have that much money.

He left the house and made his way in life, moving closer and closer to the capital, studying more and more, surviving by wit or trick or labor. He was not a great looking man, a lanky little indian boy too tall for his age, with a large, broad nose and a full and thick head of wild black hair—but he made up for it with a great personality, always happy, always smiling, always bringing sense and light to the darkest times. He won friends; he influenced people.

In his twenties, he had a wife who left him to work for the Voice of America. By then, he was well known, his humor shaping the way of many a radio soap opera so popular in those days, making great contrast with the melodramatic soaps of the past and making him a name. Soon, he was writing for the more famous comedians in the country, and then he, too, was one of them. Things were looking up.

He found a pretty girl who wanted a successful husband, and what should have been the beginning of great times turned out to be, in fact, the end. They never really liked each other. Marriages of convenience are so much more convenient when the parties involved are indifferent to each other. Animosity is rarely tamed by custom. This was the middle, the senseless plateau that comes from sheer exhaustion and gives the false sense that things are settling in, that it all might just work out…

In his thirties, he discovered politics. Being a man of the people, he took the people’s side and fought in silence like so many did then. The war came. Many of his friends died—some just went away. The war took his house, his wife, his country. In the end, all he had left were his children.

He had found happiness in his children. Yes, there were far more than those he’d had with just his wife, but that was ok, because that’s what everybody did. And he took care of them—all of them. He visited the ones he didn’t live with, and he paid their way. He had money now, and everybody ate plenty. When he left the old country for the new one, and he could only take the four he lived with, he cried. He cried for home and country—he cried for loves long lost—he cried for children he’d never see again.

Somewhere along the road, he lost his way. He erred, like many had before. He hurt those he loved most because he never knew how to show true love. He tried—he did his best—and if his best was not good enough, how could he be to blame? And yet the blame never left him; the guilt stayed with him to the end.

In the new country, he found times at once far more civilized than the childhood back in the days of home and far harsher. Men who’d been his friends now turned on him and on one another like hungry hyenas on the last carcass to be found, though they smiled and spoke softly and went to church all together. Men who had at home not been half as successful as he, now closed the doors that others had opened to them. For twenty years, he tried all the tricks he’d learned when young, and found they did not work in this new, undiscovered country. He tried to make a new life with a new woman, and she left—and the next one left, too. By the time he found the one who’d bury him, he’d given up—as often happens.

He lost his will.

Things started happening to him. He stopped happening to the world. The strong, happy, virile man that defied the strength of electric cable at the hands of a sadistic engineer since he could remember, could now not remember what it was to be a strong and happy man. He lived from day to day like practicing some masochistic 12-step program whose only aim was mere survival. He who for long had persevered, now merely survived. The end of the end came with a cough. What bullets couldn’t do, an enemy too small to see managed with ease. A viral infection of the heart tripled its size. The lack of activity in a man used to massive meals tripled his size. One day, a doctor told him to lose 150 pounds in six months or he’d die.

Three months later, he was dead.

He died on an easy chair watching Johnny Carson. A random day like many before, promising to be like many after, we all went to sleep and left him alone in the living room. Fat and heavy, he breathed easier if he slept sitting. Sitting there, I’m sure he wondered why he should fight so hard for the next breath. The doctor had given him twenty-five pills to take every day. His wife counted them out for him at the beginning of the week. When he died, we found hundreds of pills hidden in little corners of the house, where he’d put them so we’d think he’d taken them. He’d given up—and who can defeat despair? In his old age, he found himself superfluous, unwanted and unloved, taken for granted and tossed aside like so many old men do. He died because that was the better way.

In the end, one need not lift a finger to kill a man. One only need stop loving him.