Wastelands of the Mind

Suicide Clinic

Suicide Clinic

My job is easy. I go over application paperwork and make the decision to approve or deny a particular applicant who seeks to qualify for our services. If an applicant qualifies, I accept the required payment and take said applicant from the reception area and into the clinic waiting room to sit with the other qualifiers as they wait for their appointment with the doctor. If a customer doesn't qualify, I will offer him a piece of candy laced with a mild opiate and schedule him an appointment with the psychiatrist who comes in once a month. He works for all of the clinics within our district because he has very few patients here; mostly because the qualifications required for our services are very minimal and the people who don't happen to qualify normally don't show up for their appointments anyway. I am required by law to approve at least nine out of ten applicants because we charge far more for facilitating an assisted suicide than we do for an appointment with our psychiatrist. Due to our taxes being higher than any other health care facility, we account for a large amount of government revenue.

Besides myself and the psychiatrist, there are three other positions here. The doctor's assistant is responsible for preparing the anesthesia inhalant and the subsequent barbiturate cocktail injections to be administered by the doctor who, meanwhile, will be conducting a full body physical on the patient. Once prepared and injected, it normally takes about thirty seconds for the barbiturate-induced cardiac arrest to cease and once the patient has been pronounced dead, the coroner's assistant comes in with a gurney to take away the body. The clinic doubles as a mortuary. We already account for more than half of the fatalities in our district, it only made sense that we expand and add a morgue in the back. So we are able to take the bodies directly across the hall to the coroner to be immediately prepared for burial or cremation. On the application, there is a space to indicate which the patient prefers. If burial is chosen, we require an additional five hundred dollars to the existing payment.

All of the paperwork that I handle on a day to day basis is essential for two reasons. One, a facility such as ours requires total transparency in regards to both the general public and the government. The public and the government's perception of us must always be at the very least neutral. We didn't use to be a politically correct healthcare facility despite the obvious demand for our services as evidenced by the increasing usage of suicide nets around factory buildings. Many politicians' reputations are at stake by allowing us to operate. It would merely take one inconsistency during one tax audit to shut us down completely.

The other reason the paperwork is essential is for the sake of positive identification. Nearly every day a nervous loved one comes through our silent, sliding doors and into my reception area to ask about a patient from a day or two ago. In that event, I can easily turn to my wall of filing cabinets and pull out the patient's file to either confirm or deny the loved one's most dreaded suspicions.

On the application, there is a space to provide a phone number to call after the procedure is complete so that the body or ashes can be collected. However, that part of the application is optional and oftentimes left blank. Many people don't want to think about anything that will happen after the procedure. To such individuals, our clinic is a place to vanish from the surface of the earth without a trace. Once they walk through our doors, nothing else exists.

One such applicant that immediately comes to mind was a young woman by the name of Serena Cassidy. She was one of the first applicants I evaluated, so she stands out quite vividly in my memory. In fact, she was the first applicant whom I had to deny our services. The fact of the matter was, she was too rich. From the clinic's server, I have immediate access to every American citizen's financial records. I am required to access and evaluate every applicant's financial statement to determine whether or not their wealth rests within the parameters set by the New Inalienable Rights Act. Ms. Cassidy's finances, as displayed on my desktop screen, showed her personal wealth to be quite above what has been informally referred to as the "happiness curve."