The Death Agreement Read Free Page A

he needed to get home.
    Taylor stood up and reached into
his back pocket. "Read this over," he said, handing me a thick
envelope.
    "What's this?" I asked. "Suicide
note, I'm guessing. Is today the day?"
    "Not for us." Grinning, he leaned
down, hugged me again, and left.
    I excused myself from the poker
game and wheeled over to a quiet corner of the dining
room.
    THE DEATH AGREEMENT had been
printed across the top of the first page. Confused, I browsed
through the letter, a contract of sorts. I wasn't quite sure what
to make of it. The pages talked of friendship and what it meant to
be remembered, each section dealing with a different aspect of a
person's death.
    The letter Taylor had given me
explained that he believed someone could stop worrying about dying
if they knew a trusted person would tell their story after they
were gone. He proposed we do this for each other. Nothing fancy,
just the truth. If I died, Taylor would give my eulogy. If he died,
I'd speak for him.
    I thought that the contract was
some sort of evolution of his original idea back at Rucker. I read
it over a dozen times, studying all eight parts, each section
containing a few stipulations. I scratched out an item here and
there and added in others. The document could help us. It could
remind us to enjoy life. It could propel us to leave a mark on this
world.
    By the time Taylor visited again,
I had worked through several revisions of The Death Agreement. We
went over everything and compiled a final version. Then Taylor had
it printed on heavy stock paper in a crisp, legalese-style font.
The finished contract felt heavy in my hands and looked more
professional than any legal document I had ever seen.
    Taylor had left plenty of free
space to make notes and future additions. Even the United States
Constitution had left room for improvement.
    We sat across from each other in
my small dorm as a notary public officer hunched over the two
copies lying on the table between us. We signed and stamped The
Death Agreement, making it official.
    I popped open a couple of beers,
and we drank to celebrate.
    ***
    Taylor came to visit every other
Saturday.
    We hung out watching television or
playing video games mostly, but when my pain subsided, and I felt
well enough to travel, we began to explore around the closed-down
sections of the campus.
    Most of the facilities had been
abandoned and off-limits by this point. In 2011, the government had
ceased primary operations of the hospital under Base Realignment
and Closure, or BRAC as it's more commonly known, and most patients
and staff were transferred to the newly built location in Bethesda,
Maryland. The public eye had been focused on the state-of-the-art
treatment center, so hardly anyone paid attention to the old
hospital, which had maintained a medical presence in case some
unforeseeable event required MEDCOM to backtrack. A small group of
patients still needed to be on-site to justify the skeleton crew.
How they picked who got stuck with the sub-par care is anyone's
guess. I think it had a lot to do with the attitudes of the wounded
soldiers. The last thing command needed was some camera crew
filming a disgruntled soldier in the lobby of their pride-and-joy
pork belly project.
    Fine by me. I preferred the quiet.
Besides, it allowed Taylor to freely push my wheelchair down the
empty streets while we listened to the sound of nature reclaiming
the world.
    Weeks passed. My attitude
improved, and a prosthetic leg replaced the wheelchair.
    Suddenly, I was able to do things
on my own again, albeit with a little help from crutches. Stairs,
for example, had become my nemesis. Though I was still in constant
pain, I could stand, and that's all that mattered.
    Bursting into my room one morning,
Taylor said, "Get your lazy ass up! We got work to do!"
    "Give me a minute," I
said.
    "We ain't got all day."
    "Yeah, yeah. Give me a sec. I
think I know where we should go first."
    We had mapped the place during our
previous wheelchair