The Schiavo Trap

Friday morning. Badly hung over. Another Thursday night in a bar on restaurant row with my college roommate, trading boozy plans for a future blockbuster film career. Don't remember what time I got in.

Awakened by a thorny red finger on my shoulder.

"Dude, wake up," a voice says. "The pope's dying again. Time to motivate."

I open one eye. "Satan," I sigh. "Come on, man, not again. After last time..."

"Last time you didn't use any of my jokes," he says. "That was your fault."

"Your jokes were worse than mine," I say. "Even Gilbert Gottfried wouldn't have touched that stuff. And that Ex-Lax bit was from Major Payne."

He sags. "Yeah, well, I love that movie. Sue me."

I get up, walk straight past him in my underwear, pour coffee. "Anyway, forget it," I tell him. "I'm not going near your shit for at least another six months. I'm checked into Boring-Ass Political Pundit Motel, and I'm paying monthly rates. Paul Krugman's in the next room, incidentally. And I'm writing about Wolfowitz this week. He's head of the World Bank now, you know. Coffee?"

"No, thanks," he says, sitting on my new couch. His tail hangs over the back. "Wait, Wolfowitz? That bitch? Who cares about him? Listen, I've got a Terri Schiavo column for you."

"Yeah?" I say, sipping.

"Yeah. 'Orgasms That Last Forever: The New York Press Handbook to Persistent Vegetative Sex.'"

I shake my head. "It's been done. There's a web site."

"There is? Shit."

"Yup," I say. "By the Bang Brothers guys. It just looks like regular sex to me."

"You're kidding," he says. "Is the girl made up to look like Terri Schiavo?"

"No," I say. "They're Swedish twins. They pick them up on a street in Pasadena in broad daylight. Give them five hundred bucks apiece to get into a microbus. They're like, 'Sure-we're tourists! Nice car!'"

"Well, hell!" he says, standing up. "Then that's not even the same thing! I'm talking about-"

"Look," I sigh. "I'm just fucking with you. There's no Terri Schiavo sex site. I'm just not touching any more of your ideas, okay? And especially none involving Terri Schiavo."

"Why not?"

"Because the whole story is a goddamn disgrace," I say. "It's an ethical black hole. All those journalists down there, it's like a meth party in a gay bathhouse. One whiff and they're off. They should do public service messages with some of those guys-'It happened to me. It could happen to you.' With Anderson Cooper, maybe."

"Since when," he says, "do you care about ethics?"

"Well, I don't," I say. "But hell, you have to have some standards, right? I mean, the parents, they get up there, and they just flat-out accuse the husband of strangling her. And these guys turn right around and reprint that-like it's not libel! I'm sure they hesitated at first, but once one guy put that out there, it was in every single report. You know: 'The Schindlers, who maintain that Michael Schiavo abused and strangled poor, once-beautiful Terri...' And then they cue up that same video of her face again, with the open mouth and those fish eyes, gasping into the camera. And you're like, the bastard! He strangled her!"

"I see," he says. "And that's irresponsible?"

"Forget about irresponsible, it's fucking stupid," I say. "And it's illeg-hey, this coffee tastes funny."

Satan laughs.

"You put something in my coffee," I say, rubbing my suddenly hot neck.

Satan laughs again.

"I... can't breathe... I-"

Red mist. Raging flames and pain. In a caldron. Boiling alive, fingernails sloughed off and floating to the surface. I am screaming like a baby. In the caldron with me is a thin-shouldered man with a bushy moustache.

"Yeah, it hurts for a while," moustache says cheerfully. "You get used to it. Well, actually, you don't."

"You must be my new roommate," the man says. "Name's Melvin."

"Matt," I whisper, extending a lobstery hand.

He shakes it. "Nice to meet you. What are you in for?"

"Uh," I say. "I'm-I was-a newspaper columnist."

"Oh, shit," he says. "I thought they kept you guys on a different floor."

"I'm sort of a special case," I whisper. "What are you in for?"

"Me?" he says. "Oh, I molest children."

"Oh. What kind?"

"Well, my own mostly," he says. "But I was also a volleyball coach."

"Oh. Well," I say, trying to smile.

"Does it have to do with children?" he asks. "Are you like a newspaper columnist who molests children? Is that why you're here?"

"No, no," I say. "I, uh-I think I printed something libelous about a coma victim."

"So it didn't have anything to do with children?" he says, smiling a little and shifting in the soup. "I mean, you weren't, say, visiting your niece's and nephew's house, and challenging them to wrestling contests on the carpet in front of the tv, and then maybe you just sort of got excited and carried away, and then the next thing you know, everyone's crying, and you're whispering these threats..."

"No, no," I say. "It was just this thing I wrote. About a coma victim."

He frowns. "A child coma victim?"

"No, a grown-up coma victim," I say. "Her husband, actually. He's grown-up, too."

"Hmm. That doesn't sound very interesting."

"No. Listen," I say. "It had nothing to do with anything like that. There was this woman, Terri Schiavo, she was a bulemic, and she fell into a coma like 15 years ago. Eventually her husband tried to get her doctors to pull out the feeding tube that was keeping her alive, because he believed she was a vegetable."

I pull off another fingernail.

"But the woman's parents," I say, "who are like these religious freaks who see the face of Jesus in manhole covers, they didn't want the tube pulled. So they fought about it in public and suddenly there were like six thousand live trucks parked outside the hospital like the end of the fucking world was nigh. In the course of the argument, the parents accused the husband of strangling the woman, which-well, if it's true, there's no evidence for it."

"And?" Melvin says.

"And every one of those six thousand reporters repeated the accusation-and a lot of other stuff," I say. "Because that's what we do these days-we just shove anything that's good copy into print no matter how nuts it is, and then we justify it by saying, 'Well, this other guy said it.' Even the front page of the New York Times does it: 'Bush campaign aides were taken aback Wednesday when a totally full-of-shit web site, citing no sources, reported that the president stuffed a gerbil in his pants...'"

"And you did that?"

"Yeah," I say. "I did that. Wasn't thinking. I just did it again, incidentally. Melvin, your new roommate is a capitalist. Readership! Readership!"

He winces. "Man, I want a transfer. The people they let in here!"