Kamikaze Lust by Lauren Sanders

peeling chrome and yellow-green vinyl. Apparently, orders for the tape were coming in faster than calls to the Home Shopping Network on a bottom price item. He had set up an 800 number and had an intern monitoring the phones. Then there were the television and radio call-ins, the satellite conferences, round tables on the Internet. His was a conundrum fit for the modern MacLuhanite: so many tools, so little time.
    All of this and the Attorney General couldn’t substantiate any of the charges against him. It didn’t hurt that he’d hired a celebrated attorney and an upscale public relations firm, which had leaked snippets of the Ida and Marvin tape. What TV station could resist these cherubic faces telling America that suicide was a lifestyle choice? Hours later came the faxed release stating that proceeds from the video sales would go to medical research foundations.
    I couldn’t stop thinking of Shade’s perfect comment about the suicides being a septuagenarian snuff film. Fidgeting in my chair, I uncrossed my legs, then quickly crossed them the other way. My stomach gurgled in stereo, so I had to speak. “When they came to you…” I said and almost didn’t recognize my own voice, “did they know what they wanted?”
    “Oh, yes, they knew,” he nodded. “You have to, otherwise I won’t get involved. There’s too much risk.”
    “You mean legally?”
    “At the very least.” He stared at me so I looked away. I saw he had hung my jacket from a coat rack frond; a mound of leather protruded in between its shoulders like a Hollywood gun hidden in a suit pocket. That was so bad for the leather.
    “You see, Rachel.” Hearing my name brought me back, a bit horrified that I returned to him. I had to fight the desire to grab my jacket and run. “You don’t mind me using your first name, do you?”
    “No, that’s okay.”
    “I simply cannot afford to be wrong. Do you realize how many requests I get a day? And since the suicides, this popularity, I can’t tell you…I talk to everyone. You cannot even imagine.”
    “I’m afraid I can.”
    “So, we’re talking about cancer here?”
    I nodded yes, but was tempted to say no. Even sitting in this office with the Master of Self-Deliverance, I had trouble admitting to myself just why I’d come. I thought of Aunt Lorraine at home in bed and wished I was there with her, watching games shows, playing backgammon, keeping this damn disease away from her.
    Kaminsky smiled and his deeply creviced face went from dour to distortedly happy. His upper lip twitched. “Cancer is my soft spot. I was once an oncologist, you see? So much pain.”
    “The thing is I think it’s more that she’s afraid of dying, than actually…she doesn’t want to, to…” I was stalled by a lump in my throat, then surprised at how the words had begun to come out. If I continued to speak, however, I was afraid of what might come next. Where I used to tether my emotions with a performer’s professional grace, I felt as if, recently, the reigns had been cut loose.
    “I had a patient last year, a lovely woman,” Kaminsky said. “She had bone marrow cancer. The way her family talked you would have thought she couldn’t make it another day. I met with her a couple of times, we talked. She ended up living almost a full year after that. She took a trip to Belize. Went to her grandson’s high school graduation.”
    I didn’t say anything. Just ground my teeth against the rim of the paper cup.
    “The reality is, sometimes just knowing I’m here, whether we go through with it or not…it’s enough. They say knowledge is power; well in these cases the knowledge that there’s help is a measure of control.”
    “Control? What kind of control can she have on television? I don’t want her on television,” I blurted out.
    “It is quite troublesome.”
    “But you said you film everyone.”
    “No, I don’t film anyone. I simply suggest that people document the process themselves, for their