Freedom of Choice
(originally published August, 2007)
Shari Curtis must make a hard choice for herself and for her mother. We meet just moments before she must have a decision.
This work is based loosely on the song “Freedom of Choice” by Devo. It is part of the “Song = Story” collection.
“In ancient Rome, there was a poem about a dog who found two bones. He picked up one. He licked the other. He went in circles and he dropped dead.” (Devo, Freedom of Choice)
“I’m sorry. Did you say something?” Shari Curtis asked the man standing next to her on the elevator.
The man shook his head. His dark eyes held confusion at her question. He shifted his body away from the crazy person on the elevator then returned to watching the floor.
Turning her head away from the man, Shari watched the lights flash as the floors passed. I could have sworn that guy said something about Rome. Then her ears heard what her mind refused to accept. They had turned Devo’s Freedom of Choice into Muzak and were playing it on the hospital elevator. Christ. What’s next? The Sex Pistol’s Anarchy in the UK?
In an elevator trance, her mind drifted to the first time she heard Freedom of Choice. Fifteen, her long hair flapping in the wind, she rode in the back of her best friend’s brother’s rusted Bronco. They were laughing at something, and plotting how to get beer, when the song came on the radio. Her friend’s brother, the coolest person she had ever met, turned up the radio and sang along with the words. Her eye, full of puppy love and lust, followed his lush mouth while he sang. Of course, the song lasted longer than he had when she lost her virginity to him a week later. He was an accountant now and fat and bald and not cool….
And not riding on this elevator.
Shari watched the man step off the elevator and panicked. As long as this anonymous man was standing beside her, she had time. Time to make a decision. Time to make a choice. When the elevator opened on the fifteenth floor, she needed to have the answer ready. But Shari had no idea what to do.
Two more floors.
Yes, in fact Muzak Devo, what she wanted was freedom from choice. She hadn’t asked her mother to have a stroke. She hadn’t asked her mother to have brain cancer. Her ever-in-control mother took care of every detail in her own life with vicious secrecy. Now it was up to Shari to make the choice for her – chemotherapy and rehab or comfort and death.
Shari siphoned off her panic in a slow breath. She had to choose between painful death mitigated by medications that would make her mother a zombie or painful zombie chemo followed by a painful zombie death a year or maybe two later. That was the choice. Pain, and its resulting zombie state, were – what word had the doctor used? – compulsory.
Like the dog in Rome, Shari licked at one bone and tried to imagine her mother in chemo. As soon as the image grew, she would abandon it for the other bone. Yes, mother would prefer a fast painless death. Unbidden, her mind would jump back to the brilliance of chemo, then back to comfort, then chemo, then back. Non stop, night after night, her mind ran in circles leaving Shari dead tired.
“As a door prize Ms. Curtis,” the Devo member in that ridiculous red hat and tie said in her head, “you have the freedom to choose between one awful consequence and another.”
“Why can’t I choose to have everything back to normal?” Shari said out loud in the elevator. I don’t have that much freedom. Say it again in the land of the free. You only have the freedom to choose.
For the first time in their thirty-five year relationship, her mother’s bitter tongue was locked behind her grey teeth. An art critic for the New York Times, words and cigarillo smoke were a force of nature that blew out of her mother’s mouth. The tenor of smoke and words changed like the wind. A sunny day, a nice art showing, and the words were kind. A dark New York City day and the words were more acerbic than the smoke.
Then without warning, nature changed and the storm of words was silenced by the stroke.
Shari spent the last week trying to determine if her mother’s eyes begged for an easy death or another moment of life. With so many spoken and unspoken words in their relationship, Shari never paid attention to the subtler forms of communication. Silence replaced words. Silence permeated the hospital room in the same way that the cigarillo smoke used to fill every room, every thought, and every interaction.
She never thought she would miss the sound of her mother’s voice. After years of wishing for a single God damn moment of silence, she longed to hear her mother speak.
Yesterday, she thought she heard her mother complain about the food, what exactly is it that Shari was wearing, when was the incompetent doctor going to arrive, and on and on. Shari had pressed her hands to her ears against the noise. But when she woke from the restless nap, her mother was still silent and she longed to hear her speak. That’s the rule of thumb. Isn’t it? If you’ve got it, you don’t want it.
As the elevator slowed to her mother’s floor, Shari rubbed her eyes. She pressed a finger and thumb against the bridge of her nose in preparation for the flood of feelings, sounds and smells from the stroke ward. If she blew out a breath from the elevator to the nurse’s station, she wouldn’t gag.
She still had no idea what to do. Glancing at the clock at the nurse’s station, she delighted that she had five minutes before the doctor arrived and the decision had to be made. Shari walked to her mother’s room. Biting the inside of her mouth against the choice, she opened the door.
~~~~~~~~
claudia hall christian is a novelist. She lives in Denver.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.