An Old Fashioned Family Tradition of Service – Part Three

“Upon returning from our honeymoon, Laura and I settled into an lovely townhouse off campus and married life seamlessly.  It was as if we’d known each other forever.  I’d start a sentence, she’d finish it.  I’d bake a luncheon, she’d return from classes with the perfect wine.  She’d have a scalpel and bone knife ready at hand, I’d have a mallet and chisels.  It was as if we were two sides of a flawlessly minted coin, two halves of a single person.

“At her urging, I shifted my major from education to sociology and political science, the better to understand the world and those who people it with such abandon.  In the meantime, she transferred her credits from Smith and joined me at Harvard, pursuing her bachelor’s in finance.  Tongue in cheek, we both signed on for as many anatomy and physiology classes as we could.

“One day, about a year later, we were chatting while doing some homework and we somehow stumbled into the philosophical fields of thought.  Who were we, where were we going, what did we what out of life; that sort of thing.  I understand that many couples do the same periodically, but we never had before that instant.  We were so in tune with each other that it really wasn’t needed, I suppose.

“But out of the blue, Laura looked up from her microscope and asked me if I really believed in what we were doing.

“Caught me completely by surprise!  I almost dropped the liver I was biopsying onto the floor, I was so surprised.  I carefully set my favorite razor down, put the liver back into the cavity (neatness isn’t hard, it just takes practice), pulled off my rubber gloves and took her hands in mine before asking if she was serious.

“She turned off her microscope and led me out of the basement before explaining that she was concerned that we’d lost our moral compass.  Shortly after returning from Scotland, we’d decided that our original projects were somewhat childish.  Rapists and prostitutes … what had we been thinking?  Both had been with humanity since the fall of Adam and, no matter how dedicated or steadfast our devotion to riding mankind of these twined, and often entwined, blights, it was a hopeless battle.

“Instead, we addressed ourselves to the general improvement of the species as a whole, judging each potential subject as an individual, rather than as a member of a larger group.  As such, we dealt with pushers, pimps, politicians, policemen (corrupt only, I assure you), and the occasional pissant.  We trimmed both the worthless and the worth-less from the communal body, striving to improve it’s overall health, in lieu of attempting to perform microsurgery on the more unsavory elements.

“I am rather pleased to mention that, after only after around fifteen months, we were far more successful than we’d hoped.  The crime rate had dropped, the Public Health facilities reported less waste, and the major’s office announced that their cuts had saved the taxpayers quite a bit of money.  Heh … their cuts, huh?   We had quite a chuckle over that article, I can tell you.  No, it was our cuts … and slashes … and strangulation’s … and – on one notable occasion – detonation, that had created such good.

“Over five hundred germs removed from the communal body, leaving … ”

“WHAT?!?”  Captain Reynolds barked out the word before he could help himself.

“What is that, Captain?  You don’t believe that our efforts were producing such results?”  Al Taylor peered mildly at the larger man in puzzlement, then both his eyebrows shot up.  “Oh!  Oh, my!  It’s not that you believe I was bragging over the results, it’s the number that vexes you, isn’t it!”

Having gotten control over himself, the Captain apologized for interrupting with a strained, “Terribly sorry for the outburst, Mr. Taylor, but … well, you have to admit that it’s a bit fantastic.  Five hundred people … ”

“Over five hundred, actually, Captain,” Al Taylor corrected.

“… in fifteen months means that you were killing more than thirty people a month.  That’s more than a murder a day, Mr. Taylor.”

“Please, Captain; murder is such an ugly word and, in this instance, somewhat imprecise.  We culled, we put down, we eradicated, we remove, we weeded; we were working for the public good, doing our humble best to improve life for the many by euthanizing those who fed on the many.”  Al Taylor chided.  “As for your figures; mathematically, it worked out to one and a half a day, Captain, which we found to be quite whimsical.  Killing half a person a day … the oddities of math, I must say.”

Captain Reynolds looked around the room and noted that he seemed to be the only person taking the testimony seriously.  The Assistant DA kept scribbling on a yellow pad, the man’s lawyer looked half asleep, and the Captain’s own men … he took a second look and decided that they seemed, emotionally, to be somewhere between horrified and amused.  He then asked, “How was it possible to conceal such numbers, Mr. Taylor?  The logistical nightmare of having to deal with that many corpses … ”

“Yes, quite.  Whilst hunting alone, I often deposed of my subjects in the many dumpsters this fair city provides.  Often, for the sake of safety, I would use several for just one subject.  Laura, being an accomplished yachtswoman,  was more in the habit of giving her prey improper burials at sea.  Neither solution was perfect, either from a safety point of view nor from an ecological aspect.

“Ecological aspect?”

“Certainement, Mon Capitanie! What benefit the man who saves the community, only to doom the planet?  Deposing of human waste and remains is a delicate matter, one that cannot simply be foisted off on the Department of Sanitation or even on the Atlantic ocean.  No, neither represented an ideal, just a make-d0 until a better solution could be found.  When we set up home together, we purchased a house with extensive plumbing in the basement for just such a reason.  Between the power tools and the industrial meat grinder we installed, subjects could be reduced almost to their primordial composition within an hour.  At which point, it was a simple matter to treat it like the sewage it was and simply flush it away.”  Al Taylor nodded to himself in pleasure.  “Not a perfect solution, either, but much closer.”

Captain Reynolds sat back, astonished.  “I see.  Well.  Sorry to have interrupted.”

“Quite alright, Captain!” The smaller man beamed back.  “An excellent question and one that helps bring us ever closer to the events of this evening.

“Now, as I was saying, we’d managed to improve the immediate community, but that was just a small drop in the bucket.  We were dedicated to the twin goals of cessation of  individual suffering and widespread improvement of society.  We tried targeting … for instance, do you know how many runaways enter our fair city each and every day?!  Young men and women who, if they are lucky, end up having to lie and steal to survive.  If they are not among those lucky few … we did some careful studies, gentlemen, and discovered that any young girl entering the city as a runaway has an average life expectancy of only two years.

“Two years!  And those twenty-four months will be an almost unrelenting nightmare of pain and suffering, both physical and mental, both emotional and spiritual.  Okay, posit two solutions:  First, remove the predators who wait for their fair flesh to debark at the bus station.  We attempted this at first, but it was like battling a hydra.  A badly dressed and rather smarmy one at that.  For every weasel we trimmed, two would pop up to replace him. At on point, I actually starting believing that there was some sort of pimp production line situation somewhere in the city, cranking out replacements endlessly.

“So we shifted to possible solution two; remove the targets.  If one removes the sheep, the wolves – eventually – will seek they prey elsewhere, so we undertook to strangle the supply line.  Oddly, this approach worked much better.  Not only were we saving those young women from two years of pain and suffering, but we were also creating an atmosphere of distrust and intense competition among the predators.  Added bonus:  those few who would have escaped the clutches of the wolves were spared a life of crime and we both passed our anatomy classes with flying colors.

“Which was well and good, but we still were morally adrift, shifting from one project to the next without any real specific goal in mind.  We needed to focus, to settle on a cause and stick to it, and it was for that reason Laura initiated the conversation.  We were going to graduate ahead of schedule, be decanted into a cold and merciless world, with only our wits, education, and trust funds to live on.

“So what were we going to do about our lack of any real cause?

“We hashed it out and decided that we had to do our level best to settle on a cause, then set the matter on the back burner and returned to our studies.  Then, one day, when we were simply laying about the house and half-listening to the radio, a rather lackluster commentator addressed the homeless problem.

“In a flash, we knew exactly what we’d be doing the rest of our lives!”