In just under half an hour, he managed to reach the building. It was oddly located beside a private children’s day care centre, but this wasn’t something he was going to concern himself with. The young man walked into the building and was guided by a corridor which he followed until he reached the end. As he trotted he could hear the echoes of his footsteps and felt an eerie sense of isolation in this dark looming path. Eventually he encountered a door which had a buzzer. He rang it and then in a matter of seconds it just slid open. This seemed rather creepy but he pushed it wide open to find a tiny room with a receptionist desk.

There were no windows in sight and it seemed as if the only visible light source was a florescent light bulb lodged at the centre point of the ceiling in the room. The lady who had answered his phone call was sitting behind the desk, gazing at her monitor. She looked dazzling as if she were a model. She had a bob cut hair style, bushy eye brows, lavender eye liner and extremely neotenous features. Her skin was ebony light and her lips were full like Angelina Jolie. Her bosom was that of a busty woman and it seemed as if she was wasting her talents on a desk job. As Tanatswa walked in, the door closed in behind him and he could hear some locking mechanism taking place within the interior of the door. He glanced back and then forth and decided to just interact with the receptionist.

“Hi, I called earlier today enquiring information about this place, so I wanted to know how I can get this euthanasia?” he asked, in an unsure manner.

“You’re the 23year old who was on the phone right?” she asked, standing up and showing more of her figure.

“Yes that was me.” he said, standing firmly as she prepared to reply.

“It has been only 30mins since you called, hmm you must be really desperate to die.” she stated with a lax tone. Tanatswa immediately maimed his face with worry after her tasteless remark. The lady noticed his sudden change of expression and became immediately self aware. She pulled her hair back and sighed, “I guess that was a bad joke. Well sit down and I will call one of our doctors to have it arranged for you. Just fill in this form.” The lady handed him a form which only needed his personal information and also had the option of him choosing either to give away his organs for a donor or to have them kept in his body post death. Tanatswa wondered how long it would take to finalize this process and asked her, “How long would it take for this procedure?”

“Well after filling in the form you’d have to go through a 5 to 10minute consultation with one of the doctors, it’s a preliminary thing that we have to do before the procedure. Once the consultation is done, we will proceed to the act of euthanasia.”

“What would the consultation be about?” he asked, confused by what was to come.

“It’s basically a talking session with the doctor as your last chance to back out before you commit. We also assess the psychological reasons for your decisions and use it in our research to come up with a commonality for why people seek suicide. So it’s also partly some statistical mambo jumbo that the data mining people use for our reports.”

“Wow, I guess euthanasia requires a lot of paper work, hmm, so is it really painless?”

“Well the process is painless and no one ever screams during their final moments, so don’t worry, it will be like you fell asleep and never woke up.” she said, reclining into her seat. Tanatswa finished the form and handed it back to her. She asked for his ID which she scanned and then returned it to him. He swallowed a bit of his saliva and lamented about what he was going to do.

“I have a question, how many people have to this place?” he asked glancing at her with a sad look.

“Well not a lot, but last week we had 5 people come in and a lot of them were young adults like you. It seems like young people are not happy these days.”

Tanatswa swallowed some more saliva upon hearing this and for some reason felt morbidly relieved to know that he wasn’t the only anomaly in the system. If others had come to the same conclusion as him then he was inevitably going to experience the same fate. He somehow changed his sad look to a sigh of relief which caught the lady off guard. In an attempt to make him feel better she ended up saying, “I don’t know what happened in your life to make you come to this decision, but I just wanted to let you know that if you were to ask me out on a date, I would probably go out with you.” Tanatswa heard this and was somehow flattered, but replied, “I am sure that in the end that this isn’t your first time saying that to people like me. Thank you for showing pity on me.” Sadly enough, the lady had used those exact words before, 3 times on other suicide victims who had come before him. He saw through her and she began to feel extremely self conscious and hollow inside.

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Just as he was done talking, a door opened and a voice called out his name. It was one of the doctors of the facility who called him by his name. The lady urged him to go as she tried to hide the tears she was repressing. Tanatswa entered the room to find a small cubicle that looked white and sanitized. A lot of cupboards and paintings where in the room and the air seemed clean. The doctor was a dark skinned short man with glasses and a white beard. He had a heavy guttural voice that made you pay attention but feel threatened by his tone. The doctor began to speak and said, “Greetings, I am doctor Kunonga and I will be taking you for consultation. You are free to not answer any of my questions for the duration of this session, but I believe a mutual discussion would be beneficial for both parties.” Tanatswa simply nodded and waited to see what the doctor had prepared for him. Thought his voice seemed intimidating, his gestures were rather friendly and this made it seem as if you could warm up to him.

“So I will ask you, why do you want to commit suicide?” asked the doctor with a straight face. Tanatswa paused and lingered in his mind for a bit before mustering the strength to say, “It’s because I am unhappy.”

“Why are you unhappy?”

“It’s because everything I try to do ends up as a failure.” he said, slouching slightly.

“So you wish to have success in your endeavours?”

“Yes. I just want to win, but I guess for everyone who wins there is always going to be a trail of losers behind them. I guess it’s the universe balancing out things and giving people roles that they can’t change.” he said, squeezing his knee caps with his palms.

“So because of the lack of success in these areas in your life you have now identified yourself as a failure?” he asked, taking down notes.

“Yeah, I think that’s what I am.”

“I believe that as a young man pressured by the demands of society you are bound to cave in due to the lack of success but you are only 23 years and have more years to bounce back and...”

“Fail, you mean more years to fail. I think I told you that the universe just assigns you roles and unless you are lucky you can’t get out of them.” he interjected.

“So I am guessing you believe in natural selection. Hmm fair enough. Do you have children Mr.Mutezo?”

“No.”

“Do you have a girlfriend?”

“I have never had one.”

“Is there anyone you love?”

“Well,” he said, pausing to think about what that question meant to him and then decided to say, “I do love my mother but I feel like my perpetual experiences with failure have destroyed our relationship and I guess I have become a useless person in her eyes.”

“How would your mother feel about you ending your life?”

“Why does it always have to be how someone else feels as if my emotions are a proxy to satisfy others? I am the one who feels bad and no one can really help me. My so called family don’t understand me and when I ask for help I am berated as being lazy and useless. I honestly want to go through this process in the end. If I can just end it all I won’t have to extend my suffering.”

“Hmm, I guess this isn’t a passing tantrum, you seem to absolutely want to get this done.” said the doctor who was scratching his beard, “So I will tell you this. You were born unlucky and received the short end of the stick. If you wish to die, just know that you had not control over the success of your own life and things were set up against you.”

“Huh?” asked Tanatswa who didn’t expect the doctor to take this direction.

“When people die from random earth quakes, die in a plane crash and others don’t, it’s simply as you stated, the force of natural selection. The truth is you were never meant to win in life. Just as those people who died tragically you were never supposed to live that long. In the end we all bend to the wills that supersede us. It’s not your fault for never being a winner; it’s just that the invisible forces never wanted you to ever be one.”

The doctor stood up and patted Tanatswa’s back after the session. The consultation ended on rather a bleak note and the young man felt way worse than he had before he had come into the facility. He was directed to a room with a hospital bed and a couple of appliances connected to it. He laid his body on top of the bed and 2 nurses showed up to set up the apparatus of tubes that would send the killing fluid into his body.

Tanatswa was first injected with an anaesthetic and lastly was pricked on one of his veins to connect the tubes. The doctor showed up again and then asked him, “If you could go to a world where everyone starts at the same level, no family ties or good genes to get you ahead, no invisible force stopping you from succeeding your goals, what would you do?”

“I would make sure I was number 1 in that world so that I would never live a shitty life again, my bad I used bad language in front of a doctor, well who cares anyway, I am just going to die anyways.” he said, a bit tearful and scared. He thought he could tense it out but he couldn’t. Who knows where he would go. In Christianity, if you were to take your own life you would definitely go to hell and probably with all the times he spent masturbating and filling his mind with garbage, he would probably have a special seat there, waiting to make him experience the wailing and gnashing of teeth. But what if dying didn’t take you to hell? What if it led to just nothing.

Ceasing to exist, a blank canvas painted pitch black. What if it all came to just being nothing? Was there an afterlife or would it just be nothing. These thoughts flowed into his consciousness as he finally succumbed to death. The poison flowed into his body and slowly began to shut down his internal organs. He experienced no pain and died. The doctor thus checked his time and pronounced his death at 11:07am.