Part I and Part II of this short story draft.
"Hullo, hullo," Rastari said in that gratingly loud voice of his. He looked quite as ugly and ordinary as he always did, as if he had never fallen from the top of the First International Bank building at all. "I can't remember what we did, but it must have been one wild night!"
"What happened to you?" I asked, trying to keep calm.
"I already told you," he said, laughing. I noticed with some pleasure that he winced as he did so. "I can't remember anything about last night. Partial amnesia, or something like that. But whatever happened, I broke two ribs and my arm, cracked my collarbone, and bruised my side pretty badly."
I tried to assimilate this. "What could you possibly have done that you only broke your ribs and your arm?"
"Only broke my ribs and arm?" Rastari said, laughing (and wincing) again. "What were we doing, if you expected me to be more banged up than this?"
"No," I said, "I meant, what could you have done to break your ribs and your arm, given that we didn't do anything. We were just strolling around, and you wandered off, and nobody saw you for hours. Max and I were worried."
Rastari looked at me doubtfully a moment. "Max?"
"Yes," I said impatiently, "Max. You and I were with Max last night."
The doubtful look became a bewildered look. "Who is Max?"
I felt myself on the verge of a rant, but then I remembered the comment about partial amnesia, and just changed the subject. We engaged in some idle chitchat about football and chess and amnesia, with Rastari shouting or laughing that odious, unbearable laugh ever few minutes. In my head, however, I was thinking about the lunch I was having with Max the next day. We were going to have to do some more planning if the world was ever to be rid of that morally detrimental state of affairs called Danny Rastari.
"He didn't remember me at all," Max asked when I met up with him at our favorite cafe and told him about the encounter in the hospital.
"Not in the least. But he says that a lot of things are fuzzy. Look on the bright side, though: he doesn't remember what we did to them."
"Perhaps," Max said, but I could see he was bothered by it. He was never one to let anything keep him down, though, and in a moment he said, "Well, it means that we can start over again. No harm, no foul."
"Maybe," I said. "But won't we just be pushing it? After all, we pushed him off a bank building once; it seems a little too deliberate to do it again. And what if he survived again?"
"There's no way he could survive again," Max said. "It had to be a fluke the first time."
"Still, I don't like the idea of doing it twice. That seems a little too much like murder."
"We pushed him off the bank building."
"Yes, but we were just helping gravity rid the world of a morally bad state of affairs. Gravity, as it turned out, was incompetent at its job, so we'd have to push him off again. Even if it weren't murder to keep pushing someone off a bank building, it's just too sloppy. We need a better plan."
"He's been talking about hunting recently," Max said.
"Yes!" I replied. "Hunting makes accidents easy. It should be easy enough to find something that will accidentally kill him."
"That wasn't really what I had in mind," said Max. "We had better keep it simple. That's what was nice about the first plan, even if it didn't work. Let's just take him out to your hunting cabin as soon as he gets well. Convalescent recreation, or something. And then we can poison him."
"No, no, no," I replied. "Have you forgotten the whole point? We don't want to murder him. We just want him to die."
"I understand that. But isn't that what we're really going to do. After all, we won't be killing him. He'll just die because his body starts shutting down in response to a particular chemical compound."
"I suppose so," I said, frowning down at my plate a moment. Then I brightened. "And because we'll be out in the middle of nowhere, we can actually try to get help without fear that he'll be saved. That's great! One thing I never liked about the bank building was the worry about being responsible for his death through negligence if he didn't die on contact. But since we can try to get help, we won't be responsible for his death at all!"
"If you say so," said Max. "I think we should just keep our minds on the goal. Let's just focus on poisoning him."
"Keep in mind that we aren't the ones poisoning him. That's important. We can't be murders; we can't kill him. We're just helping the poison do so. But what poison would do the job?"
"I know just the thing," said Max. "Leave that to me."
We were silent a moment, then I said, "But what if the poison doesn't kill him?"
"It will kill him."
"That's what we thought about falling from the top of the bank building."
"I already told you that was a fluke. But if it's any consolation, we'll have guns."
"But we can't shoot him. That would be murder."
"Look," he said with some impatience, "you were the one who pointed out that accidents happen when people hunt. Those guns are going to go off at some point or another. All we'd be doing is helping them to go off in the direction that most improves the world."
"True," I said slowly. "And, really, if you think about it, it's the trauma that kills people who are shot. But I still like the poison idea better. There's less ambiguity there. Let's hope that works."
"Very well then," he replied, raising his glass. "Here's to hoping that it works."
We clinked glasses. And that was how the new plan was set: we were going to find a way to let poison rid the world of that odious Danny Rastari.
It's a pity that poison was as incompetent as gravity.
