Switzy

Chapter 1

David flies toward London aboard Stearns’s new plane, though his real destination is Zurich, and the journey immediately becomes a confrontation with his own dissolving mind. He wants to reach Anna Gould and complete whatever transaction awaits him there, but the flight forces him to reckon with a failing memory and his growing dependence on Cody. The aircraft itself is a monument to Stearns’s wealth, a machine of polished surfaces and quiet power, and David sits inside it as a passenger in more ways than one. Every hour in the air makes the distance between who he was and who he is now more painfully clear.

Cody sleeps while David plays solitaire, the cards laid out on a table that belongs to someone else’s life. David wants nothing more than to pass the flight, to fill the dead hours with the small ritual of the game, but the solitaire becomes a mirror. He cannot remember the shared history between himself and Cody, the years and moments that should bind them, and the blankness where those memories should be shows how much time and mind he has lost. The game is a way to keep his hands busy while his thoughts drift into the void, and the void keeps staring back.

A flight attendant brings him a hydrating powder mixed into water, a small gesture of care in the sealed cabin. David drinks it, wanting to feel looked after, but the gesture only highlights the hollow luxury surrounding him. The powder is a modern convenience, a product of the same world that has made him obsolete, and it tastes like nothing. He is being cared for by strangers on a plane that belongs to a man whose empire David no longer understands, and the care feels like a form of storage. He is being kept comfortable while he is moved from one place to another, and the comfort is not for him. It is for the people who have to manage him.

David writes notes in his notebook, wanting to anchor himself, to pin down the facts of his life before they float away. But the handwriting on the page is not his own. The letters slant differently, the pressure of the pen is unfamiliar, and the realization lands like a blow. His body and mind are becoming unfamiliar to him, and the notebook, which should be a tool of control, becomes evidence of his unraveling. He is writing in a hand that belongs to someone else, or to no one, and the page offers no comfort.

The flight attendant serves dinner, wanting to maintain Stearns’s standards, and the meal is presented with the quiet precision of wealth. David eats, but his nostalgia for old air hostesses and the rituals of air travel past shows how obsolete his world has become. He remembers a time when flying was a ceremony, when the people who served you had names and faces and a certain way of moving through the cabin. Now the service is efficient and anonymous, and David is a relic of a time when the ceremony mattered. The dinner is good, but it tastes like the end of something.

David drinks Scotch despite his earlier abstinence, wanting comfort, and the decision marks the collapse of his brief, fearful attempt to change. He had been trying to hold himself together, to resist the old habits that dull the edges, but the Scotch is a surrender. It is warm and familiar, and it does what it has always done. It blurs the sharpness of the present and softens the fear that has been building since the plane took off. The abstinence was a gesture toward a self he can no longer be, and the Scotch is a return to the self he cannot escape.

He recalls Anna Gould and the arrangements in Zurich, wanting to complete the transaction, but the months of paperwork and assessments show he is being processed toward an end he cannot fully name. There have been forms and interviews and evaluations, a slow grinding machinery of preparation, and David has submitted to all of it. He does not know exactly what awaits him in Zurich, only that it has been arranged, and that Anna Gould is the one who arranged it. The transaction is the point of the journey, but the journey itself is a kind of processing, a movement toward a conclusion that David can feel but cannot articulate.

David tries to recall the itinerary without looking, wanting to prove his mind still works, but he fails. The schedule is a simple thing, a list of times and places, and he cannot hold it in his head. He has to unfold the printed schedule and read it, and the small failure is another confirmation. He is not the man who could once keep the details of a dozen deals in his mind. He is a man who needs the paper in front of him, and even then the words seem to shift.

Cody identifies the black-and-white cookies as Nate ’n Al’s, wanting to orient David, to give him a familiar landmark in the strange geography of the flight. But David’s delayed response exposes the lag between them. Cody is trying to reach him, to pull him back into a shared world of reference and memory, and David is slow to arrive. The cookies are from a deli that should mean something, and perhaps it does, but the meaning takes too long to surface. Cody is patient, but the patience is its own kind of distance.

Cody offers dried figs, wanting to share a small pleasure, a moment of ordinary human connection in the hermetic cabin. David ignores him, and Cody quietly replaces the lid. The gesture is small, but it is a withdrawal. David is not refusing the figs; he is refusing the connection, the offer of companionship, the reminder that there is another person here who wants to be with him. Cody puts the lid back on and says nothing, and the silence between them grows a little wider.

David retreats into an interior chamber of privacy, wanting safety and calm, but the retreat further separates him from Cody and the world. He goes inside himself, to a place where no one can follow, and the quiet there is not peace but isolation. Cody is on the other side of that door, and David knows it, but he cannot bring himself to open it. The chamber is a defense against the confusion of the present, but it is also a prison, and David is the one who built it.

Cody brings David Trazodone or Ambien, wanting to help him sleep, to give him rest on the long flight. But David asks for Klonopin instead, choosing sedation over clarity. The choice is deliberate. He does not want the sleep that comes with the other pills, the sleep that might bring dreams or memories or the kind of rest that leaves him vulnerable. He wants the Klonopin, the smooth chemical blanket that quiets the noise without demanding anything in return. Cody gives it to him, and David takes it, and the choice is another small surrender.

David wakes mid-flight and opens the window shade, wanting to see outside. But the black void beyond the glass and the thinness of the pane make him feel he is practicing death. There is nothing out there, no lights, no land, no sign of the world. Just the black and the cold and the sense that the only thing between him and the void is a sheet of glass. He looks into it and sees his own reflection, and the reflection is a stranger. He closes the shade and sits in the dim cabin, and the feeling does not go away.

David comes out of the bedroom and argues about landing at Heathrow, wanting control over where the plane touches down. He wants the familiar, the airport he knows, the route he has taken a hundred times. But Cody tells him it is impossible, that the plane must land at London City, and David must accept it. The argument is about an airport, but it is also about everything. David is trying to assert his will over a journey that is not his to control, and Cody is the one who has to tell him no. David accepts it, but the acceptance is bitter.

David discovers he has no fresh clothes in his bag, wanting to change before landing, and his anger at Cody and Sylvia cannot hide the fact that he packed badly himself. He blames them, but the fault is his own, and he knows it. The bag is a mess of old clothes and forgotten items, and David stands over it with the frustration of a man who has lost the ability to manage the simplest things. He remembers choosing clothes in his closet, wanting the right costume for the trip, the right presentation for whatever is waiting in Zurich. But he knows these clothes will be left behind, like a coffin’s mute holdings, the garments of a man who will not be coming back.

David reflects on his old business world, wanting to find legibility, to locate himself in the landscape of deals and meetings and the language of power. But he concludes that the young people have seen behind the curtain, and there is no place for him in the future. The world has moved on, and the things he knew how to do are no longer the things that matter. He is a man without a country, without a role, without a future. The plane carries him toward Zurich, and the Scotch warms his stomach, and the Klonopin smooths the edges, and David sits in the cabin of a plane that belongs to someone else, flying toward an end he cannot name.

David notices his own decline and fixates on decay, losing trust in his senses and memory. He discovers the smell of aging is his own and orders special persimmon soap to mask it. He tries the soap and finds it may not work, deepening his isolation and shame. He reflects on young people as brain-in-a-jar workers, realizing he is obsolete and addled.

David hides his growing confusion, spending enormous effort to appear normal. He loses track of time and thoughts, leaving mental breadcrumbs to find his way back. He uses chattiness and neutral comments to cover pauses, then finds even talking difficult.

The Budget Meeting

David blanks during a budget confrontation with Stearns, exposing his incompetence. Stearns protects David from the board and gives him a job, letting things slide for a while. David misses an important meeting and senses colleagues avoiding him, unable to understand why. He is found confused in the elevator by a startled girl, showing his public deterioration.

Home and the Tax Question

David hoards useless objects and mailers, then fires and rehires a housekeeper. He decides to get his taxes in order, but Cody tells him it is already dealt with. David erupts at Sylvia for throwing away his sweaters, forcing her to retrieve and repair them. He lies back on the plane as Cody's phone slides away, and they land.

Chapter 2

The phone is trapped somewhere inside the seat's machinery, and David cannot leave without it. He and the attendant work at the mechanism until it comes free, but the delay has cost him. He is exposed now, visible, unsettled, and the feeling follows him as the attendant moves to hurry him along.

She wants him out of the cabin and off the plane as quickly as possible. She helps him into his coat, presses mints into his hand, and steers him toward the tarmac. Her efficiency is meant to move him, but it also makes clear how little time there is.

Outside, David wants only to avoid the wet ground and get straight into the waiting car. Cody has other ideas. He redirects David back inside, toward passport control, and David's resistance folds. The tarmac glistens, and David's preference for dry ground loses to Cody's insistence on procedure.

A man from the Lounge Team takes over, guiding them through the airport. David resists at first, then concedes to the dry path and a bathroom stop along the way. The concession is small, but it sets the pattern: David's wishes bend to the structure Cody and the team provide.

Cody keeps the transfer moving, leading David through an empty terminal, the corridors bare of the crowds David might have expected. At the passport desk, Cody hands over both passports. The officer processes their entry without hesitation, stamping the documents and admitting them officially into the country. The stamp is a small sound, but it makes their arrival real.

David's next worry is his bag. Cody reassures him, and a luggage cart arrives carrying all the bags, dissolving the anxiety before it can take hold. The cart's arrival is ordinary, yet it removes the last practical obstacle between David and the next stage of the journey.

Cody wants David in the waiting SUV, and David follows docilely, climbing into the back seat. The driver, making conversation, explains the traffic: a drone protest has shut down Heathrow. The revelation confirms how fortunate their landing elsewhere had been, a small piece of luck in a journey that has otherwise been tightly controlled.

In the back seat, David reaches for distraction and plays solitaire on his phone. Mid-game, the screen glitches. It is a small thing, easy to dismiss, but it is a sign, another tremor in his worsening condition. The glitch is not dramatic, but David notices it, and the noticing is its own kind of confirmation.

He looks out and recognizes London. The city is familiar, and so is the fact it carries: Rebecca has built her life here, far from him. The recognition settles over him without comfort. The streets are hers now, not his, and the distance between them is measured in more than miles.

He wants to assess his plan. He opens his notebook, finds the note that his grandchild is nine years old, and closes it again without writing anything. The blank page is its own answer. He cannot summon the words, and the failure is quiet but complete.

He turns to the question of whether he could do this alone and concludes he could not. The logistics require Cody. Whatever else is true, David is bound to him now, and to the process. The admission is not surrender, but it is close.

He wants to comply with Ghoul's timing rules. He recalls the constraints clearly: he must be lucid enough to sign, and he must exit before his mind fails further. The window is narrowing, and he knows it. Every delay, every glitch, every blank page brings the deadline closer.

The letter still has to be produced. David tries to write it himself and fails. Cody writes it aloud instead, and David listens and approves, the words becoming his by consent if not by hand. The arrangement is strange, but it works, and David accepts it.

He wants to account for Cody's loyalty and his theft. The money Cody has taken sits between them unspoken, and David silently accepts it as fair payment. He lets the deception pass. The theft is not forgiven so much as absorbed, a cost folded into the larger transaction.

Then he wants to confirm the legal arrangements. He asks about the will, the funds, the notary. Cody answers yes to each. The machinery of the plan is in place. Each yes is a small reassurance, and David collects them.

Ghoul wants final confirmation. She asks him, again and again, whether he still wants to proceed. Each time, David does not change his mind. The repetition is a test, and David passes it by holding steady, even as everything else shifts around him.

Chapter 3

The streets are a crush of traffic, and David watches them through the window with mounting irritation. He wants nothing more than to reach the hotel without disruption, but the city refuses to cooperate. Every block is overrun, every light seems timed against them, and the delay grinds at him. Cody, at the wheel, wants only to get David checked in, to deliver him smoothly to the room and the rest that has been promised. But when they finally pull up to the hotel, the bellman ignores them entirely, attending to other cars, other guests, as though they are invisible. Cody waits, hoping the man will turn, and when he does not, Cody has no choice but to leave the car and go fetch him himself, leaving David sitting alone in the passenger seat.

David wants to get out of the car, but when he tries, the seat belt holds him fast. He had not realized it was still buckled. Cody has to point it out, and the small correction lands with more weight than it should. David wants to operate the seat belt himself, to manage this one simple thing without help, and he waves Cody off when Cody moves to assist. He fumbles with the latch, working it free on his own, reclaiming a small piece of control in a morning that has offered him very little of it.

Inside, David wants the calm of the hotel's old-world grandeur, the hush of marble and dark wood, the sense that he has stepped out of the noise and into something ordered. But the lobby is crowded, thick with guests and luggage and voices, and the illusion frays almost immediately. Cody approaches the desk, and David waits, expecting the room he requested, the one in the older part of the hotel, the quiet corner he had specified. The clerk tells Cody that none are available. The words land flatly, and Cody wants to smooth over the failure, but there is nothing he can do except argue quietly with the clerk and then turn to David with an apologetic face, a small grimace that admits the defeat without repairing it.

David wants to be distracted from the setback, and his eyes find an orchid displayed nearby. He studies it, and notices a dark smudge on one of its petals, a blemish that draws his attention and holds it. The flaw becomes a kind of focal point, something to rest his gaze on while the disappointment settles. He wants to imagine that the disease might unlock something in him, some new talent or capacity that has lain dormant, a compensation for what is being taken. But he recalls, honestly, that he was never artistic. He searches his past for some hidden capacity, some evidence that he was once capable of creation, and finds only the forced recorder lessons of grade school, the plastic instrument pressed into his hands by adults who insisted he learn. He remembers wanting to be moved by music, sitting at the Philharmonic, waiting for the transport that others described, and feeling only that he was checking a box, present but untouched. He wants to understand his family, to make sense of the distances between them, and the memory of Rebecca's metronome rises, ticking in her room, measuring out the failures to keep time for one another, the small desynchronizations that accumulated into something larger. He wants to recover the lost recorder, to find that brown felt bag and the instrument inside it, but they are gone, long gone, and the absence feels like a verdict. He wants to understand his younger self, the boy who took those lessons, and the memory of Tom's guitar and poetry surfaces instead, Tom's easy talent, his songs and verses, and the old embarrassments come with it, the sense of being outmatched, of standing in the shadow of someone who could make things while David could only practice.

David wants to keep his diagnosis private. He decides, sitting there in the crowded lobby with the flawed orchid and the apologetic clerk, that he will withhold the information from everyone. The decision settles over him like a coat. He will not tell. He will carry it alone.

He wants to know what the illness will actually be like, what it will do to him day by day, but the doctor could only offer terms, plaques and tangles, words that describe the machinery without describing the experience. He wants to believe the treatments might help, that there is something that will hold the line or push it back, but he learns that the medications can only maintain him, that they cannot restore what is lost, and that they carry the risk of fatal brain swelling, a danger that shadows every dose. He wants to retain his executive privileges, the access and authority that have defined his life, but after being rehomed with Stearns, the arrangement has changed, and he must pay for the physical himself. The privilege is not gone, but it is no longer free, and the cost is a reminder of his diminished standing.

He wants to prove he still has control, that his mind is still his own, and so he takes the memory test. The doctor asks him to remember a word, and he grasps at it, reaching for "Rose," holding it, losing it, grasping again. The test reduces him to that single syllable, and the reduction is its own kind of diagnosis. He wants to draw a clock, to pass the test, to demonstrate that his hand and his mind can still work together, but when he puts the pen to paper, his hand produces a tangle of lines and numbers, a shape that is not a clock, that cannot be read as a clock, that betrays him. The tangle sits on the page, and David looks at it, and the thing he wanted to prove is the thing that has been disproven.

Chapter 4

The elevator doors close and David is alone with Cody, the boy who has been assigned to shepherd him through this vast, unfamiliar hotel. He wants nothing more than to reach the room without incident, to move through this building like a normal person going about a normal day. But the elevator is mirrored on every surface, and David's reflection multiplies into an infinity of himself, an endless corridor of aging men in identical posture, and the sight stops him cold. For a moment he cannot move, cannot speak, caught in the vertigo of seeing himself repeated into nothingness. The freeze passes, but the unease lingers.

When the doors open, David pauses just outside, willing his body to obey him. His legs feel disconnected from his intentions, as though the signal from his brain arrives a half-second too late. He has to reach into his pocket and feel the notebook there, the solid rectangle of it, to jolt himself forward. Only then can he follow Cody, who has already started down the corridor without seeming to notice that David had stopped at all.

They walk. The corridors stretch on and on, carpeted in patterns that repeat without variation, turns that lead to more turns. David's hip aches with each step, and his confusion about where he is and why he is here makes the hotel feel actively hostile, a labyrinth designed to swallow him. He wants to reach the room, to sit down, to stop moving through this endless sameness. Cody walks ahead with the ease of someone who knows exactly where he is going, and David follows, dependent on the boy's certainty.

A room service cart appears ahead, abandoned in the hallway. Beside it stands a woman in a bathrobe, her hair wet, her expression blank. She is standing as though waiting for something, or someone, and the scene feels unfinished, suspended. David wants to understand it, wants to ask her if she is all right, wants to touch the cart, to make sense of this frozen moment. But Cody stops him, a hand on his arm, and moves him past the woman and the cart without a word. David looks back, but Cody keeps him walking, and the woman and her cart disappear behind a turn in the corridor.

Cody unlocks the door to the suite. David steps inside and finds his luggage already waiting, his bags arranged neatly on a luggage rack as though he had been expected hours ago. The sight confirms what he has suspected: others are managing his life now, moving his things, arranging his arrival, making decisions he is no longer capable of making himself. He wanted the solidity of the old wing, the weight of tradition and permanence, and this suite delivers it. The furniture is heavy, the walls thick, the windows looking out over grounds he cannot quite identify. He accepts that the problem at the front desk resolved itself without him, that someone else smoothed the way, and he does not ask who.

Cody moves to the window and checks the view, then announces that he is just across the hall. The words are meant to reassure, to let David know he is not alone, that help is close. But David hears something else in them: the boy's proximity is now necessary. He cannot be left alone, cannot be trusted to navigate even a single night without someone watching. The realization settles over him like a weight.

He lies down on the bed fully dressed, not bothering to remove his shoes or his jacket. He wants rest, wants the oblivion of sleep, but his mind will not cooperate. He stares at the ceiling and feels the blankness spreading through him, the tears that come without warning, the smell of old person rising from his own skin. He has lost so much control, and the evidence of it is everywhere: in his stalled thoughts, in his unresponsive body, in the way others now arrange his life for him.

He thinks about ordering a hamburger. The desire for something familiar, something simple, rises in him. He reaches for the word he wants, the condiment he always asks for, and finds nothing there. The word "mustard" will not come. He lies there, trying to retrieve it, and the failure terrifies him more than the tears did.

His mind drifts backward, to his honeymoon with Annabel. They were silent with each other then, too, unable to bridge the gap between them, until he invented the game. One two three. A way to talk without talking, to say the difficult things by counting them out. It had worked. They had finally spoken to each other, finally found a way through. He holds the memory close, the only proof he has that he was once capable of connection.

He checks his notebook, wanting to confirm the plan, and finds the itinerary he has written for himself. Dinner with Rebecca is scheduled at her private club. He muses about Rebecca and Mickey, trying to sort out the guilt and the blame, trying to understand what happened between them and what he owes to each. But Mickey is not there to ask. Mickey exists only as a ghost of the past, a figure he cannot locate in the present, a name that brings only questions.

He confronts the future of his body, the decline that is coming for him, the helplessness that waits. He returns to the idea that has been circling in his mind: exiting while good things remain. Before the indignity becomes total, before he loses the last of himself. It is not a new thought, but it has gained weight in this room, in this hotel, with Cody just across the hall.

He reviews his notebook again, wanting to keep his facts straight, and discovers something he does not remember writing. Stearns's Palm dinner has been crossed out, the line drawn through it in handwriting he cannot verify as his own. Someone else has been in his notebook. Someone else is editing his life.

He recalls the missing money, the forensic accounting, the slow unraveling of his competence. He wants to understand how far he declined, how long he hid his failing mind from everyone around him. He recognizes now that he concealed his incompetence until others had to intervene, until the damage was done and strangers had to come in and sort through the wreckage of his affairs.

He remembers Switzerland. The assisted-death program, the clean exit he had researched, the dignity he had hoped to preserve. He accepts that Cody and Stearns must know about it, that they are managing it along with everything else, that even his death is now a matter of logistics handled by others.

He maps Tom's life in his mind, the planned meeting, the old friend he wants to see. He learns that Tom was surprised to hear from him but agreed to coffee. The small victory of it, the confirmation that Tom will see him, is something to hold onto.

He goes to the indoor pool, wanting to swim, wanting the familiar comfort of water. A lap swimmer refuses him, tells him the pool is taken, and David does not argue. He sits at the edge instead, his feet in the water, and watches the swimmer move back and forth, back and forth, in a rhythm he can no longer match.

David waits by the pool, hoping Annabel will come find him. He wants to be discovered, to be sought out, and he lingers in that wanting. But the women gather their things and leave, and the truth settles over him: she is not coming.

Cody finds him there. He wants to bring David upstairs, and his arrival buries whatever hope David still held that Annabel might appear. Cody helps him to his feet, guiding him, and David loses his solitary watch by the water.

In the elevator, David wants only to remain passive, to let himself be moved without effort. He sees himself reflected in the mirrored walls, one David among many mirrored Davids, multiplied and indistinct.

His mind drifts to quitting smoking. He had wanted to escape the addiction, and in desperation he turned to a hypnotist. He remembers visiting the man, wanting to be cured, submitting to an unsettling session with a strange practitioner. The hypnotist guided him into a trance, wanting to put him under, and David followed images of an elevator and a staircase descending downward. Then the hypnotist snapped him awake, wanting to end the session, and David returned to ordinary consciousness.

Cody leads him back through the hotel maze, wanting to return him to his room. David follows without hearing his own footsteps. When they reach the room, David sees the room service cart and wants to understand his situation. He lifts the silver dome and finds a hamburger.

David tells Cody he wants to nap, wanting escape through sleep. Cody warns him it will screw him up. David snaps at him, wanting to be left alone, and Cody agrees to the nap.

Then Cody asks for David's phone, wanting to restore location tracking. David hands it over without complaint. Cody turns the location back on, wanting to prevent David from disappearing again, and leaves the phone facedown as a false gesture of privacy. He wheels the room service cart out, wanting to clear the room, then returns to say he will stay in the sitting room. Cody closes the bedroom doors, wanting to keep watch, and David loses the privilege of total aloneness.

Left with himself, David thinks about Tom. He wants to understand their diverging lives, and he concludes that greatness passed them by.