We’re sort of a hexagon-shaped bunch, one of millions of cruel sleeper cells around the world just waiting for opportunity. We’re damaged and twisted, but very high-grade and aggressive as hell.
We pick her out at random at Penn Station. It’s 8:30 AM. She looks vulnerable wearing a plaid jacket, a red Phillies cap and Nike sneakers. “I think we can take this woman down. So, let’s do it,” I say and, within minutes . . . we’re in. She doesn’t feel a thing. We grow and prosper getting fat and lazy, gorging ourselves on banquets of estrogen.
We can no longer hide though. Her right breast is hot, red and swollen. She consults with her surgeon and oncologist and signs up, to her credit, for combat on the front lines. We laugh our way through the infusions, drunk on the Red Devil (Adriamycin) and the slow drips and drops of Taxol. The process takes hours and hours, months and months. We Grade 3’s survive the chemo leaving her with 19 of 19 lymph nodes still loaded with cancer. Ha! It’s been a rough ride nearly destroying us too, but we are resilient. What do the white coats think they’re doing except for killing her taste buds, libido and making her hair fall out?
She cries a lot especially in the shower, even though her husband assures her that she has a nicely shaped head and that he still loves her. He makes her blueberry pancakes for breakfast. She can’t eat them. They smell like mineral oil.
Some of us survive the surgery. We reload. Both breasts are gone now and we wait quietly to be radiated; “mopped up” they call it. Those of us who remain take bets. We underestimate the power of the rays. For the first two weeks, we put on our shades and just bask in the light, absorbing its energy. But then, things start to heat up. The woman’s chest begins to look like a battle field of bacon bits and blisters. We’re losing traction here and getting fried to a crisp ourselves; six weeks of this, every day except for weekends, our days off. “No thanks!” Finally, we calculate the odds (life expectancy multiplied by 5.23) and reach a consensus. “Let’s get the cell out of here!” We pack up our arsenal and leave her for now.
Six years later, she’s still here! Rest assured; although we’re gone, we have not been forgotten.
ALL THE SLUDGE
Benjamin Kane Ethridge
Benjamin Kane Ethridge is the Bram Stoker Award winning author of Black & Orange, Bottled Abyss, and several other novels. By thirty-six years old, he’d already lost a grandmother, an aunt, and one of his best friends to the beast known as Cancer. It isn’t fair, and it has to stop.
Condition: Alcoholic Cirrhosis of the Liver
Eric Bendy tried to ignore the sludge rising from the floor. It was his mind trying to break him and he would not be broken. If that miserable nurse would just bring the fifth he’d asked for, ignoring the sludge would be a sight easier, at very least calm his nerves about what he faced. The nurse had that same dead-set expression Carol got. He could still hear her monotone voice. “Ask all you like, Eric, I’m not giving you money for booze.” Carol’s brown eyes almost looked dark maroon when she said shit like that. Yeah, the color of damp brick.
And she had the gall to call Eric stubborn?
Well, she’d let him drink for thirty years before turning all saintly. He was better off now, better off on his own, and it didn’t help to think about Carol anymore. Better to turn his thoughts to—
The sludge.
Some more gurgling came from the floor. The stench made his stomach flutter. He glanced over the side of the hospital bed. The sludge steadily climbed. His IV stand and tubes were half-submerged in the stuff. With loud smacking sounds, several human heads popped up from the surface to stare at him. This wasn’t the first time he’d seen the faces of his family and friends. The faces sank back down, one after the other. Glunk, glunk, glunk. A few others surfaced in their place but weren’t readily distinguishable. It didn’t matter who they were. The looks in their eyes were clear. Even with him on his death bed, these fucking people couldn’t help but judge him.
Like when Carol had first wanted to move out of their house in Sepia Basin. One afternoon, just after work, she was out watering her garden and she discovered her black cat staple-gunned to a fence. Loving that cat as much as she did, Eric had thought she’d be blubbering, but instead she looked livid, and her anger wasn’t directed at the miscreants who committed the crime. Oh no, why should it? Right? She was angry at him. At her soon to be ex-husband, Eric Bendy.
He promised he’d dismantle the pitiful crucifixion and bury the cat with a decent grave marker. It’d been a long day though and he lost track of what he was doing while looking for pliers, and he wasn’t normally a whiskey drinker, so admittedly, he overdid things a little that night. It happens. All in all, the long and the short of it was that he completely forgot about that asshole cat. Carol, being ever so thick-skulled, didn’t listen to his reasons. The woman had no bones for forgiveness. She’d made up her mind about Eric long ago anyway. This was just a splendid excuse to cut and run.
But whatever. This crap was in the past. Eric still wore his wedding ring, even though a younger man named Chris Lane slept beside Carol now. This Chris fellow would never be her real husband. Oh they had their dumb little ceremony, but Eric was and always would be Carol’s true husband. Time had branded it so.
Maybe that’s why his ex-wife thought she’d come to visit him last week. It wasn’t just to beg Eric to call their daughter Tabitha—Carol, no matter how much she hated it, knew their union was still real and unbreakable, despite all those jackass papers citing otherwise. That’s why she’d wanted to see him.
Well, tough shit. He wouldn’t see her. He had that right. And she could just get over him not seeing Tabitha either. His daughter didn’t need this kind of memory; she still had many years to accumulate her own sludge and hopefully filter it better than he had.
Eric let his memories drift and listened to the room bubbling like a cauldron. This was his squandering, his shit, his bad luck monster, and it had to vanish so he could prove things weren’t all as dire as these ninnies liked to believe.
Symptom: Fatigue
“But I don’t want to be tired anymore,” Eric explained.
“You’ve had enough coffee. Do we need to call in Doctor Philips and see if it’s all right?” asked the nurse. “Remember he said it wasn’t last time. Just one cup.”
“It’s too watered down.”
The nurse stared at Eric for a while. Her face was too close to his and he could tell she’d eaten something with sesame oil for lunch. Foundation makeup built around her eyes, just as surely as his sludge built around her legs, squeezing at the kneecaps. Her scrubs sagged with oily splatters that raced down in rich brown spinach droplets. The nurse didn’t notice it. Nobody saw the sludge except for Eric. But that was fine with him.
“It’s frustrating some of the other girls, your not wanting to see your daughter,” she told him, changing the subject. “We all think it’s sad.”
“Just tell all those women to get a life.”
The woman clasped her big tanned hands together and dropped them in her lap. “Let’s be real here for just a moment, Mr. Bendy. I’m not trying to upset you, but your levels haven’t improved—”
“Ok, ok, yeah.”
“You have to think of these things.”
“I’m too tired to think. Go get me that coffee, maybe I will. And make it strong!”
The nurse walked out then, but the distracted, almost clumsy way she moved signaled more coffee wasn’t in his future. Good God, they made things too complicated here. He’d have to sign a waiver to scratch his nuts pretty soon. Coffee should have been an easy matter, no red tape necessary. Tabitha used to make him a whole pot every morning before school. He remembered in her senior year in high school, one day when she handed him his mug. “Thanks baby girl,” he’d said.
Tabitha was in a moody stage then and she told him she was too old to be called that anymore. So Eric took a sip, ignored the coffee’s bitterness, and replied that he was fine with that, whatever she liked.
<
br /> He didn’t forget though. Five years later, a senior for the second time, now at the university, Tabitha mentioned how she missed being called his baby girl.
“Yeah, it’s a shame,” he replied and left it at that.
He went on to miss her graduation that weekend, tying one on too heavy the morning before. Eric wasn’t in the practice of being hurt twice. Most people had to learn that lesson about him the hard way, but his damn family should have known better. Eric couldn’t believe how stone-dumb they all were.
The waste surrounded his bed, folded over the sheets and pressed down, filled up to his ears. He saw more faces bobbing out of its surface, some snarling, some singing or whistling, some moaning with orgasmic stupidity. The pressure of the sludge warmed him with its noxious filth. There was too much to get rid of; he was pinned, like that cat against the fence, something that refused to not be seen, blatant. The weight against his ears made him dizzy and after struggling a moment, he drifted away for some death practice.
Symptom: Easy Bleed, Easy Bruise
The sores were not to be scratched, per Doctor Philip’s instructions. The ointment they gave Eric stunk and only made the itch slippery.
“The cream works well, give it time,” said the nurse.
“It doesn’t work, goddamn it,” he shouted, “and it smells like an unwiped butthole. You try and put it on!”
She trudged out of the room, through all his muck, flinging putrescent beads on the walls and across his IV bag.
Eric scratched the head of a particularly large sore near his wrist. It felt good. He was a firm believer in if it feels good, it has to be good. There were no regrets about pleasure and release, as far as he saw fit. He had more of those small reddish purple sores, mostly on his hands, arms and legs. He scratched them until they bled and that seemed to make the itching go away sometimes. One itch cropped up suddenly under his shoulder blade and it caused him to jerk sideways and bump his head on the bed’s side rails. The impact was light, but blood ran freely between his eyes and slid over the bridge of his nose.
Now he’d done it.
“What’d you do to yourself?” the nurse later pressed.
“Not a thing. It just happened.”
“The bruise just happened out of the blue, huh? It appeared? Just like the sludge?”
“Like the sludge,” he replied.
“I can see the bruise and the dry blood, Mr. Bendy. You said the sludge was just a hallucination.”
“I was wrong.”
“You’re too stubborn, you know that?”
“One of us is,” he answered.
She hurried off, to check his ammonia level again, he presumed. Although she’d cleaned his forehead, Eric could feel the blood flowing still, gently, in drops that floated up to the ceiling like tiny burgundy balloons, and when the drops struck, they pooled into a shiny red theater screen. He could see his life projected behind that murky red lens across the ceiling. He could see all his prized memories, all of the happy moments spent with his father and brother and wife and daughter, projected and then gone, cooked by the toxicity below.
Complication: High Blood Ammonia Level
The syrup they gave him to treat the rising ammonia levels tasted like some kind of military grade moonshine. Eric loved just about anything with a little wang to it, but some of the cheaper wines, the Thunderbirds, the Night Trains, the Mad Dog 20-20s—there were limits to what a man could take, hard-up or not, and this syrup stuff, Lactulose, it wasn’t doing it for him.
Eric wisely didn’t tell the nurse that. He just waited for her to leave before he spit it into his bed pan. This sugary slime wouldn’t help anyway. He’d taken it for a week and still the room overflowed with the cesspool.
He wasn’t thriving, but he was alive. He was still very pale, and his body had taken on a particularly strange funk. Bathing didn’t seem to help much, although he enjoyed seeing the nurse clean his penis and make it hard. It was interesting to watch his erection sprout through the veil of sludge.
Yes, Eric was doing well. The facts were there. He didn’t have fluid build-up in the peritoneal cavity, and he didn’t have the jaundice like before.
His breathing did become shallower one day, and he saw the air coming out of his mouth. Because he wanted to see it, okay, not because he was ill . . . No, he would see his own breath, just like this: snowflakes roaring out his mouth, airborne a moment and then falling. The flakes weren’t brilliant white. They looked a raw yellow color, like turning egg yolk. The snowflakes coated his body, froze him down through his muscles and bones, to his heart. He was trapped again, cat-stapled, encased with his remaining dreams. He trembled and fiercely rubbed at his frostbitten arms. One of his fingernails tore away some skin and he started bleeding again.
Symptom: Nausea, Weight loss
The sludge followed him. It seeped down through the drains in the hospital floor, traveled through the sewers across the city and rose up again in Eric’s room at the hospice. The journey had surprisingly made the waste smell worse. The sludge was thicker, full of pebbles, grit, worms and dead plants, and he could hear more people and things swimming underneath, though he couldn’t see if they surfaced because the snowflakes still smothered him. He could only stare at the ceiling. The movie screen of blood had come to the hospice too, but now the screen was curdled and dried, a visceral monstrosity. No more images of his life played on the screen. Flies laid eggs in its dark brown expanse. Early forecast was a heavy maggot rain. He wouldn’t feel them though. The maggots would blister and rupture from the layer of sulfurous frost on his body.
Symptom: Confusion
Eric went back to the hospital for eight days before returning to hospice. Apparently his ammonia levels couldn’t be controlled anymore. All that could be done now, they said, was to keep him comfortable. Eric refused the Do-Not-Resuscitate order. There wasn’t a need. Things were becoming clearer.
The sludge had dried. Its crust resembled the cracked floor of a desert. When people walked into the room they carved dusty pathways through it. Well, it made perfect sense. The liver was like any filter. Wash it out, remove the solids, let them dry, dispose of them, and continue use. These white-coated cretins thought just because he had a couple of issues that Eric Bendy was going to croak. They should’ve known better.
Eric wasn’t dying.
He was forgetting a few things though, but that came with getting older.
Without warning one day, his caretaker turned into his wife. Carol was there, giving him a bath, washing his penis. It got so hard it hurt his balls and he grabbed the shaft to pleasure himself, because he knew she wouldn’t. The caretaker (or maybe it really was Carol) made a startled noise and grasped the crucifix at her throat with a soapy hand. He didn’t recall Carol being religious. She screamed at him, called him names.
But Eric wasn’t a pervert. He was a stud. Despite this, his frantic stroking sent her running from the room.
Eric stopped when his hand got bloody. It wasn’t sexy anymore.
“Jenny isn’t your ex-wife,” a bald man later told him, stroking his handlebar mustache in an attempt to appear thoughtful and important. He was just a walrus in a tweed coat. “Jenny’s your caregiver. Do you want to see your ex-wife?”
“Did I say I did?”
The Walrus opened his mouth, stunned for a second. “She helped get you into this facility you know. It wasn’t easy.”
“I don’t need to see her until bath time again.”
The man’s mustache made his frown look positively immense and ridiculous. “Your brother John showed up earlier. Nice fellow. He said he’d come back.”
A strange light in his mind blinded Eric a moment. “No, no—wait, just let me see Tabitha instead. I’ve got this figured out. She can bring me the damned coffee.”
“Coffee?”
“There’s no time for questions, just get Tabitha before that mustache strangles you.”
“Now, who’s Tabitha?”
“My d
aughter.”
“Oh of course. Right away, Mr. Bendy. I’ll make the call.” The Walrus smiled victoriously and burst through the dried sludge cake, atomizing it completely.
Resolution: Symptomatic Rejection
Eric heard things exchanged in the hall between his daughter and the Walrus, and then with the caregiver who’d forgotten she was Carol, or never was? Eric didn’t remember giving authorization to let Tabitha come to the hospice, but it was all very well. The room was dark. The sludge was gone now, the ceiling bare of rotting movie screens, the breath-snowflakes melted off his body.
He felt good.
His filter was clean.
His life was fresh.
He was ready to do some more living.
If he could talk her into it, Tabitha might drop him off at the brew-pub for the Friday dart tourney. Was it even Friday though? Maybe he’d just drink and talk shit.
“His body is shutting down,” said the caregiver.
Eric opened his eyes. Tabitha sat on a stool next to his bed. She was beautiful. Even soaked in tears, she was beautiful. She moved some mousy hair to her shoulder. In a moment she had her arms wrapped around his waist and head pressed against his ribs. “Thank you for letting me come,” she sobbed, body shaking. “Thank you.”
“I’m good to go.” Eric ripped away the stinking sheets. Just the movement bruised him from armpit to forearm. Tabitha startled as he jumped off the bed. On impact, his toenails cracked and one completely popped off. Eric’s body went rigid and he looked down. Those were a dying man’s toes, not his. That wasn’t his blood on the ground either. These were the most vicious hallucinations yet! Really there was no cause for alarm, although he couldn’t sell that to Tabitha.
Or the large male caregivers who got him back in bed and put up those damn side rails so high he couldn’t reach over them. Pinned down, again.
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