Thank You and Good Night

by Ray Succre

  CUT TO:

  EMERY’S P.O.V., WIDE ANGLE. We see the DOCTOR PROFESSORS standing around, bending over into Emery’s view, into frame. They hold various tools of dissection and surgery. Beyond them and all around frame, we see the circular array of students peering down from the second floor.

  EMERY (V.O.):

  What… what’s happening?

  LEAD DOCTOR:

  Hush now. This is our time. You’re gone.

  EMERY:

  No, that’s not true.

  LEAD DOCTOR:

  Ssh. Give it time.

  CUT TO:

  Susa. He needed to see her before it was too late. His dear mother. If he could get to Miami quick enough, if he was sincere in his love, she would not go the route of his father so soon. She would have out her coming years in the fortune of acceptable health. A stroke was not so troubling. People had comas and did not die, if the care was taken and the will was strong. Emery leaned his head over and viewed her on the gurney beside him. Miami was there, but he could not move. Miami was so close to him, yet so far from his straps.

  “What are you going to do to her?” Emery asked. The lead surgeon lifted a length of arterial canula while an assistant readied an aneurysm hook. The assistant, an apprentice, was a Japanese man with familiar eyes above his mask. He slit into one of Susa’s arteries, near the collarbone, and then glanced over the body, cocking his head, estimating.

  “This is America. We embalm our dead,” the apprentice answered.

  “That’s… you have to stop, that’s my mother.”

  He could recall the short words she had used when he returned home from the war, the way she had preferred not to speak of her husband’s passing. So few syllables. Sharp and unfeeling.

  “I’m glad to be home. I missed you,” Emery had said in the terminal.

  “Yes, of course. I’m glad you’re home, too. William will be here tonight from D.C. He wanted to be here to meet you, but his flight was pushed back.”

  His mother had aged. It had only been a few years, but Susa looked weathered more than she should have. Living at home, without Henry or the kids, almost all at once, had taxed her immeasurably.

  “It was awful there,” he had said in the car, driving home from the airport.

  “Certainly, but you’re back now.”

  “I wish I’d learned about dad sooner.”

  “Well, you were far away.”

  “You or William should have sent a letter. You should have. It wasn’t right I didn’t know for so long.”

  “Oh, didn’t you have enough to worry about? We didn’t want to make it worse for you, and some letters weren’t making it over to the soldiers. They talked about it in the Post.”

  It did not seem right, and it never would. Emery had not been there when his father died, due to a world circumstance beyond his control, a human disaster. His regret for this had diminished over the years, but would never fully vacate. They had not told him about his father’s death for over a month. He had looked daily, while in the fields and tents and gulleys of Leyte, even above the Earth in a Skytrain, upon the photograph he had brought along, the one in which he stood beside his father before he had left for the induction center. He had looked fondly and lovingly at that image for a month, without knowing the elder of those two men was dead. He didn’t find out until a few days prior to the worst part of his tour. All of it at once.

  Emery stretched as much as he could on the gurney. The surgeon motioned to the apprentice and the students above scribbled quickly. Emery worried he would not be there when his mother died, just as with his father. Was Emery such an awful boy? Susa’s face had not weathered so much as her hands. She wore her age there, in the fingers and wrists. No liver spots or arthritic kinking, but the skin was weathered, and somewhat gloomy. Having her son go off into the war might have taken ten years off her life. Losing Henry might have cost her another ten. That would leave her looking down the sickle at sixty, not but five years off.

  There were days she had swum in the lake while her husband fished. Those were the precocious times, when William had learned the art of unruliness, and Emery had begun the age-old trait of believing he did not need his parents much. This, for both children, was the nature of independence, something Susa proffered in them greatly, but a thing that had caused them to turn from her too quickly. The times had chosen to make men too early, and boys stayed around so shortly. Henry would come home from the shop, reeking of butchery, his hands stained red and apron in need of intensive bleaching. She washed and prepared the better meats the Asher family ate. She attempted to teach her boys a bit of her wisdom, which was cagey and always unexpected.

  Henry had loved his wife dearly, but showed it most in the summer. The summer was the time for boys to be. For love to show itself. This had been obscured and lost to her when summer proved to be the time when Henry passed. Summer then became the time of year in which all the bad news came: Her youngest son’s war injury, the butcher shop foreclosure, the death of her husband, and now her stroke and hospitalization. Summer was now where she waited to wake up as the great bird of coma pecked the bits from her mind. What had once been a wondrous time for vacation and family had become the season of fate’s hag.

  The pain occurred on a shriek of flesh as the scalpel hit his sternum and slowly dragged down to his naval. He lifted against his leather restraints and gave a scream. To this, the apprentice wadded a large ball of gauze and, after pinching the joints of Emery’s jaw to force the mouth open, packed the young man to quiet. Unable to breathe or scream with his mouth, Emery grunted and let the water run from his eyes as the incisions continued and the students above watched with curious eyes. They were bear cubs intently watching an elder fetch fish from the river.

  He turned his head and saw the large hose. The apprentice snaked it down his mother’s throat and then taped it in place roughly. William sat among the students above, dictating into his recorder, watching every detail of the procedures for his article. The saw’s teeth gristled into Emery’s first ribs and after a moment, snapped through to the next. His mind drifted on the urgency of fatal pain. His temples cooled and his eyes ached behind the clenched lids. With his upper palate mashed against the gauze, his tongue was forced back enough to gag him the more each time he tried to make sound. He had lost track of pain some time ago. He remembered now. Perhaps he was on a drooping bed-cot in Leyte with his knee having been sent through a grinder. Had he returned?

  Then his doppelganger appeared, behind the surgeons. Another Emery Asher, in a black suit, looking up and addressing the onlookers. He was the host of this surgery. There was a camera in the suite, and a second above, among the small audience. Bob Keith sat amongst the viewers, telling the camera what to do. Many of these viewers were Antioch kids. He knew some of these people. He knew his doppelganger. He knew the apprentice, as well, for he had once stabbed the man to death against an incline. He knew the alpha-doctor. That southern accent. The regal manner of his posture and quick motions. The bone-saw may has well have been a saber.

  CUT TO:

  INT. MEDICAL SUITE

  Amid onlookers, we see through the spectator window, looking down at the surgery suite and its occupants.

  We see HOST ASHER begin his introduction, all the while we are zooming slowly in on him, until he takes up about half-frame. He gestures, he moves his eyebrows, he annunciates well. There is a cigarette in his fingers and a look of intrigue on his face.

  HOST ASHER:

  Is there a doctor in the house?

  The onlookers give in to mild chuckles.

  HOST ASHER (CONT.):

  For tonight’s episode, the doctor is most certainly in. A surgeon, to be precise, and one that fate has given much acclaim and the pedigree of reputation only those brightest of our professionals can hope to attain. In this case, Dr. Merrill, a genius in the medical field and an instructor for which potential future doctors will cut their teeth. He is a man who could be said to have saved as
many lives as he has lost. Dr. Merrill is given only the most difficult work, you see. Those patients with but a thread’s width chance of survival. Patients many doctors would deem hopeless and without a chance at living.

  What the world does not see, however, is that Dr. Merrill’s surgical genius, often experimental in tone, comes to him by chance. He is a man who is expert at hiding his true rationale, his impetus for the surgeries he performs. You see, the good doctor has an addiction. He is an addict of luck. That rare thing that by its own random design causes many of life’s highest and lowest points.

  HOST ARCHER here holds up a faded coin and flips it in the air, catching it again before continuing.

  HOST ARCHER (cont.):

  Pure chance. During each surgery, he has but one outside artifact on his person. It’s a very old coin. This one. And he keeps it in his pocket while he works over the body in question. This coin, so simple in appearance and function, has selfishly controlled his skill for over a decade. Before each surgery, Dr. Merrill flips the coin. This single act, out of view of patients and professionals, hidden from the world, decides whether he is fated to save a life, or end one. Whether he is to play guardian angel or a sinister reaper in the sterility of silver and white. The matter is quite simple: Tails, and your dead. We call tonight’s episode Fifty-Percent of Genius.

  FADE TO:

  Susa whimpered as the jugular drainage tube began drawing out her material. Her blood, draining from her body, moved at the rate of the embalming fluid, which was in a second tube that fed the glutinous liquid into her. Emery’s tears dripped from his cheeks onto the gurney. He lurched upward several times, attempting to free himself.

  “No sense arguing,” Merrill said, “I flipped it twice. Tails. Both times.”

  Emery groaned from the deep movement of his ribs jostling apart, but this only caused him to choke on the bunched gag of antiseptic gauze. Bernie Dozier stepped in close, leaning over the writer and examining the surgeon’s work. Emery’s anger resulted in a scream, both from bitterness and physical trauma. Crying out nearly dislodged the gag.

  “It’s not your fault,” Dozier said, “It was a big show and you’re just one guy. Nobody could have kept it up like that. Nobody.” Emery squinted in pain and then stared with much hate at the producer. Bernie was a handler. He identified with others as a means of displacing them.

  Dozier’s face unhinged, then, swinging wide, exposing the jagged mandibles. He peered at Emery through the hideous face of an insect, looming over Emery’s cadaver with an eager hunger.

  “Find the node. I want it,” the insect muttered. Merrill nodded, positioning his elbows and nudging hard, opening up Emery’s chest with a grunt and a shove. Sol Jamison approached and stood beside the insectile Dozier. Exposed, Emery’s heart was snipped from its tethers and removed, dropped into a glass jar. Sol muttered quietly to the Japanese apprentice, who then used a hose to fill the jar with formaldehyde.

  “Weak heart,” the surgeon said. Jamison screwed a lid down onto the jar and taped a label onto the lid’s surface. He wrote the contents on the label.

  Then the lungs. They were filleted from his chest cavity, then severed from the windpipe and jerked from his chest. They, too, were placed into a jar, packed down with the palm of Sol’s hand. The formaldehyde came and soon overflowed from the jar. Sol screwed down a lid with a label. He wrote the name. After this, Bernie lifted the jar with his pincers and examined the lungs through the glass, exhibiting a minor curiosity. There were black splotches on the tissue.

  “Smoker’s lungs,” the surgeon said, shaking his head in judgement, “Tsk tsk.”

  The liver. The gall bladder. The spleen. All set into jars soon filled with formaldehyde. Sol affixed labels on each, admiring his duty while Dozier grunted, quite pleased with the harvesting and preserving of Emery’s organs. Susa stopped moving. The tubing that had been red, removing her blood, had gone clear. There was but embalming fluid in her now. Her eyes had hardened and dried. Her face had locked into a final positioning, an expression of torment.

  “Get an eye, he doesn’t need both,” Sol said, staring down at Emery’s face. This was done with several digs and a hard yank. Emery’s breath had been held and did not want to return. After the insect was satisfied, the surgeon began rooting around, looking for something amid the pig-trough that remained of Emery’s upper half.

  “No, hold on... there it is. Right there,” the surgeon said, his hands in Emery’s cavity at a spot near the bottom of the stomach, just off to the side and beneath the slide of large intestines. Dozier grunted and began salivating. Dr. Merrill set himself to task, removing the find, snipping an artery and severing all ties to the body that had grown this particular thing. This was the excogitation node. When Dr. Merrill tugged this node from Emery’s body, Dozier squealed and reached for it, jaws wide.

  “Wait,” the apprentice said, examining the small organ, shaped somewhat like an appendix, “I’ve never seen one like this. Look here, at the fatty base. Those flecks of black and the way they coat the ancillary valves.”

  “What are they?” Sol asked. Dozier squelched as his head tilted atop his neck, a wriggling motion that demonstrated his pleasure with this moment.

  “We knew his creativity would be sickly,” the surgeon added, “but I didn’t suspect the organ to be this diseased. Top to bottom, look: The whole damn thing is crusted in irony.”

  Emery’s daughters were among the students, watching his dissection and waiting for the man they were supposed to know as a father. They knew him little. Was he a good father? In the broadest sense, he had been a successful provider. He had converted a pint of blood into many scripts, and the money had come. He was not like his own father, however. Emery was not often present. The vacations in Cayuga were mostly for himself, an attempt at regaining a thing he loved so much. His daughters were somewhat bored with the place, as was Beth.

  A breeze drifted through the surgery suite from an opening door. She entered in heels and made it to the gurney quickly, yanking the tag from his toe with a huff of agitation. Emery moaned and tried to swallow, but his tongue had fallen down his neck, toward his chest, limply from the base of his lower jaw. He could hear the sound her feet made across the cold floor. He could recognize that pattern anywhere. His ears knew his wife better than his other senses, perhaps. She came into view of his remaining eye.

  “Stop this. Leave him be,” Beth said, removing the gag from his mouth. The surgeon watched her with a sense of quiet. Jamison, eyes glimmering with guilt and shame, stepped backward and left the scene. The cameras of this particular moment wanted her in full frame, and he exited when it was time, in the way subsidiary characters were designed to quietly step back forever.

  “He’s a good man,” Beth said of her husband while looking over the ghastly Bernie Dozier and his bug eyes, the lanky antennae. She moved her look of reproach from Dozier to the surgeon, Merrill. Reproach was a somewhat maternal look, and when she offered them this look, it indicated they should have been mortified with themselves. Emery had never been so happy. Beth… sweet Beth would collect him up and take him home. It was too late for his mother; the circus of knives and grotesquery had claimed her. He was still alive, however. There was hope. He only needed his organs back, his excogitation node for his creativity, and his lovely, wondrous wife.

  “Perhaps you’re in need of surgery,” Lieutenant Merrill said to her. The students leaned forward at this, crowding the glass with a sort of academic anticipation. Dozier nodded emphatically, his antennae wagging in the air above his shrewd, exoskeletal head. Rebecca and Vivian, standing above, squeezed forward by the press of students, began to bash their faces repeatedly against the glass. Smudges of blood buffeted from their foreheads with each collision, leaving a red film before the obscured faces. Beth turned and shoved Dozier, whose insect body broke to pieces and scattered across the floor. The jaws fluttered and issued a final squeal of perish. The insects were many in the world, but so frail, so temp
orary. They expired with little qualm. There were more eggs, however. That was their strength, their temerity. There were mounds of eggs for every soul lost, if the insects had souls at all.

  “Show him,” Beth said to the surgeon. There was a moment of stillness as Emery tried to speak. He had nothing with which to do so. His lungs were gone and now the apprentice had taken his tongue.

  “Go on,” she repeated. Doctor Merrill sighed and slowly removed his surgical mask with blood-soaked hands. The man looking down at Emery was the confederate, the lieutenant. The mustache was tapered into the long beard and the war-weathered face imposed a sense of both despair and wisdom. Emery looked upon his old friend with sadness.

  “Stop it,” Beth said to the confederate, “He already knows that. SHOW HIM. He’s earned it.” Merrill licked his lips a moment and then lifted the scalpel, drawing it from his right temple down the side of his face to the chin. The blood ran and stained his shoulders, inching down his neck and dripping into Emery’s cavity. Merrill then did the same with the other side of his face. There was a moment of uncertainty where Beth gave him a glare, and then Merrill reached his fingers into the cut, grasping the face. After a roll of the eyes, he tore it loose and Emery saw the man behind; the new face was an old one. Had the Lieutenant been this man from the start?