“I’m not that strong,” Wendell said, and touched his forehead. He was surprised there had been no blood.
He had just assumed that the front door would come down from the outside. He never considered it being destroyed from within. And for a moment a sound caught the air, a sound much like the animal screams he remembered hearing in the institution’s vents. He shrank back from the door, and whatever he heard receded.
I know who you are, the man named Drake had said.
“He knows.”
But he couldn’t know, Wendell thought, trying to stay rational. No one knew him here, and as powerful as he assumed the people of the institution were, they couldn’t have someone already living in the apartment building. They were good, but not that good. But it did little to assuage his fear.
“He knows,” Wendell repeated. “I don’t know how, but…” He walked over to the table and sat down.
“No, no, it’s okay,” he told himself. “It’s gonna be fine. Just take it easy, just be cool. For now, it’s safe.” He picked up the pencil. He wrote IT’S NOT SAFE on the table in tall block letters.
Find the gun, he thought. It might help a little. At least it might make him feel better.
But they would find him, he knew that. It was only a matter of time. And time, of course, was working against him as well. He felt like he was changing by the hour.
Wendell looked in the corner near to the TV table and saw one of his mother’s old dresses draped over a rocking chair. Like so much else in the apartment, it was old, moth-eaten, with lace edging that was once white. Somehow, it still felt like part of her was there, walking through the walls. He had been wondering how he would react if, the next morning, he opened his eyes to see Dr. Scotia and his associates hovering above him. But seeing the dress in the corner prompted as unwelcome an image—if not more—as that of the doctors: he thought about awaking to see her, angry at his invasion of her home, wearing that moth-eaten dress, staring down at him with half moon eyes.
DAY FOUR
MORNING CAME, AND WENDELL WAS surprised to wake up in a strange bed, outside of his room at the institution. The mornings often had him on Sub-2, in what they called the chamber, waiting for the day’s first round of gas tests.
“Always smelled like Windex in there,” he mumbled, propping himself up on his elbows in the bed. A dull ache crept into his back, so he lay back down and stared up at the ceiling.
The chamber.
It was an oval room with a chair—with restraints, of course—in the center and an entry hatch which locked from the outside. He never saw the gas, but could hear it, hissing out of the vents near the ceiling. Light-headedness would come, then the nausea. On a few occasions he had blacked out, coming back to consciousness with his breakfast soaking the front of his shirt.
He remembered a particular day, early on during his time at the institution, watching them enter the chamber. They were wearing yellow rubber bodysuits which covered them head to foot, with elongated alien hands and hoods molding their heads into ovals, like unbroken egg yolks. The faces were two round black eyes like camera lenses and a breathing vent, black and round, at the mouth that sucked in filtered air like an asthmatic. The two figures paused to regard Wendell, then looked at each other and nodded, then turned back to him. He had just come to, feeling the first of a number of waves of nausea, and in his daze their bulbous heads swam and swelled.
“The gas is off. Is the gas off?” The first face turned to the second. The voice seemed separated from the body, as if it came from another room, or another country.
“Yes, it’s off. He’s conscious, so it’s off.”
The first face leaned towards Wendell. “Dilated pupils. Bloodshot.” It pointed a narrow yellow finger at Wendell’s face. “Petechia around the eyes. Some scaling. Like the previous doses, just a bit less.”
“Expected.”
“Breathing less labored.”
“Expected as well.”
“Eyes and skin are one thing. All typical. I’m wondering about the effects of these post-op doses on his bone structure. Growth and density rates.”
Post-op? Wendell never remembered a surgery. But there had been periods, some frighteningly long, of unconsciousness, a day—perhaps even days—without a single memory.
“SPECT scan again. We’ll get some more good 3-D images. This is all breaking new ground.”
“Post-op?” Wendell asked, acid on his tongue. His face felt swollen.
Both yellow faces turned to him, vegetal and horrid.
“What did…” Wendell had to pause to catch his breath. “What did you do? What are you doing? I don’t want…surgery.”
“Mr. Mackey,” said one of the faces, “it’s Dr. Scotia. No need to worry. Dr. Thane is with me.” He nodded to his associate. “You’ve met him before.”
The other face, Dr. Thane’s, leaned forward, stopping next to its twin. “Good morning Mr. Mackey. Beautiful day. The sun is shining.”
All that Wendell saw were the dual yellow orbs—themselves the suns in their own world—hovering over his head.
“The sun is shining,” Dr. Thane continued, “a new dawn. A new paradigm, Mr. Mackey. Do you understand?”
Wendell felt a line of drool slip down his chin. He felt his eyelids scratch along the surfaces of his eyes as he blinked.
“Scientific barriers are coming down,” Thane added, “and we have you to thank for it Mr. Mackey. The building blocks of life, torn apart and rebuilt. We’re redefining things, the most basic of things.”
He assumed they were smiling their glassy smiles behind their breathing vents. Dr. Thane’s vocal tone, metallic and false through the vent, rose slightly as he spoke, with a hint of enthusiasm. But if their mouths weren’t smiling, their eyes were, behind those lenses. Ruthless eyes, but excited, jubilant even. Sensing those eyes revealed it all as a fait accompli. Resisting, if at all successful, only postponed the inevitable, and prolonged his pain. Total capitulation had its advantages, Wendell thought, though still groggy as he tried to piece together Dr. Thane’s odd blandishments. He could only imagine what they would do—how those voices would drop, would freeze—if he fought them. Freeze, along with those faces trained over years to portray the restraint of capable medical experts, into a rigor of parental disappointment, as parents they were more and more every day, with Wendell increasingly becoming their own creation. Fight, and the pain, though agonizing now, could be made worse, of that Wendell had no doubt. Morphine drips would slow; IVs would find their vein, but on the fifth try, and not the first; even the evening aspirin—if they really were aspirin—would get lost in the shuffle during dinner prep. And if his fight grew, so too would their response. They had the will and the means to keep him imprisoned, and with such an investment made, he feared what they could do to keep him compliant. Muscled fingers would clamp onto his arms, as needles like jousting lances ensured agreement. Even the occasional broken bone would only mean more necessary drugs, and more visits from a “concerned” doctor. Blood would run on the white tile, and his screams would mirror those he had heard in the building’s vents. If Wendell fought, it had to be to escape, and it had to be to the death, if necessary.
“I don’t want to die,” Wendell said wanly, surprising himself and both doctors.
“Mr. Mackey? Are you still with us?”
“I need…to go home.” It was a reflexive thought. There was no home, at least none that he could think of. But it felt good to say it.
“But you are home.”
“Please…you need to stop.”
The two expressionless masks, like mutant gourds, looked at each other, and then back to Wendell.
“You need to let me go. I won’t tell. You…need to stop.”
“But Mr. Mackey, we’re just getting started.”
Just getting started. Wendell returned to the present, propped himself up again on his elbows in his mother’s bed, then sat up and turned to see a fine dusting of hair on the pillow.
He examined his hands, and then his feet, still in socks. He wriggled his toes, watching them move in unison. But he worried about how the toes would look underneath, so he kept the socks on. He pulled the bottom of his shirt out in front of him, for a moment expecting to find his breakfast staining it, as in the chamber. Nothing.
But he needed breakfast now. Unit 200 fed him rubbery eggs and a sponge of toast every morning, with a cup of juice—made bitter with the not so subtly concealed medication dissolved in it—to wash it all down. At least it was something. His stomach gnawed at him and forced him out of bed and towards the refrigerator. But he stopped, remembering the petrified remains of food.
“Gonna die anyways,” he said, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Might as well starve.” His stomach disagreed. He needed food.
Yet food meant venturing out, and venturing out meant danger, since the nearest market was blocks away, and he wasn’t about to have a pizza delivered. But starvation was no way to go. He thought of whittling away, his body eating itself, shutting down, sitting at the kitchen table as his muscles shrank, dehydrated, turned to leather. And then he thought of his mother, scrawny in her bed, the last time he saw her. According to Nurse Maggie, she had been refusing more and more meals, prompting Maggie to warn her of feeding tube insertion just to motivate her to eat. Maggie said that Diane was unfazed; Wendell assumed that her slow starvation was only feeding her perpetual scowl. No, he couldn’t be like her. He needed a meal. A last meal, perhaps. He closed his eyes and imagined Scotia and Thane entering his room at the institution. Scotia had his head bowed, a purple stole over his shoulders, and he read verses from Wendell’s medical chart. Thane followed, led by his own smile, wearing a white chef’s coat, his black toupee covered by a matching chef’s hat. He pushed a cart covered in meat: cut into steaks, ground into piles, pulled off the bone, red, undercooked, raw. Both men stopped, looked up at Wendell, and then down to the cart. To that beautiful cart. He felt warm, flushed, aroused. He was sitting at the kitchen table, but he was reaching out his hands for
ribs thighs snouts heads
the piles of red. He tasted it all in his throat, felt it squeeze between his fingers. Tongue over teeth. Eyes clenched shut.
“No, this isn’t…”
Scotia and Thane turned to him.
Wendell opened his eyes and relaxed his hands, half expecting to see clumps of moving sinews in them.
“This isn’t right. This isn’t…normal.” And his stomach soured. Perhaps death was better. A cool release into darkness. But he couldn’t go like his mother. Wendell stood up from the table, walked back into the bedroom, and threw himself onto the bed sheets.
In his dream he was lying in bed, and spiders with syringes for legs picked their way up his chest. His lungs were frozen, and with each step the syringe plungers pumped more of their fluid into his chest. At the other end of the room, the door stood open, and through it the darkness breathed. Wendell tried to raise his arms, but couldn’t. Moved by something unseen, the door swung closed. The spiders stopped, startled by the door, and scrambled over each other to get off Wendell’s chest.
Shhh, Wendell.
Wendell awoke, and heard a voice floating away, singing as it went.
…all the wonders of wonderland…
And it was gone. Female, warm. So not his mother’s. It sounded like his Grandma Mackey, who used to sing him lullabies when he was little. He knew he had just come out of a dream, but couldn’t remember anything about it.
“Gotta get out of here. Gotta eat.”
He got up from the bed, tucked his t-shirt into his jeans, and headed for the front door. But what he felt under his shirt stopped him. Wendell reached a hand to his back, and felt a pronounced lump, long and slender, where one of the black marks was yesterday. He switched hands and felt the same lump on the other side. The revulsion was gone, replaced now with dismay, like a cancer patient hearing the word “terminal” from the doctor, even though the sunken eyes and sallow skin would have already told him that. At least now, even if he didn’t know the specifics, he knew what to expect: it would get worse. The ridges on his back would grow, or expand, or bleed, blacken, harden—it didn’t matter. The end was still certain.
And it was certain that they would come, sooner rather than later. They couldn’t have one of their ticking time bombs, one of their lab rats, walking about freely. Sturdy hands, a straightjacket, and an injection or two into the thigh, and it would be back to the exam rooms for Wendell.
The exam rooms. They were always white—an almost neon, glowing white—with an austere collection of furniture and equipment.
“I can’t go back,” he told himself.
They all had a bed with restraints, and always at least two or three doctors who would greet him with disinterest.
Get the gun, he thought.
And then came the rooms’ horrors—out of pockets, cases, seemingly out of the walls: needles, vials, wires, and tubes uncoiled like serpents.
No. Fight, defend myself. Get that gun. Take down as many as you can.
“I need that gun.” Wendell sat down at the kitchen table.
But it wouldn’t be enough. They were smarter than that. They would be expecting him to arm himself. Still, he wanted it.
“Just find the gun, then leave.” The apartment. The city. In an instant he saw himself working at some gas station or diner in a cozy corner of the forgotten world. To start again. To be reborn. He could live and die without a name. The anonymity would be paradise, but it was only a thought, nothing more. Go where? Do what? Never more than a glorified janitor, sorting mail and running a mower, Wendell didn’t exactly have the tools to build a new life. And in his present condition? Everyone would look at him, their jaws would drop, and they would turn the other way. And, of course, the institution would keep looking for him. They wouldn’t give up just because he became more difficult to find.
“But just to get out,” he said, “just to try. Disappear, and never have to worry…”
He stood up, but something caught his eye as he turned for the front door. He was surprised he hadn’t seen it before. It was a picture frame on the wall behind the TV table covered with his mother’s literature. A frame, holding a photograph.
It was Wendell, as a child.
If not for its low hanging—three or four feet from the floor, which was oddly low—it would have been obvious. Still, he never remembered it from previous visits, certainly not his last. The television had disappeared long ago, so it wasn’t a matter of the frame hiding behind it. Wendell approached for a closer look.
It was an odd centerpiece for a naked wall. It was, in fact, the only thing hanging on any of the walls in the apartment. The simple wooden frame contained a small boy, at most five or six, standing like the only tree on a brown patch of grass, a baseball bat leaning on his shoulder. Wendell saw the dull brown hair, pushed over to one side, and a pained solemnity on his face that revealed more than five or six years. Childhood had been abrupt, an autumn cut short by October snow. But the picture—and he in it—showed the passage of too much time, as if the process of snapping it had been drawn out, over years.
“Dad…”
His father’s absence from the photo brought his presence to mind. Wendell supposed he had been waiting for his father as it was taken. Always waiting for him, it seemed.
“Keep that right elbow up,” his father would say, often too late in the day for it to matter, “weight on the balls of your feet.” He would use his umbrella as a bat, and go through the swinging motion. “Just make contact, Wendell.” He would smile. And then it was a late bite to eat, a later beer, and a pat on Wendell’s head as the boy shuffled off to bed.
Their old house, a beautiful yellow colonial, sat on a small parcel of land, but the lawn in the back, hedged in by trees and a low line of shrubs on its east side, was a hidden personal world for a young boy, one that h
e so often inhabited alone. He was a boy with his imagination, turning stumps into trolls and a copse of trees into a pirate ship.
“She never went out there,” Wendell said to himself, his mind’s eye seeing his mother behind the kitchen window, watching him with a sponge in one hand and a plate in the other, her yellow rubber gloves covering up to her elbows. “But he did.” When he could, that is. When he wasn’t working. He would burst out the back door, still wearing his suit and tie, or his uniform and nametag, whatever costume for whatever job was being done that week. Those moments always seemed few and far between. But they were pure joy when they did happen, just the boy and his father, smiles all. The bat, a ball, and two gloves. Watching the goldfinches feed. Sandwiches under the beech tree. He would put his hand on Wendell’s shoulder, and for that moment, the sun shone only on them. But multiple jobs, new jobs, job searches, swing shifts, all conspired to rob the child of his father.
“He wasn’t a bad man,” Wendell said. His father had tried, but struggled.
And so Wendell would wait, and the passage of time eventually made the disappointments memories. Still, childhood had its moments, things worth remembering, worth desiring. But like all things worth desiring, it was ephemeral, gone as quickly as his father’s numerous jobs. At first Wendell’s father had sold printer parts, then vacuum cleaners. And then it was a comfortable desk job at an auto parts store. And while the little Wendell enjoyed his father’s variegated employment—which brought with it curious stories of coworkers and customers—he couldn’t comprehend how a transient worker often made for a credit risk, which threatened the house and the life in the suburbs. Wendell remembered trying to crane his neck to see into the back yard one last time as the old colonial receded from view in the car’s rear window.
And he remembered seeing the apartment building for the first time, chipped brick, almost weary like the elderly tenants milling about on the sidewalk out front, like it had been there first and the rest of the city had crept up around it.
The Death of Wendell Mackey Page 6