Maggie stared red-eyed at the tiny feathers on the underside of Josh's forearm, the glossy nub budding from his armpit. She raised her right hand to her mussed temple. Trying to absorb what the doctor had said. "Why doesn't anyone know about this? It sounds…ridiculous."
The doctor scrunched his eyes. "You'd be surprised how much 'ridiculousness' there is in the world that only doctors and police officers know."
Wade stepped forward, looking at Maggie's distraught face. "How can we help?"
The doctor pointed his index finger at him. "That's what I wanted to hear. When he transforms into a large bird, there's very little we have to do except restrain his wings and talons. But when he transforms into a giant caterpillar, we need someone who is willing to crawl across the caterpillar's bandaged abdomen, unwrap the bandages from around its maw, and feed the caterpillar raw hamburger meat."
"Do what?"
"To get the caterpillar to feel something for the person feeding it. Because that person is going to have to eventually fully unwrap the caterpillar. A caterpillar is an insect. It's not like a dog or a cat. It takes a tremendous number of feeding sessions for it to feel affection for the person feeding it, so it doesn't eat that person, once its restraints are removed."
"What happens then?"
"The caterpillar extrudes the ghost inside it, turns into a butterfly, wings away, and that ghost on the floor, realizing it doesn't belong on this plane, allows itself to metamorphosize back into the host, in this case your friend Josh, and departs."
"Does an orderly feed the caterpillar?"
"They belong to unions. Bargaining unit agreements don't allow orderlies to participate in the process, because of safety issues. But if you offer to buy them pizza afterwards, some may help with the incidental stuff, off the clock. We need a volunteer. Most cases, no one volunteers."
Maggie spoke up. "And Josh is okay if someone does volunteer?"
"Well, he'll have been through a few changes. Some of the hosts recover with just a little bit of emotional damage. Others need to be institutionalized."
Maggie and Wade sat out in the waiting room on the top floor. They were the only two people at this late hour.
She turned to Wade, tearfully. "You forced that tomato into Josh's mouth. None of this would have happened except for that."
His tall forehead tilted. "What was so hard about wanting me? Instead of him? I saw you first. We were having a great conversation, then all of a sudden he comes along, and you just ignored me."
Small voice. "I was attracted to him."
"But not to me."
She rolled her big brown eyes. "What do you want me to say, Wade?"
"I'm not risking my life for him."
"He'll never get free then."
"Too bad. I'm lonely. I've been lonely all my life. I thought we had something."
She sighed. Thought about it. Tossed her long brown hair, gave him an up from under look, not the first she had ever given in her life. "If you do this, I'll sleep with you."
His voice came out hoarse. "What?"
She stared straight into his eyes. "Yeah."
"How many times?"
That surprised her. From between her parted rows of teeth, she let out a huff of disbelief. "Are you serious?"
He thumped the tip of his index finger against his chest, face hard. "You sleep with me, exclusively me, for the rest of your life. You never see him again. That's the deal."
"Wade, come on…"
"That's the deal."
As hard as it was to believe Josh would turn into a giant bird, that's exactly what he did over the next three days.
He was completely wrapped in bandages by then, all the sheets and blankets and pillows pulled off his hospital bed so he lay on the striped mattress like a mummy, tubes going in and out of him.
Each time Wade looked in on him, returning from the rest room or the downstairs cafeteria, the orderlies had loosened his bandages and added more, to accommodate his growing bulk. The bandages around each widening arm were a yard across by now, enclosing the wings. The sweat-soaked bandages around his head rose up in a tall cone at the front of his face, wound around his growing beak.
Dr. Turin spent a lot of time in the room, since the case was so unusual. Probably writing up everything for publication.
The three of them stood at the foot of the bed the third evening, watching the tall, bandage-wrapped cone at the front of Josh's face thrash left and right in frustration, the cloth-bound talons bounce around on the mattress, trying to get free.
"When does he change into a caterpillar?"
The doctor turned towards Wade. "Since this is the third day, the transformation should start tonight."
"When will it be completed?"
"Three days."
"That's when I start feeding it?"
He nodded.
Wade stared at the convulsing, bandaged body on the hospital bed.
Maggie, holding Wade's upper arm, leaned in, gave him a kiss on the side of his neck.
They sat side by side on one of the sofas in the ninth floor waiting room. The wing had been cleared of patients and unnecessary hospital staff, in anticipation of what was going to happen.
"I think you should sleep with me in advance, in case I don't survive."
"If I do, you won't go through with it. Once you've had me, you'll lose interest."
"I might not."
Dark circles under her eyes. "They all do."
"What's wrong with me? I'm rich, I make a lot of money…"
A nurse with a white cap, eyeglasses reflecting ceiling lights, walked over, holding her hands in front of her. "We're ready to start."
Josh, or what he had become, was completely encased in bandages, a giant, rolled carpet twisting against its restraints, canvas straps across its body, from the thoracic legs at the head of the bed all the way down the segments and prolegs to the spiracle near the foot of the bed.
The cone of bandages at the front of his face was deflated.
Dr. Turin came up next to him. "What you need to do, Wade, is climb up on its abdomen near the bottom, then slide your knees forward to its front end. Try not to fall off. Snip the bandages away from where the beak was. The maw should be directly beneath. We have big plates of raw hamburger meat ready to pass to you."
There was a stepladder at the foot of the hospital bed.
Wade went up the three steps, leaning forward, hands lowering.
Dr. Turin stood by the hospital room wall, holding a shotgun slantwise. "You want to avoid that rectangular clump of bandages on either side thrusting up towards you. Those are its anal claspers. It uses them to grasp upside down onto a branch. We double-wrapped them, but they're very powerful."
Wade put his hands down on the bandaged tubular length beyond the anal claspers, carefully lifting his feet, looking over his shoulder to make sure he had cleared the questing claspers.
He was on all fours on the soft underside of the caterpillar's abdomen.
The smell of ammonia was overwhelming.
Him as a kid, being led to the ocean's loud, rippling edge by his Dad, jerking his small hand, his skinny body, into the deepening crash of waves, white and green, to teach him how to swim.
Beneath his knees, he could feel muscles rippling. "I don't think I can do this."
Maggie stepped forward, holding her ax. "You have to, Wade. You promised. He's in there."
Trying to crawl on his hands and knees atop the undulations, to not think about what he was riding, to not get nauseous from motion sickness, he raised his head. "You're going to fuck me, right?"
She looked sideways at the doctor, embarrassed.
Dr. Turin smiled. "It's not an unusual agreement. A lot of the world revolves around the promise of a fuck."
Wade moved forward down the length of the bandaged caterpillar, swaying side to side, as if crawling down a narrow waterbed.
As he passed each wrapped set of prolegs, they raised, quivering at his slow-moving
tickle, trying to bend their swathed cloth towards him.
After a few hand and knee liftings, he actually got the hang of it, but kept moving slowly, knowing too much confidence could cause him to be careless.
He reached the thoracic legs, at the top of the thorax. They waved wildly in their bulky rectangular bandages, trying to get at him.
Up ahead, the long bandaged front of the caterpillar raised, raging against its canvas restraints, thrusting left, right.
"Scissors!"
One of the nurses stepped forward, handed him a pair of ordinary, orange-handled scissors, quickly stepped back, taking another swig from her beer.
He positioned the scissors at the bottom of the deflated cone of bandages, closing, closing, closing the blades across the dirty cloth, snipping until he reached the other side.
The cut-off cone fell within the bandaged head.
The triangle of bandages rose and fell within the hole in the bandages, in response to breaths.
Using the tips of the scissors as a pair of tweezers, he plucked the cut-off triangle out of the hole, tossed it sideways.
Looked down, into black and yellow insect fur, wondering if the opening he had cut in the bandages was in the wrong place, but then the coarse fur split apart, like an anus, and there, directly beneath him, was the moist, mindless, sliding maw.
"Hamburger!"
He dropped fistfuls of raw red meat from the plate down into the convulsing maw, watching the meat get gulped down into what looked like a nostril.
After the last pink plateful had been dumped into the chewing, he crawled backwards off the long, undulating length, down the step ladder, walked over to the nearest wall, threw up on his shoes.
The pizza arrived for the two orderlies who were helping out.
Dr. Turin came over, squeezed the back of his shoulder. "Most people jump off halfway up the thorax.. You're a good man. Get some rest. The next feeding is in four hours."
"I really appreciate you're doing this."
Wade drank more of the cold can of Coca-Cola from the vending machine, to get the acid taste of vomit out of his mouth, sitting on one of the waiting room sofas with her. "I'm only doing it so you'll sleep with me."
Her big brown eyes smiled. "I understand. It's very flattering."
He drained the rest of the can of Coke. "No one would ever do this to sleep with me."
She put her hand on his shoulder.
He looked around the large waiting area, all the other sofa and chair arrangements empty. "Do you get along with your mother?"
A look of surprise on her face. "Sure. Mothers and daughters almost always get along. We carry the weight of the world in our wombs."
"I could never please my father."
"Did the two of you reconcile before his death?"
Wade snorted. "He didn't even know who the fuck I was."
"I'm so sorry."
"I cooked him a big feast this past Thanksgiving. I thought it'd be like childhood, everyone showing up, you keep opening the front door, relatives standing out there with foil-covered casseroles, the smell of turkey in the air for hours, driving everyone nuts, the adults finally sitting down around the long table, smaller table for the kids, later on all the men watching the football game in the den, fat sandwiches at half time, but it was just him and me. I put a white cloth on my dining room table, tall red candles, twenty pound turkey in the center, me standing over it with an electric carving knife, blue and white china bowls with stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, canned cranberry sauce, pearl onions and green peas in cream sauce, oval relish tray arranged with jumbo green olives with red pimento centers, trimmed green and white scallions on crushed ice.
"I put him at the head of the table, that's where a Dad belongs, I.V. stand next to him, clear tube snaking into his forearm because he was getting anti-nausea drugs to quell the effects of his chemo, but then, as I started slicing down through the brown skin into the white breast, he leaned over and threw up on his plate. I got him a new plate, it was a dinner service for four, so I had two extras, but his bowels loosened on his captain's chair seat, so I had to carry him under his armpits to the front bathroom to clean him up. By the time he could stand up again, all the food was cold."
"It sounds like you went to a lot of trouble."
"I was trying to create a happy, family atmosphere. That's the thing about having a Dad who's dying of cancer before he's fifty. You think Thanksgiving can still be turkey and pumpkin pie, but instead it's just vomit and diarrhea." Wade looked off, at the distant, dark windows of the waiting room. "At one point, he and I are sitting on the bathroom floor in front of the toilet, I'm dabbing at the blood trickling out of his ears, and he tells me he's disappointed how my face turned out."
"How your face turned out?"
"Yeah. You had such a gentle face growing up, really open, friendly, caring, but then over the years I saw your face get harder, turn into one of those arrogant faces, tall forehead, tight cheekbones, teeth too prominent. A greedy face. Can you believe that?"
"Do you think you have a greedy face?"
"Are you kidding?" Wade said nothing, then looked at her. "Why, you think I have a greedy face?"
He fully expected her to say, No, of course not, but instead she tilted her head to one side.
"You think I have a greedy face?"
"Wade, I don't know."
The second time Wade rode the caterpillar's length, fed its maw, he didn't throw up.
Dr. Turin came over afterwards with his big face, gave Wade a pulled punch to his upper arm. "You're doing great."
Wade rubbed the white foam of anti-bacterial soap over his hands, palms and tendoned backs, staring at the writhing length of bandages. "I never realized insects had a smell."
Dr. Turin gave an appreciative nod. "They're normally so small, you don't pick it up. But when they're this size, it's like being in the same room with four hundred pounds of warm cheese."
Wade rinsed his hands in the white sink. "You said Josh might be almost normal after this."
"Possibly."
"What about me?"
"Will you ever be normal again?" Sad smile on the big face. "No. We go through certain experiences in life–death of a loved one, physical pain from an injury or illness, divorce, bitter disappointment, public humiliation, abuse– and they change us, forever. But in time, you'll forget what your old 'normal' self felt like, and the new you, maybe not as happy as the old you, will come to seem normal."
After the third day of crawling up the caterpillar's abdomen, feeding it raw hamburger, Wade stood by himself in the room, hollow-eyed, Dr. Turin coming over to his left ear, talking to him like a coach.
"You may have thought you've been going through the hardest part of this, but actually, the hardest part is today. You need to crawl up its length again, but this time you have to use your scissors to cut through the bandages, release its head, then release its length."
"Is it going to eat me, once its head is released?"
"We're hoping it doesn't."
"Where will you be?"
"I had hoped to be able to be here with you, to lend moral support, but the hospital administrators convinced me it was more important that I stay out of harm's way." Dr. Turin pointed to the glass partition between the ICU room and the observation room beyond.
"You'll be by the partition?"
"Actually, on the other side of the partition. In the observation room. You'll be in this room by yourself, with the caterpillar."
Wade turned to Maggie. "And you?"
She raised her head. "They talked me into waiting in the observation room, too."
The doctor led Wade over to the middle of the brightly-lit hospital room.
Wade swallowed. "This is crazy, right?"
The doctor held Wade's eyes, an old man's stare. "How much do you want her?"
Wade breathed through his nose. "A lot."
The doctor stood back, big face, spread his hands. Grinned.
O
nce everyone was cleared from the ICU room, Wade walked to the foot of the bandaged caterpillar, orange-handled scissors in his right hand.
The large, wide windows of the back wall had been opened, mesh screens removed, to allow the caterpillar to escape, once it transformed into a butterfly.
Wade looked at the glass partition between this room and the observation room. Behind the glass, Dr. Turin and Maggie stood side by side. Using her right index finger, Maggie drew an invisible heart between her breasts. Behind her, some of the nursing staff, facing forward, ate pizza.
Wade mounted the hind end of the caterpillar, knees on either side, like mounting a wide motorcycle about to drive into Hell. After three days, his squeamishness had left him (you can get used to anything, over time). He shuffled on his hands and knees up the undulating length, to the front, to the big black hole in the bandages, to the furry maw within the hole smacking, waiting for raw meat.
He opened his pair of scissors, placed the lower blade between the filthy bandages and the caterpillar's rising and falling orange and black fur, started snipping upwards.
The slit lengthened upwards, bottom of the slit widening with the maw's blind questings left, right.
He snipped his way almost to the very top of the wriggling bandaged shape, wondering what else he would need to do to free the head, when the split he had cut suddenly widened, falling away, the furred front end of the caterpillar lifting out, freed, large, black insect eyes rolling wildly, coming together, cross-eyed, to focus on his face.
He looked up into those huge black eyes, their naked hunger, and crawled backwards, snipping down the abdomen as fast as he could.
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