Long Eyes and Other Stories

by Jeff Carlson

  He'd become a different man with what felt like someone else's future. It lay in wait for him ghoulishly.

  Great strides had been made in minimizing and controlling the effects of the disease, but there was no cure and might never be. In fact, most researchers had given up on overcoming the virus. The current focus was on creating a vaccine to prevent infection in the first place. Protease inhibitors could drop HIV to below detectable levels, and with care and some luck he might live most of his normal life-span — yet how normal would it be?

  Each day he lived out sixty years in his mind, breathing in claustrophobic phantom mobs of might-have-beens and cruel visions of himself as a bed-ridden husk. The effort was exhausting, lethal, and he tried to shut down his mind. There were more danger zones than safe areas now. He needed to be smaller.

  He kept busy. Another new lesson was that action of any sort was better than waiting, worrying.

  "Stay positive," a therapist told him, not understanding the irony of her word choice.

  "You've got a long time ahead of you, son," a specialist promised.

  #

  There were no fingerprints on the needles or the notes. Interviews with theater employees and the small number of movie-goers who'd come forward generated not one lead.

  If there had been any point, any profit, it could have been the perfect crime, but it was only perfect madness.

  A ninth victim discovered more needles in the coin return slots of three payphones down the block, but again there were no clues or witnesses. Short of receiving a confession, the police might never be able to explain who had done it or why.

  He'd become a statistic. For what? He dwelled on lunacy, though greater minds than his had offered only more questions or cures that helped few at best. Monsters in all their many forms were a perverse cancer that would have been abolished by now if evil was not inherently part of the human being. Shooting sprees, arson, child molestation — the insanity had become so constant, most people tried to ignore it.

  Others sought out chaos and pain, some to feast, some to heal. In the days after the theater incident, he was harassed by both types. And half a year later, when tests proved that eight of the victims were blood positive, the circus started again.

  He was a minor celebrity in the media, especially the tabloids. There were plenty of other crazies and their deeds to celebrate (Golf Club Killer Bludgeons Neighbors; Sabotage Kills 4 In Subway), but he and the other infected victims were walking dead and this insidious aspect played well — as did the fact that their only mistake had been to sit down. Everyone sits down. On buses, in restaurants, at ball games. Everyone.

  His notoriety wasn't anything that a man could properly capitalize on, of course. Women would never clamor for space in his bed. Employers wouldn't compete for him. His buddies started picking up the tabs for beer and food, but very soon he was seeing less and less of them.

  Some of this distancing was his own fault, partly because he ran to see every specialist his insurance would cover, mostly because he couldn't stand rehashing what had happened or getting maudlin about the good ol' days.

  Much of the gradual separation was their doing, however, and he quickly learned who was a friend and who had been a mere acquaintance.

  Losing his girlfriend was the hardest.

  Her pity hurt. Her revulsion hurt. Memories hurt. Hope and regret and wishes hurt. She was experiencing her own myriad of anguishes, but he didn't care. He couldn't afford to.

  He'd stopped answering his phone during the blitz of calls from media, friends and family — and from oblivious telemarketers who made him smile bitterly. The plaintive voice on the machine no longer sounded familiar. He erased all her messages.

  #

  A lawyer approached him with the news that six of the other victims were filing a liability suit against the theater, a national chain which was at least sure to settle out of court.

  "I'm in," he said.

  What had happened could hardly be considered the theater's fault, but protracted phone calls and paperwork and meetings with representatives of his insurance company had him frightened. Money meant more doctors, more treatments.

  He visited the lawyer's office twice but continued to avoid the other victims despite his therapist's suggestions to join group sessions. He didn't want to know those people. In a sense, he wished he no longer knew himself.

  #

  He hoped work would be an escape. All he wanted was to be ignored. Instead, he was avoided, a different thing altogether, which he deeply resented. His first life had been full of casual contact — handshakes, the brush of fingers when exchanging files — but now he walked in a ghost world, isolated and damned, unclean. Once he caught a woman emptying out the coffee pot in the break room after he'd poured himself a cup.

  "You need an outlet for your anger," the therapist told him. "Paint. Play music. Let it out."

  He blasted ten thousand spaceships on his PlayStation and smashed baseballs at the batting cages until his hands and wrists throbbed. He went skating but ached deep in his soul when confronted with rollergirls whose firm-bodied health had always been the stuff of fantasy.

  There were dating services that linked HIV-positive singles, even heterosexual drug-free singles. He'd never have oral sex again or experience intercourse without the sensation-killing barrier of prophylactics — mixing viral strains at random would only hasten his decay — but the possibility of intimacy did exist, no matter how sad and unappealing. Nonsmoker, professional, likes movies...

  The note left in his cubicle read: Faggots rot in hell!

  He should have laughed at this ignorant cowering bluster. His therapist would have been proud. Yet it was a full minute before he stopped shaking and unballed his fist from around the crumpled paper. He showed it to his boss, establishing a record, then did his best to provoke his suspects, visiting their cubicles often, volunteering exaggerated reports of his treatments and future symptoms.

  With luck, they'd strike again. Another lawsuit meant more money. And he enjoyed his plotting with fierce joy. It was wonderful to be the aggressor again.

  #

  The skinny old woman in the free clinic that only charged fifty bucks had trouble finding his antecubital vein. The inside of his elbow might as well have been a dartboard.

  "Here," he said, with all the patience he could muster.

  Flying out to California had not been a great idea — his mom made him chicken soup thirteen times in two and half weeks, and his dad no longer seemed capable of looking him in the eye — but he couldn't afford a real vacation. The liability suit had yet to be resolved, and he'd missed too much work during the past year.

  There was solace in resignation. Even a bad game of golf with his dad was better than rotting alone. Iced tea tasted as good as ever. Fresh-cut grass still smelled amazing. But the yuppie foursome that played ahead of them ripped his heart. The breeze had been full of the men's advice and cheerfully crude propositions, the women's laughter.

  He should have been one of them.

  Let go, let God, was his mother's mantra, and he tried to believe it. He practiced meditation now, energy-channeling, color therapy. Unfortunately, these were acts of desperation instead of than real faith.

  Anger flared in him like a migraine when the old bitch missed his vein for the third time. Familiar, powerful anger.

  He'd hoped to get through the summer without subjecting himself to more blood work, but his doctor wanted to try a new anti-viral and needed a fresh count. His insurance, which had begun clamping down, declared this an elective process, so instead of visiting real professionals he'd come here, exposing himself to a lobby full of sicknesses borne by other people who couldn't afford better care.

  Even worse was the humiliation of revealing his secret to new people. The dark-eyed receptionist had been polite but he knew what she was thinking. He wished she wasn't so pretty. He wished no one was that pretty.

  The skinny old bitch forgot to apply pressure afte
r she withdrew the hypo. He grabbed a cotton ball from her supplies and jammed it down on the puncture himself so that he wouldn't bruise. He almost said something caustic, but in his new life he'd encountered plenty of workers who were ill-trained, indifferent, condescending, too busy.

  It did not surprise him that trust was a mistake.

  #

  "There's no need for alarm," said the man on the phone. "We just want you to come down for retesting just to be safe."

  Rather than disposing of disposable needles, the silly bitch had washed them with hot water and soap, thinking she was doing good, being thrifty. Her training had consisted of two four-hour classes and she would have continued to mix and match blood-borne diseases in unsuspecting people except that a more experienced co-worker happened to observe her at the sink.

  Of the more than five hundred people this woman treated, only eleven proved to be infected. Various officials declared victory.

  Six of those eleven had passed through the clinic immediately after him. Ironically, all were healthy twenty- or thirty-somethings, for the most part sexually active, in their prime, exactly like he had been not so long ago. All six had chosen to be tested for HIV merely for their own peace of mind after seeing too many community service commercials.

  Now they had his strain of the virus as well as the Hepatitis B he'd picked up from a man before him.

  He remembered a few faces and articles of clothing from the waiting room, a strident voice, nothing more. What had happened wasn't his fault — it had never been his fault — but he felt a connection that had never existed between himself and the other victims of the movie theater incident. Perhaps he was weaker now, after months of constant isolation and loss.

  He tried to seek them out, but confidentiality rules made this difficult, as did a circle-the-wagons mentality on the part of the clinic, which was already under threat of several lawsuits. Neither of the two women he managed to track down wanted anything to do with him. One was hysterical. Both seethed with blame. He understood, yet it might have helped to create a special tribe. People to die with.

  Hepatitis would ravage his compromised immune system.

  #

  When he woke the next morning, the sun was strong and promising and two fat scrub jays screeched energetically in the flowering shrubs. He watched them without expression.

  He'd finally achieved the narrow thoughtlessness that had eluded him for so long. He understood why now — knew what dark instinct had driven the nameless monster who'd killed him, no matter how random and insane as it must seem to the healthy, the secure, the happy.

  He had been infected in that theater in more than one sense.

  After breakfast, he stabbed himself with a dozen needles and went out to boobytrap some park benches.

  END

  Afterword

  "Monsters" must be the most disturbing piece of fiction I've ever written, and I say that as someone whose first novel opens with five billion people dead.

  The heroes of Plague Year are murdering cannibals — the heroes! — but this story bothers people more. I think that's because the protagonist of "Monsters" deliberately turns to evil. In the end, he chooses to walk into the darkness, whereas Cam and Sawyer and the other survivors of Plague Year have no other option.

  I got this idea from a newspaper article, and, later in the story, the nameless hero reads about other mindless attacks both large and small. A lot of people are unhappy. Some of them try to make everyone else unhappy, too.

  Why? What drives them to spread the misery instead of working to reduce it?

  Sometimes I think it's a failure of imagination. Many of us are short-sighted. We can't see beyond our own immediate needs, and I think that's incredibly sad. It's also scary as hell. "Monsters" is upsetting, but it's probably also the best story to emerge from my horror phase. Too often, life is horrific, and it's hard to argue that "Monsters" doesn't capture that feeling.

  ROMANCE

  That the odds were always against them must have been part of the appeal.

  He was a dark stranger with a Glock 9mm that never left his reach and suitcases full of cash belonging to another man. She was book-smart, lonely, restless, the only daughter of that other man — a greedy and fear-plagued mob boss who treated her like a treasure, like something to be counted and displayed.

  He had wasted his life earning percentages. She'd lost hers dreaming of freedom.

  He spoke to her gently when they met in her father's house and she murmured a polite response, and their watchful eyes conveyed a promise meant for no others.

  They escaped that bleak world together.

  Her skin was hot silk, his kiss devouring, her murmurs an invitation as well as a demand for more.

  He found work hammering nails while she took tickets at the zoo — mundane jobs that delighted her with their ordinariness. Their apartment was tiny and had only one window. It was a perfect nest.

  She taught him laughter and intimacy with notes and whispers; by loading his dinner with jalapenos; by sharing her education. He taught her less meaningful things such as how to count cards, stack beer cans, clean handguns. They were content.

  The men who tracked them down brought a terse message: Come back. Now. She surprised everyone by pulling a pistol.

  They escaped again, this time deep into Mexico. She read him poetry while he massaged her neck. They slept late and basked in each other's heat.

  One day her father himself appeared, backed by twenty men.

  The siege lasted two hours. They killed six. Their wounds were horrible, their spirits undaunted, their final shared smile a loving, bloody grimace of fierce beauty.

  Last chance, her father called through a bullhorn from the smoky yard, and she killed the bastard who'd stolen their dreams with a lucky shot snapped off from the hip.

  They died in a firestorm, triumphant like all doomed lovers, together forever.

  END

  Afterword

  Like "Exit," this short short was conceived for an annual fiction contest, this one held by SLO Nightwriters, a writing group of which I was a member for two years while living on California's central coast. "Romance" didn't do as well as "Exit." As I recall, it placed fifth or sixth, but I've always liked it for its compact elegance.

  Yes, it's cliché. But it's elegant. You won't be surprised to hear that I was watching a lot of Quentin Tarantino movies at the time.

  NURTURE

  Shawna placed the jane doe's age at mid- to late-twenties. Her age. She'd never cut someone who could have been her friend before, and she hesitated twice before pressing down on the scalpel.

  Like Shawna, the jane doe had been taking care of herself, exercising, eating enough greens, trimming her nails and bikini line, unlike the sloppy bastards who came in full of taco grease and wearing the same boxers that they'd had on for a week. You could read people's lives by how they'd treated themselves. The jane doe had expected to kick ass for another seventy years.

  It was sort of like seeing herself on the table, and Shawna got spooked, which made her mad. Here in the city, people weren't bothered by anything — screaming on the next block over, naked homeless people — unless you slipped into a parking space they'd been waiting for or held up the line at the ATM. Shawna punished herself by proceeding slowly with extra attention. Otherwise she might not have catalogued the subtle deformations in the woman's temporal lobes.

  At first the withered specks, just slightly whiter than the pale yellow sponge of so-called "gray matter," were something that Shawna assumed to be part of the head trauma.

  Probably the victim of a hit-and-run accident but considered a possible murder, the jane doe had been smashed by a vehicle going in excess of forty miles per hour. Her blue shorts and the fluorescent green impact gel on the soles of her running shoes had been alien swatches of brightness in the quiet, tiled lab until Shawna removed and bagged them.

  This was Shawna's first solo autopsy, which she'd been permitted only because Oaklan
d PD had already taken samples of the orange-colored paint imbedded in the jane doe's skin — and because the cause of death was so obvious: fractured neck, impacted cranium. Shawna's boss expected her to finish the paperwork and return to other tasks, but she had always been meticulous.

  Close examination revealed that the withered pinpoints were a preexisting condition, which didn't make sense, given the jane doe's youth and obvious health.

  Shawna had seen plenty of weird stuff, of course, even though she'd only been an assistant M.E. for three weeks. In med school, it had seemed like every other case study dealt with some abnormality or affliction — and after she washed out, her new instructors had nothing but horror stories. Few people grew up wanting to inspect corpses as a career, although it paid well, and many medical examiners took a perverse pride in cataloging "unique freaks." Nature was wild. Second stomachs, missing genitals, hair growing inside the skin rather than out from it — living structures were too complicated to be cookie cutter perfect. In fact, perfection did not exist. The immaculate businesswomen who made Shawna feel so much like an imposter, like a hick, were in reality all mascara, padded bras, and hair gel, doomed like everyone else to allergies, shag carpet eyebrows, toe fungus, or irritable bowel syndrome.

  The jane doe must have had some difficulty processing her senses. It wouldn’t have been anything as dramatic as autism, but Shawna knew enough neurology to suspect that sound and smell especially had been dim for the dead woman. A specialist would be able to tell more.

  Could the jane doe's inattention have contributed to the accident that killed her?