Dead Inside

by Chandler Morrison

  I crush my cigarette beneath the heel of my boot and light another. “What the fuck do you care who lives or dies,” I say. “If that guy in there dies tonight, how will your life be any different.”

  The janitor opens his mouth to respond but apparently can’t think of anything, so he clamps it shut. The paramedic is looking at me like I’m crazy. Maybe he can see inside me and he knows what I am, like Tamara the Rape Girl had. Or maybe he’s just a narrow-minded, ignorant imbecile who’s been sufficiently brainwashed by society.

  Three guesses upon which option I lay my money.

  “And if he dies,” I continue, “he’s winning. He’ll go out doing what he loves. I can’t think of a better way to go, honestly.” I picture Tamara getting beaten and stabbed and gang-raped and loving it. I imagine Helen choking to death on a hunk of baby meat and experiencing erotic asphyxiation as she goes. I envision myself having a massive coronary as I reach the cusp of an orgasm while fucking some dead teenage cheerleader. I look harshly at the janitor and say, “Wouldn’t you want to die by having a stroke while jerking off to Frankenstein. Forgive the bad pun. Couldn’t resist.”

  “Hey, man,” the janitor says, putting his hands up. “Chill out. Don’t say shit like that.”

  The paramedic is snickering, although I’m not sure at what. I’ve been talking too much. I’ve engaged myself in these people’s lives, and that’s bad. You know how I am, by now. I try to be a phantom, just kind of floating through the world, my presence not really registering in anyone’s mind. I try to be bland and forgettable. My occasional hallway conversations with the janitor are always brief and in passing, not of any real substance, something he’ll forget about as soon as he walks away. That’s how it should be. But now I’ve opened myself up, to a degree, and made my presence known. The janitor will remember this conversation the next time I see him. He must now be avoided.

  I . . . have . . . opened . . . up.

  How did this happen.

  I already know the answer to that as soon as the question enters my mind.

  Helen.

  Fucking Helen.

  Literally.

  Has Helen penetrated me and somehow made me more a part of the world? I think about what she keeps saying about “the light”. I look at the light overhead. I’m standing in the radius of its illumination. Usually, I stand out of its reach, in the shadows. Shrouded. But here I find myself, for the moment having emerged from darkness, and both men’s eyes are on me. They can see me, and I can see them. Really see them, for the grotesque, inane chimps they are. I know this of them, of all of them, but I ignore it as best I can so as to avoid nausea and subsequent vomiting.

  I am not one of them. I do not want to be among them.

  I take a step back, away from the light, back into the shadows, toward the door. I’m suddenly nervous, my body anxiously attempting to claw its way out of my skin. My vision fades, and I’m afraid I might faint.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I tell them, still backing toward the door. “I have to go. I have to . . . check the monitors.”

  The paramedic tries to say something to me, but I’m already gone, through the doors, thinking back to a similar scenario I’d been in with Helen, not long ago.

  And I’m thinking that I wish she were here.

  And that’s just fucking gross.

  ***

  She shows up later, not long after my conversation outside. She doesn’t even knock anymore. She just comes in and plops down in the extra chair and starts talking. It should annoy me, but it doesn’t, and that annoys me.

  “You don’t look so good,” she tells me, crossing her legs and twirling a lock of hair around her forefinger. She’s really high tonight. There’s hardly anything in her face at all. Her eyes are as vacant as the tip jar at the Bad Seed. I think of Nick, the junkie bartender, and figure the two of them would get along nicely.

  “What do you mean,” I ask, swiveling toward the monitors so I don’t have to see her looking at me.

  “You look . . . out of sorts. And kind of sick.”

  “I ate a bad . . . cheeseburger.”

  “You don’t eat cheeseburgers.”

  “How would you know.”

  I can feel her smiling her dopey, stoned smile. “You don’t seem like the type who eats cheeseburgers.”

  “You don’t seem like the type who eats babies.”

  “Oh, that reminds me,” she says, her voice raising a little, like she’s excited about whatever she’s just remembered. “I had a dream last night. A good one, this time. Most of them have been bad lately.”

  “That’s . . . good to hear.” I don’t have to ask her to tell me about it because I know she’s going to anyway. She always does.

  “I was delivering a baby,” she says dreamily, and when I glance at her she’s staring off into space, wearing a crooked grin. “There were other doctors there, too, though. And then the other doctors and I turned into monsters. We ripped open her vagina and pulled the baby out, and we ate it. All of us, we shared it. And I kept thinking, in my dream, that it felt good. Not just the baby-eating part . . . the part about all of us doing it. I felt like we were all superior beings. We, the monsters, were special and unique. The mother of the child, and the baby itself—they were nothing. They weren’t like us.”

  I start to ask her if I was one of the monsters, because that would make sense, but then she says in her pensive, distracted voice, “The baby’s name was Caesar. I don’t know how I knew that, but that’s what it was. Caesar. And all of us . . . we ate little Caesar. He was delicious.”

  “That sounds like a very nice dream,” I say, because I can’t think of anything else.

  “It was,” she says. “It was very nice. You know, I think . . . I think I’m starting to look at things differently.”

  “What do you mean.”

  “I mean, all my life, I just wanted to be normal. But I think I’m starting to see things the way you see them. Maybe it is like you said—we’re special. To hell with everyone else. People like us, people who are into strange things, I guess—we’re better. Than the others, I mean. The normal people. They’re missing out.”

  “Yeah,” I say. I’m thinking again of Tamara Jericho, who was also into some really strange things, and how she had died so peacefully. Helen would have liked her, I think. We could have been one big happy family of fucked-up weirdos. A group of doctor-monster-things eating a kid named Caesar.

  “Anyway,” Helen says, “I have to get back to work. I just wanted to stop by. You should take some Tums, or something. You really look awful.”

  “Yeah,” I say again. “Yeah, I’ll do that.”

  I’m not going to take any fucking Tums.

  “Listen,” she says, pausing on her way out the door, “when I get off, do you want to come over and—”

  “No,” I say, my sweating hands clenching the armrests of my chair. “No, I don’t.”

  She doesn’t say anything else, and I don’t watch her leave. I wait to hear the door close, and when it does, I turn and look at it and wonder what I’ll say if it opens again, if she comes back and asks me one more time.

  She doesn’t, though.

  The door stays closed.

  As it should.

  ***

  Things go on like that for a while. She comes in and talks to me and tells me her dreams, asks me to interpret them. I never do. Occasionally she tries to get me to come over. I never do that, either.

  Then, abruptly, she stops showing up. A couple of nights go by, then a week, then a whole month. I watch her on the monitors, but I don’t seek her out. She never goes out to smoke, which I suppose makes sense because, now that I think about it, she only smoked with me, and she never had her own cigarettes.

  She’s not at the hospital as often. A lot of nights I’ll flip through all the cameras in the hospital, even the ones in places she wouldn’t have any reason to be, and she’s not there.

  Something feels off.

  I fe
el off.

  Another month passes. September is drawing to a close, but it’s savagely, unseasonably hot. Every time I go out to smoke at night, I come back in sweating.

  It’s toward the end of my shift, and I’m reading The Sweet Smell of Psychosis when I’m startled by a knock at the door. I look at the monitor, and it’s Helen. I bite the inside of my cheek and think. This is peculiar; she’s been absent for over a month, so the visit in itself is strange, in addition to the fact that she’s knocking, because she had stopped knocking awhile back.

  I get up and let her in, and we both sit down. We stare at each other, not speaking, and she looks different. She’s gained weight—not much, but enough to be noticeable. Her face seems more flushed, even though her eyes are still dead. She shakes a few pills into her hand and tosses them into her mouth.

  “I don’t have anything to drink,” I tell her. “I already drank all my water. My shift is over soon.”

  She nods and grindingly crunches the pills down, swallows, and keeps looking at me.

  “Where have you been,” I ask.

  She sighs deeply, her shoulders raising high and then falling low, so she becomes hunched, almost like a scared child. Her shaking hands are clasped on her lap, and her knuckles are white. “Life has become complicated for me,” she says.

  “Wasn’t it always complicated.”

  Her pale eyes well up. “It’s different, now.”

  “What do you—”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  At that second word I seize up. My heart plummets into my groin, and my blood turns to cold, brown slush. My vision becomes gray, and I fear I’m going to pass out. I take tight hold of the arms of the chair and close my eyes, waiting for it to pass.

  Pregnant.

  Pregnant.

  PREGNANT.

  Once I’m reasonably sure I can maintain consciousness, I open my eyes. “It’s not mine,” I say.

  “It is,” she says. Tears are now running down her ruddy cheeks.

  “No.”

  “Yes. You’re the only person I’ve had sex with in months. Me and . . . I haven’t had sex in a long time.”

  “How long have you known,” I ask.

  She shrugs and looks at her lap, appearing again as a frightened child. “A while,” she says.

  “Why didn’t you tell me,” I say, trying to make the anger within me evident in my voice. And then, the more important question. “Why haven’t you aborted it,” I ask.

  She makes eye contact with me. “I can’t. I won’t.”

  “It is a monster. The way it was conceived . . . it is an abomination.”

  Her face grows even redder as she says bitterly, “You don’t think that you’re a monster. You’re the one who’s always preaching about being different.”

  Running a hand through my hair and looking at the ceiling, I say quietly, “Helen. I don’t preach about anything. And just because I’m okay with being me, doesn’t mean I think there should be more of me. There should not be more of me. You have to kill it.”

  “No.”

  “I hate kids, Helen. I hate them. Flush it out.”

  “No.”

  “You eat babies. You don’t give birth to them, or raise them.”

  She bites down hard on her lip and closes her eyes. She’s holding back an outburst of sobs. She says, carefully and deliberately, “It’s different this time. This time, it’s mine.”

  “It’s ours,” I correct her. “I have a say in it. And I want it dead.”

  “It’s my body,” she argues. “Listen, I don’t want you to think I came here to tell you that I want anything from you. I don’t expect you to be a father, or anything. Obviously, I’d never come after you for child support. You don’t have to do anything at all. I just thought you should know about it.”

  “I want it dead,” I say again. I’m panicking. I’m short of breath, and yet horribly craving a cigarette. I close my eyes and massage my temples as I feel a headache begin to settle in, burrowing itself into my skull and building a thorny nest. Helen asks me if I want any of her Vicodin, and I tell her no, I don’t want any fucking Vicodin.

  “I’m sorry,” Helen says. “At first I wasn’t going to tell you at all. Maybe I shouldn’t have told you. But I really think you should know about it, at least.”

  I meet her gaze and feel the anger leave my eyes and be replaced with pleading desperation. “Please, Helen,” I beg her, somewhat satisfied with the audible amount of anguish I’m somehow able to infuse into my voice. “Please, don’t do this to me.”

  “I’m not doing anything,” she says, her tone soft and soothing and motherly. “It’s okay, really. It’s not even that big of a deal.”

  I try another approach and say, “You’re going to eat it. You know you will. You won’t be able to resist it. You’re going to eat your own baby, and then you’re going to go to prison.” As an afterthought, I throw in a little flattery and add, “You’re too pretty for prison. The women in there . . . I think they’d eat you alive.”

  She smiles sadly. “I’m not going to eat my baby,” she says. “It’s mine. I will love it and raise it and everything will be fine.”

  “Nothing will ever be fine if you have that baby.”

  “I have to go,” she says, standing up. “I’ll . . . I guess I’ll talk to you later, or something.”

  “Yeah,” I say, swiveling away from her direction. “Or something.”

  ***

  My hands are shaking and my heart is racing as I drive home that morning. I take side roads to allow myself time to think.

  It seems clear I won’t be able to convince her to abort the fucking thing. Regardless, I can’t let it be born. The thought of having offspring, a child with my genes, walking around in the world . . . I can’t have that. Some nasty fucking infant with my blood lying there and shitting itself and crying like a gutted dog, its ugly little face all scrunched up, squirming and wailing for Helen’s tit—I can picture all of it, and it’s fucking disgusting. I can’t be responsible for bringing another goddamn human onto this godforsaken rock. I try to have as little impact on the world as possible, to leave no trace of my presence, but reproduction is the exact antithesis of that.

  I make a right turn into the Metroparks, which typically have little-to-no traffic this time of morning, and which have an exit right onto Jubilee Street. I take this way occasionally; it’s quiet and serene, and while I’m not one for the aesthetic appeal of nature, there’s something about the way the dawn sun peeks through the canopy of the trees and casts a golden-red light over the road that makes the drive feel almost dreamlike.

  I’ve only been on Parkway Road for about five minutes before I come upon a small gray Ford off to the side of the road, its front end wrapped around an enormous tree, with pale smoke billowing out from under the hood. There are skid marks on the road—the driver had likely been attempting to avoid a deer, I imagine. The evasive maneuver clearly failed in execution.

  I pull over about thirty feet behind the crashed car and turn my hazards on. I don’t see any movement from within it, which excites me. I’ve got my fingers crossed that it’s a girl, a dead one, because Preston Druse is the closest hospital, so that’s where she’d be taken. The morgue has been strangely devoid of fuckable females lately, and with the catastrophic bombshell that’s just been dropped on me, I could really use a good lay. I want to see if it is, in fact, a fuckable dead girl, because I’ll be able to sleep much easier if I know I’ve got that waiting for me tonight.

  I get out of my car and look behind me, listening for any approaching vehicles. Not hearing anything but birds and the faint drone of an airplane high overhead, I cautiously approach the smoking Ford. The windshield is broken and my feet crunch over the glass scattered on the dew-moist ground.

  My heart jumps when I peek inside—it is a girl. It’s hard to make out her features because she’s slumped against the steering wheel—she’s not wearing her seatbelt, and the airbag failed to go off—b
ut she’s thin and athletic-looking, which is more than good enough. There’s blood all over the dashboard, and I’m pretty sure she’s dead.

  I try to open the door so I can look at her face, but it falls off as soon as I pull on it. Cheap American-made cars. I poke her arm, and she doesn’t move. I’m giddy with excitement. When I grab her shoulders to pull her back, though, she stirs and starts to cough. A mist of blood sprays onto the steering wheel. She turns her head to look at me, slowly, and her face is pretty fucked up—cuts, gashes, smears of gore, some missing front teeth, strands of her long auburn hair glued to her forehead and cheeks with matted blood.

  “I’m . . . not . . . okay,” she whispers. She tries to move, but cries out in pain, and tears begin to run tracks down her mashed-up face. Broken ribs, I’d imagine.

  “Help,” she whines. “I can’t . . . it hurts . . . I’m . . . it’s so . . . ”

  I just stand there for a few moments. I’d been counting on her being dead. I look both ways down the road again. There’s still no one coming. I could go back to my car and drive off, and no one would ever know. I’m by no means obligated to help her.

  One of the gashes on her forehead is bleeding rather profusely. If I leave, she’ll probably die, unless someone else comes along in the next fifteen minutes, or so—tops, by the look of her injuries. She’s breathing irregularly, with strenuous effort, and it’s largely possible that one of her ribs has punctured a lung.

  “Hold still,” I tell her. “Try not to move.” Before I even know what I’m doing, I’m unbuttoning my shirt and balling it up. I lean over and press it against her forehead, feeling it dampen immediately. With my free hand I take out my cell phone and dial 9-1-1.

  My shirt soaks through in a short matter of minutes, so I drop it into the grass and peel off my undershirt and use that in its stead.

  The girl’s head is lolling and her breath is becoming slower. I don’t know why I’m doing this. I can leave her to die, and then fuck her tonight. I have no reason at all to try to save her. I’m disgusted with myself, but I keep holding the shirt against her forehead. Soon, I can hear the peal of sirens in the distance.