Needles & Sins

by John Everson

  …And Ambition died as Charles watched the next hotshot and the next and the next walk past his cube over the years atop the soulless grey carpet to take a manager’s office at the end of the hall. An office with a door. And at last, one night he walked into that envied office and sat himself in the chair of his boss, 10 years his junior, who had left for home and cocktail parties two hours before, leaving Charles to work alone, pulling the weight for both of them. Charles sat in that leather-backed chair, and leaned back to stare at the framed poster on the otherwise sterile wall that featured the block letters spelling S-U-C-C-E-S-S in a black bar at the bottom and at long last, years in the making, he began to cry.

  ««—»»

  The needle now closed the livid tear near his throat, the end of a long scar of twisted, bloody, knotted flesh. “They say not to sweat the small stuff,” the woman whispered behind his head. “But that’s what it’s all about…”

  “I wasn’t like that all the time,” he said, and then moaned, “It hurts.”

  Images clustered in his mind’s eye of his wife and kids and broken dreams mixed with the memories of dying mice and the spider-webbed glass of the car his parents last drove in and the pink slip that sent him from a broken home to the apartment where the liquor drove away the cold. And then his memories fled like dandelion seeds in an angry April breeze.

  Dad?

  Charles?

  Baby?

  Son?

  The voices reverberated from inside, first louder, but then muffled, as the woman pulled the last skein of thread through his suppurating skin.

  “It will hurt,” she whispered, humming softly into his ear. “It will hurt forever.”

  “But why?” he moaned, trying without success to lift his arm to touch the horrible stitching that held him together and formed a knot at his heart.

  “Because you lived.”

  At last she moved so that he could see her. After tying off the thread that wound and bound inside him, she picked up the bowl of liquid. Her chin thrust into the dull shadow in stark, bone white, heavy eyes shone black as night water. She drank the deadly liquid from the bowl and grinned, her teeth stark in bony sockets stripped of flesh.

  “Every stitch soaks my poison into the flesh,” she grinned. “Just like every sin poisons the soul.”

  “So this is the end,” he whined. “All of my days done?

  She only laughed.

  Behind her, Charles watched the black shadow of wings unfurl in the wavering amber of the room’s deadly light.

  “Still they begin,” she whispered and gathered him to her to start again…her needles and his sins.

  — | — | —

  SOMETHING INSIDE

  “There’s someone else hidden inside me,” the woman whispered. She seemed adamant. “She has been trapped inside me forever, and I want you to set her free.”

  I had heard it before. Sometimes, I felt like I’d heard it all before. Hidden within every big assed woman was a skinny beauty queen dying to be “set free” for her tempestuous moment on the runway of dreams. Or so they thought. As a surgeon, I have a firm and well-founded belief in the innate ugliness of some people. No amount of surgical intervention is going to change the summation of a gene cesspool. But still they came, false dreams in their rosy lenses and checkbooks in hand. They wanted their water balloon slack tits to defy natural law and stand up straight as B-52 bomber cones, or their cellulite-striped bellies not to stretch like beached and rotting whale blubber over their shiny, tight-cinched steel belts. They especially wanted to obliterate that saggy, baggy line that stretched from the pubis to the ribs and which rippled and shook every time they moved. No regimen of weight loss could completely erase the sagging quicksand slippage of skin that said “once there used to be a big vat of fat—or a parade of babies—that nested here.”

  The latest in a long line of women who wished that I worked in miracles and not scars sat in my examining room and pointed at the spiderweb of lines on her face, and then gave a general gesture to the rest of her flesh. It was not unattractive, but it was also not a look-twice-at-on-the-street body. An objective assessment said that she clearly wasn’t one of the genetic cesspool derelicts that was beyond salvaging. With a bit of cutting, stitching, nipping and tucking, I could set free the more beautiful woman that the years had walled up inside her.

  But there was a look in her eyes that I couldn’t place. I’m not sure how to describe it really. Desperation? Yearning? Obsession? It was the kind of overly intense look that, five years ago, would have made me send her packing without a second glance.

  Surgeons can’t take a chance on potential crazies. People think doctors make cartons of cash, and they do. But what people don’t know is that most docs have 10 years of student loans to pay off, and that as soon as you hang up your shingle, you’ve got to sign up for malpractice insurance—which instantly saps half your revenue. You operate on a couple nutjobs and get some outrageous lottery judgments against you from a bleeding heart liberal jury, and your malpractice insurance goes up and up; you might as well take up baggin’ groceries to earn a living.

  Which I was close to doing now. I speak here from the deep deep well of experience. Ironically, because of my desperate situation, I listened to the desperately strange woman longer than I would have not so long ago when things were better for me—back when the local newspapers used to write articles about my surgical prowess, not ineptitude.

  “I want you to cut me open,” she continued to explain. Her finger traced a line down the center of her forehead, across her nose and down in between her breasts. I noted, purely professionally, that she had no need of augmentation or reduction there…her chest looked provocatively obvious and well-rounded. No sags or deflated bags there. She was of a higher caliber than most of the patients I’d seen in the past two years. Not that there had been very many of any quality.

  “There is certainly cutting involved,” I said, ignoring her crude directions which basically would have had me cut her in half if I carried them out to the letter. “But what is it that you want to achieve?”

  She looked at me with the kind of seriousness that I imagined impassioned serial killers display as they approach their victims with single-minded purpose.

  “I want you to cut me from my forehead to my toes,” she said. “I want you to set her free.”

  I nodded and wrote something in her chart. “Nutcase,” I believe, is what I wrote. Then I stood up and said, “Wait here just a minute.”

  I opened the door and ducked into the hallway.

  “Wait doctor,” she began, leaping off the paper-covered examining table. “I know this sounds crazy but…”

  I was already at the receptionist’s station. “ Carrie,” I said. “I can’t operate on Ms. Phoenix. Please give her the name of someone at the Artgeld Clinic.”

  I always used to give Carrie the shit jobs. After all, she ran the desk. She was my front line protection.

  The problem was, when you’re on the way down, nobody is all that keen to protect you and help you back up. Especially when your checks bounce. And when you turn down cases when your payroll checks are bouncing…

  Well…that’s why, the next time Ms. Phoenix—“Please call me Janis”—came to my office, I was the only one there to receive her.

  She rang the buzzer at the front desk and I had to answer. She roused me from a reverie of worry that involved the winner of the next NCAA pool among the medical building tenants, the fleeting concern about my overdue mortgage and the thought that maybe, just maybe, I might get laid if I went down to Billy’s Tavern tonight and mentioned that I was not just a surgeon, but a doc who had given “breast lifts” to the stars. It was a weak dream, but it was better than the thoughts of the repo men coming to cart all of my furniture back to some endless, Orwellian warehouse.

  I knew the stains on my office carpet were really the visible comments on the lackluster spark that had been my brief career. I probably would have failed as a v
et. I was probably best cut out as an accountant. But here I was. A skids surgeon who had gotten his degree in an offshore program because my grades weren’t quite up to par to make it into a medical school here in the states. A guy with a scalpel, a mediocre degree, and an office that cost too much, even though it shared a zip code with the slums. While at first I had charmed a few well-connected patients—and the press—I had, in the end, not done particularly well for myself.

  Nor for others really.

  The carpet of my office was as stained in blood as the legal proceedings against my name were saturated in ink. I got into this business to help people; really I had.

  Yet here I was, in an empty, beaten-down office, with a crazy woman asking me to flay her open. Filet her like a trout.

  And there wasn’t a nurse to be found to back me up. Normally, doctors always had a nurse in on a consultation, largely to make sure that if any litigation followed the surgery, there would be a) a witness, and b) another woman to refute it. Put a man in court against a woman with a spit-on-command eye faucet…and the man lost every time, regardless of the circumstance. Estrogen always triumphed over testosterone in our courts of law. Call it primordial. Call it unfair. It was what it was.

  And right now, there was a woman in my broken down office, for the second time in as many months, asking me to cut her open.

  Only this time, I was within five days and $250 of losing my lease. I had no staff salaries to pay because I had no staff. But Janis Phoenix was potentially the only patient between me and bankruptcy. And I didn’t even have a heroin habit to blame on my decline.

  “You remember me,” she said, when I came out from the back room and raised an eyebrow at her stance behind the nurse’s station. She had rung the tiny “call” bell ten times in as many seconds.

  “How could I forget?” I asked. “You want me to cut you open…but to gain what?”

  “To release the inner me,” she said.

  “What you’ve proposed will only release your blood and put you in danger of dying,” I said.

  When she smiled, I almost believed that letting out a little blood on the table would make her sing. But that wasn’t the end of it. She wanted me to trim her flesh to the bone. To cut her from stem to sternum and then some…until her skeleton was set free to dance in a kaleidoscopic celebration on my fucked-up bones. Because if I did what Janis wanted, I would have no office or career, or life. I would be locked up forever, for first degree murder…with a violently violated corpse as gruesome evidence that provided no potential defense. Nobody cut open a woman for a procedure the way this woman wanted me to.

  “You can release your inner you without my help,” I said finally, after listening to her insane demands. “Watch Oprah.”

  “I have,” she said. Her wide lips curled up higher in a sneer. “But this isn’t a fake bourgeois ‘I need to go to the mall’ problem that I have.”

  I shrugged in curiosity. I’d like to say disinterest, but frankly, this woman fascinated me. She was not bad looking. She was close to my age. And she seemed to be fixated on having me put a knife to her flesh. I assumed she was some kind of extreme masochist. Not my kink, but fascinatingly perverse, regardless.

  “Listen,” she said. “There is a better me inside me that needs to be let out.” She ran a finger up my arm, as if to suggest…sensual reward for my work. This, I was well-versed in dealing with.

  “Janis,” I said, “I can help you to realize the goals you have in your surgery…”

  “Spare me the surgical-psycho mumbo jumbo,” she cut me off. “I don’t have any goals other than that you cut me open and let the real me out.”

  I laughed.

  She slapped me.

  “I’m not fuckin’ kidding,” she said. “I want you to put a scalpel on my forehead, draw it down to between my breasts, and then open my belly, my thighs and my calves until the blood flows out to the floor like a bad plumbing leak. I want you to slip your hands inside the open wound, and lift the flesh like a door until my body is truly ‘open.’ Only then, can she be set free.”

  “Assisted suicide is not legal in this state,” I whispered.

  “I’m not talking about suicide,” she insisted, her eyes blazing wide. “I’m talking about rebirth.”

  Color me stupid, but I just didn’t feel that desperate yet… I turned her away, a second time. And as the door to my ramshackle office rattled itself closed, I sank to the stained carpet and held my face in my hand. She had been my only potential patient for days, and I’d turned her away for …what? Morals? Ethics? She was crazy as a loon but who was I to deny taking money for doing what she wanted? And I was at the end of my own hang-noose rope. I could have insisted on cash payment up front and disposed of whatever remains remained efficiently, after the fact. Beggars can’t be choosers, or they die. I stood up after a while, walked to the back office, and poured a tall glass of Maker’s Mark bourbon. No other patients rang the receptionist bell that day to interrupt my drink. It was the last I was likely to have of the good stuff. When I finally left the building, it no longer looked lost and rundown to me. It only looked blurry. Like the focus on my life.

  I imagine that she went to other doctors in her mad, self-abusive quest. I imagine she was turned away. I imagine that’s why she spent some time on research when she found that my medical practice had closed, and turned up at the door a few weeks later to my one-room apartment. It was hard to pull myself away from the buzzing glare of the hypnotizing lights inside my head to answer the door. I had been drinking cheap whiskey and sometimes cheaper vodka for much of the month, and sound was occasional. Cognizance optional. The lightshow was phenomenal though.

  “I’ve been looking for you,” she whispered, when I finally staggered to the door. I responded with something intelligent to that, like “huh?”

  “I want to live,” she said. “I can’t take being bottled up anymore. But you have to set me free.”

  She pressed a boxcutter into my hand, and began to unbutton her blouse in full view of the still-open hallway door. “I want you to help me.”

  How could I dare to touch her? She was a more handsome woman than the bitch who had married me, drained me of all my free cash and then divorced me with a large alimony anchor. Her eyes were hazel and mysterious in their refusal to choose a color. Her breasts were full and alluring, despite being hidden behind a fabric that never showed cleavage. Her waist was not thin, but was also not fat. I could imagine being lost in the midnight mysteries of her and dreaming of returning. Why would I cut her?

  She waived a stack of green hundred dollar bills in my face. The stack was thick. At a glance, I guessed that it amounted to three or four thousand dollars. Maybe more.

  “There’s more if you’ll just perform the procedure,” she promised. I laughed at that.

  “If I cut you the way you said, you’ll be dead within 10 minutes. There will be no more anything.”

  “No,” she insisted. “I will be reborn. And I’ll pay you for that.” She pulled up her shoulders to stand straight and declare with laughably dramatic posture, “I will pay you handsomely for setting me free.”

  “Why don’t you just cut yourself open?” I asked. I looked pointedly at her visible scars. “You’ve clearly played with knives in the past.”

  “I didn’t say the procedure wouldn’t hurt me,” she said. “You’re right; I’ve cut myself plenty.” She pointed at the ghost-white lines tracing history across her face, her neck and her arms. “I’ve seen the real me, my beauty within. When I open myself, I can see her slip around and knot and move beneath the skin. But it hurts too much for me to do it myself. I need your help.”

  She pressed her hand against my chest, and the pressure almost tipped my inebriated derelict body over.

  “I need a surgeon,” she said. “And you need the money.”

  The idea of the money in her hand transferring to my bank account flitted through my blurred mind. It was a fine idea. Buying bottles to hide in was gro
wing increasingly difficult.

  “I need anesthesia,” I declared, wobbling just a bit. “Not for me,” I added.

  “No anesthesia,” she said. “No drugs of any kind. If you put me to sleep during the procedure, you’ll put my inner self to sleep as well. And then it all will fail. I need you to strap me down, and cut me open. Fast. You must be quick.”

  She looked hard at me, and there was a glint in her eye that threatened to dissolve into tears. “Can you do that?”

  What she asked of me was barbaric. To be filleted alive. Without relief. It was worse than murder. Yet the crime didn’t daunt me in my desperation.

  I nodded. Yes, I could be quick.

  “We need an operating suite though,” I said. “I need a table to strap you to, and scalpels. And no one can be around.”

  “They haven’t emptied your old office yet,” she said. “I stopped there today. The door was locked, but the furniture still was inside.”

  “Why…” I began. But she put a finger to my mouth.

  “Don’t ask questions,” she said. “Just cut me open, and let the real me out.”

  There was a chain around the door of my old office, and a yellow sticker that declared it an off limits place. A scene that had been deemed criminal…or at least, unpalatable by local authorities. I had been evicted. But from the look of the door, you’d have thought that I had murdered patients and stacked them like gory firewood against the rafters inside.

  Maybe tonight, I would perform an act that would give those stickers some remote credence.

  “We can get in a side window,” she suggested.

  “We’d have to break one,” I said. “They didn’t open easily from the inside, let alone from the out!”

  “It’s not like anyone’s monitoring the place,” she pointed out.

  I looked at the urban avenue around us and had to agree. The pet supply house across the street had bars on the windows and doors, and a pawn shop two doors down also was well sealed. A few cars slipped through the intersection two blocks down, but nobody had passed through the sighing wind on our street in five minutes. It was desolate. And lonely. More than a little creepy. The wind felt empty as hopelessness, and tasted hot and end-of-day stale as broken dreams. When I had moved into this office, this had been a vibrant section of the city. Now it had about as much going for it as I did.