by Bryan Hall
“You claim you have no idea who would have wanted to do something like this?”
“No, none. I was unconscious.” Byron put his head in his hands.
Chambers said, “Presumably, whoever murdered Cedric Lindstrom and Rick Dempsey knocked you unconscious first?”
“I guess so.”
“And did not harm you?”
“No.”
“Was there anything unusual about what else was found at the scene?”
He hesitated. “The fingerprints ... found on the murder weapon, that screwdriver, were ... well, they were Private Dempsey’s. His prints were on file for the Army.” He paused. “But he had no hands!”
“And did the medical examiner—”
“It was determined that Dempsey was the second to die. He committed suicide with a hand he did not have, after using that hand to kill Cedric!”
“Can you account for that in any way, Doctor?”
Byron shook his head. Behind the therapist, a large black shadow moved with the silent grace. It crossed in front of the window, and then it vanished.
Chambers leaned forward. “Dr. Stevens, are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Byron whispered. He wiped a sheen of sweat off of his brow.
Her eyes were hard as they stared at him. “Your file indicates that subsequently you requested a transfer to the brain trauma unit. Can you tell me about that?”
“I ...” His eyes burned and he avoided her gaze. “I considered that my experience would make me a good candidate to help others who suffered traumatic brain injuries,” Byron said. He squirmed in his chair. Sweat poured down his face now, but he ignored it.
She closed the file. “Well, I think that’s all we have time for today, Dr. Stevens.”
“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
“No, not at all. I think you’ve been through some terrible experiences. You were traumatized almost as much as your patient.” Her look softened. “Look, these things take time, Doctor, and the more you talk it out, the closer you’ll come to finding some closure. We’ll talk more.” He nodded, unconvinced. “And Dr. Stevens, for next time could you bring your files on the Dempsey case?”
“I guess so,” Byron said. “It’s not ... really legal, is it?”
“Everything we do here is completely confidential, Doctor. I think having the files here ... will help you through the process. I’ll see you next week.”
Julia Chambers watched Dr. Byron Stevens leave, his defeated eyes haunted by what they had seen—but also by what he needed. She felt the need in him. She sympathized, but only to a point. He was beaten, almost forced out of his profession, tainted. Marked. An addict, of sorts. She shook her head and carefully placed his file in a locked drawer. Then she went to the bookcase and touched the photo of her daughters. Her eyes misted.
The year before, they had both died in that goddamned accident. She had allowed them to drive to the lake without her. It was a decision that could never be undone. A pain that could never be relieved. She’d tried. Oh, how she had tried. She had plummeted down a rabbit-hole of drugs and drink and despair the likes of which not even her worst patients could understand.
Now she replaced the frame carefully, turned it just so. Steel in her bones.
Moments later she was on the phone, finalizing her appointment to meet a Sergeant David Weiss, currently a resident at the Veterans Administration. His wounds were freakishly similar to those suffered by Dempsey. His file now lay open on her desk. She’d pulled it when she had seen that Stevens had requested a transfer to the brain trauma ward. She knew there had been a reason. She knew how the mind of an addict worked. And ...
She had developed a sudden interest in brain trauma herself.
At least, in this kind of brain trauma.
Mostly, she wanted to stick her fingers in this man’s wound, touch the metal plate embedded there in his skull, and seek the solace he could bring. She shuffled the papers. Perhaps she would see what he saw. Perhaps she would see her own salvation. Or perhaps she would find only relief from the pain. But it would be worth it, whatever it could be. Her eyes hardened at the thought of what she might need to do to keep him from hurting her—to keep him from thwarting her ...
Her hands trembled.
BABYDADDY
BY JONATHAN TEMPLAR
They had their first session with the counselor two months into Dominique’s pregnancy.
The counselor didn’t come cheap. She had an uptown office that had been designed by an expert to be perfectly bland, perfectly unthreatening. It was a vision in beige, gentle on the eye, not a sharp edge in sight and soft carpeted from wall to wall. The blinds were pulled in case the view outside dared to ruin the illusion. It was like being in a well-furnished womb—which was ironic, given the circumstances.
“You’re having some issues with the pregnancy?” she asked them in a honey-coated voice, her hands folded carefully in her lap.
Dominique pointed the finger. “He’s the one with the issues.”
Henry bristled. “It’s not pregnancy I’ve got a problem with. Pregnancy is fine. Shit, we worked hard enough for it, mind my French.”
The counselor waved a hand to suggest she’d heard far worse between these walls.
“So what is wrong?” she asked him.
“Nothing’s wrong. I’m just fed up with hearing how we’re pregnant. People come up to me, people I know, and they just can’t wait to say it to me. ‘I hear you’re pregnant?’” Henry looked down at his flat, empty belly. “Shit, that’s news to me! We’re not fucking pregnant, she is fucking pregnant. My part in this was pretty much over by the time I’d finished shouting hallelujah and rolled over.”
“And don’t you just love to let me know about it? This is supposed to be a magical time, for both of us, and all he’s done for the last month is make me feel guilty that I’m the one born with a womb.”
The counselor gave a small, superior smile. “Womb envy,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s more common than you might imagine.”
In his time, Henry Schade had envied many people and many things. Michael Jordan. Ron Jeremy. Mike Karchevsky three houses down with the red Lexus and the wife with the hundred-thousand- dollar tits. They didn’t have much in common, but the lack of a womb was foremost. “Bullshit.”
She was undeterred in her prognosis. “Pregnancy can be a complicated time for both parents. Male emotional responses are often overlooked in a rush to coo over the expectant mother. It’s understandable that daddy might become resentful of the attention that mommy starts to receive. And it’s even more natural to feel as if you have been relegated to a supporting role in the process when you begin to see the physical effect pregnancy has on mommy.”
“She’s got a fucking name, stop calling her mommy,” Henry spat.
She ignored him, as if she was doing this whole session from a preprepared script. “Trust me; you’re not the first man to sit on that sofa suffering from a lack of empathy with a pregnant partner.”
“Hey, I have plenty of empathy!”
Dominique scoffed.
“I do!”
The counselor raised a hand, palm outward, a calming measure, sensing that Henry’s temperature was rising. “I’m not disagreeing with you. But it’s an easy response to understand, you see all the physical effects that mommy undergoes as baby develops, you can sense them bonding before you have an opportunity to contribute, and you feel that you’re just reduced to the role of a spectator.”
Henry nodded. To his great surprise, she’d actually summed it up pretty well. “It pisses me off, that’s all.”
She returned his nod, smiling blandly at him as she did. “I have a colleague who runs a clinic you might find helpful. He’s keen on enhancing the male experience of child gestation and birth. He’s something of a ... pioneer in the area.”
“Anything that might help,” Dominique said with undue eagerness.
The counselor
wrote a name and a contact number on the back of a business card. The card was inevitably beige with a gentle font. She passed it to Dominique with a furtive look that briefly betrayed her sympathetic loyalty to the pregnant party. Henry saw it clearly.
“Good luck,” she said.
Conception
It was called “BabyDaddy,” but judging by the muted signage, it wasn’t too keen to advertise the fact. The contrast to the counselor’s uptown office couldn’t have been more depressingly striking. BabyDaddy was comprised of no more than a forlorn single unit in a forgotten business park located far away from anything that mattered. Next door was an importer of foreign sex toys called The Cock Shop. Henry wondered if this was by accident or design.
The unit was littered with, not so much furniture, but debris, the flotsam of failure that had accumulated around its occupant. The chaos of the surroundings suited Dr. Petorian only too well. Precisely which institution had awarded him a doctorate, and in what discipline, was not disclosed in any of the company literature.
“Doctor” Petorian had a manner that could kindly be described as animated.
“Don’t they just fucking piss you off, cooing and clucking over your wife like she was the prize pig at a county fair? And just because you were kind enough to impregnate her? All she had to do was lie back and let it happen, and now suddenly she’s the center of attention. How the fuck did that happen?”
Dr. Petorian was not what Henry had expected. He thought he’d again be spending the afternoon listening to the carefully chosen platitudes of someone else ready to charge a hundred dollars an hour to tell him what he already knew. But Petorian was something wild, a force of nature who paraded around his office like a bear trapped in too small a cage. His eyes shone out from behind thick-framed glasses that magnified them until they appeared too big for his face, and there was stubble on only one side of his chin, as though he’d been distracted halfway through shaving. To add to this, he wore a white coat that was incorrectly buttoned and far too large for him. He was like a hyperactive child playing doctors and nurses.
But Henry still thought the man was talking a lot of sense.
“I do get the feeling I’ve got the thin end of this deal,” he said.
“Well, my friend, let’s see if we can’t beat nature at her own game. Let me tell you a little about the procedure I offer.”
He pushed a bunch of leaflets across the desk. The one on the top was adorned with a picture of a man with his hand tucked tenderly around his own, obviously pregnant, stomach. The logo at the top shouted BabyDaddy far more confidently than the sign outside the door.
“Now, childbirth itself is beyond us, of course. But we can give you the experience of pregnancy, we can replicate all the symptoms and physical changes that your partner will be encountering at the same rate she does. You can, quite literally, share in the pregnancy, with the bonus that you duck out for the final act and leave all the pain and mess to her.”
Henry brushed the pamphlet with his fingertips, reluctant to actually pick up the thing. “What would it involve?” he asked.
Petorian shrugged a shambolic shoulder. “A simple surgical procedure under local anesthetic. We implant what amounts to a bladder in your abdomen. Across the time frame of your partner’s pregnancy the bladder inflates, pushing your stomach outward to mimic the growth of the fetus. We’ll provide a series of hormonal supplements that you will take at prescribed intervals. When the child crawls out of its mother, or if you have enough of being the daddy to a faux baby, you simply deflate the bladder and have another ten-minute procedure to remove it from your belly. You’ll have a tiny little scar afterward that you can tell everyone hails from your own caesarean section.”
“That’s all a bit extreme.”
“Maybe so. But this way, you get to share the joy of childbirth. You get to experience what nature has denied us. You get to feel what she feels. Why should she get it all to herself when you both had a hand in baking that bun in her oven?” He leaned across the desk, his comically large eyes bulging. “Don’t you deserve someone cooing over you for a change?”
“I’m supposed to be achieving empathy,” Henry pointed out.
Petorian shrugged. “You know what they say about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.”
Henry certainly did. He started to flick through the leaflet.
It couldn’t hurt to consider it, after all.
Second Trimester
Everyone in the store gave Henry a wide berth. He didn’t care anymore. He was used to it. Used to that look on their faces, that look of puzzlement that slowly surrendered to disgust.
Fuck them.
He didn’t care about what they thought, not anymore. The only thing he cared about was Junior. He walked down the aisles with a basket in one hand and the other wrapped around his belly as if to shield it from the rest of the world.
His feet hurt. His ankles were swollen. And his nipples had started leaking again this morning, so he’d worn a sweater even though it was baking hot so he sweated as if there were a tap left on beneath his skin. It dripped from his forehead onto the ice cream as he bent down to pick up a tub. He put the frozen cardboard to his brow and let it cool him for a while.
The girl at the checkout served him with a scowl on her face, as if someone had shit on the conveyor.
“You got a problem?” he asked her.
“Look who’s fucking talking,” she murmured.
“What did you say?”
She looked him right in the eye.
“Freak.”
Henry thought about asking to speak to her manager. But he needed to pee and he just wanted to get home. So he let it pass. The manager would probably just be worse, anyway.
The procedure had been carried out two months before. Henry had it done at a clinic that provided a cheap but cheerful service. They even seemed to think he was doing a wonderful thing having the rubber womb implanted. The attending nurse certainly told him as much. As Petorian promised, it was indeed a brief operation, although it wasn’t exactly painless. The womb/bladder had been the size of a balloon, and it went in easily. The incision was sore for weeks; it still itched when Henry had a bath. He’d gone home with a box full of hormone treatments provided by Petorian. The medicine came from a Mexican pharmaceutical company, with dispending notes all written in Spanish. Henry hadn’t stopped to consider the implications of that, but by then he was so wrapped up in the idea of fatherhood, he likely wouldn’t have cared anyway.
He started to inject them. The bladder started to swell. And soon enough, it wasn’t anything to do with empathy anymore.
Dominique had walked out on him a couple of weeks ago. She wouldn’t even take his calls. Selfish bitch. It had come to a head at a Lamaze class. She was starting to show, that curving round stretch of belly that told the world that she was expecting, that she was with child, that she was, for the extent of her pregnancy, someone special. But Henry had started to show even more, and when they had sat and begun to practice focused breathing, it was pretty clear to both of them that whatever reason he initially had for having his own mock pregnancy implanted, it was now more important to him than the one they had made together. Her breathing didn’t matter to him, it was his own that he needed to perfect. The looks of revulsion from the other couples were too much for her. She couldn’t have gotten out of there fast enough, and one of the other mothers-to-be, a sour bitch who must have been fat even before the pregnancy pounds had piled on, had cornered Henry as he tried to follow.
“You fucked-up creep. Think about your wife for one second and get rid of that thing.”
She poked him in his engorged belly. It was all he could do to stop himself from slapping her ugly face.
“I believe in my baby’s right to life,” he told her, and pushed past.
He didn’t catch up with Dominique and he hadn’t seen her since. Their only contact had come through her friend, Angelica, who had made it clear that there was only one way
that they could possibly be reconciled. And Henry had no intention of getting rid of his baby.
“You seriously care more for a bag of fucking air than your own child?” Angelica had said to him.
“This is my child,” he answered, pointing to his stomach.
“You need serious help, Henry.”
And perhaps she was right. But he was happy. Since he’d had the implant, everything seemed to make so much more sense. And there was no way he was going to let that feeling go, not until he reached full term.
Third Trimester
Dr. Yates pointed to a dark shadow on the x-ray. It pressed against the bright white blur that was the bladder in negative, as if it was fighting off the rapidly inflating intruder.
“It’s definitely a tumor. We’ll need to do a biopsy to determine its nature, but it’s growing at an alarming rate.”
“It’s not a tumor, doc. We both know what it is.”
“Mr. Schade. Henry. I understand why you undertook this procedure. I think you probably did so with noble and selfless intentions. But all you have done is allowed yourself to be mutilated at the hands of a hack. This has caused you and your wife no end of emotional pain and now there is clear physical damage from the pressure you have been putting your body through. It’s time to put a stop to this. We can have that implant out of you within the hour and have you on a proper course of remedial steroids to try to prevent the growth of the tumor.”
“It’s not a tumor.”
Dr. Yates sighed, rubbed his temples, tried not to let the exasperation show. “Henry, you are not pregnant. Your body is simply lying to you, responding to the chemicals you’ve been pumping into it, chemicals that have no right to be circulating in your system. That, and the monstrous thing you’ve got implanted inside you, is pushing your body to its limits, and your body is starting to crumble under the pressure. You need to have it removed now, before it’s too late to repair the damage.”
“This is not damage. This is my child.”