Imperfections

by Bradley Somer

  At first, I lay still: initially from shock and then from the thought that he would release me if I didn’t resist. There was no air going in or out. Pressure built in my head as the need for oxygen grew desperate. I couldn’t swallow so a string of saliva pooled on the floor from the corner of my gaping mouth. As the seconds passed, my lungs—emptied from my fall to the floor—demanded more than basic submission.

  My body started to convulse and buck. It was an autonomic panic reaction. I heard flesh squeak against linoleum and the man’s breath in my ear. I heard the steady whoosh whoosh of my pulse grow louder. With a strength I normally lacked, I pushed up and flipped us onto our backs. The man grunted and wrapped his legs around my waist to reinforce the fact that he was immovable. I pushed backwards, crab-walking us into a display rack. The hanging shirts enveloped us. I reached out an arm, feebly grabbing at the rack. It slid sideways a few inches and then stopped. With every passing moment, I lost strength. My struggles became pathetic spasms.

  “Hush, hush, hush. There, there,” the man whispered in my ear. He rocked me gently back and forth. He tightened his grip on my throat.

  “Hush, hush, hush.” His fetid breath in my ear was the last thing I felt.

  “There, there.” His harsh voice in my ear was the last thing I heard.

  There’s nothing I remember clearly after that point. It’s hard to separate my unconscious dreams from the hazy reality of anesthesia-induced visions.

  I remember Leonard walked, tall under the fluorescent lights, across the scuffed linoleum in the menswear section of the department store. His head swivelled back and forth looking for me. His black patent leather shoes stopped at the Deacon Grande display. He didn’t distinguish between the fresh scuffmarks of my struggle and the old ones from past traffic. He didn’t see the puddle of saliva from where I deposited a stringy slime.

  Leonard stopped to pick up the shirt I had dropped when I turned to run. He looked around, trying to piece together my vanishing, trying to figure out what to do next.

  He continued his slow search, the shirt hanging limp in his hand. He walked past the mannequin and stopped at the watch counter. The woman behind the display counter smiled at him. Every watch displayed a different time but each reminded him that we were mere hours from my wedding.

  I remember waking again with a headache and a deep soreness in my neck. I stared up at exposed wooden beams of some dimly lit space. The musty smell in the air was of an underground, basement space. I heard voices.

  “He’s coming to.” The rusty voice of the man who attacked me.

  “I’ll put him under in a second.” A woman’s voice. “He’s wonderful,” she admired.

  The voice was familiar but I couldn’t place it.

  “He’ll do,” the man said.

  “He’ll more than do.”

  I turned my head, my neck screaming in protest. I winced and tried to swallow but it hurt too much.

  An IV tube was attached to my arm. A bright light flared on, blinding me but not before I caught a glimpse of Dr. Bella and the man. The IV tube tugged gently. Shortly after, the pain in my neck subsided and my head no longer throbbed. I smiled thankfully and closed my eyes.

  I remember Leonard and Paige talking. He was wearing a tuxedo and Paige looked stunning. She had designed her own wedding gown.

  “What do you mean,” she asked, “disappeared?”

  “Um…” Leonard stammered. “He was looking for a shirt. I went to the can and, when I came back, all I found was the shirt.”

  “Seriously, I’m going to kill him.” Her voice wavered with emotion. “I’m going to kill him and then I’m going to kill you for losing him.” Then her face crumpled and her composure was destroyed by wracking sobs. “We were happy. He was happy. Why would he leave me?”

  Leonard embraced her. He stroked her back and she wept on his shoulder.

  I remember opening my eyes. The exposed beams overhead were set as a series of black and white lines from a severe light source. My body was numb and I felt nothing but a rapid, repetitive tugging on my leg that reminded me of a documentary I once saw, one where a feral dog tugged to rip a meaty chunk from a carcass. My body felt so heavy and the tugging made my vision oscillate, the beams above shifted back and forth rapidly.

  “Come on,” someone encouraged generically.

  A power tool whined briefly, deafeningly, and then whirred to a stop. There was a wet crunch and a pop. The sound reminded me of dad chewing on the gristle from a steak. The tugging stopped.

  “Shit,” someone else gasped. There was a retching sound and a liquid splash. The sharp stench of vomit wafted over me.

  “Christ,” Dr. Bella’s voice said. “Get out. His chances are slim as is. Forget blood loss and infection, I don’t need you puking all over him.”

  “He’s awake,” the first voice groaned.

  “If I give him much more anesthesia, it’ll kill him.”

  “He’s looking at me.”

  “He’s not really all there. Wait a sec…”

  I grew drowsy again and, as I closed my eyes, I heard Dr. Bella say, “We’re almost done.”

  I remember Paige, sitting in a room, on a bench near a window. She looked outside, into the evening light bathing the gardens where we were supposed to get married. Out there, amidst the flowers, one hundred empty white chairs sat, laid out fifty per side, with an aisle bisecting them. They looked like tombstones spaced out in the failing light. The hanging tendrils of the weeping willow framing the altar swayed in a gentle breeze.

  I remember the breeze. I couldn’t feel it but I could smell it. It was fragrant with vegetation of a summer’s evening. It was dark and I was being carried on a sling of some old blanket. One shadowed man grunted, holding the corners of the blanket near my head. Another, similarly burdened, struggled with the edge of the blanket at the opposite end. He stumbled as he walked backwards.

  Above us, the black and white leaves of trees flickered on and off, their swinging surfaces reflecting the streetlights. Higher, far above us but below the stars, the gentle breeze blew in the dark, bringing with it the smell of mown grass.

  A dog barked in the distance.

  In a house across the street, I saw the back of someone’s head framed by the blue glow of a television set.

  The two men muttered and grumbled. We stopped moving. With a final straining heave, they deposited me in the trunk of a car with a thud. The springs squeaked once under the weight.

  The men stood for a moment, panting. From my perspective, on my back, looking up from the stinking nylon carpet lining the trunk, a streetlamp cast a halo around their heads. The stars were nearly blotted out.

  “That’s it then?” One of them asked, not looking at the other. His eyes were fixed on me.

  “I suppose,” the other replied. “I kind of expected more, really.”

  The first hissed out a laugh and then said, “What did you expect, that he’d be filled with gold or something?”

  The other mulled that over before replying, “I don’t know. Either that or chocolate.”

  They leered for a moment longer. Then one of them lifted his arm, rested it on the trunk lid for a second before closing it, plunging me into darkness.

  I remember coming out of the anesthesia and regaining consciousness. My black world smelled of exhaust with a sharp tinge of burning antifreeze. We were moving. I heard the chatter of gravel under the wheels. The tailpipe rattled in its bracket as we powered over bumps.

  I knew the anesthesia was wearing off because, for the first time, I could feel a painful throbbing itch all over my body.

  We drove over another bump and a shovel I had seen in the trunk before everything went dark, batted me in the back of the head. Another bump and there was the gurgle of an oil container.

  I don’t know how much time passed. I moved in and out of consciousness, waking more and more frequently as the pain in my body mounted to a point I had to concentrate solely on not screaming. Thankfully,
it became unbearable and I passed out again.

  I remember waking up to the absence of noise. It wasn’t so much waking up as it was coming to. It took me a moment to realize the car had stopped. It was hot and stifling and, in the crack around the lid and through a nearby rust hole, daylight fought its way into the darkness.

  The car shook. I heard one door slam, then another and then a third. There were voices, at first muffled and distant but slowly becoming more coherent as the crackle of walking feet on gravel grew more distinct. I could make out the voice of the man who had attacked me.

  “Doc says we gotta give him three shots of this a day to fight off the rot. Doc says he needs painkillers for a good while. One shot of this every six hours.” There was a pause. “Looks like we’re about a half-day late on both shots.”

  They laughed and I started at a loud bang on the trunk.

  “Seriously though,” the voice ground on, “I’ve invested a lot in getting this guy. Won’t do us no good to let him get dead on us. So, you,” a pause, “take care of these shots. And you,” a pause, “can babysit his pain.”

  There was some scratching at the trunk, what I assumed to be a key navigating the lock, and then I was awash in a painful burst of light that almost outdid the burning stabs of my body.

  I clamped my eyes shut, seeing only the red burning through my eyelids—and even that was too brilliant to bear. I snuggled my face into the stinking nylon until I could stomach the light.

  “There now,” the gravel voice rolled. “The next attraction.”

  I cracked my eyelid and looked up to see several looming shadows and a brilliant blue sky above. I looked at my body. My beautiful body, that was admired, that carried me, that fed me, pleased me, sustained me. My body that was envied, gazed upon, used for expression and motion and sex, for everything, my everything was nothing but a torso. The finality and permanence of it, my missing arms and legs. The irreversibility of what they had done shattered my mind.

  I tried to howl but my vocal chords were dry and crusted from dehydration and the drugs they had pumped through me. So, I lay there, my only expression a dry wheeze and a mouth that could open no wider to express my sorrow.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the man said, “please welcome our latest addition, the next great attraction. Allow me to present, for your viewing pleasure, Turtle Boy.”

  As my eyes adjusted, I could make out the assortment of bodies gathered around. The fat man, the Mighty Mite, the carnie with a rusty nail hanging out of the corner of his mouth, Esteban the wolf-man, all staring, all smiling.

  “Everyone’s gonna want to see you,” the carnie said. “Yer gonna make us heaps of cash, Turtle Boy.”

  He leaned forward, jabbed a needle into me and depressed the plunger. My pain subsided almost immediately.

  “Welcome to Mexico, boy.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Thank You, Good Night

  It may seem like there are moments where nothing is happening but don’t be fooled. Every heartbeat leads to the next event and every seemingly mindless conversation will culminate in something. The funny thing is, the story never truly ends. The narrators just change as if life is some endless relay.

  The track is circular.

  You run and pass the baton.

  You run and pass the baton.

  You run and pass the baton.

  Repeat and repeat and repeat.

  The baton is nothing more than existence, a faded collective memory. Between each hand-off, that’s where it all happens, life’s lived. Once it’s passed, once life has a beginning, middle and an end, once we know the dead like a friend, we know what we have truly lost. And that’s our job for our time here, that’s the baton—don’t let them leave you. Remember them well.

  But there’s a little left to this story yet.

  That’s me in the rusty li’l Red Rocket wagon, the one with the wobbly wheel like so many kids have toted their stuff around in. That’s me lying on my back, looking up at the sky, being jostled across the gravel lot, along the dusty corridors between faded red canvas tent walls. Everything about the wagon rattles, bumps and squeaks.

  The wheels raise little trails of dust. Esteban pulls me like he does every morning and this one, this bright blue morning, is no different. He struggles to pull my wagon up a rutted and potholed hill. His feet kick dust from the dry stubble grass, which causes me to cough.

  We do this in the mornings, find a hill to climb and look down over the carnival. If the terrain is flat, we just wheel out until the tents are small on the horizon and we watch from the distance. We sit and talk. Some days, when a newspaper can be found, Esteban reads to me. He swats flies from my torso. Lately, my left leg stump has been attracting more flies and smelling a bit like blue cheese.

  Today, the wagon rattles to a stop under a scraggly tree at the top of the hill. Its branches click together in the breeze. The tents sit like pimples below, in a valley at the edge of some small Mexican village. To the horizon, whaleback hills make for a soft, scrubby, rolling vista.

  “Where are we?” I ask.

  Esteban flops down beside me, puffing, his fur matted with sweat. He hasn’t complained once about the effort of hauling my torso around. He smells pungent, like a wet dog.

  “This town is called La Concepción. In Guanajuato,” he says. “Not much happens here.”

  We sit for a span. Esteban’s breathing calms.

  “I’ve been wondering,” I say. “What do you think they did with my arms and legs?”

  “Don’t even worry yourself with it,” Esteban says. “When the médico made me, the months of transplants and hormones, man, I don’t even want to know whose hair this is or how she got it.” He smoothed out his fur with a hand. “When she made the fat man? She must have saved the fat from hundreds of rich folks getting it sucked out, then injected it into him. And you don’t even want to talk to the Mighty Mite about it. They had him bound like a mummy, wrapped up tight for years to keep him small. He was…”—Esteban made a scissor sign with his fingers—“…so he wouldn’t get big. They starved him and gave him some kind of injections. Took his whole youth—years—you don’t want to even know.”

  Esteban shakes his head and squints at the valley. “Somethings, once they’re done, they can’t be undone. Sometimes, you have to accept things the way they are.”

  I nod a bit and look out over the rolling, sunburnt land.

  Dr. Bella had said, “If the body can’t be corrected, the mind remains tormented.”

  As we sit on the hill, a gentle morning breeze caresses us and my wolf-man buddy scratches my leg stump. The branches tick overhead and the peace I feel makes me wonder if Dr. Bella was right. Or was she just close? Should she have said, if the mind can’t be corrected, the body remains tormented? The soul is the tangible intersection of the body and the mind and the world. It is the harmony of these parts, not simply our physical parts, that creates beauty. When I stopped taking the three apart and started putting them back together, I felt whole again and I could see beauty.

  Dr. Bella could treat her patients’ unhappiness but, in creating their new bodies, she only created the need for more. She created addicts. With each procedure, she made everyone look more the same. The need to stay young and fabulous creates the need for a more extreme vision of beauty just to stand out. It creates a whole new disorder of pretty ugliness.

  Chester taught me about blind sight, where the eyes don’t see reality, they see the fantasy of what the brain wants to see. But, from what I can tell, the line between this reality and fantasy doesn’t exist. The mind makes its own reality.

  “You okay, Richard?”

  “Yeah, Esteban,” I say. “I’m fine. I was just thinking, looking at the tents.”

  “Thinking about what?” Esteban shoos a fly away from my leg stump.

  “Someone once told me that if everyone looked the same then no one would be beautiful or ugly. No judgments would exist. No one would stare.”

  “
Yeah, but we’d all be the same, nobody different. Man, I don’t know about beautiful. I don’t know about judgments. I never had a chance.” Esteban smiles. “But I like you and the other guys. I like the Mighty Mite. Fat man’s my buddy. The people here make me a home.”

  “I know. You’ve figured out what I wanted my whole life, not through the quest for perfection but by the acceptance of imperfection. You’ve subverted the pretty war.”

  “I don’t know nothing about no war. This place, these people, is what I know.” Esteban plucks the newspaper from my wagon. He shuffles the papers and starts reading to himself with a sigh.

  I squint at the valley. The sun blazing overhead works to wash out all colours save for a few brave shades of yellow and brown. My stump itches.

  I thought hard over the past while and I should have known all this would happen. Looking back, I can see the flow of events that brought me to this. Mind you, even now, I can’t see what’s to come. Leonard’s the one who could see all the connections, not me.

  Leonard. It was like a lifetime ago.

  Paige. I don’t even remember how long.

  I won’t die. It’s all a matter of perspective really. The world will just cease to exist to me. It’s about the anatomy of any given moment. Without a witness to life, the other building blocks of the moment don’t matter. I witness time push seasons from one to the next and each day slip from one into the other, all heading toward an end that becomes clearer to me.

  Esteban chuckles. “Someone bought an eleven-year-old grilled cheese sandwich on eBay for almost $30,000. It had the Virgin Mary’s face cooked on it. This lady, Duyser, said it brought her years of good luck at bingo.”

  I grunt. “Can you scratch my left leg stump? It’s itchy like crazy.”

  Esteban reaches over and rubs the stump. His eyes stay fixed on the paper.

  “Thanks,” I say.

  A trail of dust rises between two hills in the distance. It hangs like lazy laundry drying on a clothesline. The air is quiet, the valley below is silent. Esteban reads the paper while I watch the plume migrate closer to the camp below.