by Jim Nisbet
The man in Green Eyes’ arms had begun to collect himself.
Savagely, he tore away the circles of tape holding the syringe. Two pale bracelets of depilation encircled the forearm, indicating repeated applications of adhesive tape.
Green Eyes was working on her appearance. She raised the dress in order to straighten the garter of first one stocking, then the other. Then she dropped the hem of the skirt and demurely smoothed it over her lap. She glanced over one shoulder, then the other, inspecting the white line of the seam of each stocking, tracing the apogee of each calf before it tapered into the upper of a well-tailored nurse’s shoe.
The guy in the white coat, his pants around his ankles, penis dripping, blinked as he plucked the needle from the vein inside his elbow. There was dried blood on the front of the smock.
“What was in that?” Stanley asked suddenly.
Helium Voice chuckled. “Doctor’s little cocktail…”
The man in the white coat looked up, as if noticing Stanley for the first time. His upper lip twitched. The eyes were bright as marbles.
When the guy suddenly smiled, Stanley clearly saw that he was absolutely, disconcertingly, hopelessly sane. As sane as a television newscaster, as sane as a vacuum cleaner salesman, as sane as any politician. As sane as the man with the sledgehammer, who, all day long, every day, coldcocks horses for dog food.
The smile was a death’s head. Nourishment had clearly become a problem. The teeth were dark, their gums receding. The skin was sallow, like old paraffin. The man was gaunt, and he looked older than his years, perhaps sixty-five. The hair was thinning on top, receding in front, spotty in back. Reddish blotches had appeared on the forehead and about the throat. A modest pimple directly over the carotid artery had become infected. There was an abscess over the inside of his right elbow, too.
This climax-injection thing has been going on a lot, lately, thought Stanley.
The man held his arm aloft, massaged the inside of the elbow, and grinned a rictus, if comradely, salute. “Speedball,” he said proudly, through clenched teeth. “Finest veterinary quality.”
And then the man laughed.
His laughter was a hideous combustion, mechanical and vapid, as of a John Deere tractor chained to an unyielding stump, or the wap wap wap of a biplane climbing into a stall.
It was the laughter of a man who’d always known that everything in the world had been put there either for his annoyance or for his amusement, and for no other reason. Nothing was funny, and everything was funny, it was all up to him. It was the laughter of a man whose entire being had been subsumed by turpitude, who could not distinguish between pain or joy in others, who lived only for the depravity that he might deploy upon them. His philosophy would preach a freedom of indulgence as the true test of liberty, but he would believe in it only insofar as it enabled him to debase. Rare, indeed, would be the partner who might share his perverse delights, compete for them while maintaining the delusion that their shared equity would always rejuvenate amusement.
Green Eyes seemed to have taken on the job with all four paws.
Indubitably damaged, his super-ego—if the term even applies—keelhauled after walking the plank, the doctor’s intelligence would not be in question; it would be as inspired as it was debauched.
All this Stanley grasped in a moment, even as the doctor held the syringe aloft for him to admire.
“Injected just milliseconds before orgasm,” said the physician dryly, “It is, as they say, way, way cool.” He made a broad sweeping gesture with the side of his hand. “It is like passing the medical boards all over again.” The hand came back to lay its fingers at his temple. “And now, of course,” he bulged his eyes, “I am wide awake!”
That laughter again. Automatic, impersonal, deadly laughter.
The safety is off, thought Stanley, on this guy, too.
He allowed his eyes to fall, rather fondly, onto his gun, on the floor perhaps two yards away.
The doctor’s eyes followed his. “U.S. Army,” the doctor said. “Caliber .45. Big slug with a lot of momentum, designed to stop armed Filipinos on betelnut.”
“Well,” said Stanley, “I only wanted to blast doped-up avarice on the hoof.”
The man with the needles tittered behind him. It sounded like air escaping from a pinched balloon neck.
“All I can hear right now,” said the doctor mildly, touching two fingers to each temple and narrowing his eyes, “is little tiny yuppies kayaking my white corpuscles.”
Oh, man, thought Stanley. And I thought I could speak English.
The doctor suddenly stooped and stood up again, dragging his trousers up to his waist and cinching them.
Stanley heard a door open behind him, and the sounds of rubber wheels on linoleum.
“Comin’ through,” said a familiar voice from the far end of the corridor. “Outta the way.”
“Turn around,” said Helium Voice. “And don’t make no funny locomotions.”
Stanley turned. Vince and the white guy whose name he’d never learned advanced down the hall, rolling a gurney between them.
On the gurney was a purple sleeping bag.
“Step aside,” said the black man, passing Stanley.
On the sleeping bag lay one of those plastic signs most often seen hanging from motel doorknobs.
OCCUPADO
NO LO PERTURBARA
“Hello, Vince,” Stanley said.
The black man stopped so abruptly that the white man drove the gurney straight into his thigh.
“Hold it!” said Vince. “I said hold it!” he repeated, and gave the gurney a kick.
The sleeping bag groaned.
“Hey,” said Helium Voice. “That guy’s in Recovery.”
With hardly a glance at the needles gleaming under Stanley’s ears, Vince demanded, “How’d you know my name?”
“Why, Vince,” chided Stanley. “I saw you on Upper Market just last night. Little cul-de-sac called Parajito Terrace? You were humping carpet with your partner, here.” He indicated the white man. “I didn’t catch his name? But, say,” he swiveled his eyes back to Vince and smiled. “Didn’t you do some time for rustling Jaguars a while back?”
Vince’s mouth twisted. “Who the fuck is this guy?”
“His name is Stanley.”
Everybody but Vince turned to look at Green Eyes.
“Friend of yours?” said Vince, his hideous grimace now inches from Stanley’s face.
“Vince,” said Green Eyes indulgently. “Try to think.”
“I’m thinkin’.”
“Cast your mind,” she suggested patiently, “back.”
“I’m casting.”
“A month ago. Maybe two.”
“That’s asking a lot.”
“In your case,” quipped the doctor, “maybe you should cast your mind forward.”
“Very funny.”
“It was the night we used that place in the Excelsior. I’ve forgotten the address.”
Vince’s expression didn’t change. “Goettingen,” he said. “The house was on Goettingen, and the car was a Pontiac wagon.”
“Bingo,” said Green Eyes. “Vince, you’re amazing.”
“Navy blue,” Vince concluded.
The white guy shook his head. “Can’t add two and two, but he can remember the stupid stuff.”
“Hey,” said Stanley. “I got that kind of memory, too. The car you stole this week, for example, was a BMW.”
“Shut up,” said Vince.
“It was white.”
“Stanley,” said Green Eyes coolly, “was the one who gave us that bad kidney.”
Everybody looked at Stanley.
The doctor stopped twirling the spent syringe between two fingers. “The kidney that came up amyloidosic? This is the guy?”
“This is the guy.”
The doctor floated down the hall as if he were on wheels, stopped in front of Stanley, and contemplated him as if he were a smear on a slide. “Remove th
e needles.”
The icy epifoci of Stanley’s being went away.
The doctor slapped Stanley’s face with an open palm. Not a tap.
“Swine,” the man said, not raising his voice. “Do you know how much work you cost me?”
He backhanded Stanley this time, considerably harder.
“An entire night — wasted!” He was yelling, now. “Do you have any idea what that cost?”
Stanley lifted his knee into the man’s spent testicles.
The doctor screamed and fell into a fetal position on the floor, both hands gripping his crotch. Vince watched him writhe there for a few seconds, not without pleasure, then planted a meaty fist directly in Stanley’s right eye.
Vince didn’t throw the fist far—a foot, maybe. But when it connected with Stanley’s eye it made a sound like somebody trying to bat a fungo with a toad.
As he went down, Stanley lunged for the .45. But Vince planted a foot squarely between Stanley’s shoulder blades and pinned him to the floor.
Helium Voice, laughing, his two syringes gathered into one hand, gingerly picked up the pistol by its barrel.
The doctor sat up, rather breathlessly, and held out his hand. “Give me that.”
The room went still. Helium Voice handed over the pistol, butt first. The doctor took it, inspected it, aimed it at Stanley’s head. Then he turned and, despite a shriek from Helium Voice, discharged the weapon in the direction of Green Eyes, who was leaning, rather languidly, against the two steel doors at the end of the corridor.
The detonation filled the hallway with smoke and noise. The spent shell spun on the floor, right in front of Stanley’s nose, like a game token.
“Sheis,” the doctor said, in the awed voice of a child, “this thing kicks.” He touched the inside elbow of his gun arm. “Damn near popped the scab off my abscess.”
Helium Voice squeaked like a stepped-on rubber toy. “Sibyl, are you… Are you…?”
Stanley rolled his good eye up from the floor. Sibyl, we are introduced at last.
Everybody was looking at her. Ten inches above her little nurse’s cap, now neatly replaced onto her marvelously tousled hair, a puckered hole smoked in one of the metal doors. The green eyes stared them all back, insouciant.
Damn, thought Stanley. This is a woman to die for.
Give it a try, a little voice cozened inside him. Die for her: see if she cares.
“Sibyl…,” repeated Helium Voice weakly. “If anything happened to you, I… We…”
Helium Voice couldn’t countenance the thought.
The day something happens to her, declared Stanley’s inner voice, is the day this operation is over.
“Gun-shy she will never be,” declared the doctor proudly. He handed the pistol to Vince. “Yes, my little aster. The day something happens to you, is the day my weltanschauung goes up in flames like a Sioux tepee in December, 1890.”
“So,” said Green Eyes, jerking her chin toward Stanley. “Where’s that leave this guy?”
They all looked down at Stanley.
“Leaves him on de flo’,” said Vince.
Everybody laughed at Stanley.
“Get him up,” said the doctor.
Vince picked him up as easily as he might raise the lid off a saucepan.
The eye hurt. Go for it, a little voice prompted him. Start early.
“Look,” Stanley asserted, though he drooped from Vince’s fist like a rain-drenched shirt. “Except that you’re a bunch of perverts, I got nothing against you guys.”
“Do tell,” said Helium Voice.
“I do. I’m not here to bring this place down around your ears. If I’d wanted to do that, I would have told the cops what I know.”
“And, my amyloidosic friend,” said the doctor, setting and unsetting the safety on the pistol. “What is it, exactly, that you think you know?”
Stanley squinted his ruined eye at the doctor. “How about we start with Giles MacIntosh?”
The doctor frowned, and didn’t reset the safety.
Vince and his white friend exchanged a look.
Helium Voice looked at Green Eyes.
Green Eyes watched Stanley.
Stanley looked at as many of them as he could. “He hacked that glitch in DonorWare right off the bat. It’s amazing it went undetected as long as it did. Face it. If hadn’t been me, or him, it —.”
“The fact is, Mister —.”
“Ahearn,” said Green Eyes. “You can call him Stanley.” She used his first name like she would her quirt.
Despite hating her, Stanley felt himself blush. He was flattered to hear, to see, his name on her lips. How abject was this going to get?
He tried to stick to his point. “The fact remains, I didn’t go to the cops.”
“Suppose we believe that. Then what?”
“Then there’s Ted Nichols. And Cabrini Carpet. And Chippendale O’Hare. Not to mention Parajito Terrace, Vince, Sibyl, and the good doctor here, who was educated in Germany, emigrated to the United States after the war, passed the California Medical boards, and, ultimately, lost his license for cutting on little children without due process. Or something like that.”
“What’s that?” said the doctor, casually fitting the gun to Stanley’s nose.
“I’m just making it up,” Stanley said hastily, turning away from the gun. “But it can’t be that far off, either. The point is, I didn’t tell the cops what I found out. Instead, I came here.” He looked from face to face. “To you.”
They waited.
“I need help,” said Stanley. “I need at least one new kidney. Or.…”
Still they waited.
“…Or I’m going to die.”
Silence.
Keep it up, urged the little voice. Negotiate. Give them something to think about. I’m okay you’re okay. Don’t stop now.
His mouth dried up, however, and the eye felt like a tuned drum head somebody was bouncing quarters off of. Go go go, insisted the little voice. Stanley cleared his throat. “I figured, if I was to ask you folks real nice, and promise never to go to the cops with what I know, maybe you’d give me the kidney I need to… to…”
“To quietly drink yourself to death.” Green Eyes said complacently.
“That’s.…” Stanley began. He looked at her, looked away. Then he looked at her again. He’d forgotten that this crowd would know at least as much about him as they knew about Ted Nichols. “That’s about the size of it,” he admitted, “though it’s none of your business.”
Nobody spoke.
“I figured the gun might help you see things my way,” he added lamely.
Silence. Then Helium Voice, his ferrety eyes darting from face to face, could contain his mirth no longer. He giggled his helium giggle.
It might have been involuntary. He tried to choke it off. The silence returned, but only for a moment. Now giggles eddied after the silence as surely as seagulls following a laden trawler into port.
The laughter was contagious. Vince chuckled, low and mellifluous. The doctor joined in with his mechanical, percussive coughs. The white guy laughed, whooped, and then slapped his knee, like a rodeo cowboy whose bull has just been turned out of the chute.
Altogether, it was an unguarded moment. Even Sibyl, watching Stanley, allowed her lovely green eyes to sparkle behind their long lashes, and her nose to wrinkle, and finally her face to dissolve into a beautiful, becoming, genuine smile. In the general hilarity this smile quickly elided into an open-mouthed laugh. She modestly covered her mouth with one hand, while casting a covert glance in Stanley’s direction. Seeing him staring at her, and her alone, she looked away, then back. She covered her mouth with both hands, but this could not conceal her amusement. She stooped her shoulders as if perhaps physical effort might contain this spontaneous jocundity. But finally, with an incredulous double take in Stanley’s direction, she dissolved into helpless laughter.
This is good, Stanley thought hopefully. If a fellow can get them laughing,
a fellow has a chance.
After a while the laughter died down. Once again, silence began to fill the corridor, interloped by the odd chuckle.
“So,” said the doctor, as disconcertingly sane as ever. He handed the .45 to the white guy who, despite this responsibility, could not stop smiling.
“Careful, Sturgeon,” the doctor said. “It’s loaded.”
This remark provoked a new outburst of hilarity.
Vince still held Stanley by his collar, from behind. As the laughter died again the doctor stepped up to Stanley and, not unkindly, plucked at the lid of, not the rapidly swelling eye, but the uninjured one.
Stanley jerked his head away, like a horse refusing the bridle.
Vince grabbed Stanley’s head by its hair.
“Now, now…” said the doctor, revealing a certain gleam in his own eye, its frigidity spreading like a skim of ice over the pinpoint pool of his stoned iris. By pinching the lashes between thumb and forefinger he succeeded in raising the lid on Stanley’s unpunched eye. “Ah,” the doctor said, turning his head to peer within, his face inches from Stanley’s. “Very good.” He released the lid and stepped back, leaving Stanley blinking amid a compounded reek of gun powder, rubbing alcohol, and semen.
The doctor nodded.
“We’ll begin with the eye.”
Chapter Twenty Three
AS THE LITTLE PROCESSION FOLLOWED THE NARROW-GAUGE tracks down the hall, Doctor Djell admonished Vince.
“How many times have I told you,” he said, enumerating his fingers. “Don’t hit them in the eyes, the kidneys, the spleen, the liver. Don’t break their ribs either, because their lungs get punctured. Lungs are expensive.”
“But Doc,” whined Vince, “What’s left?”
“Just administer him a concussion, like I showed you…”
Just explode, the little voice said to Stanley. That’ll do it. The shrapnel will kill them all. He flung his arms outward. His hands made a grab for the doctor’s throat. He kicked somebody.
Vince expertly blocked Stanley from the doctor, as easily as anyone else might have restrained a child.
“Be careful,” said Djell, from behind Vince. “Don’t let him hurt himself.”
“Lemme at a meaty vein,” said Helium Jaime.