by Jim Nisbet
“That’s the idea,” said Djell. “Pre-op the monkey.”
Stanley unleashed a feeble kick to the side of the gurney, which still blocked the hall.
“Hey,” said the white guy. “That’s an outpatient.”
“Well, Sturgeon?” said Djell. “Give a hand, there.”
Sturgeon caught one of Stanley’s flailing arms and twisted it high up his back, until the wrist was between the shoulder blades.
“Can you turn that elbow outward?” Helium Jaime asked.
Sturgeon obliged, eliciting a yelp from Stanley.
“A few milligrams of fentanyl.” Djell suggested, watching disinterestedly as the three men pressed Stanley face-first into a wall. “Skip antibiotics, skip the anti-immune course.”
Sturgeon yanked the collar of Stanley’s jacket backwards over his shoulders, pinning his arms to his side.
Vince showed Stanley the business end of a scalpel.
“Look at this,” said Sturgeon, disentangling the extra clip of bullets from Stanley’s jacket.
“Loaded for bear, were we?” said Vince, as he used the scalpel to slit the jacket’s sleeve to expose the inside of Stanley’s elbow.
Jaime expressed a jet of fentanyl from his syringe onto the wall about a foot in front of Stanley’s face.
“That’s very professional,” said Sturgeon, admiring Vince’s work with the scalpel.
“It’s analgesic,” said Jaime to Stanley, as they both watched a thin rivulet of fentanyl run down the wall. “It’s an opiate, too. You’ll be conscious until we put you under, with no pain. I’m sure you’re all jacked up about the humanitarian angle. Don’t worry. You’ll be docile as a New Age symphony.”
Stanley was getting weak in the knees.
“What about the enema?” inquired Sturgeon, his mouth emanating a foul odor an inch from Stanley’s nose.
Djell smiled. “He’ll never miss it.”
“Bummer,” said Sturgeon.
Upon feeling the sudden coolness of an alcohol swab on the inside of the exposed forearm, Stanley kicked feebly.
“Why anesthesiology’s a specialty,” said Djell, observing Jaime swab the arm, “I’ll never know.”
“It’s just somebody else they can sell insurance to.” Jaime moved the needle aside as Stanley struggled. “Fucking Class Five insurance driving me bananas.”
“Something you know too too much about,” said Djell.
“Insurance?”
“Bananas.”
Vince laughed.
“I could miss with this and hurt you badly,” said Jaime, showing Stanley the hypodermic. “My insurance policy tells me so. So hold still.”
Stanley struggled more than ever.
“Save the isometrics.” Vince bumped the back of Stanley’s head with the palm of his hand, bouncing Stanley’s forehead off the tiled wall.
Through the stars that ringed his vision Stanley could see Sibyl standing behind Djell, watching them wrestle, with cool detachment. He caught her eye. Come on, baby, he thought as loud and stupid as he could think. Get me out of this. We could make something out of ourselves, you and me…
A sharp prick announced itself against the skin at the inside of his elbow, and the needle sheathed itself in the vein below.
…Then I could kill you.
“Ahhh…” said Sturgeon, watching with satisfaction as Stanley’s type O-Negative plumed into the barrel of the syringe.
Stanley strained every fiber of his musculature, but could not move. The two gorillas held him to the wall and he twitched feebly there, like a moth webbed to a twig.
“Damn. You are good at that, Jaime,” Sturgeon whispered.
“Shit,” breathed Jaime, steadily depressing the plunger. “I used to lie in my bunk when I was in the Navy. The high seas would pitch that tin can like it was in the bathtub of an epileptic. First you’d see lightning and the undersides of thunderheads, then the porthole’s rolled two fathoms under. Me, I’m in my bunk with one foot on the bulkhead, the other on the floor, banging the mainline with morphine sulfate, just for the practice. Force Ten’s nothing to these hands. Steadier than what El Señor Malpractico has got going, over there…”
“Wait till you’re my age,” Djell said, petulantly rubbing his abscess. “Then we’ll see who’s got shaky hands.”
Stanley watched Sibyl watching him. She was waiting for the drug to hit him. Stanley realized he’d seen this look before. And suddenly his memory recovered an image and slipped it into his mind as neatly as a slide slots into a projector.
It was late. Sibyl and Stanley stood in the shadowed living room of the bungalow on Goettingen Street. He was drunk. Not too drunk to note to what part of town she’d driven him. He’d expected Nob Hill. He got the Excelsior.
And not too drunk to recognize the tune she’d taken the trouble to cue up, on a portable boom-box type CD player, a common device, too common for its portability to be suspicious—but portable it was and suspicious it should have been. The tune was Chet Baker’s cover of Everything Happens to Me.
Black cats creep across my path
until I’m almost mad
I must have roused the devil’s wrath
cause all my luck is bad…
The ultimate in jazz-age self-pity, it could have been Stanley’s theme song. A solipsism in a minor key; a chestnut of misfeasance, afloat in a Tom Collins. Grotesque, overstated, lyrically ham-fisted; yet in Baker’s hands, everything happened to him, who spoke for Stanley. Artistic empathy. Existential squalor.
…I make a date for golf
and you can bet your life it rains
I try to give a party
and the guy upstairs complains…
He’d even sung along with it, what a sport, lamentably off-key. If she loved him, she wouldn’t mind. And why shouldn’t she love a lonely, self-indulgent drunk? He’d even flattered himself that she’d gone to the trouble to intuit his taste in music—the fool doubled down.
…I guess I’ll go through life just
catchin’ cold and missin’ trains…
If he was drunk enough to suppose she played it just for him, he was right for the wrong reason. It was annoying and embarrassing and not a little disconcerting to have discovered that his pathetic psycho-portrait would be so obvious to such a beautiful predator, that she could handle him as easily as a bright kid handles a new video game.
Ev’ry-thing hap-pens to me-ee…
Ev’rything got poured into him, too. No food, of course, with a comely apology, having to do with a lack of interest in shopping, lately—too depressed, she admitted simply. Nothing solid to which a man might anchor his belly against the tsunami of intoxication that characterizes alcohol and chloral hydrate poisoning.
I never miss a thing
I’ve had the measles and the mumps
And every time I play an ace
my partner always trumps…
Besides, you don’t want your patient to be eating solid food within twelve hours of his nephrectomy.
The copious liquor selection, of course, like the boom-box, she would always carry with her, from house to house, victim to victim. Normally plenty paranoid, he’d been too drunk to even cough up that preposterous an idea, let alone assess it. No blame there. Obviously, he’d prefer to believe that she wanted him strictly for his innate sex appeal. It would have been paranoid to think anything else.
…I guess I’m just a fool
who never looks before he jumps…
Sitting on the very comfortable couch, littered with fat down pillows covered in silk, he’d patted one of them with the handle of the little quirt. His way of saying he wasn’t really into flagellation, but he’d settle for the missionary position. What an idiot. The prop department of this operation must be quite something to see in action, Vince and Sturgeon ranking with the best stage managers, their fealty to illusion up there with that of the highly skilled stagehands who can gaff a touring set for tonight’s show in less time than it takes t
o say
Ev’ry-thing hap-pens to me-eee…
He’d been too drunk to notice her slip his dose of chloral hydrate with the ice into three ounces of whiskey, and too enamored to notice the modulation in taste of a brand of booze he’d been drinking every night without fail for three years…
And he’d been too drunk to remark upon, though not too drunk to remember, the curious way she’d begun to watch him after he’d swallowed about half the drink. She had watched him then the way she was watching him now, as if he were some kind of curious dinoflagellate her dishwasher had failed to scrub off the rim of the crystal punch bowl, a repellent life form, perhaps leaked down from the columbarium, onto which she had lavished a sixty-second jet of insecticide, whose toxicity guaranteed the dissolution of the nervous systems of anything from red-headed soldier ants to translucent scorpions; yet the creature languishes; and now, having a bit of time on her hands and a curious mind, she would watch it writhe until it died: unless the phone rang; unless the mundane interrupted the banal; or vice versa.
Green Eyes on her post-coital death watch. Her cheeks flushed with blood, her lips swollen and gleaming, her eyes emitting more light than they were collecting.
“Okay,” he heard Jaime’s helium voice say, muffled by great chemical distances and an extraterrestrial wind. “He’s a pussycat now.”
I’m a pussycat now, Stanley thought to himself, watching himself watch her watch him. Why don’t you float on over here and transmogrify this whole deal into some kind of fantastic sex trip? Let’s leave together. Sexodus? Because, he endeavored to articulate the formula, whose words he’d always had trouble saying, the mantra he’d never been able to utter at the right time, never been able to say aloud at all, because, he’d always found it so hard to give tongue to it, he’d practically choked over giving it full throat, but he thought he might say it right now because they were the right words for her, and this is the right time, and this time he did it. He pulled it off. He mumbled: Because… Because…
“…I love you,” quite audibly.
Sibyl started. Shock and amusement vied for a holiday with the nerves and muscles beneath the surface of her face.
“Woo-ee,” said Vince, relaxing his grip on Stanley. “I got to try me a snootful of that stuff my own self.”
“Do you know,” piped up helium-voiced Jaime, “that one of my colleagues wanted to manufacture lollipops spiked with this fentanyl? For kids?”
“You shitting me,” said Vince.
“Git the fuck outta here, Jaime,” disparaged Sturgeon. “Lollifuckingpops.” He, too, had now relaxed his grip on Stanley, relaxed it enough so that it could no longer be called restraining, but not relaxed it entirely, so it could still be called supportive, so Stanley wouldn’t sink to the floor like a suit falling off a hanger.
“It’s true,” said Jaime proudly. “I have sucked the prototype.”
This elicited a number of catcalls.
“How come you leave the needle in, like that?” Sturgeon asked when the fun had died down.
“I just think it looks cool,” said Jaime. “Unbutton his shirt.”
They turned Stanley around, and Vince unceremoniously tore Stanley’s shirt open. Its buttons ticked onto the floor.
“Pipe down, Help,” said Jaime. “I’m trying to get a heartbeat, here.”
“Who you calling Help?” bristled Vince.
“You,” Djell barked. “Shut up.”
I could save you the trouble, thought Stanley. Heartbeat’s all I can hear, in here. Ba-boom, ba-boom… It was true. His heartbeats came to his ears like a stylus darts to the spindle at record’s end.
“Huh,” said Jaime. “Heart’s going like crazy.”
“He’s in love,” said Vince.
“He’s scared,” said Sturgeon.
“Must have more sense than I thought,” said Vince.
“I got… high blood pressure,” Stanley croaked-and-drooled, lying for the hell of it.
“Man,” said Jaime. “One kidney, amyloidosis — which could mean rheumatoid arthritis or TB or even myeloma — and on top of that he’s an alcoholic with high blood pressure. Liver’s probably damaged, too. You sure you want to mess with this mess?”
“Certainly,” confirmed Djell.
“Don’t look gift giblets in the mouth,” chuckled Vince.
I’m stoned on speed and codeine, too, thought Stanley. Maybe that’s an edge. Maybe I’m gonna puke. Maybe this time I explode for real.
Stanley’s mouth was moving, but no sound came out. A little bile did, though.
“You could use a good doctor,” Jaime said to him, as if in confidence.
Stanley agreed, his voice thick on his tongue.
Can’t you hear my heart beat, Baby, he sang softly to himself. Give me a narcotic and right away I’m hearing Herman’s Hermits. Sibyl was talking to Djell about something. Lookit that ass on that woman. I’m going to fuck her. Then I’m going to kill her.
“Look out,” said Sturgeon. “He’s lurching.”
“Okay,” said Jaime softly, throwing the bell of his stethoscope over one shoulder. “Just a little more. Not too much…”
You know, Stanley was thinking, noting with detachment the renewed pressure at his forearm, I’m just groused about my kidney… I’m not a contrary guy. How come you wanna mess with me…?
“That’s the part you like, isn’t it,” said Vince. “The needles.”
“Actually,” said Jaime, “it’s the far-reaching humanitarianism of medicine that got me into the profession.”
“There’s some dope left,” said Sturgeon.
“Not for him there isn’t. Not with that pulse.”
“I wasn’t thinking about him.”
“He’s all yours, Manny,” said Jaime. “Actually, Vince, the part I really like about this profession is it enables me to afford that condo at Tahoe. Now, the wine cellar is in pretty good shape. Mostly California reds, and some French; but there’re some very tasty Sauvignon Blancs and Chardonnays for your swishy types to drink. Just as soon as the hot tub gets plumbed and the birch switches come from Colorado and I can get my hands on an ounce of pink Peruvian flake, I want you and Sturgeon to come up and spend a little time with me there because, frankly, I just don’t see enough of you guys around the mortuary, here.”
“Aw, Jaime,” said Vince. “You mind I bring a mess o’ catfish?”
“You embarrass me in front of my guests, I’ll lock the wine cellar and swallow the key.”
“He means he hasn’t seen enough of us because we keep our clothes on,” cautioned Sturgeon.
Vince shook his head sadly. “We just ain’t goin’ to be relaxed around each other, you can’t get wid a mess o’ catfish.”
“If you insist on keeping up that bogus patois,” said Jaime, “I’m going to bust you one in the patella with my little pink hammer.”
“Whoa,” said Vince.
“Watch it,” said Sturgeon, grabbing Stanley. “He’s sliding down the wall.”
“Like a mess of catfish,” said Vince, helping.
“All right, boys,” said Dr. Djell from the end of the hall, raising his voice out of his conversation with Sibyl.
“Oh, shit, look out,” said Sturgeon. “The boss has a plan.”
“Let me swab that arm,” said Jaime, removing the hypodermic. “Don’t want any sepsis.”
“First,” said Djell, pointing to the gurney, “Take this sheetrock taper up to the garage, roll him up in a carpet, put him in the van. Crack a window so he gets plenty of fresh air. Lock up and keep your eyes peeled, somebody else might come snooping. Bring a gurney down for Bum Kidney, here. We harvest Bum Kidney, cremate the dross, enshrine the ashes… We get all that done before dawn we’ll be lucky.”
Ashes…
“Then we drop the outpatient in the park and make the perfusion delivery, see, but we only take one run to do it.”
“That’s good task flow,” said Vince.
“Hold him,” said Sturge
on, turning Stanley loose.
“Hey,” said Jaime, dropping his syringe in order to catch Stanley.
Sturgeon backed through the double doors toward the loading dock, pulling the outpatient gurney behind him.
Stanley hugged the coolness of the tiled wall. Purple sleeping bags, he thought hazily, watching the gurney pass between himself and Sibyl They must have gotten a deal on them.
“Guy’s heavy,” said Jaime, groping with his portion of Stanley. “Like he’s dead already.”
“Exercise is good for you,” said Vince. “Be showing less carbs in the sauna.”
Jaime shouted gleefully, “Aieee, Chihuahua!”
“What about the cremains,” Vince asked.
Djell shook his head. “We get this harvest squared away, then you take off. Sibyl can call in the delivery while you guys dump the outpatient. We’ll deal with the ashes here. By the time you get back, we’ll have them shared out among any number of grandmothers, upstairs.”
Cremains… Stanley heard a subway train, rushing from one side of his head to the other, all its cars lit and completely empty. It didn’t stop for him, though. It went on down the tracks, its wheels counting off the odd loose tie under a curve in the rails.
Djell rubbed hands in anticipation.
“Uh-oh,” said Vince. “The Doc is scrubbing early. Big casino: money-night.”
Vince and Jaime high-fived.
“Nocturne of filthy lucre,” Jaime squeaked.
“I could get used to this,” Djell agreed. “We’re looking at eighty or ninety kay, here. Depending on how good this louse has been looking after himself.”
“You know,” said Sibyl. “That’s a point. That other kidney should be amyloidosic, too. Almost has to be.”
“Son of a bitch,” snarled Djell. “That’s correct.”
“So we skip the nephrectomy,” said Sibyl.
“Just go for the big stuff,” Jaime agreed.
All of Me, thought Stanley, please, take all of me… The hits just kept on coming. Despite Green Eyes still taking the time to cast him a curious glance once in a while, he drooped between Vince and Sturgeon like a windless flag. Everything Happens to Why Not Take All of Me…
“Fine,” said Djell. “It’s going to be all night as it is.”