by Jim Nisbet
Sturgeon returned with the empty gurney. Within a few minutes they had Stanley strapped onto it and were wheeling him toward the double doors at the far end of the corridor.
Why? thought Stanley, casting euthanized-puppy eyes and silently beseeching lips at Djell, who walked beside him. Can’t we talk this over? Can’t we pause this video?
“What’s that?” said Djell, cooking an ear in his direction.
“Can you hear me?”
Djell shrugged. “Sure.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why didn’t you send Giles up the stack? Isn’t that what you’re going to do to me?”
Djell looked down at Stanley for a moment, then shrugged. “We didn’t know who you were, and we couldn’t get him to tell us.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I guess he had a lot of experience with drugs.”
“You didn’t torture him?”
“What do we look like,” Djell scowled. “Barbarians?”
“Well…”
“Skip it. We couldn’t figure out who you were. He obviously wasn’t trying to blackmail us or something stupid like that. He didn’t have a venal bone in his body.”
“How could you tell?”
“I looked.”
“Jesus Christ.”
At the head of the gurney, Vince snickered.
When his queasiness had passed Stanley asked again. “So why did you leave him in the park?”
“So you’d hear about it.”
“Me?”
“It was a warning. We knew you weren’t the cops. The cops wouldn’t have thrown MacIntosh to the wolves like you did.”
“What do you mean? I didn’t—.”
“So we figured somebody was out to cash in on us, move in on our operation. Who would have thought…?” Djell laughed. “Who would have thought it was some guy that wanted his kidney back?”
Vince and Jaime laughed aloud.
Stanley choked down a bolus of bile. So Corrigan had been right. Poor Giles MacIntosh.
“You see how well it worked,” Djell added.
They were through the doors now.
Chapter Twenty Four
IT WAS AN OPERATING ROOM, SIMPLE AS THAT. IT MAY AT ONE TIME have been used for preparing corpses for burial. It may at one time have been used for serving tea.
Nephrectomy, necropsy—the room didn’t know the difference and didn’t care. Stoned nearly senseless on a smorgasbord of drugs, Stanley saw the room as a coyote trap with no exit, starring himself as the coyote.
A large, circular light looked down on an operating table. There were smaller, wheeled tables, each covered with a clean white cloth, each cloth displaying a neat array of stainless steel instruments. There was a cart packed with electronic gear and looms of wires, and another cart with cylinders topped with valves and gauges. On a table against the far wall, opposite the pair of double doors, stood a boom-box and piles of CDs.
The personnel bustled around this equipment, each individual focused on some function, very team-like.
Vince, Sturgeon and Helium Jaime wrestled Stanley off the gurney and onto the operating table. Djell and Green Eyes stood aside—holding hands, yet. Even upside down, as Stanley momentarily saw them, they appeared a cute couple. About as cute as a nuked atoll.
“This guy,” grunted Sturgeon, who carried Stanley’s legs, “is heavy like he’s dead already.”
“You say that every night,” said Vince, who carried Stanley’s shoulders.
Producing his scalpel, Vince neatly severed Stanley’s leather belt. Sturgeon began to tug at the cuffs of Stanley’s jeans.
“It’s gonna be c-c…,” mumbled Stanley. “Cold.”
“You don’t know the half of it,” said Jaime, parting the buttons on Stanley’s fly.
Sibyl’s going to see my dick, Stanley thought to himself. And when I’m scared it’s real small. Oh, please, don’t let Sibyl see my.…
“Look,” said Sturgeon, as Jaime and Vince lifted Stanley’s hips off the table, so the jeans would come off easily. “Goddamn hippie wears no goddamn underwear.”
“Roll him onto his side.”
“Whoa.”
“This guy has definitely been here before.”
“He’s been giving those sutures a workout.”
“Any sign of the aster?”
“He must have transplanted it.”
“Hardee har har.”
“Ragged from stress, but healing nicely,” said Jaime, tentatively touching Stanley’s nephrectomy scar. “As clean as a cat’s forepaw.”
As the boys rolled Stanley onto his left side he reestablished contact with the green eyes. These eyes, surrounded as they were by the clinical horrors zeroing in on him, yet persisted as some treacherous salient of beauty to Stanley, the first to have broached his emotional perimeter in a long time.
And, once through his defenses, what had she done?
What hadn’t she done?
There she stood, receiving caresses from another man as Stanley watched.
Well within shooting distance…
And now, to his mortification, Stanley felt a double twitch in the glans of his penis, and its length began to stir.
One pulse for lust, two for pure hatred…
His pulse counted off the cadence of his humiliation like ratchet clicks on a windlass hoisting a yardarm.
One for pure sex, two for loathing, one for fornication, two for murder…
Oh, no, he protested silently, giving an order to his body, something he hadn’t troubled it with in some years, perhaps never. Not now. Not here.
One for itch, two for scratch. One for life, two for death…
His concentration protracted the silence, in which the three men finished stripping him. For some reason they left his socks on.
One for no, two for yes…
“Hey,” said Sturgeon, absently feeling his way through the pockets of Stanley’s pants. “Check it out.”
The little voice in Stanley’s head looped a string of blasphemous gibberish over the waters of his mind like a casting fly line. Not now, of all nows…
“How’s that?” said Vince, who was likewise meticulously rummaging through the pockets of Stanley’s jacket.
Please…
“He’s gettin’ a hard-on,” said Sturgeon. “Check it out.”
“Pre-op tumescence,” said Helium Jaime. “Happens to me all the time.”
To hell with it, Stanley thought suddenly. Lights, camera, masculinity. Pump it up, motherfucker. I hate you, I hate it, I hate everything. Concentrating his gaze on Sibyl’s eyes, Stanley let himself go. He beamed hatred and lust directly at her, like an underfunded observatory desperately probing an empty universe for any sign of life.
Vince followed the gaze. “Hey. Guy’s got a hard-on for Sibyl.”
“Join the club,” cooed Jaime.
It’s for you, Stanley thought furiously, hopelessly straining to bring to a glow certain telepathic capacities within vast unexplored areas of his brain that he had never doubted didn’t exist at all. See how much I love you.
“Tighten that strap.”
Agitated by fear and embarrassment, Stanley tried to buck himself off the table. But the drug they had given him made it a languid gesture, as if he were merely practicing the backstroke with an erection in a sea of mercury. Vince and Sturgeon, at opposite ends of the operating table, restrained him easily, while Jaime tightened the various seat belts. And still Stanley did not take his eyes off Sibyl, who, along with Djell, had approached for a closer look.
“Man,” said Sturgeon. “Guy’s hot for your old lady, Doc. Look at that.”
“He touches her I’ll kill him early,” Djell said matter-of-factly. “Cover that disgusting display.”
“What do you say, Sibyl?” teased Jaime. “Want to kiss it goodbye?”
Well? thought Stanley, experiencing a groinal twang at the idea.
Sibyl’s eyes suddenly twinkled with malice.
He’s right, you know, Stanley persevered. It’s for you my body makes a fool out of me.
Without breaking the connection between her eyes and Stanley’s, Sibyl picked up a pair of surgical scissors from a nearby table. She held them vertically next to her fixed smile and, still not breaking eye contact with Stanley, she made the scissors go snip. Snip snip.
Sturgeon laughed uneasily. Sturgeon knew Sibyl better than Stanley did, and the tone of his disconcerted, half-hearted laugh communicated to Stanley that Sturgeon was giving her a fifty-fifty chance of following through with the gesture, the snip snip. Like a diver who has just achieved the top of his arc, Stanley’s erection hesitated at the very brink of its maximum potential, poised for the acceleration into spent kinesthesia.
“That’s enough prurience out of you, Lopez,” snapped Djell. “Cover this guy up and let’s get on with the job.”
Sibyl thought Stanley, watching the green eyes. Sibyl, you are so silent. Why don’t you speak up? Get me out of this. All you’d have to do is say the word, and we—. You wouldn’t cut me, would you? Would you?
Hah.
“You know,” said Sibyl suddenly, breaking the lock that her gaze maintained with Stanley’s long enough to glance at his throbbing penis. She placed a hand on Djell’s shoulder and scratched his day’s growth with the closed point of the gleaming scissors. “No surgeon should have to go through this sort of debasement. The patient should have been prepped long before you even stepped into the O.R.”
“Sheeit,” Vince hissed under his breath, moving a table. “This guy is never worked nowhere else but debasement.”
Jaime tittered.
Djell clasped the hand bearing the scissors and kissed it. “Exactly, my dear.” He watched Stanley’s penis with a long-suffering sigh. “It’s unseemly. But with such help as we have been able to scour off the sidewalks, well—” he shrugged “— one must monitor every aspect of the operation. Otherwise,” he smiled, “the patient might suffer.”
“Of course,” Sibyl said solicitously, her eyes again meeting Stanley’s. “You’re always right about these things.”
Oh, Sibyl, thought Stanley. You wanton sycophant, you fucking bitch. In the confusion arising from a bloodstream full of drugs, his illusions struggled with his reason. This woman saw him only as property, a collection of assets, a job description; yet some part of Stanley insisted on wanting to possess her; while, equally desperately, it wanted to filet her with her own scissors. No amount of humiliation seemed sufficient to quench this twin desire. And yet, and yet…
Somewhere deep down Stanley knew, and he could see it in her eyes, too. Deep down in those cruel green eyes Stanley could read that, given the chance, given the opportunity to have her, given the moment to seize her, and despite the manhood yet rampant on the operating table, despite a thorough ravishing…
…He would fail to touch her.
Those eyes would render him impotent. Even as he mauled her, he would never touch the evil that animated those green eyes.
Even as he thought this thought, his manhood withered like a napalmed silkworm.
If he’d been paying attention, six weeks before, this realization might have saved him a lot of trouble.
Sibyl smiled. Her eyes intuited a kill. Anticipating triumph, they glittered.
Stanley’s eyes dimmed in defeat.
And, finally, Stanley looked away.
“Tape him,” said Djell. “On his back, as he is.”
The rasp of a length of two-inch wide tape, torn from its roll. A sudden adhesion, as the strip was pressed to his naked thighs.
“Shit,” said Sturgeon. “Got it crooked,” and he tore the tape away. The strip brought with it a sparse mat of crisp hair, yet Stanley felt only a tug. Wow, some fraction of him registered, I’m more stoned than I know, here.
Sturgeon peeled another length of tape off the roll and carefully reapplied it, as before, across the thighs. He laid another over the shins, and taped down the ankles individually.
Vince continued to hold down Stanley’s shoulders as casually as he might lean over the back of a couch to watch television.
Sturgeon abruptly re-cinched a nylon strap over Stanley’s chest. He restrained each of his wrists, too, with Velcro cuffs.
Far away or close by, his perceptions increasingly unreliable, Stanley could hear the hum of compressors. As Vince and Sturgeon worked on him, the anesthesiologist gathered the tools of his trade. He wheeled up the cylinders and a rack of electronic equipment. At the periphery of Jaime’s endeavor, Sibyl broke a fresh surgeon’s smock out of its hygienic plastic packaging and donned it. She broke out another and helped Djell into it. Djell was careful not to touch anything with his hands.
Sturgeon laid the last strip of tape across Stanley’s brow, about half its width in his hair and about half on his forehead, and thus fixed Stanley’s head to the table.
“Can you move your head?” said Vince kindly.
Stanley blinked his eyes once. No.
“How about wiggling your ears?” laughed Sturgeon.
Beads of moisture mottled Stanley’s brow.
“Goddammit, Sturgeon,” squeaked Jaime. “Veins up — veins up.”
“Oh, yeah,” said Sturgeon. “Sorry.” Sturgeon un-Velcroed Stanley’s right wrist, turned it palm up on the table, and re-Velcroed it.
Jaime came into Stanley’s narrowed field of vision. He had donned a pale green smock and a mask, the latter held in position over his mouth and nose by four strings tied behind his head. His hair was neatly tucked into a mint-colored shower cap. Vince rolled a chrome IV pole to the side of the table. Various tubes and plastic sacks hung from its upper arms. Some of the tubes had clips on them. Some of the clips were stainless steel, some of them plastic, the plastic ones had different-colored hand-written labels, da dee da dee da dee…
It’s the little things that will drive a man crazy, knowing that they ultimately conspire to cut on him.
The light above the table suddenly came on. Stanley squinted against the glare.
Shades, he thought stupidly, I want my shades…
Jaime positioned a smaller table behind the IV pole. He unstoppered a bottle, let its contents saturate a cotton swab, and replaced the stopper—all with one deft hand. The odor of ethyl alcohol wafted over Stanley’s nostrils.
Stanley heard the clink of instruments, the whirring of the small fans that cool electronic assemblies, and now, Chet Baker in the background.
“Vince,” Sibyl said. “I need a couple of French drains, sponges all sizes, the big clamps, all the hemostats we have, Ringer’s solution — stand by: Manny, we’re skipping the nephrectomy, right?”
“Correct, my pet. It’s probably damaged, as you so keenly observed.”
Pet. His pet. Will you get over this, demanded a snappish little voice. Why bother now? Oh, Sibyl…
“Skip the Ringer’s, Vince.”
“Yessum.”
“…Couple boxes of gauze, start the autoclave…”
“Yessum.”
“Will you stop with that yessum drivel?”
Despite his slim build, Jaime loomed over him. Jaime had his eye on the inside of Stanley’s forearm, over which he made a pass with the alcohol-soaked swab. “Okay, my friend,” he said, his kind tone belying his insidious diction, “we begin with a local. You’ll feel a mild prick.”
Stanley felt a mild prick.
Another pass of the cool swab.
“Let that take hold…”
And then, among the clink of instruments, the closing of doors, the chatter of casters over the tiles, and the distant strains of Chet Baker, Stanley heard a very familiar sound.
It can’t be, he thought. Now I know I’m out of it.
But his ears did not yet betray him. Someone was chopping cocaine.
“Jesus,” said Jaime. “Didn’t you get enough of that stuff in the mainline?”
The sound of a rush of air, drawn inward by the lungs, pulling with it a line of granulated
cocaine through a straw and into the maxillary sinus.
“Never,” came Djell’s reply, in a strained voice. “Never enough blow, never enough money, never enough Sibyl…”
“Or type O-Negative donors,” threw in Jaime.
Sibyl’s green scrubs flitted through Stanley’s peripheral vision.
Come a little closer, my vampire, thought Stanley, and I’ll spit in your eye.
“Well, let’s have some of that blow, you pig-valve host.”
“Certainly, Jaime, since you ask so nice. Anyone else?”
“Yo,” said Sturgeon.
“Uh-huh,” said Vince.
Everything stopped while somebody laid out six or eight lines, and the entire staff took their turns at the straw.
“If any rhinoviruses can hear me,” said Jaime in a strained voice, “Now is your moment.”
“Fret not, this surface is sterile.”
A lot of snorting followed. It sounded like a Doberman pinscher trying to worry a Barbie doll into wetting its pants.
“Hey, that was my line.”
“There’s more. Be cool.”
“Ach,” said Djell, beyond Stanley’s vision. “I’m operating now. I’m an operating fool.”
“Sheeit,” drawled Vince. “When Manny was born his pappy jump back and say, Look out, Mama, he’s got a straw in his hand.”
“Scalpel,” Djell corrected him archly “Scalpel in his hand.”
“Will you use it to cut out that lame country shit?” barked Jaime. His bark sounded like a Chihuahua’s.
Someone sneezed violently.
“Ach-shit! Ach-shit! Ach-shit!”
“Sturgeon,” said Djell. “Try to sneeze away from the work.”
Jaime reappeared, rubbing his masked nose with the back of a gloved hand. “Now I’m going to install a couple of IV catheters,” he said to Stanley. “You should only feel a little pushing.”
Stanley felt a little pushing inside his left elbow.
“All set, baby?” Jaime said over his shoulder.
The head of Djell appeared within the corona of the overhead light. On his other side appeared Sibyl. They, too, wore masks, caps and smocks.
Her eyes were radioactive, above her surgical mask.
He focused on them.
If he spit very carefully…
He tried to muster a missile of spittle. But his mouth, or that part of him he could still discern as his mouth, was dry.