Prelude to a Scream

by Jim Nisbet

  “As salaam Alikum,” Jaime said timorously. Lowering his head and raising the ounce with the scalpel above his head, bowing, he approached the wheeled gurney. “With all due apologies, I bring you the contents of the left, that is to say, the correct, pocket.…” He glanced up. “It’s a mistake we make often around here.”

  He was ridiculous, and he was serious. This was an apology. They’d tried to drug Stanley so they could kill him. They had drugged him. They’d almost gotten away with it.

  And now this guy was sincerely apologizing to him for their failure.

  Stanley struggled with his temper. And his fear. He’d never seen anybody push the edge of destruction like this. He’d never even heard of it.

  Jaime gently laid the ounce with the scalpel on the gurney, stooped low to the floor, and backed all the way around the foot of the operating table to his anesthesia post.

  Stanley fiercely scalpeled the baggie and dipped a moistened fingertip into its contents. Jaime watched hungrily as he cautiously scrubbed a gum with the powdered finger.

  “That’s the stuff, eh boss?”

  “If it isn’t,” said Stanley, his good eyelid drooping toward his raised upper lip, “you’re dead.” He sounded like somebody trying to have a conversation while flossing.

  Jaime nodded happily.

  The drug did, indeed, seem to be the real stuff. This powder was pink, shot through with large, flat flakes, and instantly numbed his gum. A couple of two-inch lines of this stuff in his face wouldn’t counteract the effects of the heroin; rather it would collaborate with it on a metabolic concerto. It would also wake him up, numb his face, make him paranoid, encourage the grinding of enamel off his molars, and, in general, affect what passes for “high” among coke snorters, a notoriously discerning race.

  It was in the nick of time, too. Stanley’s head was nodding like a late-summer sunflower on its stalk, his eyes were closing, and he was ceasing to care, even as he tried to speak.

  “Speedball, huh,” said Stanley stupidly. He awkwardly raked a couple of fat lines of the new product onto the stainless steel with the edge of the scalpel.

  “To quote the septic bard—,” Jaime began.

  “If I pass out,” Stanley managed to interrupt, flattening the gun on the table so that it was aimed toward Jaime, “it’s going to be in an empty room, spiritually speaking.”

  He lowered his face to the pile and inhaled the first line, flakes and all, and growled aloud.

  “Could it be that our fair captor’s sensibilities are impaired?” Jaime whispered loudly.

  “Jaime,” said Sibyl, not laughing. “That was a stupid thing to do. Shut the fuck up.”

  “You sew that nice nurse up,” said Stanley, looking sideways at them with his good eye, the bandaged socket not three inches from the surface of the gurney. “Then we’ll shoot it out.”

  The cocaine did wake him up—although, he knew, it would take more and more, at shorter and shorter intervals, to keep him that way.

  But to keep him paranoid?

  No problem.

  Jaime shook his head. “This is getting expensive.”

  “Try to save me some,” Djell nodded. “I’m intrinsic to this nightmare, yet I’m fading.”

  Stanley came up from his second line and looked at the surgical team, tears flooding out of his good eye. As usual, Sibyl was watching him, as was Jaime.

  And Stanley’s thought was, would Green Eyes dime her own husband to save her skin?

  He winked at her.

  She winked back.

  Stanley felt a distant uptick in penile blood flow.

  And his next thought after that was, how could he have doubted her?

  This is perfect, said a little voice. First these people try to gut you, then they try to lay you low with junk, and all you can think about is sex. Each thought is stupider than the one that came before it.

  Jaime caught the exchange of winks. Though excitable, he didn’t miss much. But for the first time he looked truly out of sorts.

  Stanley couldn’t let them kill Iris. He owed her that much. For the Get-Well Bear, he forgave her. Not to mention the new kidney, if things got that far, which betokened total redemption. But after all, what did he really owe her?

  No answering argument was to be found or heard; the barroom of Stanley’s soul was deserted.

  That’s great, thought Stanley. Get a nice little psychosis going and what happens? Nobody sticks around to appreciate it.

  All these thoughts paraded before Stanley as if he were their proud father, home from three years at sea.

  He was entertaining the illusion of lucid thought.

  Picky bastard, aren’t I, thought Stanley. So I must away under steam of my own counsel. And my own counsel declares I owe Iris that much. She won’t see it that way, of course. Not at first. In fact, she’ll probably try to kill me. Well, at least I’ll still be alive to kill. There. That makes perfect sense. I can piss her off, but if I’m dead, what good is it going to do her? Besides, if freshness of scar really is her thing, she is about to be in high cotton. She can lick its reflection in a mirror.

  No way I’m going to lick it for her. I’m stubborn that way.

  As it had healed, his nephrectomy scar had diminished in scarlingual magnetism. But perhaps the renewed sex appeal of Stanley’s freshly scooped eye-socket might appease her resentment. Given that, at any moment, he was prepared to blast Green Eyes to kingdom come; and given that, basically, he was a moral relativist, mostly innocent of the baser malefactions, a victim merely trying to cope; and given that Iris herself had killed on his behalf; given these things, he could probably make do with Iris and her violet eyes, her ebony hair, her predilection for a freshly scarred loser, he meant lover, and she with him. One in a million finds one in a second million. A match made in a stochastic maelstrom. Besides, she had a job. And a car. She probably had a couple of IRAs, the 401-K, social security, good benefits…

  But, he was really thinking, his mind adrift like a holed barge, if he could get Green Eyes into the sack… Just once… Maybe before Iris wakes up.…

  Well, if not in the sack, maybe on the gurney.…

  Green Eyes, whom he hadn’t had.

  Who owed him big…

  The doctor’s wife. The wife of the man who’d stolen his kidney, to insult him by thus taking his wife, right in front of him, would be a greater revenge than Stanley had dared hope.

  Those eyes.

  Watching me. Always watching me.

  He looked at the two piles of drugs.

  There might be enough stuff here to get them all through it.

  “Elevating…,” Djell announced.

  “The man is an artist,” said Jaime. “A fucking artist.”

  “Clamp the renal, Sibyl.”

  “Clamping…”

  “Okay. Jaime…”

  Jaime darted back around the table to close the circle of endeavor around Iris’ nephrectomy. The organ made little kissing sounds as it left the only home it had ever known. And before Stanley knew it, the kidney had been lifted like a Eucharist, gleaming, rust-colored, dripping, trailing spaghettini, and lovingly deposited into the machine to experience the joys of chilled perfusion by a heparinized electrolyte solution.

  The surgical team heaved a collective sigh of relief.

  “Okay, Green Eyes,” Stanley said. “Come here.”

  Chapter Twenty Eight

  “WAIT WAIT WAIT A MINUTE,” SAID DJELL, FLINGING A FORCEPS into a steel pan with a clatter. “Not her. Not my wife. She’s got nothing to do with—”

  “Shut up, mister,” said Stanley. “I’m going to make you a deal so slick you could lubricate trains with it. Close up Ms. Considine’s wound, there, and send your wife over here.”

  Nobody moved.

  “Aw, shit,” said Stanley raggedly, and sent a round straight through the package of drugs on the table in front of him.

  The detonation was tremendous. The gurney rang like the first bell of a prize-
fight and jumped a foot into the room as if jerked by a rope. Where the bullet went was anybody’s guess, but it left a puckered hole in the stainless steel big enough to stick your thumb through. The air above it swirled with narcotic dust.

  “She’s coming, SHE’S COMING,” squealed Jaime, looking out from beneath his arms, with which he’d covered his head. “She has to be going, Manny. SEND THE WOMAN OVER THERE. She’s coming, buddy,” he said, abruptly calm, to Stanley. “Take it easy with that thing. And for God’s sakes, stop wasting the drugs.” He drew himself up, paused, then exhaled loudly. “You know, I’m awfully tired. Manny’s been working us like a MASH unit. And, really, in order to anesthetize at peak efficiency, I could use a blast of that blow, there, that you have been shooting at. You know? Please? Willya?”

  “Bring her over here. Close the wound, clown, or your wife gets the next round.”

  “Closing, closing,” said Djell, hastily pulling his mask back over his mouth. He traded a worried glance with his wife, and shook his head, no. She shrugged and, rolling a table full of surgical tools within easy reach of her husband, removed her own mask and approached Stanley.

  “Bring along that roll of tape,” he said to Jaime. He shifted the gun to Sibyl. “That’s far enough.”

  Green Eyes was now three feet away from him, just on the other side of the gurney, the closest she’d been to him since the night they’d first met. Or, more properly, the night he’d been selected.

  He could feel the pull of her, the magnetism of her physical presence, the heat of her, a spiraling vortex spinning so fast as to present the illusion of stillness and tranquility, of no motion whatsoever; yet she captured everything that came within her influence. Men, in particular, sank helplessly into her gravity, only to disappear into her brand of casualty management forever. It actually looked inviting.

  She knew it, and stared at him accordingly. If she’d been a spider with eight eyes she couldn’t have stared harder. Or more insidiously. Or more patiently.

  “I had a puppy, once,” she suddenly said.

  Stanley winced as if he’d touched an electric fence. “What—?” He sighted the gun on Jaime, a step behind Green Eyes and to her left. Jaime said nothing, unexpectedly calm. He sighted it back on her. “You talking to me?”

  “It was speckled, tan on brown, and it had little white feet, like sneakers. It was really a she. I called her Gabby because she liked to yap a lot. You know how puppies do. Yap yap, yap! All the time. Especially when she was alone. What is the sound of one puppy yapping? I’ll tell you. It’s your neighbor dialing the SPCA. The SPCA called me and said that if I didn’t put a lid on that puppy they’d take her away from me. Take Gabby away from me! I said yes ma’am, I’d get right on it. I told Manny. That neighbor regretted that phone call, all right.

  “I forget her blood type. The new one wasn’t half bad. New neighbor, I mean. Said she loved puppies, especially since the grenade went off in her hand in front of a Bank of America in Santa Barbara in 1970 and made her deaf. Gabby yapping, she signed to me with her stump, no hay problema. So Gabby did fine with that neighbor. She and the neighbor used to hunt mice by feeling for vibrations in the walls. Caught plenty of them, too. Of course, you can’t catch all the mice. Experiments have shown, it’s impossible. There’re always more mice. But after a while they get to know where the black holes are, mouse-wise, and avoid them. Unless you put out lots of birthday cake for them that is. Then the mouse authority sends one in, just for a test. May Jaime and I have some of that blow?”

  Stanley had backed up a foot until he stood against the astragal of the double doors, the big pistol still hot from its recent statement held in both his hands and aimed right between beautiful green-eyed Sibyl’s breasts.

  “All work and no blow,” Jaime pled, “make surgery a dull course.”

  “Sure,” Stanley said quietly. “Have some blow.”

  Jaime fell to manipulating cocaine while Sibyl watched and narrated.

  “So one day while she was eating her very first birthday cake with a single puppy-proof candle you buy them you know in any pet store they light but run on cold fusion or something so the puppy can’t burn itself, little Gabby gets kind of sick. We thought it was from eating too much birthday cake and maybe from hyperventilating to blow out the candle — not Gabby hyperventilating but Manny hyperventilating and when he couldn’t blow it out I was hyperventilating and then it turned out there was this tiny slotted rheostat on the bottom of the candle we hadn’t noticed you could adjust it with a little screwdriver comes with every box, adjust its ability to be blown out, from it would hardly stay lit to you couldn’t blow it out, but anyway by the time we got that snag worked out the puppy was going round and around, but we thought it was because she’d been hyperventilating so hard, see.”

  Jaime, having laid out six large lines, kneeled beside the gurney and rhinospirated two of them. Squinting violently, he angled the straw toward Sibyl without lifting it off the table. She leaned over it, applying the upper end to one nostril, daintily closing the other nostril with the forefinger of her free hand. As in, how do you do cocaine, Stanley? Well, Stanley thought to himself, one difference is I don’t show so much cleavage when I wear my little nursey uniform.

  This maneuver put her head inches from the barrel of Stanley’s gun, which followed her head as it dipped, inhaled, raised while she changed nostrils, dipped and inhaled again.

  “So finally,” she said, “whew, I needed that, so finally — hey Manny, there’s a brace for you, too.” “In a minute,” snapped Djell, obviously ill-tempered.

  “Manny’s hurtin’!” Jaime jerked a thumb toward the pile of corpses against the wall and explained, “Vince was almost shaped up to close wounds unsupervised.”

  “I can see what a loss that must be,” Stanley said, not deviating the pistol muzzle so much as a millimeter from the center of Sibyl’s chest.

  “After wobbling around all over the house and really freaking out the new neighbor who couldn’t even hear how the poor thing was whimpering and had the hiccups and all, poor Gabby just keeled over, you know? Dead as pressed flowers. I couldn’t believe it. I cried and cried. Manny, though, he scooped her up and swept her down to his little hobby operating theater we used to have in the basement when we lived out in Piedmont on Hillside —”

  “Placita,” Jaime corrected her.

  She frowned. “Hillside.”

  “Placita.”

  “Hillside.”

  “Maaaan-neee.”

  “Placita, I’m telling you. Why drag him into this? It was Placita I know because it was right up above that hot tub place where you and I used to go to, uh, relax.”

  Stanley blinked at Jaime. Was he serious?

  “Okay, Placita. You’re right. Manny took the dear poor little thing downstairs and put her on oxygen and that didn’t work so he pounded on her little heart with a suction-cup dart from his dart gun like a miniature toilet plunger it was brilliant but it didn’t work and he began to relish this I could see it but I was just hysterical until finally Manny tore the cord out of his favorite soldering iron. He quickly stripped an inch of insulation off the two conductors at one end and plugged the other end into the wall and zap-zapped little Gabby’s heart no bigger than a plum as it momentarily turned out, he flattened the stranded copper against her little chest and — yipe — she yiped just like she always did, once for each jolt — yipe yipe.…”

  Just breathe from the diaphragm, Stanley told himself, and you might not panic or throw up…

  “I mean it was just so life-like,” Sibyl continued unabated. “But all it really meant was that her little puppy spirit was going backwards, of course, regressing through yaps to yips to whimpers. Manny persisted with his last-ditch Hippocratic electrical-cord thing until the air in the basement smelled like fritters, but until it was obvious there was no jump-starting that little Gabby’s puppy heart.”

  Jaime held up a single finger. “They opted for electricity when they sh
ould have tried adrenaline. C-nine, H-thirteen, N-one, O-three: nothing like it. Adrenaline initiates many bodily responses, including most relevantly the stimulation of heart action as well as an increase in blood pressure, metabolic rate, and blood glucose concentration.” He lowered his voice and rubbed his hands together. “Adrenaline has been known to save puppy-butt under very extreme circumstances.”

  “That puppy had plenty of adrenaline in its system from trying to blow out that joke-shop candle,” said Djell querulously, raising a threaded needle high over the wound to snug a suture. “The very idea of that bungled triage with you in charge makes me stitch crooked.”

  “It was no use,” Sibyl continued determinedly. “In the end, just at the threshold between this world and the next, she was just squeaking.”

  “Like a little rubber toy,” said Jaime sadly. He emitted several toy-like squeaks. “Like one of those latex carrots you see zealous Weimaraners named Rilke trying to bury at the beach too deep for their childless yuppie surrogate parents to retrieve and make them fetch again.”

  Sibyl looked thoughtful. “Wasn’t Gabby a Weimaraner?”

  “No way,” squeaked Jaime. “She was a Jack Russell terrier.”

  “Impossible,” said Djell, raising the needle shoulder high and snugging its thread. “Their hearts are smaller than their brains, which are smaller than plums.”

  “Anyway,” said Jaime, “I want a Kelpie next time.”

  “Well, of course,” Sibyl shrugged, “it was hard to tell what Gabby had been, because Manny went right ahead with the autopsy. And you know what he found?”

  Stanley by now had sagged against the doorjamb, more or less terrified. The gun muzzle was trying to keep up with his eye as it jumped from Sibyl to Jaime and back again.

  Jaime and Sibyl knew this.

  “Well?” said Jaime finally turning to Sibyl, “What did he find?”

  “A single kidney,” Sibyl said, narrowing her green eyes at Stanley.

  Jaime turned back to Stanley. “The little dear had come and gone through this veil of tears with but a single, forlorn kidney.”