by Jim Nisbet
“I’m not here to help,” said Stanley. “I’m here to motivate.”
“An interesting distinction, and I take your point. Still,” Jaime cajoled, “have a dose. It can’t hurt. It’s not a sedative.” He indicated Sibyl, whom he’d already injected. “You see how she’s reacted.”
Green eyes, wide open and staring at him.
Jaime held up the serum bottle and syringe. “Same supply hers came from, plus a clean needle. What service, huh?” The needle penetrated the pink rubber top of the jar with a squeak. He held the syringe to the light and watched the fluid descend its gradations. “Observe: about twice Sibyl’s dose. A little Valium never put anybody asleep. With all that coke in you, you’ll never know the difference. You probably already hear elevator music, and, sorry to disappoint you, but that’s about it for special effects. Your surgeon here however will notice benedictions in your body. No spasms in delicate locations, for instance. I am your anesthesiologist. Trust me.”
Did he really say that? Again?
Jaime sighed. “A shame to waste it.” By way of a smile he showed some teeth. “Well?”
Stanley rolled his eyes toward Djell. “Let’s leave it up to the guy with the vested interest.”
Djell was breathing heavily. Mastermind and surgeon, never had control so thoroughly eluded him. Whereas he would have liked to disassemble Stanley organ by organ without benefit of anesthetic, the gun taped in his wife’s mouth tempered Djell’s enthusiasm for vengeance. Just barely.
“Fifteen milligrams will do,” said Djell. “As Jaime says, Mr. — Mr. —.”
“Ahearn. You guys never remember your patients, do you?”
“Just the ones who don’t pay their bills. As Jaime points out, it’s a mild dose. Even so, it will relax you. Muscular and vascular spasm will be minimized, making my job easier. You might have noticed as we operated on — on…” Djell cleared his throat.
They all looked at Iris.
“I never got her name, either,” Djell admitted.
She was lying peacefully against the wall on a pile of quilted mover’s blankets, as if asleep. The blankets happened to be cornflower blue, Iris’ favorite color. Tubes connected her to two bags of fluids tacked to the wall. Her jet black hair covered half her face. Her shoulder rose and fell steadily with her anesthetized breathing. A huge wad of gauze soaked in rust-colored betadyne was taped above her upturned hip.
“Considine,” said Stanley. “Iris Considine.”
“She gave her all,” observed Jaime.
“Yes,” said Stanley. “She’ll want to be discussing that.” He leveled his eyes at Jaime. “Let’s not disappoint her.”
Djell got on with it. “You might have noticed that we occasionally paused the earlier procedure in order to allow spasms to pass. These spasms are caused by trauma to vital mechanisms. Drugs, including Valium, can alleviate only some of this trauma. We also administer anti-immune agents as well as antibiotics and a half-liter or so of blood.”
Jaime smirked. “Type O-Negative, I believe?”
Stanley scowled. Jaime glanced away.
Djell spoke automatically. If it was a speech he had given a thousand times Stanley couldn’t imagine when or to whom, but he had a list of at least ten people Djell hadn’t bothered to lecture on the finer points of nephrectomy.
“You’ve got at least as much at stake as I do, Djell.”
Djell nodded grimly.
“So let’s do it your way.”
“Excellent,” said Jaime. He dabbed an alcohol swab at the inside of the elbow on Stanley’s gun arm.
“Lopez!” said Djell sharply. “Don’t act crazy. Not now.”
“Who, me?” said Jaime, looking up.
Djell closed his eyes. “I think,” he said quietly, “you can find a better site for the injection.”
Jaime looked at the inside of Stanley’s elbow, where he was swabbing. Then his eye followed the forearm to his bracelet of tape, the checkered butt of the pistol, the two little powder burns that fanned away from the back corners of the breech, the serial number filed off the slide, the blistered bluing of the barrel where it entered Sibyl’s mouth, the yoke of duct tape, her wide open green eyes above.
Even the cool Sibyl, now, had begun to sweat. A fine dew of perspiration spread evenly over her forehead like condensation on an untouched glass of beer.
Sure Sibyl was sweating, thought Stanley. It was unavoidable. It would be one thing to watch Jaime and Djell cut up lonesome drunks. But now her two clowns were about to effectively, if vicariously, cut on her. Whatever happened to Stanley in this surgery would be, as it were, automatically transferred to Sibyl.
What Djell had done to Ahearn and nearly a dozen others, he was more or less about to do to his own wife. She and Stanley had something besides mere larceny in common at last.
Along with the gun. They had the gun in common.
Intimately connected. At last.
They shared a third thing, too.
Sibyl and Stanley were going to live separately, or die together.
This was way beyond mere sex.
And yet, Stanley thought, lying there facing her, it was a lot like sex.
Her sinuses packed by cocaine, Sibyl sighed raggedly through the gun barrel—the straw connecting her lungs to the outside world—and closed her eyes.
Sleep, partner, Stanley caught himself thinking. Sleep while I keep watch over you, and maybe catch a late flick on TV…
Jaime found a vein behind Stanley’s knee and injected the Valium. Then he touched a place on Stanley’s back. “First,” he squeaked, “a local anesthetic. Subcutaneous. Little pinch.”
Stanley felt a little pinch, as the needle slid under his skin.
“Couple minutes to let that take effect.” Jaime withdrew the needle and swabbed the site.
Djell studied the dials on the portable perfusion machine, which was labeled as a Nephrolander FX. He and Jaime exchanged some technical information concerning temperature, procaine and heparin ratios, effluent clarity, titration, potassium radicals and so on, and made a few adjustments. Once satisfied, Djell went to the wall-mounted sink and began to scrub.
Stanley said nothing, but sweat was pouring through the pores of his gun hand like water through a saturated earthen dam. Sibyl had opened her eyes and begun to study him. He studied her, too. For the first time he noticed that her eyebrows were plucked. The right one, the downside one, concealed a small mole. His eye darted to her hairline. Sure enough, about a quarter inch behind her hairline another mole was visible, a fraction larger than the one in her eyebrow, but still quite small. Both were a flat umber, raised almost imperceptibly above the skin. He’d often noticed that moles and other beauty marks would favor one side of the body over the other. He thought of it as one of the odd characteristics that went along with the dichotomy between symmetry and asymmetry in the human body. Whereas lungs, kidneys, ovaries, not to mention ears, legs and eyes, occurred in symmetric pairs in the human animal, other parts, like the heart and appendix, occurred asymmetrically. He imagined that moles might occur on Sibyl’s right side only; on the hollow between the Achilles tendon and the ankle, in the hollow behind the knee, in the hollow at the top of the inside of her thigh, hard by the perineum. One, perhaps, would occur on the small of her back, alongside the base of the spine.
He wondered if Djell had kissed them all, if that were a routine of their conjugal act. Or, if not Djell, then some attentive lover, present or past. He wondered if, by some mistake, Vince and Sturgeon had ever missed their rendezvous with Sibyl—or if, say, the chloral hydrate hadn’t taken effect soon enough, or not at all, or if, perhaps, the intended victim had been more aggressive than most—whether she’d been forced to follow through with the sexual charade, to go all the way with her victim, and whether, in the course of this mistake, the drunken, lucky, doomed fool might have managed to brush with his lips or touch with the tip of his tongue so much as a single one of these delicate birthmarks.
I
t seemed to Stanley that he was witnessing in Sibyl’s eyes a little struggle between her distaste for him and her instinct for survival. Something there was, no doubt, about the psychology of victimhood that attracted Sibyl to her prey as surely as the smell of mice attracts a cat.
It was a natural thing, as natural as yellow jackets using cement slurry to build a bullet-proof nest.
Stanley could see it in her eyes. Even now, completely at his mercy, she projected her need upon him like a picture upon a screen.
It wasn’t a need for him, specifically. It was her need to survive—for which the first synonym, in her thesaurus, would be to win.
If sex was involved in the winning, well…
Sex was just a tool, like a row of tanks.
Surprise?
What did Stanley think sex was? Communication? Special?
He could feel the pull of her. Worse, he began to feel something inside himself, some force he’d never realized or even acknowledged, as it stirred, rummaging among the empty cells of Stanley’s monastery, looking for something.
Something to give to Sibyl.
A token of his… dedication.
This realization horrified him. Something somewhere inside him not only had learned absolutely nothing, but did not care. Something inside him yearned to yield to this woman, to this force in the guise of a woman, to hand over whatever it was she wanted. It didn’t even care what she wanted. It just wanted to give it to her.
It was a sensation almost like… trust. Blind trust.
The realization filled him with loathing and revulsion and hatred—for himself at least as much as for Sibyl—and brought him as close as he’d yet come to pulling the trigger. He even pressed it sideways a little. If it went off, well.…
And then another layer of reality peeled away. It was like a wind lifting the tin roof off a house in silence, leaving the contents exposed within. Then the upper story is blown away, exposing the first floor. And finally the first floor too is gone, leaving the single resident in the roofless basement, cowering behind the water heater, barefoot. Naked. All protection, possession, comfort, concealment—gone.
But Stanley had another creature left in his basement.
Stanley wanted to live.
So this, finally, was what he and Sibyl had in common.
And, likewise, this is what made them irrevocably, mutually exclusive.
For in order for one to live, the other would have to die.
He heard the whisper of the sheets drawn aside. “I’m inserting a catheter, Mr. Ahearn,” said Jaime soothingly, at work behind him, “in the back of your knee. You didn’t even feel the Valium injection — did you? This will be your first IV, which you will hardly feel either. It will administer antibiotics and anti-immune products. Soon after I will administer amethocaine, the local anesthetic, a distant cousin to the one you now have in your maxillary sinuses, at the T-6 vertebra, just above your tailbone, also by stationary catheter. This will anesthetize most nerves within the trunk of your body from your knees, more or less, to your heart. Kind of like you’re having a baby.”
“I must caution you, sir,” added Djell, who had appeared behind his wife, “that while you will be conscious during the installation of your new organ, the least movement could be disastrous.”
Stanley watched the green eyes.
Djell gingerly put a hand on his wife’s shoulder. “Coraggio, my sweet.”
“Mustn’t get touchy so early in the game,” said Jaime. “Or, finito es el partido, as we say at the country club.”
“Endgame?” Djell sighed raggedly. “It must be five o’clock in the morning.”
Jaime shrugged and held up a latex glove. “So? We going somewhere?”
“No,” Djell lamented, pushing his hand into the glove. “I’d just like to get some rest. I’d like to go home. I’d like to get my wife back. I’d like to be normal again.”
“Come off it,” said Jaime, holding up the second glove. “Take a look at the floor.”
“Vince.” Djell filled the second glove. “I’m going to miss that guy.”
“You and me both,” said Jaime. “Nobody in this outfit had his experience.”
“Not to mention his failure rate.”
“We’re closing fast,” said Jaime darkly.
“Fucking don’t talk like that,” shouted Djell suddenly. “You talk like you’re trying to jinx us.”
“Who?” said Jaime, professing amazement. He clasped his hands to his chest. “Me? Jinx this operation? What you want me to do, burn chicken feathers or something? You think I don’t think there’s enough dead people laying around here tonight?”
“Reminds me,” said Djell, thoughtfully eying the two corpses piled along the wall, their feet at the head of the peacefully dozing Iris. “We oughta harvest them puppies.”
Jaime closed his eyes and sighed loudly. “I’m gonna start a union.”
“Can you think of something better to—.”
“First things first,” said Stanley drowsily. “Get on with it. Which reminds me, how long until Iris wakes up?”
Jaime shot a cuff and checked his watch. “An hour or two, I’d say.”
“Can you local her like you did me?”
“It’s called a regional. I already did.”
“Good,” said Stanley. Incredibly, he was thinking he might need Iris to help him out. If she could get beyond a simple thing like her thirst for revenge, that is. Either way, she still might see the logic of the situation, which was that she might help Stanley anyway, as opposed to placing herself at the dubious disposal of Jaime, Djell, and Sibyl.
Maybe Stanley could talk her into it.
And if things didn’t go smoothly?
Who would be left to care?
Certainly not Sibyl. Nor Stanley.
That would leave Djell, Jaime and Iris.
They could sort things out for themselves.
Maybe get couple of lawyers on it. Expensive. Enough body parts to fund a platoon of lawyers.
Get it straight in a couple of years.
Everybody healed by then. Everybody friends. Adjacent condos.
Come out and sit by Stanley’s grave in Oakland. Hold hands and tell his tombstone all about the settlement.
The inscription on his tombstone? Easy: Lived, drank, died.
Maybe they’d bury him with Green Eyes. Mix their ashes.
Stanley and Sibyl: gone to hell together.
He looked at Sibyl.
Sibyl, with her wonderful eyes, was watching him.
He liked that mole in her plucked eyebrow.
Made her seem almost human.
Those moles sprinkled up along some meridian of her metabolism, like stars in a constellation. Little ones, bigger ones, round ones, odd-shaped ones. They might occur in pairs, too, like Castor and Pollux, the twin stars of Gemini, all of them asymmetric to her right side, all-girl stars strewn along the arm of some estrogen galaxy…
Could Djell even suspect this romanticizing? Isn’t that part of being married to a beautiful woman? To know that other men fantasize over her?
“Hey,” he said. “What’s your sign?”
Her eyes just perceptibly widened.
If a gun barrel hadn’t been taped to her pursed lips she certainly might have laughed. As it was she said into the barrel, “You’re a fucking idiot.”
Genuine contempt. Some mountains, Stanley reflected, are never conquered.
Again he experienced the impulse to pull the trigger and get it over with. To commit suicide and murder. He’d already killed tonight. His first murder. He hadn’t felt a thing. Was that what it meant to be an idiot?
He heard a rumbling noise. It sounded like a dog chewing on a bone. He realized his teeth were grinding. The hand taped around the grip of the pistol had begun to shake. His hand was frozen, cramped, clenched, cast in iron, boned by pain. The bladed sight at the far end of the gun must be quivering against the backs of her front teeth or her palate. He could see in her ey
es that he was — what? — some subatomic measurement away from pulling the trigger by convulsion. One Angstrom? A billionth of a meter? The radius of a hydrogen atom? But what about Time?
How long would it take him to pull the trigger on this cannon, even if the distance required for the travel of the spontaneously enraged trigger-finger were a billionth of a meter? How was time measured, at such a distance? Did instantaneous cover the subject?
Faster’n a greased string through a guru.
Catbird!
C’est moi, pardner.
Where the hell you been? I got, like, existential dilemmas wanting consideration.
Do tell.
Sure I —. What the hell you mean, do tell? Can’t you see what’s going on? Don’t you know I’ve got this gun taped into this woman’s face, here, and this guy out back installing my new kidney?
Yeah, I can see that. But I ain’t sticking around to enjoy it.
What? What are you talking about?
It appears as how you’re doing stellar by your own lights.
But I’m asking you for help. I need, like, a consultation.
I just came back to get my stuff.
Stuff? What stuff?
Oh, you know. Tool box. Pair of gumboots. Couple Louis L’Amour novels I can convince myself I haven’t read yet. No big deal. Stuff.
What’s up?
For the first time in our coexistence, I don’t know what to say.
So? Say nothing. Have a drink. I’m buying.
The little voice didn’t speak.
Hey.
You let them cut on that girl.
What girl?
What girl, he says.
Stanley listened to his circulatory system moving his blood around. Goose flesh arose on all his exposed parts. The overhead light dimmed. The grinding suddenly stopped.
Rage replaced everything.
I didn’t let them do it. I made them cut on her.
Good enough. I’m not arguin with you.