by Stephen King
Attractable phenomena? Attractable phenomena? What the fuck do they think I am, a buglight?
He lifts my head, the pads of his fingers on my cheekbones, and I hum desperately—Nnnnnnnnn—knowing that he can't possibly hear me over Keith Richards's screaming guitar but hoping he may feel the sound vibrating in my nasal passages.
He doesn't. Instead he turns my head from side to side.
"No neck injury apparent, no rigor," he says, and I hope he will
just let my head go, let my face smack down onto the table—that'll make my nose bleed, unless I really am dead—but he lowers it gently, considerately, mashing the tip again and once more making suffocation seem a distinct possibility.
"No wounds visible on the back or buttocks," he says, "although there's an old scar on the upper right thigh that looks like some sort of wound, shrapnel, perhaps. It's an ugly one."
It was ugly, and it was shrapnel. The end of my war. A mortar shell lobbed into a supply area, two men killed, one man—me—lucky. It's a lot uglier around front, and in a more sensitive spot, but all the equipment works . . . or did, up until today. A quarter of an inch to the left and they could have fixed me up with a hand-pump and a CO2 cartridge for those intimate moments.
He finally plucked the thermometer out—oh dear God, the relief—and on the wall I could see his shadow holding it up.
"94.2," he said. "Gee, that ain't too shabby. This guy could almost be alive, Katie . . . Dr. Arlen."
"Remember where they found him," she said from across the room. The record they were listening to was between selections, and for a moment I could hear her lecturely tones clearly. "Golf course? Summer afternoon? If you'd gotten a reading of 98.6, I would not be surprised."
"Right, right," he said, sounding chastened. Then: "Is all this going to sound funny on the tape?" Translation: Will I sound stupid on the tape?
"It'll sound like a teaching situation," she said, "which is what it is."
"Okay, good. Great."
His rubber-tipped fingers spread my buttocks, then let them go and trail down the backs of my thighs. I would tense now, if I were capable of tensing.
Left leg, I send to him. Left leg, Petie-boy, left calf, see it?
He must see it, he must, because I can feel it, throbbing like a beesting or maybe a shot given by a clumsy nurse, one who infuses the injection into a muscle instead of hitting the vein.
"Subject is a really good example of what a really bad idea it is to play golf in shorts," he says, and I find myself wishing he had been born blind. Hell, maybe he was born blind, he's sure acting it. "I'm seeing all kinds of bug-bites, chigger-bites, scratches . . ."
"Mike said they found him in the rough," Arlen calls over. She's making one hell of a clatter; it sounds like she's doing dishes in a cafeteria kitchen instead of filing stuff. "At a guess, he had a heart attack while he was looking for his ball."
"Uh-huh . . ."
"Keep going, Peter, you're doing fine."
I find that an extremely debatable proposition.
"Okay."
More pokes and proddings. Gentle. Too gentle, maybe.
"There are mosquito-bites on the left calf that look infected," he says, and although his touch remains gentle, this time the pain is an enormous throb that would make me scream if I were capable of making any sound above the low-pitched hum. It occurs to me suddenly that my life may hang upon the length of the Rolling Stones tape they're listening to . . . always assuming it is a tape and not a CD that plays straight through. If it finishes before they cut into me . . . if I can hum loudly enough for them to hear before one of them turns it over to the other side . . .
"I may want to look at the bug-bites after the gross autopsy," she says, "although if we're right about his heart, there'll be no need. Or . . . do you want me to look now? They worrying you?"
"Nope, they're pretty clearly mosquito-bites," Gimpel the Fool says. "They grow em big over on the west side. He's got five . . . seven . . . eight . . . jeez, almost a dozen on his left leg alone."
"He forgot his Deep Woods Off."
"Never mind the Off, he forgot his digitalin," he says, and they have a nice little yock together, autopsy room humor.
This time he flips me by himself, probably happy to use those gym-grown Mr. Strongboy muscles of his, hiding the snake-bites and the mosquito-bites all around them, camouflaging them. I'm staring up into the bank of fluorescents again. Pete steps backward, out of my view. There's a humming noise. The table begins to slant, and I know why. When they cut me open, the fluids will run downhill to collection-points at its base. Plenty of samples for the state lab in Augusta, should there be any questions raised by the autopsy.
I focus all my will and effort on closing my eyes while he's looking down into my face, and cannot produce even a tic. All I wanted was eighteen holes of golf on Saturday afternoon, and instead I turned into Snow White with hair on my chest. And I can't stop wondering what it's going to feel like when those poultry shears go sliding into my midsection.
Pete has a clipboard in one hand. He consults it, sets it aside, then speaks into the mike. His voice is a lot less stilted now. He has just made the most hideous misdiagnosis of his life, but he doesn't know it, and so he's starting to warm up.
"I am commencing the autopsy at 5:49 P .M.," he says, "on Saturday, August 20th, 1994."
He lifts my lips, looks at my teeth like a man thinking about buying a horse, then pulls my jaw down. "Good color," he says, "and no petechiae on the cheeks." The current tune is fading out of the speakers and I hear a click as he steps on the footpedal which pauses the recording tape. "Man, this guy really could still be alive!"
I hum frantically, and at the same moment Dr. Arlen drops something that sounds like a bedpan. "Doesn't he wish," she says, laughing. He joins in and this time it's cancer I wish on them, some kind that is inoperable and lasts a long time.
He goes quickly down my body, feeling up my chest ("No bruising, swelling, or other exterior signs of cardiac arrest," he says, and what a big fucking surprise that is), then palpates my belly.
I burp.
He looks at me, eyes widening, mouth dropping open a little, and again I try desperately to hum, knowing he won't hear it over "Start Me Up" but thinking that maybe, along with the burp, he'll finally be ready to see what's right in front of him—
"Excuse yourself, Howie," Dr. Arlen, that bitch, says from behind me, and chuckles. "Better watch out, Pete—those postmortem belches are the worst."
He theatrically fans the air in front of his face, then goes back to what he's doing. He barely touches my groin, although he remarks that the scar on the back of my right leg continues around to the front.
Missed the big one, though, I think, maybe because it's a little higher than you're looking. No big deal, my little Baywatch buddy, but you also missed the fact that I'M STILL ALIVE, and that IS a big deal!
He goes on chanting into the microphone, sounding more and more at ease (sounding, in fact, a little like Jack Klugman on Quincy, M.E.), and I know his partner over there behind me, the Pollyanna of the medical community, isn't thinking she'll have to roll the tape back over this part of the exam. Other than missing the fact that his first pericardial is still alive, the kid's doing a great job.
At last he says, "I think I'm ready to go on, doctor." He sounds tentative, though.
She comes over, looks briefly down at me, then squeezes Pete's shoulder. "Okay," she says. "On-na wid-da show!"
Now I'm trying to stick my tongue out. Just that simple kid's gesture of impudence, but it would be enough . . . and it seems to me I can feel a faint prickling sensation deep within my lips, the feeling you get when you're finally starting to come out of a heavy dose of Novocain. And I can feel a twitch? No, wishful thinking, just—
Yes! Yes! But a twitch is all, and the second time I try, nothing happens.
As Pete picks up the scissors, the Rolling Stones move on to "Hang Fire."
Hold a mirror in fr
ont of my nose! I scream at them. Watch it fog up! Can't you at least do that?
Snick, snick, snickety-snick.
Pete turns the scissors at an angle so the light runs down the blade, and for the first time I'm certain, really certain, that this mad charade is going to go all the way through to the end. The director isn't going to freeze the frame. The ref isn't going to stop the fight in the tenth round. We're not going to pause for a word from our sponsors. Petie-Boy's going to slide those scissors into my gut while I lie here helpless, and then he's going to open me up like a mail-order package from the Horchow Collection.
He looks hesitantly at Dr. Arlen.
No! I howl, my voice reverberating off the dark walls of my skull but emerging from my mouth not at all. No, please no!
She nods. "Go ahead. You'll be fine."
"Uh . . . you want to turn off the music?"
Yes! Yes, turn it off!
"Is it bothering you?"
Yes! It's bothering him! It's fucked him up so completely he thinks his patient is dead!
"Well . . ."
"Sure," she says, and disappears from my field of vision. A moment later Mick and Keith are finally gone. I try to make the humming noise and discover a horrible thing: now I can't even do that. I'm too scared. Fright has locked down my vocal cords. I can only stare up as she rejoins him, the two of them gazing down at me like pallbearers looking into an open grave.
"Thanks," he says. Then he takes a deep breath and lifts the scissors. "Commencing pericardial cut."
He slowly brings them down. I see them . . . see them . . . then they're gone from my field of vision. A long moment later, I feel cold steel nestle against my naked upper belly.
He looks doubtfully at the doctor.
"Are you sure you don't—"
"Do you want to make this your field or not, Peter?" she asks him with some asperity.
"You know I do, but—"
"Then cut."
He nods, lips firming. I would close my eyes if I could, but of course I cannot even do that; I can only steel myself against the pain that's only a second or two away now—steel myself for the steel.
"Cutting," he says, bending forward.
"Wait a sec!" she cries.
The dimple of pressure just below my solar plexus eases a little. He looks around at her, surprised, upset, maybe relieved that the crucial moment has been put off—
I feel her rubber-gloved hand slide around my penis as if she meant to give me some bizarre handjob, Safe Sex with the Dead, and then she says, "You missed this one, Pete."
He leans over, looking at what she's found—the scar in my groin, at the very top of my right thigh, a glassy, no-pore bowl in the flesh.
Her hand is still holding my cock, holding it out of the way, that's all she's doing; as far as she's concerned she might as well be holding up a sofa cushion so someone else can see the treasure she's found beneath it—coins, a lost wallet, maybe the catnip mouse you haven't been able to find—but something is happening.
Dear wheelchair Jesus on a chariot-driven crutch, something is happening.
"And look," she says. Her finger strokes a light, tickly line down the side of my right testicle. "Look at these hairline scars. His testes must have swollen up to damned near the size of grapefruits."
"Lucky he didn't lose one or both."
"You bet your . . . you bet your you-knows," she says, and laughs that mildly suggestive laugh again. Her gloved hand loosens, moves, then pushes down firmly, trying to clear the viewing area. She is doing by accident what you might pay twenty-five or thirty bucks to have done on purpose . . . under other circumstances, of course. "This is a war-wound, I think. Hand me that magnifier, Pete."
"But shouldn't I—"
"In a few seconds," she says. "He's not going anywhere." She's totally absorbed by what she's found. Her hand is still on me, still pressing down, and what was happening feels like it's still happening, but maybe I'm wrong. I must be wrong, or he would see it, she would feel it—
She bends down and now I can see only her green-clad back, with the ties from her cap trailing down it like odd pigtails. Now, oh my, I can feel her breath on me down there.
"Notice the outward radiation," she says. "It was a blast-wound of some sort, probably ten years ago at least, we could check his military rec—"
The door bursts open. Pete cries out in surprise. Dr. Arlen doesn't, but her hand tightens involuntarily, she's gripping me again and it's all at once like a hellish variation of the old Naughty Nurse fantasy.
"Don't cut im up!" someone screams, and his voice is so high and wavery with fright that I barely recognize Rusty. "Don't cut im up, there was a snake in his golf-bag and it bit Mike!"
They turn to him, eyes wide, jaws dropped; her hand is still gripping me, but she's no more aware of that, at least for the time being, than Petie-Boy is aware that he's got one hand clutching the left breast of his scrub-gown. He looks like he's the one with the clapped-out fuel pump.
"What . . . what are you . . ." Pete begins.
"Knocked him flat!" Rusty was saying—babbling. "He's gonna be okay, I guess, but he can hardly talk! Little brown snake, I never saw one like it in my life, it went under the loadin bay, it's under there right now, but that's not the important part! I think it already bit that guy we brought in. I think . . . holy shit, doc, whatja tryin to do? Stroke im back to life?"
She looks around, dazed, at first not sure of what he's talking about . . . until she realizes that she's now holding a mostly erect penis. And as she screams—screams and snatches the shears out of Pete's limp gloved hand—I find myself thinking again of that old Alfred Hitchcock TV show.
Poor old Joseph Cotten, I think.
He only got to cry.
AFTERNOTE
It's been a year since my experience in Autopsy Room Four, and I have made a complete recovery, although the paralysis was both stubborn and scary; it was a full month before I began to get back the finer motions of my fingers and toes. I still can't play the piano, but then, of course, I never could. That is a joke, and I make no apologies for it. I think that in the first three months after my misadventure, my ability to joke provided a slim but vital margin between sanity and some sort of nervous breakdown. Unless you've actually felt the tip of a pair of postmortem shears poking into your stomach, you don't know what I mean.
Two weeks or so after my close call, a woman on Dupont Street called the Derry Police to complain of a "foul stink" coming from the house next door. That house belonged to a bachelor bank clerk named Walter Kerr. Police found the house empty . . . of human life, that is. In the basement they found over sixty snakes of different varieties. About half of them were dead—starvation and dehydration— but many were extremely lively . . . and extremely dangerous. Several were very rare, and one was of a species believed to have been extinct since midcentury, according to consulting herpetologists.
Kerr failed to show up for work at Derry Community Bank on August 22nd, two days after I was bitten, one day after the story (PARALYZED MAN ESCAPES DEADLY AUTOPSY, the headline read; at one point I was quoted as saying I had been "scared stiff ") broke in the press.
There was a snake for every cage in Kerr's basement menagerie, except for one. The empty cage was unmarked, and the snake that popped out of my golf-bag (the ambulance orderlies had packed it in with my "corpse" and had been practicing chip-shots out in the ambulance parking area) was never found. The toxin in my bloodstream—the same toxin found to a far lesser degree in orderly Mike Hopper's bloodstream—was documented but never identified. I have looked at a great many pictures of snakes in the last year, and have found at least one which has reportedly caused cases of fullbody paralysis in humans. This is the Peruvian boomslang, a nasty viper which has supposedly been extinct since the 1920s. Dupont Street is less than half a mile from the Derry Municipal Golf Course. Most of the intervening land consists of scrub woods and vacant lots.
One final note. Katie Arlen and I dated for
four months, Novem ber 1994 through February of 1995. We broke it off by mutual consent, due to sexual incompatibility.
I was impotent unless she was wearing rubber gloves.
At some point I think every writer of scary stories has to tackle the subject of premature burial, if only because it seems to be such a pervasive fear. When I was a kid of seven or so, the scariest TV program going was Alfred Hitchcock Presents, and the scariest AHP—my friends and I were in total agreement on this— was the one starring Joseph Cotten as a man who has been injured in a car accident. Injured so badly, in fact, that the doctors think he's dead. They can't even find a heartbeat. They are on the verge of doing a postmortem on him—cutting him up while he's still alive and screaming inside, in other words—when he produces one single tear to let them know he's still alive. That was touching, but touching isn't in my usual repertoire. When my own thoughts turned to this subject, a more—shall we say modern?—method of communicating liveliness occurred to me, and this story was the result. One final note, regarding the snake: I doubt like hell if there's any such reptile as a Peruvian boomslang, but in one of her Miss Marple capers, Dame Agatha Christie does mention an African boomslang. I just liked the word so much (boomslang, not African) I had to put it in this story.