Mister October - Volume Two

by Edited by Christopher Golden

  The examining room is pink and round like a womb. She’s wearing a short-sleeved jumper so she won’t have to undress. The needles are plastic, which makes them cheaper but not as sharp. She has to shove the small one really hard to get it into a vein. Blood squirts. She puts the second needle inside the port in the back of her neck and twists its metal ring until it locks into place. Some people do it standing, but she likes to lie on the cool metal table. Makes the whole thing floaty, like a dream.

  The doctor is a five-foot-wide metal box in the curved corner of the room. It’s attached to the needles, and her, by worn plastic tubes that over time have turned pink from other peoples’ blood.

  The doctor’s got a Cyclops-like eye in the center of his face. It lights up white, and then red. The needle jabs through her neck and into her skull. Her skull is especially big, so she had to get her port adjusted at a shop in the mall. The sales lady broke off a piece of her skull, and replaced it with hinged plastic that she has to swipe with rubbing alcohol every night so it doesn’t get infected.

  The light flicks from red to green. The machine starts to purr. She holds her breath. This is her fourth time with the doctor, and it is always this moment that feels most wrong. The needles have warmed to the temperature of her blood, but they are still foreign objects; they don’t belong inside her skin. Neither does this port that has left her gray matter vulnerable. There are people, mostly the old and young, who experience drip. Their spinal fluid leaks, and they become paralyzed. She wants to rip out the port. She wants to pulls the needles and break them. She wants her booze-hound daddy. Mostly, she wants to run.

  But then the doctor doles his medicine. It travels, colder than her blood, but tingly. First her elbow, then her shoulder, her back, and finally, all the places that are just beginning to get tender. It feels like the boys she wishes would touch her. Like laughing so hard her stomach hurt back in Westchester, when life was easy and she was Giggles. Like her mother’s embrace. Like love. It feels just like love.

  “Begin,” a recorded female voice announces over the loudspeaker. Its mechanical quality reassures her. This is too intimate for human witnesses. Too special. Oh, how she loves the doctor.

  She pulls the wad of paper from her spandex jeans and starts: “I’m afraid for Lulu.” She always begins with this one, but so far every time they excise it, the worry grows back. “…In school they say that early cultures believed in this thing called a soul. It scares me. I don’t know why. Like we’ve all got these ghosts that live inside us. Like I’m haunted by my own ghost.”

  Continue, the voice tells her. It’s soft voice travels through the tubes, so that her port vibrates.

  “The actors in the movies—it doesn’t make any sense that they look so different from the people I know. They’re so pale and thin— they never have mechanical lungs…. I hate the way I look. I wish I could cut myself into little pieces. I wish I was pretty….”

  The tube in her arm is getting backflow. Red blood mixes with morphine, pink and pretty like all girls should be. Except, she’s brown and pudgy.

  “I got so mad last week I bit my hand. You can still see the teeth-marks. They’re smaller than you’d think. Looks like baby teeth, so I told everyone at school it was a neighbor's little kid. Well, actually, nobody asked. But if they did, that’s what I’d tell them.”

  She looks at her list. The rest are the items that her father invented: You don’t like sour milk; You want to devote your life to your country. You’re so excited about Patriot Day that you can’t sleep. Then he added, like it was an afterthought, but she knew it wasn’t: You want to be popular but you don’t fit in. You don’t understand that you’re special. Your worries are a gift. She’d felt her face flush when he said that, because suddenly the gig was up, and they both knew that nobody at PS 30 thought she was cool.

  She decides she’ll say the honest one. Maybe it’ll stop being true, once she says it. Maybe the doctor is magic. “I’m not pop—” she starts, and then stops, because if she says the words, her father will be right. Because that smack had been so unexpected, and undeserved. Because every day for as long as she can remember, things have been worse than the day before, which is how she knows that last night wasn’t a fluke. He might be sorry for it, but next time he gets drunk, he’ll hit her again.

  The morphine has wound all over her, like amniotic fluid. It feels so good, and safe. The doctor will know what to do. She crinkles the paper into a ball, and for the first time, tells the doctor what’s on her mind. “I’m so sad…. My mom doesn’t take pills because she wants to be happy. She just wants to be numb. I’d take pills if they made me numb, but they don’t.”

  She sniffles and bites her lip hard until she’s sure she won’t cry. She’d like the doctor to take everything this time. She’d like to be so empty that she doesn’t remember how to breathe.

  The machine starts clicking and humming, (clack!-clack!-clack!). She gets nervous. Was she wrong to say that pills don’t work?

  “Continue,” the voice tells her.

  The thing she really wants to say sits on her tongue like a sliver of reconstituted nectarine. She bites down and lets its juice run down her chin. This is not her problem. She is not accountable. He has done this to her. Her father. The doctor, too.

  “I hate my father. He drinks. He hit me last night.” She notices, dully, that her voice now echoes. I’m being recorded, she thinks, and then: Good. Now he’ll really get in trouble.

  “He makes us wear air filters in our chests, even though the EPA says we don’t need them. He fills the apartment with them, too. He says he’s working on safe cigarettes at the lab, but really he’s testing metal dust on mice again. He says it’s the debris from the bombs that’s killing us. All those falling buildings. He’s going to move us to Canada because they’re granting amnesty—I heard him talking. He wants to get out before the mandatory ports go into effect.”

  As she talks, the drug warms her. She’s almost sleeping. Sweet, thick dreams. She will be sick from this for days. But for now it is so good. “Continue,” the voice says, but she doesn’t have anything else to say.

  “That’s all.”

  “Continue,” the voice says.

  She tries to make something up, but her thoughts scatter. She licks them like gossamer spider webs but can’t collect them into coherent strands. They bundle and knot in all the wrong ways. “I have no soul to haunt me,” she says, because it reassures her to think this.

  Then the pull. This is her least, and most, favorite part. She closes her eyes and starts floating. Warmth radiates from the port in her neck. She doesn’t feel it. There are no nerves up there. Just pulp and grey matter. Heat in tiny lasers breaks the synapses, until all those bad thoughts disappear. Memories fade, and are gone. First Lulu, then school, then the pills, then her father, then her soul. She can’t remember them anymore.

  When the stream ends, she nods off. In her dream a little person lives inside of her, and that person is so angry she’s eating her own fingers until all that is left is a pair of opposable thumbs. She holds them up, bloody and ragged as the coast of a beach.

  The table jiggles as it rescinds. She falls to the floor. The needle in her arm tears her skin on its way out. Blood squirts. The needle in her port, still attached, yanks her head back. “Cripes on a cross!” she mumbles, then with an eye half-open, looks at her watch: 11:15. She’s been sleeping for two hours. A personal best. She twists the tube from her port and starts out just as the sprinklers and ammonia pour from the ceiling, to clean the room for another patient.

  Except for the headache that longs for more morphine, she’s as light as air when she opens the door to the waiting room. The world is like a flat desert, and she sees nothing for miles. Wings, sparkly and slender as silk threads, are attached to her back; they’ll fly her away.

  In the waiting room, her father is sitting next to the woman wearing the garbage bag. The woman is really fat, so maybe it’s a contractor bag. You could roll
her, Trina thinks, and then she giggles. The doctor has made her so happy!

  Her dad stands to greet her. He’s tall, dark, and skinny. Long, long ago, her mother used to call him beanpole: My funny beanpole, I could grow cumquats off your arms. My funny beanpole, bend down a few stories, and give me a kiss. Two years ago, the apartment got so hot that he filled the tub with ice water, and they all took turns snorkeling for rubber duckies in their bathing suits.

  He’s frowning like he’s worried, and suddenly her stomach turns. Something is wrong. What could it be? She knows, even though she can’t remember. She did something bad.

  Her temples throb. She cradles her head like she’s wounded, because she wants him to know that she’s hurting. There’s a bruise on her cheek, but she doesn’t know how she got it. “Daddy,” she says, and she doesn’t know why, but she’s crying.

  It smells like metal out, another explosion in midtown. They walk with their shirtsleeves over their noses to the car. His legs scrunch in the seat, and he has to bend into the steering wheel.

  She thinks maybe he’s going to hit her, which is stupid, because he’s never once hit her in her life. But he only raises his hand to make sure her sleeve stays over her nose. He holds it there, so she doesn’t have to talk for a long while. He takes care of her, which, come to think of it, he’s always done. After a long while, he takes his hand away, so she raises her own hand to keep her shirt in place. Out the window, ashes fall. If you think of them as black dandelion wishes, they’re almost pretty.

  She was mad at him, she realizes, so she told the doctor something very bad. Now he’s is in trouble. To keep from sobbing, she puts the heel of her hand in her mouth and bites down. “I’m sorry. I told,” she whispers through a mouthful of bone.

  He closes his eyes for just a second. “Remember me,” he says.

  In her mind, a bomb explodes where she sits. Its fire swallows her, and her father, and the car, and the doctor, and her apartment in Queens, and her city, and her country, and the whole world. All ashes, falling down.

  He’s not yet gone, but already she remembers something as if she is reminiscing at his funeral: before the war, her dad never drank.

  “Where do they go?” Trina asks her best friend Lulu the next day at lunch. They’re on line in the school cafeteria. She can’t remember what she said to the doctor, except it feels queasy, like spoilt milk. It feels gnawing, like missing fingers.

  “Where does what go?” Lulu asks. She’s got a voice like Darth Vader because her mechanical lung needs a tune-up. When Trina’s feeling left out, she takes tiny breaths like hiccoughs until she feels loopy, because Lulu says that having a mechanical lung is like being high on nitrous all the time.

  “Where do our thoughts go after we visit the doctor?” Trina asks. In her mind, doctors across the country collect the worries into a giant vat. They’re extracted one at a time by the people in charge, who best know what to do with them. Why should the whole world worry, when you can give the job to a select few?

  “That’s stupid!” Lulu giggles. “There are no problems! That’s why we go to the doctor. To get adjusted. It’s a throwback from early evolution. Our species worries even when nothing is wrong.” It’s a line from a commercial for the doctor that Lulu’s quoting but Trina knows better than to argue, so instead she shrugs.

  Lulu scoops up a ladle-full of lard-fried iceberg lettuce onto her Styrofoam tray. She used to be one of the pretty girls, but over the last few years, she’s gotten fat and dim-witted. Trina caught her on the way down.

  Trina bypasses the lettuce for a vitamin-fortified fluff sandwich, and they sit in the back of the cafeteria by themselves because, except for each other, they don’t have any friends.

  There are about twenty television screens all set to the same program, “Brick Jensen’s Health Challenge.” They hang from hooks in the ceiling and descend to eye level at the middle of every table. Lulu is fascinated. Brick Jensen, also known as Mr. Fit, is explaining that five minutes of exercise each day is enough to keep in shape, so long as you do it correctly. You can squeeze your butt while standing, for example, and do three sets of mechanical lung lunges. For perfect arms, you hold your backpack over your head.

  The show is interrupted by Mr. Mulrooney, the school principal. He’s got a tiny black mustache, so everybody calls him Hitler. The mustache is pencil thin, though. So maybe it’s Gay Hitler. Eccentric Hitler. Hitler Lite.

  “Two days until Patriot Day!” he announces: a small man trapped inside twenty small screens. It’ll be July 4, 2076. The 300th anniversary of the Great Emancipation. “Remember to wear your school colors,” Hitler Lite adds.

  “If they weren’t maroon and orange, maybe,” Lulu mumbles. Her wilted lettuce looks like green poop, but she keeps eating it, like she’s punishing herself for getting ugly.

  “If everybody wears maroon and orange I’ll go blind,’ Trina adds. “Seriously. It’s a health concern. I’ll get dizzy and puke and go blind, not necessarily in that order.” Lulu is wheezing, so Trina punches her backpack until the battery starts humming. She’s done this enough times that it no longer requires acknowledgment. They’re best friends, and that’s what friends are for.

  “For those of you without ports, remember to bring your insurance cards.” Hitler says. “And if you’ve got private insurance…. Well,” he smiles tightly, “Nobody here has private insurance.”

  Patriot Day is the same day that the law goes into effect, and everybody who can’t pay for a private doctor has to get a port. She used to be really happy about that. What progress: adjustments for the masses! Better yet, poppies for the masses! But that means her dad will have to get a port and she knows he doesn’t want one. Her stomach feels hollowed out again. Like somebody scooped away her insides with a metal frozen-yogurt spoon. She thinks about the Cyclops' eye, the list she crinkled into a ball instead of reading. And the morphine. She thinks about that, too, because she misses it already.

  Hitler makes a final announcement. He’s the third principal in two years. They keep getting fired for embezzlement. The last guy partnered with Milk of Magnesia, so everybody got free laxatives after lunch. The bathrooms stank, but at least the school colors were blue. She liked that a lot better than Hitler’s pick: who wants free Tang? Everybody knows that trip to the moon was a hoax.

  “Ozone levels are too high. No after school sports today,” Hitler says before signing off.

  “Bees knees, shit up a tree!” Trina moans. Unless it’s video games, sports are for lesbians and stupid people. Everybody knows that. Still, she LOVES track, and the weather’s only been nice enough once this season.

  “Sports are for lesbians and stupid people,” Lulu wheezes. It’s the running joke on the show everybody’s watching lately: “Will Brick Jenson get laid?!?!” People keep remaking it with their own video cameras, and posting it on their personal television channels. It’s the joke that won’t die. It’s pulling its decaying corpse down the hall with its thumbs.

  Because of her natural lungs, Trina is really good at running. She even laps the boys. It’s showing off, but she can’t help it. She loves to run. When you go fast and long enough, it’s like being high, only better. It’s like living, only good.

  Most people in this neighborhood get the operation by the time they hit grade school. Stores all over the mall take out your bronchi, and replace them with plastic tubes. That way you never cough when the bombed buildings fall. But so far, Trina doesn’t need the surgery. Thanks to her dad and the time she spent in Westchester, her lungs are clean. Even if it makes you popular, fake lungs look like a bad idea. Sure, you won’t get cancer, but what happens when they rot? Still, she’s an outcast at this school. When she volunteers in class, she doesn’t pant like the rest of them if she says more than a sentence. She doesn’t need to shoot insulin in the girls’ room, either. Sometimes she brings a needle anyway, and fills it with saltwater.

  Trina frowns. It’s coming back to her, the stuff that got excised. Sh
e wishes it would go away. She wishes she was like everybody else and nothing ever bothered her, but instead she’s crazy like her dad. “Do you think the doctor helps people? That it’s good to forget?” she asks Lulu.

  Lulu shrugs. “I wouldn’t know. I don’t have any problems.” Then she adds, “I’m feeling much better than yesterday.”

  Trina sighs. Lulu always says she’s feeling better, but she coughs more and more. It’s not just the battery that’s low. The tubes are clogged with pus.

  The gnawing inside her hurts like a morphine headache. In her mind, a girl is chewing her hands into rags. “Maybe it’s all a lie,” Trina says. “And we can’t figure it out because the doctor makes us stupid.”

  Lulu’s jaw drops. She looks around, because they both know that Trina said a very bad thing. Something so bad that if Lulu reported it, the Committee for Ethical Media would take her away to a re-education center, where the kids get stuck cleaning rubble and bodies.

  They look at each other for a while, and finally Lulu smiles like a phony. “You pink lung!” she teases. Only, she’s not kidding, and for the first time in the three years that they’ve been best friends, Trina is on the outside, looking in.

  The door is open to the apartment when she gets home, which is new. “Where’s Dad?” she asks.

  Drea is watching three different programs on the television while instant chatting with her friend next door. Trina wishes she’d inherited Drea’s white skin and blue eyes, but no dice. She’s brown like a terrorist instead.

  In big letters in the corner of the screen Trina sees: “Sports are for thesbians and flaccid people!” “Brick Jenson gets me wet!” “Sour milk=de-lite-FULL.” On a side bar are all the quips she wrote but doesn’t plan to send because, unless she dumbs it down, nobody ever knows what she’s talking about: “These ashes are our loon’s call; mad and maudlin.” “Remember, my love, it ends not with a bang, but with a whimper.” “The womb grows like a widening gyre, and even our best suckle its poison.”