by Smith, Aaron
“You didn’t have to dissect it did you?” Claire asked, wrinkling her nose. “That would be too much.”
Danielle laughed. “No, no cutting, just looking and touching and getting to know which bones connect to which bones and how the tendons work and all that stuff.”
Claire was laughing too now. “Are you absolutely sure it was yours? I mean, seriously, you had it off what, almost a year ago? And now it just happened to make its way from the hospital to the medical school and end up on your desk?”
“Yeah,” Danielle confirmed, “almost a year, but it was attached to me for twenty-two years before that, so I think I’d know it. And I found the little scar where I sliced my middle toe on a piece of glass on the beach when I was in high school. It was mine! I mean, I did ask for it to go to research purposes after the surgery, so it’s not impossible that it would end up there at that moment, but it is unlikely. Long strange trip, huh? Is that weird enough for you?”
“Yeah, I think so. It’s kind of creepy. I’d be freaked out, but I’m not you.”
Claire turned back to the TV as a set of commercials ended.
Danielle leaned forward and pulled off her right shoe, flexed her sock-covered toes, and smiled at the increase in comfort. She went to her left foot next, gripped it, twisted, and felt it pop off, shoe and all. She placed the still-dressed prosthetic on the floor beside the empty right shoe and peeled the sock-like cloth covering from the end of her leg, revealing the narrow rounded stump just above where an ankle had been. She rubbed the slightly scarred skin for a moment, glad to have finished putting weight on it for the day, then swung her legs up onto the couch and rested her head on a pillow.
She intended to sit for only a few minutes. She would then reach under the couch, where she kept a crutch for occasions like this one, and use it to make her way into the bathroom for her pre-bed routine. She never got that far. Her eyelids were heavy from the long day and the background noise from the TV was like a lullaby as she drifted away to dreams.
Maribel Lopez found her first two young patients resting peacefully, which made her smile. There had been no sign of pain on their slumbering faces and she hoped their dreams were pleasant, filled with ice cream and sunshine. She looked back down at her clipboard as she made her way to the next room on her rounds. She always liked to have the child’s name in mind as she checked on them. It somehow made her feel closer to the patients, more responsible than with the coldness of anonymity. Joseph Saunders, she read, was three years old, had nearly drowned, and had not regained consciousness. She crept quietly into the room, hoping that little Joseph was at rest as the others had been. In the dim light of the one small lamp that added to the slight glow of the monitoring machines, Maribel met with a surprise as she saw the little boy sitting up in bed, his eyes wide open.
“Well, hello,” the nurse said, gently smiling, aware that the child was probably frightened by the experience of waking up in strange surroundings. “How do you feel, Joseph?”
There was no answer. Maribel walked closer to the bed, switched on a brighter bulb, hoping the light would make the patient more comfortable. She put the clipboard down on the edge of the bed and leaned in to check on the child’s condition. There was no emotion on Joseph’s face, just a blank, dazed stare.
“Do you know where you are, Joseph? How do you feel? Does anything hurt?”
Still no answer, Maribel raised her hand in front of the child’s face with one finger extended. She began to slowly move the finger back and forth in front of his eyes, to see if he followed the motion, hoping for some response.
There was a sound. Not a word and not a cry of pain or discomfort or even fear. It came from Joseph’s mouth, or at least his throat, but Maribel didn’t have time to interpret its meaning.
Movement, a flash of pain, and blood.
Maribel pulled her hand away from the child, stepped back and looked down at the damage. A chunk of flesh had been torn from her finger and blood was flowing freely. She went into nurse mode and pushed away any urge to panic or lose control of her emotions, trying to ignore the pain. She grabbed the box of tissues, covered the wounded finger, tried to stop the blood flow.
She looked back at Joseph. He was standing on the bed, his eyes stared straight at her, and they seemed blacker, darker and wrong for the eyes of a small boy. She could see some of her blood staining his teeth and dripping down his chin, causing her to gag.
Another sound came from the boy —louder, sounding something like “More!”
He squatted down on the bed, and leaped through the air at her.
Maribel had time to scream one word before the small flying body hit her.
“Help!”
Chapter 3
Douglas Clancy was a serial killer waiting to happen. He could feel himself sliding closer toward his destiny with each passing year. He knew what the seed in his mind and heart was and what it would grow to be—and although it disturbed him, he did nothing to stop it, for he also, in some very honest way deep inside his soul, looked forward to the day when the dam would burst and the blood would flow in the real world just as it did in his most personal dreams. Eventually, Douglas knew, he would allow it to happen, for he could not keep his nature in check forever.
Doug was fascinated by the structure and composition of things. He always had been, since the earliest moments in his memories. He wanted, perhaps needed, to know how things were put together, how they worked.
He still remembered how it had started. He couldn’t have been more than three or four when he suddenly came to the realization that the house he lived in was not just one big piece sprung up out of the ground like a vegetable. It was, he understood with his child eyes and child brain, something made of very specific parts put together in a very specific way to serve a very specific purpose. The foundation held it all up and the roof topped it off and every beam and brick and bit of cement in between added something to the stability of the structure.
He could recall looking at many buildings with the same fascination as he went to various places with his parents and noticed the magnificent variety of structures. He saw the high ceilings of the church and understood that the roof there was of a different kind than that of a residence. He saw how the school was entirely different from either the house or the church, and how each had been put together purposely to serve its role and not fall apart.
The seeds that began to grow in Doug’s mind at that early age seemed destined to grow into the soul of an architect. He could visualize the how and why of each piece of each building and how it related to all the other pieces, whether directly connected to its partners or separated by the many components in between. A house might have appeared to be one solid object to a casual observer, but Douglas Clancy knew better. Every house or skyscraper or little log cabin was a committee, a team of bits and pieces working in absolute sweet synchronicity to become and remain what it was meant to be. Such reveries brought many fascinated smiles to young Doug’s face and he often wondered if he was the only person in the world who truly appreciated the way everything was put together.
Yes, it began with buildings; but it spread in Doug’s brain and he began, not intentionally, to apply it to other things. He would sit in the passenger seat of his parents’ station wagon as his mother or father drove and he would watch the cars passing them and he knew that those things, too, were miracles of ingenuity and intentional design, wheels and gears and wires and steel put together expertly to make something wonderful and useful and greater than the sum of its parts. Douglas could have been an architect or an engineer or a miracle worker of a mechanic.
His childhood was filled with moments when his imagination caught fire with images of how all things connected and operated. He was an intelligent child and could have grown up to be a genius in any mechanical field had that latent talent been spotted and honed. That may have been the case if the potential within Douglas Clancy had not been tainted by an unforeseen imbalance, a complication
that was triggered at his entrance into adolescence.
The hormones of puberty slammed into Doug’s brain like a sledgehammer and everything changed. He could still find joy in imagining the workings of the parts of an automobile or a house or the arcade games he often wasted hours playing, but the teen years brought something else into the equation, added a dimension to his fascination with composition, function and design.
He was at the mall when it happened, walking out of the arcade. He had spent his last quarter and was headed home to finish a project for school. He was fourteen years old. He watched a girl walk by. She was a year or two older than Doug, and she was beautiful. She had a smile on her face and as she passed it occurred to Doug how many little muscles in her face were working at that moment to make that smile happen. His head began to spin and he had to sit down. The muscles around her mouth—his mind screamed to him what he already knew but had never thought about before—were connected to the rest of the face and the face was the front display of a head which contained a brain that sent electrical impulses to all the other components of that artfully constructed entity. Doug saw it all in one big flash of realization. The old cliché about a man undressing a woman with his eyes was intensified a thousand times in that moment, for he did not just undress the young woman with his eyes; he dissected her.
The jolt of revelation shot through his brain and the erection sprang up in his pants and he grew dizzy and flew into the nearest public restroom and simultaneously vomited and ejaculated and felt a fascination and joy far superior to anything a car or an office building or a toaster had ever induced in his mind. He had found the ultimate construct, the most perfect machine he had ever laid eyes on. It was the one design for which he suddenly felt such awe that it almost overwhelmed him.
Such an experience, for other men, might have caused religion to take root, as credit for the beauty of a woman was given to God. For others, the joy brought on by the sudden knowledge of the body’s intricacies may have led to a desire to spend a life in the service of science, perhaps medicine. But Douglas Clancy was not those other men. He was an aberration. He did not want to understand that body by learning about it through diagrams in books. He did not want to heal human bodies or learn new things about them to further any branch of human endeavor.
What he wanted was to take them apart and see the things that made them what they were, touch the parts with his own hands, arrange the components on the table like pieces of a reversed puzzle, exploring segment by segment, layer by layer, and dimension by dimension until he had seen everything. It was not the girl that fascinated him. It was the design, the machine.
He never spoke of this experience. High school went by and then a partial college education, but he never completed college and his potential for genius was never realized in any practical way. His way of seeing things as assemblies of parts did him some good, though, as he found a career servicing and repairing those arcade games he had grown up loving so much. As the technology of the games evolved and they grew more sophisticated, so did Doug’s knowledge of them, and his career remained quite secure. He lived alone, as he knew he had to. He remained single and even his virginity remained intact, for he was not a man without conscience and he feared his secret fascinations even if he did not quite detest them, for they were a part of him. He was materially comfortable with his apartment and his car and his solid, dependable income. He was successful, to a blue-collar degree, by the time he reached thirty.
Doug looked normal to everyone he met. He was tall and of average build, with a full head of dark hair and bright blue eyes, and a quiet, seemingly relaxed demeanor. He had no close friends, but was friendly to his acquaintances: the arcade owners, the clerks in the video game stores, the occupants of the neighboring apartments. They all thought of him as a moderately intelligent, polite young man who was very, very good at his particular profession. They figured he would meet a woman at some point, get married, buy a house, have a few kids, work his ass off until retirement age, putter around for a few decades, and die like the average American of his time and place.
But Doug knew better.
Sometimes, when he was out fixing gaming machines, a woman would walk by and he’d see the soft, supple epidermal exterior hiding all those wondrous inner workings and his head would float like he was swimming through the clouds and he would have to put his tools down and close his eyes and take a deep breath until she passed by.
Yes, Douglas Clancy knew there would come a day when he could contain his true self no longer and the real Doug would burst forth and do what he had been born to do.
Kacey Sherwood was not the suicidal sort, though she sometimes wished she was. In theory, it sounded so easy, such a relief; but in practice, it was something else entirely. Bellamy, Illinois was a little town far west of Chicago, closer to the border of Iowa than to Lake Michigan. Kacey hated Bellamy. She hated, hated, hated it all, but the main heat of her loathing was centered on the Mirage Diner. An appropriate name, she had sometimes thought, for she wished it was a mirage, an illusion, a dream from which she could awake, but it didn’t vanish with the night. Each morning when Kacey awoke, the Mirage was still there and so was the rest of Bellamy, Illinois. She felt tied to it, locked in place like a prisoner in cuffs. Stuck.
Yet there she was again, another night in the diner, another night in the same stupid town she had lived in her whole life, another night waiting tables for a measly salary and tips that could be halfway decent or could suck. In the three years since high school had ended, she had vowed over and over again to get out of Bellamy, go to college somewhere and breathe some air that didn’t taste stale from its sameness. She had yet to make the break and she couldn’t understand what kept her from leaving.
It wasn’t money or its lack that kept her chained to Bellamy. Not that she was rich, but she could have waited tables anywhere and managed to survive. It was more a matter of uncertainty as to what she would aim for, what she might concentrate on. She feared she would make the break only to decide that her path was the wrong one and turn back to face that awful little town again. Better to stay until the time was right, she had convinced herself, than to flee and face the prospect of coming back to Hell.
She had money, she had a brain, never doubting her intelligence, and she had a face that would help too, a face she had grown into quite well, though her opinion of her own looks occasionally slid back to the insecurities of her early teen years when she had disapproved of her own short stature, slightly upturned nose, and nearsightedness. Now, at twenty-one, when she looked in the mirror she saw a nose that fit her in its perky cuteness: a body that was appropriately petite and not dwarfish, as she had once feared, and a head of strawberry-blonde hair. The glasses were okay too, she decided. She never bothered with contacts. The spectacles reminded people, just in case they needed it, that she had her own thoughts in her head and not just their orders for burgers and soup and coffee.
When Kacey really thought about it, life didn’t seem so bad, certainly not bad enough to die, but she had nasty nights too; nights when she wanted to shred the order pad, spill coffee on the customers, and disappear from Bellamy and from all of Illinois and from her dreadfully repetitive life forever. She was having one of those nights.
The smell of bacon hung in the air to the point of almost inducing nausea. Kacey liked bacon, but that smell had come to symbolize the Mirage in her mind and had gone from being a pleasant aroma to a stench. She felt bombarded by all the little details of an evening in the diner. The low slurping of tomato soup through badly fitted dentures on some old lady who went to church with her parents, the flap-flap-flap of menus being opened and closed. The gold and white smear of a fry that had fallen under the table and been stepped on. The blinking of the neon sign that now said “MIR_GE” as it blasted a semi-migraine into Kacey’s peripheral vision.
She shoved aside the hatred of her surroundings and her desperation for the day when something interesting—destiny, perhaps
—would see fit to send her a sign and get her out of that place, and took the next order from the middle-aged couple that had just sat down in the fourth booth on the left side of the diner.
She finally made it through her shift and was free to go. She pocketed her tips for the night, folded her apron and stuffed it into her locker, and got out of there. She started her beat up little car and drove home to her apartment above her parents’ garage. On the way, the scenery was the same as it had been on so many days and nights before, as far back as she could remember. It was always Bellamy, Illinois, and it was always the same. She was sick of it and her head began to throb more.
She drove past the gas station, the post office, the end of Main Street where it twisted off into a more rural route, passing the same old fields that were so familiar and varied only in that you would see corn in the summer and pumpkins in the fall and went on for the ten minutes that seemed like an eternity until she reached her home. Other than the seasons, nothing changed.
Kacey Sherwood got home, fell into bed, and dreamed of the day when something, anything different, would finally call to her and she would go.
Harold and Katherine arrived at the hospital separately but simultaneously at eight-fifteen in the morning. They parked a few spaces apart and fell into step as they crossed the lot. There were no smiles or warm greetings, nor was there hatred hanging in the air between them. The near-tragedy had become a Band-Aid, not enough to heal, but sufficient to stop the bleeding of their hearts.
“Where’s Brandon?” Harold asked.
“I dropped him off with Phyllis,” Katherine answered. “Don’t worry; Martin will be out all day. I know you don’t like the boys being around him.”
“Well, he’s an asshole.”
“I won’t disagree, but Phyllis will take care of Brandon. I didn’t want to bring him until we find out how Joseph’s doing. If it’s okay for Brandon to see him, I can go get him or have Phyllis bring him. They didn’t call me at all last night; you?”