Psychostasis

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Psychostasis Page 9

by Ezra Blake


  “Give it here,” she says.

  His fingers pulse gently with his heartbeat. He passes her the organ and watches as she packs it in ice.

  “Alright, that’s it.” She zips the cooler and peels off her gloves. “Tell Paul to start the car. I’ll write a note.”

  He’s halfway to the door before it dawns on him. “Hang on, a note? As in ‘sorry, about your organs, please call 911?’ You know she doesn’t have a phone, right?”

  “There are pay phones around here.”

  Elliot cocks his head, pauses. “You’re trying to kill her.”

  Vic grabs one of the wall tarps and yanks it down, revealing a row of scratched mirrors. “I don’t like killing people.”

  “Right, better to just let them die. You don’t want another me situation.”

  She spins around to face him, boots squeaking against the chipped linoleum floor. “What do you suggest we do, Elliot?”

  “Drive her to the fucking hospital. How many people have you left for dead because you didn’t want to deal with a witness?” He strips off his gloves, yanks the tie out of his short ponytail, and shakes his hair out around his face.

  “I told you, I don’t do removal. You were only my second.”

  “So improve your procedure,” he says, and stalks to the door.

  Max and Paul tear down their mobile operating theater. The four of them load Destiny’s limp body into the back of the van, and Elliot confirms once more that she’s breathing—he’ll begrudgingly admit that Vic knows what she’s doing when it comes to narcotics.

  “This will work,” he says. He traces the van’s wake of swirling garbage in circles. “They won’t find her in Jersey.”

  “I’ll call a cab. There are spare clothes in the duffel. Get changed.”

  They wait on a street corner in matching pink T-shirts that read Brooklyn Community Recovery Center’s 10th Annual Block Party. Vic has a duffel bag stuffed with thousands of dollars worth of surgical equipment slung over her shoulder, and Elliot is holding a human kidney in a cooler.

  The driver asks what they’re doing out here so late at night. Elliot, in a fit of stupidity, spots a takeaway restaurant in the rear-view mirror and blurts, “Chinese food.”

  He pauses, scrunching up his mustache.

  “I mean, we work there.”

  “You Chinese?” He asks.

  “Uh.” Pluck. Pluck. “I’m mixed.”

  Vic squints at him. “You don’t have to be Chinese to put rice in a box,” she says.

  They spend the rest of the ride in awkward silence. Vic asks him to drive straight to the loading bay and tips generously for the trouble, and as soon as they’re out, she makes a phone call. Some affirmatives. A precise location. They lean on the cold metal railing and wait.

  “I’m crashing,” Elliot says.

  “Fifteen minutes. Then you can vomit in the bushes or whatever you gotta do.”

  He grimaces. “I’m not going to vomit.”

  “‘Course not.” She fishes around in her bag for a pack of cigarettes, lights one, inhales. Elliot waits for her to ask if he smokes, but she doesn’t ask. She has a lot of preconceptions. Eventually, he sits on the ground and tucks his knees into his damp jacket.

  If he were a better person, he would have soaked his jeans in vomit half an hour ago. This isn’t clinical distance. It’s pure acedia, the cruelest type of out-of-body experience. A decent human being would howl his remorse to whatever deity is listening, but all Elliot can think is I don’t need to be here. I should’ve taken the cab home.

  Vic’s no better, with her hands shoved deep in her pockets and a cigarette puckered between her thin lips. She’s worse. She’s a murderer. At least Elliot pushed for the hospital.

  The door swings open. He scrambles to his feet.

  Doctor Frost kicks the stopper into place and adjusts his tie. “About time.” He catches sight of Elliot and shoots him a self-satisfied grin. “It’s good to see you up and about.”

  “You’re the buyer?” He squints at Frost like it’s not a rhetorical question, like his face might peel off at any moment to reveal a more likely candidate. “I can’t believe you. This is the most reckless, egotistical bullshit I’ve ever had the misfortune to take part in.”

  “There’s no need to be melodramatic.”

  He scoffs. “If you wanted to teach me a lesson, you could’ve handled it like a fucking adult. And by the way, what the hell was wrong with my kidney?”

  Vic shoulders her way between them. “Check the organ first, then send the money. Latzke’s done being generous.”

  “I was talking to him,” Elliot snaps.

  “I don’t want to be out here too long.” She takes the cooler from his hand and passes it to Frost, along with a few sheets of paper. “Here’s her blood work. The boss says if this one ain’t good enough, he can’t continue doing business.”

  Frost scowls.

  She raises her arms and adds, “Don’t fuck the messenger, man.”

  He unzips the cooler, flips on his phone flashlight, and peers inside. He jostles the kidney around for a moment and says, “This will do.” Then he pokes at his phone screen.

  Elliot fumes. Frost doesn’t need more money; he has no goddamn reason to involve himself. He’s only doing it because he can. The asshole.

  “Your receipt,” Frost says, brandishing the phone in Vic’s face. “Pleasure as always.”

  She grabs Elliot’s bicep and turns to leave, but he shrugs her off.

  “Frost, we’re not done here. You referred me?”

  “Of course not. Herr Latzke contacted me and I told him the truth. Had I known you’d take offense, I would have told him you’re an abysmal student.” He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose, pauses mid-gesture, tilts his head. “Ah, I nearly forgot. I have something for you.” He glances from Elliot to Vic and back again. “Can you wait?”

  “If it’s some book on bedside manner, you can shove it up your ass.”

  Frost smirks. “No, you’ll like this. I’ll just be a moment.”

  Elliot’s ‘defective’ kidney sits in a styrofoam take-out container on the curb. A poor consolation prize, but better than nothing. He sits next to it, hunched over the sewer grate.

  “Does this get easier?” He asks. Vomiting is dangerous with a healing abdominal wound, but he has to release the tension somehow. To Vic’s credit, she doesn’t say ‘I told you so.’

  “I don’t like that question at all.” She flicks her cigarette butt into the gutter. “It implies you plan to do this again.”

  “For five grand? Yeah, I do,” He wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, wipes his hand on his jeans. “My mom is sick and I gave you all my savings. And you need the help.” His eyes dart toward the grate. “I mean, we make a good team.”

  She grunts.

  “I can’t go back to class on Monday.”

  “I’ve heard Oregon is nice.”

  Elliot’s stomach spasms. He sits back on his heels and gazes over a sea of asphalt. Though the ER is never empty, there are only a few cars out tonight, nestled among the grassy islands topped with saplings. The hospital ran some sort of green campaign in his first year, but instead of reducing emissions or, god forbid, putting some windows in patients’ rooms, they spent a thousand bucks planting sad little trees in the parking lot.

  “It doesn’t get easier,” Vic says. “If you’re feeling guilty now, wait until you kill somebody—or, sorry. Let someone die.” She drags her duffel closer and retrieves a small, silver flask, takes a swig. “I got ulcers. Didn’t go away ‘til I went to confession.”

  “I don’t believe in that stuff.”

  She smiles. “Ulcers?”

  “My mom’s half paralyzed, my dad left, and my brother’s in prison,” Elliot says. “No one’s looking out for me but me.”

  “You don’t have to believe she’s good. Nobody in AA bought the benevolent creator shit, but it still worked for a lot of them, just acknowledging a higher p
ower.”

  Elliot glares at her drink.

  “Your mileage may vary,” she adds, raising her flask.

  When Elliot gets home, before he even removes his shoes, he opens his styrofoam box under the dim bathroom light. The pink lump inside smells like raw steak marinating in piss, but he can’t help himself—he picks it up with his bare hands. His kidney is small and cold and denser than he expects, and when his fingers slip across its slick surface, the bathroom dissolves. This thing was inside him.

  More inspiring: it isn’t inside him anymore. Elliot can finally see himself in the third person, as intended.

  So his kidney floats in a jar and drinks isopropanol. He maintains that it isn’t dysfunctional, but it’s been sitting around long enough that he can’t say for sure. No use worrying about it now. Its previous home, Elliot’s retroperitoneum, is already full of liver and bowel and other organs that have no business being there. Nature abhors a vacuum.

  Over the course of the following week, Elliot avoids Frost and tends to his mother while the preservative bleaches his kidney ghostly white. The pantry runs low. He takes notes, administers amphetamine salts, and studies through sunrise.

  He doesn’t find much time to think about Vic or Destiny until the postman slips a check through the slot in the front door. He pays their bills. He builds mental spreadsheets to accommodate his prospective freedom: he averaged $750 an hour. If this were a full-time job, it’d pay a quarter of his student loan in one workweek. He’d be a millionaire in six months.

  And even if Destiny died in the hospital, he did his due diligence. She was a drug addict and probably a prostitute. She had no quality of life.

  By Monday morning, white sediment veils his guilty kidney.

  Chapter 11

  Things change when people witness death. The shrunken, shriveled world inflates with blood and starts pumping. You realize the doors and windows have always been open.

  After Jake’s mental breakdown, his father got him another job as an annuities operations assistant. It didn’t pay as well as the one that caused the breakdown. In most respects, it was worse.

  On paper, his job was to service various financial contracts, and paper was all he did: printing and scanning and shredding and printing. He could service that copier better than he could service his own dick. Six months in, he was in the subway, on his way to work with a briefcase full of paper. There was this homeless guy perched on the steps—not unusual—but as Jake drew nearer, he saw the whites of his eyes, the skin draped over his bones like a decayed tablecloth, the whipped cream spit dripping down his face. Nobody else stopped, so Jake stopped.

  The 911 operator told him not to start compressions. He had to do something—this was a human person, dying like an animal while everyone walked past—so he set down his briefcase and talked to the guy about some Lifetime movie he saw, the one where the kid finds a one-legged dog and hides it from his parents. He can’t afford to bring it to the vet so he just carries it around everywhere, and at the end, he escapes from his abusive stepfather and raises money to buy a little doggy wheelchair. Jake was still talking about that when the guy drained out of his own eyes and stopped moving.

  And then the paramedics showed up and asked if he knew the guy, and he said no, and they asked if he had a train to catch, and Jake said I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t know.

  He flushed his Lithium because it made him feel the way that guy looked, all scrunched-up and empty. He couldn’t stomach two weeks’ notice. He just left.

  That’s the change his friends need in their lives. That’s what he’s thinking about as he seals the gallon jug of Hawaiian Punch, and that’s what they’re talking about when they say:

  Elevate them. Make them understand.

  The leather seats creak as Jake plants his ass in the Nissan. His morning bump wasn’t enough to keep him focused on the road. Though coffee is cheap, Jake has always hated the taste, so he grabs an energy drink and two jelly donuts from the QuikFill and he stuffs the donut in his mouth at the pump and he chokes it down with a gulp of Raxxberry Rebel and everything is going to be fine. Ash is fast asleep in the passenger seat. Jake leaves his donut in his lap. Then it’s suburbs trickling into farmland, forest, mobile homes. People burn leaves in their backyards. The pistol burns white-hot in his waistband.

  They’re quiet today, which leaves plenty of space to untangle what-ifs and cut them into neat lines on the dashboard. What if nobody shows up? What if he’s crazy? What if someone calls the cops and everything goes to shit?

  No. Let it rest. He listens to talk radio and smiles forcibly to himself. When the announcer starts reading his browsing history aloud, he flips the channel. It’s that easy.

  Rose’s beat-up sedan is parked to the side of the furrowed dirt driveway, its rear bumper spattered with mud. She and Mocha the human are unloading, zombified.

  Camp smells wet and living and dead; saplings sprout from soil fertilized by layers and layers of decay. He hasn’t been here since hunting season two years ago, when he stole the key. He always forgets the perfect, clean silence. Like the newts and crayfish he stashed in plastic containers as a child, it doesn’t survive once removed from its habitat.

  As soon as he exits the vehicle, Mocha the terrier is yapping and nipping at his heels. He picks her up and spins her around before settling her against his shoulder.

  “Did you manage to pick up?” Rose greets him with a dull side hug, which is really an excuse to snatch the dog.

  “Yeah, but let’s get inside first. It’s fucking freezing.” He spins around to find Ash with the makeshift kill kit slung over his shoulder, his mouth ringed with powdered sugar. Without thinking, Jake swipes the sleeve of his hoodie across his face. Big mistake. Touching is a hard no, but Ash doesn’t flinch this time; he only laughs and licks the last specks of sweetness from his lips as they trudge toward the cabin.

  “So, this is me,” Jake says, opening the door. It isn’t him and Ash knows that, so he probably shouldn’t have said it. Just nerves. Someone he’ll never meet poured love into these lacquered cabinets and kitschy antler coat hooks. When the recession hit, his father bought this place for pennies on the dollar and paid contractors to gut it like a deer carcass. He kept the coat hooks, but only because they’re irreversibly bonded to a load-bearing wall.

  “You got pills, then?” Rose asks.

  “Yeah, sorta.” He sets his stash box on the manufactured, raw wood dining table.

  “What’s sorta?”

  “Well, Gavin isn’t selling pills anymore, I guess. This is the real deal.”

  Her eyebrows draw together.

  “He said it’s not cut, but everybody says that so you should start really easy, even if you smoke. Here’s the—actually, let me hang on to the bag.” If he passes it over now, they’ll find an excuse to leave in the next twenty minutes. “I’ll put some in foil for you.”

  She and Mocha give him that junkie stare he first saw in Trainspotting. At the time, he assumed it was just for dramatic effect. He flips on the radio.

  When our phoenix crumbles into ashes, God won’t be around to watch.

  And there’s his name again. Everywhere. Always.

  You don’t get an explanation, hope you weren’t expecting much.

  He tosses their foil packet on the table and says, “Alright, have fun. I’m gonna start a fire. Ash, c’mere. You ever been camping?”

  “We did bonfire nights at Holy Trinity,” Ash says, slipping out the screen door. “It was nothing like this, though.”

  “I’ve never been real camping. Just this rich people shit with a cabin and electricity, y’know.” He crouches by the pit. “Find me some little sticks, would you? Dry ones.”

  Ash gives him this benign, honeyed smile and drifts into the forest. Too bad he’s only like this on his deathbed.

  Jake splits logs. Yeah, he’s lanky and weighs about one-forty, but he can split a log like nobody’s fucking business, especially on speed. He sniffs s
ome speed.

  Spread your legs, plant your feet. Grip the base with one hand and slide the other down the shaft as you swing. Drunk uncle Jeremy taught him this. Since he maintained the cabin in the off season, Arthur and the good old boys had to let him tag along on their hunting trips. Like Jake, he was a necessary shadow.

  Swing, crack. Swing, crack.

  Black smoke congeals at the edges of his vision—pulsing, motionless. His muscles know what it would feel like to sink this wedge of metal into someone’s skull. He piles up logs and slams his axe into each one in turn.

  Shockwaves travel through air and soil to find Ash, sitting on a carpet of lichen, watching the wind animate ferns. His jeans are soaked. It’s been a wet, frigid spring, and they couldn’t have picked worse weather for camping, but he belongs out here. Birds nest in the wire-frame branches, insulating themselves with dead leaves and scraps of plastic bags. Squirrels lose acorns and plant trees.

  The forest lives and dies without spectacle, and in its shelter, martyrdom seems a little pathetic. He could die alone in this clearing. He could sink into soil until his flesh sloughs off his bones and maggots polish them to a sheen, and it wouldn’t change anything.

  He entertains the fantasy for a minute more before brushing himself off and carrying his sticks back to camp, painfully aware of the moisture soaking through his canvas sneakers. Jake is leaping around the fire pit, cursing at logs from every conceivable angle. Behind him, a gleaming axe protrudes from the clearing’s lone pine tree.

  “Hey,” Ash says. “That’s…a lotta sticks.”

  His head snaps up. There’s an uncanny delay between recognition and his wide, toothy grin. “Some of those are way too thick to work as kindling. I need to split them.” He tucks the bundle of felled branches under his arm and wrenches the axe free. The steel is magnetic; Ash can’t tear his eyes away. Jake lays the largest branch on the chopping block.

  He could shove his head underneath at the last second. Split his skull open, call it a freak accident.

 

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