by Ezra Blake
She’s taller than him, and she stands up straighter, even when she can barely stand. At seven years old, Chris already knows better than his father—he knows that whatever they’re talking about, this is not the time. He’s not yet old enough to understand how low men will stoop in desperation.
A sliver of light catches her face as she steps around the decrepit air conditioning unit. Her dark hair is unwashed, alive and twisting like tendrils of smoke. Her lips are pale.
“You shouldn’t have stopped me,” she says. “Children drown all the time.”
“Em,” his father groans. “Please, I’m still here, Em. Nothing you could do would stop me loving you. Even that.” His chest is tight, but he can’t cry now. Chris cries for him, black tears dripping through his fingers and onto the moldy carpet.
She takes a step forward; he takes a step back and says, “Just do this for me. Extra fifty a week and we could eat fresh fruit after your loans go out.”
“Have you seen the news, William? EMT shot dead on a false call. Drug seekers. Just last week.”
“It won’t happen twice,” he says, sounding less than sure of himself. “Em, baby, I’m on my knees here. The boy needs to eat.”
He blinks away a strangers’ tears. Within seconds of waking he’s blacked everything out with printers’ ink; he’s left alone, lonely, blank. It isn’t happening now.
What’s happening now is a thud on the door and a smell like wood shavings. He mumbles something indistinct, which Ivan takes as permission to enter. “I have a surprise for you,” he says.
Chris props himself against the headboard and skims Ivan’s body with red, sunken eyes. He’s wearing clean clothes. His hair is slicked back. He’s even scraped the blood out from beneath his fingernails.
“Where’s your leg?”
He tilts his chin toward the bathroom. Ivan retrieves the prosthetic and buckles it on, lays a tender kiss on his knee. “Come with me,” he says.
Chris shuffles after him, still naked and absent. Through the kitchen—the lights are off; nothing is cooking—and into the wine cellar, to the door on the far wall. Ivan turns to him and says, “Open it. It’s unlocked.”
Behind the door, he’ll find Joy strung up like a puppet on meat hooks. She’s split open and spilled out, or chopped and sewn together wrong, and Ivan has surely detached her forearm and repurposed it into a grotesque phallus, fist clenched, jutting from her pubic mound.
But the monstrosity behind the door is not Joy. It’s made of wood.
It’s a hideous mess of raw pine and the remains of a dismembered drawing table, joined together with frosting-thick layers of wood glue, disfigured dovetail joints, misshapen tenons and horrible mortices. It’s supposed to be a coffin. Not a box-shaped casket; a real coffin, hugging the corpse’s shoulders in its diamond embrace.
“What do you think?” Ivan asks.
His gaze is locked on the half-inch discrepancy between the coffin’s two parallel planes.
“It’s…” He looks up at Ivan. He can’t bring himself to say the word ‘hideous.’
Ivan nods, taking this in stride. “You’re the carpenter’s son, after all, but I did what I could,” he says. “Look at her, Christopher.”
He steps closer to the metal table upon which the coffin rests, braces himself, and peers over the edge. Joy is intact. No meat hooks, no autopsy, no forearm-phallus. She looks pale and soft and slightly purpled in places, but her hair is clean and springy. Her eyes and neck have been sewn neatly shut. Her lips are parted as if in a contented sigh. She could almost be sleeping.
He turns to Ivan, a thousand questions vying for space in his mouth, and Ivan says, “You’re right. She was innocent.”
“I don’t…”
“I’ve thought long and hard about this issue. If you only torture sinners, I’m willing to respect that preference. There’s no shortage.” He lays a hand on Christopher’s shoulder. “Would you like to be alone with her?”
“No,” Chris says, though he wants nothing more in the world. “No. Stay.”
Ivan nods and leans against the cinderblock wall. They both know what will happen if he takes a moment alone: Chris will fail this test of obedience, and it will be catastrophic. After all, he is exclusively homosexual. Ivan decided.
He stands on his toes to peer once more over the edge. Joy is naked. Her belly and breasts are pillows of loose skin, streaked with the lightning-bolt stretch marks of childbirth—was she a mother? Who else did she leave behind? He takes her cold hand in his and tilts it back and forth in the light, examining its shifting translucence.
“How long have you known her?” Ivan asks.
Her blue veins seem to float to the surface, buoyant in death’s viscous silence. “We met on Monday.”
“Introduction to abduction in less than a week. I’m almost impressed.”
“I was going to end it.”
“Why?”
His gaze flits to Ivan. “You know why.”
He unfolds his crossed arms and steps forward to wrap them around Christopher’s waist. He stiffens. Ivan’s lips brush the nape of his neck. “For me,” he murmurs. “My poor little martyr…”
Chris braces a foot on the table’s crossbeam and lifts himself up, out of Ivan’s grasp. With his knees crammed onto the narrow ledge alongside the coffin, he dips inside and brushes a strand of hair from her face.
“Get in.” The voice is low and rough behind him but when he looks, Ivan is stoic. “Do it. I know you love her.”
“We were friends.”
“Perhaps, but you love her now.”
He leans a little further over the edge. The faint scent of decay lingers in her hair, sweet and rancid.
“We leave in the morning, you know. Get in,” he says. “Before I change my mind.”
Chis hesitates. It sounds like permission, but what if it isn’t? Asking is wrong—he must assert his autonomy. Declining could be seen as disobedience. He lives in that impasse for a small eternity, breathing her, his thumbs smoothing down her clavicles.
Finally, Ivan cups the back of his skull and guides him downward.
Her lips are cold and Ivan is always right: he loves her in this moment. She is María the dancer and Emily Dour. She’s every woman from every dreamed lifetime Chris has mourned upon waking. She’s Joy, and she tastes like blood and black coffee.
Chapter 18
Elliot leaves them with a care sheet, his cell number, and instructions to give Ash whatever they have for pain. He tries once more to pawn off Vic’s smack, but Jake declines. He siphons off a little for his personal medical kit, just in case. He counts and re-counts their cash while Vic writes up an incident report which nobody will ever read. His veins bulge from his forearms, coursing with newfound vitality, and he’s inside, inhabiting himself. It’s good.
“So this is my cut?” He asks, brandishing one thousand, two hundred and fifty dollars in Vic’s face.
She turns away from her laptop and plucks the fifties from his hand. “That’s your cut,” she says, gesturing to the remainder. “The rest goes to Latzke.”
“But I found the client. He doesn’t even know about this.”
“Who do you think the report is for?”
Elliot balks. “You don’t have to send that.”
“Too late.” She snaps her computer shut and turns to face him. “Relax, okay? He’s not pocketing that money. Think of it like taxes.”
“Isn’t the whole point that—”
“Look,” she says, brushing her hair out of her face. “Latzke takes care of his people. He put me through private rehab twice. We get caught, we get hurt—doesn’t matter if it’s a gunshot or gallstones—he pays. That’s why we give him a cut.”
Elliot slips the money into his pocket and paces to the window. Plants force their stalks through cracks in the sidewalk below. They react genetically to their habitats, and each generation is better at growing through concrete. “So…it’s kind of like a gang, isn’t it?” He turns
around and flashes Vic a smile. “I don’t mind twenty percent anyway. It’s more than I’d make at a part-time job, and if we’re doing this even once a month, I could—”
“You want some coffee?” Vic asks, banging open one of the garish, avocado-green cupboards. “You’ll need to get moving soon if you’re gonna make it to class.” She sets the kettle on the hot plate and starts pouring instant coffee into mugs.
“I’m not going today.”
She sighs, turns off the hotplate, and pinches the bridge of her nose. Is she older or younger than his mother? It’s hard to tell by wrinkles alone. White women don’t age the same, and besides, his mom’s skin is perfect. She hasn’t seen sunlight in a decade.
“Do you know why I’m doing all this?” Vic asks. “The black market shit?”
“Good pay and benefits. And you lost your license.”
“I’m doing it because I have to. You fuck up, you become a pariah in this field, then you talk to Latzke. You don’t need this. Focus on school.”
“I’m not a child. I’ve been balancing responsibilities my whole life and I know how—”
“One time I did a rhinoplasty on this gorgeous woman,” she says. “Supermodel gorgeous, just stunning. This is back when I was practicing. During our consultation, she told me I should get surgery too because I look like a horse. You know what I did to her nose?”
Elliot crosses his arms.
“Shaved off the bump, like she asked. Everyone deserves your best standard of care.”
“So you won’t work with me because I’m not nice enough?”
“It’s not about me and you as partners. It’s about your future.”
“Keep preaching,” he spits. “I’m just a dumb kid, right? Can’t look out for myself?”
“That’s not what I said. You’re smart, but you’re not—”
“Not as smart as you. Yeah, I get it.”
“You’re smarter than me, and you’ll be a better doctor than I ever was,” she says, “as long as you don’t get arrested first.”
“Saint Victoria,” he sneers. “Thank you for your fucking blessing.”
Vic bites her lip and replaces the battered mugs on their shelf. He never noticed the yellow cast to her teeth before. She says, “I give a shit about you, Elliot. That’s why I don’t want to see you again.”
“Great.” He stalks to the door. “The feeling isn’t mutual.”
So he walks an hour home, half-hoping to get mugged. He’s never been in a fight, but now is as good a time as any to start. Elliot will open his bag and display the ziplock full of ice and severed cock to all the men loitering on their Broad Street stoops, to the addicts selling Newports for fifty cents a piece, and it will say, fuck with me. I dare you.
Nobody fucks with him. He knocks on the door with an armful of groceries and then lets himself in anyway. In their shitty Section 8 condo, Elliot’s mom lies in bed with the blinds closed and the lights off, reading People by the glow of the television. It means she listened. Reading in the dark doesn’t make you go blind.
“Elliot Alvarez.” She sets down her magazine, pauses for emphasis. “Where the hell have you been?”
He’s struck by deja vu—have they been talking themselves in circles, reliving the same conversation ad nauseam? If so, will the same excuses work on repeat?
“I was studying,” he says.
“I wasn’t born yesterday.”
He sighs. “Okay. I was at a friend’s house.”
“A friend’s house? What friend?”
“Her name’s Victoria. Mom, I got tons of groceries. What do you wanna eat?”
“Aren’t you supposed to be in class? I dunno where you’re finding all this free time to see friends.” He passes her a cold turkey wrap, and her brow softens. “What’s gotten into you?”
His mind drifts to the trophy in the vegetable drawer of their fridge. “I just have a lot going on right now,” he says. “I was thinking, mom, maybe we should hire someone to help out at home.”
“You know we can’t afford that.”
“Yeah, but what if we could? What if I got a part-time job or something?”
She unwraps her meal and picks it apart with her manicured nails. “I don’t know about that,” she says. “I don’t want some stranger in my house. And besides, I need you home. Almost feels like you’ve been avoiding me. Nothing’s been the same since—”
“I’m not avoiding you,” he says. “Shelf exams are coming up, so I have a lot to study this week, but I’ll do my best to be here when I can.” He steps closer to give her an insincere kiss on the cheek, but pauses when his forehead brushes her damp hair. “Mom, did you take a bath?”
“You weren’t here to do it.”
“I thought you couldn’t—”
“I have the chair, Eli, but it’s hard.”
He hesitates for a moment, glancing at the doorknob. “Okay. I’ll check back in a few hours.”
“Wait, wait,” she says. “I never get to see you. Sit.” Elliot doesn’t move, and she adds, “Please?”
So he joins her on the bed. Her warmth drains the tension from his shoulders, despite his best efforts. “I wanted to talk about something,” she says. “I’ve been doing some research. I know you want to get top surgery before we do anything downstairs, but I found a doctor who—”
“No,” he says. “I told you, I don’t want to do that. We can’t even afford my school fees.”
“We could get a loan.” She offers a weak half-smile. “There’s a charity that does low-interest loans for this sort of thing.”
He stands. “I said no, Mom. Jesus.”
“You know,” she pauses. “You look just like your father when you’re angry.”
Elliot slams the door.
This is a moment for slow breath, contemplation, reassessment. Elliot would rather die than reassess, so he shoves the full grocery bags in the fridge, grabs his backpack, and locks himself in his room. His mom always gets on this fucking surgery kick when he’s away for too long—she must love the idea of him bedridden alongside her.
She wasn’t always so afraid. What happened to the vibrant, energetic woman who rolled her chair to the grocery store, the laundromat, and all of Travis’s parent-teacher meetings? Who fed pigeons and talked to strangers?
It’s a useless train of thought, and it’ll crash if he doesn’t stop now. He isn’t contemplating. He knows damn well what happened.
Elliot attacks his laundry and reorganizes his bookshelf. Once he starts, he might as well clean the kitchen, stock the cupboard, and cook dinner simultaneously. He might as well badger his mother about physical therapy and give up and leave her with a plate of burnt chicken and undercooked potatoes and lock himself in again. He might as well have a bump of Adderall—after all, he should be studying.
He catches himself ten minutes later with his hand down his pants. He’s going to fail at this rate, but he can’t focus and his dick is throbbing. Elliot is a man, with or without phalloplasty. He has a cock.
It’s in the fridge downstairs.
There is no delay between the thought and the action; he rushes to the fridge and retrieves his prize, locks the door, shimmies out of his jeans. Opens the bag. It looks like an albino sea slug. It’s shriveled, even smaller now that it’s detached—not the cock he’d design for himself, but a cock nonetheless. He strips down to his binder and underwear and stands in front of his warped full-length mirror, holding the penis against his briefs. He looks like a goddamn clown.
It looks better inside his underwear, its severed end mashed against his hard clit. In a timeline where genetics didn’t screw him over, it could be his.
Fuck that—it’s already his. He took it.
He mounts a pillow and presses his bulge against the fabric, concentrating on the soft, squishy flesh under his clit, the slow drip of fluid and fat from the base. His head throbs in time with his heartbeat. Sweaty handprints soak into his comforter. If anyone found out about this, they wouldn’t
dare mock him. The cock is his, and the pillow is someone who can’t fight back, and nobody—not Vic, or Frost, or his mother—will ever, ever humiliate him again.
He comes. Speed makes orgasm feel uncomfortably compulsive, a brief flood of dopamine followed by enduring emptiness. For a few minutes, he lies face-down and catches his breath. When he works up the nerve to remove his underwear, he grimaces at the brown, shiny stain.
Ash’s cock slips out onto the bed. It looks like something a butcher would discard. His body is numb, his brain is TV static, and the dick is ruined. He can’t use it again.
In the end, he puts it in a mason jar and adds it to the collection. He showers. He scrubs his cunt until it looks like an open wound. By then the sun is rising, but he’s too exhausted to move, too alert to sleep. He gives up and takes more Adderall.
The shelf exam is coming up soon, and he should study, but his internal camera is broken, and he can’t commit the pages of his textbook to memory. Reading is impossibly tedious. He stares into space until his alarm chimes. It’s been weeks since he slept well.
At the hospital, every sound is an echo of an echo, and his notes won’t stay between the lines of his yellow legal pad, so he doses himself again in the bathroom. He’s running out of pills. Sooner or later, he’ll have to cut some of these obligations out of his life.
Their first patient presents with obscure gastrointestinal bleeding, meaning they don’t know why the hell it’s happening, and Frost is always irritated when he’s uncertain. “This test is a bidirectional endoscopy,” he says, with direct eye contact. “Assuming it comes up negative, what’s our next test?”
“Capsule endoscopy,” Elliot says.
Frost never congratulates correct answers; he just moves on. “Capsule endoscopy examines three portions of the small intestine. What are they?”
Amy fucking Shearman answers first. “The duodenum, the ileum, and…um…”
“The jejunum,” Elliot says.
He doesn’t even nod. He says, “Mrs. Kauffman, I’m going to put this bite block in your mouth to protect your teeth. I need you to take slow, deep breaths through your nose.” Their patient accepts the hollow, pacifier-shaped device into her mouth, and God bless Mrs. Kauffman for letting them turn her traumatic procedure into a game of Trivial Pursuit.