by Jan Carson
The sound of a shotgun emptying into the tiny boxed room was the loudest thing Malcolm had ever heard. Instinctively he covered his eyes and ears. The smell sneaked through, sharp and metallic as a thousand fireworks recently spent. The inside of his ears clogged up with the memory of gunfire. He heard, as if through a blanket, Irene wheedling over and over, ‘I thought you might want a coffee, I thought you might want a coffee,’ Nate Grubbs, crumpled behind the bedroom door, screaming like a stuck child, and from the floor, directly in front of the wardrobe, the ungodly silence of Cunningham Holt. The silence was by far the worst.
Malcolm Orange opened his eyes, hands first and then eyelids, undrawing like leaden blinds. Cunningham Holt was leaking all over the bedroom carpet. A black, red hole, ragged and raging as the unplugged mouth of a volcano, had eaten up the centre of his belly. Blood was around him and over him and hovering from the ceiling in demonic constellations of dots and drags. His mouth moved up and down, in and out, as if attempting to chew on something much too big to swallow. No words came out. Malcolm Orange recognized death as it lay beside him heaving laboriously. He had, over the years, witnessed the untimely death of many, many old people. In the final instance they had all gone quietly. Blood and guns were a brand-new evil. Malcolm Orange did not know how to manage such a messy death. He placed both hands like wide-fingered butterflies over the wound and attempted to stem the bleed. After a few minutes Nate Grubbs sobered up and ran, as quickly as his lumbago would allow, to Bill and Irene’s for backup. Irene remained, hovering in the corner, mopping the blood and coffee stains with a pillow slip as she continued to mutter her mantra, ‘I thought you might want a coffee, I thought you might want a coffee.’
Malcolm Orange ignored her. None of this could be corrected by apportioning blame. As he held his friend’s insides together he prayed to the Jesus God, a torrent of his own homemade prayers: prayers for healing and wholeness, prayers for miracles, prayers like Band-Aids for the disappearing.
Nothing changed. Each minute Cunningham Holt seemed further deflated; a snowman settling into the thaw. When the last bloody gush had left him and the burgundy halo quit expanding beneath his back, Cunningham Holt gave a little shiver, a noise as slight and insignificant as gravel settling. His left marble loosed itself and rolled down his cheek, onto the carpet and under Nate Grubbs’ bed. The empty eye socket stared up at Malcolm. He could see the blood and muscles; jaundiced, white knots supporting a ham-pink cave. Malcolm Orange prayed all the louder for the empty eye. As he prayed, turning every so often to check if help had arrived, Cunningham Holt escaped through his fingers, royal red and sticky, staining his shorts and sneakers with an unwashable darkness.
It was decades before the door finally opened. The relief, when it arrived, was solid enough to swallow. In the interim the years had fallen off Malcolm Orange until he found himself a small child, desperate to defer responsibility to any consenting adult. He’d expected salvation to come in the form of an ambulance, or at very least Roger Heinz, who boasted regularly of surgical procedures performed, blind and without anesthetic, in Army field hospitals. Instead, he pivoted, arms still implanted in Cunningham Holt’s stomach, to find his mother, framed in the doorway, an enormous electric wheelchair lodged in the hallway behind her. The shock caused him to topple backwards into the offending wardrobe. His mother gave him no time to recover.
‘Get him in the wheelchair, Malcolm!’ she said firmly.
‘Where have you been, mama?’ Malcolm fired back. There were a hundred thousand questions, prickling like unburst popcorn kernels, at the back of his head.
‘No time for questions, Malcolm. Get Cunningham into the wheelchair, now. We need to get him out of here.’
As Malcolm, Martha and Cunningham Holt’s supine corpse zipped across the cul-de-sac, the People’s Committee for Remembering Songs emerged from Bill and Irene’s to amble arthritically behind them. They made for an odd-looking parade; the blind, the halt, the doddering lame and the disappearing, trundling after an almost dead man in a stolen wheelchair. Their route took them past Miss Pamela Richardson as she sat, upended in the middle of the turn circle, lamenting the recent loss of her electric wheelchair. The wheelchair had been liberated minutes earlier, a sacrifice for the greater good of the group. Martha Orange had instigated the theft. This, it was later noted, was the slightest and most excusable of her recent crimes.
Having intercepted Nate Grubbs on his frantic dash from Chalet 3 to 11, Malcolm’s mother had made a quick assessment of the situation. An ambulance seemed the most sensible option available. However, Martha Orange, confused by the old man’s mumbled hysterics, instinctively wished to protect her eldest son from the possibility of a manslaughter charge. ‘Let’s not get the authorities involved,’ she’d announced, utilizing every ounce of false bravado still available to a child dumper, caught in the act of flight. ‘We’ll take Cunningham to the Center. They’ll be able to sort him out in the Center.’ Nate Grubbs, who was well-aware of the kind of shit the shotgun had landed him in, readily agreed. Mere seconds later Pamela Richardson had cruised down her driveway, patchwork quilt tucked around her wizened knees in anticipation of an afternoon nap. ‘We’ll need something to transport Cunningham,’ Martha Orange had muttered, her musings loaded with heavy insinuation. Without further ado, for his own scalp was on the line, Nate Grubbs tipped Miss Richardson into the turn circle and seized her electric wheelchair.
‘It’s an emergency!’ he’d yelled as he fled the scene of the crime. ‘I’ll explain later!’
Miss Pamela Richardson was not a fortunate woman. All her life she’d suffered terribly with excessive facial hair. She was allergic to alcohol and rain, a particularly unfortunate combination for a lifetime resident of the Pacific Northwest. The years had proven her incapable of keeping a plant, pet or gentleman longer than eighteen months. Her first husband had passed away at the ungodly age of twenty-three, victim of a severe allergic reaction to cream cheese. The second husband had drowned after tripping into the touch and feel tank at Sea World, and the third, terrified by the untimely demise of husbands one and two, had run off with the mail man as soon as he caught wind of his new bride’s terrible misfortune. Miss Richardson herself had lost the use of her right leg after tumbling, nose first, from the open door of a Trimet bus and two months later caught her crutch in the mechanics of a shopping mall escalator, losing the use of her left leg in the ensuing crush.
Over time Miss Pamela Richardson had come to instinctively fear the worst. Motivated by a particularly sinister session with a Mexican fortune teller at the previous year’s Cinco de Mayo festival, she’d spent all sleeping moments since pivoting the turn circle with her electric wheelchair locked leftwards. ‘It’s like this,’ she explained to all those visitors who stopped to ask or offer assistance, ‘the Grim Reaper’s after me. I can see him coming when I got my eyes open. As long as I keep moving while I’m sleeping the old bastard won’t be able to catch up.’ On the afternoon of the shotgun incident, finding herself unceremoniously grounded before the afternoon siesta could even begin, Miss Richardson lay crumpled in the middle of the turn circle, lamenting her chronic misfortune. Like the crippled kid incapable of keeping up with the Pied Piper, she fluctuated between an enormous shame and an anger, loud as the Liberty Bell, which boomed and bled against the People’s Committee as they trooped past, too preoccupied to notice the left-behind.
Malcolm Orange, running to keep up with his mother as she steered the parade towards its unknown destination, permitted himself one final question.
‘Where are we going, mama?’
‘To the Treatment Room. It’s too late for anything else.’
‘Oh,’ said Malcolm Orange, ‘we were already going there.’ A certain symmetry had taken charge of the afternoon. Like a boomerang returning home, the People’s Committee had been dragged back to their original plan. Furthermore, Malcolm’s mother had returned to the Baptist Retirement Village, acting the responsible adult he’d long
ed to see these last few months. Malcolm Orange began to believe that everything, even the disappearing, might be fixable. If the Treatment Room lived up to its promise, he might even reconsider his longstanding grudge with God. Malcolm Orange placed a hand on the small of his mother’s back. He wanted to reassure her that he was not angry. He wanted to add his own spindly weight to the effort of pushing Cunningham Holt up the hill to the Center. He wanted to hold his mother together.
The sensation of Malcolm’s hand, resting damply at the base of her spine, was a lead weight on Martha Orange’s shoulder, a reminder that she had not returned to the Baptist Retirement Village for love or duty. Rather, the godless pursuit of her credit card and, should the opportunity arise, her winter coat.
– Chapter Twelve –
Vietnam
Trip Blue had not always been the Director of a retirement village for elderly Oregonians. Previously he’d occupied, for almost ten years, an unrivaled and exorbitantly paid position as plastic surgeon to Los Angeles’s nouveau riche. Before California there had been a brief, ladder-climbing stint as the prodigious assistant to a controversial New York-based micro-surgeon, and, before this, Vietnam.
Trip Blue had never been to Vietnam himself. He’d seen pictures. The pictures were enough to put him off and the stories sealed the deal. Trip was the kind of young man who could not go without brushing his teeth before bed. He struggled to picture himself dispersing napalm or going hand-to-hand with an angry VC. Neither did he suppose himself capable of lying around for weeks in stagnant paddy fields or, in adherence to the frontline trend, smearing peanut butter on his toes in the hope that some Vietnamese rat might bestow upon him a bite infected enough to guarantee a one-way ticket back to America.
Vietnam, Trip Blue quickly concluded, was not his sort of war. Ideally, he’d prefer something more hygienic, something snappier, with less actual death. Subsequently he’d weathered the war years from the relative comfort of a prestigious east coast academic facility. Asthma, and an entirely fabricated two-week affair with a male lab technician (luridly documented for the benefit of any draft officer skeptical enough to ask questions, in six none too convincing ‘love’ letters and a single blurred Polaroid snapshot), ensured that Trip Blue had ample excuse to avoid the draft.
Trip Blue began his medical training in the Fall of 1971 and, as the Vietnam war dribbled catastrophically into its sixth, seventh and eighth years, he’d shut his ears to the growing American unease, ignored the sea of angry placards sprouting in front of the Student Union, and focused on his education. He’d studied the medical greats for days at a time, pouring over thousand-page manuals in the dusty upper echelons of the university library. When he’d run out of books Trip began paying the more gullible undergraduates to let him practice his doctoring; first on warts and minor abrasions and later, as his confidence grew, on diabetes, eczema, broken bones and various congenital heart conditions. He learned fast. He had few disasters.
Very occasionally one of his experiments went pear-shaped. Patients passed out or went into cardiac failure. Shoulders refused to set, even under extreme manipulation. On one notable occasion, the appendix could not be located, and when, using a cigarette lighter and sterilized salad fork, Trip had finally tracked down the infected organ, it seemed attached to the intestines by a substance as elastic and unyielding as Laffy Taffy. Some situations proved themselves beyond the capability of a DIY medical student.
Trip Blue was not yet a megalomaniac. He knew when to concede defeat and on the rare occasions when he found himself out of his depths during a procedure, simply deferred to the authorities, calling ambulances, making drive-by deposits at the local ER, and silencing his victims with a hefty bursary, siphoned from one of his father’s offshore bank accounts. Many of Trip’s ‘unsuccessful’ patients were marked for life, yet more than happy to trade a kidney or minor burn for the possibility of graduating debt-free. A code of silence settled around Trip Blue’s medical research. It was not so much fear which kept his patients quiet, as an unvoiced belief that the young man was a genius; a Hippocrates or Pasteur destined to discover cures for any number of twentieth-century diseases. In lending one’s armpit or uterus to his experiments, his patients could later claim a footnote in the annals of medical history. By night Trip Blue experimented in his home-constructed operating theatre. By day he played the academic overachiever, drinking in the compulsory lectures and plaguing his professors with the kind of spiraling, sycophantic questions which had them consulting their academic superiors for satisfactory answers. Whilst no one appreciated Trip Blue as a person, students and staff alike envied him his telescopic mind.
In June 1975 Trip Blue graduated top of his class, triumphing over the three hundred scalpel-wielding junior surgeons who stood squinting beside him in their class photo. These stiffnecked men and formidable young women were the cream of the medical crop, destined for a lifetime of unsociable hours, sterile scrubs and miracle-working. Each was, for the most part, obsessed with the gravity and greatness of their vocation; gladly working weekends and holidays without asking for overtime, rarely remembering the birthdays of parents or siblings and, in moments of brave honesty, confessing that people were much easier to approach once anesthetized. Trip Blue could not have cared less about any of them. Trip found the majority of people thoroughly unnecessary. He had, however, in the final term of his final year, met and married Soren James’s mother.
Magda Mulaney first caught his eye in the science library elevator. At the time she’d been carrying an armful of molecular biology textbooks, the rims of her glasses barely visible above the topmost volume. Two days later, ten minutes into their first date in the campus coffee house, he was disappointed to discover Magda a junior librarian and not the teenage genius he’d presumed. Over their first mutual cappuccino, Magda made stilted attempts at small talk whilst Trip glared furiously from the opposite end of the couch, silently battling his own conscience.
Trip Blue did not believe in love. He could not see himself at any point in the future developing a belief in love. There was simply no scientific justification for such atrocious sentimentality. Great wealth and a strong jaw line had conspired to ensure Trip Blue would have no problems, past, present or future, in gratifying his sexual whims. He did not need a wife. However, as he dredged the last frothy drops from his coffee cup, Trip concluded a wife might help to establish his reputation as a respectable professional. He was neither particularly attracted nor repulsed by Magda. On the strength of their first date she seemed ill-inclined to question anything he said. If Trip could not have a genius for a wife, an unassuming simpleton was the next best thing. The years would prove Magda formidable beyond his initial assumptions and Trip would come to realize that libraries were not the natural habitat of docile women.
On the eve of their second date Trip kissed his not-yet-wife perfunctorily by the staff parking lot. ‘You’ll do,’ he said, observing Magda at arm’s length. Magda had laughed drily, imagining this a joke, and, four weeks after their first deeply mediocre kiss, agreed to become his wife. At the time she’d seen no further than a much-needed exodus from her parents’ duplex. Later, when the honeymoon blinkers fell off, Magda Blue wondered what exactly had attracted her to a man more driven, more ruthless and inconsiderate than any of the three hundred egocentric obsessives in his graduating class.
Dr and Mrs Blue began their married life by relocating to the suburbs of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania had never appealed to Magda. Born in Brooklyn and raised in downtown Chicago, she found the state excessively scenic and the people prone to engage in endless, circular contemplation of the weather, the church and, during the warmer months, baseball. She could not understand why her new husband’s galloping intellect had deposited them in the most backward spot on the eastern seaboard. For three years she languished in the Harrisburg lending library, a two-story prefab crouching awkwardly in the shadow of the United Methodist Church. As she stacked and stamped a lifetime’s worth of p
lastic-backed Mills and Boon novels (the library’s most popular lends, farm manuals and the Holy Bible excepted), she read her way through the complete canon of Russian literature, special-ordered from head office, and grew fat on grilled cheese sandwiches. Though far from a provincial backwater, Harrisburg was the smallest place Magda had ever lived. She felt like Gulliver lumbering over the little people every time she stepped outside. The local women, burnt out on generations of short-loan army personnel, refused to acknowledge her. Magda did not take this personally. There was a line, impassable as the Berlin Wall, separating the locals from the army wives.
However, the wives and girlfriends of the few military men still stationed at the base also kept their distance, withholding dinner party invites and acknowledging her only when they came to borrow the latest arrival from the Romance section. Magda Blue was too mortified to challenge their standoffishness. She said nothing, though her loneliness felt like a freezing fog. Everyone else’s husband had served in Vietnam: a single tour of duty, a second or, in a handful of cases, a soul-destroying third. These men suffered from night sweats and terrifying hallucinations. Their heads were full of horror stories, impossible to share. Many were missing arms, legs and large chunks of skin. They were not the men they had been on their wedding days. Their children adapted, learning to hold their laughter still for fear of a whipping belt. Their wives wore the martyred look of beleaguered patriots even as they ran their errands and emptied their trash cans and collected their buzz-cut progeny from little league. Magda Blue could not claim membership to this club. Each time she walked down Main Street she carried the shame of her draft-dodging husband, the only non-serving civilian stationed in the town’s military hospital. While it hurt to be so universally ignored, Magda refused to confront any of the women. She saw herself a traitor by marriage and could not spite the ladies their patriotic spirit. However, it was not patriotism which kept the army wives from her front door. Each of them had heard rumors of Dr Blue’s ‘experiments’ on H Wing. Gossip traveled fast in a town as tight as Phoenixville and within three months of their arrival, Trip had been branded a latter-day Mengele, and Magda, his evil muse.