by Jan Carson
Malcolm Orange stared at his mother. She was not the same person she’d been yesterday. He was not sure exactly who she was. Mrs Orange blushed under her son’s gaze; a teenage girl, awkward in her own blossoming skin. She looked beautiful and strange like a comic book hero just beginning to understand her own powers. Malcolm Orange was torn. His mother was real in a way he could barely remember and the happiness of this was so enormous and all-consuming he felt capable of having diarrhea right there on the corridor carpet, yet the other side of him – the twenty selfish percent inherited from his father – was jealous in a way he could neither explain nor ignore.
While his mother was unarguably more, Malcolm Orange seemed less with every passing second. His holes had never felt louder. By the time they arrived at the doors of the Treatment Room Malcolm was all but invisible, his T-shirt and shorts resting on the memory of a body. He caught his reflection in the fire exit door: mouse brown hair and the ghost of a grimace, floating, unanchored, on a five-foot shadow. The shock of confronting his own disappearance caused Malcolm to forget everything – Cunningham Holt, the Director, his lately absent parents – in a tremendous panic to pull himself together.
‘Can you still see me, mama?’ he cried out, holding the barely visible remains of an arm as evidence in front of his mother’s hovering nose.
‘Not now, Malcolm,’ replied Martha Orange. ‘There’s no time for your nonsense right now. We’ve got to help Cunningham before it’s too late.’
Malcolm waved his arms wildly in front of his mother with no significant effect. It was clear that Martha Orange could not or would not see her son. Malcolm suspected that she hadn’t seen him properly in months. The larger losses – husbands, cars and aging parents – had taken their toll on his mother. There was very little of Martha Orange left and the slim part still in her possession seemed better equipped for flight than the everyday understandings of motherhood. Though the idea of a flying mother was inexplicably cool, Malcolm could not help but fear that the wings would prove to be yet another means of taking her away from him. Much as he loved his mother, right now Malcolm would have swapped fifteen Marthas for a single stay-at-home mom, with Laura Ashley frocks and a mean way with macaroni cheese. Malcolm Orange required an ordinary parent with arms for carrying and occasionally holding still. Instead he’d been blessed with a winged mother and a father with wheels where his feet should have been. Under such circumstances it was a two-bit wonder he hadn’t disappeared earlier.
Considering the weight of evidence piling up on either side of his gene pool, there was little point in fighting the inevitable. With this realization, Malcolm Orange’s insides finally evaporated in sympathy: lungs, kidneys and still-throbbing heart keeping pace with his external perforations.
Empty inside and out, Malcolm Orange disappeared.
The Director unlocked the door and ushered the Secondary Unit into the Treatment Room. It was death dark inside and terribly cramped. Martha Orange, incapable now of keeping her feet on the floor, grazed her head as she entered, leaving six blonde hairs like a Passover symbol on the doorjamb. Roger Heinz and Nate Grubbs, each holding a handle of the wheelchair for support as much as sympathy, manhandled a ghost-gray Cunningham Holt over the threshold. The Director followed, locking the door behind them. When the lights came blinkering on, illuminating a square room, sparsely furnished with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, the Director did a double take.
‘What happened to the kid?’ he asked.
‘You must have locked him out in the corridor,’ replied Martha Orange, wrestling the ceiling tiles as she tried to force her feet back onto terra firma. ‘It’s probably for the best. Malcolm can be a bit of a handful.’
In the corner, knees crumpled over elbows like a discarded tissue, Malcolm Orange allowed himself the comfort of a single, invisible tear. It rolled down the invisible incline of his cheek and burrowed into the Treatment Room floor, where it joined in morose communion with the terrible sufferings of all those previously subjected to the Director’s treatment. Whilst Malcolm Orange could still see the Secondary Unit as they fumbled and fussed around Cunningham Holt, he felt certain that they could no longer see him. The prospect of disappearing alone, unnoticed in a room full of familiars, felt like the very worst kind of end. Malcolm Orange was suddenly desperate for even the smallest acknowledgment of his existence.
Crawling on hands and knees towards the room’s centre, he propped himself against Cunningham Holt’s wheelchair and reached for his friend’s hand. While he could no longer see his own arms, the feeling had not yet left him and, to Malcolm’s amazement, Cunningham’s fingers pulsed in his. The touch was barely perceivable, a medical anomaly which Scientific Investigative Research could undoubtedly have explained away, yet Malcolm Orange read in the gentle squeeze of familiar fingers an assurance that the blind man could see him far more clearly than anyone else in the room. Maneuvering himself closer to Cunningham’s ear, Malcolm wrapped his arms like bandages around his friend’s neck and in low whispers began to fill him in on the afternoon’s adventures, beginning with the shotgun closet and concluding with a hastily whispered description of the Treatment Room and its present occupants, so hell-bent busy preparing the machines necessary for a resurrection, they hadn’t noticed their corpse was conscious again.
‘Am I dying?’ asked Cunningham Holt, interrupting Malcolm mid-sentence. The second marble had come loose in transport and the loss-haunted sockets dominated his face, lending the old man the look of a Halloween corpse.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Malcolm. ‘You might be.’
‘Malcolm,’ whispered Cunningham Holt, tiny bubbles of spit and blood bobbling at the side of his mouth. ‘I don’t mind dying but don’t let me sink. Promise me, son, you won’t let me sink.’
As he spoke, his face settling into a mask of ferocious intensity, Cunningham Holt clutched Malcolm’s hand so hard he left individual fingerprints in his flesh.
‘I promise,’ said Malcolm Orange, unleashing a stream of invisible tears which trickled down the back of Cunningham Holt’s shirt and formed a damp patch at the base of his spine. It was enough to reassure the old man. His face relaxed. His fingers unclenched. Allowing his eyelids to droop like a pair of paper blinds, Cunningham Holt fell asleep. As he slept the final sleep of his very many years he dreamt tremendous dreams – high towers and hot air balloons, mountaintops and ladders – all the solid lustings of a man confident in the ground beneath his feet. Malcolm Orange, watching the risings and raspy fallings of his friend’s chest, could not help but wonder how a small boy, recently disappeared, could possibly hope to hold on to an entire adult. A promise was a promise however, and it was this promise which kept Malcolm Orange from slipping out the door when the Treatment started.
‘Clear the room for Treatment,’ cried the Director and without further ado Roger Heinz, Nate Grubbs and Malcolm’s mother joined him behind the protective glass shield in one corner of the room. Malcolm watched over Cunningham’s shoulder as the Director passed out four sets of enormous bucket headphones. It was dangerous, he concluded, for normal, healthy people to be subjected to the Treatment. The lights dimmed, illuminating Cunningham Holt in a single blond spotlight and the foggy outline of the Director and three well-cushioned spectators, insect-like in their goggles and ear protectors.
‘Right,’ said the Director, slipping into demonstration mode, ‘seeing as the patient is most likely dead.’
‘I’m not sure he’s completely dead,’ interrupted Roger Heinz.
‘Let’s take it that the patient is dead.’
‘Didn’t you bother to check?’
‘It’s simpler if he’s dead.’
‘What sort of quack doctor are you? You can’t go round assuming that your patients are dead without checking.’
‘Enough!’ yelled the Director, rapidly losing patience with Roger Heinz. ‘I’m going to assume he’s dead, or on the way out. If he’s not dead I’m not interested. He’s just another crinkly ger
iatric and God knows I’ve done enough of them in the last year. The only reason I’m here is to have a stab at raising the dead. It’s difficult in this place, I don’t get the same access to the recently dead I used to have in my old job. People are sentimental about corpses. They don’t understand that I’m not the enemy. I’m trying to help people.’
Even from a distance Malcolm could see his mother slipping away. A look of sheer, unfiltered disgust had set on her face and her wings, visible now as actual hand-sized sails, had drawn her two full feet off the floor. Opening her mouth to protest, the English words seemed to stick in her throat, and reluctant to voice such enormous disdain in beginner’s Spanish, she simply said nothing, allowing the distance to grow gradually and perceivably between herself and the horror unfolding on the floor below.
‘Right,’ continued the Director, ‘as I was saying. Seeing as the patient is already dead, I’m going to begin on a particularly high setting. I wouldn’t normally administer such a condensed dose but we only have a small window of time before rigor mortis sets in and resurrection is physically impossible.’
‘I’m not dead,’ whispered Cunningham Holt, the furor at the back of the room having roused him out of the best and final sleep of his life.
Malcolm Orange heard and gave his friend’s shoulder a reassuring squeeze. Roger Heinz and Nate Grubbs thought they heard something but swept their suspicions aside under the excuse of wishful thinking and ill-adjusted hearing aids. Martha Orange heard but there were many voices in her head competing for attention and she’d long since developed the ability to funnel out all but the loudest. Trip Blue heard, and whilst it irked him slightly that the old man was still alive, he chose to say nothing and crank the machine up to a level just one notch lower than his last ill-fated experiment on H Wing. If he couldn’t raise the dead, he reasoned, then he’d sure as hell take the opportunity to experiment on a willing victim.
‘Here we go!’ shouted the Director and, flicking the final switch, released a regular torrent of clipped computer voices through the wall-mounted speakers.
‘WISE UP,’ bleated the voices, male and female, soft, loud, melodic and harsh, in French, Spanish, Russian and Cantonese (for Trip Blue had been lately experimenting with the healing properties of foreign languages). As the speakers coated Cunningham Holt and Malcolm, crouching behind, in a brutal chorus of honesty, the floor circulated slowly beneath their feet; a turntable, forcing them to pirouette round the room in weary quarter-time. Malcolm Orange felt no discernible reaction to the Treatment. The floor beneath his feet was not yet spinning fast enough to induce nausea. The piped words were irritating but no more so than the incessant gargle of his mother’s Mexican soaps which she insisted upon watching at full volume. However, Cunningham Holt was not faring so well. Three full revolutions into the Treatment with no significant change in his condition, he began to become agitated. Gripping the arms of his wheelchair, he tried to draw his wizened knees up to meet his chin as if pulling away from some imagined horror.
‘It’s started,’ he hissed. ‘I can feel the water nipping at my ankles. It’s getting higher. Don’t let me sink, son. Promise me now, Malcolm, promise you won’t let me sink.’
‘Don’t worry, Cunningham,’ whispered Malcolm. ‘I’ll hold on to you.’
Struggling to his feet, Malcolm Orange hooked his elbows under the old man’s armpits and attempted to wrestle him upright. Cunningham Holt was a big man. Even in old age Malcolm guessed him to weigh something close to a two-seater sofa. It took sheer force of will and big time cursing to get Cunningham Holt approximately vertical but Malcolm managed. From behind their protective glass screen the spectators watched on in amazement as the patient appeared to rise, with great deliberation, from his wheelchair and stand unaided in the middle of the Treatment Room floor.
‘It’s working!’ shouted the Director, permitting himself a single celebratory air punch. ‘I’m going to crank it up one more notch, see if we can’t get the guy walking again.’
The other three said nothing. They still didn’t trust the Director. It was quite clear that he had no regard for Cunningham or any of his other patients. However, his was the only hope on offer this afternoon and they kept their concerns to themselves and tried to see the rudimentary evidence of a resurrection in the awkward way Cunningham Holt was now wobbling around the Treatment Room. This was not the miracle the People’s Committee had been angling for. Even from a distance Martha and the two men could tell all was not well with their friend. Granted, he had risen unassisted from his wheelchair, but his legs now trembled frantically like overstretched piano strings. His head drooped against his chest at the most unperceivable angle and the gasping hole in the centre of his sternum continued to leak black-red blood in half-hearted trickles. Cunningham Holt seemed more than likely to die right under their noses, flat of foot and pirouetting slowly like a music box ballerina, the perfect picture of a bitter end.
‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’ asked Martha Orange quietly.
The longer the Treatment continued the more falteringly unsteady Cunningham appeared to be. Great drops of sweat the size and shape of boiled candy were now dripping from his brow, forming a puddled testimony around about his brogues. Martha Orange had suffered enough to recognize a fellow martyr. The compassionate part of her conscience told her to intervene. However, when all three of the men – for reasons ranging from fear to overleaping ambition – chose to disregard her, she allowed this small hiccup of compassion to dissipate. Worse things had happened in Texas. Despite the niggling notion that this was just the moment for an intervention, Martha Orange decided (with the same nonchalance that had kept her riding shotgun through the last fifteen unraveling years) that it was easier not to get involved. It was only when Malcolm began to materialize, arms and shoulders fizzling into focus like a recently tuned television set, that Martha Orange realized there would be no choice in the matter. Maternal instinct came thundering over her, defying flight and fear and long-grounded apathy. Martha Orange was compelled to come back down to earth and intervene.
– Chapter Fourteen –
All Things Go
Malcolm Orange had never done well with rotation.
At the age of eight, under the auspices of Scientific Investigative Research, he’d borrowed the Usborne Book of Science Experiments for Grade Schoolers from the children’s department of the Milwaukee Central Library. When the Oranges had rolled out of town some three days before the loan expired, Malcolm found himself the semi-permanent owner of this and a selection of other age-appropriate library books. However, a lifetime of Volvo living had taught Malcolm Orange that all possessions should be held lightly. Like bicycles, dogs and sneakers past, his library books soon gave precedence to other more necessary articles. The Usborne Book of Science Experiments for Grade Schoolers lasted for approximately two weeks, before Mrs Orange, bound by some deeply ingrained reverence for the American library system, insisted upon returning Malcolm’s books. For once Jimmy Orange, feeling the pinch of five extra items in a car already crowded with elderly relatives, cooking equipment and thrift store shirts, wholeheartedly agreed with his wife.
For the entire duration of her married life a strange logic had kept Martha Orange lending, leaving town and returning books five hundred miles or more further along the road. Martha Orange believed in books like other people believed in God. In the early days, before the open road left her brain incapable of joining the dots between one sentence and the next, she read to escape the cramped monotony of the passenger seat. Devouring Steinbeck, Hemingway and other less worthy paperbacks, she imagined herself capable of one day leaving Jimmy Orange for a louder kind of existence. Martha Orange fervently believed that all people should read. Novels were her weapon of choice for nine out of ten concluded with the kind of optimistic ever after she’d never experienced in real life. For Martha, leaving a good book in a different town was an act of evangelism designed to spread the good news of literary escapism to al
l four corners of the American world. Depositing Malcolm’s books in a carrier bag on the steps of the first small town library the Volvo passed by, Martha Orange had imagined future readers rejuvenated by ideas from another place. Meanwhile her son, eyebrows still singed from a failed attempt at the ‘Create your own Volcano’ experiment, silently mourned the loss of twenty-seven scintillating science experiments, never to be attempted.
Malcolm Orange had cursed his mother for fifteen minutes and then, distracted by a veritable epidemic of highway road kill, forgotten his fury. The loss of the Usborne Book of Science Experiments for Grade Schoolers was a mere blip on the landscape of larger losses. Books from the children’s section were beneath him. Even at eight, Malcolm Orange had suspected himself scientifically astute on a par with a high school graduate. Experiments with soda pop and balloon static seemed a dumb preamble to the possibility of atom splitting or dabbling in genetic manipulation. Though aimed at the amateur Einstein, the Usborne Book of Science Experiments for Grade Schoolers had also included a fascinating chapter on centrifuges which stayed with Malcolm long after the library book had been abandoned on the steps of some midwestern library, pages curling damply in the October drizzle.
Following the guidelines set out in Chapter 19, Malcolm had spent a happy hour in a Milwaukee rest stop, spinning a sealed pop bottle of oil and water on a shoelace until the oil rose and the water, pure as April rain, sunk to the bottle’s base. Scientific Investigative Research had taught Malcolm that all good experiments had repercussions for the everyday. If centrifugal force could divide a liquid into all its separate components and the human body was almost two-thirds water, any sort of sustained spinning could have terrible medical repercussions. Almost instantly Malcolm Orange developed a horrendous fear of spinning floors, roundabouts and all such rotating devices. The idea that he might be unintentionally separated into all his indivisible, liquidy components had Malcolm suffering from the possibility of a panic attack every time the Volvo passed a playground.