Blue Anesthesia

by Daniel Lidman

  “What?” The anger in her tone both surprised and terrified her. She didn’t dare to know what Humphrey would do to her if she got angry with him.

  “I have been given a second chance. The world is in my hands. I learned my lesson with your brother, and I’d be damned if I made the same mistake again. This isn’t a game. I don’t care how much you whine, I am not putting lives at risk.”

  Susanne gripped both sides of her jacket, pulling them over her torso as if to shelter herself from the cold. She wasn’t physically cold, but mentally her body had turned into an ice cream factory. The ice creams were frozen emotions. Right now, she tasted the ice cream of fear.

  A few minutes later, Humphrey flicked the flashlight against a room decorated with motivational texts. BE STRONG, one of them read. A cardboard cutout of a penguin sat against the wall, beside the words SMILE. Flowers were penciled onto the door’s window. It was the first thing in this building that actually impressed Susanne. A beautiful text surrounded the flowers in scripted letters.

  IN MEMORY OF MIRANDA JENSEN: 1956-1976.

  “Well, what do you say?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Would you like me to draw you?”

  Nervous stutter rose in Susanne’s throat. She didn’t have time to answer before Humphrey started walking again, saying nothing else on the matter.

  “The mother of four, who committed the crime, took her own life in a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. If you’re thinking that she did it out of guilt, you’re wrong. I don’t even think she understood what she had done. They still allowed her to draw. No crayons, though; only markers and pencils with a soft brush. She had drawn what some considered a masterpiece. I saw it. I’m not big on drawing, but it was good. She had drawn landscape surrounded by other stuff beneath a sky. I say other stuff because I don’t know what else to call it. The drawing was of another world. The scenery was completely different from Earth or another planet in our galaxy. Even the sky looked different; like the content of a volcano, splattered across the sky.”

  Humphrey shrugged. “Anyway, she bit through the skin of her arm and wrote on the wall of her cell with blood. She wrote, ‘TAKE ME THERE.’ And then she hung herself. I remember reading in the papers that she wore a satisfied look on her corpse.”

  Susanne swallowed what felt like a fireball. Neither of them said anything until they reached a row of doors in the ward. Next to the doors sat a Ping-Pong table, rackets and ball still resting upon it, dead relics in the dark of an ancient past.

  “Here we are,” Humphrey said. Susanne jumped at the sight of what she thought was a snake, but turned out to be a spiral of chains on the floor. She looked at it with wide eyes. Humphrey’s flashlight focused on the chains. In the shade of his flashlight, there seemed to be no gap between Susanne’s eyes. To Humphrey, her eyes resembled a horizontal white line.

  “You’re not locking me in there, are you?”

  Humphrey shone the light around their stance, as though he expected someone else to stand there and confirm the madness of what Humphrey had just heard with a shocked face.

  “It’s always about you. You, you, you, and YOU! Have you learned nothing? The world is suffering. You have the chance to turn it all around. Yet, I get the feeling that you don’t want to. Are you seriously complaining about being locked up in a room? At least you have a room, duckling. The blue blanket of our sky has kept you under its protection. It concentrated energy upon you. And now, when it asks for you to give a hand, you spit upon it, rejecting the love of your protector! You know what?”

  “What?”

  “I am in complete shock.”

  “Are you?”

  Yes, I am.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you. Welcome to my world.”

  Humphrey’s face drew back. An inner filter of emotion buttered another layer of darkness upon him. Susanne could tell by looking at his face that he was skilled at suppressing his emotions. She knew by experience with her brother that isolation does that to a person; it numbs them. Axel started to shove his emotions under a carpet after the first few months of isolation. And even then, he wasn’t completely isolated, for he still saw his family and people he worked with.

  Humphrey must’ve been isolated for years, she thought. Who knows what kind of laughs and smiles he has shared with the darkness.

  Built-up emotions kept hidden in a mental closet in the back of Humphrey’s mind, flashed across his eyes. “Do not compare me with the likes of your own twisted world. You don’t have the slightest concept of what the world is. Your world revolves around you. Your thoughts never leave the borders of your own self-absorption. Do not welcome me to your world. I am not even close to entering that world.”

  He picked up the chains with one hand, grabbing Susanne by the arm with the other. All the strength in his body applied to dragging Susanne, who lost balance with her hands tied behind her back, crashing with her weight across the floor. She felt the soft, tickling texture of dust against the naked parts of her skin. Her glasses jumped with the fall, but they managed to stay on. Humphrey dragged Susanne across the floor. There were times when he had to stop to adjust his grip.

  Susanne pulled her head upward, away from the floor, to talk. The dust and whatever else laying on the ground invaded her now open mouth. She felt like she was kissing a werewolf.

  “WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Her words were dry, raspy; fingernails scratching against the back of her throat.

  Humphrey’s voice circled a brink of amused laughter. “We’re going to The Play Room!” His tone applied delightful flare onto the words “Play Room.”

  Fear empowered her blood. Adrenaline shot through her veins. She quickly realized, however, that her own adrenaline didn’t match Humphrey’s excited adrenaline. She resisted with all her might, to no avail. As they reached The Play Room, she felt like a hopeless vessel. Susanne Gardner was locked into the dark of The Play Room at two-seventeen A.M. No one cared for her screams. A lesson she shared with Axel, who was still strapped to a hospital bed.

  The siblings thought of each other.

  Chapter Eight

  Comedian by Day and Writer by Night

  1

  Fourteen minutes after Susanne was locked inside of The Play Room, Humphrey returned to the outside area where Axel waited. Stars presented themselves in groups across the night sky.

  “The white never leaves us alone, wouldn’t you say? During daylight, white invades that beautiful blue, and at night—it teases us amongst the stars. We thought our nights would be of peace, but instead the white invades the black, mocking us that evil is still here. Evil is still watching over our world.”

  “Where is she?”

  Humphrey sighed. “You know, I just went over this selfish nature of only caring about yourselves with—“

  “Tell me where she is. Tell me right now.”

  “Do you plan on being stuck out here all night? If not, then you will listen to me.”

  “You’re dead.”

  A needle of silence slid through the side of Humphrey’s head, penetrating both ears.

  “You’re dead,” Axel repeated out into the night.

  He heard the heavy swallow of Humphrey’s throat. “You prove all my points correct, crabby.”

  “Good. If my reality makes an insane man even more insane, then I know that I’m right.”

  “Mentally ill,” Humphrey corrected. “Which I’m not, as I’ve said before. Now quit yapping your mouth.”

  “Let me see her.”

  Humphrey went behind the hospital bed, pushing it back inside. Axel kept repeating his wish. When they met an intersection, something told Axel that they would turn away from 363.

  They didn’t.

  2

  For the briefest of moments, Susanne had a sensation that all of it had just been a dream and that she was lying outside somewhere. During the first seconds of her awakening, a window behind her played tricks on her mind, casting white ligh
t into The Play Room.

  A window, she thought, raising her body with the speed of someone that’s late for work. Her fingers laced behind her back with an eager touch. Along with her hands, her fingers felt phantom now. Her eyes chased the colors outside. She looked downward. It was too much of a drop. She would break more than her legs if she decided to jump. Birds raced across the morning light. Susanne felt a prick of jealousy at their freedom. The beauty, radiating from outside, fueled her with motivation, which in turn gave her physical energy.

  No coffee needed on this morning, Susanne. No, ma’am.

  All the toys around her reminded her of Emma. She felt an odd kind of madness sink over her. She realized that this was a mother’s madness; the strongest of all. Her vision targeted the door’s window, where a face appeared.

  Humphrey’s face plastered against the window. His eyes never moved. Susanne moved her head to the side; his eyes didn’t follow. The door opened. A wagon was pushed inside. Humphrey followed, carrying a Beretta pistol. He shut the door behind him, dropped, leaning against it with his back. The pistol pointed at Susanne, who leaned against the wall on the opposite end of Humphrey.

  “There’s something that I’ve been thinking about. I decided to ask you now, before we begin with the extraction. Why did you make the decision to have a child?”

  Susanne stared down the pistol’s barrel. The black hole resembled Humphrey’s pupils, which had grown into a circle of excitement. Staring down that barrel was like staring into the pupil of Humphrey’s soul.

  “I’ll answer that when you tell me what you mean by extraction.”

  The pistol’s hammer clicked. Humphrey aimed it at Susanne’s toes. “I’ll pop these suckers like I’ve popped glass bottles. They’re all right there; lined up in perfect order. Shooting them will be like biting down a cherry.” Susanne pushed her body against the wall to the point of pain. Her spine met the wall with a hard knock. “You have knowledge. When I ask for a piece of the pie, you share. I thought you understood that when I locked you in here. If the next thing that comes out of your mouth isn’t the answer that I want, your blood will taint this room, and join forces with Miranda Jensen.”

  “I wanted to build a family.”

  “Ah, see, that’s what I’m talking about. You wanted to build a family. You gave birth to a child so that it would make you feel good.”

  “It’s not like that.”

  “That’s exactly how it is.”

  Susanne’s hair irritated her vision, but she was afraid to make sudden movements with her head. “My husband and I were full of love—“

  “It’s a mule,” Humphrey interrupted.

  “—we were ready to share that love. I was ready to pass all that love onto a child.”

  “Why did it have to be your own child? What about the starving children who live in poverty? Your child didn’t exist at the time of the decision. But children in need did.”

  “I don’t know.”

  Humphrey closed one eyelid, straightening his aim with the pistol.

  “WE WANTED IT TO BE FROM US!”

  Humphrey relaxed his aim. Her tone turned calmer. “We wanted it to be born out of our love.”

  “That’s selfish, wouldn’t you say?”

  Susanne was swept away from The Play Room. In her mind, she swam along a river of memories. All this talk of her daughter grew images. Every time she heard or saw something that reminded her of Emma, an image of her spawned in Susanne’s mind. Along with that image, many more followed. She was scanning through a collection of mental photographs when she heard a loud bang.

  Humphrey pulled the trigger.

  She felt a sudden burst of pain. Susanne assumed that she had been shot, but in her reaction to the loud sound, she had simply swallowed too much air. It clogged her chest. Tiny rocks of concrete fell from the ceiling, crumbling onto Humphrey’s right knee. An infection of dust swayed in the air. Humphrey rose, brushing off the ceiling’s excrement. “On that note, I say we begin.”

  “Begin with what?” Her voice was lost in the rummage of tools. Humphrey seemed to have a hard time making up his mind. A finger tapped impatiently on the edge of the wagon. He let out excited relief as his hand twirled around the handle of a small knife.

  “I usually deal with teeth,” he said. “I’ve never actually handled the texture of an eyeball before. I assume that it’s kind of like cutting into a grape. That must be fairly accurate, wouldn’t you say?”

  Susanne stood up. Her hands were flat against the wall. She tried to force herself to run, but immense terror kept her in place. Humphrey raised the pistol. “Sit down, would you? What is wrong with you people?”

  “I’d rather have you shoot me.”

  “Can you say the same for your daughter? Sit down.”

  She expected her body to move down along the wall, but it dropped. The strength in her legs gave out completely. She wasn’t even aware of Humphrey’s touch; now chaining her legs together, in case she would try to challenge him. After a lock around the chains clicked, Humphrey petted his metal snake. He returned his attention to the small knife, running it along the cloth of his blue glove. He inspected it for a long time, admiring its power.

  Humphrey approached her, knife in hand.

  “Don’t worry. A mule with a one-eyed duckling is still a very lucky mule.”

  She expected him to throw her glasses to the side. Instead, he removed them with slow caution. To Susanne, it seemed like Humphrey was uncovering an ancient treasure.

  His fingers waved with patience for the preparation of delicate touch. His surgical mask left a dent in his mouth with every excited inhale, returning back to normal with a warm exhale. Humphrey closed his eyes. The grip surrounding the knife squeezed. He opened his eyes. A golden aura sparked the outer rim of his existence. Humphrey’s palm touched Susanne’s chin. With ease, he lifted her head backward. A blurred mist danced around the ceiling. Susanne thought of the afterlife. A knife invaded her vision, inches away from her left eyeball, appearing large. Behind it, a blue figure loomed. Susanne didn’t know if she should look at Humphrey or the knife.

  She felt the cold, sharp teeth of the knife scrape against her eyeball. It slid across the moist surface. Humphrey had to press down to keep the knife steady. Something warm ran down her face.

  She couldn’t tell if it was blood or tears.

  3

  Axel couldn’t say for sure if the night had passed or not. Even during the day, the darkness in this room remained the same. He suspected that a few hours had gone by since Humphrey chained him back to the chair, but time was strange in this place. He wanted time to be slow and boring, savoring every second of hope that Susanne was still alive and well—at least physically. However, he also wished that time would be of incredible speed. Axel was anxious to find out if he would ever see his sister again.

  His mouth had begun the healing process of his newest addition. Humphrey had made sure that the tools used were clean. Axel felt a hint of humor in his way of passing time; licking wounds, checking up on the healing process, tasting the metallic flavor of blood and the crusty flavor of scabs. He felt a kind of shame in thinking about his family whilst doing all of that. The bizarre action, along with those thoughts, simply didn’t match.

  In addition to pondering over Susanne’s fate, he also thought of Emma and Samuel. To him, there were not many things much worse than speculating over the lives of loved ones in a room where eyes had no power.

  Axel’s ears picked up a familiar sound. Someone sprinted down the corridor, behind the metal door. Even though he prepared for the loud bang that comes with the opening of the door, he still jumped. Humphrey stood in the frame, panting rapid machine-gun breaths of madness. He looked like he was about to faint. With no time to lose, Humphrey darted toward the chair. Axel saw the pistol. Humphrey began to unlock the chains. Axel couldn’t decide which sound was louder; the rattling of the chains, or Humphrey’s exhausted breathing.

  In almost no
time, Axel was free. Humphrey struggled with his breathing between words. “IF YOU WANT TO SEE…YOUR SISTER AGAIN…THEN MOVE!” A pause to somewhat catch his breath. “If you slow down, I will shoot you. Your sister is waiting. Let’s go.”

  They both ran side-to-side down the corridor. Axel struggled with regaining enough blood in his legs to sprint, and Humphrey struggled with exhaustion. When Axel felt the tickle of his legs awakening, he picked up his speed. He felt a sense of déjà vu. He didn’t start to sprint because of Humphrey’s command, nor because of the gun aimed at his back. He sprinted because of Susanne.

  The chains on the main door at the end of the long corridor were unlocked. Axel glanced backward. “Go ahead,” Humphrey uttered in a burning tongue. Axel pushed the door open.

  Red and blue lights flashed across the floor through the windows. The sirens made no sound, probably so that the people outside could hear themselves talk. Axel’s wide stance broke when Humphrey approached him from behind. Mumbles and movement from outside increased in volume.

  They ran until they encountered a stairwell. “Down,” Humphrey said. Their feet were rapid against the stairs. They ran down three floors.

  “Through here!”

  Axel opened a backdoor, running into a completely white room. The floor had aged well; coated with gloss. They ran down a much steeper stairwell, down into an underground tunnel. All the lights were out down here, but the glossy white color was easy to follow. They sprinted along the walls. Two black lines ran parallel with each other in the middle of the floor. They passed what looked like a cart of old laundry. Axel frequently lost his sense of direction in the dark and bumped into wooden rails along the wall with his side. He heard Humphrey do the same.

  Their feet sang the melody of a drummer hooked on speed. A cool wind blew against them in their sprint, aiding their bodies.

  Multiple lights greeted their back.

  “STOP RIGHT THERE!”

  Axel turned to look at Humphrey for reference. He prayed that Humphrey would surrender. Instead, Humphrey raised his right arm, mid-sprint, and aimed backward. The pistol sneezed. Gunfire was traded. Axel and Humphrey jumped behind the cover of a flipped table.