Dystopia

by Richard Christian Matheson

  "I want you to go home and pack, take a cab to the airport and leave today. Call me when you get there. It's the only way you'll survive this maniac."

  The woman looked up at the doctor with defenseless eyes and nodded.

  "Good," said the doctor.

  Fifteen minutes after Miss Shubert's flight took off, the doctor sat overlooking city, completing notes. The buzzer sounded on one of the phone extensions and the doctor pushed down the lighted button.

  "Yes? This is Miss Shubert's psychiatrist," said the doctor. "No, I don't know where she is. She left today without a word. But I'm glad I reached you. I think you're somebody I'd really like to get to know."

  The doctor trembled, running hands through her own hair, imagining the first thing he'd do to her.

  Visit to a Psychic Surgeon

  I don't like to admit it, but sometimes I feel there's no way out. Circumstances, relationships, you know what I mean.

  Maybe that's why I agreed to go.

  I think it's why Patrick did, too.

  We were looking for magic, though we didn't realize it. But since it's said magic eludes when initiates seek it directly, maybe we were better off. Keep reading, you may disagree.

  Patrick is a very interesting guy. He grew up in a volatile, Irish Catholic family, in Buffalo, New York, where it gets bitterly cold.

  Rumors have long abounded of people freezing to death there and entering the afterworld as Fudgesicles, but for Patrick it was always sunny, and he grew up a torrid optimist.

  When he was nineteen, he finally left Buffalo, as all people who want more in life eventually leave somewhere, or something, and, with his congenial anarchy as companion, joked westward, across America, taking odd jobs as truck driver, ski instructor, or whatever he could charm someone into.

  But he couldn't always hear how much he'd won others over, because he has a hearing problem. Where you and I hear a Bach glissando, Patrick hears bad bearings in an overheating engine, and these disparities occasionally drive him insane.

  Maybe that's why he eventually drifted toward Hollywood, to become a writer, and succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.

  That's how we met.

  On the writing staff of a television show Patrick had co-created with a primetime pharaoh named Stephen J. Cannell. It was a funny show, filled with warmth and humor and conflict. Just like my relationship with Patrick. And though the two leads never said anything close to affectionate, Patrick and I often tried. With some help, actual closeness seemed possible. It's one key reason that, as people who seek miracles go, we were perfectly cast.

  We'd heard about a woman who opened and closed human bodies, with her empty hands, from a friend who'd been to see her. The procedure was called "psychic surgery" and Patrick and I were enthralled by its exotic details. So much so, that, on guarded whim, we decided to go; Patrick wanted to hear right, again, and, though I doubted such things, I wanted to see magic up close. Not coins hidden in knuckles, or fluttering capes. Real magic. Like in South American jungles, when the dead walk, again, after potions are dripped on their foreheads.

  Los Angeles has a knack for hosting methods of healing, which often swerve, a tad, from AMA doctrine and, as something of a mecca for bohemian cure, surreal approaches find a receptive climate. I've had friends try stuff you wouldn't believe to restore wellbeing. But psychic surgery was an arresting spin; allegedly painless, ripe for eerie anecdote.

  That's how Patrick and I ended up riding together, in his black Porsche, to a friendly house near the ocean in L.A., joking the whole way, nerve-racked into bubbly chatter; scared beyond our capacity to admit it.

  Remember what I said about being afraid there's no way out? It's an important feeling to recognize, in yourself, so you can change whatever you must, to live a better life. And I think Patrick and I both knew we needed to change our own, each for different reasons. I won't go into those reasons because everyone has their own, and each is as valid as the next.

  But it seems, now and then, we all need to abandon certain ideas; do things which disagree with our ease. I've met otherwise pleasant people who didn't and they worried me; enough to see I didn't want to end-up as they had; untested, dozing in habit.

  As we sped toward the inexplicable, though Patrick and I were laughing, our anxieties seeped. When you're within an hour of having your body scissored by a woman from some weird, snake-filled country, where death-squads and toucans are normal as 7-11s, irony befriends you. By the time we'd finally found the house, and gone inside, to face our scheduled innards, we were on a macabre roll.

  The house wasn't important.

  Just a place for the psychic surgeon to stay, while she was in town, since she traveled the globe year-round; roaming flesh, exterminating the unwanted or malignant. Some thought it regal honor to have her hands within them, and had come from far to be here.

  After Patrick and I signed in with one of her assistants, and gave seventy-five dollars each (no checks, or credit cards, accepted), we sat and waited with a handful of others.

  And though we said much, we said little.

  Patrick and I easily fell into that sort of armored sharing; sardonic, film-critic glances around the room, and shared observations that stole attention from our often uneasy relationship. Wide, alarmed eyes, staring at some absurdity we alone observed, yet done so covertly no one noticed but us. The little bullets we fired around the room . . . bullets of curious superiority . . . bullets of polite interest; obligatory and low caliber. Bullets fired by two guys who thought they needed to go through life armed. We were funny. But we didn't realize we had the choice not to be.

  We needed the magic more than we understood.

  We looked up with wordless dread when the first person in this living room, filled with five or six other "patients", was summoned. She was a Vogue-faced, Hollywood actress, suffering colitis, who'd come with her boyfriend, a temperamental, narcissistic actor who was starring in his own TV series, about a temperamental, narcissistic detective.

  She was led down the dim hallway and taken to one of the small bedrooms, which we couldn't spy from our living room vantage. We saw only the hallway and a second bedroom. A bathroom separated the two, as if the common membrane between two heart chambers. I use an organ analogy here because body parts were very much on my mind.

  From where we all sat, we had a perfect view of the bathroom, and Patrick and I split a look, apprehensions clouding. We all tried to calm our nerves, each imagining, in our mind, what the actress would look like with the hands of the healer sunk, to the wrists, in her body. And though none said it, we were grateful for the company; relieved not to be here alone.

  There were faint murmurs from the bedroom, as if lovers were trying not to awaken children. There was also muted laughter, like what Rosemary heard through the vents, when the coven burned candles and celebrated the evil infant. It was so dulled by wall, it seemed all the more faraway and unsettling, like we weren't supposed to hear it, and if we could, we'd be very sorry.

  I suppose for Patrick the faintness of it was nothing special.

  I felt badly for him.

  Within minutes, he nudged me, discreetly pointing to the assistant, with the glass bowl who exited the bedroom where the actress was undergoing surgery. The bowl was clear, big enough to hold tortellini for a family of four. But it wasn't full of pasta; rather what looked like badly mixed, pink lemonade. Floating in the pastel slosh were pieces of what appeared to be tissue. They weren't big; had no exact shape. But we all winced. If nothing else, it was first-rate theater.

  The assistant carted the bowl into the bathroom and poured the contents into the toilet, where they splashed loudly. He flushed the queasy evidence and began to rinse blood-stained towels, which also soaked in the bowl. Patrick leaned to me, whispering that he thought the best parts the actress would ever have may have just been flushed. I felt weak and he offered to get me a glass of water.

  I was sorry to see him disappear into the kitchen, but continu
ed to wait patiently, watching the tortellini bowl go by several more times, red contents resembling a tiny sea after a shark attack. As Patrick handed me my water, I wondered how much of the actress might remain when surgery was completed.

  She finally came out from the bedroom operating-theater, looking pale and exhausted, sat heavily beside her boyfriend, on the couch, and promptly fell asleep before we could ask questions.

  Patrick and I were called next.

  I was led into one bedroom, Patrick the other, and we waved farewell to one another, parachuting into the mystic void.

  In my room, I was told the surgeon would be in shortly, by her surgical assistant, a sedate M.D., who was on the faculty at UCLA Medical School. He asked that I undress, try to relax, then left. I disrobed and wrapped my waist in a towel; a pre-op jungle boy.

  I laid on the portable examination table and stared at the roof, feeling very alone. Soon parts of me would be gulped by the house's plumbing, routed through city pipe systems and spat out to sea, to drift forever. I reminded myself I'd always meant to travel more.

  The door finally opened.

  She was fifty, maybe sixty. Short, stocky. Tobacco skin, black hair. She wore a simple, cotton dress and, other than a heavy crucifix, no jewelry. Her gentle smile tried to reassure, as her warm palm felt my forehead and face, searching; a primitive scanning device, stalking deformations. Objects that had no place within my body. She spoke almost no English.

  "You have pain?" I didn't. "You are scared?" I said nothing.

  Her soothing hands glided slowly down my bare chest; twin gulls, skimming skin sea, searching for what hid behind bone rocks, nerve kelp. She moved with serene focus, as people who paint religious art might; calmed by holy task.

  She stopped. Felt more carefully. One spot. Above and to the right of my abdomen.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  The assistant looked calm. "A blockage."

  A faucet inside me turned slightly and fear began to drip. I started to perspire and, as he dabbed at my forehead with a cloth, she placed hands on my heart and stomach. She said something to him, in her language, and the assistant told me she'd asked if I wanted to continue.

  Though perhaps driven by a misguided sense of adventure, I said yes and, to this day, am not sure exactly why. Maybe it was knowing this odd appointment might represent other pivotal choices to come in my life, and somehow measured my depth of engagement. That if I bailed now, I always would; that this moment, in a way I couldn't totally measure, was indicative; essential.

  Or maybe I understood, in a sub-conscious wisdom, that her question and my reply were mirror versions of the same personal affliction: faith gone to zero.

  But none of that really adds up.

  I now think I agreed for very much the same reason I'd come. Not out of curiosity or high-minded inquiry, but because I was genuinely afraid. A bit convinced there might truly be bad things lurking within me; not rooting malaises, but contaminations more difficult to rid oneself of. Imbalances, not of health, but belief, irreversible, self-poisoning. Jealousies, intolerances, self-pity. The list seemed endless; hard to face.

  I'd long suspected a host of such flaws, however great their actual presence, and knew any had the power, over time, to defeat me. In my darkest theory, they'd all gathered, undetectable to orthodox medicine, somewhere in my body, where I hoped she could corner them and manage removal; save me.

  I also think I chose without equivocation, despite unknown risk, because in my own ways, like Patrick, I'd become partially deafened. Not to sound, but feeling. Not to voices, but to the people who spoke. I couldn't remember the last time I'd listened to someone with absolute attention.

  It was a bad trend.

  When I gave the go-ahead, she instantly pressed harder on the spot, and I heard a popping sound, like a small suction cup pried-off a refrigerator door. In seconds, four, then five fingers were buried, to the knuckle, and mining within me, hunting for trouble.

  There was blood.

  Not Tarantino liters of it . . . but enough to trickle down my sides, into my navel. I felt absolutely no pain, only pressure and, from what I could see, she wasn't faking it. I asked her assistant what was happening and, after a moment of doubt, he told me she'd found it.

  The tenant.

  I wondered what it was; how long it had been in silent residence? Would it regard eviction as antagonistic? Chilling images of combat, between her and it, filled my mind.

  After a bit of struggle, she tweezed two fingers, tightly, and withdrew what looked like a bloody shoelace, nearly a foot long; the damning strand that had held me back all these years. She showed it to me quickly, as if it were Kryptonite, and I disliked it on sight; a skinny non-contributor.

  She nodded to the assistant and he asked if I'd like to keep it. I should have said yes; I know that now. I could have placed it under glass, suspended in solution, and eyed it every day, reminding it who was now in charge, as it tread with imprisoned futility. But I declined, too shaken by the moment to think clearly.

  She understood, and I was quickly re-sealed, wiped of spillage; watertight, again. She stared into my eyes with soulful closure, then left. The assistant told me I could dress, and dropped the alleged tissue into his glass bowl, where it floated freely. It was taken away and flushed; a small aspect of me forever edited; to be replaced over time, I hoped, with something better.

  Patrick went next and, though the pruning took longer with him, forty minutes later we drove away in silence.

  We were both tired, haunted by the experience; its unlikely braid of shamanism and suburbia.

  Patrick kept asking me if I thought his hearing was improved and we experimented with his Alpine system. It was hard to be certain, though he was hungry to be convinced.

  As the Porsche pawed up Sunset Boulevard, aside moon-washed Pacific, Patrick asked me if I believed we'd encountered something miraculous. I had no good answer and we rolled down windows. Wind blew our hair and he told me he'd been scared; I said I hadn't been at all. We smiled at each other and I admitted how frightened I'd actually been. Minutes passed and we talked more, making fewer and fewer jokes.

  Because we were naturally on the subject, Patrick began to talk about other things in life that scared him. I countered with my list. We spoke about what made us insecure, feel alone, lose faith. As the curves held us, we talked about triumphs we'd had in our lives.

  Big. Small.

  Admitted heartaches.

  Dreams.

  Sea glittered beyond guardrails, and we heard ourselves say things to each other we never had before. It seemed something in her touch had severed restriction and we were becoming best friends; perilously intimate, no longer wishing to disguise wounds or truths; sharing precious cargo.

  After that night, it never happened again. I guess everything heals sooner or later . . . even things that don't need to. In L.A., nature abhors a genuine moment.

  Remember I told you that sometimes I feel there's no way out?

  I was right. But I missed the point. The magic is finding the way in. And though I never talk to Patrick anymore, and bear no scar, nor cure, for one night in our lives it seems the way in found us.

  But that's not quite the end of the story.

  Two weeks after the peculiar encounter, I was speaking with a studio executive I know. She's very successful, frequently miserable and I worry about her. Her ex-boyfriend, an emotionally imploded agent, is still deeply in love with her, but she's afraid of love; your basic 90's, anti-depressant-soothed, urban romance.

  On my suggestion, she'd gone to see the psychic surgeon about a depression she feared had organic origin, irrigating outward, she theorized, from cobwebbed ovaries; a sort of macabre, Ally McBeal premise. Since she's only thirty-one, she admitted this was likely surreal anxiety, borne of non-dating, and generalized angst about hurting her ex. But she is, nevertheless, chased by it late at night, when her turbo-Saab, and all the deals in the world, can't help.

  She
reported that she'd found the encounter with the psychic surgeon lurid, in a Haitian funeral sort of way, but unconvincing. For her, though tiring, it was ultimately one step up from a Monty Python, witchdoctor sketch and she'd gotten zero from it. Even though the psychic surgeon had told her she had something in her heart that held her back, and had excised it, my friend wasn't impressed.

  "Chicken parts," she said, tossing aside another script, as she fingered through her weekend stack, sunning on beach house deck.

  However, she did admit that the woman's palms moving near her heart had left her feeling cornered; trapped. I was tempted to point out her executive life of Armani-bloodletting often stirs such states, but instead I just listened, in the mood to let her talk.

  She railed on, complaining about how the experience had exhausted her enough that she'd gone home, immediately after, soaked for an hour, in a latte of Mr. Bubble, and, as usual, pondered her future as barren powerbroker.

  She sighed and asked me if, given everything, I believed in miracles. I told her I basically did. She spent forty minutes telling me I was wrong, and was setting myself up for heartache should I continue on such a naive path. She cited endless examples of trickery, wanton in an exploiting, cynical culture, and got very worked up. But she's paid to feel strongly, so it's mostly just a reflex; like a sneeze attached to an opinion.

  She sipped something and said we should develop the whole subject into a movie. That's how meaning is conferred upon things in Hollywood. Not via any essential value, but rather when they can be developed into something else; tear-down thinking.

  I told her we'd kill each other, our differences too vast.

  She smiled a little, smoking and tanning under Malibu sky, and said I was right. Then, she paused and said she actually felt a little better; less stressed. By encouraging her to talk, I guess I'd lifted a burden. Maybe even removed something that was doing her no good. Call it a mood, a futile point of view. Nothing sloshed or got flushed. But she'd been occupied by things that needed eviction and I suppose I'd done my small part.