Come As You Are

by Steven Ramirez

  “Normally I’m not in favor of strangers putting their feet on the table, but in this case, I can make an exception. Fingers and toes. That’s twenty. You’re probably wondering what number twenty-one is. That’s a surprise.”

  Mercer tried to will his heart to stop. He wanted desperately to die, but it stubbornly kept beating stronger than ever.

  “Dad, can you bring over a garbage bag?” Gary said.

  “Sure, Gary. What will you do with all the dead flesh?”

  “Oh, I think I won’t have any trouble getting to the incinerator at the hospital.”

  “He’s a smart boy, my son,” Hershon said as Gary put on a surgical mask.

  “Now, Mr. Mercer,” Gary said, “let’s get started.”

  Mercer’s room was quite pleasant. It overlooked the Pacific Ocean. The sun was just going down. The windows were open, and the white curtains billowed gently from a warm breeze. It felt good.

  He hoped the orderly would bring his food soon, because he was getting hungry. These last few weeks had given him time to reflect on everything that had happened. Now sitting in the wicker chair by the window, he raised his arms and looked at what used to be his almost-perfect hands. Piano hands, his mother had once called them, although they could never afford lessons. Now they resembled flesh-colored paddles with little nubs sticking out. The skin was smooth and shiny with scar tissue where the Mexican surgeon had expertly repaired what was left of his fingers.

  The pain was almost gone. And so were the nightmares. Until recently, he had relived those horrible few hours nightly. The drug—whatever it was—had allowed him to do nothing more than breathe and blink his eyes. But it had done something else. It has sharpened his senses to the point where every sound was magnified, every sensation achingly bright.

  The first finger was the worst. He heard the saw and felt it slicing cleanly through at the joint connecting to the hand. He remembered Gary saying something about a carbon blade as he tossed the finger into the garbage bag. Again, in his mind, he screamed in agony. And so it was with each of his ten fingers. He had wanted to pass out as Gary went to work on his toes.

  Mercer remembered a lot of blood, too. It was the blood and the screaming and the smell of the burning bone that tore through his dark dreams and left him weak and exhausted in the morning. But the dreams were fading now like the scars on his hands.

  He examined his bare feet once again. They too seemed like elongated paddles. And like his hands, everything was smooth and shiny where his toes used to be.

  He was tired of sitting and almost decided to get up from the chair. But after past repeated attempts, he knew he would just end up falling forward, maybe even going out the window. There was no way for him to balance without toes. He was in effect a cripple.

  However, the thing Mercer thought about most—especially during the quiet evenings overlooking the sea—was how he ended up in the situation. This was the mental exercise that plagued him daily. He struggled to pinpoint the exact time in his life when he went from a quiet loner to a desperate con man.

  Was it his father’s death when he was fifteen? It would be easy to blame everything on that. But wasn’t he already conning kids out of their lunch money in middle school? Never the bully, he would devise elaborate cons involving playground games, girls’ lockers, and PE showers. Over time, the other kids looked forward to his schemes and gladly handed over their money as the admission price for the show.

  In fifth grade, he won a speech contest sponsored by the local Rotary Club. He was eleven and had found out quite by accident that his father was cheating on his mother. He always had a facility for persuasion. If he hadn’t become a con, he might have gone into politics.

  Was it fourth grade? No, because at that time, he lied about everything. Never for money though. Just the normal reasons like not doing his homework and getting out of chores at home.

  In second grade, he kissed Melody Levinsohn. She liked it, too, and pursued him the rest of the year. In third grade, she forgot who he was and focused on her schoolwork. Is that when it happened? No, because he was already stealing candy from the corner liquor store.

  Had he been born bad?

  He thought about kindergarten. It was called the Little Red Schoolhouse. He was five and had never to his recollection been in school before. This was where his memory grew fuzzy. He tried to recall the faces of the other children and the teacher, but it was hopeless. He remembered playing with Tinker Toys and Legos. He recalled a ventriloquist’s dummy that sat on a bookshelf. Sometimes, the teacher would use the dummy for storytelling.

  Then he saw it in his mind as clear as day.

  He had been playing on the carpet with a Tonka truck. Another boy wanted the truck and tried taking it away. Mercer refused to give it up. Where had the teacher been? The boy kept pulling at the truck. Because he was bigger, he was able to get it away from Mercer and hit him over the head with it.

  Mercer screamed as blood poured from a nasty cut on his head. He could still remember the look of complete disinterest on the other boy’s face as the teacher took him away to the office and another adult—the nurse?—attended to Mercer.

  He hadn’t done anything wrong. He was just playing. He had not been bad.

  There was a knock. The orderly came in and he brought the food. Mercer’s stomach growled as he smelled the savory rice with chicken broth and bits of meat and vegetables. The orderly put a bib on him and fed him with a spoon. The chicken and vegetables had to be cut up very small so Mercer wouldn’t choke. It was still hard to chew, so he mostly swallowed.

  The last time Mercer saw Gary was here at the clinic. Mercer was in bad shape—almost unconscious and in shock, his hands and feet wrapped in bloody bandages. Gary had spoken Spanish with the admitting nurse and signed a pile of papers. Mercer wasn’t certain, but he had the impression these Mexicans thought he was Gary’s ward.

  Even without fingers, Mercer was able to grasp the plastic cup filled with ice-cold limeade and bring the straw to his lips without spilling a drop. He liked limeade. He knew he would probably never see Gary again. What he didn’t know was how long he would remain in this purgatory.

  He remembered Gary’s words to him just before he left. Mercer would be here for a time, but one day, the orderly would enter the room and, instead of bringing food, would throw him out the window to a silent death on the rocks below. He would never know when. It could be tomorrow; it could be in ten years. Mercer wouldn’t know until it happened. And that ate at him.

  “It’s like a bone in your throat,” Gary had said. “It doesn’t kill you, but you can’t stop thinking about it.”

  Mercer would have liked to ask someone in charge how long. He would have liked to know his fate. He would have liked to have the facts so he could decide whether life was worth living. But he couldn’t ask anyone. And it wasn’t because he could not write or because he didn’t know any Spanish.

  He couldn’t ask, because the last thing—the twenty-first thing—Gary took was his tongue.

  Regino Sings

  Regino had been suffering for a long time with the cancer. Now, it was at the point where he could no longer function as a regular human being. He drooled constantly. Eating was a problem.

  The doctor told him it was time for the operation they had discussed so many months ago. It frightened Regino to think he would have a mechanical mouth and not the lovely soft pink cradle he was born with. But unless he went through with it, he would die.

  His mother, Isabel, drove him to the hospital early in the afternoon. Though she couldn’t see very well, she refused to wear glasses. Regino was afraid she would hit a kid or a dog.

  “Don’t let them take your clothes away,” she said. “What’ll you do if there’s a fire?”

  He couldn’t answer because the large fleshy gray lump that had sprung from the roof of his mouth prevented him. So, he sucked on it in silence.

  At the hospital, the nurse took all of Regino’s vital information fr
om Isabel who was only too happy to provide details. He had never been the sort of person to blush. But he turned crimson as his mother confided to the nurse that her son had never married and consequently was a little virgin, and could that have anything to do with the cancer in his mouth? The nurse didn’t know but promised to mention it to the doctor.

  Isabel kissed Regino on the small indentation in his forehead as she had done for fifty years and said goodbye. Just as soon as he got into his semi-private room, they took away all of his clothes and left him with a diaphanous hospital gown. He thanked God no one was in the other bed.

  The operation would begin at seven in the morning. At six, Regino would be given an injection to induce sleep and “dry him up.” By ten, it would all be over, and he would be ready for his new mouth.

  The development of the prosthetic device was remarkable in that it had been invented by an ex-ventriloquist named Vrolo who claimed to have thought of it after seeing bright lights in the sky. After years of studying speech pathology, engineering, and computer science, Vrolo successively built more complicated prototypes.

  For his trouble, he was awarded a patent and eventually sold his machine to a global medical devices company for ten million dollars. Unfortunately, Vrolo went mad, and the proceeds had to be spent on constant care inside the walls of a great, gibbering booby hatch somewhere in the Midwest.

  Regino recalled the glossy sales brochures. The device ran on a state-of-the-art nuclear battery and contained a powerful microprocessor. Another chip contained all the known words of the English language according to the Oxford English Dictionary and could be updated with wireless downloads from the Internet. Other chips could be added later for foreign languages.

  He thought about all of the lovely new words he would be able to use and how nice it would be to speak like a poet. He recalled famous speeches he could recite and dark, brooding technical articles he might like to quote. He thought of love.

  The doctor warned Regino there would be a lot of postoperative pain at first and how he would be unable to speak to anyone. That was fine with Regino because he knew the first person he would lay eyes on when he awoke was his meddling mother.

  They had given him a mild sedative. He dozed off around ten. When he awoke the next morning, he found a nurse preparing to inject him.

  “Do you have to tinkle, Mr. Lopez?” she said.

  “Yeszth.”

  Then, without warning, she gave it to him in the ass.

  “Just rest there, and someone will come for you in around forty-five minutes.”

  He had hoped Dr. Shapiro would stop by to give him all kinds of reassurances. But the only people he saw were orderlies delivering breakfast to other patients and nurses prattling on about their sleazy ex-husbands and unmanageable teenage sons.

  Some time later—he didn’t know when—two orderlies arrived and wheeled a gurney next to his bed. Then, they slid Regino sideways onto the gurney, sheets and all, and quickly wheeled him down the corridor. His head was spinning.

  “How do you feel?” someone said.

  “Woozshy.”

  “It’ll be over soon.”

  He waited in another corridor for twenty more minutes. Finally, someone pushed him into the operating room, which was very cold. They covered him in a blanket, and he was grateful.

  The anesthesiologist was fiddling with incomprehensible instruments and dials. He said very little except to tell Regino he was about to run an IV. Thickly, Regino watched as a needle was inserted into his forearm and taped there. His eyes followed the clear plastic hose and saw that it fed into a plastic sack filled with liquid. He spotted a valve. The anesthesiologist turned it, and Regino’s life ended for a while.

  Regino awoke in another room. It seemed no time at all had passed, and the operation would soon begin. Then he fell asleep again.

  When he opened his eyes, he was back in his room. Isabel was there, knitting fiercely and scowling at the sick and injured who passed by as if they had no right to exist.

  “They took your clothes,” she said without dropping a stitch. “What did I tell you, Regino? How do you feel?”

  It hurt. It hurt like nothing he’d ever felt in his life, including that time the old redwood garage door fell on his head and split it open. It hurt bad.

  “Nain!” he said.

  “Pain? Yes, I thought so. Look.”

  She removed a pink plastic hand mirror from the huge canvas knitting bag and shoved it in his face. What he saw was a crater swaddled in blood-soaked bandages. His chin and lower jaw were missing. All that remained was flapping skin.

  “Augh!”

  On cue, a nurse appeared and snatched the mirror away. “You shouldn’t upset him like that,” she said. “He needs his rest if he’s going to recover.”

  “My mou?”

  “It’s all right, Ruhgeeno,” she said, her voice childlike all of a sudden. “They’re programming it now. Tomorrow morning, if God’s will, it will be fitted to your skull. Today, they had to remove all of those bad old parts and implant the steel pins. Soon, they’ll hook up your new mouth. Now, then. Who wants a nice, cold orange soda?”

  The nurse glared at Isabel and left the room, still carrying the mirror.

  “I want that back when I leave!” Isabel said, humiliated for perhaps the first time in her life. And it’s pronounced ReHEENo! Bitch.”

  Regino wept. He sobbed to think that the teeth he grew up with, the chin he had so lovingly shaved for so long, were gone forever. Burned in the hospital incinerator by now probably. And what about all those gold fillings?

  “I made them give me all the fillings,” his mother said.

  She opened her palm and dumped them onto the little tray next to the water pitcher. They were dirty-colored and misshapen.

  He cried some more.

  As the weeks passed, the pain lessened. Dr. Shapiro was very pleased that Regino’s body had not rejected the false mouth. Soon, he was eating solid food again and smiling in the bathroom mirror through new, perfectly straight white teeth.

  Strangely, as he learned to speak through the machine, his voice deepened. It took on a rich, resonant quality it had never had in his younger years. His mother hated it because, in contrast, it made hers sound nasal and irritating.

  Life was fun again. Regino read books. He watched old movies. Soon, new healthy skin completely covered the mechanical parts, and his mouth appeared natural. Except he was always aware of the whirring of tiny motors in his ears conducted through the bone and amplified. Occasionally, he picked up radio broadcasts.

  “‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.’ A Tale of Two Cities.”

  “I know what it is, Regino,” Isabel said. “You sound like a radio announcer.”

  “‘I haven’t lived a good life. I’ve been bad. Worse than you could know.’”

  “Stop it, you’re making me angry.”

  “‘I won’t be innocent.’ The Maltese Falcon.”

  One day while Regino was reciting Shelley, he skipped a few articles, then a pronoun. At first, he thought it was his eyes and used his reading glasses. Rereading the passage, the problem appeared to go away.

  “What do you want for lunch?” Isabel said through the bathroom door as her son bathed.

  “I’d like a bowl soup.”

  “You’ve done it again. You’ve forgotten the ‘of.’”

  She was right—it was happening again. A missing word here and there. Something was wrong with his new mouth. He had thought the “of.”

  “I’d like a bowl soup.”

  No, the “of” was definitely gone. Regino tried other phrases.

  “Sackful dreams. Cup coffee. United States America.” The “of,” it seemed, had permanently left his mouth’s memory.

  It was Friday night. Dr. Shapiro would be out of town for the weekend. Regino would have to manage somehow. After slurping frantically at his soup, he hit upon the idea of s
ubstituting “off” for “of.”

  “I’d like another bowl off soup,” he said. He felt sure that if he said it fast enough, no one would notice.

  “That sentence doesn’t make sense,” Isabel said, laughing.

  He became enraged at her braying insensitivity. “I’d like another bowl off soup!”

  “I’ll give you more soup when you ask for it properly. What do you think off that?”

  He hit her. It was the first time. And the stinging look of shock and rage that welled in Isabel’s eyes filled him, too, with shame and a kind of spent hubris.

  “Mother!”

  She left the house. Choosing to ignore her tantrum, he inserted a probe into his ear to check for radiation leakage.

  Days went by. At first, Regino worried his mother had gotten into some kind of trouble. Then, he remembered the time she left his father for a week. Eventually, she called them from Puerto Vallarta. Regino’s father had wept openly on the telephone and promised to try and be a better husband.

  Regino didn’t cry, though. Instead, he ate meatball sandwiches from the Butcher Boy deli and drank beer out of bottles. Isabel hated beer—the smell of it. And she hated what it did to men sometimes. Once, Regino’s father had gotten very drunk and urinated on the carpet to the utter horror of his Wagnerian wife. Later, he claimed it was an accident. Not the urinating. That was deliberate. Regino’s father had gotten drunk by accident because a coworker had died. The office decided to go and have a drink in his honor. Then, they honored him three more times. Three more bars and six hours later, they had bestowed upon their dead comrade la Légion d’honneur. Regino’s father was not a good drinker.

  Cousin Felix showed up on Tuesday looking for Isabel. Regino hated him because he was handsome and didn’t have a false mouth. He also hated Felix because he was successful. Felix owned a string of gas stations and never once got his hands greasy. He left that to his aged father who wore three trusses and a black patch to cover his lazy eye, which, Felix insisted, frightened the customers.