Short Stories About You

by Jeffery Martin

  The patient laughs, a high squeal, and the sound of his laughter makes you recoil. It is like a sonic weapon. You wince. Behind his laughter, you sense that he is becoming agitated. This makes you wary, but it also means that your plan of attack is working. He’ll show himself when he gets frustrated enough. This mask will fall and you’ll see the person he really is.

  “That’s a great theory, Doc,” he says, laughter still tingeing his voice. “It really is. It would explain so much, wouldn’t it? Personality repression and annihilation because of an overactive guilt complex. So simple! So textbook! And so far off base.”

  His voice lowers. “You have no idea what I am,” he growls. It is as threatening as he can be inside that straitjacket. You glare back at him. Don’t play mind games with a psychiatrist, you think.

  “I think I’m dealing with a man who is hurting,” you say. “I think I am dealing with a broken man who is aching to be whole again. But damn it, I can’t help you unless you let me. And I need your permission for that. I need you to allow me access. Let me in so I can help you out.”

  You’re pretty pleased with yourself at this point. It’s going a lot better, and a lot faster, than you thought it would. You’ve already made the first attempt at engaging him in his own recovery. This is fantastic!

  “You’re going about this the wrong way, Doctor,” he says with a sigh. “There have been many doctors. I have been here a long time. They have all said these things to me, many times over.”

  You can almost hear the air escaping your deflated ego.

  “What is the right way to go about this, then?” you ask.

  He shrugs as much as he can. “Start asking the right questions.”

  It’s time to play your ace. “I don’t have to ask shit,” you say. From your lab coat pocket you produce a syringe filled with 250 CC’s of a clear liquid, a protective plastic tip over the needle.

  “This is sodium pentothal.” You hold the hypo up to the light, making sure he sees it. He follows it with his eyes as you wave it about. “Keep bullshitting me, and I’ll get the truth out of you anyway.”

  The patient nods. He seems strangely impressed.

  “This is a last resort, you understand,” you continue. “I would much rather just talk to you, like a civilized human being, without the introduction of drugs. So, you tell me. What do you consider to be one of the ‘right’ questions?”

  You put the syringe back in your pocket. It’s not sodium pentothal, of course. It’s just water. But he doesn’t have to know that. Empty threats will have to do for now. You’re not even supposed to be here. You don’t even want to imagine the kind of hell that would rain down if his real doctor caught wind of some strange person in a lab coat pumping his patient full of truth serum.

  The patient clears his throat. “It’s not my job to tell you what questions to ask,” he says. “Start easy. Work your way up. See what happens.”

  You sit back and cross your legs. You look at the case file in your lap again, although you already know what it says. You look back at the mysterious man in front of you. You’re irritated with him, on the verge of anger. Does that mean he’s winning? You’re not sure. The atmosphere is changing. Things are happening you didn’t count on.

  “Who are you?” you ask.

  “There you go,” he says, approvingly. “That’s more like it.”

  “Who are you?” you ask again.

  “I am eternity,” he says, closing his eyes and grinning, ever so slightly, like someone remembering a great meal or some fantastic sex. “I am older than your entire species. I remember when you were born. I was here before day and night existed. I have never not been here.”

  Okay. So it’s a God trip. You can work with that.

  “If you are eternal, then why do you say you inhabit this man’s body? Do you not have form of your own?”

  “Bodies die. They decay. They rot. Humans. You’re all so funny. Giant bags of meat with delusions of grandeur. Imagine a hot dog thinking it is king of the universe. That’s what humans are to me. A body wears out, I slip into another. It’s simple.”

  “So you’re a spirit of some kind.”

  He shakes his head. “No.”

  “Some kind of microbe?”

  “You’re getting colder.”

  You sigh. “Help me out here, then,” you say.

  “I have form. I have shape. I have substance.” He raises an eyebrow. “I have also learned how to hide.”

  “Bullshit,” you say. “X-rays would find you.”

  “They haven’t,” he says firmly.

  You nod. “That, my friend, is a great story. Can’t prove it, can’t disprove it. Well done.”

  “It isn’t a story, Doctor.”

  “You really believe you’re not human?” you ask, a slight sneer crossing your face.

  “You really believe you are?” he asks.

  You’re starting to get angry. This is going nowhere. It’s just been a series of contradictions. This is not how things were supposed to go.

  “How long do you think you can keep this up?” you ask.

  “Keep what up?” he innocently asks.

  “This little story of yours. Mister ‘I’m not human’ when obviously you are, because you’re sitting right there in front of me.”

  He furrows his brow. “You’re not a good doctor, are you?”

  “I am a great doctor! You are a lousy liar! This smokescreen you put up, not letting anybody in, refusing to take any responsibility for yourself or your actions, it’s childish!”

  “Did you think you were going to achieve some kind of emotional breakthrough this quickly? There are so many more options left, things you haven’t even tried yet!”

  “Shut up!” you yell. “Shut up and tell me the truth!”

  He stares at you, stares you down, cowing you into silence. He breathes deeply and holds it for a moment before exhaling loudly.

  “If I tell you the truth, Doctor, will you kindly leave me alone? Will you just shut up and let me rest? Will you feel better if you know?”

  Good Lord. You’ve broken him. You’ve shattered that wall and you’re in. You’re walking around in his subconscious now. This is the moment every psychiatrist waits for. Breakthrough.

  “Yes,” you say calmly. “Yes, I think it’s time for that.”

  “Fine,” he says, and his blue eyes settle onto yours, making that contact and holding it. “This will take a minute.”

  You watch and wait as a look of slight discomfort crosses his face. His eyelid twitches. His Adam’s apple begins to bulge, as if he is trying to swallow something too large for his throat. When the skin on his neck begins to split, your first instinct is to make a note of it in his case file. But this is not your case. This is not your file.

  The crack in his neck begins to grow. Your raise your hand and point to it, like you could warn him about what’s happening. Like he doesn’t already know. Like he isn’t making it happen. There is no blood coming from that split and how is that possible? He should be gushing, spouting, yet there is nothing.

  Not nothing. A thing. Something is coming out of him, through that crack, like something unclean coming out of a portal, a time rift, a rip in the dimensions that let something out. You can see fingers. Are they fingers? They might be tentacles, snaking their way out of that growing hole in his neck and sweet Jesus, why doesn’t he bleed? The things push and pull and tear until the hole in your patient’s neck is half a throat wide.

  It is impossible, the thing you are seeing, and when you try to scream or call out to Tony for help, nothing comes out. The man is also quiet, making no sound as whatever it is that lives inside him pushes its way out, out of some kind of nightmare world into this one. Then the man has three eyes: the two in his head and the one staring at you through the jagged gap in his neck, where his artery should be. It gazes at you, diamond-shaped pupil of the purest black, surrounded by an iris of all the colors in all the worlds, a kaleidoscope of knowledge encir
cling that black jewel of hatred, looking upon this place, this Earth, from a new perspective. It looks at you like it knows you.

  Does it know you? Could it possibly recognize you, the same way a great-grandfather recognizes his great-grandchild, picks out the family resemblance, understands intuitively that somehow, that child is his?

  Two eyes are poking out of the man’s neck now, and you believe he is smiling. He’s done it. He’s shown you his real self, his true face. Fuck your years of training, fuck everything they taught you to believe, everything they told you was true about life and science and evolution and how you got here and what you’re supposed to doing.

  You actually feel a small “pop” when your mind breaks, a subtle shift in the skull, the slight separation of hemispheres. Continental drift. As the creature grows and continues to climb out of its host into the room, you can’t stop gazing into those cold reptile eyes, the eyes of something old and evil, something that refused to evolve or die off like it should. You feel that hate that keeps it alive. You burn with the hunger it feels, to be warm again, to rule again, feeding and feasting, culling the herd as it did when it roamed freely and was worshipped as a god.

  You begin laughing. You can’t help it. Everything is starting to make sense now. Religion, government, medicine, it’s all wrong. Those things are simply human constructs. Everything you were taught or compelled to believe in is designed to hide people from the ultimate truth. You want to see more, you need to see more of this thing, this genesis of everything, but your eyes are in the way. They don’t do enough, can’t open wide enough, can’t see far enough into the past to give you the vision your brain now desires.

  Fumbling about in your coat pocket, you find the syringe, the one you had previously threatened the man with. The man. The messiah. The one who opened your mind. You love him. You love him for showing you the way, the truth and the life. You squirt the water out of the syringe onto the floor. Even if it had been truth serum, it wouldn’t have given you the kind of enlightenment you’ve received now.

  You jab the syringe into your left eye. The nerve endings in your cornea scream with pain at the puncture. Agony means nothing to you now. It feels like adoration. Laughing even harder, you pull the plunger down on the syringe. The fluid in your eye begins draining down into the clear plastic cylinder. You remember the medical name for eye juice: aqueous humor. Good thing you’re laughing. You can feel your eye deflating, your vision dims. You’ll never watch a 3-D movie again, you think.

  It’s all right, though, you think. The things you know now, the things you’ve seen, the expansion your mind has undergone! What are you now? What are you becoming?

  You plunge the needle into your right eye. It pops like a water balloon filled with lube. You have to stop seeing in order to see. As sight fades, you take one more look at the man in the chair.

  The face is gone. The thing inside him has disappeared. It has crawled back inside, waiting and hiding, and there’s not a single mark on the man. No spot where his skin distended and tore, no marks of the door to the ancient portal that dwells within him. In the last second before you go blind, you wonder if the whole thing was a hallucination, a waking dream, a trick of the light.

  And if it was, isn’t that the funniest thing you’ve ever heard?

  You pull the syringe out of your eye and throw it down. Your laughter has taken on a higher pitch, becoming a manic keening. You hear a key in the lock as Tony barges his way in.

  You feel his hands on your face. He tilts your head from side to side. “Jesus,” he whispers.

  “Can’t see it anymore!” you cackle. “Can’t see it anymore!”

  “What did you do?” Tony yells. He must be talking to the man in the chair. “What the hell happened?” You hear nothing from the man, that beautiful man, that wonderful, glorious man beyond men.

  You hear Tony scuffling down the hallway. You assume he is going to get help. There is no help, but there is no way for Tony to know that.

  Then, faintly, like a whisper from another room, the man in the chair speaks to you.

  “Happy now?”

  You start laughing even harder. Beyond laughter. You are crying in a language you’ve never spoken, a language humans have neither seen nor comprehended, ululations to mad gods older than the cosmos.

  When the doctors and nurses rush the room, they all voice shock and concern about your eyes. How you could have done this to yourself. What might have triggered it.

  This just makes things even funnier.

  You can still see.

  Boiling seas and pyramids, different worlds, strange languages etched into stone pillars. Space, folding into itself, turning inside out, exploding and imploding, over and over. Creatures you’ve never seen before, things that dominate and roam through the night skies, eating worlds and drinking galaxies. Giant beings, sentient, living under the water in great sunken abbeys, waiting for the stars to align and when they do, oh, when they do…

  … the whole world will know the truth.

  Final Solution

  Frank drives the truck. He’s an older guy, doesn’t talk much. You’ve grown used to the smell of his cigars. They don’t stink nearly as badly as the stuff you handle on a daily basis.

  Tommy is the new kid. He’s in his mid-twenties and he’s a bit of an asshole. He’s always talking about how this is a temporary stop for him. “My uncle knows the mayor,” he says. “I’ll be running this town in ten years.”

  “That says maybe,” you reply, “but right now, you’re smashing trash, just like me.”

  “Yeah,” Tommy says, “but this is like all you know how to do. I’ve got prospects, doo.”

  Little fucker. You don’t even start into the argument that could easily happen. You could tell him about how you’re only six hours away from your doctorate in anthropology, but he wouldn’t even know what anthropology is. You could tell him how there’s no work in this town for an anthropologist, or about how you had to drop out when the economy shifted from bad to shit. You could tell him about your sweet wife, still asleep at home, or your twin girls, currently gleefully dominating their fifth grade classes.

  None of that matters to a shit heel like Tommy.

  It’s mid-May. The morning is already sticky, even in the dark. Birds are chirping angrily at the noise of the rear-loader. You put on your work gloves. Tommy adjusts his ear buds.

  Frank is behind the wheel already. He slaps the side of the door with his left hand. “Let’s go, ladies,” he yells. “Time is trash!”

  You take the left. Tommy takes the right. In unison, you step up onto the back of the truck, grab onto the iron bars and brace yourselves.

  “Once more into the fray, Frankie,” you yell.

  With a great rumble, the garbage truck takes off and the work day begins.

  The town is tranquil this early. Empty streets. Dew covered lawns. Everything immaculate and perfect. A John Hughes movie, a glossy magazine spread.

  You work a higher end suburban run. Houses larger and prettier than anything you’ll ever own, unless things shift dramatically in your favor. SUVs covered in pollen sit unlocked in driveways. Everything is safe. Everyone is secure.

  You don’t envy these people, but you are curious about that kind of lifestyle. How it feels to wake up and not immediately wonder how much money is left in checking. When your student loans are due. When one of the girls will need braces or glasses. How you’re going to pay for any of it when the day comes.

  “Look at these bitches,” Tommy says. “Man, I’m gonna have a house bigger than any of these. You’ll see.”

  You nod.

  Your first swing is through a sub-division called Terrace Pointe. You never understood why developers threw that extra “e” at the end of that word. Does it really entice people to move there? Do people think, “I would have bought a house in Terrace Point, but it just sounded too sharp! If only there had been another vowel in there somewhere?”

  House one. Two cans full
of suburban refuse. Frank brings the truck to a halt. Tommy jumps down and drags the cans over to the rear loader. You jump down and run across the street to get the cans from the opposing driveway. A quick lift and dump into the chute, with a quick knock of the can against the spill shield to knock any stragglers loose, and that’s it. Take the empty containers back to the curb and move on.

  You and Tommy jump back onto the truck and move on to the next pair of houses.

  There are certain shortcuts you’ve learned on this route. There are five cul-de-sacs in Terrace Pointe. Frank drives the truck all the way around the circle. You don’t jump off until the front of the truck is pointing outwards. That way, Tommy and you can just grab all the trash from the five houses at once. You know which cans go to which house by memory. Anything that shaves time off is a good thing.

  Once the people start to wake up and traffic begins rolling, it slows you down. Impatient people in their luxury sedans start whipping around the truck without looking. There’s angry honking as you pull garbage cans across a busy street. The job gets a lot more dangerous when the sun comes up. Frank just keeps his middle finger raised to deal with the assholes who yell at him for blocking the road.

  The streets in Terrace Pointe are all named after girls. Martha Way. Caroline Way. Samantha Way. No roads, just ways. The lack of imagination bothers your inner academic. Your outer garbage collector just uses the names to gauge how much longer you have to spend in this neighborhood.

  Tommy runs the packer blade. It makes him feel powerful. When you’ve thrown enough trash into the back of the truck, Tommy grabs the switch and pulls it down like he’s electrocuting a criminal. He laughs every time he does it. The pneumatics kick in and the steel blade comes down, puncturing the black plastic trash bags, dragging the garbage further up into the truck and compacting it. More food for the beast, and the beast is always famished.