Seconds

by David Ely

  Again, Wilson felt humbled. Of course, the woman was right, he decided, but at the same time he was irked at the fact that he had been placed in such a vulnerable position—to be confronted without warning by a woman when he was not even properly dressed. It was deliberate, he thought. They wanted to keep him in a docile state of mind, by a combination of social unease and pills.

  “You said something about a busy schedule,” he said.

  “Yes. First, you go to the Delivery Room.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  She smiled. “That’s what we call it. The Delivery Room. You’re being reborn, you know. Isn’t it logical? Well, actually it’s our surgery. Completely modern in every respect.”

  “Ah, yes. But—why surgery?”

  “My, you are a little jumpy, aren’t you?” She clucked, in mock disapproval. “Look here, you’d better slip into bed again and let me take your temperature, and then I’ll tell you all about it.” He glanced uneasily at the rumpled bed, and she added, with a hint of maternal solicitude, “Come on, now. You’ll be much more comfortable there . . . That’s it. Good.”

  She took a thermometer from a case inside her purse and put it in Wilson’s mouth, gave the covers a professional touch to smooth them, and looked briefly at her wristwatch.

  “Now,” she said in a bright little voice, as if she were about to tell him a bedtime story, “in the first place, you’ve got to go to the Delivery Room to let the doctors get accurate measurements of your body, so they can pick the right size from Cadaver Storage. It wouldn’t do to have one too tall or too short, you know. Well, and then they’ve got to make certain kinds of special casts of your teeth and your hands and so forth. It’s all very complicated and scientific, but they do just marvelous work, and of course it doesn’t hurt you the tiniest bit, but they need to do it, you understand, so they can process the cadaver to meet your specifications. You’re having a first-class death, I think . . . Yes, I’m sure of it. Well, anyway, that’s the first stage, and they don’t want to waste time, because you’re supposed to be found dead tonight.”

  Wilson sat up.

  “The cadaver, of course,” she added, gently poking his chest to make him lie down.

  He remained sitting and took the thermometer from his mouth. “I understand that. But you said that’s the first stage. Is there a second, then?”

  “You’re not worried, are you?”

  “No, I just want to know.”

  “Aren’t you feeling drowsy?”

  “Not a bit. Would you mind telling me—”

  “Well, all right. I must say you’re a sensitive type, though, Mr. Wilson.” She clucked at him again. “The second stage is cosmetic, naturally.”

  “I don’t quite grasp—”

  “Cosmetic. You can’t go out into the world looking the way you do, you know. You’d be recognized at once.”

  Wilson sank back. “Of course,” he muttered.

  “Believe me, Mr. Wilson, you’ll be amazed by what a little change here and there can do for a man. You’ll feel younger—and you’ll look younger, too. And that’ll mean you’ll be younger,” she went on, soothing him with little pats on the forehead as he lay staring up at the ceiling. “Don’t you want to be younger? Goodness, I wouldn’t mind a little tinkering like that myself, one of these days. You can just thank your lucky stars you can afford all of this. Not that you aren’t a fine-looking gentleman as it is, Mr. Wilson, but even the best of us can stand a weeny bit of improvement now and then . . .”

  Her voice was gentle and chatty, but it did not completely set his mind at ease. It occurred to him that it had been confoundedly unfair of Charley not to have mentioned this right away. But then, why hadn’t he thought of it himself before this? It was obvious enough.

  “Look here,” he said, interrupting the woman, “don’t I get a chance to, um, approve the . . . the final version, beforehand?”

  “Well, we used to do that, but we found that our clients could never really come to a decision. They kept adding a little here and wanting to take a wrinkle out there, and, really, it was a terrible nuisance, and so we dropped that feature.”

  “I’m not at all sure I like the idea.”

  “Mr. Wilson, we aren’t going to have a little problem with you, are we now?” She shook her forefinger at him playfully, and Wilson was again impressed with the company’s slyness in assigning a woman to deal with him. As a gentleman, he could hardly make a violent protest in her presence, and besides, the idea of being given a more youthful appearance somewhat intrigued him, especially since it had been urged on him by a woman who was by no means unattractive; which, he assumed further, was still another evidence of the craftiness of the company, in placing this phase of his processing in the hands of a female.

  Nevertheless, his expression remained quite worried, and the woman regarded him anxiously.

  “Don’t you feel a little sleepy now?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “You should, you know. From the pills. Goodness, Mr. Wilson,” she said, placing her hands on her hips and frowning down at him, “we can’t have you trundled off to Delivery all nervous like this.”

  “I’ll be all right.”

  “We can’t take any chances on that. After all, it’s my responsibility. Well,” she added, rising from the chair beside the bed and going toward the bathroom, “we’ll just have to give you something more, to calm you down.”

  “Really—” Wilson began, but she had gone into the bathroom and had closed the door behind her. He sighed, and feeling in reality somewhat drowsy, turned over on his side, facing the wall, closed his eyes and waited for sleep to come, wondering indolently whether he would awake to find that the plastic surgeons had already completed their work. Would he be permitted to glance in a mirror beforehand, for a last look at his old face?

  But before he was quite asleep, he was aware that a pair of hands was quietly unbuttoning the jacket of his pajamas and, more remarkable still, was also pulling loose the drawstring of the trousers. In his somnolent condition, he half-imagined that he was a child, being changed in the middle of the night, and so he lazily wriggled, to help the unseen parental figure slip his pajamas off; then, when he lay naked, and felt the hands that had undressed him begin to knead his shoulders, he grew more wakeful, and decided that the woman was giving him a rubdown, to relax him physically while the pills became fully effective. However, the hands moved to his chest, then to his stomach, where they no longer rubbed but stroked and alternately scratched gently with slow upward motions of the fingernails, and then in a moment, to Wilson’s considerable surprise, they descended still lower, where they commenced a delicate massage of a nature he doubted was prescribed in the pages of a nurse’s manual. It was at this point that he turned over.

  The room was dark, for the shades had been pulled and the curtains drawn.

  “Is this supposed to calm me down?” he asked.

  “Not at first. But it will later.” Her voice still had its characteristic note of efficiency, despite the fact that she now was ministering to him on a far from impersonal basis, for she lay beside him, unclothed, with her unbound hair coiled down around her neck and shoulders.

  “I frequently find this necessary with our more sensitive clients,” she added, taking his hands and placing them against her breasts. “Not that I mind, really. I mean, it’s part of the job, and someone who doesn’t enjoy their work . . . well, they ought to do something else, don’t you agree?”

  “Certainly,” said Wilson, somewhat thickly.

  She kissed him. “Goodness,” she remarked, her hand having explored his body once more, “you woke up fast, didn’t you! Well, remember now, haste makes waste. Don’t hurry. Kiss me all over.” And as he complied with her request, she lay on her back, from time to time directing his mouth and hands with expert little movements, until after some minutes she provided him with final guidance, and they struggled harmoniously there, but only for a short time.
/>   “I’m sorry,” said Wilson.

  “Not at all. I mean, it’s not as if you did this every day, you know. You’re not the kind of gentleman who goes running around after chorus girls, after all, and I would suspect that your wife has passed her peak years.” She patted his shoulder reassuringly. “Tell me honestly, Mr. Wilson, when was the last time?”

  “Oh . . . three months ago, or longer.”

  “There now. You see? When a man’s out of practice, it just takes a few seconds, and then—zip!” She snapped her fingers. “All over and done with. But you’ve got nothing to be ashamed of, Mr. Wilson. Goodness, some gentlemen are impotent, and believe you me, I’ve really got my work cut out for me in those cases.” She exhaled a little reminiscent sigh at the thought of these special labors. “Oh, but there aren’t many of them, actually, mostly because our clients feel sort of at home with a person who’s not exactly a child. They’re more apt to be relaxed with a mature woman, don’t you think? Someone who reminds them of their wives . . . That’s the theory, anyway.” She studied Wilson’s face, “How do you feel, Mr. Wilson? Tell me. I’m really interested. As a person, I mean.”

  “I do feel relaxed,” he answered, honestly. He was silent for a moment, pondering. “It’s strange,” he added, “but there’s a kind of logic to it all. Let me put it this way. This morning, for example, certain remarkable things have happened to me, not the least of which was the act of adultery, to use a prudish term. Now, I’m not an adulterous man, really, but I feel no guilt at the moment nor do I think I ever will, simply because it all seems quite natural and simple, and—well, logical. I suppose it’s partly because, as you have said, you are a wifely kind of person. And then yesterday, what happened then was logical and familiar, too, in a way. Granted that I was in a semi-drugged condition much of the time, still it amazes me, in retrospect, that the whole process didn’t strike me as being fantastic—beyond belief. I did believe it, though, and that’s why I went through with it, barring an occasional objection, and I think the reason for this was that the whole framework of the operation was businesslike and efficient. In short, I was confronted with a process that was, perhaps superficially, quite familiar. The process of providing guidance, advice, and services to a client, roughly similar to the manner in which I myself have been trained, with the exception, of course, that where I have dealt with money, this company deals with human beings.”

  “Oh, yes,” the woman said, “the company’s very up to date. The whole idea is to treat the client as a complete person and make him feel at home, whether at work or play. Only, the difference is that we care. I mean, our entire purpose is to serve the client. His happiness is all that’s important to us. Really,” she added, waltzing her fingers playfully across his chest, “if we don’t succeed in providing that service, then we’ve failed. That’s what our president says, over and over.”

  “I’m sure that’s right,” Wilson said, remembering the kind-faced old man who had conversed with him so reassuringly the night before. “As a matter of fact, that’s supposed to be the guiding principle in banking nowadays, too. We adopted a new motto a few years ago, for instance. ‘The Friendly Bank.’ ” He smiled drowsily. “Of course, it didn’t make any difference. We didn’t care any more about our clients, personally, than before, but our public relations man made a very strong case at the time for that motto. He said, as I recall, that people were terribly anxious to feel that they were wanted, and that if our corporate image—that was his phrase, not mine—if our corporate image could only wear a friendly smile, why then they would come flocking to us with their funds. Well, nothing happened. I suppose it was because we were still too strongly bound to the old tradition, thinking that people wanted us to handle their money, when they really wanted us to love them . . . Now,” he added, from the depths of his sleepiness, “that’s a strange thing for a banker to say.”

  “But you’re right. That’s the whole point—loving. We love you, Mr. Wilson. Yes we do.” Her voice seemed inexpressibly soothing to him now, and with a sigh of gratitude, he turned toward her. “You just cuddle up and forget about everything,” she went on, drawing his head down so that his face nestled into the warmth of her bosom, and clasping him close with a faint rocking motion of her arms. “Isn’t that better now?”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “You’re going to sleep, aren’t you?”

  “Mmmmm.”

  “That’s the boy. That’s the good boy.” She continued the rocking motion and at the same time began to hum softly what sounded like a little nursery tune, which sent a purr flowing from her body to his. He seemed to be sinking deliciously into a fragrant sea of tenderness, lulled by her faraway voice. “That’s my goodykins. That’s my sweet lamb . . .” The sea received him entirely. It was warm, protective, and wholly his, and it caressed him sweetly with the vibrations of her lullaby.

  He regained consciousness only once during the operation. He was lying on his stomach, his head turned to one side, and when his eyes opened, he beheld the naked body of a man occupying a similar position on an operating table some six feet distant. The face, turned his way, seemed familiar, and the longer he examined it, the more convinced he became that it was his own, but unpleasantly distorted, as if it were paralyzed in some fixity of emotion—laughter or fright, he could not tell which.

  At any rate, Wilson assumed that he was seeing his own body, perhaps reflected in a mirror or possibly projected through some hallucination produced by drugs, and so he was concerned to see a man in white bend over the naked figure and begin to pluck delicately at the eyebrows with a pair of tweezers. Wilson waited for the prickings of pain; they did not come. He tried to move his hand up toward the eye, in vain, but when he sought to speak he produced a kind of grunt that encouraged him to try again. It was here that the man in white stopped his work, turned, and gave a peremptory signal. Someone clapped a rubber mask on Wilson’s face, and he sank regretfully into oblivion once more.

  When he at last awoke, he was in bed in what had every semblance of being a private room in a hospital. The walls were white. There was an odor of disinfectant. On the table beside the bed was a gay bouquet of flowers with a card bearing the words: “Warm personal regards—Charley.” There was a transistor radio, too, softly tuned to symphonic music, and stacked beside it were several paperback mystery novels.

  Wilson’s face felt prickly. He reached up to touch it and saw that his fingers were wrapped in bandages; he thought that his face was bandaged, too, but because of his wrapped hands, could not be sure. Finally, he managed to work his pajama sleeve up above his wrist, so that he could press his face with the bare flesh there, and he was able to confirm his first impression. The entire lower part of his face was apparently bound by tape and gauze, and his jaws throbbed rather painfully. He moved his arms and legs in an exploratory way, and wriggled his toes; he was relieved to find that only his face and fingers seemed to have been involved in the operation.

  A nurse appeared, all in white.

  “Doctor is coming,” she whispered reverently, and vanished.

  Wilson continued to take inventory of his physical condition. He tried to speak, but could only croak dismally. His throat was sore, and he wondered if the surgeons had not fiddled with his vocal apparatus, too, to change his voice. Would his baritone now be bass or tenor? Or would it be higher than that . . . ? The disturbing thought crossed his mind that the company’s medical men might have officiously made some permanent and radical alteration which, while it certainly would reduce the chances of his future identification, would never have received his prior approval. He wished that the nurse had addressed him by name. Would it be Mr. Wilson still, or Miss Wilson? He shuddered at the idea; but managed to gain some reassurance when he pressed his bandaged fingers around the area concerned, and felt no pain.

  “Doctor is here,” whispered the nurse, appearing once more.

  The gentleman who entered the room was dressed not in a surgeon’s smock but in a blac
k suit, like a clergyman’s. He was lean and grey, and his face bore the scars of some terrible accident, which gave him an impressive expression of spiritual agony.

  “All right, Wilson, just lie quietly,” he declared, somewhat brusquely, sitting beside the bed and staring at its occupant in a penetrating way. “You can’t talk yet because we yanked all your teeth and you’re sore all up and down, eh? So I’ll do the talking.” He seemed almost to enjoy Wilson’s alarmed movement at the news about the teeth. “You’ll feel better in a few days, though. Don’t worry. And later on when you get a look at that new mug we’re giving you you’ll be prancing about like a stud bull, no doubt. Just be patient for a while, until we can get you ready for the world again.”

  The doctor at this point held up a folded newspaper before Wilson’s eyes. It was opened to an interior page where the obituaries were carried; one of these items had been circled in red ink. Wilson saw that it was his own death notice, but before he could read more than the first few lines, the doctor took the paper away again.

  “You were found very nicely dead of a stroke in a hotel,” he said. “All quite ordinary and simple, just as you were told it would be. Funeral services tomorrow. And then you’ll be cremated. Any questions?” He grinned rather wolfishly at Wilson. “Since you can’t ask any, I’ll have to guess them . . . As for your operation, we’ve begun grafting and ironing out, plus a chin-lift and earlobe trim, all of which will take about ten years off your appearance. We had to yank the teeth, you know, but you’ve got permanent choppers in place now, and in a week you won’t know the difference . . . No, we didn’t castrate you, Wilson. That’s something every man seems to have on his mind . . . When I say ‘we,’ I speak editorially, of course. I’m the house physician, in permanent residence, not a surgeon, but your face was carved up by two of the best grafters in the business, and very high-priced, too.”