by Lotta Smith
I didn’t want to, but the imaginary scene of his first encounter with his mother came into my mind. I felt sick.
“If it wasn’t the ultimate way of showing rejection, I don’t know what that was,” he muttered, slumping his shoulders. “I was heartbroken. She refused to see me when I wasn’t even born, and then refused to see me when she met me for the first time. She didn’t know how much time and effort I had invested to reach her. She didn’t even bothered to care about it. I felt like dying on the spot. I went to the window; it was on the third floor, so if I jumped from there, I could probably have ended everything. Then all of a sudden, a strong wind blew and hit my face with sprinkles of snow, so I looked away. It was then something incredible happened—her eyes met mine.”
“Excuse me?” I muttered.
“You heard me, Kelly, our eyes met. And I saw her eyes sparkle with recognition and well up with tears.” He smiled from ear to ear. “It was the first time we got to communicate with each other. At that moment, all the conflicts, wrath, and resentment that had been built up inside me disappeared like vapor. What remained was love, forgiveness, and peace. We were finally united, and I knew we’d be together and we’d get to know each other.”
“But…,” I fidgeted, “that’s so impossible. You said she was dead.”
“Her body was expired, unfortunately. Still, her soul was alive, and we’re meant to be together, forever and ever.”
He started talking to the glass with two eyeballs. “Here we are, Mom. It was a long, long journey for us. Literally, we crossed the big water, and I had to conceal you in a jar of cold cream. But finally, we have found the right solution. This here is Ms. Kelly Kinki. Say hi to her. And, Kelly, meet Mom.”
Alan saluted the glass in my direction.
“These are not your mom!” I said, bewildered. “They’re nothing but a pair of eyeballs plucked out of a dead body.”
Seriously, I couldn’t believe he was able to bring the eyeballs from the UK to the U.S. What had happened to this world?
And… Hello, TSA, are you there? Can you hear me? Remember, you confiscated my Juicy Tube lip gloss from Lancôme as a potential weapon of mass destruction? Hey, now I know you let a lunatic slip away carrying fresh human body parts with him. Good thing the lip gloss was almost finished when it got taken away.
“Kelly, don’t be rude to my mother,” he shushed me. “Just because she doesn’t have a body doesn’t mean she has no feelings.” Then he talked to the eyeballs sweetly. “Mother, don’t worry. I’ll soon settle you into her body.”
My jaw dropped.
“Y-yo-you…” I gasped. A lesser woman would have fainted on the spot, and a better woman would have started giving out a badass rant. I was only myself, so I stuttered. “Yo-you’ve got to be kidding.”
“No, I’m serious.” And his face was serious. “I told you, after all, it was quite stupid and unjustifiable the media called me Eyeball Snatcher, because stealing eyeballs has never been my purpose. And those lying schmucks in the media call themselves journalists. Talk about an irony. They don’t give a damn about the fact that I was merely looking for a body to host my mother’s soul. It’s just, in order to bring my mother’s soul back to life, the body’s previous occupant’s soul is not welcome.”
He grasped the knife. “So, Kelly, I need to remove your eyeballs from your body.”
“Come on, Alan. Don’t tell me the victims were killed in your ridiculous attempts to bring your dead mother back to life.”
“Unfortunately, I’ve had my share of disappointment in the pursuit to bring Mom back to life,” he confessed nonchalantly.
“Oh, my God. Killing people in order to resuscitate a dead person from death? That’s the most ridiculous excuse for committing mass murder.” I shook my head. I would have added dramatic hand gestures for emphasis, were it not for my hands being restrained.
“Kelly, I strongly disagree with your calling my project ridiculous. You’ve got to invest lots and lots of time and effort in order to successfully obtain the desired outcome.” Alan shrugged. “So it was unfortunate that there were casualties, but nothing goes without experiencing losses and failures. Take medical technology, the current medicine saves lots of people from diseases and injuries, but in the process of developing the technology we now enjoy, a whole lot more people have suffered and died. Some from shaky techniques and others from experiments that didn’t go so good as the initial hypotheses. In short, everything we do is a kind of experiment.”
“But, Alan, look at the other eyeballs. You’ve tried your resuscitation routine with multiple victims in the past, and look what happened; you failed on all the attempts. If I were you, I’d definitely conclude that plucking eyeballs out of strangers and replacing them with the ones from your dead mother won’t resuscitate her. It’s just killing innocent strangers.”
“But this time, it’ll work. I know it,” he said. “And it’s reincarnation, rather than resuscitation.”
“Get real.” I said, trying to be persuasive. Oh yes, I tried. “Okay, so, to err is human. Then again, making the same mistakes of killing people and having no regret seriously ruins your karma, you know. That kind of sins really whacks out your karma to the point the judges in the afterlife divvy you into smaller pieces and you’ll be an ameba in your afterlife. You don’t want to be an ameba in the afterlife, do you?”
“I don’t care about my afterlife. What’s important is that you share some critical personal traits with Mom, Kelly. You used to be called the poisonous bitch, for instance, and you had the nickname Dragon Lady. My mother used to be called those names. Oh, did I mention her name’s Kelly as well? Just like you. I had picked women who share some physical features like hair and eye color with Mom, but they didn’t work well. Then again, you have more things in common with her. Guess what? My mother has had her time being called a bitch.”
“In that case, Patricia Warshawski, the congresswoman, seems to work magic for your needs,” I said, crossing my fingers. Screw karma, I needed to buy time. “Believe me, she’s a real bitch. And considering she craves media attention more than anything, she’ll definitely accept meeting you one-on-one, trying to score and prove she’s better than everyone in law enforcement.”
Desperate times called for desperate measures. I didn’t feel bad at all about urging him to get Bitchtricia.
All right, so maybe I too have some bitch personality.
“I don’t think so. Her eye color doesn’t meet my requirement criterion.”
He shook his head nonchalantly, as if it was a job interview or something.
Some women land high-paying positions with Goldman-Sachs, and here I was, a candidate to be brutally killed!
Talk about an opportunity of a lifetime.
“Kelly,” Alan said with a stern face, “you were not paying attention to my words, I’m afraid.” Mrs. Halliday told me the same thing when I was in third grade.
“Try concentrating when you’re being stun-gunned, kidnapped, tied-up, and threatened to be killed with a giant knife; you’ll have an attention problem.”
“Don’t get me wrong, Kelly. I’m not killing you.”
“If that’s the case, can’t you at least ditch the knife?” I suggested.
“I don’t think so. This baby is necessary for the procedure.”
“Forget the procedure. Remember? It’s not an organ transplant. Also, speaking of a baby, why did you do your sick trick on that baby of Dr. Julia Stewart’s? The baby wasn’t even born. So, tell me, what had she done to deserve that kind of cruelty?” I demanded.
For the first time, he was silent.
“Tell me,” I pressed. “Why did you have to yank her out of the mother’s womb? She was no threat to you, and considering you’d brutally murdered her mother, she would have died without your sick procedure.”
“It was not my fault,” he said through gritted teeth. “It was her fault. That woman, the coroner, was so persistent—desperate even—begging and pleading f
or me to help the baby, not to touch the baby, do no harm to the baby. Baby, baby, baby! That bitch! Her rapping about the damn baby, that was so sickening! She was oh-so-keen about protecting that fucking baby, guarding her belly with her bleeding hands, even when I poked her eyeballs out of her. How could she do that when my own mother had tried to kill me when I wasn’t even born? That’s not fair!”
“For your information, life never has been fair,” I said. “Especially when an unborn child gets brutally yanked out of her mother’s belly by a jealous head case so that the fruitcake can play a goddamned sick trick on her by poking out her eyeballs. Talk about unfairness. Stop victimizing yourself already!”
“Stop judging me!” he shouted. “I didn’t do it just out of jealousy. As they say, little babies have lots more potential for everything than adults. I thought maybe a baby could bring Mom back to life. Though the result was disappointing.”
Shaking his head as if to shrug off some kind of a burden, he continued. “But considering the killing of the coroner and the baby brought the chance to take a glimpse of you on TV, along with an opportunity to know you, maybe that was time well spent.”
“I’m not quite seeing your point, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, Kelly, you could never imagine my excitement when I caught you on the TV for the first time. It was just a moment that the camera captured you for the nine o’clock news. It was one of the old, boring news segments regarding this Eyeball Snatcher bullshit. Then again, it was worth watching. I was lost, clueless, and frustrated; then all of a sudden, you popped out in front of me.”
I couldn’t imagine his excitement, and I wasn’t all that keen on knowing more. Too much information. Still, he continued anyway.
“Your hair, body shape, your face, the way you walked, how you looked away from the camera…everything was brilliant. No, perfect is more like the word. On top of all that, it was your eyes that were screaming perfect…the shape, the width, the color. Especially the color. The splendid shade of brown was truly something other women didn’t possess, and maybe it was your attitude that added some kind of sparkling fire to them. I had the feeling you were the one. So I did some research on the web and found out about your past, how you obtained the Vicious Bitch and Dragon Lady status and all.”
He sighed contentedly. “It was just a brief moment, but that was enough for me to know you’re the one. Besides all that, take a look at this.” He took out something from the breast pocket of his shirt.
It was an aged, fading photograph of a young woman. So she had brown hair and big brown eyes, bearing some resemblance to my physical features, but that didn’t necessarily mean I was the one to replace her. Besides that, I would sacrifice just about anything to welcome a baby and for the happiness of a baby.
“Alan, I may have similar hair and eye color with her, but we have nothing in common. No matter what you say, carrying out your demonic scheme will just increase the body count without bringing what you want,” I said firmly.
“You make it sound like I’m a cold-blooded killer,” he interjected. “On the contrary, I’m just trying to help you become immortal, and I need to carry out the procedure, whether you like it or not.”
“Excuse me?” I narrowed my eyes. “Plucking eyeballs out of me and putting your mother’s dead eyeballs into my eye sockets makes me blind, not immortal.”
“But you don’t wanna die, do you?”
“Of course not.” Not now, at least.
“In that case, making you immortal is the only solution for a win-win situation.” With a big grin pasted on his face, he stood up. “You’ll thank me later.”
Screaming “Lunatic alert!” was tempting, but I bit my tongue to keep myself from that. Doing that just might aggravate the situation.
I looked up and met his eyes; this was no joke, prank, or antic. He was completely serious.
In his eyes was a glittering confidence that I have seen before—the same absolute, downright delirious belief, an obsession somewhat resembling faith. Long story short, he was 100 percent certain that he was right. I had seen the same striking credence in the eyes of Warren Bernadoff Estevez.
Just like that.
In Warren’s world, he had never been a fraud.
Incriminating evidence was nothing but a conspiracy to screw him, to destroy him. He was innocent in that little world where he was God Almighty in charge of setting up the rules and keeping the order. No one, nothing, even the law could knock sense into him.
It was the first time I truly accepted the fact that no one could have saved my ex from himself.
The Eureka moment.
I realized that the fiasco in the UK and the consequences had never been my problem. That issue had become mine only because I had made it mine. Finally, I came to terms with myself so that I had no feelings toward the ex-husband, much less love, since a long, long time ago. It just took years for me to become aware of my true feelings. My God, bothering to visit Belmarsh was a total waste of time.
How pathetic was that?
Oh, my God, I’m an idiot!
I felt like punching myself and crawling in the corner to cry, if only my body and hands were free.
Not to mention, it was not a good time to indulge myself in full-blown self-pity.
“So that’s why you poked the eyes out of the other women? To make them immortal?”
“Yes, I did that to them with good intentions. But look at them, how they turned out to be dead. It was devastatingly disappointing. Still, I’m keeping their eyeballs to remember at least I tried.”
“Maybe you could have just given it up.”
“No, I couldn’t just give it up!” he snapped. “Don’t you have an imagination? So I tried and tried, just in vain. Each time, my anticipation got higher and higher, and I got more and more desperate. Please, please let me make it—wishing, praying to God, spirits, devils, and whatever to let me successfully bring my mother back to life, only to fail. But now, I’ve got you. And I know you’ll turn into Mom and love me unconditionally.”
“Oh…” A drop of sweat trickled down my face. “Speaking of unconditional love…,” I started, though I was running out of topics. “It seems like one of your victims was in love with this artist named Sam. Whatever happened to Sam?”
Sue me, I was still trying to buy time.
“Come on, Kelly. Seriously?” He shook his head. “Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that you’re talking to him, Sam the artist? Are you babbling to buy extra time? Unfortunately, your strategy won’t work, I’m afraid.” He chuckled. “Perhaps you’re hoping your boss will be coming to your rescue any minute, but then again, he’ll be wasting time vainly searching for the artist near West Virginia. Brilliant, just brilliant.”
“So tell me, Alan. What’s the reason for making up this Sam character?” I asked, successfully buying extra seconds.
“Well, Sam is the name of the so-called artist, whom my mother had followed to Paris after abandoning me. So I made up this artist character with the assumed name Sam with some help from articles left by the real Sam, including the old oil painting named Rhapsodie—though I corrected the spelling when I named my little shop after that ugly pink painting. I had this gut instinct that women attracted to an artist bearing the same name and similar painting style have a great potential to host Mom’s soul.”
Skeptically, I stared at the glass containing several eyeballs.
“You are not convinced.” He followed my gaze and grinned. “Of course, things didn’t work out well at first. Still yet, in retrospect, Mom has been helping me throughout all this process, as much as my Sam role has lured candidate women and brought you to me. That has totally compensated for the malfunction with the first candidate women. One greedy hooker and a rich divorcee, they came from different backgrounds, but they had a few things in common—they were desperate to boost their luck and both women complimented my Rhapsody, saying the painting seemed to be improving their happiness. Can you believe the rich divorcee even
traded her very expensive pieces for my crappy paintings? In a nutshell, they were both desperately craving something they didn’t have, overlooking what they already had. Looking at those women, I realized maybe my mother had tried to abort me for the same reason. So, I had my share of frustration, but in the big picture, Sam’s role and the artwork was a definite success. They also attracted this stupid, sick head case of a musician.”
“You mean Yves?” I asked.
“Yeah, a stupid loser,” he spat. “He whined, fussed and wailed about his past, his relationship with his mother, and everything! I had female customers who bitched and/or bragged about their relationships, but he was the worst and most annoying fusspot ever. Still, I listened to his grievance. It was hard to fake earnestness, but I did so anyway. I knew he was usable. Believe me, he was positively convinced he was the killer who had poked eyeballs out of women, not even doubting that his worsening nightmares had anything to do with me. He kept complaining how he wasn’t sleeping well, so I gave him innocent-looking tea, saying it was a remedy from Patagonia. Of course, it was laced with hallucinogenic ingredients extracted from magic mushroom, and he had just been hallucinating. He didn’t even know where Patagonia is. When he saw all those news feeds about Eyeball Snatcher, he was sickly shocked. He did everything I told him to do, like writing the suicide note and taking the medicine I gave him. And the rest is history.”
“He might have been sick, but you’re sicker than him,” I muttered.
“I’ll take that as a compliment. Anyway, the encounter with him was necessary for me, I guess, especially after I’d discovered you. I knew you were the one and only to reincarnate my mother, and I had no time to waste on other women. But at the same time, I needed closure for the Eyeball Snatcher fiasco to make it easier to acquire you. And guess what? The Sam character brought just about everything I needed. He not only arranged the convenient closure for my previous experiments, but he also brought you here before I went to get you. Kelly, what do you think this turn of events means?”