Silver Zombie dspi-4

by Carole Nelson Douglas

  Helena’s voice was shaking with fury now.

  “Can any of you med-school robots imagine her confusion, her fading trust, her growing panic, her incredible agony? Grown women have a tough time with the pain of cervical dilation, because you can’t give a patient anesthesia in a medical office. You didn’t even give this twelve-year-old any ibuprofen before she came in. I see nothing to reduce pain on the chart. Nothing to make it easier, or make her suspect that something bad was coming. Can you imagine the nightmare you became in her psyche? You heard her cries and screams. Several nurses must have had to hold her down. She’d not yet been culturally trained to lie on a gynecological table and handle pain like a super-soldier.”

  Heads hung, but mine was among them. The humiliation was profound. I’d been a lamb to the slaughter. I had been trained by then. Don’t move no matter what, they’d said. It’ll make it worse if you move. Still, the nurses had to hold my arms, I remembered.

  I remembered …

  “I was cold and shaking afterward,” I heard my own dazed monotone. “So dizzy I kept almost passing out. I remember they had me sit in an office and they gave my first cup of hot coffee to drink, because I’d been ‘a big, brave girl,’ and crackers.”

  Helena went ballistic. “She went into shock? You obviously treated her for it. That’s not on the record, Doctor. How could you conspire with self-serving social workers who were afraid they’d have to answer to a juvenile pregnancy to make the innocent object of possible assault pay like that, and let the boy would-be rapists run rampant? Why didn’t you put the males on drugs?”

  The old man spoke up, his voice hollow. “You know. Prescriptions are recorded and must be justified. Putting adolescent boys on medications reserved for sex offenders … too many in the system would question it.”

  “Too many male supervising doctors and lawyers and administrators, you mean,” Helena corrected. “That’s why there’s still no systemic male contraceptive pill, promised since the sixties. Let the women take all the risk.”

  Helena held up the beautiful silver instrument so like an Art Nouveau wine bottle opener. “You needed the cervical dilator to force open her immature cervix and insert an intrauterine device to prevent pregnancy. That was the ‘unspecified procedure.’ The social workers couldn’t control the boys, so the girl had to pay, to bear the risks and pain.”

  “You don’t understand, Dr. Burnside,” trembling old Dr. Youmans said. “Delilah was an exceptionally beautiful child, like the young Elizabeth Taylor, if you remember the actress that far back. They were all after her. We had to protect her from the consequences of a juvenile pregnancy, from birthing some half-supernatural monster.”

  His words, sincere, but representing years of denial, stirred me to speak for my lost self at last.

  “I had ways of defending myself against them, the vampy-boy creeps, you old fool!” I felt the shout torn out of me. “But I had no defense against you. Not against my group-home keepers. They could take me anywhere, order anything done.”

  I stepped away from the wall on trembling legs. The silver familiar had gone into hiding, as if I had to stand alone, without any of my guardians.

  “You unethical cowards should never be allowed to practice medicine again,” I shouted. “Look at you! Was it easy money, a contract with the social services? Yes, those creeps were threatening me. Did nobody think about really protecting me where I had to fight day after day? Were you willing to let me be gang-raped as long as no evidence showed up? As long as no ‘helping’ medical or social professional would be held accountable for being unable to control the group homes?”

  I grabbed the goosenecked lamp and yanked it, wrenching the electrical cord out of the wall. I swung the metal lightbulb hood at the overhead light fixture, bringing huge splinters of the plastic lens and then the shattering fluorescent tubes down on the examining table, dimming the awful glare, making the table a sea of sharp shards.

  “I remembered you all as aliens,” I told them all, “aliens who’d abducted me, and you are. You are alien to the human race, the real unhuman ones.”

  I started tearing the paper covering off the wave-shaped examining table. I kicked over the foot-operated white trash can that would have held the bloody cotton. I grabbed the tray and crashed all the metal instruments to the floor. I launched myself at the table itself and somehow pushed it off center and into the wall.

  When I paused for breath and brushed my hair off my face, the room was a shambles and the nurses were cowering in a sheeplike clot by the wall rack crowded with torn, years’-old magazines now out of print. One title read Modern Contraception.

  “T-t-this is my office,” Dr. Youmans said. “You’ve trashed it. I could s-s-sue you.”

  Helena stepped into the mess to put a hand on my shoulder. “You sue us? I didn’t find any place in the buried records where you ever actually removed the IUD from your underage patient.”

  The silence said everything I needed to hear.

  I lashed out with my boot-toe, dead center of where it hurts a guy the most.

  “And you gave me hideous menstrual cramps for eternity? May you have phantom ball pain for the rest of your days, Dr. Malpractice.”

  I held back from contact, but he cringed, writhed, and cupped his privates anyway.

  A nurse objected from the corner of the consulting room. “This is … this is a physical attack. The police—”

  Ric stepped between us. “I’m a Fed. You don’t want to involve the locals.” He glanced to the doctor’s clenched knees and protective, palsied hands.

  “You’re lucky she’s taking it out on … uh, inanimate objects, Doc, and only figuratively. Me, if she wrung all your necks, I’d just call it in as self-defense. Who’s to say different? The last time Delilah was here she was assaulted against her will by all of you.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  “SHOCK THERAPY MAY be okay to use on an illiterate boy once enslaved in the Hell Zone between the U.S. and Mexico,” Ric told his foster mother.

  Angrily.

  He slapped his palm on the table of her boutique hotel suite, making Helena’s eyelashes flinch. “Not on Delilah. Not with me there.”

  Me, I was beyond flinching. I’d batted my last eyelash. My mind and emotions were churning, trying to make sense of the last half of my life. The post–Millennium Revelation part, when I’d been physically altered against my knowledge and will.

  Ric was not done ranting.

  “It’s not something to spring on a woman who blotted out a childhood medical assault because it was too damn traumatic to remember at all.” He stopped behind me, bending down, voice lowered.

  “You didn’t damage your hands or feet, did you, paloma? Butt-kicking inanimate objects can hurt you more than it will ever damage them.”

  I let him kneel beside me to examine and clasp my fingers. His hands were as warm as his riled temper, and my ice-cube core of dazed fear and fury was melting. I was mad enough at Helena to let him rage, which was rather mean, because I could see Ric’s every accusing word flayed the foster-mother inside the scientist.

  “She had to confront it, Ric.” Helena’s soft, controlled voice was pleading. “She had to see what had happened to her in a legal as well as a personal sense, and grasp it all at once. She needed her ‘day in court,’ because she won’t get justice in any real sense.”

  “She could still bring a civil suit,” he argued.

  “And put her character on trial?”

  “She is fucking flawless,” Ric shouted.

  Damned if my lips didn’t try to break their grim parade formation to smile a little shakily. That kind of described our amorous adventures so far.

  “Language,” Helena murmured, as she must have reprimanded the teenage boy.

  “You’ve heard—and said—it all, Helena,” he returned. “You can’t do your demure act on me like you do on the D.C. military brass when you want something, including Philip. I was a feral boy. You and I fought like chu
pacabras over a goat corpse in ‘therapy.’”

  “Always so colorful,” she murmured, daring to glance at me. “It wasn’t anything Annie Sullivan didn’t have to put up with when she was domesticating the deaf and mute child Helen Keller.”

  “That rough?” I said, my voice cracking from not having spoken since shouting myself raw in that … butcher’s office.

  Ric flung himself into the chair next to me. “Drink some wine, Del. It’ll soothe and calm you.” His lips brushed my temple, doing more than any wine could.

  “I need to ask Helena some questions,” I said.

  “So do I,” he said, glaring across the table.

  Helena answered mildly. “She means alone, hijo. Girl talk.”

  “About today, or about then?” he asked.

  Helena shook her head gently from side to side, meaning “Yes, and this and that.”

  “About … us?” he asked, his voice hardening with a touch of … dread.

  She nodded. “I’m a head shrink, not a medical doctor, Ric. I need to determine the degree of damage and how Delilah’s doing with her current life issues.”

  “He told you,” I said. “I’m fucking flawless.”

  “Ouch. Your chica’s claws are in fine condition,” she told Ric with a gleam of humor. “Don’t worry. I’ll be gentle. I know you were.”

  I watched his dusky face flare dull red.

  Wow. I’d never seen anyone or anything make ex-FBI man Ricardo Montoya, the Cadaver Kid, blush.

  “Where am I supposed to go, what am I supposed to do,” Ric asked. “When am I supposed to come back?”

  “You’ve got a cell phone,” Helena said. “You do know how to use it? Just pick it up when it ring-tones and put it to your ear and talk. Try the bar, Ric. It’s guy country at this hotel.”

  He had no idea he was being given the Lauren Bacall brush-off to Humphrey Bogart, in paraphrase, but he left.

  “The hotel provided me with this insanely overstocked room bar,” Helena told me, pointing to a pair of louvered doors. “Whip me up a new drink before we settle down to talk. Your Vampire Sunrise is the party circuit hit of Alexandria, Virginia.”

  “Really?”

  “Ric’s right. You’re a very talented girl.”

  “Virginia, huh?” I walked over and swept the double doors open on a mirrored wall of liquor bottles and glasses. “No minibar for Helena Troy. You figure keeping me busy will ease the angst?”

  “Generally, it does. And I figure we need something stronger than this sissy wine Ric ordered. Men think we women are made of glass.”

  “Just bar glass,” I said, pulling down a few bottles and setting up two martini glasses. “I wish there’d been more glass in that consulting room to smash.”

  “Do you have any questions?” she asked.

  “Let me try something mind-bending here first.”

  I mixed some flavors in a set of three shot glasses, sipped and remixed, sipped more. My mind and mouth were working in concert again, as she’d intended. I wondered what poor Ric was downing in that main floor bar in the noisy, echoing atrium.

  “There you are, Counselor,” I said, placing something dark, tall, and bloodred before her.

  “Why are you calling me that?”

  “You got your client off the hot seat and into the driver’s seat.”

  Her eyes closed a moment in relief.

  “What are you calling this?” she then asked, sipping the drink and closing her eyes again, this time in relaxation. “Delish, Delilah.”

  “It’s named in honor of my biggest Darkside Bar fan from the party state of Virginia.”

  “Yes?”

  I sipped from my own glass. “It’s a Virtual Virgin.”

  “I take it you’re ready to talk,” Helena said.

  “Way too overdue. Do you like my cocktail?”

  “Love it. A Virtual Virgin, wouldn’t that be fun to dabble in again?”

  Of course my dead-white skin flushed like Mrs. Haliburton’s chagrined face. Helena didn’t truly understand how recently that condition had been mine.

  “What’s in it?” she asked.

  “Chilled Coca-Cola, or you could use Dr Pepper, for starters. Some black cherry vodka and then citrus mixes to cut the edge.”

  “Black cherry vodka,” Helena mused over our tall, footed glasses.

  Besides exotic ingredients, I prefer stemmed barware for my cocktails, when possible.

  “How,” Helena persisted, “did you come up with black cherry vodka for your Virtual Virgin, my new favorite drink, Delilah?”

  “The cherry was obvious and my mood is a bit dark right now.” I was not about to explain Ric’s addiction to my Midnight Cherry Shimmer lip gloss. “You could leave out the vodka for minors and those who dislike strong spirits.”

  “Not us, Delilah.”

  “No, not us.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  I sighed and leaned back in my chair. The numbness was wearing off. My reptile brain was curling back up to sleep after giving almost everyone around me a good tail-lashing.

  I’d never had anyone to tell me these things. “This IUD?”

  “A method of birth control for decades, of varying usefulness. Not really meant for nulliparous women.”

  “I’m this nulleperous woman?”

  “Nulliparous. The word means non-child-bearing. We’re both nulliparous women.”

  “Cheers,” I said, lifting my martini glass rim to hers. “Why is the installation process so gross? Computers do it better.”

  “Ancient Arabs put stones into the uterus of a camel to prevent pregnancy.”

  “Sure don’t want inconvenient pregnancies in beasts of burden,” I noted. “Weird, the Rolling ‘Stones’ recorded a song titled ‘Beast of Burden.’”

  “In the last century’s twenties, a German named Ernst Gräfenberg placed rings of silk—and later, silver—within the uterus of his female patients to prevent pregnancy. Too much bleeding.”

  “I can testify.” That mention of silver unnerved me, so I sipped my Virtual Virgin and let Helena enlighten me further.

  “Starting in the sixties IUDs became much more workable and popular. The trouble is the body tends to reject foreign objects unless the uterus has hosted a fetus.”

  “This all sounds like a biology class at Our Lady of the Lake, where they told you all the scientific stuff, just not exactly how the egg and sperm get together.”

  “I think we can gloss over that part too, Delilah. What’s crucial is that you were not even in puberty, yet you were fitted with a birth control device without your knowledge. Your ignorance of the medical procedures made the act an assault. It was a crime, and it’s a sin that it’s not prosecutable in a court of law.”

  “If I were one of these leprous women,” I started.

  “‘Liparous,” she corrected. “You’d be used to routine pelvic exams since puberty.”

  “And that turkey baster?”

  “Would be a familiar if not favorite article once a year, when you were given a Pap test for cancer. It’s criminal that you haven’t had any basic female organ care.”

  “And the dilator?”

  “Would be used briefly to obtain a scrap of uterine tissue to test for abnormal cells. It would be a necessary— possibly uncomfortable, but no more—procedure for your good health.”

  “So the procedure, the pain, I experienced as a kid was no worse than a woman who wanted an IUD would go through.”

  “Except such women are usually sexually experienced.” Helena stared into her Virtual Virgin. “You weren’t. You weren’t accustomed to penetration, to intimate invasion. Your fear and natural resistance would make it far more painful. For a young girl of your age and history, it would be a nightmare.”

  “It was.”

  “Your highly creative subconscious converted it into an alien abduction dream. Since others went public with such claims, it gave you something ‘real’ to cling to after what must have been
a devastatingly surreal experience. That’s not so different from Ric converting his first adolescent wet dream stimulated by a vampire bat bite into an appearance of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The immature mind needs cultural coat hooks. Yours was alien abduction. I’m sorry, Delilah. You needed to know the truth, no pussyfooting around it.”

  I nodded.

  “On the other hand, for those responsible, it was an unconscionable dereliction of duty. Which Ric realized, and which infuriated him. Essentially, the social services powers-that-be then punished you for being attractive to predators. Blame the victim.”

  Now that she’d put it in bald terms, the injustice of it all hit home. It wasn’t even just the single invasive, controlling act. It was all the consequences, even more to my mind than my body.

  “It’s why I’ve always hated my looks,” I said slowly. “I thought it was my coloring, my white skin looking even paler because of my black hair. I thought vampires went for me because I already looked like a corpse.”

  “They went for you because they were also teenage boys and you were a very pretty girl. Still a predator-and-prey situation, but one we call ‘normal.’”

  I shook that damning head of black hair.

  “Now,” Helena said carefully, “here’s why Ric is probably drinking boilermakers down in the bar. I need to ask about your sex life together.”

  “You can’t. You’re virtually his mother.”

  “Virtually, Delilah? That’s a dividing line these post– Millennium Revelation days, isn’t it?”

  “Except for the me-never-on-my-back-thing, it’s none of your business. Now my phobia makes sense, and I feel a lot better that I wasn’t hallucinating aliens. I also feel better knowing that a woman of my age would have experienced pretty much the same thing I did, minus the panic, to get a routine Pap smear.”

  “Is it possible you’ll actually make an annual appointment now?” Helena smiled ruefully. “It’s for the good of your health.”

  “Yeah, but I’m finding a woman doctor who will understand my issues. The twentieth century must have sucked for women.”

  “You should have seen the nineteenth. I read about it in grad school.”