Dr. Adder

by Jeter, K W

“There are,” said Limmit, “no trains anymore.”

  “That’s all right. Some of these don’t have laps.”

  Limmit turned over the top card, glanced at it, then turned it back over and handed the pack to Droit.

  “Don’t worry,” said Droit, scribbling in his notebook. “Your silence says as much to me as anything else you could have done.”

  “That’s really sick,” said Limmit. He felt depressed now, the picture having reminded him of Dr. Adder and his handiwork. “Is that all the questions? I’ve got business to take care of.” “That’ll do for now.”

  Limmit swiveled around and saw that the bar was vacant except for themselves. Empty chairs and tables bare except for clusters of bottles and glasses. “Where did they go?” he asked.

  Droit waved his pen at the door and the street beyond it. “They left some time ago,” he said. “They carry TVs along the sidewalk when Mox’s nightly spiel comes on. You missed it—if you want to see the old fucker, you’ll have to wait for his ser-monette in a couple hours. Most of the MoFos would prefer to stay in here and get loaded, rather than go out and risk getting shot. But if you’re going to stay in Mox’s little fan club, you have to take some chances.”

  Outside the bar, Droit turned to Limmit. “Don’t worry about your little business deal,” he said. “I don’t really know what’s in your briefcase, though I don’t doubt I will before long. I just knew that somebody like you would be coming, and then when you arrived I got your name from Alice, the pilot.”

  “Who else knew I was coming?”

  “No one. At least, no one you'll be coming into contact with. Even though I could have used the money, there are certain, shall we say, sequences of events that generate more useful information if allowed to run their full course.”

  “I’m glad,” said Limmit, “you’ve got my best interests at heart.”

  “Dispassionate science, my friend. I’ll see you around.” He walked off down the street.

  Limmit felt cold sober. The alcohol’s effect had drained off, leaving him here on the street again, no further than before. The rest of the Interface and the black iron gates were still in front of him. Let’s get on with it, he thought. The fear remained, but something else had died. He sensed other things growing, the running out of time.

  “Is your little friend Lyle going to be waiting for you when we leave tonight?” Dr. Adder smiled innocently across the surgical table.

  “Yeah, I suppose so,” said Pazzo, sullenly concentrating on the equipment’s gauges. This is the part I hate, he thought. The finishing touches on a job—when I’m shot and he’s really starting to come on. His own rabid joy. Especially after kicking Romanza’s ass out of here, and then hearing himself talked about even more than usual by Mox. Dualities, said Pazzo to himself.

  “Don’t know what you see in that little honey,” murmured Adder absently, deftly smoothing with a whirring chrome instrument the stitches in the spread-eagled female crotch on the table. Transforming the elaborate surgical alterations performed on the unconscious girl’s flesh into a weird semblance of virginity. “No accounting for tastes, I guess.”

  Pazzo noticed Adder’s hands laying down the tool. He looked up into Adder’s amused, baiting face.

  “Right?” said Adder archly. “No accounting for tastes, is there?”

  Feeling his face grow heated, Pazzo said nothing, continuing to meet Adder’s level gaze.

  “What accounts for little Lyle’s taste, I wonder?” continued Adder. “KY, most probably. Smegma, perhaps, if his parents were antiquarian enough. Have you tried putting honey on your honey’s honey?”

  “Knock it off,” said Pazzo. “Dr. Adder—the world’s last queerbaiter. There’s something to be proud of, all right.” “And you’re the last one in the world to be ashamed of it. Not many of you little honeys left, are there? Glad I’m not a faggot.” “Get screwed.”

  With a speed and agility that astonished Pazzo, Adder vaulted over the girl-laden surgical table, knocked Pazzo down, and knelt on his chest. “You fuckin’ queer,” he said, grinning fiendishly, and menaced one side of Pazzo’s face with the surgical instrument.

  “Christ,” said Pazzo, straining his face away from the chrome. “You’ve flipped out—you’re really on something tonight.”

  Adder tossed the tool away and stood up. “Bullshit,” he said, almost childishly hurt by the accusation. “Nothing but adrenaline high—you know that.”

  Pulling himself up, gasping for breath, Pazzo nodded. “Yeah, I know,” he wheezed. I only said it to hurt him, he thought. Get him off me.

  “Look,” said Pazzo, his voice measured. “Maybe you’re still up for fun and games, but I’m exhausted. I just want to go home and go to sleep.”

  Adder picked up the surgical instrument and walked around to the other side of the table. “You know, Pazzo,” he said, his narrow hands resuming work almost independently of the rest of him, “I’m actually very fond of you ... but I’m beginning to think you’re not cut out for L.A.” He smiled thinly.

  My bones agree, thought Pazzo, feeling them being pulled, dead weight, to the earth’s mass below. He watched the gauges, the edges of his vision starting to haze from fatigue.

  The proprietor of the hamburger stand called Harry’s Hot Shit leaned his bare, meaty arms on his grease-stained counter and observed the traffic on the Interface. In my own way, he thought, I’m just as important to this street as Dr. Adder. He does his work, I do mine: cut and stitch, thaw and cook. He fingered one of the paper napkins that read HARRY’S HOT SHIT —WE FEED THE INTERFECA, misprinted by some spaced-out Rattowner on an old offset he had unearthed. From below L.A., the proprietor thought, whence all blessings flow, including my frozen meat.

  “So how come the name?” inquired the kid sitting on the other side of the counter. A few crumbs and spots of grease lay before him, remnants.

  The proprietor ignored him, content and impassive. Young stuff, he thought, cataloguing the street’s female inhabitants. Old stuff. One-legged, two-legged, other. All stuff. He liked the word—it implied to him, if not inanimation, at least submissiveness. He rolled it silently through his head, the s sliding and hissing up to the t behind his incisors, the ff passing without a sound through his lips like an invisible pearl. Live meat, frozen meat. Adder fixes them, I fix them; he sends out to me for hamburgers, I send them up to him, they come to my counter and eat. So how come Mox never talks about me on the TV?

  “I said, how come the name?”

  He looked at the kid as if from a lofty height. He hadn’t seen him around before, and had his suspicions. “What name?” he asked.

  The kid pointed up to the flashing neon sign.

  “What’s your name?” asked the proprietor, as though this would somehow answer it.

  “Edgar.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen, of course. Why’d you ask?” the kid snapped. He was obviously both on something, probably kainine, and a believer in a good offense.

  “Oh, nothing,” the proprietor said coolly. “I just hadn’t seen you around here is all.”

  “I just haven’t eaten here before,” said the kid, glaring upward through his lowered eyebrows.

  The proprietor’s attention wandered away while the kid calculated the best means of sneaking away. Before he could slide from the torn plastic stool a policeman had responded to the proprietor’s unobtrusive signal and nabbed the kid by his collar.

  “Buddyfucker!” yelled the kid as the silent policeman gently dragged him off to the car that would return him to Orange County.

  “Now you know,” said the proprietor, folding the crisp bill the policeman had given him. “Come back next year, when you’re of age.” He tucked the money away in his spattered apron, and felt momentarily sad. I’m not it, he thought. Not the big time—like Adder and Mox. The double star we orbit around.

  His foot slipped in something wet on the sidewalk, and Limmit lurched heavily into another person. “Excu
se me,” he mumbled, too sunk in his own thoughts to look up to see which of the anonymous figures on the street, hustler or straight, he had collided with. Before he could continue on his way, he noticed a woman’s hand clutching his free arm. He looked up into her face, familiar enough after the years since he had seen her last to stagger him under the weight of memories.

  “Jesus,” he said, after a moment’s dumbfounded funk. “Mary. Mary Gorgon.”

  “Old E. Allen,” she said tenderly. She drew him, unresisting, into the shadow of the building they were beside, out of the harsh blue-white light and the pull of the crowd. “I never thought I’d see you in L.A.,” she said, smiling, her face level with his.

  Limmit laughed nervously, his emotions confused. “I never thought I’d be here either.” He paused. She looked almost exactly the same to him as before, complete to tight faded denims. He wondered for a moment, as he had done before, where she and her comrades obtained their distinctive thick-soled boots. Perhaps the Front had its own factory or something. “What about you?” he asked. “The revolution over or something?”

  Stiffening slightly, she shook her head. “Organizing. We don’t win battles on guts alone.” She grinned slightly at her own melodramatic tone.

  “Organizing? Here? An Amputee Hooker Battalion—that’s a hot idea.”

  Another shake of the head. “Not here. The slums.” Her smile had faded but not, he saw with a pang, from annoyance with him—but concern. “What about you?” she said quietly. “What are you doing here?”

  He hesitated, then decided to trust her as he had before. “Business,” he said, lifting the black briefcase up to her attention.

  Her eyes widened, as if the briefcase had sparked some sort of ominous recognition. “What’s in it?”

  Limmit looked around warily, then snapped open the briefcase a few inches and held it up to her face. He could tell from her expression as she looked inside that she knew it for what it was.

  “Shee-it,” whispered Mary. Limmit, snapping the case shut again, felt a momentary pleasure at the sudden respect for him that seemed mixed into her expression. It faded, replaced entirely by the almost motherly concern he remembered from before. “It’s for Dr. Adder,” she said evenly. “That’s where you’re headed now, isn’t it? The only place where you could unload something like that.”

  He nodded, silent.

  “Where’d you get it?” she asked.

  “Long and involved,” he said. “I’ll tell you some other time. Don’t worry, I’ll find you afterward.” Without saying more, he turned to leave.

  She clutched his arm tighter. “Don’t,” she said. “Don’t go there now. Wait until later.”

  He whirled angrily on her. “Why,” he said. His voice seemed choked by some colossal lump of phlegm that had gradually been accumulating in his throat. “So that I’ll never get there?” he gasped, the words barely able to squeeze past the frustrating, evil taste seeping into his mouth. “Would that please you?” Whipping her head from side to side, she said, “No. You’ve been stuck on that damn egg farm all these years, right? You don’t know how it is with people like Adder. Everybody in L.A. except you knows that he’s been cranked up for the last two days working on one of his jobs. It’d be suicide to try to deal with him now—he’d bite your head off for fun.” She pulled him closer toward herself, almost an embrace. “Come on,” she pleaded, reasonable, “give yourself the advantage at least.” He shrugged, looking away from her face down the length of the still-crowded street. What time was it? he wondered dully. Time seemed to be telescoping—it must be hours since he had left the bar. All ability to move or resist seemed to have been finally sapped off, replaced by an overwhelming fatigue. Accepting, he thought; like death. He nodded slowly, eyes closed, to Mary. Yeah, okay, he said to himself. First the street, then the hooker, the bar, and now this. The first good thing to happen to him in L.A., a miracle almost. Is there a conspiracy, he wondered, to keep me from seeing Dr. Adder tonight? If so, by now he welcomed it.

  “You were right,” said Dr. Adder, looking over his shoulder toward the iron gate. “There he is.” He finished locking the building s front door and turned around, ostentatiously sucking in the cool night air through flared nostrils.

  Pazzo shrugged and said nothing. Across the motorcycle- and dead-vegetation-inhabited courtyard he could see Lyle on the other side of the gate, dancing on his toes and waving at him.

  “That one,” said Adder, “is lasting a long time, eh, Pazzo? You’re getting to be just like an old married couple.”

  Up yours, thought Pazzo. In fact, he was getting tired of Lyle s gamut of little-girl imitations. Maybe I’ll kick his ass out of bed tonight, he thought. Better yet, kick the rest of him out and keep the best part there in bed. What would Adder think of a commission like that?

  While Adder lifted the motorcycle off its center stand and wheeled it to the gate, Pazzo studied the tableau on the other side. Besides Lyle there were three others waiting motionless for them: the ubiquitous Droit and a young hooker and her pimp whom he didn’t recognize. The crowd milling past them on the sidewalk slowed down a little to gawk but none stopped, except for a sodden-looking, gray-coated MFer shuffling a few yards away.

  A sudden coughing roar announced that Adder had managed to kick the cycle into starting. Straddling it, he reached up to unlock the gate, then swung one half of it open. Pazzo closed it behind them and snapped the lock together. Lyle circled his arms about Pazzo’s waist while Adder watched contemptuously, rolling the cycle’s throttle back and forth, varying the dynamics of its ragged noises.

  Suddenly, as if by afterthought, Adder turned to the others standing a few respectful feet away. “You,” he said over the machine’s racket, pointing to the girl. “What’s your name?” She smiled. “Just anything you want it to be.”

  He waved her off with a disgusted hand. “Don’t bother. I’ve heard that line before.” He turned to the pimp. “You I’ve seen around before. Don’t tell me why you’re hanging around here: let me guess.” He peered down at them, as if the motorcycle were some sort of throne. His eyes seemed to iris down, focusing into concentration. “You want me to take this fresh merchandise home for the night, as a free sample from your newly founded firm, Lust and Greed—‘We Pander to the Famous.’

  Eh? Is that it? And in return for the night of ecstasy thus produced, I will gratefully bestow an expensive ADR run and subsequent surgical modifications on said whore. All free of charge, no doubt.”

  The young pimp shuffled his feet in the street’s debris, oddly shy under the circumstances.

  Adder sighed elaborately. “Such, such is the price of fame. Everyone starts to dope out your every little weakness and takes advantage of it. Still, I am a hard sucker for virginity. The sexual fascination of the tabula rasa.” He extended his arm and pulled the girl up onto the seat behind him. “Relative, of course,” he said, warming to his own hugely enjoyable seriocomic theatrics. “No scalpel has pierced your epidermis, your largest sexual organ in fact, so the matter of the hymen you split like an onion skin in your seventh-grade gym class is superfluous.” He turned from the girl’s ashen face to the pimp. “Not for free, though. Just because you caught me in such a good mood, you only have to give me fifty percent of her future earnings, rather than the sixty percent I usually get from those without the up-front money. Don’t bother thanking me now.”

  Pazzo turned away, slightly nauseated by the spectacle of Adder’s gleeful role playing. Lyle whispered something unintelligible into his ear, punctuated by the wet end of his tongue.

  The girl leaned her head against Adder’s back, her thin arms around his waist. “Hey,” Droit called out suddenly to him. “Did you catch Mox on the TV tonight?”

  Adder began to slowly twist the motorcycle’s throttle around, converting its noise into a gradually crescendo-ing whine. “Yeah, I saw him. That old fart and his show.”

  “What was your reaction to it?” asked Droit, readying his pen over hi
s notebook. It was one of his standard research questions.

  “Are you sure about this?” asked Azusa, lifting his eye from the gunsight.

  Milch nodded. “No sweat,” he said. His eyes were slightly lidded, reptilian looking, from the injection a few minutes ago of the herpezine combination.

  “You can’t find another MFer?”

  Milch shook his head. “Lucky to get this one. Usually they all disappear after Mox’s first broadcast.”

  “Maybe we should call it off for tonight,” said Azusa, glancing out at the distant strip of light surrounded by darkness.

  “No way,” said Milch emphatically. “And disappoint all my fans?”

  He’s right there, thought Azusa. At this late stage of excitation, if we don’t take a shot we might not even get off this roof alive. “Go ahead then,” he said. “I guess you know what you can do.” He turned and pushed his way alongside the guardrail, through the edge of the encircling crowd, silent but reeking of sweat and chemical exudations. The word had flashed that Milch had finally lined up his shot. There was some squabbling over binoculars and telescopes.

  Leaning out over the guardrail, Azusa could see, beyond the serried backs of the Rattowners, Milch kneeling down into his contorted assassin’s position: left hand and arm in control of the gunstock and trigger, the other arm wrapped through the new girl’s thighs, the right hand plunged into the terminus of her crotch. The gunsight had been locked over into following position, so that the picture it presented to Milch’s and the girl’s eyes, their faces pressed up to the mechanism alongside each other, changed slightly with each minute adjustment of the gun itself. The girl moaned, transfixed at eye and groin, and began to whisper, out of some subconscious connection, a feverish chant or song. Milch’s breathing, conversely, had seemed to cease entirely, as though he no longer needed it.