Dr. Adder

by Jeter, K W

  When the last body had also drained into the red ground around them, she crawled in with him into a roll of blankets and continued to weep as he, as well as he could, comforted her.

  Later, he would wonder if she had been merely grateful for that comfort. Or if he, Limmit, had somehow become identified in her mind with her dead and beloved comrades. When they reached the drop-off point, she told him she loved him.

  “You love everyone, minus capitalists,” he said. He felt oddly surly. Perhaps whatever controlled his emotions had reasoned that if he hurt her enough, she wouldn’t mind his leaving.

  “What’s there for you in Phoenix,” she said. “A lot of mutant chickens and redneck sodomites.”

  “Maybe that’s where I belong.”

  “Why. Feeling guilty? Join the MLF to forget that Spec. 4, some other sin, your own child-of-exploiters inheritance.” “Shove that.” He started walking west, toward Phoenix. He looked back and thought he saw that her strange, sadness-tinged smile meant from this distance that she cared for him too much to stop him, that she had already seen so many loved ones depart from her, the way they could depart only from someone who cared. He turned and started running, until he tripped and fell, breathless, scraping his hands raw against the road. Pressing his palms to his mouth, he sucked the dirt from the oozing cuts, then got up and walked on.

  Now that smile pressed itself against his ribs, in this room in L.A. Is it victorious now? wondered Limmit. Pushing her away, he got up and walked to the window. He picked up the yellow radio from the floor below the sill and studied it. “I didn’t think,” he said finally, “that there even were any radio stations still operating.”

  She watched him, eyes wide. “It’s just a small one,” she said. “Operated by an old guy living in Rattown, using a miniaturized transmitter—you can only pick up his broadcasts in L.A. Just during daylight. Plays mostly old recordings of German opera.”

  “What’s his name?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. They call both him and the station KCID, whatever that stands for, if anything. Nobody ever sees him, but he’s supposed to know everything that happens in L.A.—he does a little patter between recordings. He’s got a thing about Adder, too, just like everyone over in the slums.”

  Limmit wished he could hear that, but decided he couldn’t take any more Wozzeck right then. It should be L.A.’s theme song, he thought, switching it off and turning to look out the window. The top pane was shattered, leaving pale jags of glass like teeth in a mouth, and the lower was mottled with dirt. In L.A.’s hazy sunshine, hunched-over figures crawled and sifted through the debris that lined the length of the Interface. “Who are those people?” he asked without turning around.

  She studied his thin, pale legs and narrow buttocks, his back with an angry splash of acne across the shoulders on top of layers of adolescent scar tissue. He doesn’t take care of himself the way he should, she thought. “They’re scavengers,” she said, not needing to look. “Old broken-down freaks and cripples that crawl out from Rattown, looking through all the garbage on the street... For lost coins or pills and shit they can gobble up right on the spot. Anything they can sell for small profit they carry back into the slums.”

  He came away from the window and sat down beside her on the bed. Idly, he stroked her brown thigh. “You know what comes next,” he said quietly.

  She looked up into the eyes set deep into his narrow face. “Your ‘business,’ I suppose.”

  “That’s right,” he said, nodding.

  She took his hand and laced her fingers between his. “In a minute. Please.”

  He shut tight his eyes, and squeezed his captured hand together, her knuckles between his, as much to hurt himself as her. “No more minutes,” he said.

  The noon sun appeared over the edge of the skylight and dropped directly onto Dr. Adder’s face below. Auggh, shouted characters in his dreams, interrupted: I’ve been shot. We die. Which was true, for dreams and all their inhabitants dissolved as Adder cocked one eye open at the glare, screwed it shut again with its partner, and shifted his head upon the rolled-up surgical sheets and bandages that served as a pillow, out of the sun’s remorseless trajectory. Goddamn sun, he muttered to himself. Or some damn god? Whatever.

  He propped himself up on one elbow and studied the nude figure sleeping next to him. After the sudden disintegration of Pazzo’s head last night, the remaining levels of adrenaline and other secretions in Adder’s bloodstream had taken his shock and, as was his personal tendency, flipped it over into flat-out paranoia. Adder had pulled the young whore and the motorcycle back behind the black iron gate, locked it, pulled the whore inside the building’s front door, locked it, and from there retreated into this room where all his surgical supplies were kept, locking doors all the way behind them. Here he had pushed two gurnies together against a wall, some vague image (perhaps gleaned from one of Betreech’s vintage cinema westerns) in his mind of using her body as a shield as he blasted with a .44 Magnum at the assailants besieging the door of this sanctum. (None of these fancies had had any effect, though, in diminishing his constant and irrelevant erection.)

  That was last night, however. Now, all stimulants and their engendered fears had drained out of his system, leaving behind only furry teeth and a general feeling of shitfulness. He pulled the sheets from their bodies and prodded the girl’s ass. “Hey,” he said. “Come on, wake up. Big day ahead of us.” Especially for you, he added maliciously to himself.

  The hooker rolled over and looked into his face. Her clear, unblinking eyes indicated that she had been awake for some time now, lying motionless beside him. “Some big deal,” she said bitterly, as if she had been rehearsing it in her mind all this time. “I didn’t figure a night spent with the great Dr. Adder amounted to nothing but a meager screw on a couple of slab-hard body carts in a crummy storeroom.”

  Adder scratched and yawned. “What were you expecting. No, don’t tell me: you cheap cunts are all alike. You expected in exchange for the services of your almost virginal body, in addition to the special analytical and surgical services of mine that you and your pimp are counting on, one, a heady, erotic dash up the Interface on Dr. Adder’s famous machine, and two, some kind of wonderfuck in Adder’s richly appointed pleasure palace in the hills. And what were you expecting as regards this?” He waved with one hand his half-erect organ. “Did you think my cock had little beady eyes and a forked tongue that flicked in and out? Shitfire,” he said, laughing and rolling on his back. “You are too much. Just what do you think I owe you?” The girl said nothing. Adder peered at her through the corner of one eye. She seemed to be looking through him at the wall beyond, a curiously satisfied, postorgasmic look on her face. “Even though,” she said dreamily, “it’s only been a week or so, it seems like such a long ways from when I was my high school valedictorian to here.”

  Adder sneered at this. “All alike,” he said, shaking his head. “A// alike. You just don’t know how all alike you are, do you?” The phrase, with these few repetitions, seemed to float loose from its meaning and assume some new, sinister potency. “Every one of you hookers I ever came across out on the Interface claims to have been her high school valedictorian—Christ, some of you probably believe it. And you know why all of you build up this fantasy of being super-achiever, pom-pom-honors-society-academic-socialite chicks?”

  Her eyes diffused over his face in anxiety, dreading revelation.

  “You really want to know why?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said, trying to suppress the quaver in her voice. “Lay it on me.”

  “Because,” he ground on, “it’s not enough to have been a typical dumb Orange County high school slut and then become a typical L.A. loser trick. Your fall, your degradation, wouldn’t be far enough. For you, it’s got to be unique, it’s got to be from the very top to the very deepest pit you ever saw on Mox’s stupid TV show that excites all you dumb, self-destructive chicks so much. Well, listen”—his voice dropped ominou
sly in pitch—“you’re all alike; you’re not unique; you won’t hit bottom, it’s beneath anything you'll ever reach; and you won’t know finally anything more than you did as a sweet, dumb Daddy’s little snatch-on-legs back in Orange County.”

  A tear spread around inside the rim of her eye. “Thanks,” she said tightly. “You really give someone a lot. For this I got laid?” One corner of Adder’s mouth lifted in a small smile. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll still get a good bargain. This afternoon I’ll run an ADR on you, and tomorrow morning I’ll start to work on whatever I get from it. I’ll even give you your choice of general or local anesthesia, in case you want to watch. You’ll get what you came here for. It’s just that it’ll cost you more; you’ll be leaving behind more than you counted on.”

  “You must really hate women,” the young whore said evenly, “to do all that you do to them, and tell them this too.”

  “Ha,” said Adder. “I love women—I give them what they want.”

  “All of them?”

  “No, of course not. Just those lucky enough to want what I have to give them.”

  “Some love,” she said, dry-eyed again. “You give us what we want even when it destroys us.”

  “More than that,” said Adder, his smile tightening into something else. “Even when it destroys me.”

  “That’s happened?”

  “Once.”

  “I see,” the whore said bitterly into her pillow, “that you recovered all right.”

  Shitfire, thought Adder with a tinge of exasperation. This is all good fun, but I’ve got work to do. Plus Pazzo is no longer here to help. He gave the other gurney a violent shove with one foot, sending it rolling into the opposite wall. The girl almost fell off, ass first, onto the floor, but managed to remain clinging to it as it clattered across the room. From there she glared at him with as much dignity as she could muster, as he swung his legs over the side of his gurney and started to pull on the clothes he had worn the day before.

  Limmit heard his name called out behind him and turned around, wincing under the intense L.A. sun. Droit came trotting up the sidewalk, grinning.

  “Well, here we are again,” said Droit, walking alongside and clapping him on the arm. “What’s your reaction to L.A. by daylight?”

  The scavengers turned blank, weakly omnivorous faces upon them, then looked back to their own busy paws, turning over leaf after leaf of trash, like the pages of some intensely interesting book or catalog. “Nice place to visit,” said Limmit.

  “It has its points,” said Droit absently as he jotted the reply in his notebook, then stowed it away again in his coat.

  “If you don’t mind being shot at.”

  “Oh, yeah. That.” Droit nodded. “Poor Pazzo. Really a nice guy when you got to know him. I just got back from seeing some of my contacts over in Rattown about the shooting. A profitable trip—a certain someone will be, ah, generously eager to hear what I found out.” He grinned and winked at Limmit. “You’re going up to see Dr. Adder now?”

  “Yeah, so are you, I imagine. Good thing for you I came along, as I doubt if Adder would have seen you at this time. He doesn’t like to be interrupted when he’s putting the final touches on one of his big jobs.” They reached the black iron gates and stopped in front of them. “You can come in with me. In return, I’m sure you won’t mind my hanging around when you open this for Adder.” He tapped with one finger the briefcase hanging from Limmit’s hand.

  “I don’t give a shit,” said Limmit, watching Droit press a large button in plain sight beside the gates. “At this point.”

  Adder heard the buzzer, swore, laid down his tools, wiped his hands off, and exited from his surgical room. Striding across the front office, he picked up a half-brick from a small pile. At the window, he looked down and saw Droit with someone else he didn’t recognize. Droit at least was the very person he wanted to see. He tossed the brick back into the center of the office’s clutter, and went down to open the door.

  After leading them silently up to the office, Adder turned to Limmit and said, “Pull a chair up to the desk. Just toss whatever’s on that one to the floor.”

  Limmit’s stomach flinched at the words, and then, as Adder walked on behind the desk, his trembling hands lifted the stack of mildewed magazines from the indicated chair. Clits & Shits, the top of the stack proclaimed. The Magazine Lesbian Coprophages Can Trust. Jesus, thought Limmit, carrying the chair across the room and setting it beside Droit’s chair. I’m about ready to shit. Adder’s thin, knife-faced figure, clad in a white laboratory coat, exuded force and presence. The cluttered room seemed dominated by him, as if it were a projection from somewhere inside himself.

  Leaning back in his own chair, Adder incised a casual scalpel cut across the much-scarred desktop. “So,” he said to Droit without looking at him, as if the ceiling were more interesting, “what’s new?”

  “Actually,” said Droit, “trends look pretty stable at the moment. I can predict quite confidently that sexual interest in amputation will maintain at its present level, with perhaps small upswings through the summer months in genital alteration, junkie balling, and—”

  Something beneath Adder’s controlled surface broke through violently. “You stupid shit!” he yelled, flinging the scalpel in Droit’s direction. It struck the wall opposite and imbedded itself there, quivering in minute counterpoint to Adder’s words. “You think I’m interested in that right now, for Christ’s sake? My goddamn right-hand man gets his fuckin’ head blown off last night two feet away from myself, and all you can tell me is what a bunch of Orange County suckers are going to want to get their feeble rocks off on this summer?”

  “Well,” said Droit, unruffled, “I do have other interesting things you might care to know, but I also have, so to speak, expenses—”

  With a grimace, Adder pulled bills from a roll he took out of the lab coat’s pocket and tossed them across the desk. “Is that enough?”

  “If you can spare a few of those green and white spansules, the combination kainine/barbiturate analog ... yes, those,” said Droit, nodding as Adder extracted a clear plastic vial from one of the desk’s drawers. “Betreech is droughting up the market on these right now,” he explained, pocketing the cheerful-colored cylinders, “to drive up the price. Good rate of exchange on these over in Rattown.”

  “The fluctuations of the Greater L.A. Dope Exchange I’m not interested in,” said Adder impatiently. “Get on with it.” “Relax,” said Droit. “You’ve got nothing to worry about. They were just having one of their usual assassination parties up in Rattown. The triggerman wasn’t aiming for you or Pazzo. He was zeroing in on that MoFo that was hanging around there last night and he muffed his shot, is all.”

  “ ‘He muffed his shot, is all,’ ” mocked Adder. Despite his sarcastic tone, it was evident that a great deal of his tension had dissipated, or else had been drained back into some internal storage. “That’s real fucking reassuring, is what that is. I ask you,” he said, appealing rhetorically to Limmit’s blank visage, “just trying to run a little business here, do I need this? Just a goddamn good capitalist, for Christ’s sake, and I’ve got to have a bunch of loser gun freaks trying to do me a big favor, which I also don’t need, by potshooting MFers all over the street. If they start driving customers away, I’m really going to be pissed, believe me. Besides”—he turned back to Droit as if Limmit were a microphone gone dead—“what kind of bullet was that anyway, to make Pazzo’s head crumble like that?”

  Shit, said Limmit to himself, does he even stop to breathe? Droit shrugged. “You know those fans of yours. They’re always rooting around in the cellars of the old CIA building back there, coming up with new goodies.”

  “Great,” said Adder disgustedly. “Just great. Next thing you know they’ll be coming up with goddamn nuclear weapons. Maybe one of those briefcase jobs ...” His brows lowered ominously as his eyes flicked from the briefcase in Limmit’s lap to Limmit’s face and back to Droit.
“Hey,” he said with a halflaugh and one thumb pointed at Limmit, “just who is your friend here?”

  Limmit took a deep breath and leaped recklessly into the opening. “Dr. Adder,” he said, “my name is Limmit, E. Allen Limmit, and I just flew in from Phoenix yesterday, in order to offer you this unique item, the value of which I’m sure you’ll appreciate.” He snapped open the briefcase and shoved it across the desk at Adder. That’s enough, he said to himself, his larynx failing. He’ll know what it is.

  Adder studied the contents of the wide-open briefcase for a long moment.

  “A deactivated flashglove,” he said finally, looking over the edge of the lid at Limmit, his face immobile. “You came all the way from Phoenix to show me this? Big deal. I’ve got three already in my collection.”

  “I suspected something of this nature,” said Droit, almost sadly, leaning back in his chair. He displayed no desire to even glance at the briefcase’s contents.

  Limmit leaned across the desk and thumbed a small switch inside the briefcase. Small red points and shapes of light throbbed on like flames or open wounds. “It’s not deactivated,” he said quietly, savoring the triumph and the small measure of control, or at least equality, it gave him. “It’s live.”

  Adder’s eyes widened as he gazed upon the transformation of the briefcase. What had been before cold and inert now glowed and pulsed with a crystalline, gemlike vitality. Shitfire, thought Adder.

  He gently stroked the shining metal surface. It seemed fantastic, an object heavy with the weight of the past. Nothing else, he knew, that Lester Gass had devised for the infamous CIA Special Operations Teams had had such an effect in ending the five-year history of the Popular Anarchy movement that had come so close to seizing national power. At one point, the anarchists had controlled all of Washington and Oregon and the northern counties of California. As a point of fact, though, the CIA’s Program Drench B had been so successful, in its own way, that the CIA itself was disbanded afterward.