Thirteen Specimens

by Thomas, Jeffrey

  Feeling bolder, this time I cut through the driveway of the conference building. I stopped, at somewhat of a distance, to confront its glass door, DOOR 2, and its flanking plate glass windows. The glass reflected the blue sky and the wheeling gulls, as if the gulls swam in blue water inside the building. My heartbeat growing heavier, I moved closer. Closer. At last, my forehead against the cool glass, I cupped one hand to the side of my face as I pointed the flashlight’s ray into the meeting room where I had seen the floating man. The room was empty. Not just of the man, but of the greenish water or fluid that had filled it to its ceiling. But could I really tell if the water no longer filled that room? At least, it appeared to have been emptied. I couldn’t make out, in the gloom, if the carpet were soaked or dry. Those two anemic fluorescent lights had not been turned back on.

  Had I really expected to see the man there, in broad daylight? Of course not. Would he even come here again, now that I had spied upon him? Tonight, in revenge, would he stand outside the windows of my house, gazing in at me?

  I moved on...crossed the street...back to the brick warehouse, and its garage door. DOOR 1.

  Naturally, I looked this way and that before I hunched down at the bottom of the door. I was looking out not only for the boy on the bike, but any passing cars. The boy did not reappear, and there was no traffic on this neglected factory road. There was nothing I could do about people gazing out of the windows of their homes. Without further hesitation, I got down on hands and knees on the concrete ramp and shone my light inside the warehouse.

  There was no coyote crouching and snarling in my beam. To my relief, I saw that there were no real places for a coyote to be hiding in wait – the warehouse was almost entirely barren. I scrambled quickly inside...and rose to my feet.

  The only features on the brick walls were the interiors of those arched windows that had been filled in with cinder blocks. The only sunlight that entered the building came through the broken panel near my feet. The cement floor was bare, oil-stained here and there. There did seem to be a little dried grass like straw in several of the corners, calling to mind the bed of an animal, but that might have simply blown in here through the broken door. There was a faint, musky animal smell that aggravated my mounting headache, but did a coyote have to be responsible for this? More likely, feral cats such as I had seen in the neighborhood, skunks or opossums, had been in here to investigate or shelter from the winter cold over the years.

  I would have expected evidence of human animals. Graffiti on the walls, maybe a stained mattress. Cigarette butts, beer bottles, used condoms. There was absolutely none of that. Could I possibly be the only person who had felt curious enough, brave enough, to have ventured inside this place? Then again, I didn’t know how long that lower panel had been knocked out of the door. Oddly, there was no sign of the broken panel either outside or in...

  I walked to the very center of the floor, my footsteps echoing, running my bean over the ceiling and walls, then pointing it into the two far corners. Like the two behind me, the corner on the left was empty except for some yellow grass, brown leaves. But there was a small pile of debris that had been swept into the far right corner and never removed. Though it was too small to be hiding a coyote, I moved toward it with a funny trepidation.

  Mostly broken bits of wood, a few lengths of pipe. I pushed through it with the toe of my shoe. Toward the bottom of the stack of wood was one large piece: a door removed from its hinges. It rested unevenly across the floor, obviously piled atop some other bits of junk. Pointing my flashlight under the angled door, I saw a teasing hint of bright color. I began pulling away the debris with my hands now, having set the flashlight down on its side with the beam still switched on.

  I uncovered the discarded door, but before I hauled it out of the pile I retrieved my light and aimed it at the wooden surface. Nailed into the wood was a brass number. The number: 3.

  I dragged the door off to the side, lay it down, and then bent to examine the items that had been wedged beneath it. For a few moments I didn’t touch them – just bathed them in the glow of my flashlight. The beam shone through their glistening green, translucent forms, casting green light on the cement floor. Finally, I picked up one of the three items. The intact one, the other two having been broken. A little green arm, a little green leg, a little green head littered the floor at my feet, snapped off from two little green bodies.

  They were baby dolls. They had to date back to when Odyllic had been Lethe Toys. Back to a time when things were still manufactured in this country. Though why they should be molded out of this hard, crystalline, emerald green plastic – smooth and clear as glass – instead of soft rubbery plastic I couldn’t say. Test experiments for a molding process? Or would these toys have been coated in softer plastic later?

  I held the doll by one arm away from me, as if I expected it to suddenly squirm or gurgle. I kicked at one of the two bodies at my feet. All three had diminutive penises. I had never seen an anatomically correct doll like this, and it seemed especially weird if the dolls dated back decades. There was another odd feature. The three dolls were frozen in three different poses, none of them having articulated limbs – and each wore a different expression. The one I held had its eyes closed and its lips parted slightly open. One of the two on the floor had its eyes apparently open and its lips pouted shut. But the broken-off head, when I rolled it under my toe, had the expression of a crying infant – its face scrunched up in silently wailing misery.

  I considered taking the unbroken baby doll with me, but I didn’t like the idea of having it in my house, as if it had been molded out of some poison fluid turned solid. The house was Grover’s place, and he wasn’t hard and green...he was soft and blue. I set the thing down delicately by its arm, afraid to shatter it as the other two had shattered. For some reason, as if I had exhumed them from a grave, I moved the door labeled 3 back on top of them...to hide them from view once more.

  DOOR 4

  During hours of random internet surfing I chanced upon a photo of a dead child. The child was buried in gravelly dirt, his or her face the only portion showing. The face was pale and eerily beautiful, devoid of signs of violence, except that its open eyes showed no irises, no pupils, as blank as those of a stone bust. The beautiful blind-staring cherub’s face was like a discarded mask dropped onto the sand. I read the story that accompanied the image...

  Did you know that in 1984, methyl isocyanate leaked from a tank at a pesticide plant owned by Union Carbide in Bhopal, India, resulting in the death of over 3,800 people? Thousands more people suffered permanent injury or disability as a result of the exposure to the leaked gas. In 2002, lead, mercury and something called organochlorines had been discovered in the breast-milk of local women. Children with cleft palates and three eyes or a single eye had been born to mothers who as children had been exposed to the Bhopal disaster. But even as of 2003, Union Carbide – now owned by Dow Chemical – had not cleaned up their abandoned pesticide factory.

  My headaches were getting worse by the day.

  I’d come upon the method of smearing a pain relieving cream, meant for arthritis and back ache, across my forehead. The cream helped burn through the tense knots of muscle in my brow, and the strong wintergreen smell cleared out my sinuses a bit, causing my nose to run, especially when I smeared a little above my upper lip. Mostly, I think the burning pain of the cream on the surface of my skin simply helped distract me from the deeper pain of the headaches, if only for a little while.

  The pain seemed centered above the bridge of my nose, between my eyes, and it felt like a bullet was lodged there in the bone. I took it to be a stubborn sinus infection, and I’d been putting off a visit to my doctor; surely a dose of antibiotics would relieve it. I had, in fact, called one time to schedule an appointment. The receptionist who answered my call was plainly sobbing; I was surprised she’d even picked up the phone at all in that state. Blubbering an apology, she’d put me on hold, and I’d waited ten minutes or so li
stening to canned Muzak before I finally gave up, hung up, telling myself I’d try again later, but I hadn’t.

  Several days after I ventured inside the brick warehouse, I decided to expand my exploration of the Odyllic grounds. Actually, it was a spur of the moment decision; I was already out in the familiar parking lot, pushing the stroller around its borders. On impulse, as I came upon a road that branched off from the lot, I turned into it, and found myself pushing the stroller along a sort of shaded corridor between two buildings, then taking a left turn into a second such corridor before another, larger parking lot stretched open in front of me. This was the largest of the Odyllic lots, the main lot for the primary production building...a veritable ocean of blacktop.

  A few cars were parked on the periphery of the lot, but I suspected they had nothing to do with the company – probably other people in the area taking advantage of the unused space the abandoned lot afforded. The backs of several businesses and an apartment house, after all, bordered the far edge of the lot. Those buildings were on Willow Street, and Marsha must have been living in that tenement right there, her apartment on the second floor. I hoped she wouldn’t happen to glance out her window down into the lot.

  There were two vehicles parked close to the massive factory building itself, however. Both were silvery-gray in hue, and they were very similar if not identical in style. These must have been the company cars Marsha had alluded to. Unfortunately, I had never been very interested in cars, so if they were of some obscure make it wasn’t apparent to me.

  Atop the building, besides a number of air conditioning units as big, themselves, as small houses, was a huge metal pipe that ran off the roof, down the side of the building, and emptied into a little caged-in enclosure. I had seen an identical arrangement – the other end of the same pipe, in fact – on the opposite side of the building, facing the lot where I usually strolled. Whenever I contemplated this silvery pipeline, I always wondered if some child had ever thought to climb up into it like a hamster in an exercise tube, then slide back down inside it, from the roof to the ground. It seemed inevitable that someone would have at least thought of doing so. The whimsical appeal of this pipe draped over the top of the plant seemed to complement the pale silhouette of the Lethe Toys clown head, which I could just make out on the face of the building, above its banks of greenish-paned windows.

  It seemed to take a half hour just to cross the parking lot, but at last I reached the far side of the main plant building. And here was the place where the immense brick chimney – surely the tallest structure in town – was rooted, soaring into the sky like a sequoia stripped of all its branches.

  As a boy I had cut through this lot a hundred times either on my bike or on foot, but I had never dared approach the base of the great chimney. Then again, the parking lot had been filled in those days with dozens and dozens and dozens of cars. From inside the building had come grinding sounds, screeching sounds – hissing, clanging and pounding noises. Once, in a museum, I had listened to a tape recording of the shy voice of an extinct passenger pigeon. These sounds of American industry should have been recorded for posterity, as well. Not the slightest metallic clink came from the long and looming main plant building as I moved toward the foot of the lighthouse-like chimney for the very first time.

  I glanced over a bit uneasily at the two gray company cars before I stepped around the corner of the building and into the cool shadow of the skyscraper-huge chimney. The whole bottom section of the shaft itself, in fact, was colored blue in the shadow of the plant, though where the chimney plunged into the brassy afternoon sun it virtually glowed red as if monstrous temperatures flamed inside it. It was bigger around than I had even imagined, and looking straight up its length was dizzying. It was a warm day; if it had been cold, would I now be seeing steam pouring from the smokestack’s summit?

  Looking down at the base again, I realized there was a metal door like that of some old furnace built right into its brick-scaled hide. I took a few steps nearer to read the words marked in red paint on the black iron hatch. Though the paint was badly flaked away, I deciphered the letters as spelling out: DOOR 4.

  My headache had me nearly in tears; I knew it was a bad time to be expanding on my usual afternoon walk, and decided to head back toward home. As I turned, however, I heard a loud and ringing clang behind me. It was as if a metal surface had been pounded with a hammer, a tire iron, something heavy...

  I looked back at the black iron door with the red letters. I expected to hear another gong-like blow, but there wasn’t any. Just the metal contracting, or expanding, due to a change in temperature?

  Retracing my path, I had crossed half of the lot’s span when I heard a vehicle coming up behind me. It was not at all unusual for cars to cut through the various lots of the derelict factory as a shortcut to reach this street or that street, sometimes escaping the traffic tie-ups in the center of town on a busy Friday afternoon like this one. But as the vehicle passed me, at a discreet distance from me, I looked up to see that it was a white truck with colored lights across its roof, like those of a police car. Though there was no identifying seal or such on the passenger’s side door, I knew that this was the security vehicle that Marsha had mentioned. Inside it, I caught a glimpse of an older gentleman with white hair. When he met my eye, he raised his hand in a pleasant little wave. For a moment there I had been so alarmed to see his vehicle that when he simply waved at me, and drove on by without asking me why I had been gazing up at the chimney, I gave him a relieved smile and a wave of my own. See? I thought at him...I’m just a dad taking his baby for a walk.

  I couldn’t help feeling, though, that he had in fact seen me gaping at the brick tower...and had very deliberately come out of wherever he had been lurking to make his presence known to me.

  “Oh God, this is terrible,” I said to Grover regarding the pain in my skull, quickening my pace. I was even feeling nauseous from the agony...

  I was able to nap briefly, but it barely dimmed the pain, so I swallowed my seventh and eighth pills of the day and took a package of frozen corn out of the freezer to hold against my forehead. In addition, I stepped out onto my front porch to breathe in some fresh air, the interior of my house always so stifling and stagnant, the suffocating stink of claustrophobia.

  It was a windy night, and actually almost chilly; one of my white plastic lawn chairs had blown over and I almost tripped across it as I stepped outside. I righted it, and as I straightened up I could hear even from this distance the wind moaning across the top of that cell phone tower, like a giant blowing into a flute. I could also hear a train rumbling along that track which ran parallel to the newly paved access road.

  I stood out there for only five minutes or so, pressing my impromptu ice-pack to my cranium, and was about to turn back inside to vegetate in front of the TV again when my eyes were drawn to a movement in the night sky. A wash of gooseflesh rippled over my skin. I was certain that I had seen a very bright star shoot to the right before it became stationary again. For me, it looked as if the star had only moved, oh say a foot, but of course out there in space the distance might have been light-years for all I knew. If what I was seeing were a star, it was impossible. If what I was seeing were a star...

  I stared at it for five full minutes, but it didn’t shift again, nor did any of its neighbors. At last, reluctantly, suspiciously, I went back inside. I triple-checked that I had locked both the hallway door and the inner door behind me. So I sextuple-checked, actually.

  After an hour and a half of TV my ice-pack had become less than icy, while my headache had regained in intensity. I glanced at Grover, up too late in his little plastic rocking chair. “Jesus, this is too much...I have to call the doctor tomorrow, I have to...”

  I pressed my palm against my forehead in a useless gesture of comfort, and what my hand met there gave me a jolt. I was then springing to my feet and scuffing into the bathroom fast in my slippers.

  “Oh my God,” I muttered, looking into the
mirror of the medicine cabinet. There was an egg-like lump directly above the bridge of my nose, a hard swelling tender under my gingerly probing fingers. “Oh my God,” I whispered again. I decided an appointment with my primary care physician would not be soon enough – I must go tonight, right now, to a hospital emergency room, however much I dreaded the ride to the city and the wait I would doubtlessly endure before I could be seen.

  I survived the ride, drank a coffee and watched TV in the emergency ward waiting room, my eyes too pained to read a magazine. After an hour of waiting here, I was ushered at last into a room – where I waited an hour more. Finally, my doctor arrived. Though he was in his scrubs and a white coat, he wore thick dark sunglasses. My first, irrational thought was that he might be blind, though logic and his actions indicated that he couldn’t be.

  “And where was this lump you felt?” the doctor asked, kneading my scalp, then my forehead. His breath smelled strongly of coffee, with alcohol, I think, underlying that.

  “Right here...in the middle.” I pointed to the bridge of my nose. I wanted to tell him to take those dark glasses off.

  “Hmm...nothing there I can feel,” the doctor mused.

  What was he saying? The lump had been like a cue ball grafted onto my skull. I brought my own hand up again, brushing against his sleeve, and felt the region for myself.

  The man was right. The lump had utterly vanished.

  “It was here,” I stammered. “It was big...”

  “Did you hit your head? It may have just been a contusion, that went away...”

  “No, I didn’t hit my head. This thing was big...it was...big...”

  “Umm...not anymore.” The doctor removed the purple rubber gloves that he had donned before touching my apparently virulent skin. Unconsciously, though, at least I hoped unconsciously, he fingered one of the finger holes. “Maybe it submerged into hiding, huh? Moved to another spot?” He smiled, but saw I wasn’t smiling. Thankfully, he threw away his gloves. “Did you know that physicians used to think the uterus traveled around throughout a woman’s body? And that this was the source of a woman’s emotional or mental disturbance? Hence the term ‘hysteria’.”