Mr Wicker

by Maria Alexander

  She marveled at Mr. Wicker’s surgical precision in excising her memories. She couldn’t conjure even the faintest image in her mind’s eye. Not a breakfast, not a playtime, not a single moment with her.

  Her sister.

  Someone knocked on the door. Dr. Farron grimaced and checked his watch. “It’s probably Arnie. You’ve got a medical evaluation after this with Dr. Stemmle.” He stood and approached the door.

  “Are you going to still be my doctor? I promise to behave.” The thought of not seeing him again felt like a knife twisting in her chest.

  “I don’t know.”

  She slid in front of him and flattened herself against the door. “If not, will you be anything else?”

  The smell of him. His skin. Everything so close, yet...

  “You need to get through this before you think about those things,” he said.

  Another knock thudded against her back. Louder.

  Alicia felt the singe of loss but was determined not to let it get to her. She stepped aside.

  Crestfallen, Dr. Farron opened the door. “Hi Arnie. She’s ready.”

  Chapter 35

  These days, Arnie was feeling pretty darned good.

  Sure, the drugs were giving him the trots and drying out his mouth, but they were better than the alternative. He started chewing gum and drinking a lot of water. That worked pretty well to get him drooling again. It masked the initial thrush, too. God! The thrush made him feel less sexy than the virus itself. Kiss me, baby—ew! A spongy white tongue carpet was definitely not how he wanted to greet a lover. But that was gone now. Finis!

  And—hooray!—his depression was lifting. The initial diagnosis was probably the worst moment of his life. That’s when he discovered that the so-called stages of grief were total bull. He went through the stages out of their supposed order, sometimes two or more at a time. He’d lost a couple of friends to the virus—who hadn’t?—but they weren’t people close to him. In fact, he’d been really blessed and hadn’t lost hardly anyone in his life. Not to death, anyway. To ostracization? Yep. But not death.

  After a long run of heartbreaks, he had decided to date only positives, as the neggies rejected him time and again. He tried to not take it personally. They were rejecting the virus, not him. But it still beat him up emotionally. The major depression last year made him reach out to the community and his friends for support. Definitely, only positives from now on, he swore. And that changed everything. For one, it took the guessing game out of when to disclose, which was great because he wasn’t about to not disclose right away. That just didn’t seem fair. But immediate disclosure to a neggie brought with it drama followed closely on the heels of shame. The other day, he bought a navy blue muscle shirt with a big red “plus” sign across the pecs. On the back it read, “Take the shame out of the game.” It both emboldened him and shocked him with its courage and honesty. He got such a supportive reaction from his friends that, with much trepidation, he wore it to his local bar last night. As frightening as it was, he got quite a draw and met potential lovers who were also positive.

  Now he was, like, really out. And it scared him shitless.

  Arnie was not a courageous guy, but he was learning something about life. About how some things he had to do would always be scary, so he just had to do them scared. This was one of those things, yet he could manage. He was really good at taking his meds, of course, and knew a lot about nutrition. But his meds had side effects, in addition to the emotional strain, financial concerns and social pressures of having the virus. While Arnie was more afraid of getting hit by a bus than dying of the virus, the daily struggle to not let the virus define who he was and how much he enjoyed life was overwhelming at times.

  Like today.

  The drugs also gave him nightmares. His CD4 count consistently clocked in at a goodly number, which meant the current antiretrovirals were really working for him. So he had been reluctant to change, even when the dreams turned bloody. Last night he had weird dreams about domestic animals that were the victims of vivisection. When Rachelle asked him to take the extra shift tonight, he did so gratefully, not wanting to go home and sleep right away even though he was definitely tired.

  Arnie straightened like a rabbit that just caught whiff of a hound. He could sense when evil—that is, Dr. Sark—was at hand. Sure enough, Dr. Sark swung into the ward from the elevator as Arnie sorted the next day’s meds. He’d always assumed Dr. Sark was one of those who was on the “DL”—that is, on the “down low,” a supposedly straight guy who secretly had sex with men but who did not claim to be gay or bi. It was just a feeling Arnie had about the doctor. He also thought Dr. Sark was attractive in a scary sort of way. He used his temper like a scythe, which would have been the kind of power thing Arnie liked if it weren’t for the fact that Dr. Sark had sidestepped a murder accusation some time ago. Dr. Sark was a tsunami in Arnie’s pond in more ways than one.

  Everyone was in bed and the day was over. Soon he’d start the flashlight rounds. Tonight an extra orderly had come in to beef up security and replace Brian’s muscle. Arnie had never liked Brian, who oozed homophobia in a stereotypical way that had sometimes proved lethal to gay men in the past. Arnie was kind of used to it. He didn’t feel too threatened, just actively disliked. He could handle that.

  “Well, heya there, Dr. Sark! Aren’t you working kinda late?”

  “What are you doing here?” Dr. Sark’s eyes were slightly dilated. Sometimes Arnie wondered if Dr. Sark had a drug problem, the way he was grandiose at times and manipulated people, but that could be caused by a number of things. Tonight, Arnie smelled something wrong.

  “Rachelle asked me to stay an extra shift.”

  “Don’t.”

  Arnie finished smoothing a new name label onto a cup. “Sure, Dr. Sark. Anything you say.” He pushed the cart aside and braved the next question. “So, who’s taking over this shift?”

  At bedtime, Alicia didn’t feel like lying down. Her mind worked feverishly over the last session. Over Lillian. She’d read the articles over and over, scraping every last clue from the printouts. Her grandfather’s confession was the most difficult to read about. He’d confessed to killing her sister. She wondered what Malcom would’ve said about that. His specialty was family law but he had an opinion about every case that crossed the headlines. Curiosity about her grandmother’s whereabouts bloomed under the constant attention of her thoughts. How could she have not talked about this? They were another generation, sure, the ones who didn’t talk about WWII, the ones who even clenched the horrors of the Korean and Vietnam Wars in tight, suffering fists. But her silence was unprecedented—or was it? Her whole family seemed experts at minimal communication. Hell, they were fucking mimes and that was only when they gave a damn to press a couple of flat palms against the air in front of them, which was almost never.

  The meds cart rounded the bend into the room. She perked up, thinking she’d see Arnie, but the last person she ever wanted to see was pushing the cart.

  “Hello, Ms. Baum,” Dr. Sark cooed. Wearing a white doctor’s coat, he plucked a cup from the cart and offered it to her. “You look well.”

  “Thanks,” she said, taking the cup. Something felt very wrong about this.

  He pretended to dust a space on the bed. “May I?”

  “Sure.”

  As he sank into the mattress, Alicia’s body tensed like a granite breadboard. She swallowed the meds and handed him the empty cups.

  “So,” he said, a statement unto itself. Dr. Sark’s lips pouted slightly as he leveled those glacial irises at her. “I just wanted to say that I’m sorry you needed something that you could not ask me for,” he said.

  “Oh?”

  “What I’m saying,” he said, “is that I thought we had an understanding. When you denied me the opportunity to do something for you, you denied yourself the opportunity to do something for me.”

  He laid his hand on her leg. An oily dollop of revulsion dropped into her stomac
h.

  She pretended to hunch contritely. “Sometimes it isn’t easy to think clearly in the excitement of an unexpected opportunity. I hope you won’t fault me with negligence as much as impulsivity. I did not forget your generosity. I count it one of the greatest assets of this hospital.”

  A thin smile stitched across his face. “Of course not,” he said. He patted her leg, then massaged it briefly. Just as Alicia prayed to everything she never believed in, he placed his hands on his thighs and declared, “Well, I won’t keep you. Good night, Ms. Baum.”

  “Good night.”

  He slid off the bed and plunged his hands into his coat pockets. He smiled and strolled toward the door as if leaving a cafe.

  Alicia laid down in bewilderment. The whole conversation stank. What did he want? To make a point? It felt strange.

  The subterranean parking garage was slightly damp, even on the third level. Arnie zipped up his leather jacket as he walked to his car. Something about Dr. Sark and the way he looked bothered him. Brian was suspended, so he couldn’t have called him in; Mindy had worked twelve hours (last he checked the schedule, anyway) and was not scheduled to come in until tomorrow; and one of the other relief nurses had the flu. The staff were spread far too thin. Dismissing him was highly unusual.

  Arnie stopped between the cars next to his Honda. A wrongness burned a forest fire in his gut. He immediately strode to the elevator, slipping his cell phone from his jacket pocket. Before last night, he would have been too scared to report something out of line. He would have feared retribution on a grand scale. In fact, that’s what happened before—when that patient died. He’d feared reporting Dr. Sark’s odd behavior the two days leading up to the isolation and death. That soul-scoring guilt was what drove him to that drunken night where he slept bareback with that guy and caught the virus.

  But now, things were different. Now he knew he could do scary stuff, even if he had to do it scared. And after the investigation, he’d realized that he alone was not responsible for what had happened. He’d just done as he was told and, beyond his keen intuition, hadn’t any reason to think or do otherwise. That knowledge had cooled the guilt somewhat.

  As soon as he reached the lobby and got a signal, he scrolled to his contact list and dialed.

  About fifteen minutes after Dr. Sark left, Alicia felt heavy. A smooth emptiness swelled behind her eyes. The air thickened. Her breathing slowed. Alicia gripped the sheets and pulled them taut up under her chin as she attempted to focus. But the strength drained from her fingers and she let go of the sheets, arms and legs sinking into the mattress without her. As she lost control, panic spiked her throat.

  The Library bled into her dimming vision. Mr. Wicker read from a book with his feathery, basso profundo voice.

  Come into the garden, Maud, for the black bat, night, has flown...

  Alicia pressed her lips together to form an “M,” but her facial muscles disobeyed. Mmmmmm.

  Her fingers bent with muscle spasms as she desperately pawed at the nurse’s button. And still, his voice:

  ...Come into the garden, Maud, I am here at the gate alone.

  Whether it was his voice or her imagination summoning him as she drowned under the influence of a narcotic, she could not tell. The veil between the worlds had grown thinner each moment since she’d first met him.

  A figure in the doorway. Tall. Menacing.

  Mmmmmm, she said. Mmmmmmiiiisssterrrrrrr.

  A cloth strap slid over her wrist and tightened with a tug. Alicia strained to focus on the face in her narcotic haze. A tremor drilled into her gut as she recognized the man who stripped the blanket from the bed and strapped her ankles to the corners of the bed frame. Two other, bigger men assisted him, but they soon left. The room door was closed, the world’s eyes shut to her.

  Mmmmmm!

  “According to my report, you became agitated and lashed out at me tonight, repeatedly suggesting that you would take your life again, and not a moment before you had taken mine. This threat required that I use both chemical restraints and mechanical,” he said, his voice a low boil. He tugged the leg straps to ensure they were taught. “Tomorrow morning, I will send a request to the court that you receive forced inpatient treatment for another month.” He circled the bed and bowed close to her. His lower lip grazed her cheek as he whispered in her ear. “But not before I make your life a living hell.”

  MMMMMM! She yanked and the wrist restraints painfully cut into her stitches.

  The door opened.

  Dr. Sark nodded at the doorway, where the burly jackass from group therapy stood, rocking on his slippered heels. Dr. Sark motioned him inside. “I believe you two are friends? Or perhaps not. Pity. Why don’t I leave you alone so that you can reconcile?” The smile that bled across his face was so chilling that Alicia forced a sort of throttled scream from her throat, the sort that she often tried during “old hag” dreams when she half-awakened in naps to the thing sitting on her chest. She’d learned not to panic during old hag dreams, but simply try to relax and go back to sleep rather than fight the suffocation and paralysis.

  This time, there was no relaxing. No waking up. The drugs folded thick wooly hands over her eyes.

  The mattress buckled and a sharp pain stung her legs as the jackass climbed over her and crushed her legs. His stinky breath wafted into her face as he growled at her.

  “So, cunt. You gonna apologize for what you did to me?”

  Alicia could barely breathe. His fat knee dug into her thigh, making her wince with agony. She couldn’t speak articulately even if she wanted to. Instead, a garbled groan escaped her throat instead of the well-placed verbal barb with which she wanted to gouge his balls.

  “All right then. You get what you deserve, bitch.”

  His meaty paw slapped her so hard that the pain knocked out a bit of the cottony feeling in her head. He hit like a girl, slapping her again and again, bruising her breasts and busting her lip before he got the gumption to drive his fist into her abdomen. Alicia coughed, winded, pain blossoming in her belly. Blood dribbled down her chin as he laughed. Her head rang with anguish as her face, torso, arms and legs throbbed. Her wrists and ankles stained the bonds with blood from struggling to escape every blow, the skin scraped raw. Judging from the pain in her neck and right shoulder, she’d pulled a muscle or worse. She couldn’t tell if the searing in her side was a broken rib or bruised innards.

  Like it mattered at this point.

  Little more registered in her medication haze except that now the asshole was yanking at the drawstrings on his sweats, loosening the wide band that hugged his overabundant waistline. He managed to unhinge the pants waist from his greasy hips and shoved them down around his ass, revealing a half-erect hairy cock bulging under his sagging, stretch-marked beer belly.

  And it wasn’t much bigger than the two inches she’d suggested.

  Injuries scalded Alicia’s entire body as he crawled up between her battered legs. She fought the sick welling up into and scorching her throat, terrified of choking on her vomit. He wrapped his hands around her neck, crushing her larynx. Every ugly pockmark on his face loomed over Alicia, spittle working its way over his lips. She couldn’t breathe! Oh god! Worse than an old hag dream. Waves of blackness washed over her eyes as his hands dug into her larynx.

  Dr. Sark stepped into the room, hands dug deeply into his white lab coat pockets. The two orderlies flowed into the room before him and peeled the man off Alicia, who choked and gasped. They dragged him away as he protested. “You said I could do whatever I wanted! You said!”

  “My goodness! I never said such a thing.” The smug lie lit a rage in Alicia that burned away some of the chemical influence. “Someone as deluded and violent as you, sir, belongs under heavy chemical restraint.” To the orderlies, he said, “Please put him in room 4-E?”

  When the orderlies hauled Alicia’s boisterous, flailing assailant out of the room, Dr. Sark remained and nonchalantly shut the door.

  “Oh, dear
, Ms. Baum. You no longer look well at all.”

  His voice spoke behind a thick glass wall—faint, distant. But he was right there, those cool irises examining her face. She could feel the lid swelling around her left eye, pressing her eye partially closed. Her breaths came in long, belabored gasps.

  “You look so unwell, I suspect they will have to put you back under medical evaluation. But before I alert security...”

  A tear leaked from her eye and rolled wet into her ear. Nightmares and narcotics. He stroked the hair from her eyes and crushed his lips against hers. His breath tasted sour. Sulfuric. A white blade of terror slipped between her eyes as he ran his large yet slender hands over her bare legs, drawing up her nightgown as he slid his hand up her thigh. He loosed his pants, letting his long, hard penis escape from the opening. Unlike her previous assailant, he was nearly hairless with just a sprouting of graying hairs from the base of his cock. His smug face dipped into hers again, his hand separating her jaws so that he could press his tongue between her lips.

  Alicia bit down. Hard.

  The doctor shrieked into her mouth, beating her head with his hands and pulling her hair, but much less effectively than he could have if the tender muscle between Alicia’s teeth wasn’t in the most intense agony. Alicia held on, the coppery juices sliding down around her teeth and gums, lacquering her throat. Fuck you, you sonuvabitch, she thought. I will fucking eat you alive.

  ...the steady pounding of ancient Norse drums...

  ...shrill explosion from the window...

  ...slivers of glass...