My loyal dark assistant, a Jackie Coogan hump pressing up through the back of her polyester nurse’s blouse, shuffles around a huge, monstrous bed. Leather straps hang off the shaky frame of metal 2 × 4’s that support the bed. Despite myself, I hear a very Vincent Price sounding chuckle rise up in my throat. On rickety tables around the bed, jars of gory red, unearthly green are stewing. My eyes leap like a close-up camera to an opaque fuchsia fluid pumping up and down a tightly twisted coil. Something viscous bubbles in a big black cauldron. My eyes snap to green lines blipping on a screen, the erratic landscape of vital signs. I look out the stone-framed, gothic window openings. Sharp mountain peaks are illuminated by furious bolts of lightning. Back on the vital sign screen, the green line dips abruptly into a valley then evens out to a very lifeless looking plain. Cut to a bright chrome tray of neatly laid out stainless steel knives and scalpels, cotton swabs and gauze. Conspicuously, in the middle of a tray, a mammoth, wooden-handled rusty knife twitches. A sharp chord jolts from an organ.
Cut to water dripping down dark grey stones upon which teeter my various diplomas from UCLA and Transylvania State. Cut to sweat popping on my brow, my tense, dramatic eyes, my trembling, entrusted-with-the-power-of-God hands, blue veins throbbing. Cut to my loyal dark assistant’s back, now straight again beneath her polyester blouse, and the loose, seductive knot that keeps her tunic tied. Cut to me blinking. Cut to Igor-Coogan’s hump bulging out of his ratty jacket. Cut to me shaking my head. Blinking. Her back flat again. Me blinking again.
Thunder crashes over the manic music of the organ. My eyes pop open. Cut to the glowing skylight above. Cut to bright silver lamp hanging from beige modern ceiling. Roll into it. Fuzz focus to white. Fade into crisp white sheet. Pull back to show the white sheet on the rickety bed raised toward the skylight. Close-up of thick, cracked leather straps with huge metal buckles. Pan the sheet beneath whose contours lie —
Did I forget to mention whose the body was? How could I? When there was only one, and only ever has been one, on whom I would be qualified to operate.
Perhaps I should have told you this before. But then, perhaps it’s you who never should have told me what you did, repeatedly, again, again, and only when you knew I would say yes.
For I remember this: Your white back arcing in the dark. Your dark mouth open like a pool. The pact you said your body meant. The true and desperate way that I believed you.
I run my trembling eyes across the white pillow case, the one with the pretty yellow and white embroidered daisies. The scent of the sheets is sandalwood. The touch of the sheets is soft. The shape beneath the snow-white sheet, on this, the longest and the sweetest night in years, is you.
Lightning crashes. The screens that watch the vital signs go blip.
I step towards the raised-up bed. My rubber soles squeak. The lights are harsh. I blink. Spots of red pop in my eyes. I watch the sheet you lie beneath. I blink again.
A movement? Slight? Your teasing breath?
I remember your pulse, your words, dear love, your white back arcing in the dark.
My loyal dark assistant pulls the white sheet back so I can see your skin. I thrust my palm out to my dark assistant. She slaps a scalpel down. The metal is cool against my plastic glove. I trace the path above your skin where I will enter you.
I remember the skin of the cup of your throat, the quickening of your pulse. I remember the way your chest, then neck, then face got rose with color. I remember your white back arcing in the dark.
Lightning cracks. Machines go blip. I hold the scalpel poised.
I blink. I think I see a pulse. Your neck? But I am here to do a quickening, a bringing back from death. Unless I’m mistaken —
One white-gloved hand of mine presses your skin. The other draws a line above your chest. My first surprise – imagine my surprise! – it only takes a tiny tap to break. It’s like I’m cutting into a quiche. I cut along a line expecting a sudden burst of red. But no, the knife comes clean, like a perfectly cooked cheese and mushroom quiche, not too dry, not too runny.
You aren’t a bloody mess inside, the way you ought to be, the way every person I’ve ever had, or ever heard or read about has been. No, you really are like those naive textbook sketches they tried to teach me from in med school. Every nerve and tendon neat, each vein in line, each artery, the layers of your flesh pristine. You’re pretty as a picture.
I touch the cutaway carefully. There is no blood. I squeeze the severed parts of you the way I’d squeeze open the two halves of a baked potato, and stick my hand inside your chest.
I stretch my fingers in until I feel something, a hard thing. I pull the skin away from it. I squint.
Nurse, I rasp. I recognize it.
A heart. Sort of. A tough pink little valentine of sugar, color, corn starch. A candy heart. I wipe my trembling hand across it and read your words: You’re mine.
Nurse, I groan. She daubs my brow. I squint, looking deeper in your chest to see the color of the candy heart is changing: sky blue. The red letters change too: Kiss Me.
Nurse, I moan, Nurse?
I try to hold your heart in my hands, but I can’t keep it from changing. Your heart is green. It says, Hot Stuff. Then – pink, white, yellow – like the horse of a different color in The Wizard of Oz. Your heart is a rainbow of sweet, after-dinner mint pastels, each printed with some cute little words.
Scalpel, I growl to my dark assistant, but she’s already pressed the sharp edge to my palm. I poke your heart. I expect it to crumble into sticky, powdered sugar. When the knife makes contact, it scrapes but doesn’t give. Though I pull at it, the surrounding tissue doesn’t move. When I pull the flesh away, I see this heart is not connected to a thing. Your artificial heart has natural bypass. It still says words. It tells me Trust me. Kiss Me. You Belong to Me. You’re Mine. Kiss me.
My stomach clenches. I try to look away from you but I can’t.
Was it my fault I didn’t accurately diagnose the symptoms?
Symptoms? What symptoms? There hadn’t been any goddamned symptoms. I had nursed you and given you more than the ounce of prevention anyone – even you – deserved. And even if there had been symptoms, I wouldn’t have been able to diagnose them. Because you were something they didn’t teach about in med school, a whole new life – or something – support system. You weren’t what you appeared to be, what you had said you were to me.
You’d said it to me as trusting and innocent-seeming as anyone, the first time you had come to me. I’d asked you to answer a few brief questions from our medical history form regarding your record of illnesses, hospitalizations, allergies, diet, susceptibilities, proclivities, tendencies, desires. I’d asked you all of that in good faith, and listened to you, and checked off the appropriate boxes in good faith. And what you told me was a load of crap.
I now see that you go against the given on which the entire history of western medicine, not to mention everything you ever said to me, has been based.
But supposing, just supposing, that you had told me the truth when you’d first come to me. Would I have believed you? When what that awful truth was, was beyond belief? When what you would have said, if you had ever said the truth, was that the most you’ve ever been is less than human, a bloodless, heartless, pretty-faced cadaver?
How did you do it, darling?
Nurse! I croak, my jaw trembling, my eyes about to let loose a flood of tears. But I stop myself. I sniff, then thrust my firm young jaw against the wind, which has suddenly begun to howl through the interior of the lab. Nurse! I snap efficiently. I’m going to be big about this. I am going, despite the anguish it will cause me, to observe this for a greater cause, for science, for the rest of humanity, the poor bastards.
Nurse! I yell.
I hear the swish of my dark assistant’s lab coat, then the squeak of her shoes, the clanging of a door. I drop my noble pose and turn around to see my dark assistant has abandoned me. She’s left me here alone.
With you.
>
I look down at your perfect skin, the dark line where the scented sheet touches you. I look down at your candy heart, its words and colors changing.
I hear blood beating in my brain. I hear —
You sigh. Your eyes slide open sleepily. As if you’ve only been asleep. You open your pretty brown eyes that sweet, slow way you always used to when you were about to have me. You look so sweet and sleepy I almost raise my fingers to your cheek the way I used to. Until I remember, almost with surprise, that both my hands are clenched inside your body.
Our eyes meet. Then, sleepily, you close yours.
I watch your peaceful face and I dig my fingers into your candy heart. The muscles in my arms and hands pull taut. I squeeze harder, trying to strangle.
You don’t flinch.
I lean over your pretty face and ask you, Don’t you feel this?
My heart beats, waiting for your voice.
You sound sweet and syrupy. Feel what?
This. I press my fingers harder inside you.
What? You pout because I’ve interrupted your nap.
Don’t you feel this? I mash my hands together hard.
There is a pause.
What? You’re petulant. I don’t feel a thing.
Keep your eyes closed, I say. Tell me when you feel something.
I clench my hands around your slippery heart. I take a deep breath. Then I rip it out of you.
Your white back doesn’t arc.
I hold your heart above your pretty body. Your eyes stay closed.
Do you feel that?
You shake your sleepy head.
I carry your heart across the room. It weighs almost nothing. I stretch my white sleeves towards the light above me. I watch the changing colors and the silly changing words: You’re Mine. I’m Yours. I Love You. Kiss me.
Then I hear you speaking words out loud.
When are you going to do it? I’m tired of lying here.
I look back at you, comfy on the bed. You have no idea what has been ripped out of you. Suddenly, your heart is heavy on my arms. I want to lower it, to dump it back inside you, but my arms lock. I buckle, about to fall, but my legs are stiff. I teeter but I can’t fall.
When are you going to do it? you whine.
I open my mouth to answer you, but I can’t speak. I want to look away from you, so calm and pretty on the bed, but my head is locked. My arms tremble under the weight. I want to drop it but I can’t let go.
WHAT I DID
MY JOB WAS TO carry the bag. I carried the bag by the rope. The rope had been run through the reinforced holes in the top of the bag. The top of the bag was gathered neatly and firmly by the rope and the rope was knotted and kept the bag closed. A couple of feet of the end of the rope was what I held to carry the bag. I hoisted the bag up and bore it on my back. I bent beneath the weight of it. The bag was heavy. The bag was about 2½ feet long, full, though not entirely full, there was some give in the bag, some looseness, but nonetheless so heavy I could not, I am sure, have carried the bag if the bag had been entirely full. The material of the bag was leather or some similarly sturdy fabric. The bag appeared to be impermeable. That is, I never saw leaking from the bag. Though in truth, what I saw was not a lot. It was hard to see. But I had felt the bag carefully and had never felt anything that felt like a seam, nor pattern of weave nor pores. I speculated there were none. In fact, to be honest, what I said about the reinforced holes at the top of the bag, was only speculation. I hadn’t seen the reinforced holes, though I had looked as closely and carefully as I could, but it was always, even when it was not entirely, dark.
There was a thing inside the bag. Which though solid shifted sometimes when I picked the bag up or set it down or stumbled under it. I carried it on my back. The rope was over my shoulder, my hand holding the end of it tightly, the bag on my back. Sometimes I held my fist around the rope right in front of my chest. Bearing the bag on my back, I bent beneath it. Sometimes I felt the contents of the bag, which was one thing, though of two parts, shift. Sometimes nearer my shoulders, sometimes nearer the small of my back, sometimes to either side of me. I knew it was not more than one thing, though it was in two parts, because sometimes when it shifted, one part fell to my left, the other to my right, but it was always connected, there was no break between these parts. And sometimes part of it moved although the other part was still. But there was never a separation; inside the bag was one, not two. It was this thing inside the bag it was my job to carry.
When the bag was to be moved, I was summoned by the light. There was no light except the light. And the light only shone when I should move the bag. All otherwise was dark.
The light summoned me. I scrambled up from my place of rest and fumbled across the yard to the spotlit path at the edge of the yard where the bag sat in the spot of light. I squatted down. I took the rope in my hand and I turned on the balls of my feet so the bag was behind me. I gripped the rope tightly and pulled the bag up on my back. I felt the bag lift off the ground and hit the small of my back just above my shorts. The rope rubbed my shoulder and my collar bone through my t-shirt and I felt the skin of the bag on the skin of my back through my shirt. I stood up stumbling. I got my balance. The bag was very heavy and with my head bent down and my stomach squished and neck twisted, my sense of balance was not all it should have been. I didn’t have much time to right myself because the light was moving away. I heaved myself up and carried the bag where the light led me down.
The spot of light on the path reminded me of the bouncing ball in old movies when you’re supposed to sing along by following the ball bouncing along over the words of the song and you have to keep up or you’ll be left behind.
The sound of the light was a hum, as efficient and sometimes as irritating as a refrigerator. Like a refrigerator it sometimes clicked off. Those were the times I wasn’t carrying, and everything was dark.
What I saw of the path was what the light illuminated, a small black, though rendered grey, like slate beneath the light, dry and cracked and split-up bit of ground. And walls. The path was straight, as straight as if a beam of light had bored down into it, more smooth than any blast, and narrow, a few inches wider than an outstretched arm. Not that I could ever outstretch my arm. Not while I carried the bag.
I walked down the path exactly as I was led which prevented me from knocking into the wall on either side of me, which prevented me from putting extra pressure on my hand and on my always aching back and shoulder. The skin of my shoulder was tender. As soft as pimento as cool as a spoon. I had never formed a callus. Walking down the middle of the path also prevented me from stepping too near the walls which I was not permitted to do. But sometimes, I stumbled and fell against a wall. Because of the dimness I couldn’t see and because of my hand around the rope I couldn’t touch, but I heard the thwap of the bag and the crumbling of chunks breaking off the walls. But other times when I fell to the side I didn’t hear anything except the whup of me dropping the bag and the thud of me on the ground. But I didn’t hear any crumbling because I hadn’t bumped into a wall because some places off the path weren’t walls but openings.
Whereinto the light led not.
I carried the bag where I was led. When the light stopped, I stopped. I did not step beyond the light. I dropped the bag. The bag hit the ground with a thud. What was in the bag shifted. I sank down with weariness. But I couldn’t sit there and rest, the light wouldn’t wait for me. It started going back up the path back to the yard. I stumbled up and followed the light back up.
The return trip was up the same path and between the same walls. In a way it was as hard as the downward trip because though I wasn’t carrying the bag, I was going up. The path was a very steep incline. Very often on this trip I thought I was about to fall – no, really, truly about to tumble back and fall back down. I was afraid to fall, I didn’t want to fall down there and I could imagine rolling down, I didn’t know where I could stop. But on the other hand, though I had no other hand, I w
ould have been relieved to stop carrying the bag. But always just before I fell I would suddenly be able to make out, as if by some sudden brightness of the light, the yard.
When I got back to the edge of the yard, to the spot where I’d collected the bag, the light went out. It was perfectly dark again and perfectly quiet. Besides myself the only sound was the moving light. It hummed. When it went out, there was only me.
I shuffled my way in the dark to my resting place in the yard. Finding my way even this short distance was difficult. I couldn’t see. I walked along so slow and stiff, my arm swinging in front of me like a trunk or a tentacle to try to feel what I couldn’t see. I slipped my feet along, feeling for my resting place. Or sometimes I crawled along on my knees, my hand along the ground looking for the dip. When I reached my resting place I felt around for my cup. My cup was full when I came back and I drank from it. But sometimes I misjudged where I was or I was so thirsty and eager or tired and I kicked it over and spilt it and it was sucked into the ground. The ground was dry and I could hear the water sinking in, it made a hissing sound. When that happened I got nothing and I was thirsty and I had to wait until the next time I came back after carrying the bag.
My place of rest was a slight depression, not quite a hole in the ground, almost as deep as me. But part of me, no matter how flat I lay, remained above the level of the ground. I had made the depression to lie in by digging up the ground. The ground was hard but I worked it hard and made a hole to contain me. I could almost lie flat on my back, side or stomach, using my hand under my head as a pillow. Or if I hoped to minimize the brightness or the light when it would summon me, I would put my hand over my eyes to shield the light or lie as flat, as far down as I could so the light might reach me less. But every time when I woke, I’d shifted in my sleep, my body had moved, and I lay exactly where the light speared in to summon me.
When the light summoned me by shining in my eyes, I scrambled up and trudged across the yard to the spotlit bag. I picked up the bag and, bent beneath the bag, I followed the light down. When the light stopped, I stopped. I dropped the bag and sank with weariness.
The Terrible Girls Page 10