Doa Ii

by David C. Hayes

  “Mr. Jordan?”

  “He’s probably not going to make it through today. I plan on staying late, to see if I can do anything to help his family.”

  “Good bedside manner,” August noted. “What about our date tonight?”

  “I may have to reschedule. Apologies.”

  “Well, we’ll see,” August replied. “I won’t cancel our restaurant reservations yet.”

  ~

  Anna stepped by the window to look out over the small city. She could see the cemetery from her vantage point, the trees hiding the multitude of pre-plotted graves.

  An ambulance pulled up to the hospital, its lights quiet. August and an emergency department physician, Dr. Sillas, walked outside together.

  The paramedics moved a gurney from the truck. The body was covered with a dirty cloth, very unsanitary. August, Dr. Sillas, and the paramedics exchanged nods. The left hand of the body dropped from beneath the sheet, exposed. Anna knew the hand; all of the fingers were missing.

  She gasped.

  Dr. Sillas flung back the sheet, August watching intently.

  The old man from the bus and the cemetery laid on the gurney. He had been beaten, odd circular wounds arranged neatly in a line from his skull to the base of his spine. His wrists appeared heavily bruised.

  Anna left, quickly climbing the stairs to her own floor. Her mind filled with panic. She was probably the last person to have seen the old man alive. Suddenly knowing of his life seemed more fraught with peril than knowing of his death.

  She longed for work and obligation to help clear her thoughts and place the recent events into a logical design. She went straight to Mr. Jordan’s room. There was surely some safety in being around people.

  The floor nurse greeted her warmly as she arrived.

  “Good news, Dr. Zidek.”

  “What good news?”

  The nurse beamed. “Mr. Jordan is almost all better!”

  “What?” Anna asked incredulously. “He’s a terminal patient. He’s on palliative care.”

  “No, no. His blood work is almost normal, and he’s regaining kidney function. It’s a miracle. A Dew miracle.” She put her hand on Anna’s forearm. “We are so blessed to have August here. He’s a miracle worker.”

  Anna rushed to the man’s room.

  Mr. Jordan sat up in his bed, alert. His color was good, his features relaxed.

  “Top of the morning to you,” Mr. Jordan said to her. “They found a cure, just in time.”

  “Well, Anna, looks like we’re still on for tonight.” August said, suddenly arriving behind her. “Good news travels fast.” He winked. “It looks like kidney problems may be declining in Dew soon. We’re already working on cures for Alzheimer’s, depression, and diabetes. Maybe you want to change specialties?”

  “Cures?” she asked.

  He ignored her.

  “I’ll pick you up at seven, and I’ll order the best bottle of champagne they have. Mr. Jordan is on the way to a complete recovery. I think that’s cause for celebration. Seven. Don’t be late. We have a lot to talk about, Anna.”

  “August…Anna,” Dr. Sillas said, entering the room. He was the ER physician on duty. He capped a tube of hand lotion, pocketing it in his scrubs as he addressed August. “Do you have a moment, Dr. Parker?”

  August nodded. “Of course.” He smiled at Anna. “And I’ll see you at seven o’ clock.”

  Anna barely heard him. All her body sensed was the smell of suntan lotion and decaying fish.

  “It’s good to be back home, in Dew,” Mr. Jordan said to the nurse who was finishing his discharge papers. “You should never leave, Dr. Anna,” he called over to her. “You’ll never be healthy anyplace else. Believe me—I know!”

  She turned to look at him, not quite sure if she should be happy for his recovery or repulsed. The smell of Dr. Sillas’s hand lotion moved like shadows in her mind.

  ~

  Anna ate in silence, managing to maintain as normal a countenance as she could. August cajoled and spoke, keeping to very mundane topics. They shared a buffet at a Thai restaurant, Anna careful of how much August was enticing her to drink. The bottles of crisp white wine and champagne never seemed to slow down. He paid when they were finished, and they got into his new Lexus. There was that lingering smell again: suntan oil and bad fish.

  August opened up her door and let her in. He placed a small bag into the back of the car, moving a lab coat. The name on it read “Dr. Sillas.” He had been in the car recently. Anna knew his hand lotion all too well.

  August drove, ending up at the cemetery. “This is as good a place as any to talk,” he said, motioning her out of the car.

  She got out, feeling watched. Scared, but excited to finally talk about what mattered.

  They walked to the paupers’ graves.

  “What did the old man tell you?” August asked.

  “A bunch of crazy stuff. About how Dew got so pristine and disease-free.”

  “Grems always said too much,” August said. “We knew he would come to a bad end.”

  “You killed him.”

  “No. I didn’t.”

  “But somebody did. Those marks weren’t self-inflicted.”

  “You see too much,” August said. “Perhaps that’s why Grems took a liking to you. He spoke too much, you see too much.”

  “I don’t believe him.”

  “Yes, you do,” August said. “Crazy as it is, you do believe him.” He spread his hands out across the graves waiting to be filled. “This bothers you. You feel in your gut that the old man was telling the truth.”

  “I believe that he believed he was telling the truth,” she said. “That’s different.”

  “You looking to leave Dew?’

  “I think I should. It’s a little weird here for me.”

  “Ah, but there’s a problem,” August told her. “You know what’s going on. We can’t just let you leave. Sooner or later you’ll tell somebody who will listen, just like Grems did with you. Dew chooses its own wisely. You self-select if you are cured or cure. Free will at its purest.”

  She started to walk away. “I’m out of here,” she said. “I’ll mail in a letter of resignation. There is something very wrong in the water here.”

  “Stop,” he commanded.

  She halted.

  “You know, the cancer thing just requires that a doctor get gang-banged every two years,” he said. “Doesn’t matter which gender. Trust me on that one.” His voice had enough empathy that she paused, realizing what he was inferring.

  “Why did you stay, August?”

  He almost laughed. “I have Ebola, Anna. A very virulent strain.”

  “I don’t understand. And Ebola is a very quick disease, frequently fatal.”

  “Especially my strain.”

  “You know what, August—I don’t want to understand,” she said, starting to walk again.

  “If you do not hear me out, at least, you will not make it out of this graveyard alive. Convenient, as we won’t have to drag your body far. We need a cure for Borna—an animal disease, but associated with bipolar disorder. Every six months we grab a worthless excuse for titties and pussy—a whore, a stripper, a snide little tease—and gut her open. We stuff her intestines in her mouth until she chokes on them. That cures Borna—we have lab animals we monitor with. That also takes care of bipolar disease in our human population. Thing is, unlike a lot of our cures, the candidate pool of cures for Borna is more open—any female will do.”

  “You’re a doctor!” she yelled. “What the Hell happened to you, August!”

  “The cure for Ebola is very benign here,” he replied, surreal in his calmness. “Do you know how those of us infected with the disease survive it? The Dew cure? Another person maintains a small wound on your behalf, case for case, and the virus is held in check. The wound is usually on the right forearm, so it can be shown by proxy to principal. A sign of trust. Both Doctor Sillas and I are infected. Most everybody in the hospital
is. We each have proxies. As long as the proxy keeps their wound open, we stay alive. If they fail to maintain the wound, we die. You will have a proxy, just as we do. It will keep you alive. As long as you obey the rules, the proxy will honor you.”

  “The rules being?” She was plotting an escape route out of the cemetery. She had brought a long, thin knife from the operating room with her to serve as a weapon, if needed. It was hidden beneath her coat.

  “You stay in Dew most of the time,” he answered. “We get passes for vacations once we have deemed ourselves trustworthy. You keep your mouth shut to outsiders, and you work on finding new cures. Think about it—you may find more benign answers to Dew’s problems, Anna, reduce the suffering. You can achieve your goals—curing, bettering the community”

  “You can’t even control your cure,” she said. “What if you wanted to die? As long as that proxy maintains their wound, they force you to live with this sickness.”

  “Nobody wants to die,” August replied.

  “You aren’t living,” Anna stated. “You’re a prisoner. An exalted one, but a prisoner just the same. I can’t even watch those shows about prisons on television. I can’t buy a cup of coffee in this town. Now you want me—what? Infected with one the worst diseases ever? Knowing that my life really boils down to the whim of another?”

  She saw the cemetery was filling with people: police officers, the old woman, nurses, Doctor Sillas.

  “The deal is simple,” August said. “You take on your infection; Mindy Leher—the nurse who attended to you after the rape—has agreed to be your proxy. She felt so much for you then. She considers it an honor to be your proxy.”

  She sensed the small crowd beginning to surround her.

  “It’s an easy thing to do,” August told her. “Let go of your preconceptions. You have an emotional objection—think about it logically. You work on curing people. And they get cured. Look at Mr. Jordan. He was going to die. Now he’s cured. How much more satisfying is that then watching patients die day after day?”

  “It isn’t about me,” Anna said.

  “Exactly. It’s about the patients.”

  “And what about those sacrificed as the cures?”

  “They defined themselves.”

  “No.”

  “Yes.”

  The crowd was getting closer, now bold in their presence. The nurse with the bright blue eyes stepped forward, pulling up the sleeve of her jacket over her forearm, readying herself to receive her proxy wound.

  August pulled out a needle and syringe. Doctor Sillas came up behind her. She could smell his dead fish-and-suntan oil smell. He reached out to grab her.

  Anna had been grabbed by him before, violently penetrated, and forced into Dew’s service. She found her victory conditions taking a drastic shape; she would not be a victim again.

  She grabbed the thin knife from underneath her coat. “I’m leaving,” she said. “I’m not being violated again. I’m not having every day be a violation, wondering if somebody is bored with being my proxy or what happens if she dies. Seeing decent people carved up so that the few may enjoy a few more years of their wretched, subjugated lives. Really? What are you all doing with this life and health? You’re just spending your time figuring out how to kill and maim more people. That’s not life; that’s not healthy. That’s the ultimate in sickness.”

  August was beginning to look desperate. “They will do awful things to you, Anna,” he said, his eyes glancing at his compatriots. “Worse than has already be done. You can’t get out of here. We have this location surrounded. I’m sorry I brought you here. But it was for the greater good.”

  “Bullshit. It was for your own good. You were entrusted with great privilege in hopes that you would understand your obligation to do the right thing. You failed. You brought yourself here, and you sold yourself to your tormentors. How pathetically weak.”

  They were moving closer. It was clear there was no way out. Sillas had backed off. A police officer had handcuffs out, ready for her. There would be no fighting back.

  “No way out,” August said. “Take the offer. Be a survivor. Take the cure.”

  Anna knew the femoral artery was the probably the fastest way to bleed out. And hopefully the least painful. She took the knife and slashed into her own leg. The artery gave way quickly beneath the surgical blade. She stumbled. The blood gushed out of her.

  The crowd was at her now.

  “Do something!” the old woman demanded. “We need her alive.”

  August exchanged glances with Sillas. “There is nothing we can do,” August said. “Not here. Not in time.”

  August rushed forward, cradling her head in his lap. “Fuck, Anna! What are you doing?” He tried to stave off the flow of blood, knowing the effort was futile.

  “I’m dying,” she whispered. “But I’m better off than you. You’re already dead.”

  The blood poured out of her. She was pleased at how clean the cut had been. It would take a minute more and she would be out of Dew.

  “We haven’t had a suicide in Dew for over seventy-five years!” the old woman said, agitation in her voice. “What does a suicide do to us? What consequence will this have?” Her eyes burned into August and Sillas.

  “We don’t know,” Sillas said. “Maybe nothing.”

  “No blood is spilled in Dew without it meaning something,” the old woman snapped back.

  Anna didn’t have the strength to say anything. She didn’t know what her death would mean, either, except that she was escaping Dew. And that somehow Dew would never get over that.

  ONE FLESH: A CAUTIONARY TALE

  Robert Devereaux

  We admit it. There’s a right way and a wrong way to bring one’s loving lady into conformity with the image of womanly perfection that burns bright in every man’s heart. Dad and me, we went about it the wrong way. That’s clear to us now, after all the grief that came pelting down into our lives when half the Sacramento police force jackbooted their way through our front door and kept us from further satisfying our desires, modest as they were, on the naked limbs of our composite wife.

  But it’s our feeling that before the state—that vast motherless bastion of rectitude and righteousness—unlocks our cell to dead-march us along its sexless corridor, then to mumble piety into us from the mercy-thin pages of its Holy Bible, cinch us down snug and secure, and hiss open its gas jets to pack us off to the next life, we owe it to the rest of you idolatrous cockwielders out there to pass on the lesson we learned. Does that sound agreeable to you, Dad? Dad, I’m talking to you! He says it does.

  It began with a birth, nearly nineteen years ago, on the night of February 15th, 1970. My dear wife Rhonda was all of twenty-one then, amber of eye and huge of breast, vivacious, fun-loving, ever faithful to me in spite of my shortcomings and the handful of cunt-hungry mongrels that always seemed to be sniffing about her skirts. Rhonda was lovely as life itself, and carrying our son.

  My folks came down from Chico in mid-January to help with last-minute preparations; they were radiant with love for us both and just itching to be grandparents. Rhonda’s mother, Wilma Flannery, flew in from Iowa to be with “her precious baby” in her finest hour. She was one eccentric biddy, my mother-in-law, old and wizened at fifty. Her husband had left her soon after Rhonda was born, never to be heard from again. That didn’t surprise me and I don’t think it surprised Rhonda either. Although I wished Wilma had stayed in Oskaloosa, I did my level best to ignore her high-pitched demands and irritating ways and focused all my attention on Rhonda.

  My wife’s projected delivery date was Washington’s Birthday, and around a quiet dinner one night at Mario’s, my mom and especially my dad—Oh come off it, Dad, you know you did!—teased us about it, threatening to call their grandchild George or Georgina in honor of the man on the dollar. Rhonda’s mother sat hunched over her plate, wolfing down tortellini. Good food always seemed to shut dear old Wilma up for a while.

  As it happened, the baby arri
ved ahead of schedule. On the afternoon of the 15th, Rhonda and the two older women, wanting some girl-time alone, talked me and Dad into a night on the town. Before they booted us out into the light drizzle that had begun to come down, I pinned a hastily scrawled itinerary on the kitchen corkboard, just in case: dinner and drinks at California Fats, then a late-night showing of Psycho at the Tower. Dad and I were fond of Hitchcock movies back then. And after the accident that brought us together, we loved them even more.

  The call came halfway through dinner. We’d done more drinking than eating, a lot more. Three swallows of wine to every forkful of food, I’d guess. Ordinarily we’d have thought twice about taking to the highway with that much alcohol in our veins. But I was determined to be right there by Rhonda’s side when my baby was born, and judging from Mom’s babbling over the phone from the hospital, we had no time to waste thinking about what was safe and what wasn’t. So we threw some bills on the table, staggered together to my VW van, ramped up onto Highway 50, and five minutes later—in a passing maneuver that would have meant certain death at high noon on a bone-dry road with a teetotaling priest behind the wheel—we rammed into the back end of a screeching Raley’s truck and felt for one mercifully brief instant the twin agonies of metal-mangled flesh and bone from the front and the whomp and sizzle of a fireball engulfing us from the rear.

  If the notations of the hospital staff present at my son’s delivery were correct, our precise time of death was 7:41 p.m. There was tightness everywhere and a painful sliding and then suddenly the chill of freedom. We were somehow nakedly intertwined, my dad and I. When the shock of the cold was blanketed away and sweet warm milk filled our mouth and soothed our belly, we bleared open our eyes and were astounded to see a gigantic Rhonda-face beaming down at us. We tried to call out to her, but our mouth was full of nipple and our body throbbed and the blankets felt so warm and cozy around us that we soon drifted off. When we awoke, nothing but baby sounds came out of us, no matter how carefully we tried to speak. When Dad saw his wife Arlene (my mom) smiling down at us, I couldn’t help but feel his sadness and his frustration, and we wailed with our whole being and balled our tiny fists and did our best to squeeze every cubic inch of air out of our little lungs with each scream. But just when we thought merciful death might reclaim us, the air rushed back in and the cruel joke continued.