I lose more friends this way.
A little known fact about me is that if someone asks me to write something for them I’ll usually do it. (Hear that? That’s the sound of countless girls weeping gently, their tears spattering poetry rendered by my young, lust-driven hand. And rightly so. Unless the poetry came unbidden, chances are I was merely proving that I know nothing about the way to a girl’s heart but that the fastest way into her bed is through sweet, sweet words and a peerless command of language.)
When someone asks me to write a story for them I only ask for a starting point: a title, an opening sentence, a question that could be answered by forcing it through the fine mesh screen of the narrative process, etc.
Sarah has given me just such a sentence. I thought to myself that I would write a nice story for a nice girl who asked nicely. The trouble is that I’ve never written a nice thing in my miserable life. The trouble was compounded when she gave me a sentence that I couldn’t help but read as semi-autobiographical on her part. I don’t know Sarah well enough to crack her psyche like and egg in a socially acceptable, albeit post-modern, show of anthropomancy. Besides, divination is somewhat passé and I’m nothing if not totally here and now, dude.
So I thought it better to play sortilege in my own dementia. Explore the themes and topos already working in my brain and not stray too far from the memes that constantly come up in my writing. What I’ve wound up with is bleak—even for me. And I apologise, Sarah, if this isn’t what you had in mind but this is how I roll—at midnight, dark glasses, dressed in black. I’m like Poe but with a sense of humour and a love of the absurd—laughing hysterically at blood pooling wherever I find it.
It’s longer than I had hoped it would be but I had so much fun writing it that I wanted it to go on and on. And Sarah’s sentence forced me into the third-person as well as the past-tense which are two narrative conventions I’ve often shunned. Though I couldn’t resist having my character tell parts of her story in the first-person at the end—as unreliable a narrator as she may be, she gets down to the subject matter and tells her story close to the skin and, as you are about to learn, that’s a storyteller’s job: to pull back the pericardium and not appear shocked that you’ve let him (or her) get so far.
So here is Sarah’s sentence:
She sat there staring into space wearing a striped scarf thinking of a sentance and worried that the walls are closing in on her in the library because she screamed for no apparent reason but if only they knew the whole story…
And here’s how I managed to pervert that perfectly serviceable thought:
The Dissolution of Priapus
J. D. Buston
She sat there, staring into space, wearing a striped scarf and thinking of a sentence. She worried that the walls were closing in on her in the library—shelves of books creeping ever closer, the smell of old, jaundiced paper and dirty cloth binding stronger, nearer, minute by minute—and she screamed for no apparent reason. At least, she thought she had, but when she looked around no one was looking back at her. If only they knew the whole story. About how cold it had been reaching into the freezer, about how long it had taken, about how it came apart. If they knew these things they’d more than look at her—they’d stare. And she wouldn’t have to worry about coming up with a sentence. They’d be more than happy to do it for her. They’d come for her with pitchforks and torches.
She got up from her chair and started toward the shelves. If the walls insist on closing in, she thought, I’ll meet them halfway.
The wet soles of her boots whispered against the low-pile carpet. Her breath sounded as a backbeat to her footfalls. As certain as she was that every eye in the room was on her, when she looked around she found just one old man—grey and wiry haired, with a week’s worth of ashy stubble on his sallow, corpse-like face and a lazy eye—looking her way. He smiled at her and she darted into a row of books to avoid having to reciprocate.
There, between the rows of books, she sensed that the shelves towering over her leaned in slightly. She thought of the racks tipping inward, falling over one another. She thought of the tomes raining down, her body being bludgeoned by heavy volumes. She knew what blood spatter looked like. She knew roughly how much damage her flesh and bones could sustain and she was pretty sure she could survive the books.
But the books weren’t what really concerned her.
The body was.
She scanned the spines that lined the shelves. She pulled out a thick volume, separating it from the rest: Stedman’s Medical Dictionary. She leafed through the pages until she found what she was looking for. Priapism, she read, was the persistent erection of the penis, accompanied by pain and tenderness—at this word, “tenderness,” she scoffed. A writer she knew once told her that word choices were important. “Nothing hinders communication,” he said, “like a word with two disparate meanings.”
She knew the story of Priapus—how he attempted to rape Lotis and the gods punished him by giving him enormous wooden genitals. This, she reasoned, was a poor punishment for a rapist. To give him a tool, by which he could continue his offences endlessly and, probably, more painfully? What sort of screwy penal code were the gods of ancient Greece working from? “He got off light,” she whispered to herself—or maybe to the books.
She put the book back on the shelf. She looked down at her hands. She was sure she could see black-red still crusted and dust-like in the wrinkles and the folds of her flesh. She felt filthy but there was nothing she could do—the red lines mapping her crime were indelible and stood in sharp contrast to her pale skin. They were there for everyone to see.
Worse yet, her hands were still cold from digging in the freezer to bury the packages.
She stuffed her hands into her pockets and rested her forehead against the bookshelf. Through eyes open and staring at the ground, she watched her tears fall to the floor making little wet marks on the carpet. She was crying—or rather, her eyes were. At the centre of herself she felt cold and disconnected. There, surrounded in a bitter coating of grief and guilt, was a chewy, separate centre of pure, black, sweet vacuity.
“My dear,” came the voice—cracked, worn and affectionate. “Why are you crying?”
She snapped up straight, startled by the intrusion. She looked to her right—where the voice had come from. The old man—pallid complexion, crooked teeth, lazy eye and all—stood a few feet away. His stooped shadow cast a question mark on the shelves beside him.
“Nothing, I’m fine,” she said, turning her back to him, cutting off the conversation, and starting away.
She made her way back to her table. She started stuffing her books into the shabby, green knapsack she’d brought with her. When she reached for her copy of Cooper’s The Practice of Surgery a liver-spotted hand lashed out and grabbed it away from her.
The old man sat across the table, looking as though he’d been there always. “This is a very old text,” he said. “This was a How-To manual for field surgeons during the Civil War.”
She reached out to grab the book back but the old man was deceptively quick and pulled it just out of her reach as he leafed through. “I can’t imagine that anything you could learn from this book would be good medicine by today’s standards,” he said.
She thought about explaining to him that, in the end, her patient’s comfort hadn’t topped her list of concerns. That she’d just needed to know the basics. Instead she grabbed for the book again, catching the old man off guard. Her fingers closed around it and she yanked it away.
The old man looked hurt. “Such a rude thing for such a pretty young lady to do,” he said, frowning.
“Tough shit,” she said, stuffing the book into her bag and closing the zipper.
“I wonder,” the old man said, “why you had the section on amputation book marked?”
She stiffened at this. Something cold and tight found her spine and closed around it, threatening to dislocate a vertebra or two. She shivered; her breath quickened. To be found out in such a simple way, by such a strange old man—it would be absurd.
“Morbid curiosity,” she said.
“I take it you’re a medical student.” he said.
She caught the old man’s gaze and held it steady. She told herself that if she couldn’t look this man in the eye here and now, she’d never manage to look another human being in the eyes as long as she lived. Besides, she reasoned, the man wasn’t accusing her of anything.
“Nursing, actually,” she said, severing eye contact.
“I suppose I could have guessed that,” the old man said, frowning. “But that book is outdated. Are you writing a paper on the advancements made in the field since the eighteen hundreds?”
She shook her head. Tiny hairs bristled on her neck. “No, just what I said. I’m morbidly curious about the process of removing large limbs.”
She pulled her knapsack over one shoulder, tightened her scarf, slipped on her gloves and walked away from the table. Without looking back she lied, “It was nice meeting you.”
The night was cold and the sky was overcast. The streetlamp nearest the library’s exit was burnt out. The strong wind whipped past her, threatening to deprive her of sufficient air to breathe. The blacktop was wet and slick. She walked with her chin buried in her chest, her hands stuffed into her pockets, her eyes tracing the path only a few feet ahead of her. Every step made her joints feel weak—as though they could come apart with little effort.
In the dark, with nothing to look at and nothing to think about but the few measly feet of concrete spread out before her, her mind was forced to conjure its own imagery to play with. Hot red meat wrapped tightly in plastic; a poured cement floor and a wobbly wooden workbench spattered in red and stinking of rust and cold steel; the crack of bones and the snap of tendons; the metallic chatter of a reciprocating saw. A freezer, buried packets, fresh blood pooling in plastic bags, all buried under a few tubs of ice cream and trays of TV dinners.
She turned a corner onto a busy street. People pushed past without noticing her. Her, and her striped scarf. Her, trying to come up with a sentence; her, trying to imagine a suitable punishment for her crimes. These people, she thought, as they shouldered past her, have no idea who I am. What I am.
She went into an empty coffee shop and ordered hot chocolate. She sat alone at a table near the window and stared into the dark brown liquid in her mug. As she contemplated the scent and the warmth of her drink she gradually became aware of a presence nearby. A cold maelstrom formed at the bottom of her gut but she willed herself to look up.
At the next table, with his chair turned so she could see him in profile, was the old man. His nose was hooked; she had a clear view of his lazy eye. His chin was pointed and peppered with stubble. For a few brief moments she realised that he’d probably been handsome once. But whatever he had been, he certainly wasn’t much to look at now.
He turned to her and smiled. His legs were splayed before him, his arms were long and thin—he appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be glued together from spare parts. His cheeks had a little bit of colour—plenty more than he’d had in the library. He looked so relaxed. Try as she might she couldn’t remember the sound of anyone entering the shop since she’d sat down. And the shop was, aside from the old man, as empty as it had been when she arrived.
He picked up the steaming mug on his table, stood, and walked the few feet to her table. He gestured with his mug at the chair across from her and said, “You mind?”
Before she could respond he planted his ass and sipped at his drink. He looked out the window, swishing whatever he was drinking around his mouth. After a time he swallowed.
“Green tea,” he said. “At my age tea’s about the only thing I can drink after dinnertime.”
“Fascinating,” she said, curling her fingers tight around the ceramic handle of her mug. He was beginning to frighten her. Appearing as if from nowhere, first at her table in the library and now here. She thought she could, if necessary, scald him with the cocoa, or even hit him with the mug. This, at least, she knew she was capable of.
This and more.
He sat and didn’t speak. He watched cars pass on the road outside. He fingered a napkin on the table. He rubbed at the stubble on his chin, producing a scratchy music that irritated her. Finally he said, “I was a doctor.”
“Was?” she asked.
“I was. I’m retired. I was a field surgeon in Vietnam; I was captured by the V.C. They kept me in a prison camp for eight months to treat what had seemed to be an epidemic of gangrene. I did a lot of amputations under less-than-ideal conditions.”
He took another long, slow sip of his tea. He didn’t look at her. He watched the cars on the street outside the window. He gazed through his own reflection and took long, deep breaths. The only sound he made for a long, long while was a gasp and a chuckle as a large dog pulled its owner through a deep puddle.
“You know what I always hated about doing amputations?” he said, still not looking at her. Without waiting for a response he went on, “The carefulness of it. You couldn’t just go in there with, say, a jigsaw and hack away willy-nilly at the joints. Nope, you gotta get in there, ligate the artery, control the bleeding—and you know you better have a top-notch anaesthesiologist! In that POW camp in ‘Nam, I had to use heroin to--”
“Stop,” she said, cutting him off.
He stopped.
“What are you driving at?” she said, just above a whisper. “What is it you think you know about me?”
The old man, the doctor, cast his eyes at the floor. “My dear,” he said, “I don’t presume to know anything about you except your taste in reading material.”
“Then why all this?” she said. “Why sneaking up on me in the library? Following me here? Why are you creeping me out?”
The old man adopted a wounded look. His eyes grew impossibly wide as a layer of salty tears enveloped them. The corners of his mouth turned down, his bottom lip edged out a millimetre or two. “It wasn’t my intention to frighten you,” he said. “I merely saw a girl who seemed—I don’t know—troubled somehow. I thought I might help. That’s been the hardest thing since retiring—feeling like I’m not helping anyone.”
She felt sorry for the old man, the old doctor. But she knew he couldn’t help her. No one could. There’s a point beyond redemption—and we all make it there sooner or later. She had reached that point because someone else had reached that point and she had tried to help him.
Her writer friend had told her once that telling a story was something that had to be done close to the skin. “It’s surgery with words,” he said. “Some writers go for the bladder and try to make you pee your pants. Others work on the lungs to get you to stop breathing. Some are brain surgeons, trying to change the way you think. But a real storyteller knows there’s nothing more demanding than open-heart surgery. A real storyteller—his job is to peel back your pericardium and go to work on your heart, never letting you know how surprised he is that you’ve let him get so far.”
“Rohypnol,” she said to the old doctor.
“Pardon?” he said. “Did you say Rohypnol?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a serviceable anaesthetic—better than heroin, I bet.”
The old doctor leaned in, swallowed hard, said nothing.
The first operation seemed simple enough. He’d come to her—her writer friend had come to her—ridden with guilt and almost dripping with remorse. He told her the story—close to the skin—about how he’d found the girl in the park. How he’d forced her down behind some bushes. The things he’d done to her. He told her about the solution—a simple procedure to remove the offending flesh, to purify him and prevent any further transgressions.
She told the old man all of this in the writer’s words.
“It wasn’t until I started to realise what I’d have to do—reroute the urethra and all its—uh, mechanisms—through the perineum,” she said, staring into her mug. “That’s when I realised it would be rough.”
The old doctor was looking at the floor. His lips were taught, his eyes focused, his jaw set. He looked as composed as anyone could—but for his pallor, which had returned and deepened. Whatever flush the tea had given him was gone and his face was bloodless.
Funny, she thought, one can prepare for the worst. They can control their reaction, their face, their breathing; but the blood always gives you away. The blood does what it wants.
“Did you do it?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, sipping at her cocoa. “I did it.”
“Did he survive? Was the operation a success?”
She set her mug down and cast a glance about the coffee shop to ensure that it was still empty. She returned her eyes to the steam that rose from her mug and said, “In one sense it was as successful as you’d want it to be. In another sense it was a disaster.”
She’d drugged the writer with Rohypnol—they’d both figured it would be poetic justice to use the date-rape drug—and strapped him down to a work bench in his basement. The bench was a crooked wooden affair wanting more nails for stability. It had been built by the previous owner. Some of his older, rustier tools had been left behind and still hung over the bench.
The one renovation she did make was to replace the bare overhead bulb with a proper surgical lamp. She stole a scalpel from the lab at school and set up in his basement with a bottle of rubbing alcohol, some cotton swabs and a few T-shirts cut into rags should the bleeding become too severe. She removed his member as well as his testicles. (There’d been some concern; the writer hadn’t wanted to grow tits but felt it would look weird, his having balls and no dick. Eventually he secured a reliable supply of testosterone supplements and the debate was over.)
Afterward, when he said he’d wanted to keep it, she packed the whole thing—penis and testicles—in plastic and kept it in his freezer in hopes that they could jar it in some formaldehyde eventually.
The old man pulled back from the table. “How did you ligate the supplying artery?” he asked.
“I didn’t, per se,” she said. “I worked quick and cauterized the veins with a soldering iron left behind by the home’s previous owner.”
“And the patient, he—he survived?”
“He did. He kept himself medicated with heroin while the wound healed.”
The doctor, his face gone a paler shade of ash, picked his mug up, brought it to his lips, but didn’t drink. He made a face at the smell and put the mug back down. “And the patient—I mean, did it work? Obviously he didn’t, um, offend again.”
“You would think,” she said. “But as I said earlier, the operation was both a success and a disaster.” She looked at the floor and felt perspiration form on her upper lip.
A few months later the writer returned to her. He asked her what the quickest way to a man’s heart was. She was making dinner and she’d just talked on the phone with her mother so she’d told him it was through his stomach. She turned the question back to him; she asked what the quickest way to a woman’s heart was. “I don’t know about the quickest,” he’d said, “but the funnest is an orbital sander applied with pressure to the sternum. It takes a while, but it’s pretty.”
The answer had unnerved her and she let him know it. Dejected he told her it had happened again. This time with a girl at the bar. He’d brought her out into the alley and raped her.
“That’s impossible,” the old doctor said, cutting her story off.
“Rape isn’t about sex—it’s about power and control,” she answered. “He used his fingers.”
The doctor’s mouth hung open. A small, weak sound came out of him.
The writer told her she’d have to remove the criminal fingers: the middle two on his right hand. She refused at first. She told him he’d have to turn himself into the police; that the first operation hadn’t helped and so neither would the second.
“Oh, okay. Would you like me to explain to them,” the writer said, “how you, a nursing student, performed an elective penectomy on me?”
She set up her operating theatre once more. She searched the abandoned tools for something powerful enough to cut bone. The only thing she found that might be capable was a heavy, clumsy reciprocating saw with but one blade which was broken. “Not that I had much choice,” she told the doctor. “And the blade was still long enough to cut through the thin bones of the fingers.”
Again she drugged him with Rohypnol, again she used the scalpel to work through the skin and tendons (leaving enough flesh to close the wound), again she used the soldering iron to cauterize the blood vessels. When the bone was exposed on both fingers she cut through them with the saw, injected her still-unconscious patient with heroin, wrapped his fingers in plastic and put them in the freezer.
The old doctor writhed about in his chair. She wondered whether the story or her own cool retelling of it was what unnerved him more. She reasoned that it must be a mixture. The doctor was likely comfortable with surgery and with stories told in a calm fashion. What made him uncomfortable were mutilations and bloodless stories about them.
“Of course,” she said, “my writer friend hadn’t known what he was getting into in having those fingers removed. He found afterward that he could not write.”
Because of their placement on a keyboard, the letters I, O, K, L and M disappeared from his alphabet. Commas were strangely absent. When he attempted a more primitive method of writing he found he could not hold a pen properly with his right hand and that what he wrote with his left was illegible.
“And listen;” she said to the doctor, “between the heroin and his missing fingers, for the first month after the operation, he kept dropping lit cigarettes into his lap. He ruined all his pants.”
She wanted to laugh at that. More than that she wanted the doctor to laugh at it. She wondered if it was too late to add levity to the story. She tried to remember what the writer had told her about humour in narratives. He’d said something like, “Either a story is full of jokes, or it is a joke.”
The old man ran a shaky hand through his thin, wiry hair. He looked more corpse-like than ever. Dark rings were around his eyes, no muscles moved under the pasty skin of his face. His jaw hung open just a little and his lips were cracked and dry. Were it not for the flicker in his eyes she’d have buried him in the dumpster out back.
“You writer friend,” he said. “What’s happened to him? Where is he?”
She lowered her head and glared at the last bit of hot chocolate in her mug. It was cold now. Outside sleet had begun to fall and what little traffic there had been when her story began was gone. In the big window she could see herself sitting at the table with the old doctor. Her own eyes were ringed with red, her hands sat motionless on the table. Her striped scarf hung over the back of the chair with her coat. Her knapsack sat at her feet. The window was double-paned and there appeared to be two of her, overlapping—or more likely, coming apart. Two eyes slowly becoming four, one mouth becoming two, one body falling to pieces. Too many pieces.
“He’s dead,” she said.
The doctor shocked her by making no indication that he was surprised. He seemed as composed as he ever had. He nodded his head, bringing it up and down in small, slow arcs. He kept his eyes focused on her. The look on his face said that he’d known this would be the outcome.
“Couldn’t stop, could you?” he said.
“No,” she said. “I suppose neither of us could. He kept coming back. I don’t even know if he was really doing the things he said he was—but he wanted me to keep taking more and more of him.”
“And you had to, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
The next time he came it was his tongue—he’d tied up a girl and abused her with his tongue (she’d never found out exactly what he meant by that; whether the abuse had been verbal or physical). Then he wanted her to take more fingers, then toes. Then it was his hands and thumbs.
“He wouldn’t stop. And I…” she trailed off.
“You started to enjoy it as you got better at it, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
The doctor pulled his chair closer to the table and leaned in toward her. In a rumbling voice like concrete scraping concrete he said, “I know. It’s impossible to stop. When they’re asking for it and you want to give it—it just seems right. I know.”
“He came once—and I don’t even remember what it was that he wanted taken off that time—all I remember is his tongue was already gone and so were his hands so he put a pencil between his lips and wrote it out for me. And while he was under, after I’d finished taking off his left big toe or whatever the fuck it was he wanted removed… I... I took an ear. He didn’t ask me to, I just did.”
The doctor nodded. The look in his eyes was not one of surprise, or sickness or even resignation. It was compassion, perhaps understanding. He reached out and took her right hand in his own. He squeezed her fingers hard and attempted a desperate little smile—which faltered and faded before it ever really came to be.
“I never let him wake up again,” she said. “I kept him drugged for days, taking a little bit at a time, wrapping it in plastic, putting it in his freezer. I practically moved into his house. I didn’t go to school, I didn’t eat—I did nothing but surgery.” She was crying now, there was a note of acquiescence in her voice and the doctor knew what it was she was resigned to: punishment.
She thought that the doctor would turn her in.
“My dear,” he said. “My dear, dear, young nurse, you only gave your writer friend what he was looking for: dissolution. He was coming apart on the inside—he had you take apart his outside because that’s what made sense to him.”
“But it’s a crime,” she said.
“It is,” he said. “I know it is.”
“I have to be punished,” she said.
“You do—and you will be,” he said.
She looked at him, dried her eyes and waited for it; waited for her sentence.
The doctor said, “After a time, when you realise how absurd it is, you have to embrace it or you die. You have to laugh at it—I laugh like hell about it at least once a week.” At this the doctor held up his left hand. She was floored. She didn’t know how she’d not noticed it before—she figured the old man had kept his left hand in his pocket the whole time, or at least distracted her with the cunning and confident way he used his right. His left hand had only one partial digit left on it: the bottom half of the thumb. “Most of my toes are gone as well,” he said. “I’ve only been punishing myself for a short while. But once a week I take a little piece off for what I did to those Viet Cong. There was one case of gangrene in that camp—I took that limb and convinced the V.C. that it was contagious and that an epidemic had begun. I freed myself by disposing of my captors one digit; one limb at a time. I’d spend half my days diagnosing Viet Cong with gangrene and the other half talking off bits of them. I did what I did because I had to—but that don’t mean I should get away without being punished.”
She nodded. No one should ever get away without being punished.
The world was sick—not just her. She was just one infected cell. And while she couldn’t put together the pathology of it, the cure made sense to her. She trusted the old doctor. She trusted the cure.
She had her sentence.
A little known fact about me is that if someone asks me to write something for them I’ll usually do it. (Hear that? That’s the sound of countless girls weeping gently, their tears spattering poetry rendered by my young, lust-driven hand. And rightly so. Unless the poetry came unbidden, chances are I was merely proving that I know nothing about the way to a girl’s heart but that the fastest way into her bed is through sweet, sweet words and a peerless command of language.)
When someone asks me to write a story for them I only ask for a starting point: a title, an opening sentence, a question that could be answered by forcing it through the fine mesh screen of the narrative process, etc.
Sarah has given me just such a sentence. I thought to myself that I would write a nice story for a nice girl who asked nicely. The trouble is that I’ve never written a nice thing in my miserable life. The trouble was compounded when she gave me a sentence that I couldn’t help but read as semi-autobiographical on her part. I don’t know Sarah well enough to crack her psyche like and egg in a socially acceptable, albeit post-modern, show of anthropomancy. Besides, divination is somewhat passé and I’m nothing if not totally here and now, dude.
So I thought it better to play sortilege in my own dementia. Explore the themes and topos already working in my brain and not stray too far from the memes that constantly come up in my writing. What I’ve wound up with is bleak—even for me. And I apologise, Sarah, if this isn’t what you had in mind but this is how I roll—at midnight, dark glasses, dressed in black. I’m like Poe but with a sense of humour and a love of the absurd—laughing hysterically at blood pooling wherever I find it.
It’s longer than I had hoped it would be but I had so much fun writing it that I wanted it to go on and on. And Sarah’s sentence forced me into the third-person as well as the past-tense which are two narrative conventions I’ve often shunned. Though I couldn’t resist having my character tell parts of her story in the first-person at the end—as unreliable a narrator as she may be, she gets down to the subject matter and tells her story close to the skin and, as you are about to learn, that’s a storyteller’s job: to pull back the pericardium and not appear shocked that you’ve let him (or her) get so far.
So here is Sarah’s sentence:
She sat there staring into space wearing a striped scarf thinking of a sentance and worried that the walls are closing in on her in the library because she screamed for no apparent reason but if only they knew the whole story…
And here’s how I managed to pervert that perfectly serviceable thought:
The Dissolution of Priapus
J. D. Buston
She sat there, staring into space, wearing a striped scarf and thinking of a sentence. She worried that the walls were closing in on her in the library—shelves of books creeping ever closer, the smell of old, jaundiced paper and dirty cloth binding stronger, nearer, minute by minute—and she screamed for no apparent reason. At least, she thought she had, but when she looked around no one was looking back at her. If only they knew the whole story. About how cold it had been reaching into the freezer, about how long it had taken, about how it came apart. If they knew these things they’d more than look at her—they’d stare. And she wouldn’t have to worry about coming up with a sentence. They’d be more than happy to do it for her. They’d come for her with pitchforks and torches.
She got up from her chair and started toward the shelves. If the walls insist on closing in, she thought, I’ll meet them halfway.
The wet soles of her boots whispered against the low-pile carpet. Her breath sounded as a backbeat to her footfalls. As certain as she was that every eye in the room was on her, when she looked around she found just one old man—grey and wiry haired, with a week’s worth of ashy stubble on his sallow, corpse-like face and a lazy eye—looking her way. He smiled at her and she darted into a row of books to avoid having to reciprocate.
There, between the rows of books, she sensed that the shelves towering over her leaned in slightly. She thought of the racks tipping inward, falling over one another. She thought of the tomes raining down, her body being bludgeoned by heavy volumes. She knew what blood spatter looked like. She knew roughly how much damage her flesh and bones could sustain and she was pretty sure she could survive the books.
But the books weren’t what really concerned her.
The body was.
She scanned the spines that lined the shelves. She pulled out a thick volume, separating it from the rest: Stedman’s Medical Dictionary. She leafed through the pages until she found what she was looking for. Priapism, she read, was the persistent erection of the penis, accompanied by pain and tenderness—at this word, “tenderness,” she scoffed. A writer she knew once told her that word choices were important. “Nothing hinders communication,” he said, “like a word with two disparate meanings.”
She knew the story of Priapus—how he attempted to rape Lotis and the gods punished him by giving him enormous wooden genitals. This, she reasoned, was a poor punishment for a rapist. To give him a tool, by which he could continue his offences endlessly and, probably, more painfully? What sort of screwy penal code were the gods of ancient Greece working from? “He got off light,” she whispered to herself—or maybe to the books.
She put the book back on the shelf. She looked down at her hands. She was sure she could see black-red still crusted and dust-like in the wrinkles and the folds of her flesh. She felt filthy but there was nothing she could do—the red lines mapping her crime were indelible and stood in sharp contrast to her pale skin. They were there for everyone to see.
Worse yet, her hands were still cold from digging in the freezer to bury the packages.
She stuffed her hands into her pockets and rested her forehead against the bookshelf. Through eyes open and staring at the ground, she watched her tears fall to the floor making little wet marks on the carpet. She was crying—or rather, her eyes were. At the centre of herself she felt cold and disconnected. There, surrounded in a bitter coating of grief and guilt, was a chewy, separate centre of pure, black, sweet vacuity.
“My dear,” came the voice—cracked, worn and affectionate. “Why are you crying?”
She snapped up straight, startled by the intrusion. She looked to her right—where the voice had come from. The old man—pallid complexion, crooked teeth, lazy eye and all—stood a few feet away. His stooped shadow cast a question mark on the shelves beside him.
“Nothing, I’m fine,” she said, turning her back to him, cutting off the conversation, and starting away.
She made her way back to her table. She started stuffing her books into the shabby, green knapsack she’d brought with her. When she reached for her copy of Cooper’s The Practice of Surgery a liver-spotted hand lashed out and grabbed it away from her.
The old man sat across the table, looking as though he’d been there always. “This is a very old text,” he said. “This was a How-To manual for field surgeons during the Civil War.”
She reached out to grab the book back but the old man was deceptively quick and pulled it just out of her reach as he leafed through. “I can’t imagine that anything you could learn from this book would be good medicine by today’s standards,” he said.
She thought about explaining to him that, in the end, her patient’s comfort hadn’t topped her list of concerns. That she’d just needed to know the basics. Instead she grabbed for the book again, catching the old man off guard. Her fingers closed around it and she yanked it away.
The old man looked hurt. “Such a rude thing for such a pretty young lady to do,” he said, frowning.
“Tough shit,” she said, stuffing the book into her bag and closing the zipper.
“I wonder,” the old man said, “why you had the section on amputation book marked?”
She stiffened at this. Something cold and tight found her spine and closed around it, threatening to dislocate a vertebra or two. She shivered; her breath quickened. To be found out in such a simple way, by such a strange old man—it would be absurd.
“Morbid curiosity,” she said.
“I take it you’re a medical student.” he said.
She caught the old man’s gaze and held it steady. She told herself that if she couldn’t look this man in the eye here and now, she’d never manage to look another human being in the eyes as long as she lived. Besides, she reasoned, the man wasn’t accusing her of anything.
“Nursing, actually,” she said, severing eye contact.
“I suppose I could have guessed that,” the old man said, frowning. “But that book is outdated. Are you writing a paper on the advancements made in the field since the eighteen hundreds?”
She shook her head. Tiny hairs bristled on her neck. “No, just what I said. I’m morbidly curious about the process of removing large limbs.”
She pulled her knapsack over one shoulder, tightened her scarf, slipped on her gloves and walked away from the table. Without looking back she lied, “It was nice meeting you.”
The night was cold and the sky was overcast. The streetlamp nearest the library’s exit was burnt out. The strong wind whipped past her, threatening to deprive her of sufficient air to breathe. The blacktop was wet and slick. She walked with her chin buried in her chest, her hands stuffed into her pockets, her eyes tracing the path only a few feet ahead of her. Every step made her joints feel weak—as though they could come apart with little effort.
In the dark, with nothing to look at and nothing to think about but the few measly feet of concrete spread out before her, her mind was forced to conjure its own imagery to play with. Hot red meat wrapped tightly in plastic; a poured cement floor and a wobbly wooden workbench spattered in red and stinking of rust and cold steel; the crack of bones and the snap of tendons; the metallic chatter of a reciprocating saw. A freezer, buried packets, fresh blood pooling in plastic bags, all buried under a few tubs of ice cream and trays of TV dinners.
She turned a corner onto a busy street. People pushed past without noticing her. Her, and her striped scarf. Her, trying to come up with a sentence; her, trying to imagine a suitable punishment for her crimes. These people, she thought, as they shouldered past her, have no idea who I am. What I am.
She went into an empty coffee shop and ordered hot chocolate. She sat alone at a table near the window and stared into the dark brown liquid in her mug. As she contemplated the scent and the warmth of her drink she gradually became aware of a presence nearby. A cold maelstrom formed at the bottom of her gut but she willed herself to look up.
At the next table, with his chair turned so she could see him in profile, was the old man. His nose was hooked; she had a clear view of his lazy eye. His chin was pointed and peppered with stubble. For a few brief moments she realised that he’d probably been handsome once. But whatever he had been, he certainly wasn’t much to look at now.
He turned to her and smiled. His legs were splayed before him, his arms were long and thin—he appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be glued together from spare parts. His cheeks had a little bit of colour—plenty more than he’d had in the library. He looked so relaxed. Try as she might she couldn’t remember the sound of anyone entering the shop since she’d sat down. And the shop was, aside from the old man, as empty as it had been when she arrived.
He picked up the steaming mug on his table, stood, and walked the few feet to her table. He gestured with his mug at the chair across from her and said, “You mind?”
Before she could respond he planted his ass and sipped at his drink. He looked out the window, swishing whatever he was drinking around his mouth. After a time he swallowed.
“Green tea,” he said. “At my age tea’s about the only thing I can drink after dinnertime.”
“Fascinating,” she said, curling her fingers tight around the ceramic handle of her mug. He was beginning to frighten her. Appearing as if from nowhere, first at her table in the library and now here. She thought she could, if necessary, scald him with the cocoa, or even hit him with the mug. This, at least, she knew she was capable of.
This and more.
He sat and didn’t speak. He watched cars pass on the road outside. He fingered a napkin on the table. He rubbed at the stubble on his chin, producing a scratchy music that irritated her. Finally he said, “I was a doctor.”
“Was?” she asked.
“I was. I’m retired. I was a field surgeon in Vietnam; I was captured by the V.C. They kept me in a prison camp for eight months to treat what had seemed to be an epidemic of gangrene. I did a lot of amputations under less-than-ideal conditions.”
He took another long, slow sip of his tea. He didn’t look at her. He watched the cars on the street outside the window. He gazed through his own reflection and took long, deep breaths. The only sound he made for a long, long while was a gasp and a chuckle as a large dog pulled its owner through a deep puddle.
“You know what I always hated about doing amputations?” he said, still not looking at her. Without waiting for a response he went on, “The carefulness of it. You couldn’t just go in there with, say, a jigsaw and hack away willy-nilly at the joints. Nope, you gotta get in there, ligate the artery, control the bleeding—and you know you better have a top-notch anaesthesiologist! In that POW camp in ‘Nam, I had to use heroin to--”
“Stop,” she said, cutting him off.
He stopped.
“What are you driving at?” she said, just above a whisper. “What is it you think you know about me?”
The old man, the doctor, cast his eyes at the floor. “My dear,” he said, “I don’t presume to know anything about you except your taste in reading material.”
“Then why all this?” she said. “Why sneaking up on me in the library? Following me here? Why are you creeping me out?”
The old man adopted a wounded look. His eyes grew impossibly wide as a layer of salty tears enveloped them. The corners of his mouth turned down, his bottom lip edged out a millimetre or two. “It wasn’t my intention to frighten you,” he said. “I merely saw a girl who seemed—I don’t know—troubled somehow. I thought I might help. That’s been the hardest thing since retiring—feeling like I’m not helping anyone.”
She felt sorry for the old man, the old doctor. But she knew he couldn’t help her. No one could. There’s a point beyond redemption—and we all make it there sooner or later. She had reached that point because someone else had reached that point and she had tried to help him.
Her writer friend had told her once that telling a story was something that had to be done close to the skin. “It’s surgery with words,” he said. “Some writers go for the bladder and try to make you pee your pants. Others work on the lungs to get you to stop breathing. Some are brain surgeons, trying to change the way you think. But a real storyteller knows there’s nothing more demanding than open-heart surgery. A real storyteller—his job is to peel back your pericardium and go to work on your heart, never letting you know how surprised he is that you’ve let him get so far.”
“Rohypnol,” she said to the old doctor.
“Pardon?” he said. “Did you say Rohypnol?”
“Yes,” she said. “It’s a serviceable anaesthetic—better than heroin, I bet.”
The old doctor leaned in, swallowed hard, said nothing.
The first operation seemed simple enough. He’d come to her—her writer friend had come to her—ridden with guilt and almost dripping with remorse. He told her the story—close to the skin—about how he’d found the girl in the park. How he’d forced her down behind some bushes. The things he’d done to her. He told her about the solution—a simple procedure to remove the offending flesh, to purify him and prevent any further transgressions.
She told the old man all of this in the writer’s words.
“It wasn’t until I started to realise what I’d have to do—reroute the urethra and all its—uh, mechanisms—through the perineum,” she said, staring into her mug. “That’s when I realised it would be rough.”
The old doctor was looking at the floor. His lips were taught, his eyes focused, his jaw set. He looked as composed as anyone could—but for his pallor, which had returned and deepened. Whatever flush the tea had given him was gone and his face was bloodless.
Funny, she thought, one can prepare for the worst. They can control their reaction, their face, their breathing; but the blood always gives you away. The blood does what it wants.
“Did you do it?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, sipping at her cocoa. “I did it.”
“Did he survive? Was the operation a success?”
She set her mug down and cast a glance about the coffee shop to ensure that it was still empty. She returned her eyes to the steam that rose from her mug and said, “In one sense it was as successful as you’d want it to be. In another sense it was a disaster.”
She’d drugged the writer with Rohypnol—they’d both figured it would be poetic justice to use the date-rape drug—and strapped him down to a work bench in his basement. The bench was a crooked wooden affair wanting more nails for stability. It had been built by the previous owner. Some of his older, rustier tools had been left behind and still hung over the bench.
The one renovation she did make was to replace the bare overhead bulb with a proper surgical lamp. She stole a scalpel from the lab at school and set up in his basement with a bottle of rubbing alcohol, some cotton swabs and a few T-shirts cut into rags should the bleeding become too severe. She removed his member as well as his testicles. (There’d been some concern; the writer hadn’t wanted to grow tits but felt it would look weird, his having balls and no dick. Eventually he secured a reliable supply of testosterone supplements and the debate was over.)
Afterward, when he said he’d wanted to keep it, she packed the whole thing—penis and testicles—in plastic and kept it in his freezer in hopes that they could jar it in some formaldehyde eventually.
The old man pulled back from the table. “How did you ligate the supplying artery?” he asked.
“I didn’t, per se,” she said. “I worked quick and cauterized the veins with a soldering iron left behind by the home’s previous owner.”
“And the patient, he—he survived?”
“He did. He kept himself medicated with heroin while the wound healed.”
The doctor, his face gone a paler shade of ash, picked his mug up, brought it to his lips, but didn’t drink. He made a face at the smell and put the mug back down. “And the patient—I mean, did it work? Obviously he didn’t, um, offend again.”
“You would think,” she said. “But as I said earlier, the operation was both a success and a disaster.” She looked at the floor and felt perspiration form on her upper lip.
A few months later the writer returned to her. He asked her what the quickest way to a man’s heart was. She was making dinner and she’d just talked on the phone with her mother so she’d told him it was through his stomach. She turned the question back to him; she asked what the quickest way to a woman’s heart was. “I don’t know about the quickest,” he’d said, “but the funnest is an orbital sander applied with pressure to the sternum. It takes a while, but it’s pretty.”
The answer had unnerved her and she let him know it. Dejected he told her it had happened again. This time with a girl at the bar. He’d brought her out into the alley and raped her.
“That’s impossible,” the old doctor said, cutting her story off.
“Rape isn’t about sex—it’s about power and control,” she answered. “He used his fingers.”
The doctor’s mouth hung open. A small, weak sound came out of him.
The writer told her she’d have to remove the criminal fingers: the middle two on his right hand. She refused at first. She told him he’d have to turn himself into the police; that the first operation hadn’t helped and so neither would the second.
“Oh, okay. Would you like me to explain to them,” the writer said, “how you, a nursing student, performed an elective penectomy on me?”
She set up her operating theatre once more. She searched the abandoned tools for something powerful enough to cut bone. The only thing she found that might be capable was a heavy, clumsy reciprocating saw with but one blade which was broken. “Not that I had much choice,” she told the doctor. “And the blade was still long enough to cut through the thin bones of the fingers.”
Again she drugged him with Rohypnol, again she used the scalpel to work through the skin and tendons (leaving enough flesh to close the wound), again she used the soldering iron to cauterize the blood vessels. When the bone was exposed on both fingers she cut through them with the saw, injected her still-unconscious patient with heroin, wrapped his fingers in plastic and put them in the freezer.
The old doctor writhed about in his chair. She wondered whether the story or her own cool retelling of it was what unnerved him more. She reasoned that it must be a mixture. The doctor was likely comfortable with surgery and with stories told in a calm fashion. What made him uncomfortable were mutilations and bloodless stories about them.
“Of course,” she said, “my writer friend hadn’t known what he was getting into in having those fingers removed. He found afterward that he could not write.”
Because of their placement on a keyboard, the letters I, O, K, L and M disappeared from his alphabet. Commas were strangely absent. When he attempted a more primitive method of writing he found he could not hold a pen properly with his right hand and that what he wrote with his left was illegible.
“And listen;” she said to the doctor, “between the heroin and his missing fingers, for the first month after the operation, he kept dropping lit cigarettes into his lap. He ruined all his pants.”
She wanted to laugh at that. More than that she wanted the doctor to laugh at it. She wondered if it was too late to add levity to the story. She tried to remember what the writer had told her about humour in narratives. He’d said something like, “Either a story is full of jokes, or it is a joke.”
The old man ran a shaky hand through his thin, wiry hair. He looked more corpse-like than ever. Dark rings were around his eyes, no muscles moved under the pasty skin of his face. His jaw hung open just a little and his lips were cracked and dry. Were it not for the flicker in his eyes she’d have buried him in the dumpster out back.
“You writer friend,” he said. “What’s happened to him? Where is he?”
She lowered her head and glared at the last bit of hot chocolate in her mug. It was cold now. Outside sleet had begun to fall and what little traffic there had been when her story began was gone. In the big window she could see herself sitting at the table with the old doctor. Her own eyes were ringed with red, her hands sat motionless on the table. Her striped scarf hung over the back of the chair with her coat. Her knapsack sat at her feet. The window was double-paned and there appeared to be two of her, overlapping—or more likely, coming apart. Two eyes slowly becoming four, one mouth becoming two, one body falling to pieces. Too many pieces.
“He’s dead,” she said.
The doctor shocked her by making no indication that he was surprised. He seemed as composed as he ever had. He nodded his head, bringing it up and down in small, slow arcs. He kept his eyes focused on her. The look on his face said that he’d known this would be the outcome.
“Couldn’t stop, could you?” he said.
“No,” she said. “I suppose neither of us could. He kept coming back. I don’t even know if he was really doing the things he said he was—but he wanted me to keep taking more and more of him.”
“And you had to, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
The next time he came it was his tongue—he’d tied up a girl and abused her with his tongue (she’d never found out exactly what he meant by that; whether the abuse had been verbal or physical). Then he wanted her to take more fingers, then toes. Then it was his hands and thumbs.
“He wouldn’t stop. And I…” she trailed off.
“You started to enjoy it as you got better at it, didn’t you?”
“I did.”
The doctor pulled his chair closer to the table and leaned in toward her. In a rumbling voice like concrete scraping concrete he said, “I know. It’s impossible to stop. When they’re asking for it and you want to give it—it just seems right. I know.”
“He came once—and I don’t even remember what it was that he wanted taken off that time—all I remember is his tongue was already gone and so were his hands so he put a pencil between his lips and wrote it out for me. And while he was under, after I’d finished taking off his left big toe or whatever the fuck it was he wanted removed… I... I took an ear. He didn’t ask me to, I just did.”
The doctor nodded. The look in his eyes was not one of surprise, or sickness or even resignation. It was compassion, perhaps understanding. He reached out and took her right hand in his own. He squeezed her fingers hard and attempted a desperate little smile—which faltered and faded before it ever really came to be.
“I never let him wake up again,” she said. “I kept him drugged for days, taking a little bit at a time, wrapping it in plastic, putting it in his freezer. I practically moved into his house. I didn’t go to school, I didn’t eat—I did nothing but surgery.” She was crying now, there was a note of acquiescence in her voice and the doctor knew what it was she was resigned to: punishment.
She thought that the doctor would turn her in.
“My dear,” he said. “My dear, dear, young nurse, you only gave your writer friend what he was looking for: dissolution. He was coming apart on the inside—he had you take apart his outside because that’s what made sense to him.”
“But it’s a crime,” she said.
“It is,” he said. “I know it is.”
“I have to be punished,” she said.
“You do—and you will be,” he said.
She looked at him, dried her eyes and waited for it; waited for her sentence.
The doctor said, “After a time, when you realise how absurd it is, you have to embrace it or you die. You have to laugh at it—I laugh like hell about it at least once a week.” At this the doctor held up his left hand. She was floored. She didn’t know how she’d not noticed it before—she figured the old man had kept his left hand in his pocket the whole time, or at least distracted her with the cunning and confident way he used his right. His left hand had only one partial digit left on it: the bottom half of the thumb. “Most of my toes are gone as well,” he said. “I’ve only been punishing myself for a short while. But once a week I take a little piece off for what I did to those Viet Cong. There was one case of gangrene in that camp—I took that limb and convinced the V.C. that it was contagious and that an epidemic had begun. I freed myself by disposing of my captors one digit; one limb at a time. I’d spend half my days diagnosing Viet Cong with gangrene and the other half talking off bits of them. I did what I did because I had to—but that don’t mean I should get away without being punished.”
She nodded. No one should ever get away without being punished.
The world was sick—not just her. She was just one infected cell. And while she couldn’t put together the pathology of it, the cure made sense to her. She trusted the old doctor. She trusted the cure.
She had her sentence.
1 comment:
That was fucking stellar! I pictured Sarah the entire time.
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