Flesh Wounds, page 19
With blood dripping to the floor, the Scissor Man turned back to David Hunter. “Literature, old movies... you think in those terms, don’t you, David?”
David dropped his arm to his side and said nothing. The empty revolver was dead weight in his hand. Forgotten, it thudded to the floor while David watched the slow puddle of blood forming about the Scissor Man’s feet.
“Perhaps you recognize these lines from Auden?
Only now when he has come
In walking distance of his tomb,
He at last discovers who
He had always been to whom
He so often was untrue.”
“‘True Enough,’” David muttered, naming the poem.
“Yes.” The Scissor Man seemed pleased. “So, you know now who you were to her all those years. Would you have her know who she was to you?”
David looked up from the puddle of blood. “What?”
“Shall I wake her up... show her some of your Memories? I can do that, you know. I can show her the truth about Christie Claremont. I can show her all the things you would rather take with you to the grave.” He looked to where Maggie lay on the bed. “I can wake her, not to do her a favor and take her soul, but to make her look into the eyes of your Memories.”
David sank back to the bed, defeated. He loved her. He loved her more than anything. He couldn’t stand to see her shown all the petty, weak, and ultimately meaningless moments in his life. She didn’t deserve that.
“Maggie,” he whispered, defeated. He traced the familiar lines of her face with trembling fingertips. “I love you.”
“Let me save her soul then,” the Scissor Man implored. “We can’t leave it for them,” and he indicated the surgeons.
“Take me with her,” David begged.
“I can’t,” replied the Scissor Man, but as he spoke, David saw an incredible thing. For just a moment, the Remover’s knees buckled, and there passed across his eyes a shadowed glimpse of weakness, as if he were about to pass out. His shoes, as he stepped to the side of the bed, tracked blood across the carpet. His hands appeared unsteady, hesitant... mortal.
The scissors came out again, pale, slender lances of moonlight. As the Scissor Man leaned over Maggie, David saw a ghostly aura strain up from her body, as if her very soul were eager for removal, as if the wasted vehicle on the bed could no longer bear the effort to contain it. Ever so carefully, the Scissor Man caught the aura at its edges and slipped in the tip of the scissors. There was a frailty about his movements, a slow grace that David suspected came not from a desire to be careful, but rather from a severe loss of blood.
David hit him with a body block, driving him against the head board. Before the Scissor Man could react, David had taken away the scissors and now held them pressed against the Dark Remover’s throat. “Bullets you might recover from,” David hissed, “but I’ll wager these barber’s shears are as fatal to you as anyone.”
“Let me go. What can you possibly hope to gain?”
David pressed the twin blades against the Scissor Man’s throat until he was rewarded with the sight of a bright trickle of blood. The Scissor Man gasped as he felt the warm gush. “I’ve a bargain for you,” David told him. “You forget your appointment book. We both go tonight. We go together.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then there’ll be a job announcement in Hell’s morning edition. Wanted, one Grim Reaper.” David caught movement out of the corner of his eye. “Make them stay back!”
The Scissor Man’s gaze shifted to the lurking shapes just over David’s shoulder. “Do as he says.” There followed a reluctant shuffling of feet and what could have only been the scraping of surgical blades drawn across each other. The Scissor Man looked back to David. “You could make something of the years you have left.”
“I give them all to you. Use whatever potential they hold to heal yourself when I’m gone.”
The Remover nodded slowly.
“We have a bargain?”
“Yes.”
“How can I trust you?”
“Death does not lie.”
Morning found them together in bed, David’s arms wrapped tightly around Maggie. His face was buried against her neck and his tears had soaked her hair. The sun tried in vain to warm her sallow cheeks, managing only to reveal their sunken depths and deathly pallor. Beneath the sheets, she was incredibly still. Her eyes did not flutter. Her mouth did not move. Her chest did not rise and fall.
David held her for some time, wishing that her cold would rob the warmth from his body, that her death would suck the very life from him.
Death was not to be trusted. Death lied. Death needed no one’s permission, kept no bargains. Death, the Great Deceiver. Death, the end of all things. David suspected it had all been an evening’s distraction, an amusing game for the Scissor Man and his entourage. He had taken what he’d come for. Maggie was gone.
Though he didn’t want to get up and make the phone call that had to be made, David was afraid to stay in bed with her any longer. He feared sleep more than anything. He knew that if he slept, he would see them. He would see the surgeons about their work. Cell by cell, they would dismantle what was left of Maggie. Time was their scalpel, and for Maggie time had become a speeding locomotive. The death she carried within her was about to be born, blossoming in putrescence and rot—the Scissor Man’s surgeons by any other name.
A few years, the Scissor Man had said.
David found himself looking forward to seeing him again.
Much More Than You Know
Vincent van Gogh, so the story goes, cut off his ear for the woman he loved. Wrapped it in a silken hanky and placed it in her hands. “This is how much I love you,” I imagine him saying on that insane December day in 1888, “enough that I would mutilate myself to prove it, dear lady.”
I went out and read everything I could find on van Gogh. Biographies. Character studies. Psychological profiles prepared by other men seeking the same answers. I studied his art. I read the letters he wrote to his brother Theo. I wanted to understand the passion, the drive, the absolute heartache that could bring a man to such an act of desperation. I wanted to understand because I was on the verge of performing something equally destructive on myself.
I daydreamed of knives carving great glistening red crenulations across the breadth of my chest, up and down my arms, across my face. The crimson demarcations would part and the blood would flow, symbol of all the pain pent within me. It was as if I wanted you to see some outward proof that you had hurt me, as if visible physical torture could mirror the inner torment. It was as if some token piece of myself, given like chocolates or roses, could serve as irrefutable evidence that I loved you, loved you enough to part with something as personal and precious as an ounce of flesh.
But van Gogh was a madman. Nothing more. There’s nothing romantic about the truth behind the misconception. In a fit of manic depression van Gogh came at his friend Paul Gauguin with a razor. When Gauguin demanded to know what van Gogh was up to, Vincent came to his senses. When he realized what he’d been about to do, he cut himself instead, running about the village of Arles, copious amounts of blood streaming from his head. He happened upon a peasant woman whom he hardly knew. It’s her that he gave the ear.
Van Gogh failed me. There were no answers there.
The Bible says thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. What it should say is thou shalt not fall in love with thy neighbor’s wife. Covet her, lust after her, sleep with her if you must, but never, ever fall in love with the wife of another. Therein lies ruin.
Therein lies a sticky piece of heartache especially made for three.
At the end of it, I had this terrifying thought that subconsciously our every action in life is designed to bring about our eventual defeat, that what we are doing and what we think we are doing are two diametrically opposed truths. If so, if trapped within me is this demon determined to bring about my demise, then the road to ruin is planned and plotted and I’ve merely to walk it. It’s a road, I think, which has been travelled before.
Perhaps what van Gogh was really after was simplification. An excised piece of himself which, discarded, would bring him that much closer to his soul. A paring down to the essential truths which fueled his art. Art and love are the only truths in this world. Peel back the layers that intervene, the barriers that link us to—as much as shield us from—reality, and turning within you’ll always find... truth... art... love.
So, perhaps Vincent did, after all, cut off his ear for love.
But he had it all wrong. I can’t give you something of myself as proof of just how far I’d go for you. You already declined the whole of me. What good, a piece? What I must give you, then, is something you had already, but could never in your wildest dreams have imagined I would go so far as to take.
But I have. And now I return it with the hopes that it will set you free.
You see, I do love you.
Much more than you know.
Much more than he ever could.
As you hold his heart in your hands, you will see this is true.
To Walk Among the Living
The life-support machines fell silent. No alarms; they’d all been disconnected at the nurse’s station.
Shelby Lloyd, last of the Magnificent Seven save I, smiled at me as her murderer shambled from the room. Tears rolled off her cheeks and vanished against the reality of the hospital pillow.
“I love you,” she whispered.
“Quiet,” I told her.
“I’ll never forget you.” Her body spasmed as hungry muscles realized the delivery of oxygen had ceased.
“With any luck, we’ll all be together again.”
For once Shelby didn’t remind me of her disbelief in an afterlife. “Kiss me, Johnny.”
I placed my lips so close to her pale cheek that the illusion of contact seemed to satisfy her. She sighed, a skeletal rattling as her final breath slipped free. Her true face faded and was gone.
Repetition. A daily routine that became a monotonous totality of existence. For what seemed an eternity I’d lain abed, surrounded by the antiseptic purity of a room without a view.
Time could only be measured in bed changes and the metronomic drone of the ventilator. How often the nurses changed the sheets—Once a week? Twice? Every other day?—I’d no way of knowing. Time, therefore, was meaningless, marching to an end for which I was forced to wait... in miserable silence.
First there was darkness. No pain—that surprised me the most. Just the encompassing, cold black of the grave, a tight-fitting glove of isolation.
Later there came what I call my grey days: hazy visions; whispers from forgotten senses; dim hallucinations of childhood memories; and, finally, the beginnings of discomfort. Then, a slow dissolve from black.
Finally there was conscious light. And then... The Litany:
I will survive.
“How will you survive?”
I will cling to life as a parasite clings to its host, as a pit bull clings to—
“Why survive when the rest are dead?”
Because Death is my enemy. I shall not yield.
After The Litany, the long white existence. The monotony. The routine. Soon The Litany was forgotten and the courtship with Death began. To woo, to entice, and finally to beg for that dark specter’s visit.
Sometimes I dream of that night. Strange, waking dreams. Blurred images that interrupt my fading vision and play like poorly focused music videos. JTV, where the music is the discordance of squealing tires, folding metal, and exploding glass. Where the rockers give it all they’ve got. And all they ever had.
They’re all dead. Mom. Dad in that silly hat he wore to keep his ears warm. My older brother Jason. Even Julie, golden youth, so looking forward to her sixteenth birthday just days away on that fateful night. All dead.
Had I seen the ice, I know it would have been black. Not the clear crystal innocence of water frozen on the overpass, but an insidious evil laid across the road’s surface for a family such as ours. And had I seen the semi driver as he hit that black ice and lost control of his rig, slewing across all four lanes and into the path of our fragile car, I know whose face he would have worn.
Gleaming bone, rictus grin, and cavernous eye sockets.
That’s the face I would have seen. The same deathshead that haunts my hospital daydreams.
The same face that refuses to come no matter how loud I scream.
Goodbye, Shelby.
I rose from her side and passed ghost-like through the door. Ward C was alive with Beverly Snider’s cackling as she ran for the room at the end of the hall where my corporeal shell lay empty and dormant. I followed, leaving behind the rooms in which my six compatriots lay in peace.
“I’m coming, Father!” screamed the demented nurse.
Yes, Angel of Mercy, Goddess of Death, come for us all. Deliver us unto your kingdom. Fulfill our dreams. Grant us peace.
Alberto had been first. Alberto, whose motorcycle had been forced off an interstate overpass. Alberto who’d lain comatose for three years. He’d winked at me when Snider cut off his machines. His true face had worn a smile when it faded.
Initially I was entertained by those who came to study, but the visits quickly deteriorated to redundant episodes of asinine rhetoric.
The med students would file through, their lab coats suffusing the room with more of the hated white. They’d surround my bed, faces earnest, disciples embarked on a grand pilgrimage pausing for worship at the Shrine of the Unknown Patient.
“John Whitley McIver,” the touring physician would intone, “victim of an automobile accident in 1988. We operated to remove splinters of bone from his brain. He never regained consciousness.”
He’d explain the complex array of life support equipment, the machines that breathe for me, the tubes that feed me and remove my body wastes. Having heard the spiel an infinite number of times before, I’d tune him out, letting my mind drift with the rhythm of the ventilator.
The inevitable question would bring me back.
“Why keep him alive?”
“Look at his brainwaves,” the doctor would answer. “Does he look dead to you?”
The med student would frown, his face betraying conflicting professional and ethical opinions.
“If your arm was broken,” the doctor would ask, “you’d want me to fix it, right?”
“Of course, but—”
“This man’s body was broken. I fixed it as best I could, however there are functions his body can no longer perform. The machines take care of those for him. The EEG proves he’s not dead. If I let him expire because of the broken parts of his body, it would be no different than me letting you suffer, and perhaps even die, from a broken arm. Besides,” and here he reveals the true medical motive behind my extended suffering, “the things we learn by sustaining his life are invaluable.”
Once he’s beaten the rebel down, once he’s justified the unmitigated rights of his profession, the doctor would continue the lecture, pleased with the sound of his own voice imparting infinite wisdom on these pupils of medicine, these apprentices to human suffering. “Note the shortening of the limbs as the muscles, ligaments, and tendons atrophy. The nurses exercise him daily, but he’s still drawing up in a fetal position...”
After Alberto, Snider had visited Donald.
Donald’s all-expense-paid stay in Ward C served as expiation for the power company whose inadequate safety measures had gotten him electrocuted. Donald had been here the longest—a full seven years.
After shutting down his machines, Snider bent over him. “I love you,” she crooned, caught up in the cocaine-overdose that had her believing each of us was her father. As her crazed-red eyes spilled waves of tears, I’d actually felt guilty for manipulating her. But there was no turning back.
Like Alberto, Donald smiled when death took him. His last words were, “Say goodbye to Eva for me,” right after he told me how much he regretted not being able to hug me.
Every existence, however vapid, has its moments. Mine are with Eva.
Her routine runs like this:
She checks the long, transparent tube in my right arm—sustenance. I fantasize the IV to be a crystal serpent, Death’s gatekeeper barring me from the beckoning darkness, from that well of warmth and comfort.
She inspects my catheter, another friendly tube, this one carrying away the waste my body mindlessly continues to produce. Despite the fact I haven’t moved in... (What, a year? Three? Oh, God, more?) Despite the fact I have never moved since the ambulance brought me in, inflated bulbs within my bladder prevent the accidental extraction of the catheter.
She puts drops in my staring eyes, cleans my parched lips where they’ve caked around the ventilator tube, and gently strokes the fine beard covering my face.
Eva Schüpfheim. A synergism of copper skin, gold filigree hair, and nebulous blue eyes. I love the soft tease of her hair on my throat and the press of her breasts against my arm. Her cleavage is lined with a silky, blond down, so fine it would be unnoticeable were it not for the harsh lights above the bed. When she leaves, her presence hangs like honeysuckle in the tasteless air of the hospital room.
Headnurse Snider hated Eva.
Perhaps it was Eva’s alpine beauty. Snider reminded me of a beached whale that’d lain too long in the sun. All of Eva could have fit in one leg of Snider’s slacks. Snider’s hair hung dark and lifeless, wet beneath the fluorescents as if weighted with oil. Her face was scarred by acne and her neck was wattled. Beneath each arm swung great pink excesses.
