Whiskey Romeo

by James Welsh

  “I see. So, what is it you want me to do?”

  “Since you’re forty-five years old, we will need to conduct a mammogram. So please disrobe and we will proceed with the exam.”

  Most doctors would have the decency to turn away as the woman removed her clothes. But Bends did not turn – instead, he stared as Anzhela pulled up her shirt to reveal her right breast. Anzhela glanced at the hungry Bends and asked in a calm voice, “Well, doctor – are you ready?”

  Bends was hoping to find some cowering humiliation in her eyes, and he was surprised to find none. “Yes – um, yes…please lean over the tray,” he ordered, stumbling over his words.

  Anzhela did as requested and dipped her breast in the gel. Bends finally tore his eyes away and looked at the computer screen in front of him. Bends pressed a few keys, and the virtual biopsy tray lit up, the red gel glowing like embers from the fire. Within just a second, a digital mammogram filled the computer screen. Bends was disappointed to learn there was no sign of cancer.

  “You may take a step back,” Bends said.

  Anzhela did so, her breast still exposed and glistening, wet from the gel. The monster inside of him pulled another string and Bends pulled a towel from his desk drawer and approached her. Instead of offering her the towel, Bends stepped closed until he was no more than a foot away. He then began to pad her breast with the towel. As he did so, he stared intently into her eyes, as if daring her to scream.

  Instead, Anzhela gently grabbed Bends by the wrist and pushed his hand away, the towel falling to the floor. Normally, the towering Bends would have been able to resist easily. He had the punch of a strongman and knew how to throw it – in his younger years, he was able to put more than a few people into a coma with just one hit. But just by pushing him away, Anzhela made Bends forget how to fight. More than that, Bends forgot how to move, his body paralyzed with awe.

  He couldn’t find the strength to speak until Anzhela had already put her shirt back on and was quietly gathering up her belongings to leave. Suddenly, the words lurched out of Bends’ mouth. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Anzhela looked at him with a faint surprise written in her face. It was as if she thought he already knew the answer. Still, she said, “I’m going home. I think we’re done here.”

  “But we have to complete the rest of the mammogram…”

  “I’ll come back when your mind’s professional and not on other things,” Anzhela said, “and not a second sooner.”

  The monster finally clawed its way out of Bends’ throat. “What are you going to do? Tell your husband how you let yourself get felt up?” Bends sneered.

  “No – I’m going to tell him that I got a mammogram, because that’s all that happened. Anything more was just you punching a brick wall. You thought you could break me, but all you did was hurt yourself. And me? I didn’t feel a thing. I hope you have a good day, Dr. Bends. I know I’m having a good day. Let me know how that mammogram turns out.”

  With that said, Anzhela turned and left the room, her shadow of quiet triumph marching behind her. The closing of the door felt like a slap across the face to a frustrated and withered Bends, and he broke down weeping. It did not take long for his crying to turn to laughter.

  ***

  Bends was so embarrassed by his defeat, he barked at his secretary to cancel the rest of his appointments for the day. He spent the time with the lights out and the blinds on his window drawn closed, as if he was trying to act out the darkness in his soul. The beast had fattened on the humiliation of others for too long – to feel the shockwave himself was like crushing his own neck between the vice of his fingers. Blinded by desperation, he scribbled out revenges in the notepad of his mind. But he threw away idea after idea, none of them vicious enough. Anzhela was right – Bends was too weak and she was too strong.

  Bends was swimming so deep in his obsession that he didn’t even realize that he was in the black of sleep. The dream felt as real as anything else: he was sitting at his desk in his office, staring at the wall, trying to find an answer to Anzhela. Just then, Bends heard a dull drumbeat from across the office. Bends stood up and walked towards the sound, curious as to what it was. The tapping was coming from a cabinet, as if someone inside was knocking, begging to be let out. Bends held his breath and swung the cabinet door open, not sure what he was going to find.

  It was a device that he had never seen before. It looked vaguely like the telegraph machines that Bends had seen in the occasional history book. Except that this machine was little more than a slim box, consisting of just a lit keyboard and a small screen. If Bends had ever seen a piano before, he would have seen that in the gadget’s design.

  He looked down at the keys and saw that they were pumping up and down, as if a pair of invisible hands was typing. This alone would have frightened most people – at the very least confuse them – but it only lit up a smile across his mouth. He smiled because he looked at the screen and read what was being typed. The message was just a simple sentence, not worthy of being what would come to change so many lives.

  Kill Anzhela – your charter commands you!

  Bends understood perfectly well how quantum entanglement – the theory that made Carina’s mining possible – could make two ends feel like they were one rope, but he didn’t appreciate that instant bond until that moment. The harmony behind both the charter and Bends wanting to murder Anzhela felt unreal inside of the walls of the dream, but it was the only music that Bends needed to hear. It needed to be done – Anzhela had made the mistake of thinking she could be better than him, that nothing he could do would break her. And as a charter official, Bends had to rise to that insult.

  It was then that Bends’ eyes snapped open, and he found his cheek against the cool of his desk. It took a few moments for him to come to, but then he snapped up and opened a computer file with a rush of typing. The prints from Anzhela’s mammogram filled the screen in front of him. None of the prints were scarred with cancer, but that had never stopped Bends before. He flicked his cursor across the screen and scratched out a blotch in the print. He had doctored images too many times before for his handiwork to still be crude. But as long as the poor soul thought that the fake cancer in the picture was real, that was all that mattered to Bends.

  Finally satisfied, Bends strode over to the door and yanked it open. He called down the hallway to his secretary, “Find Ms. Anzhela Khunrath! It’s an emergency!”

  From down the corridor, Bend could hear his sleepy secretary squeak awake, followed by the scurry of her shoes. She was propelled because she heard a tone in Bends’ voice that she had never heard before. She thought she heard horror in Bends’ voice, but it was actually excitement.

  ***

  “Are you sure?” Khunrath demanded.

  Bends nodded. “Oh, I’m sure. There’s no mistaking something like this.”

  As the Khunraths shifted and squirmed in the uncomfortable metal chairs in Bends’ office, their reactions were unexpected. Bends saw a thesaurus of fear just beneath the water of Khunrath’s eyes. This was a man who just learned how much he could possibly lose, and Bends was there to witness it. But Anzhela was as cool as ever – while her husband stared horrified at the cancerous pictures, she looked at Khunrath with a mild amusement. Bends felt his face redden as he wondered how much she already knew. But that was impossible.

  Khunrath was still obsessing over the prints. Without looking away, he asked, “What are our options?”

  “Fortunately, we discovered the mass in its early stages. If we cut it out now, I’m positive this story will have a happy ending,” Bends said, lying so easily even he believed it.

  “So does that mean she can have the surgery today?” Khunrath asked, hopeful.

  “I was just about to say the same,” Bends said as he stood up. “I’m going to clear the rest of my schedule for the day and…”

  “Do I get a say in this?” Anzhela said suddenly. It was the first thing she said since she arri
ved at the office for the second time that day.

  Both of the men froze and looked down at her. Shocked, Khunrath repeated, “Do you get a say in this? There’s only one right answer to this.”

  Anzhela turned to Bends and commanded softly, “Can we have some privacy? Just for a moment?”

  For the second time, Bends found himself blinded in Anzhela’s shine. Silently, he got up and left the room, closing the door behind him. However, he left the door opened just a slip so that he could listen.

  He could hear Khunrath pleading to Anzhela. “Don’t you want the surgery? Don’t you want to live?”

  Bends could almost hear the smile in Anzhela’s voice. “Love, you misunderstood me when I asked if I could have a say. Of course I want life! Before I met you, I would have never gone through a surgery like this. I’ve always been afraid of being cut – I would rather die whole than live torn. Don’t you see? The fact that I want the surgery shows I want you even more. I just don’t want you speaking on my behalf, that’s all. I spent my life having men speak for me, until I didn’t even know if I had a voice or not. I didn’t know what freedom was until I flew across the galaxy to fall in love with you. But just because you gave me a voice doesn’t mean you can take it away.”

  There was a long pause, followed by a gruff, “Okay.”

  “Jules, no matter what happens to me, you’re going to be okay. You have to be okay – worlds of people need you to be okay, even if they don’t know it yet. Don’t you understand?”

  Bends scoffed to himself, mistaking Anzhela’s honesty for dramatics. But on the other side of the door, Khunrath took it seriously. “It’s meaningless if you’re not there with me.”

  “That’s sweet of you to say. But we both know that you’ve been married to your work far longer than you’ve been married to me,” Anzhela said, her voice trickling with laughter. “You’ll be okay.”

  There was a pause, and then Anzhela called out, “Dr. Bends! We’re ready now.”

  On cue, Bends flapped open the door and strode back into the office, somehow feeling like a stranger in his own home. He looked at both of the Khunraths and saw that they were ready. Trying to stifle his glee, Bends said, “Well then, let’s proceed. Now, Mrs. Khunrath, if you’d come with me, we’ll prep you for the operation.”

  Anzhela nodded and turned to her husband with a shy smile. “I’ll see you in a little bit.”

  She pecked Khunrath on the cheek and whispered something in his ear. Bends didn’t catch what Anzhela said, but he did notice Khunrath turning away and wiping his eyes. More than anything else, Bends wanted to stay and watch Khunrath suffer, but Anzhela swirled to him and said, “Well then, doctor, where are we walking?”

  “This way,” Bends said, motioning to the door with a flourish of the hand. He added to Khunrath, “The procedure shouldn’t take more than a half-hour. You may wait in the lobby.”

  As Bends and Anzhela walked down the twist of the hallway towards the operating room, the doctor glanced over at his patient. Bends – himself one of the tallest men in the colony – expected to tower over Anzhela. But he was surprised to see that she stood as tall as he did, inch for inch. He never noticed this before in her, and it only made him want to demolish her more, so that she couldn’t look him in the eye.

  The operating room at the end of the hall was simple and minimalist. There was just a single reclining chair in the center of the room, with one of its arms supporting a tray of surgery equipment. Anzhela eyed the cutting tools on the tray, and Bends could have sworn he saw a ghost of fear across her face. But in a moment the mirage was gone, and Bends wasn’t sure what it was he saw.

  “Sit down,” Bends ordered.

  Anzhela did as asked. As she wriggled in the chair and found a comfortable spot, Bends asked, “Are you ready?”

  “I am, but only if you’re ready to be a doctor.”

  Bends wasn’t sure how to respond. After a moment, he mumbled, “Then you’re ready.”

  As Bends rooted through the mess of instruments on his tray, Anzhela asked, “So what’s the first step?”

  “The first step is administering the painkillers,” Bends said, finding what he was looking for on the tray. He pulled out a small device that looked like a hairbrush and admired it in the overhead lights.

  “What’s that?”

  “A nanoneedle brush,” Bends replied, taking a tiny glass capsule and inserting it into the brush. “It’s what I’ll use to inject the medication. The procedure we’re about to attempt will be quick, but it’ll seem much longer if I don’t give you this beforehand.”

  “I’ve never seen a needle like that before.”

  “It’s new – I just got it from the charter in the last shipment from Earth. The needles are so tiny, you’ll never feel it. It’s not necessary, if you ask me – the needles I used before were small enough. Now sit still.”

  Bends took the brush and pressed it against the inside of her right elbow, injecting her with a mysterious green substance. Anzhela winced a little, more out of reflex than anything else. In reality, the needles felt like brushing past someone on a busy sidewalk. After a few moments, Anzhela closed her eyes and inhaled – she could almost feel the medicine rinsing through her. But that second of good feeling ticked dead as her eyes rolled to the back of her head. Anzhela slumped in the chair and slurred, “What’s…what’s-going-on…”

  “Relax,” Bends said calmly, taking a step back to admire his art. “Don’t fight the medicine – just give in.”

  But Anzhela refused to surrender. She lurched out of the chair and stumbled towards the door, swaying like a pendulum. As if going on a morning stroll, Bends walked behind her, grinning a little as he watched Anzhela in her long fall. The capsule he had inserted into the nanoneedle brush didn’t contain painkillers. Instead, it was an injection of a synthetic compound designed to dissolve all of the covalent bonds in her body’s water in just a few seconds. With the bonds broken, there was an immense release of air bubbles deep beneath her skin, the air rushing through the hose of her veins. It would not be long before her body short-circuited from such a trauma to her bloodstream, and Bends wanted to watch every moment of it.

  But Anzhela’s heart didn’t stop, and neither did she. Before Bends knew it, they had made their way through the throat of the hallway and into the squeezed lobby. Bends’ secretary – a short, squat woman – leapt up from her desk and rushed to Anzhela’s help. But Bends pointed one of his curled fingers at his secretary and roared, “Stop! There’s nothing you can do!”

  But Anzhela wasn’t stumbling towards the secretary. Instead, she tripped towards her shocked husband, who was sitting on one of the chairs in the lobby. Khunrath was a statue as Anzhela tried to climb from the hard floor to his eyes, her fingernails tugging at his clothes. But her grip grew faint and she fell back to the floor, her arms having finally failed her. Crying, she twisted her head to the side and her body arched with electricity as she threw up her soul on the floor.

  Slowly, Khunrath slipped from his chair to the floor and took his love by the hand. He was shaking even more than she was. Then, with a last drip of muscle, she yanked Khunrath closer and whispered with gritted teeth into his ear. Bends watched the silent play unfold like origami swans gliding into the sunset’s fire. Centuries of murderers before him would have ended the life before eyewitnesses spoiled the crime. But Bends was twisted and always twisting – he wanted to see the splash of horror across Khunrath’s face, as he watched his love die. Before that day, Khunrath would think of his wife and only think of joy. But after that day, Khunrath would think of his wife and only think of sadness. To Bends, this was the legacy Anzhela deserved.

  Just then, Anzhela settled her head on the floor, her eyes silvery. She lurched upwards one more time, as if someone was lifting her up from the unforgiving floor. And then she sighed for a long moment, her breath slipping off her lips and snaking down to the floor. The church of silence was suddenly broken by Khunrath, who began sobbing
over his dead Anzhela.

  Bends sat down in one of the nearby chairs and stared with awe at the body. He was so hypnotized that he didn’t even notice that Khunrath was now staring at him. Khunrath had a different color for each eye – one eye was blue with mourning, and the other eye was gray with mystery, and both of them swam as he tried to understand Anzhela’s final words.

  Bends thought he had watched Anzhela’s end, when he actually just witnessed her beginning.

  ***

  It took only fifteen minutes for the entire colony to know of Anzhela’s death. This should not have come as a surprise, though. The colony’s population was already rare and precious, and the cave’s walls close and choking, and so it was not long before a racquet of rumors echoed against the walls. At first, they bought Bends’ story like papers at the newsstand, and not just because his word was cheap. It was also because Bends was the only side to that story. The colonists had no choice but to play along, not understanding how off-balance the whole account really was.

  But it did not take long for his word to fall apart. One of Bends’ former patients – he wasn’t sure whom, since so many of the colonists avoided going to him – spread around the rumor that Bends was drunk at the time of Anzhela’s death. But this wasn’t true at all, since Bends had never had a drink in his life. As much as he enjoyed watching a good stumbling drunk, Bends had never felt the urge to play that role. Bends was indignant, wondering who would spread such a vicious lie about him. He thought this, conveniently ignoring the fact that his own story – that Anzhela died from an allergic reaction to the painkillers – was also a lie.