A Variable Darkness: 13 Tales

by John McIlveen

  And she will—

  …it left only him. He would be utterly alone. Who wanted that? He wouldn’t even have the ability to kill himself and escape this prison. That was the truth that made it unbearable. Even with all his faculties intact, if Melanie left, the loneliness would be intolerable. His only choice and hope was to undergo the operation—if not for a second chance, then at least as a way out.

  Wednesday

  “When would the surgery take place?” Ricky asked Doctor Higuchi.

  Standing near the foot of the bed, the doctor perused his notebook and then looked at Ricky as if only just realizing he was there.

  “Many surgeries,” said the doctor.

  “Huh?” asked Ricky. He couldn’t remember if Doctor Higuchi was Chinese or Japanese, but whichever it was, his accent was thicker than mud.

  “Oh… it’ll take many surgeries.”

  Ricky didn’t like the sound of that. Surgery meant pain, and he had always gone to great measures to avoid that. One surgery scared the shit out of him, and the thought of many surgeries put his mind on the verge of shutting down.

  “How many?” he asked.

  The doctor pinched Ricky’s big toe, which made his left leg spasm. Higuchi gave a brisk, satisfied nod, and quickly jotted something in his notebook.

  “We would need to do it over time. It is a very complex and delicate series of procedures that would involve many hours… too many for one surgery. Surgery of that proportion would be too traumatic for the body to endure. The prototype spine would be installed in single-disc segments. Maybe five discs for each procedure. Each disc has an intricate cluster of nerves that weave between it and the next disc. Each disc connection would be performed with extreme care to avoid damaging the spinal cord and nerve bundles. Nerve weaving for the sacrum alone would take sixteen hours.”

  Ricky felt as if an eel had coiled in his stomach and was sending jolts of panic from his core outward. When Doctor Keating told him that he had checked out okay to perform the surgery—all systems go—he had felt a level of elation he had not felt since this whole mess started. The funding hadn’t come through yet, but they weren’t too concerned. A procedure as unique and revolutionary as this one would garner a lot of attention. The funding would come, they had assured him.

  Now he wasn’t feeling quite so enthusiastic.

  The doctor pulled down the blanket and then raised the hem of Ricky’s Johnny to expose most of his leg. He withdrew an instrument from his pocket that looked like a metal toothpick with a screwdriver handle and proceeded to poke around Ricky’s knees.

  “You still haven’t told me how many surgeries,” Ricky said.

  Higuchi gave his left knee a painful jab that made the muscle react such that—spine be damned—Ricky’s leg kicked outward and pulled him about two inches lower on the bed.

  “Ow! What the hell?”

  “Sorry,” Doctor Higuchi said, and smiled his life is good smile. “Maybe five or six surgeries. One every two months. Twelve to sixteen hours each.”

  “Will the surgeries be painful?”

  “Oh… very painful. Very painful times six,” Doctor Higuchi said, and nodded emphatically, that damned smile still pasted to his face. “But you’ll be very happy afterward.”

  The eel flipped and Ricky vomited across the front of his Johnny.

  Monday

  Ricky’s insecurity had been increasingly eating at him. He hadn’t seen Faulkner McFall since that night, but Mac’s words bounced around in his head non-stop and his inability to act on his anxiety only managed to acerbate it.

  —and she will.

  “I have to work, Ricky,” Melanie said. “I’m sorry, but if I’m here all the time, the bills ain’t getting paid.”

  She stopped coming right after work. The previous week, she’d showed up at five on all but one day. He wondered if she was having an affair… not that he could do anything about it. She gathered a few stray magazines she had brought in and set them on the windowsill.

  “You get out of work at three-thirty,” he said. “It’s nearly seven.”

  “I had to go register the car. You know how long that takes. And I had to do some food shopping ’cause there was nothing in the house. Life goes on, Ricky.” She took a sip from her Starbucks iced coffee and set it down.

  “So, is that it? Are you moving on? Did you find someone to screw around with already since I can’t anymore?”

  He knew he had gone too far, but the words spilled out and it was too late to retract them. Melanie stared at him with cold, empty eyes, and it dawned on him that he had never seen her look at him this way before.

  “You know what, Ricky? Fuck you! I’ve had it. I’m going home.”

  Dread washed over him. He knew her anger was justified as much as he knew his words were poison, but he had no governor. When shit popped into his head, there was nothing to keep it from sliding out through his mouth.

  “Hey. I didn’t mean it.”

  “You wouldn’t have said it if you didn’t mean it.” Large tears pooled in her eyes and dropped heavily to the floor. “I stand by you. I come visit you every day, and you keep hitting me with this shit. I don’t deserve this, Ricky. No one does.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry don’t cut it, Ricky. You say those words a lot, but I don’t think you even know what they mean. I’m going.” Melanie picked up her purse and walked to the door.

  “Don’t leave, Melanie,” he begged. “My first surgery is in two days. I need you.”

  She looked back at him and the disappointment he saw in her damp eyes rattled him.

  “You shoulda thought of that before,” she said, and walked out of the room.

  “Sure!” he yelled after her. “Leave me now that I’m fucking crippled!”

  Why can’t I just shut the fuck up? he silently scolded himself.

  Her footsteps paused for a moment—and then resumed down the corridor.

  Tuesday

  “Well,” said Mac from the chair at the foot of the bed. “It appears you’ve mastered the art of the fuck-up. Hell, you’ve probably earned a PhD by now.”

  “Leave me alone,” Ricky said. He’d had a feeling Mac would be showing up to rub his face in it.

  “Not on your life, brother.” Mac rose and walked to Ricky’s side. “Not on your death, either. I’m going to ride your ass for eternity.”

  “Why…”

  “Don’t even go there,” Mac warned.

  “How could you do this to me?”

  Mac leaned on the bedrails. “How was easy. I made a little deal with someone. He’s not such a bad guy. Certainly not what everyone makes him out to be.” Mac leaned forward and whispered into Ricky’s ear. “He punishes the sinners.”

  He nodded and righted himself. He raised as if he just remembered something important. “Oh! By the way, this revolutionary surgery they’re going to give you? It’s going to be a colossal failure. It will demolish your spinal cord.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Because I won’t let it succeed,” Mac assured him. “How would that benefit you? What lessons would you have learned? You’d still be the same, self-centered, spineless piece of shit.”

  Ricky gawked at Mac, an incredulous look in his eyes.

  “Do you doubt that I can do this… floppy boy?”

  “No! I don’t want this!”

  “Me either, man. But when I left this little monkey show, my wife was still by my side and still very much in love with me. How’re you doing with that? Not so good… you screwed it up even after being forewarned.”

  “The other night you said something,” Ricky said. “You told me that I was a useless bag of bones and that it was my own fault.”

  “Truth.”

  “But you also said that only I can change that.” Ricky finally looked Mac in the eyes.

  “I see you’ve been thinking things over. I’m impressed and a little surprised.”

  “Are you saying I can get m
yself out of this?” Ricky asked.

  “Don’t know. I supposed that’s up to you. Maybe you can say a prayer.”

  “I tried. He’s not taking requests.”

  Mac chuckled. “It worked for me.”

  “How? You’re dead.”

  “Which is exactly what I prayed for,” Mac said.

  “Why didn’t you pray to get better?”

  “You can bet your ass I did,” Mac assured him. “But what put me in that particular place wasn’t my doing—it was yours, so it wasn’t mine to undo. Maybe if you had visited and said a little prayer of your own, things would have been different.”

  Ricky tried to think of something repentant to say, but there was nothing to be said.

  Mac waved it away dismissively. “Water under the bridge, now.”

  “What do I do?” Ricky asked, nearly whining.

  “Like I said… don’t know. That’s up to you. But you can start by not being pathetic. Stop the sniveling. Self-pity ain’t attractive to anyone.” He quickly clapped his hands as if preparing to leave. “I’m going to do you a huge favor, but it isn’t because I want you to succeed. In fact, I hope you figure it out. That way you’ll have to live on, knowing what you are, and what has happened because of it.”

  “Will it help me get better?”

  “Don’t know. What’s better?” Mac said. “Better is debatable. Better is relative. Your better and my better are most likely very different.”

  Ricky sighed and seemed to shrink into himself.

  “Alright… enough small talk,” Mac said. “The first thing I have to say to you is that shit smells. You fall into a pile of shit, you’ll smell like shit. If you don’t want to smell like shit, you have to get clean. If you clean a little off, you’ll still smell like shit. If you clean most of it off, you’ll still smell like shit. You get it?”

  “Yes,” said Ricky.

  “Okay. Now, there once was this really smart guy named Albert Einstein. You heard of him?”

  Ricky nodded.

  “Good,” said Mac. “Well, Mister Einstein said we can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them. That’s your problem, Briggsy. You don’t change your way of thinking. So think about it… in a different way.”

  Mac was gone before Ricky could protest.

  It seemed that he had no good direction to go in. Mac had said that the surgery would be a disaster, and there was more than enough reason to believe him. Deciding not to go for the surgery was an easy choice for a coward, especially if it meant avoiding Very painful times six. He realized that admitting he was a coward was a huge step for him. He had always known he was, but he’d avoided the confession. It was easier to keep it hidden.

  Not going for the surgery may sidestep a lot of pain, but the outlook wasn’t much brighter, and as Mac had said, the big P would probably get him anyway. As far as he could tell, there was only one direction left, though there seemed little to no promise in it.

  But in the end, it was all he had. It was time for Ricky to come clean.

  Saturday

  Melanie walked briskly into the hospital room followed by a short and pretty woman with guarded, tired eyes. Ricky could see the resolve in Melanie’s stance and expression. Her guard was up a mile high and she wasn’t going to take any shit.

  “I don’t like being manipulated, Ricky,” She said. “You’re driving me crazy.”

  Ricky had barraged her with an onslaught of telephone calls, convincing each staff nurse to ring her multiple times and stressing the importance of his need to speak to her. As he had expected, Melanie was too softhearted, and her resolve to ignore him broke.

  “What’s such an emergency? Bothering this poor woman, especially at a time like this in her life?”

  “Please, pull up a chair,” Ricky said. “Both of you. I promise this won’t take long, Mrs. McFall, or for you, Melanie, but I need to tell you something of dire importance. You can choose to leave afterward, Melanie. For how long is your prerogative, and if you do leave, I promise I will not bother you again.”

  Melanie sat in the pleather chair. Her expression was a conflict of emotions. Distrust and annoyance were prevalent, but there was a layer of curiosity she couldn’t hide. Dannelle McFall sat opposite Melanie. It didn’t escape Ricky that she chose the seat in which Mac always appeared. Ricky didn’t know how to start, so after a couple of shaky breaths, he leapt in headfirst.

  “I have a confession to make.”

  Both women stared at him expectantly, their expressions unreadable.

  “I’m a coward,” he continued. “It’s not irony that I have no spine. It’s fate… a message.”

  “I know you put off the surgery,” Melanie said. “It’s only natural to be afraid…”

  “Wait!” Ricky interrupted. He closed his eyes and gathered his thoughts with uncommon patience. “Melanie. You’ve always been too kind-hearted to see the truth. I seldom had to make excuses for my actions because you always did it for me. What you are seeing, my cancelling the surgery, is just another level of my spinelessness. It runs so deep it has cost lives.”

  Ricky took another deep breath and released it.

  “Dannelle. Mrs. McFall. There are things you need to know about Mac.” Ricky saw a defiant light ignite in Dannelle’s eyes and he realized that his words had been conveyed wrongly. “Please, don’t misinterpret me. Mac is totally honorable. I’m the one who was and is inexcusable. My actions were selfish and, as I said, cowardly.”

  “Mr. Briggs,” Dannelle McFall said. “I have no idea what you’re trying to say.”

  Ricky held her gaze and had to coerce himself into continuing. “The ambush, Mrs. McFall. It didn’t go down the way you heard… the way anyone heard. The real truth—and I’m the only person who knew it until now—is that Mac is the reason I came out of there alive, and I’m the reason Mac was carried out of there.”

  “Go on,” Dannelle said, stiff-jawed.

  Ricky felt Melanie’s stare, but he refrained from looking at her, knowing that whatever he saw there would prevent him from finishing.

  “We got a tip that someone was dealing meth in front of a small market on Broadway. We watched him for a few days and learned his pattern, which always brought him back to an apartment on Buswell. I don’t think we did very well, because he was just as aware of us as we were of him. When we finally made our move, they were waiting for us. We were fortunate at first. We busted down the door and charged in to see three guns aimed at us from down a hallway… our perp, another man, and a woman who turned out to be the perp’s wife. One of them fired. Maybe it was a warning shot, because it somehow missed us. One of the rules in our training is to look for an out as soon as you’re in. There was a door on either side of us… a bathroom to the right and a bedroom to the left. I got off one shot before diving into the bedroom. Mac ducked into the bathroom. Turns out it was a lucky shot. I killed the perp. Could you give me some water, please?”

  Melanie lifted a glass from the over-bed table and directed the straw into Ricky’s mouth.

  “Thank you.” He paused and closed his eyes for a moment. “In the bedroom, I found a young woman in the corner, hiding between a dresser and the wall. She was the fifteen-year-old student from Lawrence High School.”

  “I know who you’re talking about, Mr. Briggs,” said Dannelle McFall, her words as sharp and hard as a carbon blade. “Her name was Keira Pierce.”

  Ricky paused. He had never known the young woman’s name and had never stopped to consider that she had one at all. It added a personal element to it, and for the first time he thought of her as flesh and blood. He closed his eyes briefly.

  “To avoid getting shot, I decided to use her as a decoy.”

  Melanie’s gasp made him pause. Onward, he thought.

  “Mac was standing in the bathroom on the ready. When he saw me pushing her—Keira—toward the door, he knew what I had in mind. He shook his head and motioned me to stay back, but I ignored
him. I pushed Keira into the hallway. I heard Mac yelling at me to stop, and then he did something incredible. He dove in front of her as the girl’s mother and the other man opened fire. I ran out of the bedroom shooting blindly, but it was easy to take them down because they had both stopped shooting and were staring at Keira on the floor. This is why they had a hard time putting it together. They finally figured out that the same bullet that got Mac in the throat also passed through Keira Pierce’s eye and lodged into her brain. In the end, there were five people dead. As you know, only I walked out of that apartment on Buswell Street.”

  Ricky chanced meeting Dannelle’s eyes, but they were studying the floor with troubled deliberation. Melanie was staring at him with a similar intensity.

  “If I hadn’t acted in that way—using Keira to protect myself—chances are everyone except Eddie Pierce might have gotten out of there unharmed. Mac and Keira would most likely be alive today.”

  After a minute of total silence, Dannelle McFall raised her tear-streaked face to Ricky.

  “Why are you telling me this now?” she asked.

  Ricky wanted to look away, but he knew he could not. He said, “The truth needed to be told.”

  “For whose benefit?” asked Dannelle. “Do you feel absolved?”

  Ricky contemplated this for a moment, wishing that it could be true, but he said, “Less now than ever.”

  “Good,” said Dannelle. “And I speak more for that little girl than for my husband. Mac knew the risks of his job. Keira Pierce’s life is your penance, Mr. Briggs. Hopefully there’s enough decency in you to carry that pain, but I question that. You took from her what was not yours to take. You’ve gotten away with murder… twice.”