The Piece.
“My mother would be very grateful…if you would give it to me.”
“Take it. It was never mine. You mother said it would bring me luck, and I gotta tell you—I think it always did.”
“Thank you,” she said, carefully placing the worthless glass and its magical stand in her purse.
The man named John, her father, almost smiled this time. He was about to speak when an auto horn beeped briefly, respectful of the hour and the neighborhood.
“Go on,” he said, kissing her forehead, almost brushing the lid of her third eye. “My daughter…”
Carmella looked at him and he looked sadder than any man should ever be. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll come back someday, and maybe then I can call you ‘father’.”
“Yeah, okay…I can settle for that.”
The cabbie beeped once again, and she opened the screen door, looked back and smiled. “Goodbye,” she said.
Oz was waiting for her in her trailer.
“How could you know?” she asked, clutching her handbag to her breasts.
The tall, gangly man shrugged. It was a disconcerting gesture, almost mechanical. “Sometimes we just know things, don’t we, Carmella?”
“Sometimes…”
“I’ll be needing it, my dear,” he said as he stared at her purse.
Opening the clasp, she reached in past the crystal globe, to touch the light-heavy metal. It reacted to the warmth of her hand as though alive and she could almost swear it had begun to glow. She handed it to Oz, who held it up to the dangling light above her tiny kitchen table.
“Yes,” he said. His hand trembled. “I knew this one, this final one, must be circular. I would have never imagined the struts like this, but yes, very ingenious, actually…”
Carmella watched him become absorbed in the warm glow of the Piece, which seemed to have acquired a soft incandescence under his touch. She suddenly felt his presence in her trailer intrusive, and something not at all desired. She cleared her throat and he looked at her as one might regard a slight irritation.
“So you’re done with me?”
“Yes, you’ve done well. All of you have done very well. We head south in the morning.”
“I won’t be coming back,” she said.
He nodded. “Yes, I remember your mother always wanting you to be free of us.”
“I promised her.”
Oz smiled. It was an awkward gesture. “Yes, well, I suppose you did…but you must know you’re not going anywhere.”
“What? What did you say?” Her stomach began to twist as she glared at him.
“No one blows the show unless I say. And especially not now. The Device will be ready soon.”
“I don’t care about your device!” The words exploded from her like lava. She had never raised her voice to him before, and a bleak point of fear touched her mind.
But Oz just smiled. “Oh, but it cares very much about you, my dear.”
“I can’t believe this…” Tears came, despite her wanting to retain control. “Oh, Momma…”
He pocketed the series of concentric platinum rings, turned toward the door, then wheeled back upon her. “Carmella, someday you will thank me for this. Someday very soon.”
He closed the door and it sealed shut with the sound of a final breath. She fell against it, biting her lower lip against the pain of frustration. What good was it to find the truth if it could never set you free?
Carmella felt herself sagging to the floor, where she drew up her knees to huddle within the prison of the night. At dawn, the wheels would turn; a new hope clanking south to be born.
I wrote a column once about the Three Stupid Questions people always ask you when you tell them you’re a writer. Number Three is “Wow…well, where do you get all those weird ideas?”1 My answer, depending on my mood and the hipnicity of my audience, varies, but a partial truth lies in simply paying attention to what is going on in the Real World. And that is the problem with most people—they walk around in a practically impenetrable intellectual force-field, through which curiosity, wonder, and plain old knowledge are unable to pass. In either direction. Most of us (you and me not included), in some weird, post-modern version of Bartleby the Scrivener, prefer not to know much of anything.
Well, I guess that’s why they’re not writers. I have learned to do the opposite and it’s served me well. Never stop noticing what’s going on around you; because that’s where you will find some of the most chilling material for stories. Many years ago, maybe even as many as twenty, I can remember listening to the news while I was driving, and there was this clip about a guy being prosecuted in one of the southern states for what sounded like a very odd offense. The identity of the state will remain anonymous because I can’t remember which one it was, and because they may have, by this time, passed a law to protect people from the kind of predicament in which my protagonist finds himself.
Of course, there is no problem without a solution, and that’s what the following story is all about.
1 Number One is “Oh…okay, well, have you ever had anything published?” and Number Two is “Hmmm, Do you use your real name?” For an elaboration of this whole phenomena, please check my collection of essays, The Mothers And Fathers Italian Association.
The bastard’s house looked just about the way Doctor Frederick Wilhelm had figured it would: a squat little cape cod with tiny little rooms and unit air conditioners sticking out of every window. The lawn needed cutting and nasty-looking weeds choked what was left of the flower beds. A beat-up, boxy-looking Ford hulked in the driveway like the dinosaur it was. No way Raczkowski would replace his wreck with anything new—he was a used-car kind of guy.
Wilhelm smiled at his small joke, and moved stealthily from the neighboring house’s shrubbery, across the unkempt crabgrass and clover, to crouch next to a rusting Sears Roebuck utility shed. Moonlight blued everything in pastel half-glows. Frederick wondered how visible he would be to anyone idly glancing in his general direction.
Probably not very. People usually weren’t looking out their windows at 3:00 AM. But if they were, they most likely were sitting in the bathroom trying to purge a raging gastro-intestinal system—and not look for a Midnight Skulker.
A Skulker.
Is that what he was? No, not exactly.
He allowed himself a little smile, then inched around the shed to the rear of the house carrying a classic Gladstone bag by his side. He had little trouble negotiating a cellarway and steps leading down to a basement door. Silent. Like a snake in the woods. Actually, he was surprising himself a little. I’m pretty damn good at this.
When the basement door turned in his hand, he nodded as though expecting it. An article he’d read in Newsweek reported more than 40% of all homes in America were left unlocked on a regular basis. And besides, Raczkowski had seemed like the type who wouldn’t be real careful.
With a gentle surge forward against the wooden door, Frederick let himself into the dark clutter of the basement. An assortment of smells greeted him: sawdust, soap detergent, paint thinner, WD-40, all overlayed by a general mustiness. He used a penlight to carve a narrow path through the shadowed junk—cardboard boxes, Hefty bags of old clothes, garden tools, patio furniture, abandoned appliances, broken toys. It was like many of our basements and attics, he observed casually. One of those places where we stash the pieces of our lives we can’t live with anymore, but somehow cannot consign to the oblivion of the trash-man.
He moved to the stairs. Old. Wooden. No railing, which was again typical. Frederick moved up to the plywood door, turned the cheap brass knob. Again, there was no resistance and he was suddenly in a cramped hall, illuminated only by seeping moonlight through venetian blinds in the living room. It was a space punctuated by empty Bud cans, the carcass-boxes of home-delivered pizzas, empty cheese doodle bags, and overflowing ashtrays. The coffee table in front of a red velvet mediterranean couch was the removable hard-top from a Chinese red 55 T-Bird.
Cute. Real cute.
Is this what Raczkowski was doing with his money? What an asshole…
Unable to resist his curiosity, Frederick checked out the kitchen, and was pleased to find it as filthy and disarrayed as he’d hoped. Butter melting in its wrapper on the counter-top, Dunkin’ Donuts moldering in their boxes, a sinkful of dishes crusted with hard fragments and probably crawling with bacteria. Anyone who lived in such squalor deserved whatever misfortune might come their way.
Frederick smiled. And tonight, that misfortune is me.
Turning from the kitchen, he crossed the living room and ascended the shag-carpeted stairs. His Reeboks carried him up in total silence. So quietly, in fact, he could hear the sinusoidal breathing of Donald Raczkowski before reaching the second-floor landing. The sound was a medium-pitched fluting, symptomatic of a deviated septum, and like a beacon, it directed Frederick to the left, to stand in the doorway of a bedroom which reeked of un-emptied ashtrays, un-laundered bedclothes, and a particularly foul blend of semen and cheap after-shave.
Just enough ambient light filtered through the chintz curtains to detail the body sprawled stomach-down on the bed. Being the overweight, unsightly mess he was, Raczkowski had no bed-partner—just as Frederick had expected.
Moving quickly, just as he’d practiced it hundreds of times, he knelt by the bed, reaching into his bag for the prepared syringe. Smoothly, with the soft, expert touch of many years of practice, Frederick injected 40 cc’s of Xylothal into the blubber of Raczkowski’s bicep. The large man grunted awake from the puncture-prick, started to raise up his sour bulk on one elbow, but his eyes rolled back as the drug reached his cortical area.
Another grunt and he fell into the fouled bedsheets on his back. Just barely conscious, he looked glassily at Frederick, who waited for recognition to flicker like a dime-store flashlight behind Raczkowski’s eyes.
“Good evening, Donald. It’s Doctor Wilhelm.”
The large man grunted weakly. Ah. Recognition at last.
A slight dilation of the pupils. Fear? One could only hope.
“I’ve come to get something that’s rightfully mine,” said Frederick. “—your left arm…”
Ah, yes. The eyes definitely widened on that last phrase. He knows. He remembers. Good.
Xylothal was an interesting drug. It had the ability to keep a patient on the edge of consciousness, with no loss of sensory input, for many hours at a time, while simultaneously damping down all entire voluntary motor centers. In other words, Raczkowski would retain full awareness of his surroundings without being able to move a muscle, and still feel pain.
That was the important part. The man would need to feel pain all along the spectrum, from mild discomfort to mind-ripping agony. The man needed to be paid back for all the anguish and torture he’d inflicted upon Doctor Frederick Wilhelm.
As he reached into the Gladstone for his scalpel case, Frederick’s mind rewound some choice memories, replayed them faster than real-time…
…and once again the rain-black skin of the Interstate was slithering beneath his Cadillac Seville. He’d been driving back from a much deserved golf-vacation in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Frederick was tapping out a rhythm on the steering wheel as his Alpine car-stereo played a CD called Digital Duke, and Ellington had never sounded sweeter. Frederick Wilhelm, orthopedic surgeon, at the age of forty-five, had achieved and acquired everything a man could hope for: faithful devoted wife, healthy kids going to the best schools, investment real estate and a fat stock portfolio, the standard finely-appointed house, and a mistress who would diddle him six ways to Sunday for just a taste of the Good Life. Sure, he was over-extended, and sure he spent more than he could immediately pay for, but didn’t we all do that? Whether you made a hundred bucks a week, or a hundred thousand every month…
And it hadn’t come easy. No way. The third son of a construction worker in East Lansing, Michigan, Frederick had worked his ass off to pay his way through college and medical school. Not like a lot of those shits he studied and interned with. The guys from the Northeastern prep schools and the family estates where they had stables as well as garages.
No way. Freddie Wilhelm had earned everything that had come his way. And nobody would ever take it away from him.
It was that kind of determination and willful attitude which had served Frederick so well. And it didn’t mean he was ruthless or heartless or anything of the sort. If that were true, he would have never stopped when he’d seen the accident.
In the wet murk beyond his wiper blades, he saw the tangle of metal on the side of the Interstate. A 4x4 had sluiced off the road to mix it up with one of the stanchions which support the big green exit signs. It must have happened recently, because Frederick saw no other cars or movement of any kind.
Without hesitation, he braked down to the shoulder and slowly approached the twisted mess that had been an old Ford Bronco. He’d always kept an emergency kit in his trunk, and being a doctor, he’d kept it stocked with a sophisticated array of drugs, instruments, and supplies. Grabbing the leather case from the rear of his car, he moved quickly to the wreck.
The driver’s side door had been pinched off and the cab had accordioned inward. The vehicle must have flipped on its side and slid into the upright support at high speed. The lone occupant, a flabby man in a red plaid shirt, had been thrown halfway through the shattered windshield.
Leaning into what was left of the cab, Frederick winced at the mixture of odors—coppery fresh blood and bad rye whiskey. Everything had been stained a black-red and he feared he was too late to help the driver. Anybody losing this much blood was severely injured. He had to act quickly. Being too cautious meant lost time, and then it would be too late.
As he struggled with the man’s bulk, getting him the rest of the way out of the cab, the worst of his injuries became clear—his left arm was practically severed at the shoulder and the main brachial artery was pumping out blood like a ruptured hydrant. Frederick worked quickly, with the cold efficiency which came from twenty years’ experience. Rather than just stanch the wound and lose the arm, he attempted miracle-surgery in the cold rain. Whether an act of hubris or heroism—motivation never crossed his mind. It simply occurred to him that his skills might save the man’s arm as well as his life.
It wasn’t the prettiest sight, but by the time the paramedics arrived and the victim was hurtling off to the nearest county hospital, the arm had been re-attached and throbbed with the pink glow of flesh not dying. Frederick gave his name and address to the highway police, drove to the nearest motel where he changed out of his ruined clothes, and resumed his trip home. As he cranked up the CD, he found himself smiling, feeling good about himself. He’d done one of those Good Things—he’d saved a man’s life and perhaps his occupation when he preserved the severed limb.
Funny, he’d thought: he never even got the guy’s name.
But he learned it about six months later when he was slapped with Donald Raczkowski’s malpractice suit. The legal brief charged him with administering medical attention without the patient’s permission, and causing Raczkowski to lose more than fifty percent of the utility in his left arm, further resulting in the loss of Raczkowski’s employment in the local pickling plant. The only job the scumbag had ever been able to keep.
Sure, it was a bullshit case. But in a backward, bullshit state where they’d never got around to passing any “Good Samaritan” laws, it was also a case that would stick.
Frederick wouldn’t have really cared if he’d kept up his malpractice insurance premiums, but Christ, with Anthony in his third year at Princeton, and Jennifer Louise accepted at Stanford, he’d been a little short, and he figured he had to rob Peter to pay Paul for little while. When his insurance carrier claimed default, and Donald Raczkowski claimed victory, things went very badly for Frederick.
Very badly and post haste.
The settlement required the liquidation of almost every asset Frederick had ever acquired. The houses, the car
s, the boat, and of course the entire stock portfolio. But it didn’t stop there. When he tried to sell some of Tina’s jewelry and furs, she decided she’d suffered enough indignity and took off for her parents’s home in Shaker Heights—with her jewelry. Telling the kids they’d have to complete their educations at the local State diploma factory drove a stake through the heart of whatever had been left of their fibrillating relationships. In addition, his colleagues considered his malpractice conviction the equivalent of a kiss on the cheek after a Mafioso dinner. Not only did every doctor in the county stop referring patients to his office, but also stopped talking to him as well. When his country club refused to offer him a membership renewal, Frederick really wasn’t all that surprised. But perhaps the final, and most telling blow, was the hasty departure of Shawna, his young, long-legged mistress, who really didn’t need to tell him she’d loved Frederick’s money a lot more than the man himself.
For a while, Frederick continued to believe in his own self-worth. He attempted to retain his dignity, rebuild his shattered practice, and remove the tarnish from his reputation. Living in a small suburban apartment complex colored with grim, blue-collar workers and legions of screaming, chocolate-mouthed kids on Big-Wheels, Frederick continued to plummet into the abyss of his private desperation. The growing reality that things would never be as they once had been began to crush him down like the great heel of a socialist government.
Every day became a monumental struggle. To pay the bills, to be civil and polite, and finally to even be a competent physician.
When not scrounging up local industrial accident cases, and the occasional neighborhood broken arm, Frederick spent his time alone. Assuredly, he would never see his wife again, unless it was over the shoulder of her divorce attorney; his children were both embarrassed and outraged at his failure to protect himself and properly educate them. Shawna of the long, tanned legs and high breasts had, by this time, wrapped her perfumed flesh around a new Sugar-Doc; and there were certainly no more Sunday afternoon ball games or golf-foursomes in his future.
Fearful Symmetries Page 23
