by Schow, Ryan
I wonder if Netty’s folks will let her come to the city with me. When I have to move in with my aunt. Or if my awful Aunt Corinne will even allow it. I haven’t seen her in years and the only thing I remember is all her cleavage and how her hair was big like the eighties even though it was 2005. The way she looked at me last time I saw her, like I was some subhuman sewer-dwelling carp with hoofs, even I could tell she didn’t like me. Now I’m supposed to stay with her? Looking like this? How the hell does my father plan on explaining away the mess I’ve made of…well…me? Inside, I’m praying he won’t send me away. Not now.
3
When I finally get to the city, I follow the directions my navigation system provides and, surprisingly, I don’t get lost. Parking is a pain in the vag, but it almost always is. I have to walk three city blocks to get to Gerhard’s and at least half a dozen people look at me like I’m an alien. Inside the non-descript office, Nurse Arabelle greets me with the stink eye.
Behind my sunglasses, my amethyst eyes look just as beautiful as hers, and clearly she’s still flipping dick about it all. Her rage has me feeling totally self-conscious. I did, in fact, hijack her originality, and a gigantic part of me feels like a poser for doing it, but what can I do now? I keep my big sunglasses on inside.
“Afraid to show me my own eyes?” Nurse Arabelle mutters.
“Half my face is falling off the bones. I’m trying to spare you the pain of looking at me.”
“Just sit and wait. Doctor will be shortly with you.”
“Aren’t you going to offer me something to drink?” I ask. I think, somewhere inside, I’m hoping for some sympathy. Back when I was getting my treatments, I learned she had a heart, some warmth inside that cold, cold shell. After getting my new eyes, however, all I get now is the Arctic stare and worlds of hostility.
“No,” she says to my request for something to drink.
Feeling aggravated by my situation, by my physical deterioration and the threats associated with it, I remove my glasses and stare into her eyes and this causes her to shift uneasily in her chair and frown even more, if such a thing is possible.
“Even falling apart, these eyes look better on me,” I say. Okay, that was mean, and totally not me. My behavior is becoming concerning. Feeling awful and foolish and horribly ugly as a person, I turn and take a seat. This is right about the time I hear her mumble something that ends with her calling me a spoiled American bitch.
“Well, since we’re not besties anymore,” I say, losing control, “I’ll be crossing you off the Christmas list.”
“I don’t like ham,” she mutters.
“Well ham doesn’t like you either, you fucking potato eater.” She gasps at the insult and stares at me in horror. “That’s right. I said it. I called you a potato eater.”
Now I’m appraising myself in horror. OMG, who have I become? This side of me, this new more rebellious side, it’s downright anti-social! Just like Jacob said.
The door opens and Dr. Gerhard is looking at me, his face heavy with exhaustion. He looks at me giving Nurse Arabelle the fangster glare, then at Arabelle’s startled expression, then back at me.
“What did you say to her?” he asks me.
“Maybe you should explain to her the concept of not dishing out what she can’t take. She’s unfamiliar with how tawdry we spoiled American bitches can be.”
“That mouth of yours is something else,” he says, and all the sudden I’m the girl at the party no one wants, the girl everyone hates.
“Are you referring to the way my mouth looks, or what comes out of it?”
“Right now, both.” He’s staring at my flaccid features. “You’re a wreck, Ms. Van Duyn. And as I said yesterday, it’s the running of your mouth that has gotten you into this kind of trouble. Come back with me so we may see if there are any options left to discuss.”
I follow him through what is a hallway of closed-door labs into a Spartan office. Gerhard sits behind a lavish walnut desk where a barely opened bottle of Bourbon sits breathing on the desk in plain sight. I park my butt on the other side of the desk in an uncomfortable plastic chair he must have pulled off the street when he learned I was coming to visit. Clearly he doesn’t see patients here.
“You need to stop talking about your treatments, about me, and about my benefactors. That’s the only way I can promise there won’t be further damage. And even then, who knows?”
“I have a better idea. Fix this mess you made or I’ll make good on my threat and expose your completely immoral operation. I swear I will.”
“I don’t doubt your aggressive tendencies, Savannah. They were bred into you.”
This staggers me a bit. I finally have confirmation of something I’ve been feeling ever since receiving my treatments. This aggression isn’t mine. I mean, it is now, but it wasn’t before. Not fully.
“If you think spanking me on the bottom and sending me on my way will solve everything, Dr. Gerhard, you’re as high as a kite.”
“Well now,” he says, disgusted, “aren’t you the one with the biggest balls in the room.” A statement, not a question.
“As you say, they were bred into me.”
“Leveling threats against me, saying you’ll expose our science to the media, what you don’t realize is the people who run the media, most of them have intimate associations with various members of the Virginia Corporation.”
“The difference between your benefactors and me is they have their friends in the media, but I have the paparazzi. How do you think society will react to the Silicon Valley power couple’s piggish daughter getting a twenty-five million dollar operation that is questionable in both its legality and its morality. And when I tell them you use fully grown human clones to extract DNA from, what will they think? When the video comes out, and it will—first on YouTube, then to the media—people won’t see clones. They’ll see beautiful people being held in captivity. A story this big, one of the networks will run with it. Either that or they lose the biggest scoop of the decade to one of their rivals.”
“If you want to play that hand, I could simply inform my employers of your intentions and you would be dead inside the hour,” he says, clearly riled. He takes a shot of Bourbon, makes a stiff face, then says, “Or you could stop all this useless posturing and let me do my job.”
I blow out a monstrous sigh, not once blinking as I stare Gerhard in the face. “It’s my face and my breasts. Well, just half my face and one breast. And I’m puking up blood. Plus I have the squirts like all the time, and my hair is falling out.”
“Undo your shirt please and take off your bra.” I hesitate for a moment, thinking I’d rather set my eyes on fire.
“Perhaps I could do this part with Nurse Arabelle.”
“If left alone, I’m certain she will harm you. Her Russian blood runs hot with vengeance, and I am afraid she’s not as civilized as she appears. Her past is…well, it’s unsavory to say the least.”
“Isn’t there someone else then?” I ask. I hate how my voice now sounds so pleading. So weak.
“If you’re worried I’ll somehow gain sexual gratification in seeing you undressed, you needn’t be concerned. Just seeing your face is difficult enough. Now I’m about to see a deflated, ruined breast. The very prospect of your private parts has me seeking the comfort of alcohol to continue, if you must know the truth.”
“Well hell,” I whisper.
He sighs, takes another shot, waves me on with his hand.
I unbutton my shirt, undo my bra and stand there before him, naked and exposed and feeling terribly vulnerable.
4
“First off,” he says, his eyes getting that glazed look you get from drinking too much too early, “that floppy thing is disgusting. It’s like my grandmother’s tit. And that nipple—my God!” He steals a long shot, closes the bottle and slips it in his lower desk drawer.
I cover myself as the tears prick the backs of my eyes. One thing I didn’t realize until this day was how confident
I had become with my new looks and my clone’s aggressive genes. The way I’m feeling now, so small and vile and helpless, it’s all I can do to keep from bawling. And just moments ago I was so tough. So “trying-to-be-in-charge.”
“Your bedside manner blows,” I say, wiping my eyes. Right now I’m not even going to try to control my mouth because if I had a gun I think I might kill him. Or myself.
“You aren’t exactly my favorite patient.”
“How do we fix this?”
“I injected you with a modified form of Caesium-137, like in Chernobyl, but with an 8 Gray dosage. The Caesium-137 is encased in hundreds of microscopic casings that disintegrate when a modified RFID chip triggers a short pulse of energy. It’s genius, if you think about it. Not traceable to me, or the Virginia Corporation. The mortician will simply think of it as an anomaly. Like your body just…melted.”
A cold fear washes over me, and suddenly I’m hit with such unbridled rage, things inside me feel bathed in fire. “Why would you do that to a person? What in God’s name is wrong with you?”
“The benefits of nanotechnology, Ms. Van Duyn, amaze even me.” Without an ounce of feeling, now picking at a hangnail to show me how unaffected he is by my situation, he says, “There are many things you can do to a human being to make them die screaming. If you’re lucky, however, I can put something together in a few days. With a strong base of Prussian Blue, I can maybe bind it chemically and reduce the half-life by fifty percent. Maybe. You will always look like this, but it’s better than dying, wouldn’t you agree?”
“No, you’ll do better than that.”
He sits up fast, turning eyes upon me that are ink black and frightening. “Do you realize what I’m risking doing this for you? I could get—”
“Fired? Big freaking deal!”
He seems to calm some. “Blacklisted is what I was going to say.”
“You seem awfully concerned about these people you work for. Are they that bad?”
Ignoring me, he says, “With your current DNA corrupted, perhaps some fresh infusions of DNA will repair some of the damage. Plus there is the matter of the particles in your bloodstream. They are part of you now.”
“So flush them out.”
He shifts uneasy in his chair, gives an empty laugh. “It isn’t that easy.”
“What activates these…particles?”
“They do.”
I’m certain he means members of the Virginia Corporation, so I don’t ask him to elaborate, even though I’m getting more and more curious about them by the minute. I just want my old self back. The second version, I mean.
“Can you disable the chip?” I ask. “Or take it out?”
“Proprietary software will alert the users if the chip is tampered with. These people are paranoid and diligent.”
“Where’s the chip located?”
“Typical implants like these go in the webbing of your hands between the thumb and forefinger. I put yours in your hip, which is why you feel pain radiating from there up to your breast and face. It’s very, very small, so small you wouldn’t be able to feel it.”
The idea of these little bombs inside me, and the RFID chip that turns them lethal, makes me nervous. “How small?”
“A little larger than a grain of rice.”
“Fine, great. You’re going to dig it out and give it to me.”
He opens the drawer, pulls out the Bourbon and pours three fingers worth of the amber liquid. He drains it in a single shot, then says, “Things could be more complicated than you think.” Judging by the return of the alcohol, I’d say he’s serious. Not that it matters.
“Save the explanation for the science geeks. I want it out today. Right now.”
He stands and says, “Are you out of your mind?” He says it like he’s exhausted.
“Yes!” I bark, holding my shirt closed with a fist. “I am. Now figure it out!”
His impatience has a dark, glacial quality to it, like the most malevolent of storms, and he says, “Fine, dummes Mädchen. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Whatever you’re going to do can’t be worse than what’s already happening.”
“If you say so.”
“I say so. And what was that you just said? That freaking German gibberish?”
“Dummes Mädchen. It means stupid girl.”
“If you’re going to call me names, at least have the sack to do it in English.”
He looks at me like he wants to come out of his skin and already warning bells are firing off in my head, telling me to shut my mouth, to not provoke the would-be surgeon.
“This could take up to several hours,” he says through clenched teeth, “and you aren’t going to be able to take the pain.” After a second he says, “You’ll have to be put out.”
“I’m going to be wide awake when you pull that thing out of me. You’re going to give it to me and then we can talk about my rehabilitation.”
He kicks his desk and scorches me with his eyes. He’s aching to hit me. “I used to kill children like you in the war,” he spits. “You officious little…asshole.”
“So kind of you to say,” I say, flippantly. “What war did you say you were in?”
“With that mouth, you’d have been gassed already.”
“Typical Nazi blather.”
Frowning, he heads for the door, then stops. Turning back to me, his face inflamed, he says, “Go to the room next door, take down your pants, leave on your underwear, and wait for me on the operating table. With that mouth of yours shut!”
“Is Nurse Arabelle coming?”
“You want it out or not?”
“Out.”
“Then stop with the questions!”
5
The next room is as cold and stark as any lab I have ever seen. Reluctantly I take down my pants and stand there in the very same g-string underwear I was trying to hide from the movers nearly a week ago. I’ve got goosebumps and my baggy skin has me feeling uneasy. Not to mention, I’m getting pissed off because I hate being embarrassed.
I fold my hands over my puddled breast and cover the front of my panties. This is ridiculous, me doing this alone. But what can I do? Still, thinking of being operated on by Gerhard and Nurse Arabelle sends a frosty chill deep into my bones.
The room is all concrete, fluorescent lights and polished steel medical and laboratory equipment. In the center is a silver gurney that will undoubtedly raise even more goose bumps on my butt and chest.
Gerhard enters the room with a medical cart and towel. He lays the towel on the table and says, “Get on the table, lay on your back.” I do what he says. “Turn on your side.” He’s angry, pumping his repulsion for me into every enunciated word. I turn on my side. He slathers a cool, jelly substance over the outside of my thigh, causing an involuntary shiver. Leaving me on the table to freeze, he rolls over what looks like some kind of ultrasound machine and says, “This will help me find the chip.”
He runs the medical grade wand over the outside of my hip, his sharp eyes glued to the portable monitor. I try to see the screen, but he says to stop moving, and he says this with a fair amount of bite.
“Has anyone ever told you that you look almost exactly like that Nazi creep Josef Mengele?”
For a second, he stops what he’s doing and looks at me as if I just wished brain tumors upon him. Then he goes back to work.
“The doctor from Auschwitz they called the Angel of Death, in some circles, he was considered a genius. Brilliant. To answer your question, yes, the comparison has been made several times before.” After a moment of concentration, he says, “The tissue bonding cap didn’t adhere to your tissue for some reason, but I’ve found it anyway. It’s here. Unfortunately for you, it’s deep.”
“How deep?”
“The extraction will most assuredly hurt.”
From the doorway, Nurse Arabelle’s throaty Russian voice penetrates the silence. “If she is to be in pain, I will be happy to be assisting you, Dr. Gerh
ard.”
“She will most definitely be in pain,” he says. They’re conversing like I’m not even here. How cute.
Nurse Arabelle is suddenly at my side, saying to me, “If I can hear screams from you, perhaps I will forget your ugly words from before.”
“I’m sure you’d like that,” I say. Nurse Arabelle turns to the doctor, satisfied. Dr. Gerhard puts on surgical gloves and a mask. Arabelle does the same. Glad to know they don’t hate me enough to put me at risk of infection.
When Gerhard selects a silver surgical blade, my stomach coils and I wonder if I’m going to wet myself right here and now. All my false bravado, it reeks of insecurity. He slathers some new substance over my skin I can’t see—perhaps a topical numbing cream, or rubbing alcohol—then he makes the first incision.
True to Gerhard’s word, the pain is unbearable, and despite my promise to not scream, I belt out an ear shattering shriek of pain. The Scream Queen Association of America would giggle with delight. Arabelle smiles. I scream again, and grinning, she shivers.
“I am top of world right now,” she says, her purple eyes blazing. She really is lovely, especially when she’s being cruel.
I’m huffing though the pain, panting, practically hyperventilating, and it gives Gerhard pause. “Don’t be so dramatic,” he tells me. His heart is a block of ice. “Besides, that isn’t even the hard part. The real pain comes next.”
6
At some point I pass out. When I wake up, Gerhard assures me this is a natural reaction to the pain. He tells me if he wasn’t so nice he would have shot me up with something to keep me from passing out, that way it would go on for what would feel like forever.
The tenderness I feel in my side is dizzying. Like I’ve been shot. Part of me wonders if this was how Gerhard felt when I shot him. Why isn’t he limping? This is both interesting and impossible. I hit him dead center to do the most damage, didn’t I? I know I’m a terrible shot, but didn’t I see it?
