The Death of Wendell Mackey

by C. T. Westing

  Finally, they turned to Wendell.

  “Mr. Mackey, right? Yes, good morning to you too.”

  Seeming accidental, the doctor had run into Wendell in the hall, dropping his pile of papers. Seeming accidental, as the doctor knew Wendell’s name, even though Wendell wasn’t in his coveralls with his name stenciled on the front pocket. The supposedly chance encounter had begun a conversation continued over coffee on Wendell’s job at the institution. Peppered into the conversation were questions about Wendell’s background—awkwardly framed as innocuous, as some of them bordered on the intimate, but didn’t cause the doctor to bat an eye. Wendell, not conversationally adept, still knew enough to suspect that the casual conversation was more of an interview, or an examination. The white collars and the blue collars didn’t mix, and Wendell’s status on the bottom rung of the ladder shouldn’t have warranted any attention—be it serious or friendly—from the upper levels. But still, the doctor, a Dr. Scotia from one of the research divisions, was interested in him. Wendell remembered that first encounter in the hall, looking into Dr. Scotia’s face, which was pink and smooth, as if all laugh lines and brow creases, all expression, had been wiped clear and thrown away. His lab coat, his black slacks, his white shirt and pale blue tie, all had been pressed with obsessive care, giving his shape subtle, but unnatural, sharp edges.

  Their first encounter was followed by a second, more intentional one. “A bit under the weather, perhaps?” he remembered Dr. Scotia saying, dedicating little time to small talk. It had been in the cafeteria. Scotia had dropped his cinnamon bun onto his tray and folded his hands under his chin. “You look, well, you just don’t look up to par. There is a bug going around, you know.” There were eyes behind the glasses, but nothing behind the eyes. He had brought Wendell up to his office on the top floor of the building and put a thermometer in his mouth, all of which led to a quick physical exam—“Friend to friend, Mr. Mackey, nothing else”—in an adjacent examination room. Blood pressure, temperature (again), otoscope, ophtholmascope, probing the lymph glands in his neck, all followed by copious notes written into his tablet PC.

  “So, what kind of bug is it?”

  “Nothing.” Scotia looked up from his computer. His pupils looked slightly dilated, and Wendell saw the faint flutter of his heartbeat in his neck, but his face stayed placid. “Nothing to get worked up about. But all of this does present us with an interesting opportunity.”

  Expressionless words from an expressionless face, but with hindsight, they worked with the efficacy of a magic incantation opening a secret door, through which were unhinged horrors and the black heart of the institution. Somewhere below him, the screams in the vents had increased.

  “What do you mean?”

  Scotia turned and went back into his office. He returned, shaking a bottle of medication in front of him. “Everyone wants to be better, Mr. Mackey. Not just healthier, but better. More alert, in great shape, smarter and happier. A simple regimen of these vitamins is the first step. Not only will it knock that bug out of you, it will improve everything. It’s something we’ve been developing for years, but we’ve only been doing voluntary tests for the past few months. It’s completely safe, of course, and it comes with monetary remuneration.”

  “With…”

  “Payment, Mr. Mackey, as many medical studies do. But after a few weeks, I assure you you’ll feel like you’re stealing our money.” He handed it to Wendell. “Three a day, with water.”

  And with that, Wendell was sent home. Wendell the Employee of the Month, the triathlete, the supervitamin spokesman and future Nobel laureate. He would change. Dr. Scotia would help. Better times and greener pastures.

  “Screams,” Wendell said to himself, sitting at the wooden table in his mother’s empty apartment. “Wonder if anyone heard mine through those vents.”

  He recalled an exchange he had at a local bar with his coworkers, two weeks after his examination. The three men had been huddled around a circular table with a painted checker board fading into its top. Wendell was cupping his empty mug, waiting for it to magically refill.

  “They got you guys on those performance vitamins?” he asked.

  Laughlin and Connor put down their beers and turned towards Wendell.

  “You know,” he continued, “those vitamins, the red ones that they leave in your locker?”

  The two men looked at each other, then back to Wendell.

  “With a note?” Wendell said. “Says something about workers being less effective due to bad sleeping habits, yadda yadda, something about a substitute for caffeine, and…”

  “They giving you vitamins? Hell, they don’t even give me two weeks’ vacation,” said Laughlin.

  “It’s nothing then.”

  “No, it’s not nothing. Connor, you?”

  “Just making enough to pay for school,” said Connor.

  “So why’re they giving you them? Afraid you’ll fall asleep on the mower and run yourself over?” When Laughlin laughed, his lips revealed teeth lined with black at the gum line.

  “Honestly, I don’t know. You think they’re, you know, running some special experiment with me or something?”

  Now it was Connor’s turn to laugh. “Yeah, sure Wendell, with you. And I hear that the Air Force is recruiting bus drivers for test pilots.” He lifted a hand to signal the waitress for another pitcher. “It’s probably just surplus they’re trying to junk. You’re more Oscar the Grouch than the Six Million Dollar Man.”

  “I don’t know. They told me about some study…”

  “They’ll say it’s for some study, but some company policy says they can’t just throw it all out. It’s probably just a placebo. It’s just tricking you into thinking it’s doing something, when in reality it’s just a sugar pill.”

  The waitress returned and filled Wendell’s mug before setting the pitcher on the center of the checker board.

  “But I’ll say this,” said Laughlin, “that whatever they’re giving you sure isn’t working. You look like hell hung over.”

  “They told me it’d take a week of two of ‘cleansing’ before things started to…feel good.” Cleansing apparently meant nausea and vomiting, and diarrhea that felt like it was propelled by a jet engine. The first time Wendell felt it coming, he had to dash to the men’s room using his hand to squeeze his buttocks together. What he did to that toilet had rattled the windows. “So I guess that means that this whole color thing—” and he used his hand to circle around his face.

  “You mean lack of color,” Connor said.

  “Yeah, whatever. But it’s not supposed to last.”

  Of course, it had. He had soiled himself once during the night. Two days later, he awoke with a line of red descending from the corner of his mouth to a faint splotch of pink on his chin. He had rubbed it off, thinking they were pillow creases, and not blood. Another splotch, far more pronounced and at the bottom of his boxer shorts, made him reconsider. Still, he hesitated to contact the doctor, even though the doctor had insisted that Wendell contact him with any concerns. It was the way he had said it to Wendell, “Call me with problems,” abrupt and seeming to contain a veiled meaning, that bothered him, as if Scotia expected Wendell to call, hoped he would in fact, and wouldn’t see Wendell’s concerns as anything at all concerning to him. The doctor seemed too eager.

  “You think beer’s good for you right now?” Connor refilled his own mug. “You know, the whole ‘Don’t mix alcohol and drugs’ thing.”

  “Not drugs. Vitamins.”

  “Potato, po-tah-to,” said Connor. “If they come from a doc where we work, they’re drugs.”

  Laughlin looked at Connor and planted his knuckles onto the table. He turned to Wendell. “Don’t listen to him. So who gave them to you?”

  “Some doctor. Works on the top floor. Dr. Scotia.” Wendell thought of the notes that Scotia left in his locker with the refills, his last name always printed and not cursive, and with a line drawn under it, but for emphasis, arrogance,
or out of sheer habit, Wendell couldn’t guess. The t in Scotia was always larger than the other letters and looked like a cross planted into the soil of the underline.

  “Good man,” said Laughlin. “Jumped his car battery once. Gave me a gift certificate to Applebee’s. Nice guy.”

  “Top researcher. Ph.D. and an M.D.,” said Connor. “He’s doing cutting edge stuff. I’d love to intern with that guy. Just ask him why you look like a junkie with the flu.”

  But asking meant calling Scotia, and there was something about him, about that smooth pink face, and how he was overly articulate with his consonants and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his pen and stared through Wendell like he could see the little red pills dissolve in Wendell’s stomach, that made him nervous.

  Still, like a dutiful employee, he kept taking the pills, which only exacerbated his occasional insomnia, soon keeping him up round the clock and prompting snoozes on his lawnmower, just as Laughlin had joked. This, of course, prompted Laughlin to trade jokes for profanity, which in turn brought a demand that Wendell contact Scotia about the situation. One afternoon meeting later led to something new.

  Wendell pressed the pencil into the wooden kitchen table, digging each letter in, one at a time:

  O B S E R V A T I O N

  Overnight observation, “Done by the best in the business,” Scotia said, “our Nocturnal Anomalies Group.” The entire conversation—more a monologue, with Scotia feeding off of Wendell’s nervous silence—was peppered with the dueling refrains “All for the best” and “It’s nothing to worry about.”

  Wendell remembered Scotia staring at him, through him.

  “You are suffering from some insomnia, right?” Scotia had asked.

  “Yes.

  “Then we’re agreed,” and he clapped his hands together, satisfied and smiling.

  The NAG wing hid behind a set of double doors with a stenciled figure reclining in a bed painted on them. At the end of every work day, Scotia would gently usher Wendell into the elevator and up to the NAG, talking all the way about the benefits of even more monetary remuneration. It was there, on the overnights, that they started administering drugs intravenously. Racing through arteries like freeways. There were no answers from the nurses, just their firm faces with all the animation of a rock quarry. But the night nurses weren’t nurses; nurses didn’t carry pistols conspicuously under their blue smocks, but those men did. Questions weren’t answered. Medications were changed, or increased. On his lunch break, a young doctor would make a trip down to the break room, just to watch Wendell swallow all of his pills. After a few weeks, something began to appear behind their eyes. Curiosity didn’t describe it. It was almost like hunger.

  Hunger, Wendell thought, which reminded him of his own. His stomach rumbling, he stared back down at the table, and he thought back to the last time that he saw Connor and Laughlin.

  They had been staring at him, oblivious to their beers, not concerned but curious. It was as if he was something new to them, like a zoo exhibit just opened. They were observant, but with a tremor of apprehension, watching the lines in his face and the bluing under his eyes for some indication that an event would soon transpire. Wendell might fall unconscious and crack a tooth on his mug, or go into a seizure, or bleed from his pores, or crack, open up, and pour out before them, a human cataclysm with poisoned blood that burned the checker board table and cheap floor tiles. They were just waiting, their heads hung low on their necks like vultures, waiting for what they thought was the inevitable.

  Wendell licked his lips.

  “So, Wendell, we’ve been…hearing things,” Laughlin said, looking to Connor, then to Wendell.

  “What kinda things?”

  It was becoming difficult to read their faces. They both sucked at their beers.

  “We’re keeping your locker untouched,” said Laughlin. “So when you come back…I mean, well, it’ll be there. Still there.”

  “My locker?”

  Connor leaned forward. “So, what’s it like?”

  “What’s what like? And when I come back from where? What’s going on?” Clearly, something was happening, Wendell knew it as well as anyone else, but in somehow avoiding it in open conversation, whatever it was that waited for him could be held at bay. Avoidance felt secure, even when everything else pointed in the other direction.

  “You know Wendell,” said Laughlin, “moving you into one of those on-site apartments.”

  Apparently, the previous night the decision had been made to bring him into the institution for more observation. Wendell assumed that, while groggy and nauseous, he had signed his name onto something to make it all legitimate, but he couldn’t remember. The pills—vitamins, since to Wendell, their power, or lack thereof, lay in what they were termed—had been the first step. And with their power to deaden his stomach and corrode his bowels, this first step had led him to the edge of a precipice. Whatever followed had the power to push him into the void. And what followed were the overnight intravenous drugs and a series of injections, the latter administered during lunch delivery by Dr. Scotia and a stone-faced nurse.

  “And your sleeping habits?” Dr. Scotia had asked during one of their weekly meetings, “still the same?” Something in his voice told Wendell that he didn’t need an answer, that he had already supplied himself with one. And with that, even without his signature touching any paper, the decision to extend his stay at the NAG was made.

  So when Connor asked what it was like, what it felt like is what Wendell assumed he meant, Wendell wondered if it was the medication, or the whole process, that Connor was thinking of. The pills and injections were one thing, but the secrecy, the questions gone unanswered, the plastic smiles and piped-in Muzak in the halls, and the doctor and his nurses at all hours appearing as if out of the tiled walls of his room, were something entirely different. It was all unknown and disturbing, his health in the hands of people who treated him for some unseen malady and pulled a veil over his eyes at the same time.

  “What’s it all like…” Wendell mused.

  They kept staring at him. He drained his beer.

  “It’s not like I feel weak or anything. Just different. Unsettled. Like all that vomiting and, well, you know—” and Wendell put his hands to his stomach “—were just emptying me out so that I’d get filled up with something new.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You look different,” said Connor.

  “Different how?”

  Connor dropped his eyes to his mug.

  “So when do you move in?” asked Laughlin.

  Move in. It usually implied moving out of somewhere else, but his studio apartment had nothing to do with his job at the institution. It would still be there, above the Thai restaurant, with its peeling linoleum, its refrigerator with its jackhammer motor, and the television on the tray table with its postage stamp screen that displayed as much snow as it did actual images. A humble cave for an unknown anchorite. The problem was that Wendell was no longer unknown. And like it or not, with attention drawn to him, moving into the institution—however temporary they insisted it would be—necessarily meant moving out of his cave. His refrigerator, his television, his privacy, all would stay tucked away above the restaurant. But something told him that he would never see them again.

  Something in Wendell trembled.

  He remembered saying “I don’t know” to Laughlin and Connor, but couldn’t remember hearing his own voice. Both men looked at him, and nodded, with the solemnity of churchmen.

  That evening, after returning to the NAG from the bar, Dr. Scotia had asked Wendell to go home, pack a suitcase, and return. Succinct, and said with a smile.

  After so much time as a patient —weeks, if not months, as time had a tendency to tumble into miscalculation in the institution—that last conversation in the bar, rational and lucid, engaged under his own power and with the only friends he could remember, kept crystal clarity in his mind, marking a dividing line between death and adve
nt, man and monster. He would cling to that memory, replaying it in his mind as he lay in his bed in the institution, staring at the tiles in the ceiling. But replaying it brought up a question: had his friends known? He scrutinized every phrase, every dropped glance, the tone of their voices and the furrows in their brows. All of it could have signaled concern, or curiosity. And had they known what was to happen to their friend—laughable as that word friend was if they truly had known—then they were complicit. Conspirators, abettors, as much bloodstained as the men who wielded the needles and scalpels.

  “Thought we’d stick together. Thought we’d watch each other’s backs,” Wendell said to himself. “But if they turned on me, if they were working with them, then I…then I’ll…” His hands dropped to the wooden table, and his anger sank into his conjecture.

  Were they capable of conspiring with the doctors to bring him in? Connor perhaps. He was quick, educated, a grad student desirous for a future in a lab coat at the institution. But Laughlin was a dull cog on a slow wheel, a mediocre foreman too lazy even for the GED, his libidinous eye for barmaids more his personal driver than his own brain. But betrayal required little intellectual capacity, and it would have only taken a case of beer and new mud flaps to buy Laughlin’s loyalty, if there had been any to buy at all. In the end, it mattered little. He didn’t know where they lived, and if they really had worked to get Wendell imprisoned, the institution’s leadership was smart enough to make them disappear as easily as they had done to Wendell.

  The night after seeing Connor and Laughlin, the night he was to move into the institution, Wendell found that his employee locker had been cleaned out. His work boots, extra flannel shirt, the Hotrod Girls calendar, the picture of his mother, his I.D. tag, all gone. He remembered closing the locker door and being met with the face of a new doctor, this one with a black toupee and an oily smile. The doctor gave a saccharine greeting, followed by “Won’t you come with me?” and a grand sweep of his hand towards the locker room door. Behind the doctor, flanking the door, were two of the armed nurses. They walked him to the elevator, eyeing him closely, even as the doors closed and the elevator rose, and dropped him off at Dr. Scotia’s office.