Needles & Sins

by John Everson

  “Let’s go in through the alley,” I suggested, not quite ready to bash in a window in full view of the empty street. I picked up one of the paving stones from the front walkway, and then we walked around an unkempt browning evergreen shrub to slip into the shadows of the alley. There wasn’t a light on in any of the buildings nearby, and in seconds, we were literally feeling our way down the wall of the building to a window.

  “This should be the window in the hall near the first waiting room,” I said, raising my hand to bash the rock through it. She pulled a t-shirt over her head and held it out to me, while standing in the alley wearing only a bra and pants.

  “Wrap this around your hand,” she said. “We can’t afford for you to cut your hand now.”

  Appreciating the irony, I used the shirt to wrap and protect my hand, and then brought the rock down on the glass.

  In the movies, glass smashes like so much electric tinsel. This glass was tougher. My hand bounced off it on the first try, and again on the second, though this time the edge of the rock made a chiseled, white-crusted mark.

  On the third try, after I exposed the edge of the rock better, and swung my arm harder, the glass gave way with a crackling splash of sound. My arm slipped into the warmth of the inside of my old office, and jabbed painfully on a shard of glass still stuck in the base of the window. But the protection of her shirt paid off, and I pulled back my operating hand unscathed. In moments, using her shirt as protection, I had cleaned off enough of the ledge of free form glass that she could help me up and into the office.

  Once inside, I found a chair and handed it through the window to her. In seconds we were both inside. I pulled the window shades on my old small surgical center room to close out prying eyes, and flipped the switch to turn on the lights. The electric still worked.

  Another bonus. My ex-office was on a deserted street in a shady side of the city and was locked from the outside…but still had electricity. Janis had surely chosen her surgeon well.

  I almost cried as I looked around at my old operating table, equipment drawers and red-stickered bodily waste disposal can. I hadn’t performed an operation in weeks now. And I missed it so bad. It had been my life…when I had a life.

  Janis didn’t look around. She wasn’t here to reminisce. She stripped off her bra and pants, and laid down on the table in the center of the room. “I’m ready,” she announced.

  I wasn’t. I asked for her to wait a moment and walked out of the bright room back into the black of the hallway and into the shadowy grey of my old office. The furniture was still there as well, and I pulled open a drawer of my desk. It was empty.

  But I felt with my fingers to the way-back of the drawer until I found a small steel stub. I pushed it, and a small door opened. My fingers slipped in, pulled out the glass container, and held it up to the dim light.

  A small secret stash of Maker’s Mark. Half full. I twisted off the stopper, took a long gulp and held it in my mouth, enjoying the burn as it settled on my gums and strained at the back of my throat.

  I coughed when I swallowed, and said “Fuck yeah” to a vacant room. Then I stalked back to the OR, to do what I was being paid for.

  To kill a woman.

  A woman who was paying me to kill her. My only saving grace here, I figured, was the fact that I would be wearing rubber gloves. I pulled on a pair as soon as I got back to the room with my bottle.

  “Care to share?” Janis asked.

  When I cocked an eyebrow at the question, she said, “Hey, I didn’t say I couldn’t have a drink. I just can’t be knocked out like a log.”

  We shared a couple swigs, and I marveled at the color in her eyes. They were brown, but that dark light veiled a flicker of fire. And desperation.

  “What do you want me to do?” I said presently.

  She pointed the way. “Cut here. And here,” she said.

  “And here.”

  She pointed to her forehead, and breastbone and belly. I retrieved a marking pen from the surgical drawer and drew lines across her in the places she marked, which grew to include slash marks on her arms and legs.

  “Why do you want to die?” I asked at the end. “And why do you want to do it in such a painful way?”

  Her chin trembled in a deliciously frightened but determined way. “I don’t want to die,” she said. “I want to live. Finally.”

  “This operation, without anesthesia, or instant stitching up, which you say you don’t want, will kill you,” I declared. As I said it, my leg gave out and I clutched at the table she presented her naked body on.

  “So says the drunk,” she tittered, and lay back on the table, exposing breasts I could never hope to suck between my pale, lost lips without induced anesthesia. I’d been there before, and the legal aftermath hadn’t been a feather pillow. She didn’t really need surgery to look good. But she was going to use an ex-surgeon to make her look bad. Really bad.

  I pinioned her hands in the straps, and then locked down her feet.

  “They’ll arrest me,” I said. But I’m sure she could tell from my voice that that wouldn’t stop me. Desperation breeds fatalism.

  “Do what I paid you for,” she insisted.

  I pulled a scalpel out of the surgical tray and held it up to make sure there were no stains on its shiny surface. I needn’t have bothered. I knew that if I started cutting this woman, I was going to kill her, so postoperative infection really wasn’t a concern.

  “Start on my face,” she said.

  I took another slug of bourbon, and brought the blade down to her forehead. Slowly, I pressed the blade into the skin of her head just above the nose, and began to bring it down. She moaned, slightly, as I broke the skin, but then, before I’d cut an inch, she yelled at me.

  “Deeper you fuck. Don’t just make me hurt…Cut me open, you lazy no-good hack of a butcher!”

  She pissed me off.

  The blade seemed to slide through her flesh of its own accord, dividing her nose in half right down to the skull, and creating a cleft in her upper lip that not only severed the outer lip but dipped deep inside her oral cavity to open her gums to the bone.

  She began to scream, bubbling bloody spray and air all over my hands, but I laughed in a haze of violence begat by empty loss.

  “You want me to cut you?” I said, as I drew the blade along the smudged marker line on her throat. The wheeze of her gurgling wet breath instantly filled the room.

  “I’ll cut you to the bone you stupid crazy bitch,” I said. The blade slipped into the chest cavity, and I could see the white of her sternum as I slit and pressed hard. I was no longer performing an operation, but a desecration. I wanted to cut her open from tit to spine. From belly to coccyx. I would lay this stupid cunt open to the core. She had badgered and stalked me and offered me the glimpse of green that could save my pathetic life, at least for another month or two. And I wanted to give her exactly what she’d asked for.

  Customer service indeed.

  “Does this feel good?” I asked, as the lining of her belly parted with a warm rush of iron breath and I could see the inner bags of her uterus and stomach lying like fruit to be plucked and crushed in her cavity.

  A rage had taken me, and I couldn’t stop.

  “Stupid, stupid, fuckin’ crazy cunt,” I howled, and dug the blade into the delicate pink folds that led from her esophagus to her belly and again from her belly to the wrinkled, tightly wrapped folds of her intestine. The room filled with the rich organic scent of blood and the foul retch of shit. And an acid, back-of the-bar smell of puke. Her insides opened like tissue paper to my knife, and I cut through them indiscriminately. On the table she thrashed and screamed but once begun, I didn’t look back. I continued to follow the lines I’d drawn at her direction, and opened the flesh of her thighs to the yellowing muscle near the bone, and to the calves, and to the bones of her shaking, convulsing, last-seconds-of-life arms.

  I cut the tendons at her wrists last. She had stopped screaming, though her how
ls were still an echo in my ears. Her blood had spilled like water from a broken dam to the floor, and her shit and piss and blood mixed in a foul odor that colored my world in a red haze of horror. A horror that I had created, bathed in, enjoyed. I was crying as I traced my blade along the last lines of marker to sever the tendons of her fingers.

  I stepped back from what was left of Janis Phoenix and looked at the ruin of her body. She had not been so bad to start. But now…now there was nothing pretty left. White flesh speckled with the radiant blood of murder. Blue eyes bulged with the pain of unmitigated brutality. Guts opened to spill like slaughterhouse waste to the ground.

  I hadn’t needed to pry her flesh open as she’d asked to let her “inner self” out. Her flesh had parted to the violence of my knife without resistance. Her life was an open book, and I was the sole reader. But I could not see any story worth studying now. She was a testament to death, and an accusation to me. How could I have fallen so far?

  After years of carving people open to change and shift and stitch them into another—a hopefully better— form, I looked at Janis and felt violently ill. My stomach lurched uncontrollably and I dropped to my knees on the operating floor, the bourbon a hot flame in my gullet that threatened to join the blood and offal of Janis on the floor. Accusation indeed.

  But as I fought off the sickness of my own pathetic life’s decay, I looked up at the body of Janis Phoenix. She shook and trembled on the table, clearly in her last death throes. I had cut her as she wanted. And her last words were to call me a butcher because I wasn’t cutting enough.

  I stood, grabbing at the table for support, and stared down into the hole I had dug in the poor woman.

  Something moved inside her.

  Something pink, and long and agile. It shook and rattled against the confinement of her flesh, shifting folds of tissue and gut and then, finally, punched through the suffocation of her intestines. A hand.

  The fingers were small but perfect. They waved in the air like a flag of victory. Or denial. I can still see the shiny needles of their white, blood-streaked nails in my minds’ eye today. First one hand, and then another emerged into the empty air from the brutalized gore of her chest, and then a small but delicate leg pulled free of the flesh of her thigh to point like a cheerleader at the blinding glare of the operating room light.

  A head finally slid free of the mush I had made of Janis’ not-so-terrible face. It had skin of porcelain, and eyes of ocean blue. It was sexy and ethereal at the same time. With a grin that showed teeth no newborn nymph should ever have, it slid like rubber from the bloodbath of her broken core and then, dragging all of its newly born body with it, fell in an uncoordinated tangle to the bloody tile of the floor.

  “Oh my fuckin’ god,” I whispered, looking at the thing I had released from Janis’ body. Sirens were screaming outside, but I didn’t even notice.

  Its mouth opened perfect, pointed teeth to laugh, and then the creature I had set free from Janis Phoenix stood up for the first time on its own two feet. She wrapped two bloody hands around my waist, looked up into my eyes with deadly piercing orbs of her own and with a strangely garbled squeak, laughed at me. I swear it was a laugh of thanks, not of meanness. As she pulled away, in a high, breathy voice she gasped three words. Maybe they were just nonsense. Syllables of the damned. I don’t know. But I could have swore she said, “Free, at last.”

  Then she stepped back and walked, nakedly— and almost human— to the broken window out in the hallway that I had entered with Janis less than an hour before. With a single, strangely liquid wave, she slipped over the sill and into the alley to disappear into the night.

  “What did I do?” I whispered, as I looked back at the mutilated body of Janis Phoenix. “What DO I do now?”

  The room was filled with the shifting light of red and blue as the sirens I’d been hearing grew closer. You can’t strap down and flay a woman alive and not expect someone to hear the screams if you lived within 50 miles of…anything. And this was the city. A backwater slum, but still the city.

  The wrecked, split face of Janis looked back at me and smiled. Smiled in the wrong direction. A vertical smile of murder.

  I was fucked, whether she had left hundreds or thousands of dollars in my pocket. Whether they found my fingerprints or my rubber gloves. I knelt to pick up her pants and her shirt, running my hands through the pockets to look for whatever money might be hidden there. Maybe I could still follow the strange creature who had slipped free of Janis like a wraith. Like a prisoner set free from a lifetime in a cage. I found a pocketful of green, but the spotlights already splitting the black shadows of the ceiling said they wouldn’t help.

  “I did what you wanted and set you free,” I whispered to the dead remains of a not-so-crazy woman in what had formerly been my operating suite. “I let something inside of you out.”

  From the hallway of my office, a smash, and then a voice.

  “Put your hands in the air.”

  Somehow I knew that it wasn’t in the cards for me to have the same kind of transcendent, phoenix-like rebirth as the corpse on my table.

  Bills fell from my hands like confetti, and I stood to meet the start of my own new life. I suspected that it would be far more confining.

  — | — | —

  THE STRONG WILL SURVIVE

  The petals slip lazily down like bloody autumn leaves, spattering the glass above his face. I put the unbreakable window there to protect him. Not from decay, he’d done that already himself, but from the children, the pilgrims. They come from near and far. Hundreds of them. Thousands. They continue to pass through this corridor and still, they do not cease to come.

  They do not bring friends. Certainly not lovers. Their pilgrimage here stems from the hidden depths of love.

  And hate.

  Some wait in salvaged pews that I dragged here weeks ago from an abandoned church on 11th Street. Often the pilgrims wait in this damp, concrete warren for hours or days before leaving. Some arrive wearing three-piece blue pinstripe suits, and some appear in sweat pants and Reeboks. Still others are dressed for the season, in layers—flannel draped over cotton shirts and T-shirts and Marine-green Eskimo coats on top of it all. I thought they should have some place to sit and sleep besides the blackened floor.

  Time seems to stand still here, deep below the steady pound of the city. Trains are the only clock, breaking the chill silence periodically with their rhythmic clicking and clacking and braking screeches. The room rumbles and shakes with their passage, but leaves us otherwise unchanged. Untouched. Our attention rarely strays from the dead man beneath the glass. He also, untouched. And we…untouchable.

  A middle-aged man kneels before him now, the gift of crimson roses shivering slightly between his clenched fingers. His almond hair is already silvering, his wide, faintly Irish face furrowed with the early cat scratches of time and heartache and worry. His ears look chafed and protrude somewhat from the cut of his close-cropped hair. A dark mole guards the entrance to his right ear, the one facing me. A tear glistens there too, and the slow rain of curling petals turns to a storm as his praying hands begin to pound on the glass above the face of the dead man.

  I leave him be for awhile; that’s why I put the safety glass there. There are others seated in the shadows of the room, waiting. Some for their turn at the glass, some for…even they couldn’t say. None move during the newcomer’s outburst. This man was certainly not the first whose mingled and conflicting emotions drove him to try to annihilate that which was already dead. But, like any monument, I felt this one needed preservation, so that all who were summoned could have the chance to witness.

  And yes, I mean summoned.

  This is no open exhibit. No wake for friends. We were all called here.

  I was the first.

  I called the rest.

  ««—»»

  I almost didn’t open the envelope. Karen’s funeral was still a thorny crown around my eyes, constricting my ability to see beyond t
he most selfish moments, and most of my mail was going straight from box to trash. I had no time for junk solicitations. I had no time for much of anything besides nursing a parade of golden longnecks on my couch while staring at the goose-feathered dreamcatcher she’d given me just weeks before. It hung, a manmade mystical web of feather and twine, in the living room above my television, where it was likely to stay empty. No dreams there. Only regrets.

  While the return address in the upper lefthand corner was pre-printed with a doctor’s name and street, this envelope was hand-addressed to me. When the day’s refinancing offers and car wash coupons and CAR-RT-SORT vacation offers slipped unread into the paper recycling bin, I held this one out. Absently slipping my thumb beneath the loose endflap, I opened it.

  Inside was a small piece of stationary, emblazoned with the same return address as the envelope. Upon it, a hastily scrawled, cryptic note:

  I need to see you. It’s urgent. Come at once.

  —Dr. Chavis

  I stared at the address, and the name, trying to make sense of it. I hadn’t been to a doctor for myself in years, though I’d certainly sat with Karen in several crowded reception areas. But none of her increasingly desperate appointments had occurred in the area of town that this office was in. And I didn’t recall any Dr. Chavis from our medical travelogue. We’d been from one specialist to another, looking for the miracle cure to her chronic disease.

  We hadn’t found one.