Soul Standard

by Richard Thomas

She drops her black bag beside his head, pulls off his jacket and shirt. She grabs a vial from the front pocket and draws a full syringe, fingertip tapping air bubbles to the top.

  “What the fuck is that?”

  “I’m not heartless. I don’t want him to get an infection.” She jabs it into his arm, sinks the plunger. “Get the brown bottle from my bag.”

  I stand in my place, staring, skin prickling as if all the hairs on my body are being yanked out one by one.

  She snaps her fingers. “Marcel. Now. Worse for him if he wakes up.”

  Rifling through her bag, I slice my finger on something sharp, grab the bottles and present her with all three.

  She nods toward his midsection, says to rub the iodine there. “There’s gauze in the bag.”

  His belly turns mahogany in streaks. I don’t know where I’m supposed to clean or exactly what she’s doing, but I get the blooming idea that the stories about organ thieves aren’t just for telling around an oil drum fire.

  She lays a swath of knives, needles, threads, clamps, and thin rubber hoses on the blanket, hands me a paper mask.

  I motion around the room, at the cobwebs and soiled food and hay. “I don’t think sterility is an issue.”

  “It’s for us,” she says. “I don’t know what this pervert has, and I don’t want it squirting up into my mouth.”

  “You’re going to take his organs, aren’t you?”

  She arches an eyebrow. “Organ.” Beneath the mask she could be smiling, but her eyes seem calm, collected. “Singular.”

  “Do you know how to do surgery?”

  She extracts a roll of paper tied with a twine bow from the bag and unrolls it on the dusty office desk to the side. “I know how to make clothes. It’s all basically cutting and sewing, really.”

  A soft sigh that I realize is skin parting. “What are you taking?”

  Her finger leaves a dark smudge on the paper, somewhere in the abdomen of the butcher’s diagram redrawn to human form. “Pancreas.”

  I stand back and watch her move. Her hands open the slit flesh, massage the muscles to the sides, ply organs from one another. She disassembles Timothy Dermott’s body the way vultures turn carrion to skeletons. Steadily efficient, but with an unexplainable sort of grace. If the White Swan were covered in blood and pirouetting through meat, this could be presented on a stage. It’s not until she pushes down near the bladder, sending a dark stain across his pants, that the image of Mona on the sidewalk comes crashing down on me. Lying on the sidewalk, moaning, clutching her stomach and trying to scoop everything back inside her, all while I’m across the City at a gym, bloodying another man.

  Carissa grunts, says to stop playing with myself and give her a clamp. I hand her three and return to staring.

  “Look in my bag. There’s a silver foil pouch in there. Grab it for me.”

  “For what?”

  She cocks her hip and in her hands she holds a dripping lump of pink and brown, blue veins threading around it.

  I fetch the pouch, open it for her. “Don’t you need a cooler or something?”

  “What is this? An urban legend? Some detective book? Who walks around with a cooler?” She tips her head to the side and asks if I’m not brain damaged.

  “I sound fine, don’t I?”

  “Just want to know what I’m getting myself into.”

  Something about her tone makes my legs tingle.

  “If you go through that door,” she points, holding out the pouch, a drop of blood falling from her fingertip, “there’s ice on the right-hand side. Take this and fill it up. I don’t want it to spoil.”

  I swing the door open with my foot, enter a kitchen of some sort. The smell of rotting wood pervades the room. I can feel the mustiness on my tongue. Dripping water plinks into a puddle. I look to the right and find a silver chest with split doors. I begin scooping out handfuls of ice.

  Voices close by. I stop scooping, stop breathing. I clutch the foil pouch containing a pirated pancreas, my cohort caught unawares in the next room. I squint, sharpen my hearing. The voice is familiar. Old, manicured by a life of luxury, smoothed by unquestioned power. Arthur Reiss?

  Further along the perimeter I come to swinging doors. Flickering neon colors bleed from the other side. I press it open slightly, catch a sliver of a fat Caucasian with dyed hair and a fake tan staring at the television. Brian. The fucking tiki bar.

  I weave through the kitchen to the back room, not caring enough to be quiet, but not quite making a noise. Carissa has Timothy Dermott stitched up from pelvis to sternum, only another five inches until he’s waterproof again.

  “The bar?”

  She looks up, shrugs. “Thirsty?”

  I lay the pouch in her bag, not sure how gentle I should be with an autonomous organ, sit and watch while she finishes.

  “Will he live?”

  “I hope so.” She snips the end of the thread, prepares another syringe. “The first one was antibiotic. This is insulin, to make up for, well, you know.”

  I nod.

  “He won’t be able to eat right for a while, but he’ll manage.” As she massages the shot through his muscle, a quiet laugh rolls from her chest. “You know, really, injecting himself every day is going to get old quick, so he’ll probably hire someone to find him a pancreas.”

  “Oh?”

  “So, on the bright side, at least we got ourselves another job.”

  Silence fills the early morning apartment. The west-facing windows keep the room dim and cool. Springs jab into my back every time I shift positions on the couch, and I lace my fingers behind my head and try to relax, staring at the shifting shadows on the ceiling. A kidney slips into a liver that splits down the center, becomes two fists nestling into ocular cavities. Amorphous organs made of darkness, ones I’ve seen but couldn’t identify hanging from chains in Chinatown storefront windows. Ribbons of old torch songs weave between the splotches of black stretching thin, effortlessly separating like cleaved flesh, elongating into hands cupped for sculpting, hands arced like protective wings, hands that peck apart the ceiling, baby birds to their mother. Her voice slides in patches from one corner to the other, circles around, keeps distance with silent lefts, disappears with a heavy right. A dark edge appears—the outline of her jaw as she’s bent over a body, concentrating. Reflections halve the twisting shadows. The specks, her glistening forehead, wiped away with the back of her wrist, keeping blood from her face. The dark coalescing into the thin wedge of her chin, her slender cheeks, her twisting hair, swollen lips. And Mona screaming, screaming, screaming.

  I run to the bedroom. The sheet winds around her legs, pinning her to the bed. Her arms thrash, beat the mattress. I hold her arms to her side, press on her wrists, make white noise beside her ear.

  Five minutes later she’s calm but still trembling. I sit on the edge of the mattress, hands near her shoulder but not touching, humming a constant note to give her focus. As her breathing begins to level, I lean my head against the wall, listening to the blood thrum through my skull.

  She grunts, hooks her chin toward the cloth’s edge. I pick up the paring knife and hand it to her. She flicks her head to the side, blows a short breath through her lips that flutters her hair. I pull it back and fold it into a thin ponytail.

  Flesh parts easily, the iron cauterizing rough-hewn edges as it passes. Sizzle and pop, the scent of scorched flesh filling my nostrils. I can taste it in the back of my throat but the impulse to gag has since passed.

  I hold on to the trader’s toes as Carissa pops a crick from her neck, starts pushing the saw through the ankle. The teeth catch on a hard patch—probably where he’s broken it before, and I wonder if that was from another, earlier unpaid debt or if he slipped on an icy patch. A towel around the cut, she keeps on with the saw until the foot hangs loose in my fingers, a red puddle forming on the tarp below. By the look and smell of the carpet, though, management would hardly notice any additional stains, and I doubt he’d be in danger of losing
any security deposit. The flat plane of his stump reminds me of sausage left in the pan until the next morning.

  Carissa drops the trader’s separated foot into a foil pouch and lets go a sigh.

  “Want to get a concha later?” she says.

  “Sure. Warner’s?”

  “Of course. Best in the City.” She seals up the foil pouch, keeping the foot fresh inside. Her face is flushed and spent. “That wasn’t too bad, now was it?”

  “Not quite how I planned to spend my evening, but it’s getting easier.”

  She touches my cheek with a bloody glove, and I flinch. “Such a fragile flower.”

  I splash hydrogen peroxide over my face, rub it with my sleeve. “What is Sal going to do with a random foot?”

  She hands me the pouch, considers me for a moment. “This one’s off the books.”

  “This isn’t for Sal?” I spread some of the ice, nestle the pouch inside.

  “Sal ain’t the only game in town.”

  “That seems a little risky.”

  She points the syringe at me. “Not if you can keep your mouth shut. This whole freelance thing—” Gesturing around the tenement room. “—this involves me, you, and Mr. I Don’t Feel Like Paying My Debts over there. Sal needs to hear nothing of this. You feel the need to chirp, little chicken, and I’ll take your wings next time.”

  I hold my palms out, telling her to calm down.

  “I’m making sure you know the score.” She unscrews a bottle of something that looks like gelatinous amber and smells like a dead dog’s asshole, extracts a small basting brush.

  I sit beside her on the mattress. “Why do you do it, then?”

  “Extra money.”

  “All of it, I mean. There’s got to be something a little less,” I look around the trader’s one-room apartment, “invasive.”

  She rubs the back of her wrist along her forehead, leaving a pale pink smear. “Look, I’m no raging beauty, but I’m easy to look at and I’ve got a voice.” She brushes the amber gel across the trader’s stump, a thin layer of bubbles left in the wake. The sound of fizzing is faintly audible. “I need to get the fuck out of here before I kill myself.”

  “So go somewhere else and sing.”

  She gives me the look a normal person would spend hours practicing, but that comes naturally to her. “It’s never that easy.”

  “Just leave.”

  The brush rustles against tarp as she drops it. She blows on the gel to dry it. “Why don’t you leave? You like having your face broke so much?”

  I flinch, say it’s not that simple.

  “Exactly.”

  “No, it’s—” I think of Mona and Plantation, Mona scrubbing our apartment, the sculptures and ghosts of herself stalking the perimeter, the look Tug gives me when I collect, the look on Sal’s face when I tell him I keep standing, the look on Mona’s face when I have to run into the room early mornings and pin her to the bed to keep her from hurting herself. “—it’s different, is all.”

  Once it’s dry, she wraps a piece of cloth around the stump, secures it with a piece of rope and lets it fall. Her head hangs loose, her neck like a broken limb. “This is from Sal,” she says, pointing at her leg. “I owed him. I’m paying him back by doing all this,” nodding at the array of knives and makeshift surgical tools.

  “How much do you owe?”

  “A lot.”

  “What do you do for them?”

  She swallows. “Stuff.”

  The trader’s fingers twitch slightly, rustle on the sackcloth blanket over his bed.

  “How much longer are you here?”

  “Depends on the job. Little ones like this don’t help with Sal, because he’ll know I went around him. It’s for the mattress, for when I’m done.”

  “Like a rainy day account?”

  “Fucking pouring.”

  The door knob shivers, shakes. I jump to my feet. She tosses a blanket over the body and knives, but his bandaged leg is still hanging out when the door opens. Yellow lamp light glints off the metal pick held behind Carissa’s back.

  A bent woman walks in, gray hair askew and two jackets draped over her broad shoulders. She surveys the room, the scene filtering through the clouds behind her corneas. A garbage bag hangs from her hand, veins like cables beneath sun-bleached leather.

  She nods a few times. “You come to collect?”

  I glance at Carissa. She says yes.

  The woman grunts. “Will he be paid up after this?”

  Carissa nods. I say maybe. Carissa tries to melt my face with a glare.

  She nods again, sets the bag next to the door. “His shopping, when he wakes up,” and she turns, closes the door, leaving Carissa and I to stand beside each other, breathe collective air and stare at cracks in the back of the door.

  My wrist turns bruise-dark as tape winds around it. I want to tell myself that it’s a consequence of missing the gym, letting my hands swell up from bloodletting with metal implements and iodine in favor of taped knuckles. Instead, I flex my fingers over my head, shake the excess fluid down my arms. I wrap the plane of my knuckles, squeeze down on the sponge in my palm. Some men use rolls of quarters, bits of pipe inside their grip—I’ve even heard of one genius taping a bullet into his palm, though luckily for all involved, he had his teeth knocked free in the first round—but it’s always felt like shying toward cheating. If you don’t believe you can fell a man by strategy, placement, and an excess of sweat, you shouldn’t be on the canvas in the first place. Granted, I’ve only come across an occasional fighter who feels the same, but still.

  Each time the door clanks at the far end of the hall, I find myself on my feet. Footsteps shuffle down the cold, damp corridor. My feet planted orthodox, left leading right by half a step, muscles flexed like a peacock. Each time I’m waiting for her to walk around the corner with a bouquet of severed fingers, a knife, a lump of pink tissue inside a heart-shaped box. Some kind of totem for good luck. And each time the blade of guilt peppers my chest when I find it’s another fighter, cornerman, cutman, mop man, house medic. I superimpose the impossible image of Mona rounding the corner but it never stays.

  Clancy rounds the corner, cackling. “I came to tape your right to your dick, so’s you keep it up.”

  “That doesn’t even make sense.”

  His fingers grip the chicken wire penning in my quarter. “If you wasn’t a bitch it would.”

  “That doesn’t either.” I plop down on the wood.

  He yanks the roll from my grip, smacks my hand against my knee and tells me to relax. He begins to wrap the tape around.

  “How’s it look out there?”

  He breathes a laugh, says, “Hungry.”

  “That so?”

  “Joking around earlier, but you really do need to keep your right up with this man. He’s got something fierce inside him. More rage than technique.”

  “Who is it again?”

  “Just a regular-ass knucklehead who’s fit to damage you because it gets him off.”

  Echoes in the hallway. Footsteps. My head turns to it like a fox to a snapping twig. Clancy twists my thumb back, hot rods shooting up my forearm. I yank back. “The fuck, Clancy?”

  “I’m trying to help you out here. You don’t want to listen, I’ll go back to my plastic cup out there.”

  “I’m listening.” Footsteps growing louder, now shuffling.

  “Then look at me.”

  I exhale, tip my head down to him.

  “He’s got some nefarious shit up in him. I recognize his cornerman from down the way. Man’s a bathroom chemist.” He finishes with a few more strips around my wrist, shores up my thumb. “You need to stay up on him. Keep him at a length so he can’t blow nothing at you, but don’t forget he’s not above a few blades.”

  I peek over his shoulder and see old Oscar pushing his mop down the gully. “Okay.”

  “Make sure your head stays on right, hear?” Hands on the rebar, he pushes himself standing. “Who you got in
your corner?”

  “Old Man Shirley.”

  Clancy grunts approval and I stand, throw a series of punches at the fridge, tiny dimples in each spot. Two uppercuts, and I jump up and down in place, working blood through my legs, swinging my arms to the side, tossing my head back and forth. Clancy holds my hands up to his face, smacks my knuckles a couple times and nods. As he turns, I ask how he got back here anyway.

  He smiles. “’Cause of you. People think I’m friends with you, I must be stand-up too.”

  Under the bright light, the boy’s not so much a boy as a monolith, a Greek warrior resurrected. His chest is leather armor. I meet him in the middle, look up at him.

  I swallow. “You up, or you in?”

  He looms above me, inhales, exhales. Every muscle ripples when he moves his arm. His beating-ridged brow casts a shadow over half of his face. The breath from his nostrils makes my arm hair tremble.

  “All right, then.” I take two steps back and wait for the bell. When it comes, he doesn’t move. I keep my hands up, approach him slowly. The crowd screams for blood. I throw a few cheap jabs, not willing to put myself within the Monolith’s wingspan. A quick look back to Old Man Shirley, who flicks his hands forward the same way you encourage a timid child.

  Fists in front of my mouth, I yell, “Come on.”

  His chest heaves. Nostrils flare. Still he stands.

  The crowd begins to quiet.

  I pull my hands in close, say, “What the fuck are you doing?” and my head ratchets to the side. I can feel my jaw leading my body, feel the weightless flutter in my stomach as my feet leave the canvas. White lights and fireflies.

  Old Man Shirley snaps his fingers, slaps my cheek. A breeze across my waist and cold water splashed over my nuts pulls me from the tar black recesses. I realize I’m sitting in my corner. The Monolith stands across the ring, hands on his head.

  “I told you to stay away from him.”

  “I thought I did.”

  “Do better.” He grabs my wrists, yanks me up. The noise of the crowd swirls around me, tracers crisscrossing the ring. I swat them away, hear Shirley grunt, feel a prick in my neck. I turn and he’s holding the empty syringe in his hand. “Help with the swelling,” he says, and the tracers evaporate.