Very Bad Deaths

by Spider Robinson

  As the credits were rolling I literally laughed myself unconscious.

  According to Susan, that changed almost immediately—in less than a minute, she says, I went from merely out cold to asleep. Deeply, soundly, profoundly asleep. Huge honking snores, shallow but juicy. She had to flee the room at first, lest her tears of relief wake me. She told my Mom, and they wept together. Then she crept back in and sat with me for hours, giving thanks to all Buddhas, before she finally went and passed out in the guest room upstairs, my old bedroom.

  The strain had been nearly as hard on her as on me—really, truly, and unmistakably. I had almost ceased to really believe in the existence of love, at the vast age of eighteen, but she clearly met the definition: there was no doubting that my welfare had become essential to her own. I knew I could be fooling myself that I loved her, I’d done that before in my life—but I could not have been fooling myself that she loved me, because I simply wasn’t that good a fooler.

  Anyway, that’s why she was so exhausted, she slept through the distant sounds of the last part of the cure.

  I awoke in total darkness, total disorientation, total confusion…aware only that something was horribly, horribly wrong, and in danger of getting infinitely worse. It seemed to take hours to grasp my situation, but it couldn’t possibly have been more than seconds; I just wasn’t strong enough.

  In my sleep, I slowly understood, I had managed to topple off that mound of pillows and fall out of bed. No, worse. I had fallen halfway out of bed. The only thing preventing me from falling all the way out of bed—and landing on the incision—was my right arm. The one that didn’t work, so weakened it was a hard-won triumph to lift a Dixie cup half full of water to my lips. There was no hope of slipping a pillow beneath my side before it hit the floor; my left hand was clutching the bedsheet like grim death to help my right arm…and slowly pulling the sheet off the mattress. Any second now its elastic corner was going to let go, and slam me to the floor.

  I screamed, at the top of my lungs. “Help!”

  That’s what happened inside my mind. That’s what I wanted to do, and that’s what I heard. But almost certainly, out there in the real world, what I actually produced was a sound much more like the bleat of a newborn kitten.

  No matter.

  In the next room slept my mother and father. Dad’s a reasonably heavy sleeper, as humans go. But Mom was like me: a hopeless zombie, fully capable of sleeping through any alarm clock and all but the most relentless and cruel prodding, useless until the second cup of coffee. But she heard her wounded boy bleat.

  What I heard, from my point of view, was an inarticulate moan which I later learned was meant to be, “I’m coming, sweetheart,” but was hampered by her dry mouth’s inability to form consonants, and then an astonishing sequence of cartoon sound effects, ranging from shattering glass to toppling night table to something I couldn’t parse that went wump-CRASH, wump-CRASH, wump-CRASH, getting louder.

  The door to my sickroom burst open. One final wump-CRASH!! and silence. The lightweight curtains billowed, briefly letting in enough moonlight to reveal my mother. She was in her pink pajamas, both eyes glued shut, chin thrust forward, one foot hopelessly jammed in her bedside wastebasket, the other bare. As I watched, she managed to pry open her right eye—and discover that she had, by chance, stopped about an inch short of impaling it on the TV antenna. The curtains closed—parted again—she refocused past the antenna and saw me, saw me see her—they closed again; opened one last time—we looked at each other across the room for one more second—

  —and we both literally fell down laughing.

  By sheer animal instinct I managed to land on my shoulder and my fist instead of on the incision, and we lay there together, a few feet apart, helpless with laughter, for a long time. When we had the strength, we began the long crawl into each other’s arms, and were rocking back and forth together there on the floor, gasping and meowing and shuddering with mirth, when Dad and Susan burst in demanding to know what the hell was going on. It was a long time before we even tried to explain, and I’m not sure Dad ever did get it.

  But when he put me back on the bed—horizontal, now, without the pillow-pile prop—it was no longer terrifying to have that much of the weight of my torso resting on my wound. I was asleep again almost at once, and I slept without pause for the next thirty hours straight, and from then on I was getting better.

  I tell you all this to support my original statement. By that evening in the summer of 2003—my God, thirty-five years later—just a few months short of my fifty-fifth birthday—I had, sad to say, met a few people who I felt knew as much about pain as I did. But I did not expect ever to meet anyone who knew more.

  Then I did.

  Allen had been creating pain worse than anything I knew about, for his amusement, and studying it rigorously, for his edification, at least once a week since—well, that’s the most ironic part. He was born ten years after me, in 1960, and took his first victim the summer he turned eight.

  Flashforward:

  2003

  Trembling-on-the-Verge

  Heron Island, British Columbia

  Canada

  1.

  “You know my name,” he said. “That’s very interesting.”

  I came very close to peeing in my pants.

  I managed not to, but it wasn’t easy; I was full of coffee. My other big accomplishment was forcing my diaphragm to take in and expel a cup or so of air at intervals. I couldn’t think why I was bothering—wouldn’t this be a wonderful time to faint? But I couldn’t help it any more than I could control my bladder.

  All this was down to his eyes. They were not all I could see, but for the longest time they were all I could look at. Moist, bright, cloudy, utterly cold, like frozen marbles in hot moonlight. Reptile eyes. One of the arguments against evolution is the eye: not only is it insanely complex to have formed by chance, but there is no structure halfway to an eye: it must occur fully developed or not at all. These might have been the original eyeballs, passed down over the millennia from one coldblooded killer to the next, squid to shark to snake to saurian to scorpion, the eyes of entropy, watching all in their view become rot and dust, and helping whenever convenient.

  If he’d been wearing sunglasses or had his eyes closed, what I would have seen was a man who looked rather like the character who runs the comic book store in the cartoon series The Simpsons. A born Trekkie, round and sweaty, bald on top with a long ponytail, wearing a beard that fought a close third with Yasser Arafat and Ringo Starr for world’s ugliest. He was actually wearing a black Lord of the Rings T-shirt, tucked in—for the first of the Peter Jackson films, I believe, though the third was nearly out then—with a pale green vest over it, and baggy khaki pants, and a cell phone on his belt that was actually made to look like Captain Kirk’s communicator. If I haven’t already succeeded in conveying to you how preternaturally, mind-meltingly frightened I was, maybe it will help if I mention that nothing about his appearance struck me as even a tiny bit amusing, even in theory.

  Because by the time I saw any of that, his eyes had annihilated the concept of funny in my universe.

  There was plenty of fun in his universe. He was about to have lots of it, and he planned to enjoy it hugely. His eyes told me that. He was already smirking in anticipation. But for me nothing was ever going to be funny again—not even in a bitter, ironical sense. Against the horror he represented, irony had no power, no significance, no purchase. It was a human response, like heartbreak or defiance or despair, irrelevant now. He was like 9/11 on two legs, and it didn’t matter, it just didn’t matter at all, whether or not you got the joke.

  What I did then did not come from my mammalian forebrain, but from somewhere way back in the reptile-remnant core it’s grafted onto. Those eyes aside, he did not look physically intimidating. He looked like the kind of clumsy, uncoordinated, cowardly nerd even someone as frail as me might well be able to take, given my New York combat experience and a little
luck. And my subconscious mind was so dumb, it still believed survival was possible. To my amazement, I found myself charging him. I had no great hope of succeeding, but it wasn’t even worth suppressing the attempt—what difference could it make?

  By the time I reached him, he hadn’t lifted his hands, or even so much as taken a defensive stance. He stood flat-footed, as if he knew he had nothing to fear, and he was right. I tagged him, with everything I had, right where I wanted to hit him, on the shelf of his jaw. I don’t think I even rattled him. He snorted contemptuously.

  He reached up with his left hand, put a finger lightly on my collarbone, slid along it an inch to the left and settled the fingertip into a little hollow pocket he found there. Then he pressed. If you pressed that hard on the button of a telephone, it might not be enough to register. It would barely have triggered the repeat-character function on a computer keyboard.

  It was like being electrocuted. I screamed at the top of my lungs, and this time I did piss my pants.

  “Ah,” he said, interested. He lifted his finger, paused—

  I began to cry.

  How did he know? Something about my body language? Something in my eyes? Please God don’t let it have been anything resembling telepathy, or I’ll have to spend the rest of my life washing my mind out with soap. All I can tell you is, the very next thing he did was move that goddam fingertip directly down to the scar that circles my torso. I felt him detect it, through my shirt. A few seconds to inspect it, without taking his eyes from mine, and he again located a spot he liked. It never even occurred to me to lift a hand to stop him, though I desperately wished someone would.

  Even before he started pressing, I was screaming at the top of my lungs, this time. Then he stepped slightly to one side, and pressed hard. I vomited on the spot he’d just been standing on, without ceasing to scream. The world dissolved to black and I felt my knees hit the kitchen floor.

  “There, I think we’ve got you more or less empty, now,” I heard him say over my screams. “Now, we can get started.”

  I could feel myself toppling forward, and some vagrant part of my brain knew I was probably going to land face-first in my own puke. But it didn’t matter; I was out before I hit.

  I believe nobody is ever unconscious.

  A friend of mine was once involved in an auto accident while driving south, just after she had entered the state of Tennessee. She was in a coma for eight days. I was there when she awoke, and I had to tell her that she was speaking in a soft Tennessee drawl, quite foreign to her, but identical to that of her nurses. Those whole eight days, someone was awake in there, listening, noting how they spoke here. I suspect that entity was simply incapable of laying down long-term memories.

  So in a sense I probably experienced chest surgery, all those years ago, and in the same sense I was probably in some sense aware during the next twenty minutes or so of my life as Allen’s prisoner. But in both cases, the memories, if they even exist, are buried so deep I doubt hypnosis could bring them to the surface. Thank all gods.

  So I got no useful thinking done during those twenty minutes, not even subconsciously. My memory insists I was on my knees in the kitchen, closed my eyes, fell forward, and opened them again to find myself sitting upright in one of my living room chairs, the one that swiveled, with broad wooden arms that curved forward and down like upside down sled runners. The amount of time that I’d lost while my eyes had been closed could be inferred, at least roughly, from the changes in my situation. But it took me a surprising amount of time to get that far, because as my eyes opened the very first thing they saw was Allen, a few meters away, sitting in the chair that reclined, staring contemplatively at my favorite photo of Susan. He had found it in my bedroom. He was only the third person ever to have seen it.

  That anybody was looking at it was horrible. That he was looking at it meant I had failed as a man, failed in my duty to my wife—failed utterly, irrevocably, unforgivably—and the fact that she was ashes long since was no consolation at all. Even death could not sufficiently insulate a pure soul like her from an Allen. Now he knew she had once existed, she was slimed retroactively; now he knew her body’s intimacies, she was raped from beyond the grave. No matter what might happen next, that could never be repaired, and it really was worse than dying.

  Many things are.

  You’d think I’d have woken up groggy. I would have expected to. But when you want your brain to stop working, that’s just when it goes into overdrive, every time. When my eyes opened and I saw him studying Susan’s picture, I hit the ground running.

  I understood at once, for instance, that my first priority should be taking inventory of my situation—and that I would have very little time for it, because the act of waking up would already have altered my breathing enough to alert him; I had maybe one respiration’s grace before he would finish his thought and turn his attention to me.

  Unfortunately, inventory was dismayingly simple. I was sitting down in damp clammy trousers. He’d wiped my face off. It didn’t much matter just where I was in the room, because my ankles were fastened tightly together somehow. There was no point in wondering what potential weapons might lay within reach, because nothing was within reach except the smooth wooden arms of the chair, to which my wrists were firmly secured with duct tape. There was nothing useful to think about. There was really only one interesting aspect of my whole fix, and I didn’t want to think about it. If you were going to tape an unconscious man’s hands to the arms of a chair, the natural way to do it would be palms down, right? Allen had taped mine palms up. Maybe he just wanted to prevent me from using even the feeble leverage of my fingers to help me strain against the tape. But I had darker suspicions. Imagination can be a terrible thing.

  The only other detail I had time to note was that I smelled awful. Hard to feel strong when you smell like pee.

  And then he lowered Susan’s photo and switched his gaze to me, and I stopped being aware of anything but his Aztec idol eyes, and his little wet pouting mouth.

  He said, “I’ve rarely been so conflicted.”

  One of the people I’d known in a previous life—the one with occasional raisins of hope in its oatmeal—had been a guy named Russell Walker. He would have found that opening line hilarious, would have devised at least a dozen snarky comebacks…would have stolen some from Leslie Charteris, if he had to.

  Allen said, “Intellectually, the choice is quite clear. You have information I want very badly. I can extract it with 100% certainty—effortlessly, in any desired degree of depth, and with perfect reliability—simply by using a combination of certain drugs in a certain sequence.” He frowned, and his lower lip pushed out slightly. “But by the time I finished, the you I’m speaking to now would no longer exist. You’d be a much simpler, and I think I can guarantee, infinitely happier animal, for as long as the state or some misplaced charity chose to keep you alive.” His frown darkened. “I don’t like you near that well.”

  If you strain hard enough against duct tape, there is a noise in your ears like thunder, like a distant, just-barely-subsonic jet engine.

  He said, “Information obtained by torture, on the other hand, is somewhat less reliable, and its acquisition takes much longer.” His frown vanished. He beamed at me. “But you have seriously vexed me. I prefer to use pain, and can afford to indulge myself. I am in no hurry at all.”

  Well, neither was I. I decided to engage him in conversation. There was some stuff I really wanted to know, and once the torture part started, I probably wouldn’t care anymore. Perhaps if I impressed him with clever enough repartee, he’d sense a kindred spirit, and mercifully decide to dissolve my brain with drugs after all.

  “How—how—how—ow—ow—wow—”

  Maybe it was too late for that.

  He smile broadened. “Let me see if I can express your thought for you, in human speech. You would like to know how I found out you were after me.”

  I decided a nod was better than an attempt at spee
ch. Way less to go wrong. Sure enough, I failed to establish a rhythm: my head simply bobbed spastically.

  He said, “Wonderful. We have the basis of a bargain, then. I will tell you how I learned you were after me…after you tell me why you were.”

  I sat there behind a pathetic imitation of my poker face, trying to construct a little mental video of myself explaining to him that I was after him because my friend Smelly the mind reader had told me about his hobby.

  The worst-case scenario was that I’d convince him somehow. He could probably kill Zudie just by rowing three times around Coveney Island. If he ever got closer than that, it wouldn’t surprise me much if he could make Zudie’s skull explode, like in Cronenberg’s film Scanners.

  Or I might get lucky: Allen might refuse to swallow such a preposterous story and kill me on the spot for lying.

  Did I have any other assets whatsoever that he didn’t know about? Any kind of edge at all? Well—one…though I could not see any possible way to make use of it.

  He had not finished talking. “And who your girlfriend is. I’m particularly curious about her.”

  There now, that was a useful secret. The reason he was satanically enraged with me was that I had frightened him, though he would never have admitted it. If I timed it right—baited him, attacked his ego, got him agitated, and only then let him know that his other amateur antagonist was an off-duty Vancouver police officer—maybe I could scare him so badly, I could goad him into cutting my throat. Good to remember.