Very Bad Deaths

by Spider Robinson

Bellevue Hospital

  New York, New York

  USA

  1.

  I awoke from surgery—let’s use that term for a process that took a day or two to complete—to find myself in a large ward, sixteen beds. That’s how big an island Bellevue Hospital is: despite outstanding competence, just about every day its dozens and dozens of operations produce at least that many people who are in unusually crappy condition. Circle the drain there, and you’ll have enough company to form a softball team in Hell.

  Even though I was loaded with morphine, I was well aware of how badly I was damaged, and had at least a glimmering of how badly it was going to hurt sometime soon. I wanted, rather badly, to feel sorry for myself. My position in the room, purely a matter of random chance, made it quite impossible.

  Not because of Reenie McGee (I think that’s how he spelled it), whose bed lay across the aisle from mine and one over to the left, although God knows his affliction was the most striking in my field of vision. He had offended the NYPD—not just by leading them in a high-speed chase with a stolen Excalibur, but by doing so with such unexpected skill that two black and whites were completely destroyed and four officers injured, one seriously, before they boxed him in. They had expressed their displeasure with nightsticks, heavy shoes, and the butt of a gun. Reenie’s face looked exactly like a Picasso, and would for many painful years to come. No two features were located in the correct relationship to each other. But that was tomorrow’s problem: it was the internal injuries whose repairs had nearly killed him.

  But God bless him, even in extremis, Reenie was charged with manic energy, his rap full of defiance and bravado. Because he was an unadjudicated prisoner accused of serious felonies, a cop sat beside him 24/7, and one of his wrists was kept chained to his bed. When he wanted to hobble to the head, the cop would cuff his hands in front of him and bring him there and back. It was always the same two cops, alternating shifts. Reenie harassed them both relentlessly. He demanded they play cards with him, beat them consistently, and broke their balls about it. He kept up a running monologue, explaining to anyone within earshot how his police brutality lawsuit was going to make him rich enough to buy a freakin’ Excalibur. Both cops, burnt out old bulls, utterly ignored him.

  No, what ruined a perfectly good orgy of self-pity for me was not Reenie. It was Sylvester, across the way and one bed to the right.

  He too was an unwilling guest of the City of New York. But unlike Reenie, Sylvester had a different cop companion nearly every day. Nobody could take it. Even cops one step from a pension weren’t numb enough.

  I asked Sylvester his last name more than once; he never answered. He had been a reasonably happy, upwardly mobile heroin dealer in West Harlem, until the day the Great Shit Lottery had yielded up his number. It began as a routine business reversal: Sylvester and his two roommates were taken off for their product by some upstart Cam-bodian mothafuckas, who left them all tied up with lamp cord in their own apartment, a fourth-floor walkup. On the way downstairs one of the Cambos, out of sheer exuberance, had popped a cap through somebody’s apartment wall, and because it winged a child, that somebody had been indignant enough to call the police. That was something Sylvester and his friends would never have done in a million years, and did not imagine anyone else in their building might do.

  So when, after long and noisy struggle, Sylvester managed to free himself from his bonds, his only thought was to arm himself heavily, take off after those punk-ass gooks, and restore the natural order of the universe. He was too angry even to pause to untie his partners. He never dreamed that as he reached the top of the stairwell and started down, the cops would be entering it from below.

  And when he did hear their unmistakable big feet, he thought only that his evening was now ruined. He would have to spend half the night dealing with these assholes, let them waste hours trying to bluff him into believing it was a crime to not be holding drugs, just because it was easier than chasing the slant-eyes. The cops had to know the perps were long gone; they’d clearly timed their response to be sure of it. He uncocked his gun disgustedly. Sylvester didn’t see a pitch-dark stairwell that reeked of piss, blood and ancient fear as a particularly scary place. It was what he was used to.

  For the cops it must have seemed a no-brainer. You respond to an armed robbery narco/squawk in Hell, you enter a black hole, you hear creaking stairs overhead and a pistol action sound, you empty your weapon. Then you pull your throw-down and squeeze off everything but the one essential shot from that, too. Then you reload your duty piece. And then you say, “Freeze. Police.”

  At least one slug, way too big to be regulation, had actually entered Sylvester’s spinal column from below, coring out maybe the bottom third of it—as he put it, like a big final fingerfuck from God. Other bullets struck here and there, but so what? He would never feel anything below the collarbone, good or bad, again.

  All that had happened nearly three years before. Sylvester had been quadriplegic ever since, and would be until the day he died. What had brought him to that room was skin grafts—for bedsores the size of dinner plates. In 1968, skin graft technology sucked big rocks if you were a rich white guy. A black prisoner was disadvantaged…and the ocean is damp compared to other things.

  For three years, the bogus felony charges the cops had filed against Sylvester, to explain why they’d shot him, and the gazillion-dollar lawsuit Sylvester’s lawyers had filed against the Department, to explain why they shouldn’t have, had been circling each other warily like wounded bulls, each furious but reluctant to close and end the matter. The cops knew their case was pure bullshit. The shysters who’d taken Sylvester’s case on spec knew that didn’t matter: bullshit or not, the best they’d get for a black drug dealer with no dependents was a lowball payoff so why not wait and hope he died first? Okay with the cops. Haste was good for neither side, and nothing was good for Sylvester.

  Therefore Sylvester’s legal status remained unresolved; therefore he was a felony suspect—like all suspects, presumed guilty until he proved otherwise. And rules, as they say, are rules. It wouldn’t do to be seen treating one prisoner differently from another, especially not an Irishman and a nigger only a bed apart from one another.

  So just like Reenie, Sylvester spent his hours—each and every one of them—handcuffed by his wrist to his hospital bed. Guarded by an armed man, a member of the gang that had put him there, for being home when they called.

  You try feeling sorry for yourself in the same room with him.

  Flashforward:

  2003

  Trembling-on-the-Verge

  Heron Island, British Columbia

  Canada

  1.

  “…Whom I used to think was the unluckiest bastard possible. Until tonight.”

  The dizziness and slurred speech went away as quickly as they had come, and I realized they had been a transient effect of some one of Allen’s home-brewed drugs coming on.

  It was true. For the first time in my life, I found myself envying Sylvester. All he had fucked up was himself. I had wrecked three lives as thoroughly as he had wrecked his one. And in about the same way: I had gone blindly into the dark without checking carefully enough for monsters. All he’d had to do was lay there in a stultifying absence of physical sensation for a hundred million years of boredom and despair, and never ever do anything fun again. Just then, I’d have given anything for that kind of luck.

  Without warning, every molecule of my body except my brain and every single nerve fiber that could carry pain to it suddenly encountered an equal mass of antimatter and was annihilated in a stupendous explosion. All the atoms of my brain except those involved in its pain center were blown to the far corners of the cosmos. The effect was to slow time, so that ultimate pain lasted for infinity, and dying was an eternal state.

  He had slapped me. Not even particularly hard.

  “An amazing drug, isn’t it?”

  At the sound of his voice my personality recongealed at li
ghtspeed. I tried very hard to say yes. No—I promised myself I’d be baldly honest in this account: what I tried very hard to say was yes, sir. No matter: all I produced was a hoarse, wheezing “—heh—” sound. I knew what I needed to end the word, even knew it was called a sibilant, but could not remember how to produce one.

  “I see you agree. And imagine if I had done something a little more intrinsically painful than a slap.”

  That suggestion seemed to magically accelerate the rebooting of my mind. I was nodding so hard and fast I could actually feel my brain sloshing back and forth in there. “Yes sir, I’m sure that would be very bad, it’s so great that we don’t delve further into that area just yet becau—”

  He shook his head and pursed those obscene lips, and I shut up in midword. “You keep saying you’re going to make me extremely happy. You’re not very good at it, and I don’t need any help. Watch.”

  I craned my head, got a look at what he was fiddling with, and began to panic. “Hey, no. That’s not necessary, man. Really—”

  “Amateurs fiddle around with ornate leather harnesses, elaborate dungeon hardware, intricate ritual gear, medieval contraptions—what I call toy torture. The serious practitioner needs nothing more difficult to obtain or incriminating to possess than the items commonly found in almost any home in Canada, in two little drawers, both in the kitchen: the silverware drawer, and the junk drawer.”

  “Listen to me: this is not necessary!”

  “Listen to me: it doesn’t have to be.” He began poking around among the items he had selected, looking for just the right one. “I enjoy it for its own sake.”

  Corkscrew. Chopstick. Cheese slicer/grater. Circuit tester, with a wicked alligator clip. Curtain hooks. Thank God, something that didn’t start with C: a box of yellow plastic pushpins. A bottle cap remover so old it had a triangular fitting on the other end to punch drinking holes into cans. For many years I had stubbornly turned pop-top cans upside down and used that tool to open them. Then the bastards had started rounding the lip off the bottoms of the cans, so I couldn’t get a purchase.

  I finally managed to get my brain running—time to do something with it. I forced myself to remember the fundamentals of a con. Figure out what the mark wants to hear, that was one of the big ones. Try to think like him.

  Yech.

  “Wouldn’t it be more artistic not to hurt me?”

  He paused in his efforts. “I beg your pardon? Did you say artistic?”

  “Sure. You’re an artist, right?”

  His mouth made a little rosebud. “I would not be so pretentious,” he protested too much.

  “A doloric artist. Wouldn’t that be the word?”

  “A student, perhaps,” he conceded modestly. “And no, ‘doloric’ would not be the word, though that’s a common misconception. ‘Dolenic’ or ‘dolescent’ would be the word.”

  I frowned. I was overjoyed. Whenever I’m being tortured, I love a lecture. “Are you sure?”

  “Quite sure. ‘Dolor’ refers particularly to disappointment, remorse, rather mild stuff. ‘Dolens’ has to do with caused pain, sharp pain, physical or mental. Actually, ‘condolescent’ would be better: that connotes severe, acute, long-term suffering.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “George Bush’s National Security Adviser. Condolescent Ruse. I know some Afghanis and Iraqis who’d agree with that definition.”

  “And some Americans,” he said, “who happen to be Muslim.”

  Awesome, I thought. Even a human being and a reptile monster from Hell can find common ground in revulsion for a real asshole. If you looked at it from a purely statistical standpoint, even if he worked hard at his hobby for a long lifetime, Allen’s body count was unlikely to ever reach higher than five figures, and the low five figures at that. Four kills a week every week for fifty years is a mere ten thousand rotting bodies, and that would be a killing pace for even a gifted private citizen to maintain without government funding.

  “How about ‘mordeic art’?” I suggested.

  He raised an eyebrow, but only slightly. “Mmm. ‘Biting’ or ‘stinging’ pain. Not bad.”

  “Aren’t you impressed that I know Latin at all?”

  He shook his head decisively. “Back in your day it wasn’t rare, for Catholics anyway. And I saw your year in the seminary in your record.”

  “Still, that was a long time ago. Oh wow.”

  “Yes?”

  “I just remembered a good one. Hadn’t thought of it since the seminary. ‘Adflictational.’”

  That rated another little rosebud mouth of pleasure, and a glitter in his eyes. “Oh, lovely. Specifically connotes torture. A student of the adflictational arts. Yes, I like it.”

  I had to try. “Can you explain the kick to a mundane? I’m sorry, I guess it’s like golf: I just don’t get why that would be fun.”

  He shrugged. “Can you explain altruism?”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Can you tell me in rational terms why, for you, it is fun to be kind? Why it gives you pleasure to give someone else pleasure, with no payback? Why you would enjoy, say, rescuing a child from a fire, or giving food to a starving man, or working hard to give a particularly pleasurable orgasm to a casual partner, or introducing a friend to a perfect mate, or getting some poor brown bastard out of Guantanamo?”

  “Well…I guess—”

  “Can we not agree that whatever is going on there, at a fundamental level it comes down like everything else to a matter of brain chemicals? You perform certain actions, evidence certain behaviors, make certain choices, and because they have been evolutionarily successful over the long term, brain chemistry rewards you. Serotonin balance and so on. Like most people, you’re wired so that by default, unless made angry or otherwise afraid, you’d generally rather be nice to people than hurt them, yes?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  He shrugged. “Every once in a long while, one leaves the factory wired up just backward.”

  “Jesus. That simple?”

  “What, you mean, nothing to do with how my mother treated me, or where my third foster father put his hand, or what were the socioeconomic circumstances of my early socialization? Yeah. Just that simple. I had a childhood as boring as anybody could possibly hope for. Then I learned how to make it interesting.”

  “A couple of wires got crossed.”

  “A sign got reversed in the programming. Whatever analogy you like. You’re tuned so that if you see a little girl in the second story window of a burning building, it would give you great pleasure to persuade her to jump, catch her, bring her to safety, and then run inside and rescue her sleeping parents. I’m tuned so it would give me great pleasure to bring her parents out, make them watch her roast, then throw Daddy back inside, bring Mommy home and party. Different strokes.”

  If there is an appropriate response to that remark, I still haven’t thought of it.

  “Have you figured out yet that dragging this out makes it much worse for you?” he asked me.

  I nodded.

  “But you just can’t help it, can you?”

  I shook my head.

  He made one of those little pucker-smiles. Fun. “Okay, then, let’s try it this way: you tell me everything I want to know, every scrap of information you possess that I want to possess, without any torture at all. Exactly what you know about me. How you learned it. Who else knows it, and where I’ll find them. What you intended to do about it until you got killed. What they will intend to do about it until I kill them. All that stuff. You have a sense of what I want to know, and you’ll get better at it as we go. What do you say, let’s do it like that: you crack like a junkie snitch, and tell me what I want to know right now without any more stalling, and I won’t have to hurt you at all. Then afterwards, I’ll hurt you anyway, a lot, more than you can probably imagine, and it will be even more fun for me because it will be undeserved…but you see, that will be later. If you force me to jump to that part first, it will be sooner.”

 
; I was nodding vigorously to show my understanding. “What a fine plan. I like this plan. I’m very happy with this plan.”

  “Then talk!”

  I looked him in the eyes. “I’m going to give you the best Christmas present you ever got—that’s exactly my problem: it’ll sound too good to be true, like something a con man would dream up. Please, please don’t jump to that conclusion, just because it’s the most likely one. What I have for you is too good to be true…and it really is true. I promise.”

  “If this is a stall, I promise you so much regret—”

  “I believe you,” I assured him. “Just don’t kill me out of hand for insulting your intelligence, give me a few minutes, and I think that very intelligence will show you that whether my story is too good to be true or not, it’s the only story that explains how I could possibly know a goddam thing about you, let alone all the shit I know.”

  He stared at me for a long time. I smelled his breath and wished I didn’t. I smelled me and wished I didn’t. I didn’t smell Susan’s perfume, which I have smelled from time to time for absolutely no reason at all since she died, and wished I did.

  “Go on.”

  There was nothing for it but to start at the beginning and tell him the absolute truth. I simply had nothing else. He was too smart to lie to clumsily…and I had nothing prepared. Maybe I should have been creative enough to make up, from whole cloth, from a standing start, on horseback, some kind of convincing explanation of how a civilian female friend and I had happened to stumble across the oddly proscribed little bundle of facts we had. You try it. I didn’t even have time to tinker with the story. The bald truth was the only thing I could tell convincingly without being tripped up. And I would be lucky to get him to buy that—in the limited sense remaining in which that word could possibly apply to me.

  I was trying to decide where would be the best place to begin the story—open with Zudie’s unexpected arrival a few days ago, or go straight to flashback—when suddenly it became necessary to turn to stone.