Rhodes fumbled with his keychain as we approached journey’s end, the entranceway to the Marilyn Monroe Memorial Annex. No lights were visible in the building; Rhodes had given his staff the day off, and the attendants were only too happy to oblige his orders and leave their charge alone in her room.
. . . so hungry . . .
“Quiet!” I said.
We halted our walk, and I listened to the wind rattle through the brush. Rhodes and Rowan looked at me expectantly.
“Nothing,” I said, unsatisfied. “For a moment there. I thought I heard . . .” I shrugged.
The keys jingled merrily in Rhodes’ fingers, playing eerie music over the wilderness. Rowan retrieved a pocket flashlight from her purse, and Rhodes finally located the correct key and slid it into the lock. The door swung open to darkness. On unspoken agreement we bypassed the light switches, letting the pencil beam of Rowan’s light lead us through the reception area and into the halls beyond. There, the illuminated EXIT signs bathed our faces in a dim scarlet shine, lending the passageway the look of a tastefully appointed submarine on red alert. Twelve identical doorways stretched out before us down the corridor. Small wooden half-tables leaned against the walls at various spots, normally adorned with magazines and vases of fresh flowers, now bereft of toppings.
. . . eat . . .
“Did you hear that?” I asked Rowan. She listened, then shook her head.
The room we sought lay at the far end of the passage, the furthermost point of the entire center; even in a structure devoid of any other patients, the room’s sole resident was kept as far away from patients in other buildings as possible. We stopped at the door, and Rhodes pressed his ear up against the metal. From the other side we could hear a feeble scuffling, a muted chime of steel links being dragged listlessly across a tile floor.
“I zink it is fine,” Rhodes concluded, and grabbed the doorknob. I stopped him and placed my hand on the wood. I couldn’t hear the voice behind the door, but a word echoed in my mind.
. . . hurts . . .
Rowan laid a pitying hand on my arm. I shook it off and grabbed her handbag, growling, confused, digging out what I needed and tossing the emptied purse back into her arms, hitting her in the bosom.
Rowan backed away, counterfeit compassion erased as she groped for the bag in the dim. “Just get this done already,” she said, miffed. She turned and walked back down the hall, the spotlight dancing in front of her. “I’ll be outside. Mr. Zombie obviously doesn’t need my help.”
“Leave the light,” I said. She looked at the small bar in her hand and then flung it at me. It bounced off my goggles and clattered to the floor, the clamor obscene in the gloom. She stalked away as Rhodes picked the flashlight up and handed it to me.
“Are you sure you do not vant me to do it?” he asked. “I do not zink anyone vould blame you.” I shook my head. This was my fault, I’d deal with it alone.
I pulled the door open a crack, and three wasps flew out and buzzed lazily down the hall. I slowly opened the door and stepped through, tracking the beam across the room and its contents.
It was a spartan affair, the room’s inhabitant clearly not one for finer things. There was no calming patterned wallpaper. There was no desk, no chairs to sit in. The one window had been bricked shut, no attempt made to blend the hasty masonry into the décor.
There was no bed, only a single mattress, its fabric befouled. Its user stood next to it, facing the wall and unhurriedly thumping her head against it. I played the spotlight around her head. Distracted from her task, she followed the beam as I moved it about, getting her to turn around and face me.
Mom had looked better.
p
After the interviews and public appearances, there was no doubt that Mom’s existence had to be dealt with. Even this secretive jaunt in the dead of night was risky; the established safety zone of floor fourteen of Fulci Towers in midtown Manhattan was several states away. Taking an unscheduled break from the webcams and various devices that recorded my every move and broadcast my day-to-day activities live on the internet to whomever cared to watch — my numbers were in the millions — left me open and exposed. The trust that those around me would not leak my whereabouts to whomever would pay the most was the only thing lying between me and a date with an extra-large petri dish.
My freedom hinged on my ability to control my ravenousness; at any moment officials from the Center of Disease Control could come to their senses and have me removed from the view of society. I’d be sealed in a sterile, airtight cube of Lucite and tucked away in a laboratory corner somewhere while Nobel laureates lined up to anally probe me.
But this had to be dealt with. Rhodes had made many assurances as to his ability to keep things secret, laying out a plan to move Mom by armored van to a remote mountain spot he knew of in the Ozarks where she could be tethered within an abandoned copper mine, one mile deep. There would be no need to end things with her, he pleaded.
There were just too many ways for this to go wrong. The lawyers were artisans, but something like this could only be kept secret for so long. With Kud’s political connections battling our lawyers for legal ownership of my being, we had to remove all possible ammunition that could be used against me. Mom could escape, or someone along the line could decide that the authorities might want to know about Rhodes’ strange elderly patient in the middle of the Arizona desert, Eileen Funk, the quiet one, the one that never ate, the one with the skin condition, the woman no one was allowed to so much as look at. And Rhodes’ determination to keep her, frankly, was too creepy even under the circumstances.
Rowan agreed with my concerns but refused to let me see to it personally until I relented and agreed to ABC’s offer to hoof it on that season’s upcoming celebrity dance debacle. Placated, she facilitated our sudden departure from the city, covering our actions with an emergency website shutdown. Anyone logging onto the site looking to watch me catch up on my reading or do my taxes (yes, I was still doing my taxes; for me, there was only one sure thing in life anymore) would find only a flash animation of a cartoon zombie coughing until his brain fell out of his mouth. CLOSED FOR REPAIRS would then scroll across the screen as the zombie grabbed a broom and swept the brains off to the side.
We left the tower through a freight elevator to the parking garage, where we entered a waiting nondescript sedan and drove out into the city via an exit that emerged from underneath the neighboring building. We drove to a private airfield in New Jersey where a small jet was fueling up, and then flew to another airstrip outside Phoenix.
a
Her face was slack, dumb with incomprehension. The folds of her skin drooped loosely as only the most tenuous strands of connective tissue kept her entire countenance in place. Her temple was an open wound from her poundings, the wall behind her spackled with bits of pink and gray. The once-mighty sweep of auburn hair was gone, and patches of her skin had detached and slithered off, revealing a skull stained pink with fluid. Her eyes were faded, laced with scars, the emerald pupils wholly masked with milky white games of tic-tac-toe. Two uneven cavities encrusted with what looked like tobacco spit took the place of her ears, gone AWOL long before. As I watched, a wasp grown fat on organic slime crawled from her ear canal and took flight. I snatched it as it leisurely bumbled past and crushed it between my fingers.
Her nightgown stuck to her body where portions of her flesh had sloughed away, bonding to her as her liquids dried and became tacky, becoming a part of her, a second cottony skin. Mom’s legs were bare, and the cuff of the chain fixing her to a six-foot circle had ground its way through the meat of her ankle as she shambled around, and was gouging a trench into the bone.
She mutely opened and closed her mouth as the beam flitted across her face. In my mind I heard her groans of hunger. She was begging for meat.
They hadn’t once fed her, Rhodes confessed as we made our way across the deser
t. Bereft of teeth (her dentures had fallen out, no one keen enough to try and stick them back in), Mom was unable to chew. She wouldn’t take any of his synthetic meatshakes and had pointedly ignored the ground cadaver flesh Rhodes had smuggled from hospital morgues and medical schools. For Mom, it was fresh or nothing.
And so she stood, rotting away, mindless, empty save for appetite. Every day an aide would check in on her, make sure she was still in irons, and would then call the doctor to report: no change in condition, sir. The aide would then go home, check his online bank account for that week’s absurdly hefty paycheck and leave any concerns he had about legal and moral ramifications of his actions at the bottom of a bottle of rye.
If I left her here, locked the front door and encased the entire building in concrete, would she stand in this spot forever, waiting patiently for a meal to come within arm’s reach? Would she stand while her skin composted into mush? Would she stand while her organs spilled out, and collapse when her ligaments decayed to nothing? Would the brain still labor away, fresh and vital, lying in an empty skull on the ground, neural impulses firing off in the dark, no muscles to move, no eyes to see, no teeth to chew, no stomach to feed?
I removed my goggles and aimed the light at my face, seeing if there was any hope of recognition. She watched me for a moment, head tilting as if in thought. Her mouth opened, forming words only she could decipher. All I could discern of her intelligence was a mad screaming that rang in the spaces of my cerebrum. I had no response to give. I was nothing to her anymore. I wasn’t even food.
My mother stood in place, swaying, expecting me to save her.
“You zee how it iz,” Rhodes said from behind me, giving me a start. “Zee differences between you and it, jah?” Mom swiveled her head around at the break in the quiet, so sudden a movement I could hear the ligaments swear and curse in her neck. A blazing hunger filled her milky eyes and she stumbled toward us before falling forward, the chain around her ankle refusing to give. Her arms clawed at the floor, and I made out a larger, thinner circle surrounding her, fingernail scratches embedded in the tile. Her mouth gaped, indecently wide. From the pits of her lungs came a thin whistle of appetite, forced out as she banged her chest and stomach against the floor in her writhings.
“Unlike you,” Rhodes continued, unfazed by the slavering hellbeast of motherdom, “it haz nuzzink in zee vay of intelligenze.” He took on a tone of a lecturer, guiding a student through the day’s lessons. “I zink you are like, who iz it, Typhoid Mary? Do I haff zat right? You are a carrier, jah, but you do not zuffer zee full effects of zee infection. Vare you still haff almozt all your faculteez, it iz completely a creature of inztinct. You haff zee ability to control your hunger, jah? Up to a point, like haffing a bowel movement. All it vantz to do iz eat. Like you, it haz decreazed motor control, but to a far larger egztent. It haz very little balance, unt itz muzcular coordination is zeverely limited. I zink it may haff a damaged, um, amygdala, jah? Ziz iz why it iz zo aggreziff. And itz hypothalamuz is completely inert, vich is vy it iz zo hungry all zee time. Yourz iz broken, too, but I fix good, jah? But ziz here, ach, I cannot fix. I zink. Vizout an autopzy, I cannot be sure, I am only guezzing.
“Zee rate of decay iz again differing from yourz. You decay zlower than egzpected, but it iz far more like a regular corpze. If not for me, I zink it vould haff fallen apart long ago. Are you sure I cannot keep it longer? Zare are some more egzperimentz I vant to try. You zee the zkin? Zee body iz almozt completely egzanguinated, zere is very little fluid left in it, it haz no blood left, but, like you, zee eyeballz are still full. Zey should haff dried out monz ago. I cannot yet egzplain zis. And zee brain? Still moizt, you can zee zat zare.” He pointed at the crown of Mom’s head. The skin was peeled away, and the skull had completely cracked open. Cloudy pus seeped through the fracture. “I can keep it a little longer, jah? Juzt a few veekz, maybe? I promize, I vill kill it ven I am done.”
I grabbed Rhodes by the shoulders and threw him against the wall, pinning him with one hand on his throat. His legs kicked at my knees. “You call my mother ‘it’ one. More time,” I said, giving him a half-volume roar directly in his face, “you’ll get first-hand. Knowledge of her condition. Doctor.” I dropped him to the ground and turned to my mother, still scrabbling at the end of her tether. I let Rhodes stumble out of the room to tend to the cantaloupe-sized boulder of spewage stuck in his throat.
We had discussed the best way to do this, and Rhodes assured me that, as movies and comic books suggested, destroying the brain was the only sure way to achieve certain second death. Rowan had brought a revolver armed with dum-dum bullets that would expand their mass on impact and blow the contents of whatever they struck forcibly out a new exit.
Mom had halted her struggling once Rhodes had left, and now lay motionless, face down, repeatedly lifting her head and banging her face into the floor.
I brought the revolver up and cocked it, aiming at the back of her skull. Right now, I knew Rowan and the doctor were waiting for the gunshot. They would then grind their cigarettes out on the ground with the toes of their shoes and walk back in to help clean up. The blast of the gun would be explained away as a generator going kaput in the night. There would be no questions; people at the center, understanding the importance of secrecy, knew better than to pry.
I knelt down and placed the muzzle at the base of her skull. I wanted to cry, or say something, but there were no tears, no words forthcoming, no eulogies. Mom continued to bang away, pressing up against the barrel every few seconds. The skin remained dimpled where the muzzle pushed in, forming a circular nook.
Is there nothing left? I thought. I hadn’t expected anything in the way of Oedipal anguish, but couldn’t I feel something? I had lived in this woman’s house for twenty-two years. She had fed and clothed me on her own, working a low-paying part-time job as a church secretary and combining her wages with Dad’s pension and life insurance to keep me safe. All this, even as she berated me over my progressively pronounced disinterest in — later explicit loathing of — all things she thought sacred: her church, her friends, her perfume, her smothering, her assurances that I was just going through a phase that the right girl would snap me out of, just you wait and see. And what a manly woman she would have been.
I placed my hand on Mom’s shoulder and slowly turned her over. She stared up at me patiently, her jaw cracking as it rhythmically opened and shut; I had no pulse, no oxygenated blood to offer, and so I was of no interest to her, just another tedious rambling corpse lurking behind the diaphanous scratches on her corneas. I put my palm against her cheek, willing her to respond, to give me something beyond hunger, show consciousness underneath the appetite. Her skin was cold, unfeeling; I might as well have tried to form emotional bonds with a slab of steak. Yet there was something at play; she rested her head in my palm, and for an instant the mind-shrieking diminished.
. . . food . . .
I played my life over in my head, pulling out the few actually happy memories I had of this woman. Her and Dad buying me an ice cream at Canada’s Wonderland, and my throwing up all over Dad’s lap as we rode the Octopus. Mom laughed at that as we whipped about in our seats, my upchuck flying, spattering Dad as we spun about in the centrifuge, Mom’s horrified chortles pealing over the noise of the grinding gears and the tinny pre-recorded music of the calliope. A summer trip to Prince Edward Island, spending two weeks in a cabin owned by an old schoolmate of Dad’s, just the three of us, every day nothing but swimming in the ocean, Mom teaching me the backstroke while Dad played a few rounds of golf, then all of us meeting up for lunch, shopping, and whatever else we wanted to do. The first Christmas morning after Dad’s death, Mom hugging me tight after I unwrapped a ColecoVision video game system, playing Donkey Kong for hours as Mom made waffle after waffle after waffle, singing carols all the while.
All those moments. Dust. This thing did not care it had once set me up on a blind date with a good
friend’s daughter, and I had agreed to go, the two of us both realizing that this was a charade that could sustain our relationship a brief time. Her mind was gone, her personality evaporated, leaving a gore-hungry It in her place. I was the only proof my mother had ever existed, I was the sole repository of her memories, and . . .
Fuck this, I thought. I couldn’t do much more than I had done; I had suffered my mother in life, but it wasn’t worth this, these post-death tribulations. I owed her something, I knew, even if this walking sack of meat was only animated tissue, its movements the only thing separating it from being fodder for worms. Even in death, a modicum of reverence went a long way. I had hated Mom for most of my adult life, I had put her in a home when she became inconvenient, I had caused her death and rebirth in my ignorance, I had locked her up to protect myself — but fuck me if I would have her last sight be the bloody remains of her own brow against a concrete floor.
I lowered the gun and blasted her shackles loose from its moorings. The discharge rang though the room and echoed down the hall. Gathering up the chain to use as a leash, I pulled my dead mother to her feet and limped her down the hall, yelling to all persons outside to back away as far as possible. I brought Mom out to the open air; she stood beside me on the stoop for a moment, sniffing at the air. Was she enjoying this sensation, freedom, however misguided?
In the moonlight I spotted the silhouettes of Rowan and Rhodes hiding behind a palm tree. The embers of Rowan’s cigarette glowed feebly in the shadows as she nervously puffed away, impatient for resolution. I was certain they were out of Mom’s sight, but she sensed their heat. She lurched forward, pulling at the chain, clawing at the air, gnashing her teeth in the dark. I pulled at the leash and the metal manacles clacked against open bone. She tugged harder, straining for release, the cuff cutting into the leftover skin of her foot. Slowly, as she jerked, the flesh began to slide off, the manacle peeling off her skin as if removing a stocking. Still she hauled against her tether, scarily silent, snapping at the air, her loose gums pounding together with a moist clapping sound.
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