by Daniel Mason
‘I told you,’ he says, ‘I’m waiting for somebody.’
I say, ‘Well, I can play your friend, too.’
He says, ‘You’re not invincible, man.’
I want to tell him otherwise. I want to tell him that it doesn’t matter even if I do put a bullet in my head, because my tumour will consume it like a spacecraft burning up on re-entry.
I say, ‘So how’s your revolution going?’
He’s all anger and clenched fists. He doesn’t manage to answer before his friend arrives, dreadlocked with pale skin and hazy red eyes. He’s wearing a bulky red backpack that looks more expensive than the clothes he wears. He says, ‘Yo, man. You ready?’
Jack says, ‘Yeah, wait a minute,’ and turns to me. He says, ‘The revolution is coming. We’re going to change the world, whether you believe it or not. People will stop watching their televisions and buying products they don’t need. They’ll start to see the real world for what it is. We’ll change the world. We will.’
I tell him, ‘You needn’t aim for the world. You have to learn to change one life at a time.’
He tells me, ‘One life at a time? It takes too many bullets that way, man. You’re so full of shit. Your game isn’t about changing lives, anyway. You were the one who was supposed to die that night.’
I shrug and tell him I’ve been trying.
He says, ‘Right.’ He turns to leave.
I say, ‘Have fun.’
Jack is laughing and he tells me to fuck off.
The two anarchist-socialists have only just vanished into the night when an ambulance arrives outside the club with its lights flashing and sirens blaring, and people from inside start spilling out onto the street. I’m pushed aside roughly by the medics, who come charging through with a stretcher. With the flashing lights and dancers crowding the streets, this is almost like the atmosphere inside the club. Spencer is at my side and he says, ‘Some bitch overdosed, man. Frothing at the mouth and twitching on the dancefloor and shit.’
We make room for the paramedics and a crowd gathers around, disperses and then regathers when they carry the girl out on a stretcher.
Spencer says, ‘Nasty.’
It’s with the idea of the overdosing bitch in my mind, her body convulsing like it’s racked by demonic possession, that I visit the methadone clinic. It’s in King’s Cross where the walls are adorned with graffiti and homeless people wander like lost disciples in search of their leader. Cars with poor suspension cruise the street blaring loud throbbing music.
I am compulsively checking my jacket to make sure that the gun is there. I know it’s there, but in the back of my mind there is nothing but constant questioning. Maybe it fell out. Maybe you forgot to put it in there. Maybe somebody stole it.
But I know it’s still sitting there, because I can feel the weight.
I stand across the street from the clinic and watch people coming and going. There are young girls dressed in black, hands twitching. Skinny bald men dressed in tight leather. Middle-aged women with a sickly grey pallor. Everybody looks like they’ve crawled out of a sewer.
I stand in the same spot for maybe an hour before I decide to cross the street. I don’t look left. I don’t look right. I step out into the street and don’t take my eyes off the clinic.
I am walking without thinking. It’s like floating. Maybe I am a ghost.
Inside the waiting room there are people seated and others standing. It’s like the waiting room for a doctor’s office but at the far end of the room there’s a window in the wall and somebody behind it dispenses the methadone in a cup with water. There’s a toilet down the hall. I hear it flush. This is for the people giving urine samples.
The patients here look like Depression-era photographs. They’re dirty and their faces are turned perpetually downward, eyes hollow and skin sagging.
Some of these people are sizing me up. Maybe trying to work out how much they could pawn my jacket for, or maybe looking for rings on my fingers.
In a moment they can wonder how much my gun could be pawned for.
I put six bullets in six different people. Where I can, I get headshots. Others are in the chest, the neck. I don’t feel anything like pity or guilt each time I pull the trigger. All I know is that I’m saving these people from their own lives. With each bullet I feel a single rush of excitement course through me. I hear the soft smack of the bullet hitting flesh under the explosion of the gun, and then I am aiming at somebody else, moving mechanically to my next target.
The people in the room that I don’t shoot just stare up at me. They stare as if I’m not holding a gun, as if I haven’t just shot six people. They just stare, as if I’m not really there, as if they’re looking right through me. There is no screaming, no rush to escape. It’s just people sitting in a waiting room.
I leave the building, tucking my gun back into the jacket, pulling my cap low over my head and walking swiftly along the street. I don’t take my time because the gun only holds six bullets and I can’t pause to reload in a crowded space. As I’m walking I feel that this is not the release I had planned. It isn’t such a rush as I’d imagined.
Before I know it I’m trying to redeem myself and I’m walking into the lobby of the first hospital I find. It’s a big white building, white inside and out, like heaven.
I breathe deep the scents of disinfectant and sickness. It reminds me of my stay in the hospital, when my tumour was first diagnosed. I remember being flat on a bed of starched sheets, listening to the sounds of distant televisions and invisible footfalls in the hall.
It reminds me of the bloodless corpse of my wife in the bath.
I stop at the reception desk, massaging my chin. I clear my throat so the pretty girl looks up at me with a smile. I find myself trying to return her smile but I can barely remember how that works. I tell her, ‘I’m looking for cancer patients.’
She tells me that Oncology is on Three.
‘Thank you,’ I say, licking my dry lips.
The elevator is wide, to accommodate trolleys and stretchers, presumably. I’m grateful for this because I hate confined spaces; it’s a relief in comparison with hotel and airport lifts. As I rise, it occurs to me that I have been subconsciously tapping a foot.
On Three I follow the blue and white signs on the walls until I find Oncology. I don’t encounter a single person along the way. I take a peek inside each door I walk past. Medicated people lie beneath their sheets and stare at television screens or the insides of their eyelids.
When I reach the cancer ward I light a cigarette. Patients with their lungs removed eye me, salivating. One old man calls to me from the bed in his room. It’s only because the ward is so quiet that I can hear his croak. He says, ‘Hey, sonny. Hey, do you think I could have one of those?’
I wander into his room. There are several auto magazines on his bedside table. His roommate is a young man, asleep. Visibly there’s nothing wrong with these men, apart from the fact that the sleeping one is shaven bald and the old one has a bandage on his throat.
His voice is wheezing as he says to me, ‘You got a cig for me? Can I have a smoke?’
I say, ‘Sure, old timer.’
He says, ‘You got to light it for me.’ He’s struggling to remove the bandage from his neck, saying, ‘I got to smoke through a hole in my neck now.’
The hole is like a tiny puckered mouth.
Lighting him a cigarette, I say, ‘That’s fucking gross, man.’
He says, ‘Don’t I know it.’ He takes the cigarette from me, plucking it out of my hand and putting it to the hole. The sinewy cords in his neck contract as he breathes in.
‘How can you live like that?’ I ask him.
He shrugs, exhaling through the hole. ‘I’m alive, ain’t I?’
I mutter, ‘If you can call this living. I’m surprised you can even talk.’
He tells me, ‘Won’t be able to at all after the next op.’
As I walk from the room, the man tells me, ‘
These things’ll kill ya, remember.’
I tell him I’m pretty sure something else is going to get to me first.
Further along the hall I’m passed by a nurse, who scolds me and says, ‘Don’t you know there’s no smoking in here? This is a cancer ward, for heaven’s sake!’
I tell her, gosh darnit, I had no fucking idea. I drop the cigarette to the white linoleum floor and crush the life from it with my shoe.
She’s a fat old maid and she can’t believe the rudeness that I’m displaying. She tells me she’s going to get a doctor, and I say, ‘Good. We’ll need one soon.’
At the end of the hall I find a room occupied by a young man who seems to be suffering leukemia. He looks no older than thirteen, but he could be sixteen, eighteen, and his body just isn’t catching up with him. He’s bald and plugged with various tubes. He watches cartoons on a television suspended from the ceiling and turns to me as I enter the room.
I say, ‘How are you today?’
Struggling to sit up he asks, ‘Are you the new doctor?’
I shake my head and signal with my hands, ‘Don’t sit up, it’s okay. I’m not a doctor.’
He says, ‘Are you another patient?’
I tell him, ‘Something like that. Are you getting any better?’
‘The doctor says yeah, he thinks so.’ There’s a look of blissful hope in his blue eyes even when he knows he isn’t going to make it. Remaining optimistic in the face of death.
I say, ‘That’s a good sign.’ I pat his bed to show that I care. I let him know that I’m sincere. I say, ‘Son, would you like to feel better? Would you like to be free of this?’
All the time I’m asking this, I am loading bullets into the gun hidden from his view in my lap. I am careful not to create a great deal of noise as I slide each bullet in.
He says, ‘Oh yeah. I want to go home. I want to be able to go back to school. The doctor says I might be able to if the new treatment holds.’
I give a smile that I can feel is false, but the boy seems to buy it anyway. He returns my smile. I suppose he’s come to believe that false smiles are real by now. He must see them every day, from the doctors, the nurses, his family.
I say, ‘I can heal you right now, if you’re willing to let me try. Would you like me to try?’
He’s frowning and saying, ‘Do you think it’ll work?’
I tell him, ‘I can’t be sure. But I think you’ll be better than you are right now, that’s for sure.’
He says, ‘If you can help me. We’ve tried everything.’
I say, ‘Close your eyes.’
He does as I say, breathing unsteadily. I assure him that everything is going to be okay. It’s maybe at the last moment that the boy senses the gun at the side of his head, because he flinches. He doesn’t open his eyes. Instead, he pulls away at the moment I’m applying pressure to the trigger. His movement doesn’t save him from the bullet, but I’ve saved him from his sickness.
With the boy dead I am questioning why the prevailing colour in a hospital should be white. I should think a hospital would see its share of bloodletting. The boy’s sheets are soaking through with thin blood, white rapidly wet with red. Why white? The blood turns up so easily.
Somebody outside in the hallway is asking, ‘What the devil was that?’ It’s a voice of authority, so probably a doctor or a physician of some kind.
‘Euthanasia,’ I call to him as he comes to the door, standing there bewildered.
The doctor looks just as sick as one of his patients. He says, ‘Dear God, what have you done?’
I’m sitting there in the visitor’s chair, with a gun in my hands and a bloodied dead boy in the bed next to me, and I know how this must look. I repeat, ‘Euthanasia. I gave him the best medication I could, doc.’
The doctor tells me, like I didn’t already know, ‘You just killed that boy.’
‘And how long did he have left to live? How much pain did he have ahead of him?’
The doctor is silent as I pass him in the doorway, and he doesn’t make a move to stop me.
Standing in the hall I call to the ward, ‘Thy sickness shall be healed!’
The doctor runs for help and I let him go, because I am busy moving from one room to the next, executing patients. In their eyes before they die, I see blissful relief. I reload in the hall between rooms, standing and watching the double doors and waiting for the police. Some patients have clambered out of their beds and are attempting to escape. A few have even made it out of the ward. I light another cigarette and move to another room, where a woman is clutching the sheets of her bed to her chest, screaming at me to spare her.
I say, ‘You don’t want to die?’
‘No,’ she says. ‘No, I don’t want to die.’
‘You’d rather suffer through the cancer?’
‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes, I’ll suffer.’
‘But it’s a more prolonged death this way,’ I tell her. I’m standing over the bed and I’m nothing but puzzled. ‘I’m making it quicker for you. Less lingering pain.’
She begs me to spare her, and I shrug.
What I decide to do is shoot her in the leg to distract from the pain of the cancer eating away at her. This is the least I can do.
She doesn’t scream. She’s just staring down at her leg in disbelief, watching the blood pump out from the tiny hole. At first the blood comes slow, like it can hardly believe it’s free of the flesh. And then it comes in a rush and she’s putting pressure on the wound. I offer her a cigarette, but she doesn’t seem to notice me anymore.
I mutter, ‘You ungrateful bitch.’
I leave behind me a bloodied and empty ward, my red footprints weaving back and forth in a zig-zagging line from room to room, a lone woman moaning in terror and pain.
When I’m walking back to the elevator, it’s like business as usual throughout the hospital. There’s no panic, and nobody seems to care about the gunshots that have just come from the Oncology Ward. A young nurse passes me in the hall and she smiles and says, ‘Hello.’ Outside, there are two ambulance officers eating sandwiches and leaning against their vehicle, and they smile and nod as I pass them. There’s a cop on the corner and he says, ‘G’day.’
I flash him a smile and say, ‘How you doin’?’
Outside the hospital the air is clean and I draw great deep breaths. There are no police cars surrounding the block and flashing their lights. I just keep walking, and the world ignores me, and it doesn’t consider me a monster at all.
Juliet and I go to see a movie in a crowded cinema. The boy in front of us keeps sneezing, almost in time with the bullets flying on screen, and I secretly kick the back of his seat in an effort to shut him up. Eventually his mother looks over her shoulder at me with a frown and I stick my tongue out.
After the movie Juliet says, ‘I don’t know why they have to make those things so violent.’
‘Escapism,’ I tell her.
‘And those people, laughing every time something terrible happened.’
‘Comic relief,’ I tell her.
‘It’s horrible,’ she says.
I tell her that it’s a way of life these days. The world is a violent place. I even hear that somebody shot up a cancer ward yesterday. She gasps and says, ‘You’re kidding?’
‘Why would I kid about something like that?’
She says, ‘Sometimes I’m not sure about your sense of humour. That you could find something like that amusing.’
I put my arm around her and assure her that I’m not a psycho. This isn’t a gun in my pocket, I’m just happy to see you.
She says, ‘Sometimes I wonder what goes on up there in that brain of yours.’
I wish that I could tell her. Nothing up here but this tumour.
Next thing we’re sitting on the couch at Juliet’s place, watching gameshows in the glow of the television. There’s a curving scar on Juliet’s wrist. I notice it while her arm is resting in my lap. There’s a thin line of white skin, sligh
tly upraised, that snakes from below her thumb and across to her wrist. I run my thumb along the scar and she pulls away from me.
I look into her big eyes as she says, ‘Don’t do that. I don’t like people doing that.’
She moves out of reach.
I ask her how she got the scar.
‘Somebody threw a vase at me,’ she says.
I ask her who.
She tells me: It was an ex-boyfriend with a short temper. They were arguing about she-doesn’t-remember-what when he threw the vase at her. She raised her arms in defence. That’s where the scar comes from, when the vase shattered against her. She kept the bruises on her throat for a week, the indentations of his fingers as he strangled her. She stayed with him for six months afterward.
Juliet has what we’d call a consistent track record in detrimental relationships.
Take Adam, for example. Her first boyfriend at age sixteen. He was four years older. Auto mechanic. Amazing body, nice smile. Seemingly genuine. They met at a party Spencer had taken her to. Spencer told her months later, when she’d broken down in tears, ‘You’re old enough to start learning from your own mistakes. This is your first lesson. Some guys just can’t be trusted.’ Spencer went out after that and the next day Adam was in the hospital with a broken leg. What Adam did was cheat on Juliet throughout the entire relationship. Said he couldn’t just be with one girl. She understood that, didn’t she? He needed to move around. Sure, he loved her. But he had to be with other women, it was just the way he was. Right.
There’s Brandon, who had the short temper. The relationship lasted a little over a year, but it was dead in almost every sense a long while before that. They moved in with each other after three months. Madly in love. Juliet was fresh out of university, earning money. She bought all of the furniture, everything, because he was temporarily unemployed. What he did all day she didn’t know, but he went out a lot of nights. This was behaviour she didn’t really notice until a few months in. At first he’d call her every day, see her every night. They move in together and it’s a different story. Comes home drunk a lot of nights. She just wants to be the good girlfriend, but after a while she can’t tolerate it anymore. She speaks up and it’s a slap in the face. She’s never been hit by a man before. She thinks it won’t happen again, but she’s wrong. She keeps thinking it won’t happen again for six months after he tries to strangle her and doesn’t finish the job because he passes out drunk. She lay under the weight of his body, his tired hands resting on her neck, and she cried herself to sleep but didn’t leave for six months because she loved him, she really did.
