by Alex Moss
“Yeah, you made a difference, old man.” Stelson moves away but the vagrant has more to say.
“Be the reaper before you go, son. Get back here. There’s a bigger reason why you’re here wit’ me.”
Stelson stops and waits for him to explain. He lowers his head, his back to the vagrant. A delivery truck rolls by on full beam, heading downtown, washing light over the pair so they appear sickly and anemic.
“I killed a stray child last month.”
Stelson is confused then appalled. He’s filling his limbs with hateful energy, the Cortisol and Dopamine flooding his mind like a river valley with a busted dam. The vagrant has given him a pass - a mandatory justification to channel a buried urge and an opportunity that’s recognized for its scarcity.
“I am sick and you got every right to stop me from doing more bad deeds.”
Whether the statement is true, or not, it is designed for effect and it triggers Stelson to turn on the vagrant. What happens in the darkness is bloody and brutal–the reluctant darkness inside Stelson Floyd has a reason to leave its containment and he lets it rip until his muscles fill with lactic acid burn. Exhausted and falling to the ground nearby, he crawls away from the aftermath of his release.
It’s close to sunrise. The light is still too soft to give color to Stelson’s surroundings, and also the blood-spatter covering his clothing, face, and hands. It looks as black as if he were ridden with the plague. He sneaks up to Room 109 at the motel.
The door is ajar.
“Anna?” Stelson pushes the door wider to get a better view of the room. It’s dark but he can see the old trunk that is now shut and its contents packed away. He steps inside and makes a beeline for the bathroom, slams the door, strips off his clothes, wraps them in a bath towel, and takes a hot shower and scrubs and scours away all the surface signs of his act of violence.
His legs are shaky so he crouches down in the bathtub, the hot steamy water scolding his back but he doesn’t care. He needs the painful distraction. The next time he opens his eyes, the shower screen is too fogged up to fully ID the figure of Anna rifling through his blood-spattered clothing. But he sees a figure and his knee-jerk impulse is to smash his fists through the glass shower-screen in some half-hearted and moronic attempt to reach the target body in the bathroom.
When the glass shatters he is eye-to-eye with Anna, the proverbial rabbit caught in headlights, too pumped up to realize that stray shards have severed his wrists. For a brief moment there is silence. She peruses the blood-spattered clothing at her feet. The oversized pearl necklace item that she now clutches, and then snaps out of this malaise.
“Who are you?” she starts softly at him.
“It’s me.”
“What have you done?”
He hesitates for good reason.
“What have you done?” She stands up and presents the pearl necklace to him but in fact she’s showing him the burns around her wrists.
“I ain’t done a thing.” He answers like a pathetic child.
“What have you done?” She’s frustrated that he hasn’t noticed the scars and only has eyes for the large pale orbs.
“I just borrowed it. I’m—”
“What have you done?” She’s growing more manic by the second and reverts to the pile of blood-spattered clothes.
Stelson has nothing to say to that. His fists are still clenched and then he releases and the blood flowing from his wrists is evident. It streams down both sides of the bathtub and he looks to her for pity or some kind of action.
“What have you done, Stelson?”
“It’s not that bad. What it looks like.”
“Get the hell away from me.”
Stelson compresses one wrist, but stemming the blood flow like this is futile at best.
“Get out!” She wants him to die somewhere else and she uses all her strength to drag him out of the bathtub and onto the floor. He slouches naked in a heap, slowly deflating, but she’s kicking him now to keep him alive so he struggles to his feet and staggers out of the bathroom, clutching the doorframe and now the bedroom walls for support.
These inanimate objects and structure are the only support he’s going to get.
“I am a blind man hunting for an exit from hell.” This sounds delirious–from some deeply buried compartment in Stelson’s throbbing skull. He shuffles toward the door to the street.
Anna picks up the clothing and tosses it in the bathtub. She gathers some mini liquor bottles from the refrigerator, empties them over the clothes, and lights them up so that she soon has a little raging bonfire.
Stelson turns and stares at the flames that fire up a hallucinatory trance–Anna seems to ritualistically dance around the flames. The fire accentuates her beauty and her limbs seem to stretch out forever, ghost-like, mesmerizing, but soon the colors start to fade with Stelson’s consciousness and he collapses. A hollow thud. Darkness.
SEVEN
Kenneth Molloy wakes up in the back of a supply truck, trafficked, and hunched up next to other squirming half-naked bodies in the half-light, hard to distinguish, all shaved head to toe.
Some alive, some dead.
He rubs up against smooth skin and wonders about the how and why of it all. Others in this predicament mutter, “Is this heaven?”
When the shutters of the supply truck rise up, a torch light fills the cramped space and the scene is definitively unheavenly, even though the lighting seems on par.
They have no reaction to the sudden blanket of artificial light because their eyes have been extracted and a cross of blood has been painted from blood-weeping socket to socket and from forehead to chin.
The writhing army of groaning Saints have been delivered and the dark shadowy figure that lifted the shutters is pleased with what he sees–he’s a young, dapper-looking man with the broad European face of a pugilist. He smacks the side of the truck repeatedly, reverberating fear right down to the core of each survivor. As dread overwhelms their senses like a tsunami’s ocean wave devours a coastal populous, some of them are tuned in and strong enough to form an instinctual pack of rabid creatures who lay in wait, in the dark, and the shadowy young man makes an error of judgment and climbs into the truck to retrieve his cargo. Kenneth Molloy and seven others are strong enough to drag the young man down and knock him unconscious with a blunt object before he can put up a fight.
The blind try and stay together. At first, they seems to scatter and lose each other, fear overwhelming them until they learn to project their hoarse voices to stay close. They don’t know they are in a car park situated somewhere on the border of Long Beach Airport. Across the street, there is an expanse of black nothingness and the faint outlines of light aircraft.
The Saint’s blood, pain, and fear must have echoed like sonar, attracting a handful of local coyotes that sense the huddle’s combined weakness. These dogs know when the tables have turned, so they advance with a snarl.
Kenneth darts from the huddle and runs full force into the car park’s wire fence. He ricochets off it and falls backwards onto the ground. His instinct is to curl up into a fetal position for protection against whatever comes next. Through some phobic reasoning, coyotes are demons in his eyes. He commands the other Saints to split up, run like hell, and look out for number one.
But none of them run.
Most stagger and stumble like zombies, feeling the dark with their outstretched arms. The blood from their eye sockets is streaking their chests to match the crucifix pattern on their faces, attracting the coyotes that sniff and lick the spatter that has hit the asphalt. Some take shelter behind parked cars, while one skinny, frail Saint crumbles with the barks and howls of three coyotes who team up and maul him to shreds.
Doctor Xander Grant is standing outside Cedars Sinai Hospital smoking a cigarette, swapping it nervously from one set of bony fingers to another. He is in his l
ate forties, silver hair back and sides and jet black on top, neat, well-groomed, and his initials are monogrammed on his cuffs and chest pockets: X.M.G.
Two brown sedans traverse Beverly Boulevard from the east and pull up next to the doctor. The cars look official and polished. The front passenger window rolls down on the first sedan and a pale elderly man in a grey suit and tie waits for Grant to finish his cigarette. The Doctor keeps him waiting, which mildly perturbs the grey-suited man who rolls his eyes and tuts.
The cigarette butt gets kicked away and the exchange can begin. The Doctor steps up to the sedan.
“You do know that smoking is illegal?” the old man says.
“I’ll bear that in mind.”
“Don’t be so cheap. It doesn’t suit you.”
The Doctor smiles. “So what have you got for me?”
“Well. Just so as you’re not too surprised when you take the mask off later on, and only later on, I’ll send you the name to your cell phone in another context, like some editorial.”
“As big as that?”
“He’s a face alright. It’ll be all over the news by sunrise.”
The doctor nods. “As long as I can execute the extraction to plan. Sometimes it’s a little more complicated.”
“Come on. You’re a pro. We’ll make pick-up in a little over three hours.”
“Even a pro has a bad day.”
“The penalty could be severe. How’s that for motivation?”
Xander shrugs. “I’ll do my best for you.”
“It’s not for me, it’s for the State. Remember that.”
“Show me the subject.”
The rear passenger door pops open to reveal a sedated man, head lop-sided, dressed in all back sweats with a composite face mask to conceal his identity. It’s the kind of mask a patient with severe burns would wear to prevent an infection to the facial tissue.
“What’s he done?” asks the Doctor.
“I can’t comment. It’s better that you do this not knowing. I don’t want emotions to compromise your true abilities, so just think of the payday. You’ll know when everyone else does.”
Someone leans over and pulls the rear door shut and the sedan pulls away and continues west on Beverly. The second brown sedan shifts forward and collects the Doctor, who gets in the back and they drive off, leaving the Cedars-Sinai campus for another location.
Xander Grant stands on the edge of a modern high-spec operating room, scrubbed down and sporting transparent surgical gloves. Behind him: darkness, muddied by an ocean of distant shimmering lights.
The operating room is a large, sealed glass box perched on a ridge in the hills above the city. A private theatre where the distant San Fernando Valley residents are the audience to the procedure that’s about to take place. The unique location and its glass walls reflect the humor, and perhaps the loneliness, of this somewhat off-the-grid surgeon.
If Damien Hirst wanted to interpret and reimagine an operating room it would be this.
There are flat screen monitors suspended from the roof and around the table to check vitals from any angle. There is also a suspended tray on a multidirectional arm with an array of surgical tools, syringes, and tubes, some of which are connected to compact devices and fluid containers.
And on the black monolithic operating table is the anaesthetized subject. His body is shrouded and his face mask still on. The Doctor steps up and lifts the mask off. Even though he was prepped for this, revealing the actual identity of the subject in this way causes him to pause for breath and consider what he’s about to do.
As he locates a scalpel from the tray he can’t help but double-take the occupant of his table and then he proceeds, blocking out troubled thoughts. He makes his first incision along the lower eyelid of a right eye that’s wide open–a normal dark brown eye–nothing unusual or freakish about it.
Blood weeps.
Three hours later, Xander pauses and considers the subject. He’s only looking at his work, refraining from reminding himself of the identity of the subject, focusing on the job at hand. The eyes have been removed from their sockets and contained in an air-tight glass box-shaped receptacle. They sit on a razor thin metal shelf next to the patient as though the subject had some trick method of gaining an out-of-body perspective of oneself during the surgical procedure and extraction. This could also be Xander’s observational comedy–to lighten the pressure of the hours that follow and the impending deadline to complete and deliver.
Xander turns away and reaches for another surgical instrument from a metal tray. He collects a series of parts that need to be assembled, which he does in turn, checking that each is spotlessly clean. It’s as though he’s assembling an extremely miniature brushed metal musical wind instrument, a surgical flute. The parts click into place with precision and a series of satisfying clicks. There are even a series of circular hollow impressions that could be controls, but seem similar in design to the holes that adjust sound and frequency in an instrument.
The device he is about to use is of his own creation and for one purpose only–to extract and erase a part of the brain that contains all the badness and intent to harm, commit criminal acts, and the memories of any wrongdoing or misdemeanor that leads down the slippery slope of shameful existence. Xander grips the instrument, his fingers over the hollow impressions, and hovers the narrow end over the right eye socket of the subject laying on the OR table. He leans over the body and connects his own right eye with the fat end of the instrument, which has a glass digital viewfinder. He appears to look down a telescopic instrument and controls it using the flute like impressions that only require him to lift and lower his fingers by certain degrees in order to adjust the instruments functions.
The instrument extends multi-directionally down and through the eye socket and uses a laser to bore cut a fractional nanometer-width circular tunnel into the front of the temporal lobe and base of the frontal lobe of the brain. Entry via the eye sockets is necessary in order to minimize the damage to other parts of the brain or nervous system.
Xander’s hands are like ice. Rock solid. There is no noticeable quivering. His breathing is virtually non-existent. He’s in a flow state, meditative, and working at what he does best and gets paid so well for. Hours later, he will have completed the extraction and removed multiple parts of the brain that are the size of grains of sand. The precision is almost incomprehensible.
Therapy complete.
Flashlights beam over Kenneth Molloy’s shivering body. The dark shadowy figure is back to round up his hoard. He will leave the skinny one behind because he is out of time, the airport about to officially open–the dark expanse now hazily lit with taxi and runway lights and the air traffic control tower blazes up.
Later, the car park by Long Beach Airport is taped off to mark the border of a crime scene. There is one LAPD patrol car and an unmarked black Chevy SUV. Two uniformed cops are bagging up the skinny one, what’s left of him, while Detective Victor Lesko hollers on a cell phone, one hand leaning against the driver’s side of the SUV. His stern words drowned out by a private jet that rolls slowly toward a small terminal building. As the jet engines fade, Victor’s voice becomes audible, “You’ve caught me at a bad time, Anna.” He pauses. “Hackett and Greenburg will be there to clean up.” He pauses and listens. “A homicide of sorts. I’m here now. Long Beach Airport. I have to go, before someone realizes I’m on a burner.” Victor ends the call and tosses the phone onto the ground and stamps on it, shattering the body and internal chipset. The cops working the scene are too absorbed in their work to notice.
Sunrise over LA and the soothing amber baby rays of sunlight wash the floor of Doctor Grant’s house in the hills. The TV is playing in the background while he cooks two poached eggs on sour dough in a sleek Bulthaup kitchen.
The news on the TV is bleak and this is reflected by his mood and lack of sleep. He
has grey panda patches under his eyes and he’s not excavated the motivation to shave yet.
There are already three or four stubbed out cigarettes in the ashtray next to him as he swaps glances at the rising sun, the outline of the hills, and the designer toaster that seems to be taking an age to deliver his golden bread.
The news story on in the background, out of focus from Xander’s distracted gaze, covers the story of a husband, father, Samaritan, philanthropist, former heavy-weight film producer, and now State Senator. The name may have been mentioned earlier in the piece, so again, the identity is still unknown.
A respectable man by all accounts and someone that people like Xander would have known and probably liked. But this has all gone out of the window. He was found bathing naked in the blood of his dead children and wife, a kitchen knife in his hand. Alive but seemingly deranged. The news story continues, digging deeper and asking the questions the public want the answers to, including–how did this man hide his demons for such a long time, and how and why did he suddenly flip?
A message alert from Xander’s phone and he picks it out of his track suit pants and reads the message from an unidentified number:
From Senator to Saint… Thank-you for your work.
Xander’s two eggs are done. He puts his phone down and carefully lifts them out of the simmering water and cools them off in a glass bowl filled with cold water, but one of them bursts and the soft orange yolk slicks into the clean water.
The Doctor responds angrily to the phone message and taps out a response:
He’s still going to hell. EVEN I can’t alter that.
And then slides the phone away and regrets the tone of his message. He’s expressed doubt and a hint of disloyalty. He knows he’s compromised himself but it’s too late. The damage is done. The phone falls off the edge of the Corian kitchen work surface. His hands are shaking. There is a picture of his wife on a high up shelf in a sleek silver frame. Attractive but not obviously so, dark hair, with grey strands, and a surgically-enhanced nose. She looks older and perhaps wiser than him.
