“It doesn’t have to be the end, you know,” he said between sips of Coke. They always started with Cokes before switching to something harder. It was their thing.
“I didn’t think you were religious.” She gazed around the room at cuter, more dynamic guys who didn’t obsess over the way breasts were represented in Renaissance artwork. Was she growing bored with this sweet but odd man?
Arnold laughed in his snorting, hiccupping way. “Religion is just man’s way of wrapping the comfortable around the absurd.” He took a final sip from his glass and set it down, eyes wide, mouth twitching. “Know what I mean?”
To her, he looked like a child who had to go to the bathroom but didn’t know how to ask. She later realized that this was the moment she lost interest. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings by saying something to the effect of, “You’ve grown tiresome. See ya.” Instead, she nodded knowingly, prompting him to continue his tirade.
“There are ways to preserve life.” He glanced at a muscular man in a tight polo shirt, his lip curling in a display of contemptuousness. “Not that everyone deserves to live forever.”
“Why would anybody want to?” She looked at him, and then felt a shiver along her arms. Sometimes Arnold’s intensity, particularly in his eyes, was downright disturbing. “Living forever while everyone around you dies? Wouldn’t that suck?”
He smiled. “Not if you could take all the people that matter with you.”
She frowned and lapsed into uncomfortable silence as he started complimenting her body parts, especially her feet and hands. She forced a smile and endured his comments until the night concluded, at which point she swore they would never see each other again.
A year later, she’d awake strapped to an operating table in a place that reeked of ammonia and mildew.
He floats in and out of her vision and consciousness, smiling down at her, sometimes frowning at something she can’t see, clapping and singing to himself. She wants to get free, to kill him or at least cause him as much pain as he’s caused her.
She wants to go home.
“Don’t cry,” he says in a tone that is meant to sound soothing. “I’m here with you.”
Doesn’t he understand that’s why she’s crying? How can someone be so crazy, so disconnected from reality? Why won’t he just let her go and why can’t she feel her hands?
“I missed you,” he says. “Did you know that?”
She tries to say, “I don’t care, you freak,” but she can’t speak. Does anything work on her anymore?
What she really wants to know is how long she’s been here. For all she knows, it’s only been a few hours—but it could have been days.
“At first, I didn’t understand why you’d stopped seeing me.” He speaks from somewhere near but out of her line of sight. “I wondered what I could have done wrong. Who wouldn’t?”
She feels herself going in and out. Sleep is not an option, but how much longer can she resist its comforting pull. Besides, she knows he does awful things to her when she sleeps.
She’s not sure she wants to know what they are.
“I thought about it for months!” A scraping sound, metal against metal, over and over. “Even when I dated other women, I couldn’t stop wondering what I’d done wrong with you.”
Footsteps, light but determined, growing ever nearer. “Then I remembered our final conversation.”
His face appears, looking down at her, filling her entire universe with lunacy and unpredictability. “Do you remember what we talked about?”
She blinks, trying to force herself to remain awake. Of course she remembers. It was why she stopped dealing with his crazy ass.
“I bet you dooooo,” he says in sing-song fashion.
He smiles down at her, a tiny bubble of spittle forming in the corner of his mouth. His brow is coated in sweat and his face is red. But it’s his eyes she can’t avoid. Although they look right at her, they seem focused on something else, something only they can see.
Arnold starts rambling about life and death and preserving what matters. She tries to focus on his words, but she’s so damn drowsy. She hears him babble about an epiphany that occurred soon after they stopped dating. Some bizarre realization based on his stupid theories about immortality. Somehow he thinks she was responsible for this experience, an opinion that seems to have prompted his abduction of her.
She hears that grinding metal against metal sound again. She tries to turn her head to see what he’s doing, but everything goes black.
Someone speaks gibberish and moans incessantly. She tries to tell the voice to shut up so she can get some sleep. Her eyes refuse to open, proving just as uncooperative as her mouth. She hears classical music and thinks back to the art museum and Arnold’s off-key humming as they shuffled from gallery to gallery. Sometimes he would stare at certain paintings and other times he’d start going on about the limbs and how real the skin and eyes looked.
She remembers how Arnold’s interest in her seemed purely analytical. He would often compare what he admired in the paintings to what he saw on her body. She kind of liked that then; it made her feel unique without feeling obligated to put out. She knew it was a doomed relationship, but she was too busy enjoying the moment to care.
She isn’t enjoying the moment now.
The mush-mouthed, moaning person won’t shut up. It’s so fucking annoying. She just wants to get a little more sleep and then maybe she’ll be able to figure all this out.
“It’s a bit hard to understand what you’re saying right now, hon,” Arnold says.
The mumbling and moaning stops and she realizes it was her.
“If you’re wondering why you can’t talk,” Arnold says, “It’s because your mouth is filled with gauze and your tongue is, umm, in a jar.” More of that metal-on-metal scraping sound. “Please don’t try to yell. You’ll just start bleeding again, and we don’t want that, do we?” Scrape-scrape. “And crying just upsets me.”
She has no idea if Arnold is still talking. She leaves this place, drifts far away into a safer, more logical realm of existence where she still has a tongue and can move her arms and legs. She’s back on the day she met Arnold in the sports bar, only this time she notices things she didn’t consciously realize before.
He’s been watching her all night. Not only that, he seems to take a sip from his glass each time she does, their motions synchronized to a degree that would be enviable among clockmakers. She knows there are better-looking women in the bar, but she’s the only one he seems to notice. That should make her feel really good about herself. She feels removed, isolated from everyone else, perhaps even preserved for something best left undiscovered.
She also notices him writing in a small notepad. No, not writing. Sketching. His hand is moving about too freely to form letters. Is he drawing her?
Here comes the moment where he gets up and heads over to talk to her for the first time. She’s nervous but looking forward to it just like last time, only this time she notices something odd about his walk. He doesn’t so much saunter as shuffle, as if weighed down by something in the middle of his body. And his skin. Was it really that pale and splotchy?
When he sits down, she wishes she could say, “What are you?” but that’s not how it happened in the past.
He still has the little sketch pad in his hand when he sits across from her, smiling his seemingly harmless smile. This time she takes special notice of the scribbled design on the page moments before he puts it in his jacket pocket. It looks like an octopus with a human head. The head looks like Arnold’s.
Scrape-scrape.
She returns to the present, still unable to move or speak.
She hears Arnold, but his voice is too muted, too far away, to be understood. She blinks. His face looms over her, wearing an expression dripping with worry.
“Not much time left,” he says. “I have to move around a lot for obvious reasons.” Scrape-scrape. “This isn’t going to be my best work, I’m afraid, but it
will have to do.”
He squints down at her, cocks his head to the side. “What? You still don’t get it? That’s disappointing.”
She feels tears stinging her eyes and blinks them away. This isn’t really happening. This is just some sleep-deprived dream based on her guilty feelings about dumping Arnold so unceremoniously.
“You’re not the first, you know.” Scrape-scrape. “That doesn’t mean you’re not special. I love you just as I love them.”
You don’t love me at all! her mind screams. Love to you is just another way of expressing the need to control and destroy!
Arnold leans over and kisses her forehead, lingering there for a moment with his cold, dry lips before raising his head. “The best parts of you will always stay with me.”
His shirt falls open at the chest and she feels her grip on reality dropping away, as if falling from a high rooftop. Arnold frowns and follows her gaze to his chest.
“Darn, that was supposed to be a surprise.” He quickly buttons his shirt and steps away
Scrape-scrape.
She tries to convince herself she didn’t see ... what? It isn’t physically possible. No medical procedure exists to do that. She must be slipping away.
She’s okay with that. Anything to end this. Anything to never have to hear Arnold’s tuneless humming and that awful metal-on-metal scraping sound. Why doesn’t God intervene and take her life? Hasn’t she suffered enough?
“I must admit, I’m a little jealous.”
She shivers, all hope that Arnold was gone diminishing. He’ll never leave. He apparently has a mission.
Scrape-scrape. “Do you finally remember what you said to me the last time we saw each other? You said being immortal while everybody else dies around you was pointless.” Scrape-scrape. “You inspired me that day. I wanted to tell you all about it, but you had moved and there was no forwarding address. You never called.”
She hears a hint of resentment in that last part and shivers yet again.
“I wanted to include you, sweetie, because you were the one that opened the floodgates.”
Oh, God, she thinks. OhGodOhGodOhGod, no!
“I knew I’d find you again some day, so I kept busy.”
Please God, please don’t tell me this is happening because I stopped seeing him!
There was a voicemail message, a weird one that made absolutely no sense no matter how many times she replayed it before sending it to the Land of Deleted Oddities. It was from Arnold, two weeks after they’d parted company at the sports bar. She was taking a shower when the call came in—so, technically, she hadn’t avoided his call, although she would have if she’d seen it on the screen of her cell phone.
It took her a few minutes to work up the nerve to listen to the message:
Hi, sweetie. Haven’t heard from you or seen you lately. Hope everything’s good with you. I miss our museum trips. I know you do, too. I’ve been working on something lately after what you said, and I can’t wait to show you! I used to be afraid of life because it’s temporary, but you opened my eyes to so many ... what I mean is, I think I might be falling in ... okay, I promised myself I wouldn’t ... It’s just that there are so many people out there that don’t GET IT! Love can last forever. Oops, did I just say ... well, okay, cat’s out of the bag! I want you with me ... always. See you soon. (Muffled sound in the background, like screaming, and the call ends)
She and her friends had a good laugh at that one. What a creep, they said. Such melodrama, one friend added. An obvious virgin, another agreed. Arnold was the subject of one more conversation during someone’s birthday party, and then summarily forgotten.
Arnold tells her there were others, both before and after her. Loves that didn’t work out for different reasons, although he seems convinced the core reason is the lack of permanence. He tells her he’s solved that little conundrum. Arnold says he always knew he was special.
“I’m only the first,” he says. “There will be many more.”
She manages a “Wha-wha-wha” sound, the closest thing she’ll ever make to words again in her life. Somehow, Arnold understands.
“It was when you said you didn’t know I was religious.” He reaches out and strokes her hair. “Remember, sweetie?”
She nods, unsure what that has to do with anything.
Arnold shrugs, gazing down upon her with that smitten look that makes her want to projectile vomit. “I never was. Never even opened a Bible. But then I started wondering if you were using secret code. So, I opened it and I found what you were talking about. People used to be immortal until we sinned against God.”
Her eyes widen. Now she understands. Oh, God, now she understands too well.
“Sure, it’s silly to believe it happened just as written, but it didn’t matter. You believed in me.” He starts crying. “Somebody finally got me.”
If not for the missing tongue, she could talk to him in placating, appealing tones. If she could move her arms, she could stroke his face and make him believe she was okay with all of this. But she can’t do anything except mumble and stare up into his insane eyes, wide and filled with longing.
“We’re going to be so happy,” he says. “All of us.”
He opens his shirt to reveal the full extent of what she’s only glimpsed previously. She tries to scream and thrusts her head forward. She hears Arnold asking her what’s wrong. She tries to look away, to escape into her mind like before, but it doesn’t work this time.
She stops and stares at him, repulsed and fascinated. His chest is covered with extra skin and eyes and mouths sewn into his flesh. Women’s eyes. Woman’s mouths. Breasts. His “loves.” Her eyes roam up and down his disfigurements, past holes oozing pus, past rejected transplants in various stages of decay and decomposition. The stench of putrescence and disease, of what he’s become, now fills her nostrils and burns her eyes. She notices Arnold swaying back and forth, his face drenched in feverish sweat.
Slowly, her gaze moves upward until she looks into his gleaming eyes. He tells her not to worry.
“You’re going to go right here!” He points with a trembling finger.
She glances down at the currently unoccupied spot directly above his heart and then back into Arnold’s grinning face.
“I love you most of all.”
THE SHAPING
BY SCOTT NICHOLSON
“One in a hundred.”
“I’ve heard more like one in eighty.”
“Possibly. Still, my chances are much tougher than yours. Haven’t you heard the saying, ‘Painter’s plenty, one in twenty?’”
“Poppycock. The odds are better than that for gaining entry into the Areopagan Skyfleet.”
“Arn, what do you care? You wouldn’t be selected if the odds were one in two,” a scornful voice interjected from a nearby bunk.
Ryn put his pillow over his head. He had heard the same arguments nearly every night for two weeks. It had started out as good-natured ribbing, one or two voices reverberating down the long halls at bedtime. But as the day of the Trials approached, everyone was getting on edge. Now nearly four dozen voices were buzzing at once, and probably many times that in the other sleepless rooms that littered the sprawling grounds of the Akademeia. The room smelled of stones and sweat and fear.
Fools all, thought Ryn. This was time for concentration, self-reflection, and meditation. This was a time to scrutinize the mirror, to reach deep and tap into hidden wellsprings. To probe the pleasures and pains and all else that was kept buried. But he supposed each artist had his own methods.
Arn, for instance, was a painter. Such a crude and callous field might call for blustering. Why should Arn care about the inner nature when he only reproduced the external? He worked on a flat surface, in two dimensions. No inner truths to reveal. Arn, and all other painters, were tricksters and illusionists.
And poor Soph in the next bunk, prattling on about metaphors and misplaced modifiers. As a novelist, Soph had no discoveries to make, no secrets
to unveil. The words already existed. All he had to do was arrange them. True, writing was a precise craft, but Soph could make revisions at any time. But Ryn was a sculptor. He had no such luxury.
Soph’s voice came to him through the clamor. “Ryn? Ryn?”
Ryn lifted the pillow from his head. He turned toward Soph, the sackcloth blanket rasping his skin. “What?”
“What are you thinking about?”
“What else?”
“Are you afraid?”
Ryn searched inside the dark alleys of his head and heart. He knew himself well. He believed he had to, if he was to be selected.
“No,” he said. “I just want it to be over.” He tried to make out Soph’s face in the half-light, but saw only his fuzzy, crown-wreathed shadow in the next bunk.
The windows were small slits set high in the walls, allowing only slivers of meek moonlight to penetrate the dormitory. Rumor had it that the windows were narrow so that no one could escape, but conjecture was a favorite pastime at the Akademeia. Ryn didn’t think anyone would leave after being allowed inside the gates. At least, no one would leave as a failure.
After a moment filled with distant shouts and forced laughter, Soph said, “I’m afraid, a little.”
Ryn nodded in sympathy, the blanket scratching his cheek. He knew Soph could not see him, but the gesture was reflexive. He reprimanded himself for succumbing to an involuntary movement. One wrong move might prove costly tomorrow.
“Listen to that idiot Fen, bellowing about his coming glory,” Soph said. “One would think that a tenor would rest his voice the night before the Trials. What if he should crack during a critical glissando?”
“They say confidence is important. And Fen lacks none of that.”
“But I heard one in sixty for tenors. Surely room for self-doubt in anyone, even the megalomaniacal. Or perhaps I should say ‘insolent.’” Soph had a habit of revising as he spoke.
Zippered Flesh: Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad! Page 7
