Zippered Flesh: Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad!
Page 10
A pencil-thin spotlight hit the stage and slowly widened to reveal a table covered with a black cloth. Behind the table sat a woman, staring out into the crowd.
He recognized Maud at once. So, she really was alive. Maybe Garcia and friends had been sufficiently frightened of him that they felt compelled to show him they hadn’t hurt her. Not more than what they’d promised, anyway.
Maud’s face showed some of the years her Botox treatments had staved off, but she was still beautiful—though the sadness that had cracked through her drugged façade might never have left, it was so etched in her features. The spotlight continued to widen and illuminate the rest of the stage.
The white light crept down her ample chest and he saw the blond hair first. Soon he saw the face and torso of what looked like some sort of animatronic ventriloquist’s dummy seated at her hip. The dummy wore a T-shirt that read: “Molly Made.”
“Molly” looked just like a scaled-down version of Maud. And she was so realistic. Too realistic. When she looked around, he noticed just one blue eye moved, like the other one was fake. Only that would mean—
The house lights came up. Getty knew how a kitchen roach must feel.
“Molly” turned her head to scan the audience. Maud remained still.
Getty tried to look past the painted lines on Molly’s face. The eye that moved glittered, and the gaze rested right on him.
Then she winked.
It couldn’t be. “Rena?” He mouthed the name.
She stuck her tongue out at him. The audience cheered and he felt gorge rise in his throat.
Rena spoke in a deep, rasping voice and pointed a small arm in his direction. “What a surprise. Sweaty Getty who kidnaps betties.”
Getty’s heart hammered in his chest. He staggered to his feet and ignored gripes from seated patrons.
Maud snapped into motion. Her eyes bulged, as did her throat when she screamed. “Kidnapper! Somebody get him! Look what he made them do to me!”
Getty stared at Maud, who started to roll the oversized wheelchair backward.
“No!” and Rena leaned forward and grabbed the edge of the table. The momentum of the chair won the tug of war and the table toppled with a loud slam.
Getty felt rooted to the floor. The audience erupted in puzzled murmurs, apparently torn about whether this was part of the act or not.
Getty knew, and now the illusion of an elaborate dummy evaporated when Maud yanked up her shirt.
Scars like railroad tracks ran wide across Maud’s torso, revealing ropy pink lines of healed flesh where Rena’s torso had been fused with her sister.
Random pictures of anatomy books flashed through Getty’s mind and he pictured the liver and kidney in Maud now working for two.
We aren’t going to take her liver ...
Rena screeched and pulled down the shirt. “You’ll ruin everything, you selfish ...”
Some people in the audience screamed, others laughed, and chaos reigned.
Maud tried to pull it up again and Rena let go to punch her sister in the face. Rena’s small fist just reached Maud’s chin and her sister’s head snapped back, reminding Getty of Maud’s reaction at the clinic.
She really hadn’t known. She’d thought Rena was dead.
Maud wrapped her hands around her smaller sister’s throat and began to throttle her.
Rena clawed Maud’s arms and legs and made a horrible mewling sound.
“Stop them!” Getty heard a voice from off stage. The women’s flailing arms caused the chair to rotate like it was on a turntable.
“Get out of my body.” Maud tugged and pushed Rena.
Getty heard a wet tearing sound.
“You stole my life.”
Getty saw stage workers flood onto the stage and try to restrain Maud only.
They don’t understand. They think Maud has gone berserk on a dummy. He didn’t think it was funny, but Getty started a high manic laugh that told him to get out of there before he lost his mind.
The last thing he saw before running over an usher on his way out was blood coming from under Maud’s shirt.
Four Weeks Later
Getty sat in the warm spring air in Balboa Park near the Fleet Science Center. Parents with kids in tow wandered along the paths and into the museum. Young people jogged by. Even the air tasted clean and sweet today.
He’d miss the park maybe most of all. He doubted this town would miss him, but that was all right. That was the point. Not to be missed.
He wondered of anyone would mourn the Spitfire sisters. From what he’d heard, they seemed to lose the will to live and their bodies barely put up a fight against the infection.
At least they’d had the decency to bury them in separate plots.
He gazed at his newspaper.
San Diego Union
Still No Clues in Deadly Doctor Triangle
Police maintain they still have no suspects in the bizarre triple homicide of three foreign-born surgeons found last week in a San Diego apartment. The victims were apparently poisoned; however, toxicology reports have not confirmed this.
The Union has uncovered that all three victims had lost their licenses to practice in their respective countries, but so far no criminal motive has been determined concerning their presence in the United States. There appears to be no connection between each of them.
Police will not confirm the rumor that several gold bars were found in plain sight at the scene, but, if true, that would cloud robbery as a potential motive.
“Not for money.” Getty watched a pigeon peck at a single piece of popcorn lodged in a crack in the sidewalk. “Nor love either, that’s for sure.” He leaned toward the near-tame bird and whispered, “When did things get so complicated?”
EQUILIBRIUM
BY JOHN SHIRLEY
He doesn’t know me, but I know him. He has never seen me, but I know that he has been impotent for six months, can’t shave without listening to the news and TV at the same time, and sometimes mixes bourbon with his coffee during his afternoon break. And is proud of himself for holding off on the bourbon in the afternoon.
His wife doesn’t know me, has never seen me, but I know that she regards her husband as “something to put up with, like having your period”; I know that she loves her children blindly, but just as blindly drags them through every wrong turn in their lives. I know the names and addresses of each one of her relatives, and what she says to her brother Charlie’s photograph when she locks herself in the bathroom. She knows nothing of my family (I’m not admitting that I have one), but I know the birthdays and hobbies and companions of her children, the family of Marvin Ezra Hobbes. Costarring: Lana Louise Hobbes as his wife, and introducing Bobby Hobbes and Robin Hobbes as their two sons. (Play theme music.)
I know Robin Hobbes and he knows me. Robin and I were stationed together in Honduras. We were supposed to be there for “exercises,” but we were there to help train the anti-insurgent troops. It was a couple of years ago. The CIA wouldn’t like it if I talked about it much.
I’m not the sort of person you’d write home about. But Robin told me a good many things, and even entrusted a letter to me. I was supposed to personally deliver it to his family (no, I never did have a family ... really ... I really didn’t ...) just in case anything “happened” to him. Robin always said that he wouldn’t complain as long as “things turn out even.” If an insurgent shoots Robin’s pecker away, Robin doesn’t complain as long as a rebel gets his pecker blown away. Doesn’t even have to be the same rebel. But the war had no fairness, no ethic of reciprocity. It remained for me to establish equilibrium for Robin.
Robin didn’t want to enlist. It was his parents’ idea. It had been raining for three days when he told me about it. The rain was like another place, a whole different part of the world, trying to assert itself over the one we were in. We had to make a third place inside the first one and the interfering one, had to get strips of tin and tire rubber and put them over our tent, because the tent fabric didn’
t keep out the rain after a couple of days. It steamed, in there. My fingers were swollen from the humidity, and I had to take off the little platinum ring with the equal (=) sign on it. Robin hadn’t said anything for a whole day, but then he just started talking, his voice coming out of the drone of the rain, almost the same tone; almost generated by it. ‘They’re gonna start up the draft for real and earnest,’ my Dad said. ‘You’re just the right age. They’ll get you sure. Thing to do is, join now. Then you can write your own ticket. Make a deal with the recruiter.’ My Dad wanted me out of the house. He wanted to buy a new car, and he couldn’t afford it because he was supporting us all, and I was just another expense. That was what renewed my Dad, gave him a sense that life had a goal and was worth living: a new car, every few years. Trade in the old one, get a whole new debt. My Mom was afraid I’d be drafted, too. I had an uncle was in the Marines, liked to act like he was a Big Man with the real in-the-know scuttlebutt; he wrote us and said the Defense Department was preparing for war, planning to invade Honduras, going to do some exercises down that way first ... so we thought the war was coming for real. Thought we had inside information. My Mom wanted me to join to save my life, she said. So I could choose to go to someplace harmless, like Europe. But the truth is, she was always wet for soldiers. My Uncle Charlie used to hang around in his dress uniform a lot, looking like a stud. She was the only woman I ever knew who liked war movies. She didn’t pay attention during the action parts; it wasn’t that she was bloodthirsty. She liked to see them in uniform, dancing with the girls at the USO, displaying their stripes and their braid and their spit and polish, marching in step with their guns sticking up ... so she sort of went all glazed when Dad suggested I join the Army, and she didn’t defend me when he started laying the guilt on me about how I was leeching, I wasn’t getting a job—and two weeks later I was recruited and the bastards lied about my assignment and here I fucking am, right here. It’s raining. It’s raining, man.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’d be nice if it wasn’t raining. But then we’d get too much sun or something. Has to balance out.”
“I’m sick of you talking about balancing stuff out. I want it to stop raining.”
So it did. The next day. That’s when the rebels started shelling the camp. Like the shells had been waiting on top of the clouds and when they pulled the clouds away, the trap door opened, and the mortar rounds fell through ... rain gone, gotta have equilibrium, balance it out, so here comes an attack.
Immediately after something “happened” to Robin, I burned the letter he’d given me. Then I was transferred to the Fourth Army Clerical Unit. I know, deeply and intuitively, that the transfer was no accident. It placed me in an ideal position to initiate the balancing of Equilibrium and was therefore the work of the Composers. Because with the Fourth Clerical, I was in charge of dispensing information to the families of the severely wounded or KIA. I came across the notice to inform Robin’s parents of his condition, and I destroyed it. His parents never knew, ‘til I played out my little joke.
Jokes are always true, even when they’re dirty lies.
I juggled the papers so that the badly injured Robin Hobbes, 20 years old, would be sent to a certain sanitarium, where a friend of mine was a Meditech who worked admissions two days a week. The rest of the time he’s what they call a Psycho Handler—a Psych Tech. My friend at the sanitarium likes the truth. He likes to see it, to smell it, particularly when it makes him gag. He took the job at the sanitarium with the severely brain-damaged eighteen-year-olds who bang their heads bloody if you don’t tie them down, and with the demented older men who have to be diapered and changed and rocked like babies, and with the children whose faces are strapped into fencing masks to prevent them from eating the wallpaper and to keep them from pulling off their lips and noses—he took the job because he likes it there. He took it because he likes a good joke.
And he took good care of Robin Hobbes for me until it was time. I am compelled to record an aside here, a well-done and sincere thanks to my anonymous friend for his enormous patience in spoon-feeding Robin Hobbes twice daily, changing his bedpan every night, and bathing him once a week for the entire six months of detainment. He had to do it personally, because Robin was there illegally and had to be hidden in the old wing they don’t use anymore.
Meanwhile, I observed the Hobbes family.
They have one of those new bodyform cars. It’s a fad thing. Marvin Hobbes got his new car. The sleek, flesh-tone fiberglass body of the car is cast so that its sides are imprinted with the shape of a nude woman lying prone, her arms flung out in front of her in the diving motion of the Cannon beach towel girl. The doors are in her ribs, the trunk opens from her ass. She’s ridiculously disproportional, of course. The whole thing is wildly kitsch. It was an embarrassment to Mrs. Hobbes. And Hobbes is badly in debt behind it, because he totaled his first bodyform car. Rammed a Buick Marilyn Monroe into a John Wayne pickup. John and Marilyn’s arms, tangled when their front bumpers slammed, were lovingly intertwined.
Hobbes took the loss and bought a Miss America. He is indifferent to Mrs. Hobbes’s embarrassment. To the particularly astringent way she uses the term tacky.
Mr. Hobbes plays little jokes of his own. Private jokes. But I knew. Mr. Hobbes had no idea I was watching when he concealed his wife’s Lady Norelco. He knew that she’d want it that night, because they were invited to a party, and she always shaved her legs before a party. Mrs. Hobbes sang a little tuneless song as she quested systematically for the shaver, bending over to look in the house’s drawers and cabinets, and behind the drawers and cabinets, peering into all the secret nooks and burrow places we forget a house has; her search was so thorough I came to regard it as the product of mania. I felt a sort of warmth, then: I can appreciate ... thoroughness.
Once a week, he did it to her. He’d temporarily pocket her magnifying mirror, her makeup case. Then he’d pretend to find it. “Where any idiot can see it.”
Bobby Hobbes, Robin’s younger brother, was unaware that his father knew about his hidden cache of Streamline brand racing-striped condoms. The elder Hobbes thought he was very clever in knowing about them. But Dad Hobbes didn’t know about me.
Marvin Hobbes would pocket his son’s rubbers and make snuck-snuck sounds of muffled laughter in his sinuses as the red-eared teenager feverishly searched and rechecked his closet and drawers.
Hobbes would innocently saunter in and ask, “Hey—you better get going if you’re gonna make that date, right? What’cha looking for anyway? Can I help?”
“Oh ... uh, no thanks, Dad. Just some ... socks. Missing.”
As the months passed, and Hobbes’s depression over his impotence worsened, his fits of practical joking became more frequent, until he no longer took pleasure in them, but played his practical jokes as if they were some habitual household chore. Take out the trash, cut the lawn, hide Lana’s razor, feed the dog, play a joke.
I watched as Hobbes, driven by some undefined desperation, attempted to relate to his relatives. He’d sit them at points symmetrical (relative to him) around the posh living room; his wife 30 degrees to his left, his youngest son 30 degrees to his right. Then, he would relate a personal childhood experience as a sort of parable, describing his hopes and dreams for his little family.
On one occasion, he said, “When I was a boy, we would carve out tunnels in the briar bushes. The wild blackberry bushes were very dense around our farm. It’d take hours to clip a good tunnel three feet into them with the gardener’s shears. But after weeks of patient work, we snipped a network of crude tunnels through the half-acre filled with brambles. In this way, we learned how to cope with the world as a whole. We would crawl through the green tunnels in perfect comfort, but knowing that if we stood up, the thorns would cut us to ribbons.”
He paused and sucked several times loudly on the pipe. It had gone out ten minutes before. He stared at the fireplace where there was no fire.
Finally, he asked his wife, “Do you un
derstand?” Almost whining it.
She shook her head, eyebrows raised. Annoyed, jaws bruxating, Hobbes slipped to the floor, muttering he’d lost his tobacco pouch, searching for it under the coffee table, under the sofa. His son didn’t smile, not once. His son had hidden the tobacco pouch. Hobbes went scurrying about on the rug looking for the tobacco pouch in a great dither of confusion, like a poodle searching for his rawhide bone. Growling low. Growling to himself.
After one of these family communication sessions failed, he would give up and go off muttering to the garage, to putter about with his hobby: restoring antique vacuum-tube radios. (He sold them to collectors, on eBay.)
Speculation as to how I came to know these intimate details of the Hobbes family life will prove as futile as Marvin’s attempt to relate to his relatives.
I have my ways. I learned my techniques from other Composers.
Presumably, Composers belong to a tacit network of free agents the world over, whose sworn duty is to establish states of interpersonal Equilibrium. No Composer has ever knowingly met another; it is impossible for them to meet, even by accident, since they carry the same charge and therefore repel each other. I’m not sure just how the invisible Composers taught me their technique for the restoration of states of Equilibrium. But that’s not quite true; I am sure as to how it was done—I simply can’t articulate it.
I have no concrete evidence that the Composers exist. Composers perform the same service for society that vacuum tubes used to perform for radios and amplifiers. And the fact of a vacuum tube’s existence is proof that someone must have the knowledge, somewhere, needed to construct a vacuum tube. Necessity is its own evidence.
Now picture this: Picture me with a high forehead crowned by white hair and a square black graduation cap with its tassel dangling. Picture me with a drooping white mustache and wise blue eyes. In fact, I look a lot like Albert Einstein, in this picture. I am wearing a black graduation gown, and clutched in my right hand is a long wooden pointer.