Sinister Shorts

by Perri O'shaughnessy

  “So two hours kinda morphed into three.” Jason chuckled.

  “Just you and your brother?” she had asked, unable to stop herself.

  He changed the subject, and she knew, somewhere in the infinitesimal portion of rational thought still accessible to her, the colors in her mind began to blur, and the brightness toned down just a hair. She knew, but for a brief time, she ignored what she knew.

  The fights began.

  Victoria came from an argumentative family. She knew how to argue, how to wield sarcasm, how to twist facts. She had a terrible tendency, she was the first to admit, to bolster her opinions with specious facts.

  Jason had a more subtle style. He opened his eyes wide, convinced with a guileless air of calm reason. Which made her crazy. And made her throw things.

  Deterioration, particularly when he responded in kind.

  He had another lover. She knew it. He knew she knew. The entire thing made her so tired, she spent days when she didn't have school lying on a couch with a blanket over her, moping and crying. He didn't call, just came by occasionally wanting sex. She gave him bitterness and grief.

  After a few weeks of this, she came to her senses. She didn't wait for the usual call, the tentative plans that were dependent upon how cheerful she was willing to act. That morning the sun spread down the sidewalks and crept happily over the bushes and trees. Her usual place on the couch, in a cold, shadowy corner of the living room close to the phone, held no appeal.

  Like a car in drive, inspired by the impulsive lurch of sunshine outside, she packed a bag with lotion, a paperback book, and a towel, popped sunglasses on her head, and hitchhiked to the beach. The day passed in a pleasant pageant of blue and white, with a touch of orange sun when she tilted her head a certain way. She swam out beyond the breakers, and had a conversation with a recovering heroin addict that made her glad to be alive and not addicted.

  Jason was waiting on the porch when she came home. The ex-addict had taken her home on his motorcycle. When he saw Jason, he stopped short at the gate, gave her a wave, and jumped back on his bike and roared away.

  She unlocked the front door, wondering what to say.

  “Have a good time at the beach?” Jason said, and she heard caverns of unhappiness in his voice.

  She let him inside.

  “I've been trying to reach you all day.”

  The accusation stood there naked for her to see. Seeing it, she didn't like it. “Want something to drink?” she asked. “I'm so thirsty.” She didn't wait for an answer. Tossing her things on the floor, she went into the kitchen and reached into the freezer for ice. “Beer?” she asked. He liked beer.

  “Okay.” He drank the beer.

  She put on some music, sat down next to him on the couch, and drank wine. While the music wound around them, tight as his arms around her shoulder, he drank another beer and another. Then he tried to steer her into the bedroom. She was surprised to discover she did not want to go there with him.

  “Time to go, Jason,” she said, trying to disentangle herself from him.

  He planted his feet in her living room. First, he flirted. She was lovely tonight, her skin glowing with the day's sunshine. When that didn't work, he pleaded. How far it was to drive home. He was tired. She didn't want him driving when he was so tired, did she? Then he got demanding and things got ugly.

  He tried to force her.

  She kicked him in the nuts.

  He bellowed with pain and left enraged.

  It being the end of the school year, she moved back home to San Francisco. Although her parents in Palo Alto offered her a safe haven, she checked the want ads in the Chronicle. Tom lived in a nice big apartment near Nob Hill with one other roommate, Luther. They needed another person to share the rent.

  She liked Tom instantly. She even liked the way he answered the phone. “Whee!” he said. Later he explained that he was taking French, and she had misunderstood the word oui, but by then she was already captivated by his devilish smile and the cute room at the front of an old building fronting a Wayne Thibault-style San Francisco street, all flat planes leading straight up. She put a chair in the middle of the bay window and made that her power spot in the apartment, strewing newspapers, books, and dried coffee cups.

  Jason wrote from L.A., and oh, could he write. His letters arrived almost daily through a slot in the front door, and his words balled up her insides until she stopped reading them. So he called. He told her about his fellow workers at the ketchup factory, making fun of them with a fondness that reminded her about the bigness of his heart. He engaged her in the furies of his creative struggles, made her laugh.

  During the day she worked in an office, busying herself with the futile task of organizing other people's chaos. She missed Jason, the intimacy. His phone calls, when she took them, had the safety of distance behind them. She felt free to fantasize again, to imagine a closeness between them, to wonder about a future. But on the foggy summer nights, it was Tom, sipping Scotch out of thin glass, who radiated like a heater and drew her closer. Only the rude blare of the telephone could upset the peace when they would sit together at the table playing cards or trading jokes.

  “You going to answer that?” Tom would ask.

  Sometimes she answered, sometimes not. Always these calls from Jason were awkward because Tom sat there sipping or snacking, his warm, brown eyes fixed elsewhere, but every molecule of his body spinning in her direction.

  One night in August, Tom went to a party with an old friend, a social worker named Peggy with muscular legs and a wide smile. Victoria spent the evening fussing, due to return to school in September, to L.A. Did that mean she returned to Jason, too? What about Tom? Tom's absence from the kitchen made her cranky, and when Luther came in to pour himself a little gin, not even drunk yet, she said nastily, “Oh, why bother with a glass when you can take the whole bottle?”

  When Tom came home, late, she was waiting for him in the kitchen surrounded by the dirty dishes and cockroaches that had crept out, unafraid of the still, fuming woman at the table.

  Tom lounged against the table, bubbling a little, as if the alcohol slogging inside him continued to brew. Ordinarily shy and wary around her, he reached a long arm out to snag her, pulling her close. Sniffing her hair, he said, “Ah. I knew you would smell just like this.”

  Maybe if she hadn't been so jealous of Peggy, maybe if her nightly phone joust with Jason hadn't left her angry at herself for leading him on when she suddenly did not want a future with him and dreaded leaving San Francisco and the life she now led, she would have pushed Tom away. She valued their friendship. She did not want to jeopardize that by jumping into bed with him.

  But the charged bolts of energy sizzled around them and she couldn't let go.

  That first night, she let Tom hold her close.

  The next night, they made love in his moody blue room, with the windows open and the cold night air seeping around and between the heat of their bodies, and she was hooked. All feeling for Jason faded into memory, into embarrassment. How could she have loved him? Examining the picture he had sent in a frame, she realized Carol had been right.

  He was sleazy. He had little piggy eyes, and he had cheated on her and lied to her face.

  The next time Jason called, she told him she didn't want him to call again. Frantic at her rejection, he stepped up his campaign, sending flowers, even a telegram. I LOVE YOU STOP

  When she stopped responding, he had flown up. “I'm coming over…”

  Life moves. That's the essence of it, force forward into progress, like mad lines of ants marching along, individual, mobbed, compelled. Yet, at that moment, while Jason's gun glinted in the corner of the attic room, and Tom moved out from beneath her, nothing progressed. Stalled, frozen, paralyzed, all these words did not do what happened justice. An eternal moment passed. She had time to assess the fundamental nature of the situation.

  Jealousy.

  Two men, one woman.

  Elemental and i
mmutable.

  In her naiveté, she had not understood completely that they were not playing. These romances constituted the essential nature of life. Childhood was over. Adulthood was life itself, happiness, children. There were no higher stakes.

  The gun glinting, as Jason raised it…

  When she was very young, very very young, she played with dolls. She invented worlds where men were not necessary, where the characters reproduced asexually. They lived on the moon, powerful and unchallenged.

  What happened in real life: staring at a gun. Something over for good. Accepting it.

  “Aaaa!” she cried, then repeated herself. Jason's hand quavered. He stared at them. Blood bloomed on the chest of the man she loved.

  “My fault?” she wondered, staring into the black hole of the barrel Jason now pointed at her. Everything on this warm, wild earth froze.

  His hand wavered and his piggy eyes fixed. He brought the gun back, opened his mouth, and shot red all over the blue wall behind him. He slumped down on the rug, leaving behind two dead bodies and one living.

  During the time their lives passed from active to inactive, she hesitated like a bee above a flower. Something was pending, something always hovered, and it was her life, lingering.

  They died, they both died, and she stayed on to fly around in the sunshine and ponder that moment for the rest of her short days.

  The Second Head

  Neurons splintered, shrapnel flew, bombs exploded. She woke up in the middle of a war, only the war was not happening outside. The war was happening inside her body. Cells died, screaming as they went down. Reinforcements crept out of ditches and met resistance. All around, flashes of light and noise…

  They wheeled her out of the operation.

  “Pain. Pain. Pain,” she said. She had no idea if these words were a murmur or a scream. She opened her eyes to a blur of people in hallways and an elevator. “Pain,” she told them. “Pain,” she tattled to anyone that passed.

  Hours later, she saw her husband. “How are you?” he asked.

  “In pain.” Her voice came out as a croak. Oxygen flowed into her nose through tubes. Another tube ran through her right nostril and straight down into her stomach, draining any liquid she took in and scratching the back of her throat. He gave her ice chips to roll around in the dry world of her mouth when she needed them and the clear tube bubbled them out to a machine on her right side. She watched the moisture move out.

  She made the decision early to use every bit of pain medicine that came her way. They hooked an IV up next to her bed and placed a button in her hand that would give her a dose every five minutes. Every time she thought of it, whether or not five minutes had passed, she pushed the button. The drug did little to disrupt the skirmishes inside of her. Instead it made her not care. In one druggy dream, she saw earnest people in white clustered around a conference table. “Do we numb the hurt or make the patient not give a shit about it?”

  They had chosen to attack her spirit.

  Her bed, a white-sheeted machine that contorted into any shape, was her foxhole. A remote control twined over the silver side rails hovered near her right hand. If she wanted to sit higher, she pushed the top right button. To rotate the entire machine, she pushed the third button from the bottom. She learned the sequence for how to sit up. First, second button on the left until the bed stopped. This button brought the bed down close to the ground. Then, the third button on the left until the bed stopped. This rotated the bed up until she was practically sliding out of it. She played with the first on the right and fourth on the left throughout, adjusting the head- and footrests, then sat, sweating, heart beating, sutures weeping, until she gathered the energy to grasp the side rails, spread her legs apart, and heave herself upright.

  Pre-op, the anesthesiologist, Dr. Phelz, had asked questions to determine her overall hardiness. “You seem to have a strong constitution. You might heal without this procedure,” he said, as if questioning her decision to have the surgery.

  The car accident had turned her easy life topsy-turvy. She could skip the surgery, and maybe continue a downward spiral that she was convinced would lead her straight down the pit into death. Or she could take the risk.

  She hated having to make the choice. She wanted to revenge herself on the cause of all this agony. She had made no threat, she had spoken no words in anger, but a plan grew with her pain, and with the impending operation. She must not only punish, but punish with impunity. That was not easy, considering the state of her health after the accident. She counted on more strength and her unshakable resolve to see her through the aftermath.

  “I do not like thee, Dr. Fell,” she had thought, gazing up at the anesthesiologist's handsome face. It was a nursery rhyme she used to read to her children. “The reasons why, I cannot tell,” her mind ran on as he spoke, reassuring her, attempting a bedside manner. “But this I know and know full well. I do not like thee, Dr. Fell.” The rhyme rose and fell behind his words like a tank rolling over hills.

  It was obvious to her he did not like her, either. Possibly, he, too, did not know why. He visited her the first day or so after surgery and she thanked him very genuinely because, like her or no, he gave her a moment of heaven in the midst of sheer hell, and he managed to keep her alive. Later, the surgeon said that he was quite an “interesting guy.” Since she respected the surgeon, she reconsidered. Dr. Phelz was whole and fit. She was lying on the table, a disorderly blob, about to be gutted. No doubt the contrast had affected her judgment.

  She did not fear death by anesthesia or heart failure. She did not even fear pain. She had given birth to four children without medication. She imagined she knew all that pain had to offer. She was ignorant, but her ignorance made her calm and strong and helped her survive the battles ahead. This same mysterious thing inside people sent young people to war with a secret in their hearts, a yearning for adventure and glory.

  She was just being human, denying the facts that stared her in the face. She did not climb mountains too high to ascend or march off to meet enemies who wanted to kill her. She walked into a hospital where sharp knives waited, sterilized upon a table.

  The day before the operation, she spent hours completing a battery of tests. Questions, many questions, but never the right ones. Why had she walked in front of the car? They did not ask. Why had the young man who hit her been without insurance?

  Why that split-second mistake? Why all that pain? During the months of her recovery she thought of little else, except holding him accountable for ruining her life. She was a teacher. He needed a lesson he could never forget.

  A few forms, to hold everyone else harmless. Then they needed her blood. “It's very hard to find a good spot on me,” she warned them. They patted, then slapped the inside crook of her elbow. They put a heating pad around it. They called in an expert. The phlebotomist, a young woman with scraggly black hair, took six tubes of her blood out of one thin vein, chattering, trying to keep her placid as the red fluid oozed slowly up the plastic piping.

  The third day after the operation turned out to be a terrible day. Where the IV entered her hand a bruise had formed, and her hand was bloated. They had once again called the meager-haired woman, who had moved the needle into her arm. Now her arm had bloated, too, and a foot-long red trail under her skin ran from her wrist to her elbow. She had cellulitus, and required more medicine.

  She passed much of that day watching the red establish itself under the wan white of her skin. After lunch, which she didn't eat, she eyed her stack of books, wondering if they held enough power to distract her from the heat of the needle and the lead rock in her stomach. When her mind cleared enough, she could think of nothing but the purity of vengeance. She pictured his death. She thought of the story, the one where the one bent on revenge walled another one up alive.

  She would like to do that. She would listen for the scream that never came, the jingling of the bells, and mortar the last brick into place anyway.

  For months be
fore the operation, while making up her mind to go for it, she had read stories about mountain climbers, trying to read between the lines to find what drove them to take such insane risks. Was it courage? A vain hope for life without pain, without the terrible outcome of a very bad moment?

  For her hospital stay, knowing she might have trouble concentrating, she had instead stocked up on best sellers. She picked up one from the bedstand, read a page, and put it down. The downfall and redemption of this character unfolded in her thoughts like a Hollywood movie, so tight. So unreal.

  The third evening, still groggy from the abundant course of treatment she had self-prescribed, a man with pocked skin was on duty: the attendant.

  Most of the hospital personnel were women. The nurses were typical American types, with the exception of the nurse on graveyard, a large East Indian woman named Mercy, who embodied the night perfectly, muttering incantations as she checked the IV, replacing the bag of fluids and the vial of medication. The orderlies and aides were female immigrants from South America and Thailand, sweet people willing to wipe dirty bottoms and powder flesh that had seen better days.

  The exception was Mike.

  He came in to check her blood pressure. His reading was different than any other she had had-which she mentioned. He didn't laugh when she joked about it. He slowly pulled out the cuff, fumbling with her arm, and tried again. And again. And then he entered figures she knew to be wrong into his log. That evening, she needed help in the bathroom. He helped her and she didn't care that he scared her a little with his moodiness and the unusual seriousness of his temperament. She didn't care that he was male and black and she was female and white. She needed him and he helped her.

  The next evening, she made her husband come earlier so that she would not feel so helpless, and so that she would not have to depend on Mike. Mike came in very quickly, took her blood pressure, and left. She remembered the car coming and the look on the boy's face as his car came forward as if powered by the stars, a machine bent on devastation.