A Man Named Doll

by Jonathan Ames

  But then, sensing something, I looked behind me, and the water was suddenly rising up like an ocean wave, a tsunami wave, and then it peaked, high above me, an immense dark curtain of water, and I couldn’t get away, I couldn’t move, and then it came slamming down on top of me, pushing me to the bottom, and I looked up and the water was roiling above me and would never let me back to the surface, and I couldn’t breathe, I was going to die, and it was then that I had the double horror of realizing I was dreaming, that there would be no saving Monica, no getting away, and that what I would be waking up to would actually be worse than drowning, and it was then that I came out of the dream, choking beneath the ball gag but still alive.

  6.

  About an hour later, Ben showed up to give me dinner. I had been wrong about that in my dream.

  He put the bed in the sitting position and kept me in the straitjacket.

  And I welcomed his presence. I didn’t want to be alone in that room anymore, in the darkness, strapped to the bed. I was already getting Stockholmed and was scared by the idea of him leaving me again.

  But I wasn’t completely slavish, not yet.

  I had been fooled by him in my nightmare, but I knew—or wanted desperately to believe—that he had some sympathy and feeling for Monica, and so I had to try to exploit this. It was my only gambit.

  He swung the tray table in front of me, sat on the edge of the bed, and began to patiently feed me a salmon patty, mashed potatoes, and a salad. I was very passive and quiet, which pleased him, and after a few bites, I said, like it was no big deal, like none of this was a big deal: “How’s Monica? She doing okay?”

  “Yeah, she’s fine. But I told you already, we’re not talking about her.”

  “Okay. Okay.” I ate some more and then I said: “I won’t talk to you about her, but you know, the cops are going to find us. They’re going to find my friend in Costa Rica, and talking to him will lead them here.”

  “Not going to happen,” he said good-naturedly.

  “It is and you should let Monica go before they get here.”

  “Shut up,” he said.

  I shut up for a few more bites and then I said: “Listen to me. Grab the two hundred thousand I got for the diamond and take off. But let Monica go first. Come on—you don’t want her to be hurt. I know it.”

  He put the fork down and said, genuinely angry for the first time: “Stop talking to me about the girl. Eat your food. Or I’m going to fucking make you go to sleep.”

  I finished the meal in silence—I wasn’t a very good manipulator—and as he rolled the tray away, I said: “Why do you do this for Madvig? Kill people? Hurt Monica?”

  He turned to me, pissed. “Why do you think? I do it for the money, asshole. And let me give you some advice: stop dreaming about any cops coming to save you two. We’ve got friends down south who we do a lot of business with and so you and the girl crossed the border into Mexico on Saturday—in your car—and you’ve been using your credit cards, having a good time, and then when we give the go-ahead in a few days, two burned corpses with your IDs are going to turn up, and then there’s going to be a mix-up in the morgue and the bodies will be cremated. So nobody’s looking for you, because they think they know where you are, and then you’re going to be dead. Except you’re not. You’re going to be here making money for us.”

  Then he flipped the switch on the fentanyl and put me down for the night.

  7.

  In the morning, Ben bathed me again and I tried to pull my hand away, my second big escape attempt, so I could jab my fingers into his voice box, and it went nowhere. With my head strapped to the bed, I had no power, and Ben swatted my hand away like it was nothing. He was back to his genial self, and he said: “You’ll stop fighting after tomorrow,” and I wanted to say something like, “I’ll never stop fighting,” but I had spouted enough clichés, and the truth was I wondered if I had already stopped fighting.

  After breakfast he took me for a walk, and I said: “Can I ask you a question?”

  “About the girl?”

  “No.”

  He shuffled me down the hallway. “Then you can ask.”

  “Why’d you kill my friend—the old man?”

  “I didn’t kill him; Andy did.”

  We came into the kitchen–nursing station. “I figured as much, but why did Andy kill him?”

  “That old man pulled a gun on us.”

  “But why? Why’d he do that?”

  “The doctor looked at his records from the VA and gave him an exam and said he was too much of a risk to die during surgery. We can’t have the patients die here. Too many questions.”

  “And with donors there’s no questions?”

  “That’s right,” he said, and he laughed.

  “But why’d my friend pull the gun?”

  “Because he still had to pay the twenty-five thousand consulting fee, except he wouldn’t. He yanked out that nasty Glock, said he wasn’t paying, and tried to back out gangster-style.”

  So it was how I imagined: Lou pulling the gun, backing into the elevator.

  We went across the living room and stared out the window at the pool. “Me and the doctor would have let him go,” Ben continued. “It was only $25K, but Andy was carrying—he and his brothers, they like their guns—and I couldn’t believe it, but he shot the old man and the old man fired back. Straight-on head shot. No more Andy. Then your friend, the old man, got away and everything has gone to shit since.”

  Just then a large black BMW pulled up in the driveway, and John, whom I hadn’t seen since Sunday, popped out of the driver’s side. Then he got a wheelchair out of the trunk, unfolded it, and opened the rear passenger door. An old man emerged, whom I recognized, and John helped him into the chair.

  I had a terrible feeling, and Ben said: “That’s where your kidney’s going, buddy. Better get you back to your room. We don’t want to spook him.”

  He started shuffling me back across the living room, and I managed to wriggle away from him, some last-ditch crazy hope, but bound at the feet and wearing the straitjacket, all I did was fall hard to the floor.

  Ben lifted me up and looked at me, concerned. But I hadn’t injured myself.

  “You shouldn’t have done that,” he said.

  Then he started shuffling me back to my room, his hand tight on my neck, and he said, not without sympathy: “I’m sorry, buddy. What can I tell you? The rich like to live forever.”

  “I guess they can afford to,” I said, playing the tough guy, cracking jokes, and Ben laughed, and I knew who the rich man was. He was the actor with the big nose from Maurais’s building. All those sitcom episodes were going to pay for my kidney, and it must have been more than real estate that Maurais had brokered in.

  We got to my room and Ben strapped me to the bed and when he went to gag me, I kept moving my head, making it hard for him.

  “Quit fighting me. I know you—you’ll scream and upset the old man.”

  “I won’t. That’s not it. Just let Monica go, please. You have me. She won’t—”

  But he didn’t let me finish. He held my head down violently, gagged me, and left the room.

  He then checked on me a few times during the day, playing with my IVs and keeping me hydrated, but then that stopped: I couldn’t have any more water, nothing, and all I could think about was Madvig reaching his hand inside my body and snipping out my kidney.

  8.

  Then that night, trapped in the jacket, gagged, and alone in the dark, I lost it in a good way and had some visitors, one after the next:

  My mother, whom I only knew from photos, but she was so glad to finally meet me.

  My father, who had changed completely—all his anger was gone.

  Lou, who got me into all this trouble in the first place, and, of course, he was smoking.

  George, my sweet boy, who kissed me over and over.

  And then a real surprise visitor: the first girl I ever loved, Sarah.

  She was my girl
friend when we were seventeen and she’d had the most beautiful smile. She was one of those illuminated people. Light came out of her and everyone felt better when she was around.

  But when I went into the Navy, she went to the East Coast and we lost each other. In my twenties, I heard she got married and I wondered if it could have been me, and then in my forties, I heard she had died of brain cancer and left behind a little girl.

  I couldn’t believe this had happened to her—not Sarah!—and it was so painful to realize that I had missed out on her whole beautiful life. Why did I let that happen? Why couldn’t we at least have been friends?

  But then there she was in that dark room, holding my hand, smiling at me, like she still loved me, like she had never stopped loving me.

  And I was so happy to be with everyone who came to see me. It all felt very real. They were right there with me, sitting on the edge of my bed, and I said to each of them many times, I love you, I love you, I love you.

  9.

  I somehow slept for a few hours, and in the morning, I woke up, probably around dawn. I was still strapped to the bed and soon I was going to be operated on against my will and I had to try something.

  I had to go down fighting, and I began to imagine Madvig talking to me before the surgery. Doctors always tell you what they’re going to do before they do it, and they’d have to unstrap me if they were going to cut me, and I could lunge for him then and get my mouth on his neck and rip out his jugular; I had seen something like that in a movie. What did I have to lose? Or maybe I might even get away and be able to save Monica. Kill him and the other two could fall.

  So I started practicing in my mind and passed a few hours like that, and then Ben, wearing a surgical mask, came into the room and wheeled me out of there on the bed, still strapped down and gagged.

  He rolled me all the way to the surgery tent, where Madvig and his son, in masks and scrubs, were waiting for us. There were bright surgical lamps blinding me and Madvig said: “Good morning, Mr. Doll. This’ll be over before you know it, so not to worry. Kidneys are very tiny, not more than five inches, so they slip right out.”

  Then he said to his son, “Let’s get him started,” and John hooked me up to the IV, inserting the feed into my neck port, and he said, “I’m going to count down from ten,” and he began, and they weren’t giving me a chance to do anything!

  They were going to unstrap me and ungag me after I was out, and John was saying, “Nine, eight, seven,” and Ben took my hand at the bottom of my straitjacket and gave it a warm squeeze and said, “You’re going to be okay,” and I could see that beneath his mask he was smiling at me with his twisted mouth.

  When I woke up three hours later, I was short one kidney.

  10.

  I was back in my room and Ben had changed my restraints.

  I was no longer in the straitjacket—probably because of the incision on the side of my abdomen—and I wasn’t cuffed to the railings with metal bracelets.

  There were still straps across my body and my head, but I was now lying on a pad with Velcro cuffs, which secured my ankles and wrists, and because I was pinned to the pad by my own body weight and the straps across me, I was utterly immobile. I had seen such rigs in psychiatric hospitals when I was a Navy cop and then later in the LAPD. They were effective with violent psychotics.

  But I wasn’t gagged and I tried to scream for the hell of it, except my throat was a dry rasp. I lay there for a while, still feeling heavy and thick from the sedation.

  Then I tried to scan my body, to see if I could sense that my kidney was gone, and I thought I felt an absence, like a drawer had been removed from a dresser. Then I dozed off for a little while, but woke back up when Ben came into the room. He said: “You like the new setup? More comfortable than a straitjacket. Was delivered this morning.”

  I just looked at him, and he lifted up the bandage on my abdomen and said: “Looking good. You and the old man did great. How’s the catheter feel?”

  “Catheter?” I couldn’t lift my head, strapped as it was to the bed, and so I wasn’t able to see between my legs, and I had no sensation down there.

  “I’ll take it out later,” he said. “We got to make sure you can piss on your own.”

  I closed my eyes and he went to the bathroom. He came back with a cold compress and dabbed it against my brow.

  I looked at him and said: “How’s Monica?”

  “Jesus. Don’t start that again.”

  “I want to start it again. What does Madvig have planned for her?”

  He looked at me and smiled. “Okay. You want to drive yourself crazy, I’m gonna tell you. Next week we’re gonna need half her liver. The good news is it will grow back if we need more.”

  I closed my eyes again. Then I said, looking at him: “It’s not too late. You could let her go. You got me. Just keep cutting me up.”

  “She’s a different blood type, asshole. B positive. We need her.” Then he put the ball gag back in my mouth to shut me up and played with my IV. “Since I’m a nice guy,” he said, “I got you morphine. Make you feel good.”

  A few hours later, he woke me up and got the catheter out, which felt like a razor was being drawn across the inside of my penis, even with the morphine in my system. Then he had me urinate in the toilet and I was weak as hell, and he said, “You got good waterworks.”

  Then he strapped me back into the bed and turned my brain off with the morphine, knocking me out, and I was glad to go away.

  The next time I woke up it was night and the door was open and a shaft of light was coming in from the hallway, and Sarah was standing over me in the half darkness and her hands were on my shoulders, shaking me, and I said, “I’m so glad you came back.”

  And she said: “Can you sit up?” Her voice was a panicked whisper and I realized that there was blood all over her face.

  “What happened to you?” I said, concerned.

  And she said, whispering fiercely: “Happy, wake up! Wake up!”

  And then she turned toward the door, afraid, thinking she heard something, and some light caught her profile and I saw a scar, and I realized it wasn’t Sarah. It was Monica!

  “Monica,” I said, and I wasn’t dreaming. Not at all. Monica was in a paper gown just like mine except her gown was covered in blood.

  She turned back to me and said: “Can you get out of bed?”

  I nodded yes, and she put her arm around my shoulders and helped me get to a sitting position. She had already undone my straps and I wasn’t connected to the IV.

  “What’s happened?” I said, slowly coming more awake.

  “We have to get out of here,” she said, her eyes wild. “I killed the son. I killed him. We have to go!”

  She helped me stand and I was a little wobbly but I could move.

  We made our way down the hall. “Faster, Happy,” she said, and I tried, and we were both in our bare feet, and we got to the living room and headed for the front door—light from the pool outside, with its underwater bulbs, made the room glow—and she said, “Come on, Happy, let’s go, let’s go,” and I was trying to move as fast as I could, but I was still half drugged, and then there was an explosion of sound, a gunshot, and the living-room window blew out, there were shards all around us, and Monica dove behind the couch, and I turned, frozen. I was standing next to the fireplace, and John was at the top of the stairs, naked.

  He was holding his gun in his left hand and his right hand was on his neck and there was blood all over his torso, leaking from a gash just below his jawline.

  “Don’t fucking move,” he said, and a cold ocean wind blew through the demolished window, waking me more, startling me, and I was next to the little stand that held the tools for the fireplace: a poker, a shovel, a small ash broom.

  John came down to the bottom of the stairs, holding the gun on me, and said: “That fucking bitch.”

  And I grabbed the poker and flung it at him.

  I got lucky and it winged just right and
struck him across the chest, scaring the hell out of him, and he dropped the gun, and we both went for it.

  I moved quickly, adrenaline surging, but he got there first and as he leaned over for it, one hand still on his neck, I tackled him, and we both went down, and he didn’t have the gun, and then we were fighting for it, it was right in front of us, and his body was slick with blood, and the incision in my side ripped open, and then Monica was standing over us with the poker and she brought it down on his head three times, real fast, and he stopped moving and would never move again. She said: “He tried to rape me.”

  Then she helped me up and I got the gun, his .22, and then we both heard something and turned and through the shattered window, we could see Ben.

  He was wearing sweatpants and sneakers—the spotlight had been turned on—and he was running down the driveway from the front house, a double-barrel sawed-off shotgun in his hand, and Madvig was behind him, in a robe, trying to walk quickly, and he had a rifle. Even with the wind, they must have heard, across the lawn, the sound of the shot and the broken glass, and then Ben fired and the shotgun blast slammed into the house.

  “We have to go out the back,” I screamed, and I fired once through the broken window, but the .22 was no good at that distance, and we ran for the French doors to the left of the surgical tent.

  On the other side of the doors was a back patio with chairs and a table, and it was tucked at the bottom of a sloping hill. There was a spotlight on the patio, casting an arc about twenty yards up the slope, and we went running across the patio and up the slope in the freezing cold, and it was covered with wild grass and rocks—it rose at about a thirty-degree angle—and we just had to get past the rim of the light, where it would be very hard to see us.

  But I started to struggle: blood was pouring out of the incision in my side, and my legs weren’t really working, I couldn’t get up that hill, and Monica was way ahead of me, moving fast, and then she slipped into the darkness—there seemed to be an outcropping of some boulders up ahead—and then a shotgun blast fired right next to me, kicking up dirt, and I turned and fired—Ben was down on the patio—and I missed, and then somehow I got into the darkness, and Monica cried, “Over here,” and she was crouched behind the rocks, and Ben fired again, but I was with her, covered, and then another shot fired, followed by silence—he must have been reloading—and I peered around the rocks and Ben was starting to make his way up the hill, in the middle of the arc of light, and Madvig was on the patio, directly behind him, huffing, holding his rifle, and I fired at Ben and it punched Madvig down.