Orgonomicon (4 page)

Scott wanted to lash out, to strike at the
threatening voice, but quickly thought better of it. This was not
the time, something told him, to be a hero. Besides, he could
barely twitch a finger, much less make a fist. Fists were all he
had. He felt his platform move, shifting on smooth hydraulic limbs,
to a position closer to the ground; the movement brought a rush of
air over his body and he realized he was naked. He still couldn't
open his eyes. There was a prick in the crook of his elbow. "I've
started the IV-drip, doctor."

"Good. Prep the area and we'll begin."

Things were getting pretty scary; Scott tried
to squirm over onto his side, but was instead consumed by a warm
wave of drowsiness coming over him and the sensation of something
cold wiped on the side of his face. "I've administered sedation,
doctor."

"Don’t tell me about it, just do it, nurse.
Now get that eye open."

Light exploded into his world as one of the
bizarre creatures peeled his eyelid back and inserted a curled
metal comb to hold it in place. He was surrounded by odd shapes in
white, indiscernible in the drug-induced haze dragging him back
towards darkness, but he had time to make them out as human beings
in O.R.-scrubs, with masks over their faces and concern in their
eyes. The head doctor, though—he looked at Scott as one would
regard a bug whose legs were about to be pulled off. More than
anything, Scott wanted to get away from that one. Nothing good
could come from that man.

"Hand me the impeller, and get another fifty
cc of the morphine-drip into him."

"Doctor, shouldn't we wait until the
anesthetic kicks in?"

"He won't remember any of this. Don't
second-guess my instructions."

The comforting red haze of oblivion tugged at
him, but Scott still resisted. He tried to yell, he tried to sit up
and pull the IV's out of him, he tried to punch the doctor in the
face, he tried to rip the thing off his face and run away; instead,
he lay prone and watched the long stainless-steel rod approach his
right eye. He felt the orb pushed to the side, felt the rod pushing
into the socket, felt it detach something that pinched onto some
part of his inner workings, felt the rod slide back out devoid of
its payload. All he wanted to do was scream; all he was able to do
was to rail inside his head.

The doctor was pleased. "It's in. Start the
recorder and make sure the uplink works."

The blackness swallowed him whole.

Ella hung up the phone and put it down on the
coffeetable, between a plate of oozing brown bananas that was
slowly devolving into a fly-colony and a plastic tray full of
marijuana leaf-clippings. What the hell was wrong with him? He was
such a loser. She didn't know why she'd ever let him shack up with
her. He only did so he could leech off her, she knew it. Well, not
anymore; she was taking charge of her life. She'd thrown his sorry
ass out for the last time, and Scott could just learn to get along
in the world like a big boy now. She was staking charge of her
life...

She sifted through the bowl of
leaf-clippings. There'd be a few good bits, parts of buds the
trimmers had passed over, she knew it. Damn Scott, for making her
so mad she couldn’t think—she needed to get her head straight.
After she'd had a little bit to smoke, she'd be able to deal with
the shit.

It seemed like that was all she got these
days, shit and more shit; she knew who was to blame for it all,
too. If she'd never met that asshole Scott, if she'd never agreed
to come back home with him to this shithole town where everybody
hated her, if she'd never made the decision to hitch her wagon to
his train—if she'd never done any of these stupid things, her life
would have been better. Things were supposed to go a certain way
when you got married, and things had
not
gone that way, not
with Scott. He was
such
a loser. He'd never gotten off his
butt and gotten a real job, the kind that could support her and a
family, and now he'd lost everything. Served him right.

The leafy-stuff was a crappy substitute for
the real thing, but it did the trick if you smoked enough of it.
She coughed hard, swallowed back something that was immediately put
out of her mind, and put the pipe back down. It was getting pretty
clogged up with resinous goo from the leaf-cuttings. Damn Scott for
making her smoke this nasty stuff—she deserved better.

When they'd first met, she'd had very
different ideas about him. The sun seemed to glint in his eyes no
matter which direction he was facing; his skin was smooth and
bronzed; he stood tall like a mountain and seemed every bit as
solid, the veins in his arms ropy and his chin held high. He'd told
her he was going to make it rich with his vehicle-restoration
company; he had a plan and everything. First he'd start by getting
his engine-repair business off the ground, get himself a small
garage to start with and then hire people to do the work for him
once it started paying for itself. He was good with engines, too;
he really could have made it if he'd only applied himself. Instead,
it was failure after failure and Scott blaming it all on the whole
world and everybody but himself, and then it was welfare and the
food bank and standing in line for handouts and everything
undignified and damn it she deserved
better
.

Not to mention the fact that he was
rock-stupid to boot; he couldn't take a hint. She'd tried yelling,
calling the police on him, she'd even thrown a set of knives at his
back; when she stayed out all night and came home smelling like sex
and he didn't even blink, she knew more drastic measures would be
needed. She'd been keeping diaries since before they'd met and she
knew Scott was well aware of them—she'd chewed his ass for three
months the one time she'd caught him reading them and she knew he'd
never done it again. This time, she left them out with several
passages marked with a yellow highlighter pen. Some of the entries
were fake, created purely for him, but not many.

She described in minute detail all her sexual
trysts, both real and imagined, and detailed the growing love she
was coming to feel for one of them. Not all of it was made up.

She'd written that she was pregnant;
that
was made up. Gahh. She couldn't get pregnant any more;
she'd tried.

Thinking about it gave her a headache. What
she needed was some coke.

Ella coughed; it was getting worse, and
starting to worry her. Scott would have normally appeared at her
side when she had one of her coughing spells with a cup of hot tea
or some noxious herbal potion—he was so controlling. Every little
thing wrong with her was amplified a thousand-fold in his presence,
as he would try to fix whatever was 'wrong' with her. And there was
always something wrong for him to fix. He was like that, always
meddling and sticking his nose in where it wasn’t wanted and always
always
always
making her feel like she was flawed. She had
enough problems with her flaws without Scott putting them up on
display. He probably thought he was being helpful, from up on his
high horse.

Who the fuck did he think he was? She could
open a door for herself, for Chrissakes.

She'd been an independent woman ever since
her fifteenth birthday, when her mom kicked her out of the house
and told her she'd have to start making it in the world on her own.
It had been a school-night, too, as if that had mattered. Her mom
was a bitch, but she was dead now. Ella cursed her mother's name,
cringing with guilt but unable to curb the hatred. She must be a
terrible person.

She
had
to be a terrible person,
considering what she'd done for Scott, out of fear.

She'd thought at the time that she was doing
the right thing for everyone. Scott needed to learn how it was to
deal with the real world, and Ella wasn't doing him any favors by
letting him nest down with her, nor did he deserve the free ride.
All she'd ever wanted in her little world was to raise a family,
and Scott had taken all that away from her. Now he was going to
learn about consequences.

The headaches were getting worse by degrees;
this was by far the worst one yet. She couldn't think any more. She
went to the bathroom to hunt for an aspirin; there were too many
bottles of pills behind the mirror. Most of them had to be
Scott's—he still had his crap spread around the apartment, even
though it'd been weeks since she'd told him to get lost. He needed
to get his stuff out of her space.

The first time she'd gotten pregnant, she'd
expected Scott to be overjoyed like she was and ready to start
their new lives together. He'd been less than ecstatic. The more he
talked, the less excited she'd been about it, too. He'd been right,
no matter how much she wanted it otherwise. They were poor. They
didn't even own a car. They were too young. They were stupid.
They’d make bad parents.
She'd
make a bad mother. The whole
situation would end up being so awful that he'd have to leave her,
eventually. It would all be her fault.

Always talking talking
talking
, until
she heard the words all the time, even when she was alone. They had
a way of working their way into your head, of beating themselves
into you.

He was right, and she knew it, and so she did
the only thing that occurred to her. She waited until he'd gone out
job-hunting and then made a phone-call. When the day of her
appointment came, she hustled him out the door and went to the
clinic by herself. A couple hours later, she returned to their
apartment, shivering and lighter by a few ounces that weighed as
much as a world. She never told him, never brought up the subject
of her pregnancy, and lied to him about a miscarriage when he asked
several weeks later. He'd bought it—hook, line and sinker, just
like he was supposed to. And she hated him for it, but she never
brought it up and never let on to it. This
wasn't
how things
were supposed to be.

She'd stayed with him, then, though
everything in her screamed non-stop at her to get out. She wanted
to have a family, that was
all
she'd ever wanted, and if
Scott wasn't going to be the one to provide it for her, then she'd
find someone else who would. She was going to do it, had gotten
herself ready on the inside and started to lay out the path to a
different,
real
life with a different, real man, when Scott
got hit by a car. Hit by a freakin' car! She'd felt so bad for him,
he'd gotten real messed up this time with broken bones and bloody
wounds, that she’d had to change her plans and take care of him
instead. Like a baby. The irony turned her heart to flint, a heavy
stone inside her that she hefted late at night, standing over Scott
in the bed while he slept, and thought about bashing his head in
with it.

God, she needed an aspirin.

She rummaged through the pill bottles in the
cabinet, the rage mounting; half a dozen of the little amber
bottles later, she still couldn't find what she was looking for and
realized that it was because she wasn't thinking straight. She
already had what she was looking for right in front of her, didn't
she? Scott didn't need the pills anymore, she did. It was as simple
as that. Two tablets went down with a palmful of water drawn from
the bathroom sink. Fuck him anyway.

The second time she'd gotten pregnant by him,
she hadn't been so quick to tell Scott about it. She knew what he'd
say; he'd say, "This is why I keep asking to use a condom," and
"Why can't we discuss this and make the decision when we're
both
ready," and a million other little things that she knew
were true but didn't want to admit.
He
was the one sticking
his penis in her;
he
was the one who should have to knuckle
under and take responsibility, like the man was
supposed
to.
She waited an entire month before she brought it up, this time
preparing all her arguments beforehand so she wouldn’t be caught by
surprise again without a comeback.
She
knew she was ready,
and that was all that really mattered. She knew what she wanted,
and that was all she needed to know.

Once again, Scott took her by surprise. He
was so quick with his reasons for not wanting to have children, it
was like he'd been preparing, too. She couldn’t actually be sure he
hadn't. In fact, thinking about it, she was
sure
he'd known
about it before she told him and must have been practicing for the
big moment at the same time as she'd been. All her arguments fell
on deaf ears; she just couldn't bring him around to her point of
view. This time he'd suggested the abortion first. But she'd
already been planning it. Someone on the telephone had helped her
decide.

She wasn't supposed to think about that.

They'd been very convincing, though. She
hadn't wanted to do it, this time; they'd made her change her mind.
It was her duty.

As a reward, they let her see the shipping
van that came to pick up the remains. She thought they were giving
her a chance to say goodbye, to the life she'd dreamed for herself,
to hope, to expectation.

The third time had been the last; for her,
for him. Three strikes and you were out, right? That's what she'd
told herself.

Scott still hadn’t gotten a job that could
actually support them, still hadn't gotten his shit together and
quit drinking, hadn't done anything to turn their lives around or
made any kind of name for himself as an auto mechanic. It had all
been bottled nonsense, a story he told himself and her, that he was
gonna make it someday and all their problems would be over. Instead
they sank deeper and deeper into debt. She'd sold all her nice
clothes, her books, the furniture and heirlooms passed down through
her family. He'd sold his plasma. It was never enough, and so they
took the final dive, sold off their pride and went on welfare. Her,
on welfare, like a bum! How could he have done this to her? How
could he make her live like this?