Six Stories (3 page)

Yes! I scream up at him out of my unmoving face. Feel uncomfortable! VERY uncomfortable! TOO uncomfortable!

But he’s twenty-four at most and what’s he going to say to this pretty, severe woman who’s standing inside his space, invading it in a way that can really only mean one thing? No, Mommy, I’m scared? Besides, he wants to. I can see the wanting through the Plexi eyeshield, bopping around in there like a bunch of overage punk rockers pogoing to the Stones.

“Hey, as long as you’ll cover for me if -”

“Sure,” she says. “Got to get your feet wet sometime, Peter. And if you really need me to, I’ll roll back the tape.”

He looks startled. “You can do that?”

She smiles. “Ve haff many see-grets in Autopsy Room Four, mein herr. “

“I bet you do,” he says, smiling back, then reaches past my frozen field of vision. When his hand comes back, it’s wrapped around a microphone which hangs down from the ceiling on a black cord.

The mike looks like a steel teardrop. Seeing it there makes this horror real in a way it wasn’t before. Surely they won’t really cut me up, will they? Pete is no veteran, but he has had training; surely he’ll see the marks of whatever bit me while I was looking for my ball in the rough, and then they’ll at least suspect. They’ll have to suspect.

Yet I keep seeing the scissors with their heartless satin shine-jumped-up poultry shears and I keep wondering if I will still be alive when he takes my heart out of my chest cavity and holds it up, dripping, in front of my locked gaze for a moment before turning it to plop it into the weighing pan. I could be, it seems to me; I really could be. Don’t they say the brain can remain conscious for up to three minutes after the heart stops?

“Ready, Doctor,” Pete says, and now he sounds almost formal.

Somewhere, tape is rolling.

The autopsy procedure has begun.

Let’s flip this pancake,” she says cheerfully, and I am turned over just that efficiently-MY right arm goes flying out to one side and then falls back against the side of the table, hanging down with the raised metal lip digging into the biceps. It hurts a lot, the pain is just short of excruciating, but I don’t mind. I pray for the lip to bite through my skin, pray to bleed, something bona fide corpses don’t do.

“Whoops-a-daisy,” Dr. Arlen says. She lifts my arm up and plops it back down at my side.

Now it’s my nose I’m most aware of. It’s smashed down against the table, and my lungs for the first time send out a distress message-a cottony, deprived feeling. My mouth is closed, my nose partially crushed shut (just how much I can’t tell; I can’t even feel myself breathing, not really). What if I suffocate like this?

Then something happens that takes my mind completely off my nose. A huge object - it feels like a glass baseball bat - is rammed rudely up my rectum. Once more I try to scream and can produce only the faint, wretched humming.

“Temp in,” Peter says. “I’ve put on the timer.”

“Good idea,” she says, moving away. Giving him room. Letting him test-drive this baby. Letting him test-drive me. The music is turned down slightly.

“Subject is a white Caucasian, age forty-four,” Pete says, speaking for the mike now, speaking for posterity. “His name is Howard Randolph Cottrell, residence is 1566 Laurel Crest Lane, here in Derry.”

Dr. Arlen, at some distance: “Mary Mead.”

A pause, then Pete again, sounding just a tiny bit flustered: “Dr.

Arlen informs me that the subject actually lives in Mary Mead, which split off from Derry in-”

“Enough with the history lesson, Pete.”

Dear God, what have they stuck up my ass? Some sort of cattle thermometer? If it was a little longer, I think, I could taste the bulb at the end. And they didn’t exactly go crazy with the lubricant …

but then, why would they? I’m dead, after all.

Dead.

“Sorry, Doctor,” Pete says. He fumbles mentally for his place and eventually finds it. “This information is from the ambulance form.

Mode of transmittal was Maine driver’s license. Pronouncing doctor was, um Frank Jennings. Subject was pronounced at the scene.”

Now it’s my nose that I’m hoping will bleed. Please, I tell it, bleed.

Only don’t just bleed. GUSH.

It doesn’t.

“Cause of death may be a heart attack,” Peter says. A light hand brushes down my naked back to the crack of my ass. I pray it will remove the thermometer, but it doesn’t. “Spine appears to be intact, no attractable phenomena.”

Attractable phenomena? Attractable phenomena? What the fuck do they think I am, a buglight?

He lifts my head, the pads of his fingers on my cheekbones, and I hum desperately-Nnnnnnnnn-knowing that he can’t possibly hear me over Keith Richards’ screaming guitar but hoping he may feel the sound vibrating in my nasal passages.

He doesn’t. Instead he turns my head from side to side.

“No neck injury apparent, no rigor,” he says, and I hope he will just let my head go, let my face smack down onto the table-that’ll make my nose bleed, unless I really am dead-but he lowers it gently, considerately, mashing the tip again and once more making suffocation seem a distinct possibility.

“No wounds visible on the back or buttocks,” he says, “although there’s an old scar on the upper right thigh that looks like some sort of wound, shrapnel perhaps. It’s an ugly one.”

It was ugly, and it was shrapnel. The end of my war. A mortar shell lobbed into a supply area, two men killed, one man-me-lucky.

It’s a lot uglier around front, and in a more sensitive spot, but all the equipment works … or did, up until today. A quarter of an inch to the left and they could have fixed me up with a hand pump and a CO, cartridge for those intimate moments.

He finally plucks the thermometer out-oh dear God, the relief-and on the wall I can see his shadow holding it up.

“Ninety-four point two,” he says. “Gee, that ain’t too shabby. This guy could almost be alive, Katie … Dr. Arlen.”

“Remember where they found him,” she says from across the room. The record they are listening to is between selections, and for a moment I can hear her lecturely tones clearly. “Golf course?

Summer afternoon? If you’d gotten a reading of ninety-.eight point six, I would not be surprised.”

“Right, right,” he says, sounding chastened. Then: “Is all this going to sound funny on the tape?” Translation: Will I sound stupid on the tape?

“It’ll sound like a teaching situation,” she says, “which is what it is”.

“Okay, good. Great.”

His rubber-tipped fingers spread my buttocks, then let them go and trail down the backs of my thighs. I would tense now, if I were capable of tensing.

Left leg, I send to him. Left leg, Petie-boy, left calf see it? He must see it, he must, because I can feel it, throbbing like a bee sting or maybe a shot given by a clumsy nurse, one who infuses the injection into a muscle instead of hitting the vein.

“Subject is a really good example of what a really bad is idea it is to play golf in shorts,” he says, and I find myself wishing he had been born blind. Hell, maybe he was born blind, he’s sure acting it.

“I’m seeing all kinds of bug bites, chigger bites, scratches …”

“Mike said they found him in the rough,” Arlen calls over. She’s making one hell of a clatter; it sounds like she’s doing dishes in a cafeteria kitchen instead of filing stuff. “At a guess, he had a heart attack while he was looking for his ball.”

“Uh-huh . .

“Keep going, Peter, you’re doing fine.”

I find that an extremely debatable proposition.

“Okay.”

More pokes and proddings. Gentle. Too gentle, maybe.

“There are mosquito bites on the left calf that look infected,” he says, and although his touch remains gentle, this time the pain is an enormous throb that would make me scream if I were capable of making any sound above the low-pitched hum. It occurs to me suddenly that my life may hang upon the length of the Rolling Stones tape they’re listening to … always assuming it is a tape and not a CD that plays straight through. If it finishes before they cut into me … if I can hum loudly enough for them to hear before one of them turns it over to the other side …

“I may want to look at the bug bites after the gross autopsy,” she says, “although if we’re right about his heart, there’ll be no need.

Or do you want me to look now? They worrying you?”

“Nope, they’re pretty clearly mosquito bites,” Gimpel the Fool says. “They grow ‘em big over on the west side. He’s got five …

seven … eight … jeez, almost a dozen on his left leg alone.”

“He forgot his Deep Woods Off.”

“Never mind the Off, he forgot his digitalin,” he says, and they have a nice little yock together, autopsy room humor.

This time he flips me by himself, probably happy to use those gym-grown Mr. Strongboy muscles of his, hiding the snakebites and the mosquito bites all around them, camouflaging them. I’m staring up into the bank of fluorescents again. Pete steps backward, out of my view. There’s a humming noise. The table begins to slant, and I know why. When they cut me open, the fluids will run downhill to collection points at its base. Plenty of samples for the state lab in Augusta, should there be any questions raised by the autopsy.

I focus all my will and effort on closing my eyes while he’s looking down into my face, and cannot produce even a tie. All I wanted was eighteen holes of golf on Saturday afternoon, and instead I turned into Snow White with hair on my chest. And I can’t stop wondering what it’s going to feel like when those poultry shears go sliding into my midsection.

Pete has a clipboard in one hand. He consults it, sets it aside, then speaks into the mike. His voice is a lot less stilted now. He has just made the most hideous misdiagnosis of his life, but he doesn’t know it, and so he’s starting to warm up.

.II am commencing the autopsy at five forty-nine P.M.,” he says,

“on Saturday, August twenty, nineteen ninety-four.”

He lifts my. lips, looks at my teeth like a man thinking about buying a horse, then pulls my jaw down. Good color,” he says,

“and no petechiae on the cheeks.” The current tune is fading out of the speakers and I hear a click as he steps on the foot pedal which pauses the recording tape. “Man, this guy really could still be alive!”

I hum frantically, and at that same moment Dr. Arlen drops something that sounds like a bedpan. “Doesn’t he wish,” she says, laughing. He joins in and this time it’s cancer I wish on them, some kind that is inoperable and lasts a long time. -

He goes quickly down my body, feeling up my chest (“No bruising, swelling, or other exterior signs of cardiac arrest,” he says, and what a big fucking surprise that is), then palpates my belly.

I burp.

He looks at me, eyes widening, mouth dropping open a little, and again I try desperately to hum, knowing he won’t hear it over “Start Me Up” but thinking that maybe, along with the burp, he’ll finally be ready to see what’s right in front of him.

“Excuse yourself, Howie,” Dr. Arlen, that bitch, says from behind me, and chuckles, “Better watch out, Pete those postmortem belches are the worst.”

He theatrically fans the air in front of his face, then goes back to what he’s doing. He barely touches my groin, although he remarks that the scar on the back of my right leg continues around to the front.

Missed the big one, though, I think, maybe because it’s a little higher than you’re looking. No big deal, my little Baywatch buddy, but you also missed the fact that I’M STILL ALIVE, and that IS a big deal!

He goes on chanting into the microphone, sounding more and more at ease (sounding, in fact, a little like Jack Klugman on Quincy, ME.), and I know his partner over there behind me, the Pollyanna of the medical community, isn’t thinking she’ll have to roll the tape back over this part of the exam. Other than missing the fact that his first pericardial is still alive, the kid’s doing a great job.

At last he says, “I think I’m ready to go on, Doctor.” He sounds tentative, though.

She comes over, looks briefly down at me, then squeezes Pete’s shoulder. “Okay,” she says. “On-na wid-da show!”

Now I’m trying to stick my tongue out. Just that simple kid’s gesture of impudence, but it would be enough … and it seems to me I can feel a faint prickling sensation deep within my lips, the feeling you get when you’re finally starting to come out of a heavy dose of novocaine. And I can feel a twitch? No, wishful thinking, just-Yes! Yes! But a twitch is all, and the second time I try nothing happens.

As Pete picks up the scissors, the Rolling Stones move on to “Hang Fire.”

Hold a mirror in front of my nose! I scream at them. Watch it fog up! Can’t you at least do that?

Snick, snick, snickety-snick.

Pete turns the scissors at an angle so the light runs down the blade, and for the first time I’m certain, really certain, that this mad charade is going to go all the way through to the end. The director isn’t going to freeze the frame. The ref isn’t going to stop the fight in the tenth round. We’re not going to pause for a word from our sponsors. Petie-boy’s going to slide those scissors into my gut while I lie here helpless, and then he’s going to open me up like a mailorder package from the Horchow Collection.

He looks hesitantly at Dr. Arlen.

No! I howl, my voice reverberating off the dark walls of my skull but emerging from my mouth not at all. No, please no!

She nods. “Go ahead. You’ll be fine.”

“Uh … you want to turn off the music?”

Yes! Yes, turn it off.

“Is it bothering you.

Yes! It’s bothering him! It’s fucked him up so completely he thinks his patient is dead!

“well …”

“Sure,” she says, and disappears from my field of vision. A moment later Mick and Keith are finally gone. I try to make the humming noise and discover a horrible thing: now I can’t even do that. I’m too scared. Fright has locked down my vocal cords. I can only stare up as she rejoins him, the two of them gazing), down at me like pallbearers looking into an open grave.

“Thanks,” he says. Then he takes a deep breath and lifts the scissors. “Commencing pericardial cut.”