Everything's Eventual Read online

  “All right,” he says. “You’ll assist?”

  “Your trusty co-pilot,” she says, and laughs. She punctuates her laughter with a snick-snick sound. It’s the sound of scissors cutting the air.

  Now panic beats and flutters inside my skull like a flock of starlings locked in an attic. The Nam was a long time ago, but I saw half a dozen field autopsies there—what the doctors used to call “tentshow postmortems”—and I know what Cisco and Pancho mean to do. The scissors have long, sharp blades, very sharp blades, and fat finger-holes. Still, you have to be strong to use them. The lower blade slides into the gut like butter. Then, snip, up through the bundle of nerves at the solar plexus and into the beef-jerky weave of muscle and tendon above it. Then into the sternum. When the blades come together this time, they do so with a heavy crunch as the bone parts and the rib cage pops apart like a couple of barrels which have been lashed together with twine. Then on up with those scissors that look like nothing so much as the poultry shears supermarket butchers use—snip-CRUNCH, snip-CRUNCH, snip-CRUNCH, splitting bone and shearing muscle, freeing the lungs, heading for the trachea, turning Howard the Conqueror into a Thanksgiving dinner no one will eat.

  A thin, nagging whine—this does sound like a dentist’s drill.

  Pete: “Can I—”

  Dr. Cisco, actually sounding a bit maternal: “No. These.” Snicksnick. Demonstrating for him.

  They can’t do this, I think. They can’t cut me up … I can FEEL!

  “Why?” he asks.

  “Because that’s the way I want it,” she says, sounding a lot less maternal. “When you’re on your own, Petie-boy, you can do what you want. But in Katie Arlen’s autopsy room, you start off with the pericardial shears.”

  Autopsy room. There. It’s out. I want to be all over goose-bumps, but of course, nothing happens; my flesh remains smooth.

  “Remember,” Dr. Arlen says (but now she’s actually lecturing), “any fool can learn how to use a milking machine … but the handson procedure is always best.” There is something vaguely suggestive in her tone. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” he says.

  They’re going to do it. I have to make some kind of noise or movement, or they’re really doing to do it. If blood flows or jets up from the first punch of the scissors they’ll know something’s wrong, but by then it will be too late, very likely; that first snip-CRUNCH will have happened, and my ribs will be lying against my upper arms, my heart pulsing frantically away under the fluorescents in its bloodglossy sac—

  I concentrate everything on my chest. I push, or try to … and something happens.

  A sound!

  I make a sound!

  It’s mostly inside my closed mouth, but I can also hear and feel it in my nose—a low hum.

  Concentrating, summoning every bit of effort, I do it again, and this time the sound is a little stronger, leaking out of my nostrils like cigarette smoke: Nnnnnnn— It makes me think of an old Alfred Hitchcock TV program I saw a long, long time ago, where Joseph Cotten was paralyzed in a car crash and was finally able to let them know he was still alive by crying a single tear.

  And if nothing else, that minuscule mosquito-whine of a sound has proved to myself that I’m alive, that I’m not just a spirit lingering inside the clay effigy of my own dead body.

  Focusing all my concentration, I can feel breath slipping through my nose and down my throat, replacing the breath I have now expended, and then I send it out again, working harder than I ever worked summers for the Lane Construction Company when I was a teenager, working harder than I have ever worked in my life, because now I’m working for my life and they must hear me, dear Jesus, they must.

  Nnnnnnnn—

  “You want some music?” the woman doctor asks. “I’ve got Marty Stuart, Tony Bennett—”

  He makes a despairing sound. I barely hear it, and take no immediate meaning from what she’s saying … which is probably a mercy.

  “All right,” she says, laughing. “I’ve also got the Rolling Stones.”

  “You?”

  “Me. I’m not quite as square as I look, Peter.”

  “I didn’t mean …” He sounds flustered.

  Listen to me! I scream inside my head as my frozen eyes stare up into the icy-white light. Stop chattering like magpies and listen to me!

  I can feel more air trickling down my throat and the idea occurs that whatever has happened to me may be starting to wear off … but it’s only a faint blip on the screen of my thoughts. Maybe it is wearing off, but very soon now recovery will cease to be an option for me. All my energy is bent toward making them hear me, and this time they will hear me, I know it.

  “Stones, then,” she says. “Unless you want me to run out and get a Michael Bolton CD in honor of your first pericardial.”

  “Please, no!” he cries, and they both laugh.

  The sound starts to come out, and it is louder this time. Not as loud as I’d hoped, but loud enough. Surely loud enough. They’ll hear, they must.

  Then, just as I begin to force the sound out of my nose like some rapidly solidifying liquid, the room is filled with a blare of fuzztone guitar and Mick Jagger’s voice bashing off the walls: “Awww, no, it’s only rock and roll, but I LIYYYYKE IT …”

  “Turn it down!” Dr. Cisco yells, comically overshouting, and amid these noises my own nasal sound, a desperate little humming through my nostrils, is no more audible than a whisper in a foundry.

  Now her face bends over me again and I feel fresh horror as I see that she’s wearing a Plexi eyeshield and a gauze mask over her mouth. She glances back over her shoulder.

  “I’ll strip him for you,” she tells Pete, and bends toward me with a scalpel glittering in one gloved hand, bends toward me through the guitar-thunder of the Rolling Stones.

  I hum desperately, but it’s no good. I can’t even hear myself.

  The scalpel hovers, then cuts.

  I shriek inside my own head, but there is no pain, only my polo shirt falling in two pieces at my sides. Sliding apart as my rib cage will after Pete unknowingly makes his first pericardial cut on a living patient.

  I am lifted. My head lolls back and for a moment I see Pete upside down, donning his own Plexi eyeshield as he stands by a steel counter, inventorying a horrifying array of tools. Chief among them are the oversized scissors. I get just a glimpse of them, of blades glittering like merciless satin. Then I am laid flat again and my shirt is gone. I’m now naked to the waist. It’s cold in the room.

  Look at my chest! I scream at her. You must see it rise and fall, no matter how shallow my respiration is! You’re a goddam expert, for Christ’s sake!

  Instead, she looks across the room, raising her voice to be heard above the music. (I like it, like it, yes I do, the Stones sing, and I think I will hear that nasal idiot chorus in the halls of hell through all eternity.) “What’s your pick? Boxers or Jockeys?”

  With a mixture of horror and rage, I realize what they’re talking about.

  “Boxers!” he calls back. “Of course! Just take a look at the guy!”

  Asshole! I want to scream. You probably think everyone over forty wears boxer shorts! You probably think when you get to be forty, you’ll—

  She unsnaps my Bermudas and pulls down the zipper. Under other circumstances, having a woman as pretty as this (a little severe, yes, but still pretty) do that would make me extremely happy. Today, however—

  “You lose, Petie-boy,” she says. “Jockeys. Dollar in the kitty.”

  “On payday,” he says, coming over. His face joins hers; they look down at me through their Plexi masks like a couple of space aliens looking down at an abductee. I try to make them see my eyes, to see me looking at them, but these two fools are looking at my undershorts.

  “Ooooh, and red,” Pete says. “A sha-vinguh!”

  “I call them more of a wash pink,” she replies. “Hold him up for me, Peter, he weighs a ton. No wonder he had a heart attack. Let this be a lesson to you.”
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  I’m in shape! I yell at her. Probably in better shape than you, bitch!

  My hips are suddenly jerked upward by strong hands. My back cracks; the sound makes my heart leap.

  “Sorry, guy,” Pete says, and suddenly I’m colder than ever as my shorts and red underpants are pulled down.

  “Upsa-daisy once,” she says, lifting one foot, “and upsa-daisy twice,” lifting the other foot, “off come the mocs, and off come the socks—”

  She stops abruptly, and hope seizes me once more.

  “Hey, Pete.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do guys ordinarily wear Bermuda shorts and moccasins to play golf in?”

  Behind her (except that’s only the source, actually it’s all around us) the Rolling Stones have moved on to “Emotional Rescue.” I will be your knight in shining ahh-mah, Mick Jagger sings, and I wonder how funky he’d dance with about three sticks of Hi-Core dynamite jammed up his skinny ass.

  “If you ask me, this guy was just asking for trouble,” she goes on. “I thought they had these special shoes, very ugly, very golf-specific, with little knobs on the soles—”

  “Yeah, but wearing them’s not the law,” Pete says. He holds his gloved hands out over my upturned face, slides them together, and bends the fingers back. As the knuckles crack, talcum powder sprinkles down like fine snow. “At least not yet. Not like bowling shoes. They catch you bowling without a pair of bowling shoes, they can send you to state prison.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to handle temp and gross examination?”

  No! I shriek. No, he’s a kid, what are you DOING?

  He looks at her as if this same thought had crossed his own mind. “That’s … um … not strictly legal, is it, Katie? I mean …”

  She looks around as he speaks, giving the room a burlesque examination, and I’m starting to get a vibe that could be very bad news for me: severe or not, I think that Cisco—alias Dr. Katie Arlen—has got the hots for Petie with the dark blue eyes. Dear Christ, they have hauled me paralyzed off the golf course and into an episode of General Hospital, this week’s subplot titled “Love Blooms in Autopsy Room Four.”

  “Gee,” she says in a hoarse little stage-whisper. “I don’t see anyone here but you and me.”

  “The tape—”

  “Not rolling yet,” she said. “And once it is, I’m right at your elbow every step of the way … as far as anyone will ever know, anyway. And mostly I will be. I just want to put away those charts and slides. And if you really feel uncomfortable—”

  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 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, banging down with the raised metal lip digging into the bicep. 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 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 which 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. Originally taken from a Maine state 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’s 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 CO2 cartridge for those intimate moments.

  He finally plucked the thermometer out—oh dear God, the relief—and on the wall I could see his shadow holding it up.

  “94.2,” he said. “Gee, that ain’t too shabby. This guy could almost be alive, Katie … Dr. Arlen.”

  “Remember where they found him,” she said from across the room. The record they were listening to was between selections, and for a moment I could hear her lecturely tones clearly. “Golf course? Summer afternoon? If you’d gotten a reading of 98.6, I would not be surprised.”

  “Right, right,” he said, 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 said, “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 beesting 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 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.