Needles & Sins (2 page)

Charles right hand came down. “I’ll show you sorry…”

“Of course he did,” the woman whispered. “A broken arm is a good lesson. One he’d remember.”

“I didn’t mean…” Charles started to say, but then broke off to scream as the hook dug into the tight part of his flesh, just above the sternum.

“Why are you doing this to me?” he cried.

“Your life is one long thread. I’m just making you whole,” she said. And she began to hum. He could hear the words in her melody, words about pride, and tears and needles.

“Ohhhh,” he moaned. As the tip dug into the space above his rib, he looked down and saw slack, dead white flesh and sickly black hair curled atop it like leavings. The remains of his day.

“Why did you live alone at the end?” she asked.

The glass was cool against his lips and he smiled in the golden light of its love. Okay, it didn’t love…but it was what
he
loved. What he needed. He remembered the last time he’d had a woman here, in the tiny space that he’d carved out for himself just off the broken pavement of 8th Avenue. The complex was a last stop for most, but he’d covered the uneven walls of his purloined space with a $10 can of beige paint that he’d watered down to make it go farther and thus had hidden most of the cracks in its distressed drywall. He pretended that he lived in a home and that the soybeans he ate tasted like filet. He’d stuffed blankets in the draughty cracks that separated the walls from the floor and the windows from the walls and most of the time in the winter, he kept the place above 50 degrees. With a bottle of Jack Daniels a day, he could make it feel like the place was warm, while his flesh shivered unheeded in the cold.

The phone rang, and he almost dropped his glass. The phone never rang. Probably just another creditor or solicitor, he thought, brain buzzing with the metallic jolt of whiskey. Still, he answered it, pressing the cool plastic to the scratchy whiskers of his chin. Idly he scratched at the dry skin there as he said, “Yeah? What can I do you for?”

“Dad,” a voice said from a faraway crackle. “I need help.”

“Buy me a beer,” he answered, and laughed as he dropped the phone between two couch cushions. He looked for it squirting in the shadows, but his hand didn’t seem to have the energy to dig between the seams to retrieve it. Instead he fell back and closed his eyes. From somewhere far away, he heard a voice calling his name, but he no longer felt like answering…

The needle dug closer, and his eyes shot open, wider than wide in agony. A jet of crimson spurted like a geyser from some lost artery near his heart, and he gagged on the bile that gathered in the pit of his throat. “Stop,” he gagged.

“…the tears I gotta hide,” the woman’s voice whispered, singing along with the tune she’d been humming with every stitch. “Needles and sins,” she laughed softly, and completed the stitch as his body jolted against her hand. “Needles and sins.”

Charles was 16, and glad to be away. He crept through the cattails holding his BB gun like an army rifle. He was ready to use it. That’s when he saw the mouse scurry down the trampled path to disappear into the crumpled mass of stalks and dirt. He kicked off the top of the mound and laughed as momma mouse bolted away from the nest, leaving four pink, hairless babies to sniff and paw at the air, blinded by the unnatural light of the day. He cocked the air socket of the gun, aimed and blew tiny ball bearings through the thin skins of those helpless rodents. One, two, three, four. Tiny circles of blood blotted their purplish bodies, and the mice shuddered and clutched each other as they collapsed onto the matted grass of their once comfortable nest. They couldn’t understand the sudden change in their lives from warmth to pain, but mercifully, they died in seconds, just like the…

…love that died as Charles lifted his hand for the first time when Gwendolyn told him in the back seat of his Chevy Citation to cut it out, that really hurt and maybe he should try learning some manners the next time before he touched a woman as if she was just another piece of trash for the curb, but he didn’t listen and her spit and blood coated his hand as she turned away in hurt and shame just like the way…

««—»»

…happiness died as Charles looked at his daughter in her prom dress and laughed, saying “who do you think you are, the freakin’ Queen of Siam? Do you think the other kids are going to go out looking like that?” And as Rachel’s face crumbled into a black hole of betrayal…

The needle dripped and stitched, washing his flesh clean of blood as it closed his exposed organs back up within.

… Trust died as Charles promised that he’d be home on time tonight, and instead stopped off, just for one nip, just one, just one more, just a quick last taste…

“Stop, please stop,” he begged.

But she only whispered from behind his head, her voice sweet as spring lilies. “Still they begin,” she said. “Needles and sins.”

…And Ambition died as Charles watched the next hotshot and the next and the next walk past his cube over the years atop the soulless grey carpet to take a manager’s office at the end of the hall. An office with a door. And at last, one night he walked into that envied office and sat himself in the chair of his boss, 10 years his junior, who had left for home and cocktail parties two hours before, leaving Charles to work alone, pulling the weight for both of them. Charles sat in that leather-backed chair, and leaned back to stare at the framed poster on the otherwise sterile wall that featured the block letters spelling S-U-C-C-E-S-S in a black bar at the bottom and at long last, years in the making, he began to cry.

««—»»

The needle now closed the livid tear near his throat, the end of a long scar of twisted, bloody, knotted flesh. “They say not to sweat the small stuff,” the woman whispered behind his head. “But that’s what it’s all about…”

“I wasn’t like that all the time,” he said, and then moaned, “It hurts.”

Images clustered in his mind’s eye of his wife and kids and broken dreams mixed with the memories of dying mice and the spider-webbed glass of the car his parents last drove in and the pink slip that sent him from a broken home to the apartment where the liquor drove away the cold. And then his memories fled like dandelion seeds in an angry April breeze.

Dad?

Charles?

Baby?

Son?

The voices reverberated from inside, first louder, but then muffled, as the woman pulled the last skein of thread through his suppurating skin.

“It will hurt,” she whispered, humming softly into his ear. “It will hurt forever.”

“But why?” he moaned, trying without success to lift his arm to touch the horrible stitching that held him together and formed a knot at his heart.

“Because you lived.”

At last she moved so that he could see her. After tying off the thread that wound and bound inside him, she picked up the bowl of liquid. Her chin thrust into the dull shadow in stark, bone white, heavy eyes shone black as night water. She drank the deadly liquid from the bowl and grinned, her teeth stark in bony sockets stripped of flesh.

“Every stitch soaks my poison into the flesh,” she grinned. “Just like every sin poisons the soul.”

“So this is the end,” he whined. “All of my days done?

She only laughed.

Behind her, Charles watched the black shadow of wings unfurl in the wavering amber of the room’s deadly light.

“Still they begin,” she whispered and gathered him to her to start again…her needles and his sins.

— | — | —

“There’s someone else hidden inside me,” the woman whispered. She seemed adamant. “She has been trapped inside me forever, and I want you to set her free.”

I had heard it before. Sometimes, I felt like I’d heard it
all
before. Hidden within every big assed woman was a skinny beauty queen dying to be “set free” for her tempestuous moment on the runway of dreams. Or so they thought. As a surgeon, I have a firm and well-founded belief in the innate ugliness of some people. No amount of surgical intervention is going to change the summation of a gene cesspool. But still they came, false dreams in their rosy lenses and checkbooks in hand. They wanted their water balloon slack tits to defy natural law and stand up straight as B-52 bomber cones, or their cellulite-striped bellies not to stretch like beached and rotting whale blubber over their shiny, tight-cinched steel belts. They especially wanted to obliterate that saggy, baggy line that stretched from the pubis to the ribs and which rippled and shook every time they moved. No regimen of weight loss could completely erase the sagging quicksand slippage of skin that said “once there used to be a big vat of fat—or a parade of babies—that nested here.”

The latest in a long line of women who wished that I worked in miracles and not scars sat in my examining room and pointed at the spiderweb of lines on her face, and then gave a general gesture to the rest of her flesh. It was not unattractive, but it was also not a look-twice-at-on-the-street body. An objective assessment said that she clearly wasn’t one of the genetic cesspool derelicts that was beyond salvaging. With a bit of cutting, stitching, nipping and tucking, I could set free the more beautiful woman that the years had walled up inside her.

But there was a look in her eyes that I couldn’t place. I’m not sure how to describe it really. Desperation? Yearning? Obsession? It was the kind of overly intense look that, five years ago, would have made me send her packing without a second glance.

Surgeons can’t take a chance on potential crazies. People think doctors make cartons of cash, and they do. But what people don’t know is that most docs have 10 years of student loans to pay off, and that as soon as you hang up your shingle, you’ve got to sign up for malpractice insurance—which instantly saps half your revenue. You operate on a couple nutjobs and get some outrageous lottery judgments against you from a bleeding heart liberal jury, and your malpractice insurance goes up and up; you might as well take up baggin’ groceries to earn a living.

Which I was close to doing now. I speak here from the deep deep well of experience. Ironically, because of my desperate situation, I listened to the desperately strange woman longer than I would have not so long ago when things were better for me—back when the local newspapers used to write articles about my surgical prowess, not ineptitude.

“I want you to cut me open,” she continued to explain. Her finger traced a line down the center of her forehead, across her nose and down in between her breasts. I noted, purely professionally, that she had no need of augmentation or reduction there…her chest looked provocatively obvious and well-rounded. No sags or deflated bags there. She was of a higher caliber than most of the patients I’d seen in the past two years. Not that there had been very many of any quality.

“There is certainly cutting involved,” I said, ignoring her crude directions which basically would have had me cut her in half if I carried them out to the letter. “But what is it that you want to achieve?”

She looked at me with the kind of seriousness that I imagined impassioned serial killers display as they approach their victims with single-minded purpose.

“I want you to cut me from my forehead to my toes,” she said. “I want you to set her free.”

I nodded and wrote something in her chart. “Nutcase,” I believe, is what I wrote. Then I stood up and said, “Wait here just a minute.”

I opened the door and ducked into the hallway.

“Wait doctor,” she began, leaping off the paper-covered examining table. “I know this sounds crazy but…”

I was already at the receptionist’s station. “ Carrie,” I said. “I can’t operate on Ms. Phoenix. Please give her the name of someone at the Artgeld Clinic.”

I always used to give Carrie the shit jobs. After all, she ran the desk. She was my front line protection.

The problem was, when you’re on the way down, nobody is all that keen to protect you and help you back up. Especially when your checks bounce. And when you turn down cases when your payroll checks are bouncing…

Well…that’s why, the next time Ms. Phoenix—“Please call me Janis”—came to my office, I was the only one there to receive her.

She rang the buzzer at the front desk and I had to answer. She roused me from a reverie of worry that involved the winner of the next NCAA pool among the medical building tenants, the fleeting concern about my overdue mortgage and the thought that maybe, just maybe, I might get laid if I went down to Billy’s Tavern tonight and mentioned that I was not just a surgeon, but a doc who had given “breast lifts” to the stars. It was a weak dream, but it was better than the thoughts of the repo men coming to cart all of my furniture back to some endless, Orwellian warehouse.

I knew the stains on my office carpet were really the visible comments on the lackluster spark that had been my brief career. I probably would have failed as a vet. I was probably best cut out as an accountant. But here I was. A skids surgeon who had gotten his degree in an offshore program because my grades weren’t quite up to par to make it into a medical school here in the states. A guy with a scalpel, a mediocre degree, and an office that cost too much, even though it shared a zip code with the slums. While at first I had charmed a few well-connected patients—and the press—I had, in the end, not done particularly well for myself.