The Dark Country (14 page)

On the way back, Jesse would not stop talking.

"That coon'll never find out who we were," he was saying. "Just like we used to do it in 'Nam. The first 'tract and 'trans units came in while I was over there. We used to keep the ARVN forces up with transes from the body count. 'Got to keep the war machine running!' they told us. Then there wasn't enough. We finally had to get into our own casualties. The NCOs told us to get what we needed off our own. They wouldn't let us take nothing off the whites. We got some of the brown brothers together and made sure ours got left alone. We had to look somewhere. Most of the civilians, the gooks, were too small. Women, kids. So we came down on the nigger bodies. We made
sure
there were always enough of 'em. Then they started transing stateside. Right away there were too many patients, not enough donors. I coulda told 'em
that
was gonna

happen. So when we got on the outs we went into business, me and Raoul. We wasn't the only ones. There are plenty of units like us. Sure, plenty now."

Jesse settled back, moving his belly behind the wheel. "Whatsamatter, kid? We made a good hit." He patted the thermostat. "We'll sell 'em tomorrow. Or the next day. Don't worry."

They squealed around a corner and headed up the long gray ramp to the freeway. They passed a collision but two independent units were wheeled into place next to it already, the two drivers haggling over the rights. Jaime saw a fist pounding the air.

"Me, now I got something to worry about." Jesse yanked the drainage belt loose under his smock. "Damn pisser. Gotta get me some new kidneys. You ever have a tube runnin' up your dick? I'll get 'em, though. That's for sure. Long as it's not off no damn spade."

They sped past accident after accident, metal and chrome and flesh spattered over and over again across lanes for miles, as if part of the same accident. And always the vans moving in from all directions, cutting across dividers, heading against the traffic, closing in.

"I need a lotta stuff, just for myself." Jesse bit fiercely at his torn thumbnail. "Old ticker won't hold up forever. Not to mention the rest of me. Get pains in the middle of the night, you know?"

He turned his head on the thick stalk of his neck.

He glanced across at Jaime. His eyes roamed over Jaime's thin body, the strong young muscles, the firm abdomen. He smiled, a crack splitting his cruel brown face.

Jaime was hypnotized by the passing lights. His eyes focused on the sideview mirror outside the door. He saw that his jaw hung slack, his mouth half open as if to speak, as it had been for mile after endless mile. He saw the white, sharp, strong teeth, good teeth, the kind anyone would be proud to own. He sat gripping the religious medal around his neck, so tightly it burned his hand.

"Don't let it get to you, kid. It's that damn smog. It's worse'n a sacka onions." He slid his fleshy hands down to the bottom of the steering wheel. "But it's all in a day's work, I guess. Be home with my wife an' kid in a few more minutes.

Welcome to the Company, Jaime. We
need
somebody like you. Believe me." When he heard no answer he said,''That is your name, right? Jaime?"

But Jaime did not hear him. He was back on the dark street, waiting, but she would not stop. She would not stop screaming.

The first thing I see is the white light.

And I think: so they have taken me to one of those places. I knew it. That was why the pain. My brain stops spinning like a cracked gyroscope long enough for me to relax. Then I get it, all of it. And I think I may go mad, if it is true.

A rubber hand closes my eyes and I see red again. Black lightning forks shimmer in a kind of bas-relief in front of me. Then the whirling stains settle in. I think they are Rorschach tests. The black shapes flow like ink on a blotter. I look into the first one. It seems to me to be an accident. I see a car, no, two cars, and the smaller one is jackknifed over the big one. Then the pain starts again at the back of my head, not throbbing like before but only dull and steady like a hot light bulb so I try not to think any more about the ink blot.

The voices again over me. They drone, too slow, hurting my ears, trying to seep in through the hardening blockages I can feel there, especially the low one that sounds like the man has a greasy tongue. I want them to stop but they continue, the greasy tongue bending closer. Then I understand, but don't understand, because I know he must be speaking a foreign language. I want the sound to stop. They always speak in foreign languages or at least thick, oleaginous accents, slow and heavy until they give the orders, then harsh and guttural. I

remember. I want it to stop because it hurts me. Don't they care? It hurts me!

"I'm sorry," says the man, slipping his hands into his coat pockets. "But it's too late for us to do anything."

But of course it hurts me. That is part of it. I remember now. It is always that way. They even called it the House of Pain once, didn't they? Yes, and the accent oppressive and stressed where you didn't expect it to be and he never bothered about anesthesia. I believe he said it was a shortage of supplies on the island but I don't believe that. I think for him it was a House of Pleasure.

Yes, that is what they are doing. That is what they are doing. Maybe I keep forgetting, keep drifting off because it is less painful that way. My heart doesn't speed when I think of it. You would think it would. All I feel there is the hardness, cold and brassy and clammy, over my heart. I don't understand that part yet but somehow it seems to fit.

I am bound. I know that now. The cool pressure around my rib cage loosens like a mummy's fingers and the cold lifts from my heart, leaving a sticky spot there. I strain mightily to move my arms and legs but still they won't work. Strapped. I get it more clearly. Lifting, there was lifting right after the start of the pain, and even then I couldn't move, so I must have been bound even then, and more lifting, always higher. But I played it smart. I kept my eyes closed. I knew what was coming. I didn't need my eyes to tell me where they were taking me. It was up lots of stairs, almost always, the top of an old building, tons of sweating stone blocks crumbling in the mortar and piles of dust and powdered limestone in corners where the torches never reached, and the stairs wound in a spiral up and down, down to the dungeons but they took me up, up to the laboratory. They always take them up at first. To the skylight. But now it must be night, the light artificial. They always worked at night on the important experiments.

"I'm sorry," says the man in charge, hiding his powdered hands in his white coat. ' 'But it's too late for us to do anything to save him. We've run all the standard tests, and so now . . ."He makes a helpless gesture.

* * *

Something smooth and lightly textured brushes my chin, my lips, my nose, my brow. Now the red darkens. I hear the swish of starched smocks. There are several of them. They move surely, impatiently. So this is a big one. Not just the ubiquitous assistant but others, experts from all over have come to observe. The low voices grind again, like old automobiles on cold mornings with the electrolyte low.

They hurry, I feel it in my skin more than hear it. It must be night. The air they stir toward me is cold. I grow colder. Even my head. Funny but as the cold spreads up from my neck the spot at the back of my head aches less and less. That is, I suppose, some kind of relief.

But still I am afraid.

I wait for the generators to start up. They always need them for electricity. I hear no lightning. So they must use the generators to rev up their particle chambers, their glowing vacuum tubes, their bubbling flasks of colored fluids, their magnetic arcs jumping and sweeping up and up and up the conductor rods. Snapping and crackling, humming and spinning rotors that whir and whine and buzz. I used to like them. I think of the lightning bugs I used to collect in mayonnaise jars. They sparked and jumped on the sill all night and it reminded me of their experiments, and the thought scared me a little but it was still pleasurable, a sublimely creepy game I played on myself that always slipped me off into a comfortable dream.

The difference now is that I can't wake up.

I hear a hum. They are ready.

'"I'm sorry," says the man in charge, hiding his powdered hands in a wrinkled white coat. "But it's too late for us to do anything to save your husband. We've run all the standard tests, and so now . . ." He bares his hands nervously and moves them in a helpless gesture.

The woman bursts into tears. ' 'But you can't! I showed you the will, notarized, carried with me all these years! And the copy in his pocket!"

The doctor fumbles through his papers. '
7
can show you his EKG. Here, see for yourself."

As the machinery is lowered over me on damped hinges, 1 can no longer feel the pain in my head. Sounds, sensations are

receding. I wonder if it is the head they are after. I remember such a head, floating in a porcelain tray, clear tubes of nutrient running in through the nostrils, stained bandages pinned around the crown. The eyes were open, and so maybe it will not be so bad. And the head went on thinking. What did it think? Let me try—yes, the door, the one with the heavy bar in front. And the sliding window at the base for food. Another experiment. The head, released from physical demands, focused its powers to make contact and control. Even the deformed monster from the previous operation. He controlled the creature behind the door, calling it out to smash through the boards and—

But now they fit it over my abdomen. I can no longer feel there but I know that is where the instrument is clamping down. That is where they always start.

I wonder if my table is mounted to swivel, to turn me upright. I hear the sheet rustling down below. They may, since I am strapped so completely I can't move a toe or finger. I hear the clasping of surgical steel. It begins.

"I'm sorry," says the doctor in charge, quickly hiding his pale-powdered hands deep in his wrinkled, blood-smeared white coat. ' 'But it's too late for us to do anything to save your husband. We've run the standard tests for death and there is just no response, nothing. I am sorry. So now . . ."He bares his shriveled hands furtively and moves them in a helpless gesture of absolution.

The wife erupts in tears of frustration and rage. ' 'But you can't operate yet! I showed you the will, notarized, carried with me all these years, since the first time. And the copy of the instructions in his wallet, and the neck chain, you found them at the accident tonight! What more does it take?"

The doctor ducks her freezing gaze and agitates his papers, moistening a finger. "Let me show you his EKG. Here, you can see for yourself, no activity whatever. I'm sorry, but we have to go ahead, do you see? We can't afford to risk any further deterioration. We have the other clause to consider, the main clause."

For the love of God I can't feel but I can hear it slicing away. Why can't I feel? They must use anesthetic now but even so I

know what fiends they are. I think I always knew. O now the obscene sucking sound growing fainter even as my hearing dissolves, wet tissue pulling apart. They suction my blood, the incision clamped wide like another mouth a monstrous Cae-sarean and I hear the shiny scissors clipping tissues clipping fat, the automated scalpels striking tictactoe on my torso and I know they are taking me, the blood in my head tingles draining down down and I am almost gone, O what is it what are they doing to me the monsters ME they must be it can't be that other nono my papers they couldn't do THAT they couldn't break the terms it says,in blackandwhite NO so it has to be like those other times I have seen the altered specimen on the table the wrapped composite the sutured One Who Waits drifting in fluid for the new brain the shaved skin the transplanted claws the feral rictus the excised hump promised long ago the suddenly stripped subcutaneous map scarred creations I call you in

"The main clause."

' 'B-but that was conditional, you can read—/'' She comes close to blowing it then, nearly falling all over herself in a quivering puddle right there in the hospital corridor. She tries one last time. ' 'He—he wanted the contract, a kind of extra life insurance benefit for the children. But it mdant more, a lot more to him. It was really the last chance for him to do something for others, for humanity. But he got to be obsessed with the technical question of dying, don't you understand? the exact moment of death. When? He was never sure. When is it? Can you prove it to me?"

"My dear lady, the heartbeat and respiration cease, the muscles go slack ..."

' 'God damn it, you cold fish! He wanted an EEG!''

The doctor backs off, assuming a professional stance. '' Your husband agreed to sell his usable internal organs to the transplant bank for the usual fee which you, as his beneficiary, will receive within 60 days. Neither you nor your husband made any move to break the contract prior to his, eh, demise this evening and so, I'm afraid . . . there is nothing further I am empowered to do. The standard tests of death have been administered in accordance with the laws of the state, and now his internal physical remains belong to the Nieborn Clinic. His personal effects, of course, remain yours—I'm sure they are at

the front desk by now—as well as his, eh, other remains, which will be available to you for burial or cremation. In the morning. And now, if you'll excuse me, Mrs. ..." She sobs. There is nothing else for her.