Six Stories

WHOCK! The sound of the driver hitting the ball, but a little flat this time, and the feeling in the hands is bad. The ball's up ... but veering ... veering off ... veering toward ...

Shit.

I'm in the rough.

Now another face bends into my field of vision. A white tunic instead of a green one below it, a great untidy mop of orange hair above it. Distress-sale IQ is my first impression. It can only be Rusty. He's wearing a big dumb grin that I think of as a high-school grin, the grin of a kid who should have a tattoo reading

"Born to Snap Bra Straps" on one wasted bicep.

"Michael!" Rusty exclaims. "Jeez, ya lookin' gooood! This'z an honor! Sing for us, big boy! Sing your deadassoff!"

From somewhere behind me comes the doc's voice, cool, no longer even pretending to be amused by these antics. "Quit it, Rusty."

Then, in a slightly new direction: "What's the story, Mike?'

Mike's voice is the first voice-Rusty's partner. He sounds slightly embarrassed to be working with a guy who wants to be Bobcat Goldthwait when he grows up. "Found him on the fourteenth hole at Derry Muni. Off the course, actually, in the rough. If he hadn't just played through the foursome behind him, and if they hadn't seen one of his legs stickin' out of the puckerbrush, he'd be an ant farm by now."

I hear that sound in my head again- WHOM-only this time it is followed by another, far less pleasant sound: the rustle of underbrush as I sweep it with the head of my driver. It would have to be fourteen, where there is reputedly poison ivy. Poison ivy and

...

Rusty is still peering down at me, stupid and avid. It's not death that interests him; it's my resemblance to Michael Bolton. Oh yes, I know about it, have not been above using it with certain female clients. Otherwise, it gets old in a hurry. And in these circumstances ... God.

"Attending physician?' the lady doc; asks. "Was it Kazalian?"

"NO," Mike says, and for just a moment he looks down at me.

Older than Rusty by at least ten years. Black hair with flecks of gray in it. Spectacles. How come none of these ~ can see that I am not dead? "There was a doc in the foursome that found him, actually. That's his signature on page one ... see?"

Riffle: of paper, then: "Christ, Jennings. I know him. He gave Noah his physical after the ark grounded on Mount Ararat."

Rusty doesn't look as if he gets the joke, but he brays laughter into my face anyway. I can smell onions on his breath, a little leftover lunchstink, and if I can smell onions, I must be breathing. I must be, right? If only-Before I can finish this thought, Rusty leans even closer and I feel a blast of hope. He's seen something! He's seen something and means to give me mouth-to-mouth. God bless you, Rusty! God bless you and your onion breath!

But the stupid grin doesn't change, and instead of putting his mouth on mine, his hand slips around my jaw.- Now he's grasping one side with his thumb and the other side with his fingers.

"He's alive! - Rusty cries. "He's alive, and he's gonna sing for the Room Four Michael Bolton Fan Club!"

His fingers pinch tighter-it hurts in a distant comingout-of-the-novocaine way-and begins to move my jaw up and down, clicking my teeth together. "If she's ba-aaad, he can't see it," Rusty sings in a hideous, atonal voice that would probably make Percy Sledge's head explode. "She can do no wrrr-ongggg... My teeth open and close at the rough urging of his hand; my tongue rises and falls like a dead dog riding the surface of an uneasy waterbed.

"Stop it!" the lady doc snaps at him. She sounds genuinely shocked. Rusty, perhaps sensing this, does not stop but goes gleefully on. His fingers are pinching into my cheeks now. My frozen eyes stare blindly upward.

"Turn his back on his best friend if she put him d-"

Then she's there, a woman in a green gown with her cap tied around her throat and hanging down her back like the Cisco Kid's sombrero, short brown hair swept back from her brow, good-looking but severe-more handsome than pretty. She grabs Rusty with one short-nailed hand and pulls him back from me.

"Hey" Rusty says, indignant. "Get your hands off me!"

"Then you keep your hands off him, " she says, and there is no mistaking the anger in her voice. "I'm tired of your sophomore class wit, Rusty, and the next time you start in, I'm going to report you."

"Hey, let's all calm down," says the Baywatch hunk Doc's assistant. He sounds alarmed, as if he expects Rusty and his boss to start duking it out right here. "Let's just put a lid on it."

"Why's she bein' such a bitch to me?" Rusty says. He's still trying to sound indignant, but he's actually whining now. Then, in a slightly different direction: "Why you being such a bitch? You on your period, is that it?"

Doc, sounding disgusted: "Get him out of here. sign the log."

Mike: "Come on, Rusty. Let's go

Rusty: "Yeah. And get some fresh air."

Me, listening to all this like it was on the radio.

Their feet, squeaking toward the door. Rusty now all huffy and offended, asking her why she doesn't just wear a mood ring or something so people will know. Soft shoes squeaking on tile, and suddenly that sound is replaced by the sound of my driver, beating the bush for my goddam ball, where is it, it didn't go too far in, I'm sure of it, so where is it, Jesus, I hate fourteen, supposedly there's poison I ivy, and with all this underbrush, there could easily be-And then something bit me, didn't it? Yes, I'm almost sure it did.

On the left calf, just above the top of my whit athletic sock. A red-hot darning needle of pain, perfectly concentrated at first, then spreading ...

... then darkness. Until the gurney, zipped up snug inside a body bag and listening to Mike ("Which one did they say?') and Rusty ("Four, I think. Yeah, four.")

I want to think it that's only because was some kind of snake, but maybe I was thinking about them while I hunted for my ball. It could have been an insect, I only recall the single line of pain. and after all, what does it matter? What matters here is that I'm alive and they don't know it. It's incredible, but they don't know it. Of course I had bad luck-I know Dr. Jennings, remember speaking to him as I played through his foursome on the eleventh hole. A nice enough guy, but vague, an antique. The antique had pronounced me dead. Then Rusty, with his dopey green eyes and his detention hall grin, had pronounced me dead. The lady doc, Ms. Cisco Kid, hadn't even looked at me yet, not really. When she did, maybe-

"I hate that jerk," she says when the door is closed. Now it's just the three of us, only of course Ms. Cisco Kid thinks it's just the two of them. "Why do I always get the jerks, Peter?"

"I don't know," Mr. Melrose Place says, "but Rusty's a special case, even in the annals of famous jerks. Walking brain death.--She laughs, and something clanks. The clank is followed by a sound that scares me badly: steel instruments clicking together.

They are of to the left of me, and although I can't see them, I know what they're getting ready to do: the autopsy. They are getting ready to cut into me. They intend to remove Howard Cottrell's heart and see if it blew a piston or threw a rod.

My leg! I scream inside my head. Look at my left leg, That's the trouble, not my heart. !

Perhaps my eyes have adjusted a little, after all. Now I can see, at the very top of my vision, a stainless steel armature. It looks like a giant piece of dental equipment, except that thing at the end isn't a drill. It's a saw. From someplace deep inside, where the brain stores the sort of trivia you only need if you happen to be playing Jeopardy! on TV, I even come up with the name. It's a Gigh saw.

They use it to cut of the top of your skull. This is after they've pulled your face off like a kid's Halloween mask, of course, hair and all.

Then they take out your brain.

Clink. Clink. Clunk. A pause. Then a CLANK! so loud I'd jump if I were capable of jumping.

"Do you want to do the pericardial cut?" she asks.

Pete, cautious: "Do you want me to?"

Dr. Cisco, sounding pleasant, sounding like someone who is conferring a favor and a responsibility: "Yes, I think so."

"All right," he says. "You'll assist?"

"Your trusty copilot," 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

" tent-show 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 ribcage pops apart like a Couple of barrels that have been lashed together with twine. Then on up with those scissors that look like nothing so much as the poultry shears supermarket butchers usesnip-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 maternaname = "note" "No. These."

Snick-snick. 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 goosebumps, but of course, nothing happens; my flesh remains smooth.

"Remernber ,", Dr. Arlen. says (but now she's actually lecturing),

"any fool can learn how to use a milking machine . . . but the hands-on 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 in or movement, or they're really going 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 blood-glossy 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 Cotton 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.

Nnnnn-

"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 now 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 fuzz-tone guitar and Mick Jagger's voice bashing off the walls""Awww, no it's only rock and roll, but I LIYYYKE IT..."

"Turn it down!" Dr. Cisco yells, comically 0vershouting, 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 ribcage 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!"