Zero, p.7
Zero, page 7
There was a sliding glass door to the left, a multicolored curtain drawn halfway across it. Beyond, there was a tall counter, behind which he could see the top of a woman’s head and a man in a lab coat with a stethoscope draped over his neck. There was a board behind them with even more names next to a vertical column, labeled by bed number.
Nearly out of sight beside the entryway was the shoulder and left hip of a tan-uniformed officer, his left hand resting uneasily on his holster.
Machines whirred and hummed to either side of Brian, against the wall behind his slightly elevated bed, flashing at various intervals with small red and green displays.
He tried to get up, but his body was unresponsive. He merely toppled to the right against the thick plastic bed rail, facing another uniformed officer who was sound asleep in a green leather chair against the backdrop of the nearly-closed vertical blinds.
It took every last ounce of his strength to right himself on the pillow, and even then his neck was uncomfortably kinked to the right.
Bolts of lightning knifed through the slats between the blinds, drawing pale stripes across his legs beneath the manila blanket, highlighting the various cords and tubes that connected his arms to the whining equipment. His left shoulder was bandaged beneath a thick coating of gauze with slimy salve seething from beneath.
His right wrist was cuffed to the rail.
Straining, he was barely able to see a bag of clear fluid dripping one drop at a time in a small chamber, then into the clear plastic tubing of one of his tethers.
Drip.
Drip.
Drip.
Lightning flared again, the resultant growl of thunder barely audible; little more than a shiver of the window pane.
The television snapped on the moment the strobe lit the room.
Brian glanced at the policeman, but he was still completely unconscious.
“…thirty-eight found dead within the remains of this house, no more than half a block from the dormitories where hundreds of students went about their daily pursuit of knowledge without the slightest clue as to what was going on behind the doors of Twenty-four Sixteen Portico Lane.” All that was left of the house behind the female reporter was half of the front façade surrounding the burnt front door, charred, still smoldering beneath the heavy rain. Policemen in yellow rain slickers milled about behind stretches of yellow tape flapping in the wind. The reporter’s shoulder-length bronze hair blew repeatedly in front of her face and she had to finally hold it back behind her ear with her free hand, pressing her earpiece further into the canal to hear clearly. “Again, authorities aren’t releasing any of the names of the deceased until their families have been notified. Stay tuned to News Channel 4 for all of the details as they’re made avail—”
The channel changed suddenly.
The officer to Brian’s right stirred in his sleep, tucking his clipboard beneath his arm to better rest his chin on his fist.
He had no remote control.
“…say they have a suspect in custody, but have yet to release his identity. The house itself – owned by the University’s Housing Department – was recently leased to a graduate student after serving as the home to a respected professor for close to a decade. University officials are guarding what little information they claim to have, though the News Crew at Channel 7—”
The channel changed again.
Brian looked to his limp right hand, dangling from the cuff a good three inches above the remote control clicker, wired to the wall and clipped to his bedding.
“…the Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the...”
Click.
“…card? Here’s your Christmas card!”
Click.
“…treinta y ocho cuerpos encontraron dentro de las paredes—”
Click.
“You think you’re big time?” a much younger Al Pacino in Scarface slurred. “You’re gonna fucking die... big time!”
Brian looked quickly to the officer, trying to force his limp wrist to jerk at the handcuffs. He tried to call out, but no sound would come.
Nothing.
“You ready?” Pacino asked.
Brian’s eyes grew inhumanly wide. A flare of light, organizing itself into the electrical semblance of a man, reflected from his irises. His retinas shrunk to pinpricks.
The television blossomed with a fiery intensity that expanded throughout the formerly darkened room. The machines to either side of Brian’s head beeped and squawked frantically.
Blue bolts of current struck at the walls as the nearly corporeal form approached, latching onto the monitors and frying the internal components.
Brian couldn’t even raise his hands in front of his face.
A bolt of lightning snared a flagpole outside, bucking and snapping to break free.
He could only close his eyes and pray.
“Here comes the pain!”
BONUS MATERIAL
THE HANDS OF GOD
An Exclusive Short Story
There’s no mystery that can’t be solved with a flash of inspiration, and a scalpel.
Human flesh is tougher to cut than you might think. After feeling the skin part for something as innocuous as a paper-cut, you would think that with the razor-honed tip of a knife, it would open right up, but you’d be surprised just how much pressure it actually takes. Granted, the blade passes through the first couple of layers of the superficial strata as if they don’t exist, but it takes a skilled hand to slice through the deeper tissues without ripping the meat like a wolf thrashing at a deer’s neck. That’s the difference between a butcher and an artist like me. A butcher hacks at the carcass without regard for function or aesthetics. Anyone can eviscerate a body with even a remotely sharp implement, but it takes a practiced hand, one that respects the complexities of God’s design, to truly master the intricacies of the flesh.
Most surgeons think that it’s a commutative theorem: I can save lives and repair the flesh, excise malignancy and restart a stilled heart; therefore, I must be God. That’s allowing ego to supersede intellect. An oversimplification, if you will. A schooled man of the blade can keep death at bay like a champion swordsman, but no matter how accomplished the hand, there is one thing that a surgeon cannot do: create life where there was none before.
That is the difference between man and God.
Gayle always said that the key distinction between man and God was that God knew when to let something die. Man will continue to revive the dying, hooking him to artificial lungs and kidneys, performing surgery after surgery, even transplanting mechanical or harvested organs. God, on the other hand, will allow a man to lie down in a field of clover with the setting sun warming his face, while his eyes simply drip closed. His physical form then brings life to the soil and clover, which sustains the deer long enough to eventually be felled to support humanity. The circle of life.
That was the thing about Gayle. She could just accept her place in the universe without aspiring to more. There was a time when such philosophical acquiescence was considered enlightened, when man accepted the notion of God by nothing more than faith.
Even now, as I remove the scalpel from the alcohol basin and sterilize it over the open blue flame from the burner, I can see the irony in how in setting out to prove the existence of God, man has built a case to destroy Him.
The hood whirs overhead, quickly drawing even the minute contaminants in my breath that pass through my surgical mask directly out of the room to maintain the sterile field. The table before me is stainless steel, as are the walls that enclose me within this enclave, reflecting back warped and monstrous mutations of my visage. Lengths of wire, precut into six inch lengths, fill a rectangular dish amidst other implements in a bath of alcohol. Halogen lamps cupped in intensifying domes like umbrellas are mounted to the top of either wall beside me on retractable armatures so that I can direct their ferocious glare onto any precise location that I so choose.
It seems a much better use of space than the pool table I used to have in its stead.
A naked woman lies face down on the table before me. Her skin’s the color and consistency of oatmeal; her hair a nest of straw. Bruises bloom like purple and brown orchids. Her flesh is already beginning to slough from the bone.
With her neck acutely flexed to open the joint spaces between vertebrae in her neck and both beams of light focused brilliantly, glinting from the tip of my surgical blade, I press the arced tip into the flesh at the base of her occipital bone, summoning a minuscule swell of black blood like ichor. Increasing the pressure with my wrist, I feel the epidermis and dermis pop as though I’m breaking through some sacred seal, and then draw the blade perfectly downward to the base of her neck. The edges of the cut pull away from the trailing edge of the blade like ruby lips opening into a sigh. Removing the knife, I bring it back to the initial point of insertion, and press it in again, deeper this time, slashing through the yellow adipose layer before parting the muscle beneath. Like an artist’s brush, I guide the blade in strokes, slicing cleanly through the fat and meat, retracting gently each time my hand gets heavy and the tip encounters the bony protuberances of the spinous processes.
Those lips now yawn wide enough for me to stroke the spine with my first two fingers, the latex of the gloves marred with blood to the second knuckles.
Placing the blade at the end of the incision, I begin again, tracing through the superficial layers all the way down her back to the apex of her coccyx. And as before, I follow the course of that line with deeper strokes, slicing cleanly through fat and muscle until the entirety of her back appears split in two from her head all the way down to the top of her crack like an overcooked hotdog, as though I could reach both hands in there and tug the flaps up flesh away like worn carpet from floorboards.
If it had been up to Gayle, I would have been a carpenter. She could have lived without the more extravagant creature comforts. It didn’t matter to her what kind of car she drove or how big her house was. Fancy clothes always made her feel uncomfortable and self-conscious. She just wanted a husband who’d spend more than a couple of hours a day at home waiting for his pager to go off. And a baby. After medical school had turned to after my residency, and then to after we’re financially secure. I always had a reason, though for the life of me, I don’t know why I ever denied her at all. Though in retrospect, I don’t even think having a baby would have cured her loneliness.
I draw the forceps from the alcohol, and sterilize them with a touch to the blue flame, allowing them to burn themselves out.
With the end of those enormous tweezers, I peel back the left side of the wound at the top of the spine, exposing the dorsal root ganglion protruding through the intervertebral foramina: a pale white turnip composed of clusters of nerve tracts growing through the hole between bones. While holding that lip back, I remove one of the wires from the basin and bring it to the spine. One end of the wire is curled like a corkscrew. I use this end to puncture the membranous sheath surrounding the nerve root, and twist it in until a gentle tug proves it’s firmly seated.
Repeating the process one ganglion at a time, I follow the course of the spine, inserting a wire to match every vertebra, and then six in the paired pelvic sacral foramina. By the time I’ve made the return trip all the way up the right side and to the base of the skull, there are twenty-seven pairs of wires standing erect, holding back the flesh like the legs of a pier running the length of her neck and back. I give each pair a loving twist like mating serpents until it appears as though she has twenty-seven spires standing straight up from her spine like the spikes on an iguana’s back.
I take a step back and appraise my work before returning the forceps into the alcohol and removing a short, hooked needle attached to a length of black thread. Starting at the distal end of the incision, I hook the sharpened end through one edge of the rent flesh before poking it out the other side, drawing the thread through and tightening it as I go. Over and over I repeat this process until the skin is closed around those wires, those angry red lips sewn shut, straining against the ebony thread.
I could have used staples, but they would have left hideous scars.
No, an artist would use the smallest gauge needle and the thinnest suture. When this healed it would be as though the wound had never existed.
Except for the wires, of course.
They’re not just standard lengths of braided copper like you can find in any hardware store. These are a creation of my own design. Tungsten filaments encased within surgical grade silver, which allows for ultimate conductivity and a reasonable amount of malleability. Metallurgy is something of a hobby of mine. While other physicians waste their free time on the links, chasing a dimpled ball from one hole to the next, I experiment with the tensile strength and the electrical conveyance of various metals. Why? In layman’s terms, because electricity is the secret of life. Look at a pacemaker; it has the ability to make a heart beat when it wouldn’t otherwise do so on its own. It’s a fairly simple mechanism, really. It initiates an electrical impulse at the SA node, which is conducted along myocardial fibers to the AV node, triggering a chain reaction of muscular contractions that pumps blood throughout the body. The implications are astounding. Why could this technology not be used to stimulate other bodily functions when they wear down?
The brain functions via electrical impulses. Could a diseased or necrotic section of gray matter not be bypassed by merely bridging the electrical impulses over the dysfunctional area? We could cut out the section responsible for Alzheimer’s disease by diverting the brain’s current past that atrophied convolution and to other healthy tissue. We could rewire a catatonic mind as easily as reconfiguring an electrical schematic.
The lungs could be stimulated to both inhale and exhale. The liver could be goaded into producing bile. The stomach could churn and peristalsis could be triggered to solve any digestive disorder. Blind eyes could be made to see.
Can you not see the potential?
Amputated limbs could be reattached without nerve damage, as those impulses could be conducted along wires if the nerve tracts were beyond repair. Lame appendages could be reanimated.
Life could be infused through a power source when the brain ceased to function on its own.
Everyone’s stimulated a frog leg to twitch in a high school science lab with the application of current. Why is it no one’s ever thought to apply such fundamentally sound, and yet ground-breaking science to the human animal?
Gayle said it’s not because no one else ever thought of it, but because they thought better of it. What I proposed was turning man into machine, she said. That was a reactionary assertion. I was plotting to take a broken machine and fix it. How presumptuous to think you can improve upon God’s design, she would respond.
Leave it to Gayle to fall back on theology.
I’m a man of science. I don’t live in the realm of fantasy. “Why?” is a question I can answer in three little words…
Because I can.
I reach beneath the steel slab and produce a pair of jumper cables, attached to the car battery on the floor. After peeling apart the wires disappearing into her skin right between her shoulders, so they now form a V shape, I attach the red clamp to the left lead, and the black clamp to the right. Sparks flare, but immediately fizzle.
Both arms snap straight out to her sides, fingers curling backward as though trying to close the hand the wrong way. They shiver violently, all the small hairs rising stiffly.
I remove the cables, and both arms fall limply to her sides, nearly tugging the fresh sutures loose.
Satisfied, I replace the cables under the table and grab the circular saw. It’s one thing for a man to be able to purchase the supplies needed to create a clean room in his basement, but securing surgical supplies is another thing entirely. Scalpels, forceps and other implements were easy enough to bring home from the hospital, but there was no way I could slip out of there with a bone saw. The Craftsman would work; I just needed to be extraordinarily careful. So long as I supplied just enough pressure to saw through the cranium without gashing into the hidden brain within, then all would be fine.
I pull the trigger and the blade screams to life.
I sift through the mess of hair until I find the circular stripe I shaved around the circumference of her skull from temple to temple, folding the upper tangles over the crown of her head, and the lower portion down over her neck. She’d kill me if I shaved off all of her golden locks. Hopefully she won’t notice a single wide part when the hair falls back into place.
Slowly, cautiously, I take the handle of the saw in both hands, using one to stabilize the other, and bring the spinning blade to the back of her head.
Blood and tatters of flesh spatter my plastic goggles, but there’s no time to swipe them away as the saw is already grinding through the occipital bone with an ear-piercing wail. Calcium dust fills the air in a chalky haze, reminding me of the snowstorm the morning Gayle left.
I understand her reasons for doing it, but still, she should have known better.
She thought I was asleep. Sometimes I find it easier to formulate my thoughts against the backdrop of the blank screen of my closed eyelids. There are often nights where I don’t sleep at all. Either the inspiration fuels me and my mind is a blur of activity, or the silence serves as a challenge from my autonomic nervous system. With concerted focus, I can slow my heart to ten beats per minute, raise the temperature of my hands twelve degrees, or even will my lungs to refuse to draw air until the unconscious threatens with sparks in the corner of my darkened vision. On that particular night, I had stilled all voluntary and involuntary functions to the point that I could hear each individual flake of snow alighting on the rooftop, each crystal tapping on the window with ghostly fingers.
