In Extremis Read online

  Crushed into a little box. A little box.

  He pressed his palms flat against the glass, tucked his knees against his chest, deliberately pulling deeper into the oven. Felt her using the opportunity to close the door on him.

  But now he had some leverage. He used all his strength and a lifetime of frustration and kicked.

  The door smacked outward, banging against her chest. She lost her footing; he heard her fall backwards, even as he scrabbled to get out—and dropped out of the oven, fell to the floor himself, landing painfully on his small feet. She was confused, cursing incoherently, trying to get up. He laughed, feeling light-headed and happy.

  He sprinted for the living room, jumping over her outstretched leg, and ran into the bedroom area. He could see the door, the way out, clearly ahead of him, unobstructed.

  Brandy got up. It was like she was climbing a mountain to do it. Something wet on the back of her head. The little fucker. The pipe. When had it got broken? It was broken, beside the sink. She grabbed the stem. It’d make a knife.

  Shit—maybe the little fucker had already gotten out the door.

  She felt her lip curl into a snarl, and ran toward the door—her ankle hooked on the wire stretched across the rug, about three inches over it, drawn from the bed frame to the dresser.

  The lamp cord, she thought, as she pitched face first onto the rug. She hadn’t left the cord that way. The air knocked out of her, she turned onto her back choking, trying to orient herself.

  The dwarf was standing over her, laughing, with the champagne bottle in his miniature hands. He clasped the bottle by the neck. A narrow bar of light came in between the curtains, spotlighting his round red mouth.

  He was towering over her, from that angle, as he brought the champagne bottle down hard on her forehead.

  “A BURGLAR KILLED MY NEW BRIDE!”

  SOBS WORLD’S SMALLEST MAN

  The newlywed bride of Ross Taraval, the world’s smallest man, was murdered by an intruder on the first night of their Las Vegas honeymoon. Ross himself was battered senseless by the mystery man—and woke to find that his wife had murdered. Her throat had been cut by the broken glass of the drug-crazed killer’s “crack” pipe. The burglar so far has not been located by police.

  “It broke my heart,” said the game little rooster of a man, “but I have learned that to survive in this world when you are my size, you must be stronger than other men! So I will go on . . . And I have not given up my search for the right woman, to share my fame and fortune . . .”

  Ross hints that he’s on the verge of signing a deal to do a buddy movie with his hero, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. A big career looms up ahead for a small guy! “I’d like to share it with some deserving woman!” Ross says.

  If you’d like to send a letter to Ross Taraval, the world’s smallest man, you can write to him care of the Weekly World Inquirer, and we’ll forward the letter to him . . .

  FACES IN WALLS

  I wake up in room 230, Wemberly Sanitarium, a fifteen by twenty-three foot room with peeling green walls. A dream of freedom and intimacy vanishes and the truth comes thudding back like a door slamming. I’m strapped loosely to a narrow bed, where I’ve lain, unmoving, for six years. I lie on my back, sharply aware that the overhead light has just switched on for the morning. It’s only later that the sunlight comes through the high window, to my right. I lay there waiting for the faces in the walls. And the one face that talks to me.

  Mostly, nothing happens in this room, except waking, and waiting, and watching the light change; the nurse coming and going, thoughts coming and going. Enduring the pain of bedsores. The paralysis.

  I can move my eyes to look around, and blink—and thank God I can close my eyes. I’m able to breathe without help. I’m unable to speak. I can move my tongue very slightly. There’s a little movement in the thumb of my right hand. That’s it, that’s all of it.

  I mentioned being strapped in. The only reason they strap me down at all is just because maybe I might have a seizure, and that could make me fall off the bed. But I haven’t had a seizure in years. Some kind of virus got into my brain, years ago, and gave me some really ferocious seizures. The paralysis came after the last seizure, like the jaws of a bear trap closing on me. Anyway, despite the restraints, this is not a mental hospital, this is the Wemberly Geriatric Sanitarium. Geriatric home or not, I’m not old, I’m one of the fairly young patients, for all the good it does me. Thirty-two, by my count, now. Does it sound bad? It’s worse. Maybe the distinct feeling of my life burning away, second by second, like a very, very slow fuse that’s burning down to a dud firecracker—maybe that’s the worst part . . . that and Sam Sack.

  I imagine a guy in a band saying, “Fellas, let’s play ‘Paralyzed’—and play it with feeling.” I can feel. I feel more than someone with a snapped spine could. Sometimes I’m glad I can feel things—and sometimes I wish I couldn’t. I can feel the straps over my chest, though they’re not on tightly. I can feel a new bedsore developing on my right shoulder blade. I can feel the thin blanket over my lower half. I can feel the warm air from the vent as the furnace comes on; it blows, left to right, across on my face. I hear the fan that drives the air from the vent; I hear sleety rain hit the window. I can taste a sourness in my mouth—the staff rarely cleans my teeth—and I can taste food, when they bring it, but they give me very little, mostly soups, and not enough. And the way they make the soup there’s nothing much to taste.

  Now I hear voices. People talking. They take talking for granted and so did I. We waste so much of it . . .

  There is something, lately, that gives me some murky sort of hope. Bethany. Though I’m not sure what exactly I’m hoping for . . .

  Before Beth, I had my sad little ways of coping. Daydreaming of course. And writing in my mind—I tell stories, only I tell them in my mind. I think them out and try to memorize them, word for word, and tell them over again, to myself. Sometimes I make the stories up. Sometimes they’re things that really happened.

  The story I’m telling now, and trying to etch into a little corner of my brain, is a true one. I know it’s true because I’m telling it even as it unfolds. I have an irrational belief that somehow, someone will hear this story. Maybe I’ll be able to transmit it to them with my mind. Because in a certain way, my mind has become the strongest part of me. I’ll transmit the story all in one piece, out into the ether, and it’ll bounce around like a radio signal. A random writer will just pick it up out of the air, maybe years from now, and write it down—and he’ll suppose it’s all his idea.

  My mother abandoned me here, but I guess it’s not like abandoning a child. I was an adult, after all, in my mid-twenties, when it happened. I’d been staying with her while I was recovering from a drug relapse.

  My mother and I were never close. That’s an understatement—we had a simmering mutual aversion, muffled by a truce. It got worse after I grew up and went to college. You’re supposed to understand your parents better when you’re grown up.

  I did understand her—I just couldn’t respect her. And she knew it.

  I won’t say she was a whore, because she didn’t take money from her lovers. (I could almost respect her if she’d done it for money.) No, not a whore—but I do think she drove my dad away with her casual adultery, when I was a teenager, and I know she discouraged him from being in touch with me later. And I know she is an alcoholic and a woman who sleeps with the random men she meets in bars. Or that’s how she was—I don’t even know if she’s still alive.

  I don’t know why Mom invited me to stay with her, after I got fired, and lost my apartment. Maybe she wanted me there to take revenge on me—she didn’t have my dad to take revenge on, so she took it out on me. It felt like she wanted me to always be saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Sorry for something I didn’t do.

  “You’re just like him, Douglas, that’s the awful thing,” she’d say. Not that my dad was ever a drug addict. And not that I was always one either.
/>   I got into speedballs in the early 1970s, when a lot of us went from Summer of Love thinking, to the whole 1970s glam decadence thing. I would get off work and go right out and score. Always a speedball—heroin and cocaine; heroin and methedrine. I got sick and tired of being sick and tired—so I got clean. I had five years clean, and a good job—before I relapsed. I started using again—and it got me fired. That was another wakeup call. I needed a place to get clean. Spoke to my mom, in a fit of familial yearning, she said, “You may as well come here.”

  Six months with my mom. Staying clean, partly because she was staying drunk. She inspired me to sobriety in a backward kind of way. I was just about to move out into a clean-and-sober hostel—anywhere, to get away from her—when the virus hit me. The seizures, the paralysis. The doctors said it was incubating in me, all that time—that I’d gotten it from a needle, fixing drugs, maybe a year or two before.

  My mom said it was my comeuppance, it was God’s way to say, “No more, Douglas!” She took care of me for a month—when she was sober enough. Thought I’d get over the virus, in time. But finally she put me here. And here I am still. Six years later.

  Because I’m going to talk about Bethany, I should say that this place wasn’t always a Geriatric Sanitarium. It was, for years, a TB Sanitarium. Tuberculosis, consumption. The White Death. In the mid-sixties, when they had TB mostly licked in this country, Mr. Wemberly, the owner, changed it over to a Geriatrics Sanitarium—only, from what I hear, listening to the nurses, it’s only about seventy percent old-age dementia cases. The rest are just odds and ends of damaged people, all ages, who end up here because it’s cheap. Very cheap indeed.

  Mom left me here, in 1976. So here it is, 1982.

  Punishment. Punishment, punishment. Here I am. I’m sorry. Does that help, to say I’m sorry? If I say it again, does it help? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Now can I get up and walk out of here?

  No. The tired gray sunlight coming through the windows says no.

  Not much happened to me, for almost six years.

  I ingest, I eliminate waste, I breathe. A few minutes of physical therapy, once a month; some electrical therapy; Sister Maria for a brief time. The day nurse and the visits of Sam Sack. That’s all. Anything really new that happens is profoundly exciting—makes my breath come faster, my heart pound. Anything new that has nothing to do with Sam Sack, I mean. I get some stimulation from Sack, sure, but that’s not excitement; that’s nausea in the shape of a man . . .

  About four years ago, for almost seven months, I was visited once a week by a nun, a chubby little Hispanic lady named Sister Maria. She used to sit with me for almost an hour. She’d bring one of those cheap one-speaker cassette tape recorders along, play canticles and the like for me, and read to me. Not always from the Bible. She read from Quo Vadis? That was pretty exciting. She had a soft Mexican accent and she used to smile at me and wag her finger and say, “Are you laughing at my accent, Douglas? I think you are!”

  It was almost ecstasy, when she talked to me like that—because I did think her accent was amusing. So that was almost like communicating. And when she played music for me, it felt excruciatingly good. It hurt that I couldn’t tell her thank you, and please come back.

  She even touched my arm, a soft warm slightly moist touch, when she was ready to leave.

  Then she stopped coming. I heard someone in the hall talking about a convent being closed. I think that’s what they said, I couldn’t hear it clearly. I wanted to believe that’s what it was—something out of her control. Sister Maria . . .

  No more music, since then. Except what’s in my mind. The old songs from the 60s that replay, over and over in my mind. The whirling dust motes. The sounds from the hall; sometimes a patient crying.

  But something important has happened—it happened, for the first time, three weeks ago. One of the faces in the walls has started talking to me . . .

  Seeing faces in the wall was one of the ways I kept my mind busy.

  It’s funny how the people who take care of me feel like ghosts—and Beth feels like a living person to me. That’s because she talks to me

  Beth spoke to me, in my mind and I replied to her—in my mind. And she heard me!

  I wish I could talk out loud—to Beth, to anyone. It’s enough that I can’t move—but if I could at least talk . . . If I could berate the nurses, flirt with the woman who comes in to mop the floor, ask for things, demand to see an attorney, sing to myself—and tell a story to a nurse . . . that’d be worth something.

  I can make just one little sound—a high-pitched immmm sound produced way deep in my throat—but it’s hard to make, and it’s such an embarrassingly piteous, subhuman noise I hate to do it. I only do it when I’m trying to ease the pressure, trying to avoid the inner hysteria, that’s like a funhouse in a very bad earthquake. If I feel that coming, then I might immmm.

  I have to be sure the nurses and attendants are nowhere around when I make the noise. If they hear it, they get irritated, asking, “Well? What’s the point if you know you can’t tell us what you want?” Figuring I’m trying to get attention. They find ways to show they’re angry with me. They “forget” to change the diaper.

  There—I hear the sound of the little metal cabinet on wheels that they roll around to feed those who can’t feed themselves. It clinks with dishes and rattles and its wheels squeak. I’m the first one in this corridor. So that means the morning nurse is coming in, just a few minutes late. I think of her as Mrs. White because she’s an old white woman with puffy white hair and a dirty white uniform. She smells old and talks old, when she mutters to herself, and she’s barely aware of what she’s doing, as she goes through the motions of cleaning me with her twisty old fingers, feeding me breakfast porridge, giving me a shot, brushing my teeth, putting antiseptic—a bandage if she feels like it—on my bedsores. She turns me, props me up back there with special little pillow to give the bedsore a chance to heal. I sort of enjoy that, since I can feel it. She’s supposed to change the sheet, but that’s a complicated process involving moving me a lot, hard work, so she doesn’t do it today. I am aware that her Polydent isn’t quite working and her false teeth are coming loose from her gums. I can hear the sound of them sucking loose as she mumbles to herself.

  Sometimes Mrs. White says something to me. Always a kind of complaint. “You’re getting fat and hard to move. They’re going to want to put those electric things on your arms again to keep them muscles up. But don’t think they’ll keep on with it, they’re cutting back on treatment again, laying people off. Well, see there, you don’t poop much, I’ll give you that. But you still smell. That sore of yours, that smells. I don’t know why I got to do this. I should have some real retirement. You can’t live on what I’d have. Some of it got stolen. My husband died and left me nothing but debts. So here I am with you . . .”

  I like her visits, though—I can see parts of the room I can’t normally see, when she moves me about. I can think about the things she says and try to imagine her life. It’s better than hearing nothing from anyone. It’s better than Sam Sack.

  After she’s gone, I listen to people talking in the hallway. They come, and they go. Now I pass the time with my worn out old fantasy that someday my dad will come looking for me and take me out of here. I imagine the whole scene, where he wheels me out, and tells me he’s going to find a cure for me. That doesn’t last long.

  Sometimes I have other fantasies—I try to avoid the sexual sort. They’re particularly torturous. And I can still get a hard-on. Which makes the aides laugh.

  There are darker daydreams, that come to me, at times. Furious, bone-deep violence against Sack; against certain orderlies; against the people who run this place . . .

  I push all that down, deep down, because it only hurts me, not them. And I think about what I’ll say to Beth, instead. It’s not time for her to come yet. She won’t come till after it starts to get dark outside. I have to wait . . .

  I watch the slanting sun make warp
ed squares on the wall to my left. I start watching the dust whirling in the sunbeams. I try to count them. I select pieces of dust to study individually. To imagine as something else. Sometimes at night before the light goes out, I can watch moths. I’ve watched spiders cross the ceiling, watched them very closely. My eyes hurt with all this staring, but it’s all I’ve got.

  Once in a while they bring in a machine that makes my muscles jump with mild electrical jolts. It hurts a little, but I like it, because it’s some movement, and I guess it keeps my muscles from atrophying. It’s experimental. Someone donated it. But Mrs. White says the muscle therapy is going to end.

  No one comes today. No electricity, nothing but waiting for lunch. Patiently waiting. The hours are like blocks of ice in a room just two degrees above freezing. Ever so slowly melting. It’s a mystery, why I don’t go completely insane. But how would I know if I was insane?

  I’ve tried really hard to go totally mad, cuckoo, out of my mind, lost in space. Definitively insane, in a mad hatter way. The important phrase is, out of my mind. That’d be a kind of escape. I’ve never quite gotten there. The most I’ve gotten to is some vicious fantasies and some hallucinations, now and then. The hallucinations are some kind of sensory deprivation effect maybe. Those faces. Except one.

  I’ve seen things in the swirling dust. Minute dancing ballerinas, and crystalline cogs. And the faces appearing in the wall. Appearing, and vanishing. The faces frighten me, but at least it’s some kind of stimulation. They sometimes seem amused—sometimes hostile. I used to be afraid they’d come out of the wall somehow and bite me. But they never do. They look at me as if they’re threatening me, but they’re as powerless, as stuck within walls, as I am stuck on the bed in room 230. They move their lips sometimes. I never heard any of the faces speak, though, till Beth showed up.

  I’m waiting for her now, my eyes turned to watch the wall to my right, under the window. I can feel she’s near. Maybe she’s a hallucination, maybe that’s how I know she’s coming—because she’s from my own mind. But I want to believe she’s real. I do believe it. She must be. She knows things that I never knew . . .