In Extremis Read online

  He starts drawing on my lips with the lipstick, whistling a song. “Camptown Ladies.”

  I feel something I haven’t felt for a while. I try not to feel it, because if I do, it’s like I’m on fire and can’t put the fire out.

  It’s pure rage. And there’s nothing I can do to express it, but breathe harder. I can sort of snort out my nose at him. That’s all. This only makes him laugh, and he hits my testicles hard with his knee. The pain brings the rage up like a siren blasting full volume in my mind.

  I fight the rage. Rage hurts me. I have to keep it down. Pretend to be someone else, like Beth says. Beth . . .

  She’s there, suddenly. Standing to my right. Sack doesn’t seem to see her.

  “Douglas,” she says, in my mind, “let yourself rage at him. If you do, then you’ll go into the rage, and you’ll be gone enough into it, and that’ll open a door for me, so I can help you . . .”

  And I stop fighting it. The rage was like a pot of water boiling over, making the lid rattle and fall away . . . I was uncovered by it . . .

  I feel an unspeakable, glutinous intimacy. Is this being raped? But he hasn’t started that yet. This is up higher, coming from somewhere else—something is pushing into my gut, right under my rib cage. It’s passing through the skin without breaking it. But I feel it force its way into whatever it is, inside my body, and brain, that I think of as me. It’s doing it insistently, not brutally. I realize it’s Beth.

  Then I feel something strange in the muscles of my face. Like I have a muscle twitch. But it’s a muscle twitch that makes my mouth move. My tongue. A jabbery sound croaks out of me. Then some control comes and I say a word right out loud.

  “Sack,” I say. Not in my mind—I say it with my mouth.

  He turns to look at me, his head cocked to one side again. Staring. “You can’t talk . . .”

  “Sam Sack,” I say. “You’re Sam.”

  Only it’s not me saying it. She’s saying it for me. She’s joined me. She’s with me in here. Beth! I can feel her there, a warm presence, twined about my spine, swirling at the back of my head, and stretching into my arms . . .

  My arms are twitching. Jumping. They’re wriggling. The straps are loose. My hand is fumbling at a buckle on the restraints.

  Sack raises a fist, slowly, over his head. I can see him flexing his arm muscle. I realize he’s going to hit me. Beat me to death, to keep me quiet.

  My right arm comes free. I watch my own arm as it rises up like a cobra—some creature I have no control over. Sack stares at it, hesitating—and then my left hand gets free. It jumps up and grabs him by the back of the neck. Holds him. His surprisingly skinny neck. My left hand makes a kind of claw, with the index finger, and thumb, and it stabs out, and jabs him in the eyes. As we do it, I remember all the times he dug his thumbs into my eyes. My own will, set free, joins Beth’s, and I push my thumb and finger hard, into his eyes. Popping through his eyeballs, digging into the eye socket.

  He gives out with a long, bubbling squeal, and blood splashes into the pillowcase and changes the color of the cloth.

  He quivers and shakes in my hands—and then he wrenches free and falls flailing back, blind.

  “Okay now,” Beth says, in my mind. “That’s enough. We stopped him.” Her voice is crystal clear. I can see her face in my mind, looking worried and almost pretty. “Let’s just get out of here, together. I can leave here with you. I can’t make it out of here alone . . . We can go out through that old tunnel . . .” It takes some time to get better control of my limbs. But I get the straps off completely, and I stand. I’m dizzy, once I almost fall over, but I manage to stay upright. I feel firmer with every passing second. “I’m standing! Beth! I can move! You’re helping me do this?”

  “I’m connecting something that was broken in your brain, just by being here, inside you,” she says. “Let’s go . . .”

  “Wait,” I say, my voice shaking.

  I feel waves of emotion go through me, rage and joy all mixed together, driving me along. I step over to the writhing man on the floor, and I kneel down to press my knee on his neck, and I put all my weight on it. I crush his throat, hard and slow.

  “Let’s go,” Beth says, sounding worried. “They’ve heard him scream! They’ll lock you up. We have to go.”

  “You’re doing this too,” I tell her, gasping the words out, breathing hard as I feel him struggling under my crushing knee. The blood is coming from his mouth now as well as his eyes. I’m feeling pain with all this movement, as if my joints are all rusty. Oil can, squeaks the Tin Man. “You’re doing it, Beth, as much as me.”

  “No. I didn’t even put out his eyes. I was just trying to push him back. Knock him down. Not that. You did that. No I’m just here, but I’m not . . . doing that.”

  I can barely hear her through the roaring. The roaring that is coming out of me. Then I realize that Sam Sack has stopped moving. He’s dead.

  I pull the sack off his head—the bloody child’s pillowcase—and I throw it in the corner and I look at him in the light from his own lantern.

  He’s a monkey-faced man with a big red nose. Old, his face deeply lined. His eyes are gone, blood running like red tears from the sockets. My hands are slick with the remains of his eye matter.

  I stand up, feeling sick, and wracked with pain, but seething with a fierce delight. Roaring to myself with exhilaration!

  I pick up his lantern and open the door, ripples of disorientation going through me as I step into the hallway. An orderly, a thick-bodied black man with a shaved head, is coming toward me, frowning, investigating the noise—he stops, staring at me. Seeing the blood on me and the lantern and the diaper—and the lipstick. He backs away. I roar at him. He turns and runs, and I laugh.

  “We have to go downstairs,” Beth says, in my mind. “The tunnel . . .”

  “No tunnel yet,” I say. Because it’s coming clear to me, now.

  I stumble along, managing to walk, spastic and hurting but loving every step. I hum to myself, sings bits of songs, just to hear my creaky voice. I find some stairs and go down—but only one floor. I step into the ground floor hallway, find the front door out into the grounds. It’s late, there’s no one watching it. It unlocks easily enough and I step out into the cold night. I’m almost naked, but I like the cold wind on me, the cold wet ground under my feet. I even like shivering. The stars, seen through the broken, racing clouds, are blue-white points of sheer intensity. I see the house in the corner of the grounds, near the front gate, close to the mossy concrete wall. I stumble across the wet lawn, through a pool of darkness. I make my way to the house, a white cottage trimmed in pale blue, in the corner of the grounds. I see there’s a light on at the small back porch.

  “We should just keep going out the front gate,” Beth says.

  I keep on to the little house. Beth comes with me, she has to. She has no choice.

  I’ve heard the orderlies refer to the cottage. “You want the time off, go see Wemberly in that house out front, and ask. He lives out there . . .”

  I find the backdoor unlocked, and step into the kitchen, still carrying the lantern. The kitchen is painted a sunny yellow.

  There is Charles Wemberly at the kitchen table, a fat balding elderly man in yellow pajamas. He’s eating a big piece of yellow cheese, which he’s cut up on a carving board, with a large knife. A bottle of Riesling is uncorked beside him. A wine glass brims in his age-spotted hand.

  He looks up; he stares; his jowly mouth hangs open, showing half-chewed cheese. His hand shakes; the wine spills.

  I stalk toward him and he gibbers something and flails, dropping the wine glass. I smash him in the face with the lantern. He rocks back. I drop the lantern and pick up the half empty wine bottle, and hit him in the face with it, over and over. The skin splits over the bones of his face, and I can see them showing through, till they’re covered with blood. He howls for help and thrashes at me and I keep smashing into him, knocking him off his chair, till the bottle shatters
.

  I discard the neck of the bottle and take the knife he was using—and I straddle him, like Sack did to me, and I start sawing at the back of Wemberly’s neck. Cutting here, cutting there. Sawing through neck muscles, tissue I can’t even identify. I’m smelling blood; feeling its wet hot thick warmth on my hands, my wrists.

  “Oh no,” Beth is saying. Her voice in my head is a sustained high note on a violin. “Oh, no Douglas. We have to go . . .”

  “It’s Charles,” I tell her, quite reasonably, saying it right out loud, as I saw at his back. He thrashes under me. I saw away, hacking down further, digging a trench in him around the spine, all the way from neck to tailbone.

  “Yes. But . . .”

  “He’s the one who raped you and let you die. And he hired Sam Sack. He left me in a moronically cruel state of neglect for six years.”

  “Yes but Douglas, listen please . . . We have to go.”

  “Wait!” I shout. “Almost done!” I keep sawing, working hard to separate the vertebrae from the body. I feel the strength of years of rage coming out in my hands, and he’s thrashing and squeaking and I drop the knife and I get a grip on the spine, I pull and wrench . . .

  It comes loose from his body, his entire spine comes out rather nicely, with his head attached. I have to cut through a few more connective threads around his neck, some cartilage, and then . . .

  I’m standing over the rest of his body holding his spine in my two hands. His head, his mind, is still alive in it, attached to the spine; his face is twitching convulsively, eyes going back and forth, back and forth.

  I swing his head on his spine, like swinging a polo mallet; it’s cumbersome, and I think of Alice in the Lewis Carroll book, trying to play croquet with a flamingo. But this one drips blood, and sputters.

  “This is to you, from me,” I tell Beth. “I am your man, Beth, and my strong arm has done this for you.”

  A shout comes from the back door and I turn to see the big black orderly and a white man in a uniform; he’s a security guard with longish hair and a cigarette in his lips and a gun in his hand.

  “Oh my fucking stars,” the security guard says. He’s staring at Wemberly’s wet-red spine, the attached head coated in blood.

  I raise swing the head on the spine and roar at them—and the guard’s gun roars back.

  “Beth!” I’m staggering back with the shot, which has struck me in the lower left side. Blood spurts out of me.

  And something else is leaving me—Beth.

  She’s draining out of me, with the blood flow. I see her floating away from me—she’s drifting away, turning around in the air to face me so she can see me as she goes. She’s getting smaller, going into a vast distance that shouldn’t be there, in a kitchen.

  “I’m out,” she says, speaking to my mind. “I’m free, Douglas. But I wish we . . .”

  Her voice trails off. She vanishes. She’s gone. The guard is staring at me, uncertain what to do.

  But I realize—

  I can still stand. I can move! Beth’s presence in me, the movement since then—it seems to have permanently bound up the broken connections in my brain. I no longer need Beth to move.

  I swing Wemberly’s head and spine, release it at the guard like an Olympics hammer throw—it trails blood through the air, falls short; the head, breaking from the spine, thunks and rolls, trailing blood. The guard makes a yelping sound and steps back. As he does, I switch the knife to my left hand, use my right to cover the wound, slow the bleeding. This wound will not kill me. It is shallow.

  The guard and the orderly are coming cautiously back into the kitchen. The guard’s hand, pointing the gun, is wavering. The gun is shaking.

  I start toward them. The orderly tells him, “Shoot him again you damn fool!”

  I roar—and the gun roars back, once more. Then again.

  I feel a cold, punching impact in my neck. I fall, fall slowly back through space. The room around me is suddenly a different color. It’s painted red, and the red paint swirls and thickens and carries me somewhere . . . into dreams . . .

  The hard part is waking up.

  I’m lying on my back. I don’t want to open my eyes. I can feel the warmth of the light bulb over me. I can smell the room. Must not open my eyes.

  But I do. I see where I am. I try to get up. I can’t. I try to lift my arm. Can’t.

  I can’t feel anything, below my neck. I’m aware of a bandage, taut around my throat. A hose going into my mouth helping me breathe.

  I see a doctor, in his white coat—a red-faced man with a mustache—talking to a frightened looking black-haired wisp of a nurse, near the door. He’s saying, “Oh he can’t hurt you.” He glances at me. “He’s quite paralyzed . . . The bullet destroyed his spine. And this time the restraints are quite tight. As tight as we can make them. So even if he could move . . .”

  I had my chance. I didn’t listen to Beth. Now I’m being punished. But this place was always my punishment.

  So I had to come back here. To room 230. Does it do any good to say I’m sorry? I’m sorry. I’m sorry . . .

  LEARN AT HOME!

  YOUR CAREER IN EVIL

  It was while his wife slept: that’s when it was easiest for Kander to think about killing her. Just the fact of her being awake, Elias Kander had learned, troubled him with doubts about the project. It was as if her movements about the house, her prattle, spoke of her as a living, suffering reality, and underlined the deepest meanings in the word murder.

  But as she slept . . .

  On those nights when he’d been working late in the lab, Kander would come home to find her soundly asleep, resentfully dosed with sedatives. Sedated, she was reduced to something like a hapless infant, clutching the quilt her grandmother had made. A time when he should feel pangs of conscience at her profound vulnerability, was just the time he felt safest thinking about her annihilation. Vistas of freedom opened up, in her hypothetical absence . . .

  But what if there really was hell to pay?

  What if evil was objectively real and not relative? And what about the thing in the lab?

  On a sleepy Tuesday night, the city was hugging itself against moody Chicago winds off the lake and it was warm by the gas fire in the steak house. Kander and Berryman came here after an afternoon’s research, as it was across the street from the university’s library.

  Waiting for Kander to return from the men’s room, Berryman sipped his merlot and looked at his companion’s empty plate across the table. How thoroughly Kander ate everything; not a shred of beef left, every pea vanished.

  Berryman considered his own peculiar ambivalence to their monthly dinners; their boys’ nights out. He’d felt the usual frisson on seeing Kander’s almost piratical grin, the glitter in his eyes that presaged the ideas, in every philosophical menu, they’d feast on along with the prime rib; and a moment later, also as usual, a kind of chill dread took him. Kander had a gift for taking him to the frontiers of the thinkable, and the disorienting wilderness beyond. But maybe that was the natural consequence of a humanistic journalist—Berryman—locking horns with a scientist. And sometimes Berryman thought Kander was more a scientist than a human being.

  “I’ve been thinking about journalists, Larry,” Kander said, sitting down. He was a stocky, bullet-headed man with amazingly thick forearms, blunt fingers; more like a football coach than a physicist who’d minored in behavioral science. He wore the same threadbare sweater the last time they’d suppered together, and the time before that; his graying black hair—an inch past the collar only because he rarely remembered the barber—brushed straight back from his forehead. Berryman was contrastingly tall, gangly, had trouble folding his long legs under the restaurant’s elegantly tiny tables. Long hair on purpose, tied in a graying ponytail. They’d been roommates at the university across the street where Kander now had research tenure.

  Berryman scratched in his short, curly brown beard. “You’re thinking about journalists? I’m thinking about leaving,
then. You’ll be doing experiments on me next.”

  “How do you know for sure I haven’t been?” Kander grinned and patted his coat for a cigarette.

  “Amy made you give up the cigarettes, Kander, remember? Or have you started again?”

  “Oh that’s right, damn her, no smokes, well—anyway . . .” He poured some more red wine, drank half the glass off in one gulp and said, “My thinking is that journalists are by nature dilettantes. They have to be. I don’t mean a scholar who writes a seven volume biography of Jefferson.”

  “Guys like me who write for Rolling Stone and the Trib and, on a good day, The New Yorker. Yes, I’m well aware of your contempt for—”

  “No, not at all, not at all. I’m not contemptuous of your trade, merely indifferent to it. But you must admit, journalists can’t get into a story deeply because the next piece is always calling, and the next paycheck.”

  “Often the case. But you get a feel for what’s under the surface, though you can’t spend long looking for it. Sometimes, though, you’re with it longer than you’d like . . .”

  “Yes: your war correspondence. I daresay you learned a great deal about South America. Peru, and, oh my yes, Chile—”

  “Sometimes more than I’d like to know. What’s your point, implying that journalists are shallow? You going to have a bumper sticker made up—‘Physicists do it deeper’?”

  “Given the chance, we do! Unless we make the mistake of getting married. But my dear fellow—” Kander was American, but he’d gone to a boarding school in England for eight years, as a boy, and it had left its mark. “—I’m talking about getting to essences. What are the essences of things? Of human events? To get to them you must first wade through all the details of a study. Now, journalists think they dabble, and knock off an essence. But they can’t; more often than not they get it wrong. A scientist though—he may work through mountains of detail, rivers of i-dotting and oceans of calculation, but ultimately he is after essences—the big picture and the defining laws that underlie things. Now take your upsetting sojourn in what was it, Peru or Chile? Where you discovered that during ‘the dirty war’ whole families of dissidents disappeared—”