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 maternal: '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.
