Everything's Eventual

   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 Gigli saw. They use it to cut off 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 co-pilot,' 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 'tentshow 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 rib cage pops apart like a couple of barrels which have been lashed together with twine. Then on up with those scissors that look like nothing so much as the poultry shears supermarket butchers use—snip-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.' Snicksnick. 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 goose-bumps, but of course, nothing happens; my flesh remains smooth.

   'Remember,' Dr. Arlen says (but now she's actually lecturing), 'any fool can learn how to use a milking machine . . . but the handson 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 or movement, or they're really doing 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 bloodglossy 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 Cotten 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.

   Nnnnnnnn—

   '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 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 fuzztone guitar and Mick Jagger's voice bashing off the walls: 'Awww, no, it's only rock and roll, but I LIYYYYKE IT . . .'

   'Turn it down!' Dr. Cisco yells, comically overshouting, 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.