Jeremy moves his gaze from the Rockwell print and stares at his doctor. “Do you suggest someone who could do it?”
Dr. Leman unfolds his arms and holds his palms six or eight inches apart in a molding gesture. “I think the best thing to do, Jerry, is to go back to the clinic, tell them our suspicion of bilateral varioceles, have them do the other sperm tests, and let them recommend a good man to do the surgery.” He glances down at the checklist on his clipboard. “We’ve drawn blood today, so I’ll alert the lab to do a hormone count—testosterone, of course, but also the follicle stimulating hormone and luteinizing hormone from the pituitary gland. My guess is that these will be low and that you’d be categorized as marginally fertile or subfertile.” He pats Jeremy on the back. “Harsh words, but good news, actually, because the prognosis after surgery for having children is very good. Much better than with most female fertility problems.”
Dr. Leman hesitates and Jeremy reads the man’s hesitation to criticize colleagues, but eventually he says, “The problem is, Jerry, that so many of these fertility-clinic doctors know that in ninety percent of the cases the female’s system is at fault. They get out of the habit of looking at the man carefully once a sperm count is in. It’s sort of a professional myopia. But now that they know about the variocele …” He stops at the door, watching Jeremy button his shirt again. “Do you want me to call them about this?”
Jeremy hesitates only a second. “No. I’ll tell them. They’ll probably call over for your records.”
“Fine,” says Dr. Leman, ready to go on to his next patient. “Jan will get back to you with the results of the blood tests sometime tomorrow afternoon. We’ll have all that data ready to send over to the clinic when they ask for it.”
Jeremy nods, pulls on his sport coat, and goes out through the waiting room and into the open air. Already, as he drives home, he is preparing his mindshield to bury the fact of the variocele.
He knows even while he works to forget what he has learned that he is lying.
There Are No Eyes Here
Bremen went up the hill in the dark, past the Jeep parked some yards from where he had left it, past the baying rottweilers in their pen—they were never left in their pen at night—and through the open door of the hacienda.
The interior was dim but not dark; light came from a single brass candlestick lamp and spilled down the hallway from the direction of Miz Morgan’s bedroom. Bremen felt her presence, the warm rush of white noise rising like the volume turned higher on an untuned radio. It made him dizzy and a trifle nauseated. It also excited him. As if sleepwalking, Bremen moved across the silent room and down the hall. Outside, the dogs had ceased their wild barking.
The lights in Miz Morgan’s bedroom were off except for a single twenty-five-watt bulb on a table lamp, and that was covered with some fabric that bled only a bit of pink light. Bremen stood in the doorway a moment, feeling his balance shift precariously as if he were on the edge of some deep, circular pit. Then he stepped forward and let himself fall into the rush of white noise.
Her bed was a four-poster, canopied with a diaphanous gauze that caught the pink light with a silken web gleam. He could see her on the far side, the light bleeding past her, her body soft and visible under its own thin folds of open lace. “Come in,” she whispered.
Bremen went in, setting his feet uncertainly as if his vision and balance were both impaired. He had started around the bed when Miz Morgan’s voice came again from the shadows. “No, stop there a second.”
Bremen hesitated, confused, on the verge of awakening. Then he saw her motion—a parting of lacy bed curtains, a leaning forward toward a glass or low receptacle on the nightstand, a brief movement of hand and mouth and a quick retreat. The shadows of her face seemed rearranged.
She beckoned him forward again with a movement more of wrist than fingers. Bremen moved around to the far side of the bed, his body throwing yet another shadow across the occupant there, and paused again, unable to move forward or back. The woman may have spoken again, but Bremen’s senses were filled with the white-hot roar of her mindnoise. It struck him like a torrent of blood-warm water flying from some hidden hydrant, disorienting him even more than he had been a second before.
He reached for the bed curtains, but her long, strong fingers batted his hands away. She leaned forward on her elbows in a motion at once feline and feminine and moved her face close to his legs. As her shoulders parted the curtains Bremen realized that he could see her breasts clearly through the gaps in her gown but not her face, concealed as it was by shadows and the tumble of her hair.
Miz Morgan set a flat hand against his belly, another on his thigh. Bremen trembled like a nervous Thoroughbred being inspected by a rough vet.
She unbuckled his belt, lowered his zipper.
Bremen started to move then, to lean toward her, but her left hand returned to his belly, restraining him and freezing him in place. The mindnoise was a hurricane of white static now, buffeting him in all dimensions. He swayed on his feet.
With a single, almost angry movement Miz Morgan tugged his trousers down his hips. He felt the cooler air and then her warm breath on him, but still he did not open his eyes. The white noise battered him like invisible fists to the brain.
She fondled him, cupping his testicles as if raising them to a kiss, then ran a warm hand with cold nails up and down his still-flaccid penis. He grew only slightly excited, although his scrotum contracted as if trying to rise into his body. Her motions became more fluid and urgent, more from her need than his. Bremen felt her head lower, felt the touch of her cheek against his thigh and the silkiness of her hair and the warmth of her brow against the cusp of his lower belly, and then the buffeting of mindnoise lessened, then ceased, and he was in the eye of the hurricane.
Bremen saw.
“Jesus!” He pulled back instinctively and opened his eyes the instant her mouth snapped shut with a metallic click. Bremen saw the gleam of razor steel between red lips and staggered backward again only to crash into the bedside table, knocking the covered lamp over and sending high shadows flying.
Miz Morgan opened blade-rimmed jaws and lunged again, her shoulders arching and thrusting like some ancient turtle struggling free of its shell.
Bremen threw himself to his right and struck the wall, writhing aside so that her wide-mouthed bite missed his genitals but took a round chunk out of his left thigh, just above the femoral artery. He stared as blood sprayed the curtains in the pink light and fell in droplets on Miz Morgan’s upturned face.
She arched her neck in something like orgasm and ecstasy, her eyes wide and blind, her mouth opened in an almost perfect circle, and Bremen saw the healthy gum-pink of the dental prosthesis as well as the razor blades set in plastic there. His blood spattered on her red lips and on blue steel. As she opened her mouth wider for another lunge he noticed that the blades were set in concentric rows, like sharks’ teeth.
Bremen leaped to his left, blind himself from the mental images now swirling in the eye of the mindnoise hurricane, crashed into the table and lamp again, and suddenly pulled back as Miz Morgan’s steel teeth cut through his dangling shirttail, leather belt, and the thinner flesh of his side, scraping bone before pulling back, her head shaking like a dog with a mouthful of rat.
