He opened book cartons and took the interesting ones home-fancy medical texts about sex and cutting. Once he found a stack of porno books in one of the lockers in the interns' lounge-white men fucking nigger women and vice versa-took it home and cut up the women until he could work up some good scream-pictures, stared at it until it turned him on and he could really get off.
Slowly but surely, he turned the minimum-wage situation into something excellent.
The key was to be careful. To make a plan and stick with it and clean up well afterward.
He smiled at everyone, was prompt, courteous, always willing to do favors for people. Very popular. A couple of the nurses seemed to be ogling his dick; also one of the orderlies, who he was sure was a fag. But none of them interested him, unless they could scream it was borrrring.
A great summer, very educational. He delivered mail to the pathology department-those were cool fuckers, eating their lunch with stiffs all around. The head honcho pathologist was this tall guy with a British accent and a clipped white beard. He chain-smoked menthol cigarettes and coughed a lot.
One time he delivered a package of gloves to Pathology. No one was in the office. He started opening the drawers of the secretary's desk, looking for stuff, when suddenly he heard this buzzing from down the hall-one of the labs that adjoined the offices.
He went over and took a look. The door was open; the room was cold. Whitebeard was standing over this stiff. The stiff lay on a stainless-steel table-a man; it had a dick. Its skin was a dull green-gray.
Whitebeard was using an electric saw with a little round wheel-it looked like a pizza cutter-to lop off the top of the stiffs skull. There was this weird burning smell. He stood there smelling it. It sickened him but really turned him on.
'Yes?' said Whitebeard. 'What have you there?'
'Box of gloves.'
'Put it over there.'
Whitebeard started sawing again, looked up, saw him staring. All the knives and tools. The Y-shaped cut in the stiffs chest, pinned back, the body cavity hollow, all the good stuff scooped out-you could see the spine. An older guy, the dick all shriveled; he needed a shave. On the steel tables were organ samples in trays-he recognized them all, felt good about that. A bucket of blood, vials of fluid, not that different from his experiments, but a nice big room, all out in the open.
Real science.
Whitebeard smiled. 'Interested?'
Nod.
Whitebeard continued to saw, pulled off the top of the scalp like a kike's beanie cap. Funny if the stiff had been a kike-the dick was too shriveled to tell.
'The cerebral cortex,' said Whitebeard, pointing. 'The cosmic jelly that creates delusions of immortality.'
What shit.
He wanted to say: I know what it is, asshole. I've seen plenty of them scooped them out just as cool as you're doing.
Instead he just nodded. Play dumb. Play it safe.
Whitebeard lifted the brain, weighed it in a scale that looked like the one they used for vegetables in the supermarket.
'Heavy,' he said. A smile. 'Must have been an intellectual.'
He didn't know what to say, just nodded and stared, until Whitebeard got this uptight look on his face and said, 'Don't you have something to do?'
His drug sales alone were quadruple his shitty salary. It turned out to be a very profitable summer. In more ways than one.
For the first time in his life he got to watch Doctor in his natural habitat. The fucker was an even bigger asshole than he'd imagined-ordering people around, never passing a mirror without looking at himself, though why the hell would he want to look at that hook nose and that potbelly, the skin getting all red and blotchy? Red skin meant he was sick-fucker was probably going to drop dead of a heart attack one day, not be able to cut himself open and cure himself, that was for sure.
Drop dead and probably leave all the money to Sarah. Dr. Sarah, soon. But she wanted to be a psychiatrist, no cutting. Unfuckingbelievable.
He checked Doctor out real good, got to know him for the first time. Fucker never knew he was being studied. They could have been standing next to each other and he wouldn't have noticed.
To Doctor he was a freak. Weird. Some piece of shit that didn't exist.
It made him invisible, which was excellent.
Doctor liked the young ones. He found out there was truth to all her screaming about him fucking candy- stripers.
Fucker flirted with all of them, got serious with one in particular. Audrey, this little brunette, seventeen years old, fucking high school student just like Mr. Invisible. But she knew her way around.
Short but curvy-big ass, big tits, wore her hair in this ponytail and wiggled a lot when she walked.
Doctor could have been her father.
Yet they were doing it, he was sure of it. He watched her go j't.to Doctor's office after the secretary had gone home. At first she knocked and Doctor answered; later she started to use her own key. After a half hour,
