Disgusted, Gerold lowered himself back in the chair, and took off the noose.
“It’s all right, buddy,” one of them said. The other cop, a sergeant with a pitted face, grumbled, “So much for a quiet shift.”
“Look, it’s not what you think,” Gerold bumbled. “I was just . . .”
“Come on. We’ll get you taken care of.”
Another siren approached, an ambulance, no doubt.
“Life ain’t that bad, pal.”
As Gerold was rolled backward into the apartment, he saw that a crowd of spectators had gathered down below.
His face turned red. Were fifty people in pajamas and nightgowns congregated outside? It looked it.
In the back of the ambulance, two EMTs said nothing as he was driven away. They were eating doughnuts.
They took him straight to the local hospital, where a silent intern took his vital signs; then another intern wheeled him to an elevator and took him up. The first thing he saw upstairs when the doors opened was a sign: PSYCHIATRIC UNIT. He felt like a putz as a drab-faced admittance nurse rolled him down stark halls. Eventually an abrupt turn took him past blue-painted metal doors with chicken wire windows. Faces appeared in some of them. Voices bled from others. “Abandon hope, ye who enter here,” someone said, and another: “Where’s my cake?”
A dark-haired woman in a white lab coat eyed him from behind a desk when he was wheeled into an office. She looked tired and displeased.
“Well, well, well.” Her eyes were bloodshot when they scanned a computer screen on her desk, no doubt his records sent over from VA. “Gerold, I’m Dr. Willet. My, what an inconvenience you are.”
Gerold was outraged. “
“Suicide is the coward’s way out. There are patients in the quadriplegic ward who would sell their souls to be you.”
“I know that,” Gerold said. He wanted to spit. “I’d trade places with any of them. The fact is, I’m sick of living. I feel I have the right to kill myself.”
The woman scowled. “Oh, but you don’t. Life is a gift, Gerold, and suicide is a crime. It’s a form of homicide, and you can be prosecuted for it.”
“Come on,” he scoffed.
“Not in this day and age, of course. Everyone’s a victim, hmm?” She had large, fake eyelashes that looked whorish. “You’re sick of living? Tell that to the people in the Sao Paulo ghettos, or Paraguay, or Chad. You’re young, capable, and have a lot to contribute in spite of your disability. But, no. You’d rather
“You should feel
Gerold winced. “What, is this some new kind of behaviorist psychiatry?”
“You don’t need a psychiatrist, you need a kick in the ass.”
“There’s nothing wrong with you mentally—I could tell that the second you rolled in here.” The frown on her face kept sharpening as she continued looking at his records on the screen. “There are better ways to get attention—”
“Listen, lady! I don’t want attention! I want to be dead! I’m sick of this!” Gerold bellowed. “It’s my business.”
“Well then next time, do it right. We’ve got people here who need genuine care. We don’t have the time or money to screw around with whiny pains in the ass like you.”
Gerold was flabbergasted.
“I hope they bill you for the 911 call, the police time, the EMT time, the fuel—everything,” she said. Disgusted, she tapped a bit on her keyboard. “Tomorrow morning you’ll be transferred to the VA hospital. Nurse!”
The drab nurse returned, rubbing sleep from her eyes.
“Take this upstanding gentlemen and pillar of the community to the precaution wing and get him a bed.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
When Dr. Willet came out from around her desk, she didn’t do it on her feet. She did it in a wheelchair.
Her body was gone from the waist down.
“I’d be sick to my stomach if I had one. You’re a disgrace, Gerold. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” For the first time, the doctor smiled. “Now get the hell out of my office.”
Gerold wished he could shrink into nonexistence when the nurse wheeled him away.
(II)
Your name is Hudson Hudson and you’ve just won the Senary. Your soul has been turned into gas and squeezed into Hell through a hole in the wall.
And here you are . . .
Regaining consciousness reminds you of the time you got your wisdom teeth pulled at the dentist’s. You’re a balloon underwater that has just risen to break the surface. First, senses, then awareness, then memory. The only difference is, that time you awoke into your physical body, but now . . .
There’s a faint noise, something reverberant like water dripping in a subterranean grotto. Your eyes open in increments but only register scarlet murk, just as another sensation registers: rocking back and forth and up and down as if in a car with too much suspension. Your vision struggles for detail as the dripping fades, to be replaced by a steady metallic clattering along with a
Then your vision snaps into perfect, even surreal, focus.
The macabre lips on the Snot-Gourd scream.
You’re in a vehicle of some kind, which idles down a street whose surface is chunks of wet bone, split ankles and elbows, and other odds and ends of meaty gristle. “How’s that for your first glimpse of the Offal District?” comes the familiar New England accent. “My own reaction was much the same, but of course, that’s why they
You look up and scream again when you realize exactly what you’re looking at: a very black sickle moon hanging in a scarlet sky.
The attempt to move your arms and legs comes reflexively; then you remember, My
Your cue ball–size eyes blink.
“The Senarial Sciences here are impressively successful,” Howard tells you, sitting off to the left. He cranes around and looks into your eyes as if looking into a fishbowl. “I trust your senses are in proper working order?”
“I . . . think so,” you reply through the brutish, demonic lips.
