'The fee is five thousand. Not a penny less.'
'Times are hard. The recession is---'
'Surely of no consequence compared to the value of your wife's life.'
The old man was silent.
'Call me when you have the rest of the money,' Anders said, again starting forward.
There were mumbled words from behind him.
Anders stopped and turned around. 'Did you say something, Mr. Proctor?'
'I said I have the rest of the money. I have your five grand.'
Anders turned and stared down the ratty hallway at the old man, past yellowed walls and broken light fixtures, past abused doors missing most of the trim, and shook his head in sorrow. Even now, it seemed, the value of life was negotiable. They were all the same, trying to haggle down a price he hadn't set because he needed the money, but because he wanted his clients to have to sacrifice to know the value of what they had. He walked back down the threadbare hallway and stopped in front of the door.
'I'm sorry,' Proctor said, his eyes falling to the ground, tears streaming through his canyon-like wrinkles. He pulled a wad of bills, folded in half and rubber-banded, from his right front pocket, and another from beneath his waistband.
Anders took the money and shoved it into the interior pocket of his weathered trench coat. His wet bangs hung in front of his blue eyes, sapped with melting snow; three days worth of brown scruff on his cheeks at odds with his pale skin. Crossing the threshold into the dark apartment, he waited for the old man to guide him. The entire place reeked of sepsis---a smell with which he was becoming far too intimate---like feces mixed with vomit and heated to a burbling sludge. Beneath, the smells of antiseptics and burnt toast lingered.
'I didn't mean to...' Proctor said. 'I mean...we can't even afford to pay our rent---'
'Where is she?' Anders interrupted.
The old man opened his mouth like he was going to say something, but then turned and headed past the kitchen into the living room. A faint glow emanated from the television in the corner of the room on stacked concrete blocks, playing nothing but static.
'We can't afford cable,' the man said. 'She finds this comforting though.'
Anders nodded and advanced into the dark room. There was a coffee table in front of a long couch, covered with scattered magazines and a bowl crusted with vomit.
'What's her name?' he asked, stopping beside the couch and staring down at the emaciated figure piled beneath tattered blankets that had definitely seen better days.
'Margaret,' Proctor whispered from directly behind him.
Anders knelt beside the woman and pulled the blankets off of her torso and draped them over her legs. The body beneath was little more than a living skeleton, tight manila skin stretched over protruding bones, save for the abdomen, which looked bloated and malnourished. What little remained of her gray hair was streaked back over her scalp with her beaded sweat and littered the pillow beneath her. He couldn't tell if she was conscious or simply unable to close her eyes all the way, but sickly yellow crescents stared out at him from sunken and bruised sockets. Her thin lips were stretched back from her bare brown teeth as though she was in tremendous pain.
'Hi, Margaret,' Anders whispered, reaching for the top button on her bile-stained blouse.
'Don't---' Proctor said, but Anders cut him off with a sharp look and continued unbuttoning her top until he could lay it to either side. Her ribs poked out like a starved dog's, her breasts wrinkled into leathery folds of dried skin.
'What's her diagnosis?' Anders asked, pulling back the sleeves of his jacket and reaching into one of the outer pockets of his coat, producing a small wooden case, barely larger than a deck of cards.
'Hepatocarcinoma secondary to lung cancer,' Proctor said as he watched Anders set the case on his wife's sternum.
'Liver cancer?'
'It's everywhere...'
Anders unlatched the small clasp and opened the lid. Inside were half a dozen sugar cubes and two thin steel cylinders about the width of a pencil, one of them capped with a surgical blade.
'You don't have to watch this,' Anders said, removing the two pieces of metal and screwing them together to form a scalpel.
'I've been watching her die for so long now...I can't imagine anything worse.'
'Suit yourself.'
Anders removed three sugar cubes from the case and set them beside the woman on the couch. He leaned forward and raised the fold of flesh that was her left breast with his left hand and brought the tip of the knife to her skin.
'What are you---?'
'Shh!' He pushed down the scalpel until blood swelled up around it, a single drop racing away down her ribs. With a practiced hand, he carved a small square and placed the first sugar cube right in the middle, carefully lowering her breast back down to hold it in place. He did the same thing on the right, wiping his bloody fingertips across her stomach. Using both hands, he felt along the lower border of her ribs on her right, pushing firmly beneath until he isolated her liver. Marking the spot with his left hand, he carved another square where his middle finger had been and placed the remaining cube in the center.
He positioned his hands precisely between the three points and closed his eyes. His lips moved over soundless words, spoken in his mind where only he could hear them. After an eternal moment...he opened his eyes. The white cubes began to slowly darken from the bottom up, filling with a greenish-brown fluid that amplified the horrendous stench in the room.
'What do you do with it...you know, when you get it all out?' Proctor asked.
'Your wife will be well. What more do you need to know?'
'I mean...do you just throw it away?'
Anders allowed himself a meek smile. 'If only it were that easy.'
The cubes were now so full that fluid began to puddle atop them.
He took a deep breath and blew it all the way out, taking his time doing so. Closing his eyes again, he pried the first cube from under her breast and threw it into his mouth. He gagged and retched, heaving, but swallowed it down. He tried to focus his mind on something else---anything else---but there was no chance of ignoring the awful taste of the sugar as it slid down into his stomach. He grabbed the second and tossed it back, already palming the third as he tried to swallow. It felt like everything in his stomach was already rising in revolt.
'Not yet,' he whispered, shoveling the third into his mouth and swallowing as forcefully as he could.
The scar tissue had already filled in the squares on the woman's skin, leaving tender pink bubbles that would stay with Margaret through the remainder of a life that had just become much longer.
Anders leapt to his feet, knocking the coffee table onto its side. He swayed there momentarily to regain his equilibrium and slapped his hand over his mouth. He bent back over and snatched his case and scalpel and jammed them into his pocket.
His cheeks bulged outward with the force of the fluids exploding from his guts.
'Thank you,' Proctor said, trying to take Anders's right hand to shake it, but the younger man just lowered his shoulder and plowed right through him, sending him careening to the floor.
Anders staggered through the darkness, finally finding the door to the hallway and yanking it open. He was barely a couple of steps into the hallway when he sprayed a flume of vomit through his fanned fingers, shaking it to fling the remainder onto the dirty carpet. It felt as though his insides were being liquefied, the acids in his stomach churning ferociously. He needed to get the disease back out before it started to take root.
A 'Closed for Repairs' sign hung on the elevator, but it wasn't fooling anyone. It was the same all across town. With the escalating cost of electricity, elevators were a luxury only the elite could afford.
Shouldering through the door next to it, he stumbled down the stairs with the smell of urine all around him. He held tightly to the railing as his weak knees repeatedly gave out, forcing him to catch himself before tumbling down to the next landing. Time lost all meaning in the grip of such phenomenal pain. He wasn't sure how many floors he had passed or how many he had left until he reached the bottom and there were no more stairs to descend. He thrust his hip against the release bar and nearly knocked the rust-spotted metal door off its hinges.
