The scale the man struggled to lift. He carted it to the door, and for just that long Mitzi saw her chance. She fumbled the knife out of its wrapping and waved it toward the examining room.
The doctor rolled his eyes. Shook his head at Mitzi’s knife wielding, but walked back.
The place, a person wouldn’t know it. Stripped. Even the sink, gone. Just the plumbing for the water and the drain stubbed off at the wall. Already some workman had come through with a putty knife and prepped for new paint. The doctor, he waved Mitzi inside and closed the door. Locked it. Locked himself inside with a knife wielder. He said, “You won’t stab me, Mitzi.” He looked at the paper towels wrapped so tightly. Asking, like he cared, he asked, “What’s up with your hand?”
Mitzi brought the knife up a little, asking, “Who are you to say I won’t stab you?”
“Because,” Adamah said, “you’re a coward.” He stepped closer and reached for the wounded wrist. “You’re the worst kind of victim: a victim who thinks she’s a villain.”
Mitzi let him take the wrist and begin stripping away the paper towels.
As he did so, the doctor said, “It’s sickening the way you come running to me for absolution.” He uncovered the cut, the slash still puckered shut under a shining layer of glue. “Look what you’ve done,” he said, touching the wound tenderly. “You stupid piece of shit.” Softly he said this. “You couldn’t even cut yourself adequately.”
With the doctor so close, leaning low to see the damage, Mitzi, she brought up the knife. Laid it against Adamah’s throat. Held the honed edge of it to his throat. “You don’t know anything,” said Mitzi. “I’ve murdered dozens of people in ways you’d never imagine.”
Not pulling away, even leaning his neck against the blade, the doctor told her, “Prove me wrong.” He tossed his head to indicate the waiting room, the movers. “They won’t know. They’ll be gone in a moment. Kill me.”
Afraid, Mitzi pulled back the knife, but the doctor leaned closer until his throat was creased by the blade, again. Mitzi pulled it away and held it at arm’s length. Unnerved, she said, “Not until I get some answers.”
The doctor slipped a hand into his coat pocket. A plastic box marked First Aid he took out. A needle pre-threaded with a length of nylon string he took out of that. A sealed plastic packet like of ketchup, he tore in half and pulled out a gauze smelling like rubbing alcohol.
“Give me your hand,” he ordered. As he’d done since Mitzi was a teenager, he took Mitzi around one wrist and shook it and told her, “Hold still, please!” And this alcohol swab he began swabbing across the patch of glue, the smell of which brought tears to Mitzi’s eyes and almost made her drop the knife because it stung so much, the swabbing did.
She was a butcher. Mitzi knew it. A Last Wave Feminist. A serial butcher and a killer, and nobody was going to say she wasn’t.
The doctor held the damaged hand firmly, teasing her, “Look at you. Your stomach is so weak you can’t bear to watch someone eat a runny egg.” A sham, the office had been. For so many years, set dressing.
The needle entered her skin, and the doctor asked, “Remember I told you how a siren makes dogs howl?” The needle exited, pulling a few seconds of string through her hand. “A siren triggers a pack instinct in all dogs,” continued the doctor. “It’s a primal scream dogs must share in.”
As Mitzi kept her eyes on the wall, the needle entered again. It exited, tugging the string through her skin.
The doctor said, “Imagine if there was some human equivalent. A cry like Walt Whitman’s barbaric yawp that would evoke the primal scream of everyone who heard it.” The needle entered. Exited. String moved under the skin.
Mitzi winced. As the string pulled, she felt herself pulled. A puppet, she felt like, tethered to the doctor’s words. As if she were a kite or a balloon, something with which the doctor played. Under the smell of cigarettes, the smell of bleach on his skin. The smell of her father she’d swallowed so many pills to forget.
“Your father was a great man,” said the doctor. The needle entering. Exiting. That tugging at something inside Mitzi. “Your father was the last in a long chain of men on this magnificent project.”
The needle pricked into her skin, drove through and emerged dragging the string behind it. “My advice to you is this,” said Adamah. “Take your baby and your money. People are going to call upon you. Give them the master of the last scream. Take your baby and your money and begin a new life someplace beautiful.”
Afraid to move, leashed by that strand of nylon, Mitzi couldn’t pull away. The pain, the sting felt small, but it was the fear of so much thread laced through her and how it would tear open, rip open like a zipper, if she tried to escape.
“You’ve done nothing.” The doctor said the words with contempt. “Nothing messy. Oh, you knew how to control the recording levels and the brightness. You worked that magic. It wasn’t as if we could bring in an outsider.” The string tugged, stretching the skin. “But you never killed anyone.”
Mitzi managed, “But I did.” Sweat pasted the blouse to her back and rolled down the inner sides of her arms.
The doctor leaned so close his breath was warm against the wounded hand. He cinched a knot and used his teeth to bite off the extra thread. He said, “No. I killed them. You were too squeamish, not a bit like your father.”
Mitzi turned to examine her hand. The neat row of stitches that now closed the wound.
As Blush told it, first the PayDay candy bars had disappeared. No one would say where to.
