“No. I’m a businessman, not Jesus. I can’t even bring myself back from the brink of extinction.” He shoves his left jacket arm high. The skin underneath is a pincushion plucked of its metal quills. The injection sites are strawberry red with infection. “I am a dead man walking, a Dr. Frankenstein who has become his own monster.”
He pushes the door to Room TC-12 wide: bold, confident befitting his status between these walls. “Good employees will do anything for a sum of money slightly larger than what they feel they’re truly worth.”
The white blinds me with its cleanliness. Willy Wonka’s Wonkavision room.
“Get in.”
I hesitate.
“That wasn’t an invitation.” He reaches into his pocket, pulls out a gun, points it at me like he means it.
“What’s inside?”
“An old friend. Of yours, of course. I don’t have friends.”
I see it now, the blood. I’ve seen too much of it, but I don’t think there’s a quota these days. I scan through the mess until I find remnants of a face I knew. The splayed body still wears its puffy coat, the one I knew from the train.
“It was easy to lure him here. All I had to do was offer him a glimpse at his big story.”
“You’re a fucking monster.”
“I suppose I am.”
“Why? Because he wanted to expose you for what you are?”
He grabs me by the throat, but though his heart might be in it, his fingers tell the tale of a body weak with disease.
“It’s a new world. I’m not the man I was. If the tests are to be believed, then I’m not a man at all anymore. I’m some kind of animal. New species, new rules.”
Then he turns the gun to his chest and fires.
Blood mist on the pristine wall. Pope slumps to the ground, a sack of potatoes in an ill-fitting suit. He grins up at me as his body leaks.
“Do something for me.” Blood bubbles.
I don’t look at Jesse. “No.”
He laughs, gags. “I had your sister killed. What do you think about that?”
“Why?”
“She was supposed to be you.”
My body heat circles the drain; I don’t need a mirror to see that I’m as white as these walls. Pope is the thief of hope.
“Why me?”
“Villain’s choice, you might say.”
“Just die, you miserable shit.”
With his last breath, he whispers his want. Then the great George P. Pope dies with the image of a horrified me burned into his retina—a portent of his journey.
“Coward,” the Swiss spits. “For a man to take his own life tells me he knew he had no value.” Something slides off his native tongue.
“Who gives a shit?” Imminent death has loosened my lips at both edges. Nobody’s going to slap my hand for cursing.
He rants on. Not English. Not even English enough for me to pick out words. Somewhere along the way, while I’m busy not listening, he switches back to English.
“His wife. I knew her. A foolish, foolish whore.”
“She’s a whore, I’m a whore, your mother’s a whore. We’re all whores.” I am going to die and I don’t care. I just want him to shut up. “You knew I worked for Pope Pharmaceuticals. Is that why you helped me save Lisa?”
“I had to see, America.”
“See what?”
“I had to know how a nobody, a janitor, is the only Pope Pharmaceuticals survivor. When all others died, why did you live? You are nothing special.”
My fingers feel around for the blade in my pocket. I hold it there like a blood-slickened talisman.
“You are not stupid. I thought you would be, you know. A janitor. A stupid janitor. Someone who cleans rat piss from the floors.”
There’s no pain now. Just warmth enveloping me in its fluffy pink blanket. I want to snuggle down and lose myself in its hold. Soon.
“You’re the stupid one, assuming people are only one thing. We’re an amalgamation of things we’ve collected along the way. I was never just a janitor.”
“What else were you? A whore?”
“A daughter, a sister, a wife, a lover, a friend.” I thought I was going to be a mother, but I’m not going to make it. I’m sorry, baby.
“You? I do not think so.”
Am I still bleeding? It’s too wet to tell. “You don’t know anything, you overgrown piece of cheese.”
“I know everything. Things a creature like yourself could never imagine.”
I laugh, because that’s all I’ve got left. This is how I’m going to go, not kicking and screaming like some dying animal, but laughing. I’ll die with a side stitch and tears streaming because the Swiss actually believes he knows it all.
“What is so funny?” he says.
“Because.”
“You make no sense, America.”
“George P. Pope was a coward. He couldn’t stand to live another minute with his disease. He couldn’t stand what it was doing to him—what it might do to him if he kept on sucking oxygen.”
“I do not see the humor in this.”
Saliva bubbles between my lips. “You wouldn’t. You weren’t there. It’s so funny. It’s so damn funny.”
“Tell me.”
I’ve never giggled, but now, at the end, I do. The Swiss shifts on his haunches; attack is imminent. His breath comes closer. I feel him. My bloody hand reaches out and touches the end of my world.
There is only one way to do what I do next: remove my emotions, place them in my pocket, keep them safe from the rest of me.
I look up at Jesse.
Nothing. I feel nothing. My psyche has flatlined. That’s a good thing. That makes it easy to heft the long- handled ax I wrenched off the white wall. It’s little more than a feather in my hands. I pull it up high, behind my head, and let it fall. Gravity does my dirty work. Gravity hugs the blade close. Together they disconnect George P. Pope’s head from its body.
I feel nothing.
I feel nothing.
I feel nothing.
Just a hole where my soul used to be.
I will not die with my eyes shut and my heart in my throat. Not this far have I come to die a coward. My hand is ready, the scalpel tucked away in my palm: my bloody ally.
