Condtion zero, p.16
Condtion Zero, page 16
Boyd couldn’t quite catch herself or her breath when she walked into the door-less wardroom at Lemuel Shattuck and saw Null sitting on the edge of his bed in his hospital johnnie, as light and quiet as a bird. He was mottled purple with bloody scars and suture tracks rolling over him like cartoon centipedes, hunched over and pensive. His face was tight, but everything else hung loose. Null didn’t seem to notice her, so she knocked.
“You’re already in,” he said evenly.
“Nothing to keep me out.”
“Looking for testimony?”
“They said you made good improvement. They weren’t lying.”
“Depends on what you mean.”
Her hands were shaking, she realized, so she covered this by reaching into her purse for a pack of cigarettes, which she thrust at him.
“They don’t let you smoke in here.”
“Fuck what they let you do in here. You probably need one.”
“No, I’m cured of that.”
“Really.”
He looked up with eyes both clinical and blunt. “Yes, that part of my brain was sacrificed during one of the procedures.”
“You had psychosurgery?”
“More like psychotropic lavage.”
“Brainwashing?”
“More like brain showering, but why not?”
“You don’t seem too bad.”
“No, I don’t, but I’m worse than bad.”
She cocked her head; his responses were almost comically mechanical, like a stilted parody of human conversation. A sarcasm of accuracy. Was he baiting her?
“No, but when you were unresponsive and psychotic, you were bad. Very bad. Now you’re just, um, unresponsive.”
“Not just—almost entirely.”
“My heart bleeds. So tell me, are you feeling up to testifying against the fuckers that did this to you, or do you want to whine some more?” She had sympathy for him, sure, but that wasn’t going to stand in the way of her nailing every last member of the Family.
“Decoys don’t usually survive long enough to give testimony, do they?” He looked at her as passionately as a fish. “I mean, aren’t they generally too stupid to do it, right?”
Boyd sighed at the expected obstinacy. “We take what we can get. And you did survive. We can help you continue that.”
“I doubt that you could, but you’re working from a false premise.”
She shrugged and lit a cigarette. “I don’t get it,” she said, chewing on the filter. What do you mean?”
“I didn’t survive.”
“Very funny.”
“I’ll take your word for it. I wouldn’t know anymore, you see, I just can’t feel anything.”
“That’s why you’re complaining?”
“Just reporting. Nothing registers, nothing evokes any response, though injury makes me feel puzzled as to how best to handle it.”
“Stop blowing smoke up my ass, Null. I know you’re not yourself. Who could be after what you went through? But you have a real chance here to strike back at the sons of bitches who, who-uh, who—”
“You mean the ones who hamstrung me? Who severed my Achilles tendon? Removed my right testicle? Plucked the toes off my right foot one by one? Eviscerated me, and then decorated me with intestines like leis from Hawaii with a clown’s hat?”
Boyd shook with rage, maybe guilt, certainly disgust.
“Shut the fuck up! Just shut the fuck up!” she shrieked.
Null looked inanimate and cold.
She drew deeply on the cigarette, killed it and lit another. “I don’t need an itemized list.”
Null seemed to be reciting rather than speaking. “You may not need one, but I do. And even though it helps me remember, I just can’t get at all that it matters, that I should care, even could care!”
“Don’t give me that.”
“I have nothing to give you, and you have nothing for me that I want.” He made a noise—an aborted laugh? “Except maybe the ability to want anything.”
“You’re making jokes.”
“Only by accident. I’m like a prop corpse in a black comedy—incapable of laughing at the butt of the joke. Me.”
“The chemicals, psychosurgery, the conditioning—”
“Left me clean as a whistle.” He pointed to his head. “But I have an aftertaste of something in the back of my mind, a fading image, a slight suggestion. It’s stamped on my brain like a boot print.”
“What is it?”
“A memory. Tickles in the back of my brain yet I can’t laugh.”
She puffed out a gout of smoke and suffused her face with it, closed her eyes. “I know that – that’s what all that means. But of what?”
His mouth hung gaping there for a moment as he sat immobile at the edge of the bed, weighing, considering. “It’s the after image of the last thoughts and feelings of the late Joey X, of the departed DQ Null.”
“You’re being poetic—you’re right here in flesh and blood.”
“No, I’m being accurate. Joey X was tortured to death by the Family. I’m what remains, that’s all. That and the little imprint on my mind. Just a little tickle.”
“Of?” she challenged.
“Hatred,” he said coolly, checking his fingernails for dirt, then blinked. After that, in a rapid, broken gesture almost too fast to see, he grabbed the cigarette out of her hand, stubbed it out on his tongue and swallowed it hard. He was as expressionless as a lizard and as motionless as if he were made of plastic when he repeated the word in a puff of smoke.
“Hatred.”
She stopped him in the hall, sad, blasted, but still showing a weary, hangdog poker face. She said it, tiredly, and he laughed.
“Doctor, I get the feeling that maybe you should be in with your patients.”
“I get the feeling you’re right. But you saw him?”
“I did. And it was a failure, your little trial.”
“I see.” He rubbed his snub little nose. “Tell me, did he know who you were? Who he was—where he was? Could he tell you what happened to him?”
“Yes, but he’s insane.”
“Okay. Granted. He is. But a different kind of insanity, a new kind, in fact. A sort of endogenous sociopathy, psychopathology down to the chromosome level like Asperger’s syndrome, a discreet form of autism.”
“He says he can’t feel anything.”
“Well, he’s wrong.”
“How could he be wrong about how he feels?”
“Because he doesn’t understand how he feels. It’s a side-effect, nothing more, nothing less.”
“Some side-effect.”
“But he really can feel. The nerves, CNS, and autonomic all work just fine—the trouble is in the solution. The amygdaloid nucleus of the brain—the site where electrochemical exchanges register and transmit emotional responses. To flatten those responses was a way of defusing his schizophrenic dissociation.”
“You’re telling me you erased his emotions.”
“To give you literary license, yes. And no. It isn’t that we wiped them clean, we sort of dismantled the means of production. For example, he can feel hunger—it just doesn’t matter enough to make him eat. He can feel pain, but it has no context, no meaning and therefore no impact other than to be distracting or confusing.”
“And this is a success?”
“Resounding!”
“He was better off insane, in his own little world.”
“I don’t know. I never asked him what it was like. But now that he can tell me, I will. And he’ll be honest down to the last detail.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well, he has no use for lying anymore. Lying is a remote function of self-preservation. But that basic impulse is as gone as his ability to feel happy or sad. He just doesn’t care. In fact, at the neurochemical level, he simply can’t care. He has no reason to lie; there’s nothing at stake whatsoever.”
“You lobotomized him!”
“Different, more crude surgery; but you could say the side-effect is that he’s been lobotomized from all emotional response.
“What makes you better than his torturers, doctor?” She was red-faced, spitting imperceptibly as she spoke. “Tell me, what the fuck makes you better!”
“That’s an easy one. I took away the pain. Probably forever.”
“Terrific.”
“He’s not dead, and all cognitive function has been restored. He’s lucid, grounded, practical, able to perform in the world, if he so chooses. He really is a new beginning for those castoffs in the living hell of stage three psychosis, catatonia or hebephrenic schizophrenia.”
“Yes, but how can you choose to do anything, to perform, when you don’t feel enough to care? When you don’t even have the will to live?”
“Poetic, aren’t we? But you make a very compelling point. In any case, I don’t think he’s going to be with us very long.”
“I guess not. No will to live.”
“Exactly. It’s like lacking a component of the immune system. Opportunistic viruses and conditions creep in. He’ll have no resistance, and none of the fight we have seen statistically save borderline patients from failing. He probably would have lived longer, left in his hebephrenic trance state. But this way, he makes it possible for others—”
“You’re a first-class fucking bastard, aren’t you doctor?”
He chuckled and shook his head. “No, Lieutenant Boyd, I’m not—”
She slapped him once hard across the face, turned on him and lurched away.
He finished his statement, calling behind her in the echoes of the secure corridor of the isolation wing. “—I’m not the first-class bastard.”
Her high heels echoed in the corridor and faded.
“Medicine is.”
EIGHTEEN
Everything in a city screams, even in a city as minuscule and cozened as Boston.
Screams come in the street, in the quiet desertion of the corner wino, the crack boy and his boom box, the arguing marrieds, the gay significant others hissing, college lovers capering, pederasts, short con jobbers, nickel baggers grasping.
Thugs converging for a score. Union workers scamming back-hours.
The wind screams in empty lots through burned out buildings, clouds of urban dust and street debris.
The greed screams out from business district authoritarians coaxing money from their legitimate scams, warring against sense, grasping at the short term, phones and headsets pressed against malevolent, child-loving faces. A loud tension in the streets.
The screams come from behind hospital walls in detox.
The screams come from secluded rooms in rehabbed housing for poor workers of fifty years ago, loaned, re-sectioned and jacked up for the poorer yet more richly skilled workers of the enlightened age. The new jack condo mortgage slurbs.
The screams come loud from behind private walls, dissipating like a bad smell.
Empty, endless, irrelevant in the human scheme of connivance and hiding, the screams die and renew, die and renew.
Null as the fever broke.
Boyd as the petty need turned back upon her flesh and tore her up.
The screaming of the phone.
Then the quiet, monotonous voice at the other end making its report.
"He's dead. Pneumonia."
She slammed down the phone and felt a silence apart from precinct business and hubbub close in on her hard, smother her like a filthy blanket. The Gilbeys came out in full view of the task force. No one said a thing as she drained the last from the half pint, lobbed the empty into the mouth of her purse on the floor.
The squad room called her into a meeting on the intercom from her plastic phone console lying skewed like a toad on her cluttered desk. She just sat there and stared ahead thoughtfully.
“Hey, LT, they're calling for you!” This from an eager beat cop transferred to research detail.
“I know,” she said. “And very likely they’ll get me.”
Southern Mortuary by Boston City Hospital is a spotlessly ancient institutional hole that only recently upgraded from state of the art 1928 equipment to that of the mid-seventies. The refrigerated slab units are a sullied white enamel, speckled with black chips, with covered, vented coils raised on top just touching the dried, smeared and painted-over plaster of many mayoral administrations ago. The implements and even the examination tables seem to be the relics of defunct, consolidated public high schools, cast-offs recycled by the city for one of its least important functions—forensic medicine.
Suffolk County Medical Examiner is more or less an honorific title bestowed on some department head at one of the many given prestige hospitals dotting Boston and its outskirts, and the staff, more or less ambitious volunteers. All were of course paid part timers, and the chief M.E. no doubt took out his rubber stamp at least several times a week to earn your standard blue collar annual salary, but the hands-on autopsies, postmortem exams, and all pathological verifications or denials of the need for an inquest were handled by doctor specialists trained doing rotations or working on staff in everything from dermatology to plastics, but almost never pathology.
Today's expert, or should we say tonight's, since no one could abrogate a sacred day shift at a prestige hospital merely to clear the county's business of a postmortem on an indigent, was an ophthalmologist trying to beef up his resume in hopes of landing a gig at a teaching hospital in Hawaii. This was years down the road, as the favors he had to pay back just to get his small corner office on staff at New England Deaconess would keep him an indentured servant until the power players that he owed in senior administration moved on first.
Anything he could do to help them move on, he would do.
This included cutting up the abused and burned out remains of Null, Joseph X., Jr. to determine direct cause.
It looked like the usual mercy DNR of a street casualty carried off by the old people's friend. But there were mitigating factors in the chart. In fact, there were some questionable transfer papers and DRG forms that were, well, wrong. Approvals for drug "cocktails" no conservative Boston hospital would ever allow—combinations of unlike phenothiazine tricyclics, psychotropics like Paxil, Zoloft—even the outmoded imipramine hydrochloride—as well as a compliment of atypical antipsychotics. It was a loaded laundry list: aripiprazole, risperidone, clozapine, olanzapine, quetiapine, and ziprasidone. It all looked funny. Worse, some resident was making authorizations department supervisors would have had trouble with, never mind senior staff!
The whole thing had a bogus feel to it.
Fuck it. Let sleeping corpses lie their asses off. No one ever thought twice about a post mortem on an indigent. Especially one with no next of kin. No, wait.
Some joke!
There was a next of kin listed—the head of the Boston Organized Crime Task Force. Next of kin in a pig’s eye.
Let the papers fall where they may.
Dr. Norm Schwabbel did the usual morphological examination and shuddered with a sharp frisson of disgust. Not the revulsion for wounds, scars, or damage of any type—this sort of thing even the most mediocre doctor had moved beyond. It was instead the unique physical revulsion born of the moral knowledge of a depth of wrong, the sinking recognition that with deliberation, even care, a human being had been subjected to brutal acts of calculated horror. War victims are blown apart, gutted with indifference, gross trauma reducing them to pieces at a remove, under exigent pressure, in the heat of battle, left to languish and die ignored, even interrogated ruthlessly and torn to bits, then slain.
But this man wasn't a war victim, wasn’t a casualty amid the surge of troops. Oh, no. Someone had in fact been very peaceful and labored about it, almost taken his time.
Whatever marks of violence there were (and there were many) were focused, patterned, organized.
This man wasn’t a reckless expedient of war, a passionate victim of rape and revenge. He had been worked at like a business.
Worse, on closer inspection from the remarkable detail of injuries—
He had been done for pleasure.
The keloid scars were everywhere, and only small, sensitive parts of the man were missing, not the larger extremities—none of them with clean cuts. None.
Jesus Christ! What hadn't they done to him? Whatever wasn’t removed was broken or damaged, whatever looked whole, was actually far from intact, damaged perhaps to better than half function if he could completely heal. Not much chance of that now, though. He recoiled, dropping the toe-less left foot of the emaciated and grayish naked form back on the examination table.
Whoever had done this—had worked on this man, for lack of a better term—well, he hadn’t finished.
He had been interrupted, stopped presumably in the middle.
Schwabbel let out the sigh he hadn’t realized he had been holding in.
Interrupted with a bullet, he hoped.
With a near sadness he hadn't felt since his first med school cadavers, Dr. Schwabbel, made the first cut of the Y-incision from groin to torso. It went fine, smooth—then a fluke! Blood flowed out of the wound as if from a pumping heart! No, he must have hit a hematoma or something, a pocket—
Something!
He couldn't breathe. The scalpel fell and bounced off the table as his panic began.
His airway—blocked! Instant panic.
The gnarled, surprisingly strong fingers of the corpse were around his neck.
The thing sat up, naked, sunken chest bloodied, the face sallow leather stretched over a human skull. A grinning, perhaps grimacing, skull. Dr. Schwabbel flapped his arms as he saw the fist coming.
Then he saw nothing at all.
The doctor was hobbling in the street in a soiled lab coat, ambling like Quasimodo in search of sanctuary. Having been hamstrung once made it forever a chore to walk, much less run. He lumbered across the city in a perverse crawl amid the shadows all night long, the misplaced intern or resident who walked like a crab, like the subject of a hazing prank separated from the guffaws of the group, impaired and wandering aimlessly, lunging fitfully without purpose, sick and drunken in aspect.
