Stupid with confusion, I look around. A chair and a bedside table—both bolted to the wall—an IV stand, lilac walls—one has a shut metal door with a plastic, chicken-wire window, and beyond that is an anteroom with two facing doors, and high up and aimed at me, a camera.
This is not a hospital.
“Hello?” Never leave home without telling someone where you’re going. “Hey!” I shout.
No answer.
I fumble for a call button, but the bed has no arms, and the manacles—I fight them, hard—don’t let my hands move far.
I scream.
“Oh, good, you’re awake,” A tall, chubby man entered wearing an unbuttoned lab coat, a white shirt, dark slacks, and black Oxfords—shiny, like his skin. His short blond hair, gelled into thorns, glistened. He toed down the door’s kickstop and approached, smiling. “Karl is my name. Is your abdomen hurting you?” He tapped the mystery lump on my stomach. “The restraints keep you from touching the access port, infections can be nasty.”
“Where am I?” After 48 hours your chances of rescue plummet. “Wait, how long have I been here?” Sudden chills–enough time to be operated on.
“You have a G1 tumor, benign unless a vein gets pinched. Your IV will lessen the discomfort without harming the teratoma.”
“The tumor?” I struggle with the manacles, but what I’m really fighting—swimming through this painkiller fog—is terror. “You didn’t take it out? What did you do to me?”
“You must both be hungry,” he walked to the door. “Get some rest, I’ll be back soon.” He pulled the door shut behind him and exited the anteroom through the right door.
I know about the tumor—a technician said the MRI showed a large one, but he wouldn’t let me see it. Something evil is growing inside me—how big? how ugly? how fatal?—I can’t think of anything else. I pull against the restraints until I’m exhausted, which isn’t long.
Work smarter, not harder.
Karl returned holding a plastic—pink, Hello Kitty—soup bowl, and I wonder why his skin is so shiny, like heated cheese?
~~~
Subj: OUR GUEST
>kh@fc-labs.org
Jun 21 at 9:33 AM
To: ml@fc-labs.org
Matt,
Patient settled in, seems happy. Child doing well. Check my attached report and approve formula recommendations.
Love the Disney pics. Did Lani dye her hair?
Karl
“Cleanliness is next to impossible”
~~~
I blink the locked door back into focus—I need Karl to reduce my dosage so I can concentrate. Women have a higher pain threshold than men. My stalker ex-boyfriend—has he noticed me missing? Has the deli? Mom? Don’t bet on the prince. Those who survive make a way–escape the predator or cut the throat, steal the bread or pay the price…
Karl ambled in, pushing a cart of medical equipment. “Feeling better today?”
…or chew off the leg in the trap.
“I would be, with less painkillers, I feel drunk and sick and stupid.”
“Thank you! I’m so glad you’ve decided to speak again.” Karl pulled Romy’s sheet down. “The port surgery is healing well.”
“What was that word—tetranome?” I fumble the syllables, certain I’m remembering it wrong.
“Teratoma, a differentiating tumor whose cells may mutate into skin, eyes, hair—many things.” He angled the monitor and slid the ultrasound probe. “See?”
A blobby blackberry with dark bristles and two tiny teeth nestles against my ovarian wall. I turn my head, sickened.
“That lighter bump…it might become an eye.”
~~~
Karl raised the spoon again, “This purée digests best warm.”
I stare at his plump face—massed like a sculpture of glossy, oven-fused bread rolls—and I imagine him sitting down to his own meal: just a little too much on his plate, self-satisfied, a clean conscience. I’ve never been hungrier, but I need to be starving and I need Karl to be very concerned—and he will be. He wants something, badly—he reduced my dosage, after all—and I have it.
Karl sighed “If you prefer, the drip can feed you.”
~~~
I watch the deadbolt as the door opens. It’s the angled type you can push in with your thumb and it springs back out. I shift my attention to Karl. Worry flashed—briefly—across his face. To him, I must seem to be staring at nothing, and I’m grinning, and scraping—mechanically, between a thumbnail and an index fingernail—at a hank of my hair.
“Your child needs a name.” Karl began inserting fluids into the port. “They’re genderless, so anything you like. Will you be eating today?” He ran a finger down her ribs—hard, like a stick across fence pickets.
See what you made him do? I shift the frizzling tangle of hair to beside my ear and listen to the sandpaper hiss of strands gritting between my fingertips.
“You have lovely hair, why ruin it?”
“It comforts me, and what else am I allowed to do, beyond get more cancerous?”
His baked-loaf face swung to his precious little port. “I’m adding stem cells. With help, someday that eye could look up at you.”
“Get that monster out of me.”
He patted her leg. “Both science and nature try things, they discard some, keep others.” He flipped on the ultrasound.
The need to know what’s happening inside me overcomes revulsion. “I want to see,” I don’t, but I have to. The monster you can’t see is always worse.
He nodded, excited, “That eye bump, sometime last week it split.”
I look inside myself. The blob now has a polyp with three orbs, eyelids gripping them like acorn caps. My curiosity dies.
“Imagine being able to see so many angles. What might your child do, free from the standard human form?”
“It’s a growth, not human—”
“The world is changing, Romy, and things need to be done. Good and just wars fail because the public can’t stomach casualties. Imagine an army that would terrify our enemy but whose lives don’t matter.” He paused. “You can’t ask people to commit sinful acts any more than you can clone humans for organs. This will free humanity to act. Romy, let your child find its path, its talent. Did you think of a name?”
I pull the sheet over my head, “Go away.”
~~~
Karl waved through the antechamber window and entered the right door. After about an hour, during which I keep rubbing the mushy mass of fraying hair against my cheek and forehead, he entered with a tray of scrambled eggs and juice.
“Hungry?”
I answer the puffed up simper on those glossy, egg-wash cheeks with a clenched grin.
He sighed, “Still refusing to eat?”
“I have a mother, friends, a life. You are more than your child. I’ve never hurt anyone, I don’t deserve this. This is a tumor, I need you to take him out.”
He beamed, “A boy!”
Panic, “No! Thing! It!” I can see any chance floating away.
He patted her tummy, “You’re my little soldier.” He tried again to get her to eat, and, disappointed, he carried the tray back through the anteroom.
I pull and twist a fused tangle of my hair it until snaps free. I appraise the block-eraser sized mass, and then rub it all over my reachable skin, scraping at weeks of body scum. I pull the sheet over my head, and let Karl’s chemical lullaby soothe me into a doze.
~~~
“It’s biting me!”
Karl pinned my shoulders to the mattress. “That’s just pressure from the tumor. The teeth aren’t set in a jaw,” He let go to reach for the ultrasound jelly, “Let me show you.”
I thrash, “I don’t want to see it eating my insides. Get it out, get it out, get it out!”
He rushed out the open door, without glancing at the door frame.
I smile.
You know…you could actually win this.
Karl returned from the room on the left and added something to the IV solution. I’ll deal with that later.
~~~
ETA
>kh@fc-labs.com
Jul 15 at 11:21 AM
To: ml@fc-labs.com
Matt,
Host body stable and cheerful. Child is viable, but I want to keep him inside, perhaps two more weeks.
Wow, Lani is sure growing up, isn’t she?
Karl
“Cleanliness is next to impossible”
~~~
Remember, people like you better when you smile.
I smile, “Karl, I’ve decided you’re right—I should be eating solids.”
After he fast-walked out and turned right, I get up, wobbly and weak, pressing my palm over the port cover to keep it sealed, and cross to the door and catch it before it closes. I jam the sticky mass of hair into the strike plate hole—tight—and use my fingernails to pack in the stray bits. Back in bed, I slip under the sheets, position the manacle chains, and conceal my slimmed-down, scraped-up wrists under the pillow. You can never be too thin.
He returned and spoon-fed Romy purée. Carrots never tasted so good.
“You look awful.”
“I know, and I want to get strong again. Thank you, Karl.”
He dabbed her face with a paper napkin and stood to leave.
“Karl? Could you help me think of a name? Adam…maybe Charles? Or a girl’s—Ruth? Look at my face, should I have been a Ruth? Let’s decide tomorrow.”
He kept backing out, grinning at her, not noticing the doorframe.
“Goodnight, Karl,” I pull the sheet over my head.
~~~
You’ve got this.
I arrange the pillows, pull the sheet over them, and stagger across the room. After teh IV bag has been changed, I have roughly eight hours without Karl. I pull on the door, expecting the worst, but it swings open. I am in the anteroom—which I must leave before Karl reaches a monitor. I’m dizzy, nauseated, and weak from my time in bed and lack of food. The left door—like the one for my room—might lead to a dead end but it could have an emergency exit; the right door—where Karl appears each day in fresh clothes—must lead outside, to his car, his home, and if he’s driving my best chance lies there, but if he lives here, you’re done.
I can’t run into Karl. I can’t.
Left.
My free hand fumbles the light switch up. After weeks? months? of soft amber bulbs, LED lights blind me. When my eyes adjust, I discover hanging white cleanroom suits, work tables with microscopes, vacuum flasks, and covered Petrie dishes, machines I don’t recognize, labeled bottles in cabinets—a lab, and across it is another door. I stumble forward. Can Karl afford all this himself? Is he alone? I scan for a phone. I don’t know where I am, but police can trace phone calls. There are no phones anywhere.
Movement catches my eye. On a desk, underneath a bellied ventilation overhang, is a computer. The screensaver slideshow is switching to a pink-haired tween—Karl’s daughter?—posing with Cinderella. I tap a key. A password field appears.
I continue toward the door. Liquid from the port leaks over my fingers. Amid all this brightness, this obscene cleanliness, I feel filthy. I am filthy. A glass-doored display cabinet beside the exit stops me. Half the shelves hold jars of formaldehyde, each inhabited by a misshapen teratoma monster. Only a mother could love.
I lurch out the door and throw my free hand up to shield my face. Sunlight pours into a wide, high room with pastel murals of geometric designs and animals. In front of me are four incubators—three are occupied. A purplish, grub-like teratoma housed in the nearest bloomed from a normal infant’s mouth—her jaw unhinged, like a snake’s, to accommodate the sibling. The teratoma’s body expanded with each breath, the ripple picked up by its sibling’s chest, like an echo. The monster lapped green froth from a feeder bottle. Nutrients must flow down to its sister through shared blood vessels. Waste must slide down her throat.
Sickened, I turn away. A door—the only other one—sits between tall, thick Plexiglas panels. Beyond those, among couches and beds and tables and a steel toilet—all bolted to the walls and floor—six ragged, sallow, ashamed women——stare back. Their “children” fought, rolled, slept piled up like mice. Two appeared to be mating. One child’s single eye noticed me. The thing undulated to the clear panel, splayed its wide, lamprey mouth, and pressed and slid it against the Plexiglass like a rooting infant. Thick black hairs coated the roof of the mouth and descended the throat. Reflexively, I gag, feeling stubborn, imaginary hair plastering itself to the back of my pallet. The thing bawled, and one of its tongues, liver-colored and toothy, groomed the cavernous mouth. More ghost hairs tickle the inside of my gums and cheeks. I vomit.
I look to the women, feeling strangely embarrassed by the splatter on my feet and ankles. A redhead points past me. Above the door frame is a box, and a wire leads to a small, plastic rectangle mounted above the door—and a matching sensor under it.
Weaker from vomiting, drugged, disgusted, I stump back into the lab, determined to try the only other exit.
Karl.
I freeze, and look for a new way out, as if magic existed and cared about me. I snatch scissors from a table, but I know Karl is bigger, stronger, healthier—instead, I open the blades, and hold one to my throat.
Karl folded his hands and waited, bearlike, smooth, placid, and shiny, like a giant plastic honey bear container. The children have spotted him through the doorway and broken into a din of roaring and crying and whistling.
The incubators! You know he doesn’t care. You can either live caged with monsters, or you can send yourself to Hell. Either way, he’ll have Ruth. Which? Which?
I tighten my grip; Karl tilted his head, curious.