Time to start going back to church,
he thought.
Dr. Untermann’s regal face appraised him, and she smiled. “Have no fear, Mr. Barrows. You’ve made the first, most crucial step. You’ve come for help. And
I’ll
help you. So many other never do that. We’ll see this thing through…and fix it.”
Barrows felt choked up as he stood. “Thank you…” His gaze drifted from her face to the wall behind her, which was covered with degrees and certificates. “You must be…pretty good.”
“Not to sound pretentious, Mr. Barrows, but as for treating cases such as yours, I’m probably the best in the country. Go home now. Think about what we’ve discussed, and envision the end of your affliction.”
“I will.”
“Tomorrow at six, then?”
“Yes…”
“And get that prescription filled tonight.”
“I will.”
She lit another long slim cigarette: long and slim and refined like herself. “Goodnight, Mr. Barrows.”
Misty-eyed, Barrows left the office. Part of his psyche, of course, urged him to head right back down to his hunting grounds and search for the strange, tender morsels of his need.
But not tonight.
Because as he made his exit from the frosty, handsome woman’s office, he realized he was leaving with something he’d never had in the last two decades.
He was leaving with hope.
««—»»
It was like heroin. It was like high-grade crack or freshly distilled crystal meth. Extreme obsessive-compulsive disorders affected the same neurotransmitters that the most highly addictive narcotics affected. Marsha. Untermann had seen enough victims to know not only this but the ultimate implications.
You always start a patient off with a positive purview—that was essential—but the rest was never easy. Sometimes it was impossible, and Dr. Untermann knew impossible when she saw it.
She knew that Barrows wouldn’t make it.
Her black Bally high heels clicked along the clean cement of the parking garage beneath the twenty-story mirror-faceted Millennium Tower, and it was a nice, new black Mercedes 450 that she slid into. She lit another cigarette—a beastly habit, she knew—but didn’t yet start the engine and leave for her lakeside Fremont condo. Instead…
She thought.
Extreme obsessive-compulsive disorders—OCD’s? Especially the really radical ones?
The trichotillomanics, the aphasics, the dysgeusaics? The success rate was actually so low, it was scarcely worth treatment. It was actually less than the seven-percent success-rate for crack addicts. Much less.
The same went for the disorders akin to dritiphily.
Dr. Untermann had learned much in her nearly thirty years of abnormal clinical psychiatry. She’d learned that some things weren’t worth trying to treat.
She heard the footsteps even before the figure turned the corner. She powered down the driver’s side window.
“I got a lot this time,” a sand-papery voice told her.
“I’m pleased.”
Dirty hands passed in the parcel. Untermann took it and handed the figure a $100 bill. “Thank you,” she said. “See you tomorrow.”
Her purveyor said nothing in response. He simply took the money and walked away. The back of his coat read KING STREET GOSPEL HOMELESS SHELTER.
Untermann gave a hot sigh when she opened the parcel: a paper bag containing a plastic Zip-Loc bag, the one-gallon size. She unzipped the bag, inhaled the aroma, and nearly swooned; the bag was heavy with various vomit. Gritty. Fuming.
Like chunky, pink oatmeal.
No, some things weren’t worth trying to treat. But capitulation was a treatment of its own, wasn’t it? Sometimes you just had to surrender to the incontrovertible truth.
Be who you are,
she thought in the ultimate Freudian nod. She flicked out her cigarette.
Accept it, and adapt.
That’s what
she
had done. And it worked. The verity of the soul, however unseemly at times, must always be embraced. Not ignored or fought against.
Embraced.
And now this fox financier, this man Barrows. Smart, successful, rich. And more than pleasing to the eye. When Barrows learned that there really was no cure for his disease, he, too, would capitulate…and the two of them would embrace
each other
.
Her nipples suddenly stood out beneath the lacy cotton bra and sheer Biagiotti cashmere blouse. Her sex moistened; her teeth ground. In her mind, she saw Barrows forlornly straying the city’s most malodorous streets and alleyways, searching for those all-too-precious nuggets, scraping them up and sucking them down like so many melted diamonds. She saw his trembling lips jacked needily open as unwashed derelicts and dirty, wan whores hacked up veritable collops of meaty phlegm into his mouth. His own uniqueness was all too similar to Untermann’s own.
I’ll show him how to adapt, just as I have adapted…
I’ll teach him how to function, unscathed.
We’ll be who we both really are. Not in social fallacy but in truth.
Two human beings one in the same.
Together.
Dr. Untermann finally started the car and drove out of the parking garage. The bag sat beside her in the fine leather passenger seat. She couldn’t wait to get home—
Oh, yes…
—
to eat.
— | — | —
GRUB GIRL IN THE PRISON OF DEAD WOMEN
Sure, hon, I got some time. I’ll tell you the whole thing while you make up your mind. And this is no bullshit, either. You can read about it in the papers.
You know about Grubs, right? No? Shit, man, you from overseas or something? I’ll make a long story short. “Grubs” are what they call us, same way they call black people niggers. Nice tag, huh? But I guess we
are
a little on the pasty side. But, look, don’t get freaked out. I heard somewhere there are over ten thousand of us total. It all started with that ramjet thing, I don’t know, a couple of years ago. Christ, I’m sure you heard about
that.
NASA and the Air Force were testing some new kinda plane, remotely piloted, they called it, flying it a hundred miles off the coast over the Atlantic. It was a nuclear ramjet or some shit, could fly indefinitely without fuel, no pilots, ran by computers. The idea was to have these things flying around all the time real high up. Cheap way to defend the nation. “The ultimate deterrent,” the President said when they announced that they were gonna spend billions developing this flop. What they
didn’t
announce was that plane kicked out a trail of some off-the-wall kinda radiation wherever it flew. The government wasn’t worried about it ’cos it flew so high, the shit would go right out of the atmosphere. Well, something fucked up during one of the test flights, and one of these things wound up flying up and down the east coast at treetop level on something they called an “emergency urban alert bomb mode” for something like five days before they could veer it off course over the sea and shoot it down. Thing was flying over
cities,
for shit’s sake. And I was one of the ones lucky enough to get rained on by this thing.
I’d just come up from the docks down there, you know, by the Market Square, and I was walking up toward Clay Street. ’Rome, my pimp, he usually picked me and his other two girls up at about four a.m. Best time for us alley girls to turn tricks is after two, after the bars are closed ’cos then the cops stop buzzing the street to bust our chops. Fuckin’ cops, nine times outa ten when they catch you, all they do is make you give ’em a blowjob, then let you go. Anyway, here I am, hoofing it up to Clay after turning about five tricks, and then there’s this rumble way down deep in my belly and this sound like slow thunder, and I look up and see this ugly motherfuckin’ thing flying about hundred feet over my head. Didn’t know what to make of it. It looked like a big black kite in the sky, and when it passed, I could see this weird blue-green glow coming out of the back of the thing, its engines, I guess. I died a couple hours later, and the next day I woke up a grub.
There was a big whupdeedo for a little while. All of a sudden there were ten thousand dead people walking around and not knowing what the fuck hit them. President called an emergency meeting or some shit. Oh, you should’ve heard all the fancy talk they were spouting. At first they were gonna “euthanize” us “to safeguard the societal whole from potential contraindications,” until some egghead at CDC verified that we weren’t psychotic or contagious or radioactive or anything. Then some asshole Republican senator made a big pitch about how we should be “socially impounded.” “Protean symtomologies,” see, that’s what they were worried about. These shitheads wanted to round us all up and put us on an island somewhere! It all blew over, though, after the activists started gearing up, and they let us be. After all, grubs are people too.
It didn’t hurt really. Just felt sick for a few minutes, got a headache, puked, and died. Woke up the next day feeling pretty much the same as I always did. Woke up a Grub, and that’s my story.
We call live people “pink” or “pinkies,” and they call us Grubs. Only fair, they got names for us, we got names for them. ’Rome didn’t get it, the prick, he stayed pink, and so did his other two hookers. The shit from the plane wouldn’t get you if you were in a car or under a roof. About a dozen other hookers got it, though, ’cos they were out on the street just like me when that fucked up plane flew by, and now every pink hooker in the city hates us. See, johns want Grubs more than pink girls ’cos we’re cheaper and we ain’t got diseases. AIDS, herpes, and all that shit, I had it all when I was pink, but not no more, and a john knows that if he buys himself a nut with a grub he ain’t gonna catch nothing.
Here’s why I killed ’Rome, though. After I got grubbed, he got this brainstorm that he could really cop a bundle off me with the kinks. He’d work me right out of his crib, hitting johns up for a couple hundred bucks an hour! These sick fucks’d come in and do anything they wanted, and I mean
anything.
Bondage, S&M, scat, that sort of shit. ’Rome’s only rule was that they weren’t allowed to break any bones or cut off any parts. These kinks were a trip, let me tell you. You’d be surprised how many really sick motherfuckers there are in the world. They’d tie me up, jack me out, stick needles in my tits, shit in my mouth, you fuckin’ name it.
Well, I started to get sick of this shit real fast. Here’s this scumbag making cash hand over fist offa my ass, and I don’t get shit out of it. So I…
Well, if you wanna know the details, I busted a toilet tank cover over his head one night, cut his belly open, and ate his guts.
Hell. Sometimes a girl’s gotta do what she’s gotta do.
««—»»
See, grubs can only eat raw stuff. You eat regular food like the pinkies and the shit don’t come out, you bloat up. There was this one gal named Sue who got grubbed just like me—blonde, kinda heavy set,
really
big tits—and she just goes on eating the regular shit that the pinkies eat, and one day I saw her walking past the hotel and, I swear, she’s big as Jabba the Hut, and before she could make it to the bus stop, she, like,
exploded
right there in the street, made one holy hell of a mess. And this shithead Republican senator I was telling you about, you should’ve heard the guy, like because we can only eat raw stuff, that means we’re gonna go on some zombie rampage eating people in the streets like some horror movie so that was his case for “socially impounding” us. Glad that asshole’s shit didn’t fly. Of course, it probably sounds pretty hypocritical of me, since I just got done telling you I chowed down on ’Rome insides. I just figured it was the thing to do, that’s all. I got tired of being used by this scumbag, so I did the job on him. It wasn’t like his guts tasted any better than anything else—grubs don’t have a sense of taste.
One good thing about being a grub hooker, though, you start to stick up for yourself. You get a case of the ass and you don’t take shit anymore. The rule had always been no girl works solo. You wanna work the street, you gotta have a pimp. Ask any hooker in any city in the world. You try to work solo, you get your face beat to mush or wind up in some dumpster with your throat cut. We’d always be too afraid to fight back, stand up for ourselves, you know? Shit, most girls are strung out anyway. I was. Back when I was pink, I was firing up scag four times a day, had to shoot up into my foot ’cos the veins on my arms all collapsed and turned black. I’d turn over my take to ’Rome every night like clockwork, and he’d keep me in junk, and that was all I cared about. When you’re strung out, you really don’t have a soul anymore. Yeah, turning my tricks, keeping ’Rome happy, and getting my fix—that’s all there was for me. It was hell, let me tell you. But after I got grubbed, I didn’t need the scag anymore, and it finally dawned on me that I didn’t need ’Rome, either. All the other grubs working the street got the same gist, and all of a sudden a lot of pimps were winding up in body bags. The pink girls, sure, they’re all still in their stables, but their pimps don’t fuck with us grubs ’cos they know that if they do, they’ll wind up just like ’Rome.