Nor for others really.
The carpet of my office was as stained in blood as the legal proceedings against my name were saturated in ink. I got into this business to help people; really I had.
Yet here I was, in an empty, beaten-down office, with a crazy woman asking me to flay her open. Filet her like a trout.
And there wasn’t a nurse to be found to back me up. Normally, doctors always had a nurse in on a consultation, largely to make sure that if any litigation followed the surgery, there would be a) a witness, and b) another woman to refute it. Put a man in court against a woman with a spit-on-command eye faucet…and the man lost every time, regardless of the circumstance. Estrogen always triumphed over testosterone in our courts of law. Call it primordial. Call it unfair. It was what it was.
And right now, there was a woman in my broken down office, for the second time in as many months, asking me to cut her open.
Only this time, I was within five days and $250 of losing my lease. I had no staff salaries to pay because I had no staff. But Janis Phoenix was potentially the only patient between me and bankruptcy. And I didn’t even have a heroin habit to blame on my decline.
“You remember me,” she said, when I came out from the back room and raised an eyebrow at her stance behind the nurse’s station. She had rung the tiny “call” bell ten times in as many seconds.
“How could I forget?” I asked. “You want me to cut you open…but to gain what?”
“To release the inner me,” she said.
“What you’ve proposed will only release your blood and put you in danger of dying,” I said.
When she smiled, I almost believed that letting out a little blood on the table would make her sing. But that wasn’t the end of it. She wanted me to trim her flesh to the bone. To cut her from stem to sternum and then some…until her skeleton was set free to dance in a kaleidoscopic celebration on my fucked-up bones. Because if I did what Janis wanted, I would have no office or career, or life. I would be locked up forever, for first degree murder…with a violently violated corpse as gruesome evidence that provided no potential defense. Nobody cut open a woman for a procedure the way this woman wanted me to.
“You can release your inner you without my help,” I said finally, after listening to her insane demands. “Watch Oprah.”
“I have,” she said. Her wide lips curled up higher in a sneer. “But this isn’t a fake bourgeois ‘I need to go to the mall’ problem that I have.”
I shrugged in curiosity. I’d like to say disinterest, but frankly, this woman fascinated me. She was not bad looking. She was close to my age. And she seemed to be fixated on having me put a knife to her flesh. I assumed she was some kind of extreme masochist. Not my kink, but fascinatingly perverse, regardless.
“Listen,” she said. “There is a better
me
inside me that needs to be let out.” She ran a finger up my arm, as if to suggest…sensual reward for my work. This, I was well-versed in dealing with.
“Janis,” I said, “I can help you to realize the goals you have in your surgery…”
“Spare me the surgical-psycho mumbo jumbo,” she cut me off. “I don’t have any goals other than that you cut me open and let the real me out.”
I laughed.
She slapped me.
“I’m not fuckin’ kidding,” she said. “I want you to put a scalpel on my forehead, draw it down to between my breasts, and then open my belly, my thighs and my calves until the blood flows out to the floor like a bad plumbing leak. I want you to slip your hands inside the open wound, and lift the flesh like a door until my body is truly ‘open.’ Only then, can she be set free.”
“Assisted suicide is not legal in this state,” I whispered.
“I’m not talking about suicide,” she insisted, her eyes blazing wide. “I’m talking about rebirth.”
Color me stupid, but I just didn’t feel that desperate yet… I turned her away, a second time. And as the door to my ramshackle office rattled itself closed, I sank to the stained carpet and held my face in my hand. She had been my only potential patient for days, and I’d turned her away for …what? Morals? Ethics? She was crazy as a loon but who was I to deny taking money for doing what she wanted? And I was at the end of my own hang-noose rope. I could have insisted on cash payment up front and disposed of whatever remains remained efficiently, after the fact. Beggars can’t be choosers, or they die. I stood up after a while, walked to the back office, and poured a tall glass of Maker’s Mark bourbon. No other patients rang the receptionist bell that day to interrupt my drink. It was the last I was likely to have of the good stuff. When I finally left the building, it no longer looked lost and rundown to me. It only looked blurry. Like the focus on my life.
I imagine that she went to other doctors in her mad, self-abusive quest. I imagine she was turned away. I imagine that’s why she spent some time on research when she found that my medical practice had closed, and turned up at the door a few weeks later to my one-room apartment. It was hard to pull myself away from the buzzing glare of the hypnotizing lights inside my head to answer the door. I had been drinking cheap whiskey and sometimes cheaper vodka for much of the month, and sound was occasional. Cognizance optional. The lightshow was phenomenal though.
“I’ve been looking for you,” she whispered, when I finally staggered to the door. I responded with something intelligent to that, like “huh?”
“I want to live,” she said. “I can’t take being bottled up anymore. But you have to set me free.”
She pressed a boxcutter into my hand, and began to unbutton her blouse in full view of the still-open hallway door. “I want you to help me.”
How could I dare to touch her? She was a more handsome woman than the bitch who had married me, drained me of all my free cash and then divorced me with a large alimony anchor. Her eyes were hazel and mysterious in their refusal to choose a color. Her breasts were full and alluring, despite being hidden behind a fabric that never showed cleavage. Her waist was not thin, but was also not fat. I could imagine being lost in the midnight mysteries of her and dreaming of returning. Why would I cut her?
She waived a stack of green hundred dollar bills in my face. The stack was thick. At a glance, I guessed that it amounted to three or four thousand dollars. Maybe more.
“There’s more if you’ll just perform the procedure,” she promised. I laughed at that.
“If I cut you the way you said, you’ll be dead within 10 minutes. There will be no more anything.”
“No,” she insisted. “I will be reborn. And I’ll pay you for that.” She pulled up her shoulders to stand straight and declare with laughably dramatic posture, “I will pay you handsomely for setting me free.”
“Why don’t you just cut yourself open?” I asked. I looked pointedly at her visible scars. “You’ve clearly played with knives in the past.”
“I didn’t say the procedure wouldn’t hurt me,” she said. “You’re right; I’ve cut myself plenty.” She pointed at the ghost-white lines tracing history across her face, her neck and her arms. “I’ve seen the real me, my beauty within. When I open myself, I can see her slip around and knot and move beneath the skin. But it hurts too much for me to do it myself. I need your help.”
She pressed her hand against my chest, and the pressure almost tipped my inebriated derelict body over.
“I need a surgeon,” she said. “And you need the money.”
The idea of the money in her hand transferring to my bank account flitted through my blurred mind. It was a fine idea. Buying bottles to hide in was growing increasingly difficult.
“I need anesthesia,” I declared, wobbling just a bit. “Not for me,” I added.
“No anesthesia,” she said. “No drugs of any kind. If you put me to sleep during the procedure, you’ll put my inner self to sleep as well. And then it all will fail. I need you to strap me down, and cut me open. Fast. You must be quick.”
She looked hard at me, and there was a glint in her eye that threatened to dissolve into tears. “Can you do that?”
What she asked of me was barbaric. To be filleted alive. Without relief. It was worse than murder. Yet the crime didn’t daunt me in my desperation.
I nodded. Yes, I could be quick.
“We need an operating suite though,” I said. “I need a table to strap you to, and scalpels. And no one can be around.”
“They haven’t emptied your old office yet,” she said. “I stopped there today. The door was locked, but the furniture still was inside.”
“Why…” I began. But she put a finger to my mouth.
“Don’t ask questions,” she said. “Just cut me open, and let the real me out.”
There was a chain around the door of my old office, and a yellow sticker that declared it an off limits place. A scene that had been deemed criminal…or at least,
unpalatable
by local authorities. I had been evicted. But from the look of the door, you’d have thought that I had murdered patients and stacked them like gory firewood against the rafters inside.
Maybe tonight, I would perform an act that would give those stickers some remote credence.
“We can get in a side window,” she suggested.
“We’d have to break one,” I said. “They didn’t open easily from the inside, let alone from the out!”
“It’s not like anyone’s monitoring the place,” she pointed out.
I looked at the urban avenue around us and had to agree. The pet supply house across the street had bars on the windows and doors, and a pawn shop two doors down also was well sealed. A few cars slipped through the intersection two blocks down, but nobody had passed through the sighing wind on our street in five minutes. It was desolate. And lonely. More than a little creepy. The wind felt empty as hopelessness, and tasted hot and end-of-day stale as broken dreams. When I had moved into this office, this had been a vibrant section of the city. Now it had about as much going for it as I did.
“Let’s go in through the alley,” I suggested, not quite ready to bash in a window in full view of the empty street. I picked up one of the paving stones from the front walkway, and then we walked around an unkempt browning evergreen shrub to slip into the shadows of the alley. There wasn’t a light on in any of the buildings nearby, and in seconds, we were literally feeling our way down the wall of the building to a window.
“This should be the window in the hall near the first waiting room,” I said, raising my hand to bash the rock through it. She pulled a t-shirt over her head and held it out to me, while standing in the alley wearing only a bra and pants.
“Wrap this around your hand,” she said. “We can’t afford for you to cut your hand now.”
Appreciating the irony, I used the shirt to wrap and protect my hand, and then brought the rock down on the glass.
In the movies, glass smashes like so much electric tinsel. This glass was tougher. My hand bounced off it on the first try, and again on the second, though this time the edge of the rock made a chiseled, white-crusted mark.
On the third try, after I exposed the edge of the rock better, and swung my arm harder, the glass gave way with a crackling splash of sound. My arm slipped into the warmth of the inside of my old office, and jabbed painfully on a shard of glass still stuck in the base of the window. But the protection of her shirt paid off, and I pulled back my operating hand unscathed. In moments, using her shirt as protection, I had cleaned off enough of the ledge of free form glass that she could help me up and into the office.
Once inside, I found a chair and handed it through the window to her. In seconds we were both inside. I pulled the window shades on my old small surgical center room to close out prying eyes, and flipped the switch to turn on the lights. The electric still worked.
Another bonus. My ex-office was on a deserted street in a shady side of the city and was locked from the outside…but still had electricity. Janis had surely chosen her surgeon well.
I almost cried as I looked around at my old operating table, equipment drawers and red-stickered bodily waste disposal can. I hadn’t performed an operation in weeks now. And I missed it so bad. It had been my life…when I had a life.
Janis didn’t look around. She wasn’t here to reminisce. She stripped off her bra and pants, and laid down on the table in the center of the room. “I’m ready,” she announced.
I wasn’t. I asked for her to wait a moment and walked out of the bright room back into the black of the hallway and into the shadowy grey of my old office. The furniture was still there as well, and I pulled open a drawer of my desk. It was empty.
But I felt with my fingers to the way-back of the drawer until I found a small steel stub. I pushed it, and a small door opened. My fingers slipped in, pulled out the glass container, and held it up to the dim light.
A small secret stash of Maker’s Mark. Half full. I twisted off the stopper, took a long gulp and held it in my mouth, enjoying the burn as it settled on my gums and strained at the back of my throat.
I coughed when I swallowed, and said “Fuck yeah” to a vacant room. Then I stalked back to the OR, to do what I was being paid for.
To kill a woman.
A woman who was paying me to kill her. My only saving grace here, I figured, was the fact that I would be wearing rubber gloves. I pulled on a pair as soon as I got back to the room with my bottle.