The Death of Wendell Mackey (3 page)

“Good man,” said Laughlin. “Jumped his car battery once. Gave me a gift certificate to Applebee’s. Nice guy.”

“Top researcher. Ph.D.
and
an M.D.,” said Connor. “He’s doing cutting edge stuff. I’d love to intern with that guy. Just ask him why you look like a junkie with the flu.”

But asking meant calling Scotia, and there was something about him, about that smooth pink face, and how he was overly articulate with his consonants and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his pen and stared through Wendell like he could see the little red pills dissolve in Wendell’s stomach, that made him nervous.

Still, like a dutiful employee, he kept taking the pills, which only exacerbated his occasional insomnia, soon keeping him up round the clock and prompting snoozes on his lawnmower, just as Laughlin had joked. This, of course, prompted Laughlin to trade jokes for profanity, which in turn brought a demand that Wendell contact Scotia about the situation. One afternoon meeting later led to something new.

Wendell pressed the pencil into the wooden kitchen table, digging each letter in, one at a time:

O B S E R V A T I O N

Overnight observation, “Done by the best in the business,” Scotia said, “our Nocturnal Anomalies Group.” The entire conversation—more a monologue, with Scotia feeding off of Wendell’s nervous silence—was peppered with the dueling refrains “All for the best” and “It’s nothing to worry about.”

Wendell remembered Scotia staring at him,
through
him.

“You are suffering from some insomnia, right?” Scotia had asked.

“Yes.

“Then we’re agreed,” and he clapped his hands together, satisfied and smiling.

The NAG wing hid behind a set of double doors with a stenciled figure reclining in a bed painted on them. At the end of every work day, Scotia would gently usher Wendell into the elevator and up to the NAG, talking all the way about the benefits of even more monetary remuneration. It was there, on the overnights, that they started administering drugs intravenously. Racing through arteries like freeways. There were no answers from the nurses, just their firm faces with all the animation of a rock quarry. But the night nurses weren’t
nurses
; nurses didn’t carry pistols conspicuously under their blue smocks, but those men did. Questions weren’t answered. Medications were changed, or increased. On his lunch break, a young doctor would make a trip down to the break room, just to watch Wendell swallow all of his pills. After a few weeks, something began to appear behind their eyes. Curiosity didn’t describe it. It was almost like hunger.

Hunger
, Wendell thought, which reminded him of his own. His stomach rumbling, he stared back down at the table, and he thought back to the last time that he saw Connor and Laughlin.

They had been staring at him, oblivious to their beers, not concerned but curious. It was as if he was something new to them, like a zoo exhibit just opened. They were observant, but with a tremor of apprehension, watching the lines in his face and the bluing under his eyes for some indication that an event would soon transpire. Wendell might fall unconscious and crack a tooth on his mug, or go into a seizure, or bleed from his pores, or crack, open up, and pour out before them, a human cataclysm with poisoned blood that burned the checker board table and cheap floor tiles. They were just waiting, their heads hung low on their necks like vultures, waiting for what they thought was the inevitable.

Wendell licked his lips.

“So, Wendell, we’ve been…hearing things,” Laughlin said, looking to Connor, then to Wendell.

“What kinda things?”

It was becoming difficult to read their faces. They both sucked at their beers.

“We’re keeping your locker untouched,” said Laughlin. “So when you come back…I mean, well, it’ll be there. Still there.”

“My locker?”

Connor leaned forward. “So, what’s it like?”

“What’s what like? And when I come back from where? What’s going on?” Clearly, something was happening, Wendell knew it as well as anyone else, but in somehow avoiding it in open conversation, whatever it was that waited for him could be held at bay. Avoidance felt secure, even when everything else pointed in the other direction.

“You know Wendell,” said Laughlin, “moving you into one of those on-site apartments.”

Apparently, the previous night the decision had been made to bring him into the institution for more observation. Wendell assumed that, while groggy and nauseous, he had signed his name onto something to make it all legitimate, but he couldn’t remember. The pills—
vitamins
, since to Wendell, their power, or lack thereof, lay in what they were termed—had been the first step. And with their power to deaden his stomach and corrode his bowels, this first step had led him to the edge of a precipice. Whatever followed had the power to push him into the void. And what followed were the overnight intravenous drugs and a series of injections, the latter administered during lunch delivery by Dr. Scotia and a stone-faced nurse.

“And your sleeping habits?” Dr. Scotia had asked during one of their weekly meetings, “still the same?” Something in his voice told Wendell that he didn’t need an answer, that he had already supplied himself with one. And with that, even without his signature touching any paper, the decision to extend his stay at the NAG was made.

So when Connor asked what it was like, what it
felt like
is what Wendell assumed he meant, Wendell wondered if it was the medication, or the whole process, that Connor was thinking of. The pills and injections were one thing, but the secrecy, the questions gone unanswered, the plastic smiles and piped-in Muzak in the halls, and the doctor and his nurses at all hours appearing as if out of the tiled walls of his room, were something entirely different. It was all unknown and disturbing, his health in the hands of people who treated him for some unseen malady and pulled a veil over his eyes at the same time.

“What’s it all like…” Wendell mused.

They kept staring at him. He drained his beer.

“It’s not like I feel weak or anything. Just different. Unsettled. Like all that vomiting and, well, you know—” and Wendell put his hands to his stomach “—were just emptying me out so that I’d get filled up with something new.” He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You look different,” said Connor.

“Different how?”

Connor dropped his eyes to his mug.

“So when do you move in?” asked Laughlin.

Move in. It usually implied moving out of somewhere else, but his studio apartment had nothing to do with his job at the institution. It would still be there, above the Thai restaurant, with its peeling linoleum, its refrigerator with its jackhammer motor, and the television on the tray table with its postage stamp screen that displayed as much snow as it did actual images. A humble cave for an unknown anchorite. The problem was that Wendell was no longer unknown. And like it or not, with attention drawn to him, moving into the institution—however temporary they insisted it would be—necessarily meant moving out of his cave. His refrigerator, his television, his privacy, all would stay tucked away above the restaurant. But something told him that he would never see them again.

Something in Wendell trembled.

He remembered saying “I don’t know” to Laughlin and Connor, but couldn’t remember hearing his own voice. Both men looked at him, and nodded, with the solemnity of churchmen.

That evening, after returning to the NAG from the bar, Dr. Scotia had asked Wendell to go home, pack a suitcase, and return. Succinct, and said with a smile.

After so much time as a patient —weeks, if not months, as time had a tendency to tumble into miscalculation in the institution—that last conversation in the bar, rational and lucid, engaged under his own power and with the only friends he could remember, kept crystal clarity in his mind, marking a dividing line between death and advent, man and monster. He would cling to that memory, replaying it in his mind as he lay in his bed in the institution, staring at the tiles in the ceiling. But replaying it brought up a question: had his friends known? He scrutinized every phrase, every dropped glance, the tone of their voices and the furrows in their brows. All of it could have signaled concern, or curiosity. And had they known what was to happen to their friend—laughable as that word
friend
was if they truly had known—then they were complicit. Conspirators, abettors, as much bloodstained as the men who wielded the needles and scalpels.

“Thought we’d stick together. Thought we’d watch each other’s backs,” Wendell said to himself. “But if they turned on me, if they were working with
them
, then I…then I’ll…” His hands dropped to the wooden table, and his anger sank into his conjecture.

Were they capable of conspiring with the doctors to bring him in? Connor perhaps. He was quick, educated, a grad student desirous for a future in a lab coat at the institution. But Laughlin was a dull cog on a slow wheel, a mediocre foreman too lazy even for the GED, his libidinous eye for barmaids more his personal driver than his own brain. But betrayal required little intellectual capacity, and it would have only taken a case of beer and new mud flaps to buy Laughlin’s loyalty, if there had been any to buy at all. In the end, it mattered little. He didn’t know where they lived, and if they really had worked to get Wendell imprisoned, the institution’s leadership was smart enough to make them disappear as easily as they had done to Wendell.

The night after seeing Connor and Laughlin, the night he was to move into the institution, Wendell found that his employee locker had been cleaned out. His work boots, extra flannel shirt, the Hotrod Girls calendar, the picture of his mother, his I.D. tag, all gone. He remembered closing the locker door and being met with the face of a new doctor, this one with a black toupee and an oily smile. The doctor gave a saccharine greeting, followed by “Won’t you come with me?” and a grand sweep of his hand towards the locker room door. Behind the doctor, flanking the door, were two of the armed nurses. They walked him to the elevator, eyeing him closely, even as the doors closed and the elevator rose, and dropped him off at Dr. Scotia’s office.

Wendell’s position had been “liquidated,” Scotia told him, due to some “irregularities in some of the test results” that warranted more extensive scrutiny. These were not the reasons for his initial monitoring by the NAG, but they proved to be effective reasons for keeping him in the institution indefinitely.

“The position will be returned once we sort all of these irregularities out,” Scotia promised.

“What’s the problem?”

Scotia looked up at Wendell, seeming to catch himself before he said something unintentional. He said, “Nothing lasting. That is, nothing that we can’t fix. You’re in the hands of experts, Mr. Mackey.”

Being “in their hands” implied some sort of benevolent attention, they the benign authorities healing Wendell, their helpless charge. But Scotia’s semantic slither was bolstered by a piece of paper, an agreement that Wendell—whether he remembered it or not—had evidently signed, stating that, indeed, he was “in their hands,” for good or bad. Scotia had played it as a trump card after seeing that his false assurance hadn’t worked with Wendell.

“All of this,” Wendell remembered saying, “I’m wondering if it might not be a good idea.”

To which Scotia reached into his desk without the slightest ripple on his placid face, pulled the paper out and held it up.

“Standard commitment papers, or, I should say, the last of the commitment papers, as this just shows the appropriate signatures.”

Wendell shook his head. “For something like that don’t I need to—”

“You did.”

“But I don’t think I—”

“Yes, you did.”

“But I don’t remember—”

“You even used my pen, Mr. Mackey.” Dr. Scotia set the paper down on the desk. “It’s not like we take pleasure in all of this. Really, as healthcare professionals, we just have the needs of our patients in mind. And to be honest, your apprehension for what may come next necessarily must become, well, secondary to greater concerns.” Scotia looked down at the paper and leaned forward. “It’s a matter of protection. Protecting you, of course, and protecting—” he tapped his finger on the paper “—our agreement here. Because, what are we if we aren’t true to our word?” Slight wrinkles at the corners of his eyes emerged, as if he was trying to wince, but found it painful. “We need to be prepared to protect this agreement. We are, in fact, prepared.” His eyes drifted to his office door, slightly ajar, where the shoulder of one of the nurses was visible. “And you need to know that.”

Perhaps a greater man would have protested. Claimed his right to break an agreement, even one that he had no memory of making. Stood up and stormed out. Reached across the desk to grab the doctor’s windpipe and hiss his own threat into his face. But greater men possessed a level of fortitude absent in Wendell. In the end, he was weak. In the end, he was still a gawky, tremulous child. What the mind wanted the body would not do, and Wendell watched as the final lock to his imprisonment was turned with a smile and a wink.

What followed was busy talk by a man for whom it was his bread and butter, medical nomenclature meant to lull the hearer’s senses into a confusing but disinterested bliss. It was all veiled in the bureaucracy of a to-do list, a doctor prepping his patient; but it had a hypnotic quality, the long technical terms like incantations, with tone and tempo smooth and inviting, so much so that Wendell didn’t even hear the other doctor and the two nurses enter behind him. Scotia continued, listing medications like items in a recipe, then mentioning blood banking and surgical consults, but at that point, little was registering in Wendell for any longer than a few seconds. The tempo slowed, and Scotia added a platitudinous coda about the “best and brightest” working their “healer’s art.”

“And that’s it,” Scotia said, “in a nutshell.” He nodded to the men at the door. “Dr. Thane here will take care of you.”

Wendell felt the three men behind him.