Look at my chest! I scream at her. You must see it rise and fall, no matter how shallow my respiration is! You’re a goddam expert, for Christ’s sake!
Instead, she looks across the room, raising her voice to be heard above the music. ( I like it, like it, yes I do, the Stones sing, and I think I will hear that nasal idiot chorus in the halls of hell through all eternity.) “What’s your pick? Boxers or Jockeys?”
With a mixture of horror and rage, I realize what they’re talking about.
“Boxers!” he calls back. “Of course! Just take a look at the guy!”
Asshole! I want to scream. You probably think everyone over forty wears boxer shorts! You probably think when you get to be forty, you’ll—
She unsnaps my Bermudas and pulls down the zipper. Under other circumstances, having a woman as pretty as this (a little severe, yes, but still pretty) do that would make me extremely happy. Today, however—
“You lose, Petie-boy,” she says. “Jockeys. Dollar in the kitty.”
“On payday,” he says, coming over. His face joins hers; they look down at me through their Plexi masks like a couple of space aliens looking down at an abductee. I try to make them see my eyes, to see 30
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
me looking at them, but these two fools are looking at my undershorts.
“Ooooh, and red, ” Pete says. “A sha- vinguh! ”
“I call them more of a wash pink,” she replies. “Hold him up for me, Peter, he weighs a ton. No wonder he had a heart attack. Let this be a lesson to you.”
I’m in shape! I yell at her. Probably in better shape than you, bitch!
My hips are suddenly jerked upward by strong hands. My back cracks; the sound makes my heart leap.
“Sorry, guy,” Pete says, and suddenly I’m colder than ever as my shorts and red underpants are pulled down.
“Upsa-daisy once, ” she says, lifting one foot, “and upsa-daisy twice, ”
lifting the other foot, “off come the mocs, and off come the socks—”
She stops abruptly, and hope seizes me once more.
“Hey, Pete.”
“Yeah?”
“Do guys ordinarily wear Bermuda shorts and moccasins to play golf in?”
Behind her (except that’s only the source, actually it’s all around us) the Rolling Stones have moved on to “Emotional Rescue.” I will be your knight in shining ahh-mah, Mick Jagger sings, and I wonder how funky he’d dance with about three sticks of Hi-Core dynamite jammed up his skinny ass.
“If you ask me, this guy was just asking for trouble,” she goes on.
“I thought they had these special shoes, very ugly, very golf-specific, with little knobs on the soles—”
“Yeah, but wearing them’s not the law,” Pete says. He holds his gloved hands out over my upturned face, slides them together, and bends the fingers back. As the knuckles crack, talcum powder sprinkles down like fine snow. “At least not yet. Not like bowling shoes.
They catch you bowling without a pair of bowling shoes, they can send you to state prison.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes.”
31
STEPHEN KING
“Do you want to handle temp and gross examination?”
No! I shriek. No, he’s a kid, what are you DOING?
He looks at her as if this same thought had crossed his own mind.
“That’s . . . um . . . not strictly legal, is it, Katie? I mean . . .”
She looks around as he speaks, giving the room a burlesque examination, and I’m starting to get a vibe that could be very bad news for me: severe or not, I think that Cisco—alias Dr. Katie Arlen—has got the hots for Petie with the dark blue eyes. Dear Christ, they have hauled me paralyzed off the golf course and into an episode of General Hospital, this week’s subplot titled “Love Blooms in Autopsy Room Four.”
“Gee,” she says in a hoarse little stage-whisper. “I don’t see anyone here but you and me.”
“The tape—”
“Not rolling yet,” she said. “And once it is, I’m right at your elbow every step of the way . . . as far as anyone will ever know, anyway. And mostly I will be. I just want to put away those charts and slides. And if you really feel uncomfortable—”
Yes! I scream up at him out of my unmoving face. Feel uncomfortable! VERY uncomfortable! TOO uncomfortable!
But he’s twenty-four at most and what’s he going to say to this pretty, severe woman who’s standing inside his space, invading it in a way that can really only mean one thing? No, Mommy, I’m scared?
Besides, he wants to. I can see the wanting through the Plexi eyeshield, bopping around in there like a bunch of overage punk rockers pogoing to the Stones.
“Hey, as long as you’ll cover for me if—”
“Sure,” she says. “Got to get your feet wet sometime, Peter. And if you really need me to, I’ll roll back the tape.”
He looks startled. “You can do that?”
She smiles. “Ve haff many see-grets in Autopsy Room Four, mein Herr. ”
“I bet you do,” he says, smiling back, then reaches past my frozen field of vision. When his hand comes back, it’s wrapped around a 32
EVERYTHING’S EVENTUAL
microphone which hangs down from the ceiling on a black cord. The mike looks like a steel teardrop. Seeing it there makes this horror real in a way it wasn’t before. Surely they won’t really cut me up, will they?
Pete is no veteran, but he has had training; surely he’ll see the marks of whatever bit me while I was looking for my ball in the rough, and then they’ll at least suspect. They’ll have to suspect.
Yet I keep seeing the scissors with their heartless satin shine—
jumped-up poultry shears—and I keep wondering if I will still be alive when he takes my heart out of my chest cavity and holds it up, dripping, in front of my locked gaze for a moment before turning to plop it into the weighing pan. I could be, it seems to me; I really could be.
Don’t they say the brain can remain conscious for up to three minutes after the heart stops?
“Ready, doctor,” Pete says, and now he sounds almost formal.
Somewhere, tape is rolling.
The autopsy procedure has begun.
“Let’s flip this pancake,” she says cheerfully, and I am turned over just that efficiently. My right arm goes flying out to one side and then falls back against the side of the table, banging down with the raised metal lip digging into the bicep. It hurts a lot, the pain is just short of excruciating, but I don’t mind. I pray for the lip to bite through my skin, pray to bleed, something bona fide corpses don’t do.
“Whoops-a-daisy,” Dr. Arlen says. She lifts my arm up and plops it back down at my side.
Now it’s my nose I’m most aware of. It’s smashed against the table, and my lungs for the first time send out a distress message—a cottony, deprived feeling. My mouth is closed, my nose partially crushed shut (just how much I can’t tell; I can’t even feel myself breathing, not really). What if I suffocate like this?
Then something happens which takes my mind completely off my nose. A huge object—it feels like a glass baseball bat—is rammed rudely up my rectum. Once more I try to scream and can produce only the faint, wretched humming.
“Temp in,” Peter says. “I’ve put on the timer.”
33
STEPHEN KING
“Good idea,” she says, moving away. Giving him room. Letting him test-drive this baby. Letting him test-drive me. The music is turned down slightly.
“Subject is a white Caucasian, age forty-four,” Pete says, speaking for the mike now, speaking for posterity. “His name is Howard Randolph Cottrell, residence is 1566 Laurel Crest Lane, here in Derry.”
Dr. Arlen, at some distance: “Mary Mead.”
A pause, then Pete again, sounding just a tiny bit flustered: “Dr.
Arlen informs me that the subject actually lives in Mary Mead, which split off from Derry in—”
“Enough with the history lesson, Pete.”
Dear God, what have they stuck up my ass? Some sort of cattle thermometer? If it was a little longer, I think, I could taste the bulb at the end. And they didn’t exactly go crazy with the lubricant . . .
but then, why would they? I’m dead, after all.
Dead.
“Sorry, doctor,” Pete says. He fumbles mentally for his place, and eventually finds it. “This information is from the ambulance form.
Originally taken from a Maine state driver’s license. Pronouncing doctor was, um, Frank Jennings. Subject was pronounced at the scene.”
Now it’s my nose that I’m hoping will bleed. Please, I tell it, bleed.
Only don’t just bleed. GUSH.
It doesn’t.
“Cause of death may be a heart attack,” Peter says. A light hand brushes down my naked back to the crack of my ass. I pray it will remove the thermometer, but it doesn’t. “Spine appears to be intact, no attractable phenomena.”