He looks doubtfully at the doctor.
“Are you sure you don’t-”
“Do you want to make this your field or not, Peter?” she asks him with some asperity.
“You know I do, but-”
“Then cut.”
He nods, lips firming. I would close my eyes if I could, but of course I cannot even do that; I can only steel myself against the pain that’s only a second or two away, now steel myself for the steel.
“Cutting,” he says, bending forward.
“Wait a sec!” she cries.
The dimple of pressure just below my solar plexus eases a little.
He looks around at her, surprised, upset, maybe relieved that the crucial moment has been put of-
I feel her rubber-gloved hand slide around my penis as if she means to give me some bizarre handjob, safe sex with the dead, and then she says, “You missed this one, Pete.”
He leans over, looking at what she’s found-the scar in my groin, at the very top of my right thigh, a glassy, no-pore bowl in the flesh.
Her hand is still holding my cock, holding it out of the way, that’s all she’s doing, as far as she’s concerned she might as well be holding up a sofa cushion so someone else can see the treasure she’s found beneath it-coins, a lost wallet, maybe the catnip mouse you haven’t been able to find-but something is happening.
Dear wheelchair Jesus on a chariot-driven crutch, something is happening.
“And look,” she says. Her finger strokes a light, tickly line down the side of my right testicle. “Look at these hairline scars. His testes must have swollen up to damned near the size of grapefruits.”
“Lucky he didn’t lose one or both.”
“You bet your … you bet your you-knows,” she says, and laughs that mildly suggestive laugh again. Her gloved hand loosens, moves, then pushes down firmly, trying to clear the viewing area.
She is doing by accident what you might pay twentyfive or thirty bucks to have done on purpose … under other circumstances, of course. “This is a war wound, I think. Hand me that magnifier, Pete.”
“But shouldn’t I-”
“In a few seconds,” she says. “He’s not going anywhere. She’s totally absorbed by what she’s found. Her hand is still on me, still pressing down, and what was happening feels like it’s still happening, but maybe I’m wrong. I must be wrong, or he would see it, she would feel it.
She bends down and now I can see only her green-clad back. with the ties from her cap trailing down it like odd pigtails. Now, oh my, I can feel her breath on me down there.
“Notice the outward radiation,” she says. “It was a blast wound of some sort, probably ten years ago at least, we could check his military rec-”
The door bursts open. Pete cries out in surprise. Dr. Arlen doesn’t, but her hand tightens involuntarily, she’s gripping me again and it’s all at once like a hellish variation of the old Naughty Nurse fantasy.
“Don’t cut ‘im up!” someone screams, and his voice is so high and wavery with fright that I barely recognize Rusty. “Don’t cut ‘im up, there was a snake in his golfbag and it bit Mike!”
They turn to him, eyes wide, jaws dropped; her hand is still gripping me, but she’s no more aware of that, at least for the time being, than Petie-boy is aware that he’s got one hand clutching the left breast of his scrub gown. He looks like he’s the one with the clapped-out fuel pump.
‘What … what are you. . .” Pete begins.
“Knocked him flat!” Rusty was saying-babbling. “He’s gonna be okay, I guess, but he can hardly talk!’ Little brown snake, I never saw one like it in my life, it went under the loadin’ bay, it’s under there right now, but that’s not the important part! I think it already bit that guy we brought in. I think … holy shit, Doc, whatja tryin’ to do? Stroke ‘im back to life?”
She looks around, dazed, at first not sure of what he’s talking about
… until she realizes that she’s now holding a mostly erect penis.
And as she screams-screams and snatches the shears out of Pete’s limp gloved hand-I find myself thinking again of that old Alfred Hitchcock TV show.
Poor old Joseph Cotton, I think.
He only got to cry.
Afternote
It’s been a year since my experience in Autopsy Room Four, and I have made a complete recovery, although the paralysis was both stubborn and scary; it was a full month before I began to recover the finer motions of my fingers and toes. I still can’t play the piano, but then, of course, I never could. That is a joke, and I make no apologies for it. In the first three months after my misadventure, I think that my ability to joke provided a slim but vital margin between sanity and some sort of nervous breakdown. Unless you’ve actually felt the tip of a pair of postmortem shears poking into your stomach, you don’t know what I mean.
Two weeks or so after my close call, a woman on Dupont Street called the Derry Police to complain of a “Foul Stink” coming from the house next door. That house belonged to a bachelor bank clerk named Walter Kerr. Police found the house empty … of human life, that is. they found over sixty snakes of different varieties. About half of them were dead-starvation and dehydration, but many were extremely lively … and extremely dangerous. Several were very rare, and one was of a species believed to have been extinct since mid-century, according to consulting zoologists.
Kerr failed to show up for work at Derry Community Bank on August 22, two days after I was bitten, one day after the story (“Paralyzed Man Escapes Deadly Autopsy,” the headline read; at one point I was quoted as saying I had been “Scared stiff”) broke in the press.
There was a snake for every cage in Kerr’s basement menagerie . . .
except for one. The empty cage was unmarked, and the snake that popped out of my golf bag (the ambulance orderlies had packed it
in with my “corpse” and had been practicing chip shots out in the ambulance parking area) was never found.
The toxin in my bloodstream-the same toxin found to a far lesser degree in orderly Mike Hopper’s bloodstream-was documented but never identified. I have looked at a great many pictures of snakes in the last year, and have found at least one that has reportedly caused cases of full-body paralysis in humans. This is the Peruvian Boomslang, a nasty viper that has supposedly been extinct since the I920s. Dupont Street is less than half a mile from the Derry Municipal Golf Course. Most of the intervening land consists of scrub woods and vacant lots.
One final note. Katie Arlen and I dated for four months, November I994 through February of I995. We broke it off by mutual consent, due to sexual incompatibility.
I was impotent unless she was wearing rubber gloves.
STEPHEN
KING
Blind Willie
UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME
STEPHEN
KING
L.T.’S THEORY OF PETS
My friend L.T. hardly ever talks about how his wife disappeared, or how she’s probably dead, just another victim of the Axe Man, but he likes to tell the story of how she walked out on him. He does it with just the right roll of the eyes, as if to say, “She fooled me, boys-right, good, and proper!” He’ll sometimes tell the story to a bunch of men sitting on one of the loading docks behind the plant and eating their lunches, him eating his lunch, too, the one he fixed for himself – no Lulubelle back at home to do it for him these days.
They usually laugh when he tells the story, which always ends with L.T.’s Theory of Pets. Hell, I usually laugh. It’s a funny story, even if you do know how it turned out. Not that any of us do, not completely.
“I punched out at four, just like usual,” L.T. will say, “then went down to Deb’s Den for a couple of beers, just like most days. Had a game of pinball, then went home. That was where things stopped being just like usual. When a person gets up in the morning, he doesn’t have the slightest idea how much may have changed in his life by the time he lays his head down again that night. ‘Ye know not the day or the hour,’ the Bible says. I believe that particular verse is about dying, but it fits everything else, boys. Everything else in this world. You just never know when you’re going to bust a fiddle-string.
“When I turn into the driveway I see the garage door’s open and the little Subaru she brought to the marriage is gone, but that doesn’t strike me as immediately peculiar. She was always driving off someplace – to a yard sale or someplace – and leaving the goddam garage door open. I’d tell her, ‘Lulu, if you keep doing that long enough, someone’ll eventually take advantage of it. Come in and take a rake or a bag of peat moss or maybe even the power mower.