Husk (20 page)

She kept thrusting, harder and harder, frantically digging her hand into my innards.

“Oh, oh, oh oh oh oh oh—”

Kud's eyes rolled back to take a good long look at the interior lining of her skull, and she crumpled to the floor. The director shrieked for commercial, and the scene cut away to an animation of a baby bear tormented by three-ply tissue cling-ons over its ass.

Rhodes rushed to Kud's side and began checking her pulse. “She is fine, I zink,” he diagnosed, “but the shock, it vaz too much for her. Ve should get her to lie down.”

“Drop her in the green room,” the director said over the loudspeaker. Two interns ran up, giving me a wide berth as they tried to hoist Kud up between them. “Makeup, check Franklin, he's got some puke in his 'stache. Let's hurry, people, we still have a show to finish.”

“Think you've got your ratings yet?” Rowan asked Franklin as the senator was wheeled away — the interns had given up trying to lift her and had decided on pushing her out of the studio in her chair. Franklin glowered, but there was a spark of journalistic interest left in him. He picked up Kud's pen off the floor and tentatively poked at my colon, waving away the makeup artist. A wide, creepily joyous smile lit up his face.

“Fuck the ratings,” he whispered. “We're talking Emmys here. A Peabody, even.”

“A Pulitzer?” I suggested.

He took one last nudge at my guts, and then reached out and heroically zipped my skin-pocket shut. “Why not?” He signaled the makeup artist, who dashed forward and gave his moustache a vigorous combing. “Sure, another Pulitzer. I deserve it, I think. Fuck Cronkite, fuck the goddamned moon landing. Fuck the Berlin Wall. Fuck the Challenger. Fuck Hiroshima.”

“This tops them all?” I asked.

“This blows them away.”

The rest of the evening went much more smoothly. Rhodes assuaged my fears and was a heavily accented delight as he described to the tiniest detail how he had gone about surveying my reconstruction, zipping and unzipping me to demonstrate his techniques. Franklin was far more gracious a host; he had tossed aside any notions of exposing a fraud and was starting from scratch, playing the dual role of impartial interviewer and astonished audience-member, asking serious questions while exhibiting a childlike delight at the medical marvel parading like a trained monkey before him.

By the end of the hour, my future was all but assured. I was the next big thing, a new star in the firmament. Untouchable.

A gibbous moon hung over the mesa and stared down at us. Judging me, I thought, taking into account my wholesale value with its low-wattage beam. Exposing the gruesome fathoms of my soul to the desert winds, the low shrubs, the nocturnal animals hunting the terrain for early breakfast.

Easy for a hunk of lifeless rock ensnared in Earth's gravitational tyranny to judge. I'm pretty sure it never had to go through something like this.

Well, at least
someone
is judging me
, I thought; the reams of fabricated sympathy I was otherwise receiving were eating away at my collapsing psyche.

The Menard Institute for Mindfulness and Mental Repose squatted in an ersatz Arizona oasis maintained through a mighty combination of humanity's cancerous desire to alter terrain to suit a nebulous vision of happiness and the economic influx of gobs of celebrity money. A thicket of transplanted palm trees bristled in the parched breeze as we walked by, and the censorious gleam of moonlight bounced off the water of a manufactured spring. Other than the smattering of adobe structures and the geographically impossible deposits of flora, there was nothing within eyesight but sand, rocks, and the occasional Ansel Adams–esque plateau of even more rocks and sand. There was no earthly reason to locate anything of value there except privacy, which is what its residents craved. And paid for in trash bags full of cash.

We were fifty-some miles west of Phoenix, just at the end of an unassuming dirt road that seemingly led to nowhere. It branched off the main highway and extended southward into backcountry, faded tire tracks the only proof of its existence and quickly blurring into an endless expanse of beige topography, no signage to indicate what could possibly lie at the finale of its unpromising route.

After an hour of bone-rattling travel, our Humvee having driven up and over the horizon several times, the unassuming premises of the Menard Institute emerged into view. Here, anonymous
VIP
s checked themselves in to purge their bodies of whatever they felt ailed them: alcohol, heroin, cancer, male pattern baldness, depression, steroids, halitosis, ego, syphilis — whatever might affect their life in any conceivably negative manner. Rumor had it, so Rowan whispered as we trekked across an unnecessary bridge over a dried canal, that this year's winner of
The Biggest Loser
was currently holed up in one of the buildings, having her body professionally excavated to remove all traces of gluten. Dr. Rhodes murmured agreement, adding that he personally had attended to the de-
STD
ing of almost every famous musician at one time or another, and began rattling off a list. I waved him quiet between rock bands, suddenly not keen on the odds that the good doctor would keep my next actions forever unknown under the silent umbrella of patient/doctor confidentiality.

Rhodes fumbled with his keychain as we approached journey's end, the entranceway to the Marilyn Monroe Memorial Annex. No lights were visible in the building; Rhodes had given his staff the day off, and the attendants were only too happy to oblige his orders and leave their charge alone in her room.

. . . so hungry . . .

“Quiet!” I said.

We halted our walk, and I listened to the wind rattle through the brush. Rhodes and Rowan looked at me expectantly.

“Nothing,” I said, unsatisfied. “For a moment there. I thought I heard . . .” I shrugged.

The keys jingled merrily in Rhodes' fingers, playing eerie music over the wilderness. Rowan retrieved a pocket flashlight from her purse, and Rhodes finally located the correct key and slid it into the lock. The door swung open to darkness. On unspoken agreement we bypassed the light switches, letting the pencil beam of Rowan's light lead us through the reception area and into the halls beyond. There, the illuminated
EXIT
signs bathed our faces in a dim scarlet shine, lending the passageway the look of a tastefully appointed submarine on red alert. Twelve identical doorways stretched out before us down the corridor. Small wooden half-tables leaned against the walls at various spots, normally adorned with magazines and vases of fresh flowers, now bereft of toppings.

. . .
eat . . .

“Did you hear that?” I asked Rowan. She listened, then shook her head.

The room we sought lay at the far end of the passage, the furthermost point of the entire center; even in a structure devoid of any other patients, the room's sole resident was kept as far away from patients in other buildings as possible. We stopped at the door, and Rhodes pressed his ear up against the metal. From the other side we could hear a feeble scuffling, a muted chime of steel links being dragged listlessly across a tile floor.

“I zink it is fine,” Rhodes concluded, and grabbed the doorknob. I stopped him and placed my hand on the wood. I couldn't hear the voice behind the door, but a word echoed in my mind.

. . .
hurts . . .

Rowan laid a pitying hand on my arm. I shook it off and grabbed her handbag, growling, confused, digging out what I needed and tossing the emptied purse back into her arms, hitting her in the bosom.

Rowan backed away, counterfeit compassion erased as she groped for the bag in the dim. “Just get this done already,” she said, miffed. She turned and walked back down the hall, the spotlight dancing in front of her. “I'll be outside. Mr. Zombie
obviously
doesn't need my help.”

“Leave the light,” I said. She looked at the small bar in her hand and then flung it at me. It bounced off my goggles and clattered to the floor, the clamor obscene in the gloom. She stalked away as Rhodes picked the flashlight up and handed it to me.

“Are you sure you do not vant me to do it?” he asked. “I do not zink anyone vould blame you.” I shook my head. This was my fault, I'd deal with it alone.

I pulled the door open a crack, and three wasps flew out and buzzed lazily down the hall. I slowly opened the door and stepped through, tracking the beam across the room and its contents.

It was a spartan affair, the room's inhabitant clearly not one for finer things. There was no calming patterned wallpaper. There was no desk, no chairs to sit in. The one window had been bricked shut, no attempt made to blend the hasty masonry into the décor.

There was no bed, only a single mattress, its fabric befouled. Its user stood next to it, facing the wall and unhurriedly thumping her head against it. I played the spotlight around her head. Distracted from her task, she followed the beam as I moved it about, getting her to turn around and face me.

Mom had looked better.

p

After the interviews and public appearances, there was no doubt that Mom's existence had to be dealt with. Even this secretive jaunt in the dead of night was risky; the established safety zone of floor fourteen of Fulci Towers in midtown Manhattan was several states away. Taking an unscheduled break from the webcams and various devices that recorded my every move and broadcast my day-to-day activities live on the internet to whomever cared to watch — my numbers were in the millions — left me open and exposed. The trust that those around me would not leak my whereabouts to whomever would pay the most was the only thing lying between me and a date with an extra-large petri dish.

My freedom hinged on my ability to control my ravenousness; at any moment officials from the Center of Disease Control could come to their senses and have me removed from the view of society. I'd be sealed in a sterile, airtight cube of Lucite and tucked away in a laboratory corner somewhere while Nobel laureates lined up to anally probe me.

But this had to be dealt with. Rhodes had made many assurances as to his ability to keep things secret, laying out a plan to move Mom by armored van to a remote mountain spot he knew of in the Ozarks where she could be tethered within an abandoned copper mine, one mile deep. There would be no need to end things with her, he pleaded.

There were just too many ways for this to go wrong. The lawyers were artisans, but something like this could only be kept secret for so long. With Kud's political connections battling our lawyers for legal ownership of my being, we had to remove all possible ammunition that could be used against me. Mom could escape, or someone along the line could decide that the authorities might want to know about Rhodes' strange elderly patient in the middle of the Arizona desert, Eileen Funk, the quiet one, the one that never ate, the one with the skin condition, the woman no one was allowed to so much as look at. And Rhodes' determination to keep her, frankly, was too creepy even under the circumstances.

Rowan agreed with my concerns but refused to let me see to it personally until I relented and agreed to
ABC
's offer to hoof it on that season's upcoming celebrity dance debacle. Placated, she facilitated our sudden departure from the city, covering our actions with an emergency website shutdown. Anyone logging onto the site looking to watch me catch up on my reading or do my taxes (yes, I was still doing my taxes; for me, there was only one sure thing in life anymore) would find only a flash animation of a cartoon zombie coughing until his brain fell out of his mouth.
CLOSED FOR REPAIRS
would then scroll across the screen as the zombie grabbed a broom and swept the brains off to the side.

We left the tower through a freight elevator to the parking garage, where we entered a waiting nondescript sedan and drove out into the city via an exit that emerged from underneath the neighboring building. We drove to a private airfield in New Jersey where a small jet was fueling up, and then flew to another airstrip outside Phoenix.

a

Her face was slack, dumb with incomprehension. The folds of her skin drooped loosely as only the most tenuous strands of connective tissue kept her entire countenance in place. Her temple was an open wound from her poundings, the wall behind her spackled with bits of pink and gray. The once-mighty sweep of auburn hair was gone, and patches of her skin had detached and slithered off, revealing a skull stained pink with fluid. Her eyes were faded, laced with scars, the emerald pupils wholly masked with milky white games of tic-tac-toe. Two uneven cavities encrusted with what looked like tobacco spit took the place of her ears, gone
AWOL
long before. As I watched, a wasp grown fat on organic slime crawled from her ear canal and took flight. I snatched it as it leisurely bumbled past and crushed it between my fingers.

Her nightgown stuck to her body where portions of her flesh had sloughed away, bonding to her as her liquids dried and became tacky, becoming a part of her, a second cottony skin. Mom's legs were bare, and the cuff of the chain fixing her to a six-foot circle had ground its way through the meat of her ankle as she shambled around, and was gouging a trench into the bone.

She mutely opened and closed her mouth as the beam flitted across her face. In my mind I heard her groans of hunger. She was begging for meat.

They hadn't once fed her, Rhodes confessed as we made our way across the desert. Bereft of teeth (her dentures had fallen out, no one keen enough to try and stick them back in), Mom was unable to chew. She wouldn't take any of his synthetic meatshakes and had pointedly ignored the ground cadaver flesh Rhodes had smuggled from hospital morgues and medical schools. For Mom, it was fresh or nothing.

And so she stood, rotting away, mindless, empty save for appetite. Every day an aide would check in on her, make sure she was still in irons, and would then call the doctor to report: no change in condition, sir. The aide would then go home, check his online bank account for that week's absurdly hefty paycheck and leave any concerns he had about legal and moral ramifications of his actions at the bottom of a bottle of rye.

If I left her here, locked the front door and encased the entire building in concrete, would she stand in this spot forever, waiting patiently for a meal to come within arm's reach? Would she stand while her skin composted into mush? Would she stand while her organs spilled out, and collapse when her ligaments decayed to nothing? Would the brain still labor away, fresh and vital, lying in an empty skull on the ground, neural impulses firing off in the dark, no muscles to move, no eyes to see, no teeth to chew, no stomach to feed?

I removed my goggles and aimed the light at my face, seeing if there was any hope of recognition. She watched me for a moment, head tilting as if in thought. Her mouth opened, forming words only she could decipher. All I could discern of her intelligence was a mad screaming that rang in the spaces of my cerebrum. I had no response to give. I was nothing to her anymore. I wasn't even food.

My mother stood in place, swaying, expecting me to save her.

“You zee how it iz,” Rhodes said from behind me, giving me a start. “Zee differences between you and it, jah?” Mom swiveled her head around at the break in the quiet, so sudden a movement I could hear the ligaments swear and curse in her neck. A blazing hunger filled her milky eyes and she stumbled toward us before falling forward, the chain around her ankle refusing to give. Her arms clawed at the floor, and I made out a larger, thinner circle surrounding her, fingernail scratches embedded in the tile. Her mouth gaped, indecently wide. From the pits of her lungs came a thin whistle of appetite, forced out as she banged her chest and stomach against the floor in her writhings.

“Unlike you,” Rhodes continued, unfazed by the slavering hellbeast of motherdom, “it haz nuzzink in zee vay of intelligenze.” He took on a tone of a lecturer, guiding a student through the day's lessons. “I zink you are like, who iz it, Typhoid Mary? Do I haff zat right? You are a carrier, jah, but you do not zuffer zee full effects of zee infection. Vare you still haff almozt all your faculteez, it iz completely a creature of inztinct. You haff zee ability to control your hunger, jah? Up to a point, like haffing a bowel movement. All it vantz to do iz eat. Like you, it haz decreazed motor control, but to a far larger egztent. It haz very little balance, unt itz muzcular coordination is zeverely limited. I zink it may haff a damaged, um, amygdala, jah? Ziz iz why it iz zo aggreziff. And itz hypothalamuz is completely inert, vich is vy it iz zo hungry all zee time. Yourz iz broken, too, but I fix good, jah? But ziz here, ach, I cannot fix. I zink. Vizout an autopzy, I cannot be sure, I am only guezzing.