Needles & Sins (17 page)

“What’s the occasion?” I laughed, and pulled at the velvet ribbon with my teeth. I couldn’t very well hold and open it easily with only one arm.

Impatient, she reached over and pulled the lid off herself. Digging through the white cover of tissue, she pulled out a flesh-colored, rubbery bag of skin and held it up to my face.

“Try it on,” she begged. I could hear the water from the upstairs bathroom dripping in steady splats on the worn carpet of my frontroom. My will to build seemed to have been lost with my arm and my eye, and so the hole in the ceiling remained. The water had taken to draining steadily through the ceiling, onto the floor and running in a black wet stain to the corner of the front room, through the drywall into the flowerbed near the driveway. The wall was covered with the thin fuzz of mold, totally rotten. It would soon no longer support the french windows I’d installed.

I’d fix it, I promised. Just as soon as I’d had my arm put back on.

Not yet, she begged. Another month or so.

I stood still, blinking blearily at her through my one good eye as she pulled the rubbery mask over my face. My flesh tingled as my new face found its comfort point and settled tightly on my skin. When she was done, there were dark rims around my field of vision, but I could see her through the hole that settled over my one good eye.

It seemed to grip and mold almost perfectly to my face; I could feel its eyebrow raise when I wrinkled my own.

“What do you think?” she asked. “It’s the latest thing—custom facials.”

She leaned back on her elbows and appraised me, orange eyebrows raised like peaks of flame. I responded with an arch of my own; she had removed the weight this week, anticipating spring, and seeing her lounge lasciviously supine on the bed was almost like seeing a stranger naked for the first time.

“I think I look like your ex,” I said, noting the wart on the right upper cheek and the swarthy complexion of my new face. I’d seen plenty of pictures of her with him. In some of them, he even had all his limbs. My stomach lurched.

“Don’t be silly,” she cooed and pulled me from the mirror to the bed with my good arm. “You can still walk.”

She stroked my cheek.

“It’s made from permaskin, the stuff they use on burn victims. If you leave it on for a day or so, it will fully bond with your skin and actually use your own blood supply to survive. “I had this one made just for you.”

“For
me
, huh?”

“Kiss me,” she said, spreading herself wide for me and pursing cupid bow lips dyed red as plums. A trail of newly pocked bellybuttons arrowed from her revitalized breasts to her burning bright pubes. Bellybuttons—lots of them—were to be this summer’s fashion statement.

I leaned forward, favoring my armed side and trying to avoid clumsily falling atop her as I pushed my tongue through my strangely puffy new lips to meet the fruit of her mouth.

Her eyes sprang open at my insertion between her moist lips, glittering with the telltale seagreen starbursts of Seduction Surgery. They sparkled in the dimmest of light like a prism. I had tried to tell her that she didn’t need that to seduce me…I’d fallen for her—for
her
…but she hadn’t listened. Maybe it wasn’t me she wanted to seduce. She pulled me down to her and ran her fingers along the smooth skin of my severed arm.

“Oh Ned,” she whispered, staring into my mask, forgetting herself as she ran desperate hands from my new facial wart to the empty socket of my eye to my limbless shoulder. “I’ve missed you so.”

She pressed me to the bed and I cried as she made love to a man I had never met. I cried for a long time when she finally pried the mask of her first husband off my head.

That was the year they revealed the sham of Sallee Regeneration Technique, much to the dismay of thousands who’d removed arms, legs and eyes for fashion. A class action suit helped, but certainly didn’t undo the damage. I have my arm and eye back again, but the arm hangs like limp rubber, and the eye rolls to left and sees only shadows. The ghosts of truth.

I kept the tattoo; I am forever now her creation, and wear her brand like a symbol. A symbol of selflessness, for I have truly lost my self.

I left Regina the house; her modifications had destroyed it just as thoroughly as she had ruined me. But I can’t lay all the blame at her feet. She called me perfection but asked me to change. And I did. Without thought. Without thinking about what support beams I was breaking inside my bones, and my soul.

I live now in a small apartment, and struggle to find the means to survive. I may never again be ready to build. I was made for her, but she was making another.

I was a carpenter with a full heart and a head of plans.

But now my heart is dry, a fluttering shrapnel-shorn skin.

My house lies in ruins, its beams rotted and broken.

I was a carpenter.

But all of my blueprints have faded.

And Regina…

She’s building a new man now, and lives in his mansion up the valley.

She’s had the Metallion Treatment. Her skin gleams like polished brass and her hair is now truly made of spun gold.

She says it’s perfect.

And he’s perfect.

They’re made for each other.

But perfection never lasts, if it exists at all.

— | — | —

It was never so sterile. So polished.

So bereft of life.

The old frame house once sighed with his tortured breath, spoke with his aching lips, stumbled from thunderstorm to snowfall with his unsteady feet.

No more.

I move from one room to the next, noting the forest green granny-square afghan folded neatly on the back of the second-hand couch, its cushions, (for the first time?) perfectly fitted together. The thick, dripping grease spots have been wiped away from the small orange and brown tiles above the Donna Reed-era Amana gas oven range, the sloppy spaghetti stains painting the wall by the garbage can scrubbed down to faded shadows. I can see the patterns in the yellowed linoleum. Bundles of daisies. Given Mac’s and my inattention to housekeeping, I’d never seen the flowers before.

The family has come, has cried, has cleaned, has gone.

Leaving me. The caretaker. The tenant.

For now.

And there is only one more thing to do.

Mac said he was only lying down for a nap on the perpetually rumpled couch. Those were his last few words to me. His breathing had been labored all week, and I worried. “Go down to The Last Chance later?” he whispered the question, and I nodded. He grinned a small grin and slipped off his heavy glasses as he curled into the cushions and afghan on the couch.

Nodded at me.

Caught his breath.

Wheezed.

And was sleeping.

I left the room, figuring to wash the car. While it was a gloomy shade of overcast in Mac’s living room with all the heavy hand-me-down curtains drawn, it was 85 and sunny outside. Out there, life was dancing. In Mac’s house, life moved slower, if at all. Maybe it was the smoke, or the low light. Or Mac. But sitting in his living room was like being trapped in a bubble of amber. Everything was still, and stained in sepia.

When I came back into the house an hour later, wet with sweat and stray hose water, Mac didn’t stir. I went to the bathroom, rinsed my face and arms, combed back my hair, and then pulled on a fresh shirt. The house was quiet. Nothing too strange there. Mac didn’t go for loud music, and only clicked on the TV at night. But this felt different, even so. At first I put the sense of stillness down to the absence of the screams and laughter of the kids outside, running through sprinklers and shooting at each other with water guns that looked like they’d come from a SWAT armory.

But no, that wasn’t it.

The absence, the stillness in the house was a missing constant—that sighing whisper of air trickling in and out of Mac’s lungs. The ever-present wheeze that meant Mac was at home. It had been the background soundtrack to my life here these past six years, for if Mac wasn’t with me, drinking away the pain at The Last Chance, he was here, wondering how it had all come down to this. From a gentle mother’s arms to the edge of the hard Chicago streets to the arms of another woman and her kids and then, not. Loneliness. Only this small house at the edge of a roughed up and left behind farm town with a migrant worker as a roommate and a minute-to-minute struggle just to breathe.

“Life is a bitch,” he’d often said to me in a low voice at the edge of a slanted smile.

“Then you die,” I’d answer.

He’d squint back at me, take another sip and nod.

“Then you die.”

The first time I met Mac was on a barstool at The Last Chance. He was emptying a tall can of Old Milwaukee, and flirting with the bartender with the shadowed eyes. Those shadows came from lack of sleep; she put in time as a receptionist at the Feed Store to make ends meet for her three kids. Still, she humored him, laughing and patting his hand as she emptied the ashtray that had filled up near his right hand.

“In your dreams,” she answered some off-color comment of his, rolling her eyes.

“And what exciting dreams those must be,” I said, edging my way into the conversation with a compliment to her. Never hurts to flirt with the barkeep—she’ll pour better for you.

“What do you know of my dreams?” Mac growled and turned away.

Strike one.

“You’re a man. You have the same dreams we all have.”

A glare from the evil eye. He started talking to the woman on the other side of him, a haggard thing with long painted nails and a mouth that stretched from ear to ear. She looked 70 but was probably really only 45. He showed me his back and said nothing more.

Strike two.

I finished my whiskey in two slugs and left the bar—and Mac—behind.

I was new to town then, having slowly worked my way down from well-paid insurance suit in Chicago to minimum wage bag boy at the last two-horse town 20 miles north. Seemed I couldn’t cure the itch in my soul, and neither could the bottle. I began seeing Mac almost every night at The Last Chance. Where else was I gonna go after a day working the fields? Sweat and forget, that was my new motto.

One night not long after my first brush with Mac, I pulled up a stool next to him and ordered a Seven and Seven. Mac turned his head to gaze up at me sideways, one eye open, the other squinted near-shut.

“What you wanna do with a highbrow drink like that,” he said. “You gonna drink at this bar, you order some Jack Daniels straight up, or have Ginny pull you a beer.”

Ginny had stopped to see my reaction, and I shrugged. “Is a Jack and Coke acceptable?”

“Suit yourself.”

From that day on, I was Mac’s barstool buddy. And eventually, housemate.

There was no funeral.

Mac wouldn’t have it. He wanted cremation with no ceremony whatsoever. The family compromised and laid him out in a box to wake for one night. Some people probably wanted the chance to say goodbye, they felt; and they were right. The family was amazed at the turnout, but not surprised when the bulk of the bodies walked straight down the street to The Last Chance afterwards.

I found one of my old Chicago business suits that almost still fit for the occasion, and stood sentinel by the casket as nurses and waitresses and rummies and friends from his growing up days in Chicago streamed by the body. An old flame with a fake eye that was downright creepy if you looked too long probably cried the most. Word is a knife fight with the man who’d been with her before she’d came and went on Mac had taken half her sight. I wondered if she still had phantom sight on her right side, like when you lose a finger but still feel its presence on the end of your hand. A high school buddy holding 40 extra pounds in his belly who probably wished he could slide his beard up
above
his forehead helped her away from her increasingly loud casket-side conversation with the dead body.

But mostly, none stayed too many minutes, or cried too hard. Many were amazed he’d lasted so long.

His face looked like softly brushed wax, his fingers molded in plastic. That thin brown mustache made him look a downright dapper mannequin lying there in his brother’s suit. He’d never owned one of his own. You don’t need a suit to drink at The Last Chance.

“It’s so sad,” his family members murmured, talking in whispers in the back of the room. “But it’s for the best,” they reasoned. “What kind of life did he have? When you’re that far into the bottle, what kind of dreams can you have left? He’d drowned them all out.”

I stifled a sad smile and turned away. If they’d only known; it was the dreams that sent him to the bottle, not the bottle that stifled them. And no matter how hard he tried, he’d never managed to drown them out.

Nobody sent flowers to Mac’s wake. One plant sent over by the local Christian church marked the head of the casket, and I watched it walk down the street with the family, when they left Mac’s body to be burned. Their cars were packed with salvaged items from his dresser and cupboards. Memory holders, keepsakes, pictures. The solid imprint of his life on the world, dispersed with more transience than his dreams.