Strange Brain Parts (2 page)
Can't fool me, Susie. I almost finished grade twelve biology twice. I know the brain can't feel no pain because it ain't got no nerves. Do what you want, slut. I ain't gonna feel any of it. I'll float in the black. Maybe sing myself a song or two.
"Just you wait, Stevie. You're gonna wish I didn't ask the Doctor to keep your brain alive. You're gonna wish I flicked the switch just now and killed you. You're gonna wish a lotta things and none of them are gonna come true. You're gonna suffer for the things you done. You got some time to think about that now."
It goes quiet. Susie ain't saying no more.
I go to thinking. Thinking here in the black.
* * *
I figured out a few things while sitting here in the black.
One thing is the difference between love and hate. Way I got it figured, hate is killing because you want to and have the urge to make murder. Love is killing because you have to, because there ain’t no other choice.
That might not get me into any textbooks or anything, but I figured it out all the same on my own. Not a bad piece of philosophy, if you ask me. As true as rain in dark clouds. Least, it has been in my experience.
A while ago I started thinking on me and Susie. We're twins. What they call "fraternal twins". That don't happen too often. Makes us closer than other brothers and sisters.
Everything was good between us until we were fifteen. Then Susie talks to some guidance counsellor asshole and nothing was the same again. Next thing I know me, Dad, Mom and Susie are talking to psychologists and shit. No one ever brought up the words "incest" or "rape" but that's what they were thinking. That’s what they were saying without saying it.
I got given drugs and a lot of talking to. Telling me that what I wanted to do with Susie was wrong. Got to the point where I almost believed them. They just didn't get it no matter how I explained it. Yeah, Susie put up a fuss most times and I had to threaten her or beat a bit every now and again, but that was all part of our relationship.
Them doctors and psychologists didn't see it that way. I got about six months more in a "juvenile rehabilitation centre" until I started telling them what they wanted to hear. Once I told them what they wanted to hear long enough they let me go home with some prescription that I just flushed down the toilet every night.
Not that it mattered. Susie's door was always locked and her bedroom window had a bolt on it. Besides, I knew if I bothered her at all I'd be back in for "observation". I left well enough alone.
At the weekly sessions with a psychologist I acted normal. Smiled lots when talking about school and girls that caught my eye. Even pretended to have a girlfriend for a short while.
Don't feel like thinking on that no more.
Floating in the black. Lots of time goes by.
I start telling myself stories. Create this whole world in my head. Gets so I can start picturing parts of it and the people that live in the world. Takes a lot of concentration, but I ain't got nothing but time to do just that. Getting lost in my own mind.
Then, one day, Susie's voice says out of nowhere, "Frankie Junior died this morning, Stevie. My baby is dead."
That was all she said.
I didn't think it was possible, but the black started getting blacker. Then there was nothing. Not even a thought. I figured she must've thrown the switch and shut my brain off.
I floated. Floated deeper into the black.
* * *
Susie sits me in front of this huge mirror most times when she ain't got nothing to do with me.
I guess it's supposed to make me think on how hideous and deformed I am. Make me feel regret or suicidal or something. Staring into the mirror. This ugliness staring back at me. At first it might've bothered me, but now it don't mean much to me at all.
It's been a few years since Susie got Doctor Frankenstein to transplant my brain into the body of her and the monster's dead baby.
Just like Susie said, this body is fucked right up. The head is all mangled and looks like it got smashed on one side by a truck. Most times I drool this green, snot-like saliva out of my mouth. It dries pretty fast, crusts up and flakes off in no time. I can't tell if the spine is twisted or what, but I can't move the arms or legs. Sometimes I can get a finger to twitch, but that's about it. All day and all night long I sit in this wheelchair in a body I guess I accidentally made.
Pretty amazing what a few kicks in the right place will do, if you ask me.
Didn't damage many nerves at all. I still feel hunger, get headaches, twitchy legs from time to time and, yeah, I feel pain. I feel it whenever Susie wants me to feel it.
There's what Susie calls "the sessions.”
"I think Stevie needs a session," she'll say and then roll me to this room with the huge mirror.
Me sitting in front of this mirror ain't a session. It's a "time out" according to Susie. When I'm supposed to sit here and think about what I've done, or some shit.
I don’t think much of anything. I do what I did in the black. I tell myself stories to pass the time. I ain't about to sit here and piss and moan about the body I got or regret the past. Can't change neither, so why fucking bother?
The sessions, though. They get pretty bad.
The last session was about twelve hours ago and my foot is still numb and bleeding from where Susie was turning screws into it. Not completely sure whether she removed them all or not.
She always does this alone. The fucking monster is never in the room while she's performing a session. Usually he comes in afterwards and cleans me up a bit. Stitches the cuts together and shit. Doctor Frankenstein used to do this, but he died last year, so the monster took up that chore.
The monster ain't been back to clean me up yet. Dumb fuck. Just like a monster.
Then again, the last session was the first time the monster did two things. It interrupted the session and it fucking spoke.
"Nuh-no, Suh-susan," it said, through the open door of the session room. "Nuh-no more."
Susie looked up from the floor at the monster and stopped doing whatever she was doing with the screwdriver. She didn't say a word. Did nothing for about a minute and just stared at the monster. Her face looked different. Like a Susie I didn't know. Like she was totally crazy or something. Quiet, but crazy all the same.
"Puh-p-please," the monster said. "N-n-no more."
Susie got up and left the session room with the screwdriver in her hand. The monster looked at me for a minute, and then turned and followed Susie.
I've been sitting here ever since.
After Doctor Frankenstein died Susie's had to be careful about what she does to me in sessions. There's no one around who can replace an eyeball or sew a finger back on. She's had to use screws, nails and needles more precisely. She once came into the session room with a medical textbook to look up the best places to poke me.
Damn good textbook. I ached for days afterward.
You'd think people'd notice all the scars and stitches on this body, but with a monster you expect that kind of thing, and when you see it you don't pay any attention to it. Just another fucked up monster to normal folk. Just ignore it. Monsters are like that. Happens to them all the time. Besides, Susie and the monster don't ever get many visitors that'd ask questions anyway.
There's a noise.
I look in the mirror and watch as the monster slow-walks towards me. About time you came to clean me up, you retarded piece of shit.
The monster drags a chair over to me and sits down. There's dirt all over it's hands and jacket. Maybe something mixed in with the dirt that looks like dried blood. Can't tell for sure. It's eyes are all red and there's crusty shit dried under the bottom lids.
"Suh-susan, is d-d-dead," the monster finally says. "Sh-she committed suicide."
No more time outs. No more sessions. If there was a new body for my brain waiting outside the door my day would be complete.
The monster sits there staring at me for a while.
"I th-thought she wuh-would work out her hate on you long before n-now. I cuh-could not watch her d-destroy herself by destroying yuh-you any longer. The h-hate had gone on long enough. T-too long. It wuh-was destroying all the g-good in her.
"I duh-don't know," it says, then stops to make series of grunts. Like it was clearing its throat or something. "I d-don't know if it was wh-what she was d-doing to you, or if it wa-was wh-what you had done to her in the puh-past that made her take h-her own life.
"Muh-maybe a bit of b-both.
"Muh-maybe these s-sessions duh-destroyed the good in her m-more than it inflicted pain in yuh-you."
It looks at me with glassy eyes. Tears running down its cheeks, and says, "Nuh-no more. My father, my son, and my wuh-wife are all d-dead. N-no more...nuh-no more suffering. Nuh-no more pain.
"Buh-being what I am I u-understand these things too wuh-well. I, luh-like Susan, c-came to accept p-pain and suffering as...as...normal. The buh-best a person like me and his l-love could find in t-this world.
"I kn-know this is not so. I kn-know it should not be so."
The monster pauses and sighs a breath out of its ugly lungs. I smell the scent of decayed flesh. Dead lungs that shouldn't be working. It's completely repulsive. I want it to shut the fuck up, fix me and go away.
"I buh-buried my father. I b-buried my wife a few hours ago. I nuh-never got to bury what was left of my son."
The monster puts it's ugly hands on either side of this head. It's easy to get a good grip because it's all mangled. I feel a bunch of pressure in my skull. I clue in real fast. The monster’s going to crush this head and smash my brain.
It pauses and says in a voice clearer than I expect, "The last time I kuh-killed you it was because I huh-hated you for what you were. I do this now f-for a different reason. One I do not believe yuh-you would understand. I am sorry. This is the only way I know how to end the pain and suffering. Please forgive me."
The pressure builds and then relaxes. The monster sighs and weeps pathetic tears.
I figure the monster just doesn't have what it takes to go through with this. It's looking into my eyes. It's seeing the face of it's son. I just know it is. No way it's going to go through with this.
It's seeing the only thing he and Susie created together. It's remembering all the times they laid in bed together and talked about having a son. It's seeing a million things he and Susie said to each other over the years. The promises. The hopes. The dreams. All that romance shit.
The monster don't see me at all. I'm sure of that.
And I know, just by looking, that the monster doesn't have what it takes to end this. The soulless bastard doesn't have what it needs in it's heart.
The monster proves me wrong.
I don't know how we got on the subject, but all of a sudden we were talking about aliens. Even Stetson Joe, who normally sat in the corner by the old Betsy Rocker jukebox feeding it quarters all night long, got in on the conversation.
It was probably after two in the morning and all the regulars were in that night. The only stranger was some guy sitting at one of the booths. He did nothing but stare at the tabletop like it was some jigsaw puzzle he was building in his head. He’d been in for an hour or more, regularly getting a refill about every twenty minutes.
Of course, I’m behind the counter supposedly working, handing out donuts and coffee and such. On the midnight shift there isn’t much work to do except that. Unless you count shooting the shit with the regulars a form of work. It isn’t so much to me, but that doesn’t mean I won't take a pay check for it all the same.
"Some guy in Hotash County found three head of cattle all cut up and mutilated in his field the other day," said Buford. He's a guy so big that when he sits on a stool the seat disappears and it looks like he's balancing on a toothpick out of his ass. "Police ain't saying, but I know it was them aliens what done it."
"You don't say," I said, refilling Cindy's mug.
"Ayup," said Buford. "Ain't the first time this happened, neither."
Cindy winked at me and splashed a dose of cream in her coffee. In polite conversation she'd be known as a “woman of independent means”. This being a truck stop in the middle of nowhere, where being polite meant not butting your cigarettes out on the floor, Cindy was commonly known as the local whore.
All the same, to a single guy who ain't getting any, a wink from a decent looking prostitute was enough to put a smile on my face and send a little charge down south.
"What'd these alleged aliens do to the cows?" asked Cindy.
"Chopped them up with lasers," answered Buford. "They cut off their family jewels and burned a hole the size of my fist where their butt hole was."
"Lord Almighty," said Stetson Joe.
"What the hell would an alien want with a set of cow's balls?" asked Cindy.
"Rocket fuel," said Buford.
"Could be a midnight snack for them," I said.