Thirteen Specimens (30 page)

     Retracing my path, I  had crossed half of the lot’s span when I heard a vehicle coming up behind me. It was not at all unusual for cars to cut through the various lots of the derelict factory as a shortcut to reach this street or that street, sometimes escaping the traffic tie-ups in the center of town on a busy Friday afternoon like this one. But as the vehicle passed me, at a discreet distance from me, I looked up to see that it was a white truck with colored lights across its roof, like those of a police car. Though there was no identifying seal or such on the passenger’s side door, I knew that this was the security vehicle that Marsha had mentioned. Inside it, I caught a glimpse of an older gentleman with white hair. When he met my eye, he raised his hand in a pleasant little wave. For a moment there I had been so alarmed to see his vehicle that when he simply waved at me, and drove on by without asking me why I had been gazing up at the chimney, I gave him a relieved smile and a wave of my own.
See?
I thought at him...
I’m just a dad taking his baby for a walk
.

     I couldn’t help feeling, though, that he had in fact seen me gaping at the brick tower...and had very deliberately come out of wherever he had been lurking to make his presence known to me.

     “Oh God, this is terrible,” I said to Grover regarding the pain in my skull, quickening my pace. I was even feeling nauseous from the agony...

     I was able to nap briefly, but it barely dimmed the pain, so I swallowed my seventh and eighth pills of the day and took a package of frozen corn out of the freezer to hold against my forehead. In addition, I stepped out onto my front porch to breathe in some fresh air, the interior of my house always so stifling and stagnant, the suffocating stink of claustrophobia.

     It was a windy night, and actually almost chilly; one of my white plastic lawn chairs had blown over and I almost tripped across it as I stepped outside. I righted it, and as I straightened up I could hear even from this distance the wind moaning across the top of that cell phone tower, like a giant blowing into a flute. I could also hear a train rumbling along that track which ran parallel to the newly paved access road.

     I stood out there for only five minutes or so, pressing
my impromptu ice-pack to my cranium, and was about to turn back inside to vegetate in front of the TV again when my eyes were drawn to a movement in the night sky. A wash of gooseflesh rippled over my skin. I was certain that I had seen a very bright star shoot to the right before it became stationary again. For me, it looked as if the star had only moved, oh say a foot, but of course out there in space the distance might have been light-years for all I knew. If what I was seeing were a star, it was impossible. If what I was seeing were a star...

     I stared at it for five full minutes, but it didn’t shift again, nor did any of its neighbors. At last, reluctantly, suspiciously, I went back inside. I triple-checked that I had locked both the hallway door and the inner door behind me. So I sextuple-checked, actually.

     After an hour and a half of TV my ice-pack had become less than icy, while my headache had regained in intensity. I glanced at Grover, up too late in his little plastic rocking chair. “Jesus, this is too much...I have to call the doctor tomorrow, I have to...”

     I pressed my palm against my forehead in a useless gesture of comfort, and what my hand met there gave me a jolt. I was then springing to my feet and scuffing into the bathroom fast in my slippers.

     “Oh my God,” I muttered, looking into the mirror of the medicine cabinet. There was an egg-like lump directly above the bridge of my nose, a hard swelling tender under my gingerly probing fingers. “Oh my God,” I whispered again. I decided an appointment with my primary care physician would not be soon enough – I must go tonight, right now, to a hospital emergency room, however much I dreaded the ride to the city and the wait I would doubtlessly endure before I could be seen.

     I survived the ride, drank a coffee and watched TV in
the emergency ward waiting room, my eyes too pained to read a magazine. After an hour of waiting here, I was ushered at last into a room – where I waited an hour more. Finally, my doctor arrived. Though he was in his scrubs and a white coat, he wore thick dark sunglasses. My first, irrational thought was that he might be blind, though logic and his actions indicated that he couldn’t be.

     “And where was this lump you felt?” the doctor asked, kneading my scalp, then my forehead. His breath smelled strongly of coffee, with alcohol, I think, underlying that.

     “Right here...in the middle.” I pointed to the bridge of my nose. I wanted to tell him to take those dark glasses off.

     “Hmm...nothing there I can feel,” the doctor mused.

     What was he saying? The lump had been like a cue ball grafted onto my skull. I brought my own hand up again, brushing against his sleeve, and felt the region for myself.

     The man was right. The lump had utterly vanished.

     “It was here,” I stammered. “It was big...”

     “Did you hit your head? It may have just been a contusion, that went away...”

     “No, I didn’t hit my head. This thing was big...it was...
big
...”

     “Umm...not anymore.” The doctor removed the purple rubber gloves that he had donned before touching my apparently virulent skin. Unconsciously, though, at least I hoped unconsciously, he fingered one of the finger holes. “Maybe it submerged into hiding, huh? Moved to another spot?” He smiled, but saw I wasn’t smiling. Thankfully, he threw away his gloves. “Did you know that physicians used to think the uterus traveled around throughout a woman’s body? And that this was the source of a woman’s emotional or mental disturbance? Hence the term ‘hysteria’.”

     “Hm,” I grunted. But later, as I was walking to my car in the hospital’s lot, I felt around other parts of my head for that tricky, elusive lump.

     I arrived home late, and utterly exhausted, but at least with the disappearance of my “contusion” my headache had dissipated at last. Though I was feeling better, I still wasn’t up to the task of picking up the litter that the wind had blown onto my property in my absence – mainly, a long shroud of cellophane that clung to one of the porch’s support beams, fluttering in the air like a specter. Another sheet of this material had draped itself over one of my untrimmed hedges like a huge, quivering soap bubble. I put off gathering them up until tomorrow.

     With my nausea having mostly subsided, I was able to eat a little something before I put Grover and myself to bed (I’d left him in his rocking chair, with cartoons playing on the TV). I no longer slept in the bed I had shared with Pam, instead stretched out on the sofa and buried myself in a nest of blankets in want of laundering, drifting off in a soothing blue bath of cathode rays.

     I fell asleep watching a program on the Holocaust, and dreamed of sad, withered bodies loaded into ovens like cordwood. The bodies were not nude, however, instead dressed in powder blue coveralls like prison garb, or the uniforms of laborers. Also, the people who fed these bodies into the furnaces wore expensive black business suits, not Nazi uniforms, but when they were done they goose-stepped away in a neat line. I heard a child crying beyond one of the thick metal hatches, and I came out from behind a pile of scrap wood and heaped dolls (at least, I think they were dolls) where I’d been hiding, pushing Logan’s stroller ahead of me. I went to that metal door to let the poor wailing child out. In bright red letters on the door, which was set into a wall of brick like a giant kiln, were the words: DOOR 4.

     But I pulled and pulled at the door’s latch futilely, unable to budge it...

     And when I happened to glance down at Logan’s stroller, I saw that its blanket was unraveled, a red baseball cap resting atop it – Grover himself having disappeared.

DOOR 5

     The lump had come back. Resurfaced, I should say. But rather than being situated above the bridge of my nose, it was up at the top of my forehead, on the right, at the edge of my receding hairline.

     Did you know that “sarcomata, if allowed full progress, may attain great size”? I read about this in
Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine,
written by George M. Gould and Walter L. Pyle in 1896. I had a copy from a 1982 reprint. Among the book’s countless harrowing photographs and drawings were some examples of lipomas and fibromas, and sarcomas of a rampant size that one would no longer expect to see in these modern times. One pendulous “lipoma of the parietal region” hanging down from a man’s face in a great teardrop was over three feet long, and had dragged his ear a third of the way down its length. One man with a “sarcoma of the nasal septum” looked like an amphibious alien, his nose a broad rectangle of flesh, his right eye pushed around to the side of his head. A cauliflower-like mass of meat covering a young man’s left eye was a “hypertrophic tumor of the scalp and face”. And an especially alarming photo showed a five-year-old boy with a huge glistening blob sprouting from his left eye socket, coolly termed an “epithelioma of the orbit”. Maddeningly, the book didn’t indicate the boy’s fate, if he had survived his condition or not – one could not tell from his staring, gaping face in the photograph if he were alive or dead. The growth looked almost as big as the boy’s head, and had reached that size in only a few months.

     Immediately upon waking I had decided to explore more of the sprawling Odyllic site today; specifically, I wanted to venture down that access road again, and get a close inspection of the building I had viewed beyond the rusted gate that I had stopped just short of passing through. Discovering the hard swelling at my hairline, though, gave me a little jolt of panic. As I fingered it, I struggled with whether or not to see a doctor about it again. There was no tenderness, and I didn’t have one of my headaches...so ultimately I decided to wait and see how it looked, and how I felt, later. My intentness to explore returned at full force. I embarked with my stroller.

     The sun had just risen above the horizon, and caused a fluffy white contrail to blaze against the pale blue sky. Despite the early hour, airborne vehicles had been busy; through the rooftops I could see another contrail, and I heard a helicopter in the distance.

     When I reached the little conference building, the neighborhood’s houses had fallen behind and I had a clearer view of the sky. Its spectacle made me stop and stare. The sound of the helicopter faded away off in the direction of the woods.

     Three airplanes must have recently passed across the sky in three different directions; one diagonally this way, another diagonally that way, and a third parallel to the horizon. Or had it all been one plane, crossing and re-crossing the sky? Whatever the case, the three contrails intersected, forming a perfect triangle. One of those rearing cell phone towers blocked the configuration a bit so I moved further ahead to see the triangle from a better vantage point. From this angle, the triangle was perfectly situated – framed – between two of the four cell phone towers. These were silhouetted against the sky, each tower with a triangular crown, like idols raised to this heavenly manifestation – high-tech Stonehenge. The contrails were slowly drifting apart, but for the moment in this dawn light they glowed like a hot brand pressed into the sky’s pallid flesh.

     A steady, cool morning breeze moaned across the top of one of the cell phone towers.

     Something occurred to me, and I turned to look directly behind me. I faced that plate glass window through which I had seen the man floating in the flooded room. The sign in the sky seemed to have been perfectly aligned for someone in that chamber to view.

     On an impulse, I looked around my feet until I found a rock at the edge of the miniature parking lot. I tossed it in my palm a few times, gauging its weight, getting its feel, before I wound up and hurled the stone with all my force at the window.

     The rock bounced off, the glass too thick for the projectile to pierce, but it did leave a nasty spider-web on the surface. Partly exhilarated, partly horrified at my actions, I glanced all around me to see if there had been any witnesses, shoving the stroller ahead of me in a near jog. Fortunately, I saw no one. Fortunately, no alarms had gone off. But I hadn’t dared pick up the stone and try a second time. I could only hope that if the room should be filled again, the pressure of the fluid would burst through that weakened point. I pictured the glass shattering wide, then, and the man slipping out like a newborn infant in that gushing discharge. I imagined him flopping, convulsing, suffocating in the air like a fish.

     They would know it was me, I was sure of it. Not some mischievous neighborhood kid, but me. Well, let them come, then. It was too late to take it back. A line had been
crossed, a window cracked, a door opened...