Undiagnosed

When I finally got down the steps to check on all the thrashing and banging, I was relieved to see it was in the final throws of life.  It somehow lodged its rigid, hair-depleted, head through the half moon glass window atop my front door.  The neck of the beast was tightly wedged into shards of glass and a fountain of blood flowed steadily down to my white tiled floor, establishing a swampland in the foyer.  Its blood was thicker than human blood.  The fiend was ripe with sweat from its struggle to escape and the scent filled the room.  These creatures were nearly indistinguishable from humans.  I had seen one only once before.  At the time, I didn’t realize what I had seen, but my wife, Jessica, explained it to me later. 
         SaTario told me I had until dawn to finish my work, however, his mutant foot-soldiers were nearly five hours early.  I had to get back upstairs and complete the surgery, but I surely couldn’t leave such a horrid display on my front porch.  I was fortunate already, not to have aroused the attention of my lone neighbor, further down the road.  For the time being, blood and broken glass would be hard to detect in the dark, so I resolved only to relocate the corpse.  Unless it happened on my O.R. table, I had little stomach for such gore and I feared I would not have the needed composure to decapitate the fiend if the head could not be shoved back through.  I stood before the door and ruthlessly pounded the skull.  I heard his feet rattling against the door on the other side.  I gripped him at the ears and twisted forcefully until the head began sliding out.  I felt the last of his breath on my hands, but he would die soon—I hoped.  Pieces of face tore off on the cracked glass, but I pushed harder and removed the body from my door.  He moaned while the opening door pressed he body aside.  Desperate to save time, I drug the carcass just steps from my porch, behind a bush in the flowerbed.  I was content, that even if alive, it would be immobile.  I disregarded the quality of the concealment and traveled back upstairs.
         I rested my shoulder against the doorway to my office.  I converted my desk into a surgery table.  Beside my patient, my laptop, slowly read out his vital statistics.  The room was dimly lit except for a desk lamp aggressively shining on the wounded interior of my patient.  Though I wished for more time to work, I had a strong feeling that this boy’s chance for survival had long past.  If I couldn’t save him within the next hour, there wouldn’t be any hope at all and I still hadn’t warned Jessica.
         I assumed she was resting, being that she had not investigated the noise like me.  I pushed ahead the door to my bedroom.  She crouched on the edge of the bed with a pen and a pad in her hands.  The volume on the TV blared at an unreasonable level considering the subject of the show.  An elderly man hunched over a charcoal grill on the screen, barbequing some form of pork.  While I watched her record his recipe, I grimaced at the thought of actually having to eat that meal, but I recognized I likely would never meet that destiny.  The one strap on her light-blue camisole had fallen to her elbow, revealing her chest.  She remained so intent on the television, she hadn’t noticed.  She had scolded me before for calling her hair black, but I found the alleged brown aspects of it typically insignificant.  Tonight, in the gleam of the set, it rolled down her back a truly beautiful shade of dark brown.  Her dark hair was a beautiful contrast to her light skin tone.  I lunged myself forward onto the bed behind her.  I needed one last chance to smell her shampoo and see those transparent green eyes.
         “My god!” she blurted out.  I was glad to have surprised her.  “Did you finish your work?”  I wrapped my arms around her and planted my head on her shoulder.  She brushed lightly through my hair with her fingernails.  I paused for a moment and then proceeded with my disappointing news.
         “I spoke with SaTario earlier,” I whispered.  It was a nervous, shameful whisper for I knew she would disapprove.
         “Why were you talking with him?” She maintained the nervousness that was now overtaking our bedroom.  She pinched her placid white thighs together and suddenly became aware of her partially exposed breast.  She held her fists clenched tight to the straps of her top.
         “Actually…”  I hesitated, missing greatly the moment between us which had so quickly passed.  “Bellatrina called me.”  She glanced a look of serious confusion.  “SaTario’s…” I didn’t know how to describe the relationship, “mistress.”
         “Baby, why are they calling you?”  She feared for my safety and I wished to console her with my bold plan to save her soul.
         “Their son was injured and she needed me to perform a surgery.”
         “Did you—”
         “I’m doing it now, baby.  He is in the office.”  I hated to see her eyes turn against me, so I fixed my gaze upon her legs.
         “I don’t understand this at all,” she exclaimed.  She was considering rising to her feet, but she seemed to fear the floor.  Something was lurking beneath the bed, perhaps.  Her eyes flashed across the room.  She examined the windows and the door.
         “I refused at first,” I explained, “SaTario had left him for dead, but Bella, thought I could help.  I promise I would not have done it, but I negotiated your release.”  I reached my hand toward her to pull her close, but she squirmed free of my hold.
         “So if you save him, SaTario will end the contract.”  She spoke with controlled optimism.
         “I suppose, but baby… I don’t think he is going to live.”  Her eyes seemed almost to withdraw themselves back into her head.  The pupils shrunk from an over exposure to reality.  “The accident happened two days ago, but I thought he could still have a chan—”
         “Two days!” she screamed.
         “You know how those fiends are.  Death comes upon them very slowly.”  Her head shook slowly back and forth, not believing the words I spoke.  “I’m not going to stop trying.”
         “Then I can’t see why it’s wise for you to waste time now with me.”
         “And baby…”  I placed my hands over hers and slid them free of the camisole straps.
         “I know,” she whispered back.  I said it anyway.
         “I’m sorry.”  I was only trying to remove her from her arrangement with the man she referred to as SaTario.  I was never told much, but I was led to believe there were entities living among us who were not anatomically human and SaTario was some how in control of them.  In similar fashion, our relationship was now one established on debts. 
         Shortly after I met Jessica, I was fatally wounded in a car accident.  As a passenger in the vehicle, Jessica managed few injuries.  She came to realization in the wake of the collision that my pulse had stopped.  She forwent the standard emergency procedures of ambulances, hospitals, and then, as she assured herself, a morgue.  She was thinner then and her arms less strong, but she extracted me from the car.  With aid from a reluctant bystander, she brought me to the surgical center of SaTario.  There was something in the blood of those fiends, I was to find out, that can provide immunity to wounds devastating to normal humans.
         From that point on, to finance the operation, SaTario indentured her to work his deeds.  She had always suggested it was only required of her to run simple errands, too tedious for her boss, but morally the tax on her appeared too great to derive from mild chores.  About one month before, we sat together, watching the evening news.  The lead story described a young man of twenty, brutally victimized beyond recognition for the purpose of a bizarre medical experiment and organ harvest.  It made my wife visibly distraught, which I mistook for natural human compassion.  Later that night, she confessed to me that SaTario had misled her in her assignments and fooled her into supplying him with this unfortunate young victim.

* * *

         I hovered over the boy, peering through his intestines.  I prodded inside him, stretched, and pulled at his organs.  I would have been ashamed to show these practices in front of the staff in the hospital.  My surgery here was aimless.  I poked at him like a doll, in my boredom, not for the sake of his life.  Early in the evening, I repaired the minor lacerations in his lungs.  I felt confident his breathing would return full and lively once the machines were removed.  Still, his liver was in a state of disaster.  After removing the protruding spine from it, I sutured the hole, but shortly after, it ruptured.  Slowly, his mucus-like blood, spilled throughout his open body.  I spent nearly and hour vacuuming him clean again before I could reassess the damage.  I questioned Bella thoroughly to determine the cause of the injuries.  Surgery is a remarkable challenge when the origin of the damage cannot be identified.  Claiming a lack of information on her part, Bella would not reveal the source of her son’s trauma.
         To satisfy my curiosity, I had the boy split from collarbone to the lowest point of his abdomen.  I studied carefully the anatomy within him.  The organic mechanisms of life that pulsed inside him were remarkably similar to that of humans.  The simple difference was the sludge-like blood running through his arteries and the enlarged, muscular, heart that circulated it.  He was made unbelievably vulnerable to the pathogens within my home; I did not have the luxury of sterilized air and I was taking some unprofessional shortcuts with the sterilization of my equipment.  Without assistance, the proper processes of surgery were dangerously time consuming. 
I concluded the boy was likely without any further recourse.  The left the operating room to inform my Jessica that we would be wise to pack our things and leave before SaTario came to claim the body.
         “I can’t imagine it’s going to be as simple as you say,” she replied after I suggested taking flight from our home.  “There are two dead bodies on our property; SaTario won’t be the only one looking for us.”
         “I don’t know what to do then?  I just have to stand up to SaTario then.” 
Tears grew in the corners of her eyes.  “That can’t possibly do any good,” she moaned.  She was kneeling on the edge of the bed, leaning forward towards me.  She grabbed the front of my shirt and dragged me closer to her.  “The most merciful thing he can do is kill you and then what will be left of me?  A worse fate!”  With me as a support, she rose to her feet. 
         “I don’t…”  I stopped before I repeated myself.  She wrapped her arms around me and whispered into my ear.
         “I forgive you for her, Daniel.”  She never used called me Daniel.  It had an eerie sound to it.  “I shouldn’t blame you for it; I haven’t been a good wife either.”  I felt very uneasy about the way she spoke.  I suspected next she would read me my last rights and then, together, we would sit patiently and await our eminent deaths.  My eyes held tight to her lips; they were still, but ready to be taken.  My tongue swelled and she leaned still closer to me.  As they fell to the floor, I felt her shorts slide against my leg and come to rest upon my shoes.  I was too aware of my inconvenient state of dress.  Slick with sweat, my hands clamored to grasp the sides of her camisole.  She pressed firmly her naked hips against my khakis and sunk her kiss upon my neck.  “Baby?” she whispered.  I struggled to reply, but the words couldn’t find there way to my lips.  “I want one night where I’m the only girl in the world.”  She had made such a fantastically simple request, yet I questioned my ability to properly satisfy it.  She was offering me a last chance to repent for my adultery before our probable doom or she was avoiding having a real discussion.
         I pushed her naked body off me.  “Alright,” I stared her in the eyes, “there is one thing I can still try.”
         “With the surgery?” she asked.  I spoke to bluntly to be referring to sex.
         “He needs a new liver.  The body down-stairs may not be a match, but it’s worth the risk, at least.”  She slid her shorts back up her thin legs and grabbed a t-shirt laying on the floor.  I took her hand and led her to our front porch.
         “You take the legs,” I directed.  I positioned myself by its mutilated head.
         “Oh, my God.  There’s blood everywhere,” she whined.  “I feel like I’m going to slip.”  I gripped the carcass at his armpits and attempted to lift him from the ground.  Jessica raised the legs up above her chest, but the creature’s mid-section was still planted to the ground.  Her muscled flared, but at just over five feet tall, Jessica’s delicate frame was not suited for this struggle.  We shifted positions, rolled the body, and tried everything we could to remove him from the flowerbed, but the beast must have weighed nearly 300 pounds.
         “Go get a flashlight,” I told Jessica.  She looked at me as if to question me, but turned into the house instead.  I pulled out a scalpel that I had in my pocket and cut away the clothing over his abdomen.  Jess returned quickly with the light and focused it over the new patient.  Jessica glanced quickly to the side.  I worried she had seen some one.  I heard what I presumed to be a car somewhere nearby and I was anxious to extract the organ quickly.  My first incision was flawed.  A surprisingly thick layer of fat hid below his skin.  I stared awkwardly at the body, judging the best method for surgery.
         “Do you need any help?” she asked.
         “No, I can handle this; just keep the light straight.”  My hands were not at fault; the scalpel was to blame for my trouble.  I continued to slice away at skin and fat, but the tool had grown dull.  Still, I was desperate to work quickly; I didn’t want to pause to find new equipment.  I leaned over the body and made a powerful stroke.  I gripped the scalpel in my fist and rammed it into the body in a stabbing motion.  Once I cut the skin apart, I tore away the surrounding organs.
         “What’s wrong?”  Jessica asked nervously.  She saw how my mouth dropped and my eyes focused with fear.
         “Hand me the light.”  I peered closer and saw the extent of the damage.  The majority of the organs appeared to be rotting away.  Cysts, discolorations, and ulcers filled his abdomen.  Despite these corruptions of the body, the liver would have been salvageable if not for two violent punctures caused by my own scalpel.  I had been foolish to rush my work as such.  I marched into the house empty handed.  Jessica followed close behind, whimpering.
         We were soaked in the blood of the fiend and wrapped in his scent.  Jessica left her clothes at my feet and charged up the stairs.  The blood seeped through and much of her body was stained in the darkest shade of red.  I had considered another option for the surgery early in the night, but it seemed too irresponsible to try.  I had resolved not to leave Jessica at the mercy of SaTario and despite my selfish motivation to help the boy, I wished to see him alive again.
         I entered my office and patiently prepared a series of local anesthetics.  Jessica stepped into the room, somewhat cleaner, and she held a new shirt for me as well.          
         “Thanks, but I won’t need it.”  I took a seat at the stool by the patient and began to unbutton my shirt.
         “Do you know how to save him?”
         “I think so baby, but I need you to be honest with me.”
         “What is it?” she asked.
         “I do have fiend organs, right?”
         “I don’t understand”
         “When you took me to SaTario after the accident, that’s how he saved me.”  She looked back at me blankly.  “You’ve seen my blood.  It’s just like theirs.”
         “I suppose,” she answered.
         “And I have a fiend liver as well.”
         “It doesn’t exactly work like that.  It isn’t that simple.”
         “Just answer this question baby:  If I transplanted my liver to him, would it work?”
         “It might; I’m not sure, but you can’t do that!  How can you perform surgery on yourself?”
         “If there’s a chance it might work, I have to try.  I’ll explain it to you and I’ll need your help.  Just follow my directions.”  I took the syringes I had readied and injected them just above my waist.  “With the local, I will still be able to use my arms and stay awake for the surgery, but I don’t think I’ll be able to walk.  I’ll first remove a piece of my liver, and then seal myself up.  Then we will begin to work on the boy.”  Her eyes blurred with tears and she looked like she was about to bolt out of the room at take a chance on the run.
         “Why are you doing this?” she protested.  Disruptively, she cleared a space on my desk to sit by my side.  Used tools and medical paraphernalia fell and scattered across the floor.  If needed, it wouldn’t have been beyond her to shove the body aside to make room.  “You don’t want to help me.  You know I would never have wanted this.  It must have been obvious, quite from the beginning of this project, that this will almost definitely make my situation worse.”
         “I was making an effort to help you.”
         “If you wanted to help me I might have suggested that you should just leave.  You act as though I need your protection, but you don’t even understand what from.”
         “You never tell me!  You don’t speak of it,” I shouted at her.  I averted my eyes from her ranting lips and proceeded to inject my abdomen with the anesthesia.
         “Except for the formality of our marriage, Dan, I have always been completely alone with you.  I can’t tell you because I can’t let you know exactly how indebted to me you are.  I can’t imagine any semblance of a real relationship at that point.”  She was horribly critical of my treatment toward her, but it only gave me more confidence in my attempt to save us.  She saw I wasn’t replying and continued to appeal my decision to dissect myself.  “If you want to make things even, so you can walk out or go with another woman without guilt, don’t bother.  I’ll be fine with you leaving now.”  I wheeled my desk-chair over to the bookshelf storing much of my equipment and prepared myself.
         “I’m not leaving.  If nothing else, I have a patient that needs my attention.”
         “Did she know you were married?” she asked in a low voice.
         “I don’t know what you mean.”  The tone of the question seemed rhetorical and I had no need to discuss it now.
         “Did you even give her a proper chance to object to you?  You probably took your ring off, never mentioned me, and lied about much of the rest of your life as well.”  She rose to her feet.  Her eyes fixed on the body, which I had covered completely with a sheet until my work was to resume.  “Just tell me what to do,” she replied with a mild sense of confidence. 
I directed her to her position and removed the cloth from the child.  I slowly made the first incision across my body, while explaining to her, in further detail, the nature of the operation.  The first few procedures went well, but I soon needed to reapply the anesthetic.  I was growing nauseous from the pain and dizzy from the medication.  My hands slowed down and my vision began to blur.  I struggled to give Jessica a few final instructions, but my words were so slurred even I could not comprehend them.
         


         

         It was three days later when I slowly crept out of SaTario’s truck and wobbled up my driveway.  He drove off almost before I was even out, but I didn’t expect any more compassion out of him.  My intestines burned and I kept one hand on my stomach to hold them from bursting.  In my other hand, I held firmly the contract I had made with SaTario. 
         SaTario had come early to the house, as I presumed, shortly after I began my major operation.  A surgeon himself, he took both his son and myself away and finished the procedure saving both our lives.  He had respected my effort in helping his son, but he demanded retribution for his work on me.  Again.  I had sat up in bed, barely conscience, and signed off on his terms.
         On the ride home, SaTario made clear my first assignment.  In the coming days, he planned to expand his experimental surgery practices and I was to be his direct aid.
         A new window sat in the frame in the front door and a fresh layer of mulch filled our flowerbeds.  Jessica seemed reluctant to greet me.  I crossed through the doorway and she hesitated to take my hand and lead me to a seat.  I slipped the contract into my pocket.  It was my own fault for these proceedings and she did not need to be worried further.
         “How are you feeling?” she asked.  She wasn’t questioning my health exactly, but whether or not I was still human.
         “He says I’ll be fine,” I answered.  We chatted for a short time about her activities over the last days.  I avoided any questions about the surgery or SaTario and I think she understood.  I soon expressed a desire to rest and she assisted me up the stairs.  I peered into my office on route to the bedroom.  Some one had cleaned and organized the entire room.  All my equipment was moved out.  I was curious to know where it went, but it wasn’t the time to ask.
         She rested beside me in bed for nearly an hour.  I was nearly asleep, but she continued to speak to me about the common nonsense of our lives.
         “Do you think you’ll be out of bed soon?” she asked me.  I groaned and rolled over to see her as I responded.
         “I actually, planned on just going to sleep now.”
         “I mean, in a few days.  Just because, I could find some one to look after you if you needed.  I have to run some errands on Saturday and it may take a little while.”
         “I should be fine.  I’m supposed to work Saturday too so-“
         “Did you call the hospital?  Cause I didn’t tell them you’d be ready to go back so soon.”  She seemed surprised that just days after a major operation I would be called back to work.  I did my best to make sense of it.
         “Yeah, I spoke with them.  It’s just some administrative stuff.  It isn’t real work, but I do have to go in,” I explained.
         “When did you call them?”
         “I called in—”
         “Because they called here this morning and never mentioned anything about that.”
         “I don’t know; it was kind of mentioned in passing so I’ll have to speak to some one again about it.” 
         A strange look grew in her eyes.  The skin upon her face tightened and her jaw clenched.  “What did he make you do?” she screeched.  Jessica pulled the blankets off me and threw them to the floor.  She straddled me with her knees and examined my body.  She grasped my shirt and tore it up to reveal the bandages.  “Where is it?” she cried.  She dove at the pocket of my pants and crammed her hand down inside.  She fell back from me with force, emerging with the paper in hand.  Her body slunk off the bed, as she read, and onto the floor.  She planted her back against her dresser and silently, motionlessly, stared at me, as if I had done something terrible.  I anticipated a yell, but she spoke to me calmly.  “When were you going to tell me?”
         “Honestly?”
         “Yes, honestly!” she belted out, “For just once in our entire relationship I’d like you to be honest with me.”
         “I didn’t want to worry you.  It was my fault and I’ll deal with it.”
         “So you weren’t going to tell me?”
         “I guess not.”
         “Because you’ll deal with it.”  I didn’t answer.  Maybe I wasn’t supposed to solve this problem alone.  Had I asked Jess about helping SaTario’s son, she never would have let me and this situation would have been avoided.  I had made her suffer so much I felt I owed it to her to resolve something without bringing her into the unfortunate details of it.  She crumbled the paper and threw it at my head.  She walked to the closet on the other side of our room and shuffled around some clothes.  When she rose, she held a large file folder and tossed it at my feet.  “Maybe, I should be more forthcoming too, Daniel.”
         I read carefully the first page.  Employer: Dr. Stephen Andrew Tario.  It was a W-2 for a doctor’s office.  I flipped to the next pages.  It much resembled the contract he had handed me that morning.  I noticed the section where “length of contract” was described.  The original date began approximately the time of my first accident as she had alluded.  The completion date was crossed out and a reference to another page was scribbled in.  I turned through more pages to find it.  Apparently, SaTario had been in contact with her, during my incapacitation.  He had extended her contract along with mine, for nearly ten years.  Names of men and women filled the final pages.  I would estimate 50 or more.  Beside the names were strange symbols I did not understand.  At the bottom of the list was the name Michael Stenson and this Saturday’s date was placed beside it.
         “I’m sorry, Daniel.  That may be a little vague.  I’ll save you from your shock this weekend.  SaTario isn’t a fiend doctor or whatever I told you or you may think.  There are no fiends… not really.  When you go to work for him, you will be mutilating a perfectly healthy person to satisfy his disgusting curiosities of anatomy.”
         “And the patient—”
         “Victim!” she yelled at me.
         “The victim is Michael Stenson?”
         “Yeah,” she answered.
         “Who is he?”
         “I don’t know.  Probably no one special, but he still deserves a fate better than what he’s gonna get.”  Her body looked depleted, even more so than mine.  This civilization of modified humans seemed too desperately like a fantasy.
         “Well then, do you want to take my car Saturday, to get him, since the trunk is bigger?” I asked.  I regretted making the comment.  She was visibly distraught over the ordeal and I was making light of it.
         “Yes, thank you,” she said simply.  She picked the sheets off the floor and climbed back into bed with me.  I lifted my head and my eyeballs pulsed, as I rose.  Against the current of the covers, I forced my feet to the floor.  After half a step, I found myself better off crawling and reached the threshold of the closet.  “That’s all I had in there, you know,” she said calmly.  My activity, didn’t concern her, despite my physical state.  She stretched to fill the space I left on the bed.  I grabbed the object of my search and pulled it into the light of the room.  I was going about my work awkwardly, taking from the closet, random, but potentially appropriate garments.  I didn’t mean to initiate the discussion myself, but it was concerning to me that she had no response.  I turned to see what exactly she was concerned with and she had silently transplanted herself directly behind me.
         “What’s with the suitcase?  Are you sending me somewhere?” she asked.  With a look of distaste, she removed the last sweater I had packed and tossed it back into the closet.
         “I’m probably not in a good position to do this, but I have made another decision for you.”
         “Oh excellent,” she said with confident sarcasm.
         “You’re leaving.”  She didn’t reply, but motioned subtly for me to elaborate.  “This isn’t a way for anyone to live.  And if nothing else, I want for you to be at peace with your behavior,” I said.  I finished with eyes concentrated on the folder.  I broke her response and continued.  “But I need to ask you.”
         “That would be?”  She was acting so distance, but still, I could never recall I time I felt she was more at ease with me.
         “Well, do you want me to come with you?” I asked.  She elevated herself to standing and I followed slowly.
         “I suppose,” she answered.  Her lips were split and she pressed to conceal her exposed teeth, but her smile had overwhelmed her previous composure.  It was a heartless reply, but remarkably sincere.  I leaned in to kiss her and consummate our pact of departure.  Her teeth met me on the nose and with a laugh; she pushed me back to the bed.  “Rest a little.  I’ll pack your things.”

         
         


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