Saturday

  In the liminal place between not awake and awake, in the in-between place between life and death. There was a menace in the poking of skin, connecting the insides of a person with the outside world, potentially mixing the two in a way that wasn’t meant for survival, but for dark things, evil things. Shaking his butt in the same spot like a worm, Barry got rid of the tape and painfully pulled himself with one hand on the cliff of the table to roll on his side. He couldn’t stay lying on his back like a corpse before an autopsy like that. His eyes fell inside the orangey ones of Terence the cat, the color of embers.

  They had met before, unbeknownst to Eugenie White, and thankfully Terence didn’t have any words from the human dictionary to testify about this encounter to his owner. “I thought you were locked in the bedroom, little friend” Barry blew some air and closed his eyes and, when he reopened them, the animal wasn’t there anymore. He was probably losing his marbles.

  One thing that made him nervous about not having opted for an actual hospital was the amount of physical suffering he would have to endure, which would have found a very simple solution from modern medicine in an official place with real doctors and real medicine cabinets. But not here, he swallowed hard, scared shitless. How long would he be able to handle that? He knew that people died from this kind of predicament.

  He needed to focus on something, stop his thoughts from being disordered by the pain. It was a well-known phenomenon that for sentient beings, imagining pain was as much painful as, if not more painful, than pain itself. What was that sentence? Thinking about pain was like worshiping the pain. For instance, if a person was strong enough, they could identify that their discomfort came from one dot on the body, and that there was no need to make a bigger fuss about it or about some other displeasure. Nerves were not carrying fire or fiery ice more than the brain was, or something like that.

  Barry wasn’t sure. It was a bit late to teach himself this meditative approach, he saw, so he tried to think. Where could the members of his team have disappeared to? He lost track of time overlapping scenarios and theories, confused by the pain, distracted by his anguish, had a vision of Eugenie White dressed as a scary Halloween nurse. In the vision, she was creepy as in, ominous, threatening, not slutty like the high school girls when they dressed up for Trick or Treat. He smiled at her.

  “Why are you smiling?” the vision asked

  “JESUSCHRIST I thought I was dreaming” Barry was shocked by the sound of his own voice. His vocal cords seemed to enjoy a very new direct connection with his entrails, and forming words with his mouth now tugged at his abdomen with some fingers made of flames. “You look like a horror movie nurse”

  “I was going for just nurse, to be honest”

  “You are b b bback” She smelled like soap, rubber, from the gloves she was wearing, and like, burned wood, she smelled like pine, her face hidden behind a thick white mask. She had covered her hair with a thin towel rolled up in a ball and her chest with an apron. The font of the apron said 1984. Was it the year of her birth? Something also smelled like boiled water in titanium. Barry gagged from the assault of all the various scents.

  “You’re okay?” she asked him

  He blinked several times with perplexity from that question, chose to ignore it, “What’s going to happen now?”

  “Now, I uh… I—” Ms White planted her gloved hands on her waist, looked up at the ceiling.

  “You don’t know” he smiled at her in the most non-judgmental manner possible. She was the one with the tools.

  “I… I… well, Barry, there isn’t any easy way to say this: I need to fetch that bullet that hit you”

  His heart skipped a beat “Nooo” he whined, “maybe like, tomorrow”

  “Barry”

  “Nooo”

  “You think I want to do this?”

  “I know” he said sadly.

  “No I didn’t mean it like that, sorry” her eyes on top of the mask filled with sadness, “I’m happy to help Barry, if I can be of assistance for someone like a superhero who puts his life at risk every day and gives so much to the communi—”

  “I get it I get it, Ms White” he sniffled, rubbed his nose with the ample sleeve of the jacket she had dressed him into.

  “The time we waste talking about it, I don’t know, it’s not good”

  He nodded gravely and felt two thick tears escape from the corners of his eyes, shook his head to hurry their fall.

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  She went on: “listen, I have a plan”

  “Are your hands trembling?”

  “Yes Barry what do you think? I’ve never done this before!”

  He nodded again in what he hoped would be an expression of sympathy, “it’s alright I… totally trust you” He lied.

  She nodded in turn and they nodded to each other in silence for a good twenty seconds. “How is your pain level right now?”

  “High”

  “I mean, from one to ten, how is it”

  “Eight”

  “Eight” she repeated, trying to draw some conclusions.

  “Eight thousand”

  “Okay give me a minute” she seemed on the verge of a meltdown, “give me a minute”

  He did. There wasn’t much he was looking forward to in his immediate future anyway. Barry watched her pinch the bridge of her nose and close her eyes, tilt her head down. Only able to see her eyebrows and her hairline in the middle of all the white color, he watched her quietly, forced the smells coming out of her into his nostrils. Fetch that bullet that hit you. More tears dug into his sinuses. His fear was afraid itself. In the distance, he could faintly hear what either was a strident police siren or a choir of high-pitched children voices. Take all the minutes you wish, he thought.

  Eugenie emerged from her reflection and grabbed something on the side. She looked ready “my plan is, look, you were right earlier, I’m going to turn on the television volume very high, just in case you” she located the remote control for the huge black rectangle above her fireplace in the middle of the mess that had been dropped and smashed from her table, “you uh… shout or yell”

  “Scream?” Barry asked in horror

  “Cuss, express yourself, motherfucker this, motherfucker that” She pressed a button and the welcoming page of her programs opened on the screen, “be my guest, it’s always uh” she browsed through her current queues, “good, to let it out, you know?”

  “Ru Paul’s Dr— Oh, is that Real Housewives of” Barry said

  “No comment”

  “That’s a lot of r r r reality TV”

  “And what is your secret guilty pleasure you like to watch?” she asked him, smiling in good spirits. Barry had forgotten how much her eyes smiled when you couldn’t see her mouth.

  He faintly smiled back ar her, summoning the energy to match her effort, “now why ww w would I tell you that”

  “Let’s agree, if you survive, you will tell me” she lifted the bottom part of the sweater he was wearing like a little blanket. Before he could react to the if, she added: “listen… put your hands on the sides, cling to the table and… in the meantime, you can bite on this” She tapped his nose and chin with a gloved finger and inserted a thick paintbrush inside his mouth. He tasted the cedar wood and gagged more. “After I am done, hopefully, I will give you something”

  “Fvainbfiller?”

  “Something to sleep”

  “Faffever”

  Suddenly, the sound of an episode of the Real Housewives of Georgia climbed from damper to deafening. Barry heard a female voice with an Atlanta drawl complain forcefully to the camera, ‘if you work at my restaurant, I don’t care how many of those waiters are your exes, you have to serve those dishes, sweetheart’

  “Alright Barry no fear” Eugenie’s eyes shone with what he could clearly see was monstrous fear. She wriggled a small scalpel in the air and leaned over him. A man opposed, ‘Susan thinks Ashley and I are hooking up in the restaurant, that makes me want to vomit’

  “Ho fveaf” Barry repeated

  “Think about something nice”

  “Foheffffing niFUUUUU” Her first incision cut deeply into him and his eyes bulged out of his head so as if to flee the danger zone.

  “Stay still, please” she maintained her hand in a firm position while holding him down as strongly as she could with her left arm on his chest, “it’s not gonna— BARRY”

  ‘You have been caught on camera, you idiot!’ Susan continued to quarrel

  ‘Susan, you know well that Warren has copied my haircut after he saw my last head shots, that could be him!’

  “Barry, don’t bend your legs DON’T B—”

  “I’mfowwy” Barry shook his head and spat out the paintbrush, “I can’t breathe with that thing in my mouth”

  “You will bite your tongue BARRY TRUST ME. Hold. Still!” she replaced it between his teeth “I’m not fucking around Barry. I know you can handle it, okay?”

  “Ih ffhurf foo huuf”

  “YOUR FEET Barry control your feet please, I’m making progress, here NO don’t let go off the table, deep breath in, ready?”

  The deep breath in burst halfway through Barry’s nose and throat, he was tasting some new blood and something salty, but the air that Eugenie White hoped he would gather and inhale was ablaze. The wringing out of the middle of his body into what felt like a small burning dot made it impossible to breathe and, now, his nose was getting runny from crying like a little bitch. Barry was immensely depressed and tortured, “fihihed?” he asked desperately.

  On the show, Ashley was denying everything too, ‘oh my god, I would rather shave my head than date Allen’

  ‘But we are talking about Warren here, not Allen’ the interviewer remarked, followed by a sad saxophone jingle.

  “Hang on” Ms White brought one of her knees on top of the table and hunched evilly above him with a mission in her eyes, which were quite impressive since they were presently the only visible part of her face, “just hang on”

  “Ih fohha faf fout”

  “It’s alright Barry”

  “Hou unheffhanv he?”

  “I’m guessing, wait a minute, COME ON”

  She plunged the scalpel under his skin again and Barry closed his eyes, abandoning himself to a stream of departure, ready to give it a wrap, not able to separate the parts of the sentences coming out of the television into their own substantives, everything becoming a puree with some Southern inflections and the sounds of silverware clicking against plates.

  Somewhere the feeling of being cut like a slice of quiche in the center of his stomach became very vivid, dancing in front of his shut eyelids, and he couldn’t be sure he still had legs and feet anymore. There was just a black hole there, throbbing and sucking the rest of him down to mother earth, to the polished fiberboard of the table under his ass, to the floor of the flat, to the ground but further and further into the mantle and the core of the planet. Somewhere the feeling of dissociation was replaced by the possibility of merging with the planet.

  One nanosecond later as if to confirm his concern, mother Earth’s gravity did call him nearer and the table finally broke in two, under his weight and from the brutal shakes and punches he had been inflicting to it. “DAMN” he shouted, watching Eugenie White ascend above him before he landed for good at her feet in a fabulous fracas. And, just before he blacked out, his eyes intercepted the shiny reflection of the ceiling lamp on a tiny piece of metal at the end of her pincers. He heard, ‘my restaurant, my rules’