Vanity Kills, page 5
They know each other.
All too well.
Jack is stunned. Frozen in the doorway. He wants to flee but Tate is behind him, like a sheep herder corralling him into the room.
“Is this,” he’s shaking so violently he can’t even get the words out without stuttering, “i-is this some kind of fucking joke?”
There is a pause before the seated doctor takes off his glasses and folds them into the breast pocket of his white lab-coat. He leans back in his chair. His face is time-worn and fatherly. His graying hair is thick and full, trimmed recently, his eyes are deeply ringed with thin streaks, depicting the harsh cruelty of father time.
He’s aged exponentially in the years since their eyes last met.
Jack’s anxiety is through the roof. He wants to cry just looking at the old man.
“I assure you, Mr. LeBlanc, this is not a joke.” His voice is serious and dry, but something about him seems soft. He raises his craggy hands like someone being robbed. Like he’s about to say: Just put the gun down. No one has to die.
“What is this?!” Drool is forming on his tense lips, his jaw clamped tight. He looks like he’s about to erupt.
“This is a trial.”
Tate watches the scene closely, her brunette curls bobbing as she swishes her eyes from one man to the other. She pats Jack on the shoulder and he flinches like she just punched him. “Mr. LeBlanc, please, just have a seat and hear him out.” Her voice is calming, but Jack just can’t fully comprehend the man before him.
“This is so embarrassing.” Tears flood his eyes as all foolish hopes of normalcy vanish from his mind. He can’t stomach the face before him. He sniffles, choking back a wave of emotion. “I didn’t know.” His hands shake in his lap. The sudden feeling that he’s in trouble washes over him.
“I knew.” A soft smile spreads onto Walsh’s face and his tone shifts to caring. “I recommended you for this.”
Jack is speechless at the admission. His eyes finally drift up to Walsh’s, searching for some level of comprehension in this mess.
The old man continues, “Dr. Lauden in Baton Rouge has a massive anti-aging study going on. It’s been impossible to gather enough volunteers for this and we need damaged tissue. The more serious the initial disfigurement, the better the results will look to the board. And, well,” he trails off, knowing Jack catches onto what he’s inferring. “I’m an old colleague of your regular practitioner, Dr. Hounsman. A few weeks ago, I asked him to put in a good word about this trial with you.”
Jack’s voice turns venomous. “You... what?”
“I’m going to level with you, Jack. I’m desperate here. The phases of these trials are lengthy. There’s so much red-fucking-tape, excuse my language, and I’m getting old. I want to see Obsidian change lives while I’m still here. I knew that, despite my issues with you, the extensive amount of tissue damage you suffered, and all the grafting, would make you the absolute ideal candidate for this trial.”
“You can’t possibly be serious.” He scoots to the edge of his leather seat, one that matches the upholstery of the exam table in the main room almost exactly. “Why would I ever–”
Dr. Walsh cuts him off with a holler, “Lauden’s got me over a barrel! I had to try. I’m already scraping this together as it is, self-funding this damned thing out of the legal settlement.”
More like blood money, Jack thinks.
“Without the minimum required volunteers, this all falls apart. Years of work–”
“Absolutely not. You tricked me into coming here!” Jack growls, starts to stand. Walsh does the same, hand outstretched and splayed in a panic.
“Mr. LeBlanc, please just–”
“It’s Jack, alright?” He screams, pounding a scarred fist on the oak desk, forcing the files and papers to jump. “You didn’t have any problem calling me Jack on the stand. So don’t bother being formal now.”
“Jack,” he obliges, taking a breath to bring the tone of the heated conversation back down to a calmer level, “your hesitation is noted and understandable. I never meant to trick you. Frankly, if I saw myself sitting here, I’d want to walk out, too, okay? I get that. But here’s what I’m prepared to offer you. After the procedure today, we won’t have to see each other outside of the daily exams. They’re fast. You’re in, you’re out. Boom. Done for the day. Just a mutually-beneficial interaction.”
Jack starts to stand again. “I’m out of here.”
“I’ll double your pay if you stay.”
“No way. This is... crazy.”
Jack is brushing past Tate when Walsh hollers something that makes him stop in his tracks, eclipsing the doorway.
“I can make sure that you’re not a control patient!”
Silence.
No one moves.
He continues, pleading calmly. “It’s not a double-blind study.”
Interest piqued, Jack turns around to face the old man. “Does that mean… what I think it does?”
“It means,” he sounds breathless, standing to address Jack respectfully, “It means you won’t be receiving the placebo. You won’t be wasting your time. I can fix you.”
The last six words mean more than a million dollars to Jack. The very idea that he can be fixed at all brings a glimmer of hope to his hardened heart. Even though he doesn’t believe the words Walsh is saying…
He wants to.
More than anything.
“It probably doesn’t even work.” He sounds distrustful.
The look in Walsh’s eyes changes in an instant. Jack sees it. Walsh is truly excited, giddy even. “Oh, it works. Trust me.” He starts to come around the desk, approaching Jack with newfound excitement. “Think about the good this could do! Think of this as a chance to restore, to give something positive to the world that you’ve taken so much from.”
The power of what he’s saying is like a waterfall, pounding down on Jack. The old man is playing into his guilt and it’s working.
After a moment, he opens his mouth again, this time with hope and excitement, “Jack, this is finally your chance to give something major back. To redeem yourself.” He grits his teeth as if the words pain him. He relaxes and smiles again, his light-colored eyes locked, unblinking, onto Jack’s. “This is an opportunity for balance and equilibrium.”
Though Jack wants to run so far and fast that he forgets this place exists, those words cut straight to his soul. The only thing he wants more than to be away from Walsh right now, to be hiding in his apartment, is to make things right. To make that fateful day that changed so many lives hold meaning. To change the horrors he could never have before imagined, into a positive act of selflessness.
Still shaking, Jack lowers himself back into the blue chair, gaze still locked on Walsh. Finally, he looks down at the floor, the cowl of his hoodie engulfing his head like a hungry blue whale.
Walsh slides some paperwork across the table and clears his throat. “Before we begin, I need you to fill out some standard surgical forms so I know all allergies and family history to clear you for the procedure.”
Jack pulls them closer to read them, blinking through the tears flowing from his unmarred duct. He raises his head, stares at Walsh like a child, “Do you have a pen?”
A pleasant smile spreads across Walsh’s wrinkled face and he nods, plucking one from beside the pile of stacked patient journals and sliding it carefully across the glossy finish of the desk toward him.
12
Though he knew what the consent forms mentioned about the procedure, they were just words on a page. Things were always so different in reality.
As Jack tried his best to relax back into the clinician’s chair, the situation he found himself in drifted into the surreal. A man whom he feared, and more importantly, one who hated him, hovered over his exposed torso, stripped of his shirt, pants, and all-too-comforting blue hoodie. Bare to the world. Laid bare to a person who he knew, deep down, wanted him dead. A man who said so, years ago, directly to his face. Spitting those words, bleary-eyed and in pain.
Now he had the opportunity to make Jack feel pain, too, albeit, in a way that would heal. Unlike his own.
Walsh’s bristled chin, covered in salt-and-pepper stubble, undulated in waves beneath the angered clenching of his jaw as he prepped Jack. Finally, he spoke.
“Eileen, can you roll over the nitrous and the tray table with the gauze pads, please?”
“Certainly, Dr. Walsh.”
The way she said his name was respectful. Eager.
In a flash, she has them both by the chair.
“Go ahead and administer the first dose, if you would.” He motions to the locked safe on his desk. “He gets bottle A.” He glances back at Jack and injects. “Non-placebo.”
Though it should, his wink doesn’t put Jack at ease.
“Who gets the placebo?” Jack’s voice is almost imperceptible.
Tate chimes in, “while it’s not a double-blind study for us, I’m afraid we cannot give out medical information for the other participants in the trial. We can only discuss yours with you. What matters is that you won’t.”
She offers up two, tiny, paper cups. One has a singular, shiny, oblong black pill at the bottom. The second is filled with an ounce of water. He hesitantly pops the oval into his mouth and holds up the cup.
“Nostrovia.” He mutters, cheering her with the second cup before washing the pill down with it.
Walsh speaks up over the rushing water as he scours his hands with a soapy scrub brush. “Obsidian is formulated to leave all healthy or healed tissue intact; therefore, any areas we wish to target will need to be surgically re-opened or scored. Basically, we cannot heal what isn’t injured. I got the idea from cancer itself, oddly enough. You see, your body has these things called T-cells, or T-lymphocytes. When you get hurt or sick, and they’re working correctly, those cells come to the rescue and start fixing wounds and aiding the human immune system until repaired. But, once in a while, those T-cells won’t turn off. They just keep going until they wreak havoc and develop abnormalities and tumors. Some start attacking the skin. Then you’ve got cancer.”
He turns the water off with his wrist and runs his hands under the Dyson blower. The neon-blue lights up his aging hands. He pulls them away and stares at Jack, pulling a set of fresh gloves over them. His eyes lock on Jack like lasers and he speaks in a tone that is gravely serious. “When something tries too hard to heal, and doesn’t know quite where to stop, it can be a very bad thing, you see.”
Jack nods as if he understands, but he’s not sure he does.
“Disastrous results.” Walsh adds, with a tense nod. “Well, what I’ve developed here is something like artificial T-cells. Only these know exactly when to stop. When I injure the old tissue, it will attack with a vengeance, healing the tissue until it’s fixed, better and faster than your body ever could on its own.”
“How does it know when to stop?” His eyes have grown large, like a deer, as Walsh tugs down a circular overhead light, illuminating the scars scrawled across Jack’s torso like wavy desert terrain.
Walsh laughs. “Now that requires a more complicated answer but I’m afraid its time to get started. This procedure is going to take a little while. Due to the severity of your burns, I would like to offer you the option of nitrous oxide. It’s what dentists use to put you out for a procedure. I think it’s the best call for the pain because the topical is still going to be awful with this severity. You’ll feel a little groggy after, but–”
“I’ll do it.” Jack nodded and held his hand out for the nitrous mask. Walsh hands it over and Tate helps him seat it securely over his mouth.
As Walsh turns it on, he leans in and speaks over the hiss of the excreting gas. “There is going to be some discomfort after the procedure, but I’ll do everything I can to keep that as minimal as possible.”
Jack nods but he notices Walsh isn’t looking at him. Not quite. He’s staring through him. For just a moment, before Jack drifts off into hazy nothingness, he gazes into the old man’s serious eyes. Eyes that, before today, he hoped he’d never see again for the rest of his life. In them, he did not see optimistic hope or the dream of creating a better future for the world.
No.
Instead, the last thing he sees before going under is fueled hatred, burning brighter than the fire he’d once been swallowed by.
13
Kate was beside him. She was healthy.
And alive.
She smiled. He reached across the upholstered chasm between them and touched her face. She felt the stress of the family dinner radiate from him. His jaw tensed like a rock. His fingers went back to gripping the steering wheel, locking hard at ten-and-two.
She caressed his inner thigh and he stared forward, unable to think of anything except the disdain he held for his new in-laws. Inheriting them was the only downside to asking her to share her life with him. The snarky comments Kate’s decrepit father made replayed in his head. Especially, his lecture about how a shrimping boats was a terrible investment for his son-in-law to have made. He spoke of how the job wouldn’t pay enough. BP oil spills. Polar caps melting. Shoreline erosion. Rising water temperatures and blah-fucking-blah. Droning on as if he knew every damned thing. Sewing seeds of poisonous doubt.
And Kate’s mother – the cunt – had something shitty to say about every petty-fucking-thing from the clothes he wore to the immediate lack of grandchildren.
Tick-tock-tick-tock. Time, she’s up, Kate. Where’s my fucking grand-baby?
His knuckles whitened as the conversation rehashed in his head, along with all the clever retorts he only wished he’d thought of in the moment.
Kate slid her hand further, stroking him through the fabric of his jeans. He felt a tingle, a pulsing that grew as he felt the vibrations from the metal teeth as his zipper lowered. His stiff cock throbbed when he saw her lower her head to his lap, flashing him that sly little grin in the rear-view that she always gave when they were about to fuck.
He stared out at the brilliantly-colored sunset, one that painted the sky a blend of moody magenta, tangerine, and hot pink.
The ancient silver SUV rattled down the gravel path, overhung by thick southern foliage, lined on both sides by dry brush. He felt Kate take him in her warm mouth, felt the pressure and resistance from the soft tissue in the back of her throat as she slid all the way down until she physically couldn’t take any more without choking. He felt a drug-like rush of ecstasy pulse through every vein in his body, head light from the sudden blood rush.
He glimpsed his own eyes fluttering with pleasure in the mirror. They struggled to stay open. His lips parted with a gentle moan, one that drowned out the noise of the wet strokes below. He snaked his fingers through her raven-black hair and gripped it softly, guiding her head down further, diving deeper.
Suddenly, a dog raced into the road – that goddamned catahoula. Kate’s head still bobbed as she struggled to take more of him inside of her in the cramped space.
“Shit!” It was all he could mutter in the moment that changed his life.
He whipped the wheel to avoid the mutt, over-correcting wildly.
The tree came fast. Almost out of nowhere. Unavoidable.
He hit it square-on without ever having tapped the brake. Without even having the time to employ a knee-jerk reaction. The thick trunk of the oak didn’t even seem to rock at the crushing force of all the twisted metal forced upon it.
He swore he heard a scream, echoing through the otherwise-silent backwoods. The noise the impact made was something he can never forget, no matter how much he wants to. It is a sound that will snap him from the comfort of sleep for years to come.
He was discombobulated, fumbling blood-caked hands through a sea of gleaming, white airbag. He heard the trickle of broken glass, like some million-shard waterfall, as he dug below to unearth the hellish nightmare.
A few yards away, the catahoula watched from a patch of scorching dirt, staring with judgemental eyes. As if the dog could say through telepathy, “I dare you to look in your lap, you prick.”
He did look down. He wished he hadn’t.
There’s hair in his lap.
Raven-black. On a head that was no longer moving.
What was left of his wife’s skull was a mangled, bloody mess. He felt a death-twitch in her throat which was still wrapped around him like a starving python swallowing thick prey. But he couldn’t move her. She was fused to him by the crushed-in dashboard, skull pinned in place by the wheel.
He tried to pull her up, tried to inhale through the tears and shaken panic to get her head on the right side of the wheel. To get her clamped teeth off of the base of his cock.
But she was still.
It was a stillness like something irreversibly-inanimate. A thing. No longer a person. He felt blood rush down her face and swore he felt an eye, no longer in the bony socket where it was supposed to be. No longer inside of her head.
He stared out the window and erupted in the scream of all screams, a noise he didn’t think himself capable of.
A scream that woke him from his nitrous-induced slumber…
14
“We’re all done, Mr. LeBlanc.” He feels the smooth skin of Tate’s palm caressing the back of his unblemished hand. He can’t see her, but he can hear her. “You were screaming. It’s okay. You’re okay.” Her inflection is zen-like, like a yoga instructor. “I know you’re probably feeling pretty groggy right now, so just relax. The procedure was a success. The doc bandaged you up really well. Everything went smoothly. You’re going to be pretty sore but as soon as you’re feeling well enough to stand, I’ll take you back to the house.”
He nods, making her out through the blurred vision in his unbandaged eye. He tries to utter something but his tongue feels lazy, and he knows it will just come out as gibberish, so he stops.
“He had to get pretty close to your eye so for a day or two he wanted to keep the whole eye bandaged. There is a printout of special shower instructions that I’m going to leave in your room that you’ll need to adhere to for the next two or three days, until the injuries sufficiently scab over. But it’ll be over before you know it.”
