Sinister Extremity, page 4
On weekends he dedicated more of his time and energy to video games and hard seltzers. He felt a deep hollow void in his heart that it seemed nothing could possibly fill, and regularly prayed that he wouldn’t wake up, and Mr. President would eat his body before somebody came to ask him to pay rent and noticed the smell, whereupon they would rescue Mr. President and give him a loving home with big clear windows overlooking a wide open space occupied by plentiful birds.
One evening in late October, soon after his heater had been replaced, he got home from a productive day of cutting off his left hand just in time to avoid a torrential rain storm. The sky began to fall almost as soon as he got through his front door, and soon there was a newly formed river running down his street that began to work its way under the front door of the building. He heard the water running in the hall and opened his door to see how bad it was, and he found that all the water was luckily pouring down the basement stairs before it could reach his door, resulting in a waterfall cascading down the steps. Griffin did not venture into the basement often because it was unfinished and held only a few utility meters and spiderwebs between the grimy floor and the ceiling. As he stuck his head out to look at the indoor waterfall, he was struck by the strong smell of sewage wafting up, then retreated back inside his apartment to comfort Mr. President.
Griffin felt so tired.
The morning after that, he opened his bathroom door and noticed it had difficulty passing over the swell in the floorboards where the door now scraped over the rise. He assumed that the combination of the water heater tank spilling and the heavy rains were responsible for the warped wood. He assumed it would get better on its own.
The next morning it was worse, and he nearly sprained his ankle as he stepped on the swell he’d forgotten was there while making his way to the bathroom in the moments after waking up. As he sat on the toilet, staring out the open bathroom door stopped in place by the swollen hardwood, Mr. President sauntered up and sat inside the boxer briefs around his ankles. While in this position, he filed a maintenance ticket with the property management company to come and take a look at the floor.
The next day, the same mumbling man who had spilled the heater came back and told him that he must be mistaken, because the floorboards had always been like that. Griffin said that he used to be able to easily open his bathroom door all the way, and the man said that was interesting, and left.
Griffin kept hoping it would get better and it kept not getting better. This continued until the day he came home to find every other apartment empty and the cleaning woman glaring at him from the window.
On that day, Griffin heard persistent thumping from upstairs, and when it stopped he watched through the single stripe of undiffused window as the cleaning crews exited the building and dumped several large black trash bags in the front courtyard. He realized, then, that for the very first time in his adult life in the city, he was entirely alone in a building. Needing to make sure that this was actually the case, he went upstairs and knocked on the doors to see if anyone was there to answer, and nobody was. To his surprise, the doors had been left unlocked, so he went exploring within the hastily-abandoned units. As he tentatively stalked through empty rooms, his heart pounded with the giddy exhilaration of getting away with something, a feeling he hadn’t known in too many years, until he was standing in the same spot that he had seen the cleaning woman standing in earlier. He looked outside at where he had been standing and saw the vague figure of somebody looking at him from the shadowed sidewalk. The man staring back was too dimly lit to make out in detail, but from the age, build, and skin tone, the guy looked like he could have been Griffin’s brother.
Suddenly paranoid, Griffin ran out of the apartment and back down into his own, where his adrenaline got the better of him as he tripped on the swollen floorboards and scared poor little Mr. President, who scurried under the bed as Griffin slammed into the ground. He lay on the floor for a minute catching his breath and gathering his composure, though he felt convinced that someone would soon be pounding on his door to arrest him for illegally entering the other apartments.
Nobody came.
Once he calmed down he realized that his brief adventure had left a large fresh trail of blood that would make what he did extremely obvious to anyone who saw it, and he needed to clean it up. He figured that the landlord would be able to figure out the source of a trail of blood that appeared after the cleaning crews left and led directly to his door.
He’d only been home for about ten minutes.
He applied gauze to his left wrist, tied it on with tape, and put the whole situation into a yellow rubber glove that hung limp and empty. The other glove actually got his right hand in it, though, and so he used it to grab his bucket and put the mop in the crook of his left elbow to go upstairs and destroy the evidence.
Ten minutes later he returned to his apartment, fresh blood coming up easy enough, and yet again forgot about the bump in the floor, which he tripped on, spilling the bucket directly over the bump, and he went to catch himself on the wall, but forgot his hand wasn’t there, so he landed on the ground again in the enormous spreading puddle of dilute bloody water.
His rice cooker sang a little song to let him know it had completed its task, but it would coast on warm mode for a while. Griffin got up from the soaking floor, used the mop to halfheartedly push the remaining water into the bathroom, and threw his clothes into the tub, where he turned on the shower to wash them and himself at the same time.
After the shower he changed into black sweats and a worn out old t-shirt, figuring it was not the time to put on any clothes he would prefer not to get covered in blood. He popped open the rice cooker, letting the fragrant steam escape into the room, and went to open the cabinet to grab a plate, which he again failed to do because he did not have a left hand, which he was still not used to and really needed to get fixed ASAP. He poured seasoned vinegar over the rice and sat down in front of the tv with the entire machine clutched to his torso as he proceeded to eat it unadorned with a soup spoon. On the TV he loaded up a ten hour compilation of burl lathing woodwork videos set to royalty-free bossa nova music. Mr. President hopped up next to him, sniffed at his stump, meowed in concern, and curled up next to his leg, waiting for the moment the rice cooker would vacate the lap so he could usurp its throne.
After wolfing down a pile of almost completely unadorned white rice, Griffin decided he needed to relax from his very bad no good day before he even considered starting to apply for work or solve problems of any kind. He had no friends and his life had contracted to a pinpoint and the only thing visible through the pinpoint had vanished. Also, because of the whole hand thing that just kept on being a major problem, he couldn’t play anything that required any quick reflexes in terms of actual button presses.
In the greatest epiphany of his recent life, he found the solution. Deciding it would also be a good idea to get some exercise in to lift his spirits, Griffin taped the motion sensor controller to his left stump and loaded up Real Pro! Boxercise Motion, wherein he followed the instructions onscreen to deliver rhythmic combos of jabs, hooks and uppercuts while pleasing sounds played and cool lights flashed whenever he did something correctly, which was the most positive reinforcement he had received at any activity in months. If not for Mr. President he would throw himself off a building.
After tiring himself out, he had a strong craving to have a quick drink or twelve, but figured that it would be a bad idea to consume a great deal of a blood thinning vasodilator with a large open wound. By the time one part of his brain finished making that argument against it, he had already consumed six ounces of freezing cold vodka and the room was starting to spin.
4
Griffin awoke the next morning unsure of when he went to bed or what time it was at present, but it wasn’t like he had any appointments to keep today, so he laid in bed for a while, trying not to let any thoughts enter his pretty little head. Mr. President, who had taken up residence on his chest, was very pleased at this development, at least until he got hungry and started pawing at Griffin’s face. This caused Griffin to stagger up and out of bed, meander towards Mr. President’s bowl, and fill it with kibble while the cat exclaimed in delight. On the way to the bathroom he managed to trip over the bump again, remembering its existence a fraction of a second before his toe caught it, but this time he managed to catch himself with the other foot before he fully ate shit. He realized it was still getting bigger.
After he pissed he decided to check the utility closet to see if the new water heater was somehow leaking into the floor already, but upon inspection it was still appeared as pristine and intact as day one. Upon a more thorough examination, there was still nothing wrong with the heater, but he did find the curved farrier’s knife that the man with the round glasses and the olive jumpsuit must have mistakenly left behind after knocking over his toolbox in there.
Griffin put the knife on the counter and tried to see what would happen if he stood on the bump with all his weight, and the answer was almost nothing. The boards squeaked a little, but there was otherwise no discernible effect whatsoever.
It occurred to him that with so much accumulated water, bloody and otherwise, having seeped through his floorboards, there might be visible water damage in the basement, and he might see some way to address the damages from below before anybody had to come and start cutting floorboards out.
First, though: breakfast. Griffin was mildly hungover and needed food to help even things out, so he headed to the fridge to check the inventory. The fridge contained a block of tofu, two 16-ounce cans of cheap beer, a nearly empty half-gallon of soymilk, one small bottle of orange juice he’d taken from work when he’d been full after lunch, a cucumber, partially cut, with the exposed end shriveling, a small container of braised shredded cricken, a pickle jar with one whole dill pickle floating alone in green brine remaining, his severed left hand, mustard, and a squeeze bottle of mayonnaise. Griffin ended the pickle’s misery, washed it down with soymilk, shot some mayo straight into his mouth, opened a beer, and tried to think of what he could do to get his left hand reattached.
Without the job, he didn’t have free access to regenerative cooling gel, and his health insurance had ended upon termination, so he had to either finance the reattachment directly somehow or immediately get a new job that gave him extremely good health insurance. The meager funds remaining in his checking account would vanish in seconds without the strictest discipline.
He decided to start a GoFundMe first, since that could coast along while he was looking for work. He had never had to do that before, but got most of the page set up pretty easily once he changed his phone keyboard to accommodate one-handed swipe inputs. After that, he managed to set his phone up on a tripod in front of the diffused windows, washed his face til he looked much less hungover, and tried to record a video pleading for help, primarily from strangers on the internet who would think he was hot.
The video started with a medium shot of Griffin from the chest up, wearing a blue broadcloth button down shirt buttoned up as far as he could get it one-handed, trying to look the precise level of needy to elicit sympathy rather than disgust and contempt. It’s the reason why characters in network television crime procedurals who’ve just seen their children cut up into tiny bits are always far more calm than they would be in reality. Actual desperation, accurately displayed, repels people. You have to strike a sweet spot. Depict emotion but don’t get too emotional. Look sad but be hopeful for the inevitable help you will surely receive from the benevolent audience. Be grateful in advance. Thank them for their generosity before they’ve given, so that they feel compelled to donate so that their self-image will match the praise they’ve already been given.
The classics.
In the video, he began to speak.
“Hi, my name is Griffin Batt. I’m 28 years old, and I’ve spent the past three years working as a sinister severance specialist. What that means is that every day I would cut off my left hand in a single swift strike, and then reattach it. It’s dangerous work, but somebody has to do it. Unfortunately, my employment abruptly came to an end yesterday after I was let go right after my lunch break, before I had an opportunity to reattach my hand with the company’s supply of regenerative cooling gel.”
At this point he raised both arms into frame, showing one stump and one intact hand holding the other severed appendage in a plastic bag.
“Now, obviously, I am in the process of looking for new employment, which hopefully won’t take too long as I have a master’s degree in economics. But at the moment my priority is reattaching my left hand, as I do not have a personal supply of regenerative coolant gel. I’ve got plenty of professional experience reattaching my left hand, but without the gel it would take weeks for the limb to reattach fully. I would go to a hospital, but my health insurance ended as soon as my employment did, and the last time I went to a hospital and told them I was experiencing issues with my left wrist, they punched me in the gut and called me a sissy. I am not sure that man was a doctor. So I’m just looking for enough cash to get a single-use container of regen gel. Of course if this works, once the funds come through and I reattach my hand, I’ll post photos of the successfully reattached limb to prove the money went where I said it did.”
Griffin had recently read a story about a man who had a successful GoFundMe campaign to pay for heart medicine, but one of the people who donated had suspected him of fraudulent misuse of funds because the man who got the money had posted a picture story showing him eating sushi at a restaurant, so the guy who donated showed up at his door and cut him in half with a sword. Griffin wanted to make sure that didn’t happen. Keep receipts and all that.
“And as further incentive to donate, plus to prove I’m following through on my claims, anyone who donates over $25 will get a set of feet pics. Anyone who donates over $50 will get to request a custom themed set of feet pics, and to anyone who donates $100 or more, I will show hole. Thank you for your time, and I appreciate you so much. Have a good day.”
With that posted, Griffin started putting together his resumé and looked for jobs befitting someone with a master’s degree in economics and his work experience. He did not find any. He did find an endless stream of demeaning, low-paying jobs where the listings contained numerous red flags for every aspect of the company culture. Fortunately, he had plenty of experience in those environments. After a couple hours of scrolling through listings while experiencing ever-increasing severe despair, he decided to check the progress of the GoFundMe campaign.
He had made one hundred and eighty five dollars and received a stunningly disproportionate number of comments without donations, some of which follow:
GenerousGiver77: Kids these days want everything handed to them on a silver platter. Back in my day if your employer cut off your left hand, you thanked god you still had a right hand.
HitlerMussoliniFranco88: >cutting off your left hand
PUSSYDESTROYER666: Here’s $50! I want you to put mustard on those little piggies
FifaPlayer80085: YOUR MOM GOOD. SHIT MAN
Minneapolis_Beardo: I have donated one dolar to your cause. I have informed my church group as to your struggles. Thank you for sharing your truth
LightRaySweetAngel: I hope you fuckig die
HORSE_CRIMES: I’ve always been confused as to what the purpose of cutting off your left hand in a single swift strike and sewing it back on was, like in terms of economic activity and value generation, but at this point I’m too afraid to ask.
That last comment struck Griffin as strange. While death threats, white supremacists and foot fetishists were par for the course in terms of posting anything online and getting replies, that comment from HORSE_CRIMES was the first time he could remember seeing anyone question why it’s important for some people to cut off their left hands in a single swift strike and then reattach them. He didn’t see anyone questioning the economic utility of lumberjacks cutting down trees, fishermen catching fish, or burger flippers flipping burgers, but now for some reason cutting off your left hand in a single swift strike confuses people? The limits of stupidity and naiveté on the internet knew no bounds.
It then occurred to him that there was probably an internet community of amputee fetishists and they were surely always on the lookout for fresh content and new faces. It was a mismatch of content to market to try to appeal to foot fetishists in the first place, but feet pics were just the first place his mind went when he tried to think of ways to make fast money online by exploiting the sexual spectacle of his still relatively nubile young body. The only problem was the inherent contradiction of making people see him perform sexually specifically to fund a way to fix the thing about him that they get off to.
Considering this, he decided not to disclose the reason he was selling amputee erotica to the enthusiast sites where the market for such things remained. They could probably figure it out, though— ever since the advent of regenerative coolant gel, attractive first-world amputees were increasingly rare, as what used to be an irreversible lifelong affliction could now be fixed pretty quickly as long as the limb in question was cut or ripped off instead of crushed or otherwise destroyed, and the kinds of people who worked jobs that got their limbs crushed in machinery tended to be the rough-living types who weren’t in high demand as the subjects of pornography.
Griffin quickly set out to find an amputee fetishist on a gay hookup app, and found one almost immediately by making his username contain certain keywords that indicated what he had to offer. Within an hour, a medium-tall, semi-hairless Dominican man with an extremely crisp hairline and a nice smile responded, indicating his interest in Griffin’s condition, so Griffin asked to see his cock. It was pretty smooth and photogenic, and large enough to look good on camera but not so big as to present major difficulties in practice. Griffin told him that if he wanted to hook up there was one thing he had to do, so the man agreed to let Griffin suck him off on camera at 2 PM on a Thursday as long as his face was never shown.
