English marked no thread of occurrences leading up to his halfhearted suicide attempt, no clear trail of his own footprints, but he did feel pretty certain that the finish of his employment in the medical world had begun with his introduction to the new surgical stapler Minotaur Systems had developed. This item was supposed to replace the old-fashioned sutures. Basically it was the same thing used around any office, but it was large and elaborate and wouldn’t have looked out of place in the hands of an astronaut walking on the moon. English had looked forward to learning all about it at a big sales conference in Chicago. But what should have been a fun and diverting trip to a medical lab near the city had soured very shortly after his cab let him off at the gate at the appointed hour. The laboratory, an offspring or cousin of the Minotaur corporate family, was out by O’Hare Airport in a sea of grass and corn bridged here and there by tiny cloverleaves of Interstate 90. There was desolation in the scouring sound made by distant jets that knew nothing about this place and in the whistling of the wind through the chain-link fence, a wind that also brought him the stink of urine and dog shit and the berserk exclamations of laboratory animals housed right there under the sky. Nobody had told him about this. Dogs running up and down their cages, kittens shivering in concrete corners, stunned rabbits, goats dangling wires from their ears, even a couple of blind sheep standing around in the straw, their eye sockets covered by bandages. English was still trying to swallow the shock of his own presence in a place like this as he was ushered into a room, in the laboratory proper, filled with whimpering, tranquillized dogs on small operating tables. There he was handed a smock and a scalpel and one of the new surgical stapling devices. The tiled floor was full of drains. As a child, he’d been bothered by certain noises in his bedroom closet. Now the closet was opened, and everything he’d imagined inside it came out and revealed itself to be his employer. He waited for somebody to point out how horrible this was. As soon as someone spoke up, he would, too. But nobody said a word. Under the direction of the laboratory’s supervisor he took his place before one of the several dozen tables and put on the green operating cap, shower-curtain booties, and translucent surgical gloves that lay beside the drooling head of a fawn-colored dachshund, and, in the midst of fifty other green-garbed members of the Minotaur Systems sales force, he began tearing at this dog’s belly with his scalpel, heaving out intestines and other organs and cutting into them and, from time to time, when directed, laying down the scalpel, picking up the surgical stapler, and learning about the variety of its uses.
English had become something of a specialist in the area of sterilization devices. He could talk antisepsis with the best of them. But, because his field had narrowed this way, he wasn’t like these other salespeople. They had all spent time in operating rooms and were not only accustomed to the sight of blood and at home with the idea of anybody else’s physical pain, but they’d even, a lot of them, taken part in surgical operations on living patients, had taken the instruments they were selling into their own hands and shown the doctors just how they worked. The idea of opening up these dumb, tearful animals didn’t faze these veterans, but English’s eyes burned and he sobbed deep in his throat, watching his own gloved hands tremble and stab limp-wristedly at gristle. Nobody talked much. Blood sprouted from arteries in brief, graceful ejaculations, like fronds of seaweed, and pattered to the floor or fell across their gowns. The ripped lungs flapped and wheezed, salesmen and saleswomen occasionally exclaimed over the unexpected force of a death rattle and made the kinds of jokes that medical people always made, and the staplers clicked, the scalpels clacked on the Formica, and once in a while, because they were slippery, a scalpel got away from somebody and went tinkling across the floor. English heard all these noises acutely, though his head hurt as much as if his eardrums had burst. The building pitched, humming, back and forth. The grasses outside no longer seemed to lie down in the wind, but cringed before the sexual approach of something ultimate. Like a long curse a jet’s sound passed close above the building toward the horizon. That an airport could go about its gigantic business in the same world as this laboratory seemed impossible, unless — and he didn’t think this so much as feel it as a self-evident fact — unless all things conspired consciously to do perfect evil.
He couldn’t stop this. There was nothing he could do. It wasn’t his fault. This dachshund was finished, no matter what. The dog was already scarred down all four legs, and just above its tail and on top of its head two bald patches had been incised for the planting of electrodes. There was some undercurrent here that, even more than his job as a Minotaur salesperson, it was his nauseating privilege, his instinctive duty to do whatever the creatures who weren’t dogs were doing to the dogs.
With the same blind gesture of childhood games like pin the tail on the donkey, he pushed his scalpel into what he hoped was the poor animal’s heart, and it expired like a balloon.
The thing was, why had he submitted so mindlessly, why hadn’t it occurred to him at the time to stop, to object, to get away? The experience gave him, in a way he couldn’t explain, some slight appreciation of what rape might be like for the victim. And now, like a woman with a gun in her purse, he waited for somebody to try again. He wasn’t going to let it beat him twice. He would do whatever he had to do.
When Marla and Leanna had fallen asleep, that first night, English climbed down from the tree with his bag of tricks and his fishing pole. He’d been aroused, even in the cold, by the sight of naked women.
On the way home he threw the tape cassette in a dumpster, and later he told Sands, “I got nothing.” He told him, “I may be an idiot, but I’m not an acrobat.” He told Sands he wouldn’t work up that high, out on a limb. There was too much for him to juggle up there.
He might have wished that he’d turned from the butter of moonlight on the harbor to see her standing there with the sea taste on her cheek, but as it happened she was in the drugstore on Commercial Street, buying something which she tried to hide from English when he said hello. Feminine protection evidently. She was dressed in a sweatsuit. She’d come from an exercise class. She smiled and seemed to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Gusts of wind took their words away as soon as they’d stepped out the door:
“Hello—”
“Hello—”
“Didn’t I—”
“Yes—”
“Right, a few weeks ago, at Mass—”
“I told you we’d meet again—”
“Let’s get a cup of java,” he said, private-eye-style, guiding her into a doorway out of the weather.
He got the idea that she was laughing at him. “Java,” she said.
“That’s right. Java. I thought you spoke Portuguese.”
“Is that Portuguese?”
“You tell me. I don’t speak Portuguese.”
“What was your name again?”
“Lenny English. And you’re Leanna, right?”
“How did you know?” Had she forgotten she’d told him?
“Things like that get around.” He liked that answer, but she seemed unimpressed. “I work over there at WPRD,” he said desperately.
“Oh? Yeah? Have you got a show?”
“Well, I do classical stuff from 2 to 6 a.m., Tuesdays and Thursdays. And also I’m a production engineer.”
“Oh, 2 to 6 a.m., oh, I’m asleep by then.”
Sometimes you are, he felt like telling her, and sometimes you’re not.