Drum blinked his twin search lights. They reflected white under the harsh fluorescent bars in the ceiling. “I did it yesterday,” he said and smiled, “Patty.”
She ignored this. Patricia had warned Fine and the other members of her lab group never to make the mistake of addressing her in such a fashion. Her name was Patricia Mills-Hanson, Patricia, or Dr. Mills-Hanson. Fine seemed to enjoy antagonizing her, but it wouldn’t be the first time a member of his gender had expressed sexual desire through passive aggression. She was, after all, brilliant and attractive with long, straight black hair and a well-honed musculature. Good genetics and a stern sense of time management enabled her to maintain an athletic figure. While she might understand his motivation, puerile as may be, she couldn’t abide the constant teasing. At least, the other two members of her lab group had respected her request.
Jodie Lincoln, future plastic surgeon (Patricia was certain she chose that specialty so she could maintain her own implants), and Robert Rose, future pathologist, crowded around the table with Patricia and Fine. Rose hadn’t expressed pathology as his chosen specialty per se, but every time Patricia looked at him—obese, flatulent, and obnoxiously good humored, like one of those long-eared Buddhas in a Chinese restaurant foyer—she could only imagine him in a morgue, eating a sandwich over a corpse and making bad jokes into the procedure-recording microphone.
Jodie bounced a step closer to the cadaver and offered her hand. Her fingernails were painted pink with white French tips. “I’ll do it, Patricia,” she said. “Drum’s right, he did it yesterday.”
Patricia tried not to allow disgust to surface on her face. Jodie was financing her studies with a lucrative career at a high-end “gentlemen’s” club. A piece of information she was all too proud to share. She’d even invited the lab group to one of her shows, promising discounts on drinks. Patricia found her school-girl flouncing tedious at best. And the fact that her attentions seemed aimed at Fine was beyond comprehension.
“Yeah, Patty,” Drum said. “Let Jodie stick im’ for once.” Had he known Patricia thought the stripper was into him, he would have laughed. Every last ounce of Jodie’s flirting was due to her enormous crush on Patty-cakes.
Standing on the opposite side of the table, Jodie leaned forward enough for her cleavage to peak and took the scalpel. She threw a soft squint at Patricia and then looked into the body cavity. A waft of formaldehyde tugged down the corners of her mouth; pink lipgloss to match her fingernails. “Um, where should I, uh, start?”
Patricia consulted her textbook, open on the table, the top edge not quite touching the cadaver’s outer thigh. Her eyes flicked staccato over the lines. “We should begin at the duodenum. That’s,” she looked up, her brow furrowed, “right around… Should be, um…”
Drum squished a finger into the guts on the table. “Here.”
“Yes,” Patricia said. “Just there.”
“Thanks, Drum,” Jodie Chirped. “Might wanna’ move that finger if you wanna’ keep it.”
Drum pulled back and asked, “Where should I put it, Jodie?”
Jodie concentrated on the incision. “Wherever you think would most benefit science, Dr. Fine.” Keeping her hands in the corpse, she looked up and threw him a wink. “Maybe up your nose?”
“I was thinking rectal exam,” Rose added.
Drum help up his index finger, retracted it into his fist and extended his middle. “Bend over, doctor.”
Rose chuckled. He thoroughly enjoyed this lab group. Jodie was a fantastic combination of eye-candy and well-hidden intelligence. Patricia’s intensity and insecurity made for a really good show almost every time they got together. And he was pretty sure that Fine was a low level sociopath, but the tension his weirdness introduced kept the dynamic interesting. That thing he did with sticking his finger into the cadaver’s guts was inspired, giving a stupendous squelch when he pulled it out.
He’d actually given the corpse a good slap across the face last week just to get a rise out of Patricia. It had, of course, worked like a charm. She’d called the professor over to the table to complain, but lost her nerve when he got there, making up some lame excuse or question. Fine had stared at her the whole time.
Rose observed Fine as he observed Jodie’s cleavage. What kind of physician would a man like Drummond Fine want to be? Jodie leaned forward a bit more to get a better angle on her work. Drum’s eyebrows twitched. A shrink—no question. Well, maybe an Ob/Gyn, but the idea of someone as creepy as Fine with his hands on a newborn gave Rose the willies.
“Fine, could you please clear my field of view?” Patricia said. “I can’t see Jodie work.”
Jodie’s cheeks flushed and a wave of feminine heat rolled through Drum. He backed off a step, reeling in the fuschia burst of emotion. He shook his head to clear it. Jesus, and people were always saying that men experienced lust with more intensity. What a load. A man’s lust was more frequent, it seemed to him, more of a hot spike. When women lusted it was like being immersed in a soup of solar plasma. And Jodie had it real bad for Patricia. A bead of sweat slid out of Drum’s hairline.
Drum himself had stayed away from sex as much as was possible. Anytime he came close enough to the emotional states of people in thrall to sexual desire he lost himself as well, and shared in those desires. The consequence was an amplification of need until he succumbed. The few times he’d strayed too close to two people reflecting their desire back at one another, the results had been somewhat embarrassing. In the case of one person panting after another where that desire was one-sided, he could maintain control, as he now did with Jodie’s crush on Patricia. Still, if Jodie got this ramped up every time old Patty-cakes said her name, there was going to be a serious problem.
“I’m not sure I can quite reach,” Jodi said, angling her arms like a mechanic attacking a difficult carburetor.
“Perhaps some retraction?” Rose said, his hands glued in his coat pockets.
Patricia waited a beat and sighed. “Here,” she said and pushed her hands into the mess, pulling gently back on a mass of intestine. Her pinky brushed Jodie’s hand. Jodie glanced up and made eye contact for an instant.
Drum moaned, and then covered it with a cough. He turned away from the table and pretended to clear his throat while closing his lab coat over a growing erection. Jodie’s emotions were like a gas. He was going to have to leave in another minute, or explain to his lab class why he got off standing over a vivisectioned dead man.
He was saved as the power went out, plunging the windowless lab room into darkness. For a long moment there was nothing but the sigh of the HVAC unit ramping down. Someone gasped and many a young student mind whispered to itself that the sound had come from one of the open dead.
The professor’s voice sliced through the pitch. “Everyone please keep your places. Most likely it’s just a fuse. The emergency generators should have kicked in by now. I’m sure they’ll be up in a moment. Those of you holding instruments, please keep as still as possible.” This wasn’t the first time the wiring in the venerable old building had failed.
An emotional gumbo of worry, giddy adventure, and annoyance slopped in Drum’s chest, but he was grateful. Jodie’s heat wave had tapered off to almost nothing, her feelings merging with the general wash of the room. A low murmur snaked through the room like a mist around their ankles as the students grumbled or joked. Someone gave off a harsh giggle, a sound just south of laughter.
Rose grunted, “When’s the movie start?”
“Know what this reminds me of?” Jodie said. “That old Halloween party thing kids do. You know, where they make everyone close their eyes and pass around like a bowl of cold noodles or whatever, and tell you it’s a deadman’s brains?”
Rose and Fine both barked a laugh. Patricia was silent.
“Oh, c’mon, Patricia,” Jodie said. “You’re up to your wrists in bowel, too, doesn’t it kind of remind of you that?” She thew a theatrical quaver into her voice. “Theeese are his braaaaaainssss.??
? She laughed. “Of course, we should reverse it ‘cause we really are touching a dead guy. We should be like, This is a bowl of noooooodles.”
Drum was about to chime in when he stiffened, his jaw clicking shut. The reek of formaldehyde sharpened. He began to sweat. A swarm of fear was wriggling up his spine. When it reached his chest, Drum’s heart skipped a beat. It was Patricia. She was horrified. The liquid sound of someone removing her hands from the cadaver slicked their ears. Drum could only listen and experience. It felt like he was going to have a heart attack. And it was wonderful. All those other emotions, the noise of his own thoughts and worries, the trash and dreams of everyone within his ever-growing range was blotted out in a white wall of terror. And just as he thought he might swoon with the relief and purity of Patricia’s fear, the room was awash in sterile light.
“Whew!” Jodie said, pulling her hands out of the body. “My hands were beginning to cramp.” She started at Patricia. “You okay, honey?”
Patricia had backed away from the table. Her face was bloodless; her minimalist eye makeup had run in thin lines down her cheeks. The tendons in her neck stood out like banjo strings. One hand clutched her left breast, the other was splayed in front of her like an animal surprised by a predator. The sleeves of her lab coat were stained a watery mustard color. Rose looked from Patricia to their cadaver and saw why: She had clawed open a thick cable of intestine, releasing its contents. He looked back at Patricia. She was having a heart attack. “Professor!” he shouted. “We have an emergency over here!”
The entire room seemed to shift over toward their table just as Patricia’s eyes flickered up in their sockets and she collapsed. A young man from the adjacent table, who Rose liked to think of as “The Life Guard”, caught Patricia before she could smack to the floor. The professor blustered through the gathering students, yanking a stethoscope from his lab coat pocket. He put an amplified ear to Patricia’s chest and pronounced, “We’ve got an infarction,” in the best tradition of useless soap opera doctors throughout history. No one noticed Drum swaying on his feet with a look of slobbering rapture across his face.
When it was all over, Drum, Jodie and Rose got together over a beer at The Flat Line, a watering hole situated just off the medical school campus. It was early yet on a Tuesday evening, but the bar was full. Medical professionals have one of the highest incidences of alcoholism and it looked like a good portion of New York’s future doctors were attempting to get ahead of the curve. The bar was bright with noise and sloppy, gluey feeling. Drum ignored it, still riding clean. He smiled, glowed, and sipped his beer. “Weird day, huh?”
Jodie stared into her gin and tonic. “What the hell happened in there?”
“Phobia’d be my guess,” Rose offered and popped a peanut into his mouth. His cheeks were already greasy with previous grazing. “That and some sort of congenital defect.”
“Yep,” Drum said. “Looks like ol' Patty’s ticker-roo was a wee bit burpy.” He mused. “My father had an old Dodge like that.”
“Drum,” Jodie flared, a Queens tint to her voice. “The hell’s the matter with you?”
He blushed, “Just kidding, Jodie. Relax.”
She shook her head and turned back to Rose. “What’re you talking about with this phobia stuff, Bob?”
Drum leaned forward.
“Well,” Rose said. “Sometimes people have these nasty little triggers in their noggins, just waiting to get yanked by a certain stimulus. Doesn’t have to be a rational thing, but once it’s set off, it hits with a serious bang. Sometimes you don’t even know you have one.”
Jodie sipped her drink and grimaced. She’d asked for strong and the bar tender had gone nuclear on her when he got a look at her shirt, or rather the painted-on fabric that served as a shirt. “You really think it can cause that—I don’t know—that violent a reaction?”
“Yeah, sure,” Rose said. “Kind of like anaphylactic shock of the brain. Instead of having some aberrant set of genes that are just waiting for a bee sting or,” he crunched another peanut, “the right kind of nut oil, you look out the window of a high building or walk around the corner and meet a stray dog.”
“Adrenaline dump,” Drum grunted.
Rose lifted an eyebrow. “Zactly. You can’t control it. A spider drops on your arm and you fuckin’ freak. You got a bad heart and the freak-out’s big enough, well…” He spread his meaty arms.
“What could her phobia have been, do you think,” Jodie asked, “that the lights going out would have pulled her trigger like that?”
“Dunno’,” Rose crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “Claustrophobia maybe. I’ve heard of claustrophobics being afraid of the dark, too.” He wiped at a grease stain on his shirt, made it worse. “For that matter, she might just have been afraid of the dark, period.”
“Burial,” Drum said.
“What?” Jodie said.
He didn’t register her, whispered to himself. “She’s afraid of being buried alive.”
Rose gave a sideways glance at Fine. “Okaaay. Well, anyway, at least she’s going to be all right.”
Jodie sat up. “What? Wait, how do you know?”
“I called a friend in residence on the cardiac unit before we came over here. It was a really tiny infarction. He said almost more of an arrhythmia, a hiccup. Ms. Mills-Hansen was stable by the time we three partook of our first libation.”
“You jerk!” Jodie said, reaching across the table and whapping Rose on his ham-hock of a shoulder. “You could have said something.” She nailed him again, but smiled doing it.
Drum rejoined the conversation. “Thank goodness Patricia’s all right.”
Jodie and Rose both looked at him. Drum favored them with a white grin. His eyes flashed red from the neon behind the bar. “Next round’s on me.”
FOUR NIGHTS LATER, Drummond Fine strangled Patricia Mills-Hansen with her own phobia. It was simple enough: finals were around the corner and extra lab time was at a premium. Drum made sure he had some to offer. He overheard Patricia bitching about how she had missed precious class time while under observation for what was really nothing more than a fainting spell. She was just overworked was all. Drum jumped at the chance and gave up his lab time…for twenty bucks. He hadn’t wanted to seem over anxious, and she had accepted. When she showed up at the anatomy lab, he was waiting for her.
Patricia paused outside the double doors to the lab at nine o’ clock on a Friday night. She checked the sign-up sheet, noted the slot where Fine’s name had been crossed out and hers written in, and gave a nod. There were four other open slots for this time, but “Cancelled” was written next to each name. Patricia shook her head. Idiots. Wasting valuable study time so they could drink and mate with one another. Of course, it had been a while since the last time she’d mated with anyone, but there would be time for that after she graduated. She sighed, a loud sound in the empty hall, and pushed into the room.
A fleet of long tables floated on a linoleum sea, their captains lay encased in plastic bags. The silhouettes were broken and strange, their meticulous dismantling unmistakeable through the translucent skin. Body bags always reminded Patricia of insect cocoons. “No butterflies here,” she muttered and was surprised at how the room swallowed the sound of her voice. She was used to this room being filled with careful bustling and subdued conversation, the clank of instruments and the occasional muted splash. “Quiet as a tomb,” she said. Funny. She didn’t laugh.
She wove her way between the tables, lifting her elbows and staring straight ahead at her goal: table 14, her group’s cadaver. By rights the rest of them should be here with her, but apparently they didn’t need to study. Well, that wasn’t being fair. When Patricia had asked, Jodie had been very enthusiastic at the prospect of putting in some extra lab time with her but had a shift at her disgusting club and claimed to need the money too much to cancel. Rose had shrugged it off, saying that he was confident of his accumulated knowledge. Arrogant slob. And Fine, it was just
as well that he valued twenty dollars over a higher grade point. Heck with them. She would study on her own. Probably do better for it, too.
Her hip knocked against the corner of a table. “Oop!” she froze, hands out in front of her as if she were caught typing a secret love letter. After a moment, she dropped them and muttered, “Grow up, doctor. You’re acting like a kid.” If Fine or one of the others saw her they’d laugh their fannies off. As if in response, some part of the cadaver on the table she’d hit shifted, whispering against its chrysalis. She froze again and with concerted effort forced her heart to slow. She was a physician, or would be. This behavior was ridiculous and beneath her. That, and she could ill afford another episode. The heart attack had been mild, but her heart was damaged now and could become arrythmic more easily than before. She closed her eyes, waited for her heart to slow, then opened them and walked to her table.
She unzipped the bag with maybe a little too much force and was greeted by a noseful of formaldehyde and checked decay. “Good evening, Fourteen,” she said. Fourteen, whose face, hands and feet were wrapped in light muslin for dissection next term, said nothing. Patricia looked over the torso. The flaps of Fourteen’s Y-incision were folded shut, their edges puckered and discolored. She slipped on her gloves with a practiced snap and laid her instruments out along the table.
Something moved behind her.
Patricia’s head whipped up. A coil of hair slipped the confines of her bun and bobbed like a spring. She scanned the rows of dead and held her breath. After a long moment of silence, she let it out and shook her head. Being a dumb kid again, Patricia. It was just one of the bodies shifting or settling. They did that. Like ice melting in a glass. It was normal, especially considering all the manipulation the tissues had endured. This was the end of term, they were practically falling apart.