Fresh Flesh (2 page)

"No," the man replied, lowering his head.
"No, wish I was. You wouldn't have scared me like you did if I
was."

"How?" She coughed again, rubbing her throat
raw.

"For now, let me ask the questions. I don't
think you should talk too much right away. You had a terribly high
temperature, it might have been pneumonia. That's why I need to
know how you feel?"

"Alive," she answered, for the moment not so
gratified by that fact.

"Do you feel nauseated?"

"No." COUGH!

"Hot? Cold?"

"Shitty," she replied.

He grinned. "Humor, that's a good sign."

A moment passed where she could no longer
keep her eyelids open. She pressed on, needing to learn more about
her surroundings.

"Who. . .are. . .you?"

"I thought I was the one asking the
questions?" He took a piece of coconut and started munching on
it.

"If you aren't a doc"
—
COUGH!
—
"tor, who are
you?"

"A friend," he touched her chin, a loving
gesture which made her cringe, "that found you three days ago."

She looked around, trying to remember what
happened to her, what had brought her to this unfamiliar place.
Everything was unclear at the moment. She had a sense that it would
come back to her in time. Right now she cared more about where she
was than how she'd arrived there.

"Where am I?"

He looked around, gesturing to a blurry,
fish-reeking cave. "My home, of course."

"A. . .cave?"

"On an island, yes."

"Island? What"
—
COUGH!
—
"island?"

Strangely, he avoided the question. "You
aren't going to get well unless you bundle up and get some sleep.
We'll talk again when you wake up."

She started to protest, but he put a
fish-stinking finger to her lips. "And I'll leave this coconut for
you when you can stomach it. You do want to get well, don't
you?"

He removed his finger when she nodded.

"Now, sleep." He smiled, showing ebony
rotting teeth, and stroked her ash blond hair. "And pleasant
dreams."

She closed her eyes and shuddered. She told
herself it wasn't the man who frightened her. It was his grotesque
debilitating body.

She drifted and slept once again.

It is believed that if you dream of paradise;
endless celebration, hot days basking in pleasant rays with warm
sand tickling your toes, a world without deception and pain, this
is a dream reflection of pent-up unhappiness, a longing to break
loose from an unsettling environment. She awoke sharply, sitting up
wide-eyed, erect as a chair. Her dream of perfect paradise, she
realized, was a terrifying mask of the cold dirt bed she'd been
sleeping on.

The bearded bum-looking man was sitting on a
large rock five feet away. He had a pocket knife and was whittling
a tree branch. A bright sun shone through the cave entrance behind
him. He was watching her, staring.

"I'd like to know who you are and where I
am?"

"Well, well," replied the man. "I see we're
feeling better this morning."

"Stop ignoring me."

The man pointed the knife at his chest. "I'm
ignoring you?" He started whittling again, never once looking at
his project.

"Yes."

"I certainly didn't mean to do so." He
whittled off the spear-like edge he was putting on the tree branch
and cursed the mistake. As if nothing had happened he looked up at
her and continued, "I'm just concerned, that's all."

"Why? You don't know who I am. You don't even
know where I came from."

"I saved you from death," he said and she
felt her rising anger bottom out. Surely this bum meant her no
harm, but why did something about him seem amiss?

"Yes, and I'll probably never be able to
thank you enough for that. But tell me, please, who are you?"

"You have been here for four days and haven't
eaten a thing. You must be absolutely famished. I'll make us both
something to eat and be happy to answer your questions. But beware,
I have a few questions of my own."

"Like?"

"Your name? That might be a good start."

"Jessica Stanton."

"Hi Jessica, my name is Dick. Now, we are no
longer strangers."

Bullshit
, she thought, forcing her
thirteen stubborn facial muscles to smile.

Dick was right about one thing, she was
famished. The meal he 'made' was something she would have expected
to eat as a castaway on Gilligan's Island: coconuts, juicy red
round berries which tasted tart but good, and (
yuck
) smoked
fish. She suffered through primitively roasted fish over a
crackling, smelly fire inside the cave. Suffered, because she
didn't like eating with her hands. It wasn't that she abhorred
getting her hands dirty, no, she'd simply grown accustomed to
eating food in a distinguished, elegant manner. There was nothing
distinguished or elegant about pieces of fish dangling like peeled
skin from her fingers.

Dick wasn't fooled by her dogged, yet
unimpressive attempts at concealing her uneasiness. He smiled and
chewed his last piece of fish. "So do you go by a nickname? Jessie,
Jess, something like that?"

"No. Not since high school. Jessica will be
fine."

"Okay, Jessica." He stamped out the fire with
his chewed-up sneaker. "Already told you who I am, so onto your
second question: where are you? I can't say for sure. I believe
we're somewhere far off the shores of San Francisco, perhaps due
north of the Hawaiian Islands, on some freakishly unknown island. I
say 'freakishly' because I haven't seen even one boat pass here.
Same for planes except I swear some nights I awake hearing the
rumbling of engines."

"How long have you been here?"

Dick stood up, "I'm not so sure about that
either." he moved over to the corner of the cave, picked up
something, brought it back, and handed it to her.

It was an old black-band, wind-up Timex
wristwatch, long since replaced by fancy digital monstrosities able
to predict all but the future. Seeing the watch, Jessica flashed
back on an equally old commercial where a man with a red hardhat
dropped a similar Timex into a cement mixer while boasting that
"Timex takes a licking, but keeps on ticking." Sure enough, when
the watch came out of the mixer, it was still ticking. This watch,
however, must have taken a much harsher licking because it wasn't
ticking. It was frozen on the time: 12:03 P.M.

When she finally looked up Dick had a solemn
expression and asked, "What year is this, anyway?"

"Nineteen ninety-three." she answered.

He took the watch from her and held it close
to his face. "Oh, Jesus, no, nineteen ninety-three. Jesus. . ." He
touched the cracked face of the watch to his forehead and closed
his eyes.

"Dick? How long? How long have you been
here?"

"Eleven years," he said, opening his distant
eyes. "Eleven long years."

As if on cue, the light outside dimmed.

"How did I get here?" Dick repeated Jessica's
question. "Do you want the long, boring tale? Or a quick
summary?"

"It's up to you."

"Okay." he paused, eyes wandering, "I was on
a long fishing trip and a bad storm caught us like the one a couple
of nights ago. There was, oh, I'd say thirty of us on the ship that
day. I'm the sole survivor." He paused again looking back at
Jessica with a melancholy expression, "I was beginning to think I'd
be here alone forever."

"We're alone?" Jessica gasped. She was
stranded alone with an old, decaying bum?

"Yes. Yes, quite alone."

"And," Jessica fought back the fear in her
voice. "There's no way off this island?"

"No way."

"Nobody knows I'm here?"

"I'm not so sure about that. Why don't you
tell me how you got caught up in the storm?"

Jessica rubbed her forehead and forced her
weak legs to stand. Her bones cracked. She turned away.

"Jessica? Are you all right? What did I
say?"

She knew he was standing behind her, staring
with his empty, pitiful pits. She was not ready to accept the fact
that she had survived. Perhaps she really had been torn apart in
that storm. Perhaps her final destination had been decided?

Heaven was too good for her because she
hadn't helped enough senior citizens cross the street, hadn't
donated enough money to AIDS research or Jerry Lewis' continuous
battle with Muscular Dystrophy, hadn't loved or labored or lived
the Good Life. Perhaps this was, instead, the other place. The bad
place. And this was where she would suffer forever: an enigmatic
island with a rotting man for company.

She turned. "I—I'm sorry. It's going to take
a while for me to. . .to get used to this."

A strong ocean wind blew through the cave
opening.

"My name is Jessica Roberta Stanton. I grew
up in New York and am married to Edward Stanton. You don't know who
he is, do you?"

"Sorry." He looked at her marriage finger and
she nodded sadly. The tide had brought her to the island somewhat
unscathed, yet it kept her diamond wedding ring as an eerie
memento.

She continued, "Edward Stanton owns the
patents on several revolutionary computer chips. The IX-2 series is
tearing it up in the business world. Edward has IBM shaking. We
were celebrating a billion in profits and then—"

The wind blew in, captured, raised and
lowered her hair.

"And then?" Dick prodded.

"Edward wanted to take a yacht trip. Just a
couple of close people we knew, and me, of course. We left from San
Francisco. . ."

"So you live in New York and he owns a
private yacht in San Francisco?" Dick said.

"No, we live in Valford, a suburb of Redmond,
Washington. Sort of becoming the tech hub in the Pacific Northwest.
Microsoft is there as well. We have a condo in New York." She kept
using 'we' but Dick was correct that the toys were more about and
for Edward than her. "We own several yachts. One in Mexico, New
York and San Francisco."

"So, you're rich." Dick must have missed the
part about celebrating a billion dollars in profit.

She expected him to be envious, as most
people were, but he wasn't in the slightest. She might have gotten
a better reaction out of the rock he was sitting on.

"Money doesn't do much good here, does
it?"

"No." He shook his head. "Unless, you want to
use it as toilet paper."

She smirked, realizing the cruel joke behind
his reply. "Speaking of toilet paper. . ."

He stood up and gestured to the cave
entrance. "Follow me, Jessica, and I'll show you the, uh,
bathroom."

Yes
, she decided,
I am in
hell
.

Outside the cave there was a large patch of
multi-shaded green plants. He showed her the beaten entrance with
the same enthusiasm as a gas attendant pointing to a dirty john.
She didn't ask for toilet paper, fearing his answer, she just went
to it.

Minutes later she emerged from the plant
enclosure holding her nose.

Her face was turning green. "The smell! Ohhh,
disgusting."

"You'll get used to it."

"It smells worse than an outhouse. I never
thought anything could smell worse than an outhouse."

"It's this way back to the cave." He gestured
for her to take his hand and she declined. She was disgusted that
he would even want to touch her hand after she'd gone to the
bathroom.

"I need to wash first," she said.

"The ocean is wonderful for cleansing," he
said. "But if you get a cut, watch out. Then the bitch gets
cranky."

He led her through a long ravine passage. She
tried to learn what directions they were twisting and turning but
it was futile. She was not a woodsman. She told herself, like it or
not, she would have to stick close to Dick. She would not know what
to do if she got lost in the woody labyrinth.

"How big is this island?"

"I figure it's roughly four square miles. Not
that big. Still plenty big enough to get lost in, if you know what
I mean."

"Don't worry, I have no intention of running
away."

"That's comforting. I promise that in not too
long you'll get to know your way around here."

The strength and confirmation in that thought
made her shiver.

In another five minutes he peeled back a bush
and showed her a long sandy beach.

"This is the southwest beach. The one you
washed in on. Go ahead and wash your hands, I'll wait for you
here."

Jessica moved slowly toward the incoming
tide, her naked feet sinking into the warm sand. Soon the beach
beneath her feet grew damp and slimy, the perfect boundary for this
hell-island. She knelt down as the tide rushed in, getting deeper
around her until the icy tide filled up to her ankles. She washed
her hands in the ocean while staring out at the violent waves
crashing a football field's distance away. The tide rolled back out
and she studied it for a long, ponderous moment. She trudged back
up the beach where Dick was waiting, feeling no relief. She still
felt something amiss. This wasn't one of those countless romance
novel islands where peace and tranquility reign.

Dick was sitting down on the beach when she
returned. "So, are you ready to finish your story?"

She sat down next to him. "My story?" she
stared off in the distance, still disoriented.

"You were at San Francisco, and the fact that
you're, um, very rich."

Very rich, ha!
Even armed with her
miraculous credit cards—which had saved her from many a terrible
tragedy—she couldn't buy her way out of this.
Let me put a
bathroom with deluxe shower head on my Mastercard, please
.

"We left for Hawaii," she said, locking eyes
on the ocean once again. "And, like what happened on your fishing
trip, the big storm came. I kept telling Edward we should turn
back. The Coast Guard had given warnings. But Edward, well, he's
stubborn. The storm came and—and the boat capsized."