Zippered Flesh 2: More Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad (36 page)

The therapist nodded appreciatively, but Byron worried that he’d said too much. “Those parts weren’t really important to the case,” he added.

“No,” she agreed. “Tell me about the condition of the bodies.”

“Didn’t you read the papers?”

“Yes, but I’d like to hear it from you, Dr. Stevens. It’s part of the healing process.”

“They were heaped up on the floor. Cedric Lindstrom had been stabbed in the face, neck, and chest more than twenty times. Dempsey was lying partially on top of the doctor with a yellow screwdriver handle still protruding from his right eye.”

“What did you do before you called the police?”

“I didn’t touch them at all. The bodies.”

“You claim you have no idea who would have wanted to do something like this?”

“No, none. I was unconscious.” Byron put his head in his hands.

Chambers said, “Presumably, whoever murdered Cedric Lindstrom and Rick Dempsey knocked you unconscious first?”

“I guess so.”

“And did not harm
you
?”

“No.”

“Was there anything unusual about what else was found at the scene?”

He hesitated. “The fingerprints ... found on the murder weapon, that screwdriver, were ... well, they were Private Dempsey’s. His prints were on file for the Army.” He paused. “
But he had no hands!
”

“And did the medical examiner—”

“It was determined that Dempsey was the second to die. He committed suicide with a hand he did not have, after using that hand to kill Cedric!”

“Can you account for that in any way, Doctor?”

Byron shook his head. Behind the therapist, a large black shadow moved with the silent grace. It crossed in front of the window, and then it vanished.

Chambers leaned forward. “Dr. Stevens, are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” Byron whispered. He wiped a sheen of sweat off of his brow.

Her eyes were hard as they stared at him. “Your file indicates that subsequently you requested a transfer to the brain trauma unit. Can you tell me about that?”

“I ...” His eyes burned and he avoided her gaze. “I considered that my experience would make me a good candidate to help others who suffered traumatic brain injuries,” Byron said. He squirmed in his chair. Sweat poured down his face now, but he ignored it.

She closed the file. “Well, I think that’s all we have time for today, Dr. Stevens.”

“You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”

“No, not at all. I think you’ve been through some terrible experiences. You were traumatized almost as much as your patient.” Her look softened. “Look, these things take time, Doctor, and the more you talk it out, the closer you’ll come to finding some closure. We’ll talk more.” He nodded, unconvinced. “And Dr. Stevens, for next time could you bring your files on the Dempsey case?”

“I guess so,” Byron said. “It’s not ... really legal, is it?”

“Everything we do here is completely confidential, Doctor. I think having the files here ... will help you through the process. I’ll see you next week.”

Julia Chambers watched Dr. Byron Stevens leave, his defeated eyes haunted by what they had seen—but also by what he
needed
. She felt the need in him. She sympathized, but only to a point. He was beaten, almost forced out of his profession, tainted. Marked. An addict, of sorts. She shook her head and carefully placed his file in a locked drawer. Then she went to the bookcase and touched the photo of her daughters. Her eyes misted.

The year before, they had both died in that goddamned accident. She had allowed them to drive to the lake without her. It was a decision that could never be undone. A pain that could never be relieved. She’d tried. Oh, how she had tried. She had plummeted down a rabbit-hole of drugs and drink and despair the likes of which not even her worst patients could understand.

Now she replaced the frame carefully, turned it just so. Steel in her bones.

Moments later she was on the phone, finalizing her appointment to meet a Sergeant David Weiss, currently a resident at the Veterans Administration. His wounds were freakishly similar to those suffered by Dempsey. His file now lay open on her desk. She’d pulled it when she had seen that Stevens had requested a transfer to the brain trauma ward. She knew there had been a reason. She knew how the mind of an addict worked.
And
...

She had developed a sudden interest in brain trauma herself.

At least, in
this kind
of brain trauma.

Mostly, she wanted to stick her fingers in this man’s wound, touch the metal plate embedded there in his skull, and seek the solace he could bring. She shuffled the papers. Perhaps she would see what he saw. Perhaps she would see her own salvation. Or perhaps she would find only relief from the pain. But it would be worth it, whatever it could be. Her eyes hardened at the thought of what she might need to do to keep him from hurting her—to keep him from thwarting her ...

Her hands trembled.

BABYDADDY

BY JONATHAN TEMPLAR

They had their first session with the counselor two months into Dominique’s pregnancy.

The counselor didn’t come cheap. She had an uptown office that had been designed by an expert to be perfectly bland, perfectly unthreatening. It was a vision in beige, gentle on the eye, not a sharp edge in sight and soft carpeted from wall to wall. The blinds were pulled in case the view outside dared to ruin the illusion. It was like being in a well-furnished womb—which was ironic, given the circumstances.

“You’re having some issues with the pregnancy?” she asked them in a honey-coated voice, her hands folded carefully in her lap.

Dominique pointed the finger. “
He’s
the one with the issues.”

Henry bristled. “It’s not pregnancy I’ve got a problem with. Pregnancy is fine. Shit, we worked hard enough for it, mind my French.”

The counselor waved a hand to suggest she’d heard far worse between these walls.

“So what is wrong?” she asked him.

“Nothing’s wrong. I’m just fed up with hearing how
we’re
pregnant. People come up to me, people I know, and they just can’t wait to say it to me. ‘I hear
you’re
pregnant?’” Henry looked down at his flat, empty belly. “Shit, that’s news to me!
We’re
not fucking pregnant,
she
is fucking pregnant. My part in this was pretty much over by the time I’d finished shouting hallelujah and rolled over.”

“And don’t you just love to let me know about it? This is supposed to be a magical time, for
both
of us, and all he’s done for the last month is make me feel guilty that I’m the one born with a womb.”

The counselor gave a small, superior smile. “Womb envy,” she said.

“What?”

“It’s more common than you might imagine.”

In his time, Henry Schade had envied many people and many things. Michael Jordan. Ron Jeremy. Mike Karchevsky three houses down with the red Lexus and the wife with the hundred-thousand- dollar tits. They didn’t have much in common, but the lack of a womb was foremost. “Bullshit.”

She was undeterred in her prognosis. “Pregnancy can be a complicated time for both parents. Male emotional responses are often overlooked in a rush to coo over the expectant mother. It’s understandable that daddy might become resentful of the attention that mommy starts to receive. And it’s even more natural to feel as if you have been relegated to a supporting role in the process when you begin to see the physical effect pregnancy has on mommy.”

“She’s got a fucking name, stop calling her mommy,” Henry spat.

She ignored him, as if she was doing this whole session from a preprepared script. “Trust me; you’re not the first man to sit on that sofa suffering from a lack of empathy with a pregnant partner.”

“Hey, I have plenty of empathy!”

Dominique scoffed.

“I do!”

The counselor raised a hand, palm outward, a calming measure, sensing that Henry’s temperature was rising. “I’m not disagreeing with you. But it’s an easy response to understand, you see all the physical effects that mommy undergoes as baby develops, you can sense them bonding before you have an opportunity to contribute, and you feel that you’re just reduced to the role of a spectator.”

Henry nodded. To his great surprise, she’d actually summed it up pretty well. “It pisses me off, that’s all.”

She returned his nod, smiling blandly at him as she did. “I have a colleague who runs a clinic you might find helpful. He’s keen on enhancing the male experience of child gestation and birth. He’s something of a ... pioneer in the area.”

“Anything that might help,” Dominique said with undue eagerness.

The counselor wrote a name and a contact number on the back of a business card. The card was inevitably beige with a gentle font. She passed it to Dominique with a furtive look that briefly betrayed her sympathetic loyalty to the pregnant party. Henry saw it clearly.

“Good luck,” she said.

Conception

It was called “BabyDaddy,” but judging by the muted signage, it wasn’t too keen to advertise the fact. The contrast to the counselor’s uptown office couldn’t have been more depressingly striking. BabyDaddy was comprised of no more than a forlorn single unit in a forgotten business park located far away from anything that mattered. Next door was an importer of foreign sex toys called The Cock Shop. Henry wondered if this was by accident or design.

The unit was littered with, not so much furniture, but
debris
, the flotsam of failure that had accumulated around its occupant. The chaos of the surroundings suited Dr. Petorian only too well. Precisely which institution had awarded him a doctorate, and in what discipline, was not disclosed in any of the company literature.

“Doctor” Petorian had a manner that could kindly be described as animated.

“Don’t they just fucking piss you off, cooing and clucking over your wife like she was the prize pig at a county fair? And just because you were kind enough to impregnate her? All she had to do was lie back and let it happen, and now suddenly she’s the center of attention. How the fuck did that happen?”

Dr. Petorian was not what Henry had expected. He thought he’d again be spending the afternoon listening to the carefully chosen platitudes of someone else ready to charge a hundred dollars an hour to tell him what he already knew. But Petorian was something wild, a force of nature who paraded around his office like a bear trapped in too small a cage. His eyes shone out from behind thick-framed glasses that magnified them until they appeared too big for his face, and there was stubble on only one side of his chin, as though he’d been distracted halfway through shaving. To add to this, he wore a white coat that was incorrectly buttoned and far too large for him. He was like a hyperactive child playing doctors and nurses.

But Henry still thought the man was talking a lot of sense.

“I do get the feeling I’ve got the thin end of this deal,” he said.

“Well, my friend, let’s see if we can’t beat nature at her own game. Let me tell you a little about the procedure I offer.”

He pushed a bunch of leaflets across the desk. The one on the top was adorned with a picture of a man with his hand tucked tenderly around his own, obviously pregnant, stomach. The logo at the top shouted
BabyDaddy
far more confidently than the sign outside the door.

“Now, childbirth itself is beyond us, of course. But we can give you the
experience
of pregnancy, we can replicate all the symptoms and physical changes that your partner will be encountering at the same rate she does. You can, quite literally, share in the pregnancy, with the bonus that you duck out for the final act and leave all the pain and mess to her.”

Henry brushed the pamphlet with his fingertips, reluctant to actually pick up the thing. “What would it involve?” he asked.

Petorian shrugged a shambolic shoulder. “A simple surgical procedure under local anesthetic. We implant what amounts to a bladder in your abdomen. Across the time frame of your partner’s pregnancy the bladder inflates, pushing your stomach outward to mimic the growth of the fetus. We’ll provide a series of hormonal supplements that you will take at prescribed intervals. When the child crawls out of its mother, or if you have enough of being the daddy to a faux baby, you simply deflate the bladder and have another ten-minute procedure to remove it from your belly. You’ll have a tiny little scar afterward that you can tell everyone hails from your own caesarean section.”