Zippered Flesh 2: More Tales of Body Enhancements Gone Bad (37 page)

“That’s all a bit extreme.”

“Maybe so. But this way, you get to share the joy of childbirth. You get to experience what nature has denied us. You get to feel what she feels. Why should she get it all to herself when you both had a hand in baking that bun in her oven?” He leaned across the desk, his comically large eyes bulging. “Don’t you deserve someone cooing over you for a change?”

“I’m supposed to be achieving empathy,” Henry pointed out.

Petorian shrugged. “You know what they say about walking a mile in someone else’s shoes.”

Henry certainly did. He started to flick through the leaflet.

It couldn’t hurt to consider it, after all.

Second Trimester

Everyone in the store gave Henry a wide berth. He didn’t care anymore. He was used to it. Used to that look on their faces, that look of puzzlement that slowly surrendered to disgust.

Fuck them.

He didn’t care about what they thought, not anymore. The only thing he cared about was Junior. He walked down the aisles with a basket in one hand and the other wrapped around his belly as if to shield it from the rest of the world.

His feet hurt. His ankles were swollen. And his nipples had started leaking again this morning, so he’d worn a sweater even though it was baking hot so he sweated as if there were a tap left on beneath his skin. It dripped from his forehead onto the ice cream as he bent down to pick up a tub. He put the frozen cardboard to his brow and let it cool him for a while.

The girl at the checkout served him with a scowl on her face, as if someone had shit on the conveyor.

“You got a problem?” he asked her.

“Look who’s fucking talking,” she murmured.

“What did you say?”

She looked him right in the eye.

“Freak.”

Henry thought about asking to speak to her manager. But he needed to pee and he just wanted to get home. So he let it pass. The manager would probably just be worse, anyway.

The procedure had been carried out two months before. Henry had it done at a clinic that provided a cheap but cheerful service. They even seemed to think he was doing a wonderful thing having the rubber womb implanted. The attending nurse certainly told him as much. As Petorian promised, it was indeed a brief operation, although it wasn’t exactly painless. The womb/bladder had been the size of a balloon, and it went in easily. The incision was sore for weeks; it still itched when Henry had a bath. He’d gone home with a box full of hormone treatments provided by Petorian. The medicine came from a Mexican pharmaceutical company, with dispending notes all written in Spanish. Henry hadn’t stopped to consider the implications of that, but by then he was so wrapped up in the idea of fatherhood, he likely wouldn’t have cared anyway.

He started to inject them. The bladder started to swell. And soon enough, it wasn’t anything to do with empathy anymore.

Dominique had walked out on him a couple of weeks ago. She wouldn’t even take his calls. Selfish bitch. It had come to a head at a Lamaze class. She was starting to show, that curving round stretch of belly that told the world that she was expecting, that she was with child, that she was, for the extent of her pregnancy, someone
special
. But Henry had started to show even more, and when they had sat and begun to practice focused breathing, it was pretty clear to both of them that whatever reason he initially had for having his own mock pregnancy implanted, it was now more important to him than the one they had made together. Her breathing didn’t matter to him, it was his own that he needed to perfect. The looks of revulsion from the other couples were too much for her. She couldn’t have gotten out of there fast enough, and one of the other mothers-to-be, a sour bitch who must have been fat even before the pregnancy pounds had piled on, had cornered Henry as he tried to follow.

“You fucked-up creep. Think about your wife for one second and get rid of that thing.”

She poked him in his engorged belly. It was all he could do to stop himself from slapping her ugly face.

“I believe in my baby’s right to life,” he told her, and pushed past.

He didn’t catch up with Dominique and he hadn’t seen her since. Their only contact had come through her friend, Angelica, who had made it clear that there was only one way that they could possibly be reconciled. And Henry had no intention of getting rid of his baby.

“You seriously care more for a bag of fucking air than your own child?” Angelica had said to him.

“This is
my
child,” he answered, pointing to his stomach.

“You need serious help, Henry.”

And perhaps she was right. But he was
happy
. Since he’d had the implant, everything seemed to make so much more sense. And there was no way he was going to let that feeling go, not until he reached full term.

Third Trimester

Dr. Yates pointed to a dark shadow on the x-ray. It pressed against the bright white blur that was the bladder in negative, as if it was fighting off the rapidly inflating intruder.

“It’s definitely a tumor. We’ll need to do a biopsy to determine its nature, but it’s growing at an alarming rate.”

“It’s not a tumor, doc. We both know what it is.”

“Mr. Schade.
Henry
. I understand why you undertook this procedure. I think you probably did so with noble and selfless intentions. But all you have done is allowed yourself to be mutilated at the hands of a hack. This has caused you and your wife no end of emotional pain and now there is clear physical damage from the pressure you have been putting your body through. It’s time to put a stop to this. We can have that implant out of you within the hour and have you on a proper course of remedial steroids to try to prevent the growth of the tumor.”

“It’s not a tumor.”

Dr. Yates sighed, rubbed his temples, tried not to let the exasperation show. “Henry, you are not pregnant. Your body is simply lying to you, responding to the chemicals you’ve been pumping into it, chemicals that have no right to be circulating in your system. That, and the monstrous thing you’ve got implanted inside you, is pushing your body to its limits, and your body is starting to crumble under the pressure. You need to have it removed
now
, before it’s too late to repair the damage.”

“This is not damage. This is my child.”

“Henry, you need immediate surgery and you need psychiatric help before this kills you. Do you understand?”

“You can feel it kicking, under the skin. Come and feel, then you’ll understand.”

He lifted the shirt, a 4XL, the only size that would now fit over the grossly distorted shape of his stomach. The exposed skin was stretched obscenely, almost gray in pallor. It looked as if he were about to burst.

“Touch it,” he demanded.

Dr. Yates turned away. Years of training, years of experience, none of it helped him hide the instinctive disgust he felt.

Henry rolled his shirt back down. “It’s not a tumor,” he said defiantly.

Full Term

ER was quiet on a Wednesday. Always was. There was a dreary calm about the place that would seem impossible during a hectic shift on a Saturday night. The staff needed no encouragement to take advantage of the lull. Rosalitta on the front desk even had time to do her nails. She held up her right hand and wiggled her fingers, admiring her work, the scarlet-painted digits that were her pride and joy. She had lovely hands. If her face had been as pretty as her hands, she would be living it up somewhere far away from this dump. If only.

Henry ruined the moment. He burst through the double doors with his hands clutched across his stomach, his face twisted with agony.

He fell to the floor. The blue jeans that he wore—jeans that he couldn’t button anymore and had to let hang loose around his waist, in the hope they didn’t fall—were blood-soaked. As he fell, he splashed blood across the floor in a pattern that might have been beautiful in another circumstance.

“It’s coming. Help me! Fuck, I need an epidural
now
!” Henry wheezed at her from the floor.

Rosalitta screamed for assistance.

Delivery

A team of blue-green attired nurses and doctors circled above Henry like uncertain vultures. He couldn’t see their faces. The pain was everything and it tended to block out most of the details.

“Extensive rectal bleeding, his stomach is distended. We need to get him into surgery ASAP.”

Henry reached up a hand, still smeared with his blood. “My baby. You need to free my baby.”

“What baby? What’s he talking about?” A female voice.

“Unless we get him into the theater straight away, it’s not going to matter.”

Then Henry was being wheeled along a corridor. He could see the lights in the ceiling. They kept trying to put something over his face, something that smelled strange and made his thinking fuzzy. He pushed it away.

“It’ll help you relax, help with the pain,” a voice from far away whispered to him.

“No,” Henry said, waving his arms at them. “I want to be awake. I want to see it arrive.”

And he held onto consciousness, despite the pain that was ripping through him.

The lights were brighter, still above his head but steady now. He was no longer moving. He was in the theater.

Henry couldn’t see the blue-green vultures anymore, could only hear their random voices.

“Jesus, what’s inside him? There’s something under the skin, I can see it pushing through.”

“There’s evidence of severe internal hemorrhage. We need to open him up, right now, before he just bleeds out on the table.”

“Why hasn’t this man been anesthetized?”

“He refused all attempts to administer any.”

Henry screamed. The pain was impossible.
Unbearable
. But didn’t women do this all the time? Wasn’t this what
they
had to endure? It couldn’t be that bad, that’s what Henry had always thought. They like to tell you what agony childbirth is. But, if it was
this
bad, none of them would ever go through it more than once, right? But they did. And if
they
could cope, he certainly could. He remembered the lessons from his short-lived Lamaze class. Remembered what they had taught about controlling the breathing, controlling the pain. He puffed his cheeks—swift, shallow breaths.