All's Well(98)

I take her hand. Cold like her forehead. Suddenly I can’t breathe. Tears flood my eyes. I feel them hot on my skin, sizzling under the lights.

“I thought she could take it! I thought she was hardy! She’s from Plymouth, for fuck’s sake, aren’t you, Grace? Tell them how you’re from Plymouth!”

I grab her shoulder, which is so very cold, and I shake it. “Come on, Grace, please. Puritan stock. The Pilgrims, remember? So strong the Pilgrims are. Resilient. Unkillable, remember? Please remember you’re supposed to be unkillable!”

The audience laughs and laughs. Doesn’t look like it now. And I shake and shake Grace, who just lies there like nothing.

“Grace, listen to me, please. I take it back, okay? I take it back! I would if I could, I would, I would. I wish I could. If I’d known this was going to happen, I would have never done it.” More tears fall, making Grace blur around the edges, making her body mix with the laughing dark beyond the lights. I shake my head at the dark. “I’m not going to just let you die like this.”

I try to rise, and this time the light doesn’t hold me down. Now the light is just light. The audience gasps as I run down the aisle toward the exit door. They’re watching me. Smiling. All those teeth and eyes on me, I feel them. And then I see them, the three men. Sitting toward the back. Taking up a whole row. Their large silhouettes leaning back in their chairs. Their feet propped up on the seats in front of them. Smiling at me running in the dark, smiling at Grace dying on the stage—making my heart drum and drum. Oh god, don’t look, just run, go, go, go, get help for Grace. Keep your eyes on the EXIT sign. Keep your eyes on—

The lights go black again. I’m in complete darkness.

Oh god.

What is this?



* * *



Music again. Everywhere. All around me like the dark. That same swell of strings.

The light is back. Faint. Red now. Coming from the stage behind me.

I turn around to find the set’s changed. Gone is Grace’s living room. Gone is Grace.

Now under the dim red light there’s a group of men on the stage. Men in blue hospital scrubs. Men in white lab coats. Men in polo shirts. The men are gathered around a long medical table.

“What’s this?” I say. The men onstage ignore me. So busy they are with whatever’s on the medical table.

There’s a man standing at a distance away from the huddled mass, watching with arms crossed. A crew cut frames his sensible face, sharp under the red light. A yin-yang pendant glows in the open collar of his polo shirt. He’s nodding slowly. As if it’s all part of the journey. Mark.

Mark, what are you doing here?

He turns and looks at me then. Standing there, swaying there in the aisle of a theater so dark I can’t see the seats around me. His face is grave and pale. What have you done, what have you done, what have you done? He holds up his arm. There’s a bandage on his wrist—right where I touched him in the treatment room. I can see a blotch of blood seeping through the gauze.

The audience gasps at the sight, horrified.

I shake my head. Ridiculous. It’s a lie. I didn’t draw blood, I just touched him. He never bled. “It’s a lie,” I tell the audience all around me that I can’t see, the three men behind me now. “This man hurt me. He hurt me! Again and again and again.”

And then I point at him. “He hurt me, and I had to defend myself!”

They don’t listen to me. They go on gasping and shaking their heads at Mark’s wrist.

Mark looks at me standing there in the audience, and then he turns away. He looks back at the huddle of men on the stage, gathered closer around the medical table. More red lights on these men. Brighter now. They’re working on something together, working at whatever’s on the table. What are they working on? Whom, I realize. Whom, not what.

And then I see her. I can see her unshaven legs trembling between their huddled bodies. Her bare feet poking stiffly out from among the khaki thighs of the men. She’s squirming, and I know she’s strapped to the bed with belts. I feel the weight and tightness of the straps bearing her down. I can feel her heart jumping under her ribs. I can feel her breath broken and raspy in her throat.

“Who is that?” I mean to scream, but my voice is suddenly very thin. Because I know who it is. I feel their every touch and pull on my skin. A sudden soreness in my muscles. A stiffness beginning to spread across my limbs. A sudden cramp that curls my foot into a claw. Inner webs lighting up red, red, red. “Stop it!” No one answers me. Not the men on the red-lit stage, not the audience in the dark who are rapt. Watching.

Onstage, Mark just continues to watch too. Watches the men huddle closer and closer around the table, pulling and prodding at the woman’s body. Mark is sorrowful but smiling. As if whoever that woman is, well, she asked for this, didn’t she? She’s trouble. We have to shut her up. She just won’t quit complaining. About how much it all hurts. Well. Well, what if we give her something to cry about, shall we?

“No.” I shake my head. “Please.”

But the men don’t hear me. They’re talking among themselves. Now one of them—Dr. Rainier? Dr. Harper?—readies the needle. Larger than any needle I’ve ever seen. I watch the needle squirt liquid into the air.

“No. No, what are you doing to her? Stop! Someone stop him.”