The Blood Artists
- Автор: Хоган Чак
- Год: 1998
- Язык: английский
- Год: William Morrow
- ISBN: 978-0-688-15622-0
- Жанр: Триллеры
Электронная книга - «The Blood Artists». Краткое содержание книги:
She was struck from behind and thrown forward sprawling onto the cement apron. She had been tackled, knocked off the track median toward the street. As she tumbled, she saw a flurry of arms and knees, most of them her own.
Steel wheels screeched as a B trolley burst behind her. The harsh, sudden noise was deafening to her keening ears, and stunned, she jerked back onto her knees.
The well-dressed man from the second trolley car was behind her now, having rolled from the force of his impact half out onto Commonwealth Avenue. An automobile skidded to a stop, curtseying just inches from his tight shoulder.
Her handbag had slipped to her side. She groped for the snap and thrashed around inside for her mace, pulling it out and thumbing the trigger. A fine steroid mist escaped. It wasn’t her Mace at alclass="underline" It was her bronchodilator, and with a grunt she flung the inhaler aside.
Then she realized what had actually happened. The well-dressed man hadn’t attacked her at all. He had shoved her out of the path of the inbound streetcar. He had saved her life.
“Hey!” she yelled after him. But the stranger never looked back. She saw the soles of his shoes and his gloved hands pumping as he raced away, and by the time she got to her feet he was down a side street and gone.
Very quickly she had her bag back in hand. People were staring at her, and a college kid wearing a powder blue surgeon’s cap stepped forward and handed Melanie back her inhaler, asking if she was all right. She snatched it out of his blue-bandaged hand and rushed blindly across the street while the traffic was still stopped.
She went a city block with tears stinging her eyes, apartment stoops and storefronts blurring past her. At the corner she ducked into the doorway of a dry cleaners and she faced her frail reflection in the steamed window as she tried to catch her breath. Cranberry, that was the color she had regrettably dyed her hair, short to her jaw on the sides and flat against her small head like sauce poured over an eggshell. She looked like a punked-out corpse. No combination of clothing or patterns could improve upon her implike frame. She was a mess.
She glanced back up the avenue and no one seemed to be following or staring at her any longer. Her damaged lungs heaved and burned. She took out her inhaler and took a deep, soothing hit, and felt her lungs begin to expand.
Just keep moving, she thought. As long as she kept moving forward, the worst they could do was force her sideways.
The appointment she was running late for was at the Allston-Brighton Parish Clinic, a busy, modern brick office building located across from a Middle Eastern restaurant, half a block down Harvard Avenue. Only a gynecology appointment could round out that most enjoyable morning. Dr. Ursula Freeley’s office was not listed in the lobby directory, nor was there a plaque on her second-floor door. But like a horse returning to the corral, Melanie’s reproductive organs knew the way.
The waiting room was always empty. The window was open and the receptionist, a different woman than last time, smiled up at her and spoke with a light southern accent. There was never a wait. Melanie was called immediately and shown into the examining room.
Light choral music playing inside did nothing for her, and she remained fraught with the chaos of the street. Water helped to calm her down. As directed, she was drinking glassfuls from two plastic pitchers in order to fill her bladder and thereby raise her pelvic organs for an impending ultrasound. Melanie suffered from endometriosis, a condition whereby stubborn endometrial tissue clung to her insides rather than being voided by her damaged body each month. It had been described to her as “rust” on her ovaries, and could lead to the development of painful cysts which, if untreated, could then lead to tumors. There was no cure, only a choice of two treatments. The first was pregnancy. Melanie’s laughing jag at Dr. Freeley’s first suggestion of this three years before had prompted a memorable sneezing fit. The other was a laparotomy, a mildly invasive surgical procedure whereby a viewscope was inserted into the navel and a tool was inserted through the abdominal cavity to scrape the uterus clean. Her ovaries were incorrigible and had already demanded the procedure four times. Her pale-as-dough bikini line — “bikini” used in the purest hypothetical sense here — was marked with four slashing pink incision scars facing her indented navel, like the constellation of whatever cursed sign she had been born under. Would the fifth, which she dreaded, cross the first four, thereby completing a set?
She heard the doctor’s footsteps out in the hall, the way a deadbolt must feel when it hears keys jingling. Dr. Freeley was businesslike and tall. She was humorless, but as with any good doctor, she had a quiet, confident air that allowed Melanie to tell her things she told no one else. She was also beautiful, with a cool, perfect elegance about her which struck Melanie as fundamentally unjust. Gynecologists, of all women, should not be someone you might lose your date to at a party.
“No examination,” Melanie reminded her.
Dr. Freeley set down her chart and wheeled over the blue machine, agreeing with a nod. “Just pictures this time.”
Melanie unbuckled her belt and slipped her jeans halfway down over the bony knobs of her waist. She removed her jersey and lay back, sliding her shirt up past her prominent ribs, revealing the scrawny torso of a teenage anorexic.
Dr. Freeley said, “How have you been feeling?”
“Never better,” Melanie answered.
“No weight gain, I see. Ninety-two pounds. You’re eating?”
“Let’s see. Cheeseburgers for dinner last night. Chicken wings for dessert. Pizza for breakfast, and I’m already hungry again. Am I on heroin?”
Dr. Freeley casually touched Melanie’s waist with her latex hands, looking merely interested, not concerned. “Just an overactive metabolism,” she decided.
Dr. Freeley slathered gel on Melanie’s bare stomach and her abdomen bucked against the coolness. Melanie often wondered how much Dr. Freeley knew about her medical past, such as the damage to her lungs. There was something in the way she treated Melanie, much like a child, and in the fact that she had never asked the origin of the other, numerous scars, proud and jagged and slashing Melanie’s belly and chest like surgical graffiti, that had gradually raised Melanie’s suspicions over time.
“Arch your back more.”
The ultrasound examination was mercifully brief. Later, after relieving the swollen balloon of her bladder in the connecting bathroom and toweling off the goop, Melanie noticed dust in the small sink. She ran water which lifted and swirled the grime into dark streaks and whisked them away down the drain, leaving a gray ring. The soap dispenser, she noted, was full; new. That bathroom had not been used in days.
She returned to the greater examining room where Dr. Freeley waited, as always, to take her blood. Melanie’s mind ran on as she watched Dr. Freeley work over her arm. Why the need for so much blood? How much did she need for testing? Melanie studied Dr. Freeley as Dr. Freeley studied her, until the room began to spin. Melanie lost count around the sixth or seventh tube.
“Just one more,” said Dr. Freeley. “You haven’t asked about the ultrasound.”
“Right,” Melanie nodded. Because she knew the answer already.
“The ovarian adhesions are back again. I don’t know why the hormone pills aren’t working. We’re going to have to schedule another procedure.”
Melanie nodded, drifting. “Or else become pregnant. Don’t leave out that option.”
Dr. Freeley finished and bandaged her arm. “I take it you’re between boyfriends?”