Everything's Eventual

   "I hate that jerk," she says when the door is closed. Now it's just the three of us, only of course Ms. Cisco Kid thinks it's just the two of them. "Why do I always get the jerks, Peter?"

   "I don't know," Mr. Melrose Place says, "but Rusty's a special case, even in the annals of famous jerks. Walking brain death."

   She laughs, and something clanks. The clank is followed by a sound that scares me badly: steel instruments clicking together. They are off to the left of me, and although I can't see them, I know what they're getting ready to do: the autopsy. They are getting ready to cut into me. They intend to remove Howard Cottrell's heart and see if it blew a piston or threw a rod.

   My leg! I scream inside my head. Look at my left leg! That's the trouble, not my heart!

   Perhaps my eyes have adjusted a little, after all. Now I can see, at the very top of my vision, a stainless steel armature. It looks like a giant piece of dental equipment, except that thing at the end isn't a drill. It's a saw. From someplace deep inside, where the brain stores the sort of trivia you only need if you happen to be playing Jeopardy! on TV, I even come up with the name. It's a Gigli saw. They use it to cut off the top of your skull. This is after they've pulled your face off like a kid's Halloween mask, of course, hair and all.

   Then they take out your brain.

   Clink. Clink. Clunk. A pause. Then a CLANK! so loud I'd jump if I were capable of jumping.

   "Do you want to do the pericardial cut?" she asks.

   Pete, cautious: "Do you want me to?"

   Dr. Cisco, sounding pleasant, sounding like someone who is conferring a favor and a responsibility: "Yes, I think so."

   "All right," he says. "You'll assist?"

   "Your trusty co-pilot," she says, and laughs. She punctuates her laughter with a snick-snick sound. It's the sound of scissors cutting the air.

   Now panic beats and flutters inside my skull like a flock of starlings locked in an attic. The Nam was a long time ago, but I saw half a dozen field autopsies there—what the doctors used to call "tentshow postmortems"—and I know what Cisco and Pancho mean to do. The scissors have long, sharp blades, very sharp blades, and fat finger-holes. Still, you have to be strong to use them. The lower blade slides into the gut like butter. Then, snip, up through the bundle of nerves at the solar plexus and into the beef-jerky weave of muscle and tendon above it. Then into the sternum. When the blades come together this time, they do so with a heavy crunch as the bone parts and the rib cage pops apart like a couple of barrels which have been lashed together with twine. Then on up with those scissors that look like nothing so much as the poultry shears supermarket butchers use—snip-CRUNCH, snip-CRUNCH, snip-CRUNCH, splitting bone and shearing muscle, freeing the lungs, heading for the trachea, turning Howard the Conqueror into a Thanksgiving dinner no one will eat.

   A thin, nagging whine—this does sound like a dentist's drill.

   Pete: "Can I—"

   Dr. Cisco, actually sounding a bit maternal: "No. These." Snicksnick. Demonstrating for him.

   They can't do this, I think. They can't cut me up . . . I can FEEL!

   "Why?" he asks.

   "Because that's the way I want it," she says, sounding a lot less maternal. "When you're on your own, Petie-boy, you can do what you want. But in Katie Arlen's autopsy room, you start off with the pericardial shears."

   Autopsy room. There. It's out. I want to be all over goose-bumps, but of course, nothing happens; my flesh remains smooth.

   "Remember," Dr. Arlen says (but now she's actually lecturing), "any fool can learn how to use a milking machine . . . but the handson procedure is always best." There is something vaguely suggestive in her tone. "Okay?"

   "Okay," he says.

   They're going to do it. I have to make some kind of noise or movement, or they're really doing to do it. If blood flows or jets up from the first punch of the scissors they'll know something's wrong, but by then it will be too late, very likely; that first snip-CRUNCH will have happened, and my ribs will be lying against my upper arms, my heart pulsing frantically away under the fluorescents in its bloodglossy sac—

   I concentrate everything on my chest. I push, or try to . . . and something happens.

   A sound!

   I make a sound!

   It's mostly inside my closed mouth, but I can also hear and feel it in my nose—a low hum.

   Concentrating, summoning every bit of effort, I do it again, and this time the sound is a little stronger, leaking out of my nostrils like cigarette smoke: Nnnnnnn— It makes me think of an old Alfred Hitchcock TV program I saw a long, long time ago, where Joseph Cotten was paralyzed in a car crash and was finally able to let them know he was still alive by crying a single tear.