Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [46]
I can’t believe this! “You really know how to make a guy feel good.”
“You should feel ridiculous, Gerold. You’re wasting tax dollars and wasting time, when you should be contributing.”
Gerold winced. “What, is this some new kind of behaviorist psychiatry?”
“You don’t need a psychiatrist, you need a kick in the ass.”
Wow, Gerold thought. I picked the WRONG NIGHT to try to off myself.
“There’s nothing wrong with you mentally—I could tell that the second you rolled in here.” The frown on her face kept sharpening as she continued looking at his records on the screen. “There are better ways to get attention—”
“Listen, lady! I don’t want attention! I want to be dead! I’m sick of this!” Gerold bellowed. “It’s my business.”
“Well then next time, do it right. We’ve got people here who need genuine care. We don’t have the time or money to screw around with whiny pains in the ass like you.”
Gerold was flabbergasted.
“I hope they bill you for the 911 call, the police time, the EMT time, the fuel—everything,” she said. Disgusted, she tapped a bit on her keyboard. “Tomorrow morning you’ll be transferred to the VA hospital. Nurse!”
The drab nurse returned, rubbing sleep from her eyes.
“Take this upstanding gentlemen and pillar of the community to the precaution wing and get him a bed.”
“Yes, Doctor.”
When Dr. Willet came out from around her desk, she didn’t do it on her feet. She did it in a wheelchair.
Her body was gone from the waist down.
Oh, my God, Gerold thought.
“I’d be sick to my stomach if I had one. You’re a disgrace, Gerold. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.” For the first time, the doctor smiled. “Now get the hell out of my office.”
Gerold wished he could shrink into nonexistence when the nurse wheeled him away.
(II)
Your name is Hudson Hudson and you’ve just won the Senary. Your soul has been turned into gas and squeezed into Hell through a hole in the wall.
And here you are . . .
Regaining consciousness reminds you of the time you got your wisdom teeth pulled at the dentist’s. You’re a balloon underwater that has just risen to break the surface. First, senses, then awareness, then memory. The only difference is, that time you awoke into your physical body, but now . . .
I don’t have one, comes the oddly calm realization.
There’s a faint noise, something reverberant like water dripping in a subterranean grotto. Your eyes open in increments but only register scarlet murk, just as another sensation registers: rocking back and forth and up and down as if in a car with too much suspension. Your vision struggles for detail as the dripping fades, to be replaced by a steady metallic clattering along with a hiss.
Then your vision snaps into perfect, even surreal, focus.
The macabre lips on the Snot-Gourd scream.
You’re in a vehicle of some kind, which idles down a street whose surface is chunks of wet bone, split ankles and elbows, and other odds and ends of meaty gristle. “How’s that for your first glimpse of the Offal District?” comes the familiar New England accent. “My own reaction was much the same, but of course, that’s why they call it the Offal District. It’s constructed primarily with surplus scraps from the Pulping Stations: less-edible organs, joints, bits of bone.”
You look up and scream again when you realize exactly what you’re looking at: a very black sickle moon hanging in a scarlet sky.
The attempt to move your arms and legs comes reflexively; then you remember, My body’s back in the house with the deaconess, but my consciousness . . . is in the pumpkin . . .
Your cue ball–size eyes blink. I’m in Hell . . .
“The Senarial Sciences here