Heartsick

CHAPTER 12

Gretchen doesn’t let him sleep that first night, so he is already losing track of time. She injects him with some sort of amphetamine and then leaves for hours. Archie’s heart races and he can do nothing but stare at the white ceiling and feel the pulse throb in his neck and his hands shake. The blood has dried on his chest and now itches. He is in excruciating pain every time he inhales, but it’s the itching that is making him crazy. He tries for a while to keep track of time by counting, but his mind drifts and he loses the thread of numbers. Judging by the stink of the corpse on the floor beside him, he has been here for at least twenty-four hours. But more than that, he can’t say. So Archie stares. And blinks. And breathes. And waits.

He does not hear her come in, but suddenly Gretchen is there, smiling beside him. She caresses his hair, which is wet with sweat. “It’s time for your medicine, darling,” she purrs. With a swift motion, she tears the tape off his mouth.

She is gentle as she pushes the funnel into his throat, but it still makes him gag. He fights it, jerking his head from side to side, trying to lift himself on his elbows, but she knots her fist in his hair and holds his head firmly in place. “Now, now,” she scolds.

She has a handful of pills and she drops them down his throat one by one. He gags and tries to spit them out, but she extracts the funnel, presses his jaw shut, and rubs his throat with her hand, forcing him to swallow them like a dog.

“What are they?” he croaks.

“You don’t get to talk yet,” she says. She smoothes another piece of tape over his mouth. He is almost thankful. What is there to say?

“What do you want to do today?” she asks.

Archie stares at the ceiling, his eyes burning for sleep.

“Look at me,” she says between clenched teeth.

He does.

“What do you want to do today?”

He raises his eyebrows in an expression of ambivalence.

“More of the nails?”

He can’t stop himself from flinching.

Gretchen beams. He can tell his pain pleases her. “They’re looking for you,” she says in a singsong voice. “But they’re not going to find you.”

Wherever they are, she is reading the paper, watching the news, he thinks.

She puts her face next to his so he can see her smooth ivory skin, her huge pupils. “I want you to think about what we’re going to send them,” she says matter-of-factly. She runs her fingertips lightly along the skin of his arm, his wrist. “Hand, foot, that sort of thing. Something nice to let them know we’re thinking of them. I’m going to let you pick it out.”

Archie closes his eyes. He is not here. This is not happening. He tries frantically to conjure Debbie’s face on the black canvas of his eyelids. He can see her as she was that last morning. He has already mentally cataloged every item of clothing she was wearing. The thick-cabled green wool sweater. The gray skirt. The long coat that made her look like a Russian soldier. He conjures every freckle on her face. Her tiny diamond earrings. The mole on her neck, just above her breastbone.

“Look at me,” Gretchen orders.

He squeezes his eyes shut tighter. Her wedding band. Round knees. The freckles on her pale thigh.

“Look at me,” she says again, her voice airless.

Fuck you, he thinks.

She stabs him just under his left rib cage. He howls and wrenches in pain and his eyes fly open instinctively.

She holds his head firmly by a fistful of hair and bends over him so that her breasts are inches above his chest and she twists the scalpel farther into his flesh. He gets a flash of her smell-lilacs, sweet sweat, talcum powder-it is a relief from the putrid stench of the corpse.

“I don’t like to be ignored,” she says in a voice just above a whisper. “Understand?”

He nods, straining against her hand.

“Good.” She pulls the scalpel out and drops it on the instrument tray.