A Man Named Doll by Jonathan Ames (popular books to read TXT) 📗

Help so many people…and your friend—she’s even more valuable. Lungs, heart, liver, ovaries, but we can’t use either of your faces for transplantation. You’re both too scarred—”

“Don’t fucking touch her!” I screamed helplessly, and I yanked my arms and legs.

“Of course we will keep you both as comfortable as possible for as long as we can. A living donor makes for the most successful transplants, and Wednesday morning will be your first procedure. Someone, who is also O positive, needs your kidney. So it’s good timing you’re here, but it’s an easy surgery and you will recover quickly—”

Then I went truly nuts, fighting the cuffs, thrashing my whole body, and Madvig said: “Stop it, Mr. Doll! I don’t want you hurting yourself.”

Then to his son, he said: “John, hook up the fentanyl,” and to the big man, he said, “Ben, hold him down,” and Ben put one of his large hands around my neck, choking me, but I kept fighting: he was going to have to kill me.

And he nearly did.

I felt myself starting to black out: his fingers were like iron, and I didn’t want to but I stopped resisting, and Ben let go, and I was gasping, and the son, John, put another line—which must have been the fentanyl—into my arm port, and I said to him, out of breath, but hoping, pitifully, to wound: “Doesn’t it bother you that your father killed your mother like this?”

But he just smiled at me, and I looked at the .22 tucked into his pants. “That gun make you feel like a man?”

“Keep talking,” he said. “We’re going to strip you and sell you for parts.”

Then I could feel the fentanyl—it came on all at once; it was like dropping down an elevator shaft, but without fear—and Ben lowered the bed, and the three of them seemed to be standing in smoke, and all the fight had already gone out of me. I only had begging left, and I said to Madvig: “Please let her go.”

He smiled beneficently at me but didn’t say anything.

Then I whispered, fading out: “Why are you doing this?”

“I lost two sons, Mr. Doll,” answered Madvig. “You owe me a great deal. I think this is more than fair.”

3.

When I woke up next, the room was pitch black, and I was in a straitjacket and secured to the bed with tight straps across my shins, thighs, chest, and forehead.

I couldn’t move at all—they really wanted to make sure I didn’t harm myself—and the port had been relocated to my neck, and I was hooked up to something. Probably something to keep me hydrated and fed.

And just to be extra thorough, they had put a ball gag in my mouth to go with my straitjacket.

So I lay there for hours, utterly immobile in the darkness, and thought of prisoners of war being tortured, and I called upon myself to be brave. I tried to be measured in my breathing, to feel each inhalation and each exhalation, and it worked for maybe a few minutes at a time. Mostly there was panic and horror, like a mouse in a glue trap.

And to know that I had brought this on Monica…

At some point in the middle of the night, Ben came in and saw that my eyes were wide open. So he flipped the switch on the fentanyl, and as I began to disappear again, he said: “We won’t keep you on this all the time. We want your kidney function to be good. But tonight, I’ll let you sleep.”

In the morning, he gently woke me and pulled open the shade behind me, flooding the room with light. I was glad that there had been no dreams.

He removed my bedpan, undid the strap across my chest, and unfurled the right side of my straitjacket. Then he grabbed my right wrist and cuffed it to the railing. I didn’t have a chance to try anything. Then he undid the left side and got that wrist cuffed.

“I want to wash you,” he said. “You going to be good? Not going to yank?”

I was still gagged and my head was still strapped to the bed and so I said yes with my eyes. I wanted to play along. I had to find an advantage.

He removed my paper gown and brought in a bucket of soapy warm water from the bathroom and proceeded to gently bathe me with a sponge.

He even smiled at me with his tormented mouth, happy with his work, and so I began to think that he was simple, somewhere on the spectrum, like Lennie in the Steinbeck novel.

When he was done bathing me, he put on latex gloves and applied an antibiotic cream to the wounds on my arm and face and put on fresh bandages. I was being attended to like a cow before slaughter.

Then he got a paper gown on me, put the straitjacket back on, and restrapped me to the bed. He was very careful, each step, to make sure I was always too restrained to try anything, and he kept the ball gag in my mouth the whole time, the strap of it running just below the wound on my left cheek and around my head.

Then he left the room for a while, and I fantasized that Thode and Mullen would be showing up any minute. It was Monday morning and I figured they would have started looking for me by at least Saturday, at which point one of Monica’s friends might have reported her missing. Maybe she had even told someone she was coming to see me.

They’d then make the link between Monica and me, which would make finding me even more urgent—maybe I had done something to her—and I might have been connected, by Saturday or even Friday, to the death of Maurais. The woman in 5H could have easily identified me, and there were surely cameras in the lobby.

So: Monica’s disappearance, Lou’s death, the Pakistani boy’s murder, Maurais—they’d be desperate to track