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

But he didn’t let me finish. He held my head down violently, gagged me, and left the room.

He then checked on me a few times during the day, playing with my IVs and keeping me hydrated, but then that stopped: I couldn’t have any more water, nothing, and all I could think about was Madvig reaching his hand inside my body and snipping out my kidney.

8.

Then that night, trapped in the jacket, gagged, and alone in the dark, I lost it in a good way and had some visitors, one after the next:

My mother, whom I only knew from photos, but she was so glad to finally meet me.

My father, who had changed completely—all his anger was gone.

Lou, who got me into all this trouble in the first place, and, of course, he was smoking.

George, my sweet boy, who kissed me over and over.

And then a real surprise visitor: the first girl I ever loved, Sarah.

She was my girlfriend when we were seventeen and she’d had the most beautiful smile. She was one of those illuminated people. Light came out of her and everyone felt better when she was around.

But when I went into the Navy, she went to the East Coast and we lost each other. In my twenties, I heard she got married and I wondered if it could have been me, and then in my forties, I heard she had died of brain cancer and left behind a little girl.

I couldn’t believe this had happened to her—not Sarah!—and it was so painful to realize that I had missed out on her whole beautiful life. Why did I let that happen? Why couldn’t we at least have been friends?

But then there she was in that dark room, holding my hand, smiling at me, like she still loved me, like she had never stopped loving me.

And I was so happy to be with everyone who came to see me. It all felt very real. They were right there with me, sitting on the edge of my bed, and I said to each of them many times, I love you, I love you, I love you.

9.

I somehow slept for a few hours, and in the morning, I woke up, probably around dawn. I was still strapped to the bed and soon I was going to be operated on against my will and I had to try something.

I had to go down fighting, and I began to imagine Madvig talking to me before the surgery. Doctors always tell you what they’re going to do before they do it, and they’d have to unstrap me if they were going to cut me, and I could lunge for him then and get my mouth on his neck and rip out his jugular; I had seen something like that in a movie. What did I have to lose? Or maybe I might even get away and be able to save Monica. Kill him and the other two could fall.

So I started practicing in my mind and passed a few hours like that, and then Ben, wearing a surgical mask, came into the room and wheeled me out of there on the bed, still strapped down and gagged.

He rolled me all the way to the surgery tent, where Madvig and his son, in masks and scrubs, were waiting for us. There were bright surgical lamps blinding me and Madvig said: “Good morning, Mr. Doll. This’ll be over before you know it, so not to worry. Kidneys are very tiny, not more than five inches, so they slip right out.”

Then he said to his son, “Let’s get him started,” and John hooked me up to the IV, inserting the feed into my neck port, and he said, “I’m going to count down from ten,” and he began, and they weren’t giving me a chance to do anything!

They were going to unstrap me and ungag me after I was out, and John was saying, “Nine, eight, seven,” and Ben took my hand at the bottom of my straitjacket and gave it a warm squeeze and said, “You’re going to be okay,” and I could see that beneath his mask he was smiling at me with his twisted mouth.

When I woke up three hours later, I was short one kidney.

10.

I was back in my room and Ben had changed my restraints.

I was no longer in the straitjacket—probably because of the incision on the side of my abdomen—and I wasn’t cuffed to the railings with metal bracelets.

There were still straps across my body and my head, but I was now lying on a pad with Velcro cuffs, which secured my ankles and wrists, and because I was pinned to the pad by my own body weight and the straps across me, I was utterly immobile. I had seen such rigs in psychiatric hospitals when I was a Navy cop and then later in the LAPD. They were effective with violent psychotics.

But I wasn’t gagged and I tried to scream for the hell of it, except my throat was a dry rasp. I lay there for a while, still feeling heavy and thick from the sedation.

Then I tried to scan my body, to see if I could sense that my kidney was gone, and I thought I felt an absence, like a drawer had been removed from a dresser. Then I dozed off for a little while, but woke back up when Ben came into the room. He said: “You like the new setup? More comfortable than a straitjacket. Was delivered this morning.”

I just looked at him, and he lifted up the bandage on my abdomen and said: “Looking good. You and the old man did great. How’s the catheter feel?”

“Catheter?” I couldn’t lift my head, strapped as it was to the bed, and so I wasn’t able to see between my legs, and I had no sensation down there.

“I’ll take it out later,” he said. “We got to make sure you can piss on your own.”

I