08.20.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:35 am by Administrator
Brian stepped out of his police car and walked into the County Medical Examiner’s office. He walked past the gift shop, one of the very few morgue gift shops in the country. There were black towels with outlines of bodies on them. Brian never understood that. He never understood what was supposed to be so clever about them. If anything, they underscored the public’s ignorance. Police don’t, and never have, drawn chalk-marked outlines around dead bodies. It doesn’t make sense. They take scores of photographs, they write notes, nowadays they make video recordings, use tape to pick up trace evidence and ever use special devices to capture and maintain odors from an area. But no chalk outlines. An office might draw a diagram and include a figure to show where a body was located. Such crude drawings must have been the confused origin of the myth.
Brian continued across the clean, shining linoleum and through the stainless steel doors that led to the morgue part of the morgue. He absent-mindedly batted away a fly. Several flies. Late summer at the morgue. Grown-up flies were annoying, baby ones could be horrifying. He’d seen maggots joyously jump a foot in the air off a dead body. He hoped it wasn’t going to see that again.
Coincidence. The pathologist was just finishing with Brian’s Jane Doe as he walked in. She’d already stitched up the Y-shaped incision in her chest. The black nylon thread stood out against the waxy blue-ish, yellow-ish white of her skin. Her face looked a little scrunched. He had made an incision along the back of her head, pulled the skin back and then opened the top of head so he could remove and weigh her brain. Her brain was in her chest cavity now. All standard procedure for an autopsy, and usually the most horrifying thing a human body is put through before it’s buried. But not in this case.
The pathologist smiled a hello at Brian and used her two hands to gently pull the body’s face up. The face arranged itself into something that seemed much more human. There was a trace, a vestige of the personality that once lived inside this body.
Brian didn’t need to glance at the pathologist’s gloves to remember not to offer a handshake. “Hi, Mary, how are you doing?”
“Things are great!” She beamed and made a motion with her hand almost as if to toss her hair back, but she stopped and it ended up just looking like a shy twitch. She didn’t know Brian was gay.
They chatted for a few minutes over the dead body, not really ignoring it.
“It’s nice to see you again,” Mary said without irony.
“I should come down here more often,” Brian said.
When Brian was finally able to extricate himself, he went out to the patrol car, started the engine and the air conditioner, and sat at the wheel reading the Medical Examiner’s report. Despite all the gross and severe damage to the body, the cause of death was a massive immune reaction caused by the a mismatched blood transfusion. The Jane Doe had been given a large transfusion of chimpanzee blood.
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08.12.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 4:34 am by Administrator
Chapman was finished with the guard. He walked through the silent guard station. It was a large building, and old Quonset, like giant aluminum half buried lengthwise in the dusty desert. It was hot and bright outside, but cooler here, and dim. The grimy high windows let in shafts of light and the dust made the shafts look like milky bars in the air.
A fly buzzed past Chapman’s ear on its way to the guard’s body. Chapman had notice that before–how fast flies were. Practically as soon as one of Chapman’s victims stopped breathing a fly would appear out of no where. Even in a cold February when no one had seen a fly for months, a fly would appear, a greedy, dirty, black, mindless companion of death.
Chapman had killed before, of course, but never at the Lab. He idly wondered how long he could get away with this. He’d hid the other murders so well, no one had ever suspected. No one except this stupid guard who’d been foolish enough to confront Chapman with his suspicions. It didn’t matter. It was time now, time to leave the Lab and venture into the wide world. Chapman was a millionaire many times over now, and he had secreted away vast sums. Enough to buy him influence, buy him freedom in another country. Everything was set. He was planning first to go to Argentina. Good hunting there. Human prey, of course. But first he had unfinished business. He was going to pay back the people who had made him as a science project. He’d kill the surrogate mother and everything else who was involved in creating him, the Humanzee. And especially, above all, he would kill his human half brother who had shared a womb with him, and who had known freedom all his life.
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08.04.08
Posted in Uncategorized at 3:25 am by Administrator
Chapman looked down at his hands curiously. He examined the flat little nails, the dimples over his knuckles, the generous layer of adipose tissue over the backs of the hands, the creamy, innocent luster of the skin. Perfectly normal hands for a seven-year-old boy.
“They look human. I am human!”
Then he pushed his fists into his eyes, half out of frustration, half to keep the tears from flowing. He looked up at the mirror that was bolted to his wall. He was a nice looking boy, brown hair, creamy skin, hazel eyes. He had a bowl hair cut. It was 1970 and that was the style. Geena, “Mom,” had cut his hair. He had never been to a hair salon. He had never been outside the compound. He thought everyone lived this way, and the carefully selected books and television programs he watched did not contradict that idea.
From his image in the mirror, he could see it was obvious he was crying. In a moment, someone might - might - come in and ask what was wrong. The mirror wasn’t a mirror, it was a window. Somehow, people could look through it and see what he was doing. He’d figured that out six months ago. However, he wasn’t watched all the time, he’d learned that too.
Chapman grabbed his knee and pretended he had hurt himself as he sat down at his desk. He needed an explanation for his tears if anyone came inside, and the real reason wouldn’t do at all. The looked in the mirror again, and his face was very red. The shame overwhelmed him again. He wasn’t like other boys. Now he knew why people looked at him funny. Now he knew why his life was so different from the lives described in the books Mr. Graber had given him. Now he knew why Geena was so angry when she found those books. Real kids went to a place called school where they played with other kids and one teacher taught twenty or more of them at one time. They didn’t live inside all the time, with no other children at all, and a series of tutors teaching them one-on-one.
And now he knew the truth about himself, the truth they had hidden. He decided he would never let anyone know that he knew. His face burned with shame again. He turned away from the mirror, went to the bookshelf opposite it and grabbed two dolls. He swung them in the air, pretending to play with them joyfully, and backed toward the mirror, always keeping his face away from it. Then he sunk down and with his back to the wall, directly underneath the mirror. No observer would be able to see him from that angle.
He took the clothes off the Barbie doll. “She’s going to have ’sex,’” he said, “just like in that book.” He was refering to the Where Did I Come From book Geena had just read him. He used his foot to drag his toy medicine bag toward him, careful that no one watching could see what he was doing. He pretended to give Barbie a shot. Then he lay her down motionless bounced the gorilla doll up and down on top of her.
“There, just like Becky and Uncle in his office.” Uncle didn’t know Chapman had gotten curious about the dropped ceiling in his bathroom one day. He didn’t know Chapman had been able to climb up into the plenum and look at other rooms. Uncle might have noticed a crack in the dropped ceiling of his office, but he never knew that Chapman had watched him so many times. And today, while Uncle was out, Chapman had dropped into the room and read a paper about himself, and learned who he was.
Chapman bounced the gorilla doll faster and faster, and then he stopped. He stood the gorilla doll up and moved it’s arm so that it slapped the motionless Barbie on her thigh. “‘Dumb bitch, you just never figure this out,’” he had the gorilla say.
Chapman started thinking about the paper he read again, the journal in Uncle’s office. He pulled knees up and leaned his forhead against them, crying. Suddenly he kicked the dolls away; he coudn’t stand to see them anymore. “That’s how babies are made. The lady and the monkey had a baby. And the baby was me.”
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