Borderlands Read online

  “I’ll never be close to a man again,” she told him a few months after the doctors had surgically created the opening in the upper end of her sigmoid colon. The stoma was located on the lower left side of her abdomen. “How could anyone be attracted to me with this bag attached to my side? With the foul odor?”

  “Someone will come along, and he’ll love you for you. The bag won’t matter.”

  A fleeting sigh of hope crossed her face, then she stared at him for a while, and that was that. She hadn’t had enough of a chance to let it all out, so she kept it all in. The subject never came up again. And what she did on the other side of the bathroom door became something personal and private to her, something he half decided he didn’t want to know about anyway.

  If he had a choice.

  “How’re you doing in there?” he asked her late one night. He’d had to help her out of bed into the wheelchair, and out of the wheelchair onto the toilet. That was all the help she ever wanted. But she’d been in there, mysteriously quiet, for an unusually long time.

  “Mom?”

  “I’m okay,” she whispered.

  “Need any help?”

  More quiet.

  “Mom?”

  “What?”

  “Do you need any help?”

  “I’ve lost the clip.”

  “The clip?”

  “For the colostomy bag. It’s not here.”

  “You want me to help you look for it?”

  “Na. See if you can find another one in one of the boxes in the closet.”

  “What does it look like?”

  “It’s…a little plastic…clip.”

  He found one, the last one, buried at the bottom of a box. It had the appearance of a bobby pin, a little longer, perhaps, and made of clear plastic instead of metal. “Found one.”

  “Oh, good.”

  He pulled the sliding pocket door open, more than was necessary if all he had intended to do was hand her the clip. The bathroom was smaller than he remembered it. There was a walker in front of her, for balance if she ever had to stand up, and the toilet had metal supports on each side to help her get up and down. It seemed as if the entire room was filled with aids of one kind or another.

  “Is this what you’re looking for?”

  She was hunched over, leaning heavily against one of the support bars, her nightgown pulled up around her waist. Her face was weighted down with a weariness he’d never seen before and for the first time he understood how taxing this daily–sometimes three or four times a day–process had become for her. When she looked up at him, she seemed confused and disoriented.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I can’t find the clip.” She showed him the colostomy pouch for the first time. He couldn’t bring himself to see how it was attached to her. Partly because he didn’t want to know, and partly because that would have been like checking out her scars after surgery. Some things are better left to the imagination. More important, there was a woman in front of him whose ribs were protruding from her chest, whose face was a taut mask stretched across her skull, whose fingers were frail sticklike extensions of her hands; and this woman, looking so much like a stranger, was his mother. God, this was the woman who had given him birth.

  “I’ve got the clip right here.”

  “Oh.” She tried a smile on him, then glanced down at the bag in her hands. The process was slow and deliberate, but after several attempts she was finally able to fold the bottom side of the bag over.

  Blair slid the clip across it. “Like this?”

  She nodded.

  And he realized something that should have occurred to him long before this: it was getting to be too much for her. As simple as emptying the bag might be, it was too confusing for her to work through the procedure now.

  “Okay, I think we’ve got it.”

  “Oh, good.”

  “Ready to get out of here?”

  “I think so.” She whispered the words, and before they were all out, she started to cry.

  “Mom?”

  She looked up, her eyes as big as he’d ever seen them.

  God, I hate this, he thought, taking hold of her hand and feeling completely, despairingly helpless. I hate everything about this.

  “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

  Her crying seemed to grow louder for a moment. “Mom?”

  “I didn’t want for you to have to do that.”

  Lovingly, he squeezed her hand. “I know.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about. It’s not a big deal.” He pulled a couple of squares of toilet paper off the roll and handed them to her. “Things are hard enough. Don’t worry about the small stuff. Okay?”

  By the time he got her back into bed again, she had stopped crying. But he’d never know if it was because of what he’d said, or if it was because she didn’t want to upset him anymore. They were both bending over backwards trying not to upset each other. There was something crazy about that.

  The whistle blows.

  At least he thinks it’s the whistle. Sometimes, it’s so damn hard to tell. There’s that part of him, that tired, defeated part of him, that doesn’t want to hear it anyway. How long can this thing drag on? Outside, all of thirty or forty feet away, a man jogs by with his dog on the end of a leash. People who pass this house don’t have the slightest inkling of what’s going on behind these walls. A woman’s dying in here. And dying right alongside her is her son.

  He pulls the covers back, hangs his feet over the edge of the bed.

  For several days, she hasn’t been able to keep food down. That memory comes horribly clear to him now…

  “Feel better?”

  She shook her head, her eyes closed, her body hunched forward over the bowl. Then suddenly another explosion of undigested soup burst from her mouth.

  He held the stainless steel bowl closer; it felt warm in his hands. This had been going on for nearly three days now. It seemed like it might never stop. “You’ve got to take some Compazine, Mom.”

  “No.”

  “I can crush it for you and mix it with orange juice.” No response.

  “Mom?”

  No response.

  “It’ll go down easier that way.”

  “Christ, Mom, you’ve got to take something. You can’t keep throwing up forever.”

  “The pills make me sick.”

  “Sicker than this?”

  “They make me sick.”

  The whistle.

  Blair slips a T-shirt over his head, pulls on a pair of Levi’s. He tries to convince himself it’ll stop. Maybe if he just leaves it alone, the sound will quietly drift into the background of the television set, and he’ll be able to go back to sleep again…

  “It’ll stop on its own,” she tried to convince him.

  “But if it doesn’t, you’ll dehydrate.”

  At last the vomiting appeared to have run its course. At least for the time being. She sat up a little straighter, taking in a deep breath. When she opened her eyes, they were faraway, devoid of that sparkle that used to be so prominent behind her smile.

  “Please, just take one Compazine.”

  Her skin began to lose its elasticity a few days later. The nausea stopped on its own, just like she’d said it would. But now, the only liquid she was taking was in the form of crushed ice, and there was the very real fear that dehydration might eventually become too painful for her.

  “We can try an IV,” the visiting nurse told him. “It won’t help her live longer, but it’ll probably make her more comfortable.”

  “Her veins aren’t in very good shape.”

  “I’ve done this before.”

  They had to lean the ironing board up against the wall behind the headboard of her bed, because they didn’t have an IV stand. The nurse hung the solution bag from one of the legs, and it seemed to work well enough. Then she tried to find a vein in his mother’s right arm. It wasn’t as easy as she’d thought i
t would be.

  After several new entries, he turned away.

  His mother began to whimper.

  “The needle keeps sliding off.” The nurse switched to her left arm, still struggling to find a workable vein, still failing miserably.

  “That’s enough,” he finally said. “Let’s just forget it.”

  “Her veins are so–”

  There was a tear running down the cheek of his mother, and her mouth was twisted into a grimace which seemed frozen on her face.

  “I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  She rolled over, away from him…

  He’s standing at her bedroom door now, and she’s in that same position: with her back turned toward him. He can see the black cord of the whistle tied around her neck, but the whistle is out of sight.

  “Mom?”

  The television flickers, drawing his attention. The scene is from Starsky and Hutch, shot inside a dingy, gray-black interrogation room. There’s a young man sitting in an uncomfortable chair, Starsky standing over him, badgering him. It seems faraway and unimportant, and Blair’s attention drifts easily back to his mother.

  “You need anything?”

  He moves around the foot of her bed, stops alongside her, the stainless steel bowl on the floor only a few inches away from his feet. “Mom?”

  Her eyes are closed. She looks peaceful. Her nightgown is partially open in front. There’s a thick tube running up the right side of her body and over her collarbone, running underneath the skin–like an artery–where the doctors had surgically implanted a shunt just a few short weeks earlier. Inside that tube, flowing out of her stomach, up her body, and back into her bloodstream, there’s an endless current of cancerous fluid the tumor has been manufacturing for months.

  In her left hand, wrapped around a long, thin finger, she’s holding the nylon cord. He can almost hear the whistle’s high-pitched hum calling to him from somewhere else. Sometimes it sounds as if it’s singing his name–Bl-air–and he wonders if he’ll ever be able to hear his name out loud again without being swept away by the strange concoction of resentment and helplessness that overwhelms him.

  He touches her arm.

  For a moment, everything is perfect: she’s sleeping soundly, the house is quiet, the whistle stilled. Too good to be true.

  “Mom?”

  He places the palm of his hand over her chest, not believing what’s going through his mind now. No intake of breath. No beat of heart. Instead, she feels cool to the touch, and…and absolutely…motionless.

  “Jesus…”

  “I don’t want to talk to anyone.”

  “You sure?” he asked, holding his hand over the mouthpiece of the phone.

  “They’ll want to visit.”

  “Maybe not.”

  “I don’t want anyone to see me like this.”

  It had happened so gradually: first the phone calls, then the visitors, finally the mail, and before he had realized what had happened, they had isolated themselves from the outside world. It was just the two of them, alone, inside the house, waiting for the cancer to run its course…

  One more time, he places the palm of his hand ever so lightly across her chest.

  “Mom? Please, Mom.”

  The wall above her bed flickers with the light from the television set, reflecting dully off the underside of the ironing board. He glances up, staring at the IV tube still dangling from the leg of the board, remembering too clearly, too vividly how much pain she went through the night the nurse had struggled to find a good vein in her arms.

  “I never should have let her do that to you.”

  It feels cold inside the house. The room seems darker, smaller, a lonelier place.

  He stands next to the bed, careful not to disturb her, though somewhere in the back of his mind he’s already aware that she’s finally at peace now. She’s lying near the edge, her legs bent at the knees, her arms bent at the elbows. She looks as if she’s praying. For a moment longer, he stares, failing to remember a time when the flesh wasn’t pulled taut like a death mask across her face. This is the way he’ll always remember her. It’s all he has left.

  The television draws his attention again, and that tiny distraction is somehow enough to stir him. He turns toward the door, wanting to be out of the room, thinking it can’t be over he doesn’t want it to be over…maybe if he comes back later…

  Then he hears it again.

  The whistle. A soft, echoing sound. Calling him.

  Bl-air.

  “Mom?”

  He expects different when he turns back, but he finds her eyes still closed, her chest still motionless. The nylon cord hangs loosely around her neck, the whistle lost somewhere inside her cotton nightgown. He sits on the edge of the bed, studying her, suddenly feeling like a little boy. It’s a lonely feeling.

  Bl-air.

  It sounds again.

  The whistle.

  With care, he unwraps her finger from around the black cord. Then he opens the front of her nightgown and follows the cord down…down there…down to where the whistle is softly blowing, to where the cancer has been growing. The incision from her last surgery is open, the tissue curled back, and inside the cavity–ash gray and darker, pulsing–the cancer is wrapped like a kiss around the mouthpiece of the whistle, exhaling a soft humming song—

  Bl-air.

  It never stops.

  The cancer never stops.

  GLASS EYES

  Nancy Holder

  Although Nancy Holder is a fairly new light in the HDF firmament, she's really a grisly (actually, she's very attractive) veteran of the Publishing Wars. After selling her first novel, a young adult romance, in 1981, she went on to write innumerable romances under a series of pseudonyms—seven of which spent time on WaldenBooks' romance bestseller list. Her books have been translated into a dozen languages, including Serbo-Croatian (how many of us can make that claim?), and her latest novel, Rough Cut, a "women mainstream fiction," recently appeared from Warner Books.

  She currently lives in San Diego with her husband, Wayne, hard at work on a horror novel. Her recent appearances in some of the best horror and dark fantasy anthologies mark Holder as a writer to watch. The following story, full of visceral panic and disorientation, will show you why.

  Going blind.

  Reeling out of the doctor's office, a skylit aerie latticed with Wandering Jew, Dot trembled from the reverb in her head:

  Glass eyes, glass eyes, going blind going blind, going blind or going to die; why why why and why the fuck not.

  She staggered over the sidewalk as if it were the deck of a pitching ship: leeward, grab the street lamp; windward, smash against the pet shop window; mayday, jagged crack dead ahead, collision with the pavement imminent.

  She stumbled hard, hugged the mailbox. The seaport town pitched and yawed–something about her inner ear, the pressure on her brain, the liquid in her eyes.

  The tears on her cheeks.

  Dot was a painter. She catered to the tourists, did seascapes and sailboats, crests and froths and 'scudding waves. For fun, for sheer delight, she painted naked men, had a show at the Women's Art Collective, called "Cupidity: Shafts and Hearts."

  Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. Maybe she could trade it in, get paralyzed instead, paint with a brush between her teeth and they'd make a goddamn movie about her. Music by Bernard Herrmann. Screech screech screech and the knife comes down as she stabs herself in the throat after they tell her they're gonna have to pull her teeth, too, and she won't be able to paint anymore unless she figures out a way to stuff the paintbrush up her goddamn nose.

  A tooth for a tooth, an eye for an—

  Blind.

  So what? So the fuck what? Do the Beethoven trick. Do the one-legged waterskier trick. Do the Screwed by God but Bounced Back polka. Braille painting.

  No eyes. Gonna grab that scalpel and screech screech screech (that was where she'd get the knife for the throat trick), gonna, er, ah, ahem, excise them
–cut 'em out, slice 'em open and let the stuff dribble out, just like Luis Bunuel. Very arty, gaping sockets. Gotta get some Blades sunglasses. Some Ray-Bans. Hell, her Medicare would cover a few dozen pairs, wouldn't it? Rows and rows of protective lenses (a little boy shrieking "Mommy! That lady! That lady don't got no, don't got–" and puking up the dog biscuits he'd snitched from the St. Bernard's bowl while his mom waited for him in the car, checking her eye makeup in the rearview mirror.) Protective lenses.

  (And some well-meaning man, possibly one of her stud models for the Cupidity exhibition, pushing her down on the bed and easing apart her legs and murmuring, "I don't care, Dot. It doesn't bother me at all.")

  Not one socket's worth. Love is blind, as his vitreous good humor gushes black inside her.

  Glass eyes. Of course. The doctor said something about that. You can't tell the difference these days. Blue–azure, cerulean, French ultramarine; burnt sienna, neutral gray; or perhaps something in green (her contacts were tinted green to go with her curly red hair)–bright aqua green, chromium oxide green, sap green, emerald green.

  He showed her the videotape about the woman who'd been shot in the head, lost all her vitreous humor, and they had to replace her eyes. He made her look at the woman's plastic ones (very ordinary hazel), hooked up to her muscles. The woman swiveled up, down, around. Did not stare blankly into that dark night. Did not look like a fucking freak.

  He said they weren't glass anymore, but made from acrylic. That nearly drove her crazy then and there, because she painted in acrylics. Same stuff they made false teeth out of. Her glass eye man was a master, had learned from the guy who did Sammy Davis, Jr.'s, eyes. Top Gun Eyeball Man.

  Did she care? Did she give a good goddamn? He said her anger was normal. Fuck him. Fuck him! What the hell did he know about having his eyeballs cut out of his head?

  He also said something about cancer. Something about that was how come the excision. Or had he said, "exorcism"? That was it. It was the eyes, her evil eyes, that could kill her. And if thy right eye offended thee, well .