The Man With One Eye


"You have a scrub top on under there, right?" Janie asks.

I nod and take off my black fleece, exposing my hairy belly and chest. Janie quickly pulls my shirt back down.

"Thanks sweety," I say, and quickly pucker my mouth shut.

Janie's eyes get big with disdain -- loving disdain (if there is such a thing), but she says nothing. She knows I know better.

We're in some anteroom with files, metal racks, and other medical stuff not far from the nursing desk. I admire the old health department poster leaning on the wall. It shows a cartoon blood drop demonstrating all the ways one can contract HIV.

Yes: the blood drop is making love without a condom.

No: the smiling blood drop is swimming under a hot sun in a public pool.

It's a professional environment, so we can't express any form of intimacy. It's especially dangerous to call attention to ourselves because I'm not an employee. Technically, Janie doesn't even work here. She's a guest, a researcher from a partnered hospital on the other side of town. That makes me nothing more than a trespasser, possibly even a criminal, especially if you consider the fact that just a few months ago I was fired from the hospital she presently represents. Simply stated, I have absolutely no business here, yet I'm curious about her work and her emotional health.

Green scrubs (as you may suspect) can usually get you in anywhere you need to go in a hospital. But, just in case, in my back pocket, I'm carrying the hospital identification I failed to return to campus security after I was fired.

"You'll need something to cover your eyes," Janie says as she hands me a plastic face shield.

Yes: the drop of blood gets research monkey poo flung onto his face

No: the drop of blood smiles wearing a plastic face shield like mine

Janie ties a perfectly symmetrical bow behind her head as deftly as I would expect of a young, ambitious physician. I, however, struggle with the broad laces for a good twenty seconds before she offers to help me. I decline. I attach the shield with a single bunny-ear.

The little drop of blood frowns.

We step out of the anteroom and walk past the long surgical scrubbing station.


"Yeah. I can smell it," I tell her.

For Janie, it was there while unpacking in Hawaii, while getting a slice of pizza in the Castro, and while ordering gelato the other day in the Marina.

"It's there," she says, "ready to pop up when you least expect it."



It's in Janie's sleeping mind, too. Quietly hiding in the dark corner of a closet tucked away under the stairs. Crouched down and motionless, shes's so close she can feel the heat radiating from a dark, murky form. Suddenly, it turns. It's an old man standing there. Without expression, a bloody eyeball dangles from his socket connected only by a thin white nerve.

Janie gasps so loudly she wakes me.

"It's okay," I say putting my arms around her. "It was just a dream. You're okay," I say reassuring her the way mothers do in old movies.

And she falls back to sleep and starts snoring again.



"To me, it smells like electrocautery," I announce.

"No," Janie said. "I know what that smells like. This is waaaay different."

We turn into a small, dirty utility room. There's a counter and a stainless steel sink. A laminated sign above a porcelain flush basin reads:

FLUSH ONLY STOOL AND BLOODY URINE DOWN THE DRAIN.

PADS WILL CLOG THE PIPES!

A large, knee high box to my right declares:

PLACENTAS ONLY!

And there it is. The smell. The real one. Ghastly.

If this smell was part of a large, eccentric family of scents, a charcoal barbecue would be its uncle, boiling hot dogs would be its aunt, and menses saturated sanitary napkins would be a first cousin.

I gag behind my clenched teeth.

Janie unfolds two blue sterile field towels on the countertop, and then places a Pyrex casserole dish, not unlike the ones you'd find in any regular kitchen, upon the blue towels. Next, she throws a stainless steel strainer in the casserole dish.

"All right, are you ready?" she asks.

"Yeah, okay," I mumble through my mask. "I'm ready."

Janie picks up the white plastic container to her left. It looks like a yogurt container, maybe it could hold about a half gallon or so. But, this yogurt container doesn't have any pictures or brightly colored labels on it. No flowers. No happy cows. No small, reassuring phrase that promises fruit at bottom. Instead, it has a name that's printed in black Sharpie. It's a Hispanic woman's name. I imagine what she looks like, just down the hall, in real life. I feel anxious. I purposely try forget the name, and then my mental picture of the woman fades.

Janie opens the plastic lid and sets it to the left of the sterile blue field. She raises the container and she pours out the contents.

The soupy mix slops around. Chunks swim in the dish before they slow to a floating stop.

I feast my eyes on a square glass dish full of red juice and large pieces of...

A leg.

Janie picks it up and measures the tiny foot with a metric ruler.

"This one isn't even forty-four millimeters."

She looks up on the wall to a Dreye's table that shows foot lengths and their correlative gestational ages.

"I can't use it. It's about twenty-three weeks."

"Are you sure?"

I take the ruler from her. It's backwards and I force myself to measure the tiny upside-down foot from the heel to the tip of the first toe.

"It's still warm," I say in a surprised tone.

"Forty-three, forty-four," I count. "May-, maybe forty-five?"

"Still, it's no good. Too young," she says. "Do you still want to look at it?"

"Yeah, sure. Janie, you're sure this is okay?"

I'm having an out of body experience. I feel like I just killed something and I'm tossing it around for fun. I'm a leopard seal tossing around a lifeless, downy white, penguin chick . But this is science. This is okay?

"Here's the femur," Janie points out.

A broken chicken wing.

"The thoracic cavity."

No, a cornish game hen -- the breast defeathered. Freshly crushed by a passing truck.

"The skull."

I feel the skull of a bloodied, mutilated, fetus. It articulates, crackles, and crunches like a crab shell that's been completely stripped of meat.

Intestines.

Like trout stomach.

Janie turns the skull around.

Tongue. Small and smooth.

Ear. Just a flap of untethered skin.

I take what's left of the skull into my hands and drop it by accident. The bloody soup splashes.

"Whoa!"

"God! I'm sooo sorry," I say. "Did I get you?"

"No, I'm fine. Don't worry."

I look and she's clean. I, however, have a speck of crimson colored juice on my forearm. My saliva thins. With each second that passes, it becomes harder to swallow my own spit.

"Oh, here's the lung!" she exclaims interrupting my nausea.

Janie does this twice a week. She takes the lungs of aborted fetuses and studies them. From what I can understand, she's learning more about fetal lung tumors with the hopes of publishing a great article. Her ultimate goal is to be selected for a extremely competitive fellowship. But, right now, all she's getting in return is PTSD. Really, she's been diagnosed.

I grab the lungs from her. They are surprisingly spongy. I squeeze them, half expecting some air to bubble out. Suddenly, I notice my feeling of disgust has vanished. I run my gloved index finger the trachea. It's still attached.



Following dinner, we arrive at Janie's apartment. The front door is wide open.  She can't remember leaving the door open. Over the past several weeks, a lot of her mail and holiday packages have been have gone missing.

She nudges me gently with her elbow. Naturally, it's my job to go in first. I step around her bike. Then, I take another step down the long, narrow hallway.

"Don't forget to check the closet under the stairs." Janie says. "I have these premonitions you know."

Just an hour before arriving, she had described her nightmare to me, the one about the man with his popped out eyeball. I listened to every gory detail while sitting down at Burgermeister eating a hamburger cooked rare and drinking a Pabst.

Now it's dark outside and I'm a little anxious to explore an apartment that had been left open all day. Where are you?

After passing through the hallway, I step gingerly into the living room. A small amount of light passes through the back window and allows me to see the shadowy edges of the sofa and bookcase. The DVD player? I touch it. It's there. The stereo? The right speaker - it's where it usually stands, only it's now lying on its side.

Carefully, I walk backward into the tiny kitchen area. Blindly, I grab a steak knife from the wire dish rack. I creep forward, up the pair of steps leading to her bed. I flick on the light. Damn! Janie had said the fuse had burned out a couple of days ago while her landlord was in Mexico. Crap!

My heart is beating in my ears. I grope for a candle, some matches. Nothing. But, my eyes are adjusting  to the darkness with every pounding moment.

I begin to crawl over the mattress. I inch forward using on my knees and my left hand, while at the same time keeping the knife in my right hand, ready to strike.

The closet: so black, so deep, and cluttered with cheap canvas storage containers and stacks of shoe boxes.

What else could be in there?


"This is so beautiful," I say. I say it three times, and I can't stop repeating it over and over, and over again in my mind.


"Here's the brain."

Janie hands it to me -- one roughly cut hemisphere anyway. It's about the size of a halved walnut. Squishy, like the lungs.

I put it back in the dish and start moving stuff around to explore more. In the corner, I spot a lightly colored spherical object connected to something stringy.

I reach for it.

"Ewe, DON'T touch it. Please DON'T touch it!" Janie begs.




I hear her coming through the front door with her bike.

"Is everything okay, honey?"

I don't respond.

I see… him.

A faint figure hiding in the dark corner of the open closet, tucked away under the stairs. He's crouched down, on his knees, completely motionless.

The image - it glides towards me. Closer, and larger -- until -- I can feel the heat radiating from it.


Frozen. Not a move. My heart pumps and it feels like it's tearing though my chest. Something is dripping from my nose. Now from my ears! Something is pushing on my head from both sides. The pressure builds until the pain -- the pulsing grows and grows until it becomes unbearable.

I shout, "Stop! You're killing me!"

I raise the knife and bring it down hard. A sharp rip. A party gown tears. Again, I stab! A jacket spills a cloud of gray feathers into the air. A towering pile of cardboard boxes crash down onto my head. I slash over and over again at the air, at the shadow in the in closet, until I'm sure the man with only one eye has vanished from this place forever.