=35=

Okay, then, so now I'm Mrs. Havemeier, whoever in hell that is, Neena thought. There doesn't seem to be much point in denying it, or denying anything, when I’m in possession of so few of the facts, and, besides, who knows for sure, who's to say, maybe I am Mrs. Havemeier, after all?

Did it make sense, for that matter, to object to the bone-saw whirring and whistling, inching close and ever closer to her hairline, sounding like a plague of locusts sweeping ominously across the plains, the spinning bit now so close as to be almost tickling before it touched the thin line of what was now no more than a five-o'clock shadow on an otherwise polished head of closely-shaven stubble?

To struggle, to cry for help, to claim this was all some variety of incomprehensible mistake, a miscarriage of justice (ha!)—even to simply inquire, mistake or not, what this was all about—would it have been to any purpose whatsoever, or would it just have been a waste of the proverbial precious breath she didn't seem to be breathing anymore?

Movement, too, as in run away, was far beyond her now, mobility and volition a thing of the distant past, like the Etruscans; her body had that cold, numb, dumb, and alabaster feel like it does when you're nothing more than a giant head made of Easter Island stone, or when all the blood has been drained from your circulatory system, and replaced with what feels like several canisters-worth of dry ice.

Hannah, meanwhile, she of the sideways chunk of bleu cheese head (remember?), having donned a dark-lensed pair of protective goggles is intent upon her work. She traces a fine line around the naked, gleaming, ghostly bluish cranium, inscribing thereupon a pretty incision around its circumference, it’s latitude perfectly corresponding with that of the Tropic of Cancer on a globe of the earth, or is it Capricorn that we’re thinking of? Either way, up goes the lid scant moments later and out comes what looks like scoop after heaping scoop of over-stewed plums, gray, skinless, pitted, a fruit for no seasons, pithy and fibrous, with a lot of what seem to Neena now to be utterly useless cogitations (knowledge, memory, speech, etc.) still a-tremble throughout.

Food of the gods it is, if mixed with peyote buttons and sage, roasted in a clay oven over a creosote fire, with a last-minute dash of tumeric added according to taste. Bon appetit! But that's all further along the assembly line; this isn't a cookbook for crissakes, not at the moment, anyway, so let's get on with it, shall we?

Good evening, Madame, let me help you with your wrap. From shoulder to shoulder and straight down the front, your jumpsuit is unzipped and out you step. Check your skin right here at the door, no ifs-ands-or-buts about it.

My what a lovely pelt, so soft, so supple. Irish is it? Scottish? Mixed with a little Indochine? Ah yes, I see! What a marvelous creature that must have been; endangered, are they? No wonder! Ah well, the best always are now, aren’t they.

A ticket? Oh no need to bother with that. You won't be needing a coat anymore, not here, these climes are tropic, after all; but, you're chattering with cold, you say? Blushing modest, then, are we? Not to worry, you'll get used to it, I assure you. Everyone does. Get used to it, I mean. 

As you watch them ladling out the internal slop, you think 

“I can't live without that, can I?” Stuff that's always hidden, and thank god for that. Yuck! If we saw what kept us going who'd have the guts to keep on going? Born between the piss and the shit, who said that, Saint Augustine? Come to think of it, didn't Leonardo, who saw everything, caution us against seeing too much? It'd put us off our feed, he warned (the face of a cherub above the bristling bleeding cunt; the most lithesome lovely form no more in fact than a colon packed with shit), it would chill our desire, cure us of the human race, and be the extinction of us all to see what it really was we loved, what beauty scarce concealed, that's what he implied.

“By the way,” you ask, “just what the hell does that chunk you just took out do? Egads, it really looks important!

And yet, Neena thought, I'm still here, even with all I've already lost, still alive; well, if not alive exactly, then alive inexactly, conscious, let's say, or conscious of hallucinating, or hallucinating I'm conscious, which is a form of consciousness, isn't it? Okay, at least I'm still thinking, after a fashion; there’s brain activity, of which I’m aware, that doesn’t seem deniable, and that’s something, no? And if Descartes were even a little bit right, that means “I am;” fine, let's not glorify what I've been doing as thinking, I’ll concede you that much—I’m reflecting, then, reacting, commenting, opining—musing, certainly—idly viewing, babbling, no less than that, like a spectator in the amphitheater above my own autopsy; you have to give me that much. You have to. I insist. I’ll accept no less.

You might, having seen her (or I) standing there so calmly at the window, like a reflection, like a ghost, with hands clasped behind her (my) back, have taken her (me) for a hardened veteran of these grisly sights, how professional, detached, and depersonalized I seem, a med student, maybe, or a homicide detective (Don't dare suggest it! Suggest what? That she is herself Inspector Thoth, the interrogator who persecutes her. I wouldn’t dare. Oh yes you would! Whatever makes you say that? I see you smirking…). She watches without emotion as the coroner plunders the victim for clues to murder or disease, whatever finished off that poor gal laid out and open down there on the table under the harsh lights, that poor soul left without a goddamn secret in the world.

Meanwhile, Mr. Butchie does the occasional prancing breeze-by. Limp-wristed, lisping, he’s attended by attendants, suggesting a suggestion with regard to the work in progress, a little more here, a little less there, a Renaissance master in his workshop of anonymous apprentices. Suddenly, he leans in every now and again, when nothing, no absolutely nothing, but the master's personal touch will do. A little dab, a little do, a smudge, a shadow, a signature schmear, a touch so light it doesn't touch at all, yet even so, this imperceptible brush of nothing, this ghostly stroke of genius, makes all the difference, makes art of artifice, silk from sows' ears, and separates a masterpiece from all that's not—it is a gift that Mr. Butchie shares with all the (under)world but only for a fee that would make your toes curl.

And they pay, oh how they pay!

Many are the imitators but none can outdo what he can do and he and everyone on this side of the dirt knows it. He is a master of decay and de-creation and he shares his genius like the plague; in other words, he can't help himself, it comes out automatically, compulsively, it overflows from him, and would continue to do so even if he weren’t paid a dime, but it’s best to pay the piper, to give the artist his due, for you wouldn’t want to be caught standing on his dark side, the victim of his left-hand work. Oh no. You wouldn’t want to find yourself the canvas prepped for a work of sheer malignant Mr. Butchie spite, oh god (if He didn’t exist we’d have to invent Him for just this reason) forbid!