The Vivesctions of Doctor Charles Jardelli
Doctor Charles Jardelli stood over a stainless steel operating table. It was a cube shape, roughly a meter in length, lined by drains and spigots and displays of tools. Above him were the kettle drum lights of a normal operating theater, beaming their light through a zone of UV-sterilized space just above the doctor’s head. There were several video cameras set up on tripods around the table and aimed at the subject of today’s procedure, a white lab rat affectionately named Wilbur by the staff, who was stretched out upon his back on the center of the table, paws and rear feet clamped firmly to the stainless steel. The tranquilizer Wilbur had been given to make him compliant enough to be strapped this way to the table was now wearing off. The rat was moving its head from side to side, trying to free itself, occasionally calming for a second to look up at the doctor, who was familiar to him but offered no treats or help this time.
“As you can see,” Doctor Jardelli said, “the sedative is now wearing off. We’ll give him another minute to flush it out of his system before we begin.”
The doctor was speaking to a group of fellow researchers and interns sitting in rows of seats at the front of the room. It was a medical lecture hall. Countless living things had been opened up here before such watching eyes, all in the name of science.
Doctor Jardelli was a cancer researcher. He studied the formations of tumors. In order to do this, rats were often inoculated with infected tissues and used to incubate cancerous growths. Wilbur’s was the size of a golf ball and protruding from his lower stomach.
It was important that the subject be alive and undrugged during the procedure so that the audience could see how the tumor had integrated itself into the body plan. That was the danger of cancer; the body did not recognize it because it was the body’s own cells gone haywire and growing out of control. It became part of the body itself, which made the removal of such growths a tricky business at best.
When Doctor Jardelli deemed enough time had passed for the sedative to be cleared, he announced that he was going to begin. He picked up a very small scalpel and gently ran it down Wilbur’s center, leaving a spreading red and yellow line.
The rat squealed and struggled, but the doctor continued his work. The noises the subject animals made did not bother him at all. He simply repeated a mantra his own teacher had taught him: little rodent, your suffering is nothing compared to the greater good of humanity.
And that was how it went. One more tumor, exposed and excised.
Poor Wilbur was conscious until the end.
***
After the demonstration, Doctor Jardelli retired to his personal research area, the excised tumor in hand, to get a look at it under the microscope. He left the still-shivering Wilbur on the table for an intern to dispose of. At his level, he only made messes; he was not responsible for their clean-up.
In his lab, he used a precisely calibrated machine –like a mini meat slicer – to make paper thin sheets of the tumor, which he stained and put on slides. He spent many hours afterward taking photos of the abnormal cells and detailing their characteristics. He was in the midst of writing a technical book on tumor development, which meant lots of research. Something his wife and family were learning the hard way. He had not been home for more than a few hours these past few months, opting instead to sleep and live out of his office.
It was putting a strain on his marriage, but that mantra was all-purpose…change the words around, and the doctor could fit it to any situation. Little wifey, your annoyance is nothing compared to the greater good of humanity.
***
Jardelli had a pizza delivered to the research wing of the hospital. An intern waited at the entrance door and paid the delivery person, then brought the food up to the doctor’s office. The doctor took the box with a grateful thank you.
“That was a wonderful presentation,” the intern said. She was a bright-eyed young woman with lots of enthusiasm and a quick mind. She’d make a great standard doctor someday. However, Jardelli had his doubts about her future in research. She seemed too emotional for it.
“You guys have to stop naming the animals,” Jardelli told her curtly.
She was taken aback by his sudden mood swing. “Oh…we take care of them, so it only seemed right to name them.”
“They’re test subjects, dear. Not pets.”
“We’re aware of that, doctor.”
“I don’t think you are. I heard people moaning about ‘poor Wilbur’ in the audience.”
The young woman bit her lip and looked away.
“We’re doing research here,” the doctor reminded her. “It’s not for everyone. Thank you for bringing the pizza.”
He shut the door on the befuddled intern. Back at the microscope, he removed a slice of pizza from the box and after taking a bite, returned to viewing the tumor slides.
Research is always better on a full stomach…
***
He opened his eyes and found he was resting face-first on his written notes. Dribble from the corner of his mouth had soaked into the page, turning part of his notes into an inky cloud of nonsense. His Rolex said 2 am.
I must have passed out. Good thing I didn’t pop my eye out with the tip of the pen when I fell forward.
Falling asleep like this happened sometimes. He often pushed himself for too many hours at the microscope or writing down the monotonous details of his observations. The mind sometimes wandered, drifted, shut down.
If this makes me fall asleep writing it, will people be able to get through reading it?
It didn’t matter. This wasn’t going to be a book for mass consumption. It was for those already in the know. It would perhaps be used as a stepping stone for further research and discovery… if he didn’t get there first.
There were voices outside in the main lab. What the hell are they still doing here? He wondered. No one had any big projects going on that required them to stay here this late. He stood up and opened the door of his office. The main lab was dark except for the blue night lights at the end of each aisle, providing just enough illumination for someone to navigate without crashing into the shelves of glassware and microscope stations. Silhouettes in long lab coats were engaged in conversation down one of the aisles, discussing tumor formation in human cells.
“Hey, who’s out there?” the doctor called. He felt along the wall for one of the main power boxes. When he found it, he flipped the switch, and the lab lit up fully.
The individuals in their lab coats all turned to face him. They were human height, but their faces were white-furred with big ears and their pink noses bristled with long whiskers. They stood on rodent hind legs, a length of which could be seen beyond the edge of the lab coat, ending in splayed claws. Long pink tails trailed out along the floor behind them.
“What are you doing out of your cage?” someone said from behind him.
Another of the rat-humanoids stood in the doorway to his office, blocking it. This one had a female’s voice, although Jardelli could not tell its gender by any outward sexual characteristics; the face seemed smoother, less angular, the fur sleeker, but that was all.
The others came forward, surrounding him and taking hold of his lab coat with their claws.
“Maybe he’s ready?” one of the creatures said, this one more of a mouse than a rat.
Someone stuck him in the shoulder with a hypodermic, and Jardelli’s head swam.
Next thing he knew, he was naked and splayed out on a cold metal table, ankles and wrists secured with clamps. He was in an operating theater, the lights bright and beaming down on him. One of the lab-coated rodents loomed overhead and inspected his face. Jardelli had never before realized how intelligent their eyes were.
“As you can see, he’s coming out of sedation now,” the rat said to an audience in the shadows.
This is a presentation, Jardelli realized. I am the test subject.
He glanced down at his lower body, to the massive tumor on his stomach like a flesh-colored water balloon.
“I believe he is ready now,” the presenter said, raising a shimmering blade.
“You can’t do this!” Jardelli shrieked.
The blade came down, ever so gently onto his throat. With one practiced move, the presenter moved it down the center of Jardelli’s body, dividing him with a spreading red line. The blade was so sharp he did not immediately feel the pain.
“It’s okay, little human,” the rat said as it leaned close, whiskers tickling Jardelli’s cheeks, “your suffering is nothing compared to the greater good.”
Then the pain came.
***
He sat up at his research station, screaming, the remnants of the dream still upon him.
He stood up, patting at his chest and stomach, opening up his shirt to see that his chest was intact and uncut and there was no tumor on his stomach. Someone from the outer lab banged on the door to his office; the clock read 8 am, normal study hours. “Doctor Jardelli? Are you okay?” a male intern asked. “Are you hurt? You were screaming.”
“Just spilled hot coffee on myself. I need to start taking my own advice about drinks at the workstations.”
“OK,” the intern said. Jardelli assumed he had left the door to return to his studies.
Now, what the hell is going on with me? he wondered. He was not one for frightening nightmares, even as a kid. Creatures from the subconscious were met by his younger mind with analytical curiosity. In the face of such scrutiny, the most horrid imaginings turned into abstract self-observation; I’m dreaming this way because of what happened during the day; the monster in the closet represents the unknown; the hag on my chest is a representation of my crush on that girl in English class, my mind’s way of letting me know she is out of reach; etc., etc.
But this… he’d been very afraid; he had felt the cut as real as if it were happening. The analysis of it was pretty clear to him; the rodent creatures represented all the subjects that had been sacrificed throughout the years. The thing was, he felt no guilt about any of that. There was no residual angst about killing rodents in the name of science. The life of a lab rat was not equivalent to that of a human. So why should these things be popping up in his mind, played back as if they were some kind of educational movie, the moral of which, when discovered, would again bring peace? Because that’s what nightmares were at their core, a kind of lesson.
I’m working myself too hard, he thought. That had to be it. As a student, he used to do marathon study sessions, getting by on little sleep and lots of amphetamines. After a few days of this, things tended to get wonky. A good sleep and lots of water brought things back to baseline.
Doctor Jardelli went to a stainless sink and poured himself a cup of water. He drank it down. The water did make him feel better. He was probably dehydrated. Energy drinks and coffee were not true hydration. He poured another cup and brought it back to his research station.
Before starting to rewrite the saliva-smeared notes from the previous evening, he decided to have something to eat. Without looking he pulled a slice of pizza free of the box and brought it to his lips. The triangle wedge of pizza was too bright and too alive with various other colors besides the red and white of sauce and cheese. The smell of it stopped him from taking an actual bite. It was a wedge of entrails from a small animal, intestines twining like yellow snakes atop a bedding of tumorous stomachs and livers.
Jardelli threw it aside in disgust as the lab then began to shake. Earthquake? he thought. We’re on the East Coast – nothing happens over here in America. Suddenly, a line appeared along the walls of the lab, halfway between floor and ceiling. The whole upper part of the room lifted away. Jardelli was staring up into an expanse of bright golden light, and giant shadows lined the perimeter looking down at him. The heads were long-faced and whiskered, with dish-shaped ears and gleaming spherical eyes.
A furry claw nearly as large as him reached down to pluck him up by the neck.
“Come on out now,” a very human-sounding voice said, “time for the show.”
Jardelli struggled against the intrusion to no avail. As he fought, he felt an extra weight on his back, a swollen gelatinous mass twice his size that swung painfully with each motion and hurt so much that he quickly lost the will to fight.
He was plopped down onto a gleaming metal pan the size of a swimming pool. He could only see a few of these giant creatures in their white lab coats around him. They were in a vast lab filled with familiar equipment, except that everything was scaled to epic proportions.
They began to cut at his back, knowing he was too weighted down by the tumorous growth and could not escape. The one wielding the blade spoke to the others. “Notice the subject’s reaction as I cut into the tumor? It is not simply foreign tissue but a part of the body itself, complete with a blood supply and sensory neurons.”
The instructor dug around to uncover structures of interest and displayed the subject’s reaction to the probings. Jardelli felt every bit of it and screamed for them to stop. Of course they did not.
Progress cannot be halted for such small sufferings.
***
Doctor Jardelli opened his eyes and faced a silent classroom full of interns. All of them were slack-jawed and concerned. One spoke up from the front row. “Doctor?”
Jardelli unclenched his hands from the edge of the lectern and relaxed his facial muscles. He seemed to recall the last echoes of a scream leaving his mouth. He looked at the wall clock and saw the time. My 1 pm class. What am I supposed to be teaching?
He looked behind him to where a diagram was projected onto the wall. It displayed various chemical and environmental factors that initiate the mutation of normal cells into tumors. It also showed the time lapse between initiation and the actual trigger point of tumor formation.
“Right,” Jardelli said. “As I was saying, there is often a long gestation period between initiation and the trigger point. Up to thirty years in some cases…”
He made it through the class because he knew this stuff like the back of his hand. What bothered him was that he had no recollection of entering the class or even what exactly he had done just before coming to. The interns leaving the class gave him funny looks, and a few asked if he was really okay.
No, I’m not okay.
***
After class, he headed over to another wing of the hospital, where a good friend was on the faculty of the psychiatric department. Gerald ‘Grinch’ Grinchoski had dormed with Charles during college. As a psychiatrist, his brand of science was suspect – except for observable physical damage to the brain, psychiatrists mostly treated behaviors with no organic counterpart. It was like so much wind to Charles, who regularly dealt in observable organic phenomena. These things you could prove by pointing to a corresponding point of physical aberrancy. Secretly Charles equated psychiatry to science the same way he equated astrology to astrophysics.
But Grinch sure could get good drugs. Charles hoped that his old buddy could write up a quick script for some mood stabilizers or flat-out tranquilizers. Something that would shut down the brain for a while and let Charles get some solid sleep. Obviously, his natural cycle was screwed up.
Grinch was in his office. His secretary buzzed him and told him about his visitor. Grinch told her to send Charles in. Charles entered a large office with dark paneling and a mahogany desk whose polished top gleamed like water. The walls of the office were decked with framed commendations and degrees.
Grinch was in his private bathroom, doing something at the sink. The door was open and the light was on, but Charles could not see his friend, he could only hear the running water. The sink was a bit to the side and blocked from view. “Make yourself comfortable,” Grinch said.
Charles took a seat on a majestic carved wood chair, upholstered with black leather. He’s really killing it with the pseudoscience racket, Charles thought.
“So, what brings you to my part of town, pal?” Grinch asked amidst splashing water.
“I’ll get to the point. I’m stressed out. Working too much.”
“I hear you’re a busy bee with that book of yours,” Grinch said. “What’s the matter? You can’t relax?”
“Exactly,” Charles said. “But it’s more than that. Things have been happening to me. I wake up in places and don’t know how I got there. It’s like I’m sleepwalking.
“You always did overdo it, pal. Is it just like lost time, or are you dreaming? In other words, when you black out, is it empty time with nothing in it you can remember?”
“Actually, no,” Charles said. “I have nightmares during the blackout.”
“What kind of nightmares?”
Charles giggled. “Promise to keep this to yourself?”
“Doctor-patient confidentiality,” Grinch swore.
“I’m not a patient.”
“Just a technicality. Out with it.”
“I’m only telling you this because we go way back. It’s crazy, but…in my dreams, I’m being operated on by rats. And mice, too. But mostly rats. Lab rats. I’m being vivisected by them. Opened up while I’m alive and having tumors removed. Then I wake up screaming. Today, I woke up in my class and didn’t know how I got there.”
“Vivisected. Now that’s freaky,” Grinch said. “It sounds to me like-“
“Don’t say it!” Charles interrupted. “Guilt, right? Not at all.”
“You didn’t let me finish, pal. I was going to say that it sounds like guilt, except that I know you better than that.”
“I think I’m just wound up about the book. Maybe if you could prescribe me something to help me rest…” He left the sentence unfinished.
“You think that will help you?” Grinch asked. The water shut off and there were the sounds of him drying his hands with a towel.
“Probably,” Charles said.
Grinch came out of the bathroom, rear claws clicking on the tile floor and dragging a pink and hairless tail behind him. He was a chubby man who made a chubby white rat, not tumorous but obese, his exposed stomach bloated and round. Wide, intelligent eyes studied Charles over a crinkling nose and whiskers. The mouth, with its protruding incisors, formed a grin and opened to speak. “You’re not getting off that easy, friend.”
They came from everywhere and nowhere, a horde of other human-sized rodents that tossed him upon the mahogany desk, angled sideways so they could get at the mass that suddenly stuck out from Charles’s side. Yet another tumor.
Grinch strolled over, picking up a Psychiatric Association trophy from a shelf. It was a metal female figure with her hands raised. He used it to gouge at Charles’s meat and open him up. “We’re really going to have to remove that mass,” Grinch said, “but then what do I know? I’m just a psychiatrist.”
***
Charles lurched upright in the darkness, sweating and heart pounding crazily. The darkness frightened him because it was so sudden after the brightness of Grinch’s office; maybe he was still there, and the rats were watching his behavior during this sensory deprivation, the way he had observed so many of them. With one or both eyes removed, chemically blinded, or a host of other alterations not always necessary. How many thousands of them have I experimented on and killed? He wondered with fright. It was uncountable except to say he was responsible for a mini-holocaust.
He felt the soft weight of a blanket upon his hips and upper thighs and realized he was on a bed. His eyes (yes, both of them were still there beneath exploring fingers) were growing accustomed to the dimness and he could make out the edges of a room with familiar pieces of furniture, although all of it was gray shadows. It was his bedroom.
“Honey?” his wife said, stirring beside him. She sat up, putting a hand on his shoulder. She was a shadowy figure, too, bulky in her nightclothes.
“Nightmares,” he said.
“I know,” she told him. “You’ve been fidgeting all night and talking in your sleep. You’ve been working too hard.”
“I don’t know how I got here,” he said, meaning the bed.
“Why, you came home from work and came to bed. Don’t you remember anything? We had a nice time. It put you right out.”
“I keep opening my eyes in places, thinking I’m out of the dream, but it’s just another part of it. Maybe this is part of it, too.”
Madelaine’s hand squeezed gently. “Come back to sleep, honey.”
“I don’t know what’s real anymore.”
“Come,” she insisted.
Charles reached for her hand but felt a strange configuration of bone, long fingernails, and silky fur. He quickly dropped the claw that should have been his wife’s hand and turned on the light, already knowing what he’d see.
Madelaine’s shadow form was not bulky because of her night clothes. As she lay on her side with a pink whiskered nose twitching at him, the downy fur of her belly lined with twin rows of pink nipples, four to a row.
“Come back to bed, honey,” she beckoned him.
***
In the real world outside of his mind, Charles Jardelli lay in a hospital bed surrounded by machines monitoring his vital signs. With each beat of his heart a point of light on one of the screens bounced upward as the machine let out a beep. He was hooked up to a respirator, and the rhythmic hiss of assisted inhalations and exhalations was reminiscent of the sound a scuba diver hears. Although his body was alive and well, he was in a coma, as he had been in the days since the accident.
His wife, as always, spent hours by his side, holding his hand, reading to him, and playing his favorite music with a portable CD player, trying to prompt responses from him. She often observed Charles moving his body from side to side as if in an uneasy dream. When that happened, she would hear a burst of chirps from the EKG machine monitoring his heart. Madelaine hoped that these were promising hints his mind was trying to come back.
He moved fitfully as another such burst took place. Madelaine looked to the doctor and nurse who were in the room with her, checking up on the patient. Doctor Nottar was unimpressed by these things, which annoyed Madelaine to no end. “He’s dreaming or something,” Madelaine said. “It’s just like when he used to toss and turn in bed next to me.”
“It’s purely autonomic muscle reactions, Mrs. Jardelli,” Nottar said.
“But his mind has to be working,” Madelaine said.
“Perhaps,” Nottar conceded. “There is much we don’t know about such states. People sometimes come back with all kinds of stories, as if they lived another life inside of their minds. Damaged neurons misfiring is all that is. I wouldn’t be the one to suggest you not continue trying to reach him, though.”
“Because people do come back,” Madelaine said.
“Indeed,” the doctor said.
“But do you think he’ll be the same?”
The doctor shrugged. “Unknown.” He kneeled beside her and, with genuine sincerity, said, “You need to get some rest yourself.”
“I don’t want to miss when he comes back,” she said. “I want to be the first thing he sees when he opens his eyes. So, he knows I never left him.”
The doctor was touched by her determination. “When he opens his eyes for the first time, he most likely won’t even be able to process what he’s seeing. It’ll be an automatic response. It will take time for his mind to adapt to all the input again. At the first sign he’s coming up, we’ll call you. There’ll be plenty of time for you to get here and be with him.”
“You promise?” she said.
“I do,” Nottar said. “Go now. There’s nothing more you can do for him than what you’ve already done.”
Madelaine kissed Charles on one slack cheek. “I love you,” she whispered, then turned and walked out the door while thanking the doctor.
Nottar bowed his head slightly. “You are welcome.”
Once Madelaine left the room, the nurse locked the door behind her and gave the doctor a nod.
Nottar took a prepared syringe from a pocket of his lab coat. It was clumsy in his clawed hand. “Someone’s got to work on making these things easier for us to use,” he quipped through his sharp incisors. The nurse’s giggle was more of a squeal. She had fully shed her human guise now. The doctor was nearly finished as well, the last illusion of his human face melting away to a substrate of gleaming brown fur.
He went to Charles’s IV drip, inserted the tip of the syringe into a catheter, and shot the contents of the needle in. It contained a paralyzing agent (not enough to kill Charles; what fun would that be?) that kept him in a light coma. Light and airy and chock full of dreams.
When the injection was complete, both nurse and doctor returned to their human form and stepped out into the hallway. “Pleasant dreams,” they chuckled as the door shut behind them.
