(real life influence: just the name rusty...just liked the name. the real rusty isnt like this rusty. walks through suburbia)

CHP 5. Rusty

 

      The artificiality of the place should have offended her. Neatly trimmed lawns, ornamented houses decorated to look exactly like home-sweet-home welcome mats. Flowers planted in neat rows and fed by regular appointment, driveways with shiny, gently used cars – not like the seizure-inducing fields of tall grass and vast sky or the dark towns whose streets were only lit by candles from unfriendly dwellings. It should have offended her, but it didn’t. I have no nostalgia for my old world. Give me rows, give me grids, give me nature altered. I like my world unreal.

      (and he had large hands, I remember. I always looked at them and thought about how large they were. Any moment I thought they would crush mine, but they didn’t. They never did. His hand just held mine -- that was all. This I know because I watched always to make sure. And when I looked away for a second, he was always smiling.)

      Lindsey and I ignore the sidewalk and walk on the road. Lindsey’s short, little legs move fast and she always looks over her shoulder. This is the city, she tells me after we pass some black children playing in the front lawn. You have to watch your back in the city, she explains.

      To be honest, I do not feel any threat here. Even the alleyways look inviting. They are paved and, ignoring the trash bins, nicely decorated with fences and flowers. I suppose I should watch my back though; I think I have forgotten how. Invincible warlords do not usually watch out for their safety.   

      Wait, there is something odd here. This is not the city. There are no tattoo parlors in the middle of a residential area.

      “Well, this is it. I’m a bit nervous – can you ring the doorbell?” Lindsey says.

      Whatever, I do it. I ring the doorbell. If this guy is practicing illegally from his home, it is not my responsibility. If she wants to catch his AIDS, his herpes, his Ebola that is her problem.

      “Be careful,” I mumble to her, an expected politeness for a fool undertaking whatever stupid venture.

      And a yellow man answers the door--with a smile on his face. His yellow eyes look at her; he puts his yellow hair back into a ponytail.

      “Are you all set?”

      “I s-s-sure am,” he replies.

      We enter his little house. There is some kind of strange yellow mold crawling out from where the ceiling and wall meet. The wall and ceiling are the same ivory color (probably white at one point) and they have creases in it, like an eyeball (and this eyeball is shut with moldy tears leaking from it). He swats his hand at something, and Lindsey takes this as instruction to follow. He dances through his house like one of those lizards who skip across the swamp, fingers playing an invisible piano.

      “Have a seat seat right there, over there – you can find it alright? O-of c-course you c-can” he points into another ivory room with moldy tears. Except that room has thick, black cables carpeting the floor. Lindsey steps carefully between the cables, as though suddenly they might turn into snakes or worms or something. Personally, I think it looks a lot like hair. I join her into the room.

      “Good girls, you found it,” he then plays a slow scale with his long, knobby fingers. He steps into the room, twitches violently, and holds onto the wall to steady himself. He then wipes his hands off his shirt and runs out. We hear his footsteps somewhere upstairs.

      The expression on my face must have evoked some sort of justification. “He is the best one around…that’s Rusty… he was top of his biomechanics class. The best, I swear.”

      Rusty trips into the room, cradling a steel box with jangling things inside.   Best for what?

      “The box, you can sit on the box over there.”

      “Kay, Rusty.”

      “My my, you look pretty today and everyday,” he giggles. He plays the invisible piano again and then opens the box. Surgical equipment, more wires.

      Is this guy a surgeon?

      He suddenly attacks himself in some crazy spasm. Oh hell, no way is this guy going to operate on my Lindsey. I open my mouth to say something, but forced logic stops me. She obviously knows who he is and what he’s like. In another age, he would probably be the Yellow Necromancer. Lindsey knows what she is doing.

      “Jesus!?” he yells.

      “Are you sure you are ok to do this?” Lindsey asks, with a little laugh.

      “Y-yea, I’m fine. I j-jumped –upped” he squints up at the other eye, “increased the voltage.”

      “Ha ha you fuck-up, just get a neuro implant like the rest of us.”

      “No, no. I much prefer my shock therapy. Besides, who who would do it for me? You? Ah ha”

      “Well, you dipshit you can just do it yourself, can’t you?”

      “Do dentists give root canals to themselves?” He seems to have calmed down a little.

      “I don’t think they do.”

      “That’s right, they d-don’t,” his yellow eyes roll back into his head then appear again. “Besides, I don’t like foreign objects inside my body. Shock therapy is much more friendly and non-intrusive.”

      Shock therapy – I remember now. A treatment once used for the clinically depressed. Somewhere in this yellow house, there is another room like this one, and Rusty sits in it, electrocuting himself who knows how many times a day.

      “Everyone’s life sucks,” he says in the midst of a slight spasm. 

      “Hell yea!”

      Inside the box is another steel box. He opens it and shows it to Lindsey. There are stacks of little clear, plastic chips separated into their respective compartments.

      “You want some, too? Naimlis?” Lindsey asks.

      “What?”

      “He’s got acid, X, shrooms, pot. Shit, he’s even got heroin, crack, and meth,” she says, suddenly very excited.

      “Those last few are a little extra,” he says, selecting a larger chip, this one wrapped in sanitary wrapping. I can see that it has several needles protruding from it. I learned enough at school to guess that this is the master chip that will be inserted into some nerve tissue, either the brain or the spine.  I don’t know enough about all this to be able to differentiate.

      “No thanks, I think I am alright,” I decline.

      “Dude what are you worried about? It’s just as good as the real thing, except it doesn’t burn holes in your brain or burn your stomach or anything. It isn’t a biological reaction, it’s just an electrical one.”

      Oh, so that’s what it is. She’s a drug addict.

      Rusty walks over to an UV sterilization machine hidden on a desk beneath black cables. He rattles metal implements into it, shuts the lid. A purple light flickers out from the lid and Rusty stands next to it, calm as a cubical employee by a copy machine. He plays with his yellow ponytail for a bit.

      “You will have to leave before I start,” he means me.

      Wait, what?

      “Wait, what?”

      “You can’t be in here. It isn’t sanitary. Now, I realize this is not an operating room, but that means that even more so I have to take certain precautions. I cannot have your germs in this room. You will have to wait outside.”

      Well, his madness seems to have left him, I think as I leave.

      Why would Lindsey want me to come along if she knew I would just have to wait outside? Wait, why would she want me to come along if I didn’t even know what was going on? Why didn’t she explain to me? I think as I sit in the center of the next room, far far away from any of the walls. She must be enjoying the fact that I am ignorant of the current trend. An insult, this was, bringing me here. Not only does she copy my homework but she also attempts to influence me by tricking me into guarding her.  A bold insult! Had I had my axe, my magic, she would think twice of insulting my honor.

      But wait, wait a second. I keep forgetting who I am again. There is no such thing as honor, here. Impulsive creatures, they are, stealing, molesting their every need, primal or not. Addicts and victims, trapped by their id; if they were to insult my honor, they would not even know where to begin. Lindsey must have wanted me to come because she was too afraid to come by herself. Had I refused, she would either not go or, more likely, she’d find someone else. She is a simple coward, though this does not exist now. I think the coward died with my time. I must think in the new mindset: she is a consumer of the new drug. Personally, and this I will keep to myself, I think cowards should not be volunteering themselves to unnecessary surgery.