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Deeper Extraction
My writing class has caused me to dust off older entries and continue them. This piece continues as though I have skipped a handful of chapters after writing this post.
Rob had the extractor in one hand and the spiral forceps in the other. He was leaning forwards over Orez who was draped awkwardly over the arm of the couch so that her blank and distant expression looked up at the nicotine-stained ceiling.
"I swear to God Rob, if you go in there you're asking for trouble."
He peered up from his perched position, like a hyena standing over a body about to breathe its last; seeing only the carrion meal and not the dying creature. I half expected him to growl ownership of his prize and bare his teeth in some primal warning
"Don't you feel it, the need to know what it was? Don't you see it on the brink of your memory every time you close your eyes?"
The steel mandibules of the extractor opened as Rob squeezed the bulb in the hilt slowly and he bore down on her closed right eye. With the black patch on he had no depth perception and was being obviously cautious, uncertain how close he was to peeling back her eyelid. I wriggled harder this time and looked for something, anything that I could use to saw through the plastic tie, instead the abrasive sharp edge of the tie sawed into me, gouging into the flesh and causing sharp pain and a wetness to trickle down into the palm of my hand.
One hook connected, then another and with delicate precision Rob twisted his right hand to put all four pads of the extractor into place on her eye. His fingers curled around the flange of the plunger and he pulled slowly, like he was extracting blood with a syringe. His left hand wavered in space, holding the spiral forceps as you would a knife you intended to plunge into someone theatrically. The eyeball audibly popped free and was drawn up into the cradle in the body of the extractor. Orez' optic nerve remained taut and I could see the pale pink stem dappled with red and blue veins.
I felt a swelling of laughter build up inside me as I watched Rob fulfilling every fantasy image of the mad professor, consumed by his work, driven by his own urgency and oblivious to the consequences. What the hell, I decided, I would just let him take the pearl, see whatever it was that had driven Orez insane and would likely do the same to him, like Indy powerless to stop the Nazi's I would allow a greater power to mete out the punishment for dabbling with things man wasn't supposed to. You can only save a suicidal friend so many times before they eventually succeed.
The laughter broke free of my lips as a wave of relief rolled over me and the chair rocked to the vibrations of my hearty laugh. Let him do what he wanted, I couldn't hope to control him, I never could, all I ever did was act as his nagging conscience, trying to keep him from setting the house on fire. My face took on a wide grin and the combination of laughter and the cessation of my pleadings caused Robert to look up from examining Orez's occular nerve.
"Whats so funny?" he asked, his eyebrows arching inwards in a contorsion of suspicion.
"You, Robert. You're so funny. You're like some mad scientist who thinks that his own brand of science isn't going to kill him just as dead as his intended victims, but it always does."
My hands had relaxed now, the fingers no longer tensing and straining to pull free of the plastic cord, instead I rubbed the oozing droplets of blood between the pads of my fingertips, dwelling on the tactile sensation which had eluded us in all the visions and images we had absorbed from the others. We had seen what they had seen, experienced it from the first perspective but we hadn't felt what they had felt; we imprinted our own interpretations over their pictures, there was no way of telling how a traumatic experience would affect a witness second-hand. It slowly dawned on me that the chances of Robert going insane from Orez's experiences was unlikely and I was still just as trapped.
Robert ran the scoop of the spiral forceps along the thick nerve all the way from the chiasma to the back of the bulb, the few pearls left there from the last time were plucked away and tumbled into the tiny stainless steel reservoir bucket beneath the tines. He angled himself differently to try and reach further back, seemingly unhappy with the crop and eventually gave up, releasing the catch on the extractor and gently allowing the eye to be drawn back into the orbit of Orez's skull. In her catatonic state she didn't even blink as the pads detached and the claws released her eyelid. He approached me from the couch, holding the reservoir of pearls like a shotglass.
"Only one in there."
"Bon appetit" I said with a sneer, powerless to stop him. He stalked closer to me and just to fuck with me he drew the eyepatch up and away from his eye showing me the scarred sunken orbit that I had looked behind so many times as a child.
"Oh its not for me" he snarled and with the pearl between thumb and forefinger forced it past my lips. "I'll catch the rerun after I see what it does to you."
Oct.25.2007