The Death of Wendell Mackey Read Online Free

remuneration. It was there, on the overnights, that they started administering drugs intravenously. Racing through arteries like freeways. There were no answers from the nurses, just their firm faces with all the animation of a rock quarry. But the night nurses weren’t nurses ; nurses didn’t carry pistols conspicuously under their blue smocks, but those men did. Questions weren’t answered. Medications were changed, or increased. On his lunch break, a young doctor would make a trip down to the break room, just to watch Wendell swallow all of his pills. After a few weeks, something began to appear behind their eyes. Curiosity didn’t describe it. It was almost like hunger.
    Hunger , Wendell thought, which reminded him of his own. His stomach rumbling, he stared back down at the table, and he thought back to the last time that he saw Connor and Laughlin.
    They had been staring at him, oblivious to their beers, not concerned but curious. It was as if he was something new to them, like a zoo exhibit just opened. They were observant, but with a tremor of apprehension, watching the lines in his face and the bluing under his eyes for some indication that an event would soon transpire. Wendell might fall unconscious and crack a tooth on his mug, or go into a seizure, or bleed from his pores, or crack, open up, and pour out before them, a human cataclysm with poisoned blood that burned the checker board table and cheap floor tiles. They were just waiting, their heads hung low on their necks like vultures, waiting for what they thought was the inevitable.
    Wendell licked his lips.
    “So, Wendell, we’ve been…hearing things,” Laughlin said, looking to Connor, then to Wendell.
    “What kinda things?”
    It was becoming difficult to read their faces. They both sucked at their beers.
    “We’re keeping your locker untouched,” said Laughlin. “So when you come back…I mean, well, it’ll be there. Still there.”
    “My locker?”
    Connor leaned forward. “So, what’s it like?”
    “What’s what like? And when I come back from where? What’s going on?” Clearly, something was happening, Wendell knew it as well as anyone else, but in somehow avoiding it in open conversation, whatever it was that waited for him could be held at bay. Avoidance felt secure, even when everything else pointed in the other direction.
    “You know Wendell,” said Laughlin, “moving you into one of those on-site apartments.”
    Apparently, the previous night the decision had been made to bring him into the institution for more observation. Wendell assumed that, while groggy and nauseous, he had signed his name onto something to make it all legitimate, but he couldn’t remember. The pills— vitamins , since to Wendell, their power, or lack thereof, lay in what they were termed—had been the first step. And with their power to deaden his stomach and corrode his bowels, this first step had led him to the edge of a precipice. Whatever followed had the power to push him into the void. And what followed were the overnight intravenous drugs and a series of injections, the latter administered during lunch delivery by Dr. Scotia and a stone-faced nurse.
    “And your sleeping habits?” Dr. Scotia had asked during one of their weekly meetings, “still the same?” Something in his voice told Wendell that he didn’t need an answer, that he had already supplied himself with one. And with that, even without his signature touching any paper, the decision to extend his stay at the NAG was made.
    So when Connor asked what it was like, what it felt like is what Wendell assumed he meant, Wendell wondered if it was the medication, or the whole process, that Connor was thinking of. The pills and injections were one thing, but the secrecy, the questions gone unanswered, the plastic smiles and piped-in Muzak in the halls, and the doctor and his nurses at all hours appearing as if out of the tiled walls of his room, were something entirely different. It was