Most Unnatural Read online

  Most Unnatural

  Liam Llewellyn

  Copyright © William T. Huntsman V

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN: 9781549979057

  Imprint: Independently published.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  Cover design by William Huntsman.

  FORTHCOMING:

  Nemesis, a novel retelling the Peloponnesian War and the Sicilian Expedition

  Irish Murder Mystery

  Days of Fury

  Stuporheroes, a satire

  Regression

  Visit liamauthor.com to read excerpts and to connect with the author directly.

  This whole act’s immutably decreed. ‘Twas rehearsed by thee and me a billion years before this ocean rolled. Fool! I am the Fates’ lieutenant; I act under orders.

  Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field.

  For whatever is truly wondrous and fearful in man, never yet was put into words or books. And the drawing near of Death, which alike levels all, alike impresses all with a last revelation, which only an author from the dead could adequately tell.

  There is no folly of the beasts of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.

  …That one most perilous and long voyage ended, only begins a second; and second ended, only begins a third; and so on for ever and for aye. Such is the endlessness, yea, the intolerableness of all earthly effort.

  Herman Melville

  Moby-Dick

  That is not dead which can eternal lie,

  And with strange aeons, even death may die.

  H.P. Lovecraft

  “The Nameless City”

  I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker.

  T.S. Eliot

  ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’

  We’re all gonna be dirt in the ground.

  Tom Waits

  She performed her own Cesarean section.

  With a scalpel she removed from the tote bag beside her naked knees in the beach sand, she cut a horizontal line three inches up from her groin, along her bloated belly. The whitening of her thumb- and forefinger-nail told of the considerable pressure she used to sink the inconspicuously sharp instrument. Starting from the left, a continuous curtain of blood seeped out from the lengthening wound, which was eight inches when finished.

  There was less blood than you might expect. What amply burst out instead was yellow fat, which mixed with what blood there was, creating a passing illusion of fire slipping out of her belly and into the night.

  Biting her lip as sweat streamed down her face from her black hairline, she put a finger from her left hand and the blade tip in her right both into the Pfannenstiel incision and she pushed in her finger while running the blade back and forth within the incision, slowly sinking deeper to cut through the deeper fat, which she flicked out into the sand below her, where the fiery blobs amassed and steamed in the cool night.

  Once she removed enough fat, she extended her neck and spread apart the lips of the wound with thumb and forefinger and then she spotted the fascia, bloodily and creamily incandescent underneath the light of the moon. She sliced another horizontal line into the fascia, then spread it apart, muscles straining as she forced herself to remain steady on her shaking knees.

  Pushing two fingers of her left hand in deeper, she slipped through the muscles, which she then spread wider so as to bring in the scalpel. With a third finger, she felt the thin rubber of the peritoneum, slick and sticky with blood.

  She hesitated more with this layer, perhaps feeling the accordion of her bowels just below that thin membrane. She may have been thinking to wait a little while more, to get her courage up, but she saw the blood leaking out of her and it gave her haste and no doubt it was this haste that led her to push in the blade tip too deeply, piercing one of her bowels, which was the greatest pain she had yet felt and which drew more blood than there should have been, and her eyes widened and she froze momentarily, maybe wondering what this meant, perhaps thinking to stop now and head for the hospital, but perhaps she knew she would not make it.

  So she retracted the blade from the overzealous piercing and moved it higher upon the peritoneum, drawing the blade vertically this time. She only cut it open a little and was able to spread it more without tearing, though at this point it wouldn’t much matter.

  The next layer was called the retroperitoneum. She made a few hesitant shallow cuts into this, then pulled it apart the rest of the way and she gasped at the sudden gush of amniotic fluid, which washed away the blood as well as the scalpel from her hand, and she was frozen again, feeling her womb still leaking, but then she was back and she reached in both hands to her uterus and grasped the head and it might have reminded her of sugar cookie dough at Christmas and she gently pulled while contracting her stomach muscles, pushing it out, and veins strained out of her temples and she gritted her teeth and closed her eyes and pulled and pushed and then she felt the head slip through the incisions and heard its watery wailing and she pulled it the rest of the way out and it was a girl and she was a mess, like some kind of grotesque Halloween ornament.

  She stared at the babe for longer than they would have at the hospital. There was no joy nor relief. Instead she looked at the child with the eyes of an art dealer inspecting a supposed original.

  The babe opened her eyes and they stared into another pair that were her same green.

  The mother nodded, flicking off the grime from the baby’s face, then she put the babe’s flat wide nose that may yet sharpen and shrivel, much like her mother’s, into her mouth and the mother sucked out the fluid and the blood from the babe’s nostrils and spat it out into the sand.

  Then she got the scalpel and cut the umbilical cord at both ends. The air was heavy with winter and snow, which didn’t fall here but farther inland, coating the forest floor and the roofs of the distant beach houses. And there was the smell of blood and the smell of molded cheese—not properly molded cheese, such as Cornish Yarg, but a kind that has been left out under the sun and moon for too many of their cycles.

  The mother was pale and sweaty and her breathing ragged. From the tote bag, she attached a laminated wristband to the babe’s wrist and there was a phone number on it. Then she got out several fleece blankets and she swaddled the bawling babe in these burrito-like. Then she got out a battery-operated space heater. With this and the babe held to her bare breasts, though not to suckle, she moved away from the shoreline, which was rather calm and dark under the moon-grayed clouds. She laid the blanketed babe among some rocks, digging a slight depression for her to lie in, then turned on the heater to medium and propped it up between two small rocks several feet away from the babe but still blowing on her.

  Then, not bothering to hold her bizarrely gaping wounds, which trailed blood and fluid behind her, she went back to the shoreline, putting herself against the bow of a moored motorboat. Her bare feet sinking in the damp sand, she strained and suddenly the boat slipped back into the water. Once far enough out, she retrieved her tote bag, then waded weakly out into the saltwater, whose slow tide washed into her body and bore away her blood and placenta, as it would with the trail of blood and fluid on the land when the tide was higher, and she hauled herself aboard.

  The engine of the rusted green craft came alive with one yank and she might have been thankful for that. It was a herculean effort for her to turn the outdrive, so that the boat’s bow turned seaward, then the engine roared like an old dog too fat and lazy to do anything else, a shadow of its former ferocity, as she pivoted the motor down and propelled the boat forward, soon losing the crying of the infant.

  The expansive coast little more than a speck now, she stopp
ed. She was almost over. She reached into the deck and lifted out a red plastic jerrycan sloshing full of gasoline. She unscrewed it and poured it out all over her naked body and she hissed as it got into and burned her most mysterious parts now made bare to the world. Then she got a pink plastic lighter that was probably some Bic knockoff and her eyes briefly glanced up to the cloudy starless scantily moonlighted darkness above before she closed them, bit her lip, and struck the lighter.

  She died before she was fully burned up, before the boat caught fire and the engine and gas tank exploded, before the boat broke apart, some parts sinking, others floating. She was all ash by that time, swallowed up into the world.

  Cordorubias Tendler came home late that night and found his 34-week-pregnant wife, Lourdes, was not home. That was not odd. She had been spending more and more time at the lab in recent months, which was probably why they worked so well together: A reporter’s and a scientist’s hours are rarely constrained to nine to five.

  Cordo worked at The Seattle Times and he had been covering the Chipotle E. coli outbreak recently and had routinely been coming home at—Jesus, 2:30. Lourdes said she didn’t mind, made her feel less guilty about working late too—doing whatever it was she was doing.

  They rarely talked about their work—particularly since the baby and everything had come on the scene—but even before that, they had never really talked about work, perhaps for the reason that the other would not understand. Cordo would not understand her talking about controls, cultures, processes, physiological functions and Lourdes would not understand him talking about nut graffs, leading questions, A.P. style, hard deadlines.

  But that had not ever stopped them from talking—clearly, to marry, they must have shared some interests. Those included…

  Oh well. Too late to get into all that now.

  He took off his navy blue cardigan and deposited it on the couch in the living room—where it would probably be the topic of one of Lourdes’ nesting admonitions to keep this place clean over coffee and not-quite-made-from-scratch blueberry muffins in the sunlit morning—as well as his blue and brown leather satchel before heading through their unlighted 2,000-square-foot three-bedroom two-bath house in Everett, a suburb of Seattle.

  They’d moved out here from a freak sideshow apartment in the city a year after getting married a few years ago. They’d gotten this house for under $300,000, so thank God for yes-men mortgage brokers.

  Maybe he thought about the average square footage of the American house today, whereas in ‘80s and ‘90s it had surely been smaller. He might have thought back to reruns of Roseanne, a then-modern family, and might have tried to imagine the house and compare it to his. Was it bigger? Didn’t the Conners’ have an upstairs? This house didn’t, so did that mean they were worse off than the Conners?

  In the bedroom with the made queen-sized bed and the light of the moon—the same moon shining upon a woman on a beach as she eviscerated herself just then—and the thick hedge outside the window, he opened his nightstand drawer and removed a circular pill container, labeled for each day of the week. He opened today’s—yesterday’s, rather—and swallowed them, four, dry.

  Sertraline, 50 milligrams. He’d recently upped to 200 milligrams a day after not being able to fall asleep a couple of nights in a row.

  He took out his phone, set the alarm for seven a.m., texted, “I love you, wake me up when you get home babe” to Lourdes, sent it off, plugged the phone into the wall charger and set it on the nightstand, then undressed, lay down, and went to sleep.

  He could not have known Lourdes’ phone lay dark and dead in her own bedside drawer.

  Six a.m. on the forested coastline was another world. The wind was salty and aromatic with the winter chill and pine. The needles crunched under your feet and sometimes you stepped on a ball of clumped dirt and other detritus that popped like a Christmas ornament from spending the night on the chilly forest floor. You could see your breath in the beam from your headlight headband.

  Two young intrepid—is that redundant?—hikers, perhaps on break from college, warm in their three layers, woolen beanies, gloves, and plastirubber boots were headed south along a trail in the pine forest. Their cheeks were ruddy and their noses sniffley and they had coffee breath and warm bellies full of doughnuts from their drive over from Sequim when they heard the baby’s cries.

  They might have at first taken it to be some sort of fowl or starving animal but when they looked at each other, they both thought the same thing and were horrified. They raced farther south, following the cries, and eventually came down onto the beach. They headed up shore and found the baby in the blankets amid the rocks and space heater. She was red in the face and snotty but otherwise all right.

  The hikers tried calling the police but there was no service out here. So, taking off their shell jackets and putting them around her, they hiked back up to the scenic overview stop where they’d left their Jeep and there they had service. The one who called was frantic and the operator could hear the baby wailing and the operator told the hiker it was good she was crying, she was healthy. The operator instructed them to take the baby to the nearest hospital, which was in Forks, officers will meet you there.

  Cordo wakened before his alarm went off by the smell of brewed coffee. Perhaps he thought, in his pre-waking consciousness, wherein anything is possible and nothing is at all absurd, that meant Lourdes was home and up before him for once. But then he probably remembered he’d bought a coffee machine that could be programed to brew at a specific time, as a result of those rare instances when Lourdes had gotten up before him and forgotten to turn on the old pot.

  He lay rubbing his eyes, then looked beside him. The bed sheets were in a tangle—he moved around like a WWE wrestler at night, Lourdes told him—and there was nothing but dissipating sleepiness in his face until he looked across the room at the dresser, where Lourdes had her jewelry box and religiously put her purse beside it when she came home. Then he noticed the bathroom was dark and there was no lingering scent of Lourdes’ shampoo or conditioner or her jasmine moisturizer nor her lavender perfume.

  He called for her and heard his echo. He got out of bed and went through the house and could find no evidence she’d been home. Then he found her purse in a kitchen table chair. He looked through it, then called out for her again.

  Back in the bedroom, he called her but it went straight to voicemail. Was she already in the lab? He went to his contacts, found Tom Liking, Lourdes’ lab partner at the university. He answered after three rings with the sound of no-coffee-yet in his voice. Was Lourdes there? No, he was still at home and hadn’t seen her since yesterday around five p.m., I don’t know where she is, I don’t either, I’ll call around, call you back, OK, thanks.

  They hung up and Cordo stood in the middle of the kitchen, unsure. He looked at the time: 6:51. He turned off his phone alarm, called her office at the university, no answer, called some other graduate assistants who had offices around hers, one reported to Cordo that Lourdes’ office was locked.

  Cordo got some coffee, poured milk in it and stirred, then sat down at the kitchen table, leg jiggling and likely thinking horrible thoughts.

  At 7:32 he called Everett police, my pregnant wife has cancer and she didn’t come home last night, yes I’ve called everyone who might know where she is, she’s not at her office. They took a description and said they would send it out through the metro area.

  Three minutes after he hung up, an unknown number called, he answered: Lourdes?

  “Good morning, sir, this is the Forks Police Department…”

  They told him they currently had a baby with his phone number on her wrist at a hospital here in Forks, could you come out here, sir? A baby? A baby. Is Lourdes there, did she go into labor? Lourdes is my wife, is she there?

  “Sir, can you please come out here and we can discuss this further?”

  Cordo went out to his car and sped to Forks.

  They’d met in Cordo’s last year at UW. He
’d been a journalism major who needed eight to nine credits of lab sciences. He’d taken astronomy as a freshman on recommendation from his father when he was pre-teen. His father had taken the same astronomy class at the same university in 1976 and emphasized how ridiculously easy it had been and so Cordo had taken it some 40 years later—and barely passed.

  So he’d put off his second and final lab science until his senior year. He searched around for a genuinely easy class and on recommendation from a friend, he signed up for Horticulture 101. He’d found it no easier and would have dropped it and taken another lab science the next semester had it not been for the hot graduate assistant, whom providence had seen fit to teach his lab, who had no ring on her finger.

  While the professor droned on about Brassicaceae, dicots, cotyledons, and loam, Cordo looked across the auditorium at the pretty black-haired woman sitting with the other GAs—including Tom—who sat in the front row. She diligently took notes on things she probably already knew backward and forward and she chuckled at all the professor’s terrible agriculture and horticulture jokes—how are husbands like lawn mowers? They’re hard to get started, they emit horrible smells, and half the time they don’t work.

  So yes, he’d stayed in the class and done fairly well, passed with a B, mostly thanks to his frequent asking for clarification from the hot GA, who quickly learned his name and smiled whenever she saw him, and from being in her office so much and small-talking in between her lessons on concepts, he gradually learned she was studying ways to introduce asexual reproduction into money crops—corn, cotton, alfalfa, potatoes.

  It was during these times, when Cordo sat in a chair beside her at her desk, he first caught the scent of her toiletries, saw how her long black hair shone like black suede, her skin pale as a vampire’s, dimples in her cheeks when she smiled patiently at him as he tried to grasp the difference between monocots and dicots.