Born in Rain, regoryfied.
And there was Dr. Blumingstein unable to say anything - Lucas had nailed him to the wall after all and he was now waiting for a retort, but to no avail; Dr. Blumingstein had nothing to say, he couldn’t possibly say anything; he had just started to sob. Lucas sensed that the crescendo was about to commence. He was always proud of possessing the sixth sense, although he should perhaps have learnt how to decipher it while he had time, but time was a luxury of the past since he had already start to walk the path of no return. No one could really blame him - he was dwelling into a vortex of insanity but he could finally see things in pure lucidity, at least to his own mind.
Back in the day when it all began, two years ago, the rays of the sun had greeted good morning to Lucas. His sixth sense though presented sun to him as ominous and he pictured it grinning evilly to him with rotten teeth. “This is going to be a bad day,” he said to himself, but what could he do? Stay in bed and not go to work? Impossible; he had to give a presentation in front of the executive board of Adshine - the advertising company he worked for.
At the age of twenty-nine he was an aspiring advertiser who strived to get into the higher ranks of Adshine. His future as the director of Adshine’s department of political campaigns depended on the presentation he would give that day. So, it was logical for him to feel a little stress when he entered the meeting room at nine o’clock in the morning with all the senior executives having fixed their eyes upon him. As he got off with his presentation his strain subsided and he completed it in success.
“Well done,” Arthur Patterson, Adshine’s president, told Lucas as he patted him on the back. “You impressed the hell out of the board,” Patterson said “and most importantly, you impressed me,” he concluded.
Lucas smiled at him in gratitude and promised that he would never fail him. “It was a good day after all,” he said to himself. “My sixth sense must be playing games on me or perhaps the sun with the rotten teeth is supposed to be a good omen.”
After the presentation Lucas had taken care of his work for an hour - fortunately, he didn’t have much to do that day besides the presentation, so he called his friends and arranged a basketball get-together than evening, at five.
Nothing pleased Lucas more than playing basketball with his friends and listening to ragtime music, especially songs composed by Scott Joplin. The basketball court was thirty minutes away from his place and he was there exactly at seventeen hundred hours. He didn’t use to arrive on time; he always got there ten minutes earlier so that he could warm himself up with stretching exercises. This time however he was on time for the game but late for the warm up, because at twenty past four, the time he used to leave from his house in order to go to the court, he decided to burn a CD with a selection of Joplin’s music so that he could listen to it on his new discman on the way to the game.
The friends had booked the court until six o’clock, so they started to play at five past five, as soon as the last one arrived. They hoped to enjoy an interval between the two twenty-minute game periods, but that interval came early, at 13:13 of the game, when Lucas stepped on his ankle and broke it. As he was lying on the floor contorting from pain he saw with his mind’s eye the sun with the rotten teeth grinning at him jeeringly.
After he got hospitalized and treated, a friend of his got him back home. Lucas walked with the help of crutches and a cast that stretched from his sole up to his knee embraced his leg. Lucas took a couple of painkillers and went to sleep, but it was the most tremulant slumber of his entire life. In his dreams he saw the sun again, laughing mischievously at him, a laughter that reminded him the stereotype of Count Dracula’s evil laughter.
When he woke up the next day in sweat and fever he called Dr. Blumingstein who had treated him the night before. The doctor advised Lucas to take an antipyretic pill and reassured him that fever was a standard reaction of the human mind and told him that everything would go well.
Next, Lucas called Arthur Patterson to let him in on his mishap.
“The doctor says I will be able to walk in a narthex in about twenty days Mr. Patterson and in the meantime I will be using my crutches to come to work.”
“That’s absolutely out of the question, my son. I have walked in crutches myself and, let me tell you this; it’s not easy at all to go to work when you have to use your hands in order to do the walking. Plus, you have to roam around the city all day and your walking resorts deem this impossible. Don’t worry my son, I hereby grant you a month’s leave of absence - use this time to recover and prepare yourself for your future activities as the chairman of the political campaign department.”
A week had passed since that call and although Lucas was happy that he got the promotion, his happiness was overshadowed by the image of the malignant sun every time he woke up from a restless night’s sleep. Lucas did not know what to make out of this image. Surely, breaking your ankle is not the best thing that can happen to your life, but on the other hand, he had gotten the promotion.
Lucas was in a taxicab, on his way to the hospital. He had an appointment with Dr. Blumingstein who examined the new x-rays of his patient’s ankle. He said everything was fine and Lucas informed him that when he was standing up he felt as if his blood surged down his ankle and strutted it; he felt as if the gathered blood around his ankle wanted to break free from the confining flesh, he felt as if his leg would explode. In other words, he felt terrible pain. Dr. Blumingstein rushed to placate his fears and told him that this was the standard procedure in such kind of traumatizations.
The same discussion took place during Lucas’ visit to the hospital a week later, but in his third weekly visit things got smelly. To be exact; things and his leg. When Lucas entered Dr. Blumingstein’s office the profound stench springing out of Lucas’ leg ravaged the doctor’s nostrils. The doctor did not talk and neither did Lucas; the first was afraid to talk while the second was afraid to listen.
And there was Lucas now, two years later, sitting on a bench at a park trying to put his thoughts in order. He wanted to prepare his speech, but he couldn’t get to it. All he could think about was the pain, the grief and the misery that had suffused him during those two years. That and the sinister sun that he had never ceased to see in his mind since the day it all began (in fact, after the surgery that followed his third visit to Dr. Blumingstein the sun had started to appear to him at any time of the day). Plus, he was thinking about his poignant and enduring research he had endeavored in during that time. He had learned all about the art of torture, from the ancient Chinese torture techniques to the updated techniques CIA was teaching its agents so as for them to apply and also pass their knowledge on to the legitimate instruments of CIA-supported regimes around the globe.
Nevertheless, Lucas was not interested in the art of interrogation, only that of torture. He decided to settle with everyday items that could be easily purchased and used by a person who wanted to shine in this field of art. It was a cloudy evening and when the time approached five o’clock he got up and walked, yes, he walked with his artificial leg, to the building where Dr. Blumingstein lived. He got in the elevator and to the thirteenth floor, where the doctor lived. He rung the doorbell and when Dr. Blumingstein asked who it was he said it was him, Lucas, and needed to talk to him. The doctor let him in and they sat in the living room opposite from each other. They discussed about Lucas’ health and he informed him that he could walk pretty well, but he had to rely on his good leg, the right one, which resulted in him getting tired easily.
“Sadly, this is a standard outgrowth of walking with an artificial leg,” said Dr. Blumingstein looking at the window - not being able to look Lucas in the eyes.
“If only it was the only problem,” Lucas muttered more to himself than to the doctor. “I guess it must be as standard as the pain I felt in my leg when it was in a cast,” he said clinching his glance on Dr. Blumingstein.
The doctor shook as if a spear of insult had wounded him. “This is not an innuendo…, I hope,” he breathed in uncertainty.
At that moment Ms. Blumingstein walked in. She was wearing a bathrobe and her hair was wet. She was taken by surprise. “Oh, I didn’t realize you had company,” she told her husband. “Excuse my outfit,” she then said to Lucas, “but I was having a shower and didn’t hear you. My name is Jessica,” she abutted and extended her hand towards Lucas.
“Nice to meet you,” he said as he shook her hand. “It was about time,” he said to himself. “Please, sit down - I was just about to answer a question to your husband and I think you’d like to listen to this,” said and it was obvious that he wouldn’t settle for a negative answer.
“Well, OK, I can stay for a while as I’m combing my hair,” Jessica said and rushed to the bathroom. When she returned she was carrying a brush with a sculptured ivory handle. She sat next to her husband and started to comb her hair.
“You see doctor,” Lucas said, “my last words were not an innuendo for I firmly believe that if you had been faithful to your oath to Ippocrates I wouldn’t have been missing a leg now.”
Dr. Blumingstein stared at Lucas. He thought he saw flames in his eyes, but it must have been his imagination (or perhaps it was the sun in Lucas’ head). “How dare you insult me like this,” the doctor exclaimed in a put-on anger.
“Well,” Lucas replied calmly, “I dare because, firstly, I am right and also because I have this.” He reached to his pocket and got a Smith & Weson gun out.
The coupled gasped.
Lucas reached to the side pocket of his pants and took a piece of rope out. He threw it to Jessica and ordered her to tie her husband’s leg up.
“No, no, I can’t - this whole thing’s not right,” she refused as the fear kept penetrating her pores reaching to the medulla in her bones.
“Well Jessica, you see, it’s either that or a bullet in each of your heads,” Lucas threatened her.
Jessica hemmed and she proceeded to tie the doctor’s legs up.
Lucas stood up and ordered Jessica to sit at his vacant seat. She seemed to comply and stood up holding her brush in her right hand. She started to walk towards the sofa Lucas had sat and as she approached him she suddenly struck him with the brush at the left side of his head. He blacked out for a few fragments of a second, enough for Jessica to turn around and start to run towards the door of the apartment. Lucas reached his hand in order to get hold of her, but he only managed to grab her bathrobe. She broke free from the robe and started to run towards the door again in her birth-suit. Lucas ran after her. Jessica reached the door and opened it, but before she could get outside the flat Lucas grabbed her by her hair, pulled her back and threw her down on the floor. He saw Dr. Blumingstein trying to untie the rope and he aimed at him with the gun.
“I wouldn’t do that if I was you,” he warned the doctor who in a look of defeat stopped moving. “Now, sit back and enjoy the ride.”
Lucas kicked Jessica hard in the face and the sound of shattered bones was instantly heard. Jessica started to bleed. Lucas left her lying on the floor sobbing and bleeding as he took a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket and walked toward the doctor.
“Run your right hand under your left thigh,” Lucas ordered. The doctor conformed and then Lucas cuffed him up in an uncomfortable position.
“What are you going to do?” the doctored asked in flaming agony.
“You’ll see,” Lucas replied and approached Jessica. He grabbed her by the hair again and lifted her up. Blood started to run down her neck and exposed breasts.
“It’s always exciting to see fattened, middle-aged people like you getting married to young babes like Jessica,” Lucas said smiling like the sun in his head as he examined Jessica’s body. “She looks like she’s at least fifteen years younger than you and I don’t think she married you because of your charms,” he told Dr. Blumingstein mockingly.
“I love my husband,” Jessica tried to say as she spat blood on Lucas.
This infuriated him and he punched her in the stomach throwing her in the sofa he was previously sitting.
“I’m sure you love something in your relationship with the doctor, but I sense that your love revolves around money - your husband’s money. If you loved your husband you would have finished me, you wouldn’t have tried to run away leaving him behind” Lucas scolded her in anger.
“I tried to call for help,” Jessica retorted as soon as she was able to breathe again and then she fainted. Blood ran out of her mouth and covered her belly and thighs.
Lucas took another piece of rope from his pant’s side pocket and tied her feet as she was unconscious, unable to move. He then uprooted the wire of the phone from its plug in the wall and tied her hands behind her back so that her body would stay exposed.
“Damn, my good foot hurts - it’s not easy chasing naked foxes in a borrowed leg.” Lucas sat on a chair and lit a cigarette up. He smoked it in silence - no one said anything. When he finished smoking he unfastened a jack-knife from its holster around his ankle. It shinned.
Lucas sat next to Jessica as he started to carve her body with her knife. Jessica came to her senses and screamed. The artist took his shoe off and hit her with it in the face. He then took his sock off and stuffed it in her mouth so as for her not to scream - he noticed Jessica had lost her front teeth and that several more were moving nastily. He motioned to the doctor to keep silent and he got back to his carving. He didn’t cut her deep - he didn’t want her dead yet. Jessica squealed and tried to move, but to no avail. After a couple of minutes Jack stopped. His design was ready; it stretched from her abdomen to her neck. It was the medical sign with the two snakes twirling against themselves and a scepter in the middle. (The double helix?)
Lucas took a deep breath and he admired his achievement. He walked towards Dr. Blumingstein and pulled him on his feet. He dragged him, nailed him against the wall next to the sofa and told him:
“Perhaps you think I am crazy. Perhaps I am. But don’t think that I’m doing this so at to write ‘He deserved it’ on the wall with your blood. Nor will I send epistles to TV channels to inform them why I did what I did. I won’t write a manifesto like a new Unabomber. Society is fucked up, humanity is fucked up, there’s no chance that the people of this world will ever think as a single mind, that the inherent genital flaws of man will ever get cured. I’m just doing this to get rid off the sun that laughs at me. You ruined my life doctor and I’ll ruin yours, it’s tit for tat, it’s as simple as that; action or even the absence of action breeds reaction. You brought this to yourself. You gave an oath, to Ippocrates and to yourself, and you didn’t stand up to it. So, you see, it’s time for vengeance to ensue. You’ll see what you love the most perish in front of your eyes. I have no plans in killing you, but your wife’s brush gave me some ideas. I will sodomize you with it as soon as I’m finished with Jessica. But, worry not, I will let you live along with the excruciatingly haunting memories of this day.”
Lucas threw him back on the sofa and waited for the doctor to respond, but all he did was starting to sob. Indignant with the doctor’s sobbing Lucas walked towards Jessica. He grabbed her right breast. She was unconscious. He dug his knife on the top of her breast’s periphery, where the round balloon met with the flesh, and started cutting her flesh. She came to her senses immediately, but there wasn’t much to do except than try to scream as if screaming would take the pain away. Lucas kept on cutting her breast, until he left it hanging on her belly with only a small piece of flesh holding it to her chest.
Dr. Blumingstein threw up. This gave a new idea to Lucas. He walked to the kitchen and he came back with a spoon and a cup in his hands - he had left his gun and knife in the living room since none of his two victims could get hold of them. He used the spoon to collect the doctor’s puke from his clothes and from the floor and put it in the cup. He then sat next to Jessica again. He removed the sock from her mouth - Jessica was about to lose her senses again. He slapped her in order to get her attention. “I’ve got a beverage for you,” he told her. She closed her swollen mouth shut. He closed her nostrils with one hand and when she opened her mouth he emptied the content of the cup down her throat. When she had swallowed the last drop of her husband’s nectar Lucas let her nose free.
Lucas stared back at Dr. Blumingstein. He reached his hand into his jacket’s inner pocket. It seemed as he would never stop bringing new objects out of his pockets, he had his own bag of gifts, but that’s not how he called them. “This is the last instrument of purification,” he told the doctor and showed him a small glass bottle. “It goes by many names; vitriol, sulfuric acid…”
He opened the bottle up and raised it above Jessica’s head. He pulled her hair back so that her face would face the ceiling. Dr. Blumingstein stood up, but as he tried to hop towards Lucas he fell on the ground. The sound that followed was identical to the sound that followed after Lucas had kicked Jessica in the face.
“Stupid, you’re bleeding like a pig and I haven’t even touched you yet,” Lucas shouted at the doctor. “Look at me!” Lucas shouted again.
The doctor was facing the floor not complying with Lucas’ command.
“Look at me you filthy pig, because I will break the promise I gave you earlier and kill you after all,” Lucas threatened and the doctor finally got to turn his head towards his molested wife and Lucas.
Dr. Blumingstein saw Lucas holding Jessica’s hair back and if it weren’t for his wife’s smashed teeth and nose, her hanging breast and her carved body he would have gotten excited.
And then the first drop of acid fell on his wife’s nose; then a second; then a third; and finally a stream. Acid covered her nose and dripped down to her mouth, her chin and her neck. Jessica screamed from the top of her lungs, but her outcries could not keep her nose from melting away. It hung to the left and it reminded Lucas of a limp baby penis. He then thought that he had never seen an erect baby penis, but Jessica’s cries did not let him ponder any more on this thought. Her lips started to melt away, following the pattern of her nose. Lucas let her head fall ahead as the acid was opening holes in her neck.
Jessica was spending the last moment of her borrowed time in this world and Dr. Blumingstein burst into the lachrymose crescendo mentioned in the beginning of this story and that’s about it; more or less.
After the doctor started to weep thunderously in despair, Lucas walked and stood above him. He used his knife to cut the doctor’s belt and removed his pants and boxers. He reached for Jessica’s brush and got hold of it. He pulled the doctor’s hair back and said: “and now doctor…” but the cops broke the door of the apartment and rushed in before he could finish his sentence. He let the doctor’s hair go and his face hit the floor once again.
Lucas ran to the balcony. It was raining now and the drops of the rain caressed him just like the rays of the sun had, almost two years ago. He climbed on the ledge and jumped. For a few seconds he felt as if he could really fly. Then he felt nothing - only the rain extinguishing the sun in his head. The sun was dying into a fog of steam. The doctor was crying into a pool of blood; his and his wife’s. Lucas had died with a smile.
Back in the day when it all began, two years ago, the rays of the sun had greeted good morning to Lucas. His sixth sense though presented sun to him as ominous and he pictured it grinning evilly to him with rotten teeth. “This is going to be a bad day,” he said to himself, but what could he do? Stay in bed and not go to work? Impossible; he had to give a presentation in front of the executive board of Adshine - the advertising company he worked for.
At the age of twenty-nine he was an aspiring advertiser who strived to get into the higher ranks of Adshine. His future as the director of Adshine’s department of political campaigns depended on the presentation he would give that day. So, it was logical for him to feel a little stress when he entered the meeting room at nine o’clock in the morning with all the senior executives having fixed their eyes upon him. As he got off with his presentation his strain subsided and he completed it in success.
“Well done,” Arthur Patterson, Adshine’s president, told Lucas as he patted him on the back. “You impressed the hell out of the board,” Patterson said “and most importantly, you impressed me,” he concluded.
Lucas smiled at him in gratitude and promised that he would never fail him. “It was a good day after all,” he said to himself. “My sixth sense must be playing games on me or perhaps the sun with the rotten teeth is supposed to be a good omen.”
After the presentation Lucas had taken care of his work for an hour - fortunately, he didn’t have much to do that day besides the presentation, so he called his friends and arranged a basketball get-together than evening, at five.
Nothing pleased Lucas more than playing basketball with his friends and listening to ragtime music, especially songs composed by Scott Joplin. The basketball court was thirty minutes away from his place and he was there exactly at seventeen hundred hours. He didn’t use to arrive on time; he always got there ten minutes earlier so that he could warm himself up with stretching exercises. This time however he was on time for the game but late for the warm up, because at twenty past four, the time he used to leave from his house in order to go to the court, he decided to burn a CD with a selection of Joplin’s music so that he could listen to it on his new discman on the way to the game.
The friends had booked the court until six o’clock, so they started to play at five past five, as soon as the last one arrived. They hoped to enjoy an interval between the two twenty-minute game periods, but that interval came early, at 13:13 of the game, when Lucas stepped on his ankle and broke it. As he was lying on the floor contorting from pain he saw with his mind’s eye the sun with the rotten teeth grinning at him jeeringly.
After he got hospitalized and treated, a friend of his got him back home. Lucas walked with the help of crutches and a cast that stretched from his sole up to his knee embraced his leg. Lucas took a couple of painkillers and went to sleep, but it was the most tremulant slumber of his entire life. In his dreams he saw the sun again, laughing mischievously at him, a laughter that reminded him the stereotype of Count Dracula’s evil laughter.
When he woke up the next day in sweat and fever he called Dr. Blumingstein who had treated him the night before. The doctor advised Lucas to take an antipyretic pill and reassured him that fever was a standard reaction of the human mind and told him that everything would go well.
Next, Lucas called Arthur Patterson to let him in on his mishap.
“The doctor says I will be able to walk in a narthex in about twenty days Mr. Patterson and in the meantime I will be using my crutches to come to work.”
“That’s absolutely out of the question, my son. I have walked in crutches myself and, let me tell you this; it’s not easy at all to go to work when you have to use your hands in order to do the walking. Plus, you have to roam around the city all day and your walking resorts deem this impossible. Don’t worry my son, I hereby grant you a month’s leave of absence - use this time to recover and prepare yourself for your future activities as the chairman of the political campaign department.”
A week had passed since that call and although Lucas was happy that he got the promotion, his happiness was overshadowed by the image of the malignant sun every time he woke up from a restless night’s sleep. Lucas did not know what to make out of this image. Surely, breaking your ankle is not the best thing that can happen to your life, but on the other hand, he had gotten the promotion.
Lucas was in a taxicab, on his way to the hospital. He had an appointment with Dr. Blumingstein who examined the new x-rays of his patient’s ankle. He said everything was fine and Lucas informed him that when he was standing up he felt as if his blood surged down his ankle and strutted it; he felt as if the gathered blood around his ankle wanted to break free from the confining flesh, he felt as if his leg would explode. In other words, he felt terrible pain. Dr. Blumingstein rushed to placate his fears and told him that this was the standard procedure in such kind of traumatizations.
The same discussion took place during Lucas’ visit to the hospital a week later, but in his third weekly visit things got smelly. To be exact; things and his leg. When Lucas entered Dr. Blumingstein’s office the profound stench springing out of Lucas’ leg ravaged the doctor’s nostrils. The doctor did not talk and neither did Lucas; the first was afraid to talk while the second was afraid to listen.
And there was Lucas now, two years later, sitting on a bench at a park trying to put his thoughts in order. He wanted to prepare his speech, but he couldn’t get to it. All he could think about was the pain, the grief and the misery that had suffused him during those two years. That and the sinister sun that he had never ceased to see in his mind since the day it all began (in fact, after the surgery that followed his third visit to Dr. Blumingstein the sun had started to appear to him at any time of the day). Plus, he was thinking about his poignant and enduring research he had endeavored in during that time. He had learned all about the art of torture, from the ancient Chinese torture techniques to the updated techniques CIA was teaching its agents so as for them to apply and also pass their knowledge on to the legitimate instruments of CIA-supported regimes around the globe.
Nevertheless, Lucas was not interested in the art of interrogation, only that of torture. He decided to settle with everyday items that could be easily purchased and used by a person who wanted to shine in this field of art. It was a cloudy evening and when the time approached five o’clock he got up and walked, yes, he walked with his artificial leg, to the building where Dr. Blumingstein lived. He got in the elevator and to the thirteenth floor, where the doctor lived. He rung the doorbell and when Dr. Blumingstein asked who it was he said it was him, Lucas, and needed to talk to him. The doctor let him in and they sat in the living room opposite from each other. They discussed about Lucas’ health and he informed him that he could walk pretty well, but he had to rely on his good leg, the right one, which resulted in him getting tired easily.
“Sadly, this is a standard outgrowth of walking with an artificial leg,” said Dr. Blumingstein looking at the window - not being able to look Lucas in the eyes.
“If only it was the only problem,” Lucas muttered more to himself than to the doctor. “I guess it must be as standard as the pain I felt in my leg when it was in a cast,” he said clinching his glance on Dr. Blumingstein.
The doctor shook as if a spear of insult had wounded him. “This is not an innuendo…, I hope,” he breathed in uncertainty.
At that moment Ms. Blumingstein walked in. She was wearing a bathrobe and her hair was wet. She was taken by surprise. “Oh, I didn’t realize you had company,” she told her husband. “Excuse my outfit,” she then said to Lucas, “but I was having a shower and didn’t hear you. My name is Jessica,” she abutted and extended her hand towards Lucas.
“Nice to meet you,” he said as he shook her hand. “It was about time,” he said to himself. “Please, sit down - I was just about to answer a question to your husband and I think you’d like to listen to this,” said and it was obvious that he wouldn’t settle for a negative answer.
“Well, OK, I can stay for a while as I’m combing my hair,” Jessica said and rushed to the bathroom. When she returned she was carrying a brush with a sculptured ivory handle. She sat next to her husband and started to comb her hair.
“You see doctor,” Lucas said, “my last words were not an innuendo for I firmly believe that if you had been faithful to your oath to Ippocrates I wouldn’t have been missing a leg now.”
Dr. Blumingstein stared at Lucas. He thought he saw flames in his eyes, but it must have been his imagination (or perhaps it was the sun in Lucas’ head). “How dare you insult me like this,” the doctor exclaimed in a put-on anger.
“Well,” Lucas replied calmly, “I dare because, firstly, I am right and also because I have this.” He reached to his pocket and got a Smith & Weson gun out.
The coupled gasped.
Lucas reached to the side pocket of his pants and took a piece of rope out. He threw it to Jessica and ordered her to tie her husband’s leg up.
“No, no, I can’t - this whole thing’s not right,” she refused as the fear kept penetrating her pores reaching to the medulla in her bones.
“Well Jessica, you see, it’s either that or a bullet in each of your heads,” Lucas threatened her.
Jessica hemmed and she proceeded to tie the doctor’s legs up.
Lucas stood up and ordered Jessica to sit at his vacant seat. She seemed to comply and stood up holding her brush in her right hand. She started to walk towards the sofa Lucas had sat and as she approached him she suddenly struck him with the brush at the left side of his head. He blacked out for a few fragments of a second, enough for Jessica to turn around and start to run towards the door of the apartment. Lucas reached his hand in order to get hold of her, but he only managed to grab her bathrobe. She broke free from the robe and started to run towards the door again in her birth-suit. Lucas ran after her. Jessica reached the door and opened it, but before she could get outside the flat Lucas grabbed her by her hair, pulled her back and threw her down on the floor. He saw Dr. Blumingstein trying to untie the rope and he aimed at him with the gun.
“I wouldn’t do that if I was you,” he warned the doctor who in a look of defeat stopped moving. “Now, sit back and enjoy the ride.”
Lucas kicked Jessica hard in the face and the sound of shattered bones was instantly heard. Jessica started to bleed. Lucas left her lying on the floor sobbing and bleeding as he took a pair of handcuffs out of his pocket and walked toward the doctor.
“Run your right hand under your left thigh,” Lucas ordered. The doctor conformed and then Lucas cuffed him up in an uncomfortable position.
“What are you going to do?” the doctored asked in flaming agony.
“You’ll see,” Lucas replied and approached Jessica. He grabbed her by the hair again and lifted her up. Blood started to run down her neck and exposed breasts.
“It’s always exciting to see fattened, middle-aged people like you getting married to young babes like Jessica,” Lucas said smiling like the sun in his head as he examined Jessica’s body. “She looks like she’s at least fifteen years younger than you and I don’t think she married you because of your charms,” he told Dr. Blumingstein mockingly.
“I love my husband,” Jessica tried to say as she spat blood on Lucas.
This infuriated him and he punched her in the stomach throwing her in the sofa he was previously sitting.
“I’m sure you love something in your relationship with the doctor, but I sense that your love revolves around money - your husband’s money. If you loved your husband you would have finished me, you wouldn’t have tried to run away leaving him behind” Lucas scolded her in anger.
“I tried to call for help,” Jessica retorted as soon as she was able to breathe again and then she fainted. Blood ran out of her mouth and covered her belly and thighs.
Lucas took another piece of rope from his pant’s side pocket and tied her feet as she was unconscious, unable to move. He then uprooted the wire of the phone from its plug in the wall and tied her hands behind her back so that her body would stay exposed.
“Damn, my good foot hurts - it’s not easy chasing naked foxes in a borrowed leg.” Lucas sat on a chair and lit a cigarette up. He smoked it in silence - no one said anything. When he finished smoking he unfastened a jack-knife from its holster around his ankle. It shinned.
Lucas sat next to Jessica as he started to carve her body with her knife. Jessica came to her senses and screamed. The artist took his shoe off and hit her with it in the face. He then took his sock off and stuffed it in her mouth so as for her not to scream - he noticed Jessica had lost her front teeth and that several more were moving nastily. He motioned to the doctor to keep silent and he got back to his carving. He didn’t cut her deep - he didn’t want her dead yet. Jessica squealed and tried to move, but to no avail. After a couple of minutes Jack stopped. His design was ready; it stretched from her abdomen to her neck. It was the medical sign with the two snakes twirling against themselves and a scepter in the middle. (The double helix?)
Lucas took a deep breath and he admired his achievement. He walked towards Dr. Blumingstein and pulled him on his feet. He dragged him, nailed him against the wall next to the sofa and told him:
“Perhaps you think I am crazy. Perhaps I am. But don’t think that I’m doing this so at to write ‘He deserved it’ on the wall with your blood. Nor will I send epistles to TV channels to inform them why I did what I did. I won’t write a manifesto like a new Unabomber. Society is fucked up, humanity is fucked up, there’s no chance that the people of this world will ever think as a single mind, that the inherent genital flaws of man will ever get cured. I’m just doing this to get rid off the sun that laughs at me. You ruined my life doctor and I’ll ruin yours, it’s tit for tat, it’s as simple as that; action or even the absence of action breeds reaction. You brought this to yourself. You gave an oath, to Ippocrates and to yourself, and you didn’t stand up to it. So, you see, it’s time for vengeance to ensue. You’ll see what you love the most perish in front of your eyes. I have no plans in killing you, but your wife’s brush gave me some ideas. I will sodomize you with it as soon as I’m finished with Jessica. But, worry not, I will let you live along with the excruciatingly haunting memories of this day.”
Lucas threw him back on the sofa and waited for the doctor to respond, but all he did was starting to sob. Indignant with the doctor’s sobbing Lucas walked towards Jessica. He grabbed her right breast. She was unconscious. He dug his knife on the top of her breast’s periphery, where the round balloon met with the flesh, and started cutting her flesh. She came to her senses immediately, but there wasn’t much to do except than try to scream as if screaming would take the pain away. Lucas kept on cutting her breast, until he left it hanging on her belly with only a small piece of flesh holding it to her chest.
Dr. Blumingstein threw up. This gave a new idea to Lucas. He walked to the kitchen and he came back with a spoon and a cup in his hands - he had left his gun and knife in the living room since none of his two victims could get hold of them. He used the spoon to collect the doctor’s puke from his clothes and from the floor and put it in the cup. He then sat next to Jessica again. He removed the sock from her mouth - Jessica was about to lose her senses again. He slapped her in order to get her attention. “I’ve got a beverage for you,” he told her. She closed her swollen mouth shut. He closed her nostrils with one hand and when she opened her mouth he emptied the content of the cup down her throat. When she had swallowed the last drop of her husband’s nectar Lucas let her nose free.
Lucas stared back at Dr. Blumingstein. He reached his hand into his jacket’s inner pocket. It seemed as he would never stop bringing new objects out of his pockets, he had his own bag of gifts, but that’s not how he called them. “This is the last instrument of purification,” he told the doctor and showed him a small glass bottle. “It goes by many names; vitriol, sulfuric acid…”
He opened the bottle up and raised it above Jessica’s head. He pulled her hair back so that her face would face the ceiling. Dr. Blumingstein stood up, but as he tried to hop towards Lucas he fell on the ground. The sound that followed was identical to the sound that followed after Lucas had kicked Jessica in the face.
“Stupid, you’re bleeding like a pig and I haven’t even touched you yet,” Lucas shouted at the doctor. “Look at me!” Lucas shouted again.
The doctor was facing the floor not complying with Lucas’ command.
“Look at me you filthy pig, because I will break the promise I gave you earlier and kill you after all,” Lucas threatened and the doctor finally got to turn his head towards his molested wife and Lucas.
Dr. Blumingstein saw Lucas holding Jessica’s hair back and if it weren’t for his wife’s smashed teeth and nose, her hanging breast and her carved body he would have gotten excited.
And then the first drop of acid fell on his wife’s nose; then a second; then a third; and finally a stream. Acid covered her nose and dripped down to her mouth, her chin and her neck. Jessica screamed from the top of her lungs, but her outcries could not keep her nose from melting away. It hung to the left and it reminded Lucas of a limp baby penis. He then thought that he had never seen an erect baby penis, but Jessica’s cries did not let him ponder any more on this thought. Her lips started to melt away, following the pattern of her nose. Lucas let her head fall ahead as the acid was opening holes in her neck.
Jessica was spending the last moment of her borrowed time in this world and Dr. Blumingstein burst into the lachrymose crescendo mentioned in the beginning of this story and that’s about it; more or less.
After the doctor started to weep thunderously in despair, Lucas walked and stood above him. He used his knife to cut the doctor’s belt and removed his pants and boxers. He reached for Jessica’s brush and got hold of it. He pulled the doctor’s hair back and said: “and now doctor…” but the cops broke the door of the apartment and rushed in before he could finish his sentence. He let the doctor’s hair go and his face hit the floor once again.
Lucas ran to the balcony. It was raining now and the drops of the rain caressed him just like the rays of the sun had, almost two years ago. He climbed on the ledge and jumped. For a few seconds he felt as if he could really fly. Then he felt nothing - only the rain extinguishing the sun in his head. The sun was dying into a fog of steam. The doctor was crying into a pool of blood; his and his wife’s. Lucas had died with a smile.