“I just about had to take the bull’s head off,” Dr. Stevenson is explaining about the rodeo. “He’d trampled the halfwit rider and the leg was hanging loose. But the bull had become lodged in a fence with his horns and we could not remove the rider from beneath him. Lucky for me, the kid had a tumor anyway. You don’t know what a tumor does to my outlook. Initially I’m angry and want to yell at the patient, 'How dare you have such undisciplined cells!' But that passes and the speed is required to cut it out in a flash. We work over heat ducts so that you sweat off pounds while you’re operating. Marvels of medical science, the only job where you lose weight as you work.”
I tried to broach the subject of getting more Baroline but he was off on one of his stories now.

“And I said I’d had enough of that brown-noser. She comes in all high and mighty, skirt two inches too short. Thought she knew the way to my heart so I asked her to demonstrate for the whole operating theater. She stepped back with unease, and I say that with all due gravity. It was then that I ordered her next to the patient. She lay down slowly, tears in her eyes. I’d had enough and that was all there was to it. I had her strapped down and told her we were sedating her, but we really shot her up with pure adrenaline. She was on a kick like none I’ve ever seen. Wet her pants and then shit herself, wired out of her skull, eyes facing different directions. The heat vents were working on all of us and she’d already lost quite a bit of weight in those ten minutes.

“It was necessary for my research, you understand. To be kept in an extended fight or flight state, possibly for as long as three hours, what this does to the human mind... Delayed psychosis, aphasia, neural shut down. We started to lose her so I took pity and had her injected with 40 cc’s of Xanax. A last ditch effort to save her from herself. If she’d calmed down at that point there’s a good chance I wouldn’t have had to go through with the procedure. I turned to the theater’s observation crowd, who had now started singing the Pledge of Allegiance with crude words inserted, and shouted, ‘Show some respect, you pigs, my father died in some war.’

“The patient was starting to come up so I had the anesthesiologist give him a double dose and quickly went to work removing the lungs. The goal was to get the heart to continue beating for a prolonged period without oxygen to sustain it. I was ready to massage it by hand if I had to but I was in luck, the heart was already beating on it’s own. The lungs had been removed and cataloged separately. Now I removed the heart from the body and placed it on a scale. It stopped beating as soon as it was cut out and I had them rig the hoses to it. The hoses led to the CO2 tanks that powered the soda fountain in the cafeteria. But it was a wash out, no pumping in normal fashion, only irregular force release. The heart was swelling and threatening to explode. I began screaming at it, shouting, 'Why don’t you want to work? How dare you defy me!'

“Seeing the furor over the heart, the brown-nosing nurse became very agitated and began to squirm under her bindings. I gave up on the patient (whose neural activity had stopped right around the time he was double-dosed) and turned to the nurse. I asked her patiently if she’d like to keep her arms and she nodded in the affirmative so I went to work on plan b. I had my assistant cut away her uniform to reveal a small triangular bush that had obviously been maintained with periodic waxing. I began to pity her and wondered how many men had seen this bush, if it was necessary to maintain it in an organized fashion.

“But by now it was too late for such thoughts and I asked the anesthesiologist to prepare another shot, a barbiturate to control her breathing and put her at least part way under. He replied that we were all out; the night janitor crew had used it all and ended up overdosed in two surgery rooms and the smoking lounge. Well I’d had enough of that too and asked them to bring the bodies down from the cool storage room to be processed immediately as tools of science.

“Turning my attention back to the incapacitated nurse, I picked up a cleansed scalpel and began an incision over the ovaries, asking her quietly if she watched much television. Television causes cancer in the brain, I’ve seen the evidence. It goes back over fifty years. If she watched television, then the entire operation may not be a waste. It was my contention that I could save this woman’s soul through surgery and that’s just what I planned to do. I opened her womb with five quick cuts and immediately was greeted with a fetus. It was in the placental sack and had yet to form digits, mouth, nose, and other features.

“I quickly withdrew the fetus and made a small incision in the sack. I then stuffed one of the CO2 hoses in the hole and reinserted the fetus in the womb. When the order was given, the placental sack filled with gas and exploded within the womb. The fetus was blown off the table and stuck to the wall before sliding to the floor, leaving a thick brown trail behind it. An orderly was immediately at the wall, licking up this concoction of blood and amniotic fluid. I made a note of this behavior as it seemed unusual at the time.

“The fetus was returned to the mother and I held it in front of her face while I punctured the skull with an instrument meant for such a thing. I let the blood and fluid leak down upon her face, those wired and atrocious eyes still doing impossible tricks, before shoving the fetus right in her ass-kissing mouth. I knew she would not swallow though, her lungs over-expanded as they were from the fight or flight reaction, and resolved to save the village by destroying it. I removed the patient’s useless penis and dropped it into the open womb, which was then sewn shut.

“The gallery of spectators were quite upset by the run of things in this procedure and I ordered the doors locked before they could escape. No sense of research in that lot. No spirit of adventure. They began vomiting and crying and I ordered roll to be taken while the orderlies began carting in the bodies of the nighttime cleaning crew.” He digs a nail file out of a drawer in his desk and begins picking at his nails. He seems exhausted by sharing this story, like his greatness is a burden.

“You ever seen someone give birth?” he finally says. “Much more gruesome procedure than that partial birth abortion I performed on the nurse. First one I assisted in, I was sprayed with a shower of blood. I was left broken and demoralized by the experience. Saw people in the hallways, they thought I’d given birth myself, that’s how disoriented and covered I was. Of course, someone had to cover it up.”
He gently removes a bottle of pills and puts it on the desk between us. He fingers a loose thread on his coat.
“Hmmm,” he says. “I could have sworn you didn’t have that glint in your eye before. It’s almost as though you’re feeding on something. You want me to take a look at you? Check for medical defects?”
I politely declined.

The announcer says that it’s time for a commercial break and we cut to a man in a Spider-Man costume shitting ping pong balls out of his ass. Up in the control booth, a programmer tells which camera to go to, instructs cameramen on distance and zoom necessary, correcting angles effortlessly. One cameraman is not responsive to instruction and the programmer calls to the executive producer, stating, “That guy’s a pinko. He sweats red.” The executive producer pulls up a profile on a computer console and reads over the man’s history. “We’ll hand him a pink slip. He’s finished around here.” The cameraman is grabbed from behind by two security guards and thrust out of the studio while the programmer masturbates to the Spider-Man routine. The executive producer watches over the scene and says, “This will play well in the sticks. We could get another 2 points in the ratings.”