Second Opinion
I walked into the office of Transcendental Review with the appointment slip in my pocket. The sweat on my fingers had dulled the ink when I handed it in at the front desk. The nurse behind the desk was a three-hundred-pound Samoan transexual with a thin black mustache and white beehive wig. She glanced at it, tilting her head slightly, the beehive undisturbed. With one finger she pointed to the staircase beside her desk.
“The doctor is ready to see you now.” Her voice was a high-pitched castrato that rang through the bones of the place like a broken bell.
I went up the stairs and down the hallway. The walls were hung with pictures of Roman orgies and Druid rituals. A portrait of a man standing on a hilltop with a blazing fire and bright gleaming stars above him was framed beside the door of Dr. M Holbert, resident analyst. I knocked and a tall thin man in a grey three piece suit answered the door. His hair was thinning, his eyes were steel blue and his face was sunken.
“Welcome my boy! Come in and have a seat.” His presence proved warmer than his initial appearance. I took a seat on the large tweed sofa opposite his chair.
“Now, Mr.________ I understand you have been experiencing episodes of transcendental distress.”
I explained the nature of the nightmares and hallucinations I had been suffering from. I told him about how I had seen a nun carrying an electric cross down to the East River, the man I watched pull out his teeth to pay for a pack of cigarettes and the conversation I overheard between two house flies.
“Surely these episodes are not without warrant. It never occurred to you that these could mean something?”
“Doctor, you can’t be serious!”
“As serious as an icicle to an eye socket my dear.” he smiled, sitting in his large red leather chair.
“Don’t you understand that these things have put me in a desperate position. The house flies had voices. They sounded like Cary Grant and James Mason.”
“But of course!” the doctor declared with disturbing conviction. “The nightmares you have described are visions of the future.”
I felt a pit of helplessness in my stomach but also some relief. What I had been seeing seemed to be brought on by the chaos of the world. It also became clear that this doctor was incurably insane.
“It is only a matter of time, my boy, before the entire structure of society has collapsed. Police openly killing in the streets. Boys with fishhooks in their eyes and toe jam crammed in their gums from licking the feet of rich old men. Politicians who pay to see broken light bulbs crammed into the mouths of loud children.” He was in some sort trance state. I decided to run for it, I didn’t think he would notice.
Suddenly a large cockroach breaks down the office door. It is carrying a suitcase which it sets down and opens to reveal a twenty gauge double barrel shotgun.
It hands me the weapon saying “Kill this quack. He is of no use to you or anyone.”
“I can’t!” I say in anguish.
“You musssssttttt” it hisses with a voice like a thousand of its brethren materializing from behind paper-skinned walls.
I refuse once more to which the creature extends one of its long appendages and skewered the crazed doctor through the throat. He drops into a pool of blood on the carpet. The insect turns to me with similar intentions but I blast it clean with the shotgun, sending white brain matter spraying across the wall.
The nurse came running up to find me standing there surrounded by carnage. I drop the gun and fumbled for a cigarette with shaking hands.
“What have they done to you?” she cries
“I only killed the bug,” I say defensively “It killed Holbert!”
She drops to her knees sobbing at the doctor’s side. Their relationship must have been more than exclusively professional.
“How the hell did that thing even get in here?”
“Through the pipes.” she wailed.
I apologized and stepped around her as she held the dead man in her arms against her gargantuan sagging breasts. I have no time to mourn for the doctor, my sanity, or the bug.
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