Of Cars and Temples

By L. G. Merrick
Illustrated by Steve Morris

This delightfully off-putting tale went on to appear in Murdered Futures, a Cronenberg fanzine, which was published in January 2023. For a while that zine was hard to find, but now it’s up on Amazon. Go look, it’s cheap, no one makes a dime!

Anderson Waltzer sliced the girl open. He knew what he was doing. The flesh of her abdomen parted easily. She was young and fit, not much fat to cut through and push back, little of that yellow slither and gob. Right there under skin, her muscle glistened. He split that along its grain. This was still a thrill.

“Retractors,” he said.

An odor irked him when the nurse leaned closer. A harsh lavender stink as he fixed the retractors in place to hold the incision open. Perfume, or shampoo. It was a distraction. He would make her life difficult later.

“Forceps,” he said.

He ligated blood vessels, pinched them with the forceps so they would not bleed, snipped them so he could get past them, assembled a layer of forceps along the edge of the incision, which was about four inches. After that, he no longer had to be particularly gentle. With forefinger he shoved aside the layer of intestine. That would have shocked the girl on the table. Shocked any patient. There was rarely need to be ginger.

“Swab,” he said. 

He soaked up fluid. Put his finger back down, prodded.

His previous patient, age seventy, she’d required a light touch. Decades of use wore out the machinery. Dried its joints, eroded its teeth, thinned its belts. Pieces fatigued after continuous operation. The way an old transmission developed hairline fractures, a pervasive fragility, started to slip and battle on the uphills—and any cog or shaft under stress might be the one to fly apart inside the casing, bring the whole contraption suddenly to uselessness. He thought of the human body as a car.

The girl on the table had not liked him at all, when he shared that view in the pre-surgery introduction. 

“My body is a temple,” she had said. Indignant. “It is sacred. It is not your joyride.” 

He’d scanned her eyes for confirmation that this self-righteous outburst was only a mask for fear about the operation. Then decided he didn’t really care either way. 

“Miss Fogel. I have removed the appendix from a great many abdomens. It is not a religious ceremony. You don’t want a high priestess doing it. The procedure really is more akin to work on a car. Ever change the oil in your car?”

She had not.

“All right, but you’ve had it changed. Maybe at a Jiffy Lube. Some high school boy gets under it, some part-timer—and you trust him, because he’s trained. So you can trust me.” He paused before amusing himself with a wry conclusion. “My training puts that boy’s to shame.”

“If he messes up, I don’t die.”

“No one dies from an appendectomy. And you could die from Jiffy Lube. What if he drains your brake line instead of your oil? But he does it right, and I’m even better.”

She winced and went pale as her appendix sent her a jolt. That ended the argument.

She tried one last attempt, in the O.R. “I really do think of my body as a temple,” she said in the last instant before the anesthesia mask was placed over her mouth. This time he saw her face express pure dependence on him. 

He said, “I promise you, in no surgery have I ever found anything mystical in there. We’re made of filters and hoses and pumps.” 

She slipped under before he finished.

Waltzer got Miss Fogel’s appendix out in record time.

“Seen worse,” the nurse said as the swollen piece of superfluity landed in the metal bowl.

“We’re not done yet,” he said. Something bothered him—enough that he wanted the nurse to see it too. “Take a look.”

She knew it must be unusual, if Anderson Waltzer wanted her opinion.

He shifted some forceps and leaned back so the nurse could lean in. 

“What the hell is that?” she said.

“Exactly,” he said, in the half-annoyed, half-impressed tone of a mechanic who has met an engine that’s making a noise he can’t identify.

It was an oblong white spot. A centimeter on its long axis, half that in width. Located on the side of the cecum—that bend where the large and small intestines join, and from which until a moment ago the appendix had projected. The spot stayed pure white too; blood from the crushed appendix stem beaded on it as if on wax paper, and ran off. Close inspection showed it to have a woven appearance, like a patch of dense cobweb.

He rubbed a fingertip across it. Distinct texture, even through the glove. But it appeared not to be a lesion on the tissue. Rather a separate entity, adhered there.

“It needs to come out,” he said—in the tone of a mechanic concluding simply enough that his original estimate of the work to do in this body was, as estimates sometimes are, short.

Deftly he worked forceps under the patch, and closed them to grip it. He lifted, peeling it up from the glistening tissue.

Now he worked tenderly. Approach adjusted to fully cautions, given the unknown aspect. Supposing Miss Fogel’s interior might be a lot more fragile than her combative exterior indicated.

He had peeled the white patch about a third of the way off when the intestine jerked—and narrowed, as if squeezing in on itself—

He froze in all his motion, rock still, so as not to cause any injury. He observed, considered. That odd jerk meant the patch was some kind of parasite—possibly. Some species of flatworm—maybe. A tiny creature that had sunk teeth into the cecum to hold on. 

Then he tapped it with a scalpel, and when it did not squirm he concluded it was not alive, was merely a spot as he had initially believed, but it was anchored in place by a nearly invisible strand looped that looped around the tube. Peeling it up had cinched the strand tighter. 

“Scissors,” he said.

He snipped the anchor line—and then saw there were more, a total of three lines encircling the intestine. Along the scissors, in his fingers, he felt each line resist the snip as substantially as plastic fishing line, though as thin as spider silk. The severed ends wafted.

He snipped the next. 

He picked up the forceps that gripped the patch, now that its hug was ended, and resumed peeling slowly—and as soon as he’d detached it from Miss Fogel, the patch liquefied.

The anchor lines that waved from it dropped like streamers of saliva back into the incision, and the patch fell in a drip from his tool.

The liquid landed atop intestine, reforming into a single droplet near the place he had peeled it from, and lay only an instant before slipping—slithering, he thought for a second—out of sight. It sank through a nothing-wide gap between the folds of the digestive organ. Moved as fluidly as cooking oil across a hot pan.

He blinked. 

He poked down that gap with two fingers, pried through, hoping to expose the drop of liquid, maybe scoop it out on a latex fingertip. It remained hidden. But he saw another white spot. 

Two more. Both on the small intestine.

He poked at one.

It too liquefied, and slid deeper into her.

“Let’s get the patient’s USG up on screen,” he said. He was not sure what to do. “Right away.”

Within two minutes he was reviewing images taken hours ago. The patches, however, or droplets—whatever they were—proved too insubstantial to show up. 

“Okay,” he said. He felt like a mechanic accustomed to Fords who has discovered too late it is a Lotus in his garage today. He wished this operation were laparoscopic—wished this hospital were well-equipped. He wanted better options right now.

“We need a sample of whatever that is. For the lab. We can’t close her back up and tell her she’s fine, and we can’t tell her she has a problem but we have no idea what it is. So we’re going on a hunt.”

He extended the existing Lanz incision. Sliced downward in a curve and turned it into a transverse incision, horizontally across her abdomen another six inches, not stopping until it passed beneath her navel. It was an aggressive improvisation that demanded his utmost focus and in the midst of parting the abdominal muscle, applying the clamps, he got another noseful of the nurse’s perfume. So strong, so cloying, he felt queasy. He had to pause. How could she be so unprofessional—right in his face. He was on edge and the stink nearly shoved him over. He wished he could take a minute to yell. He wished he could banish her from the O.R.

He forgot his anger, though, when the bright light hit the moist turns of the digestive tract. What he saw made his hands start to shake. 

It seemed to him impossible. For an instant he wished he had not seen it. He slipped nearly his entire hand in there, to the palm, and lifted, and when he did, the overhead lamp lit Miss Fogel’s plumbing to a new depth. And therein, much as sunlight, cast at teh right angle across the flat green surface of a trimmed hedge, might reveal a truly shocking number of spiders’ nests—he saw those white patches riddled her everywhere. His breath thinned into rapid gasps as he persisted at lifting, searching, hoping to discover a limit to the infected area. But wherever he turned intestine, he exposed more spots. So plentiful, so large—and when he lifted intestine, white substance stretched between its folds, the same way spiderwebbing will stretch when a hose is lifted from an engine block in a long-disused car. Strands lengthened, and thinned in midair, and did not let go. Some anchor lines tugged up the digestive tubing. And wherever he tried to peel off any piece, it melted promptly into white goo, and rolled out of sight, as if in escape. Dr. Waltzer became, for once, nervous in the O.R.

Later, in the last hours of his life, he would look back and recognize that worse than nervous, he had become downright afraid. It would then be his final task to forgive himself for that—but he found he could, easily, because it was the first time since childhood that he had faced a complete unknown. And he had recovered his cool so quickly, proceeded onward so efficiently, inventively, prudently, done everything right; and descended into the pure concentration of the brilliant mechanic that he was known to be.

He snipped strands. This one, and here.

Where he snipped, though, the webbing fell into her as liquid, white and oily, and slid deeper, out of view. No spot remained solid when detached, no portion allowed itself to be obtained as sample.

“I have an idea,” he said after stuff escaped for the third time.

He pulled Miss Fogel’s intestine far out of her. Lifted it four inches up, watched the webbing stretch. The anchor points tighten. The nurse understood with minimal instruction. She placed sterile bandages into the incision and a small steel bowl atop the bandages. He maneuvered intestine over the bowl. He worked quickly now. Determined. Hands steady in the surety of a plan to enact. He snipped the threads around the section he had lifted, and whatever he snipped liquefied, and whatever liquefied this time plinked into the bowl.  

One drop missed the bowl, and the incision as well. It sat on Miss Fogel’s skin. A half pearl. 

“Swab,” he said, intending to dab it up.

But before the swab met his hand, the half pearl began to roll. It rolled up the slope of her flesh, past the clamps, toward the gaping hole—and dropped into her. 

In the bowl, his samples had merged into one larger globule the size of a quarter. Two milliliters, or so.

“Victory,” he said. “Let’s close her up. Send that to the lab. The appendix too.” Then he had an idea that the liquid in the bowl might try to scale its side and jump out. He said: “Nurse, secure the sample right away. Cap it tight.”

He performed two more surgeries that day, neither gracefully.

That night, bad dreams churned up his sleep. A man stood in the corner of his bedroom, flesh the white of that oil. In place of hands his arms ended in drooping long white threads that swayed, that braided and unbraided, that endlessly helixed, caduceused, that flapped and flopped. The man’s white legs ended likewise in threads snaking into the carpet, sewing him into it more thoroughly with each minute he stood there, until he could never be removed. He stood not far from the bed all night and his name could not be pronounced and without breathing he muttered dark prayers.

Long before dawn, Waltzer woke fully, hopeless of sleep. He could not stop thinking about what he had seen inside Miss Fogel. He did not see a reason to conclude the mysterious substance had caused her appendicitis, which itself had appeared ordinary; he believed the appendicitis was a coincidence that enabled him to discover something that otherwise would have remained hidden. But what those spots might be—only vexed him.

When he arrived at the hospital he remembered he had to get at that nurse about her scent. The intrusive stink—it had made his eyes water while he held the scalpel. So intensely floral he may as well have inhaled a handful of pollen, a lungful of spores. He’d pay her some hell she wouldn’t forget.

First he went to see Miss Fogel.

“This scar is not what we agreed to,” Fogel said. “I trusted you. This looks like a C-section.” 

“Exploration became necessary,” he said. “Your intestine is secreting—or possibly hosting—something.”

Now he saw the stab of fear in her. No self-righteousness now. He was not above deriving some satisfaction from that.

“Hosting?” she said.

After that, Waltzer went to the lab on two. Ted was head technician. Waltzer liked Ted.

“What’s the story on that appendix?”

“It had appendicitis.”

“That’s all? How about that weird sample?”

“Very funny,” Ted said.

“Funny how?” Waltzer said.

“You called down like you were about to send me something practically radioactive. Then you sent an empty vial.”

“Empty?”

“Okay—empty except for a whiff of perfume. I opened it and got a pretty thick headful of roses or lavender. We all did.”

“I thought it smelled nice,” said the female assistant. Waltzer didn’t remember her name.

Ted ignored her and said, “It was noxious. Har-de-har, chief.”

The good surgeon paused, and supposed his next visit would be to the nurse. But he realized now that he was going to be polite, and use the gentlest voice he knew, to ask about her perfume. 

Now, he realized, he was hoping she would say it was something awfully flowery.

The end