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Squeeze

S. William Hepner

    The first thing that happens is a black linen bag covers my head. It’s cinched tight around my neck—almost too tight because I immediately start to cough and gag. My hands are bound behind my back, wrists hugging each other via the nylon-rope-method.
    The next thing is me muttering something about being the wrong guy. There must be some kind of mistake. I’m a close personal friend of the governor. Anything. But a hard, solid punch to the solar plexus shuts me up, good and quick.
    Then there’s the comforting hand on my shoulder followed by a boot kick to the back of my right leg direct in that soft fleshy part behind the knee between those two vertical tendons holding it all together. I drop like a hangman on the gallows.
    I remember when I was younger trying to impress a girl, showing her how tough I was by slamming my forehead against a cement wall. I like to think that it was mighty impressive, but all I remember is waking up on the floor to all of my friends laughing at me. I still remember what it feels like—that first hit.
    That’s what’s next: a cement wall-punch to my temple. That feeling of trying to impress the girl comes sweeping back into my mind. That tingling and that sudden rush of cold circle my entire body. I don’t feel my legs buckle, but I do get nauseous and lightheaded. Then I hit the ground and the lights go out.
    And believe me, that’s the best part of my day.
    
    When I open my eyes, the beautiful woman stares back. Her haunting eyes drill deep into me. It’s a comforting way for me to awake. It’s a nice transition between the semi-truck impact of whatever the hell it was that knocked me out and whatever the hell it is that I’m in store for. But anyway, that beautiful woman...
    She gazes down at me. The thing that I quickly recognize is that she smiles at me when I want her to smile at me. I want her to wink, and she winks. I want her to shake her hair, and she shakes. I want her to blow me a kiss, and she blows. And it hits me in the face hard. I see it coming and cannot turn away. I brace for impact, and I take it—the best I can.
    It hurts like hell, the kiss, the fist to the bridge of my nose. That tingling returns but this time I stay conscious. The pain from the nose builds so much pressure that my eyes feel like they’re going to explode. It feels like a balloon is being inflated inside my head. Blood escapes my nostrils with a violent current down my cheeks—both sides—over and into my ears. That kiss, it’s a helluva kiss.
    
    I’m lying on my back on a metal slab of a table, and I can’t move. My arms and legs are bound tight to the table—no wiggle room. I struggle to shift even an inch and am entirely unsuccessful. Worse yet, I can’t move my head. With a cold, hard pressure against both sides of my face, I can only stare up toward the ceiling.
    My eyes dart from one side to the other. I’m seeing what looks like a room in a dirty abandoned hospital. The walls are painted green but soaked dark in the corners—armpit stains on a derelict wall. Over head, the florescent lights hum, suspended by chains like the lamps that hang above pool tables in bars. The lights dangle from a drop ceiling—two-foot by four-foot panels resting on a metal grid system. The panels—each placed into its own slot—are stained in areas due to water damage, but mostly they look dusty and scratched. The texture effect has a sand and pebble appearance. Bumps and cracks. Small holes and even bigger dents.
    It’s in the panels that I see the woman. It’s in these textures that my mind sees the images. The bumps and scratches—like constellations—form her eyes. The sand and pebbles become the curves in her skin. The small holes and dents shape her features—nose, cheeks, chin, lips. All the cracks on the panel above help produce her flowing hair.
    You find an image in the chaos. You narrow in on it and capture it as a whole. It is, in fact, just a bunch of imperfections. It’s nothing until you connect the dots. You try to hold your attention on it because looking away for a split second and you just might lose it. You focus until something breaks your concentration.
    I stare intently up at this beautiful woman, until a loud, hefty voice interrupts my star-gazing. It shakes me loose from anything beautiful that I still think exists for me.
    “One question: do you have the money?”
    I know the voice. It’s Banner. He’s big and mean and tough as hell. He works as muscle for Packer Wells, a big-time loan shark who I’ve never even seen—despite owing him well over a hundred grand.
    I would rather not give Banner the time of day—not say a word—but I can’t move my head to shake it or nod. So I have to say no, I don’t have your goddamn money.
    Banner yells a lot about the money that I owe his boss. I song and dance Banner as best as I can, but he’s heard it before, several times—from me. My assurances—at some point they aren’t worth much. There’s a certain dollar amount that I accumulate in debt when it doesn’t matter what I say anymore. I just have to accept that someone’s going to put the hurt on me when I can’t pay.
    But I’m not worried, entirely. Alive, I’m worth over a hundred grand. Dead is just bad business.
    I just have to take another beating for a time—while Banner tries to squeeze me for the juice.
    I try to ignore Banner and focus on the beautiful woman, but I can no longer find her. Instead, I see a fluffy-eared dog, tongue out and panting. Suddenly, Banner’s fist drops powerfully onto my right kneecap—now both sides of my right leg hurts like hell—and the dust and panel scratches turn the fluffy dog’s pant into a snarl. That sharp sting on my right leg, and I can’t even writhe in pain.
    Banner yelling: Wells wants his damn money.
    Banner growling: We’re getting real tired of this game.
    Banner dancing his fists against my body: You have only yourself to blame for this.
    Then I hear the door to the room open and the click, click, click of footsteps. Now, another voice in the room—one that I don’t recognize. And the sounds of metal scraping metal.
    
    Banner’s above me, behind my head, saying all the same things that he’s been saying. My head starts to ache. The pressure on the sides of my face is building. The blood that gushed out of my nose is now dried to my cheeks. Everything I hear is somewhat muted, either because of the blood droplets in my ears, pooling around the tympanic membrane, or because of whatever the hell this thing is that’s holding my head in place.
    However much blood is in my ears, I do hear a cranking noise, twisting metal. It sounds like a tightly wound metal spring, getting tighter. And it’s making my headache worse.
    Banner’s making threat after threat, and I’m trying to work his heart-strings. It’s not working. So I give up on all the talk. I’m sure he’s been told how far to take this before he eases up. It doesn’t matter what I say.
    So he says, do it, and I feel cold metal against my skin. Until now, it doesn’t even occur to me that I’m not wearing any shoes.
    The metal presses tightly against both sides of the little toe on my right foot. Its edges are sharp and threatening. My ear holes aren’t entirely filled with dried blood because the next thing I hear is a quick crack. And it doesn’t even register what has happened until I hear my little toe go thud on the cement floor.
    
    Digital amputation.
    It’s modifications to the bones and surrounding soft tissues of the fingers and the toes. It’s refined carpentry, however you look at it. It’s cutting through the muscles and the tendons. It’s slicing through the nerves and the blood vessels. It’s sawing through the bone.
    It takes two full seconds before I feel the pain. Two seconds can really seem like a long time, unless, of course, you’ve just had your toe amputated without anesthesia. When that happens, you savor every single millisecond that it takes for the nerves to send the signal to the brain.
    During second one: The specks on the ceiling panel show me a firefighter saving a baby from a burning building.
    During second two: He drops her.
    The searing pain is so intense that I feel the sting crawl up my leg and bite down on my testicles. My eyes fill with tears. I scream so loud that the noise coming out of my voice box actually scratches the back of my own throat. My body shakes so violently that I manage to move off the table—at least an inch or so.
    My heart is tachycardic. I breathe deeply and slowly, trying to slow it. I squeeze my eyelids as tight as I can to juice the wetness out of the corners. The tears roll down my face—a saline drip. I blink and blink to regain focus on the ceiling. I need solace, some comforting.
    But I can’t find her.
    Where is that beautiful woman?
    Banner’s saying: Jesus.
    Banner’s barking: You made us do that.
    Banner’s threatening: Don’t struggle.
    I hear the crank again—the metal spring turning slower. The pressure on the sides of my face, my head aching.
    The sound below me is a tuh, tuh, tuh of the blood droplets dripping—from the hole that used to keep my little toe—onto the floor. It feels like my toe is still attached, even though I know it isn’t. I feel as if I could wiggle the phantom limb if the wound wasn’t so painful from neuroma—the swelling at the end of the cut nerves—and oedema—the swelling of the stump.
    Stump pain.
    
    My body goes cold. I’m shivering and sweating simultaneously. I’m coughing, and every time I do, my chest hurts. My entire right foot is numb and tingling. And I feel like I’m going to vomit.
    Banner’s still yelling and getting more and more pissed off that I’m not saying anything in return. My mind is sort of focused on other things, you might say. I do manage to mutter one word:
    Stop.
    “This will all stop when you pay Wells what you owe him.”
    More of the crank, more of the twisting metal, more of the pressure on the sides of my face. More of the head pain.
    Banner says, do it again, and I feel the metal on the big toe on my right foot. They must be saving me a couple of digits in the middle so I’ll still be able to walk. They aren’t going in order. For sure, this little piggy’s going to hit the goddamn floor.
    Whoever is on my south end presses down hard—and I feel the squeeze—but nothing happens. My big toe must be too big, too thick for whatever tool is being used to snip it off. There’s a release—a relaxing feeling—just for a second and then again the sounds of metal on metal. The switching of instruments.
    What’s next is a razor blade slice to the top of my big toe. The incision drags the circumference of the digit. And suddenly, I feel a suction release as the fascia—the fibrous tissue that binds together the skin and the muscles—are pulled from the toe, like taking off a glove, exposing that yellow clumpy tissue and revealing the bone.
    Then metal scrapes—the changing of the guards. And the snip. It sounds like someone taking pruning shears to a piece of old bamboo.
    I’m screaming again.
    In the panel above I see a mushroom cloud.
    Where is that beautiful woman?
    Banner’s getting sick, and the voice that I don’t recognize says, keep it together, man.
    “Crank it again,” the voice says, and my head hurts like hell, again.
    Then I finally understand what is happening. I know why I can’t move my head. I know why it hurts every time that I hear the twisting metal...
    My head is being held in a large, metal vise, and then I start to smile.
    
    “What the hell is so funny?”
    This isn’t anything that I’m looking forward to. But I’m finding it really satisfying.
    “What the hell is so damn funny?!?”
    When I realize that my head is wedged between the metal clamps of a vise, I know how things are going to turn out. I burst out in laughter. These pricks have no idea how much money they’ve lost their boss.
    Not like I’m going to pay him anyway. More like, not like I’m ever going to be able to pay him.
    “Why the hell are you laughing?” goes the unknown voice. And he pushes Banner aside and gives the vise another crank.
    I’m laughing because I’m relieved that I’ll never have to yield to this kind of torture ever again.
    I’m laughing because it hasn’t dawned on them, what they haven’t taken into consideration.
    I’m laughing because...
    
    I’m thinking about the girl that I’m trying to impress when I’m young. I’m thinking about waking up to my friends’ laughter. I’m thinking about the sirens and the ambulance ride to the hospital.
    I can’t hear much back then either.
    When I thump my head in the front, I fall backwards and the back of my skull pounds hard onto the concrete floor. The doctors say that I’ve suffered what’s called a basilar skull fracture. The blow to the back of my head causes the separation of the suture between the occipital and temporal lobes. And I can’t hear because the cerebrospinal fluid—a clear fluid inside the skull that surrounds the brain—is leaking from my nose and my ears.
    Mighty impressive.
    
    “I’m going to ask you for the last time. What the hell is so damn funny?” the unknown voice says. And he cranks again.
    I’m laughing because Banner’s getting sick in the corner.
    I’m laughing because Packer Wells is never going to get his money.
    I’m laughing because it takes a lot less pressure to crush a human skull if it’s already been crushed in the past.
    The unknown voice gets upset because I’m still laughing. And he cranks the vise—one last time.
    My face starts to swell, and, suddenly, I can’t hear a damn thing. That fluid must be building up in my ears. Because I can’t hear the pop or more like a poof as the back of my head caves in. Then I start to lose my vision. The blood from the fracture tracks down into the soft tissue of the eyes. And I look like I’m wearing a mask.
    Raccoon eyes. Periorbital bruising.
    It’s weird, but I can feel the back of my head drop from my body. It hits the concrete floor in a liquid pile. I’m not smiling anymore. I’m not laughing. My vision is fading. I focus on the ceiling as my head falls out of my head.
    And where the hell is that beautiful...?
    Oh, thank God, there she is.



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