Unhealthy Extremes
Paul Stansfield
That night it was the four of us at the bar. Michael Conium (the doc), William Rubin, Rhea Steato, and me, your narrator, Orson Garfield (and yes, with my first name I’ve heard many jokes, especially when “Mork and Mindy” was on the air). We were gathered for our once or twice monthly sit down meeting. We were pretty tight in college, but after graduation, what with all of us getting big boy or big girl jobs and we don’t get to spend much time together as a group anymore. So we value these times.
The place we hang out in, the Cleveland Street Pub, is suited for our purpose. It’s an old man bar; no loud music, no crowds, just a few old guys (and us) sitting around drinking and smoking. We can always find a table or booth, always. Not that we have anything against dance clubs, or meat market bars; they have their own charms. It’s just when you want to catch up with old friends, you want quiet sedateness.
We’d already gone through the important details-in-our-lives updates, so we’d moved on to anecdotes. As usual, Mike had the floor. I should explain; the rest of us had office jobs of one kind or another. Business, computers, all of that. Even we’re bored by the minutia of our careers, the grosses, the payroll accounts, the new software, so the others are, of course, also uninterested. Only Dr. Mike has stories that we can all appreciate. Not shockingly, I’d asked him about anything weird or disgusting that he’d seen or heard of since we’d last spoke (five weeks ago). We’ve learned that it is these stories that Mike enjoys telling the best. Request for tales of heroism, nobility, and inspiration always get him depressed or even pissy. Even the way he tells these stories is in a jocular manner, interspersed with crude and sometimes tasteless humor. Rhea thinks this is a defense mechanism, and I am inclined to agree.
We’d just downed out shots as I recall (Beam for Billy and Mike, Jager for Rhea and myself) and Mike had just fired up a stogie. That’s a funny thing about Mike, and from what he’s told us, it’s a think about doctors in general. You’d think he of all people would be trying to live healthy, given what he sees every day. Hell, he’s shown us snapshots of blackened lungs and cirrhotic livers and the rest, but that doesn’t’ stop him. As he says whenever we bring it up, “Yeah, yeah. Physician heal thyself. Fuck you.”
“I’ve been saving this one,” said Mike, “until we were all together. Weirdest shit I’ve ever seen. It was nearly a month ago. I was on the ER one night, and this guy we’ll call him Mr. S, comes in complaining of severe abdominal pain. It was kind of a slow night, and the case was mysterious, so we triple teamed him. Me Gary, and Tammy. We get his history and do a preliminary check, and don’t know the cause of his discomfort. No conditions, no injuries, and it’s not appendicitis or stones. Then Gary takes me aside for a minute and says he knows this guy. Gary was only with us that night to cover for someone else; normally he’d in obstetrics. Anyway, Mr. S had been in several times with his pregnant wife. Mrs. S was pretty open and chatty, especially when her husband was out of the room. It seems Mr. S was the perfect expectant father, according to his wife. Couldn’t have been more sweet and sensitive. Went with her to all the classes, did all the reading, dealt with her mood swings patiently, did all sorts of extra chores and everything. As Gary got to know Mrs. S better, she revealed even more. Her hubby’s sensitivity was real acute. You’ve heart of sympathy morning sickness, right? He was getting that gangbuster. Mrs. S said something else too; apparently before her husband met her he’d been told time and time again by old girlfriends that he was selfish and insensitive. So it appeared that he was trying to mend his ways big time.”
“We had to get back to our patient then, not that it did any good. We still couldn’t identify the problem. Finally, not knowing what else to do after we’d taken some samples for tests, we bundled him off to get X-rayed. He’s still moaning and screaming the whole time, really in agony. Since we didn’t know what was wrong, we were scared to give him any potent pain killers, and the milder ones weren’t doing shit, evidently. While he’s in the X-ray room Gary tells me more about our mystery guest. Not only had a former girlfriend miscarried years ago, his wife had miscarried the night before! Why Gary didn’t mention that before, I don’t know.”
“Mr. S was back in our charge about five minutes later. If anything, his pain was getting worse, his screams made you want to cry they were so agonized. I was just about to suggest giving him a heavy pain killer, the unknown disease or whatever be damned, when Mr. S grabs his hospital gown and rips it off to the side. He’s writhing there, starkers with the rest of us trying to hold him still and calm him down. Suddenly we see a stream of blood shoot out of his urethra (“His Penis hole,” he added, as Billy looked puzzled). Not just a short trickle, either, it kept going and going. Then Mr. S’s screams meshed into one continuous wall of sound even more intense than before. Our ears were ringing for days afterward, like that time I was next to the speaker all night at the Misfits show. Patients and visitors down the hall actually vomited from the noise. As we looked on, I swear I saw it bulging on the way down, an object the approximate size and shape of a bean made its way out of S’s dick head. Not smoothly, either, as you can imagine. It completely tore up the guy’s member. I saw a nasty accident involving a Prince-Albert-in-the-can piercing gone horribly awry, but this was way worse. It looked like raw hamburger.”
“Enough, enough,” groaned Billy at this point. He was always the most squeamish of our bunch. Actually, to be fair, he’d held out longer than I would have predicted. Rhea was affected strongly as well. She’d been resting her hand on my knee, and she had involuntarily increased the pressure as the tale wore on.
Mike just grinned indulgently at Billy, and went on, less graphically. “I’ve heard stories about mind over matter, like all of you have. Swamis who can cut themselves and not bleed, or stop their hearts temporarily, and stuff like that. I’m skeptical; I’d need to stick my hands in the non-bleeding wounds, so to speak, but I think it’s possible. The placebo effect is well documented, and what are these examples if not conscious, more extreme versions of this? But this, Mr. S, surpassed them all. Forget the leaf, he turned over a whole new forest. Sympathy morning sickness is one thing, but a sympathy miscarriage is quite another. Even Alan Alda on his best day couldn’t do that.”
He let this sink in for a bit, and no one said anything. I think we were all just pondering what he’d just told us. Rhea and me especially, since we’d been trying to get pregnant for a few months. Eventually we all got our thoughts in order and broke the silence.
“Where was his wife while this was going on?” I asked, getting the ball rolling.
“Home asleep. He hadn’t awakened her.”
“You got the tests and X rays back, I assume,” said Billy. “What was going on physically within him?”
“Mr. S was healthy and normal. Somehow his system tapped some blood and tissue for the incident, but otherwise he was okay.”
“And his dick? What happened there?” I asked.
“His penis, like I said, was damaged significantly. Luckily we were able to get him to Johns Hopkins, which is one of the sex change hospitals, and has doctors who are some of the best dick builders, or in this case, repairers, in the business. They were able to fix him up pretty well. They did have to add a device, a pump I think, because there was permanent damage, but he should regain near normalcy, I should think.”
“Plus I hope he gets some psychiatric help,” added Rhea.
Mike shrugged. “I think that would be a good idea, sure.”
“What about the main thing,” Rhea went on, “Was the fake baby alive?”
Mike had been drinking at his beer, and he choked and did a beautiful spit-take. He couldn’t answer for a long time. It was the hardest I saw him laugh all night.
“You’re precious, Rhea,” he said when he recovered. “Oh, that’s rich! No, of course it wasn’t alive. Granted, it’s amazing that Mr. S was able to somehow form a pseudo fetus, and then expel this, along with a lot of blood from no wound, all cause by his own mind, but there’s limits. He couldn’t actually reproduce a human himself, is his body.” He went back to chuckling.
“Okay, it wasn’t alive, but tell me this. What would have happened if his wife had carried to term? Would his body have built himself a false replica of this larger baby too?” Rhea’s eyes found mine as I finished my question. Clearly she’d been thinking something similar.
Mike didn’t laugh this time. “I don’t know,” was all he said. He drained his beer without interruption. “You want to know another weird thing about that might? “ Knowing his question was rhetorical, he went on. “We studied samples of the gore he shot out. Semen, with sperm included was mixed in with the blood.”
And that was our cue to buy another round of shots. And after that we turned to other topics. Weird was cool, but we fulfilled our quote for the evening.
This whole story flashed through my mind about a week later, when Rhea got a call back from her doctor. She’d pissed a blue cross, or whatever, a few days before, and the doctor confirmed what the over the counter oracle had prophesized. We were jubilant, of course, after months of wondering if one or both of us, “was the problem,” and them hating ourselves for suspecting it was the other. We were going to be parents! We spent the evening at the best French restaurant (all right, the only French restaurant) in town (with non-alcoholic champagne, though) and then went dancing. “While I can do it without knocking over about twenty people with my belly,” as Rhea put it. Afterwards, we went home and fucked like bunnies (“just to make sure,” I joked). We were resting afterwards, my ass glued to the wet spot on the sheets, when Rhea let me know that she’d been thinking about Mike’s story again, too.
“For once I’m glad that you’re a selfish bastard. Don’t you go making fake babies and then rip up my fuck toy by giving pretend birth to them.”
“Agreed. And don’t you mess up my love tunnel making and birthing the actual, real baby.” I paused a beat as she giggled. “And go make me an omlette, bee-atch.”
She laughed and punched me, but not too hard.
