Christopher WunderLee - The Loony - a novella of epic proportions

“Throw the gun out,” the marine yelled.

“No… ah… you throw your guns in here,” Albert tried, even shrugging.

“You’ve got five seconds to throw your gun out and unlock the door… or we’re firing,” the second marine barked, Albert could see his legs spread in an attack stance. Harris was being dragged out of the room along with the rest of the spectators; he caught one final glimpse of her before she disappeared around the corner. He was quite sure she’d waved.

“I’ll give you two and a half seconds to throw your guns in here or I’m letting loose the hounds of hell,” Albert replied, pointing his pistol at the door.

“Five… four…” the marine began.

“One hippopotamus, two hippopotami,” Albert counted down.

“three… two…”

“two and half hippopotami,” Albert finished first and squeezed off all six of his rounds into the door. Then he listened for a second, they were still standing there, perhaps they were stunned.

“FIRE,” he heard and things started to explode around him, first the side of the toilet erupted, then the wall behind him, then he felt a surging pain in his shin, another caught him in the shoulder, the toilet paper receptacle got the worst of it, two right in the kisser, it was gone…

Those were the days of snow battering the windowpanes, great swirls of ice and gusts of wind, knock, knock, knocking on the glass. Albert was relieved that they’d try to help him; at least they had not forgotten him. The days were dark from their very start, as if the sun could not penetrate through the thick afghan of clouds and some celestial hand had dimmed its helium glow. The trees he could see from his restrained position were naked of leaves, shivering in the wind, contorted and lifeless. The sky was a soupy ash, heavy and melancholic.

Of course, Albert was a bit down. Locked up in a room, the drip, drip of his IV, the occasional sanitized nurse or doctor with their distant voices and farther away mannerisms his only company, the pain in his shoulder and leg. He was kept restrained, a prisoner patient. They refused to answer his questions, he had stopped asking them, and they began their own interrogation. He wasn’t about to reveal a thing.

She was with him constantly. It pained him worse than the bullet in his arm, he tried not to think of it, but she continued to bother him, and he had nothing else to do. He replayed the meeting over and over, invented things he could have said, dreamed up alternate endings, things she could have said or done, he stopped himself though, she hadn’t done those things or said those words… She had not saved him. He tried to forget her, tried to wrestle her from his thoughts, but she held on, refusing to depart, and so, he lived with it.

His only respite from the gloom was the every other Tuesday nurse. She was young, milky, heavily laden with curves, and jocular, she wouldn’t let him frown or brood. How could he be sad when she stripped him of his gown and sponged him considerably, giving special attention to his wee little winky? At times, she would lean against him or her bare forearm would brush against his skin and he would react embarrassingly. “Well, you’re easy,” she would tease and give his teepee a little pat. Albert would grin despite himself and make small talk with her.

“This is incontrovertibly the most dismal April we’ve ever had, a real T.S. Eliot kind of season, I honestly don’t know what they’re thinking, six more weeks of the groundhog in Hades, I guess,” he usually said and she would nod her head or give him a smile, or he would try: “If you feel the need to have your way with me, I won’t tell a soul, I understand, there’s something about restraint, something uninhibited, its really not your fault, you should embrace those feelings, and climb on board, you see, I’m ready…” But she never did.

Albert was quite sure he had made some mistake. She was not returning. The doctors didn’t know anything about her, or they claimed they didn’t, and Albert grew feverish. They calmed him the best they could, an administrator promised to look into it, and that helped, he recovered slowly. By now, he was able to move about. Everyday, he went to the nursing station and asked: “do I have any visitors coming this week?” He didn’t say anything specific about her, not with the pores at the end of their noses being bugged, or the cuticles of their nostril probing fingers having micro-recording devices (the skinnier of the two “regulars” had a mole the size of a dime on her upper lip, which, Albert was convinced, contained some sort of pigmented video relay projector), but he knew they knew who he was asking about, and they would always, annoyingly, in Albert’s opinion, sympathetically (artificially) answer “no.” However, this didn’t deter poor Albert, he had time and fantasies and his every other Tuesday nurse still appealed to him in her cleansed nun of the religion of the mind sort of way, a priestess of a forbidden temple of some lost faith, a very naughty, orgulous religion in which she was enslaved.

* * *

He was beginning to develop an escape plan, with the help of his every other Tuesday nurse, whom he was sure would help him. But he never got to implement it, for the very day he intended to broach the subject with his bather, the administrator announced that Harris would be coming for a brief visit.

Albert waited for weeks, they really couldn't say when, “soon” was all they knew. He tried to look better; his belly seeped over his regulation filament pants (they replaced the buttless gown after he had recovered from his wounds and was allowed out into the halls, there was something unclean about his ass hanging out and he often took to rubbing its bristly hide against unsuspecting nurses when he was in a good mood). He started to do crunches, not very many, not enough to make him sweat or breathe heavily, but all the same, a little something for her. He had gotten his head shaved when he first arrived, very military, very dapper, he thought, and he could now shower on his own — which brought up a host of problems, first being that the every other Tuesday nurse no longer gave him a sponge bath and thus, his winky was ignored, and secondly, he was vulnerable in the communal tile room. An assassin had made an attempt on his life just two days before, obviously highly-trained, the predator had actually gotten himself taken in as a patient and came after Lochner with the end of a tube of toothpaste. Luckily, Albert saw him coming, his own commando training switched on in an instant, and he karate chopped the guy in the neck, round house kicked him in the chin, and knocked him off his feet. Albert had been hit though, he hadn't been fast enough, right above his left eye, and blood began to stream down his face, making it difficult to see. The assassin, not missing a beat, leapt to his feet again like a break dancer ready to do some jigging and came after Albert again, masterfully stabbing the toothpaste tube at him in fitful lunges only an equally well trained soldier could parry, dodge, and avoid. Finally, the assassin made a mistake, over extending himself at just the wrong moment, and Albert swooped in, snapped his elbow, causing the deadly tube to fly skyward, kicked his legs out from under him, while keeping hold of his shattered arm, spun him around like a pro-wrestler ready to do a close-line maneuver, got the tube as it fell, and ninja starred it right into the guys larynx, severing the artery in his neck, the poor fool fell dead in the now pink drain of the shower.

They held her arrival over his head like a Damoclesian sword, forcing him to undergo interviews and experiments, keeping him in line with threats that she wouldn't be able to see him if he didn't behave, motivating him during group sessions, impregnating his mind with ideas about giving her a present he had made during arts & crafts (a finger painted portrait of her inner eye surrounded by angels, saints, and humming birds), and still, she did not come.