Writer's Journal

The doctor closed the door, and looked at the bearded man strapped down to the table.

“Hello,” the patient said.

“The anaesthetic didn’t take?” the surgeon asked, curious.

“I suppose it didn’t.  Probably won’t.  I mean, you know who I am, right?”

The doctor smirked, as he limped toward the table.

“I know who you say you are, and who you actually are.  You’re a vagrant.  Hardly the son of God.”

“Wasn’t the last one?”

“That’s not the point, you know that.”

“Do I?”

“Suppose you don’t.”

“Suppose I don’t,” the man agreed, with a slight laugh.

The doctor came to the side of the table, and picked up the stainless steel orbitoclast, holding it up to the light, so that it glinted.  The hospital had had to get it specially made for the operation.

“I’m not going to lie.  This is probably going to hurt, at first.”

The man snorted.

“I doubt it.  I thought this was illegal, though.”

The doctor nodded.

“Yes, the operation is somewhat…barbaric…in nature, but the judge ordered it, and the ACLU failed their appeals.  What’s left is this.”

A nurse entered, and adjusted the clamp holding the man’s head in place.

“You would live to be thirty-nine,” the man predicted, looking into the nurse’s eyes, “and have two children.  The first is a son who plays football, serves on student council and  die in a car accident at age seventeen with one illegitimate child, who suffers down syndrome and is put up for adoption by her fourteen year-old mother.  Your daughter loses her virginity at a similar age, get poor marks, and give birth to three children from different fathers.  The first would win a Nobel Prize in chemistry, the second would eventually be canonized as Saint Phillip the Floridian and be patron of zeppelins, opium addicts and television sports broadcasters.  The third would be her mother’s favorite child, even though she doesn’t achieve nearly so much, or even manage to graduate college.”

The nurse ignored him, and stood ready.

The man reached out, having worked his hand out of his bonds, and touched the doctor’s wrist.  A shock like static electricity filled the surgeon’s body, and he lurched, spasming from the shock.

The nurse grabbed the man’s wrist, and restrained him, wrestling unnecessarily to put his arm back into the restraint.  The man cooperated, waiting as she patiently tightened the strap holding him down.  He even helped her, pulling the strap tighter as she worked on it.

“Shall we begin?” the doctor asked.

“If we’re going to,” the man said.

The nurse applied the clamps to force the man’s eyelids open, and the doctor raised the orbitoclast, positioning it in the cleft between the eye and the skull.

After the hammering  and swinging had been completed, the doctor left the operating room to wash the blood and gray matter from his hands.  It was the strangest thing, though.  His limp was completely gone.  In fact, his legs felt as strong as ever.

Troubled, he left the operating room with the nurse and the drooling idiot inside it.  The hospital hallways were silent, and outside the windows there was only a vague, spaceless darkness.