A harsh light erupted from the dining room, and for a few seconds I couldn’t see anything at all. Then Mozart appeared in the doorway, pulling his bathrobe tight around himself, a terrified look on his face.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, like a scared little mouse.
He stumbled to the ground as I forced my way inside.
I dashed toward the front of the apartment, where the living room and the bedroom were. Where was my neighbor? She had invited the devil in, she would have to get rid of him.
“What are you looking for?” Mozart asked, standing up with difficulty.
I wasn’t going to reward him with a response. Who did he think he was? He had invaded my life. I was now an occupied territory, and had the right to defend myself. I hadn’t spent all these years struggling to achieve modest literary status just to let some cocky young kid oust me without putting up a fight.
“You’re not acting like yourself,” he said wearily, following me into the living room. “You’re worrying me.”
We were strangers! How dare he judge my state of mind! And his head? Cocked on the side like a dog, questioning my presence in the house? Questioning my very existence!
I leaped at him, my flashlight brandished in the air. I remember hearing my neighbor in that instance, but her screams only echoed those of Mozart’s as I hit him with the flashlight. He didn’t budge. His stillness enraged me even more, so I hit him again. And again.
My neighbor kept screaming. “What are you doing? Stop!”
The room began to spin. I didn’t understand why Mozart wasn’t falling under my blows. Then, suddenly, he exploded into a million pieces, just like in my nightmare. And I saw my neighbor gripping my arm. She wouldn’t let me go. I was afraid she would pull me away with her into the spiral.
Then there was nothing.
No sound. No image. Darkness. The great void.
When the authorities arrived, they found my neighbor unconscious on the floor, and me lying motionless at her side, half-dressed, my bloody flashlight in hand. There was no trace of Mozart. Despite my pleas of innocence I was later declared unfit to stand trial and placed in an institution. Mozart had disappeared in the night; the authorities did not believe he even existed.
But he did. And these words are my written testimony...
From far away, he heard the sound of someone clapping their hands. Who would dare to bother him while he was writing?
“Are you still there?”
He groaned.
“You were telling me that it started...”
He raised his eyes.
“...when you began writing your magnum opus.”
He screamed.
Two large male nurses grabbed him by the shoulders, and one stuck a needle in his arm. Before he lost consciousness, he heard the doctor say: “His hallucinations are almost constant now. I’m afraid his condition is irreversible. He will never leave this institution.”
The older of the two nurses gripped the handles of the wheelchair and started pushing him out of the office.
“What is he doing with his fingers?” asked the younger nurse who had just started working at the hospital.
“He’s typing on an imaginary keyboard. He spends his days writing stories that will never see the light of day.”
The nurse looked stunned. “Why?”
“The man is a well-known novelist who has always struggled maintaining his sanity,” intervened the doctor. “He was my patient long before his collapse. I thought I could control his illness with medication, but...” he paused almost theatrically, “one night, in a moment of delirium, he broke into his neighbor’s home and attacked her. Luckily she survived; she said that he mistook her for someone else.”
“What do you think pushed him over the edge?”
“I think the lack of inspiration drove him crazy.”
“I guess we can’t all be Shakespeares like you, doc!” The nurse pointed to the doctor’s crowded bookshelves.
“Indeed, I’m fortunate to be able to pursue two careers successfully.”
The young nurse approached the wall of books. “May I?”
The man nodded.
The nurse grabbed a book and read the blurb printed on the cover flap: “Claude Chopin took the literary landscape by storm, eliminating his predecessors along his path. Wow! Is that so, doc?”
Dr. Chopin smiled. The critics had never been so right.
The Sin Eaters
by Melissa Yi
Côte-des-Neiges
I didn’t trust guys who were too good-looking.
Strange, since I was sitting to the right of a rather fantastic-looking patient at that moment. He had carefully combed dirty-blond hair, high cheekbones, and very white skin. Beautiful, but he gave me the creeps. He was perched on the edge of the bed with his legs and hands crossed, gazing steadily at the plastic surgeon.
Dr. Mendelson didn’t seem to notice anything. “This is Hope Sze,” he told the patient, waving at me. “She’s a resident doctor, but she won’t bother you.” He flipped through the patient’s chart, glancing at the before pictures, a big element in plastic surgery. “You’re healing well. Lift your chin up.”
I was a first-year resident finishing my palliative care rotation, but I was spending a day on plastics at Montreal’s Samuel G. Wasserman Jewish Hospital, just for the heck of it. I didn’t get to see aesthetic patients very often, because they pay privately, and don’t want students descending upon them, but Dr. Mendelson said I could shadow him if I promised not to touch anyone, speak, or practically breathe. Dr. Mendelson was a gnome of a guy, with a deeply furrowed brow and a rumpled white lab coat. He was not exactly the kind of person you’d pick out of a lineup to perform plastic surgery.
This patient’s before picture didn’t seem all that different than what he looked like now. He’d paid for cheek implants and Botox, even though he was twenty-two years old, only five years younger than I was. The implants did give a foxlike sharpness to his features. As I assessed his new cheeks, his green eyes fixated on me in an uncomfortable way.
Dr. Mendelson took another picture and said, “Could you stand by the window? The light is better.”
The patient posed with such alacrity that I figured he was either a model or a wannabe model. Dr. Mendelson snapped some frontal and side pictures, and the patient leaned forward to check his own image on the back of the SLR camera. “That’s the best one,” he said, pointing a thin, pale-skinned finger. He was glaring at the camera, which fit in with the fuck you image that most advertisements project nowadays. “Can I get a copy? You can e-mail it to me, or put it on Tumblr.” His voice was high and thin, not as striking as his appearance.
I wondered what he did for money to afford plastic surgery at such a young age. Maybe it was just the bank of Mom and Dad. I wanted to ask him about his work, but since I was forbidden to speak, I glanced at his chart. His name was Raymond Pascal Gusarov. He was a Scorpio like me — not that it mattered — and we’d both recently had our birthdays. In fact — I took a quick look — he’d had surgery on his birthday, November 14, which seemed strange to me. Yay, I turned twenty-two. Better have someone cut my face open.
I’ve never been a big fan of plastic surgery. I just hope my Asian genes will protect me from the ravages of time.
“I don’t put patient photos online because of confidentiality,” said Dr. Mendelson, scribbling in the chart without looking up.