MAX ORDOS DOES NOT EXIST

MAX ORDOS DOES NOT EXIST: FINAL CHAPTER

It takes fifteen minutes for the ambulance to show up and another ten for the EMTs to find Pearl, who did throw up again in the interim. They don't investigate the exposed door or the hallway beyond it. Instead, they load Pearl onto a stretcher and get him to the hospital. The ride to the hospital, the ER waiting room, and the process of finding him an unclaimed bed pass in a blur as Pearl discovers that he doesn't react well to cocktails of pain, stress, and opiates. His stomach clenches and floods his throat with bile, his head swims, his tongue heavier than lead in his mouth. Once a couple of nurses settle him into a bed, he takes that as a signal that he doesn't have to move around anymore and falls asleep.

He wakes up with his swollen, bruised leg unwrapped and exposed. A doctor with extremely hairy wrists and hands tells him that he wrecked pretty much everything around his knee, and his best option now was having it scoped and cleaned up. The bone snapped like a broomstick, this doctor tells him, leaving broken ends that need to be shaved down to prevent nerve damage. Or something like that — Pearl is more concerned with the freakish proportions of his leg and the sound of police sirens outside than anything the doctor's saying. He nods and agrees while staring at the window, and after another day of rest, they put him under and perform the surgery as described.

Pearl comes to in a different room, with a cast on his now-elevated leg and handcuffs securing him to the bed. A policeman stands over him, spitting chaw into an empty milk bottle. He tells Pearl that as soon as he's cleared to leave, he's being taken downtown for questioning about a traffic incident involving Sheriff West and Dr. Jane Cornette. Pearl mumbles that he doesn't know anything and the cop glares at him. "I'm sure you don't," he says, mid-spit.

When the doctor comes to check on Pearl, he tells the cop not to chew in the hospital, and the cop reluctantly spits a wad of tobacco into the bottle and caps it. They talk for a moment, then the doctor leaves and the cop turns on the TV mounted on the wall across from Pearl's bed. They watch two daytime talk shows before the door opens and a blonde woman in jeans and a letterman jacket walks in, a smile distorting her cherubic face. The cop stands up and she facepalms him, digging her fingers into his eyes as her other hand makes a fist in his thinning black hair. She snaps his neck and watches him sag to the floor the way cats swat things from desks to watch them fall.

Before Pearl can say anything, she finds the cop's keys and unlocks his handcuffs with fumbling hands. He gets glimpses of a cauterized scar under her hairline, winding all the way around her head.

"The doctor told me what you did," Maxine Ordos tells Pearl. She's still figuring out the mechanics of human speech, and has what his mother would call a hot potato voice, thick and muffled.

"How did she know I was here?" Pearl asks, rubbing his sore wrist.

"I feel bad about her," Maxine says. "But I think she wanted me to do it. I would have, anyway." She cracks her knuckles.

Pearl realizes what she's saying and his stomach sinks. "Please don't," he says. "I can't even defend myself."

Maxine looks him up and down, unsteady on her feet. "I wanted to feel it," she says. "One of my primary functions was to make enemy soldiers run headlong into gunfire, but what if I felt it ripping him apart?" She taps his cast. "I had to know. My whole existence would be compromised."

"Did you?" Pearl asks.

"No." Maxine turns away and walks to the door.

"They're gonna come after you," Pearl says. "You have to know that." He isn't sure who they are in this situation: the police? the Army? Kadath University's board of trustees? But he's certain there's a grander they out there who won't take any of this lying down.

"I know," Maxine says. "But I have legs now. I can run." She turns to look at him over her shoulder and almost loses her balance, then leaves.

Pearl presses the back of his head into his thin pillow, aware of the dead cop on the floor and the dead doctor in an underground lab full of jarred brains and the very-hopefully-dead sheriff on the highway shoulder. Slowly, gently, he picks up the white two-piece phone at his bedside and dials the lawyer's number. He is told to wait, and put on hold.

(the end)