The Face

uncontrollable tears, to sobs that sounded weirdly inhuman-and quite disgusting-coming from his withered voice box.
        Although crushed by despair, Stinky had not suffered the heart attack for which Corky had been hoping.
        Rather than coddle the man with a sedative, Corky had introduced a powerful hallucinogenic through a port in the IV line. His hope was that Stinky would be unable to sleep and would pass the darkest hours between midnight and dawn in a hell of drug-induced visions featuring his brutalized wife.
        Now, regaling his guest with an even more outrageous tale of the many crude violations and cruel acts of violence visited upon young Emily, Corky grew weary of the tears and anguish that were replayed here yet again. Under the circumstances, a massive cardiac infarction didn’t seem too much to ask, but Stinky would not cooperate.
        For a man who supposedly loved his wife and daughter more than life itself, Stinky’s determination to survive was unseemly now that he’d been told that his family was nothing more than rotting meat. Like most traditionalists, with all their loudly expressed belief in language and meaning and purpose and principle, Stinky was probably a fraud.
        Now and then, Corky glimpsed rage underlying Stinky’s grief. Into the man’s eyes came hatred hot enough to sear with a look, but then at once vanished under pools of tears.
        Perhaps Stinky clung to life only for the hope of revenge. The guy was delusional.
        Besides, hatred only destroys the hater. By the example of her wasted life, Corky’s mother had proved the truth of that contention.
        [330] With facility and efficiency, Corky changed infusion bags after doctoring the new one with a drug that would induce a semiparalytic state. Stinky had so little muscle tissue left that an artificially induced paralysis seemed unnecessary, but Corky was loath to let anything to chance.
        Ironically, to serve chaos well, he needed to be well organized. He required a strategy for victory and the carefully planned tactics necessary to fulfill that strategy.
        Without strategy and tactics, you weren’t a true agent of chaos. You were just Jeffrey Dahmer or some crazy lady who kept a hundred cats and filled her yard with unsightly piles of junk, or a recent governor of California.
        Five years ago, Corky had learned how to give injections, how to insert a cannula in a vein, how to handle the equipment related to an IV setup, how to catheterize either a man or a woman… Since then, he had enjoyed a few opportunities, as with Stinky Cheese Man, to practice these skills; consequently, he used these instruments and devices with a facility that any nurse would admire.
        In fact, he’d been trained by a nurse, Mary Noone. She had the face of a Botticelli Madonna and the eyes of a ferret.
        He’d met Mary at a university mixer for people interested in utilitarian bioethics. Utilitarians believed that every life could be assigned a value to society and that medical care should be rationed according to that assigned value. This philosophy supported the killing, by neglect, of the physically handicapped, Down-syndrome children, people over sixty with medical problems requiring expensive treatment like dialysis and bypass surgery, and many others.
        The mixer had been full of fun and witty conversation-and he and Mary Noone had clicked the moment their eyes met. They’d both been drinking Cabernet Sauvignon when they were introduced, and over refills, they had fallen in lust.
        Weeks thereafter, when he had asked Mary to teach him the proper way to give an injection and how to maintain a patient on [331] intravenous infusion, Corky had solemnly revealed that his mother’s health was rapidly declining. “I dread the day when she’ll be bedridden, but I’d rather attend to her myself than turn her over to strangers in a nursing home.”
        Mary told him that he was a wonderful son, and Corky pretended to accept this compliment with humility, which was an easy pretense to maintain because he was lying about both his mother’s health and his intentions. The old bitch had been as healthy as Methuselah still six centuries short of the grave, and Corky had been toying with the idea of injecting her with something lethal while she slept.
        He was pretty sure that Mary suspected the truth. Nevertheless, she taught him what he wanted to