I saw him coming. He ran with black bags below his eyes and vomit flowing down his bottom lip. People stepped away when they saw him coming, clutched their prized possessions: handbags, jewelry (to their heart), children (to their hip). He came to them and he pleaded but the people, when asked for the Doctor, would only shake their heads and back away. Mouth agape, pupils almost gone, vertigo caused him to stagger from side to other side of the street as the people, either from a waning depth perception of his or from sheer fear of him, fell away farther and farther. The man remembered policemen ushering the crowds of them behind police car blockades, using hang signals while blowing their whistles. The man remembered hissing like a rodent, baring yellowed fangs then diving for an alleyway. Two shotgun barrels fixed on him. Their owners, police officers, took aim.

Both barrels roared, one after the other.

‘O’ shaped, the mouth of the man struck. Fingers felt around the rim of a bloody donuthole. They found organs where they should have never been allowed to go to begin with. The pitiable scraps of some burst sac (the stomach), the gnawed-off side of some slobbery ribbon (the intestinal tract nicked in one of the two blasts), an assortment of squishy other things.

The man held fingers up to face. Steam wafted up from stubby pillars of flesh, and he watched, numb to the sensation of corrosive acids eating away. The man remembered they smelled like barf (for he had held them up to his face right before they dissolved to all-bone).

I saw him falling. No conscious thing at that point, I don’t believe: he was a corpse. I rushed through mobs of panicking people and I brushed through the complacent ones on the far end of the crowded street, those who had no idea what the hell was going on. A man heard me screaming sobs as I descended from his view, down the steps en route a subway.

Shuttle 10 steamed into the station as I shot down the escalator, quarterbacking people down and when they screamed screaming back “fuck you too.” I did a leapfrog into the train before its doors slid shut, wondering where it was bound.

The engine hummed to life.

People stared at me. Maybe because black bags had appeared below my eyes and a streak of vomit down my chin. I wandered shuttlecar to shuttlecar, in the connecting space between them screaming obscenities, mainly because that’s where the railway screeched around you and you couldn’t be heard anyway.

Empty, every vinyl seat freshly vacuumed, the last car of the train appealed to me. I sighed into a chair, shoulders slumping to show the sockets of my bulimic body. I just stared, stared into the nape of the next chair up. I remember the hum of the shuttle got progressively deepthroated then died down. Warm station light fixtures replaced the pale ones of the subway stretch that came from my window, highlighting a maroon billboard with a martini glass on it reading “NOIR” or “KAAPKA” or some other Russian name they could’ve put on a women’s perfume bottle; it doesn’t matter.

I remember the billboard blurred, and in the window I saw my numb face. Blue bruises blemished not just my eyes, but the bottom of my jaw, and I had gone slackjawed. When? It doesn’t matter. I viewed the reflection of the doors behind me sliding open, of two black bodyarmoured men stepping into the shuttlecar. They aimed,

fired.

Looking from the outside in: my memories of him splattered the tinted window with gore. Not me, him.

Presently the Tesla Operation began.

Now, let me take you to the lab of the Doctor where I was, in a sense, reborn. They ran my scrambled brain (which the scene investigators had ziplocked and sent in express airmail packaging pronto to them, at Docks) under their scan-ray. I can’t tell you the scientific name. I can tell you it gave visuals like an “X,” except they didn’t show bones, they showed microorganisms crawling in my leftover brain matter. Ballpark goal: 10% of my brain cells lost or deceased, the rest still milling about my cranium soup. Of course, this was Docks, and not one of the knock-off branches. Docks, whose cronies made one slip and the next day not even the hanger they hung their labcoat on remained.

They scored a new record with me: only 2%. And what good 2% can do. For instance, instead of reprimand for countless failed reports, they could show the Doctor, for the first time, what he’d always wanted to see: a resurrected conscious.

Fragmented. Sometimes tasting splotches of color; sometimes hearing bliss or anger; sometimes feeling savory flavors, as if they were textures. Nevertheless, live.

They reaped my memories of him for a cure.