Burnt Filaments

11pm

If the eyes are the windows the soul, I was looking at two shattered panes of glass. I’d been told that his eyes were electric-blue, though the fuses seemed to have been removed from them. The only electric-blue that mattered now was the 200 volts keeping his life support machine on.

The basement was cold in every sense of the word. A ceiling of fluorescent strip lights offered a garish glow to the clinical, white room below. The soft hum the lights gave off was accompanied only by the metronomic beeping of the heartrate monitor. Each pulse it made signified another undeserved heartbeat. I stared at his motionless body lying in the bed, hooked up to wires like a marionette. Peyton Salvadori. Just a few weeks ago he’d been one of the most powerful figures in organized crime, now he’d been reduced to a number on my monthly electricity bill – hooked up to life support in my basement with no sign of waking up anytime soon.

Even in a comatose state, his face was a reflection of the iniquitous character he’d been in waking life. He looked like brutalist architecture, featureless and unyielding. I thought about smothering him with the pillow he rested on. Thought about all the medical instruments I had and what damage I could do with them. I thought about what the Salvadori family would do to me afterwards. It had to look like an accident.

I trudged over to one of the medical cabinets that laced the walls and flung it open, pulling out a small blow torch I occasionally used for sterilization. I looked at Salvadori for one last time, as if checking he wasn’t going to wake up. The heartrate monitor beeped like clockwork, like it had done 67 times a minute every day for the past three weeks. In the corner of the basement was the fuse box to the house. I traipsed over to it, my heart hammering in my ears like a heartrate monitor of its own. Sweat seeped from my fingers over the grip of the blowtorch. I opened the fuse box and was met with a wall of switches and fuses. A melted fuse can easily happen and can easily short-circuit a whole house. That meant cutting the power to Salvadori’s life support. A fateful accident that could have happened to anyone.

My breath quickened, as if trying to pull some tranquillity from the air around me. My heartbeat rose up until it was almost deafening. Could I do it? Could I kill him? The answer to those questions came in the form of the blowtorch sparking into life. I aimed it at the main switch and was instantly greeted by the cloying smell of burning plastic. It bubbled and melted for a second before cutting the power out, taking Salvadori’s life with it.

10pm

I fluffed his pillows, though I was sure it didn’t matter. I could have chucked him into a pit of broken glass, and he wouldn’t have noticed. But my perfectionistic nature and sense of duty of care meant I fluffed them, nonetheless. The heartrate monitor informed me he was still living and breathing by way of beeping out every second or so like blips on a sonar.

I checked my watch. They’d be here in a few minutes. I did my best to make Salvadori look as presentable as possible given the circumstances, brushing his hair with my fingers, and moisturising his pallid face. He still looked like someone had drawn a grimace on a haunted tree, but I think that was more down to genetics than my doctoring skills.

Ever since I’d lost the ability to practice medicine in one of our great nation’s hospitals, I’d been working as a doctor for one of the largest organized crime syndicates in the area. A mafia hitman shot in a failed assassination attempt can hardly go to the hospital; in hospital they ask questions, and questions lead to answers, and these particular sorts of answers lead to arrests. So they come to my basement-turned-hospital. Mainly I spend my time pulling bullets from backs or stitching stomach knife wounds but when the don himself needs critical care, the mob pull out all the stops to keep him on life support.

Though he was a murdering psychopath who didn’t say a word, I’d grown to quite like Peyton Salvadori. There’s a certain intimacy that comes from caring for someone round the clock. It always gave me a sense of feeling indispensable, of being needed. It gave me a sense of purpose.

My whimsical musing was cut in half by the sound of my phone ringing atop one of the cabinets. They were here. The door at the top of the stairs burst open and two suits sauntered down them. Inside the suits were Tommy Romano and Domenico Ricci, two of the Salvadori family’s most loyal dogs. They came by daily to insure I was delivering the highest quality medical care that a dusty suburban basement could offer. They reached the bottom of the stairs and nodded at me, almost in unison.

“What’s new, doc?” Asked Romano in a voice that was somewhere between a squawk and a slightly more annoying squawk. “Any change on the boss, here?”

“Sadly, the same as yesterday and the day before that and the week before that.”

“Then what are we paying you a king’s ransom for?” Barked Ricci. The sound of his voice was like metal grinding. He was the bigger of the two and looked like the school bully’s school bully.

“You’re paying me to keep him from dying, Mr Ricci. I’m administering antibiotics, performing blood transfusions as required and generally living my life in a basement to ensure that he doesn’t die. That’s where your king’s ransom is going.”

Ricci shrugged and kept his glum expression pointed in my direction. Romano walked over to the bed where Salvadori was lying and looked him over. He looked at the machines hooked up to him with childlike wonderment. He was a weaselly looking man whose face looked like it had been carved out of cheap stone by inelegant fingers. He pointed at some of the equipment in bafflement.

“What’s this one here do?” He inquired in a voice that could be marketed for dog whistles.

“That’s a ventilator,” I said, because it was one. “It assists with his breathing. Mr Salvadori has extremely reduced reflexes and as such can’t breathe on his own, so that machine does it for him,” I said, as if explaining how a car works to a four-year-old.

“Ahh right, kinda like how Ricci once beat a guy with a coffee percolator ‘til he stopped breathing. A coffee percolator for Christ’s sake. Remember that Ricci?” Ricci nodded, with a grim smile as if proud of this achievement.

“Yes, it’s almost exactly like that in every way,” I chimed. As my eyes rolled to the back of my head, I wandered over to Salvadori’s bedside and pretended I was adjusting his ICP monitor in an attempt to look busy. I was hoping it would encourage them to leave. They never normally stayed long but their conversation almost always steered towards other people they’d disfigured or killed in the past. I always hated the reminder of the sort of people I was working for.

“So, when’s he gonna’ wake up?” Murmured Ricci in his signature caveman fashion. He was now also at the bedside probing the machines that were keeping his boss alive.

“Don’t touch that,” I demanded, then recoiled as I realised who I was making demands of. Ricci’s ever-growing frown grew evermore.

“When is the boss gonna’ wake up, is what I asked. I didn’t ask if I could touch that. If I wanted to ask if I could touch that, then that’s what I would have asked. So, tell me, when is the boss gonna’ wake up?”

“He…I’m not sure, Mr Ricci. It’s impossible to say. Could be in the next five minutes, could be fifty years from now. Unfortunately, there is just no way of knowing.” I returned to pretending I was busy, this time adjusting his endotracheal tube to exactly where it was in the first place.

“That don’t sound much like a good, erm…what do you call it now? A good psychosis,” squawked Romano.

“The word is prognosis, idiot,” corrected Ricci.

“Psychosis, prognosis, halitosis, who cares? All I’m saying is I don’t like the sounds of what he’s saying.”

“The boss is a fighter don’t forget. And a killer. He’ll pull through,” spat Ricci.

“He’s a fighter alright. Ain’t much of a killer no more, though. Hell, he hasn’t shot anyone since he clipped that lady at the Silver Lantern when he tried putting two bullets in Marco De Luca. No worries though, Ricci caught up with De Luca a week later and got him with the shotgun, close range. Say, wasn’t De Luca’s cousin the guy you got with the coffee percolator? Small world, huh?” Said Romano, chuckling to himself. Ricci threw a laugh in too, reminiscing on crimes gone by.

This was normally the sort of time when I’d add a nervous, fake laugh of my own, pretending I was one of them. But not now. Now I was frozen in time. Suspended in the weightlessness of my own thoughts. Something Romano had said had struck a nerve. My head was swimming with thoughts. I was dragged from them by Ricci’s growling voice.

“Anyway, we better jet. Just make sure you take good care of him, doc.”

“Yeah take good care of him, doc,” echoed Romano. I nodded in agreement, still lost at sea in my thoughts. I didn’t even hear them leave. All I knew at that moment was that I had to kill Peyton Salvadori.

9pm

My wife was paralyzed from the neck down and emotionally stunted from the neck up. When I wasn’t caring for gangsters in my basement, I was caring for her in the living room. I was feeding her steak, medium rare with a peppercorn sauce. Her favourite. Though judging from the expression on her face I might as well have been feeding her barbed wire. She let out a sigh that could strip the needles from pine trees. Her eyes were two vacant mineshafts, empty and dark.

“I was thinking this weekend we could maybe go to the lake,” I said. “You always loved it this time of year.”

“I always loved swimming in it this time of year. How do you suggest I do that now? You got an inflatable wheelchair or something?” I laughed a humourless laugh.

After Claudette’s injury a few years back, I’d had to quit working at the hospital to look after her full-time. Eventually that had dropped from full-time to very nearly full-time and the small amount of free time I had was spent on my operation in the basement. She didn’t ask where the cheques were coming from, as long as they kept her in regular peppercorn sauce.

“So, what would you like to do?” I asked. A pointless question.

“How about skateboarding? Or maybe a nice walk in the park? Or maybe I can sit in the same prisonous chair I’m always confined to and wither away, just like every other day.”

“I was only asking.”

“Well don’t only ask. If you want to do something this weekend, feel free to get out of my hair and do it,” she spat. It was my turn to let out a sigh. I shovelled another forkful of barbed wire or steak into her mouth.

It wasn’t always like this. In fact, it was nothing like this before. We used to have a life together, not this. This was just a mirror’s image of living. A pixelated reflection of what our lives together could have been. Three years ago, on our anniversary I thought I’d treat Claudette on our anniversary to one of the most expensive Italian restaurants in town. Champagne, lobster, live violinist, the full works. Unfortunately for us, some of the other guests were more focussed on a firing pistols rather than firing the grill. A few masked men walked in shooting up the place and a stray bullet caught Claudette, confining her to a wheelchair for the rest of her life. It was the last time we’d eat out at the Silver Lantern again, and the last time I’d see Claudette smile. I doubted I’d ever have the pleasure of meeting the man who’d shot her but I spent every night since then dreaming of what I’d do to him if I did: putting his lights out.