The Soft Machine

Stuff of nightmares are often right in front of us, hiding malevolently in plain sight. In our face, right under our nose, calling to us, beckoning for us to notice but we are never any the wiser. Uni Med is a healthcare provider developed by the US government. It was designed to offer care free of charge for americas indigent sick and dying. Hailed as revolutionary by the government and sold as groundbreaking by the media, no one could have known the insidious truth lurking just beneath the philanthropic facade. A faded yellow taxi cab rattled to a stop at the curb. “Fifteen dollars,” said the bearded Arab cabby. Oscar Blane’s ashy grey eyes fell to his old brown leather wallet. He had a ten and four ones in cash. Change jingled in his denim pocket as he dug around for another dollar. He handed the cabby what cash he had with four quarters. “No tip?” Oscar took a lengthy swig from a flask and shrugged. “You lousy drunk,” the Arab yelled thick with accent. Oscar flung open the door and stepped out into the crisp blue morning. “You son of bitch,” the cab driver roared. Oscar slammed the door on the cabby who was still hurling insults at him in throaty Arab phlegm. He had himself another long pull from his flask and the taxi cab sputtered away. Standing across the street from a Uni Med complex, one of many all over the country now, he winced and rubbed his belly. Ulcers burned like stoked red embers. They fouled his breath. No brand of mint would mask the odor and the whiskey only made it worse. Looking on he could see the premises was new and meticulously landscaped. Neatly manicured swaths of green grass edged with lush emerald shrubbery lay cradled in the U shaped formation of three rectangular buildings. They were a gleaming white and several stories tall, the central building being the tallest. Each of them had an orange stripe down their left end and windows like honeycomb. He knew where he was supposed to go and went in to the central building, taking an elevator to the ninth floor. There were only two other people waiting in the stark white lobby as he walked in and approached a woman behind an orange countertop. She was an unremarkable figure in orange scrubs with a stern hardened face and pixie hair. “Sign in,” she said pointing to a nearby clip board, “we’ll call you back.” Her demeanor and manner of speaking indicated she could not be less interested in being there, much less talking to him. She didn’t even lift her eyes from her paperwork. Oscar signed and found himself a seat in an orange upholstered chair across from the duo of waiting patients. “Hi I’m Gary,” said a thin mealy mouthed man, whats your name?” He had a greasy rat face with squinting slits for eyes. “Why are you talking to me? I don’t give a damn who you are,” Oscar thought but only said, “Oscar.” The frail looking fellow next to Gary did not speak, engrossed in a Time magazine. Gary leaned over and let out a long foghorn of a fart. “I’m in here for my IBS,” he said without so much as a molecule of shame. Oscar said nothing. He just wished Gary would shut his mouth, asshole too. No such luck. “I tell you my guts are killing me. Just killing me you see. By god i mess my pants at least once a day.” Oscar could smell it. He thought the magazine man must be made of stone, the guy was utterly unaffected. “Andrew Torres,” called an orange clad male nurse from an open door. Magazine man flopped his reading material on an orange table and left with the nurse. “Lucky bastard,” Oscar thought. Gary prodded him still further, “and what brings you in Oscar?” “I don’t want to talk about it,” he answered rising to his feet, “look I need a cigarette ok?” Oscar didn’t wait for a response and left, hearing Gary ramble on seemingly to no one about how bad cigarettes are. “Cancer sticks is what they are. So oh so bad for you. They’ll kill you don’t you know.” “Not soon enough,” Oscar muttered. Outside the first floor he expected fresh air but no, an identical odor assailed his nostrils there too. He wondered if Garys stench followed him like some smelly haunting specter. Trying to ignore it he puffed on a cancer stick in the shade, intermittently sneaking nips from his flask when no one was looking. A garbage truck passed by on its path out of the complex and the stink of it was unbearable. It was like ten thousand Garys. “Jesus H Christ,” he choked, “the hell are they throwing away here?” Oscar finished His cigarette and pitched the butt. Another garbage truck rumbled by opposite the previous and disappeared behind the building, this one without odor. His stomach still actively tormented him. His ulcers had been acting up with some frequency as of late. He rubbed his belly as he often would but it never helped. “You need to stop drinking so much,” his wife Gloria would always say. He missed her terribly. She died unexpectedly in the process of giving birth some years ago, baby too. He would have named the boy after himself. Instead he was alone in a tragic world hollowed out and empty with their passing. He had no family or friends to speak of. Gloria was all he did have and now he had nothing. Such loss left him a broken man. He ran a hand through his mop of grey hair and sighed longingly. “Let’s get this over with,” he grumbled. Oscar was relieved to see Gary was nowhere to be seen when he shambled back into the lobby. He sat and continued to wait. The Kurt woman behind the counter was reading a cheesy romance novel, Love Triangle in Bermuda, and did not look up from it. A minute passed, then another. He had just started to become restless when he was called back. The nurse who brought him to a sterile white exam room was much warmer than the frigid front desk ice queen. She was soft spoken and pretty with ringlets of blonde hair and piercing blue eyes that seemed to stare through him. “We’re going to need you to change into this gown Oscar,” she said with a shy smile and handed him a folded one, orange of course. Oscar looked at her for a moment then began removing his white tee shirt. “I’ll leave you to change, she said pulling open the door, “the doctor will be in shortly.” She departed closing it as gently as the tone with which she spoke. Oscar had a long sip from his flask before returning it to his pocket and disrobing completely. He piled his clothes on the exam table and picked up the hospital gown. His body was weathered and blatantly showing its age. His anchor tattoo from his time in the navy was a faded blur on his thick bicep. It wasn’t long after he tied on the gown when the doctor knocked and entered. “Hello I’m Doctor Nimitz,” announced a distinguished looking grey woman who was probably beautiful in her time. Hard lines of age long ago robbed her of her youth. Oscar nodded, “hello.” Oscar was mildly amused she had the last name of a great admiral. “So the medication will need to be administered in a strictly controlled environment,” she began. The doctor went on explaining in her mind numbing monotone and Oscar soon lost interest and quit listening. He just nodded in the breaks between droning. He didn’t care about the damn details, just fix it. His stomach was on fire. He watched her mouth move, sculpting words that rained upon apathetic ears. He wasn’t listening. His mind swam in whiskey as he tried to figure if she still looked good naked under that white lab coat and ubiquitous orange. He couldn’t help himself. “Understand?” He didn’t but nodded anyway. “Normally we have the therapy technicians take patients back but I’m not sure where they are at the moment so I’ll get you set up myself,” she instructed. Doctor Nimitz led him to a door opposite the one they both entered. He hadn’t noticed it before, too distracted by the younger prettier nurse. It had a small keypad next to it and she entered a five digit code. After two short beeps granted entry she pushed open the door. “Right this way,” she motioned with her hand. Oscar followed her down a very long white hallway lined with more doors and little keypad locks. He thought it was odd a medical facility required so much security. Some of the military installations he had lived on didn’t even have so much. The doctor hummed a tune as they walked. He couldn’t quite place it but it sounded vaguely familiar. “Probably some classical horse shit,” he thought. They came to a stop before a wide door at the end of the hall. It must have been twice as wide as any other door there. “Here we are,” she said punching another code in another keypad. She pulled the door open to a room pitch black. A wall of wet heat washed over him. “No lights in there?” Oscar asked the question with anxiety mounting like rising dough in an oven. Doctor Nimitz started going on again about photosensitivity, and temperatures, and other jargon he didn’t understand. Nor did he care to. He hesitated. Dark confined spaces stirred something awful in him. Off the coast of Vietnam, during the war, he had narrowly escaped a sinking navy cruiser. It had somehow tripped a mine which blasted a substantial hole in the hull. A compartment he was in below deck blacked out and rapidly flooded. No matter how he tried, he could not find his way out of it. Oscar was stunned having been so near the explosion. Rising sea water found its way into his lungs during the frantic disorienting struggle and burned them. Were it not for the valor of a fellow sailor blindly extracting him at the last possible second, the compartment would have sealed him in a watery tomb. That moment in time, that sense of impending doom and the dread of helplessness in the face of it, clung to him like an ugly stain. “Right in here Mr. Blane,: she said. Oscar sighed. A door on the other end of the hall swung open and two orange clad men walked briskly toward them. They may have been nurses but they were built like orderlies. They were large with broad chests and menace in their eyes. “Ah and here are the therapy technicians now,” she declared turning to them. Doctor Nimitz wore a bizarre expression that didn’t match her boring drone. It was the sort of look one gives to say, where the hell have you been? Her cool composure was rotting away like a decaying wisdom tooth.Oscar stepped back from the hot dark room. “I don’t want to do this” he said, “I’ve changed my mind.” They were closing on him. Doctor Nimitz urged him forward with a spidery hand on his back. It was at that moment Oscar could read the writing on the wall. It wasn’t a request. She wasn’t asking him to pass through the doorway, she was telling him to. Oscar locked eyes with one of the men and yelled, “you deaf son?” Looking back to Nimitz, Oscar could see a look of worry. No, it was fear. Oscar threw his fist into her nose. It broke with the sound of a stick snapping inside a wet towel. She toppled backward and into the rescuing arms of one of the large men, clutching her nose. Blood came quickly and gushed over her cupping hands and through the spaces between her fingers.without a word the other man pressed forth. Oscar grappled with him at the threshold. He jabbed his thumbs into his attackers eyes yelling, “what is this Mickey Mouse bullshit?” Oscar did not receive an answer. Just a scream as he attempted gouging out their eyes. Before he could rip them from their sockets though, the man shoved him away and inadvertently tripped Oscar in the process. As he tumbled into the abyssal darkness of that ominous room he shot out grasping hands and seized his attackers shirt. The man wailed in protest as Oscar used the momentum of his fall to pull them in as well. No sooner had they crashed to the floor when the door slammed shut and plunged them into complete darkness. The whimpering man got up off Oscar and rushed to the sealed door. He pounded on it wildly. “Hey,” he screeched, “I’m still in here. Hey I’m in here. Let me out. Please god.” Oscar could feel the ground was oddly soft, almost spongey, and wet, the moisture on it thick like slime. The room was sweltering and humid. It felt like triple digit heat. With a groan he got to his feet while the panicked man banged on the door and sobbed openly. “Open the door,” he shrieked, “open the fucking door for the love of god.” Suddenly the floor began to move. It undulated then rose up tossing Oscar some distance and into something very hard. “What the hell is this?” Oscar shouted the question rubbing the side of his throbbing head. The shrieking man’s sounds of distress increased dramatically. His vocal chords seemed ready to tear from the strain at any moment. Oscar had never heard a grown man scream so loud.the floor undulated again and he grabbed on to the solid something he crashed into so as not to be flung about. It was large and wide and he could scarcely grip it. “No please,” the man bellowed, “oh god please no.” It was then Oscar heard the sound of bone crunching. “My leg,” they cried, “oh god my leg.” The supposed floor undulated and rose then fell and undulated again. Oscars foot slipped from its hold and he felt it drop over a sweeping edge. He realized he was very near falling into god knows what. He clung to whatever it was that he held for dear life. It was very smooth and difficult to gain purchase on. He was slipping. More screams. A cacophony of snapping bones and the gurgled yelp of a man drowning in his own blood made Oscar’s stomach lurch. Again and again the noise of mashing. Breaking and crunching bones giving way to wretched sloppy squelching, a visceral symphony. Somewhere in the depths of Oscar’s increasingly battered psyche he had a thought. “Sounds like chewing.” In that moment he had assembled the scattered fragments of clues into a single cohesive realization. The floor wasn’t a floor. The room was not a room. “It can’t be.” What he had taken for solid ground was in fact a great thrashing tongue. He collided with the revelation he was clinging to a massive tooth, a molar, they were in a mouth, and they were being eaten alive, masticated. Oscars mind reeled from the ridiculousness of it. He had been lied to, the whole country had been lied to. Uni Med was exterminating people, certain kinds of people anyway. Namely the poor and down trodden. Undesirables. The powerful tongue undulated and began to carry the remains of the orderly, or nurse, or whatever he used to be, towards the titanic throat over which Oscar dangled. The man had been reduced to a saliva saturated lump of ground flesh, tattered torn scrubs, and splintered bone. Closer and closer it came until the repugnant wet mass was pressed right into Oscar’s face. Then the weight of it bore down on him. It compromised his already tenuous grip on the molar. A frosty chill of abject fear made him shiver. This was much more dire than the incident on the cruiser and this time nobody would be coming to his rescue. If there was a way out of this, he would have to find it himself. With a great contraction of muscle the mighty tongue pitched him back and the cavernous throat swallowed. He slid down a long way, he the one screaming now, into what he could only assume was a stomach. It was a hot swampy nightmare smelling of vomit and metallic blood. Oscar felt his iron clad composure suddenly falter, weakened by an explosion of terror. He stifled a sob then promptly collected himself. “Get it together.” Oscar took a deep breath then gagged and cursed himself for doing something so obviously stupid. Oscar stood, masticated pulp squishing between his toes, and noticed he was completely naked. He slipped out of his hospital gown in his descent. He wondered for a moment if he was standing on Gary. That made him retch. He emptied the contents of his own stomach. “Oh fuck me,” he groaned wiping his mouth, “if this ain’t hell, its in the same zip code.” Oscar forced himself to feel around the stomach wall for a way out. He knew he had to keep moving. He could already feel the stomach’s acid irritating his skin. Marching through bile pools and mounds of eviscerated humanity, he gagged and dry heaved. Finally after some time of blindly wandering, he fell. He splayed out prostrate and his face mashed into a pile of gore. He spit out the bits that entered his gasping mouth and painfully dry heaved. His abdomen was a cushion riddled with the stabbing pins of cramping pains. His foot sloshed into something feeling like a fleshy pot hole. It was an opening to the small intestine. He figured this thinking to himself, “guess there is only one way out of here.” He could feel there wasn’t much clearance and he would have to crawl the immense length of it on his hands and knees. It was deathly silent, like the stomach, in there as he made his way crawling. Only the visceral noise of peristalsis, a slimy sound like macaroni being stirred in a pot, and the din of Oscar’s own movement and heavy breathing being heard. He traversed that particular section of bowel with some ease, the path largely clear of obstruction. He began to suspect his journey might actually be of little difficulty. He was a fool. There was more room to move in the large intestine but he still had to hunch as he walked. He skirted passed clumps of human debris here and there. “Poor bastards in here are more turd than human.” A smell, a tinge of shit, hung heavy in the atmosphere like a sickly fog. The occasional semi hard boulder of half digested abhorrence gradually increased to the point where he had to dig through. With a face twisted in disgust he shoveled handful after handful of the unspeakable matter out of his way. Eventually he reached the colon. He ran into some real trouble there. Deep shit you might say. His winding path shifted from largely horizontal to near completely vertical. The odor, increasingly rank. Although he had nothing left to vomit, a transformation of smell, one that could shame a septic tank, caused another fit of retching. Then his foot slipped. The walls of the colon were caked in shit and he fell trying gingerly to make his way down. Squishing safely in a soft cushion of poop he had the awful certainty he would have to dig through that too. It ignited the powder keg that was his temper. “So this is what you do Uni Med,” he screamed into the void, just throw us away.” He gagged. “Just kill off the hangers on. That’s easier, ain’t it? Fuckers. We’re just fucking parasites to you, ain’t we?” He gagged again. Oscar’s voice was horse with rage. He thought about how only just this morning he was enjoying an Irish coffee and reading the newspaper. Now he was neck deep in feces. In all his half century of life, he had never been anything near this pissed off. Not even close. Not even when the zipper heads, as he called them, tried to drown him with a cowardly mine in the waterway. He had almost started to sob when he dropped straight down yet again inside an avalanche of excrement and found himself buried completely. He was disorientated and could not discern which way was up, or down for that matter. Oscar’s arms and legs burned with exertion as he desperately struggled. He was beyond exhausted and getting weaker by the second. Breathing became increasingly difficult as He dug, and kicked, and cursed. “You god damned sons of bitches.” Digging and digging, digging some more, scooping, scratching, and clawing, he fought for his very life. “Oh you better hope this kills me. Fucking. Cock suck. Ass.” Lack of air however, eventually ushered him into unconsciousness. The golden mid day sun shined like a fireball in the sky. Two male nurses stood smoking cigarettes in the long shadow cast behind the central building. The first and second floors were depressed along the entirety of the rear wall far enough for the garbage truck there to park under the overhanging upper floors. A wide chimney like stub pointed down from the ceiling of the depression, over the partially filled bed of the garbage truck. At the center of the upside down half chimney, housed in it, was the star fold of a large puckered anus. It was pale and pink and it farted. It squeezed out a man sized glob of shit like soft serve ice cream that fell into the half full truck bed with a plop. Flies buzzed madly about. “So I says to her, yeah as a matter of fact that dress does make you look fat,” the taller of the two men said to the other exhaling blue smoke. “Yeah?” “Oh yeah buddy,” he continued, “then she says she’s turning off the tap, the bitch. I haven’t had a piece of ass in weeks.” “Damn shame,” said the shorter nurse shaking his head solemnly and pushing up his spectacles. Conversation ebbed and they dragged their cigarettes in silence. The giant anus squelched out another fart with a couple small chunks of turd. Plop. Plop. “You hear what happened to Nimitz?” The short portly man asked after a time as though searching for something to break the silence. Tall nurse shook his head and spit. “No,” he said. “Well get this. Some nut flipped his ever loving lid and punched her right in the nose, broke it I think.” Tall nurse chuckled. “That guy just did what we’ve all been wanting to do, that old bag,” he said then puffed on his Camel. “Too bad about Carl though,” the short nurse went on, “the crazy bastard who punched Nimitz pulled Carl into the damn chamber with him. He’s a goner.” Tall nurse waved off a buzzing fly. “I always liked carl,” he replied, he was a nice guy.” He then looked at his wristwatch and frowned under a puffy black mustache. “Better get back to work buddy.” Short nurse shrugs and flicked his smoldering cigarette butt away. “Back to the salt mine,” he said flatly, “Nimitz will really have our asses if we’re back in late today.” Tall nurse nodded his agreement tossing away his butt and they left. The anus dropped another small glob of stinking excrement. Plop. Then something else began to emerge. It was a head, Oscar’s head. He was unconscious, maybe dead, his expression blank under brown smears of waste. The anus widened to accommodate his shoulders and he slid from the asshole into the garbage truck. Plop. His eyes shot open and he took in a heaving gasp of rank air. He sat up and looked around, daylight stinging his eyes. He gagged. Squishing through the feces to the raised edge, he clambered over it. When he lowered himself to earth he slipped, his feet slick with shit, and fell hard on the pavement with a wet slap. He lay there for a long moment before struggling to his feet. Oscar shambled away stinking, shit smeared, and naked. His stomach still hurt like hell and he was utterly exhausted. He briefly considered going somewhere, telling someone, something, but then he thought better of it. “I need a god damn drink.”