Bodily Functions

Cort opened his eyes again, and found he was looking at the ceiling.  He tried to stretch, but something was holding his wrists and ankles in place.  When he tried to turn his head, he found there was a fixed, heavy collar around his neck.

“Kitty?” he whispered, remembering the four times that he’d been captured by Bad Kitty.  He’d won all of their encounters, but knowing that she was in the same retirement home as him gave him occasional nightmares, and now it seemed as though she might have taken advantage of his failing health.  There was no response from anyone, so he whispered her name again.  This time there was the rustle of paper, and then the clicking of heels on tile.  Approaching heels on tile.

“Mr. Stretch?”  It was his nurse’s voice, calm and motherly.  “Mr. Stretch, try not to move too much.  We’ve strapped you down for your own safety.  Your mucus… well, it seems your mucus has taken on a mind of its own.”

He blinked, and suddenly memories returned.

*

He collapsed in Dr. Hernandez’s office, everything going black, and he heard the alarm start sounding.  Dr. Hernandez must have pressed it, but why?  Then there was a shifting sensation in his chest, almost as though someone had been standing on him and decided to step off at last.  He curled up a little more, and then tiny pinpricks of light appeared in the darkness.  They grew larger and his vision untunnelled.  In front of him he saw Dr. Hernandez looking worried, and backing away.  Something lurched in from the left, something green and jelly-like.  It was shaped like an iceberg and about the size of a medium-sized dog, and clearly shouldn’t be moving around by itself.  Dr Hernandez backed away again, and Cort realised that the green blobby thing was chasing him.

A door banged back, though Cort couldn’t see it, and there was a sharp intake of breath.  Then someone barked orders, short, harsh instructions, and there was the sound of running feet.  Dr. Hernandez hauled himself up onto his desk, crouching there, one hand holding the edge of it for balance.  The green mini-iceberg paused at the desk, and then it started bubbling, translucent green spheres growing out of it like someone blowing into soapy water with a straw.  Dr. Hernandez looked deeply concerned, and was looking around too, hunting for a way to escape.

“Stand back!” shouted someone, and Dr. Hernandez, looking desperate, let go of the edge of the desk and allowed himself to fall backwards.  As soon as he was crashing off the back of the desk there was a crackling sound like the rapid discharge of static and a smell like old ice.  The air hazed, and the green bubbling blobby thing suddenly frosted over and stopped moving.  The last thing Cort saw before his vision faded again was snow falling all around him.

*

“It’s alive?” asked Cort.  His voice was coming back to normal.

“Possibly,” said the nurse.  “Possibly.  It’s been taken away for study now, so you don’t have to worry about it.  You just need to rest and recover.”

“Why am I strapped down?”

The nurse didn’t answer, but walked off instead.  Cort waited for her to come back, unwilling to believe that the nurse who’d been looking after him for the last eighteen months would just abandon him now.  Sure enough, a few minutes (that felt like an hour) later, she returned, with Dr. Hernandez.  He loomed into view, standing deliberately over Cort so that he could see him.

“The problem, Mr. Stretch,” said Dr. Hernandez, his voice sounding restrained and reluctant, “is that we don’t know if you’re going to produce more of this mucus.  That is, was this just a side effect of your illness, or is it a new thing that you’re going to be doing from now on?”

Cort shuddered.  “Are you saying I might be an incubator for that thing?” he asked.

“You saw it?”

“Yes.  A little.”

“We don’t know.”  Dr. Hernandez sighed.  He sounded genuinely upset.  “I really hope not, but… well, you superheroes are an odd bunch.  We’re always learning things about you that just don’t apply to normal people.”

“I’m sorry,” said Cort, meaning it.  The use of the words “normal people” still rankled, but not as much.  The green mucus blob had shaken him, and the idea that he might be producing more of it made him want to curl up in a ball and cry.

“Don’t be,” said Dr. Hernandez.  “You’re all fascinating.  So few of you seem to have expected to get old, or to have any problems when you did.  It’s like you all thought you’d be young forever, fighting amongst each other and having fun without thinking about the rest of us.  And then it all changed and there are no superhero doctors, so you needed us normal people after all.  In a way it’s flattering, and what I’m learning from you all is making me almost as famous.”

“Fighting amongst ourselves?  I always fought the villains.”

“Well, when you all get old there’s not much difference, is there?”  Dr. Hernandez waggled his eyebrows.  “I know all about how you and Bad Kitty used to fight, and now you’re three rooms apart and you both play backgammon on Thursday evenings.”

Cort was silent, thinking that he and Bad Kitty were pretty much level pegging on won backgammon games, but that was exactly where their rivalry, their enmity, had ended up.  Was that sad, somehow?

“How long before you know about the mucus?” he asked at last.

“A couple of days, maybe?” said Dr. Hernandez.  “I’d have you X-rayed, but it wouldn’t help.  You’re so stretchy, so extensible, that I can’t tell when a shadow is cancer, or mucus, or scar tissue from one of your many battles, or even just you being a bit stretched in that place when the X-ray was taken.”

“Do I have to be like this the whole time?

“I’m afraid so, Mr. Stretch,” said Dr. Hernandez.

Welcome to the Glasshouse

Cort coughed, a nasty wet rattle that made people standing nearby back away, covering their own mouths and noses.  The cough lasted nearly a whole minute, at the end of which he was folded over on himself, his head down by his feet and his chest hurting with every spasm.  A warm hand rested on his shoulder, then gently pulled him back upright.

“Now then, Mr. Stretch,” said a voice, “have you remembered to take your medication this morning?”  The nurse at his shoulder was middle-aged and wore her body comfortably.  Her hair was just starting to grey, and a strand of it fell, attractively he thought, across one eye.

“Yes,” he said, shuddering as he heaved a huge breath and got air back into his body.  “Bloody yes, of course I have.”

“There’s no need to swear, Mr. Stretch,” said the nurse, but her voice was still friendly.  She said this all the time to all the residents.  “That cough is sounding worse.  I think you ought to go and see the doctor today.  Get dressed and I–“

“I killed the Doctor!” Cort jolted upright and pulled his dressing-gown tightly around his thin, scarred chest.  “Three times!”

“That’s right,” said the nurse, smiling.  As part of her job she was required to learn all of the significant events of her patients’s history.  She stepped slightly to one side, just in case.  “And the third time, he stayed dead, so it can’t be him I meant, can it Mr. Stretch?”

“Hmmm,” said Cort, unwilling to back down.  His fights with the Doctor had been gruelling, days-long battles that had caused significant architectural damage, and had taken their toll on both of them.  During the first fight the Doctor had managed to destroy the only hospital in a fifty-mile radius, and during the second they’d done enough damage to a nuclear power plant between them that it had had to be immediately decommissioned.  Cort had a sneaking suspicion that the real reason he’d won the third fight was the radiation damage that the Doctor had sustained by Cort leaving his body in a pool of radioactive cooling water.

“So you’ll get dressed,” said the nurse, “and I’ll take you up to see Dr. Hernandez in twenty minutes.  Can you do that for me?”

Cort nodded, his head bobbing and his neck elongating.  The nurse laid one hand back on his shoulder, and gently pushed on his forehead, helping him retract his neck back to a normal length.  Cort said nothing, but he was quietly grateful.

After the nurse left, he pulled the bed-covers back and swung his legs over the edge.  His hips ached abominably as they did every morning when he tried to get up, and he forced himself to stretch his legs out until his feet touched the floor and he could effortlessly stand up.  Then he concentrated, shrinking his legs back down to his normal height, and then further until he was almost just feet, knees and torso.  Finally he stretched back up again, and let out a breath he hadn’t realised he was holding.  He wiped his eyes, telling himself that the wetness was just the effects of the coughing.

As he dressed, he resisted the temptation to just stretch his arms out across the room, opening the wardrobe and collecting his clothes.  Instead he forced himself to walk over and collect them, just like a normal person.  The word normal left a slightly bitter taste in his mouth; he wasn’t normal, and he hadn’t been for years.  If he’d been normal he’d never have been able to take on the Doctor (three times!) and come away victorious.  He’d never have been able to save eighty-two people from a collapsing skyscraper, or face down Bad Kitty over twenty-eight times, twice in council meetings!

“Are you ready, Mr. Stretch?”  The nurses were always careful to use the ageing superheroes' public names, and never their private ones.  It was a small touch of respect that the superheroes were ridiculously grateful for.  “Dr. Hernandez is expecting you.”  She held out her arm, and Cort took it, hating himself as he rested his feather-weight frame on her, and limped slowly from his room.

The room next to him had the door slightly ajar, and he could see the beautiful Fizz Mission sat up in bed, staring out of the window.  The nurses kept her on Mogadon to try and keep her away from her memories, and there were serious consequences to anyone who tried to talk to her without written permission from the matron.  After that they passed a closed door, which was General Tcho-Tcho’s room; that the door was closed meant he was either sleeping or a dimensional reconfiguration of his body had gone wrong again.  After that was a door on the other side of the corridor that was Bad Kitty’s room, and then they were at the lift.

“I used to be able to just lean out of the window, stretch up to the fifth floor and climb in the window there,” said Cort.  “I hate having to take lifts.”

“There’s always the stairs,” said the nurse, and he fell silent again.

Dr. Hernandez’s office was two doors away from the lift, and he was stood at the door, waiting to take Cort’s arm from the nurse and lead him to the examining couch.  Cort sat down, grateful for the relief from aching joints, and looked at the doctor.

“Nurse tells me that your cough is getting worse,” said Dr. Hernandez.  He was in his fifties, with oiled-back white hair, facial hair modelled on Colonel Sanders, and knotty fingers in huge hands.  “And we will investigate that shortly.  But first, tell me how your memory is?”

Cort sighed, and started talking.  All his visits with Dr. Hernandez were the same, the doctor would check his memories, check his physical condition, and perform a psychological evaluation before he’d address the reported symptoms.  Cort really hoped that if he had a heart-attack it wasn’t Dr. Hernandez who was first on the scene.  Finally Dr. Hernandez pulled out his stethoscope and listened to Cort’s chest, asking him to cough a little.  Cort, who had been trying to control his cough for the whole meeting, gladly let himself start coughing.  To his surprise, he found he couldn’t stop, and then everything went black.  As his vision disappeared, he heard a siren sound, and dimly realised that Dr. Hernandez must have pressed the alarm button in his office.