Cut off
When she had left him, he decided to remove every inch of his skin that
she had ever kissed, touched, or licked. The pain was bearable, especially
after he had removed his left eyelid (gently, gently, she had pressed the
edges of her lips against it one night when he had awakened from a
nightmare), the membrane was too thin to merely slice the uppermost layer.
Having one eye remaining open for always was a sensation that overcame any
other possible mutilation. In fact, he was surprised that carving off his
nipples, excruciating as he thought it might have been (each with a swift
twisting stroke, one following the other, almost with the same deftness
of
the flick of her tongue as she had moved from one to the next), was nothing
compared to the raw quality that the left eye had continued to see for a
number of days, until it dried up, becoming useless.
The majority of the work he had done himself after having his scrotum
removed and the testicles placed back into the abdomen. He had to go
practically to the other side of the world to have the procedure done (a
friend, who had gone to the airport to pick him up on his return, had
noticed something in his step that made the friend uncomfortable and ill,
but this friend would be unable as to explain why). From then on, he,
himself, held a scalpel in either hand, without any sort of anesthesia,
but with the help of his memories, meticulously went about what he had set out
to do. He started with his face, the eye first, then the lips, which came
off quite easily (when he had pulled the bottom one in particular, for the
blade to slide across more fluidly, he recalled, and could actually still
feel, her teeth playfully biting it). In front of his bathroom mirror,
propped on a stool to give him as full of a body view as possible, he had
worked his way down (his legs bearing the longest scars eventually, her
having entwined her own about them), five or six towels underneath the
steel supports. It was not a quick process, the face itself (where her
fingers so often lingered on his cheeks and neck as she slept) took a full
day and several hours after dinner. Never did he perceive the peeling
tissue as his skin, equating it instead with uncooked pork, whose texture
was similar. He was merely removing dead meat from his face, meat that had
no purpose, not even fit for consumption, diseased.
In the middle of the night, he would awake, startled and sweating, the
more recent of the wounds stinging (her voice in his ear, fresh, warm,
close), having suddenly remembered, through his dreaming of her, a specific
spot he had missed. He had tried to remain on, and skim from, one area of
his body at a time, in an organized and orderly manner. The most difficult
in getting to, nothing to do with a degree of sensitivity but with the
mechanics of his shoulders, was the plane of his back, its indentation at
the center. To solve this problem he had gotten fresh towels, arranging
them by the door of the bathroom, opening it inward, placing the handle
of
the scalpel into the space between the frame and the door so that it would
jut out. With his right-hand pulling the door firmly closed, his body
practically sideways, he moved onto the blade until he felt the desired
spot (her fingers would sprawl themselves wide, nails etching, digging at
times, just below the shoulder blades, where her forearms were tight
against the back of his ribs), piercing around it, and shift himself
accordingly, in a semicircle, switching angles to close the loop. When he
had done so, he used a sterilized fork to peel off the skin, a piece
sometimes falling off the prongs of the utensil onto the red blotched
towels.
It would only be after each successful operation, never during, he would
keep his mind sharp and concentrated then, that waves of nausea and
dizziness washed over him, and he would bite down on his tongue to bring
himself back into focus (despite the fact that it was the tongue that she
had most contact with, he could not bring himself to the point of severing
it, he was sure he could not live without speaking). Afterwards, having
given himself enough time for the brunt of the pain to be smothered by
drugs prescribed from the operation abroad, he would carefully climb into
bed, fresh gauze wrapped about himself, onto seven or eight layers of bed
sheets. Each morning, numb but clear headed, he would change the bandages,
checking each laceration for infection, applying creams, iodine, washing
off the previous night's applications. He had saved the hair for last, the
body done (she used to scratch his head as they watched T.V., or tug gently
tufts of it before she would climax, his head between her thighs). With
a
pair of shearing scissors, he cut as close as possible to the scalp.
Because the sink was more or less always moist from the week's constant
rinsing off of blood, clumps of hair had clung together, resembling fur.
He finally recognized himself again. Until then, he had seen himself as
something other than a person, more as material, a meat sculpture for an
artist motivated by both an objective application of technique and a
deep-rooted blind creative passion (mimicking the same recklessness with
which she had taken off his clothes). Now, however, his name returned to
him, a sense of ownership for the body before him: a sculptor recognizing
himself in his work, the marking of his hand on the work itself, and the
effect on him of the work being finished.
It was on that night, as he lay in bed, he felt that she was very near,
almost atop him, not merely in his thoughts. He could not explain this
knowing in his mind of her presence but he got out of bed, walked down the
dark hallway, approached the front door, and slowly put his hand on the
knob. Inexplicably, he then thought of the number of phone calls that were
on his answering machine from his friends and his employer. They were, at
first, concerned, then distressed, wondering, if he was still alive, why
had he disappeared off the face of the planet? None were from her. While
working, he had not answered the phone or the door when someone rang,
keeping most of the lights off (as how often it had been with her here,
dark and silent).
Turning the knob and pulling, he realized that what he had done to himself
was not solely because of her. Opening the door, he stood there, the night
clear, the air hugging him, cold and fresh, the street empty, seeing no
one.