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.