“What have I done? Nothing I didn’t have coming to me, I know that now. But it was your words, Hannah, that made me do this.”
“Oh no.” She shook her head vehemently and started to close the door. “This isn’t my fault.”
“No, of course not! I know that! That’s not what I’m saying! Please!” She tried to shut the door on him but he got a foot in the gap to prevent her. She slammed it anyway and he grunted in pain but didn’t budge.
“I’ll call the police,” she warned.
“Hannah,” he begged, and the pleading in his voice was more naked than his ruined flesh. “You were right! Absolutely right to say what you did! After you went I took a good hard look at myself – I mean literally – and all I could see was the ugliness. Every mole, every blocked pore, every wrinkle. They were all I could see, and they were everywhere, and I knew that I had to cut them out of me, so that’s what I did. I did it because you told me to! I couldn’t stop myself! I kept cutting and cutting until it was all gone. Please, you have to understand – you have to see!”
“Oh, I can see well enough,” she said. “Get your foot out or I swear to God—”
“NO!” He shoved the gap wider, snapping the chain, and then he was over the threshold and in her hallway, advancing on her with his mutilated hands in their surgical gloves. She screamed and tried to run, but even in his condition he was too fast. He caught her by the staircase and wrapped his arms around her from behind. “I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, his breath fervid in her ear. “But I’m not going to let you ignore this, either.
“You did it, deep down you know you did. You made me do this to myself. Don’t get me wrong!” he added hastily. “It was a good thing, a right thing, but you know you have to see all of it. You can run and call the police if you want, but I’ll be long gone by the time they get here, and you’ll never know. Or you can come with me and let me show you. I’m only asking for an hour of your time. Then you’ll never see me again, I swear.”
He was as good as his word, and let her go.
She ran.
But she only got as far as the kitchen, her hand on the back door.
She stopped, paused, and looked back. He wasn’t chasing her. It seemed that his efforts to break in and restrain her had cost him because he was leaning against the wall, shuddering and gasping in pain. She could easily escape and call the police, or pick up a knife and drive him out of her home. She did neither. She edged back towards him warily.
“One hour,” she said.
He nodded, as if even talking was beyond him now, and staggered from the house.
She followed.
He took her to his old apartment. They went by alleyways and empty side-streets where there were fewer people to see him – though he’d pulled a kind of wraparound scarf over his face anyway – and through service yards to a set of back stairs which led up to his door. She found herself surprised that he was still living in the same place, as if his strange affliction should have made it impossible for him to maintain a home, but realised that she’d never known anything about his domestic arrangements. For all she knew he might have owned the place outright, and not needed a job to pay for it. He couldn’t possibly be working in his current state, after all. It occurred to her then that she’d never really known anything substantial about him. Had she really only dated him because he was handsome and attentive and looked good next to her in photos that her friends and family would have liked? Had she actually been no less shallow than he?
Once inside, it became clear that he wasn’t maintaining anything. Far from the clean, elegant apartment she’d seen, it was rank with filth and stank like an abattoir.
“I couldn’t just throw it away, you see,” he explained, leading her down a hallway piled with old stacks of newspapers. Scurrying things fled from their approach, deeper into the shadows. “That would have felt like a betrayal of everything I was learning.”
“What… what were you learning?” she asked, stepping gingerly.
He stopped and looked back, his lidless eyes gleaming. “What I was,” he replied, and led her on. “A vain, superficial man obsessed with the perfection of his outer appearance, and blind to the ugliness inside. It took you to make me understand, to bring that out of me, so that I could cut it out of myself. But throwing it away? No, that would have been an even worse denial.”
They were at the doorway to the bathroom, the last place she’d seen him as a normal human being, scrubbing at his flesh in horror and staring at his reflection. A meagre light seeped through the murk-smeared window, enough to see that the chrome fittings were tarnished, the slate floor mottled with old blood, and the porcelain of the sink unit streaked ochre with it. The medicine cabinet was still there – in fact it was probably the only clean thing in the whole place, one gleaming oval wiped out of its filthy surface. Scattered around it, beside the sink and on the floor, were the rusted and bloodstained implements from inside, the ones that he’d used to cut away the ugliness that her curse had forced him to see. And, hanging on an ordinary coat hanger from the shower head, something which she at first took to be a ruined dry cleaning bag, or else the discarded husk of some monstrous insect.
“There,” he whispered. His face was averted, as if he couldn’t bear to look at it. “You see?”
She saw.
It was the curd-yellow of old skin rinds and overgrown toenails, strips and shreds of it curled and browning at the edges but laboriously sewn and glued back together into a crude approximation of where each had been cut from his body; a man-suit of his own scarred skin. Some parts were recognisable – here an eyelid, there a nipple, elsewhere a swirl of knuckle – but the rest was a harlequin motley of wartgnarled and blood-blackened flesh, utterly loathsome. She backed away, hands to her mouth in horror.
“I cut it away, but I had to put it back together, to see myself as you saw me.”
Then she looked at the muscles and tendons of his face, testament to the physical torture that he’d put himself through to atone for his vanity – and suddenly saw the beauty of his offering; what nobility his suffering had brought to light.
When he reached for her, she didn’t shrink away, but went willingly into his arms and kissed him. He gasped a little; he was raw, and it must have hurt, but he let her explore the softness of his flesh, the quivering velvet of his muscles, the smoothness of naked bone.
“I’m sorry,” she said, surprised to find tears on her cheeks. “Sorry I made you do this to yourself.”
“I’m not. It’s just…” He faltered.
“Just what?”
His whisper was so faint, a hair against her cheek. “It hurts.”
Now, with her body pressed against his, she felt the heat deep within him. Not the burning of infection – though Lord knew he should have been dead from that long ago – this felt familiar. It was the rage and hurt that she had thrown into him on the night he’d shamed her six months ago. It was still in him, keeping him alive and forcing him to commit atrocities upon himself. He hadn’t just brought her here to show her the results of that; every straining sinew in him was begging for release.
He wasn’t the monster here.