(Did she nightmare of crawling up to a lake and peering in, hating the face she saw there?)
(Had she seen an unmade visage leaning over her crib, embracing her with a curse?)
Whatever it was, the child would wake up and it would be all right, because she was beautiful. This made everything possible.
The mask’s edges had never been properly filed down. A ribbon ran around the border to keep it from slicing into fingers. Tombi now stripped off the border. She gingerly tested the revealed keenness with her fingertip. It cut immediately and she watched the blood bloom.
I wish I could be as this sleeping child, she thought. Dead, then begun over, reincarnated with a new shape and glaze.
Tombi brought the small mask to her own face and pressed. The edge cut into her eyebrows, down the cheekbones, into the bottom lip. She managed to speak, breath fogging into the mask, barely able to open her mouth or flex her jaw—as if she were a mental patient muzzled to keep her from biting.
Just like she’d seen in Wymath’s office. In one of those disturbing little etchings. Except this muzzle had silver, sliver shard fangs.
“Change me. And change me again,” she commanded.
She used more pressure, blood running into her eyes and mouth until she was blinded, choking on salty red. She shoved it against her head until muscle split and bone ground against glass. At some point she swooned, felt herself fall, heard the delicate mask hit the floor and shatter.
Poor baby was now nothing but knives and teeth.
Tombi didn’t reach consciousness again for several hours. She squinted as a setting sun poured filmy scarlet through the window. She managed to scramble to her feet but she had to hold onto every stick of furniture she passed to get to the bathroom. She clawed at the walls to keep upright, leaving gory handprints as if she were finger-painting a map to lead her back with.
In the mirror over the sink she assessed the damage. There were the severe lacerations she’d anticipated: drying, clotted in a fissure which circumnavigated her face. It had gouted at some point, streamed, and left her sheeted in blood.
But, wait, what was that loose skin at the hairline? The glass mask hadn’t gone up that high. And there was more of it along her jaw; the mask hadn’t gone down that far. She had an adult head and the mask was of an infant.
Tombi reached up and grabbed at fluttering edges, watching the flesh ripple like wet crinoline. She tugged and it began to pull away, in one piece. Down from the brow, pulling away the eyelids-complete with each damp lash, buckling up from the bridge of the nose, off with plop and smack the bulk of the lips, down to the chin. So slowly she pulled it away, like anyone does who has given themselves a peel-off facial, sure to get every flake and line. Eventually she was left with no face at all.
Purple with shadow, a mass of glistening sinew with stringy, bloodied hair falling back from it peered back at her.
She fainted again. She woke up at dawn, starting because she heard a voice breathing into her ear, “Tombi? Look, look…”
Her mother and sister had come home. She felt Reine’s hand against her cheek and felt Vedette’s (annoying) kiss on her forehead.
She only found herself alone, crumpled on the bathroom tile. It must have been some type of seizure, for without eyelids Tombi hadn’t been able to close her eyes. And yet she’d been there all night, unseeing, unfeeling.
(Had there been a little frown in what vagueness there was left of expression, slight downturn at the corners of a lipless mouth…tweak between lidless eyes?)
The limp folds of what might have been a latex mask lay in the sink, sticky against the porcelain.
She didn’t recognize the beautiful girl she saw in the mirror. This was a complete stranger.
Complete.
Strange.
Tombi’s trembling hands went up to touch the glass. To assure herself it really was a mirror. Not a window where some lovely girl she’d never met stood mocking her.
The alien female’s fingers came up, identical in motion. They touched through the icy glass, a communion in crystal. Tombi frowned, stuck her tongue out, bared her teeth. The other girl frowned, stuck her tongue out, bared her teeth at the same time.
Tombi spat at the other girl’s face. The stranger did likewise. Saliva met saliva with only a frosty barrier between. They slid down together like coupling teardrops.
“Fuck me…” Tombi murmured, amazed, delighted. Surely she would actually wake up any second now.
She peeled the discarded face from the porcelain. It was cold, clammy, limp and stretched out of shape—only barely recognizable as human. It was slimy with blood, like an old tampon.
She started to drop it into the wastecan. Then she thought, No! Reine or Vedette might find it. It would completely freak them out. I can hear them now, wriggling and puckering up and saying “Yeeuuuchchch!”
She turned to the toilet give it a sea burial but imagined it clogging the pipes and floating back up in the overflow. Her face, as if Tombi herself had been flushed and was rising from the watery dead. She envisioned it floating, between her legs—or Vedette’s legs maybe—while seated on the toilet, as if the ghost itself had been expelled from the body in some bizarre latrine exorcism.
(Out skinless psyche! The power of God compels you!)
Or an abortion. Done because it was known the infant would be hideous. And it was kinder to end its life before it could suffer, wasn’t it?
She took it into the kitchen, determined to let the garbage disposal devour it. Blades chopping, whirring, destroying what she had been and—thanks to some dream of soul revealed and kept beyond the nightmare—was now no longer.
No, she couldn’t that. She must keep it. This had been part of her. The most important part. The one that always seemed to count most.
She stole a silk scarf from Reine’s dresser and carefully wrapped the shed skin in it. She shuddered, thinking it was like wrapping up Jesus in the burial cloth. (A long way from it, unless Jesus had been flayed, instead of crucified.) Would it leave an imprint like Turin’s shroud? Would she steal back throughout her life to peek at it, as if it were an icon of her humbler self?
No, she would never look at it again. But she still took great care when folding the silk around it, unnerved by this reptilian sloughing. Tombi tried very hard to feel respect as she did this, if not reverence.
“This is the epitaph of the old me,” she whispered.
««—»»
Mother and Vedette still hadn’t returned home yet. Tombi wasn’t surprised. Her smashing the mirror had likely frightened them into staying the night in a motel until they could be better assured she was over this particular tantrum. They had stayed away before. When she’d broken all the mirrors in the house, for example. And when she’d painted all the mirrors black. And there was another time. Vedette had just lipsticked her mouth, then had smiled, pursed her lips and kissed the mirror. Reine had done the same as a joke. Tombi kissed her own damp print there and then threw a can of crimson paint over the whole thing, splashing it red to run like opened veins.
“Blood of my blood,” she’d murmured, scaring them both silly.
They never left when she’d done damage to herself though. No, they took care of her then. And Tombi had never actually struck out at them physically. She just frightened them.
Of course, she’d done a great deal of damage to herself yesterday, acts of misplaced aggression and self-destruction meeting headlong this time. But they didn’t know that. They only knew she’d had a tiff and broken a mirror.
(But she hadn’t done that in a while. Not since Wymath died and she’d put on her well-behaved act. Maybe even now they were out hunting up another doctor. Maybe they were even looking at a hospital to confine her in.)
“That’s not fair,” she whispered. “They wouldn’t send me away. I know they wouldn’t.”
Tombi had no explanation for this lovely new face. But she was determined not to jinx it by questioning. Perhaps this was a daz
zling dream, a part of Dr. Wymath’s puzzling conjecture about the skinless psyche. (Which was why the other face had come off…it was the skin part of ‘skinless’.) Or perhaps she’d worked some sympathetic yet potent magic with the baby’s mask. Masks were a potent symbol. It was why so many shamanistic societies used them in their rituals. There was power in countenance.
She wasted no time trying on Vedette’s clothes, Reine’s jewelry, experimenting with an arcana of cosmetics and hairstyles, even kissing the mirror with the perfect, full pucker. It stained the glass like some just-changed butterfly. It left a tiny Rorschach, reminding her of the picture in Dr. Wymath’s office of the mental patient pressing into the Rorschach like Alice Through The Looking Glass. (Mirrors, faces. And always what was on the other side held an allure, reachable through ink stains, glass, the vanguard of visage.)
She chose a tight, short skirt, a halter top, and a jacket, all in indigo leather. Her eyes were kohled in damson plum and her lips were painted rose.
Then she’d gone out, curious to discover what it felt like to be pleasing to the eye. She strolled to the campus, trying to control her gait. Usually she walked fast, head down, determined not to meet anyone’s gaze. Or—if she did that by accident—glaring at them until they looked away.
What did beauty walk like?
(She walks in beauty like the night, like tombèe de la nuit and night’s fall.)
Straight, proud, leading with the breasts (no, no—the face!). With the hips swinging a seductive pendulum back and forth behind to hypnotize with.
It was all she could do when she found some young man smiling and watching not to shout at him, “What are you staring at, creep?”
It had been a war of emotions but she managed to smile back, sensing dimples, batting long lashes. And before she knew it she was walking arm in arm with him. She suspected she’d seen him before but couldn’t recall precisely where it had been. Perhaps he was in one of her classes and she’d just never noticed before because she so studiously avoided eye contact.
They shared wine during a late afternoon lunch. They ended up naked in his apartment where she spent more time admiring her own body than she did his. He didn’t seem to mind, but indulged her. He might have had the physique of a god and she wouldn’t have noticed. Hell, he might have owned fangs and bat’s wings for ears…
Tombi glanced around the place, lifting her head up proudly, tilting it like a coquette, tossing back her hair.
“There’s no mirror here?” she asked in surprise.
He shrugged with a rather shy grin and offered as an excuse, “What can I say? Cheap campus housing.”
He was almost too gentle as he entered between her thighs, lightly kissing her face, tasting it with his tongue, fascinated with the shape of her cheeks and brow, the curve of her lips. She would have expected him to be more interested in her other parts, the way she’d always heard boys were. Was her face really just that extraordinary now?
She pushed her breasts against his chest, hips grinding back and forth on the sheet. These were the perfunctory motions of sex as she’d seen in movies. But she delighted most in the flush she felt across her cheeks, the burning in her lips, eyelids flickering like candles. All her erogenous zones were in her face, which sometimes was welded to his at the mouth and other moments was scrunched up in painful ecstasy. Tombi finally accepted that this was no dream.
They fell asleep after hours of lovemaking. The sun set. Tombi woke up with the jellied, sliding sensation in her head, the gorgeous new face coming away onto the pillow.
She almost screamed, hands coming up trying to pat the skin back in place. She wept and the loosening eyelids flapped like window shades in the rain. She managed to get out of bed without waking the young man. She hurriedly slipped back into the skirt and halter top. She snatched up the slimy, fallen face, stuffing it into a pocket of the leather coat. Then she fled the apartment with the coat over her head.
There was little blood this time, not like the previous night. But she’d cut herself badly then, on the glass mask. Most of what there was had dripped onto the pillow. She wondered what he would think when he found the mess next to him.
Tombi fled as darkness settled on the city, trying to keep in shadows, going down alleys. She skulked, flinching from people who managed to catch a glimpse of her, spatters of blood between her breasts.
Someone did cry out, “Hey, lady, are you okay?”
She tried to answer, “Just a nosebleed,” but she couldn’t articulate clearly.
She made it home, wrenched open the door, fell inside and collapsed on the floor.
Tombi wondered, what sick joke is this?
««—»»
She’d opened her eyes, glimpsed Vedette walking through the living room in her rose-colored robe. She didn’t see her clearly so Tombi assumed she still had blood in her eyes.
There was a white flash in the hallway. Mother in her long, pale nightgown, headed for the kitchen to make coffee.
One (which one?) of them said, “Tombi? Look, look…”
What? Had they come in late and left her on the floor? Hadn’t seen anything odd about her, lying there without a face?
She blinked, they vanished. She crept to the bathroom mirror. She knew she’d grown new flesh during the night. She’d lain on the floor, awake, eyes burning from dryness in full constant exposure to the air until she thought they would shrivel into raisins. She’d felt an itchy reweaving as of spiders crawling across her, creating a thickening web of wet silk and mucousy sponge. This had gradually stretched fabric over her forehead, stitching new lids into the corners of her eyes, billowing in pulpy balloons for her lips. It stung as it fastened to every hair that grew at the temples. It needled as it sprouted new, downy hairs of its own. She’d been terrified, wanting to touch it, revolted at the idea of touching it. She wanted to look at it. But she’d been cold, shivering with shock, unable to get up from the floor.
But then morning came, and light. She put her head down, pulling all her hair down across her features. Then she faced the mirror and in slow motion peeked through the tendrils. What peeked back was awful.
Would this be the last one? Was Nature trying some new evolution out on her?
The phone rang. Tombi lurched down the hall, grasping for the receiver, holding it upside down at first, she was so confused.
“Hello?”
She listened for a few minutes, chewing on the new, uneven lip as the voice at the other end related the facts. Reine and Vedette were dead, murdered. Their bodies had been found in some vacant, tumbledown house a few blocks from the college. They had been mutilated. Witnesses has seen the lunatic early two nights ago, but only from the back. He’d been running for the park and the concealing shelter of thousands of trees. But the bodies hadn’t been discovered until this morning.
“We’re looking for him. We’ve got a lot of men combing the area. Best description we have of him is that he’s got a tattoo on his hand, a red gargoyle. Can’t be too many of those, I don’t imagine,” said the officer. “You’re family doesn’t know anyone who fits that description, do they?”
“No one like that,” Tombi admitted and hung up.
This was why they hadn’t come home. It was nothing to do with her. It wasn’t because her violence had scared them. It wasn’t because she was ugly.
Except Tombi hadn’t been ugly. She’d only been plain.
Now she was ugly. It was the face of someone who had every right to hate the way they looked.
Killed two nights ago. While Mother and Vedette were lying butchered somewhere, Tombi had been wearing their clothes, their make-up, had been out flirting—whoring. Presently she felt the twisted heaviness of today’s expression in cosmic humor, and it burned with shame.
««—»»
There is nothing we connect ourselves with as regards identity more than how we look. The face is the blueprint of the soul. There is nothing about ourselves we look at more than our faces. It manifests the ir
resistible draw to any reflecting surface. Self-image could be connected with intellect or spiritual development. But it isn’t. It bears all the diamond splinters of ego and the acid-etched, lethal aggression of id.
Tombi prepared to stare into her mirror, family twenty years dead. And she wondered, Will I be able to wear lipstick today or will I make myself sick? Will I be forced to wear a disguise if I have to go out? Can I pass unnoticed in the street or will I have to stay indoors away from the windows and stray confessions of light? Waiting for dusk to arrive, taunting or merciful, when the skin will peel at the brow, bending like space between a gravity of jaws, this day’s facade rejected by the fickle skull until I pull it off to end the pain.
She looked. Amazing how after two decades she still smiled when it was beautiful and winced when it was unspeakable.
This morning she winced.
The two sides weren’t even, the left sliding down, the right tilted up. How was it the bones beneath rearranged each night, thickening or narrowing, brutish or crystal? She didn’t know.
Could have been worse. She’d endured one caricature after another throughout the years. This day’s might have been one of the unfinished ones. She would look into the mirror and have to suppress a shriek which surely would have roused the neighbors into phoning for the police. There would be a hole in the cheek, showing teeth inside. Or a missing eyelid. One time there were lips formed around her eyes and eyelashes thick around the hole of her mouth.
Tombi recalled the one night, maybe fifteen years ago, when the weather was especially hot. She’d had to open the window a crack. She woke up during the early phases of her new face being knitted to feel a fly light on her bare eyeball, squirming as its feet scritched across the pupil, trailing God knew what filth across the cornea. Then the flesh wove rapidly, trapping it before it could escape. Tombi’s hands had clutched at the sheets, a wail of helplessness spiraling out of her unfinished mouth like a half-cranked siren. Then, mercifully, she’d lost consciousness again.
Guises Page 31
