by Alan Ryker
I nodded vigorously. I hated build up.
He pointed the mirror at my face, and my insides dropped out. The staples had all been removed, but I could still see the lines between grafts. My features were barely there. It was hard to tell what was a lump of scar tissue and what was my nose or my ear. They’d covered my right eye socket completely, paved it over like a pothole. Because the eye lid had burned away, there was no way to keep a false eye in place, and so no point in leaving it open.
The skin was raw and red and bulging. I looked like an enormous newborn rodent.
People say it feels like wearing a mask. It did, to some extent. Especially because my face was so puffy. Especially because I had one recognizable feature sunken deeply into the mess: my left eye. I watched my eye, and tried to guess what I was thinking. Because I’d gone numb. Disassociated.
I looked away, indicating I was done.
Jake said, “You’re going to be getting a lot of reconstructive surgery, and we’re going to make you a mask to help mold the scar tissue, to squeeze it down.”
I closed my eye. I didn’t want him there anymore.
It wasn’t so bad, though. What I didn’t want from Jake was a bunch of palliatives and pep talk. I wanted silence. My insides had grown so quiet in that second when I saw my ruined face, and I needed to know why. I needed to listen closely.
I found resignation. I’d been preparing myself for a life lost, but I’d held out some hope, as if I might be a phoenix. But no, my face was the final nail in the coffin of my old life, of my old future, if that makes sense.
I wouldn’t be a high-powered businessman. I wouldn’t one day be the CFO of Sanders & Stevens. No company would be sending me around the globe to meet with other executives. I couldn’t be the face of any company other than maybe a slasher movie studio. I could be the face of Freddy or Jason.
My dreams of a family evaporated along with my dreams of a productive career. Madison wouldn’t be coming back. I couldn’t blame her. Looking at me was literally enough to induce vomiting. She’d done the right thing, leaving when she did.
They made my mask as quickly as they could. Being half black, I had a predisposition to keloid scarring, and they wanted to get pressure on the tissue as soon as possible. So they made a mold of my face and then a silicon mask within a week.
I loved my mask. It wasn’t just that it covered my hideousness. I knew that in appearance, the blank mask was nearly as disturbing as my face. What I loved about it was that people stopped searching me for expression, stopped trying to figure out what I was thinking and feeling. I didn’t want the roiling, tormented flesh of my face to be some sort of external manifestation of my internal environment. Behind the expressionless mask I could be calm. I could settle into the nothingness of the future I saw stretching before me.
Even after I let go of hope, I found an empty spot left within me. In fact, my true, quiet sorrow was easier to hear without the noise.
I missed Madison.
We’d never be together, but we could be friends. I missed talking to her, hearing about her day, listening to her thoughts, always coming so fast, always so passionate, a tidal wave she was barely able to keep the crest of.
I texted my parents, telling them not to visit that day. I couldn’t handle them looking at me. Come evening, though, when I’d had some time to process the concrete truth of my present and future, I texted Madison.
What are you doing?
Drinking.
By yourself?
Yes. In my room.
Madison didn’t drink much, and never alone, always socially.
Why?
I like the warm fuzzies. And then sleep.
I miss you. We should talk more.
Text?
Yes, text.
I miss you, too.
It’s good you can’t see me. They took off the bandages. My face is raw meat.
I’m so sorry.
It’s okay. I almost said, It’s not your fault, but couldn’t quite bring myself to. I wasn’t sure if I meant it. It depends on how you define fault. Is that fabled butterfly at fault for starting the hurricane? If so, then Madison was at fault, and so was I, and so was the couple who’d stayed late, and so were Madison’s parents, for having that party, and so were all the people who’d built the fryer, and then maybe their parents for giving birth to them, and on and on and on and it didn’t matter.
But for some stupid reason, I couldn’t quite say it.
5
I wouldn’t be considered out of critical condition until my wounds all closed. A month and a half in they were applying the last grafts, and things were looking good. What no one could see is that beneath a graft on my right arm was a pocket of air. Whether due to a lack of contact, a bit of remaining eschar, or just bad luck, the skin hadn’t healed to my flesh, instead sitting over top of it, creating the perfect place for infection to breed. Because it hid beneath a graft, it wasn’t cleaned and wasn’t noticed. Because it was the site of a third degree burn where I had no nerve endings, I didn’t even feel the inflammation. I just started feeling worse and worse. The problem was, I was the boy who’d cried wolf. I’d managed to be the least stoic patient they’d ever had. And then there’s the fact that it’s hard to detect a fever when my temperature never dropped out of the low hundreds due to my hypermetabolism.
My body was once again conspiring against me.
I told them I didn’t feel good, but it’s hard to blame them for not believing me. By the time they understood what was going on, my brain was frying inside my skull, and I abandoned the outside world once again, this time without the need for narcotic assistance.
I slipped into that hole, and emerged again from it, time having passed, but backward, back past the first coma to when the world had burned. I’d escaped it once, but not again.
The drugs might have turned things strange, but also slow and dopey. The fever that raged inside of me manifested in the opposite way.
The world burned.
I went to the window and looked outside. From the fourth floor I had a good view of the city. The streets were an inferno. Torrents of fire ripped through them like blood through veins.
Outside my door, people screamed. I stepped out and found the nurses and doctors writhing in flame.
Jake lay on the ground, his skin turning black, splitting to reveal white, pillowy fat that began to melt and sizzle.
“Cody! Cody please!”
For a moment I saw him leaning over me, heard a high-pitched whine, and then I was back in the burning world.
I left the nurses and doctors behind. There was nothing I could do for them. I stepped out into the street, into the rushing flame. It hugged me close, once again grabbing me, slipping beneath my clothing.
Around me, people shrieked, fell to ashes, were hit by the next gust of inferno and blasted into a scattering cloud of dust and sparking cinders.
Me, though, the flame had already had me once. It sizzled away my shell quickly enough. The skin that had been so carefully grafted over me peeled up like strips of bacon, crisped, blackened, fell away. As people burned to nothing all around me, I stood in the center of it all, an island in the raging torrent.
My body was hard, crystalline blackness, split into fissures that glowed red. The fire had consumed me once, and now I only burned from the inside. Only I burned me.
As I walked, the city slid past me until I found myself in Pajino’s.
In the dining room, customers sat in various stages of immolation. Some were already human-shaped piles of ash. Others smoldered. One man gripped the table and screamed that same high-pitched whine I’d heard before. The flames couldn’t touch me, but the whine staggered me, made my vision pulse black, fading, fading, until with a jolt the world again burst into existence. Blow-torch flame sprayed from his mouth, silencing him, blasting away his lips, his cheeks, burning through his skull in several places until his silently screaming mouth opened wider and wider and his head fell backw
ards, leaving his lower jaw still attached to his neck.
I continued, found Janet behind the bar, twisting back and forth on the ground. Until that moment, I’d felt nothing, but the horror of the situation hit me like the torrent of flame couldn’t, dropped me to my knees beside her. I held her as she turned to ash. For a moment she saw me before her eyes turned cloudy like frying egg white.
She fell apart in my arms.
That was it. I needed out, and there was only one way. I ran into the kitchen, past the cooks and dishwashers who clutched at my slick black body as I passed, their fingers snapping off as they refused to let go and I refused to stop.
The fryer was a geyser, but I gripped the edges and leaned into the flame, followed it back to its source, where it had begun.
I flipped the switch, and everything went dark.
When I opened my eyes, the world still burned. No, the fire was contained. I poked at a burning log in the fireplace, turned and found my family sitting around a Christmas tree. My parents, Madison, and her parents all sat smiling on the couches, sipping coffee and watching our beautiful children opening their presents.
I’d done it. I’d escaped into the future that should have been mine.
Remembering what would come next, I dug my fingers into the moment. I wouldn’t let it slide away. I knew that as I went further from the reality I’d escaped, it would pull harder at me.
I wouldn’t go back.
I poked the fire one last time, impotent there in its brick prison, then joined Madison on the couch. She handed me my cup of coffee and we leaned into each other.
The draw of the other reality—the one where I forgot to flip that tiny switch—grew and grew. I gritted my teeth. Beads of sweat covered my forehead.
“Cody, are you alright?” my mother asked.
“Yeah, great.”
But I felt the breaking point approaching, I felt something give, and then—nothing. I had clamped my eyes shut, but when I opened them, I was still in the reality I’d dug into, clamped onto like a bulldog’s jaws, unable to let go if I’d wanted to.
The tension lessened and I laughed. But then I heard that whining, and felt a growing pressure. From out of the fireplace the flames roared, filling the room with fire.
I leapt from the couch, grabbed my little girl, turned my back to the flame. From there, I watched Madison, my parents, her parents all stiffen, then scream as one as they lit. I watched them burn.
The entire house went up. The windows blew out. Once again my false skin peeled away, leaving only my used-up, fissure-cracked core. I felt no discomfort, but in my arms, my little girl writhed and screamed and turned to ash.
I’d been strong enough to hold on, but we were meant to be together. Not me and my family. Me and the fire. And when the burning world couldn’t draw me back, it followed me. The gap between us had shortened. I hadn’t budged, but something had to give.
Carrying my child, stepping over the corpses of my incinerated family, I walked outside.
The blue morning sky had turned black and red. Now this world burned. That’s when I knew for certain that wherever I went, the flames would follow.
6
The return was quicker that time, as I had no narcotic stupor to keep me numb to the sensations of my daily routines. Once the infection had been beaten and the fever let me go, my daily wrap changes, debridements and therapy kept me locked solidly in the real world, though my confidence in reality was shrinking. I felt like a polar bear on ice flow drifting south into warmer waters.
When are you going to see me again? I’d sent a variation on this text a dozen times and hadn’t received a response, but this time I followed it with. I almost died again. Bad infection. My heart stopped twice.
Oh my God. You’re okay now?
Jim dandy. Except the antibiotics killed one of my kidneys. How are you?
Drunk.
It’s barely noon.
Haven’t you heard of a liquid lunch?
Now that you’re responding, when will you see me?
I don’t know. I came to the hospital two weeks ago. Talked to the nurses.
Why didn’t you come here?
Feel too bad. Every day it’s harder.
I need you.
You don’t need me. Nobody needs me.
I need you.
* * *
Madison and I met in the food court of the student union. It’s funny, the little things that determine your life. I usually didn’t have breaks on campus if I could help it. I just didn’t have the time to waste. I’d eat lunch in the fifteen minutes between classes. But one of the classes I’d taken was with my least favorite professor. And then I couldn’t get the books, and it’d be at least three weeks before they’d come in, which meant I’d have to try to borrow. And then I showed up to class the first day and found my grad school nemesis Mark Stoddard smiling at me from the front row as I stepped into the room, and I just turned and walked back out. Since our first class together, we’d spent all of our time trying to squash each other’s answers. I wasn’t going to deal with it, not with that professor, not without the book. I went and dropped the class right then.
So I had ended up with an empty hour and a half there on campus right over lunch time, and started going to the student union every day, where they had a food court and comfortable chairs to study in. And that’s where I saw Madison for the first time.
It was spring semester. She had on the classic rich-girl winter outfit: sweater, skirt, thick white tights. Her huge blue eyes peered out at me from beneath blunt bangs. Then she looked quickly back down at her basket of fries and the book she had spread on the table, pinned open with a phone.
I watched her for a bit longer. She was very pretty, like a little doll with her heart-shaped face and her small stature. But she was of a different breed. I could tell just from looking at her. She didn’t know anything about striving for something better or hustling every opportunity. Most of my classmates were well off. They’d have an easier time because of the paths their parents had forged, but they’d still have to work. They were using their advantages to the fullest, but this girl was of the sort whose status wasn’t used to give an advantage in the struggle, but which alleviated struggle altogether. I guess I’m class conscious, because I knew before I even knew.
Looking back down at my own book, I ignored her as best I could, though I could feel her eyes through those heavy bangs.
Two days later, she was seated at the same table when I sat down. I put my back to her, not wanting to be distracted. An empty hour and a half was bad enough. I could at least get some reading done. So why didn’t I choose a seat completely out of sight?
I was engrossed in the intricacies of corporate structure when a small voice said, “I love your hair.”
My hair sits in big, loose curls—what I call a halfro—and I was using a Goody band to wrangle it into a halfro puff and out of my face. Women constantly complimented my hair. I said, “You can touch it if you want,” before I even saw who it was.
That might sound strange, but my hair draws women’s hands. Especially in the more casual college atmosphere, I was constantly being petted. It might not be dignified, but I can’t say I minded.
When I looked around, my eyes fell into hers. It was the rich girl, looking at me from beneath those heavy bangs like a guard peering through a slot in the fortress door. She smiled and reached forward, and I tilted my head to her and she patted my puff.
“Oh my God, it’s so soft. I’d kill for hair like that.”
I laughed a bit. I always laughed when these white girls who obsessed over the position of every strand of their hair said that to me, while women with hair like mine fried their curls out attempting to get “good” hair.
“It’s kind of a pain in the ass,” I said. “If I wear it short I’ve got rogue clumps trying to curl all over, and if I wear it long it looks too casual. I don’t know what I’m going to do with it when I graduate.”
“It
looks nice long. Don’t cut it.”
“I can’t walk around in a suit and my hair in an elastic band.”
“It’s beautiful, and I think you would look very handsome in a suit with your hair just as it is.”
“Are you going to hire me?”
“Maybe I will.”
I gestured to the other chair at the table, and she sat down. “And what do you study that’s going to enable you to take me on as an employee?” I asked, having no idea what kind of business connections she had, that her father was the CFO of one of the largest engineering firms in the world.
“Philosophy,” she said, her eyes challenging me to say something. “With a special focus in ethics.”
“So you’re going to need a CPA for your…I can’t even come up with a fake philosophy business.”
“You practical people, always so proud of your practicality.”
I scoffed. “Come on, this country worships artists and actors.”
She scoffed right back. “This country judges you by one thing above all: the size of your bank account. If you didn’t think that were true, you wouldn’t be reading—Capital Structure and Corporate Financing Decisions. Oh my God, it’s worse than I thought.”
“I admit it’s not everyone’s thing.” I felt a bit indignant, but decided to keep any ‘little rich girl’ comments to myself. “So what are you reading?”
She went back to her table and gathered her things, then showed me Hegelian Dialectic. I fell back in my seat and started snoring.
“So trying to better yourself is boring?”
I snored even louder.
“Okay, well I’ll leave you to your nap.”
When her chair scraped, I sat quickly back up. “Alright, alright. I’m sorry. I don’t even know what a Hegelian dialectic is.”
She started explaining it to me, and it was the perfect topic of conversation because not only didn’t I have any interest, but even if I had I wouldn’t have understood a thing given the specialized vocabulary she was using that made business-speak sound like plain English. So I could just watch her talk.
