When the paramedics arrived they couldn’t find anything wrong with me and for a while they were paranoid that perhaps I was an amputee who had always been missing his ear and was perhaps reawakening to this fact in a state of confusion.
They questioned me for an hour and when I couldn’t satisfactorily answer them verbally, I showed them numerous selfies and pictures from my phone, showing them dates and times of the pictures. And when finally, my wife called me back, her voice strained and terrified, the paramedics believed me and took me to the hospital.
I saw a new doctor this time, though I could not tell him much apart from the last. He explained that they hadn’t seen anything like this before. They kept me for days running MRIs and CT scans, interrogating me over and over. The curl of the ear in particular was of interest to them. My wife sat by my side the entire time in a daze. When they asked her to recall, to the best of her ability, what the missing ear looked like she shrugged and said, “like the other one.”
When they sent someone to talk to me about prosthetics, I knew the doctors didn’t have anything. The questions stopped and instead only physical therapy remained.
Two weeks later, my wife guided me back to our car. She didn’t talk on the drive home but sobbed silently. I couldn’t hear her because she was on my now deaf side, but I caught a glimpse of her in the mirror. At home we tried to sleep in bed but couldn’t and she took the couch, not wanting to disturb my rest.
I stayed up staring at the ceiling until I felt like I couldn’t take it anymore and went to the bathroom to survey the lumpy mold that used to be my ear. The doctors hadn’t let me look at it at all in the hospital, preferring instead to poke and prod me about the most intimate details of my day to day life. What did I eat and drink? What were my stools like? Had my wife and I engaged in any deviant sexual activities alone or with others?
There in the mirror I could see it. A crumpled mound like a flat raisin attached to the side of my face. I ran my fingers across it and it felt like a fleshy walnut. I couldn’t believe this was happening to me. The hair loss of weeks ago seemed like nothing now.
When I turned my head to see my other ear though, I began to scream. I know because my wife ran into the bathroom and shook me. I couldn’t hear it. My other ear had gone like the first. Dissolved into another membranous scar. I clutched my head and wailed. I could feel my wife’s dull voice throb against my skull as she wrapped her arms around me. I felt her tears run down my neck and spine and we stayed that way until the ambulance arrived. I could only tell by the red lights reflecting throughout the house.
This time the tests took months, maybe longer. It was hard to tell. Functionally I was deaf but the doctors communicated to me the strangeness of my condition and their subsequent inability to diagnose it through a series of documents I was left to read alone. Along with my insurance’s notification of their inability to cover said strange medical condition.
One night I had to be restrained and medicated because I was found bleeding from my skull wandering the hallways asking if I could hear now. If they could hear me. Or if I could hear them. It took three big orderlies to strip the bloody scissors from me and tie me down.
I read a lot and my wife and I wrote letters. In our last exchange she revealed to me why she had to leave. Not because of my condition, which she assured me meant nothing to her. But because the strain and strangeness had grown too much for her to bear. And should the doctors find any explanation or even a semblance of understanding, she would be happy to come and be a part of my care and my life.
I called her several times, knowing I wouldn’t be able to hear her voice. But when I saw that she had answered I begged. Begged with my new voice, which I wasn’t sure I controlled anymore, for her to stay. I never heard her response. But I did see the call disconnect.
After that and the insurance, the hospital bumped me to the curb and the cab dumped me back at home where I saw that all of my wife’s things were gone. The bed was still there. The couch. The linens. The fridge was stocked with food. My hair product. And there was an unopened letter on the kitchen table that I decided I couldn’t read.
The next morning, I needed to see what I had become wasting away in the hospital since the last season, afraid of my limp and weak body which had only subsisted on hospital food, which I hadn’t eaten mostly.
Looking back at me in the mirror was my new. The stranger’s face. Bald, with two grotesque protrusions on the side of my head, and now, a veiny patch of skin where my mouth used to be. I saw my jaw widen inside my face as a tormented wail echoed in my throat and tears welled up in my eyes.
I fell to the floor and crawled to the couch, where I doubled over and tried to scream and scream but instead only succeeded in smashing my head against the cushions over and over until they were soaked and damp from my tears.
The last time I looked, I had one nostril and one eye left. The nostril, I wasn’t so sure of anymore, as I only felt my shallow breath wheeze through a flap of skin where my nose used to be. I used a hand mirror to check that it was still there occasionally, careful not to reveal the whole thing, lest it be stripped from me like everything else. The mirror now showed a craggy surface of broken and twisted skin, mutilated cartilage, and aborted features.
I had purchased IV fluids to sustain me and I spent most days in front of the TV running out the last of my savings on cable until that eventually ended as well. I never heard from my wife again. I never read her letter either. Afraid that after reading her farewell it would become too tempting to look one last time in the mirror and see nothing at all.
PORPHYRIA
By John S. McFarland
Viktor closed the elevator cage door in disgust. His friend, Sandor Bessenyei could not look at him. Sandor was pale and covered with perspiration from the fever he’d had all morning. He collapsed against the side of the cage as it started to make its way slowly up the mine headframe to the surface.
“I am sorry,” Sandor mumbled. “I am too sick. Èn vagyok a beteg. I am too sick to work anymore.” The black spot on the back of Sandor’s hand and the one at the tip of his nose had been painful and distracting all morning. In the last hour, the one on his nose had gone completely numb and he smelled the metallic scent of his own blood when he inhaled. He struggled to redirect his attention toward his friend.
“Én vagyok az egyetlen barátja. I am your only companion here,” Viktor said. “It’s a harsh and unwelcoming world and you have to take whatever comfort you can, but it would seem you could try a little longer. Not everyone has money to live on. Some of us have to work. If you feel better a month from now they won’t hire you back, you know? You quit now and you’re done for in the mines, and no one else will hire Hungarians in this place. When your money runs out you’re finished. In the meanwhile, I’m down in this pit with nobody to talk to.”
“My money will soon be gone,” Sandor said. “Regardless of that, I cannot work anymore. My strength has left me for good, I think.”
Sandor felt ashamed, though he tried to hide a little smile. There was something very predictable, but oddly innocent about Viktor’s resentful nature. Sandor knew, in spite of the visible symptoms of his decline, that Viktor would see his illness as abandonment and a personal inconvenience. Back in Budapest, Viktor had been an academic, a professor of Elizabethan literature at St. Stephen’s until he was terminated for being “impossibly disagreeable.” When the war started in 1914, he feared conscription into the army. He responded to a recruitment advertisement for able-bodied men to come to America and take jobs in the mines of the Osage Lead Company, asking Sandor, his only real friend, to come with him. To the disbelief of his family, Sandor agreed because he knew his friend expected it, depended upon it. His health had never been robust and though he quickly regretted his decision, he swore to God in Viktor’s presence to never go back on his word. Sandor’s wife had died of peritonitis the year before, the very week they had started reading Shakespeare out loud to each other in Eng
lish. His grieving period was a short one, and knowing his friend could not function in the world alone, he sold his rare-books and documents shop and made the long and difficult trip with Viktor to the village of Ste. Odile on the banks of the Mississippi.
Sandor looked at Viktor meekly with red eyes that were, by the minute, growing increasingly sensitive and watery, as the elevator cage climbed up the mineshaft toward the afternoon daylight. Last winter his teeth had begun to discolor and darken, and his gums to recede from them, as the doctor predicted. Doctor Treves had examined Sandor four months ago and told him he had porphyria, a disease of the blood. He told Sandor he knew little of the condition, but recognized that his patient appeared to have both the acute and cutaneous types. Treves had read that victims crave blood to compensate for the deficiency in their own, and he advised Sandor to yield to this craving to keep his vigor and vitality from waning away. Treves said that Sandor would become weak and be unable to tolerate sunlight, that exposure to it would blister, scar and rot his skin, and that soon he may expect to start having hallucinations.
“I am sorry, Viktor . . . my friend,” Sandor said. “I really can’t help it. God is my witness, I am too sick to continue loading ore by hand. Should have quit months ago, and would have if not for . . . I was never really strong enough for this. I can’t score-out in a single shift anymore. Kívánom, hogy soha nem volt íde.”
“Speak English! I, too wish I had never come here,” Viktor nodded. “But here we are. I suppose you are blaming me for this.”
They’d never had the elevator cage to themselves before. This was the first time they had ever left work after the usual shift change time. Viktor had waited for Sandor in the staging area underground as he spoke to the shift boss in his office and collected his final wages. By that time the early shift had finished and gone home for the day and the second shift had taken over, blasting tunnel to the west and southwest. With a war raging in Europe, the demand for lead had never been higher.
At the surface Viktor opened the cage door and the two men stepped out into the sunlight. Sandor squinted and shaded his eyes with his hand. He twitched in pain a few times, as he had done more and more recently, in a manner that seemed to irritate Viktor.
Sandor was careful not to pity himself in his situation. He did pity his friend though. Viktor had no love for himself and seemed to be naively angry at the rest of humanity because of it. Sandor knew how completely Viktor had come to depend upon him, even if Viktor himself didn’t know. Very soon after his wife’s death, Sandor became Viktor’s only unassailable human contact in the world, and he accepted this as a responsibility he must uphold.
The volume Sandor had prized above all others in his bookshop in Budapest, was a late 16th century copy of Tyndale’s translation of the Bible. The first time Sandor opened the book, his eye was drawn to Cain’s disavowal in Genesis: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Sandor knew the phrase first appeared in Tyndale’s translation, and when he opened the book, coincidentally, a second and third time to the same passage, and then dreamt about it that night, he was certain he was receiving a directive for his life and thinking. He spoke with Father Bartok at St Emeric’s, who confirmed that Sandor had been given signs. That was why he had agreed to come to America and to take difficult and unpleasant work.
It worried Sandor that he could not make his companion understand how sick he was, and that he must inevitably leave this friendless man alone in a foreign place which, after two years, he had made no effort to adjust to. To press these facts upon Viktor would anger and upset him, and Sandor could not decide if he should insist, to his own satisfaction, that his friend understood what his doctors had foreseen or not continue to bring it up.
It was Saturday afternoon, the end of the work week. The two men walked east into town toward Tranquille House on Rouen Street, where they were boarders. From Sunday night until Saturday afternoon they shared a room there. After their shift on Saturday they gathered their things and boarded the train for a seventeen-mile trip west to LaMotte where Viktor had a room. Sandor’s tiny house was a mile farther, in the woods near Gibson cemetery.
The train west was waiting at the station, and Sandor was glad he had not made them miss it. His legs had begun to cramp as Viktor hurried him along toward the platform, and he had to walk even more slowly than usual.
The men seated themselves on a bench at the front of the coach. It hurt Sandor’s legs to sit, and he was exhausted. As the train lurched away from the station, Sandor looked at the black spot on the back of his left hand, and noticed how much darker in general his hands had become from his disease, in recent weeks. And since mid-winter, fine hair had begun to grow in his palms. He knew if he were still home in Hungary, the superstitious country people he would see at the vegetable markets on Saturdays, would look at him with fear and suspicion.
Sandor thought of the appearance he must present to the world, and to Viktor, especially. His elongated, dark teeth, his purple gums, his gray skin streaked with darkened areas, his red eyes and the blisters and blackened spots on his arms and forehead, did not in themselves convince Viktor that his companion had not made every effort to keep him company down in the mineshafts and drift tunnels. Sandor smiled at the selfishness, and innocence of that.
Viktor shifted uncomfortably on the bench. Sandor noticed that his friend was looking at the black spot on his hand, and that he glanced briefly at his disfigured face. He could not tell if the expression on Viktor’s face was one of disgust or pity.
“It’s an unwelcoming world,” Viktor mumbled. “I suppose we have to take comfort wherever we can.”
“I don’t see the world as bad as all that,” Sandor smiled.
There were seven buildings on the muddy main street of LaMotte and only five of them were still in use. As the men approached Viktor’s boarding house, a dilapidated brick building with a collapsing porch roof, Mrs. Hobbs, the landlady came out the front screen door.
“There you are, Mr. Suba.” Mrs. Hobbs was a woman of forty who looked twenty years older. Four of her front teeth were missing. She had not seen Sandor for many months, and seemed a little shocked as she approached them. “I reckon you heard the news?”
“I heard no news, Mrs. Hobbs,” Viktor said.
“Well, then, I’ll tell you. America’s a-getting’ into the war. Your European war. Now we been dragged into it.”
Viktor and Sandor looked at each other. Sandor thought it best to hide their elation from Mrs. Hobbs.
“I see,” Viktor said. “I know it isn’t good news to you, Mrs. Hobbs, but it will certainly end the war faster.”
“What do we care how fast a war in Europe ends? It ain’t our war!”
“Certainly,” Sandor said. “We are sorry for that. Politics is an unhappy business.”
“That ain’t the half of it!” Mrs. Hobbs seemed determined to stoke her own rage. “It’s gonna be a conscription. A draft. And you fellas, you foreigners, ain’t a-gonna be in it. Our American boys hafta go fight your damned war while you Hunkies get to stay here a-workin’ just as safe and sound as you please! I know you two come here to get out of it, now we gotta do your fightin’ for you!”
“This great country loves the people of Europe . . .” Sandor began. His voice was weak.
“Well, it got nothin’ to do with love,” Mrs. Hobbs interrupted. “I don’t love you people and I don’t know nobody who does.”
“I know it’s just politics and national interests,” Viktor said. He looked disapprovingly at Sandor. He knew Mrs. Hobbs well enough to know she resented anyone telling her how she felt or should feel about anything. “I don’t know why my friend said that!”
Sandor smiled. “Love isn’t something you know about, Viktor! We are upsetting you, Mrs. Hobbs. I will leave you both here. I am exhausted. I hope your son is improved.”
Mrs. Hobbs’ nine-year-old son, Vernon, had been sick for several weeks, coughing and pale, as had several other children at his school.
&nbs
p; “You never mind about Vernon!” Mrs. Hobbs snapped. “I ain’t the only one around here thinks you know more about these sick kids than any of us!” She turned suddenly and walked back to her house. Sandor watched her walk away, dumbfounded.
“What did she mean by that?” Sandor asked, but Viktor had turned away from him and was following Mrs. Hobbs back into the boarding house.
Sandor always enjoyed the walk from the train depot out to his property west of LaMotte on Saturday afternoons after work. The road out of the small town was a dirt path maintained by the county out into the oak woods, where it ended at an old logging road which wound past Sandor’s small frame house. The house bordered the old Gibson Cemetery, and had been built for the caretaker just before the beginning of the Civil War. The cemetery had been abandoned for at least fifty years, and now, like Sandor’s clapboard home, was nearly lost in the hardwood forest.
Halfway to the cemetery the road became almost completely overgrown with weeds and saplings. Just ahead of him, nearly hidden by a cluster of mayapple, Sandor saw a gray mound with streaks of red across it. A slight scent of decay blew past his face in a breeze and he thought for a moment he might vomit. He saw that the mound was the shredded body of an opossum, killed by a dog or coyote. The blood on the carcass was mostly dried, but some of it, deep within the wounds, glistened in the afternoon sun. He realized he was staring, transfixed, at the bloody flesh, and that he was imagining the salty taste of it. Abruptly he became aware that he wasn’t imagining the blood taste. His gums had started bleeding again and his mouth was alarmingly full. Painfully, but almost involuntarily, he swallowed.
As Sandor had grown sicker, his appetite had changed and become limited. As he unlocked the peeling front door of his small house, he thought he might make himself a stuffed pepper or cabbage roll for a light dinner. He still had some Csabai sausage in his pantry, though what he really wanted, as he realized more and more lately, and as his response to the opossum carcass reminded him, was raw, bloody meat.
Year's Best Body Horror 2017 Anthology Page 27
