The death of my father. Roland Funk, the accountant. His face smooth and calm, the complete negation of everything he had been in life. My mother, emotionless, stares into the coffin, holds my hand tightly as a warning to keep my tears in check. It was a church, after all. All her friends are here, it wouldn’t do to cause a scene.
Adam Garwood. First real kiss. Grade eleven, backstage during a high school production of The Pirates of Penzance, he the Frederic, I the Major-General. His breath, stale with cigarette smoke, harsh, the most marvelous air I had ever tasted. His hands paw at my ruffled shirt, ripping off buttons as I gasp around his tongue, my moustache falling loose from the friction.
My mother, Eileen, always religious, now fundamentally insane without the calming counterweight of Roland. Condemns me for becoming an actor. Asks me if I had prayed to God about my choice; she was worried deviant lifestyle choices were imminent. My response, “Yes mother,” an agreement brought on by a lifetime’s conditioning to obey at the cost of my happiness. My partners all introduced as “friends in the play,” no possibility of truth within the walls of her house. Relief floods me as I watch her emotional character succumb to early senility, slowly draining her personality of everything her.
The whole of me, all at once.
Every film I ever watched.
Every book ever read.
Every shirt/pant combo worn.
Every dream, every daydream, every masturbatory fantasy brought to conclusion.
The combination to my seventh grade locker, twenty-four left, three right, eighteen left.
That missing peacoat I turned the house upside-down looking for, only twelve feet from where I sat, in the closet behind an old parka I never used anymore.
My demise. Cold and alone in a bus restroom. My head wedged against the door. The light dimming. My absolute last thought, repeating the phone number scrawled on the wall over and over as if it was of some importance. The smell of lawn after a heavy frost — then nothing but eternity.
No person should have to go through one’s own death twice. It’s once too often, and doubly unpleasant.
All my moments, everything me, my me-ness bludgeoned deep into the tender cushioning of my brain, the only fully functioning organ I had left now imploding from psychic pressure. I was an empty bucket suddenly filled, wet and heavy. A dried-up peapod husk mysteriously called back into service, brimming with vegetable matter and nonplussed at the odd turn of events.
“It’s Rowan, babe,” the voice from the speaker continued. Rowan. My agent, the one who set me up for that exercise in humiliation known as my last audition. She sounded distant, as if the phone was farther away than the three feet to the wall. I moved my head slightly, and realized I was now deaf on my right side. The eardrum had blown out under the physical power of the memory deluge.
“Listen,” she continued, so far away. I rocked my head over onto its right side, bringing the operational ear closer. “I know you’re down, and that’s partially my fault. Clearly, reality is not your forte. But lest we forget, I told you not to be yourself.
“But listen up. I got you in to see Fern Davidson, she’s casting for Platinum Dunes, so this is big, honey. They’re doing a remake, something horror-ey, and they like your looks. She said to me, and I am not making this up, that you, my darling, have a look. A look, Shelley. That’s as good as saying you’re in. They want an unknown, someone fresh to play the older brother of a serial killer who haunts co-eds or something in a small town, I know, what bullshit, right? But this, I kid you not, has major money behind it, and they are, brace yourself, actually thinking the word franchise. A tentpole film with an option for three more films at least if the first one makes money, which it will, because these things always do. And I know what you’re thinking, Shelley, you’re thinking I am an artist. You know that, I know that, but no one else knows, and this is a real foot in the door opportunity for you.
“Call me when you get this, don’t worry about the time.”
A clicking noise, the phone hanging up.
Under any other circumstance, I would have been spurting joy in all directions. I had been toiling in the trenches for the better part of fifteen years; I was a prostitute in every way except the most obvious (and sometimes even that), selling my body to any bidder desperate enough to consider me. Visions of glory on the Broadway stage and rave reviews in the New York Times rapidly rotted to sludge under a crush of bills, debt, and a mother in the final stages of dementia. The highlight of my professional acting career thus far was a four-line role as Confused Car Buyer #1 in a national Saturn commercial, an utter rending of the only withering moral fiber I had left in my body, which nevertheless earned me enough to set Eileen up in a second-tier care facility.
As it was, it was all I could do to muster a silent retch of exuberance. All my crap about being an artist vanished in a puff of ego. Every sacrifice I had made suddenly meant something.
I jerked myself up, my spine crackling loudly. I was in no shape for acting. I had been up all night, for one thing. I was dead on my feet. Somehow in my excitement I had managed to pave over that pressing issue. In times of distress and uncertainty, go with what you know, and what I knew was how to prepare for an audition. Sure, yes, I was dead, but I was an actor. Dying was easy, people did it every day. Comedy, now, that was hard.
It was high time I had a better examination of myself.
My joints popped as I forced myself back into a sitting position. I pushed against the table to right myself and bumbled toward the washroom, home of a mirror, water, and clean bandages.
The reflection was not kind.
First off, my face was blue. Not with cold, not with death, but with bus-grade chemical disinfectant. I soaped up a loofa and gently scrubbed until my natural hues were all that remained. Not that my efforts made me much more presentable.
My face exuded the unhealthy pallor of a drowning victim after a lengthy stay in a lake. The flesh covering my face seemed overly loose, leathery. More so than usual. My face had always looked a little slack and un-elastic, prone to wrinkles, with a perpetual resemblance to Droopy Dog that was only going to get worse as I aged. I was not ugly, exactly, but neither was I a Brad Pitt–esque example of human perfection. I had played up my features as a plus to casting agents, trying to gain attention through the less-showy character roles that could benefit from a uniquely memorable visage. Worked for Giamatti and Buscemi, anyway. But now, the face that was going to launch a career of “best friend” and “business partner” roles — maybe even going so far as to afford me acting employment as a violence-prone henchman or a wacky next-door neighbor in a syndicated dramedy — that face was magnified and extended well past its best-before date.
This face was . . . the face was dead. The lips hung loose in a slack howl of apathy. The bags under my eyes had gained weight, pulling the skin down and showing a tad more of my eyeballs than I was comfortable with. The complexion was a mixture of pink and gray, battling for supremacy, and gray was winning. What I looked like was what I was, a recently reanimated corpse, shambling and lurching about.
Fucking depressing.
Ignore it, I told myself. You’re a professional. You once auditioned for a Renée Zellweger flick while suffering from a flu virus, high on Nyquil and Advil. You didn’t get the part, but the point is, you showed up, gave it your all, and so what that you threw up on the stand-in, at least you tried. Focus on the positive. You can do that, you can do this. I smiled, forcing my cheek muscles to contract, trying to inject some cheeriness to the expression. My lips stretched up and away, revealing yellowing teeth in a bed of gums already withdrawing upward. I bared my chompers in a garish clown approximation of a grin, and only succeeded in scaring myself.
So. Smiling, out. I ran through simple facial exercises from my acting classes — frowning, lifting the eyebrows, flaring the nostrils, squinting the eyes, forming the mouth in
to a wide O, fluttering the lips (exercises once done by rote, not at all easy now) — but there was a fractional slowness to the response. The muscles and tendons were half a step behind the impulse, giving my face the sleep-stupid expression of a gasoline huffer. The effect was of a rather clever monkey trying to imitate a human. A rather clever, rather deceased monkey. I pushed at the skin with my fingers to try and massage some fluidity back into my face, but it was like shaping old clay. My fingers were also quite white, I noticed, unhealthily so. This is what happens when blood stops pumping.
Leaving the face for later, I shed my coat. My forearms were striped with red, the results of the quick skirmish with the attendant. His aim had been better than I had realized. I wet a towel in the sink and dabbed at the wounds. Scales of skin fell away to the bathmat beneath my feet. His makeshift weapon had sliced deeply, but no blood issued forth, only the grayish-red of muscle. The lacerations were tacky and clung to the towel, tearing threads of terry cloth away as I continued to wipe. I guessed whatever blood I had left in my body had clotted and was drying up in the veins. I dug through my medicine cabinet and came up with a roll of medical tape I sometimes used to support my right knee (hurt in a racquetball accident and kind of iffy since). I tore the tape with my teeth into two lengthy pieces and wrapped each arm tightly. It wasn’t a great job, but a loose-fitting shirt would cover any bumps.
That done, I set to peeling the bandages away from my chest. The flesh was still partially iced to the fabric, and frozen kernels of skin shucked away as I pulled. Freed, the epidermal shutters swung open and a chuck of veiny beef popped out and plummeted into the bathroom sink, followed by a rope of sausage, the whole mess slapping the basin with the sound of raw chicken being thrown against a wall.
I had forgotten about the previous placement of my innards. Funny how you can completely ignore the little things.
Like intestinal geography.
Scooping the guts from the sink and letting them dangle to the floor, I stared at the heart, cradled in gore-spattered porcelain, forgotten, sad. The metaphysical ramifications of looking at my own heart from the outside battled with an overwhelming sense of incompleteness. Whatever else was happening to me, the fact of my heart somehow not being a necessary part of my existence anymore was obscene. This unhappy hunk of gristle and tripe was supposed to be the meat of my matter, the fundamental engine of my human machine. The mythological bassinet of my soul.
A sound caught my attention, a lapping. Looking down, I saw Sofa taking exploratory licks of my bowels. I pushed her away with my foot and shut the door.
I turned on the taps and bathed my heart until the meat was lukewarm, gently wiping off tendrils of pus with a hand towel. I stuck a finger in an aorta and slowly spun it on its axis under the running water, lettering moisture into every space, filling its ventricles. I lovingly squeezed the water out, now discolored and chunked with rubbish. I tamped the organ dry and stored it in the medicine cabinet for later.
Looking back to the mirror, I took an unobstructed look at the monstrosity I clearly was.
It was a dog’s breakfast. The lungs bumped slackly against the walls of the ribs. My various organs looked to be intact, but then again, how could I tell? Was I even aware of the proper feng shui of human innards? I would have to find an anatomy textbook to make sure (I had a Grade 12 biology text in a box in the basement, I remembered), or download autopsy images online for comparison’s sake. Regardless, everything save the heart and that one errant kidney appeared to be more or less where it should be. My stomach, without the cushioning of intestinal tracts, swayed at the end of my esophagus. I bounced on my toes, feeling the weight pull at the back of my throat.
My stomach let forth a gurgle. It was a tiny squeak; in other circumstances it would never have been heard at all. But I had never heard it complain in the open air, and far preferred the muffled murmur of a bellybowl sheathed in dampening layers of muscle. It was a gruesome burble, evil, raw, festering, the digestive howls of Satan’s tract.
There was a contraction and ripples of movement passed down into the upper intestines, now hanging far past my knees. Whatever I had eaten pre-death was still in there and wanted escape.
Would I shit all this out? Did I shit at all? Was that me from now on, the incredible non-excreting boy?
All at once, I was tired of the freak show. I didn’t know what would happen next, but gawking was not constructive time management. I once more bundled the muck back inside me, ignoring the blankets of gore that abandoned their posts and took up residence with the mildew of the bathroom carpet. The most pressing issue was the hollow; I had no intention of proceeding through the rest of my life as the visible man, and I had an idea of how to fix it, if only temporarily.
I wrapped my heart in a thick hand towel, grabbed several more from the rack, and walked out to the kitchen. Rummaging through my tools drawer, I withdrew the heavy-duty stapler I used for minor household repairs. I retrieved an old wooden cutting board from my cabinet, and then moseyed downstairs to get my dad’s old nail gun, the one I used when a big staple wasn’t enough.
Using the detachable spout above the kitchen sink, I gave my interior a hot spraying, sponging up the water and slop with the towels. Once I had the area relatively clean and dry — you might be surprised how presentable you can gussy up your chest cavity when the blood stops pumping — I placed my heart in approximately its original place, using a decorative mirror from the hallway to help guide my hands. I had to use one hand to push my lungs apart and away. I lined up the aortic halves of the heart with the remnants that protruded from my walls. This was not strictly necessary, as I functioned perfectly fine without it — I had only an elementary school conception of the proper placement of the various tubes and pulpy conduits anyway — but I felt it might help me from a psychological perspective. Pinching the aortas and veins together with my fingers, I squirmed my stapler into place and fixed the whole mass together. The effect was Frankensteinian, but I felt better knowing it was safe and secure within me.
For an instant I considered the possibility of infection, then silently mouthed a laugh. There’s absurd, and then there’s really absurd.
Only later on did I consider that what I was in the process of doing should have really hurt. I should have been screaming to wake the dead; in the annals of pain, self-inflicted heart surgery should have been right near the top of the list, alongside labor pains and shooting Mountain Dew out the nostrils. It wasn’t as if I lacked for tactile sensation, but my brain compartmentalized the torture, kept it behind a curtain. It was as if I was watching a drive-in movie from outside the fence, listening to a buzzy soundtrack on a half-assed radio while a projector lit the action onto a distant screen.
The next part was trickier. I climbed up onto my kitchen table and lay on my back, my flaps loose and open. I had likely lost some essential packaging en route, and could use a thorough stuffing before the final step. I wadded up the few clean towels I had left and crammed them into the nooks and crannies of my physique. I took care not to pack too tight, but with the loss of the ribs, the next stage was going to need a little support.
I carefully placed the cutting board atop the towels, fitting it up between the remnants of ribcage until it was good and snug. Aiming at an angle, holding the mirror in my left hand and the gun in my right, I shot a nail into the board, piercing the wood and embedding itself deep into the marrow and bone of my sheared ribs. I put two more nails in, then switched hands to repeat the process on the other side. This was not as successful, my aim too shallow; the first nail glanced off the surface of the board and shot into my bicep. Cursing (as much as a mute can curse, which is quite a bit), I adjusted the angle and set the next two nails in solid. My makeshift ribcage was not pretty, but neither was the real thing, and as I lacked any skill in sewing, carpentry was my only option. I pulled the one-inch spike from my arm and tossed it away.
I folded the doo
rs of flesh over the board, stretching them tight to minimize gaps, and nailed my chest together. I made sure not to use too many nails, to reduce the chance of tearing. I rolled onto my side and carefully left the tabletop, acclimatizing to the new weight. The construction appeared firm. Checking out my handiwork in the mirror, I chose to ignore the haphazard pattern of the nails — my high school carpentry teacher would have freaked at the slipshod work on display — and congratulated myself on a job, well, done. The edges more or less met at the middle, and the skin appeared amenable to the metal pins perforating it. My nipples were stretched and lop-sided, but I could live with that. There were a few bubbles of air, but a quick banging with the stapler solved that problem. At least now I could wear a shirt and not have to worry about constant bandage readjustment and repair.
So, physically returned to near normality.
Next, the voice.
The role likely had a fair amount of dialogue, unless the character was a deaf-mute — how great would that be? Either way, I’d have to make at least some noise during the process, if only to meet the casting agents. I would have to learn to speak.
With the musculature so ravaged, getting any noise out at all would be a miracle. I focused inwardly on my lungs and diaphragm, picturing them working together, the bags opening and closing in a continual and unbroken rhythm. Inhale now. I forced the walls of the lungs to expand, and felt a thin stream of air pass my tongue and enter the throat. Now, exhale. I tightened the muscles, squeezing the sacs empty. Exhaling was definitely easier. I practiced this for a few minutes, just moving the air in and out, trying to make it appear natural. The breaths shuttled back and forth, up and down my throat, hissing forth into the air with a sound like a decaying pump organ — moldy, dank with disease, leprous.
Emboldened, I tried to make a sound. I didn’t work on clear words, just tried to get some noise to exit my mouth.
Anything.
Any noise at all.
Husk Page 6
