Issue 3:1 | Fiction | Ace Boggess

Scars

Ace Boggess

College felt like being chained to a cave wall away from Man.  The first semester was an invitation to isolation.  I lacked the skills to merge albino skin into the flushed face of a new society.  Still, my beautiful ambivalence, my openness to everything, got through it.  To stand outside the group, one learns to observe, capture each expression, pick up every whisper from across a crowded room. It's Prometheus listening for the flap of a familiar wing, the squawk of an old friend come to pay his daily respects. For my cave, I hid in a dorm room. 

My tormentors, my closest friends, were brooding monsters: El Toros, Mad Dogs and Old Crows.  I swam in every sweet, fermenting sea I could. No one carded the poor albino boy. Maybe my nature made me look older, or else clerks at liquor stores and convenience marts figured I of all people deserved to drown my sorrows.

Alone and often drunk, I would've been a topic of discussion even without my white hair and retinal flashes from violet eyes hidden under prescription sunglasses. How often did I hear my name on a young girl's lips followed by giggles or whispers of I don't believe it?  Rumors blossomed like dull flowers only to wilt into lies or inconsistencies. I became a thief, a reclusive genius, a medical experiment, a spy hired by the university, a rapist, a prince, a monk, and the world's greatest lover, all merged together. I was all of them and none of them, as confused in the eyes of my fellow students as a forgotten country on an old map.

These misconceptions didn't open me up to ridicule like other misfits living in the dorms. No one sprayed glue in the lock of my door or phoned me at all hours of the night to chant threats or obscenities. I suffered none of the torments an outcast's plagued by when the group turns its back. There were only whispers. It gave me a certain air of mysticism. Every time I walked down a hallway, the tension followed me like stray glances, and more than once I heard a young woman gasp as she came face to face with me while turning a corner or climbing a flight of stairs. Sometimes the sounds were fearful, but often they came across like they were filled with awe. 

As the rumors spread, so did my adventures.  Instead of locking myself in my room and crying out of loneliness and contempt, I reveled in the myth I'd become. I accepted the role and played my part as best I could, offering a cynical smile at just the right moment or slipping into a conversation uninvited long enough to answer some challenging question, then to disappear through a doorway before anyone could reply.  They wanted a man of subtle perversion and legerdemain, and I refused to disappoint.  Eventually, the rumors helped me fit in, melt into this college subculture that had shown so little interest in me. It happened in small bursts as people started to disbelieve. One by one, the young men and women in my dorm took the giant leap of faith to talk to me, always working the conversation around to whatever questions lingered on their minds.  "Did you really kill someone?" I was asked. Or, "Is it true what they say about you making porno movies when you were sixteen?"

By the start of the second semester, the mysterious they no longer found me amusing. I opened up, revealing myself in historical accuracy. Soon, the others knew more about me than they knew about themselves, though I helped them discover those hidden truths as well. My peculiar insights and willingness to explore even the darkest chasms of possibility made me a favorite player in the societal game. A party almost never took place without me, and meditative questions outside my presence went unanswered. I no longer stood at the peripherals, becoming the center of attention, the focus for stares. It's then that my history in verse took shape as I composed it line by line, detailing each experience with the love and care of intimacy:

And here, my sensitive scar
                    leans in toward my lips
                    at last to be devoured. 
                    The taste of her is sour,
                    a fallen pear dying
                    from its first bruise,
                    first descent into shadows
                    of extended roots and weeds.
                    And what have I to offer
                    in death but life, extracting seeds
                    from wounded flesh, the vengeance
                    of nature's cyclical whip
                    beating back the hour by degrees . . .


"I have secrets, too," she said, whispering it as an invitation.  I turned to look behind me in the stairwell. That's when I first saw the girl I would call My sensitive scar. Or, not the first time.  I'd caught an occasional glimpse of her wraithlike form between classes or late at night, always circling the back halls as if attempting to avoid human contact. But this was the first time I really saw her, the first time I caught her full view and apprehended the beauty of her frail, anemic face, frayed ends of her dirty blonde hair, skeletal arms with knobby elbows and hands as tiny as an infant's, green paint covering fingernails chewed down to meat and bloody scabs. She wore a gray shirt and full-length skirt, her clothes as colorless and ethereal as the sky on a dreary day.  I could tell she wanted to be invisible. 

Why then did she reveal herself to me, my own angel of melancholy? Did she expect to find a kinship with me, as if we were born together under the same rock? I didn't know, but I wouldn't turn my back on her. "Secrets?" I said, as detached as a leaf from the flicker of stars. "What kind of secrets?"

"You want to know?" she said.

I nodded.

"No, really. You want to know? If I'm bothering you. . . ."

"Come," I said, and I could feel my beautiful ambivalence ease its warmth into my lips and corners of my eyes, radiating outward in fingers of heat that caressed her skin and subdued her.

She said nothing.  As first flickers of purple evolved into full blush along her pallid cheeks, she nodded and took a step toward me to show her desire to follow.

I led her around the building, through the lobby, across the lounge, and down the main halls. I tested her willingness to give herself to me by taking her on a public tour of the dormitory. At times I thought jeering faces of students so surprised to see us together might damage her confidence, but I was mistaken. Her footsteps never ceased behind me, and every door I passed through remained open for that extra second as she crossed each threshold. So, finally, I returned to the place I'd just left. Inviting her into my room rather than heading for class as I should've done, I bid her welcome with a tranquil but devilish grin. 

After she entered, I closed the door behind me and turned away for the briefest pause. That moment was more than enough. Before I could offer her a drink or so much as point her toward a seat, she started removing her clothes. Not the least unnerved by this, I watched in silence as she lifted her shirt over her head and deposited it ever so gently on my bed. Even before she reached for the clasp of her generic cotton brassiere, I understood this drama's purpose. It wasn't sexuality, but disclosure. Her body served as a frame for the strokes of some spiteful artist's brush. White and purple lines traced obscure constellations down her back and shoulders, her breasts, abdomen, thighs, most colorless and sinister like the photonegative of a tiger's stripes.

I had to touch her, to lay hands on her and trace the hieroglyphics with an archaeologist's eye and a lover's mesmerized tenderness. Slowly, effortlessly, I walked toward her, closing the distance in baby steps while stretching out my hands.

She completed a couple turnsÑarms raised above her head, defeated smile of a victim never straying from her lips. She didn't resist as I brushed my fingers over her back, her shoulders, her neck. Turning, she used her body to induce my hands to a breastÑthe area around that one nipple, her right, the only feature not tracked by another's vengeance. "Thank you," she sighed, as I stroked the soft erectile tissue, feeling it tighten under my touch.

"For what?" I said.

"For silence.  Most people gasp when they see my scars. They either turn away in disgust or try to make me feel better with false sympathy. Oh, you poor girl.  I'm so sorry.  Tell me all about it. Thank you for not being like that, for not patronizing me, not acting like you care."

"I do care," I corrected her.

"That's not the same thing."

"No, perhaps not."

"You didn't ask what happened.  You were so overcome with compassion."

"No," I said.  "It was desire."

This time, her eyes took on the look she'd seen so many times in the gaze of others. "How can you say that?" she asked, a hint of scorn hiding in her tone.

"Because it's true."

She denied me at first. "Don't lie. I thought you were different."

"You were right," I told her. "It's my nature. That's the way I am. I accept things as they are and revel in their unique beauty, so I'm enthralled by how beautiful you are."

The glow of embarrassment developed again on her cheeks and dripped down until her entire body seemed to blush. The scars, too, appeared to brighten, haloed.

"Relax," I said, guiding her to the bed. It was a small mattress, and her naked form covered much of it as she stretched out atop of the covers. I sat lotus-like on the floor, continuing to stare. We said nothing for several minutes as each electric impulse talked for us. 

When the weight of silence grew too heavy, she spoke. She told me her story without ever having been asked. "My father drank a lot," she said, singing a familiar refrain I'd heard so many times. Hers was a history bearing up many more intricate levels of despair. "He used to beat my mother with the leg from an old chair. I was just a kid then, maybe five or six. Anyway, one day she got up the nerve to fight back. Not against him, though. She fought against the club. She threw it in the fire and watched it burn to ashes and black metal from hidden nails. It was the bravest thing she ever did. But Dad was furious. He was so angry when he found out that he took off his belt and beat her within an inch of her life."

I listened patiently, saying nothing and nodding on occasion when she looked toward me for encouragement. This only happened once or twice, always at the most self-pitying moments, those powerful points where she expected me to react. Every now and then, I'd stretch out a hand and trace the lines on her skin as if erasing them gently with my fingers. But I kept quiet, preferring to listen rather than talk. That must have moved her. She kept going. She told me how her mother killed herself some time after that intense beating, how her father's drinking grew steadily worse and took up more of his time, how she soon fell into the center of the old man's drunken wrath. "I used to wish for a chair leg," she said at one point, fighting back tears and a crackle in her panicked voice. "Blunt objects usually only bruise. The belt's kiss was poisonous. Occasionally it drew blood." She pointed to memorable scars, sighing as I traced each with my middle finger. Then she showed me a pair of other scars, newer and applied by her own trembling hands. "I tried to kill myself, like my mother. I didn't know what I was doing then, so I failed." I could tell by the fluctuation in her tone that the matter had yet to be resolved.

Once more, I said nothing.

She noticed my deference and loved me for it. "Thank you," she said a second time, acknowledging that she understood.  I nodded, and the two of us returned to silence and touch.

We made love for hours as the sun descended outside my window. It was clear this was her first time. I continued with slowness, valuing her pleasure so much more than mine. Her initial grimace turned into a shadowy smile and a stream of muffled sighs contained by the biting of her lip. At one point, she reached out to me, studying the structure of my face with her hands. When she reached my glasses, she removed them and deposited them carefully on the floor beside the bed. The sun was still too bright through the window, and I had to close my eyes. "Why do you hide your eyes? They're so pristine, not at all like my scars."

"They hurt.  I'm sensitive to light."

"I guess even perfect beauty has its price," she said.

"Perhaps," I agreed ambivalently.  "The same with me as you."

Later, as we lay beside each other in darkness, our naked bodies pressed tightly together to fit on the dorm's standard twin bed, she finally spoke about that most pressing question on her mind. "I can trust you," she said. "You aren't critical of me for things I'm thinking."

"Like I told you, I accept every woman according to her own design."

"I know.  But tell me, what do you think about suicide?" The inflection in her voice made it clear my answer would deal with her specific situation, but that at the same time, she wanted a general response rather than a personal declaration directed to her.

Kissing her atop the tangled cluster of hair draping over her forehead, I took in a deep breath and then began. "I don't believe there's any such thing."

She jerked.

"We have the power to direct and motivate life, but death's beyond our grasp. It's a natural function independent of us. When it's time to die and only then do we succumb. You can wish for it, pray for it, and struggle vainly to achieve it, but you can't will it. It comes when it pleases and not before. That's why an old man who's smoked three packs of Marlboros a day all his life, who's drinks tequila by the liter and eats fatty foods can live to be a hundred and twenty-seven but a child of eight can die of cancer without a chance even to sin and repent. That's why a trained assassin's bullet sometimes strikes the wrong target and a powerful tornado hits the most well-protected fortress almost head-on. That's why I didn't die when I stepped in front of a moving car once when I was a child and you didn't when you added fresh scars to your wrists."

She kept silent for a long time. "But people do kill themselves," she said at last.  "I read about it in the papers all the time. Hemingway did it. And Kurt Cobain. And my mother."

"Coincidence," I suggested, ignoring the sadness in her last three words.

"I don't understand. How can it be coincidence? They set out to kill themselves, they planned it, and they did it."

"It's just coincidence. If they succeeded, it was their time. For them, suicide was a means, and it was as much happenstance as a car wreck, a heart attack, or a falling tree.  If they hadn't done it, they would've died anyway. Perhaps they would've been struck by lightning or killed in a gas-line explosion or, who knows, maybe hit by a falling star. It was time."

"But there's hope," she countered. "If people can kill themselves, if they can predict their own times as you're telling me, then so can I."

"Can you?" I said. "I don't think so."

"Of course I can. Why couldn't I?"

"Consider your history," I advised, as calmly yet fervently as if I were Death, choosing all the times. "You tried and it didn't work, just as so many people have tried and failed. For those who guess wrong it can make things even worse."

"Not if they do it correctly."

"That's where you're mistaken. Think about it. A man puts a gun in his mouth in just the right spot to administer a fatal wound. He blows away half his face and a third of his brain so the medics have to scrape him off the walls. But he lives. For another twenty years, he hangs around, horribly disfigured and only half cognizant of what's going on around him, fully dependent upon others for his care."

"That doesn't happen all the time," she argued.

"But it does happen," I said. "Okay.  How about this? A young woman hangs herself. Dangles there for days. When she's found, she's blue and stinks of fear and defecation. But she's still alive with a cryptic scar around her throat to remind her that she's human and unable to control death. Likewise, a guy tries to burn himself up. Sets his house on fire, takes sleeping pills, then drifts off, waiting for flames to come and kiss him good night. When he wakes up, he's in the hospital, so heavily medicated he can't feel where all his skin's been erased."

"Those are rare events."

"Then consider your own situation. What in this world makes you so sad that you long for the approach of death?"

She said nothing for a moment, then reached down to trace a scar across her chest. "These," she admitted. "I hate them. They remind me of the past. I hate the past."

"I thought so. The scars wound you inside as much as out. That's why you tried.  And what happened? You added new scars to your collection, but you're no less alive than you were a moment before you made the cut." To emphasize the point, I lifted her left hand and rubbed the scar on her wrist in a tender circle, hearing her coo a thank you, at once for both the explanation and the touch.