Peel Back the Skin

by Anthony Rivera

  But Cathy had said, “I don’t care how much he’s changed. He’s still Robin underneath. Can’t you understand that? His soul is still Robin. Nurse Wing said the first thing he asked was, ‘Where am I?’ and the second thing was, ‘Where is Cathy?’”

  As she went to the front door and opened it, Holly followed her. “You know how much I care about you, Cathy. You really need to think about what you could be getting yourself into. You’re only twenty-two, for Christ’s sake. You’re clever, you’re pretty. You have so much to look forward to. Don’t saddle yourself with a cripple for the rest of your life.”

  “Holly! How can you use a word like that? I love him!”

  “You love the memory of him, sweetheart. The way he used to be. But he’ll never be like that again. And being all burned up like that, it will have changed his personality, too. There’s no way he’s ever going to be the same. How could he be? Would you be, if you hadn’t gotten out of that car and had burned up with him?”

  Cathy sat in the driveway in her car, with the engine running, and the windshield defroster switched on to full blast to melt the thin layer of pearly frost that had formed overnight. She knew how much of a challenge it would be to take care of Robin. But he was still alive, and now he was awake, and he had asked about her. That was all she could possibly ask for.

  * * *

  Nurse Wing was waiting for her in the smart, open-plan reception area of the hospital. She was tall and Swedish-looking, with blonde hair scraped back into a short pony-tail and pale blue eyes. As soon as Cathy came through the doors, she walked across and took hold of both of her hands.

  “Oh! You’re so cold! But I hope this news will warm you up a little. Doctor Fremont says that he cannot believe that Robin is making such a strong recovery. He is still very sick, of course, but we have taken him off the danger list.”

  “Is he awake?”

  Nurse Wing smiled and nodded and led her by the arm along the corridor. “I told him that you were coming and he said that he couldn’t wait to see you. When I told him how long he had been unconscious, and yet you had come every single day to sit by his bedside, he couldn’t believe it. I think if he still had any tear-ducts, he would have cried.”

  They reached the end of the corridor and Nurse Wing opened the door labelled STAFF ONLY. Inside, there was a small changing room, and just as she had done every day when she visited Robin, Cathy took off her coat and put on a green surgical gown and cap, and a mask. She took off her boots, too, and replaced them with pale-green theatre clogs.

  When they were ready, they crossed the corridor to a room labelled MR ROBIN STARLING. STERILE AREA. NO UNAUTHORIZED ADMITTANCE.

  The room was dimly lit, and the venetian blinds were drawn, although Cathy could still see snow clustering on the windowsill outside. Robin’s bed was in the center of the far wall, two drip stands and a monitor softly beeping beside him. Robin was propped up by two large pillows. His face was covered with a transparent TFO mask, which allowed his doctors to see how the healing of his face was progressing. Cathy had already been told that even after reconstructive surgery, he would have to wear the mask for twenty hours a day for at least the next two years.

  Both of his arms and his chest were still wrapped in white, mummy-like dressings.

  Cathy approached the side of his bed, and he turned his head towards her. All she could see underneath the plastic was a knotted mass of reddened welts, but his eyes were open and glistening, and she could see that through the holes in the mask he was staring at her.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” he whispered. His voice hadn’t changed.

  She pulled up a blue plastic chair and sat down close to him. “How can you say that? I love you. I’ve been coming every single day.”

  “Megan told me. I don’t know why you bothered. Look at me. And the same could have happened to you.”

  “Robin, it’s going to take time. I know that. Years, even. But I’ve talked to your doctors, and they’ll be able to give you a whole new face.”

  Robin’s eyes rolled uncontrollably. “They’ve told me that, too. But what kind of a face? I don’t have a nose anymore. My ears are gone. I’ve seen people whose faces have been burned as badly as mine. It doesn’t matter how good the surgeons are, they all look the same. Like monsters.”

  Cathy laid her hand on his bandaged arm, and he grunted in bitter amusement. “You won’t even be able to hold my hand, do you know that? I’ve lost all of my fingers. Oh, I think my left thumb managed to survive. I won’t be much use to you in bed, either. Not unless you like your wieners extra well-done.”

  Cathy shook her head, and she couldn’t stop her eyes from filling with tears. “I don’t care, Robin. I love you. I’m not going to walk away from you, ever.”

  Robin started to cough, harsh and phlegmy, and Nurse Wing came forward with a plastic bottle of water so that he could sip some through a straw. “Thanks, Megan,” he said when he could speak again. He turned his gleaming, masked face back towards Cathy and added, “Megan…she’s been sent directly from heaven. She treats me like I look normal.”

  “You do look normal, Robin, for a burn victim,” said Megan. “And from now on, you can only begin to look better.”

  “Hunh,” said Robin, and then lapsed into silence.

  Cathy didn’t really know what to say to him. Should she tell him about everything she had been doing since the accident? How she had moved from her parents’ house in New Milford to stay with Holly in Fairfield so that she could be closer to Bridgeport? Somehow it seemed rather petty and self-congratulatory to tell him about that. I’m such a martyr. You look hideous, but I haven’t abandoned you.

  After a long silence, Robin lifted up both of his bandaged arms like a frustrated teddy bear and then let them drop back onto the bedcover. “Cathy, the first thing I thought about when I woke up was you. To tell you the truth, sweetheart, I haven’t been able to think about anything else.”

  Cathy smiled and said, “I don’t care how long it takes, Robin. I’ll always be here for you.”

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking about,” Robin said, and coughing again, but when Nurse Wing came forward with the water bottle, he waved her away. “You’re such a pretty girl, Cathy. I can’t expect you to devote the rest of your life to a man who looks like me. I’m going to be a freak, no matter how good they try to patch me up. What do you think people are going to say when you walk into a room with me? They’re going to pity you, that’s what. They’re going to whisper about you behind your back, and they’re going to feel sorry for you. You don’t deserve that.”

  “Robin, my feelings for you, they haven’t changed at all. If anything, they’ve grown stronger.”

  “Well I’m afraid that’s just too bad, Cathy, because I’m not going to let you waste yourself on me, not the way I am now. God made you beautiful, and you need a handsome prince in your life, not a burned-up mess like me.”

  “Robin—“ Cathy began, but he started coughing again, and his coughing was so hard and so harsh that it sounded as if he were ripping his esophagus into shreds.

  Nurse Wing touched Cathy’s shoulder. “I’m afraid I think you should leave him for now, Cathy. He’s very distressed,” she said.

  Robin went on coughing and coughing, gasping for breath at the end of each spasm, and so Cathy pushed back her chair and stood up.

  “Please,” Nurse Wing said, and so she left the room, feeling both guilty and abandoned.

  Does Robin really not want me anymore, or is he just saying that to spare my feelings? How can he possibly understand how I feel? I don’t understand it myself. I should walk out of this hospital now and drive home to New Milford and forget I ever knew this man. But for some reason I can’t. He touched the very core of me, not just because he was so good-looking, but because he was always prepared to challenge everything that was ordinary and boring and conventional. He set me free, and I can’t just turn my back on him, no matter what he looks like now.

&n
bsp; She sat down in the reception area and, after a few minutes, Nurse Wing came out to join her.

  “Robin’s reaction is only to be expected,” she said, taking hold of Cathy’s hands. “Most of our patients with severe facial disfigurement feel the same way. We call it disturbed body image. They have a preoccupation with the change in their appearance and the loss of their normal looks. They also develop a strong fear of other people’s reactions and of being socially rejected.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help him cope with it?” Cathy asked.

  Nurse Wing shrugged. “You can continue to tell him that you still love him. But that’s only if he allows you to go on visiting him. He just told me that he doesn’t want to see you again. I’m sorry, I really am, but he feels so strongly that you’re a beautiful young woman, and that you should find somebody else.”

  “I’ll come back tomorrow anyway. Maybe he will have changed his mind,” Cathy said.

  “Why don’t you give it three or four days? Even a week. Doctor Fremont and Doctor Mazdani will be talking to him tomorrow about facial reconstruction, which may give him more hope of returning to a normal life. Besides, if you leave him for a while, he may start to realize that he misses you.”

  * * *

  When she turned into the driveway of Holly’s house, Cathy saw that Holly’s car was missing, leaving crisscross tire tracks in the snow. When she went inside, she found that Holly had left her a note on the kitchen table.

  Cathy,

  Mom not well. Gone to Darien for the weekend. Probably back Tues or Weds.

  XX

  She went to the kitchen window and looked out. Although the backyard was still blanketed in snow, and the sky was still slate-grey, the snow had stopped falling and the wind had dropped. The world was silent and very cold, as colorless and motionless as a black-and-white photograph.

  So what do I do now? Do I forget Robin? Or is there a way to make him think differently about me? His one reason for telling me that our relationship is over is my looks. I know I’m pretty, but supposing I wasn’t? Then he wouldn’t have any reason to end our relationship. Suppose I was just as monstrous as him.

  She opened the cutlery drawer. Inside was a clutter of corkscrews, slotted spoons, potato peelers and spatulas. There were also several kitchen knives, including a very sharp knife with a six-inch blade which Holly used for cutting up chickens and trimming steaks.

  If I can still recognize Robin underneath his disfigurement, then he’ll be able to recognize me, no matter what I look like. That morning before the accident, he said he loved me. He told me that he had never felt the same way about any other girl.

  She took out the six-inch knife and cautiously ran her fingertip along the edge. It cut into her skin, although not deeply enough to draw blood. It was so sharp that she didn’t even feel it.

  She took the knife into the bathroom and stood in front of the sink, staring at herself in the mirror. There would be blood. There would probably be a lot of blood, so she pulled one of the bath towels off the heated rail and folded it over the rim of the bath, well within reach. Then she took off her pink sweater and removed her bra so that she was bare-breasted.

  Her face in the mirror was pretty, but it was totally expressionless. There was no appeal in her eyes for her to change her mind, to forget Robin and find somebody else. She took hold of her left ear and pulled it outwards, and then she positioned the edge of the knife in between the top of her ear and the side of her head.

  The knife hadn’t hurt her when she had cut her finger and it didn’t hurt her now. She drew it downwards and forwards at a slight angle, and in one stroke she sliced her ear off completely. Blood immediately flooded down the side of her neck, and she dropped the ear into the sink so that she could reach for the bath towel and press it against the side of her head. She felt hardly any pain at all, more of a chill, although the blood was warm as it ran over her collarbone and dripped off her breast.

  Surprisingly, the flow of blood stopped quickly. Cautiously, she lifted away the sodden bath towel and turned her head to one side so that she could examine what she had done. Her ear was nothing more now than a bloody hole, but it still looked neater than the shrivelled-up bacon rind of Robin’s ears. She looked down at her severed ear lying in the sink. It could have been some kind of mollusk, and she found it hard to believe that a few moments ago it had actually been part of her.

  She placed the sticky-handled knife in her other hand and grabbed her right ear. She was quicker and more decisive this time because she knew that it wasn’t going to hurt very much, and she sliced it off without any hesitation. Again, she let it drop into the sink, and again she pressed the blood-soaked towel to the side of her head. She looked at herself defiantly in the mirror, with runnels of blood all down her chest, and she thought, yes, I can do this, I can change myself so much that Robin will love me for what I am.

  Her hands were trembling, and she realized that her system was beginning to show signs of shock, but she was determined to continue. Now she leaned forward closer to the mirror, and lifted up the tip of her nose between finger and thumb. Look at you, little piglet, she thought. Then she placed the knife underneath her nostrils like a shining steel mustache.

  She cut upward into the septum, but this was much harder and much more painful than cutting off her ears. She couldn’t stop herself from letting out a strangled moan as she was forced to cut upward again and again, until at last she reached the bone. Blood poured over her upper lip into her mouth and dripped off her chin.

  Gagging and shaking, she sliced the knife across the bridge of her nose so that she could twist the nub of flesh away from her face. She staggered backwards, dropping the knife with a clatter onto the tiled floor, and when she reached out to stop herself from falling over, her hand left a crescent-shaped smear of blood across the wall.

  Cathy stood in the middle of the bathroom, giddy with shock. It took her almost a minute before she was able to approach the sink again and look into the mirror. Where her nose had been there was now a gory cavern, and she could see right into the dark recesses of her sinuses. As she breathed, she made a thick bubbling sound, and she could feel the blood pouring down the back of her throat, which made her retch.

  She had begun her self-mutilation, but she knew that what she had done was not enough. Robin was disfigured much worse than she was—well beyond any chance of ever having his original good looks restored. He was suffering third-degree burns over most of the upper half of his body, and as he had told her, he wouldn’t be of much use to her in bed, so his genitals must have been shrivelled up, too.

  Cathy bent down, blood still spraying out of her sinuses with every breath, and she picked up the knife. She felt numb and detached, as if she were having an out-of-body experience, or watching some other young woman in a horror movie. Her hair was sticking up in a tangled fright wig, and her chest was varnished red with gradually-drying blood.

  She took hold of her left nipple and stretched it outwards in the same way that she had stretched her ear. She hesitated for a moment while she swallowed a mixture of blood and vomit, and then she sliced upwards and cut her nipple clean off. She dropped it into the sink along with her ears and the lumpy remains of her nose.

  Next, she cut off her right nipple, and she stood there with both breasts bleeding, as if she were ready to wet-nurse an infant vampire.

  She let the knife fall into the bath and then she shuffled back into the kitchen, leaving a trail of bloody footprints behind her. Robin had suffered burns to turn him into a monster, so she had to suffer burns too. She went to the cupboard where Holly kept her blender and her weighing scales, along with the chef’s blowtorch that she used for melting the sugar on top of crème brûlée.

  Cathy took the blowtorch down from the shelf and slowly made her way out of the kitchen and along the corridor to her bedroom. She sat down on the bed, and as she did so, she could see that it was snowing again. She was finding it very difficult to breathe n
ow, and she kept making a terrible snorting sound.

  It seemed to take her hours to wrench down her jeans and push them off her feet. Her head was throbbing and her breasts hurt so much that she couldn’t stop the tears from running down her cheeks. Robin would have to love her after she had suffered so much. When he saw what she had done to keep him, he would have no choice.

  She dragged down her thong, left it dangling around one ankle. Then she picked up the blowtorch, thumbed off the safety-catch, and pressed the button to light it. She sat there for a long time, staring at the pointed blue flame while the snow continued to fall outside. She wondered if she secretly wanted the blowtorch’s butane gas to run out so that she wouldn’t have to do what she intended to do next.

  This will ruin me forever, she thought. But then I’m ruined already. I’m a monster and there’s no going back.

  She leaned forward and played the flame of the blowtorch up the inside of her left calf. The skin reddened and blistered instantly, and she gave a honking scream of agony through her noseless face. But somehow, the sheer intensity of the pain made her even more determined to do it again, and now she directed the flame at her knee and then her inner thigh. As she burned away the outer layers of skin, and then her nerve endings, she felt as if she understood completely what Robin must have experienced when he was burning in the driver’s seat of his Mustang—unbearable pain, but then a strange absence of any sensation at all. She continued to direct the flame at her inner thigh and felt nothing.

  Cathy lay back on her pillows where her Raggedy Ann doll was lying with its ginger hair and its fixed, silly smile. She opened her legs wide and turned the blowtorch onto her vulva, so that it looked for a moment as if she were being penetrated by a penis made of blue fire. She smelled burning hair and burning flesh and her lips curled up like living worms thrown onto a hotplate.