-September 15th-
The doctor sat beside his bed and smiled at Charlie. His smile was tight and thin and his hands shook slightly. Charlie knew that this man knew more about Death than probably anyone else in the hospital. He knew that the doctor was like a photographer on battlefields strewn with corpses and last words and struggling breaths snapping footage for the public back home. He was immersed in it. His hands smelled like it. And no matter how many times he scrubbed before performing surgery, no amount of water and soap could take away the blood that Death left on him after shaking his hand and collecting his patients.
“So how are we doing today, Charlie?” the doctor asked.
“Better than her,” Charlie said pointing to the middle-aged woman in the bed next to him. Her breathing whistled and she gurgled up blood and spit every ten minutes or so like plugged sewer systems. The doctor's smile slid off of his face and he looked down at his lap.
“Charlie?”
“Yeah?”
“Charlie, you were in a pretty big accident the other day.”
“Yeah. Bad guys with bombs tried to burn me up.”
“Right. And they almost succeeded.”
Charlie was silent.
The woman whistled like distant subway trains.
“See, Charlie, the bad guys dropped a bomb on Chicago which killed a lot of people and destroyed some of the surrounding area. You weren't more than ten miles away and the bomb still managed to hurt you pretty bad.”
“And Mom.”
The doctor looked back down at the floor. “The bomb disfigured your face and some of your body, bud. It burnt you pretty bad. We've tried to fix you up as best as we can, but you – you're never gonna look like you did before.”
“Like a haircut,” Charlie said.
The doctor looked annoyed. “No, no. See...”
He paused.
“Why don't you take a look at your face for yourself,” he said and handed Charlie a portable mirror.
***
At first, Charlie was confused.
Looking into the mirror and seeing what his face had become was like staring into a pool of stagnant, crystalline water and seeing the face of some rotting body the Mafia had dumped there a couple weeks ago where you expect to see your reflection. He had nothing to relate the image to. Nothing real to connect it to.
And then, he was terrified.
What was this face paint, this hideous Halloween mask, doing on his face?
What was this broken porcelain doll doing looking at him behind a layer of glass?
It was like someone had taken as straw, punctured his skin with it and had proceeded to blow milk bubbles under his cheeks and chin and forehead.
***
Charlie started crying.
He scared himself.
***
The doctor was saying:
Massive third degree burns.
Permanent scarring.
Surgery out of the question.
But all of those words were meaningless to Charlie. They washed over him like a bucket of water dumped over the head of a fainted woman slumped in the arms of her husband.
What had stolen his face?
***
Beside him, the middle-aged woman whistled lovely spring-time tunes.
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-August 27th-
Outside the window, cars and buses and trucks streaked passed the taxi cab like mice running cardboard mazes and Charlie found himself becoming dizzy watching them after a while. The driver of the cab had a cigar jammed into his mouth like a pipe bomb stuffed into a mail box, wore a kippah, and the words spilling from his mouth as he talked to Mother and Father waged war against the cigar smoke for airspace.
He was saying, “ – I've been around the block a couple times and I've seen a lotta stuff when it comes to bomb scares and terrorists and all this Russian-Iranian axis crap. And you wanna know what I got to say to it? It's a load of garbage. See, the schmuck sitting up in the white house right now has got everyone right where he wants us. In fear for our lives. If we're paranoid of people across the puddle shootin' missiles at us while our backs are turned, he's got the upper hand. He's got the senate. He's got the power – ”
The words the cabbie spoke were harsh and smudged black like fresh newsprint. But Charlie had no use for them.
They couldn't sing.
They couldn't dance.
The words were fat and immobile.
Mother had her arm draped over his shoulders and was nodding at whatever the cab driver was saying and Father was watching the traffic and checking his watch. Charlie knew that this was one of Father's business trips and that he would be gone in Chicago for five or six days. He wondered what his father did during these business trips and imagined they were much like sitting in church and listening to pastors tossing bible verses and damnation into the crowd like wedding guests throwing handfuls of rice at the bride and the bridegroom.
Father checked his watch again.
Charlie stared out the window again and tried to count the vehicles passing by, but found that all the world outside the cab was smeared up, like bloody hand prints on bathroom stalls.
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“Charlie!”
He heard the voice, but ignored it.
Around him, wheat grass nodded their heads and divulged gossip about the sky. His breathing was slow and heavy and he stood there with his eyes closed and his arms limp by his sides. The sun was a polished peso lying on heaven's sidewalk and the wind was blow drying the field, like hair salon stylists with greedy scissors and frothy conditioner.
The peace Charlie felt was something that originated from his core.
It radiated through his veins and to his fingers and toes and up through his lungs.
“Charlie!”
What?
His eyelids were as fat and heavy as slashed car tires, but Charlie made his best effort to open them and look for whoever was calling him.
At first the light was far too intense for him to focus on anything and he had to squint to see a figure in the distance waving at him and laughing and calling his name over and over. Her hair was tangled. It was barbed wire that trapped the sun in it like dying World War One soldiers .
His eyes focused.
It was his mother.
Her laugh and her presence infected his peace and he felt the overwhelming impulse to hold her forever. Here she was, resurrected! She had been too strong for Death. She was too good for Death. A body bag blanketed by snowfalls of dirt couldn't keep Mother from Charlie, it couldn't keep them apart. He saw her beckon to him but before he could take a step toward her, she was standing right behind him with her arms slung over his shoulders.
She whispered in his ear, “Come on, hon. Turn around and show me that beautiful smile.”
Something told him he shouldn't, but her voice was so persuasive and he only wanted to make her happier so he faced her and smiled as best he could. His mother's face looked so young. So eternal. There were no more lines drawn on her face by age and cigarette smoke and her skin was almost biophosphorescent with beauty. When she saw his face, however, her smile shattered like the glass windows of downtown shops broken by looters.
Her eyes grew distant.
She straightened up and her fingers slid off of his shoulders.
“You're not Charlie.”
“Mom?”
“Have you seen a little boy about your height running around here? He's got this beauty of a smile.”
“Mom, it's me.”
“No?”
Frantic now, “Mom, mom! It's me, Charlie!”
He tugged on her hand but it was limp, as if it belonged to an autistic child with empty eyes and rows and rows of perfectly organized building blocks set out before it. She was looking over his head into the field.
“He was supposed to be here...”
“Mom!” Charlie screamed. He fell to his knees and held onto her leg, but she just shook him off vacantly and began backing away.
“Well. Keep and eye out for him will you, kid?”
“It's me! It's me! It's me!” Tears and snot ran down Charlie's face and he sobbed on the ground as he watched his mother running through the field calling,
“Charlie!”
Clouds were pulled over the face of the sky like ski masks hiding the identity of men with shotguns yelling for convenience store owners to empty their cash register. All the wheat grass was dying. It rotted before Charlie like the mouths of grinning homeless men.
The sun was chilled.
Charlie screamed and cried and he tried to run in the direction his mother had gone, but the wind turned into God's breath – battery acid and burning hair – and paralyzed him as the clouds played catch with those screams.
In the distance his mother spun like a lonely girl waltzing with an invisible partner.
“Charlie!”
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Charlie.
Sucking air and drowning in sweat, he awoke from his dream to the sound of a voice calling his name mingled with the night sounds of the hospital stumbling through his room like Jews in a Nazi death march. His ears were ringing. His heart was knocking clandestine password rhythms on his ribcage.
The image of his mother was stamped on his eyelids, so that when he blinked he saw her blank and empty eyes.
As the world spun, Charlie wiped sweat from his forehead and laid back down on his pillow and listened to the middle-aged woman whistle for him. He knew why his mother hadn't recognized him. He knew that he wasn't the same Charlie anymore. Not to her. Not to anybody.
Because his smile was charred.
And his face was all scrunched up, like used whorehouse bedsheets.
Charlie turned over and hid his face in the sweaty pillow and cried.
But he was sure to cry softly, so that rest of the hospital couldn't hear, especially Death while he made rounds. Because tonight, he was angry at Death.
He was angry at him for not lifting Charlie's soul out of his body as well when he stopped by the shelter for his mother's.
Charlie wished that he could keep his face hidden in his pillow forever. He wished that he could hide from the world and descend into the bowels of the earth or evaporate into the air. He wished that every mirror in the world would shatter or that everyone's eyes would suddenly cease to see.
God had taken an pencil eraser to his face, like people sitting on subways with scrubbing out crossword puzzle mistakes, and he hadn't finished the job.
Charlie cried for a long time.
He fell asleep again breathing into his pillow.
