When the morning nurse came in to check on Charlie, she found him wearing his pillow case over his head so that he looked like a Ku Klux Klan wizard burning the homes of black families. He refused to remove it.
***
“Come on, Charlie. Just take it off,” the doctor said with the nurse standing by his side. “You can't go around wearing a pillow case for the rest of your life. Or the rest of the morning, for that matter. Take it off and eat some breakfast, alright?”
Charlie was silent.
The doctor said, “If you don't take it off, Charlie, we will.”
Charlie was unmoving and voiceless, like a religious idol in front of pagan congregations. His mouth was stitched up. His face was gone. He was gone, absorbed up into the pillow case just like his tears and his sweat. Charlie wished that the nurse and the doctor and the rest of the world would just leave him alone. All he wanted to do was cease to exist peacefully.
“Is this about your face, kid? It is, isn't it? Well, bud, let me tell you something. Let me put things into perspective. There's a little girl down the hall just about your age. She lived a couple neighborhoods over from you and didn't make it to her shelter because her mom and dad were strung out on drugs. When the bombs hit, she was burned all over and crippled for the rest of her life. Now she can't move, she can't smile, and she's still alive. You, my friend, are in a position ten times better than hers. ”
Charlie had made his heart was as cold as coffins sinking to watery depths after their funerals on the ocean.
Its hands were folded across its chest.
Its limbs were rusty with rigor mortis.
There was no way to reach his heart because he didn't care.
The doctor sighed and nodded at the nurse.
“Pull it off.”
***
Charlie dissolved into tears and buried himself in the bedsheets – like tired gravediggers in cemeteries feeding dirt to corpses – and would not resurface, he swore to himself, until the nurse returned the pillow case.
He did not eat that day.
He did not sleep.
Eventually, the nurses stopped trying and the doctor told them not to replace Charlie's pillow with any more sleeves.
But.
For some reason, Charlie couldn't get the thought of the girl down the hall out of his head.
***
On the seventeenth day of Charlie's residence, the middle-aged woman was a caged canary whistling in mine shafts poisoned with Carbon Monoxide. Her breathing stopped. Her lungs were balloons filled up with too much air.
Death winked at Charlie has he carried her out the door.
***
Charlie imagined the little girl with the broken body extended on her bed like a Playboy centerfold with a respirator over her face and lips made out of concrete. He imagined her voice. It was soft and small like mice in experimental labs and could barely make it through the walls, like everyone else's. He imagined that Death was probably pretty good friends with her. He would have to be, with someone who so closely resembled a corpse already.
Charlie desperately wanted to meet this girl.
He wanted to see if she was really worse off than him.
He wondered what they would talk about.
Probably the smell of God's breath and the precise dance steps required to fit in with a city full of burning people and the music that people make on their death beds. They would talk for hours. They would keep Death away by being together.
Charlie imagined her eyes, the only things untouched by evil men and cancer.
They would glow.
Like the skeletons of kites flying in electrical storms.
***
That night he listened for her voice in the dark, instead of his mother's.
***
The doctor told Charlie that morning that he no longer needed to say at the hospital.
He told him that nice people were coming to take him home and care for him since his parents weren't alive anymore. He told Charlie that these people would feed him and clothe him and shelter him and that they were called foster parents.
Again, when the couple walked into the room, it became a depressed zoo animal with tranquilizer darts stuck in its thigh and drooping eyelids. To Charlie, Joseph's face looked as if a smile would break it into a thousand pieces and Liesel's lips were as thin as Chinese fans. They stood in the doorway sounding out of place as their heartbeats dropped into the room like coins into the paper cup of a blind man sitting on the sidewalk.
Charlie was standing by his bed on wobbly legs.
His hair was slicked back and he was dressed in a new clothes that crinkled and gave off plastic smells.
The doctor was there telling them that Charlie would need to return to the hospital every week for check-ups and was handing over the medication that would make his face hurt less. Charlie could tell that they were were staring at him instead of listening and at the mention of his face, Charlie bowed his head.
The wilting flowers on the bed stand were as closed up as the eyes of babies listening to Mozart as Joseph spoke:
“What about a mask or something? Do you have one of those?”
“A mask?” the doctor asked.
“You know, for his face.”
“Oh. No, we don't. And I would advise you not to encourage him to wear one. Charlie's...is a delicate situation. And it'll take him a long time to adapt to his image. Just be understanding and supportive and he'll be able to make it through the storm.”
Joseph nodded.
Charlie's shoulders sunk even further, like the Titanic treading water with its passengers all bloated with life jackets. As soon as he got to Liesel and Joseph's house, he swore to find all the pillowcases and hide them so that no one could take them away from him.
“Okay, kid,” Liesel said. “We don't have all day and these dying bastards give me the chills. Let's get out of here.”
As he walked down the hallway, he held Liesel's hand and felt the doctor's eyes staring at his back.
The hand was cold and dead.
And patients stared at him from out of open doors as he walked by, their eyes glittering like the flashbulbs of the paparazzi taking tabloid photos.
