Arthur watches a fly crawl across the withered little plant on Dr. Kane's desk. In the background he can hear the clock ticking, counting out each empty minute. How has he been feeling? What has he been feeling? When he cards through the last two weeks in his mind it's like staring at a wall of solid white. He feels nothing, has felt nothing, will feel nothing.
Sometimes there's a stirring of frantic energy in him, a burst of color and movement behind his eyes and something boiling in his head. Sometimes he grits his teeth and digs his nails into his skin, his body mimicking an agony he barely registers. But there's no name for things like that, no crude drawing of a face on a chart that he can point to and say "I feel that one".
He rubs the sleeve of his sweater and wool scratches at the scabbed over burns on his arm. He's been told before that the urge to hurt himself proves he feels strongly, in intense, forbidden ways. Ways that make him dangerous and in need of help or punishment or both. But when he's doing it - lighting the same cigarette over and over so he can stub the sun-red ash out against his skin - he feels nothing.
The thrill of pain, the way fear jolts his body, the relief as blistering heat fades to tender warmth, the anticipation of doing it all over again; these are the emotions that he makes for himself. Every one of them a secret he has to cover in layers, like the holes he’s burned into his skin.
"I'm fine," Arthur tells her. He fits his cigarette between his lips and reaches down to dig his journal out of his bag.
"If you feel nothing when you die, then what's the difference between being alive and being dead?" Arthur has his face burrowed in the pillows on the couch and his voice is smothered by smoke-stained plaid. He doesn't know if the man with the painted face is there and he doesn't have the energy to lift his head to check. When only the desolate nighttime sounds of the apartment answer him he decides he's either talking to himself or the man with the painted face doesn't think he's worth speaking to today.
His arm throbs where he's stubbed cigarettes out onto his skin, starlike points of searing heat. He'd taken the lighter to himself too, when the few seconds it took for his lungs to inhale was too long for him to go without feeling anything but the emptiness inside himself. The wounds made by living flame are misshapen and strange next to the perfect little halos made by dying ash.
"What's the difference between being alive and being dead?" Arthur asks again. He tries to imagine how the man with the painted face would answer him. He can never see his face clearly in his mind but he can always hear his voice, sometimes more distinctly than he can hear his own. "When you're dead they burn all of you at once."
Somewhere inside himself he hears the man with the painted face cackle.
"What happened?" The man with the painted face is leaning against the bathroom door, his expression all marble white angles that barely fit together.
"I broke the mirror," Arthur tells him. He's on the floor and the ceiling is surrounding him, reflected in hundreds of silver shards strewn across the tile. Trails of blood twine over and between them in a path that outlines frantic pacing slowly calmed.
The man with the painted face crouches, takes Arthur's hand in his, and examines the cuts that begin where his fingers had been curled around glass and streak violently up his forearm. He says nothing and his face is too blank to decipher his silence, but he raises Arthur's bloodied palm to the white of his cheek and holds it there. Arthur's thumb touches his lips and he parts them to let him feel his teeth, to stroke their jagged edges and compare the blunt ache of his bite to the razor edge of glass.
Arthur looks away, catches his lone reflection in a splintered piece of mirror, and turns it over.
Content: Gore, Mutilation, Suicidal ideation, Personal
I'm laid out on the linoleum floor of Arthur's tiny kitchen and he's kneeling over me with a thin knife he's pulled from a drawer. I remember the metal scratch of shifting silverware and the slope of Arthur's back as he's bent and searching. He has one cold hand splayed across my stomach and I'm so thin that my heartbeat can be felt and seen through the skin there, warping softly around his fingers. My body feels heavy and I'm so calm.
He stretches the skin beneath his hand with his thumb and forefinger and brings the knife down, pressing its silver tip to drum-taut flesh. He pauses and takes a moment to look at me, maybe to read my expression, or to see if I'll stop him now at the very last minute. I'm only aware that he's looking because I notice the slight shift of his body and catch the wavelike motion of his hair as he turns his head. I can’t take my eyes off his hands.
The long, deep line he carves into my body blossoms apart between his fingers and he breathes this soft, stuttering sound when blood slicks his hand. Behind the knife trails the sting of the cut, but it's pleasant and hazy, like I'm stretched out in a boat with warm water lapping at its sides. When he sets the knife down on the linoleum the inorganic tack of metal touching plastic melts into the rhythm of his breathing. One of his palms cups the sharp arch of my hip bone and the other lays against my stomach, smeared with fresh and drying blood. His fingers graze the edge of the opening he’s made, tracing it like he traces someone else's smile, then they dip inside one by one.
He disappears inside of me so slowly and in fragments: the bony knuckles of each finger, the branching veins that cross his metacarpals, the exposed ridges of his radius and ulna. The skin and muscles of my abdomen try to seal around him and blood bubbles up around his wrist and rolls onto the floor. Inside myself I can feel the sifting spread of his fingers and the sensation of his cold hand being warmed by the hot interior of my body. His other palm smooths up my side, over the deep trenches of my ribs, across the flat expanse of my chest where my heart beats slowly under scars.
He sinks deeper, gently pushing through my organs, and finds my spine. His fingertips smooth over its ridges and he wraps his hand around and between the vertebrae, holding onto me. The pressure is intense and grounding. I arch up off the floor, just enough for my spine to squeeze his fingers, and slowly lift one hand to clutch his bloodied forearm. It's so difficult to touch him. Like I'm engulfed in thick tar, or I'm deep underwater.
We don't kiss, we don't speak, and I don’t look at anything but his hands. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of his bottom lip caught between his teeth, or I hear something he murmurs to himself, too low and slurred for me to understand. Every part of me that he’s not touching feels miles away. He’s the only thing keeping me anchored to the earth and when he finally slides his hand from within the cavern of my body I will stop existing.