Schism

"While we managed to save most of your features in surgery, only time and physio will help with restoring feeling."

I felt a hand on the left side of my face. On my right was just a dull pressure. My own hands. My own face. I ran them over again and again and found it was the same. Press hand, agony. Press softly, nothing. Fingertips find cracks and pits that felt like features more at home on some asteroid flying in a lazy arc away from the sun. But this was my face, not some distant rock. Right here, right now.

"How long has it been," I asked. I didn’t really want to know but you have to account for all lost time. Proper accounting is the only way we can maintain the unbroken illusion a continuous self. The doctor told me. The pain was unimaginable. I regained my composure, lost it, got it back. I knew what I looked like in vague reflections. Two-face had a good side. I had no face at all, just scars.

"My wife?"

He shook his head.

—-

"You’re doing great! Five more steps, four, three…" I waved her off and finished the walk. She looked a little hurt I didn’t want her enthusiasm. Or maybe that I didn’t need it. I never needed much encouragement.

"Honey, lets go camping." My wife. Or what’s left of her. A voice I hear when I feel like falling. Maybe it isn’t her voice. My eyes had been closed a long time, my ears just as long. Do memories change over time if you never reflect on them, or do they stay as pristine as the day you made them? I smelled hotdogs and chips and a lake in the evening. One foot in front of the other.

"Honey, lets…" I waved her away. I turned around, grabbed the parallel bars, and walked back to my nurse.

—-

My home had been sold, my car, clothes, and everything else transformed into paper and then eaten by a machine, transformed again into electronic paper. My brother-in-law kept all our old photos, thank god, but he couldn’t look at me. He couldn’t talk to me. Part of it was probably the uncomfortable aspiration a melted lip brings to the table but I think he just blamed me. He died a few years later, so I never found out.

I stared at myself in my new apartment. An old photo, me and Dawn, smiling in our first car.

"Honey, lets go camping." I couldn’t stop, so we went camping.

We packed the barest of supplies into our car, that old Chrysler yacht, and sailed down the freeway for a day. We pulled off the road once night fell and camped under the stars, that flat plain spreading out like its own blanket and we were ants. We slept.

My wife never woke up. Her breathing was shallow and she was pale, cold. I panicked and left everything behind, hauling her into the car and speeding to the nearest town. Mobile phones were for kids back then. I wish I had one.

She was in a coma for months before everyone gave up. Doctors thought it was a bite, or a rare allergen, or cosmic rays, or a fucking curse, who knows; her family blamed me. My family blamed god. I blamed myself enough to give up too. I went home after visiting her, our home, my home, and sat in the garage. I stared at the car for hours somewhere between crying and screaming and numb as I am now.

"Honey, lets go camping."

I got in the car and put the foot down. She wouldn’t wake up. I don’t want to be awake.

"Honey, lets go-" I hit the telephone poke dead-square-fucking-on and launched through the windshield. I landed on the hood, unconscious. The car was my pyre but I wasn’t allowed to leave. The car burned and I burned with it.

—-

I was never meant to be in a coma. I was put under to heal because the agony, I’m told, is unbearable. They don’t know anything about unbearable agony. Being awake in this world is the real agony. Burned everything and endless white-hot pain is like sailing a calm ocean on a clear day next to real loss.

I lost more than ten years. I lost more than a car, a house, family, friends, and money. I lost more than a pretty face and an even pace. I lost more than memories and a place in the world. Sitting here now, some entirely different person, is the worst loss. The man who died lost everything worth losing and the man born from his husk got all his debts.

I’m still paying for it. Taxes on happiness are only paid after death.

"Honey, lets go camping."