**CONTENT WARNING** - contains heavy drinking, body dysmorphia, self-injury. Read with caution and care.
That day, he didn't feel up to going anywhere or doing anything. Didn't want to sit outside and watch Malory swim, didn't want to follow him to the studio (which he increasingly disliked with each visit), didn't want to be a wallflower at the theatre. Didn't want to chat up the help, either, or watch them work, or sketch them while they worked. Didn't want to speak to or be perceived by anyone, including the gardener that only spoke Russian (he presumed; it could've been any language that relied on Cyrillic). Didn't want to leave the house, either, or risk running into strangers that might take an interest in him during this petulant, mopey mood.
But this house — Malory's house — was always a struggle for those moments when he didn't want to be perceived. He could throw an arm over his eyes, a blanket over his head, shove his face into a pillow, but he knew all those mirrors still littered the walls. As long as there was light in the room, they would be reflecting him. Showing off that pervasive wrongness that only burrowed more solidly within him with each passing day.
Eles couldn't understand it, that wrongness. The way it bled into his otherwise carefree life in a way that no one else perceived. No one looked at him and told him that he didn't look right, or that he seemed more a caricature of a person than a person in and of himself. Not even Malory, who seemed more perceptive than was comfortable sometimes. Whatever it was, it had to be in his head.
But it felt so convincing. So ubiquitous. Like he need only spare a glance at a mirror to know that face didn't belong to him.
For the better part of the afternoon and trailing into the eve, Eles withdrew to his own little sanctuary with a bottle of Riesling and a spotless glass. He hoped a drink would soothe his nerves and loosen up those thoughts that he might prise them away from his person. For a while, he thought it worked — the wine proved pleasurably warming, went down smooth, and left a sweet aftertaste on his tongue. He liked its dryness, the way it left him this side of parched. For a time, it suited him, and Eles contented himself with finishing up a sketch of an empty picture frame, then filled it with a question: do you create stories to protect yourself?
Flipping the page, he tried to draw from memory his instinctual sense of self. Shut his eyes to it, let the wine drive, let his hand maunder along the page with a charcoal pencil in hand. But when he took a peek at what his subconscious called art, he decided it was nothing more than a senseless set of squiggles. Nothing took shape from them, even when he squinted at the page. Waste of time and paper, Eles supposed.
After a second glass, then a third, he lay sprawled on his back with his attention on the regalia of the setting sun as it streamed through the window. The way molten golds and feverish magentas caught on the clouds like a fever, hanging there, suspended, fleeting and wild in their aliveness. How he wished for that same aliveness, but he only ever found it in those brief, liminal moments when that boy's knuckles resurrected old hurts from dying bruises. Soon, those would be gone; would they take with them those brief reminders? That'd be a pity. A ******** travesty, he decided. That'd be cause to scare up some trouble and get himself beat half to death.
Holding up his glass, Eles admired the way that the pale drink caught and held the sun's golden glaze. It looked like ambrosia. Tasted like it, too. Like it could wick away his every worry and leave him as fresh and purged as the day he woke in that alley. He drained the rest of the glass.
When Eles stirred, night had fallen. As he opened his eyes to the darkened room, he realized it must have been a half hour past sunset at most. The room lurched as he sat up and he was soon greeted by that same wrong impression of himself. The wrong that never implied right. Eles hissed out his irritation in a huff, and he set his glass aside to fill it again, albeit sloppily, as dregs of wine were wasted atop a varnished wood nightstand.
Everyone else had gone home for the night, he realized, as he stumbled into the kitchen unseen and undisturbed. By now, he'd rifled the drawers enough times to know the junk collection from the cutlery from their fanciest, sharpest knives. He didn't need much; a few rolls of tape — painter's, packing, electrical — and one of those delicate knives. While he could fit all but the smallest roll over his hand and onto his wrist, the roll of electrical tape and the knife had to occupy one hand. The wine, obviously, occupied the other.
Then he slunk back toward his room, all the while stopping at every single mirror along the hall. Each one got its own tape treatment, all the strips parallel to one another, though not necessarily at the same angle for each mirror. Thus were they turned blue, turned black, turned brown. It must have taken hours — it certainly took his entire glass of wine — but by the end, when he reached his room, he could turn back without seeing those orange eyes looking back at him. A distinct improvement.
An improvement so inspiring that it deserved a fifth glass of wine, the last of the bottle, and an encore in his bedroom. Such a feat finished off two of the rolls, but he had enough to do the bathroom. And damn did he need to piss.
So that was next, even if he needed to brace himself against the wall here or there, without yet finishing his drink. When he made it and the doorway didn't dodge out of his grip, he ducked inside and set his half-finished glass on the counter. He paused at the reflection in the mirror — it would've been easy enough to punch it and fracture it into less comprehensible fractals — but he thought better of it. Cracked open the medicine cabinet to his right. Pawed through the offerings until he found a bottle of aspirin and took a handful. No, took two handfuls. Just to be safe.
He felt numb enough, couldn't feel his lips, but he had to be certain. Swallowing the rest of the wine, he washed down its bitter aftertaste. The room never really settled when he blinked now. Maybe that wouldn't make a difference.
Taking up the knife, Eles looked down at his own hand. Nothing about it was obviously amiss, but that was part of this insidious body-snatched haunting he'd had to endure over the past days. Of course it looked like a normal hand. Of course no one else would think twice about it. But some deeper part of Eles warned him that it wasn't what he looked like, that it wasn't him, and he shouldn't trust the clandestine wrapper in which he was packed. He wanted to believe that, if he could find his real skin, if he could wrench from memory or reality what he truly looked like, then he might regain all those lost memories. Like they were all papered over, but still intact.
Eles looked at himself in the mirror again. <******** you, he mouthed to those orange eyes. Then his attention was again drawn to his hand, palm supinated, fingernails exposed. Pink to nearly the tips of his fingers, then a crescent moon of white overlooked his finger like some keratinous awning. That wasn't what his hands looked like, he knew. His fingernails didn't look like that.
Eles pressed the tip of the blade at the juncture between fingernail and tip of finger. Then he tried to leverage the fingernail upward by tilting the blade, but it wouldn't budge. He applied more pressure. The blade slipped, drawing sideways, and Eles sucked in a hissing breath. Bubbles of bright red blood beaded forth and spilled like silent tears, but the pain was manageable. Negligible, even.
So he tried again, this time sinking the blade further down his fingernail for greater purchase. He felt it but didn't feel it, like his body was half anesthetized. He tilted the flat of the blade again and again, this way and that, working ever more separation between finger and nail until most of the resistance had been carved away and drained into the sink. Finally, when the nail hung on by its cuticles, Eles peeled the nail upright with the thumb on the same hand and cut away those last connections with the knife.
Looking down, all he saw was pooling blood and an angry hole of exposed flesh. Feeling around it with his finger, he couldn't find anything that stood out to him like a second hidden nail. But that didn't make sense — there had to be something. The feeling was too pervasive to be wrong.
So he started again, this time at the heel of his hand. Picking one of the creases where his wrist would tilt to and fro, Eles began carving along its path. While he winced a couple times, and blood poured freely from where he separated skin from skin, he felt rather hopeful for this incision. Once again, he worked the knife beneath the surface, feeling around blindly with it, until he could make out its translucent shape somewhere under all these layers of false person. Progress, he thought. He must have been on the right path, he thought.
But he wasn't on the right path. Once again, he peeled away what he thought was a false glove of a hand to find only more bleeding meat beneath. Blood streaked down his arm in quick rivulets as if running away from him, dripping down the sink and staining the pants he'd borrowed from Malory. The mental note to put them in the wash was made in earnest, but quickly forgotten.
He wasn't satisfied. Hadn't made any progress. Hadn't proven or disproven this all-consuming idea that the person he wore wasn't the person he was. Eles tilted his head back, angling up the side of his face until he could make out the underside of his jaw in his reflection. He prodded just along the inside of his mandible with the knife until he found a spot that might be promising. Then he pressed the blade to skin once more and used his jaw to guide it toward his chin, where he finally stopped in the middle.
This drew another hiss of breath. The knife clattered into the sink, flinging flecks of blood across the countertop and mirror. Humming his displeasure, Eles prodded at the wound with his fingers in search for the source of such pain, but they grew slick with red blood much too quickly. It fell down his neck like a curtain call and soaked into his shirt, and for all that trouble, Eles couldn't see into the wound far enough to know if another face was lurking under there. Too much blood was in the way. Eles didn't have a solution for that.
Maybe, then, the skin was the wrong path. This time, he drew closer to the mirror, close enough that the shallow breaths from his nose clouded its surface, and he stared into one of those orange eyes. He brought the knife up then, tip up, and with his free hand pulled down his lower lid until he saw the delicate network of blood vessels overlaying the pink meat. The knife tip edged ever closer to the bottom of his eye, toward the strange orange iris —
Then he stopped, the knife slipping from his grasp again as a wave of wooziness caused him to lurch. Maybe that was the wine's fault. He had so many glasses. Just in case, however, he absconded with a couple of the hand towels and used one to wrap his hand while the other was pressed to his neck.
The mess was everywhere, though. There was no saving it. Pity that he didn't get anywhere.
His night ruined and his energy shot, Eles dragged himself over the rim of the tub and laid against its cold porcelain surface. It would do, he supposed. He didn't need to be comfortable every night.
