The Man Who Ceased To Be. 1: At Home

The Man Who Ceased To Be

At Home

Everything started with a sort of nervous tic. What had been a conscious little pinch of the fingers on the eyebrow had soon converted to an unconscious, impulsive twitch.

One day, he had started to scratch the skin of his arch, where his eyebrow started, because it felt itchy, just like that. It procured him the mixed feelings of pleasure and prickle.

In some way, it brought back to his sensorial memory the same sickly pleasure he had when he burst his pimples when he was a teenager. Now that he was passed his thirties, this little masochist sensual pleasure puberty had given him was long gone. Now, he was not missing wearing a marred masked, a face speckled with dark or yellowish purulent spots of course. No he missed the secret, narcissistic bliss of the visual and tactile exploration of his self, of the two-dimensional image reflected in the mirror. A sensation of pleasure he could compare in some wicked way to the nights he masturbated in his bed, hidden under the warm covers, looking under the dim light of a lamp at the glossy pages of the pornographic magazines he had stolen from his progenitor.

Like all the kids his age at school he believed it was a girl’s thing to look at one’s reflection in the mirror. At the end of the day pranks, sports, fist-fight, were manly activities; painting one’s face with colors, and talk fashion was for girls. Nevertheless, every evening, as soon as he reached home, he would stand in front of the mirror to observe the evolution or help the fading of his spots and pimples. Beyond the sheer exultation to make disappear, in its blissful hurt, the facial affliction, he secretly enjoyed infringing the rules of his social circle.

Now, a few years short of a couple decades on, he was in some way experiencing the same kind of twisted pleasure he had back then; he was not a kid with a face covered with pimples any more; he was a married man now, a salesman. One of thousand others that worked for the same corporation. His recognition was not based on the display of his penis in the shower after a football game now; or punching the face of a contender for the eyes of a nubile, mid-teen, mini-skirted girl her hair done in bunches for the matter.

His success, his recognition by his social circle (his family, his neighbors, his friends, his coworkers) laid now in his assets.  

Those included his wife (a good-looking, refined, successful personal assistant in another corporation he had married half a dozen  years ago); his luxury sedan of the year (with all the extras in the catalog: GPRS, mp3-DVD player, electronic and voice-recognition lock) he kept squeaky clean; his house with four bedrooms (including one en suite), two-and-a-half bathrooms, a house he had a mortgage on; the giant plasma screen they had in the master bedroom they could watch the games on Sunday (when they were still cuddling up and watching the games on Sunday, now a rare occurrence); a front and back yards he did mower carefully after the games and where they did organize barbecues for family or friends or coworkers or any combination thereof; trips to exotic places when they managed to synchronize their vacation slots (also getting more rare lately); perfect denture, splash of cologne, power-suits and patent shoes; a body toned carefully thanks to a lifetime membership in a gym.

Even his Xbox did not entertain him as much now as he was entertained standing in front of the mirror, feeling his three-dimensionality through the scratching of his eyebrows. It was a near sexual experience he could not feel in his professional or social life.

Unconsciously, the titillation of his sensorial pleasure jumped across his nose-bridge and propagated from the right to the left eyebrow. His wife noticed the twitch:

‘Quit scratching yourself you moron,’ she told him one fine morning, ‘you’re going to fuck your eyebrows up.’

He dismissed her observation as another of her bitter comments, those becoming increasingly more common lately.

Then one fine morning, as he was brushing his teeth, he realized how accurate she had been. Where only a few days ago there was still an abundance of hair, only a few red marks over a blank arch remained. He put his mind at ease thinking that after all, the marks were too tiny to be noticed. He licked the tip of his finger to smooth what was left of the hairs down to cover the naked parts, resolved not to give away to the nervous tic again.

But the itch and the resulting pleasure of his action to soothe it overcame his resolution; he kept scratching off his eyebrows. After a few weeks, they were completely gone, and were replaced by some kind of fleshy lumps. Fortunately, the tone was the same as the rest of the flesh, so it did not strike out as odd or contrasting aesthetically. He convinced himself anyone could hardly notice this incongruity. The feeling of itch went off with the last hairs he removed.

He felt empty for a few days; he did not know what to do with his hands and fingers now. They seemed odd, heavy useless things hanging down at his sides instead of coming up to his eyebrows. In some way, it was the same feeling he had had at the twilight of his puberty: when the last pimple had been pushed and split open, its ugly yellowish matter oozing out of his face and bursting out to the glass, that mark of un-beautification forever gone off his face, he had almost regretted it the moment it was done: what was he going to do without his acne? Fifteen years on, the same unknown question hanged over: what was he going to do without the itch in his eyebrows? He felt shallow, emptied out.