The Face

            Eyes on my feet.  Always, especially when I’m walking around other people.  It feels like I get places faster this way.  I heard once that we rely on sound more than sight for spatial coordination.  That is how I justify blindly dodging others on the street.  I carry books around but I don't read them, and I have earbuds in but they aren’t plugged into anything.  The sounds of the city rush in rivers around the sides of the cheap electronics, and my feet are oars on the sides of paperback boats carrying me from street to street.  And thank God, because it's way easier than looking up.  Looking up and seeing the face.

            I am eluding it.  The face, that is.  It's all I think about anymore.  The thin threads of time sewing the scenes of a day together unravel.  Everything gets jumbled in my head.  What I do, what I eat.  Where I go and how I get there.  I never remember.  All I know is what I have.  What is mine.  I have treasures: books, a couch, bedsheets, notebooks, the memories of failed friends and lovers and family members I don't speak to, or at least not anymore.  They are mine and they cannot escape from me.  But my life has become a hurricane and everything I do to pull myself out draws me further in.  To the chaos, that is.  The drag is strong against me, so I guess I’m just getting weak.  It’s pulling me through to the eye.  To the calm.  The face.

            Eyes on my feet, for God's sake just keep them on my feet.  

My job is to stare at a computer and answer emails.  That’s about it.  I push buttons.  We have buttons for everything.  Cameras, phones, snoozes, doorbells, triggers on guns.  Buttons.  Effort-wise, we’ve got it set up so in any circumstance the only state of mind required to accomplish anything is probably close to the kind immediately preceding a coma.  Every cognitive process reduced to the lowest possible awareness, as intentional as photosynthesis or a heartbeat.  That’s okay, though.  In a very real way, buttons are the only thing between me and the face.  Without them, I'd be on the street.  With others.  Drowning in an infinite sea of faces.

The sky outside my window is always grey, above a grey bar graph of a city, where pale people wear black and white clothes and at night when everything is dark silver street lamps illuminate concrete and asphalt with piercing white light.  Sometimes at night when there's no one around I go outside and look at the lights and their auras and you can see rainbow spheres encapsulate the bulb in a spectral bubble that grows and shrinks when you squint.  On those nights I dream the face is caged in a mesh of those bubbles and it's the only time that I confront it and feel relief.

I am walking to work.  In my hands is a copy of Danielle Steel’s Echoes.  I have been reading the same part of this book for about two weeks, and it is the only part of the book I have read.  There is a nun and she has escaped from a Nazi concentration camp with a German soldier who helped her.  He tries to rape her, because why not?  Isn’t it secretly every woman’s fantasy to be taken advantage of?  I heard that somewhere.  It doesn’t matter though, because she kills him in self-defense.  This is what I’ve been reading, two or three sentences at a time while I wait for lights to change. 

I am wondering how a German soldier exposed, numbed to the ruthlessness of a concentration camp could be killed by a nun.  Luck?  No.  I know why.  When he was looking down at her, stripped bare and struggling, possibly bruised and skeletal from malnutrition, he suddenly found himself far from her, as though everything had gotten huge, and incredibly small distances were gaps stretching outward as infinitely as he stretched back.

It was the same as my last night with Melinda.

We were leaving her friends’ house.  Outside in the car we kissed, and Melinda could taste my drunkenness.

You can’t get another DUI, she said.

That’s why I’m not getting another DUI, I said.  I was smiling.  I pushed the button on the dash, and the motor turned twice and roared.

No, I mean you can’t drive, she said.

Sure I can, I said.

Why do you have to be such a defiant prick all the time? She said.

It’s not defiance, I said, My mom tells me I’m just ornery.

Ornery this fuckface, she flipped me off and moved her hand to the handle.  I hit the lock on the doors and accelerated.  We played tug of war with the locks all the way out of the neighborhood.  I was laughing.

Let me out! She kept crying.  By then we were on the main road.  I unlocked the door and turned to say I was sorry.  I remember her pushing back on the dashboard and horns baying and a hiss that rose and rose until there was darkness and silence.

And then I was awake out on the road and covered in blood.  Was it mine?  I don’t remember.  I stumbled to the car beside ours, and none of the four bodies inside were moving.  Still as the oppressively muggy autumn air.  In unison, each of their heads flipped back and turned, and they were all the face, abyssal eyes and mouths, skin like the last clouds of steam exhaled by those who die in the cold.  I ran to the car to save Melinda.

But I did not find Melinda.  I found the face.

The German in Steel’s book died because his pants were at his ankles, so he couldn’t run away.  I could, and I did.  Running and running and never looking back, all the way into the life of an assumed identity in a city I’d never been to prior.  Pursued forever by a demon wrought from the naked innocence of those I have no choice but to call my victims.

A horn blast and crash pull me out of reverie.  It is a construction crew beginning to chop up concrete on the other side of the street, and the sidewalk is now closed.  Dammit.  That sidewalk is the only route I know.  They’ve taken down all the street signs on the block.  God dammit. 

            Eyes on my feet.  I can’t go back home.  No way.  It’s okay though.  I got this.  This is mine.  I take a deep breath and lift my head.  A man on the corner is watching the construction, pushing the button on the streetlight vigorously.  He is wearing a brown suit and has auburn hair.  The skin on his hands is white, so the skin on his face must be white too.  White as sunlight on paper on an ivory plate.  I approach him, and when I am near I trip on a crack in the concrete and bump into him.  He is solid.  That means his face must be solid.  His head is definitely bones covered with muscles and tissue and that white, white skin of his.

            Excuse me, I say to the man with a face on the front of his head, What’s the best way to get to 33^rd and Washington?  He turns slowly.  Just before I am about to see his face I let my book slip from my hands.  He bends down to help me but I wave him off.  It’s okay I got it, thanks, I say.  I am starting to shake; I can’t keep my eyes on my feet.  This is a terrible idea.

            Okay, he says.  He is standing back up and looking across the street to the right, pointing.  Go that way, take a left and follow that down to Franklin and take another left.  He makes angular, meaningless gestures as he explains.

            Left, then left on Franklin, I say, Got it.  I am trying to write the directions down inside the cover of my book, but I am shaking. 

            K so here from here it gets weird, he says.  What I do is go down Franklin about a block and a half, take a right at the stairs.  Keep going that way til you get to a food court.

            Food court, got it, I said.  Charles Richter comes to mind as shakes become tremors: voice at magnitude 2, body magnitude 3.  Hands at 5.5.  I can feel the glare of the face from the man’s head.  It’s clutching his mandibles, waiting for me to see it.  Begging for confrontation.  Body at magnitude 8.

            It is there, waiting for me to look up.  Waiting to devour my anger, to send me back, far away into myself where the world and I cannot be the same.  So far that people close by are impossible to reach, diamonds at the bottom of pits that are fabled to have none.  Maddening, that through the course of a day you spend the most time close to strangers; but the face is always the same and those people you care enough to call yours are never so anymore than drunks and slobs and criminals.  As long as there is the face, I can be close to no one.

            Hey man, are you okay? He asked.

            Why can’t I have you! I am grabbing his shoulders screaming into the face, gaunt and furious, and I am stumbling back as more and more come into sight, skeletons in glistening parkas from the mist that is rain that is never ending, thin veins of dirt and pollution dripping off their jackets on the street, marching forth one after another with the voices of concerned people yet shrouded by the visage of nightmares that demand  my strength and fear, growing larger till they’re merging, overflowing my vision, flooding the dark places in my skull where eyes shouldn’t see.

            There are claws digging into my back.  I am the wolf-in-sheep’s clothing, mistaken for dinner by an eagle, being dragged away to be ripped to pieces.  Glorious, peaceful pieces.  The fable’s trajectory is much different if the wolf isn’t interested in eating, but being eaten.  He is a tired wolf.  The eagle flips me around and it’s a woman with very dark hair, and I can see her face.  Her own real face with those hungry ice-blue raptor eyes fixated on me.  There’s a recognition I recognize in them.  She can’t see me.  She’s seeing the face. 

            Eyes on my feet.

            You need to come with me right now, she says.  I am about to start crying.  I don’t see her face anymore.

            What the hell is his problem? The man in the brown suit asks.

            Death in the family, she says, He’s taking it pretty hard.

            No shit.  Someone should lock that freak up.

            Yeah, maybe, I say.  She grabs me under the arm and drags me down the street the way the man directed me before.  We take the left on Franklin and go up the stairs, but instead of entering the food court we go into a jet black skyscraper.

            Who are you?  I ask.

            She pushes the button to call the elevator.  I’m like you.  Kind of.

            The elevator dings, and we go inside and she hits a button with a letter “R”.  The doors slide shut and we begin the ascent which quickly accelerates until it feels like we can’t stop and the car is going to explode out of the roof of the building.  About fifteen floors from the top it slows and stops and the doors open.

            I tilt my face and feel the light drizzle dab my skin.  There's a bright spot in the clouds where the sun should be.  I feel alien.  Amnesiac.  There's soft wet green stuff I’m standing on and giant plants of rough brown tubes and green blades and other smaller ones with colorful bells and petals. A creature like me that is somehow nothing like me wanders around touching things silently except for footfalls on the ground.  I am hoping that life will stay this way.  Let me exist forever in blissful unknowing; my lost memory consists of inventions, explorations in the make believe, and what I'm experiencing right now—this formlessness—is how things really are, or at least how I wish they could be, how they've always been since existence bubbled up from those tarpits of universal darkness.  Simple.

            I should have stayed home, I say.  I should always just stay at my damn house.

            Well you didn’t, she says.

It's the first time I've ever seen the face without fleeing.  It looks like some answer to some question that never stays the same even though the words never change.  She is reaching out and touching things with hands like a porcelain pasta ladles.

            You can see it too, I say.

            Maybe everyone can and they just won’t admit it, she says.  A breath from the gray sky coaxes a sigh from a nearby tree.  There is a pond of rippling water, its surface popping where the fish mistake misty raindrops for insects.

            Who are you? I ask again.  I sit on the grass and it immediately soaks through my pants but it is okay.  The cold air and moisture are sobering.  I am up high on the mountain top, away from the marketplaces and cities and states of the world.  Just the sky and the rain, and the eagle who picked me up and carried me here.

            Who am I, or what’s my name? she asks.

            What’s the difference?

            Because if you can name a thing, you can call it your own.  And if you’re anything like me that’s exactly what your problem is.  Ownership without consequence.  My eagle woman isn’t making any sense.  She sits beside me.  Her hair is wet and smells sweet.

            Have you ever wanted to save the world? she asks.

            Not really, I say.

            I do.  I’m an artist.

            Oh.  I’m pinching at an ant, trying to pick it up without crushing it.  She’s on the bench hugging her knees to her breast, tilted at an angle.  What kind of art?

            I'm a dancer.

            That seems strange.

            Why?

            Do many dancers kidnap random people off the street?

            All artists work two jobs, she says.

            Saving the world one ransom and one pirouette at a time, then? I say.  She winks and does a click thing with her mouth when she cocks the thumb hammer of the finger gun she has pointed at me.

            Witty, she says, So do you want to help me?

            I don’t dance.

            Sure you do.

            You lied to a stranger and dragged me to the top of a skyscraper to teach me how to dance?

            Maybe.

I finally have the ant in my fingers.  Its little legs are squirming around angrily.  I imagine that it's desperate.  I wonder what desperation feels like to an ant, or if it can ever feel desperate, or a dog or a cat; like Descartes thinking you need a soul to feel pain, do you need to be human to feel some complex emotion or does everything collapse into either pleasure or fear?

You’re taking all this pretty well, she said, when I was in your place I must have put a thousand coats of fingernail polish on. 

            What are you talking about?  Like this is a thing that happens to people regularly.  At least now I feel confident that I’m not fucking crazy.

            You aren’t crazy, she says.  I used to put fingernail polish on all the time as an excuse to keep my eyes off people’s faces.  On a bad day I could go through fifteen colors.

            What were you doing when you saw it the first time? I ask.

            I’m a dancer, like I said.  These days I’m into classier stuff like Cabaret and Burlesque, but back then it was a full-nude place called Buckshot Billy’s.  I ripped a guy off pretty bad one night and he shot himself in front of me in the parking lot.

            Jesus.

            Yep.  She shows me her ice-blue eyes.  I am looking into them trying to find the place inside myself that can tell her I feel sorry, but sorry is a stupid word for those feelings and I’m looking for different ones instead.

            Why’d he do it? I say

            I don’t know.  Why does anyone do anything?  He was talking about not having money to feed his kids or something.  I wasn’t listening.  You hear all kinds of bullshit from people with buyer’s remorse.  She shakes her head and hands.  Sorry, I didn’t bring you here to talk about that.

            Okay.  Why did you bring me here then?

            She turns and centers her gaze on my face.  I’m going to ask you a very strange question, she says.

No way.  I can’t believe it.

Stop.  If you had a button that killed seventy-five percent of the human population when you pushed it, she says, would you?

            Would I what?

            Push the button.

            I don’t know.  Who dies?

            I dunno.  People. 

            Just people?  Didn’t Philip Dick cover this already?

            It was Matheson, she says, and no.  More people die and you don’t really have anything to gain.

            Right.

She stands.  Her feet are bare, and I realize I don’t have any idea what happened to her shoes.  There is a flower tattoo on her foot that looks like it must have hurt pretty bad.  It’s brown and blue, and looks like henna but more clean.  I wouldn’t push it, she says.  The clouds ripple faintly on the sides of her head.

            No.  Why not?

Because.  People need each other.  I mean sure, it seems like killing a bunch of people at once would solve all our problems, but which ones? 

            I still have the ant in my fingers.  Its little hairs of legs are still squirming around in fear, or whatever.  I pinch harder and hear a wet crunch like a cracking knuckle.

            All the big ones, probably.

            You’re wrong, she says.

            I suppose that means you’re right then, I say.

            She is sitting next to me.  Out of the pocket of her pants comes a red button size of the cap of a vending machine toy fitted into a thick black casing.  She grabs my hand, brushes the ant guts off my fingers, and puts the button in my palm.

            Be careful with this, she says.  I think it’s a big deal. 

            You think?  I say.  The button is like the dislocated eye of a very angry robot.  Are you serious? I ask, Is this a joke? 

            Sure, why not? she says.  I’m tossing it back and forth from hand to hand feeling its weight, trying to decide which country I can’t pronounce this was made in.

            Where’d you get it?

            From a guy who found me on the street screaming at people like a maniac.  She winks.

             Did you ever push it, I ask.

            What do you think?

            What’s the point of having a button and not pushing it?

            It got me to stop painting my fingernails, she says.

I slide the button into my pocket, stand up and say, Okay then.  I think I’m going to go to work now.

Sounds good, she says.

Thanks.  I’m not sure why, but I’ll take it for granted that you did something for me.

And not only does he have grace, but candor! I’m touched, she says.  I leave her sitting in the garden with her face up to catch the drizzle.  The button in my pocket feels warm, and when I rub it I feel powerful.

I am back on the high speed elevator which gets to the bottom floor by way of free fall and I walk out to the street shaky and grateful to be on solid ground.  I see people yelling at each other, ambulances, the shuffling of sick people coming home from work.  A proselyte ticker on a building is busy informing us of all that is important in the worlds of politics and wrong-doing; everything which is not here, things thousands of miles away from us in nearly every way brought right to our doorstep.  Problems that aren’t ours, but ones we think we can touch.  The screen flashes and turns off. 

We have buttons for everything.