Husk (6 page)

A loud crunch resounded through the stall as the right rear wheel — the wheel I was almost directly above — entered and exited what felt like a pothole of satanic depths. My feet left the floor, slid back, up, and for a brief moment I was weightless, an astronaut of the loo. My hands released their fleshy tube to flail for a stable surface. Urine cascaded out of my now-undisciplined member, coating the toilet, the sink, my arms. A single thought popped into my head, barely registering in the onrush of adrenaline flooding into my system:
gross
. Gravity then resumed, and my knees slammed down on the sharp front ledge of the toilet. I gasped in torment, my mouth sucking in air, my body preparing for the great-grandmother of shrieks, when the recoil of the liquid in the urinal nether-pit discharged a perfect storm of disinfectant slurry directly into my face. And then I did scream, long and heartily, my eyes blind and roaring, swords thrust deep in my sockets and forcefully stabbing my brain, Justin Timberlake assaulting my ears, moaning about the girl he could never have. The taste of chunky bleach overwhelmed my senses, became my world. There was nothing to the universe but searing white torture, chemical death. My stomach rebelled, vomit flowed from my mouth. My body battered itself about the tiny room, insane with agony. My legs tangled in my pants, now down at my ankles and mopping up the liquid. My balance shifted as the bus took a hard turn and I fell into the door, my hands now operating as my eyes, grabbing for everything, anything. A flat surface, a knob, a depression.
The sink! Water!
I twisted the faucet, grasping at where water should pour forth but feeling nothing. I squinted an eye open, earning another knife-thrust. No water. Above the sink, a gray plastic device labeled
ANTIBACTERIAL HAND SCRUB
was affixed to the wall. I squeezed the dispenser's lever feverishly, filling my palm with clear gel. I rubbed it over my face, my mouth, my tongue, swishing it through my teeth, gargling, spitting, yelling with equal parts shame and revulsion all the while. Still frantically rubbing, I slid down to the floor and curled my legs to my chest, gagging as my tear ducts worked overtime.

An eternity later, my eyes smarting but clear, I rose unsteadily to my feet, leaving my pants down and doing my best to ignore the gruesome fluid saturating the fabric. I grabbed handfuls of tissue paper and rubbed at my face, applying more hand gel that went on clear but came back blue. I peeked at myself in the metal. Streaks of cobalt and sapphire ribboned down and across my face, giving me the look of a mercenary camouflaged for a
fabulous
night on the town. I must have popped a few blood vessels; my eyes bulged red. Globules of almost-digested cheese and dough spackled the front of my shirt and pretty much the entirety of the vehicular outhouse. I massaged my face with clean paper, lightening the hues, then applied more scrub to my arms, the urine smell lessening, my fingertips inked. How I was going to leave the room wasn't a thought to be crossed yet; the only thing important in the world was cleaning myself.

I scrubbed harder, almost frantic.

My head pulsed. The veins squirmed in protest to their forced compression. The skin around my skull felt too tight, constricting my braincase, as if it was a wool toque thrown heedlessly into the dryer. My arms felt anesthetized. It was difficult to hold on to the wads of paper.
Adrenaline crash
, I decided, forcing my hands to continue their rubdown. Bulbs of sweat loosened themselves from their perches and exited my pores.

My heart palpitated, anxious.

Too anxious.

The emergency was over, although public embarrassment was still pending. I should have calmed down. Even in the throes of my improvised ablutions, I thought:
That's kind of weird, that shouldn't do —

A boa constrictor snaked its way under the door, undulated up my torso, and squeezed.

Pain seized my body, locking my joints. My brain melted from the stress.

A vengeful deity stomped down from on high and began punching me about the torso.

Strength fled my legs and I slumped, my chin hitting the edge of the sink.

I bet that'll leave a mark
, I thought through the blur, but I couldn't bring myself to care.

My head cracked against the metal wall, and again when it collided with the floor.

That really should have hurt more
.

A bricklayer took a quick job on spec and sealed up my windpipe good and proper.

I lay curled on the grating.

There's something I'm supposed to acknowledge when this happens
, I thought.
All this seems like it should be important somehow
.
To someone.

Lance Bass chirped out the last few notes of a ballad to someone's girl, somewhere, that he could not ever have for his own.

God, don't let that be the last thing I hear.

For a good time, call Brenda.

My vision faded, and the universe displaced itself.

All I could see was green.

Am I outside?

What's that smell?

Who's Brenda?

Shel. Sheldon Funk. Shelley to my mom. Shel to my friends, of which I had . . . none to call home about. Gary Jackson, stage name, an alias forced upon me by my agent, insisting
Sheldon
was not a name that inspired confidence, would not open doors. Not manly-sounding.

My head pressed into the varnish as the message continued.

I remembered everything.

I thought one's life was supposed to replay before death, not after.

It was unspeakable.

It was
everything
.

The warmth of the womb, then screaming light. Floating monsters in smocks grab my head, haul me forth from aqueous Eden into the gaseous atmosphere of nightmares.

A spider bites my eyelid while I coo and burble in my crib; my shrieks bring my mother running into the room. Her hands flail at my face, brushing the spider away, her nails wounding in her alarm, scratching my nose and forehead.

My first skinned knee, my mother hollers at the driver who brushed his Buick against me in the Safeway parking lot.

Fiona. First kiss in grade five. Clumsy, sloppy.

The death of my father. Roland Funk, the accountant. His face smooth and calm, the complete negation of everything he had been in life. My mother, emotionless, stares into the coffin, holds my hand tightly as a warning to keep my tears in check. It was a church, after all. All her friends are here, it wouldn't do to cause a scene.

Adam Garwood. First
real
kiss. Grade eleven, backstage during a high school production of
The Pirates of Penzance
, he the Frederic, I the Major-General. His breath, stale with cigarette smoke, harsh, the most marvelous air I had ever tasted. His hands paw at my ruffled shirt, ripping off buttons as I gasp around his tongue, my moustache falling loose from the friction.

My mother, Eileen, always religious, now fundamentally insane without the calming counterweight of Roland. Condemns me for becoming an actor. Asks me if I had prayed to God about my choice; she was worried deviant lifestyle choices were imminent. My response, “Yes mother,” an agreement brought on by a lifetime's conditioning to obey at the cost of my happiness. My partners all introduced as “friends in the play,” no possibility of truth within the walls of her house. Relief floods me as I watch her emotional character succumb to early senility, slowly draining her personality of everything her.

The whole of me, all at once.

Every film I ever watched.

Every book ever read.

Every shirt/pant combo worn.

Every dream, every daydream, every masturbatory fantasy brought to conclusion.

The combination to my seventh grade locker, twenty-four left, three right, eighteen left.

That missing peacoat I turned the house upside-down looking for, only twelve feet from where I sat, in the closet behind an old parka I never used anymore.

My demise. Cold and alone in a bus restroom. My head wedged against the door. The light dimming. My absolute last thought, repeating the phone number scrawled on the wall over and over as if it was of some importance. The smell of lawn after a heavy frost — then nothing but eternity.

No person should have to go through one's own death twice. It's once too often, and doubly unpleasant.

All my moments, everything
me
, my me-ness bludgeoned deep into the tender cushioning of my brain, the only fully functioning organ I had left now imploding from psychic pressure. I was an empty bucket suddenly filled, wet and heavy. A dried-up peapod husk mysteriously called back into service, brimming with vegetable matter and nonplussed at the odd turn of events.

“It's Rowan, babe,” the voice from the speaker continued. Rowan. My agent, the one who set me up for that exercise in humiliation known as my last audition. She sounded distant, as if the phone was farther away than the three feet to the wall. I moved my head slightly, and realized I was now deaf on my right side. The eardrum had blown out under the physical power of the memory deluge.

“Listen,” she continued, so far away. I rocked my head over onto its right side, bringing the operational ear closer. “I know you're down, and that's partially my fault. Clearly, reality is not your forte. But lest we forget, I
told
you not to be yourself.

“But listen up. I got you in to see Fern Davidson, she's casting for Platinum Dunes, so this is big, honey. They're doing a remake, something horror-ey, and they like your looks. She said to me, and I am not making this up, that you, my darling, have a look. A
look
, Shelley. That's as good as saying you're in. They want an unknown, someone fresh to play the older brother of a serial killer who haunts co-eds or something in a small town, I know, what bullshit, right? But this, I kid you not, has major money behind it, and they are, brace yourself, actually thinking the word
franchise
. A tentpole film with an option for three more films
at least
if the first one makes money, which it will, because these things always do. And I know what you're thinking, Shelley, you're thinking
I am an artist
. You know that, I know that, but no one else knows, and this is a real foot in the door opportunity for you.

“Call me when you get this, don't worry about the time.”

A clicking noise, the phone hanging up.

Under any other circumstance, I would have been spurting joy in all directions. I had been toiling in the trenches for the better part of fifteen years; I was a prostitute in every way except the most obvious (and sometimes even that), selling my body to any bidder desperate enough to consider me. Visions of glory on the Broadway stage and rave reviews in the
New York Times
rapidly rotted to sludge under a crush of bills, debt, and a mother in the final stages of dementia. The highlight of my professional acting career thus far was a four-line role as Confused Car Buyer #1 in a national Saturn commercial, an utter rending of the only withering moral fiber I had left in my body, which nevertheless earned me enough to set Eileen up in a second-tier care facility.

As it was, it was all I could do to muster a silent retch of exuberance. All my crap about being an artist vanished in a puff of ego. Every sacrifice I had made suddenly meant something.

I jerked myself up, my spine crackling loudly. I was in no shape for acting. I had been up all night, for one thing. I was dead on my feet. Somehow in my excitement I had managed to pave over that pressing issue. In times of distress and uncertainty, go with what you know, and what I knew was how to prepare for an audition. Sure, yes, I was dead, but I was an actor. Dying was easy, people did it every day. Comedy, now, that was hard.

It was high time I had a better examination of myself.

My joints popped as I forced myself back into a sitting position. I pushed against the table to right myself and bumbled toward the washroom, home of a mirror, water, and clean bandages.

The reflection was not kind.

First off, my face was blue. Not with cold, not with death, but with bus-grade chemical disinfectant. I soaped up a loofa and gently scrubbed until my natural hues were all that remained. Not that my efforts made me much more presentable.

My face exuded the unhealthy pallor of a drowning victim after a lengthy stay in a lake. The flesh covering my face seemed overly loose, leathery. More so than usual. My face had always looked a little slack and un-elastic, prone to wrinkles, with a perpetual resemblance to Droopy Dog that was only going to get worse as I aged. I was not ugly, exactly, but neither was I a Brad Pitt–esque example of human perfection. I had played up my features as a plus to casting agents, trying to gain attention through the less-showy character roles that could benefit from a uniquely memorable visage. Worked for Giamatti and Buscemi, anyway. But now, the face that was going to launch a career of “best friend” and “business partner” roles — maybe even going so far as to afford me acting employment as a violence-prone henchman or a wacky next-door neighbor in a syndicated dramedy — that face was magnified and extended well past its best-before date.

This face was . . . the face was dead. The lips hung loose in a slack howl of apathy. The bags under my eyes had gained weight, pulling the skin down and showing a tad more of my eyeballs than I was comfortable with. The complexion was a mixture of pink and gray, battling for supremacy, and gray was winning. What I looked like was what I was, a recently reanimated corpse, shambling and lurching about.

Fucking depressing.

Ignore it
, I told myself.
You're a professional. You once auditioned for a Renée Zellweger flick while suffering from a flu virus, high on Nyquil and Advil. You didn't get the part, but the point is, you showed up, gave it your all, and so what that you threw up on the stand-in, at least you tried. Focus on the positive. You can do that, you can do this.
I smiled, forcing my cheek muscles to contract, trying to inject some cheeriness to the expression. My lips stretched up and away, revealing yellowing teeth in a bed of gums already withdrawing upward. I bared my chompers in a garish clown approximation of a grin, and only succeeded in scaring myself.

So. Smiling, out. I ran through simple facial exercises from my acting classes — frowning, lifting the eyebrows, flaring the nostrils, squinting the eyes, forming the mouth into a wide O, fluttering the lips (exercises once done by rote, not at all easy now) — but there was a fractional slowness to the response. The muscles and tendons were half a step behind the impulse, giving my face the sleep-stupid expression of a gasoline huffer. The effect was of a rather clever monkey trying to imitate a human. A rather clever, rather deceased monkey. I pushed at the skin with my fingers to try and massage some fluidity back into my face, but it was like shaping old clay. My fingers were also quite white, I noticed, unhealthily so. This is what happens when blood stops pumping.

Leaving the face for later, I shed my coat. My forearms were striped with red, the results of the quick skirmish with the attendant. His aim had been better than I had realized. I wet a towel in the sink and dabbed at the wounds. Scales of skin fell away to the bathmat beneath my feet. His makeshift weapon had sliced deeply, but no blood issued forth, only the grayish-red of muscle. The lacerations were tacky and clung to the towel, tearing threads of terry cloth away as I continued to wipe. I guessed whatever blood I had left in my body had clotted and was drying up in the veins. I dug through my medicine cabinet and came up with a roll of medical tape I sometimes used to support my right knee (hurt in a racquetball accident and kind of iffy since). I tore the tape with my teeth into two lengthy pieces and wrapped each arm tightly. It wasn't a great job, but a loose-fitting shirt would cover any bumps.

That done, I set to peeling the bandages away from my chest. The flesh was still partially iced to the fabric, and frozen kernels of skin shucked away as I pulled. Freed, the epidermal shutters swung open and a chuck of veiny beef popped out and plummeted into the bathroom sink, followed by a rope of sausage, the whole mess slapping the basin with the sound of raw chicken being thrown against a wall.

I had forgotten about the previous placement of my innards. Funny how you can completely ignore the little things.

Like intestinal geography.

Scooping the guts from the sink and letting them dangle to the floor, I stared at the heart, cradled in gore-spattered porcelain, forgotten, sad. The metaphysical ramifications of looking at my own heart from the outside battled with an overwhelming sense of incompleteness. Whatever else was happening to me, the fact of my heart somehow not being a necessary part of my existence anymore was obscene. This unhappy hunk of gristle and tripe was supposed to be the meat of my matter, the fundamental engine of my human machine. The mythological bassinet of my soul.

A sound caught my attention, a lapping. Looking down, I saw Sofa taking exploratory licks of my bowels. I pushed her away with my foot and shut the door.

I turned on the taps and bathed my heart until the meat was lukewarm, gently wiping off tendrils of pus with a hand towel. I stuck a finger in an aorta and slowly spun it on its axis under the running water, lettering moisture into every space, filling its ventricles. I lovingly squeezed the water out, now discolored and chunked with rubbish. I tamped the organ dry and stored it in the medicine cabinet for later.

Looking back to the mirror, I took an unobstructed look at the monstrosity I clearly was.

It was a dog's breakfast. The lungs bumped slackly against the walls of the ribs. My various organs looked to be intact, but then again, how could I tell? Was I even aware of the proper feng shui of human innards? I would have to find an anatomy textbook to make sure (I had a Grade 12 biology text in a box in the basement, I remembered), or download autopsy images online for comparison's sake. Regardless, everything save the heart and that one errant kidney appeared to be more or less where it should be. My stomach, without the cushioning of intestinal tracts, swayed at the end of my esophagus. I bounced on my toes, feeling the weight pull at the back of my throat.

My stomach let forth a gurgle. It was a tiny squeak; in other circumstances it would never have been heard at all. But I had never heard it complain in the open air, and far preferred the muffled murmur of a bellybowl sheathed in dampening layers of muscle. It was a gruesome burble, evil, raw, festering, the digestive howls of Satan's tract.

There was a contraction and ripples of movement passed down into the upper intestines, now hanging far past my knees. Whatever I had eaten pre-death was still in there and wanted escape.

Would I shit all this out? Did I shit at all? Was that me from now on, the incredible non-excreting boy?

All at once, I was tired of the freak show. I didn't know what would happen next, but gawking was not constructive time management. I once more bundled the muck back inside me, ignoring the blankets of gore that abandoned their posts and took up residence with the mildew of the bathroom carpet. The most pressing issue was the hollow; I had no intention of proceeding through the rest of my life as the visible man, and I had an idea of how to fix it, if only temporarily.