benjaminteicher.com – freelance writer

/Voiceworks, #60, Autumn 2005/

It was a frightening morning when the wound arrived. It started when it started when it started when it started when my head was spinning when I woke. There was an intense pain, a monstrous ache seeping from my midsection. I lurched up too quickly. The neurons of my grey matter stretched out painfully from the thrust and the G-force – tugging at my eyes in their sockets, which whined and gave vindictive little gasps of pain one after another to the rhythm of my pulse. I looked down. Two lacerations as long as my forearm spread over each other, marking me with their smooth pink edges like withered lips.

I screamed for help, won’t somebody help me please? Ah – in the night some menace or other has carved a cross into the wretched fat form of my chest; drew a knife across the contours of flesh – the great flabby tits and folds of gut like kneaded dough – and very gradually it’s seeping out. I’m seeping out. But no one answered, not a soul.

And so I lay with this freakish fucking wound spewing ever so slowly, like the discharge of a bub, a hideous browny-grey substance, thick like clag, but smooth and shiny like blood.

I sort of lifted myself up from my futon with my arms and pulled this dingy old blue nightie over my mutilated form. I trounced through my flat to the bathroom and let the nightie fall from my shoulders and onto the shag carpeted floor. I showered and wiped away what I could of the vomitous discharge with a grey washcloth.
Afterwards, I sat on the bathtub clasping the damp curls of carpet in my toes and stemmed the flow with a whole packet of band aids – 50 adhesive first aid strips – which sort of just floated atop the crud around the wound’s lips.

I could find no clean underwear and so I pulled on some withered old piece of navy blue; elastic threads frayed golden. The discomfort of dirty underwear arrived in an instant. But my suit, ah, it cost just loads it’s and double breasted, and it’s, silvery grey and its-

Inside it I felt tapered and calm, and it carried me to work. Though, once I’d settled into my office chair, my stomach folded and I began to sweat in the crevices and along the wound.

My role is a thing; I do this thing on the phones – market research. It pays the bills and, really, it’s an interesting job and I tried to forget about the wound in the midst of all the phone calls.

My cubicle is 6-K – dead centre of the whole little enterprise. Granted, I am as far away from the two exits as it is possible but I have an excellent vantage point from which to view everyone.

There’s a woman who works in 3-J over by the photocopier and about a cubicle or two from the exit. We live in the same block of flats and I watch her all of the day and whenever I can spy her in the evenings, though we’d never said more than a word to each other we’d never said a word to one another.

She’s kind of fattish. Not that it matters of course, I don’t judge women based on their bodies but if we ever had sex, I just know that she’d be gagging for it. And what I like best is her great big fat arse. Whenever I see her in the evenings, it’s always kept in tow by a pair of red or grey pilly sweat pants. I wait for her to come home from the gym all kitted up as she is. Hoping, scanning for a little dark patch of sweat, somewhere in that immense underside.

After half an hour my sweat dissolved the caking around my wound and the discharge seeped through and marked my shirt. I felt uncomfortable and flustered and squirmed about in my chair.

At lunch I went to the toilet cubicles next to our office cubicles. The handle of the men’s registered “engaged,” and so I disappeared into the ladies’. It’s essentially the same except that it has a pinkish-grey box idling in the corner for tampons or what have you. I wouldn’t mind if we just had unisex toilets. They could even put one of those bins into the men’s and we could all share, together. I really wouldn’t mind.

I rushed my shirt open and saw that the wound had settled a bit. The band-aids were crusted in like insects in amber. I grabbed a handful of paper toweling, ran it under hot water until it was a thick wet wad and dabbed at the wound. I felt quite relieved. The pain had subsided, and it would probably heal by itself, I thought, maybe leave a little bit of scar. Girls like them don’t they? Pretty manly and mysterious. It seemed a cool little story to tell to some hussy or other: I got attacked in my sleep and that’s why I got these scars here. And then we’d have sex and she’d cum at least twice.

But someone burst into the toilet and busted up my little fantasy. I’d not put the lock on and, fuck, it was the fat girl and, fuck, I had my shirt off. I panicked and panicked. I tried to explain it to her but it was like I spoke another language I just said that I’d woken up and I had a great big wound across my chest and I thought that it might have been some sort of intruder, like some sort of vendetta but that I’d treated it with band aids and although it still hurt it had sort of become dull so that if the wound and pain left me abruptly it would be like missing a plaster cast or a favourite hat.

But she, – she just stared straight for the wound giving me a look that I couldn’t read. “You’re disgusting.”

“I need help.” I cried.

She scurried out leaving me panting, the wad dripping muck on the floor, and me feeling as miserable as shit.
I was overflowing with emptiness so I skipped the rest of work. On that sunny afternoon, it was all I could do to go past the shops and buy myself a Cornetto. I bought the ice cream back to my flat and sat down on my couch without a shirt, my chest dividing into folds. Tears and melted ice cream raced along the rapid course to the wound, and the room fractured as tears mashed between my eyebrows. My back itched. I masturbated, cauterised by yellow light through the metal blinds hanging at my window, thinking about the fat girl.

I imagined peeling off her panties and sniffing at the crotch. I wanted to see her sweatpanted arse unsweatpanted, bulging in front of my eyes. I am no pervert. It’s just a little game I play in my head; a filthy routine: cramming my revulsion and my sexual desire together, whisking them around a few times like bingo balls and waiting for the shameful and aching lust to emerge from the barrel.

I went out for a meal to a local Iraqi eatery. I pushed some oily couscous with vegetables around the bowl. I couldn’t eat much as I was quite disgusted by myself. The wound had grown awesomely large through the day, nearly as wide as my sternum. A few layers of skin at the corners now peeled pack as soggy flaps flapped as the brown venom coursed with each heartbeat. I could feel my heart twitching and burning somewhere deep inside the wound. I started to pant and I felt my face flush.

There was some sort of conspiracy to taunt shared between all the crafty streetlights on the way back home. Each and every one would fade to darkness as I ran beneath it, and then burst back, full of light once I’d past. It was ghastly and unnerving and so I was in a right state when I got back to the foyer of the flats: screaming and wailing, coursing sobs, stiff, fearful shoulders up towards my ears, and I couldn’t stand. I kept slipping and I couldn’t properly stand up, and all the tiles were wet; there was a pipe leaking or something so I’d hunch up and try and gain my footing but my little feet would skate out from beneath me, and I’d flop over again. So after I while I, I, I- I just lay in the water with a gash to my forehead like a stunned animal in a pen about to have it’s throat cut.

I can’t breathe, I couldn’t breathe, as she stands, stood above me, picking up her mail in her large fist: all junk mail, bold colours, reds blues and stunning fonts. The fat girl! She glides across the tiles with ease.

“Can’t you get up?” She talked to me this time.

I sighed. Never once have I found my footing, I told her. And sometimes I think I’d rather be splayed out with a red wound at my forehead.

She smiled, warmly. “Come up with me,” she said.

She held out her arm, and I climbed it like a rope and kissed her palm. I held it all the way into her apartment.
She let me lie on her bed for a few hours. She woke me at midnight, dressed for bed. She watched me gaze up at her dole eyes.

She cast all doubt away with her t-shirt, leaving only all this flesh fell which fell like great bags of – I could have died she was so beautiful. She settled on my lower back gracelessly, squeezing the air from my lungs. She peeled away my shirt, it had caked with the wound and she had to give it a firm tug to finally pull it away. She whisked me over and the wound glistened in her eye. She sat next to me, so close that her nipples brushed against my thighs, and thrust her fingers into the wound making me moan. And just as suddenly she withdrew her hand and we watched the fluids in my wound swirl like a void. She fished around her bed and emerged with a pair of handcuffs that she slipped on my wrist.

Then a second time she rummaged around underneath this timing emerging with a big black dildo. She grinned and I stared up at her agape. It glided into my wound like a steamer routing the bay. She thrust it in and out, as she lay on top of me, her calves wrapped around my head and nearly lifting it from my shoulders. She fumbled my fingers around her clitoris as I coursed around the bed sheets ecstatic, my eyes wide with fear and awe. Pump, pump, pump. We both climaxed at the same time, she beating my head with a fist.

Later, we cleaned each other by the bathroom mirror.

I spoke. Can you feel your heart move? I can feel my heart actually sink.

She shook her head. It’s not your heart, it’s your brain; like when you think that you’re stomach rises.
No, I can feel my heart. I can feel it pushing other organs out of the way. I drew a line down my chest with a finger to illustrate its path.

She punched me in the chest, striking the heart which gave a desperate little cry of pain.

It deserved it, I suppose, and my heart whimpered towards the back of its cavity, licking its wounds.

An hour later as I lay naked on the floor reading the paper, she laid a couple of swift kicks to my chest. When I whined, she reached her arm in the wound and squeezed my heart until all went from red to white and I could feel nothing and I stopped.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not impartial to having that certain special someone in my life but this was in a sort of, snarly, sort of, smouldering cigarettes into my back sort of way, and I felt scarred. I knew that this was a bad thing, and that I had to get out to. But how? How could I remove myself from this awful mess, this lack of autonomy, this constant tightness in my chest. I spent the week thinking and plotting, but to little avail.
One morning as I ate my breakfast from the floor, she lifted me up by the hair like a cat by its tale, just because she felt like it. I stared into her maw. It spoke.

“Are you just going to fucking lie there like a slug?”

I wiped little flecks of food from my face. “What do you mean?”

“You’re just hanging around. What exactly is it that you’re waiting for?”

She dropped me onto the linoleum. What happened next I don’t really like to think about. She battered me, really badly; threw me against the kitchen wall, stomped on my face, I-

A boot landed beside my head, I dodged it with a neck reflex.

“ I thought we had something, you know, something good, something special.”

Another boot landed, to the other side, nipping the lobe of my ear. As I leapt up the section of my lobe which lay beneath her boot was torn away. I bought my hand up to my ear and ran out of the apartment faster than I needed to; she made no pursuit.

The wound seared and I puffed naked through the courtyard of the block, across a weedy Japanese stone garden and out, out into the street. Half naked I wailed along the street, a crowded street but nobody paid me much attention. Everyone seemed in distress and nobody seemed to notice me.

And I felt an unbearable searing coming from the direction of my wound and flopped like a fish on the pavement, but I wished I’d fallen further – from 30 floors at least so that my legs would snap like matchsticks. My hands clawed into the flesh, tearing open the congealed pus and scabs and deep into the territory of organs. With a momentum that was not my own, my fingers struggled against fat and gristle and slipped amongst muscle and bone, desperate for a go at the heart, to tear it out and mash it into the pavement. The public gathered around and some big fella in a tracksuit marched out tore my hands out of the wound and held them at my side. He had strong, broad features: a large nose, powerful teeth and dark eyes. And so I lay, my hair slightly unkempt and a knowing grin just knowing. And my face was streaked with vomit, and my arms, hands and legs shook and fought to lift myself as though I were a battered fly.

In any event it probably would have been for the best had I faded away there on the pavement as when I arrived at the hospital on the faint outskirts of consciousness it was in some sort of an uproar. They had exploded a device on the street below and the casualty ward shook with the moans of mutilated men and women and coursed with their blood. One fellow stood above me where I lay, with his arm clasped neatly in the crevice of his shoulder. His stump was like a geyser of red muck. All the little bits and bobs of flesh scattered about would have been enough to fill a pizzeria – a really meaty pizzeria – but the mood was really far too grave for anyone to make such a tasteless comparison.

The Doctors seemed a little overwhelmed with their sweaty, grey foreheads and jagged, wide eyes. They looked as though they wanted to slip out of their white coats and splash around in the blood with the rest of us. But, credit to them, they did what little they could for the walking mortuary. They wondered about frowning and making little interested noises at the state of various hacked limbs; rubbing their chins and furrowing their brows as though it were not a massacre but a rather complex jigsaw puzzle which might take the whole evening. It was farcical, really, and it was all that they could do to sidle up casually to moaning patients and pop fatty deposits that don’t spray nice.

I lingered towards the back of the casualty ward, next to a drinking fountain and a man who’d hit his head in the bath. I was finally seen to hours later by a middle level nurse with a big gay mustache and a tick.

He licked his thin lips. “And how is sir?” He asked nonplussed.

I gave a lurch with my torso to indicate in the direction of my wound. The middle level nurse drew away the bloodied sheet. I looked up at him for some approval, some sort of impression but he shrugged and gave a little grunt as though to say, I’ve been everywhere, man, I’ve been here and there, man.

“How did this happen?” he breathed through his teeth?

I looked around at the carnage.

“Ah, explosion?” I suggested.

The middle level nurse strained a vindictive breath through his nostril hair.

“Your injuries are inconsistent with an explosion, sir. In fact I would have to say that judging by the trajectory of your wound, that it is, in fact, self inflicted.”

The fella in the tracksuit gasped, and drew his hand away.

“No, no, it’s not. It was just there, I woke up and it was just-”

The nurse spoke through the big fella in the tracksuit.

“Would you like to ask sir if he is aware of the tragedy that has occurred?” He ran his fingers through his waxen comb over and straightened his shoulders. “Does sir know that hundreds have died, hundreds, thousands more have been wounded, through no fault of their own in a terrorist attack that early signs predict will be on the scale of a world recognised disaster and yet you have chosen now to burden our struggling health system with your tragic pathos.” The big fella in the tracksuit gave me a punch to the throat which left me gasping and blue.

“Get out, get out of here now, you, you wretched demon.”
The middle level nurse swung his arms up from his sides and with a violent thrust, tipped over the trolley on which I lay. I fell on my front onto the filthy linoleum floor so that my face absorbed all of the impact.
The middle level nurse screeched above me and in amongst ineffectual kicks to my ribs he would scream. “He’s not a victim, he’s not a victim.”

When I drew my head up and rested for a moment on my haunches, two jagged pearls, floated in a red pool beneath me: fragments of my front teeth. My jaw screamed in white pain.

I staggered up onto my feet, but the middle level nurse set upon me, I think he was, like, biting my neck and ripping at my hair. The moans in the ward stopped and there was only our din as all eyes, all blood streaked faces were on me. With some reluctance the middle level nurse drew himself away and took a moment to compose himself, to straighten his ruffled hair and clothing. He cleared his throat and then screamed

“He’s a fraud. His wounds are self-inflicted.”

And that was all it took, the whole ward set on me, screaming recriminations and the like. One man might even have thrown his severed limb which bounced past my shoulder and under a vending machine.
I clambered away from the ghouls, through a set of swinging double doors and ran and ran and ran out into the pink light of dawn – complete with crimson clouds floating overhead – and listened to the roar of traffic from roads distant.

It was still dark, wet, and smoke billowed from random sites across my very limited horizon. I could not imagine a world more frightening, or destructive to my grey matter: so soft and pummeled into degeneracy that I imagine it looks more like a sponge than a steak. And I had no idea how I might walk, if I might walk at all through all this mess.

And I had not staggered a thousand paces down an alley when it began to rain, little tiny droplets. As I licked a drop of water from my hand the hospital exploded. I felt strangely elated, actually, for a moment and was quite content to catch the rain in my mouth and kick my boots along the pavement and ignore the whole sorry mess. But the rain that dropped was acrid like soot and when I looked back towards the hospital little scraps of charred paperwork manoeuvred down a wind tunnel towards me. The cloud dropped over me and as the little scraps swept into my eyes I read cancer, cancer, cancer over and over again, written a million times. I ran, and ran, as fast as my legs could carry and the streetlights were up to their old tricks again, except, this time, they exploded one by one as I past. The wound had spread its edges nearly as far as the small of my back, but I couldn’t care.

Let it rain, I screamed.

I felt a rip and a noise like a butcher’s shop. The wound edged along the rest of my flesh, little quakes, a jolt of spasticitiy, and the red line and then the springy red fat and gristle. For a moment all I could see was inside: sinewy flesh, veins like red drapes which soon parted as my eyes coursed along through my shattered skull to look outside at the world, still the same – destroyed – but glowing ever so red.

I ran along the road and past a school gymnasium set alight. I stopped, and shook my sore from running legs. Little chimney sweep faces stared at me with the stupid whites of their eyes, gripping their hands to the bars of a fence. I don’t know what I looked like but it must have been a horror of a monster because they all pointed and tittered among themselves and to think that for a moment I was going to offer them my help. Panting and laughing I picked at some of the exposed muck, and threw red sods at their faces. “I hope you fucking burn,” I yelled. They turned away. I really am too far gone, aren’t I? This is too much; too much!

I started to run again, but with each step I would grind some of myself into the pavement. A few scraps here and there add up. I fell to the ground and laughed and laughed so hard I heaved up vomit and when there was no more vomit, bile; black bile over my exposed innards and the clean, black asphalt. From the sky, shards of glass, wiry filaments and black mud fell over me. Perhaps memory is just warm around the edges but is it possible that there was a time where everything seemed right as rain, perhaps at some glowing moment of my youth in that brick veneer past? I laughed even harder. These days, not even the rain is right.