the man who could grow new faces
Abbey Hebert
​
There was once a man who, whenever he did anything wrong, cut off his face.
When he was twenty-five years old, he worked in a business, some corporation just like all the others. Every day he donned a suit and tie as an attempt to conform and blend with his many bland co-workers. This costume transformed him into a mundane middle-class working man, not the man who had the haunting burden of growing new faces.
As he entered the front doors of the building one day, the sounds of printers, faxes, and other miscellaneous beeps overwhelmed him. Walking through the herd of cubicles, he wondered what mistake he would make this time, yet he found comfort in the fact that it seemed nearly impossible to mess up, as he had done many other times, in such a simple setting.
Trying to go unnoticed, he crept up the stairs, and once he made it to the top, a cool breeze from the open office window forced goosebumps to rise on his body. He accidentally ran into his boss, a woman that he had always found rather dignified. She had an indecipherable quality that reminded him of his mother before she completed suicide when he was a child. Other people deducted that she was demanding and pretentious from the way the bones in her neck stood perfectly straight atop one another, yet the man found her admirable. He knew that he could never demand respect from people because he felt as though he just simply didn’t deserve it.
“Good morning,” she said and grinned at him. He smiled. This duo had always harvested a healthy relationship centered on mutual respect. He never understood why people viewed her so negatively. Many of the men, but sometimes even the women, who sounded as if they had been trained to give this reaction, would whisper to one another, “Why is she being such a bitch today?” and, like a call-and-response, another would answer, “Oh well, you can’t control that time of the month.” And then they would laugh.
The man usually heard these inconsiderate and mocking phrases while on his way to the bathroom, which was a proper destination, for after he heard these things, he felt notably nauseous. He had a good heart. Every day he ignored them, he felt a piece of his heart crack like an egg would if it were dropped; he felt his own heart-yolk drip and drip and drip out of his body until he felt so guilty that, one day, he finally stopped walking.
“That’s really offensive,” he said gently. His eyes darted about like alienated gnats.
The group of men and women released one cacophonous laugh, then one of the men wound his arm back and slingshotted it at the man’s face. His nose dripped bloody-drop by bloody-drop, and he remembered the metallic smell that barged into his nostrils whenever he’d cut off his face.
He picked himself up and walked slowly, for the scent of blood made him light-headed, towards the man who had hit him. As a way of claiming a truce and as an apology for upsetting this man, he tried to create a peace treaty: a hug. His attempt to hug the man failed, and every step he took forward, the man took back. A moment before he could hug the man and apologize for the upset he had caused, the man fell backwards out the open window. It’s hard to write this.
Pedestrians on the sidewalk lowered their heads, and the congregation ran away from the man who could grow new faces. He felt a tingling in his fingertips and dryness in his throat, and he wished he would have been the one down below on the sidewalk, legs bent at right angles, jaw broken, and blood rushing out of his ears. Instead, he grabbed the knife that was always kept in his pockets in case he made mistakes, and he took it securely in his hands and soon began dripping blood like a waterfall. I wish I could tell him to stop.
After he cut off his face, he grew the face of a child.
​
His walk on the playground was tarnished by his constant worrying. Fear hung above him like a knife dangling from a thin rope and he was aware of the hyper-fragility of that rope - in fact, he believed it should be called a string.
Play-sets and plastic riding-horses tempted him, yet the man was so frightened to enjoy them. If he were to hurt someone, as he assumed he would, he’d have to add yet another face to add onto his kabob of depleted faces.
A boy at the playground grinned up at him. “Do you want to play a game with me?”
The man did not know how to react, or he was never asked this question when he was younger. He spent his time playing card games with his mother, trying to block out the distant voices of distant children. And after he lost his mother, he was left completely alone and wished to be someone – anyone else – who was not.
He hesitated, not quite trusting himself to be careful enough to play a game. Shyly, he asked, “What kind of game?”
“Tag!”
When he scratched his arm, his nails did not draw blood, but they did leave white marks. “Okay, I’ll play.”
Half an hour passed, and they were both still running around, tapping each other, then quickly sprint away. The man noticed how the game of tag was quite a contradiction; in the moments where the boy would run away, he felt lonely - or normal because this was how he felt most of the time - but he knew tag was a team sport. He was playing with someone, and he was grateful for this face.
​
Excitement beat him until he forgot his own strength, and his tap accidentally intensified into a shove that caused the boy to collapse onto the ground. He did not mean it. Once the boy collided with the ground, he started crying and grabbed his knee. The man looked around for the boy’s parents, assuming that the child couldn’t have been there by himself. He saw no one. He knew he had to try to take care of the child’s bleeding knee. Miniature red beads seeped through the broken seam of skin, and the man was reminded of what blood looked like, the red swirl of catastrophe as if everyone had started skinning themselves, adding to the man’s blood-river.
Panicking, the man quickly turned his head to get a panorama view of the playground; what could he use to stop the bleeding? As he looked to his right, an idea formed, and he knew he had to act quickly; he could not let this little boy bleed out like the man who had punched him. Perhaps he could make up for his wrongdoing. It was his accident.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. Let me help you. Calm down, and don’t look.”
The tourniquet was fresh and new and soon to be wrapped around the boy’s leg. The man watched his shaking hands carefully, frightened that he would not tie it tight enough, so frightened, in fact, that he re-tied it twice. He tried so hard to help. The little boy cried even more and began complaining about how he couldn’t feel his leg anymore, so the man looked and gasped when he noticed the inhumane color.
Screams echoed off the playsets as the mother of the child collapsed next to him. “What did you do?” she screamed in between gasps of air. He wondered if his own mother felt this grief every time she watched him cut off his face from the clouds.
The tires of the ambulance shrieked, the sirens sobbed. The last thing the man saw before cutting off his face was a paramedic untying the tourniquet, which was stained with one dot of blood, and preparing to amputate the little boy’s leg.
After he cut off his face, he grew the face of a doctor.
He was now wearing all-white scrubs, as pristine as could be. He’d never spent a day in medical school, so he found it ill-fitting to be a doctor. But he knew how messy and painful it was to cut off his face; therefore he decided he would try to learn the technicalities of medicine and nursing. He wanted to help.
His curious hands and eyes snooped around the room, reading through patient files and picking up heavy needles. As he put back the most recent needle of study, he observed the primary color throughout the room: white. The walls, the sheets, the floors - everything was white. Never had he seen something so clean and organized. He hoped that the hospital room was too clean for even him to mess up.
“Doctor! Doctor!” a hectic voice cried. The voice grew closer, and he heard the sound of wheels hurrying against the tiled floor. A nurse rushed in, rather out of breath, while pushing a stretcher. “We have an attempted suicide here. She cut her wrists, and she’s bleeding terribly. Start the procedure, and I’ll go get more help.” With those quick demands, she turned around and sprinted out the threshold, leaving the man who could grow new faces and the suicide alone.
The man stared at the woman, whose eyes, instead of blinking, stayed half-down and whose breath was so faint he could barely tell she was breathing at first. As he stared at his boss lying motionless on the stretcher, he wondered what drove her to this and why no matter what face he donned, he was reminded that he did not and could not save his mother. He had suspected that his hope, the one of doing something right, would be murdered because he could never do anything right.
After staring at her for a moment, he rushed to grab what he believed he needed. Perhaps he could save this woman who had always reminded him of his mother.
He grabbed the bandages resting on the counter and reached for a tool, which he had assumed was for placing bandages on people in the most sanitary way possible. The instrument bit the gauze, and slowly the man who could grow new faces put them on the attempted-suicide. As he did this, though, he couldn’t control his nerves and his hands slipped. The tool went inside her body, splitting open an artery. Her eyelids opened and did not close, and her breaths were not shaky as they were earlier because they left her body in a final breath of wind. Her blood drenched the stretcher until it resembled a piece of bread dipped in water. He stared at her with saddened eyes and sat on the chair in the hospital room, staring at his fatal mistake.