Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction (42 page)

I could not imagine going through it
again
, and just as I had done all my life, I searched and searched through my intellect for a way to make it okay, make it bearable, for a way to
do
it. I lay awake all night on that train, feeling the tracks slip beneath me with an odd eroticism, when I remembered an afternoon from my three months in the hospital. Boredom was a big problem those long afternoons, the days marked by meals and television programs. Waiting for the afternoon tea to come, wondering desperately how I could make time pass, it had suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t have to make time pass, that it would do it of its own accord, that I simply had to relax and take no action. Lying on the train, remembering that, I realized I had no obligation to improve my situation, that I didn’t have to explain or understand it, that I could just simply let it happen. By the time the train pulled into King’s Cross station, I felt able to bear it yet again, not entirely sure what other choice I had.

But there was an element I didn’t yet know about. When I returned to Scotland to set up a date to have the tissue expander inserted, I was told quite casually that I’d be in the hospital only three or four days. Wasn’t I going to spend the whole expansion time in the hospital? I asked in a whisper. What’s the point of that? came the answer. You can just come in every day to the outpatient ward to have it expanded. Horrified by this, I was speechless. I would have to live and move about in the outside world with a giant balloon inside the tissue of my face? I can’t remember what I did for the next few days before I went into the hospital, but I vaguely recall that these days involved a great deal of drinking alone in bars and at home.

I had the operation and went home at the end of the week. The only things that gave me any comfort during the months I lived with my tissue expander were my writing and Franz Kafka. I started a novel and completely absorbed myself in it, writing for hours each day. The only way I could walk down the street, could stand the stares I received, was to think to myself, “I’ll bet none of them are writing a novel.” It was that strange, old, familiar form of egomania, directly related to my dismissive, conceited thoughts of adolescence. As for Kafka, who had always been one of my favorite writers, he helped me in that I felt permission to feel alienated, and to have that alienation be okay, bearable, noble even. In the same way that imagining I lived in Cambodia helped me as a child, I walked the streets of my dark little Scottish city by the sea and knew without doubt that I was living in a story Kafka would have been proud to write.

The one good thing about a tissue expander is that you look so bad with it in that no matter what you look like once it’s finally removed, your face has to look better. I had my bone graft and my fifth soft-tissue graft and, yes, even I had to admit I looked better. But I didn’t look like me. Something was wrong: was
this
the face I had waited through eighteen years and almost thirty operations for? I somehow just couldn’t make what I saw in the mirror correspond to the person I thought I was. It wasn’t only that I continued to feel ugly; I simply could not conceive of the image as belonging to me. My own image was the image of a stranger, and rather than try to understand this, I simply stopped looking in the mirror. I perfected the technique of brushing my teeth without a mirror, grew my hair in such a way that it would require only a quick, simple brush, and wore clothes that were simply and easily put on, no complex layers or lines that might require even the most minor of visual adjustments.

On one level I understood that the image of my face was merely that, an image, a surface that was not directly related to any true, deep definition of the self. But I also knew that it is only through appearances that we experience and make decisions about the everyday world, and I was not always able to gather the strength to prefer the deeper world to the shallower one. I looked for ways to find a bridge that would allow me access to both, rather than ride out the constant swings between peace and anguish. The only direction I had to go in to achieve this was to strive for a state of awareness and self-honesty that sometimes, to this day, occasionally rewards me. I have found, I believe, that our whole lives are dominated, though it is not always so clearly translatable, by the question “How do I look?” Take all the many nouns in our lives — car, house, job, family, love, friends — and substitute the personal pronoun I. It is not that we are all so self-obsessed; it is that all things eventually relate back to ourselves, and it is our own sense of how we appear to the world by which we chart our lives, how we navigate our personalities, which would otherwise be adrift in the ocean of
other
people’s obsessions.

One evening toward the end of my year-long separation from the mirror, I was sitting in a café, talking to someone — an attractive man, as it happened — and we were having a lovely, engaging conversation. For some reason I suddenly wondered what I looked like to him. What was he
actually
seeing when he saw me? So many times I’ve asked this of myself, and always the answer is this: a warm, smart woman, yes, but an unattractive one. I sat there in the café and asked myself this old question, and startlingly, for the first time in my life. I had no answer readily prepared. I had not looked in a mirror for so long that I quite simply had no clue as to what I looked like. I studied the man as he spoke; my entire life I had seen my ugliness reflected back to me. But now, as reluctant as I was to admit it, the only indication in my companion’s behavior was positive.

And then, that evening in that café, I experienced a moment of the freedom I’d been practicing for behind my Halloween mask all those years ago. But whereas as a child I expected my liberation to come as a result of gaining something, a new face, it came to me now as the result of shedding something, of shedding my image. I once thought that truth was eternal, that when you understood something, it was with you forever. I know now that this isn’t so, that most truths are inherently unretainable, that we have to work hard all our lives to remember the most basic things. Society is no help; it tells us again and again that we can most be ourselves by looking like someone else, leaving our own faces behind to turn into ghosts that will inevitably resent and haunt us. It is no mistake that in movies and literature the dead sometimes know they are dead only after they can no longer see themselves in the mirror; and as I sat there feeling the warmth of the cup against my palm, this small observation seemed like a great revelation to me. I wanted to tell the man I was with about it, but he was involved in his own topic and I did not want to interrupt him, so instead I looked with curiosity toward the window behind him, its night-darkened glass reflecting the whole café, to see if I could, now, recognize myself.

William Harrison

 

WILLIAM HARRISON
is the author of eight novels — the last five set in Africa — as well as three volumes of short stories. He taught at the University of Arkansas for a number of years and lives in Fayetteville.

 

At night in the Bristol Hotel everyone seems to have a key to my room, this little cinderblock cubicle at the rear, two floors above the alleyways of Lagos. I fold a pillow beneath my head and try to sleep facing the door.

A jangle of keys, then a vendor shuffles in, speaking softly as he shows me his magazines. Get out, I tell him, and he nods, but advances to the foot of the bed, smiling and nodding and selling until I raise my voice.

A man with a flit gun arrives to kill insects.

A squat little woman with a kerchief on her head comes to clean the basin.

It’s now two o’clock in the morning. The desk clerks all retired at midnight and, besides, this is Africa where complaining only adds stress to your problems.

An Arab boy with a neck brace enters, pointing out that I’ll need a tour guide the next day.

Twenty minutes later a young prostitute arrives, asking in broken English if I didn’t ask the bartender to send her up. Please, I manage, go away, please.

Exhausted, I stand at the window looking down on hundreds of wayfarers, dark figures in the rainy alleyway out back. Some of them sleep beneath old cartons while others slump in doorways, smoking cigarettes and waiting out the night. Not far off is a rubbish pile as large as a city block. A church bell clanks out a toneless count.

A man in a uniform unlocks my door and peers in, wanting to know if everything is all right. He’s the watchman, he tells me, and he suggests money, just a little tip, please, but he smells drunk and unofficial.

An old woman with assorted flowers.

A nearly naked man with a bicycle wheel.

A waiter from the lounge bar.

It’s four in the morning when the magazine vendor loudly jangles his keys and tries again. Yes, all right, I tell him, one of those, and I prop myself up after he’s gone, turn on the single naked lightbulb, and begin to look at the pictures and read.

At a roadblock near Singida our van is stopped by a trio of ragtag Tanzanian soldiers, one of them carrying a rusty M-1 rifle with an oily rag dangling like a flag from its breech.

The day is scorching, dustdevils everywhere, all the waterholes dry, and the tall soldier in the vest who glances into our van sees that we have six full cases of Tusker, the best Kenyan lager.

The drinking begins.

The third soldier, dressed in short khaki pants and a crushed straw hat, carries the lone bullet for his companion’s rifle. Wrapped in dirty string and draped around his neck, its brass casing glints in the sun.

As they drink bottle after bottle of warm lager they ask where we’re going. Dodoma, we tell them, then up to Mwanza. But why? No reason, we tell them, and that’s clearly reason enough.

The landscape here, north of the lush Iringa Forest, is bleak as the moon: high savannah, rocky, red dust covering the leaves of a few thorny bushes. As our van waits in the raw heat — and we can see ten miles in every direction and there are no other vehicles in sight — we offer the beer as a gift or bribe, no one knows which, and we stand around in the road, everybody waiting to see what will happen. How much will they drink? Do we offer them a full case? When they’re drunk, will they become hostile? Or will they soon raise that flimsy crossbar?

What to do? We’re rich travelers by their standards, just passing by, a fortune of beer in our possession, plastic cards in our pockets that will buy us the world, and they’re small men in tatters who share a common rifle with a single bullet.

We’ve talked about what to do if the van breaks down out here, how we’ll stay close to the vehicle because, as we know, we’re the slowest beasts on the landscape. We’ve talked about emergencies, all the wild animals, how to stay calm. This is a land of cobras and lion, of strange diseases and pestilence, but the great dangers are fleeting authority, vague boundaries, old gods and loyalties, and the oblivion of some unintentional insult in a language no one really understood. Unlike the world we usually inhabit in America, politics here can kill you.

At Cape Point there’s an asphalt parking lot, then a steep climb uphill to the promontory where one is supposed to be able to see the Indian Ocean meet the Atlantic.

The day is cool with a bright sun and a steady breeze, so we tuck our windbreakers under our arms and start up. At the top of our climb our perspiration quickly dries and chills us, but we can look miles out to sea and we joke about seeing all the way to Antarctica from here. On such a day and with such a vista, the troubles of South Africa seem far away.

There is an excruciating beauty all around us here. Cape Town, where we started driving from this morning, is a silver city on the edge of civilization, clean as a space station. For Americans, only San Francisco compares to it. The surrounding province is a world of vaulting coastal mountains, white beaches, old Huguenot villages, pastels of wildflowers, and lush vineyards. In recent years the political climate has prevented a lot of people from saying much about the beauty here. There’re no packaged travel tours or advertisements in tourist magazines. While tribes fight with one another, while the whites make concessions yet hold onto power, South Africa’s celebrated beauty has almost receded into secrecy. One sees a few Japanese with their cameras or a few Germans with theirs, but the land has lost much of its tourist trade.

There are often ugly emotions that go with a country of extraordinary natural vistas such as this. One can argue that the loveliest places on the earth often inspire men to become fanatics — that, say, the splendor of Bavaria had something to do with making the Nazis happen. We know that a beautiful woman often creates male hysteria of a particular lunatic sort, but the same may be true of certain spectacular homelands. Is beauty a curse? One can imagine that it is here.

We can look back to the left at False Bay — a place well named considering all the illusions of South Africa — and see the white beaches of Simon’s Town and Muizenburg.

After a while we look back south toward the meeting place of the oceans. The cold breeze continues and we know we won’t stay very long.

We try to imagine a dotted line out there: Indian Ocean on the left, Atlantic on the right. We’re talking about this when a man in an old ski jacket overhears us and says, “No, it’s not out there at all. That’s not where the oceans meet. It’s far to the east of here.”

He’s a professional type, maybe a little seedier, with a frayed collar above his jacket, his shoes worn down at the heels, but with an old meershaum between his teeth and an assertive manner. We want to dispute him, but he’s got the Afrikaans accent — he’s indisputably a native — and he just seems to know.