..............TO THE BONE

2011-02-16T19:26:00.001-08:00

Henry pulled out of the lot, steered with one hand while he scratched his neck and arms and face, accelerated past a UPS truck and turned right on Crescent.

“Laura, what room are you in?”

“I ordered Mimosas.” She started to cry. “But I drank them, Henry. Do you know how hard it is to separate the blade from these goddamn plastic—”

“Oh Jesus, Laura, what room are you in!”

***

Henry rubbed his face and leaned back as the shadow crossed his desk. He turned to see John Elmore hanging over the left wall of his cubicle.

Both men were forty, and twice divorced. Both were tall and a bit doughy. And up until two years ago, both were completely bald. Now Elmore had a surfer’s tan and a head of blonde hair down to his shoulders.

The lifestyles columnist pressed his tinted glasses against his face, drained the water in his tiny paper cup, tossed the cup at Henry’s trash can and, as usual, missed.

“Got plans for the weekend, do ya?”

“I’m moving,” Henry said and tapped the mouse to wake his monitor.

“Right. Sleeping with the neighbor’s wife.”
Henry’s mouth fell open as he tried to think of a lie.

“Your father stopped by,” Elmore told him. “Said you were scared shitless. Anyway, Malcolm and I are going to a beach party.”

“Don’t you think you’re a bit old for that?” Henry said, grateful for the subject change. In Chula Vista there was nothing more common than a beach party. But Henry didn’t do beach parties, or pool parties, or parties.

A party, he thought, was nothing but a gateway to possible sex. Henry only wanted the sex, but the only sex he could get was with fat, ugly women who weren’t even single. And yet Elmore, with his hair and permanently tinted glasses, was rolling in ass.

“I’m too old, am I?” Elmore laughed. “Just get the treatment, Madsen!”

Henry wrinkled his mouth and resisted the urge to slowly run his hand over his scalp, a motion he’d been reenacting every day since he’d first realized there was not one hair left.

“It’s not natural,” Henry muttered.

“Oh, fuck that. Get the treatment.” Elmore tossed another cup at the basket and walked away.

While Henry gathered the trash, his computer beeped. A message from Laura.

His hearted pounded as he clicked on the tiny envelope.

I finally convinced my boss to send me to San Diego. Are you ready to meet in the flesh?

Henry scanned the message for more, but he knew Laura often cut her messages short without explanation, without sense.

He quickly typed, When?

March 24.

Sixteen days. He never thought the day would come. It was just something to think about. She was beautiful, and he was…

Henry walked off to the restroom to stare at himself. Normally he did this around four thirty, but today he needed an earlier look at the plain, insignificant face. In most things Henry was not short on confidence, but with women he was a zero.

Laura had seen him, or at least a photo. She’d accepted him. “So why,” he asked the restroom mirror, “do I want more than anything to have some goddamn hair on my head!”

He found Elmore in his gaudy cubicle staring at porn.

Elmore did a double take when he saw Henry hanging over the partition. And when he saw Henry’s expression, he grinned and folded his hands behind his head.

“You want it, don’t you?”

“What?” Henry remembered the time, twelve years ago, when he’d purchased a bag of weed from a teenage Asian in Seattle. The deal went down in a park. It felt like this.

“The number to my guy. You know what?” Elmore reached into a drawer, handed Henry a card. “I’m not even going to give you shit for this. I mean it's kind of noble, you holding out.”

“Allergies,” Henry mumbled.

Elmore laughed so hard his glasses flew into the trash.

“Well shit, man!” he told Henry. “They came out with hypoallergenic months ago.”

Henry grabbed the card and walked to the elevator.

“Tell Dr. Green you know me!” Elmore shouted. “I get a kickback!”

***

“Hypoallergenic’s the same,” the secretary told Henry over the phone, “but…”

“But what?”
“You the Henry Madsen writes for the Star?”

“I guess.”
“I don’t care for your point of view. Are you allergic to anything else?”

“Only what you already know.”

“You mean everything?” He could hear the woman shaking her head.

“The doctor’s running a bit late,” she told him, and hung up.

Walking into the Dunbar Hair Treatment Center, Henry was full of doubts, but outside of the surly secretary, the appointment and following treatments went off without a hitch. And three weeks later, when he met Laura in the flesh, Henry’s glistening skull was, for the first time in twelve years, fully covered in thick, black fuzz.

He’d been experiencing a slight itch on his forearms, but the doctor told him it was nothing, and Henry had many reasons not to care.

Two days after the first sprouts, he felt the female stares bombarding him, and two weeks into the treatment, Gertrude, his young redhead neighbor, welcomed him to the apartment complex by screwing his brains out. She’d been slightly drunk, and made it clear that it was a one-time thing. But still, Henry was feeling pretty good when he met Laura at a café near the beach.

In person, Laura was even funnier, more beautiful, more intelligent then she’d been online. She was two years older than Henry, but she had an athletic figure and gorgeous blonde hair. She wore little makeup, which Henry liked, and when he said something she perceived to be meaningful, Laura squeezed his hands. He noticed the lines on her wrists, but didn’t comment, and fought every urge not to scratch his neck and the backs of his legs.

Laura wanted to take things slow, so they waited a week to have sex.

“It may seem stupid,” she told him after the second time in his bed, “but a few months after we started communicating, I stopped going out on dates, stopped seeing other men.”

Oh no, Henry thought. That was ten months ago. He saw the hope in her eyes, the hope that he’d done the same. He didn’t speak, hoped the moment would pass, but a few minutes later, Laura told him she had to wake up early, and politely walked out the door. An hour after that, Gertrude knocked, asked if he wanted to hang.

Two weeks later, Laura decided to move to Chula Vista and began looking for an apartment without telling Henry. Instead she decided to show up on a Saturday morning with coffee and donuts.

Gertrude opened the door and stood before Laura in Henry’s boxers and nothing else, smoking a cigarette and sipping vodka from a mug.

“We don’t want any,” Gertrude told her, and slammed the door.

Henry stepped outside in time to watch the woman he thought he might love run over a trashcan on her speedy retreat. He scratched his head, and scratched his arms, and his crotch, and walked back inside.

“Jesus what the hell do you have?” Gertrude said and stared at the marks on his arms and legs.

“Nothing,” he told her and decided it was time to see Dr. Green.

“You have to stop the treatments,” the doctor told him. “At least until we can figure this out. Your drawing blood for Christ’s sake.”

Henry thanked the doctor and ignored his advice. Over the next week the itching increased.

On Friday morning he stepped out of his apartment spreading hydrocortisone wherever there was space. He’d gone through three tubes already.

His phone buzzed. It was Laura. For five days he’d tried calling her.

“Laura, I—”

“I still love you, Henry.” She sounded drunk. “I just wanted you to know …I blame myself.”

“Where are you?” The last time she’d stayed at the Marriott. She liked their mints.

“I left you everything, Henry. Even after…I’m not mad. I’m not.”

Henry pulled out of the lot, swerved around a girl on a ten-speed, accelerated past a UPS truck and turned right on Crescent, all the while scratching himself.

“Laura, what room are you in?”

“I ordered Mimosas for us.” She started to cry. “But I drank them, Henry. Do you know how hard it is to separate the blade from these goddamn plastic—”

“Oh Jesus, Laura, what room are you in!”

“I don’t think it will hurt, Henry.”

The line went dead. He pressed his foot to the floor and steered with one hand while he scratched his neck with the other. He set the cruise control on seventy down a thirty-five zone, slipped his feet out of his sandals and raked his toe nails across his ankles, his calves. He was amazed to hear no sirens as he flew through yellows and reds and slid into the Marriott parking lot. He ran barefoot into the lobby scratching his arms, his legs, his neck, his face, dropped his keys on the counter and asked for Laura Founder’s room, not even sure if she was here.

“I’m sorry sir,” a teenage boy told him without looking up from the computer. “We can’t—”

Henry grabbed the boy by the arm and pulled him towards the counter. “She’s going to kill herself! Now tell me where the fuck she is!”

Henry released the boy, who scowled for a second but finally pressed a few keys and told him, “814.”

The elevator doors opened before he even pressed the button, and Henry wondered what side of luck he was on as the elevator began to ascend, and then shake.

Everything stopped. The lights went out. The floor jerked from side to side and the walls rattled. In the distance he heard screams and car alarms and heavy objects crashing into the ground.

“Oh god!” Henry screamed as something heavy crashed into the top of the elevator and rocked the box from side to side.

While the quake seemed to go on and on, Henry sat in the corner, trembling, and scratching.

When it stopped, he didn’t know what to do. He listened to the sirens, the terrified screams in the distance. Screams of fear, screams of pain. He wondered how Laura was, if she’d stopped, if she was waiting for him. He listened to his finger nails dig into his arms, his toe nails scraping his ankles.

He stood, and pounded the walls and screamed for help. Somewhere below, he heard the voice of the teenage boy, but he couldn’t make out the words.

He tried to stop scratching, but when he stopped, it came back stronger. His ears, his nose, everywhere called out for him to stop the burning for the love of Christ.

Forcing his hands into his pockets, Henry sank to the floor and prayed for them to hurry. He looked up at the huge dent in the roof, felt the box slip as something snapped.

For five minutes he resisted, but he had to scratch.

His keys were in the lobby, phone, wallet in the car. He had only his nails to work with.

No one’s here, he thought and pulled off his shirt and groaned as his fingers dug channels of blood across his arms, down his back. He slipped off his shorts, and his boxers. The more he scratched, the more he drifted into a world of satisfaction.

But between the haze, he found moments of clarity, the voice begging him to stop. He saw the lines of blood across his body and decided to get rid of the tools. He chewed off his nails and rocked back and forth, listening to the other voice in his head begging him to continue.

“Scratch, you son of a bitch! Scratch!”

When his dull fingers proved useless, he used his toenails, scratched his ankles raw, scraped the skin from the tops of his feet. For a while the satisfaction was euphoric, until the pain began to pulse, matching the rhythm of his racing heart.

In control once again, and horrified, Henry tried to tear the nails from his feet with his bloody fingers, but the only solution was to bite them. He stretched and contorted his body to sink his teeth into every last nail, pulled his groin chewing off the point on his pinkie toe, until there was nothing left, nothing sharp, anywhere on his body.

He screamed for someone to help, but no one replied. The car alarms had stopped, the distant screams faded. He pushed his fingers into his skin, and rubbed, and rubbed, but rubbing was not scratching, and he could not sate the itch in his bloody feet, his bloody legs and arms and back and neck. He wanted to scratch out his eyes and tear off his ears.

He looked up, saw the trap door in the ceiling, jumped for it, but every time he jumped, he slipped on the blood and crashed into the floor.

No escape. No escape. He stopped hoping, and searched for something to use, to scratch. There was nothing. He tried to rip out the buttons, tried to peel off the metal paneling, but nothing would budge.

And then, he ran his tongue over his teeth, and smiled. He pulled and pushed but they wouldn’t give, so he closed his eyes, braced for it, and punched himself in the mouth. Two teeth rattled to the floor a second before he fell back into the wall.

Working methodically, Henry pinched the teeth between his fingers and gratefully, satisfyingly tore more flesh from his skin, ripped open tissue and muscle and scratched to the bone. And it worked, as long as he didn’t stop, didn’t pause to let the pain overtake the pleasure.

He scraped the skin from his kneecap, worked through the blood on his neck and pulled out his hair, all of it, sliced through his scalp and pulled it back to get at the burning, itching skull. And when the skull flap, hanging down in front of his face, blocked his view, Henry grabbed with both hands and tore it free.

When the teeth wore down, he punched his bloody hands into his bloody mouth, pulled and twisted, but realized he could simply use his teeth to scratch away the rest of his flesh. He worked at his arms like he was eating corn on the cob, pulled his knees and legs up to his mouth and scraped until it was teeth against bone.

He was barely conscious when he turned and calmly studied the bones that were his arms.

The itching stopped.

In the reflective metal wall, he saw a skeleton covered in blood. He looked down, saw the flaps of discarded skin floating in the pool.

“Jesus,” he moaned. “Jesus…Jesus.”

And then came the pain.