That is how I became Stockholm Sven the disfigured miner. Stockholm Sven of the mangled face.
MacIntyre’s cabin had no mirror and no washroom, of course. For his ablutions and his infrequent attempts at grooming, MacIntyre used the washroom in the Company barracks. So for a week or two, as I struggled to focus my one good eye and regain my feet—the lingering concussion was substantial—my knowledge of my wounds was limited to MacIntyre’s circumspect answers and the occasional distorted reflection in icy glass.
I say “good eye” as though my other eye—my right, fortunately, for I am left-handed—were simply “not as good” or even “bad.” My right eye was no more. Gone. Buried beneath untold tons of ice, rock, and coal. There was no sign of it when they found me, and no one had paused to dig through the filthy snow with frostbitten fingers for a tiny useless sphere, frozen and likely crushed for three unspeakable days and nights.
This emphatic lack may have contributed to the slow recession of fluid from my brain, or to its lasting effects. I could not persuade my left eye to act as it should. It felt like a grape suspended in marmalade. When I willed it to move, it was loath to comply. Sometimes its lethargy seemed conscious, as when a dog hears a command that he dislikes and obeys only with grudging deliberation.
I tried not to moan, I truly did. I was keenly aware of MacIntyre’s shifting presence—sometimes he was conspicuously absent, so as to give me space, I think; sometimes he was watchful and concerned. Always generous, always patient. But despite my best efforts, the wounds on my face, neck and shoulder, and the screaming, suppurating hole that was my right eye socket, all served to elicit some otherworldly noises. They came from deep within, unbidden. I would hear them as one hears one’s own voice through the veil of sleep, acting out a dream but speaking nonsense.
Many times I asked MacIntyre for an accounting of the avalanche, and each time he complied. Many times I asked him for details about my injuries, and each time he demurred or dissembled. I did not blame him then. I do not now. How do you tell your friend that his features have been rewritten? That the dog-eared atlas of his human form must be thrown out and forgotten, now that a volcano has erupted upon it and rivers of magma have reshaped the topography?
“Please, Charles,” I said. “Just tell me how bad it is.”
“It is not wonderful,” he replied.
“What does that mean?”
“You were never very handsome to begin with, Sven, so you may consider it an improvement.”
“I’m not in the mood for jokes.”
“No, I suppose not. Perhaps in this newfound state of humorlessness and ugliness, you will now feel at home among the Norwegians.”
But his concern was palpable, and founded. An infection in the barren socket resulted in a fever that tried to burn the life out of me. I floundered outside in the snow, cooling like a barrel of lager. Quinine was slow to work. The camp surgeon prevailed upon MacIntyre to smoke less during my convalescence if he was such a fool as to shift me from the infirmary—he feared that the fumes were an irritant. Maybe the surgeon was right, but I believe he knew, as MacIntyre clearly did, that establishing a will to live was crucial, and that such a delicate maneuver could be successful only if I were moved to a place of friendship and comfort.
So it was that I did not get a good look at myself until over a month after the incident, when I was finally well enough that MacIntyre and the surgeon deemed it permissible for me to walk, aided by both of them, across the camp and down to the Company barracks to wash. When I looked in the mirror for the first time, they both turned away, as though the sight of me seeing my own face was worse than the face itself.
Perhaps I was somewhat prepared by then. Perhaps I feared the worst, and therefore had less trouble becoming acquainted with my new face. I don’t seek to downplay the shock, or the living nightmare that was now my outward embodiment. But if you have seen someone who was scalded by industrial solvent, or walked past the begging cup of a man whose body has been caught in something meant for textiles or leather, as most of us living in this machine’s world have done, then my face would not surprise you much more than it surprised me.
I do not think of myself as prone to vanity. I did not feel a great personal loss of something valuable. What wounded me most of all was the attention—in horror or in sympathy—of everyone I came upon in the camp. The extended looks. The dissolution of anonymity.
Shortly thereafter I resolved to spend my life alone.