Will Maclean
There was once a man, a very bad man. A gangster in fact, the very worst kind of bad man – a man who dresses up what he is in some kind of spurious moral code that means absolutely nothing, but justifies any action. Such a man is capable of anything.
He lives by one rule and one rule only, the most ancient, reptilian rule, that whoever dares to do, will prevail. By this rule, if anyone opposes him, they must not merely be stopped but broken, destroyed, snapped in half. He understands this completely, without words. He has understood it since he was a child. So he makes his money, illegally, and he builds his criminal empire through extortion, protection, theft, prostitution, drug dealing, and, almost incidentally, murder.
Grinning round a cigar, he recounts the first time. Me and the lads had some bother with this shopkeeper… (the story is old by this point, worn smooth as a pebble). From, I dunno, some fucking place. We offer him the usual policy, he says no, he didn’t come here from the old country to be intimidated (faded map of the old country on the wall, roughly square, with a jagged river through it, like black lightning). So after a week we smash the place up, we threaten his family ’cept he don’t seem to have one. The bloke doesn’t bend. Stubborn. Another week, then we go back to first principles as it were and I let the boys – my boys – go to work on him.
I watch, but only seeing as it’s work. The man, the shopkeeper, suffers under a variety of tools and tortures. We fuck him up something awful, like that, for four hours, do anything we can think of to the prick. He still won’t break. White shirt, red with blood, black with burns, still he don’t see. Before he dies, he becomes something else, someone no one ever thought of before, not even in a nightmare. Fucking mess. After that we wrap him in a curtain and dump him in the canal. Next week, someone else takes over the shop. Someone… (he pauses to find the word) …someone pre-approved. A gale of sycophantic laughter. He pauses to exhale foul cigar smoke, lost in fond reminiscence.
And so, built on the dead, his empire grows. After a few years this man – this monster – becomes so powerful he doesn’t have to do any first-hand monster work anymore and his life starts to resemble that of any successful CEO. He goes to the gym, plays golf. He eats out, Michelin star restaurants, puts on weight, goes to charity dinners. A little shiatsu, trips abroad, some more golf. All the while, all the cruelty and murder and broken lives pile up in his wake; he, now far removed from it, disconnected, an executive, his hands grown soft.
Disarticulated bodies turn up in bin bags on the banks of the river, minor hoods and those who oppose him, turned to rot, stinking sludge falling from greening bones, blue flesh at low tide, food for seagulls. He takes up tennis. He’s crap at it. Seven times a millionaire, nine, thirteen, twenty-four. Seven cars, a wife, a mistress. Four overweight Rottweilers, a vast, sprawling house that looks like a Tudor mansion might if it had been designed by a disturbed child and assembled over a weekend. Things, he remarks one day, fork in hand, are going well. What else is there? What lies ahead? Years of idleness. Years of comfort.
Then, one day, his mistress suggests they go to a fairground, because she wants to go, so they go. It’s terrible. Fucking toerags running rusty machines with glazed amphetamine indifference, shit sweets and treats, the horrid stench of doughnut batter, the din. He hates it. He shoots three bullseyes, wins her a grotesque pink chipmunk with a leering, skull-like grin. Can we go now. Strolling away from the whirl and the noise, they see a lone caravan. Set apart from the rest of the fair. A fortune teller. She says he should see one, he’s always wondering about his future, reading his horoscope and stuff.
So, laughing at his destiny, ha ha ha, he goes into the tiny caravan.
Inside, bad light. Bead curtain. Smells of cat. Not much furniture. Faded map of the old country on the wall, roughly square, with a jagged river through it, like black lightning, which stirs a memory, but it’s gone as soon as he thinks of it. Behind a table (a piece of plywood covered with a satin cloth) sits a scowling woman of seventy, face as wrinkled and unwelcoming as a clenched fist. She smokes long, cheap, cleaning lady fags, and she sucks on one now. She regards him, unblinking, takes all of him in. His haircut, his Armani shirt, which fails to hide his paunch, his grey trousers and black loafers. She looks him up and down, and suddenly he realises that his defences, the million behaviours that tell the world to leave him alone, to fuck off or get fucked, that tell you he’s a someone – they’re all deactivated here, and he is naked. She looks him up and down, says something in a language he doesn’t know. He goes Wha? Finger to his ear, pantomiming ignorance to raise a cheap laugh from a nonexistent sitcom audience, confrontational but feeling foolish, and she shakes her head as if clearing it of a bad thought. He ignores this, and sits down, but she’s still looking at him, with the level, matter-of-fact hatred with which a venomous snake in the zoo glares at its captors. Her eyes are almost all black, no white at all, they seem huge to him.
In tart vowels and long consonants she gives him the prepared speech. You can have Tarot, palm readings, crystal ball, or something a little more… (she hesitates, her dark gaze darts to his face, then back to the table) …direct. He is confused (scared) and a little bit freaked out (scared), so he tries to recall the half-a-Business-Management course he went on years ago. If faced with someone proffering unbearable alternatives, you should, he recalls, choose the most unbearable and see how they like that (in his heart he dearly wishes he was outside, with his mistress and the pink lights and the skull-faced chipmunk and the candyfloss and the frying smells). So he says, the last one, and she smiles nastily and he smiles back, a false smile hurting his overfed face, and tries to look confident. She tilts her head left to right, looks this way and that, as if to say, well, it’s your funeral, and proceeds to grind her Superking out on the heel of her shoe.
She instructs him to place both hands palm-up on the table in front of him. Smirking (scared) he does so. With a suddenness he associates, somewhere deep in his mind, with predatory, many-limbed, female things (squid, octopus, spider), she places her cold bony hands over his. He wants to whip his own hands away, to run outside, he’s in way over his head, he knows that now, but he can’t move. He feels something running through his body, something it has never felt before, something deeply and viscerally unpleasant, like worms squirming through him. He looks to her face, her bold, ancient face with its triangles of black skin under the eyes, looking for reassurance, possibly, but she is in a trance already, so quickly, and her eyes, so black and piercing, have rolled over to white, and her mouth gibbers and starts, forming words, not-words, bits of words, things that should never find expression. As she jabbers, saliva pours from her mouth, crumbs of thick pink lipstick, and he so desperately wants to run now but he’s clamped down, held there.
She starts to speak. The voice that issues from her lips is awful, not hers or even like it, older by far, and deeper, like some heavy antique machine that has somehow ground into speech.
In short, clipped words, it speaks.
It tells him his name. It tells him his wife’s name, his mistress’s name. It tells him how old he is, the name of the first and only woman he has ever loved, the name of the first man he ever killed. The vitals. Omitting all that cannot be proved, deleting all falsehood. The voice tells him his secrets; the money in the safe under the sauna, the trio of dead men concreted under a house on the coast, the offshore accounts. Information that he has shared with no one. And he sits, panting, unable to move. Silence and the smell of silence, overpowering. Things no-one could possibly know. And he is beyond scared now, fear has made a child of him, but he can’t stand, can’t run, he knows that he will hear something he wishes he hadn’t, but he cannot move, all he can do is sit and tremble. And the voice informs him that his movements and actions, his empire, and all the steps he has taken to build it, have met with the approval of a thing, or rather, a thing that is not a thing, a terrible, abyssal absence, two broken sets of teeth against blackened gums, open in perpetual mirth, but bravado is always his first reflex, even here, and he simply twitches in the furnace of that moment and says Wha? again.
On it goes, this voice, this strangulated snarling of giant gears, inexorably, toward a conclusion. Done with past and present, it starts to foretell the future, which is what it is here for.
In not so very much time from now, the summer of your life will end, and your life with it. You will be killed, murdered.
He stammers, blurts questions, but he can’t even hear them himself. The experience is flowing through him now, in all its reality, like an electric current. This is real. It is happening. Dirty, sick thoughts. Electric stench of river rot, the kind of aroma that reaches into you and pulls out your last meal. Still it talks.
It will happen soon. It will happen with terrible precision, by magical means. It will be, as if it were already done.
He will be killed by one in eight billion, by a man with his face, his exact double. His Doppelgänger. His Doppelgänger.
This last detail – the alien sound of the word – is too much, and he rips his hands from the table.
And there it is – a worst nightmare he never knew he had. Stunned, her eyes fill with human being again, and she briefly sags like a puppet before becoming grotesquely animated, her face quivering and juddering like the wattles of agitated poultry. Her hands are claws on the tablecloth, tearing it, rending it. He crashes into the bare bulb on the way out, scrabbling at the door, and when he looks back she appears to tick like a metronome, back and forth, swathed in a membrane of pulsing shadow, tick tock.
He screams and slams the caravan door behind him. What’s wrong, crows the mistress, what’s wrong?
Jump-cut to a few weeks later. Dark hollows under his eyes now, he hasn’t slept for days. He has lost a lot of weight. Whisky by his side, all the more potent for being a cliché. He has become obsessed with the experience, with the absolute reality of it; he cannot dull it or buy it off or rub it out with the usual distractions. Its power in his mind seems to grow rather than diminish as time passes. The thought preoccupies him, riddles his every waking thought like a disease. His executioner will arrive one day, soon. Wearing his face. In that moment, he will know total fear, and the anticipation of this is killing him.
One day, he is alone in his enormous house, apart from the men in suits, the human oak trees he hires to guard him. Both his wife and his mistress, have, by this point, left him, disturbed and upset, both separately picking up instinctively on things other people, hamstrung by delusions of their own rationality, would deny.
He wanders to a marble bathroom, rubs his stubble, looks at his face in the mirror.
The face of the betrayer, of the executioner yet to come.
Fucking face, he thinks.
He begins to shave, foaming his jaw up. All around him, bad things. Shadows where shadows should not be. Creaks and cracks in the air as if time itself were watching, dirty, filthy intentions climbing spiderlike around the doorframes, eyes pale yellow like tartar or old ivory.
He peers out of the open bathroom window. Two of the security goons, the human oaks, are involved in monosyllabic confab on the immaculate lawn. They remind him of characters in a fairy tale, but why he thinks this and what it means he doesn’t know. It is broad daylight. No silent assassin, features all too familiar, skulks across the grass. A full security staff. Surrounded by oak trees. Still he doesn’t feel safe. A pistol in his pocket, six bright brass-tipped bullets in it, still he doesn’t feel safe. He stares into the mirror. His own face, tired, soaped up with shaving foam, so he looks like a cheap department store Santa Claus.
Fucking thing! Fucking face! That this should be the thing that marks him out for extinction! The razor glitters in the cold sun. The sunlight is pearly, lethal, madness dances in it, and it is at this point he has the idea.
Before he can think better of it, he slices the razor across his cheek.
A second of nothing, the world hangs suspended, things are almost as they were, and then time and space march on in unison, and a curtain of blood descends from the cut.
The blood, the sheer amount of it, breaks him out of his trance. Fuck, there’s loads. Fuck, what have I done? Fuck! He presses wads of toilet paper to it, pats the bloody foam from his face. He swaps the wad of damp paper for a towel, makes his way uneasily down the stairs, heads out to the car.
If the oak trees are surprised, they don’t show it. One of them drives him to hospital, in silence, asking no questions. When they get there, this same mysterious lack of curiosity also grips the doctors: they’ve seen enough cuts to know that this one is self-inflicted, and know enough about who their patient is to keep this assessment to themselves. They tell him it will scar, that he will need plastic surgery, but he tells them he doesn’t want it. The weirder and more distinctive the scar will be, the more distance it puts between him and the rest of the human race, the better.
Twelve stitches. A hideous thing, like a centipede, crawls across his cheek.
Two weeks later and he’s almost accustomed to it, he feels better already, sleeping better and drinking less. The fear, whilst not entirely gone, has subsided to manageable levels.
And yet.
Doppelgänger. It’s one of those words, imported from the German, like poltergeist, that is unheimlich by its very nature, it sounds as if it did not originate on Earth, or any Earthly place. And then, some days later, he looks into the mirror, and again sees dread. He sees that, far from being distinctive, his new scar is, after all, a fairly ordinary scar, of the type anybody might have. Worse still, it is healing nicely. All his past misdemeanours, and the executioner in the shadows, wearing his face, ready to step out of the wings and snuff him, send him to the void. Bearing that same scar. He runs a finger along his cheek and thinks it’s not enough. It’s too humdrum, too much like anything else. And that word, doppelgänger, haunting him, barely there, turn around and glimpse it, made of steam, of smoke, of air, it’d be gone.
He rummages in the bathroom cabinet till he finds the cut-throat razor, a heavy thing, ornate, the blade like a miniature cleaver. It was his dad’s.
Now he stands before the mirror, like last time, razor in hand.
Like Van Gogh, he thinks, and he smiles, the last complete smile he will ever make.
One decisive, untrembling wrench of the blade rightwards, like the carriage return on an old typewriter. Something plops into the sink. He fishes it out and quickly, quickly, into the toilet bowl, flushes it, so there is no going back.
Two minutes later he’s out on the lawn. The oak trees are disturbed, they have nothing in their experience to help them process this. They cluster, leaning toward each other in conference, like a dolmen that’s lost its capstone. He, another crimson wet curtain consuming his lower face, red smeared teeth, smiles and grimaces, smiles and grimaces.
One of the oak trees expresses concern, places a hand on his shoulder, but he tells the oak tree to go huck himself, don’t hucking touch me. They are rattled but, as before, they take him to hospital, a different one this time. Again, however, the doctors and nurses there aren’t stupid, they know who he is. And if he wants to cut his face up, who are they to stop him? They tut and fuss and do what they can, but the lip has gone, and when they send him home he has a face that perpetually drools and sucks, a face that will forever, now, show the machine-like grille of his bottom set of teeth. Every second breath, he sucks the scab inwards, agitates it. A black ragged line, like a dog’s lip, like a slug that’s been doused in salt.
His reward for this? Four days of almost-peace, and he feels the madness dissipate, though not enough for him to quite accept what he has done. Nonetheless, his brain begins to unclench, to organise itself. He stares out of the window onto the empty green lawn, dribbling whisky onto his collar, gun in hand, alert to any movement at the edge of things.
But then, on the fifth day, alone again, in the bathroom, staring at his lipless face, bathed in the lethal, pearly sunlight, the awful alien word runs through his mind again, and he knows it isn’t enough. Something more is required. Something final.
He heads down to the enormous garage, where he keeps two of his lesser cars, and a speedboat on a trailer.
There is also a workbench, with an extensive rack of tools.
At the workbench now, moving fast so he won’t think about what he’s doing. From his jacket, he takes three items: a brand-new razor blade, wrapped in card, a pocket mirror, and two grams of cocaine, the closest thing to anaesthetic he could find, folded in squares of British GQ. He rubs a lot of the cocaine on his upper gums until they start to go numb. When he is satisfied with the numbing, he takes the razor blade from its packet.
He carefully chops out three colossal lines of coke, pausing momentarily before snorting them through a rolled-up fifty pound note, one after the other, methodically, right nostril, bang, left nostril, bang, right nostril, bang, bang. He waits five or six seconds until the first terrible, fantastic belt of apocalyptic euphoria thrills through him and his palate is numb. Then, he reaches for the pliers.
He places the metal jaws of the pliers around an upper left-hand canine. Both tooth and pliers feel reassuringly solid, as if all of this were really happening to someone, somewhere. His heart is galloping in his chest now, tripping over its own rhythm to keep up with itself. He grips the pliers as hard as he dares: the tooth, caught in the metal jaws, becomes, for a second, the focus of his whole being. It feels alternately large and small, huge and tiny.
He gasps and wrenches it with all his strength, to the left.
A tiny sound, like a stem of celery being snapped, as the socket cracks around it. To the right (the pain enormous, more than even muted nerves can describe), and before he can fully take note of the situation, he yanks it sharply to the left again. Lots more rich red blood. The gum tears in a ragged strip as it surrenders on the fifth wrench, the tooth an inch long including the root, the bloodied enamel gleaming in a stray rod of pearly sunlight. He is crying, his shirt is covered in blood, he feels fucking amazing. He smears coke into the ruined gum, chops out another enormous line (difficult, as he’s shaking and bleeding so much, but he does it) snorts it at once.
And why stop here? A tooth is only a tooth. It won’t be enough. Is it enough? The very fact of thinking this, a weird kind of creeping guilt. Again the feeling that jaundiced eyes are watching, whilst his back’s turned, sticking their fingers in the pool of his blood, licking and tasting.
Of course it’s not enough.
What else is there on the tool rack? Numerous knives and saws. A roll of chisels. Every variety of hammer. A blowtorch. He is particularly drawn to the blowtorch. Grimly, he chops out another enormous line. He’s laughing now. The cocaine has been cut with something, as usual, and he feels as if the barrier between this world, the quiet afternoon garage divided by queasy sunshine, and the world where the chattering jabbering things live, is being dissolved. There is a nailgun, a bolt cutter, a power drill. He doesn’t really have a nose to speak of to sniff the final, enormous line into, but, heroically, he manages.
Halfway through cauterising his new face with the blowtorch, he dies, of course, falling backwards onto the concrete, heart stammering, consumed by the moment, a lethal fit of shock. He lies on the floor, his face ruined once and for all, a skull wrapped in loose bloody muscle, three teeth gone, one eye put out, the other staring manically, lidlessly outwards from the red mess in comical surprise.
But just before he dies, a strange thing happens. The garage falls totally silent, free from any noise at all, free from the distant chatter of birds or the furnace roar of the blowtorch, running out of fuel as it rocks back and forth, on its side.
As he lies on the concrete floor, the sunlight thickens inexplicably, takes on the sickly quality of that other world, from where he felt he had an audience; the air becomes thick and brown, like rank water. And a figure coalesces in one corner of the garage, filthy rags unfolding out of space. Roughly a person, bound in a stinking, rotten robe.
On broken limbs, in angles that aren’t human, it shuffles its painful way towards him. The figure is cowled, stench of riverbed, of dead leaves, flesh turning to mud, and he can’t move or scream now. He’s already dead, but that fact seems suddenly irrelevant. The thing, unmistakeably a man at some point, now become something else, inches toward him. Rags and waterlogged lilac flesh, one bloated hand opens, a gesture of salutation, of recognition. The light thick as soup, heavy with significance. And it is here, now, in front of him. Something else. Something no one ever thought of.
And in that flash he knows everything. The thing beneath the cowl. White shirt, red with blood, black with burns. Not even in a nightmare. Fucking mess. After that we wrap him in a curtain and dump him in the canal. The shopkeeper, the one he tried to extort, the one he had tortured to death, all those years ago. The first man he ever killed. Two riverbed-rotten hands reach up and bring the cowl of the curtain they wrapped him in down, around the shoulders, but he knows already what is under there, what he will see, and see he does.
The remnants of a face. Burnt. Sliced. Drilled. Destroyed. A lip is missing. Three teeth. An eye is out.
He was doomed all along. Every step he took away from this moment, his destiny, has been a step closer to it. A man with the same face.
He laughs, until the enormity of the joke crushes him off this plane once and for all.
When the oak trees break down the door and find him, they see the face that is no longer a face, they see the tools and the blood and the cocaine, and the blowtorch, still roaring, but the thing they will take away forever is that laugh. Silent, two broken sets of teeth against blackened gums, open in perpetual mirth.