Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

YET ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE POROUSNESS OF CERTAIN BORDERS (XXIV)

Between a cold kitchen window gone opaque with the stove’s wet heat and the breath of us, an open drawer, and the gilt ferrotype of identical boys flanking a blind vested father which hung in a square recession above the wireless’s stand, my Mum stood and cut off my long hair in the uneven heat. There was breath and the mugginess of bodies and the force of the hot stove on the back of my emergent neck; there was the lunatic crackle of the wireless’s movement among city stations, Da scanning for better reception. I could not move: about and around me the towels trapped hair at my shoulders’ skin and Mum circled the chair, cutting against the bowl’s rim with blunt shears. At one edge of my vision’s strain a utensil drawer hung open, at the other the beginning of Da, head cocked past the finger at the glowing dial. And straight ahead, before me and centered direct across the shine of the table’s oilcloth, like a tongue between the teeth of the pantry’s opening doors, hung my brother’s face. I could not move my head: the weight of the bowl and towels, Mum’s shears and steadying hand — she, eyes lowered, intent on her crude task, could not see the face of my brother emerge against the pantry’s black. I had to sit still and straight as a tin grenadier and watch as his face assumed, instantly and with the earnestness reserved for pure cruelty, whichever expression my own emerging face betrayed.

The face in the well-oiled doors’ crack hung, I inert, the face neckless and floating unsupported in the cleavage of the angled doors, the concentration of its affect somewhere between sport and assault, Da’s shaggy head cocked and sightless at the tuner, two bars of strings distorted by the storm and snatches of voices found and lost again; and Mum intent on my skull and unable to see the white hair-framed face reproducing my own visage, copying me — for we called it that, ‘copying,’ and he knew how I hated it — and for me alone. And with such intensity and so little lag in following that his face less mimed than lampooned my own, made instantly distended and obscene whatever position my own face’s pieces assumed.

And how it became worse, then, in that kitchen of copper and tile and pine and burnt peat’s steam and static and sleet on the window in undulant waves, the air cold before me and scorching behind: as I became more agitated at the copying and the agitation registered — I felt it — on my face, the face of my brother would mimic and lampoon that agitation; I feeling then the increased agitation at the twinned imitation of my face’s distress, his registering and distorting that new distress, all as I became more and more agitated behind the cloth Mum had fastened over my mouth to protest my disturbing her shears’ assertion of my face’s true shape. It ascended by levels: Da’s cameo recessed against the glow of the tuner’s parade, the drawer of utensils withdrawn past its fulcrum, the disembodied face of my brother miming and distorting my desperate attempts by expression alone to make Mum look up from me and see him, I no longer feeling my features’ movements so much as seeing them on that writhing white face against the pantry’s black, the throttle-popped eyes and cheeks ballooning against the gag’s restraint, Mum squatting chairside to even my ears, my face before us both farther and farther from my own control as I saw in his twin face what all lolly-smeared hand-held brats must see in the funhouse mirror — the gross and pitiless sameness, the distortion in which there is, tiny, at the center, something cruelly true about the we who leer and woggle at stick necks and concave skulls, goggling eyes that swell to the edges — as the mimicry ascended reflected levels to become finally the burlesque of a wet hysteria that plastered cut strands to a wet white brow, the strangled man’s sobs blocked by cloth, storm’s thrum and electric hiss and Da’s mutter against the lalation of shears meant for lambs, an unseen fit that sent my eyes upward again and again into their own shocked white, knowing past sight that my twin’s face would show the same, to mock it — until the last refuge was slackness, giving up the ghost completely for a blank slack gagged mask’s mindless stare — unseen and — seeing — into a mirror I could not know or feel myself without. No not ever again.