Freezer Burn

Nine

At first he thought perhaps he had been snake-bitten, but it made no sense. He felt okay except for being wasted, and if he had been bitten he felt he’d have known it.

Bill leaned closer to the mirror. His eyelids were huge, and his nose was knotted up, along with his forehead, which had a series of angry red welts across it like a bridge built of heated stone. Every inch of flesh on his cheeks was bloated and inflamed and itched. His lips were blowed up like inner tubes. They had rolled back on one side of his mouth to reveal his teeth.

Mosquito bites, only much worse than he had assumed. He had lain down amongst thousands of mosquitoes, and while he slept, they’d had their way with him. His face had hurt bad for a while, but now the real hurt was past and there was only the swelling and the itching, a bit of heat behind the skin. He thought he must be allergic to them.

That’s what the dog-man had been talking about. One of us. One of us. He’d assumed Bill was a freak.

Wow, thought Bill, I’m disguised.

When Bill returned to the table, Frost said, “I must ask. How did you arrive here?”

“I was hitchhiking. The driver had a little accident. I banged my head, and when I awoke, well, here I was.”

“Was the driver hurt?”

“I can’t say. He was gone. I guess he put me out beside the road. I wandered in the woods after that.”

Frost thought about that for a while. Bill couldn’t tell if he was convinced by the story or not. Frost changed tactics, asked, “Your face, that isn’t how you were born, is it?”

“Mosquitoes.”

“What?”

“My face is swollen, that’s all. Mosquito bites.”

Frost let out with a whoop. “I’ll be darned. Fooled even me. I’ve seen many a freak, and you fooled even me. I’ve never seen anything like it. Maybe in the daylight I would have known. I thought it was some kind of industrial accident. An explosion of some kind. Mosquitoes. Now that’s the ticket. I’ve never known anyone to be bitten that bad before.”

Bill smiled, and he knew a smile on his face must look strange and hideous. Then he quit smiling. He said: “I suppose it’ll go away. Probably I’m allergic.”

“Well, now, mosquito bites. I reckon it will. I suppose.”

“But you’re not certain?”

“It’s hard to be certain of anything,” Frost said.

“How do you… Why do you hang around all these freaks? Doesn’t it… depress you?”

Frost smiled. “Freaks are only mistakes of nature, but they have hearts and minds like everyone else. Some, like the pinheads and the balloon heads, do not have good minds, but they have feelings just the same. Suppose your face stayed that way?”

“I’d have an operation. I’d kill myself. I wouldn’t live like this.”

“Oh, you might. Freaks live among freaks here. We accept one another.”

“But you’re not a freak.”

Frost smiled. “No?”

Frost stood and unbuttoned his shirt and pointed to his chest. On his left breast was a tiny gray hand, the wrist growing from the location of his heart, or at least the location one imagined for the heart. The hand poked into the air with slightly bent fingertips; the hand looked like a crustacean or prehistoric spider that had been partially boiled. The gray flesh was lined with dark, thin veins that throbbed with blood.

“There was a whole child here once,” Frost said, tapping the hand. “We were both living, but I was freed of him and he was… destroyed. I know no other way to say it. This is all that remains. This hand. The wrist is connected to vital organs. They could not cut him all the way clear. The hand is a part of me. It beats with my pulse, with my blood. It is me, and him.”

“Good God!”

“That’s not all.” Frost unbuttoned his pants and lowered them and scooped at his underwear and peeled them down over his ample right hip and showed a massive red scar that ran all the way up his right side. “And here was the third. Triplets. By operation and the choice of my parents, I lived, and they died. They were misshapen. I was the easiest to save. I am one of three and I am all three. Sometimes, late at night, I can almost feel the hand at my chest, squeezing, trying to drive its fingers through my chest, angry I survived, wanting to mash the life from me. And the scar on my hip. It heats up, pains me. When it’s cold especially. Other nights, the scar and the hand are companions.”

“You were Siamese triplets?”

“Incorrect term, but as I said, I was one of three. I am still one of three. You can not create one by destroying two. Had my parents chosen for them to survive, they would have been my brothers.”

“You couldn’t have lived a normal life.”

Frost readjusted his clothes. “True. But there’s very little normal about wearing the wounds and remains of your brothers. To know I survived because I was in the middle, easier to save because my heart was stronger and my appearance normal, it has its burden.”

“They didn’t look right?”

“They were misshapen. Prunish is the word used to describe them. Shriveled up like little mummies. They wouldn’t have grown very large, either of them, but I would have grown to the size I am now, carrying them with me. One clutched to my chest like a nursing baby, the other hanging to my hip like a pet monkey.”

“Shit, you’re lucky,” Bill said. “You’re alive and they’re dead. That’s no burden.”

Frost’s face took on a sardonic air. “You think so?”

“Take it from someone who doesn’t have any luck. You’re lucky.”

“I suppose it’s all in the way you look at things. Do you have more to tell me about why you’re wandering about in the woods, hungry, worn out, and mosquito-bit?”

“I don’t guess so,” Bill said.

Frost studied him. “Well, I trust my instincts. You don’t look like a murderer.”

Bill thought: No, I look like someone with a million mosquito bites.

“I suppose you have your secrets and your reasons. You’re welcome here. You may sleep in my place tonight. Tomorrow night, you wish to stay, we must find you another bed. When you feel stronger, you may leave.”

“I’m much obliged, Mr. Frost.”

“That’s all right, Bill. That’s quite all right. I’m always glad to help a man that’s down. Especially one I can see needs the help. If there is one thing I believe, it is this. Man is meant to help man get along in life, and that is our singular purpose on this earth.”

“Thanks,” Bill said, and thought: Boy are you a dumb shit.