A Mostly True Story

He was exactly where I was told he’d be which was, on its own, a bit of a shock, because I really didn’t believe he existed. What truly shocked me, though—what I hadn’t prepared myself for—was his appearance. It was far, far worse than I had imagined.

He was sitting on the sidewalk, with his back against the cold grey stone of what was once a used book store, but had been empty, available for lease, for several months. The intersection on which he and the empty building sat was in a section of town reputed to be governed by drug dealers and other sundry criminals. It was clearly not the ideal location for retail space, but seemed to suit his purposes, presumably because there was no one around with an interest in getting him to move along.

I approached him slowly, nervously. I was afraid—not so much of the risk of potential violence that comes with being in a rough neighborhood, interacting with a homeless and desperate drug user, but more of the excitement roiling in my chest. I was afraid of becoming the type of person who would do what I was about to do.

From where I first spotted him, a little over half a block away, he looked like a burn victim. He had no hair, no ears, and no nose. The closer I got to him, though, the more evident it became to me that he had not been burned. His eyelids and lips were intact, for example, and his scars were not the swirling mass of grooves and pits indicative of burn scars, there was a pattern to them. They were a mosaic of rectangles tilted slightly away from the center of his face. His skin was a patchwork of small, discolored strips, cascading downward. He wore a dirty green t-shirt and baggy, stained jeans. His clothes were dotted with old blood stains and the radiating cloudlike stains of more transparent fluids. He sat barefoot on a sheet of cardboard. Next to him were an old pair of tennis shoes and a dusty, almost empty roll of paper towels. There was a makeshift bandage of what looked to be a paper towel and electrical tape stuck to the side of his neck. It was permeated with thick clotted blood.

I stood over him, intending to speak first, but the smell that came up off him squeezed my throat shut. It was the smell of infection—the smell of rot.

He looked up at me. “What do you want?” he asked.

I breathed slowly through my nose and held the air a moment. “A friend of mine mentioned I might find you here,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “No one approaches me unless they know who I am and what I do. I was asking what part you want.”

I hadn’t given any thought to the details. Ten minutes earlier I mostly didn’t even believe he existed. “I’m not sure,” I said.

He stood up slowly and swayed a bit before he found his balance. His toes had been stripped of most of their flesh. What remained were thin, pointed stubs, like you’d expect to see on mummified remains. He peeled his shirt off, tugging at the area where it stuck to his chest, reopening a small, rectangular scab. Blood slowly oozed from the tear.

He dropped his shirt onto the cardboard and stretched out his arms so I could inspect his torso. What I saw was an amazing and horrifying pattern of geometric shapes—straight lines and sharp corners interspersed with dried blood and pus—oily open wounds and wounds held nearly closed with makeshift sutures. I followed the pattern of scars down each arm to his hands. The fourth and fifth fingers of each hand were missing. The remaining six were scarred only slightly, and seemingly functional.

After a few seconds he silently turned around. The back of his neck and shoulders were the familiar cluster of rectangular scars, but the skin that stretched from his shoulder blades to the top of his jeans was smooth, untouched. Aside from a few moles and patches of dirt, his back was flawless.

He turned around again. “Do I need to take my pants off?” he asked.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” he said. “There’s nothing left worth taking down there anyway.”

“Your back is off limits, I take it?”

“That’s right,” he said.

“You must do all the cutting yourself.”

He smiled at me with chapped, but unscarred lips. “You’re a smart man,” he said. “I can’t reach back there, and I certainly can’t trust people to take only what they pay for.”

“This is probably a question you’re sick of,” I stammered, “But I have to know. Doesn’t it hurt?”

He laughed, loud and hard, giving me the opportunity to glance into his mouth. Most of his teeth were gone. Only the molars remained.

“Of course it hurts,” he said. “It hurts less than it used to—there are fewer nerve endings in scar tissue—but it still hurts. What I buy with the money will take the pain away for a good ten or twelve hours, though, then I’ll come back here. I always come back here.”

“Why do you do it?” I asked, a little embarrassed at the obviousness of the question.

“Because I’ve got no choice,” he answered.

“Do you think you’ll ever stop?”

“Are you a reporter?” he asked.

The question surprised me. “No,” I said.

“Sometimes reporters come down here,” he said. “They ask all sorts of questions and never buy. I don’t have time for people who don’t buy.”

“I’m not a reporter,” I said. “I brought money.”

“Well, it’s a hundred bucks for a square inch,” he said. “I don’t have many fingers left, so they’re a thousand each—fifteen hundred if you want a thumb.”

“I have only two hundred,” I said.

“So you get two inches. What part do you want?”

I thought. I wanted to just hand him the money and walk away. Morally, I wanted to be the person I purported to be—the person I thought I was. I wanted to simply offer the man help and leave it at that. Something other than me was at work in my mind, though—something much stronger and much darker.

“Is there anywhere other than your back that hasn’t been cut yet?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said. “I’ve been doing this a long time.”

“What about the bottom of your feet?” I asked.

Any hint of a smile or pleasant demeanor left his face then. “Like I said, you’re a smart man.”

He lowered himself to the cardboard again and sat cross-legged, exposing the pale, dirty soles of his feet. They were rough and worn, but uncut.

“Well, he said,” Am I taking two inches from one foot, or an inch from each?”

“I’d like two inches from your right foot.” I said.

“Give me the money, then.”

I took the two new hundred-dollar bills I got from the cash machine out of my back pocket and looked at them. They were smooth save for the fresh crease I had put down the middle of both. I held one in each hand, turning them over and wondering if any of their future owners could ever imagine what their money had once purchased.

I folded them again and handed them to the man, who slid them into his back pocket. From the same pocket he produced a small grey razor blade.

“Do you want to record this?” asked the man. “Most people want to record it, or take pictures with their phones.”

I shook my head.

He shrugged, held his foot in his right hand, took a deep breath and drove the corner of the razor blade into his skin. There was no ceremony to it, he just cut. He made no noise apart from fast, heavy breathing. He made four deep cuts in the center of his foot—a one-by-two inch rectangle exactly like the hundreds of others that covered his body in both size and proportion. I became aware that nearly all his scars matched the dollar amount most people are allowed to withdraw from a cash machine in one day. That made me feel strangely justified in what I was doing. It was evidence that the man wasn’t being toyed with by an eccentric and sadistic group of rich people, he was conducting straightforward business transactions with people like me—the curious and the doubtful.

He slid the razor blade under the flap of skin as he peeled it back by the corner. He pulled the skin free and held it gently in the palm of his left hand. Blood poured from his foot and sank into a pool in the cardboard. He set the blade down with his right hand and fumbled with the paper towel roll until he managed to tear a sheet free. He folded the skin neatly in the paper towel and handed it to me. The package was moist and strangely heavy. I may be remembering the situation incorrectly—perhaps even making things up—but thinking back, it also seemed very warm.

The man wadded the last two paper towels on the roll and pressed them tightly against the sole of his foot. Holding the wad in place, he slid his wounded foot into his tennis shoe and tied it carefully. He looked up at me, as he put on his other shoe, as if to ask what I was still doing there.

“Do you mind answering my question now?” I asked. “Will you ever stop?”

He staggered to his feet and stood with most of his weight on his left foot. He hopped a couple of times before he was able to steady himself. “I used to think that one day I’d be able to stop,” he said. “Now I just hope the infection will take me soon. That should do the trick.”

With that, he picked up his shirt and limped away.

I unwrapped the paper towel as I walked back to my car. The skin, all bright crimson and pale blue, was much thicker than I had expected it to be. He had cut through all the top layers and well into the dermis. I was certain he had exposed muscle, but didn’t remember seeing any. I was unwilling to touch the skin directly, obviously. I just held the edges of the paper towel and stared at the curled, bloody lump in the center.

As I passed a trash can on the next corner, I threw away what I had just bought. I wiped imagined contaminants off my hands and onto my pants, and walked hurriedly toward a safer, more civilized neighborhood.