This Wreckage I Call Me

It’s cold outside.

If he concentrates, he believes he can see the paint peeling from the walls of his room, in the spaces between the 30.48 cm square photographic images positioned with geometrical precision and affixed to all four vertical surfaces, floor-to-ceiling, hundreds of copies of the same four images.

The windows, too, are adorned with these images, arranged in such a way as to leave no transparent surface uncovered.

The light fades outside; inside this room it’s always night.

He wonders what he’s doing in a room like this, a crumbling studio apartment in a ramshackle house on 19^th Avenue, between Judah and Kirkham, in San Francisco. Surrounded by these images.

And just for a second, he thinks he remembers where and when this began.

*****

The alarm seemed to sound for days inside the cavernous bedroom in the turreted Granada Hills mansion before he was able to reach through the sedative fog to silence it.

Lying on his side, he couldn’t recognize the man and woman smiling out from the framed photograph adjacent to the clock on the bedside table, although he knew exactly who they were.

He had dreamed of another man, a man whose mind was decaying, 595 kilometres to the north.

*****

He had come to live in fear of himself. Accordingly, he had removed the mirrors from the room. When it was absolutely necessary to venture outside, he did his best to avoid all reflective surfaces. He stared straight ahead as he passed storefronts and parked cars. He kept his eyes trained on the floor whenever he needed to open glass doors.

Over the past decade, he had been plagued by a recurring dream. He dreamed he had been in a car crash. Or was it a war?

It was a car crash. He had become absolutely certain that this is where it began.

He had felt safest in cars. Until then. Until the morning a red TVR Cerbera rear-ended him at a four-way stop in Granada Hills, propelling him into the centre of a fortunately empty intersection.

The impact of his forehead on the steering wheel had drawn a small amount of blood and caused him to lose consciousness for twenty seconds.

When he came to, the other driver was leaning in at his open window, apologizing profusely, assuming all responsibility and offering to call an ambulance. He waved away these concerns, distracted by a feeling of familiarity as he gazed up at the man’s face: the intense yet affectless expression, the vaguely porcine nose, the irregular, slightly protruding upper front teeth, the spikey raven-black hair. And the nasal intonation of the voice.

After they had exchanged insurance, license and registration information, he reassured the other motorist that he felt fine and requested a selfie, which he later had enlarged, printed and framed. 

He kept the photograph on an upturned packing crate next to his mattress. He looked across at it now. He recognized the man, so familiar from years of record covers, music videos and press coverage; over time, however, he had ceased to recognize himself, although he remembered the occasion of the photograph.

*****

His dream of the man whose mind was decaying was a recurring dream. It had been visiting him for what felt like years. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he became that it dated from the time of a minor car accident he’d had near his home. 

Ten years ago, distracted as he hurried to his first cosmetic-surgery procedure, he had driven into the back of an orange Ford Pinto. The driver had sustained a small laceration on his forehead but maintained that he didn’t require any medical assistance. They had exchanged insurance information and, their respective vehicles still roadworthy, had resumed their journeys. The man had been a fan, he recalled. They may have even taken a photo together.

The dream had increased in frequency, intensifying, becoming incrementally more vivid, more elaborate with each iteration. Although he had initially dismissed the notion as absurd, he was now convinced that this increased dream activity was somehow linked to the successive cosmetic facial and dental procedures that he and his wife had elected to undergo.

With each procedure and each new version of the dream, the setting became clearer: the man was often lying on a mattress, in a miserable, windowless room, a rough wooden box to the right of his mattress serving as a bedside table. Every surface of the room, except the floor and the ceiling, appeared to be plastered with large, square-shaped pictures, which had eventually come into focus, revealing themselves as the covers of his first four albums.

Initially impossible to discern, the face of the man in the room had also gradually assumed form. With some alarm, it started to dawn on him that the man’s features were his own, albeit his features from a time before he and his wife had embarked on their odyssey of cosmetic renewal.

Nevertheless, throughout the slow reveal, unfolding over the years, he always felt there was a crucial fact that the dream was withholding from him. There was no evident trace of it in the dream image itself; rather, he simply had the sense that something was missing, that an element was eluding him, always escaping back into the night. In time, however, it began to appear, first manifesting as a dark, undefined space on the upturned wooden box, an object refusing to declare itself fully.

Until the day of his twenty-third procedure.

He had retreated to bed, lulled by narcotic medication, fresh surgical dressings on his chin. He fell asleep quickly and the squalid room appeared in his mind’s eye: the man, the mattress, the box on the floor next to the mattress, the record sleeves. On this occasion, the blind spot in the dream-image was no more. In its place stood a framed photograph, more accurately a selfie. He was unsurprised to encounter himself in the photograph.

*****

It had been three years since he had last contemplated his own image; he had stopped looking when it became clear that the process was inexorable and irreversible. He knew that if he were to look, he would encounter the face of another man, a man more than twice his own age. He knew that he would encounter someone who was no longer him at all. At best, he would perhaps find the wreckage of himself. 

In the early stages, he had sought medical advice. The doctor at the local community clinic had been no help, speculating initially about the possibility of late-onset progeria, but ultimately conceding that he had no idea and could only refer him to a specialist he could not afford.

If he were to look now, he would see that the transformation had been merciless. The facial dermis had been ravaged with wrinkles and burst veins. An etching of deep lines gave him the appearance of an antique wooden marionette. On a good day, he might have passed for Ronnie Wood. At the first signs of greying, he had taken to dying his hair a shade of black not found in nature, one that emphasized his increasingly ghoulish pallor and only intensified his likeness to Ronnie Wood. His teeth had become horribly discoloured and had assumed the uneven, bucked formation of a teenager’s dentition before orthodontic correction.

As for the rest of his body, it had developed a stoop and a limp; the knee joints and lumbar discs were disintegrating. The stomach had expanded and was losing its battle with gravity.

*****

Under the vaulted bathroom ceiling in his Granada Hills mansion, he carefully removed the gauze pads and considered his face in the mirror.

For the first few years, the diminishing familiarity of his own image had shocked him. Now he had reached a point at which he felt that his reflection was no longer really him at all: cheekbones had appeared and chins had disappeared; his features had become sharply chiseled; his eyes less tired, his nose thinner; his skin tighter, smoother, more tanned. His hairline had advanced and his hair had thickened. Bariatric surgery had returned his hips to him. His teeth were definitely not his own but perfect nonetheless.