A Man of Many Faces

A man of many faces takes one from his hall, from beside the coat stand, and wears it to his day. When he gets home, he hangs up his skin on a coat hanger, and leaves his thoughts in whatever he is reading. She comes home and imparts, unto him, her feelings. He doesn’t listen, letting her words hang between them until she sighs and plucks them again from the air. She says she is going to bed but exits through the front door of her phone. He laughs at what someone he doesn’t know has said to someone else, whom he also doesn’t know. He takes their faces to his hall and draws them on the faded paper, next to the others. He smudges ink everywhere, lest they be recognisable. Eventually, he withdraws from his portraits and follows his steps to bed. His own face he leaves in the mirror. Glassy eyed. It stares back from his reflection amongst others he can barely recall. For sleep he goes to some distant land of half-formed, once-fond, already-forgotten memories until he can give his subconscious the slip. Contented, with his limbs left empty like slippers beside the bed, he is laid bare.

The next morning is the same. He packs his mind into a briefcase and says ‘bye, honey’ but doesn’t wait for a reply. Out of the door, on his way. He stops at a red light and waits beside the other automatons. Amber. Green. His car rushes forward, giving chase to the seconds that slip seamlessly beneath its tires. It is only the instant after that he sees them. Someone is running to cross the road, late for the 8:20 train. Perhaps their dead-end job or perhaps a loved one lying on a hospital bed or a hastily planned coffee date with a dear friend. He sees them. He brakes. The past recedes in the wing mirrors of his car. Hard. But the person stumbles. Closing the distance. Five seconds or thereabouts. He feels the impact.

For a long while after, the man of many faces tries to convince himself it was unavoidable. He sits still, back against the cold leather seat. His face is fixed, blank, it's trapped in the windscreen of his car. An ambulance comes, followed by a police car with its lights blaring, sirens blaring, too loud to think, and then they go. He drives his car and parks it near a warehouse. He calls in sick from work. The moment will relive itself forever in his head, he thinks. The faceless person on the dark tarmac. The crunch and the way they fell, limb over limb.

The police have his name, his address and a negative on a drug test. He begs on the phone to his insurer but cannot say whether the fault lies with him. When he gets home, he buries the face he chose that morning and replaces his skin with something softer. He is expecting a call about the collision. Whilst he waits, he picks out a new visage from his gallery: a mask in the image of someone both fiercer and younger, except the lines that crisscross his forehead and the bags outlining his eyes remain. He says to himself, ‘There was nothing you could’ve done, nothing, it was predetermined, an idle quirk of fate or fathomless flaw in God’s grand design.’ The voice he uses reminds him of someone shouting on television, but to whom it belonged, well, he cannot recall.

Over the phone to the police, he says, ‘this doesn’t happen to me’. He describes how he left home, heading for work. The traffic lights that barred his path. Amber. Green. It happens again, wheels crying, body colliding. He watches the person fall and sees them lying on his carpet with their limbs spread like windchimes in a breeze. ‘But it wasn’t my fault,’ he says, before the conversation ends. Again, he leaves the person in a hospital bed.

She comes home early but says little. Later, he speaks at her as they make their evening meal. His words invade her over the kitchen counter, but she cuts them apart neatly on a chopping board and serves them back to him over dinner. He goes quiet. She goes out to meet friends, saying she won’t be back till late. He flicks through the channels but can’t find anything to watch, so he wanders his gallery until he doesn’t remember the way back. There is a face he is searching for, a face he used to have. It was proud, perhaps, a little too proud, but handsome, quick, quick as a hummingbird, to laugh. He had worn it the day he met her. He had sunk into her eyes, resurfaced and dived again, for a while.

He doesn’t find it. Not now, anyway. But soon, too soon, inevitably, his steps retrace themselves. There is the person he felled, sitting up now, cross-legged, faceless. Even so, they stare at him until he flinches. He watches as they take faces from his walls and as they toss them aside. He wants to know what he could have done. Could he have swerved? Could he have braked an instant earlier? Would it then have been okay?

He’s still inventing questions as he lays in bed, consulting the bare ceiling as if it was a witness. ‘Do I still have that face, the one she liked on me?’ He asks.

The next day. A Saturday. He rises early only to meander aimlessly. It is the very first time that he doesn’t know which face to wear. They hang from his walls, waiting for him with quiet eyes, sullen lips, combed hair, vacant pupils. They look down upon him but he covers his eyes so they can’t see in. In their midst, he sinks to the floor. Something is missing, absent, he feels it breaking into him under the skin, a face he used to have. It was the one his parents and he moulded from childhood clay; the one which bore his very first scars and the immense wonder he had until the first signs of it fading.

He doesn’t recognise the faces about him anymore, those that he has hung so proudly. He stands up, straight up, until his eyes are level with theirs, looking each of them over as if assessing and then, gradually, one by one, he begins to take them down. Unhooking a few, he piles them in a corner, painting over some whilst peeling off others, wallpaper and skin coming away until the floor is littered so he sweeps it too aside and builds anew.

That afternoon, he visits the hospital. It approaches him as he approaches it, enveloping him with warmth. People of flesh and blood pass him by. On their faces he looks for malice but doesn’t find it. In one hand he clutches a flyer he took by the entrance, in the other he holds the memory of her hand. She laid it upon his shoulder before he left, so he grips the feeling tightly.

He speaks to a receptionist and takes a lift to the seventh floor. Fifth. Sixth. Doctors enter and exit. He watches himself go out with them, apprehensive, visiting her once when she was ill. Seventh. He asks a nurse who directs him to a door, just along the corridor, and then he pauses outside it. The seconds file past him, he lets them go. A minute later he knocks, and a voice inside tells him it's open. He twists the handle and pushes it away. The voice’s owner is sitting up in bed, their face illuminated faintly by the afternoon sun. He says ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know I could do this much harm.’