few details visible were rats and pigeons watching with their small, reflective eyes. One of the rats broke from the group and ran across him, sniffing like the uniformed inspectors on the bus. Then, emerging from the mist that shrouded the bridge, a vague pair of thin human legs approached. Someone had been out in the storm longer than him. No one here would help him, he had decided, so he thought it best to blend in with the surroundings and let the pedestrian on his way.
He didn’t have the strength to move. The pedestrian would have to either step over him or—more likely—on him. His mouth opened. The person approaching was wearing high heels. Above, she had a strangely shaped head—but then he realized she was covering herself with some kind of square or panel. The panel was removed and lowered toward him. Then softness—fur—brushed him with gentle strokes.
She was doing him a favor. He was sure of it. She was going to suffocate him and put him out of his misery. He wanted to say thank you, but his mouth would not close for him to speak. The fur moved across his face; he coughed once, and realized he had stopped breathing. A moment later, he closed his eyes.
4
FIRST THERE WAS DARKNESS, THEN IT WAS FILLED WITH SOUND. Soothing orchestral music entered his head. A slow string section played a waltz, a clarinet moaning the melody. Then his vision returned. He found himself lying on a kitchen table, wrapped in a mantle of fur, staring at a ceiling covered with brown blossoms of water stains. The fur quickly slipped off when he sat up, as if, once released, it was trying to escape from him.
The music played from a radio on the kitchen counter. He focused on what he thought was his heart beating but then discovered it was a steady stream of drops into a body of water. Behind a thin curtain drawn across one side of the kitchen was another room, filled with rainwater. The curtain fanned in time with the rhythmic dripping and the waltz on the radio. He glanced to his right and there on the stove sat a baking pan holding his detached arm.
His body’s newsprint had dried like a crisp shell, shriveled with a skein of tiny wrinkles spreading across it. He stood up and learned that his feet were soft; he could not stand without holding on to the dining chair. The room, he noted, exuded a whiff of fungus.
He staggered down a narrow hall that led to a bathroom, its wall displaying several framed photographs. One was a family photo, a father and mother with two girls, but the rest were of a pretty woman, probably the one who had rescued him. Some looked professionally taken, glamor pictures, and others were blurry self portraits almost purposefully out of focus. In the dim light, he thought of home. He had grown up in a decommissioned primary school that his father had purchased at auction. The long hallway that connected all the classrooms to the former office was decorated with drawings, paintings, and photographs. These were the pieces his father—an art teacher by profession—had been unable to sell. In some ways, it should not have surprised anyone that Michael’s father used his own artistic skills after Michael’s accident. He distrusted medicine and blamed pills for the cause of his wife’s death. The subject of most of his father’s unsold work was the change of his own sons, so when Michael had walked down that hall, he passed pictures of himself from the time he was a baby to the young man he was now. While the photographs illustrated the growth of his younger brothers from boys into men, Michael, from the age of fourteen on, appeared the same in each one.
Inside the bathroom, Michael stood before an egg-shaped mirror, bracing himself against a small sink and preparing to see what had happened to him. A moment passed as he listened to the pipes groaning within the walls. Then, with a single desperate motion, he flipped the light switch. It flickered several times, humming loudly, emitting a very dim glow. At first, it gave everything a milk chocolate overtone, and Michael could make out in the mirror, staring back at him, a familiar young man. Across his face, still frozen in the bland, impassive look his father had created for him, a jagged fault line now spread down his forehead and faded near his nose. His yarn hair still framed his face, but instead of being parted neatly to the side, it was a curly mass.
When the light finally reached an antiseptic brightness that could burn any mold or soft-shelled insect, the true damage became clear. The entire upper right side of his face had been caved in, dented, as if a crater had exploded around his eye socket. The flesh-colored paint that made his skin had faded to a dusty rose and in many spots was completely gone so that he could see the newsprint underneath, a pulpy sinew of smeared words from ten years ago. While most people could recover from an injury—a bruise or a cut always healed on its own—his body had not been designed to heal itself. That was a kind of art beyond the powers of his father. In a frenzy, he removed his clothes and examined the rest of himself.
His paper coin nipples: gone. His belly button: caved in, leaving a gaping tunnel to his innards. His paper coin roll penis: still fully intact and flaccid as usual. He moved his hands along his body and skin: dents, more dents, and occasional soggy spots. All of it was a close approximation of what he used to be. His elbow and knees: pins still between the segments of his arms and legs, except for the missing arm. He fingered his empty socket, hoping for any kind of physical pain, but of course, it didn’t register. The sensation caused was purely visual. In the mirror, he saw his reflection fade into the colors of the wall and tile for a moment before his shape defined itself again and returned to normal.
This was how his body would be for the rest of his life. After the accident, when he had been rebuilt with paper, he’d at first imagined it would be temporary, even refusing to believe his father when he confessed that there was no going back. And now after ten years inside the paper cast, here he was, in a strange city, in a stranger’s home, a strange creature himself, disintegrating into something hideous.
He no longer wanted to be alive like this. To be made of paper was bad enough; to be made of deformed, defiled paper would be unbearable. He considered sitting under the shower in the tub that was too small for him until he had melted away like a piece of soap. He was, in fact, reaching to turn on the water, when a phone began ringing, so loud it shook the toothbrush off the edge of the sink.
In the kitchen stood the woman, her back to him, the phone held to her ear. Her hair was tied up, revealing an elegant neck.
“Only one room is flooded,” she said in a hushed voice. “The same one every time it rains. Can you come tonight?”
On the kitchen floor lay the fur cape. As a guest, he knew he should help keep things tidy, and so he crept into the room and with his one hand draped the fur onto the tabletop. But as he did this, one corner snagged under the foot of a chair, which squealed in surprise. The woman reeled around and dropped the phone to the floor. She squeaked like a mouse.
Michael darted into the darkness of the hallway. The woman scrambled to untangle herself from the phone cord and then held the receiver back to her ear. “It was nothing,” she said. There was a long pause while she smoothed the hair around her forehead. Finally she added, “I saw a spider, that’s all.”
She spoke for a few minutes, negotiating a time for someone to inspect the flooded room. Then she hung up, undid her bale of brown hair so that it cascaded over her shoulders, and stared at the fur on the table.
From the hallway, he waited a long time before he said: “I’m sorry if I scared you.”
She approached, but he stepped further away, past the pictures and back toward the bathroom.
“It’s all right. Come out,” she said. He paused in the doorway, and she stopped before him, a silhouette against the light from the kitchen. She stepped closer. She was young, with tired eyes, and had a small mole on her jawline like a mushroom. Her frame was petite, and yet her posture made her stand as if she were much taller. A moment later, he noticed that he was touching his own
