Face a Week

Anne Quince was never very pretty, but people who didn’t know her before she got hit by a truck assume she was beautiful, because it’s a charitable thing to assume. To be fair, her hair is golden and flawless, but it’s not actually hair. It’s a wig. Hair doesn’t grow on the left side of her head anymore. Anne is thirty-three years old, but the crash has made her age almost impossible to guess. Her left side is twisted. Her left ear is nothing but a hole in her head. Her fingers zig-zag and jostle each other when she tries to hold a pen, and her shin curves inwards at the bottom. But some of the cells in her right side became paralyzed in the crash, and there are places on her face – around her eye, especially – that look the same as they did when she was twenty-six.

Anne works in a bakery, arriving at four in the morning to make the day’s bread from scratch. It’s a job where she can make an endless supply of  small, perfect things, and where she doesn’t have to deal with people. She likes people well enough, but she gets tired of strangers looking at everything in the room but her. She wears fringed leather pants and one of those reflective jackets construction workers wear. Sometimes she wears a low cut, neon orange blouse with the word “FUCK” on it in huge black letters. She made the shirt herself. But hardly anyone ever starts a conversation with her. Everyone holds the elevator for her, but when she gets inside, the silence is so intense it makes her ears pop.

Anne only has a couple of friends she really keeps in touch with, one of whom works at the bakery and one of whom she roomed with in college. She goes to parties every so often, and she gets laid about as much as anyone else, but not with any consistency. She has a theory that guys want to see what it’s like to get a cripple in the sack, and then can’t live with themselves once they realize that was what they were after. She laughs about it. Her pelvis is so twisted up that sex is pretty painful anyway.

Anne has an ulterior motive for working at the bakery. She’s saving up money. She lives in a shitty apartment that used to be an opium den, in a neighborhood two steps ahead of gentrification. Her ex-roommate works in a thrift store and hooks her up with whatever clothes she needs. She takes home dough from the bakery and eats mostly bread and chili. Anne is saving up to be a cyborg.

Piece by piece, Anne is rebuilding her body. The wig was the first step, a symbolic declaration of intention. Next came a metal bracket at the base of her spine. The latest addition is a prosthetic foot, replacing the worthless splinters she used to walk on. She’s painted flames on it, and it’s fitted so that it can be attached to a prosthetic leg when she gets the money. She wants to hollow out her prosthetic leg and smuggle heroin in it, or put thigh-powered blowgun in it and become an assassin. She knows that’s never going to happen, of course. But she also knows that in a few decades, people are going to be sawing off perfectly healthy arms and legs to be what she’s becoming.

Isaac Fitch’s face is just a placeholder between two swollen headphones. The headphones cost more than the rest of his wardrobe combined; the puffy blue polyester jacket, the baggy khakis, the mismatched socks and the disintegrating Converse don’t fit him, and don’t match. Isaac is twenty-four years old, but he won’t be born for another thirty years from our perspective. Every day he walks through a city not terribly different from the cities of our present, his head down and his hands in his pockets, and his headphones pump noise into his brain.

He listens to music mathematically engineered to induce movement. A kick drum hammers through his skull in four-four time, and he walks to the beat. The pops and squeals and washes of electronic fuzz distort the colors of his surroundings, sap the city of its realness. He watches children play in a park as if they are part of a book he is reading. He is entranced by his own feet. His jaw remains slack, and his hands never leave his pockets unless he needs to pay for something.

The music drowns out thought. Isaac’s hair grows in four-four time. He showers with the speakers in his tiny apartment turned up all the way, and he never shaves. He doesn’t read the news except when he accidentally follows a link broadcast by a friend on a public feed. He figures he knows all the relevant information already.

The world, according to Isaac, moves to a four-four beat. Nothing unexpected ever happens. The planet is gradually getting worse and worse. Wars will break out, economies will collapse, cities will sink beneath the sea one by one, and there is nothing Isaac or anyone else can do about it. He doesn’t mind so much. He doesn’t think enough to mind. And anyway, there’s no use worrying about what he can’t change.

Instead, he is waiting. The music, and the walking, and the looking at the city through electronic fuzz and pops and squeals is his way of passing the four-four time. He is waiting, very patiently, for the first ships to go mars. It’ll happen any day now. He’ll see them in the sky and he’ll already be listening to the perfect soundtrack for getting out of here.

Nadia Petrokovitz ages the way a gypsy travels: she sheds things as she goes, to make space for the things that suit her. She weighs less now at ninety-five than she did when she was fourteen, her forearms are skeletal, and she comes up to her grandson’s belly button when she hugs him. But she moves with manic purpose, and wears sea green jogging shorts and watches Die Hard marathons on TV. She thinks Bruce Willis is sexy.

She keeps her hair cropped short and dyed red-orange like a robin’s chest, and wears vintage gold jewelry when she goes grocery shopping. She knows the names of all the clerks who work mornings at the Ralph’s near her apartment, and they know hers. When she leaves, the clerks whisper, “she’s a spry ninety-five, isn’t she?”

Nadia used to sell carpets for a living. She would go into peoples’ houses and measure their floors, pick out colors to go with the decor. Her own apartment is hardwood. She never liked carpet. She worked the job to support her husband’s drinking, then to support herself when he moved out, and then – once she became eligible for pension, and had no excuse – because she couldn’t think of anything else to do. But her husband’s twenty-five years dead now, and she’s learned to enjoy being single for the first time since she was eighteen. Men from the apartment complex bring her flowers and sing her songs from the old country in the rec room. Nadia spends a portion of her pension money on bikini waxes.

Nadia’s family cares about her very much. Her children and her grandchildren and her great grandchildren visit her often in her apartment. But more and more she can’t wait for them to be gone so she can go outside. She has so many things on her mind these days, so many possibilities. She is just now getting into go-kart racing, and learning to dance the quickstep. She volunteers as a poll-worker during local elections, and flirts shamelessly with the twenty-somethings who come to her door to distribute campaign literature. All in all Nadia has had a good life, but not nearly as good as the one she has now.