Aiko’s Blog!

Monday, September 9, 2019 | September 09, 2019 |

Point Blank

Her greatest fear is to get shot in the face. It is a fear born out of a nightmare where a gun was pointed at her point blank, at the tip of her nose. Upon waking up she said her orisons, imploring that this may not happen in real life and went about the day with the nagging fear that whichever way she turns her face lurks the dreadful possibility that something, not even limited to a gun anymore, might blast on her face.

She wasn’t what one might call pulchritudinous, in fact her rotund cheeks and prominent chin unfortunately give her the puffy look of one afflicted with a kidney ailment, although her nose and eyes, charmingly retrousse and feline, respectively, more than make up for her liabilities. Her upper lip juts a little further than her lower lip which she counts as an asset, citing the same quality present in actresses who are described as “baby-faced”; her lips, when taken in consideration along with her propensity to whine over trifles, certainly is becoming of a baby. It is by all means a decent face, neither repulsive nor plain, a face one’s eyes would certainly linger at for a second or two in a crowded train, maybe not because of its beauty, but due to a passing regret that had it not been for her fleshy cheeks and chin, she would be pretty.

Almost pretty. She languishes at the foot of beauty’s throne where beauty in turn throws her down crumbs which are not enough to satisfy her. Nor is it enough to satisfy all her past lovers who by some form or another (she decided inwardly), spurned her because she wasn’t beautiful enough. This perception of hers drove her to an almost frenetic state of resoluteness to make herself prettier, yes, in order to be worthy of a man.

The nightmares started during the course of a relationship with a man far better looking than any of her past beaus. He is a doctor, and she a nurse, and the romance bloomed in the emergency room where judgements of physical appearances are less preoccupied with considerations of beauty than of the immediate need for a cure. They were in the first bloom of love when a woman whose husband shot her in the face was brought in; a crime of passion, they said, the usual story of a jealous spouse over an adulterous better half. The woman was said to be beautiful, and it is because of this fact that the husband became possessive of her and paranoid of her interactions with other men until the wife became suffocated with this imperiousness that she was driven toward the arms of another man.

After the surgery, the aforementioned woman lost her nose and her left eye. All that’s left of her face is a mangled mess of flesh bereft of any trace of her former beauty. There was something about the sight of this atrocity that hit deep within her. She didn’t mind so much the gravity of the events which led to the woman’s present tragedy, but rather the notion that the face, where so much of human relationships depend for its communication and subtle cues, would in a flash become disfigured and deprived of any ability to express emotion. As she looked at what was left of the woman’s face--truly, it was no longer a face but a jumbled lump of skin, an almost sacred fear as yet untapped within her innermost instincts floated to the surface of her thoughts.

Her face, by no means a face that would launch a thousand ships, was her only gateway to human interaction. She wouldn’t know how to show love, joy, and pain without her deep-set eyes, incapable of expressing disgust and annoyance without her nose, and will not be able to indicate her childlike charm with mutilated lips.

Oddly enough, the nightmare began before the fear set itself in. During that first night she dreamt that she was at home sitting by the window looking out through the street when a naked man without a face appeared and stopped directly in her line of vision; with the staccato irrationality oneiric scenes are characterized with, the naked faceless man out of thin air conjured up a gun, and notwithstanding the physical distance of the street where he was standing from her position behind the window, pointed the gun toward her face, it’s tip smack-dab at the tip of her nose. Although that first nightmare did not culminate with the gun’s trigger being pulled, she had variations of the same dream since with varying degrees of destruction wreaked upon her face. One morning after a few nights of the recurring dream she woke up with the fear of getting shot in the face imbibed in her with an intensity far surpassing that of her own fear of the Lord.

The doctor meanwhile seemed to her like mirage in the middle of her desert of nightmares; he took on the quality of a daydream, tangible yet ephemeral, and effable yet elusive, he became a metaphysical quest that she learned to seek daily for a bit of respite. There may have been times when this vitreous daydream cracked on the surface and threatened to pierce her with its shards, their passion reaching saturation point and when he began showing signs of disinterest that’s when she knew that it’s time to wake up.

She did let go of him eventually, but her demons prevented her from bidding a silent goodbye; the intensity of the nightmares increased and along with it her doubts, her questions, from accusing him of infidelity to blaming herself—just like she did with past lovers—that she simply wasn’t beautiful enough. Initially, the doctor bore through her misapprehensions patiently, insisting that he loved her the same, but one can only take so much a woman’s paranoid accusations before waving the white flag. This surrender was for her the proof of the veracity of her misgivings, the final nail on the coffin where their whilom verdant love lay withered and dead.

The art of losing as she read it from Elizabeth Bishop, isn’t hard to master. The doctor, true to the oasis that she thought he once was, is merely an illusion that by its nature is intended to fizzle out in a matter of time. Losing him seemed to her like the letting go of a childhood teddy bear: one lets go of a small part of oneself, and along with it frees some space within for one to grow and flourish. This was her noble intent. However, in this space sprouted doubt and insecurity instead of the growth she aimed for. The nightmares around this time grew more intense that she dreaded falling asleep every night. It was always a naked man, and she was always looking out the window, the gun was always pointed directly at her face, and by the time the man pulls the trigger, she would always wake up in a cold sweat. She told a friend about the nightmares who in turn advised her to consult a psychiatrist, but she was afraid of what the psychiatrist might tell her. Nobody needs to be told that they’re losing their mind, she thinks to herself, and besides, she can’t afford the additional burden of being labeled with a mental problem, if indeed she does have an ailment.

Each night before going to sleep she would pray the Rosary, mumbling the words and barely registering their meaning for she looked upon prayers not as a solemn form of communication with a Higher Power but as a mantra to repel evil and attract good. Once, as she fell asleep after the second mystery, the same nightmare took on a different skin: she dreamt she was looking at a mirror and interestingly, she was looking at it behind the bars of her window. Her reflection stared back at her and it was naked. Suddenly, a naked man without a face appeared behind her reflection and merged with herself in the mirror, her reflection, if she may still call it so, became without a face, it held a gun in its right hand and when she looked down at her right hand in the dream, she too was wielding a gun. This time it was she who pointed the gun at her reflection and she was about to pull the trigger, the figure in the mirror, still faceless, grew a bloody slit where the mouth should have been and out gushed together blood and an equally blood-curdling scream. She woke up with tears in her eyes from the fright it gave her.

On the next day while watching the news, headlines reported about the rape and murder of a woman named Eileen Sarmenta. The death of a young lady is always a tragedy in itself, she thought, but in view of the fact that she died at the hands of another human being who before killing her subjected her dignity to utmost debasement by raping her is a scelestious crime, an unforgivable sin that may God Almighty burn the culprits’ souls in hell for all eternity. Her roommate, who sat beside her while watching, loudly exclaimed that this world is getting more and more dangerous, especially for girls; she nodded vigorously in affirmation and was to add another comment when something in the report caught her off-guard. Eileen Sarmenta, it turns out, died because of a gunshot to the face.

The mind is a microcosm of all our waking life’s perceptions--nothing in the intellect without passing through the senses, they say, but what does one make of unfounded fears? Is she merely the product of a hypersensitivity to her environment? Are her nightmares the augur of a nefarious threat? paranoid delusions? or possibly, the fantasies of a mind depraved and languishing for some sort of vaguely sexual gratification? It might have been way too carelessly thrown around, but the power of a gun as a phallic symbol has been made part and parcel of psychology; the Freudian connotations of virility found in the barrel of a gun, when pointed at the face of a woman, conjure up images of sexual submission. This is a theory she has recently been considering in her mind, but it is not enough to convince her as being the root of her nightmares.

Once, while gazing upon herself in the mirror, she finally found the answer she was searching for: she was with all her being dissatisfied with her face. A few years have passed since the nightmare began, and although they are less frequent now does not mean they are any less intense. Time had exacerbated her unwanted features and it dawned on her to ask the question that would thus lead her to a downward spiral and doom. What if?

What if I have the power to take it upon myself to change my appearance?

And so she has undergone many plastic surgeries to correct her perceived flaws, painstakingly saving money to go under the knife believing it would alleviate that nagging voice in her head which was saying that she will never be good enough for anybody. She became obsessed with a perfect face, a face that would be pretty enough for men to take a second look. The first couple of surgeries succeeded in their aim, but a second look was not enough. In her sixth facial surgery, the dreams took on a different quality. This time it was she outside of her own home looking in at an unfamiliar woman sitting by her window. The woman was crying, and there were no guns this time.

When morning came the first thing she did was to look at herself in the mirror. A face deformed and different gazed back at her. She was the unrecognizable woman in her dreams. She was the man aiming the gun at her face, and in the end, she succeeded in killing her self.

No, physically, she wasn’t dead, but the ragged breathing afforded by her all-new, way-too-narrow nose certainly gave off the impression that she was struggling to survive. No, not even this terrible fact indicated the death of her essence. Inside the shallow grave of her bosom, she mourns for the death of her heart. Her past lovers only knew her on a superficial level but never got to her heart; there was always an empty space that was never quite filled, not even by the best of them.

The monster in the mirror formed the rictus of an anguished scowl and before she knew it, tears were falling from her all-new, way-too-wide eyes. This thing she had done to herself, it was like being shot in the face, but the thing is, like the woman in the emergency room from all those years ago, she lived to tell the tale. Or in her case, she lived to see herself a mangled mess. It couldn’t get any worse than that.

What is there to life when one is already dead? The dead do not know what goes on in everyday life because they stopped living it. She counts herself as one of the dead, and buries herself every night in her dreams. The dead cease to be conscious of life’s pleasures and pains as she has discovered for herself. Neither sorrow nor joy could stimulate back to life what has been lost. If she believed in resurrection she was not destined for it, for she was not worthy of a second chance. But one would ask, what grave sin did she commit to be cursed with such fate? Try as she might, she can’t figure out an answer to that.

Maybe life is unfair, but that’s beating a dead horse. Maybe life is cruel, but that’s something most of us already know. Maybe life just happens.

And perhaps life is just like a gun in the hands of a lunatic in that out of an irrational spite, it aims at you and hits you square in the face.

Labels: aiko-lactaotao, asian writers, filipino women writers, filipino writers, short story