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Member
Join Date: Oct 2004
Posts: 18
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Dysfunctional
Dysfunctional
Derek looked up at his wife and daughter, but they were blank. He wanted to see his wife’s eyes and know what they were saying and how she was feeling, but he could only wonder. Her body language was hard to understand, she might be thoughtful or regretful or hopeful or anything. He knew it was hard for her, but she would last a month. For a trip to Europe she’s wanted her whole life, she would last.
His daughter slurped her milk with a loud gurgle and awkwardly wiped her mouth. She, on the other hand, was very angry with him. Derek didn’t need to see the expression on her face to know that; her daughter had always been dramatic and obvious. She exhausted a short sigh and began to pick at her food again, nibbling away at the corners of things. Derek felt greatly relieved by her daughter’s sigh. Ever since the contract was signed and the experiment was started, he preferred her to be angry at him. It was the most obtuse emotion and it made her feel real and personal. Anna, on the other hand, controlled herself. With her dream trip to Rome on the line, she had no obligation to be angry with him.
She scraped the last of her pathetic portion of food into a corner then into her mouth and neatly arranged her cutlery on her plate. “How was work?” she said.
Derek had to stifle a laugh and just smiled, they wouldn’t see it. He gave a thoughtful little sigh and said, “Everyone stares. But I’m sure you two know what I mean.”
“No,” his daughter said, “They just laugh at me, even my friends.” She stared at her plate of food. Derek wondered if she really was looking at her food or if she was glaring at him or if she had closed her eyes.
“Jan, how long have we been doing this?” Anna said in a sympathetic voice to her daughter.
“Only two days!” Jan whined.
“That’s right. Do you remember how long we have left?”
“Have left?” Jan said, “You mean how much longer we have to have these stupid things on?” she asked and pinched the white mask on her face.
Anna nodded. “Mmhmm,” she murmured, and touched the mask on her own face, rubbing her temple. Derek wondered if she had an itch or if she was still getting used to the foreign skin.
“A long time…” Jan said and there was silence again. Derek hated that silence, he would rather they all be arguing and hating each other than spend an evening with his daughter and wife in uncomfortable and unexplainable silence. Without voices and faces they looked and felt like things to him.
“Don’t worry,” Derek said, “When this is all over, your hair will grow back extra fast.”
Jan stared at him and Derek guessed her look was a glare of despise and blame. He sat back, finished his wine and looked upon his family and whimpered inside. Their never changing faces made them feel so alienated and queer to him. He felt his family was always hidden from him and their bonding had turned into a moronic guessing game. At the same time, it was also very funny to him how the weird blank masks fitted onto their otherwise normal bodies. How ridiculous they all looked. Derek grinned to himself, knowing they would not notice unless he opened his mouth, so he waited for a moment and let them become forbidding and queer and alienated again. Then he stood up and said, “Homework time, Jan.”
Jan did her homework then her evening chores and then went to bed without argument under the influence of one and a half sleeping pills. Derek said goodnight to his daughter as she began to drift off and Anna tucked her in and then they read together on the living room couch for awhile. The little shades over their eyes on the masks made looking in impossible, yet barely tinted the view outwards. His mask didn’t bother him, he hardly noticed it anymore unless he touched it or caught his reflection, but his wife’s dead face distracted him from his book. He had to re-read several sentences and sometimes paragraphs over, unable to concentrate with her sitting next to him knowing who she is but not being able to see her. He had always spent time with his wife as much as he could, but with the masks on he felt like he was proving something to someone, the scientists in charge of the experiment perhaps.
When eleven o’clock came, they retired to their bedroom. Derek stood in the bedroom bathroom in his pajamas, brushing his teeth. Though his mouth was wrenched open wide, no wrinkles formed on the mask’s material. He’d often wondered what it was made of after the scientists told them their faces would never sweat nor itch nor dry.
His wife walked into the bathroom as well, dressed in her night gown and began rubbing a white cream into her hands. She held her hands up to the little holes leading to Derek’s nostrils when he was done brushing his teeth and said, “Smell… Do you like it?”
Derek mumbled an “Mmm” sound and said, “Yes. That’s good.”
She leaned up and kissed him and rubbed her moisturized hands up his stomach and chest and then down and grasped his groin. They maneuvered to their queen sized bed, kissing and groping and disrobing each other like they had many times before. Though their form remained unchanged, Derek found he was discomforted by kissing his wife throughout the process. Even when his own eyes were closed, he felt like she was unknown to him and that not being able to see her simplified their love making to mechanics powered by lust rather then the reasons and actions being irrelevant for the sake of intimacy. Derek was discomforted by this, and he turned his head into the curve of her neck, smothering his face in a pillow. He thought Anna would be confused or angered, but she made no disagreement. With the factor of intimacy almost lost, Derek felt it was stupid and useless. The sex was good, but to Derek it didn’t mean shit.
The next day carried out with the same stares and comments at the office as the first, but Derek didn’t mind. For the Pontiac Firebird he had fantasized about since he was fourteen, he could stand a lot more then stares and laughs. After explaining his situation to some of his co-workers, they felt the same way; most of them were jealous of him. When he returned home, he found Anna had a similar day, and so did Jan. However, paying off the house with money to spare did not mean to Jan what it did to her parents and she was troubled that night more than before.
After they had eaten and the table had been cleared away, the three of them sat at the table trying to begin Jan’s homework.
Jan stared across the table at the both of them and said, “Why don’t you get how weird this is?”
“Honey,” Anna said, “It’s an experiment. Some experiments can be done on things like rocks, but some have to be done on animals or people. And some of them have to be done on families, just like ours. And we’re getting lots of money for this, so when it’s over, guess what?” Jan gave no reply, so Anna continued, “You can get whatever you want from Wal-Mart or Toys-R-Us or the mall, or anywhere you want.”
Jan stared at them. “We look like aliens,” she said.
Derek and Anna laughed, to be clear in what they were feeling to comfort their daughter. Jan just stared, and Derek wondered what emotions the mask hid. He guessed her little face was twisted in disgust or hate or horror or all three, but the mask remained unchanged. You piece of shit, he thought, let me see my daughter. Stop hiding her from me!And he was suddenly angry at the mask or her face or his daughter altogether for being raped of his rights to his child.
“I want it off,” Jan said.
Derek sighed and said, “Does it bother you, Honey? Can you even feel it at all if you don’t touch it?”
Jan hesitated then said, “Yeah… It’s always there, even when I think it’s not. It’s like it lives on my face. I hate it, it’s so stupid!”
“Answer the question,” Derek said, his anger flourishing inside him again, “Can you feel it right now?”
Jan hesitated again, longer this time and said, “No... Not unless I try. But it’s there, dad, why don’t you listen to me?” Jan buried her face in her hands and her voice began to tremble. “It’s like a nose, it just sits there but you don’t notice it even though it’s always there. Why don’t you believe me? I want it off. I want it off!” she yelled, and started to cry.
Derek was greatly relieved by his daughter’s weeping. In his mind it brought her back to life again. It was something he could relate to and it made the little girl in front of him feel once again like his daughter instead of a person with a blank face that sounds and acts like someone he knew. He sat back and watched Anna comfort her, wondering what she was whispering.
After some desert and a pay-per-view movie, Jan was in bed and fast asleep with the help of two sleeping pills. Derek spent an hour catching up on some paperwork and then him and Anna read together, this time in bed. Again, Derek felt it almost impossible to concentrate by his wife.
“Maybe…” he said after re-reading one page four times, “Maybe this is a little bit too much for Jan.”
“Janice is fine,” Anna said. “She’ll get used to it. She won’t be complaining when this is all over and we get paid.”
“I know, but she was really upset, and this is only the second day. I’m not letting these damn things tear apart our family.”
“Tear apart our family?” Anna said, with a sudden anger in her voice that startled Derek. “They will not tear apart our family. They’re masks for god’s sake! It’s idiotic that masks could mess up our family. We’ve started this thing, we’ll finish it and we’ll get our money.”
Derek sighed and said, “Okay, but if they do, they’re gone. I’ll tear them off myself and shove ‘em up those family specialist’s asses.”
Anna put her book down and giggled. He stared at her mouth. Though the mask hid most of her lips and made it hard to interpret a smile from a frown, he found some sense of emotion in it, and it made him glad. But almost as quick, she closed it and again he felt his rights were stolen from him, and his wife disappeared again, leaving behind her shell. Disappointed, he sighed and threw his own book onto the floor. For a moment, both of them lay facing each other, having no idea what the other was looking at. Derek brought his eyes away from her mask and looked down at her breasts. He had always admired his wife’s body, but always altogether. He’d never singled out her hips or legs or her breasts as he did now. Normally he would’ve felt guilty, he knew she hated it, but he knew she couldn’t see him looking. And even more, without a face, it was hard for him to accept her as his wife. Without a sense of her emotions and her personality, the person in front of him was his wife behind glass: a thing that acted like his wife. He wanted this woman more then he ever had before and love was unimportant then, it had left with Anna.
And so, still staring, he brought his hand up and grasped her right breast. Their love making had always revolved around kissing, as to them it had always been the most intimate gesture, so Derek expected her to ask what the hell he was doing but she just let him continue.
He pulled down the spaghetti strings of her night gown and kissed her chest and still she made no argument. When he thought he was beginning to push his luck, he brought his head up and tried to kiss her, but to his great surprise she backed away.
“No,” she said, “It’s too weird. It’s like I’m not kissing you, it’s like you’re just saying the things you say and doing the things you do, but you’re not really my husband. I hate kissing with these things on.”
“I know,” Derek said and pulled away. “It is strange, isn’t it?”
“No,” Anna said and pulled him back, “I don’t want to stop, it’s just that I don’t want to kiss, not until these things are off. Let’s just… try something different tonight.”
The next day at the office, Derek spent a good portion of his break staring into the bathroom mirror. The mask covered his entire head, front and back and ended directly beneath his chin. Inside the mask was a perfect mould to his face, but on the outside he looked like a cheap manikin with no distinguishing features at all. Derek couldn’t even tell if it was supposed to be a man or a woman. But whatever it was, he loathed it. Once last night and a few times already earlier in the morning, he had thought of ripping it off and giving it back to the quacks that put them on his family. But he remembered what the scientists had said: “That material is worth almost as much as you’re getting paid. If you wreck it, that money is going to end up going the wrong way. Remember that, no matter what.” And so he left the mask alone and hated it even more.
With a few minutes left on his break, he phoned Anna at home and expressed his concerns.
“You’re being nervous, over-protective and a pessimist!” she said immediately. Derek didn’t mind her aggressive tone, talking to her over the phone made her feel distant, but in a way that convinced him his real wife and lover was on the other end. “Listen,” she said, much more calm, “We’re getting a lot of money for wearing some silly masks for a month. Maybe you could be a little more mature and stop bitching about what you classmates say like your nine-year-old daughter, and worry about the concerns of your family!” Anna hung up.
Derek slowly put his phone back into its cradle, not sure what to think. He just hated the mask. Under the stares and a laugh of near by co-workers, Derek walked down the hall to get a coffee.
He phoned before leaving work to tell Anna not to cook anything and picked up Dairy Queen -Jan’s favorite food- on the way home and they were soon all seated around the family table, munching away at fast food.
Anna had hardly spoken to Derek when he came home and he didn’t need to see her face to understand that she was angry with him. But Jan was delighted when her dad brought home her favorite junk food, and this cheered both of her parents up. However the good mood only lasted so long and Jan’s mood took a turn for the worst with the coming of her nightly homework. She sat at the table, scratching at the mask with her sweatshirt’s hood drawn over her head, doodling over her spelling homework with a pencil.
Anna was in the kitchen baking scones and Derek was on his own to drag his daughter through her homework.
“This is so stupid. I can do this tomorrow. Or Sunday,” Jan said, drawing a house on the top of her paper.
Derek sat back and yawned. It was a Friday, and work had tired him out. “Because,” he said in a careful tone, “Then you can do whatever you want on Saturday and Sunday.”
“I don’t want to go to school anymore,” she said.
“You want to stay home for a whole month?”
“No, I don’t want to be here or at school. If I have to wear this stupid mask I don’t want to be anywhere.”
“Honey,” Derek said, trying as hard as possible to avoid another fit, “We’ve talked about this before. If you can be a good girl for one month, you can get whatever you want.”
“Don’t say good girl, I’m almost ten,” she said, erasing the house she drew.
“Well,” Derek said, hoping he could put an end to it, “Then why don’t you act like a grown up ten-year-old and be mature about it for another twenty seven days?”
“No,” Jan said. “I want it off now. I hate it and I hate yours and moms too! It’s not like a stupid game, it’s just stupid and I hate it! I WANT IT OFF!” she screamed, and took the pencil firmly in her right hand and stabbed it into her check. She whimpered and buried her face in the crook of her left arm.
Derek jumped up, knocking his chair over and ran around the table. He held her head firmly, ignoring her cries, and felt the mask near where the pencil was hanging out, and could find no blood. “Thank god,” he said and pulled the pencil out. He looked at the piece of material over her cheek and brushed off a little bit of led, then let go of her head.
Anna ran in and looked to the both of them and said, “What the hell was that? What’s going on? Honey, are you alright?” She walked over to Jan and started awkwardly comforting her, careful to avoid the mask.
“She tried to stab herself with a godamn pencil,” Derek said, pulling his chair off the ground.
“Shut up, Derek,” Anna said.
Jan stared at Derek. He couldn’t hear any crying from her, he knew she was glaring. That thing that should be daughter hates him. Why? Because it’s a stupid thing. With that bitch to protect her, he thought. He could feel his face flush with anger and he kicked the chair he just pulled up back to the floor. “This is bullshit!” he yelled.
Anna and Jan looked up at him with blank faces. They’re angry at me, look at them, Derek thought, I bet they’re even laughing at me. They think I’m stupid because I can’t see them mocking me. Derek took a few deep breaths and said, “We’re canceling this stupid shit. I’ll call them tomorrow and tell them we’re finished, alright Honey?”
Jan just stared at him, blank and motionless. Anna stood up and walked over to him and grabbed his arm. “We need to talk, now,” she said, and pulled him into their bedroom.
“Go to your room and play,” Derek called to Jan and followed his wife into their room. Anna shut the door behind her and turned to him, pointing her finger into his face.
“You need a serious fucking priority arrangement. Who the hell do you think you are?” she said, trying to push him back but Derek held his ground.
At that moment Derek felt angrier then he ever had before. This thing in front of him that was once his wife, this fake person, this object was accusing him of trying to protect his family. Knocking her across the room flashed through his mind no more serious then kicking that chair down. They’re both things, Derek laughed to himself, except one’s a money grubbing whore, the other you can sit on. Derek laughed out loud this time and suddenly felt sorry for the chair.
“What the hell is so funny?” Anna said, still sticking her finger in his face. “Godamn jerk, do you know what you’re doing? We’re guaranteeing ourselves this house, our daughter’s education, our future for wearing masks! Stop being such an idiot!”
Derek laughed again, holding his sides. “A manikin’s calling me an idiot!” he snorted, bursting into laughter again.
Anna stepped back and swung her hand across Derek’s jaw. Derek could hardly feel it through the mask and grinned so widely it pulled the sides of the mask up his cheeks. He sighed and said, “You see? You can’t hurt me. We are things! We can’t be hurt!” Derek took a step back of his own and swung his fist into the bridge of Anna’s nose. She fell backward and crumpled on the floor. “But,” Derek said, still grinning between giggles, “Naughty things can be broken.”
Anna tried to open the door but her weight held it closed and she feared standing to open it would bring her too close to Derek. But Derek didn’t make any other moves, he just watched her, still smiling. “Funny, isn’t it, how some silly masks can show the real us. How dis-funk-to-nial we all are!” he said, catching his breathe from his laughing fit. “But that’s ok, isn’t it Honey? As long as it’s for the money, right? For the money, Honey!” Derek said and stifled his self-pleased giggles.
“Derek,” Anna said shakily, sputtering the blood dripping from her nose into her mouth,“What are you doing?” She slid up against the door, standing upright, opened the door a crack and slipped through.
Derek sighed and followed in slow but long strides. “You fucking THINGS!” He yelled. “Jaaaaaaaan, listen to your mother! You little shit, you need to worry about the concerns of your family!”
Derek walked into the front hall where Anna pulled Jan in a run to the door. Derek ran after them and slammed the door shut when they tried to open it. “Who do you think would help things like you?” Derek said, grinning at them. “People would think you’re part of some fucking reality show, or you had ‘em on candid camera!”
Jan tried to say something, but Anna grabbed her and pulled her towards the kitchen. Derek skipped after them, following right behind. Anna tried to open the back door but Derek slammed that shut too, just before they could get out.
Anna pulled Jan into the kitchen and backed her into a corner. Derek walked to the opposite end of the kitchen so that they couldn’t leave without passing him by. “Well then…” Derek said. “Chat time, yes? So, fill me in, when the fuck did Scrooge become my wife, you greedy bitch? And Jan, since when did you-”
Anna grabbed a long knife from a magnetic rack on the side of the cupboard and held it out to Derek, shaking all the while. Jan sat crumpled behind her mother’s legs, trembling, too confused and terrified to move. “Derek…” Anna said, like her daughter also too confused and terrified to think of anything. Instead she began to sob beneath the mask.
Anna shivered and Derek jumped foreword. Anna tried to recoil, but Derek grabbed and her wrist and pulled the knife from her hand.
He took a step back again and examined his wife and child crumpled in a pile in the corner of his kitchen trembling and he smiled another huge grin that lifted the cheeks of the mask. He saw the two of them no longer as people, but objects carrying out human like actions, like ants. Derek had crushed many ants in his lifetime, and two more would make no difference.
He stepped forward, standing above them and raised the knife upwards at an awkward angle. Anna twisted herself over Jan’s body and Derek brought the knife down and sliced his mask down from his forehead to his mouth. Little streams of blood fled from the split in the material over his face. For a moment he stood still, and Anna and Jan turned and hid their faces.
Derek looked down on them through a startled daze. He looked at the knife in his hand, then to his wife and child shriveled in terror before him. Then it all came back to him and he grinned his huge grin again. He brought his hand to his face and dug his fingers between the material and his own skin and pulled the left half of the mask off his face.
It had been firmly stuck onto him and brought with it bits of skin and in some places whole chunks. Beneath the mask was a pale face with brown eyes set into hairless and bloody features.
Derek looked at the knife in his hand and said, “Things can’t kill other things, but I can. Regret isn’t part of the package when you kill a thing. Remember that.” He dropped the knife and it stabbed into the floor, its handle shivering.
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