See Through Me

‘Ready?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yeah.’

He held my gaze for a moment longer, then reached over, took hold of the top of the glove, and carefully folded it down.

6

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the way I am, and even now there are still things I shudder to see, but if you live with your inner self for two long years – seeing the life inside you every single day – you can’t help growing to admire it. You might still hate it – or at least what it’s done to you – and you might not find it quite so grotesque anymore (though you know it’s still hideous to others), but at least you can appreciate its wonder. How do all those things inside me know what they’re doing? How do all those mindless lumps and blobs and tubes keep going? And if I have no control over them, which I don’t – I don’t even know what most of them actually do – who or what does control them?

I’ve also come to realise that no matter how I feel about the things inside me – whether it’s wonder or hatred or anything else – their only purpose is to keep me alive, and they do their job with such tireless devotion that it seems a bit heartless to hold anything against them.

Unless, of course, you don’t want to be kept alive.

But I’ll come to that later.

All I’m trying to say now is that it’s taken me a long time to even begin coming to terms with the way I am, and while that doesn’t really mean much more than being relatively okay with it most of the time, it’s a whole world away from the devastating horror and hopelessness that was all I had in the weeks and months after that day of revelation at the RDRT Centre.

And as for the revelation itself . . .

Words aren’t enough.

It was beyond words.

Beyond description.

Beyond all understanding.

Dr Reynolds was true to his word – he worked very slowly, taking his time, revealing my condition inch by inch, hand by hand, limb by limb . . . all the time checking with me to make sure I was still okay to go on, and pausing at regular intervals to let Dr Hahn look me over and decide whether or not I was too traumatised to continue.

The initial shock – the revelation of my lower arm, wrist, and eventually my hand – was tempered only slightly, if at all, by the fact that it wasn’t a complete surprise. I’d already seen the meat and muscle of the upper halves of my legs, and the half-hidden bone of my kneecaps . . . and I’d already seen my skull in the mirror too – faceless, skinless, screaming . . .

But this was different.

This was right here, right now, right in front of my eyes . . .

My arm and hand, skinless things of meat and muscle, the living redness framed in the white of the pillow.

And this time there was no doubting it.

My mind and my senses were perfectly clear. I wasn’t sick. I wasn’t half crazy with pain. And I knew I wasn’t just seeing things, because when I looked up and gazed around at the three doctors, I could see the extraordinary truth in their eyes.

‘What is it?’ I managed to mutter, staring down at my hand. ‘What’s happened . . . my skin . . . what’s happened to my skin?’

‘We don’t know yet,’ Dr Reynolds admitted. ‘We’re looking into the possibility that it might be some kind of genetic disorder, but as far as we can tell there are no known records of any condition – genetic or otherwise – that presents with symptoms anything like yours, which basically means we’re looking for answers to questions that have never been asked before. And unfortunately that takes time.’

He stopped for a moment, watching closely as I tentatively moved my hand, turning it very slowly until the palm was facing up. It looked inhuman – like the inner workings of a demonic claw.

‘Try moving your fingers,’ Dr Reynolds said.

I waggled them a bit, then cautiously closed my hand, forming a loose fist. I held it for a second or two, then opened my hand again.

‘Did you see it?’ Dr Reynolds asked.

‘See what?’

‘If you look very hard you can just about see the outline of your skin. It’s incredibly faint, and it’s only really visible when you move. But it’s definitely there.’

I tried again, this time moving more freely, and after a few moments I saw what he meant – an almost imperceptible flickering of hand- and finger-shaped outlines, barely more than fleeting shimmers, like the outline of a glass hand in crystal-clear water.

‘It’s pure transparency,’ Dr Reynolds said, unable to keep a whisper of awe and admiration from his voice as he gazed at my hand. He carried on staring at it for a few moments, then gave a little shake of his head and turned to me. ‘There’s doesn’t seem to be anything actually wrong with your skin, or any other affected tissue. Every test we’ve done shows that the structure and function of the transparent cells is perfectly normal. Of course, I realise that’s of no consolation to you, but –’

‘Am I like this all over?’ I said.

He froze for a second, his eyes blinking and his mouth half open, and that was all the answer I needed.

I didn’t look at everything that day – there were parts of me that I simply couldn’t bear to see – but I saw more than enough to confirm the unthinkable truth. The skin of my entire body was transparent.

I knew very little about human anatomy then, so I couldn’t put a name to a lot of the things I saw, but as more and more of my inner self was revealed, the more it seemed that most of it looked much the same.

Muscle . . .

Flat bands of fibrous red, the redness blotched with the dull yellow shine of fat.

The pale gristle of cartilage.

And in places with little or no covering of muscle – knuckles, knees – the shadowy white presence of bone.

And I seem to remember that it was this – this basic sameness of my inner body’s landscape – that drifted into my mind as I gazed down numbly at the skinless vision of my belly.

At least, I remember thinking . . . at least you can’t see any deeper inside yourself.

Imagine that . . .

Imagine the horrors lying in wait beneath that canopy of muscle.

And it was then – just as that very thought came to me – that Dr Reynolds made another revelation.

7

Dr Reynolds kept it as simple as possible. Partly, I think, because he assumed – correctly – that I wasn’t in the right state of mind to deal with anything too complicated, but also because – as he freely admitted – he barely understood it himself. All he really knew, and all he could really tell me, was that it wasn’t just my skin that was transparent, but that other soft tissue was affected as well, and that the extent of the transparency – the degree to which it could penetrate my body – was dependent on the level of light I was exposed to.

‘So, for example,’ he said. ‘In this kind of light . . .’ he gestured vaguely at the surrounding dimness ‘. . . the transparency doesn’t generally reach beyond the superficial layer of muscles. It seems to penetrate further in some places, but that’s only because some places are closer to the body’s surface than others, so the light doesn’t have so far to travel. The one exception to all this is your bones. It seems that no matter how close to the surface they are, or how bright the light is, your bones aren’t affected by the transparency.’

He paused for a second, glancing round at Dr Kamara who I realised had moved across to the control panel by the door again. He gave her a quick nod, then turned back to me.

‘When the intensity of the light is lowered . . .’ he said, waiting as the light in the room grew even dimmer, ‘. . . well, you can see for yourself what happens.’

My belly was still exposed, and as I looked down at it again, it was immediately obvious that something had changed. I could still see inside myself, but not as much – not as deeply – as before. A few strips of muscle were still showing here and there, but the bulk of it – the covering of fibrous red bands that had been so visible before – was itself now covered by the layers of tissue above it. Most of this covering was a thinnish coat of fat – a vile-looking yellow jelly that was simply too sickening to look at.

I swallowed hard, took a few steadying breaths, then turned back to Dr Reynolds.

‘What happens if there’s no light at all?’ I asked him.

‘We don’t know.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because if it’s too dark to see anything at all . . . well, obviously, if we can’t see anything, we can’t see anything. And if we use a torch, or any other kind of light – no matter how faint – you won’t be in total darkness anymore, which defeats the whole point of the exercise.’

‘How bad does it get?’

‘Sorry?’

‘I mean, if the light’s really bright . . . it’s going to get worse, isn’t it? That’s why you dimmed the lights before showing me anything, so I wouldn’t see all the really bad stuff straight away.’

‘We were just being cautious, Kenzie,’ Dr Hahn said. ‘If we’d shown you too much at first, it might have been too much of a shock.’

‘I need to see it,’ I said. ‘I need to know . . .’

‘Are you sure?’

I nodded. ‘If I don’t see it, I’ll just keep thinking about it.’

‘You’re going to keep thinking about it anyway, I’m afraid.’

‘Yeah, but at least I’ll know what I’m thinking about.’

She smiled at me, but it was the kind of smile that’s too fragile to hold, and by the time she’d turned to Dr Reynolds it had disappeared without a trace. She didn’t say anything to him, and he didn’t speak either. He just nodded, then looked back at me.

‘We’ll do it gradually again,’ he said. ‘Just like before. Whenever you’re ready, I’ll ask Dr Kamara to start turning up the lights. We’ll begin with the small one on the wall, and if you still want to keep going when it reaches full brightness, we can start fading up one of the main ceiling lights. Is that all right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘We can slow things down or stop completely whenever you want.’

‘Right.’

‘Are you ready to start?’

‘Yeah.’

He signalled Dr Kamara to go ahead, and the near-darkness of the room slowly began to lift.

It wasn’t anything like I’d imagined . . .

It wasn’t anything like I could have imagined.

It was infinitely worse.

Unimaginable.

The stuff inside your body doesn’t look anything like those see-through illustrations of the human body you see in biology textbooks, or those plastic anatomy models with their nice neat innards, all in exactly the right place. That’s not how it is. In reality, it’s just a jumbled mess of soggy red stuff and thick globs of meat, all shoved together in whatever way they’ll fit. And it’s not inanimate either. It’s a living thing, a mess that moves – pumping, pulsing, throbbing, twitching . . . keeping itself alive.

I know it for what it is now.

But back then . . .

All I could see was a repulsive stew of guts.

Entrails . . .

Sickening coils of intestine, knotted together, fold upon fold, like parasitic worms . . .

Tubes, greyed pink, the colour of rotted meat.

Foul things.

Too much.

‘Stop,’ I said.

8

I came very close to putting a stop to everything then. I’d had enough. My brain was too scrambled to think anymore, and all I could feel – physically and emotionally – was a numbing cold sickness that felt like the end of the world.

I wanted to be left alone now. I wanted to lie in the darkness and not think or feel anything at all. I wanted to empty myself of everything and float off to a place where things were still all right.

But I knew that I couldn’t.

Not yet anyway.

Not until I’d seen the skull in the mirror.

‘I’d strongly advise against it,’ Dr Hahn told me. ‘You’re already highly distressed – understandably so – and another major shock to your system now could have very serious consequences. On the other hand . . .’ She paused, her eyes fixed on me, her lips pursed in thought. ‘I completely understand why you need to do this – if I was in your position I’d feel the same – and it doesn’t make any difference what I say to you anyway, does it?’

‘No.’

‘You’ve already made up your mind.’

I nodded.

‘And if we don’t do it now, you’ll find a way to do it on your own later on.’

‘It’s my face . . . my head. It’s me. I can’t not know it.’

The only time I cried during the whole revelation was when Dr Kamara told me that I’d lost all my hair. And by lost she meant lost. Not just transparent, but gone . . . every last bit of it. For some reason – which they still didn’t understand – it had all fallen out when I’d been half crazy with sickness and pain.

Dr Kamara told me this before I’d looked in the mirror, and I know it might seem like a strange thing to warn me about – that having no hair should be the least of my worries – and from the look Dr Reynolds gave her when she told me, a puzzled frown, it was perfectly clear that he didn’t get it. But Dr Kamara knew what she was doing. She knew that the shock of losing my hair wouldn’t be the same as the shock of everything else. Everything else was extraordinary, impossible, unbelievable. Losing my hair was real. It was something I could understand, something I could have real feelings about . . . feelings that actually made sense.

If Dr Kamara hadn’t warned me in advance, those feelings would have got mixed up with all the unbelievable stuff, and I would have missed the chance to have some true sadness and grieve a little for what I’d lost.

My hair . . .

My lovely, stupid, midnight-black mess of hair.

All gone.

I loved that hair.

I really did.

But even as I sat there crying my eyes out, I couldn’t help wondering how my tears must have looked as they streamed down my skinless face.

They must have planned to show me my head – or at least planned for the possibility – because Dr Hahn just went into the little bathroom and almost immediately came back out again carrying a medium-sized frameless mirror. As she walked back over to the bed, she kept the reflective side facing towards her, and as Dr Reynolds stepped aside to let her stand next to me, she held the mirror close to her body, clutching it almost secretively to her chest, as if my reflection was already in it and she didn’t want me to see it yet.

I know she spoke to me then – I remember seeing her lips move – but I have no idea what she said. All I could hear as she stood there talking to me was a surging roar inside my head and the deafening thump of my heart. Everything else was just a distant drone.

I don’t remember how the mirror came to be in front of me either.

I don’t know if Dr Hahn just gave it to me, and I held it in front of me, or if she positioned it for me and held it herself . . . or if it was all done gradually, revealing my reflection bit by bit, or if there was no hesitation at all, just a straightforward no-nonsense revelation . . .

I have no recollection at all.

I remember the roar in my head . . .

I remember the fear in my heart . . .

And then suddenly I was back home again . . . standing at the bathroom sink, my head crashing with electric madness, staring at the nightmare vision in the mirror.

A skull, skinless . . . white bone, grinning teeth . . .

Eyeless . . .

Faceless . . .

Hairless . . .

A skull, pocked with grey stuff and schemes of blood . . .

A thing of death.

It was me.

I could see the tracks of my tears running from the holes where my eyes used to be, the holes looking back at me like caves of bone. I knew my eyes were still there, but it’s hard to believe in something you can’t see.

I closed them.

Something might have flickered in the mirror, just the tiniest shimmer of unseen movement as my invisible eyelids closed . . . but nothing changed. I still couldn’t see the things I was seeing with.

It was too much.

I didn’t want to see anymore.

I covered my eyes with my hands, desperate for the sanctuary of darkness, but all I got was a blurred transparency of finger bones and muscle and blood. The skull in the mirror was still there, still grinning at me through the glaze of my see-through hands . . . and I knew that I didn’t have to keep looking at it, that all I had to do was turn my head and look away, but no matter how much I wanted to – and in that moment I’d never wanted anything more – I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t feel, couldn’t speak . . .

Kenzie?

A voice from a million miles away.

Kenzie!

Your face is who you are. It’s your identity, the thing that makes you you. It’s how you see yourself . . . which is kind of strange, if you think about it, because your face is one of the few parts of your body that you can’t actually see, and the only way you know it is through the second-hand imagery of other things – mirrors, photographs, videos . . .

But it’s still how you see yourself. And it’s how everyone else sees you and knows you too. Your face is you. And because you see it so many times every day – and you’ve been seeing it every day for most of your life – you know it more intimately than anything else. You know every millimetre of it – every line, every turn, every shape . . . the way it all fits together. You know it so well, and it means so much to you, that if it changes in any way at all, you’re instantly and intensely aware of it. And if that change is enough to disturb the familiarity of your face – and it doesn’t take much to do it – the effect can be staggering.

The thing that’s you, and has always been you, has suddenly become something else. It’s not you anymore . . .

That you has gone.

And now you’ve become this . . .

This fucking thing.

I hit it.

My head cracked.

And then I was nothing.

9

They kept me in the special care room for another two days – the lights permanently dimmed, my body covered up, a sleep mask for sanctuary when I needed it.

‘We’ll move you to a recovery room soon,’ Dr Kamara told me. ‘You’ll be a lot more comfortable there. We just want to make sure there’s nothing else wrong with you first, so we need to keep you hooked up to all the equipment in here for a little while longer.’

I think there was probably a bit more to it than that. I think part of the reason they wanted to keep me under observation in the special care room was so that they could monitor and assess how I was coping – or not – with the shock, and they didn’t want to move me until they were sure I was relatively stable.

I don’t know how I was coping with the shock, to be honest. I remember bits and pieces of the days after the revelation, and some of the memories are all too vivid, but a lot of that time is completely lost to me. I don’t know if I’ve blocked it out, or if I was so traumatised that I never even registered it in the first place. It’s also quite possible that the reason I don’t remember much is that I spent most of the time asleep.

Reasons . . .

Reasons don’t matter.

‘We think it’s best if you don’t have any visitors just yet,’ Dr Kamara said. ‘You need as much peace and quiet as you can get. We’ve talked this over with your dad, and although he’s very keen to see you as soon as possible, he understands that the only thing that matters at the moment is doing what’s best for you. So we’ll give it a couple of days, then hopefully get you into a recovery room and see how it goes from there.’

‘So when will I see Dad?’

‘It’s hard to say. We’d like to keep you fully rested for at least another three or four days –’

‘What about this?’ I muttered, indicating my head, my face. ‘I can’t let Dad see me like this . . .’

‘He’s already seen you, Kenzie. He knows –’

‘When did he see me?’

‘The day after you were brought here.’

‘I don’t remember that.’

‘You wouldn’t. You were in a bad way at the time – you weren’t really aware of anything – and your dad didn’t stay long anyway. He had to get back to look after your brother.’

‘Was I like this when he saw me?’ I asked. ‘Was I . . . you know . . . ?’

‘The transparency hadn’t fully set in at that point. It was still fading in and out, so you weren’t permanently affected when he saw you, but he knows what’s happened to you, Kenzie. He’s seen how you are. He knows –’

‘I’ll have to cover my face when I see him . . . my head . . . all of it . . .’

‘You don’t have to hide anything from him. He’s your dad . . . he’ll understand.’

‘Some kind of veil might do it . . . a niqab maybe, or even a burqa . . .’ I looked at Dr Kamara. ‘Are you allowed to wear stuff like that if you’re not a Muslim?’

She sighed. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

‘Could you find out?’

She just looked at me then, and for a moment I sensed a slight coldness to her.

‘I think you’d better get some rest now,’ she said.

‘But what about –?’

‘I’ve got your clothes here,’ she said, holding up a bulging carrier bag. ‘Burgess Park General just sent them on to us. You need to keep your gown on for now though. You can get changed when you move to the recovery room. Your dad’s going to bring you some more things when he comes – clothes, toiletries, books . . . whatever you need. Is there anything in particular you want him to bring?’

I shook my head.

‘Well, just let us know if you think of anything.’ She leaned down and placed the bag of clothes on the bottom shelf of a monitor stand just to the right of the bed. ‘I’ll leave this here, okay?’

I nodded.

She studied me for a few seconds, and I thought she was going to say something else, but she didn’t. She just turned round, went over to the door, and left.

Reasons . . .

The why of things.

One of the things about dressing the same way nearly all the time is that you can always be pretty sure what you were wearing on any given day. It’s a fairly useless thing to know, and all it really meant that day was that as I lay there staring at the carrier bag, I automatically knew what was in it. The clothes I’d been wearing on that rain-sodden Sunday night would have been the same kind of clothes I always wore – black leggings, black skirt, black T-shirt, black hoodie, my favourite silver and black pumps. I also knew that when I was taken to BPG my phone was in the pocket of my hoodie. Whether it was still there or not was another question, and at first I couldn’t have cared less. What did I want with a phone? I was hardly going to take a selfie and post it on Instagram, was I? And whatever anyone might be saying about me on Snapchat or yapTee or Facebook . . . well, I was feeling bad enough as it was. Why would I want to read a load of stuff that was guaranteed to make me feel even worse?

Was there anyone I wanted to call?

No.

Not even Finch?

I felt tears in my eyes then.

Of course I wanted to talk to Finch . . . there was nothing I wanted more. But I knew what would happen if I did. I knew I’d start sobbing my heart out the moment I heard his voice, and that once the tears had begun to flow, I wouldn’t be able to stop them. And all that would do was make us both feel worse. Finch would be upset because I was upset, and that would make me more upset, which in turn would make Finch more upset . . .

No.

I couldn’t speak to him . . . not yet, anyway.

But maybe . . .

I gazed down at the carrier bag.

Could I text him?

I thought about it . . .