l'Enfer C'est les Autres
Chapter VII - … Into The Mess That Scalpels Make
Jayne had no idea how long she remained kneeling there upon the dock, weeping until her burning eyes could produce no more tears and her chest hurt with each wracking breath, unable to muster either the strength or the will to drag herself to her feet. Time's passage meant nothing. She meant nothing. The handgun digging into her hip seemed to beckon with temptation, and only her deep-seated loathing for mess kept it holstered where it belonged.
"Although most of the mess would just go in the lake," the insidious voice of her self-loathing whispered throughout her, and by Great Cthulhu was it tempting to just give in to its sweet coaxing.
But there was something about despair that somehow prevented her from ever acting upon her most self-destructive urge when she was hanging, torn and bleeding, from its razorblade claws. She knew and accepted that her end would be painful, just like everything else about her existence, but there was just … something … that felt profoundly wrong about dying with her mind in such a state. Something as wrong as she herself was. That something had kept her alive thus far, through her blackest depressions when all she could do was huddle in her darkened room beneath her favourite blanket for days at a time, not even eating or brushing her wildly curling mop of hair, only taking breaks to trace over the lines of scar tissue inscribed in her skin with a scalpel.
Her hatred for herself spoke again, sweetly cajoling.
"There are two scalpels, fresh and shiny and so very beautiful, so very sharp, still in their wrappers, sitting in the glovebox - just waiting for you."
That temptation was far more powerful, and Jayne was not certain that she had the strength to resist.
Did she even want to resist?
As her mind bounced amongst various horrors, she remembered something that clenched her pounding heart in a cruel fist. No matter how nicely it had started, with warm sunshine, singing birds, and the anticipation of a shower, today was never going to be a good day. It could not have been. How could she have expected otherwise? How could she have forgotten today's significance? Just because she was somewhere beautiful and peaceful, just because her morning began with less pain than usual?
Ten years ago today was when she had been ruined. The woman who the naïve teenager she was might have grown up to be had been murdered, destroyed, had bled out from that unspeakable wound between her legs upon rough, greyish-blue industrial carpet in the unfurnished third-floor attic of a French Quarter apartment, her corpse left behind, and the pale, trembling, bleeding wraith that stumbled down the stairs after he grew bored with torturing her was simultaneously someone other than the girl who had confidently climbed the stairs not even an hour earlier and no one at all.
The applesauce she had eaten earlier curdled in her stomach, and Jayne could taste it trying to escape her body, but she swallowed thickly, trying to keep it down. This was how the universe punished her for having the temerity to retain any shreds of hope. Clutching her hands to her belly, exerting light pressure in an attempt to soothe the clenching and spasming muscles, she tried to focus upon the physical discomfort so that her mind would not go back to that trip into the city. In a cruel sort of irony, the more she tried to think about anything else, the more those awful, awful memories intruded upon her.
"Even if the serial killer deemed your blood unworthy of his blade, there are always others that would spill it," that internal voice reminded her, all the while snickering at her weakness.
It was probably the thought of the pair of individually wrapped Bard-Parker scalpels sitting lonely and longing to be used in the glove box of her little hatchback that finally gave her the strength to drag herself to her feet, although accepting that an urge to watch her bright scarlet blood dripping down her torso in striking contrast with her unhealthy pallor was a motivator was something that she could not do. Despite how precise the patterns she cut were, the designs almost elegant in their balance and symmetry, more like scarification than outright self-mutilation, she felt deep shame both at cutting herself and at the resulting appearance of her body.
No wonder Jason hadn't wanted to sully his blade or the water in which he had drowned with something so weak, so contemptible and disgusting.
Not that she would have liked how her body looked without the scars, either. Her self-hatred and the utter revulsion with which she viewed herself was just too all-encompassing.
And what did it say about her that she never left home without a scalpel or razor blade, even after having her own knife used upon her in such a horrific way … ten agonising, miserable, wretched years ago today, she bleakly wondered.
"It means that you are so worthless and irrelevant that even a man who murders everyone he sees knows that killing you is a pointless waste of time," the cruel voice inside of her informed her with a snide little giggle. "You're nothing - you're not even worth killing."
A soft, hopeless moan escaped from between her tear-salty lips and she very nearly fell to her knees again, almost collapsing under the overwhelming physical weight of her despair, everything in her head at that moment too much for her to bear. However, her tight grip upon her walking stick proved itself to be just strong enough to keep her upright, and the siren call of sharp steel, blood, and the odd, burning pleasure of it was irresistible. Once she felt steady enough upon her feet to walk despite the headache blooming behind her eyes from crying so hard for so long, Jayne stooped to pick up the last jug of water, then she trudged back toward her campsite.
Her feet dragged over the ground, the walking stick hanging from her lacklustre grip trailing along unused behind her, but even though it caused her to stumble over the roots and rocks littering the overgrown trail, she could not force herself to lift her feet any higher. She could not force herself to care. She felt drained, as if her insides had been hollowed out with a melon-baller and tossed aside like the garbage they were, leaving her completely empty and at risk of collapsing in upon herself like a black hole.
A black hole. Now that was an apt comparison. She often felt that when the x-acto knife was plunged into her that dreadful day (ten years ago today … that happened ten fucking years ago today … that's when I was destroyed completely and irreparably and he should've just killed me then because that would've been better than … this … anything would be better than this … ), it had thrust a black hole deep into her womb, that the poison gestating within her somehow still-living and still-breathing shell that really should have been dead had transformed her into a great, sucking void of darkness that warped everything that came too close.
She was in such a dazed state that she barely recognised her campsite when she finally made it back. Robotically, her mind too caught in the bloodied steel jaws of the trap that was the very worst of her many awful memories for full awareness, she poured the water from the last jug into the camp shower reservoir, not noticing when her shaking hands splashed some onto her converse sneakers even though it soaked through the black canvas and into her socks beneath almost immediately. Any anticipation she might have felt for the upcoming opportunity to wash off the griminess of travel was repressed beneath her despair and the rejection (as she interpreted Jason's failure to kill her to be) she had just endured.
She believed rejection to be another of the defining characteristics of her existence, not far behind pain and abuse. Often enough, she was the one rejecting, but then again, she was also prone to abusing - at least to abusing herself … seeking out smaller pains to distract herself from the worst of it - so whether the rejection was directed to her or from her was an unimportant detail in the formation of her belief. And she accepted that all of it, the abuse, the pain, and the rejection she experienced, was deserved, even when she could not manage to figure out precisely what she had done to deserve it. She focused upon the what rather than the why, finding the why either too obscured and convoluted or too frightening to contemplate in too much depth. On the one hand, the what simply was, and that, at least, her mind could accept. But the why - oh, the why had teeth and was prone to biting into her and not letting go.
Once Jayne finished setting up the camp shower so that the sun could heat the water within the reservoir, her movements dream-like, slow and mechanical but not as methodically, almost obsessively careful as they ordinarily would have been, she turned to face Rodney. Although she had no memory of picking up her keys, she somehow found them so tightly gripped in her shaky hand that her knuckles were white and the rough grooves dug bruisingly into her palm, threatening to break the skin. She hated herself for what she was about to do to herself, but she loved it at the same time; she revelled in every aspect of the ritual even though cutting herself disgusted her.
In the glovebox, the pair of individually-wrapped scalpels lay atop the old Civic's paperwork - her proof of insurance, the registration, the receipts for new tires, spark plugs, fuses, the alternator which she had replaced the previous December, the oil which she preferred to change herself when her body allowed her to do so, and the vehicle title which she already had signed over so that whoever found Rodney once she was gone could own him or sell him to someone else without any hassle. She just hoped that whoever found him would not junk him because, despite his somewhat rough appearance, he ran like a top and easily had another 100,000 miles left in him or more, although she knew that his end fate was out of her hands. At that moment, though, Jayne took no pride in her organisation and attention to detail. She had eyes only for the blades. It would be different, she expected, performing her ritual in the woods instead of in the private sanctuary of her bathroom before the despised mirror where her reflection taunted her with her pallid, scarred insignificance, which felt vaguely uncomfortable. Any change whatsoever, no matter how slight, to the pattern she had developed so many years ago was unsettling, but aside from the setting, she expected to be able to replicate the steps as long-settled habit meant for them to be performed.
It just would have to be sufficient; if it were not …
"No, Jayne, don't think of that. It will be sufficient. It will be enough," she murmured out loud, trying to convince herself after locking the glove box while she carried a fat, red candle already one-quarter burnt, one of the scalpels, and a bottle of 90% isopropyl alcohol back to the blue-tinted shade of the tarp.
A sort of peace born of the mindlessness allowed by following a familiar pattern settled over her as she prepared for the ritual, the tension knotting the muscles of her neck, upper back, and shoulders loosening when her thoughts about what she viewed as the killer's cruelly dismissive rejection of her and the significance of the tenth anniversary of the loss of her virginity to the cold edge of a blade wielded by a drug addict whose name she had not even known, faded from the front of her mind. Nothing mattered but replicating her solemn rite of blood. She knelt upon the crinkling blue plastic ground cover then carefully placed the scalpel in its wrapper atop her stack of novels with shaky hands, balancing it at a diagonal across the bottom right corner, and lit the candle, placing it opposite the scalpel at the top left corner of the topmost volume. Pausing for a long moment, she examined the altar, her breathing deep and even despite the tremors wracking her hands. It was not perfect, but when she wracked her brain for how she might improve it, she could come up with nothing.
It would just have to do.
She dragged her pillow over and sat upon it, gently pushing off her shoes with her feet and placing them beside the pillow before crossing her legs and trying to get comfortable. Closing her eyes, she pulled the loose-fitting grey T-shirt off over her head and opened her eyes again to fold it neatly then laid it beside her converse. She had not put on a brassiere that morning as she typically went without, considering them unnecessary unless she planned to go running because her breasts were small and muscular enough that they barely bounced during her normal activities and the straps had a tendency to slip off her narrow shoulders, irking her. Goose prickles arose along her arms as an errant breeze slithered beneath the tarp to caress her scarred flesh now so exposed, causing her to shiver at the reminder that she was sitting half-naked outside in the middle of the woods even though it was not truly all that cold, and the candle's flame guttered but was not extinguished. Uncapping the bottle of isopropyl alcohol, she poured a capful into her hands and rubbed them together to sterilise them, poured out a second capful, then picked up the paper-wrapped blade.
The tremors wracking her hands subsided as she peeled back the wrapper with cautious care bordering upon reverence, revealing the small, curving #10 blade set in its seafoam-green plastic handle that always felt so warm, so good and so right in her hand. Although the packaging proclaimed it to be sterile, she dipped the razor edge into the cap of alcohol out of an excess of caution born from how prone to infection her medications left her, then lifted the cap to drizzle its cooling contents over her breasts and belly. Once the preparatory work for the ritual was complete, the setup process itself a ritual of sorts, a smoky haze rose up within her mind, obscuring all conscious thought and blotting out even the worst of her memories until everything was obscured within the swirling grey fog.
It was the closest thing to peace that Jayne knew in her adult life, and she treasured it.
She barely had to look down to position the scalpel blade correctly at the side of her left breast, the rolling of her shoulder and the angle of her elbow necessary to making the first incision deeply embedded in her muscle memory. Barely exerting any pressure at all, she sucked in a breath then slowly slid the cold, damp steel along the line she had first incised almost fifteen years before, the blade hugging the curve of her flesh, and the blood welled out in its wake, sluggish and crimson and hot against her chilled skin. There was no pain then, not really - just a faint stinging that preceded the gentle flow of adrenaline through her veins. She did not consider it a rush of adrenaline like the sensation when seeing a large truck barrelling toward the rear of her stopped car giving no indication of hitting the brakes, as it was too mild for that, but it was all the more pleasant for the moderation of its intensity. Sensations that were too intense, even pleasurable ones, tended to alarm her and render her too uncomfortable to enjoy them.
And, even though admitting it only increased her disgust with herself, feeling the cold blade parting the topmost layers of her skin was pleasurable. With a blank mind filled with kitten-grey mist and a softy sighed exhalation of breath, she proceeded through the ritual, scratching each of the eight longest lines of the pattern that extended outward like the arms of a windmill or a childish drawing of the sun from the pale rosey-pink hub of her nipple. Once the main lines of the left sunburst were complete, she switched the scalpel to her right hand, repeating the process, following the lines of silvery-pink scar tissue radiating outward from her right nipple.
She hated looking at her right breast when she reached that part of the ritual, though, because there the pattern was imperfect, marred by the one thick, raised, purple-tinged white scar that she had semi-unintentionally inflicted upon herself the first time she attempted to cut with a scalpel blade rather than the x-acto knife she had used up until that point. Not knowing how much sharper a scalpel was, she had pressed the blade into her flesh just as firmly as she was accustomed to doing with box-cutter and crafting blades, and to her horror (and fascination), the split flesh of her breast had sagged open like a hungry mouth, revealing the dark purple muscle tissue beneath. For some reason, even though it was by far the deepest incision that she ever had carved into her skin, the resulting injury actually had bled less than the shallower cuts typically did. It also had been strangely painless, the main sensation being gravity tugging vaguely uncomfortably at the edges of the wound where the skin sloughed open and a strange sort of numbness that did not precisely tingle but came close thereto, and she knew of no better words to describe the unique sensation. And although getting a glimpse of the muscle tissue beneath her skin was a thrill of sorts, the whole experience had been unsatisfying, lacking both the stinging and burning sensations and the hot flow of blood to drip down her skin that she sought, even craved, from her ritual. Unable to face a doctor and explain what had happened, fearing the consequences of being found out and having her ugly little secret revealed, she just had used butterfly bandages to close the wound herself at home, and although it had healed well enough, that thicker, more colourful scar did not match its fellows, interrupting the symmetry of the pattern and therefore destroying any beauty that she might have been able to see in her scarification. It looked like someone had stabbed her with a kitchen knife in her right upper chest, not like it was a carefully drawn and redrawn, ritualistic representation of Jayne's struggle to balance her compulsion to create and maintain order in her world against the awful, uncontrollable, roiling chaos of her rapidly declining health and her emotional volatility. Therefore, she hated that ugly, wrong scar and the breast that it adorned. However, that hatred did not prevent her from cutting upon that particular subtly curving canvas, re-tracing the other scars (but never that one), or from trying to maintain the symmetry of the other, thinner scars around it.
Laying down the scalpel upon the altar of novels so that the blade was suspended over thin air, making sure that it touched nothing that might contaminate it more than her vile flesh and tainted blood already had once she completed the process of tracing over the lines upon her right breast; then, tilting her head back, she closed her eyes and let the combination of sensations roll over her - the slight, ticklish sting of the wounds, the subtle burn that made her breath hiss between her teeth as the droplets of rubbing alcohol with which she sterilised her skin slid over and into the cuts, and the liquid heat of the blood slowly flowing down over her flesh. No hints of guilt or self-loathing yet accompanied the act and the feelings it evoked in her, and she very nearly revelled in the combination of almost-peace and almost-pleasure that she never had been able to find elsewhere in any other experience. After a minute or two, when she felt the warm tickle of the first rivulet of blood sliding into the shallow indentation of her bellybutton, she poured some alcohol onto a clean washcloth and carefully cleaned the stains upon her chest before intentionally flooding the wounds with the isopropyl alcohol and slitting her eyes, hissing with her back arched at the intensity of the tingling burn that ensued … which probably was her favourite of the sensations associated with her ritual.
Her eyes heavy-lidded with the shameful bliss, Jayne picked up the scalpel again in her left hand and began tracing along the shorter lines of scar tissue that each lay halfway between each of the longer, sluggishly bleeding lines she had just incised around each nipple, contributing to the sun ray effect. Watching how crimson welled out along the thin lines, following in the path of the steel blade gliding across her skin, the corners of her mouth curved up into an oddly sated little smile that probably would have horrified anyone who happened upon her and saw what she was doing to herself in that moment. Perhaps fortunately, two of the only three other people then present in the entirety of that forest were over a mile away from Jayne's campsite and mere moments away from their far, far bloodier encounter with the third, who himself was busy silently stalking them, intently observing them while planning how best to effect their imminent demises, so there was nobody anywhere nearby to witness her terrible, illicit pleasure.
For a few minutes, Jayne considered extending the ritual, moving down her torso to trace the outline of her protruding rib cage and each of her ribs with lines of scarlet, to re-draw the inverted cross at the base of her sternum and the precise, wavy lines of the 6-rayed sunburst around her belly button, but continuing did not feel necessary. The pinwheels upon her breasts were complete and her mind was blessedly empty of the overpoweringly devastating emotions with which she knew no more effective ways to cope - and if they returned … more properly, when they returned, three-quarters of the scarred white canvas upon which she drew her pain's design remained blank and open. But, to her surprise, although she did not feel the need to sketch upon her skin with the scalpel any further, apparently the ritual was not quite complete after all. She had never before cut herself outside of the privacy of her bathroom, so she could not be certain that the sudden, blinding need she felt was simply due to her performing the ritual outdoors, or if it was because she was bleeding here, in this particular forest with its blood-soaked history and tragic curse. Regardless of why, though, the compulsion was irresistible - she found herself powerless not to run her fingers over her chest, to gather up as much of her blood upon her fingertips as she could then hold out her dripping hands over the leaf and pine straw littered ground, allowing the precious droplets to fall to the earth like so many unfaceted cabochon rubies - an offering of her very essence to that voracious, hungering land where the dead walked and Nature reigned supreme.
The wind rattling through the autumn leaves, the songs of the birds and insects, and the chittering of the squirrels all seemed to express an acceptance of her sacrifice, wordlessly thanking her, without any common language in which to speak, for the offering of herself to the forest as she peacefully, silently bled in the Autumn quiet.
Once scabs began to form over the shallow cuts and she had cleaned the scalpel and the smeared blood dripping down her chest with isopropyl alcohol, she blew out the candle then spread out one of the blankets at the edge of the tarp and flopped back upon it with a sigh, able to gaze up at the sky from her position, her fingers trailing in the forest detritus above her head. The grey haze clouding her mind was already starting to fade, revealing the shadowy shapes and forms that hinted at everything within her that she was so desperate to escape, and she knew that the ephemeral sense of peace filling her would not last much longer. She cherished it all the more for that. The guilt, the deep aching of her joints, the fear of her body turning against her and increasing her suffering beyond what she already had experienced, the sickeningly awful rape - by blade when his flesh had failed to pierce her - which she had survived exactly ten years before, the agonising rejection that she had felt when the killer turned his back upon her without fulfilling her wish for an end to everything, and all of her bitterly painful memories would all come crashing down upon her soon enough. Until then, she would enjoy the brief respite from herself that her ritual of blood and steel afforded her.