With his nose off he almost did not look like himself. No, Edward looked nothing like himself, or John, with it off. Instead he was new: charming, warm. He could tell me to lay over a bed of hot coals and I would because I trusted it would be painless. He could tell me to reveal my secrets, like the time a friend and I had fondled one another as children, and I would, because he’d make me feel that moment was part of my innocence.
But with his nose on I saw who he really was. I saw the ugliness, who he’d become years ago, as a boy. I saw his brother, John, too. Heard John. Tasted the skin of their father’s palms in my mouth. Heard his cruelties rattling around in my head. Felt their history in my stomach, sinking.
I felt my upbringing also. Those years with Mom. Those without her. Staring at his nose, I could feel us all, sinking, deeper and deeper.
~~~
When Edward and I met I’d been seeing his brother in a professional setting for two months. John would enter my office weekly, sit across from me, and break down over the way their father had treated them.
This was not a slow confession for John, but an immediate outpouring. Our first session he said: “He was hardly in our lives yet always looming over us, over there. Like some hovering ghoul, his teeth yellowed. He was cruel to us both but to me specifically because he knew right away I liked boys. He told me once, when I was a teenager, that he knew I was gay when I was four. He said that was the first time he’d ever fantasized about punching me in the face. Yes, when I was a four-year-old, he wanted that.
“With Edward he was different. With Edward it wasn’t direct cruelty but more this lingering disappointment. Because Edward reminded Dad of Dad. What did that disappointment do to Edward? I don’t know. All I know is that he’s cold now. He grew cold, and he never talks about any of it with me.
“But that sort of upbringing must mess with a child, right? A father who’s hardly around? Who loses his temper at the slightest things when he is around? Who calls you names? Who pits you against one another? Who never says ‘I love you’? That all must’ve bothered Edward, too, right?”
I took long to reply—not because I was thinking deeply about what John had said but because his nose so entranced me. It was the most perfect nose I’d seen; that’s what I thought then, before I met Edward. It was perfectly round and smooth and supple, flicking this way and that with each syllable. Staring made it easier to ignore his whining, his balding, the way he ranted about his dating life. Everything.
Eventually I responded, though I don’t know what I said. It must’ve been something reasonable or halfway intelligent, though, because for the next six months he kept coming back.
~~~
Between Edward and John, I’d visit Mom. A nurse practitioner would escort me through the Centre’s long, sunless hallways to her room and there she would be: staring out the window, listening to the birds, making little chirping noises alongside these birds as if it were a game.
But here’s the thing: there were no birds. And there was no chirping aside from her own. And the view from her window showed only the beige cement of the public housing complex next-door to the Centre. There was no game, either, and despite it being the middle of the day her bedsheets were often soiled because that is the level of care doled out to people in her condition unless they can afford better.
“Mom,” I would say. “It’s me.”
She would turn from the window, her eyes pure white, then rush over to me in her hobbled way and kneel on the carpet, her head whipping this way and that by my waist, as if someone was spying on us.
“Did you bring it?” she’d ask.
“No,” I’d say, kneeling beside her. Every time I tried to stroke her hair, to calm her, to remind her I was her daughter, she would pull away from me or push my arm away. Once she even spat at my feet.
“Why are you here if you didn’t bring it? Get out! Leave me alone!”
“Don’t you recognize me?” I would say. But she didn’t; I already knew that.
~~~
I met Edward at a rave. In the darkness I could not recognize that he was John’s brother. Then the music started and with it the lights flashed red and the bass erupted and I saw that his nose was perfect. I knew I recognized that nose and its perfection from somewhere, but back then I also took ketamine on weekends, so by that point in the evening I wasn’t putting pieces together.
I’d come with a friend and so had he, but these friends were gone. It was just us, outside, away from the music. Sharing a cigarette out in the cold, bass pumping through the walls. I couldn’t stop staring at his nose.
“Have we met?” I said.
“Nope.”
I leaned in closer. I took the cigarette from him and stared at his nose. There was nothing redeeming about him aside from it, I thought.
“But I recognize your nose. Are you sure we haven’t met?”
“Positive.”
Despite the fog of the ketamine I could see how his face hardened between thoughts, how his muscles tensed. If it weren’t for his nose, I would have run from him. He seemed the type to grow angry at how the sun sets on a given day.
“You’re not kind to new people, are you?” I said.
“No, I guess not.”
“But why? Why be that way?”
He shrugged. “I’ve been this way since I was a little boy. As far back as I remember.”
“Don’t you want to be different ever? Wouldn’t it be nice?”
I let that question settle under my skin. How would I answer it?
“I can be different,” he said. He took his cigarette back and held it in front of his face.
“What?”
“I can be different.”
“How?”
Again he shrugged. “I just can be.”
“I don’t believe you. Show me.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding, “but don’t get all pussy on me.” He took in more smoke from his cigarette and let the smoke linger in his chest and when he exhaled there was nothing; the smoke was gone inside of him. He dropped the cigarette under his boot and stomped it out, and he took both hands and placed them over his round, smooth, shining, perfect nose.
His hands stayed there a moment—like his fingers were melting into his skin. Then he closed his eyes and breathed in deeply and I could feel the bass still coursing through me, stripping the remaining balance from my knees.
I nearly toppled over when finally he removed his hands to reveal a new face. One without pain. Without complexity. Without abandonment or the burden of his father’s existence. Without a past, a present, or even a future. But most of all, without a nose.
~~~
“You haven’t provided me with enough coping techniques,” John said one day from across the room. “Honestly, I feel just as lost as when I first started paying for you.”
He told me next that he would awaken in the middle of the night feeling as if the moonlight were swallowing him whole. He would awaken and think his father was still alive. He would awaken and think he was a mannequin, his father controlling his every movement.
Of course, I had a whole list of coping techniques I doled out to patients. I would tell them to do this, do that. Powerlessness during tense encounters? Abandonment issues? Attached to money because you grew up in a financially insecure household? Here, here, here. But with John, I rarely knew what to say. By then I’d realized that he and Edward were brothers, and so I wanted to tell him that it was all so easy: he could just remove his nose and be like Edward. That was the way out. He could forget the fear and anger their father had instilled in them by simply covering up this one organ with both hands and tearing it away. But to tell him that I’d have to reveal a whole lot more.
“You know, I saw my brother yesterday for the first time in three months,” he said. “We caught up over a drink. I tried to talk to him about Dad, even asked him how he copes with everything. All he said was, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ Then he finished his beer without another word and left. I went home, meanwhile, and cried half the night. Isn’t that pathetic?”
I agreed, it was pathetic. But I didn’t say that. Instead, on his way out of my office, I assured John I’d brainstorm coping techniques for our next session. I reminded him that his father was no longer here, that he no longer had any power over him, and that we were working towards somehow forgiving him—because that was what John had said he wanted.
That evening, in Edward’s bed, I thought about that word: forgiveness. I tried to make sense of what it meant. I wondered: Does anyone truly know? Has anyone ever truly forgiven, or been forgiven?
~~~
Around that time, Mom had not said my name in many years. She no longer recognized my voice or face or the stories I’d tell. But there had been a time, long ago, when she knew me. This was after my stepfather had gone out in our back shed and hung himself but before I’d gone to live with Grandma—before I’d applied to university, even.
I remember the last day Mom recognized me. How cool the air was. How quiet. So quiet that on my way home from school I heard the clouds above me collecting, growing in their density.
She was in our back shed. She used to spend a fair deal of time there in the years after everything with my stepfather. She used to head out there and pull shut the doors behind her and shutter the blinds to the lone window and flick on the overhead light and drink her vodka and talk to him and say over and over, “Kevin? Are you there, Kevin?”
She’d peed herself. I smelled it as I came through our back gate. She had peed herself again and spilled what was left of her vodka—there couldn’t have been much left anyway—on her blouse. So the shed reeked of liquor, urine, and a mold that had begun to spread along the ceiling.
I lifted her into a sitting position and shook her awake. After a minute her eyes opened.
“Kevin? You’re back?”
“What?”
“Is it you?”
“No, Mom. It’s me. It’s Annie.”
She began to sob. Outside it had been so quiet that I thought everyone in the world had moved elsewhere—to another continent. But in that shed her sobs echoed and shook the walls and it was so loud that somehow I could also hear her urine and the vodka and the mold as much as I smelled them.
“Bring Kevin,” she said.
“He’s gone, Mom.”
“Bring him here or leave. Go away, Annie. Get out!”
So I did. But I didn’t go far. I closed the shed doors and sat on the grass with my back leaned up against them. I listened to her sobbing for another hour, not once thinking that might be the last time she’d say my name. I listened to the quiet from outside get sucked into this giant vacuum of her misery. I listened until the rain came, and then I went into the shed again and dragged Mom, who’d just about passed out, to her bed.
The next morning, when I woke her, she stared blankly at my face.
“Who are you?” she said.
~~~
Edward had no photos in his apartment. Nothing of John or their parents. Nothing to signify he had a family or friends or any sort of social life. He had only his books, movies, and music.
With his nose on he spent most of his time enmeshed in those things. He would read the latest in some sci-fi trilogy, putter around with over-ear headphones on for hours, then pop some obscure, gory Korean movie into his Blu-ray player and nod as the characters were killed off one by one. The whole time he refused to acknowledge my presence. It was like he didn’t remember he’d woken up noseless, called me, and requested I come over.
I hated him with his nose on, hardly wanted anything to do with him. But still I was always content to wait for him. Because when he finally took it off it was like I’d found someone quite unlike myself: someone who knew how to handle pain.
One night, very late, after he’d taken his nose off and we’d stripped down to nothing, I asked him, “What’s it like to become a new person?”
“I don’t become a new person. It’s still me in here,” he said.
“But it’s not.”
“But it is,” he said, sighing. “It’s impossible for anybody to become a different person. We can become different versions of ourselves, but we can’t just assume new DNA. That’s biologically impossible.”
“Fine. But you still didn’t answer me. What’s it like?”
He turned towards me, slung an arm over my ribcage. “It’s like I can take everything and bury it in the dirt. Like everything with my father. I know he treated me terribly. I know he hurt my brother and me in unforgivable ways. I know that my brother resents me—because he got the worst of our father’s rage, because he needed him more than me, because I was straight, and because I never talk about any of it. But with my nose off I’m able to take all those things and bury them beneath my feet. I still know everything is down there, but now it’s at least tucked away. There’s a layer between me and it, and it’s in safe, healthy soil. It’s down there and it’s not going to die. It’s going to get nourished and be independent of me.”
I nodded, feeling I’d absorbed at least some of what he’d said. Then, for the first time, I reached out and touched the space where his nose should’ve been. It was just a smooth flat of skin. It felt like any other flat of skin on his body, only much warmer, like there was another heart beating underneath it.
“Can you teach me how to do it?” I asked.
He shook his head.
“It’s something you can only learn to do on your own.”
~~~
It would be a lie to say everything with John and Edward ended abruptly. It would be like saying Mom forgetting my name was abrupt. I’ll also admit I started drinking early the day it ended. And I’ll admit to taking ketamine before noon, too, which was unlike me. But I only acted that way because a nurse from the Centre had called the night before and told me how Mom had started a fire in her bedroom. How she’d lain in bed as the fire spread along the carpets. How it had taken four nurses to break Mom’s door down and rescue her and put the fire out. How the smoke would’ve been fatal if Mom hadn’t mistakenly left that lone window in her room open.
So yes, after visiting Mom early that morning to check on her, I’ll admit I didn’t feel like myself. I was too busy considering whether Mom would get kicked out of the Centre, whether she would try something like this again now that she had figured out she was capable of doing such a thing.
That was all on my mind when John called and said, “Maybe I messed the days up, but don’t we have a session?”
With two sticks of gum already chewed to chalk in my mouth, I apologized from across the lobby and led him into my office. This session would be free of charge, I said. There was a lot on my mind, I said, but that was still no excuse for my tardiness. Then I asked, “What about you? What’s on your mind today, John?”
“What else? My father.”
And so he launched into a story. One he’d forgotten for so long but that had returned to him in a sudden rush the day prior—the day Mom torched her room. He told me of the time their Dad had forced him and Edward to fight when they were five and six years old. How he had taken them into the bathroom and gripped their necks and pressed their faces up against the mirror—these two small, blond boys—and said, “Look at your pretty little noses. What’s the matter with you two? Boys aren’t supposed to be this pretty. It’s one thing for John, but for you, Edward? You don’t want people thinking the two of you are alike, do you?”
Then he took Edward and John by their necks, his palms rough like shedded snakeskin against their flesh, down the elevator and around the side of his building. There was a parkette there. The sun had disappeared behind a blanket of clouds and no one was around in this parkette, so it was just them and the grey sky and the dirt beneath their feet. It was cold, too, John remembered, when Dad told them that whichever son could bury the other son’s face in the dirt first would get a present that night. He hadn’t bought the present yet, but he would, he swore that to them.
The two boys stared at one another, at first standing motionless. But then John saw quickly in Edward’s eyes that his brother did not want his nose stuffed in the dirt. And he saw that Edward knew it was better for at least one of them to not look so cowardly in Dad’s eyes.
So Edward leapt at John, sending them both to the ground. They struggled for a second there but that was all John had in him; he didn’t want to fight. Then Edward had flipped John over onto his stomach. He gripped his brother’s hair and pressed John’s face into the ground, into the dirt, into the mud, until it sounded like John might drown. Edward pressed John’s nose further into the dirt so John could smell the soil, see the earthworms, taste the groundwater, taste the minerals, hear nothing. He pressed his face into the dirt with Dad cackling behind them, his hands clasped together, proud, if only for now, while John wondered if he might die.
When Edward finally released him John grasped at his nose, hoping and praying it had not fallen off. He wiped the dirt from his eyes and from the inside of his nose until he could see and breathe again. He sucked in as much oxygen through his nostrils as he could. Then he began to cry.
In my office he began to cry, too, as he said, “We’ve never looked out for one another, Edward and me. We were supposed to look out for one another, but we haven’t.”
He was really crying. And, yes, the story was sad, of course. Disgusting, even. But my mother had also just tried to burn her room and her own flesh alive. Mom, who hadn’t uttered my name in more than a decade. And so part of me sat there, drunk, high, listening to John’s story, thinking: What’s so horrible about that?
“Why don’t you just take your nose off?” I said. “Like Edward. Wouldn’t life be easier?”
Immediately his crying ceased. And from the look on his face, I knew, even in my state, that I’d been caught.
~~~
After losing John as a patient—after losing Edward and having my psychotherapist license suspended—I finally received some good news. Following a month long review, the Centre had decided Mom could stay. They’d laid out certain conditions for her ongoing care, but for now, she could stay.
As I rode the subway down to the Centre to visit her the other day I stared at all the blank faces around me and wondered: How do we all do it? How do we walk around with our noses, unable to conceal anything?
A practitioner led me to Mom’s room. I could tell how difficult this all was for this practitioner—how much stress Mom had caused the staff. She was one of their worst patients.
“We’ve removed all the electrical outlets from her room for now,” the practitioner said. “Actually, we’ve removed anything hazardous. It’s a little jarring. I just want you to know how jarring it is to see.”
And it was. Her room had nothing left in it. No TV. No fridge. Nothing that could be made into a sharp object. They’d even boarded up the window out of fear Mom might throw herself through it and send herself hurtling to the pavement.
Mom’s condition had worsened. In four weeks her hair had thinned and her skin had turned a lime shade of green. Still, there she was, by the boarded-up window, chirping at the birds, alive.
“Mom?” I said, shutting the door behind me.
As was common, she crawled along the floor and knelt at my knees.
“Do you have it?” she said.
I shook my head, and she began to sob. Then she lay on her back against the floor and stared up at the ceiling. At nothing.
“Do you remember me, Mom?”
She was quiet. Her eyes blank. I lay beside her on the floor and stared at the ceiling with her. I pictured how we might’ve been thirty years ago, before I could walk. Before I could stand, even. The type of mother she must’ve been then. Surely there had been a time when she’d coddled me. When she’d allowed me to be a child, even taken care of me.
Yes, that had happened once. I knew it had. And it had been special.
“Mom?” I said. Still she did not look at me, but it didn’t matter, because something had already settled inside of me, taken over.
On the floor beside her I pressed one hand against my face, then the other. I touched my skin with both hands: my forehead, my eyes, my cheeks. Finally my hands came to rest over my nose. I felt each finger, one by one, melting into the skin around my nose. I felt my hands become one with my skin and everything else inside of me. My palms turned into claws. They gripped my nose and began to tear away. I pulled with all my might, but it wasn’t painful. In fact, it was the most painless experience I’d ever put myself through.
Now that I’d figured out what to do, it was effortless.
When it was done, I placed my nose on the floor between us and felt the smooth new flat on my face. It was so warm. It was the warmest thing I’d ever touched, a type of warmth you can’t envision until you’re able to bury things.
“Mom?” I said. My voice had changed. Something about it had softened.
This time, Mom looked at me.
“Annie?” she said. “Is that you?”
Evan Manning
A writer hailing from Toronto. I was the winner of Muskeg Press’ 2020 Short Story Competition, and a finalist for Sixfold's Summer 2023 Fiction Contest. Fiction is forthcoming in Archetype: A Literary Journal.
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