Four Faces (Short Story)

Author: Yuval Klein

Portrait of Arthur Rössler (1910) by Egon Schiele

The dream began as soon as I awoke.

I staggered towards the bathroom in pursuit of water to soothe a contracting throat, attempting to sustain my sleep-bound drowsiness by ceasing conscious thought, trying—improbably—to ascend the stairs without reflexivity. 

The bathroom did not merely lend its water; it divulged three faces: one emaciated, one pale, and one disinterested. I write ‘faces’ rather than ‘bodies’ because the bodies were only of interest insofar as they could be understood to extend towards or away from that evocative facial terrain. Engaging with these embodied visitors almost immediately left me unmoored. It occurred to me that my sanctuary was permeable to the most ominous elements outside; to reconcile these faces was to bear pollution of cosmic weight. I felt primal, hijacked by the most impulsive, evanescent cognitive input. At this moment in which interiority—my subtle companion–was subsumed into something incomprehensible, I will commence the story. 

The emaciated face approached the faucet with hurried urgency, like a scavenger laying claim to its livelihood. I gaped at him in a state of ad hoc paralysis. He gripped the steel, thumb-shaped handle, lifting it up with arms trembling from exertion. The water penetrated triumphantly through the perforated base. Then, his fingers clumsily wandered towards the clog, but the unimpeded current cascading on his fingers sapped the strength from his body, such that he was unable to wrest the metal disk from its place. He gave up, stepped aside, and ventured a feigned smile towards me. 

“I invite you to use the water in whatever way you see fit… fitting… fitting for you, that is. I’m currently—at this moment—inviting you to quench your thirst, or perhaps perform ablution if you’re a Mohammedan… I don’t know if the Mohammedans perform ablution at night, in which case, that is, if that were… weren’t true, you likely wouldn’t do it—of course, if you aren’t a Mohammedan, this deliberation wouldn’t be very pertinent, would it?, at least not for you, or for my understanding of you and what you intend to do with the water in your midst…” 

The emaciated face kept emitting unintelligible sentences that fumbled to obscurity as my body no longer felt like transducing his externalized deliberations, no longer desired to incorporate his consciousness into mine. The disinterested face, meanwhile, looked at his emaciated companion with irrelational indifference. I stood inert as the water from the faucet rose with predictable, mechanical vigor. The emaciated face—now quiet—gazed kindly at me. He wound his body mysteriously, and when the water neared the surfacing threshold, floundered towards the sink, willing the faucet handle down with two snakish arms; he let go of the handle after a protracted interval in which he watched the water stagnate with relief (and perhaps, pride). 

By this point, my terror had largely subsided. I no longer felt estranged from my circumstances. Naturally, you may be reading in anticipation of the moment in which I summon the courage to ask, “Who are you people? And what’re you doin’ in my damn apartment?!” It never occurred to me at any moment to probe along those lines. After all, my face belonged to this bathroom no more than my three counterparts’; the walls of the house no longer conferred an in-ness, no longer consolidated my stance vis-à-vis everyone else. “Order” hadn’t been transgressed; it had been thoroughly nullified; the very substrate of reality had been recast, in which case, there was no point in protecting it—of invoking its unassailability in lieu of its evident obsolescence. 

The emaciated face directed his kind eyes towards mine; they protruded inhumanly, as though reaching towards me, as though embracing my own. My ephemeral thoughts yielded to reflective, dialogically expansive ruminations. I reassessed the faces around me: the emaciated, the pale, and the disinterested; and it occurred to me that a sinister force had led to their depletion, discoloration, and calcification, respectively. 

The pale face shifted his attention from the faces to his left to the darkness to his right. He seemed to be rapt by something suspended in this blackness. I realized then that the back of the bathroom was presently unlit, languishing in a remarkable, obfuscating darkness. 

Meanwhile, the disinterested face muttered in French, “Sourire, souffrir; sourire, souffrir…” The pale face, reddening for a moment before whitening further, suddenly pronounced, “Why do you keep fucking saying that!” Then, with a dazed gentleness, “It can drive a person mad, you know. Like, it’s bad enough in life and your words can hurt.” He whipped his face back to its darkness-bound orientation and sulked with resignation.

“Souffrir, sourire; souffrir, sourire,” muttered the disinterested face, as he approached the mirror. He grabbed my razor and began grooming himself with deft movements. It lasted for an extraordinarily long interval of time during which silence abounded. The disinterested face perched itself on the toilet seat, nearly grazing me on his way down. He looked at the sprigs of red hair jutting sporadically from my legs. 

I turned towards the disinterested face, but it did not shift to reciprocate interest. Looking now at the ceiling, he muttered his catchphrase again, inflecting it now with a sort of fierceness. I cautiously asked him about these words he kept uttering, and at the moment in which it seemed I would fail to elicit a response, he began whispering strings of sentences in French. When I asked whether he might disclose the meaning of these words, he once again led me to believe that my question would linger aimlessly until it was forgotten. Then, still fixated on the embers texturing my legs, he began to describe a poem by one Jacques Prévert:

“... The reader is instructed not to engage with this old, lonesome man—who sits on a bench, calling out to passersby, inviting them to converse. Once you meet the man's gaze, indulging his smile, you are ineluctably drawn to the bench beside him; you smile…”

For a moment it seemed as though he were tilting his face towards mine; and he did, but all the while, his eyelids swooped down—serenely. 

“… and then, you smile back. And it hurts. People pass, children play, birds fly about, but you… stay seated; smiling and suffering, your porous face distorted with this sweet man’s despair.” His eyes opened, pointed unmistakably at mine. He observed me disinterestedly, like one might observe a faceless object. The more callousness he asserted in the face of my humanity, the more my entire body ached.

“That’s beautiful,” I told the disinterested face—sincerely. He scoffed, once again shunning eye contact. The pale face was now leering more frantically, more conspicuously at the patch of darkness. “There you are!” the pale face exclaimed with uncanny excess. A figure alighted; I closed my eyes so as to avoid the sight of more faces. 

The doorknob screeched behind me, prompting me to lung back with terror. A woman entered, full of flesh and disbelief as she gaped at our four faces—one disinterested, one emaciated, one pale, and one suffering.