Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy

Author:Lucy Grealy [Grealy, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

I was still experimenting, unsuccessfully, with making myself ill. Pneumonia remained my pet plan, though I was still unable to inhale the water. Summer had arrived, so there was no hope of catching cold outside, but I'd seen enough trapped-in-the-desert movies to hope for heat stroke. I didn't have a clue what heat stroke was, but the word stroke made me envision some sort of tender caress. I did know that it involved seeing mirages. I wasn't allowed to go into the sun because of the extra radiation, so any exposure that might give me a tan was out.

I wrapped myself in a blanket and went to lie in my private spot in the back yard. I lay there and felt the ants crawl up on my skin. Although I liked ants and bugs in general, I occasionally tortured them, then felt guilty and sinful afterward. I'd vow not to, but I always did it again. I was finally cured after reading a German fairy tale that described a horrible little girl who liked to pull the wings off flies. When she died and went to purgatory, she was doomed to have all the flightless little lives she'd ruined crawl all over her and get in her mouth and eyes. I stopped my tortures not out of morality but from a combination of self-preservation and disgust.

Sunlight came through the blanket in pinhole streams. Birds and chainsaws sang and wailed in the background. It was sweltering. I sat up and pulled the blanket cowl-like around my head and stared into the distance. Sweat rolled down the side of my rib cage, a rib cage so skinny I could feel the drops momentarily rest above the ridge of each bone. I stared into the distance. I was looking for my mirage. In the movies they saw either water holes or beautiful women, sometimes both. My eyes scanned the back yard: nothing. My T-shirt now was drenched with sweat. Even the backs of my hands were sweating, and my scalp, which itched against the blanket. I realized this wasn't going to work. Lifting myself up with great effort, I walked back into the air-conditioned house, the wave of cold hitting my face like a bucket of water when I opened the door.

The one time I actually got out of having chemotherapy, I wasn't even feeling particularly ill. But when the blood test showed a high white blood cell count, I was overjoyed. Deciding I should be put into isolation for a bit, a porter came down to the clinic to collect me in a wheelchair. I loved riding in wheelchairs, and I waved gaily to Dr. Woolf as I was chauffeured past him.

"Better not look too happy," my mother advised me. Immediately I went into my waif mode, a style I'd been perfecting for some time. Since becoming slowly aware of my odd appearance, I'd decided to use it for all it was worth to have an effect on people, to matter somehow.

Isolation wasn't such a thrill after all.

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