On Tuesday I cleaned my apartment and watched my hair spin around in the clear canister at the top of my stick vacuum’s neck.
Then I opened its full, gray mouth into the trash.
On Wednesday the regular dirty spots were still clean, and I wanted to feel spotless again, so I tied a rag around the shaft of a candlestick and rubbed it back and forth against the vents in my bedroom until long lines of dust clung like caterpillars to the folds.
I set the rag on my nightstand and slept next to it. That night I dreamed a museum. Gleaming rows of curios: tangled balls of hair, yellow slabs of fat, downy drifts of skin cells. Everything I’ve ever shed, shelved.
On Thursday I took to my own body. I went farther than a weekday shower and shave. I cut and filed my nails on all four appendages, clipping them into a tissue. Cuticles, too. I peeled off a pore strip and preserved its narrow towers of pus. I scraped off the extra plaque on my teeth with the top of a Bic pen, then wiped the plastic clean of the yellowing gunk. I tweezed the thin dark hairs around my areolas and added them to the tissue.
I heard my phone ring and when I came back from checking it — it was not him — I saw the tissue. It looked like seasoning. The hairs were delicate strips of seaweed, and the dead skin and dried plaque were dull-hulled sesame seeds to be sprinkled on top of rice.
But the byproducts of my careful ministrations to make myself more palatable, more perfect, younger, ageless, worthy of being chosen, and unworthy of being left were not for consumption. They were a collection of visible markers of hours spent buffing skin, brushing hair, cutting, scraping, picking. Of my crusade against decline and towards being witnessed.
I picked up the tissue and brought it into bed.
I arranged it on the empty pillow next to me. I used my homegrown materials to make a face.
The nipple hairs became eyelashes; plaque and pus colored the iris. Commas of dry skin from my cuticles formed the nose. I ripped off a piece of skin from my lips and set it where the mouth should be, then kissed the new-old face.
Something was missing.
I tugged leftover hair from my round brush and carded it like wool until it was thick and even, then set it like a frame around the face.
I rubbed moisturizer onto my actual face and climbed into my side of the bed. I felt cold and got up for socks and a pair of fleece pants. As I rooted around for them, the brass drawer pulls dinged like clinked glass. I put the layers on, turned the light off, and got back into bed.
I reached for the light switch and flicked it on again. I found the rag on my nightstand.
I pulled the fuzzy gray lines of dust off the cloth and laid them on the pillow next to me like rows of a sweater.
Now neither of us would get cold.
I slept better than I had in weeks.
I liked the way my dread was disappearing as I cataloged what was left behind, and I wanted someone else to see it. On Friday I opened the apps for the first time since the breakup. I found a banker, 31, 6’2”, “ mental foreplay >>>”. We exchanged six messages about the brilliance of Christopher Nolan. When he asked where I’d like to meet, I gave the name of the bar down the street and said goodbye to my other face before leaving.
There, I gulped an IPA that smelled like decomposing lilies and picked at the orange-dusted bar mix while he told me about his first erection.
“It happened reading my uncle’s Archie comics. You know Betty and Veronica?”
“Sure,” I said.
“I traced their outlines to draw my first naked pictures. For a while, I could only get hard if I was with two women at once.”
I took another sip.
“Of course, now I prefer sketching from life, and I’ll take two when I can get them, but I’m happy enough with one.”
He laughed. I let him put his hand on my knee and squeeze my thigh. By the time he paid the tab, and we were walking to mine, I hadn’t spoken a sentence of more than six words. I had grazed his dick — certainly erect, and he’d only met one of me so far — twice.
I unlocked my apartment and suggested that we make our way to my room.
“I’m in no rush,” he said. “Let’s look at your art.”
I listened to him comment on the prints I had framed above my couch until I couldn’t listen any more. I told him I had a piece in the bedroom I wanted him to see and pulled him in after me.
I held his chin in my hand and tilted his face towards the Manet print above my bed. I told him to look at it as I undressed myself.
My mom had given me the copy of “The Luncheon on the Grass” after we saw the original on a trip to Paris. In it, a woman sits on a crumpled blue planet in a dark forest. She is fully nude, hunched over her knee. Her stomach is three rings of white flesh stacked on top of each other. The two men she is sitting with are fully dressed, wearing pleated pants and laced-up shoes. The naked woman, surrounded by discarded bits of picnic — picked-at grapes; a dropped croissant — is staring directly at the viewer.
“It’s arresting, the light on her skin but not on the men’s,” he said as I laid down naked on the bed next to my other face. She was still wearing her lint sweater. He was still wearing his clothes. I pulled him on top of me and kissed him.
The tender patch on my bottom lip where I’d ripped off the skin the night before throbbed. I pulled his lips to my neck.
I looked behind me at the woman in the painting as he devoured me. She watched me, and the face I’d made from my discarded bits watched me, too. He didn’t seem to notice either stare. But I felt their eyes like fingertips. They were witnessing me.
My hands were moving — I unzipped the banker’s fly, held him in my hand, rubbed him against the slick stigmata of my center — but the clock was stopped.
I stayed as young and flawless as the woman in the painting, as unbroken and perfect, even as I slipped him inside of me, even as time was marked in wet thrusts. The banker, hovering a handbreadth over my other face, hadn’t seen it. He never would.
I didn’t need him to. The women in my room could stay there, looking on at me, seeing me, today and Saturday and Sunday and every day of the week to come, this banker’s hot breath in my ear, then the bartender’s, then my yoga teacher’s, then an architect’s, then a line cook’s, then the mixed breath of the two grad students who lived next door, each panting into a lobe. My women saw them all.
“Come closer,” I told the men.
“More,” I told them.
Their sweat soaked into my sheets as they thrust above me. Faster, then faster still. I raked my hands down their arms, threaded them up their necks, into their hair.
“It’s coming,” I said. “Now, now, now!” I cried as I yanked.
I dropped handfuls of their hair onto the rag on my nightstand. They never noticed.
Every night that week, I sent the men home minutes after I’d come. I stayed up late, sitting under the naked woman in the painting above me, weaving the men’s hair into garments for the face who slept next to me. I made her a long cloak and thick pants. The night I finished making her a pair of fuzzy socks, I deleted the app.
For the first time in weeks, both of us slept through till dawn.