Idiopathy

and everything he could see that that was certainly true sometimes, in the right circumstances, at that particular time it wasn’t true at all, and everything was very much worse for having been brought out into the open. He remembered, he said, cutting his finger when he was a kid, and staring at it, watching the blood bead up along the edge of his knuckle, and feeling nothing, and being unbelievably excited by the thought that he didn’t feel pain any more, that perhaps he’d grown out of it, and running to his dad and holding up his finger and telling him it didn’t even hurt, and his dad saying it was because the air hadn’t got to it yet, and then right as his father said that he could feel the air get to it and his finger started hurting and he started to cry. Well it was just like that, he said. The air got to everything, and he could feel all the areas where he was exposed, as if someone had folded his skin back and he was just bare muscle and nerves.
    By this time, he said, he was just standing there, right in the middle of the crowd, and everyone was dancing around him, and he felt overwhelmed, and all this, this
stuff
was roiling away in there, and he didn’t know how to put his skin back on, as it were, or his mask, like Katherine had said, and he got it into his head that somehow, somewhere along the line, he’d become the wrong person, a person he’d never intended to be, and it was like he saw himself for the first time, and he looked ridiculous, and he was in pain, and it was all so stupid, and he’d left the crowd and walked off into the woods and sat there a while, spinning out, everything warping and floating, his hands leaving smeared contrails when he moved, the air very thick when he tried to breathe, and all of him straining outwards and trying to expand but held in check by what he’d become.
    Anyway, he said, shaking his head. The point was he’d stripped off most of his clothes and taken hold of his camping knife and started hacking away at his tattoos, beginning with his calf, then moving on to his arms and chest, and then even having a go at his neck, and he’d felt very clear and calm, even when he was holding a tatter of his own skin in his hand, and he remembered thinking that it didn’t hurt because the air hadn’t got to it.
    Here, Katherine, who had managed to get through everything up to this point without saying anything, and indeed without even making any especially communicative facial gestures, which just half an hour ago would have unnerved Nathan, but about which he now no longer cared, interjected in a voice she had very obviously run through several pre-speech checks to ensure it was bleached of all inflection.
    ‘Who found you?’ she said.
    ‘No one found me,’ said Nathan, who didn’t see why this was particularly relevant. ‘I was out in the woods and no one knew where I’d gone.’
    Ultimately, he said, the knife had got pretty bloody, and therefore pretty slippery, and so luckily he’d had to give up on his project, and as soon as he stopped he started to panic, like really freak out, and started to cry and call for help, but then the shame found its way in, and he realised that he didn’t want anyone to see him, so he called an ambulance on his phone and walked through the woods to the main road, and when it came he held up his hand like he was hailing a taxi and blacked out, and woke up in the hospital covered in bandages with his mother sitting over him looking like he’d ripped her heart in half.
    When Nathan finished, he spread his hands as if to show they were empty. He had imagined this conversation, rehearsed it, more times than he would ever be able to enumerate, but in the end, in reality, it was a sort of negative image of everything he’d pictured. The outline was the same, but all the colours were reversed, and now that he saw the change, he felt all the events between then and now neatly reverse themselves along similar lines. He wasn’t in love, he realised. He was angry. He’d phoned Katherine because he was angry with her. He was here because he was angry with her. He’d hurt himself not because he was upset, but because he was angry. He’d told her everything not because he wanted to explain, but because he wanted her to have to know. If she hadn’t needled him, he thought, it might have been different. It could have gone on being different for a very long time.
    She was looking at him coldly; breathing slowly but