Idiopathy

Stripped of her skirt suit and makeup, her legs veined, her face slack and pale and, without its usual layer of makeup, more deeply ridged, more expressive as her eyes swept up his body and traced the patterns of pain he’d caused himself and, by extension, her, she looked, Nathan thought, suddenly older, a little softer, a little sadder. Her gaze roamed his chest. She winced, her eyes filming briefly with tears.
    ‘Oh Nathan,’ she said.
    She covered her mouth; pinched her nose. Then she started to cry. He hugged her, felt her fingers feeling the ridges of the scars.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
    ‘I know,’ she said, nodding into his neck.
    She held him at arm’s length, taking him in. Then she sniffed, recovering herself.
    ‘Please do something about that beard,’ she said. ‘You look a fright.’
    Back in his room, he lay on his bed. At some point people were going to have to be encountered and dealt with. He was not entirely unprepared but resistant nonetheless. He felt, as always, torn between opposing sensations of loneliness. If there was a word that related specifically to loneliness in the company of others he didn’t know it. Calling people would be pre-emptive and would establish a position of control as opposed to sitting around and waiting to see if people called and then being simultaneously relieved and disappointed if they did or didn’t. This was the thinking that had led to him organising so many parties attended by so many people he both arrived and left without knowing. Sometimes he had attempted to connect, although mostly not.
    He remembered, quite vividly, the evening of That Night, his peripheries hazed with whatever was in the water, the insides of his cheeks gnawed raw, his nerves oddly leaden, sweating behind the mask that was part of his costume, walking through a field of other masks and costumes, the bass heavy in his chest, pressing even at his corneas, at his cheekbones and the base of his skull, and leading a woman, not just any woman but a particular woman, a woman who stood out, with whom he had, on occasion, actually talked and actually come close to being himself, and who he liked because he suspected her of feeling lonely in all the ways he himself felt lonely, off to the side, sitting her on a log away from the din and the press of bodies and the steam of sweat in the cooling air, and taking off his mask and rubbing his eyes, and telling her, quietly and seriously, that he felt alone in what he could only describe as an atomic way; that he felt, sometimes, like a stray molecule in a structure that was always becoming. He could almost feel, he said, the invisible ties that pulled the people around him into a unified mass or whole, the energies and magnetisms that bound them. He could, he said, staring at the leaf-strewn floor and musing briefly that autumn was coming and the gatherings would soon cease for another year, walk through the crowd, and reach out his fingers to glad-hand and flesh-press, and feel nothing bar the enormous and unfathomable forces that rendered them united and him isolated. It howled inside him, he said, and howled all the worse at moments like this, when he felt surrounded and hemmed in and unable just to be alone with his alone-ness, which seemed to be the very thing his alone-ness demanded. He couldn’t think, he said; couldn’t talk. He looked at people’s faces from behind his mask and saw only a flickering cathode blankness; a repulsion where attraction should have been. He was giving it all up, he said. He was turning his back. He was going somewhere where he might have a stab at feeling connected in the way he’d always wanted, connected in the way he felt, as coincidence would have it, to her, this particular woman. He said he thought she might feel the same thing; that she gave off, at times, a sense of isolation and radioactive distance that he understood, and which he believed he could help with, since he felt, as he’d already explained, so very much like her, so very alone like her, and he’d taken her hand and asked her to come away with him and told her everything would change: that they’d be cured; that two people so terminally alone could only ever be good for each other because they’d always need each other in such a vital way.
    ‘Yeah,’ she’d said simply, eyeing his costume and then briefly scanning the ululating crowd ahead. ‘You’re obviously really shy and lonely.’
    ‘You don’t believe me.’
    She