Hectorectomy
a horrible little story, sorry
Hector degloved his right hand with an expert’s finesse, stoic and passionless as planned. This was just how he had envisioned it. The pain had been blanketed completely by adrenaline as he traced the knife around the full circumference of his wrist, applying the exact amount of pressure required to break the skin, but avoid hitting any of the vessels beneath. He had then proceeded to cut a vertical slit up from the wrist along the palm, and with this done, opened the resulting flap to the right, and begun to peel. The skin now lay heaped on the tray to his right, like a discarded latex glove, only thicker, and marred with blood.
Facedown on the table, Hector’s phone buzzed. He grabbed for it on instinct, but it slipped between his raw, blood-dampened fingers, and shattered on the tiled bathroom floor. Just as well really, that was what this was about, removing all the barriers between him, and the rest of the world. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d stood in the corner at a party, using that phone as a shield against strangers. Yes, it was one barrier, but certainly not the main one. That would be Hector himself. His lumbering body, and the brain whose signals it refused to properly interpret. That was the root of the problem. You could be as self-aware as you liked, know exactly what you needed to do, but if you couldn’t get your body to listen, you ended up perennially stumbling into rooms, mixing up your words, and creating awkward silences. But body and brain would be gone soon. Soon only Hector would remain. The real Hector. The rot.
He had decided to start with the right hand and work his way up the arm, then do each leg in turn. He would follow this with the left arm, which may prove more difficult, as he would need to use his already flayed right. The right was his dominant hand though, which he was hoping would mitigate the issue a little. He had spent the last month using his left hand for everything, preparing it, knowing it would need to do the first part of the work. They’d laughed at him at work, when this had caused him to burn himself with the steam-wand, and smash the cup he was holding. They would have said they were laughing with him, not at him, but he could tell the difference between kindness and pity. They’d understand too when this was done.
As he sliced his way up the outside of his right arm, passing carefully over the speed bump of the elbow, he became aware that the blanket the adrenaline had provided so far was slightly thinner than he would have liked, and he could feel the jagged rocks underneath. Perhaps he should have taken something to help with the pain. Something about that hadn’t seemed suitably authentic during his planning stages, but Hector couldn’t for the life of him see the logic of that, not here in the moment. He could easily have got something from someone at the coffee shop. God knows what the other baristas got up to on all those nights out; he had definitely heard mention of ketamine, coke, and something they called mandy, but he’d never been granted access to that world, and hadn’t the foggiest if any of them would help in this situation.
Reaching the top of the arm, he began to give it the old wrist treatment, left arm under right armpit with the knife, positioning the point at the top of the completed arm-slit, and circling down around the shoulder. It required some contortion, but once the back was done, the front should be easier. Hector hadn’t really thought in detail about the armpit though. All his cutting up till now had been supported by bone, and as he circled under, still applying the same amount of pressure, like a pen going over the end of a clipboard, and punching through the paper, the blade of the knife suddenly disappeared upwards, into the soft tissue. His entire right arm dropped instantly to his side, a dead weight. He saw his skinless wrist bash against his seat, saw the knife’s handle trapped against his torso, forcing the blade up further, but felt none of it.
This was when it fully hit home for Hector that his aims hadn’t been realistic. The sharpness of the pain in the dead arm had disappeared completely, replaced by a strange artificial burning, somehow reminiscent of a crackling neon sign in the rain, and with this came a new clarity; a bigger picture view of how stupid the whole thing had been. It wasn’t just the fact that his right arm was now useless, making the left arm unskinnable, it was all of it. He couldn’t believe he had thought it possible. The early stages had been thought through more than the rest, but he had worked himself into a manic obsession, where none of the real world’s rules applied. Had he really believed that once done with the skin, he would be able to cut away all the rest? It was absurd. He’d laugh now if he wasn’t frozen with shock. The end result he had craved was simply impossible. He pictured it. The skin: a neat folded pile of linens, next to all of his organs neatly arranged. Above this, all of his bones, in size order, and all of this lying pristine on a bed of raw pink flesh.
He had envisioned all of this discarded, leaving just the tumour sitting there in his grandfather’s old chair. The cancer had quickly become the part of Hector he identified with most strongly. A useless, destructive lump of excess cells. All he was doing was making what he actually was line up with how everyone saw him. Sure, the cancer had never actually been diagnosed, he hadn’t even been to the doctor, but he knew it was there. The idea of removing all the rest until that was all he was had seemed poignant. Deep, even. A statement that really said something about… something.
Hector pulled out the knife with his left hand, toppled out of the chair, and slowly ebbed out, thinking all the while about how profound it would have been.