Illustration by Bella Aldrete
Light streamed in oblong blocks through the frayed, crosshatched curtain. Splayed out onto the garish pink tile, it lazily reflected itself throughout the bathroom, casting a monochrome haze that seemed to ebb and flow. The tiles were octagonal, framed by the cracks between them, with hints of mold growing intermittently.
I stood at the edge of the shower, thirteen and adolescent, taxonomizing the sprouting hairs creeping towards my navel. The pipes popped and creaked as the water warmed, steam lending itself to the haze. I placed my hand underneath the water, before following with the rest of my body.
The bottle of shampoo and conditioner were identically styled, same color scheme, font, and size. Everytime, I was forced to pick up both of the bottles, turn them around, and read the label to tell which was which. I blamed my mother. I meant to tell her that she should buy different colored shampoo and conditioner, and that I blamed her. As I shampooed my hair, bubbles of soapy air erupting into existence, I thought of my day. I woke up, went to school, came home. Home, school, home. I showered in the morning too. I always took two showers, but I never shampooed in the morning. I enjoyed those kinds of sets, in which one thing is bookended by the same thing done over twice. Most things start from that: our first words are Mom and Dad, which backwards are Mom and Dad, and we start out by barely being alive and end up being dead. There is a vowel, there is a life, and both have a beginning that matches up with the end. That’s how I figured things were, and while I enjoyed these sets they also scared me, because I did not want to die, and it seemed that I would.
As water washed away the lather, I stared down at my legs, lost in the criss-crossing confusion of its hair. It seemed strange, having hair on skin, two things so unlike. In science class, we grew mold on agar, white and yellow spots staining the otherwise uniform sample. We took swabs of different dirty places around the school, like toilet seats or the mouths of water fountains. I was supposed to swab the napkin dispenser, but I did my armpit instead. No one knew I had done it, but I did imagine someone confronting me about it. I spent hours, both before and after the incident, formulating lies and excuses for why I swabbed my armpit. In the experiment, I had the least growth in the class, but even then there were still small spots of white pockmarking the clear gelatin. Staring down, I watched invisible spots of white crawling up and down my leg hairs. Then, I saw them hop onto my arm, my crotch, and take root in my armpits, creating a bacterial blizzard around my body. I never used shampoo anywhere other than my head though, because people did not do that. Especially boys. Back then, I knew that boys did not shampoo their legs, nor their arms, nor any place but their head.
I moved onto the conditioner. I took a large glob of the porcelain white substance, and rubbed it into my hair, scratching and spreading alternately. My fingers and toes began to crinkle, marking the time since I had entered the shower. I had homework to do afterwards. I could not be long. Suddenly, I stopped the application and let my arms drift down to the side of my hunched body. The bacterial hair and the conditioner had brought back an image I had been encountering and avoiding for the past month. A painting. I had seen it during a field trip to the MET, as I traveled with a group of boys who I did not so much hang out with as around. They were looking for paintings with naked women so they could laugh and discuss their limited knowledge of boobs and vaginas. I tried to comment on every third painting or so, bringing in terms I had heard online, and the vague remembrance of a half-watched porno. Originally I was planning on not talking at all. However, an inevitable impetus came in a damning painting.
The painting was around my height, although taller in the gallery as it was placed above me, and if I really stretched my arms, I could have reached both ends of the frame and embraced it. The central figures were situated in a workshop, surrounding a central woman, standing on a large pedestal. While her arms and lower body were made of marble, a wave of skin was washing over her form, turning her head and chest to a pale pink. To her right there was a young boy with wings, holding her marble wrist. The young boy and woman were similarly dressed, both with a garland of flowers on the head, and both wearing nothing but a tapestry, covering their genitals. Neither of them had any hair on their bodies apart from their head. The painting, as the caption read, was based on Pygmalion, of the marble women made into living form. The young boy with wings was added by the painter, a christain addition to the Roman myth. It may be more accurate to call him an angel; I did not see him as an angel, but rather as a young boy who happened to have wings. For that reason, him being a boy and not a divinity, I was inexorably attracted to that pair, the marble woman and the young boy with wings.
Nervous of these unknown feelings, I made an unnoticed joke about her boobs, and left the painting with the group. But, it stuck with me, the painting and the pair. I thought of Pygmalion, I thought of the young boy, and I thought of a marble human, and how similar the marble woman and the human angel appeared. I thought of how they would die. Or rather, I imagined how they would never die, since statues always stay the same, and if the young boy looked just like the statue, and stood right by the statue holding its marble wrist, he would stay the same too. And I thought about how they had no hair on their body, the two slabs of skin. I thought about the two slabs of skin, how they had no genitals, because I could not see them in the painting, and my memory had conflated coverage with nonexistence. So I stared down in the shower, at my genitals surrounded by hair, bookended by unkempt legs, encapsulated by swarms of bacteria.
I imagined grabbing a hair on my leg and pulling, unspooling a long black strand, as if every follicle stored both the hair and all future hair within it. Then I would grab another and another, until not only my legs but my entire body would be free and smooth. A small indent in the wall to the left of me stored various toiletries: body soap, razors, toothbrush. I took my razor, a slick jet-blue color and a mechanically styled body, and shaved my face. I started in the top left corner right beside my ear, pulling the razor upwards. I went over the same section, chin-to-left-ear, three times, then washed the small flecks of hair off the razor, and did it another three times, repeating this process until the razor glided over my jaw and there were no hairs to wash off. I did the same for my right jaw, my chin, and the slice of skin lying between the chin and neck.
The water, all the meanwhile, continued pouring itself over my body, running in miniature rivulets down every hair. Again, I thought of long black threads unspooling from my body, dragged out by the running current, swirling down into the shower drain. And with the razor, I would shave off my skin to reveal marble underpinnings, and my genitals would fall away, as if rubbing away dead skin. I would join the woman and boy, hugging and holding onto both of them with an unmovable grip, their flower garlands would unfurl and encircle the three of us, binding and tightening, until we became indistinguishable from one another. I wanted more than anything for this to be the truth.
But, I had homework to do, so I placed the razor back into the indent, and left the shower.
Nicolas Denton-Cheng is a senior in CC.