Try as people might to fight their instinct, it remains nonetheless the
cruel reality that ugliness is repulsive. Disfigurement is repulsive.
Anything that isn’t healthy and glowing and whole is repulsive.
Try as people might to fight their instinct.
I was eating breakfast one morning and sprinkling walnuts on my oatmeal
when I thought of an old man who works in a prosthetist’s office,
the place where they make artificial limbs for people who haven’t
got real ones. The last time I saw him, he had some crumbs of something
brown and sticky firmly stuck in the white wisps of his sparse beard.
I didn’t want to look at him because that crumby thing bothered
me. I wanted to gnaw at my fingers, but I didn’t. Instead, I sat
on my hands and felt guilty because he was telling me about how he liked
Charles Dickens and how when he was a kid, he woke up one day and all
his bones were broken—the explanation for his twisted body and
one leg shorter. That was all. No fall off a tree. No childhood disease.
No reasonable cause whatsoever. He just woke up one day to a body of
broken bones. I didn’t know what to say. I wanted to ask him if
he had read A Tale of Two Cities. But I forgot because I was
making sympathetic noises instead of words. There was that crumb in
his beard, brown and telling against the sour milk wrinkles. And there
was the tragic meagerness of the explanation. Charles Dickens is dead.
I volunteered at the Motion Picture and Television Hospital for a month
in high school before I got sick and never went back. (I mean, I actually
got sick, not that I was sick of the old people, though perhaps that
was true too.) I still think about the Motion Picture and Television
Hospital these years later, the place where the movie stars disappear
to with their golden statuettes when they are old and unwanted. Everything
seemed moldy at the hospital even though everything was sterilized,
and when you neared the flesh, you could smell the cloying redolence
of baby powder—sickening, not fragrant and fresh like it is on
babies. The old people at the hospital were depressed or diseased or
out of their minds, and so lonely jammed together in their private,
curtained cells. They had fluids coming out in all kinds of places,
in colors to make you vomit if you looked long enough. Some of them
were sweet and grateful if only you nodded your head, feigning comprehension
at the incoherent things they mumbled. Some were like children who erupted
in rage when you didn’t check their bingo boards fast enough.
They coveted the prestigious awards—hairclips, notebooks, things
plastic and cheap. One woman screamed at me to go to hell, screamed
at everyone to go to hell. She had pain that morphine couldn’t
kill, pain that was killing her.
I don’t know why I thought of those things during breakfast.
I could feel my mouth going dry and the walnuts crunching like old people’s
bones between my teeth. I sat there tired and repulsed, while my breakfast
turned to cold sludge, cold and slimy like the bodies of dying people.
To dust you shall return.
There was a girl in third grade older than the rest of us, too big
for our class. Something was wrong with her. Everyone could tell that
something was wrong with her, but you couldn’t put your finger
on it because it wasn’t obvious. There were slight anomalies that
you discovered one by one—the words that she slurred, the confused
looks on her face, the too happy way in which she skipped, awkwardly.
We knew in our sharp little minds that she wasn’t quite normal.
We even knew, without the vocabulary, that she was sub-normal.
Lauren was nice to everyone and she shared her things. I tried to be
friends because she didn’t have many, but I looked around first
and I was a better friend when we were alone. One day, the teacher was
in the middle of saying something when some girl squealed, “Ewww!!”
loud enough for everyone to hear. We turned around to see her little
accusing finger pointed to Lauren. Something that looked like water
was dripping from Lauren’s chair. Already a puddle had formed
beneath her and was spreading outward on the floor, pale lemonade yellow
and acidic. It was not water. Neither was it lemonade. The class erupted
with the tittering of little girls, the insults of little boys, and
the squawking of little chairs being rapidly scooted to create distance.
I remember that Lauren had raised her hand earlier during class, had
been rejected by the impatient command to wait a little, just wait a
little! She was alone and sobbing now, her oversized figure bowed over
and big fingers covering a crumpled face. The kids shunned her like
a leper. No one would sit in her chair for months.
I thought Catch-22 was a hilarious novel when I first started.
I practically fell out of my chair during Clevinger’s trial, laughing
so hysterically that it was fortunate for me I had no witnesses. I stopped
laughing though by the time the book ended. There was reality lurking
in the absurd exploits of characters who were all too familiar behind
the hyperbole and farce. The girl with the squishy sandals and piebald
burn, mutilated and hideous—who would love her? Even
children know instinctively to despise the wretched, the way the little
girls and boys in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot despised consumption-ridden
Marie. They tormented her and pelted her with derision for her illness
and poverty until they saw their idiot Prince show love, and only then
did their hate turn to compassion. But the hate came first, and more
naturally. I have wondered why sickness, deformity, and abjection arouse
such great loathing in people, even in those who try to suppress it
and children who have not been taught. Perhaps all things unwell reek
too ominously of death. To dust you shall return.
I wanted to slap someone, slap someone hard, hard enough to leave a
handprint. We were too cruel. At the time, I felt only a sense of embarrassment
on Lauren’s behalf, pity because it wasn’t her fault, and
relief that it hadn’t been me. Only in retrospect does the anger
come too, at the injustice and hurtfulness of the day, anger colored
with shame and resignation because there could hardly have been an alternative.
The same thing will happen to another Lauren today, and the next day,
and the next. And the old people, the old people oozing infirmity and
derangement from every wound in their spent bodies—have they any
alternative? They began to die the day they were born, and when I found
them, they were merely reaching the logical conclusion. What could I
do? Slap the world silly and it would still be a world of unwanted people,
disintegrating people, people with leftover crumbs in their beards.
It is a foolish thought, taking revenge. We are hurting enough as it
is.
It’s not only the girls with burned faces who are ugly, or the
old people about to die. The great whopper of catch-22’s is that
even the beautiful people of the world who radiate relief for our eyes
and respite for our pity are hideous too. Turn everyone inside out and
we’ll see what Jesus saw—people rotted away by gangrenous
sin so foul that external ailments are only shadows and signs. Inside
is where death festers and outside is only the smell.
“The night was filled with horrors, and he thought he knew how
Christ must have felt as he walked through the world.”2 I wonder
what went through Joseph Heller’s head as he wrote that. Did he
see the lines on Jesus’ face etched deep from thirty-three years
of horrors, the feet calloused and tired? Did he picture the lips parched
from speaking and the eyes weary from seeing all there was to see? I
wonder sometimes if Jesus ever laughed. Perhaps He did, but the Bible
doesn’t mention it. The Bible only speaks of Christ’s grief,
Christ’s distress, Christ’s anger, and Christ’s tears
for people’s unbelief. There was more evil than good, more to
mourn for than to celebrate. To Him of all men, the illness of the fallen
world must have been most repugnant. To have known only the communion
of Father and Spirit, the consummate love of the Three in One, the adoration
of spotless seraphim, and then, to be plunged into darkness, into chaos,
into a body of dust! Yet he was the only Man who ever had a choice.
[He]made Himself nothing...being born in the likeness of men. It
makes no sense.
I get afraid sometimes when I’ve had too long to think. I see
people in hospitals who cannot wash themselves, and I dread the day
of my dependence. I watch marriages shatter, nightmares come of doors
slamming and a figure slumped, alone and shivering. I read of hopeless
burn victims, and faces void of human vestige trouble the cavernous
haunts of my worry. And the babies—what must Rose of Sharon have
felt birthing a dead baby? It’s horrifying to be flesh and blood
if you stop and think about it—flesh and blood whimpers, weak
and destructible. Can you take an easy breath if you didn’t know
that flesh and blood is not all, this life not the last, and this world
not the only? Can you take an easy breath if you did not know? And yet,
there are times so dark when even we who know crumble to our knees in
terror and grope for the indestructible promise. And God Himself
will be among them.
But we are in the here and now, we are in the first things, and we
need something for the mornings and nights, for both inside and out,
something stronger than caffeine and Tylenol. There are the lines on
His face, I tell myself, the lines carved in flesh, and wounds that
have healed to scars. They are an ointment for the soul. They are a
pleasing aroma. They cover the stench we carry. By His scourging
we are healed.
He walked first, bravely, and we walk behind Him, tremblingly. We clutch
His hand, and know gravely that He sees our terrible disease. “No
one would ever love her,” they said, and shunned her like a leper—it’s
enough to dam the fragile flowing in us, but thank God they are wrong.
He loves us, our Savior Prince; He loves the wretched Marie’s.
There are the carved lines that tell us so. Behold…My life
for the sheep…a lily of the valleys…to the end of the age.
1 Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), 383.
2 Ibid., 382.
Scripture taken from: For you are dust, and to dust you shall return.
~Genesis 3:19 (ESV); But made himself nothing, taking the form of a
servant, being born in the likeness of men. ~Philippians 2:7 (ESV);
And I heard a loud voice from the throne, saying, "Behold, the
tabernacle of God is among men, and He will dwell among them, and they
shall be His people, and God Himself will be among them. ~Revelation
21:3 (NASB); But He was pierced through for our transgressions, He was
crushed for our iniquities; The chastening for our well-being fell upon
Him, And by His scourging we are healed. ~Isaiah 53:5 (NASB); And behold,
I am with you always, to the end of the age. ~Matthew 28:20 (ESV); I
am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the
Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the
sheep. ~John 10:14-15 (ESV); I am a rose of Sharon, a lily of the valleys.
~Song of Solomon 2:1 (ESV).
Li Deng is an undecided major on leave in California. She will return
in fall 2006 as a member of the class of 2010.