I.

The ear is among our most resilient organs, capable of ingesting the filthiest things.

“Did you hear about what happened here this morning?”

“No. I didn’t. I was at film club.”

“They’re saying they found another body. I think somebody jumped.”

A giggle, followed by a gasp and sharp cutoff. Yes, etiquette desires that one must be careful not to insult the dead in public. Next comes the gesture of apologetic surprise.

“No way. Again? That’s crazy. What are all these fancy screens for then?”

I slammed my book shut as hard as I could. Two faceless cretins next to me jolted upright and gave me a sour look. I gave them my middle finger, imagining how satisfying it would feel to jam a poorly clipped fingernail into one of their eyes. The ideal target would of course be the ear canal, to drill past bits of wax and pierce the drum.

You might be wondering why not the mouth, which is equally capable of expelling toxic waste at alarming rates. Unlike wax or aqueous humor for some reason, just the thought of the miry drip of saliva on my skin is enough to cause churning in my bowels.

More importantly, however, the mouth doesn’t often move without the ear.

People love hearing themselves talk.

Kill the ear, and the lips wither and die.

No. I shouldn’t think like this, I told myself.

What had Mr. Caraway told me? Oh right.

Just learn to drop it, Rosalyne.

I stuffed my book into my bag and made for the nearby stairs. I made a mental note to brag about this encounter to Mr. Caraway when I saw him later today. He would be so proud.

Words already spoken, however, do not easily pass into silence. They linger like afterimages of a dying projection. My eyes averted to the aforementioned screens. Painted with perforated gold aluminum and reflecting the afternoon sun, they followed me down the staircase, rising to each floor’s ceiling like… rolling gates at a prison? The walls of an inescapable cave, maybe.

Whatever they looked like, they looked ugly, monotonous, an exuberant showcase to masque death itself. As such, a gloom had fallen upon the library; a monstrosity slithered between me and clear skies. When I reached the atrium, I looked up. I imagined the sky crashing down, razing the solarium like my brother’s sand castles crushed beneath my feet. The gold panels would buckle and as we fell, our eyes would be bequeathed with the moment earth and sky conjoined.

Outside, the summer sun filed away those thoughts to the back of my mind. Instead, I was reminded that even as a child, I produced sweat more easily than other kids. During those foundational years, to avoid the mockery of others, who pointed at the crystalline flats on my darker shirts and called them salt mines or referred others to me citing that I was a narcotics dealer, I took on the habit of always wearing white garments.

I could almost feel my glands twitching at the humidity. As I pressed down the sidewalk, I took every opportunity to dive beneath every bit of shade. But the heat of the sun trailed behind me. My armpits began to drip. My shoes felt like they had waded through puddles.

The streets around campus were filled with people, and to me, they were all faceless. Clinking bracelets, a frilly black dress, and cigarette smoke passed me by.

Yes, the two individuals in the library were no exception.

No, this wasn’t prosopagnosia. At least, Mr. Caraway didn’t seem to think so.

If I stared long enough and at enough people, I was sure that once familiar geometries of human faces would become apparent to me, but it’d been several years, in my estimation, that I had really looked straight into anyone’s real face, including Mr. Caraway’s. For those who wonder about my own face, I kept a torn rag draped over my bathroom mirror. I cleaned myself properly every morning and night, of course, but regrettably I could not tell you about my own assuredly beautiful reflection.

The effect of all this was an inability to recognize the human face. It was not that I could not tell faces apart, I simply could not acknowledge the existence of them. Mr. Caraway believed this phenomenon a juvenile fancy of mine, especially when I told him human bodies appear to me more like rendered anatomical models from industrial software than live organisms, but tell me, truthfully, what's the difference between an inability to describe the faces of others and an inability to see them entirely?

Cool air and a damp moldy stench filled my lungs as I pushed into a building, past a yellow sundress and a mahogany shirt whose collar was netted with weblike lattice. The one in the dress wore a turquoise necklace and their velvet red fingernails dripped with half dried polish.

I wiped my brow with my sleeves, careful to not raise my arms above a certain elevation lest the odor attract unwanted attention. I moved up the stairs, weaving through a wave of white tennis shirts and one pair of ripped denim shorts that pushed past me.

“Valerie! Wait for me!”

I thought about cursing the name Valerie but chose to once again heed Mr. Caraway’s recommendation. I successfully reached the second floor without another ill begotten thought.

Room 1999-7 sat to my right. If I was here that meant it was 2PM on a Monday, Wednesday, or Friday because there was simply no other reason to cross the length of campus to reach the Bergerac Building, a dilapidated university hall and the last of the old structures that had not been selected for modern renovation.

Its air conditioning worked fine but was prone to blackouts during peak hours, and that was the least of its problems. Janitors who entered the building would recognize defeat immediately and not even attempt to combat the black mold festering in every corner of every hallway. The administrators cared even less, waiting for the grievous health inspection violation that would give them license to level the place for good.

The Bergerac, in other words, had fallen deep into ruin, which made it the perfect venue for the gathering of the school's philosophy students, yours truly included. While the school’s more prosperous return-on-investment-students strolled into newer buildings placed several football stadiums away, the mid to upper level classes in the philosophy department all lived on the second floor of the Bergerac.

We had been cordoned off like plague victims into what could only be described as an unsanitary sanitorium, primed from the ground up with moldy, hallucinogenic fumes that would turn one of us into a genius and the rest of us insane.

And yet, as I opened the door into Room 1999-7 and found my usual seat by the window, where at 2PM this Friday would mark the third recitation since summer classes began, I was greeted with the same banal anti-intellectual babble of everyday human beings who since time immemorial possessed no respect for the dead.

“Did you see it this time?”

“No. They took the body away first thing in the morning. I heard from someone that a student was there though.”

“Really? Who?”

“I don’t know, but whoever it is, it’s probably the culprit.”

“What? The culprit? I was told that they jumped…”

“Nah. You’ve seen the screens. You can’t climb up by yourself. Besides, surely you’ve noticed the pattern. The deaths. The circumstances. Everything. It’s the same as the Electromagnetic Man-”

A chair toppled over. A bulky bang shook the room. The desk that received the blow screeched and lurched backwards. I thought I was the perpetrator at first, but I had not yet achieved a level of disassociation that my mind and body could stand at opposite sides of the room, and for that matter, my bag still hung over my shoulder.

“I-I don’t think you should be talking about things you don’t understand.”

Someone stood over their desk at the back of the room. They wore a sleeveless shirt that exposed their meek, slim arms. They had clearly stood up in a rush, which had knocked over their chair, but I recognized the formation of her body, the forearms stretched over the desk where her hands had slammed down a copy of some philosopher I had never read before.

And that’s when I realized.

Oh my god.

Through a veil of dark umbra hair I spotted a single black eye.

She has a face.