Chronic Pain Will Never Leave You

When he was a boy they called him Meenu, because Meenu meant fish, and because he was covered in scales. At home he wept to his father, who picked him up and tossed him into the water reservoir behind the house.

“They call you a fish, then you will swim like a fish!” his father laughed, his logic boyish and flawless as always. The next time at Varkala Beach, the boy removed his clothes without hesitation, and though he saw the others grimacing at the grey-silver of his skin, the same color as the cresting wave, and though, against his scabbed feet the sand was so hot it was almost glass, he ran across the beach and leapt from the precipice like a dragon, effortlessly, into the Arabian Sea.

Henceforth the other, unblemished boys only called him Meenu in tones of respect. He became the anti-hero in the schoolroom, and the others traded raisins in exchange for small pieces of his flaking skin. When he came home with arms raw where his classmates had pulled off the top layer, his grandmother poured him a bath of milk. It sloshed against his crouched body inside an immense galvanized steel barrel. He could smell the richness of the milkfat as it cooled his surface, but the sharp, even burn of itching never left him, covered each bulb of elbow and knee, each angle of hip, itching under his skin, inside of it, possessing the hollows of his pores. There was the sensation of a thousand splinters working their slow way up to the air. When he was finished, his grandmother emptied the milk, saturated with his skin, into a dirt pile far from the house; the cats circled and she shook her head at the waste.

When the skin became infected, son and father walked the three miles to the government hospital. A stray dog followed them, and Meenu coaxed it along with a white-barked stick, prodding the animal’s emaciated frame. Outside the hospital, the lepers stood together and he looked into their inarticulate faces and feared the way they held their shapeless hands in front of them, away from their bodies, and feared the way their bodies leaned in arbitrary directions, in anticipation of dying. The doctor inside the hospital prescribed ointments his father couldn’t pay for. On the walk home, his father told him stories about for- giving gods, and as Meenu listened, he watched the piece of paper with the doctor’s signature flutter uselessly in his father’s hand.

It was some time later, when, as a thirty-seven-year- old man, he flew to North America with a suitcase so empty the few items shifted weight as he carried it, that he discovered the ointments and other medications were just as useless. His health insurance paid everything and he took it all—biological injections and topical pain relievers and anti-inflammatories. His face swelled from steroids—became a moon face with the texture of crumpled foil—and his back shuddered under the burden of its ugly weight. He turned sideways to avoid seeing himself in mirrors, and the reflection of his profile was that of a dried, curling leaf. In the waiting room at one of his doctor’s appointments, he moved his left palm lightly against his right arm, in lieu of scratching, and read an article in a magazine about a penguin from Antarctica who had swum three thousand kilometers to be stranded on a New Zealand beach, eating sand it had mistaken for snow. In that same waiting room on another visit, he looked out the window to where he could see people migrating from the subway to the hospital’s entrance, and he silently counted the numbers, constructing for himself a sort of demographic map of the city. In his mind, the map was fluid, with a spot representing every person, in varying shades based on the severity of their disease. In proximity to the hospital, the density of illness escalated and culminated, the dots changing in color, person by person, as they were healed, disappearing as they passed away.

By sixty, he hadn’t married. He took indulgent baths in tepid water, and in one such moment of his isolation, he said aloud, “Who will love me in this lizard’s skin?” and then, sheepish, laughed into the echoing bathroom. He remembered the one lover he had had, a woman with severe eczema. They had rolled together in bed like two pieces of the coarsest grit of sandpaper. Afterward, they lay not touching, supine on a pile of their shared, shed skin. In the bathtub, his skin came off in sheets. He recalled the Russian nesting dolls he had seen at the house of a colleague who collected them, and how the colleague had opened the bulging wood shell, and how taking it apart had only yielded increasingly smaller versions of the same thing, one homunculus buried inside another, nesting, ending with that innermost doll, the smoothest piece of birch. He wondered how many exact but smaller replicas of himself were underneath, how many layers it would take to reach his core.

It was well into his retirement, when, at his computer, typing words with molting fingers, he discovered satellite images of the earth. His father was long dead. Before he died, in a crackling phone call, his father had told him, “What an excellent swimmer you became,” because he had bisected the Atlantic to get here. Into the computer he typed in his address and zoomed in on the roof of his apartment building, then on the paved hospital parking lot, and on the barren yards of the few people he now knew. He typed in the name of the village he had grown up in, wanting to see the bodies of water in which he’d learned to swim. The screen navigated and tried to focus, but found only blurs of brown and blue and green, of undefined earth, smudges in the precise internet map; what was left was only a forever chronic feeling, a chronic itch, a chronic pain that would never leave.