THE MAN WHO ATE HIMSELF

 The Man Who Ate Himself

By Graham Swanson

To S

A Surgeon. Unknown Artist. Wellcome Collection.

Girl With No Mouth. Unknown Artist. Wellcome Collection

Young Man With Rodent Disease. Unknown Artist. Wellcome Collection. 

Dissected Feet. Unknown Artist. Wellcome Collection.

Hector Larenzo Ubul used to be a doctor. That’s what he told people. He wore gold necklaces that cascaded down his chest and big rings. A Pediatrician specializing in traumatic surgery. He still kept his Oxford degrees even if he had been exiled and banned from practice from several countries. The only ones left he could practice in was North Korea and Eritrea. The rest got wind of his experiments and practices and blacklisted him from any clinic above ground. 

Hector kept this secret from his wife Casimir. They lived on an island off the coast of Nicaragua in a big elegant mansion. Long ago his ancestors landed on the island, claimed it, then traded the natives rum for the constriction of the estate and many remained working under the family as they cleared forest for sugar cane and lime orchards. 

The lime orchards failed and the sugar never came. One by one the natives of the island disappeared. Probably sailed back to the mainland and never told anyone. The mansion remained however beautiful, kept up, and it featured things like their own air strip, their own harbor, their own fuel line, and their own power generators. 

Speleologists told them that the island would sink into the sea someday. The caves underground already filled with ocean water. Slowly the ground eroded, and the once fruitful forest land became swamp infested by giant man eating mosquitos. Hector didn’t want to hear it, but all the landscaping done by their forefathers caused the island to fail. Hector refused to leave.

    “When we first came here, there was nothing but snakes and huts. No air conditioning, no bathrooms, no clean running water. My family built it all here, then the protestors came, then they threw employment disputes at us, next thing you know my mother was a hostage, and we had to pay EVERYTHING we had left to spare her life from rebels from the mainland. Then began the long arduous process of identifying and destroying those involved. There’s no leaving for us.” 

Hector had many children. The first two of Casimir's he ran his experiments on, and they lived in the basement. The third one he decided not to treat. Not because of a sudden change of heart, or a wave of kindness bleeding over the earth, but because the little girl had a birth defect. He knew it as soon as he saw it. Harlequin Ichthyosis. 

Number Three's skin was like solid diamond scales. Her eyes were red. She could not be used. He needed purebred, healthy children. He didn’t expect her to live past one week. Considering the effort he would need to put forth to keep the child alive, he opted for euthanasia, but he knew the day would come when he needed a close servant. The condition was genetic, and he feared his friends might discover her. He paid for all the medicine she’d need and assigned a servant from the lab to take care of her needs. Despite the cruelty he showed everyone else, he offered Number Three the closest thing he knew to love.

Casimir was assigned to marry Hector after he performed surgery on the son of a Mafia lord. She was flown to the island and married in the cargo bay. She’d been on the island ever since. At first she cooked and cleaned, beat the rugs, and brought coffee for her husband. She never knew about his career, or the nature of his work. He never told her, and threatened to feed her to Bullet Ants if she ever asked about it. 

One day he came home, covered in blood, exhausted, broken chains around his wrists. When she begged him to tell her how it happened he hit her so hard she flew across the room and crashed into a case of dishes. So she never asked again, and started dreaming of escape. Except that she didn’t know where she was, and she didn’t know where he kept the rest of her kids. 

After Number Three was born, Hector expected different services from his wife. Now no longer would she be the mother and housekeeper. Soon they’d have a replacement for that. No, she’d be responsible for procuring more children for the island. He gave her a special computer with internet access only to a few social media websites. 

“Tell them it’s a special job. Lots of money. Easy money. We’ll fly them here. A private tutor for our beautiful children.” 

Hector looked at himself in the mirror. His elbow tendons, his nose cartilages, his pockets of meat and rings of fat. He placed a gun to his head, then loaded a bullet into it, set it down. He had a case of drugs. Stimulants. 

Hector wandered down the basement corridor and examined his failed experiments. One by one he shot them. They protested and wailed for him to stop. He shot eight, reloaded, then shot three more. He looked at the portrait of his late late late grandfather. Tall, black clothes, the flag of his brotherhood behind him, a knife on his belt, heavy black cape over his shoulder. The man sneered at his descendent in front the frame. 

“I promise you, the flame will burn on.”  

Meanwhile the island shook. Dust and bits of debris rattled from the ceiling. There wouldn’t be much time. He hurried into the operation room and locked the door behind him. He injected himself in the neck with a numbing agent, stripped naked then laid down on the table. On one side his boots and instruments. He checked the marking on his body, the circles over his vital organs, and the dotted lines over his muscles.

Casimir heard screams echo from the basement. It happened so much that she barely thought about it anymore, but the voice sounded like her husband. He forbade her from entering and kept the keys with him. He didn’t think enough about it, but she stayed in that house more often than him, and suspected that she knew about his hiding places. 

Casimir wished for death. On most days of her life. The things that once brought her happiness, the beach, the animals, food, no longer did. Even the love she had for her children stopped producing the magic chemicals that inspired joy. She laid in bed, hoped for death, barely slept, got up, started her “job” then went back to bed around midnight after drinking an entire bottle of Polish Vodka. 

Casimir almost fell asleep when she heard the door open. First she reached for a pistol under the bed as the shadow entered the room. She knew it wasn’t her husband’s shadow so she raised the gun. 

“Don't shoot me mommy.” 

Casimir got a better look through the haze. She wiped her blonde hair away from her eyes and looked into the window light. Her daughter, Number Three, stood there in a nightgown. Her thin wires of hair ran out from the side of her hat and down one side of her head. She stuck one thick black fingernail in her mouth. As her shadow shifted, her joints remained locked because it hurt her to bend them. Her eyes like dark holes  glittered in the moonlight, framed under smooth eyelids, no eyebrows. 

“What're you doing here?” Casimir lowered her gun. She never saw her but she heard the sounds in the nursery. “Did they put on your moisturizer and disinfectant?”

“No mommy she didn’t come up for days so I did it myself.” She wore layers of sterile gauze wrapping under her gown. “But I'm scared of the earthquake.” 

“Oh, Number Three, it's just the island collapsing. Soon it will be our grave and we won’t have to worry about trouble like that anymore.”

“Where is daddy? He must be in the lab.”

“You know he doesn’t like being bothered when he’s in there.” 

“What’s he doing?” 

“We don’t ask. Stop bothering me, and find something to clean. Its your fault I’m sick. Now get out and put yourself to bed.” 

Casimir started to cry and sweat. Even when she did sleep she awoke from horrid nightmares of being buried or burned alive. She awoke from thunder and nightmare with her daughter laying in her husband's spot. He still hadn’t come up. Drunk with vodka, and with a deathwish, the woman got out of bed. She tried many doors, as usual, they were locked. 

More and more of her husband’s screams echoed through the house from the basement. Deep down, everything in the cages had been shot. Bloody clothes lay in a pile. Hector lay naked, with one foot already dangling from the ankle like a ribbon. He ripped the last muscle off with his teeth, then got started on the next foot. 

As he chewed he re-examined the anatomy chart. The meat between the toes tasted the best. It was chewy and once he got his teeth in there he could rip out a large chunk of tissue. A little more blood trickled out of his mouth than he preferred so he tightened the belts around his ankles. His toes were already blue. 

The ankle bone hurt his teeth but underneath he found a capsule of tender, spongy sinews. He stuck his tongue in and licked until the marrow fell out of the bone. The veins and skin remained and he slowly tore it away bit by bit. It didn't lift off in a solid piece, but in strips like paper glued to a desk. He mostly wanted to taste the cartilage of his toe knuckles. He liked the way it crunched in his mouth. 

Once finished with his feet, he tightened the third and fourth belts. His hamstrings had gotten so fat since his work kept him from hiking much. He injected himself with more numbing agent, and brought his leg up to his mouth and sunk his teeth in. Blood dribbled down his chin and chest. 

The Doctor’s appetite only became more ferocious. He tightened belts around his quadriceps until his flesh turned purple. He checked his own notes and diagrams, and reached for a meat carving knife. The fat and flesh peeled from the meat. Despite the drugs he felt tingles of pain shoot up his spine. He dug the knife into his tendons again and sliced the muscle off his leg. Now only a bone lay wrapped in a skin stuck out as he swallowed the blood from his fat pockets.

Rats began lining up against the darkness of the walls. Their eyes bounced as they dared eachother to dart over and grab a loose cut of meat. Yet they remained in the protection of the rafters and pipes. The doctors started to scream again until he stabbed himself once more with a needle. 

Hector laid there, exhausted, rolling his head back and forth and whimpering until he noticed the row of rats. A mask of carnage drizzled off his face. His arms and hands slippery and wet. A silent laugh lit up his face. “Looks like I beat you to it for once.”

Hector tied a tether around his other leg, and tightened clamps around his stomach. After throwing a few pieces of his quad meat to the rats, he devoured its raw, chewy texture. The meat reminded him of the lizards he’d catch in the jungle. The coppery bite, the greasy splinters of bone, the bits of skin getting stuck between his teeth, and the way it made his stomach hurt. 

“Of course, the stomach.” He tightened the clamps, and drew a scalpel but he realized how slow he moved. He turned on the IV drip, red fluid filled the hose. Cold bubbles entered his arm. It hurt at first, it always does, but he felt himself come back to life. He finished eating his leg, then located the stomach and cut around the circle until a nice little hole opened up. 

The stomach bulged from its cupboard in his gut. He moved aside the shelfs of muscle to touch his stomach. Immediately blood and bile gushed from his mouth. He tried to sit up but the force of vomit reached him first. He lay there swallowing everything his body rejected and held the hole in his stomach as the cold air made the cut on his body burn. 

Once empty, Hector rested his head and felt his heavy eyelids drop. He prepared for this, and took a syringe full of stimulants and injected it right into his heart. He shot up for the table, unblinking, his heart beating through his chest, his stomach expanded out from the hole he cut. He wiped blood from his gut, and started digging into the meat of his abdomen, his thighs, and ass. 

Huge deposits of meat entered his body, but his stomach kept horking it back up. He switched to a new IV bag, and opened the hole around his stomach even wider to reach the meat under his ribs. He pressed his organs down to reach it, and CRACK- one of his ribs popped. If not for the ocean of drugs pounding through his system, the pain would’ve caused him to pass out. He reached further in to see what had broken, and to his amusement, he pulled out an entire rib covered in a soft, hair-like meat. He stuck the rib in his mouth and sucked the meat off. He opened his abdomen even more until he needed to insert splints to keep his lower intestine from rolling out of his body. 

The lights flicked as the ground and ceiling shook. Water splashed when heavy debris fell from above. He looked down and noticed the dark water ripple on the linoleum tile. He looked around for a leak, listened for rain, as slime and water ran down the walls, drenched the portrait of his judging ancestor and knocked it to the floor. 

Casimir watched the rain flood the caves and depression over the island. Her heart dropped. That’s where she kept and bedded her “recruits”. Without them to serve Hector, he would surely kill her. She tried first to contact anyone down in the caves. She dialed emergency phones she gave the guards, and all he heard when they picked up was the roar of water blasting down a pipe. 

Number Three slept so soundly in the storm. Casimir shook her until she woke up. The girl stirred with bad dreams, murmuring about mirrors, until Casimir shushed and held her close by. 

“Do you know where daddy keeps his lab keys?”

“He told me never to go into the lab.”

“They keys, sweety.” 

“The girl reached into her shirt and pulled out a necklace with the key attached, the slight smile developed as her cheeks cracked. “Daddy says that when I’m old enough, he’ll teach me to be a scientist, like him.” 

“Give it to mommy.” 

Number Three’s smile turned around and her brow crinkled over her eye holes.

Casimir grabbed a pillow and shoved it down onto her daughter’s face. The little girl kicked and punched. The pillow case became wet with her slobber so Casimir shoved it down her throat. Her murmurs became gurgles, precious gurgles. The girl found a pen by the bedside, and hurled it forward. The tip landed right in her mom’s chest. 

They struggled and fought in the bed, covering its ivory white fabrics in squirts of blood. The girl on the other side of the pillow felt weaker, but her hold onto the pen only got stronger. She twisted it and dug it deeper into her mom. She felt it break through layers of tissue until the oxy levels finally dropped and her brain stopped. 

Casimir removed the pillow. Her husband’s abomination had a slight pulse. The dark pits she had for eyes still glimmered for she had no eyelids to close over them. The pen in her chest. The girl drove it deeper and deeper before her hand finally fell off. Casimir took the gun from her nightstand and shot Number Three in the chest.

Casimir felt around and tore the pen out of her body. Yet she didn’t feel relieved. She hurried into the bathroom to find something to plug the wound with, but she knew by the labor of her breath that the pen struck her lung and punctured it. 

“Hector,” she whimpered down the hall. Outside the watchtower collapsed. Their cars slide downslope into a rushing current. Water from the sewer backed up and exploded from the toilets and sinks. 

Casimir came to the lab door, but found it open. She cried for her husband, but didn’t even hear a scream. The stairs, the flickering lights, the plastic tarps stained with god knows what. The lab was wide open, a key hung in the key hole. She turned around to see a naked something-person on all fours, blech out in fear from the thing she thought to be a face, and then leap out the window. It had her hair and her husband’s eyes. 

Step by step she went down pacing her breathing. If anyone had the tools to save or her keys to the plane, it was Hector. She called for him again but received no response. As she made her way down the isle of tarps her fleet splashed in silty water. One cage door hung open, the ones not under water contained bodies of human-like creatures with holes and lead in their skulls. Brains and mouths, and brains inside of mouths, hung open, their eyes going in different directions, or their faces turned into a white mask drooping off of their skulls. 

Casimir called for Hector again. Each time she braced herself for a furious outburst. Maybe even a blow to the head that finally kills her. Instead she found the operation room door ajar. She pushed it open and gasped when she saw what had become of him. 

So much carnage that even his black hair turned red. So much meat on his face that it looked like someone dumped a bucket of worms on him. Snakes of red and white meat stuffed his throat. It looked like he tired to eat as much as he could but his body finally pushed it all back out but it just jammed in his mouth until he couldn’t close it anymore. His kidneys were missing from the cavity in his chest. Six ribs broken from the solar plexus. Gallbladder and bladder, gone. His large intestine floated in the flood. His legs rendered down to transparent globules of cartilage and tissue, red bones completely cleaned of meat and vessels. The steak of his buttocks and crotch was completely removed. She approached, holding her nose, too afraid to scream, but paralyzed in fear. As she stood above him, she saw his lungs inflate. His heart beat. His eyes remained wide open. 

Casimir whispered into his ear “I killed Number Three.”  She took a hook from the instrument table, and dug it into his ribs. She broke one off and started eating it. She lost her words in the fraughtful tears, eating and swallowing a mouthful of her husband’s meat before resuming her crying. She smiled a bit, and reached back in for more.  “Oh, my man. Poor Hector.” 

CRUNCH. GULP. SIZZLE