25. The rejection, part 2.

In another life he had been a man who felt pain very acutely. Not just pain, but all sensations, to such a degree that even pleasure was an agony, too strong a feeling.

To this man the finest silk felt like burlap. The sweetest taste was sickening, and foods that were sour or salty he couldn't bear at all. This is when he would succumb to eating. To him, the act of feeding the body was an act of raping it, to pump rough matter through the tiny tube of a throat, to grind it sickeningly (each step of which he could feel), then press it through a mile of coiled intestines. The most horrifying sight he had seen as a child was a diagram of the insides of the abdomen on a doctor's wall. It was a clean drawing, without gore; there was nothing inherently frightening about it. But to the man (then a boy) each turn of the guts, each foot of tubing, spelled out an infinity of disgust and discomfort.

And no sooner was the mass expelled from the body, the painfully few nutrients ground out of it until it was hard and stinking, that the hunger began. Whenever he could, the man drank soup or quietly chewed oatmeal for sustenance. His ribs protruded from his chest, stretching the skin painfully. He crushed up vitamins and gagged at their taste as he swallowed them, mixed with milk.

Blinking his eyes as he watched television through sunglasses in his shaded room, the man longed to die, but couldn't bear the thought of the pain he might endure if he brought it upon himself. Even to swallow single a pill was a misery to him, and his oversensitive stomach would expel a fatal dose before he was able to choke it down. Crushing the pills was out of the question because he would not have been able to force the foul-smelling powder into himself. The thought of poison made him shudder. Each day he spent hours trying to think of ways to destroy himself, or trying to work up the courage to face one instant of terrible hurt, so that he could find an end to the million needles of discomfort he felt all the time.

One day, the man walked to the window, not bothering to turn off the television. He slid the pane up (feeling agony in his joints as he did so), and got up onto the sill. Something within him was calm as he stared down upon the street far below, so bright, so loud.

"I reject this pain," he said in a whisper. His ears hurt from the din of the traffic that reverberated all around him, wafting up, beckoning him. And he fell.