Matt knows that he’s got scars on his face. He knows exactly how they feel, how they ripple in drunken zags across his brow and over his eyes. He knows that they’re obvious and that people stare because of them more than they stare because of the cane or the glasses. He knows every sprawling detail; his fingers have been tracing the same path down the hardened skin since it healed decades ago.
His left hand starts up that path when he’s nervous or bored: tapping at his right temple over the tiny dots that mark where the liquid splashed. They pause to rub at the hook over his right brow, and then skirt around his first eye and race down the length of his nose. An offshoot from the main body of the scar has left an imprint of his childhood bone structure on the left cheek, and the ragged palm of his hand stings with the memory of his attempts to get the stuff out of his eyes. The second he’d touched his face, it had burned the skin right off of his wrist and palm. All he’d managed to do was spread it over his left cheek and exacerbate the damage to that eye. His fingers always wind their way around the plane of his cheek before working their way up, over the eye, and quickly past his left ear. Sometimes he starts again.
He has damage elsewhere. He remembers a time, back in the haze-covered experimental days of grad school, when Foggy told him the chunk of scar that was visible on his neck accentuated his jawline. He hadn’t really known what to do with that information.
Matt’s absentmindedly messing with the part of the scar that eats into his hairline by his ear while he listens to a deposition. Foggy’s in the other room prepping an argument and all of the windows are open. Tepid, humid air rolls into the office and mingles with the drone of the box fan across the room. The voice in the earbud marches dully on.
His mind wanders in sleepy loops. It settles drowsily on the day of the accident. He remembers his dad’s frustrated, terrified attempts to get him away from the spilled chemicals. His hand reaches subconsciously around to his upper back, following the gnarled ghost of the folds of a shirt drenched in liquid fire. His dad's screams of agony as he tore it off Matt’s back. He remembers seeing—the last seconds, tinged maroon and browning hastily at the edges—his shirt in those hands. His dad’s hands: rocks hewn with greatest care from hardest stone. Battlin’ Jack’s hands, always so stoic and steady and present. They shook then, fingers curled into reflexive fists around the inundated fabric. He remembers the angry red of chemical burns all over the palms, the tips of the fingers buried to the second or third knuckle in that damn shirt.
Then he couldn’t see anymore, but he could feel. He could feel a puddle of the stuff eating at the pit of his right knee. He felt his dad’s throbbing, burnt knees chafing his bare back as he was pulled further into his lap. He remembers bits of the ambulance, the soft-spoken paramedic who told him to lay still. She’d held his hand the whole way there, traced around his numb palm. Told him he’d get through it, that he’d survive.
He did. His dad did. They found their way back. The PT and the OT and about two dozen other abbreviations helped. The deep-tinted glasses helped. His dad pushed through it and pulled him along and he clung to that ferocity with all the tenacity his screaming body could muster.
He knows exactly how the scars might look. Had Foggy describe the exact coloring on a drunk night a couple of years ago. His left hand returns to its place at his temple; Foggy had told him through a cloying breath of scotch that it’s reddest there and around his eyes. The canyon carved into his eyebrow stretches white when he’s surprised. The whole thing, Foggy had whispered into the inebriated air, was marbled pink and gray and the bone-dry white of trauma. “Like some kind of fancy stonework. Looks like Michaelangelo got half finished carvin’ your face out of a slab of some expensive fuckin’ rock.”
Matt can’t recall any of Michaelangelo’s sculptures. He has some vague notions about the images that cover the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, maybe the outline of David from deep in a book of art picked out from his dad’s coffee table.
Matt made Foggy tell him all about his eyes, too. He’d been trying to remember his father’s visage. He knew that his dad’s hair was dark red--slick terrain, the last heat from a sunset, a terse reply before a slammed door, the earth of decanted cabernet. He remembered a man telling him before the accident that he had his dad’s eyes.
“Fogs, c’mere.” They’d slammed their heads together and fallen into fits of full-bodied laughter. “No, no. Come ‘ere. Gimme--gimme your peepers.”
He and Foggy were inconsolable with mirth for a good five minutes after that, but eventually they’d settled down enough for Matt to ask, “What color are my eyes?”
Foggy had gone very quiet for a moment. His whole body had stilled. Matt remembers Foggy’s heartbeat slowing as well, so as not to distract him from his concentration.
Foggy leaned in, buzz of drink trailing a path behind his head. “Dude, they’re so fucking--I don’t even know how to describe it. They--they look like they were blue, I’d guess, before. But there’s all this film and clouding and scars on top of it. Y’ever pour milk into water as a kid?”
“Think so, but I can’t really picture it.”
“Hm. Think of like, all the shifting universes up above us.”
Matt chuckled and said, “There’s a roof above us, Fog.”
He’d earned a soft punch on the shoulder for that. “No dumbass. In the sky. In space.”
“Don’t go waxing poetic all over me now.”
“I’ll do what the fuck I wanna. Lemme finish… What the fuck was I talking about?”
Matt cracked up so hard it hurt, and by the time he was finished, Foggy was audibly pouting at him. He gestured to continue.
“So. You gotta couple eyes. I guess if you want me to give ‘em a color they’re gray or white, but like, they almost match the white on your other scars. S’funny ‘cause you’ve still got super thick eyelashes and pink all around your eyelids and then inside, your pupils match your irises and they’re all silver-white. Bet money the pattern imitates the way the stuff splashed into ‘em.”
Matt pushed out a shaky breath and turned to face Foggy. Hearing each minute detail of the mark the chemicals had branded into his body forced many visceral and terrifying memories up from where he’d been successfully suppressing them for years.
“Sounds like a party in there.”
“Dude, don’t trivialize your shit. S’like--bad coping mechanisms or something.”
Matt knows the topography of his scars because they create ripples in the way he perceives the world through touch. He knows that his right hand is better for fine motor movements and mapping delicate objects; his left is better-suited to the brutality of nights spent fighting base and hateful criminals. Sometimes his right knee acts up, or the knotted swirl on his back stretches the wrong way and he loses his rhythm in the middle of a fight, but that’s becoming increasingly less common as the new scars build up to cover the old ones.
Sometimes every inch of him douses itself in kerosene and lights up like a molotov. Sometimes he thinks he is the only one in the world who knows how Moses felt when he encountered the burning bush. Sometimes Matt feels like he is the sole conductor through which God delivers fire and brimstone and all His punishment for humanity’s sin.
It’s a burden Matt bears with little grace and even less stoicism. He’s confessed this before, but it seems he’ll never be forgiven for whatever vice caused him to run out in front of that truck and push that old man out of its path. He doesn’t think he regrets it; better him than that man, or worse, some other innocent bystander. Better for everyone that he takes the brunt of the damage.
He can handle it. His body’s got the scars to prove it, all mapped out in slashes, in stabs and puckered bullet wounds, in the legacy of his father laid out atop his knuckles and scrawled over his back. He can take it all. Whatever shit the world dishes out.