The Lipstick Man (The next incarnation of HORROR. Do not miss it!)

The Road Must Be Paved. 
I’ve scrawled it up and down and across and backwards and in coiling spirals across the pages of my journal. Entire landscapes, entire worlds, have been edified and destroyed by those 18 letters. The doctors caution against my fixation. The Lipstick Man. The number 18. They say it will delay recovery, that so long as there is a monster to be conquered, my grief will remain tireless.

But what can doctors know about The Lipstick Man?   

On the veranda, in a garden reminiscent of Nineteenth Century plantations, hemmed by weeping willows and swaying curtains of Spanish moss, I wonder if He is not an agent coughed up by the earth itself to teach its greatest viral threat a lesson; and to accomplish it through the great distinguishing feat that separates our race from the animals it consumes.

Art.  

I cannot remember her face before the artistry. Funny, I know—not remembering the face of your wife. The doctors say I’ve buried it in some deep fold of my mind. To hide the loss. The emptiness.

I do remember the waste of shattered bone and teeth she became. The collapsed orbits and cheek bones, as if she’d been hammered with the bottom of a fire extinguisher. The way the forehead cracked inward like windshield glass, trapping her dark locks in their teeth. When I drift into a medicated sleep, I still see her eyes. Cradled in her palms like virgin blossoms. Hands laid across her opened ribcage in funerary pose. The wrists broken and twisted so that they face the other way.

I wish I could remember her face before the Lipstick Man. The doctors hold up pictures, but her features remain blurred, as hot breath will blur glass. I cannot bring myself to say her name. I call her what she was when I found her.

I call her Meat.

*

I was a sculptor all my life. I like to think that even during my gestation, I carved shapes across the amniotic sac. I say was because I haven’t sculpted in years. Since I saw Meat laid out on the coffee table. Her entrails suspended above her in bright coils by twists of sculpting wire hammered to our ceiling. Her body made to replicate a tableau of cosmic birth. A hatching.

The damn table was too big for our living room. And I wonder now, had I listened to Meat in the first place and gotten something less ostentatious, if the Lipstick Man might have spared her, moving to other cottages where a more suitable worktable awaited Him.

The Lipstick Man must be capitalized. Even the pronoun. I have come to believe He is an exiled God, crawled through some moth hole in the universal fabric to breathe chaos into the world. I know the pain of exile, though mine is one filled with little plastic pill cups and the wheels of hospital beds squeaking endlessly through the night.

“How are you today?” asks the doctor. He is a tight-lipped man of fifty, with white hair combed close to the skull. He is always shaved. Come to think of it, I have never seen a trace of stubble on his sharp, receding chin. His eyes are the color of old coffee, unflinching behind their spectacles. He is tall and gaunt and terrible in some self-contained way. “Getting fresh air out on the veranda? It is a lovely day.”

I ignore him, as I ignore them all.

This is the only way for me to speak.

I talk little these days, understand the threat such action brings. For in the spiraling pattern of Meat’s viscera I glimpsed the first sequence to the mystery of our existence. Building blocks in some elevating staircase. What we are and were and are slowly becoming.  It is too hard to explain, even harder to show them, so why speak? It was not carnage in my living room, so much as deification. A biological pattern. Within it I saw the first blades of grass and the first scaled beast hurl itself from the primordial seas to suck air instead of fluid. I saw the tribes of hirsute hominids hunting in packs and vaulting the carcasses of great beasts whose bones will never be discovered. I saw empires and gods and the advent of war. And madness. There was a type of madness encircling her. A double helix of insanity.

It is there in all of us.

It could be you sitting here.

*

The Lipstick Man is not His name. I do not know if He can speak. I do not know much at all. He is a legend quietly building strength in hovels and shadows and cracked basement temples. A cipher that modulates through the reshaping of flesh. He speaks angles and equations, same as the stars. Perhaps he fell from space. What am I saying?… all of us fell from space. But what is space, really? Emptiness?

No.

Space is very, very full.

I cannot prove it with equations. I cannot build it with a machine. I can only tell you I glimpsed it, the truth of it, in the air that breathed between the glistening strands hung from our ceiling. My ceiling. I keep forgetting Meat is dead. Sometimes I see her walking behind the Spanish moss of this place, her face a shifting blur infused with television static. This doppelganger is broken, as she was broken—an effigy to the last image I possess of her.

In this sometimes daydream she holds a triangular scalpel that glows with soft pink light. She holds it still until I acknowledge her. I try to resist, but the pull of it, the whisper. It is not so much a blade as an insect. I get the strong impression that the device is alive. As soon as I look the blade burns white. She draws it to her stomach, removes the useless blockage there, and goes about coiling the ribbons of her anatomy among the branches. The work sometimes takes her hours. She is painstaking. Delicate. But with the task complete, leaning back like some queenly spider amid her web, the air between the shreds begins to ripple.

I see things between the ripples.

Sometimes it is my face, screaming, fingers broken and bleeding.

Sometimes it is the doctor asking me how I’m feeling.

But mostly I see Him.

In a hood of black liquid that moves like smoke. Thick simian lips peeled back from gums the white of desert bone. A faint impression of ecstasy. Dripping with something too thick to be saliva. Venom, I always think, Like a worm. A parasite. And always the wrinkled chin and pitted olfactory organ tilt in curiosity, spilling just enough light to reveal a surface lathered with thick red resin.

Like lipstick.

*

When I was three my father beat my mother so badly she had to be hospitalized. I watched it happen, sitting there with a toy truck in my mouth, the sensation of my teeth still strangely wonderful to me. I must have been frightened, but can’t remember that. What I remember is the way Earl looked up after he was done with the clothes iron, crimson streaked across the steam holes. His eyes both focused and unfocused. And in the space between those two battling elements: a kind of ecstasy. A release. As of something clicking into place. That secret expression of pleasure remained a mystery to the police that later carted him off to a piss-smelling cell, even as he shrieked.

He didn’t come back. Mother limped for the rest of her life and eventually married a man who didn’t mind the dent in her forehead or constant wander of her eye.

Maybe that’s why I fell in love with Meat.

Men search to recreate their mother in a mate. Could it also be possible that undiscovered senses search to recreate their mother in the fate of a mate? Are there ganglia sensing the identical cancers and misfortunes that await our beloveds, syphoning the past for replication in the future? There is a comfort in patterns.

They are familiar.

*

When I was eighteen, against the advice of my mother and stepfather (who I’d always just called Hank), I tracked down my father. Living in Galveston, Texas, Earl had remarried a failed stripper with pock scars and replaced the old piss-smelling cell for a piss-smelling trailer. He drank while I stood in what passed for a living room, the floor giving uncomfortably beneath my weight. I was a large eighteen-year-old, with broad shoulders and a ship-builder’s hands.

The old man looked me up and down, pink belly peeking from a stained undershirt two-sizes too small. “What the hell’d you come all the way out here for?”

“To see you,” I said, after a pause. “I’ve got an art scholarship. I thought maybe you’d be proud.”

“Well, now you seen me.” He motioned to the trailer with his beer can. “Ain’t much. But hell, life ain’t much. You work your ass off then you die. Whether its art or labor. There ain’t no such thing as a future. But sometimes there’s redemption. Word to the wise, boy. Search between the folds.”

Something about that phrase has always stayed with me.

When I asked what it meant, he said, “This is shit. The world is shit. You’re shit and I’m shit. But we’re only layers, see? There’s a million layers. And in between the layers … He waits.”

Two words whispered like the secret name of God.

“Earl…” rose a Marlboro-chewed voice from the kitchen. “You ain’t goin’ on with that mad talk again, are ya?”

“Shut the fuck up!” He threw his can of Budweiser, the projectile disappearing through the narrow kitchen doorway with a heavy metallic thwack. “I’m talking to my fucking son in here!”

“Maybe I should go, dad.” Calling him dad didn’t feel right. None of it felt right. I wanted to leave, felt the pressure of a building catastrophe, a thing that once uttered could never be taken back. A thing that would haunt me.

“Like hell. You just got here.”

“I can leave my phone number. My girlfriend’s waiting for me. I left her at the gas station. We could get dinner. I didn’t know how this would go.”

“Girlfriend, huh? A looker?”

I nodded.

“Your mother was a looker … before, well…” He shrugged. “Women are a cancer with tits. Better off to leave her there and just keep driving.”

“Dad, I should—”

“Don’t interrupt me.” His register dropped to something dangerous. Bones could have cracked in the grip of that voice.

“Sorry.”

He stared at me with an unreadable emotion—conspiracy; maybe desperation—edged up on the La-Z-Boy and whispered, “Between the folds, son. I’m too old now, too used up. I did my work. But there’s more to do. A road must be paved.”

I retreated a step. “What are you talking about?”

“The only thing in this ugly world that’s real is what I'm fuckin' talkin' about.”

I said nothing.

“He’s a prophet,” Earl said, suddenly breathless, eyes begging me to listen. “A savior. He made the world. And now He unmakes it.” A smile. “You’ve seen Him. Back when your mother and her iron had that disagreement. I saw you look. He was there. Never thought I’d be so lucky, but I was. Just that once I was.”

I stood in horrified silence, my mind chewing backward, burning through birthdays and nightmares and schoolyard fights, into the living room stained with my mother’s blood. And there in the shadow of the open closet, between clothes pushed to either side, I envisioned a glistening red smile.

“He knows your name, boy. I told him.”  

I bolted from the trailer, out and down the retractable aluminum stairs. The gunshot snap of the screen clapping the siding followed me into the dust, the wind kicking draughts into my eyes. The sounds of Earl rising, rushing to the doorway.

I jumped in the rental car, but not fast enough. Before I turned the key, before the engine could thunder to life, I heard him scream.

“The Lipstick Man’ll find ya! Best to find Him first!”  

*

At the age of 22 I was a successful artist. I showcased in New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Chicago, and Saint Louis. I was lucky. I sold pieces at auctions. I had articles written about my creative process, which included nothing more than Maker’s Mark and Pall Mall cigarettes, rehashing old wounds and past traumas until they rose like a syphon of wasps, cutting off the sunlight. For days, sometimes weeks, I would see only the bloody iron, my mother’s legs spasming; I’d see the small trailer’s livingroom with an old fat drunk grinning from his recliner.

I’d see between the folds.

And at the end of each piece—not the completion, but the end, as if I were telling a story—I would collapse, sheathed in sweat, starving and exhausted, to think of that smile in the closet. Whether or not it had always been there, or if the ultimate disappointment that was my father had suggested it into existence.

Meat complained of my distance. She was the type of woman who always wanted to be a part of me. Every nuance, every haunt. She felt closer when she knew my current fixation by name. And yet the partner of an artist is a boat docked to an island in perpetual drift. 

The island survives storms.

The boat is not always so lucky.

*

One night Meat shook me awake. My eyes snapped open and I became aware of a tightening band across my chest, the breath shallow, the engine of my heart thumping so hard I felt it in my eyes. I rose quickly. Were it a bunk bed instead of a four-post I would have split my forehead to the bone.

Meat placed a calming hand on my shoulder, the fingers warm, making me aware of the sweat on the pillows and sheets. “You were dreaming.”

“Dreaming,” I said, with one foot still in that other place, the scenery blurred, the details sucking into fog.

“You were having a nightmare.”

I nodded slowly, rested back on my palms, back straight, forcing slow, deep breaths. “I can’t remember it.”

I turned (though now in recollection her face is a shifting blur). She rubbed my back, the way my mother did. And that made me think of the nightmares of my childhood. The phantasmagorias doctors eventually attributed to the traumas of Earl. I told Meat then. Funny that I’d never thought to mention them.

“What were they about?”

I couldn’t remember, not really, but beneath the confusion and fear, in the fold, I suddenly knew what I had dreamed as a child. Of what I’d dreamt that night.

“Your face is white, honey.” She sounded scared, out of breath. “Let me get you some water.”

She rose (and in memory it’s like watching a wax-sculpture imbued with life, her pale skin afire with moonlight, but the face itself melted flat), leaving me in the cool darkness of our bedroom.

I couldn’t hear her footsteps—only the thump of that long ago iron hitting the hardwood floor, denting it, spraying chips of sawdust like powdered snow; only the gleeful aspiration of my father as his head rocked back, eyes closed, as a man who has accomplished something that has nearly stolen the life from him, his face beaded with sweat, turning to whisper words beyond memory, the intonation not unlike a psalmody, a prayer. And then another, deeper sound revealed itself between the others.

The tinkling of wire hangers being parted.

The wet wriggling of red lips in darkness.

*

I snapped my face toward the open closet.

Empty.

But not always.

Recently.

Even then I thought it was crazy to be so sure of something. Yet there it was, a fever in my blood. The truth of what was only then opening its pages. I jumped out of bed and rushed the open door, tugging the chain of the pull-light, every muscle flexed in anticipation…

To see nothing. 

Meat’s dresses and shoes filled every corner except for the small place I kept my jeans and plain black T-shirts. I slid every article along its pole. Reached through to feel bare wall, slightly moist, as if a mold was slowly fruiting. There was a musk there. A tang. I can’t say what it was. A burning, maybe, like a dying engine made of flesh. Hot plastic. Rubber bleeding in the sun. And fur. 

Something animal.

There was one last rack. Far in the back. The clothes wedged so tightly that the hanger hooks had started to cross.

My next thought came in Earl’s voice.

Who’s to say there isn’t a doorway behind those clothes?

I understood then that The Lipstick Man would be there. Between the folds. My body was trembling. Freezing and burning at once. I reached out, surprised at the tremor in my hand, carpals jerking beneath the skin. Knowing and yet unable to un-know. My fingers brushed the shirts and dresses and slacks.

There was a hot rhythm between the fabric. Like breath. Heat. Rottenness so far progressed it was almost sweet.

I reached deeper, couldn’t help myself…

“Honey, what are you doing in there?”

Meat’s voice broke the pull of that place, that … what?

Gateway?

I saw what I was about to do. Leapt backwards. Slammed the door. Retreating to the bed, afraid to give the closet my back, I picked up a candlestick from the nightstand and watched the black doorknob. Willing it not to turn while understanding it was inevitable. Maybe not tonight. Maybe not for years. But someday.

He knows your name, boy. I told him.  

Meat was a slow approaching shadow to my left. “What’s wrong with you?” A sense of her turning. “You left the closet light on.”

“It doesn’t like the light.” I must have sounded crazy.

“Honey just take a sip of water. You had a dream. You—”

“It’s not a dream!”

She almost dropped the glass, stumbled back, some of it spilling on her negligee. “Jesus Christ! You don’t have to yell at me.”

And she was right.

And it didn’t matter.

I pressed my back to the headboard. Unable to blink, to look at her. Watching the doorknob. “I’m sorry.”

She sighed and sat next to me, probably thinking this was some eccentricity, an adventure upon which she could follow and somehow be enriched. “So…” She handed me what was left of the water. “What are we waiting for?”

I shook my head, not wanting to say it. Words have power. Spoken aloud, they can undo things or make manifest the undoable.

“Come on…” She had no idea of the danger. There was humor in her voice. “Don’t go all silent on me.”

So I changed the subject. Or tried to. It turned out they were connected. “I’ve been thinking about my father.”

She had been there at the gas station, seen the sweaty horror on my face, suffered through my unwillingness to talk about what had happened.

“Earl?” it came in a horrified whisper.

I turned. (In memory I can discern no expression from the blankness, but I imagine she looked afraid) “Why did you say it like that?”

“You said his name.”

“No, you said his name. This isn’t the time for one of your little games.”

“I’m not playing a game. In your dream, I mean. You were saying his name. Telling him to stop. Then you just started … to scream. The same thing over and over.”

I was staring intently. “What did I scream?”

But I already knew, raised a hand to stop her as she whispered, “The Lipstick Man.”

There was a small click.   

Then the knob began to turn.

            *

The doctors tell me things I can’t accept. They tell me that I’m sick. That I’m getting worse. I tell them little to nothing. When feeling generous, I sometimes nod or motion with my hands. The orderlies treat me with kindness, think I’m just another artist that’s inspiration has become the mainspring of infirmity. They coddle me like a crippled puppy, sneak me cakes from the cafeteria. But they cannot know what waits between the folds.

If they did, they would be running.

*

I vaulted off the bed and slammed the closet door, dragging the dresser across the frame. I was vaguely aware of Meat screaming, asking me what the hell was going on. I grabbed her, yanked her out of bed, and rushed into the hallway, flipping the lights on as I went.

The doorways began opening.

One by one.

Each cupboard.

Each vent.

Not enough to let the light in. But enough to send the message that we were being watched. Meat was crying by then, begging me to explain a reality that was wholly mine, the reality I had doomed her to survive.

“Here.” I stopped under the cone of hallway light, holding her. “Here,” I said, over and over. “Close your eyes.” Mine were pinched so tightly I could see white dots floating in my periphery. 

“What’s happening?” 

“It will all be over soon.”
“What’s happening?” 

“It’s a ghost. A very hungry ghost.”  

“After you?” 

I nodded, my chin nuzzling her head. 

“Why?”

“I don’t know. My father…” I wanted to tell her everything, but the words ran dry. I couldn't bear to vent my conscience at the expense of her sanity.

“What about your father?”

“He…” I felt the weight of His name trying to form in my throat, sliding up like fingers through grease. “He invited it. When I was young. He…”

I heard her breath, sharp as a gunshot, suck back against her teeth.


“What? What is it?”

She was trembling all over, as if her bones wanted to break. “It’s… It’s…” the voice so small, crawling backwards, trying to choke her. “It’s…”

“What honey? What?”

“Something's in the doorway of the bedroom.” She buried her face into my shoulders. The next sentence spilling in a muffled cry.

“It’s watching you!”

*

My hands were broken when the police found me, months later. The neighbors heard the crashing sounds of my sculptures being hurled in horrified rage. By the time they entered with their guns drawn, I was collapsed in Meat’s atrium, lying in a circlet of broken glass. My hands were crushed beyond repair.

I knew I would never sculpt again. Maybe I didn’t want to. Not after seeing her that way, a trapped bird given flight. I think that was the worst part. Rage tried to overwhelm me, but the beauty was too much. I felt as a mortal given a glimpse into the clockwork of a God.

They drew their weapons. One of the officers made his way into the living room and vomited. When he returned, wiping his mouth, he looked at me like I was an animal.

“Put your hands up! Now! Where I can see ‘em!”  

I held up my hands and began to laugh, the fingers bulging, crippled roots. There was no pain. The pain was emotional. Seeing my bones rearranged that way—with such clumsy emulation—made me understand that I was never an artist. Not one so true as The Lipstick Man.

The older officer was not so suggestible “What the hell happened here? What is this?”

“Art,” was the last thing I remember saying. “This is art.”

*

We hid in the hallway until dawn, pink light spilling through the curtains. Meat had fallen asleep against me, her body curled in a knot of terror. I couldn’t sleep, nor did I for many weeks.

My body began to force itself into a series of micro-naps. They could happen at any time. Behind the wheel. On the toilet. Making love. Therefore I no longer drove or had sex. In the bathroom I affixed myself to a type of harness, crafted from a sex swing an art colleague had bought us as a wedding gift. 

I lived in a world of perpetual sunlight. Meat went to live with her parents for a time. I warned her against it, but she wouldn’t listen, couldn’t stay. I guess I understand that. There are things too terrible for the uninitiated. Her leaving turned out to be a blessing.

I used my time to learn anything and everything about The Lipstick Man. The internet turned up nothing but dragqueen manifestos. The Library turned up less. There weren’t social circles in which to casually mention my chance encounter with a being from another where.

So I returned to Galveston.

To the Charity Hills Trailer Court.

            *

The aluminum box that served as Earl’s home was in ruins when I found it. Sheets of soot stretched upward from the windows and door in fanning black wings, the paint curled and bubbled or else completely eaten through. A molting skin of aluminum hung in rusted strips.

I was afraid.             

I pulled the blackened screen frame open, saw the darkness of the kitchen, and withdrew back to the light. There was a smell in there. Like raw meat.

            
“Can I help you?” a voice half-asked, half-threatened.

            
I turned to see a man with a belly twice as large as Earl’s had been the last time I’d seen him. His beard was combed, but still caked with grease, twists of gray glowing white in the sun.

            
“Yes. My father lived here.”

            
“Earl Planchett was your father?” The man looked suspicious, then confused, glancing at the dust and muttering, “Earl Planchett had a son?”

            
“What happened?”

            
“Y’got eyes, don’t ya? Damn thing burned.”
            
“And Earl?”

            
“Disappeared about two weeks ago. After the fire.”

            
“What about his wife?”

            
A shadow passed across the man’s face. “Burned up in the fire.” Though he didn’t say it, I knew what he was thinking. “Norma Jean. Nice girl, for all her faults. What’s life without faults?”

            
“Did you know him?”
            
“Earl? Sure. Worked at the Elcon factory with him a few years. Strange fella, if y’don’t mind me saying.”

            
“I don’t mind.”
            
“Just up and left the night after the trucks came to douse it. Got asked a few questions by the police. An insurance fella was out here last week looking for him. Something about Norma Jean’s policy. I’ll tell you what I told him. Earl Planchett is a drunk. If you want to find him, search the bars. If those are empty, search the willow rooms.”

            
“Willow rooms?”

            
The man coughed, embarrassed. “Whore houses.”

*

           

I searched the bars, then the whore houses, then the bars again. Always at night, awake, in light. I was on a considerable amount of stimulants by then. And I could tell the people talking to me responded with the guarded syntax reserved for drifters and other persons of suspect, especially considering the battery-powered lantern in my hand.

            
When the bartenders and managers no longer helped I questioned the patrons, though to call those people such a dignified name as patron robs them of their gloried subsistence. The women smelled worse than the men. The men wept more than the women. Some of them had seen Earl a week or a month ago. Down at Shifty’s or Walking into Mr. Quick’s Liquor.

            
There were seven witnesses in all. And of those seven, each sighting was localized. Near the cross streets of Pearl and Edna Drive. I bought them their drinks and left them to their dying. That was thanks enough.

            
Everything deserves the chance to die.   

  

            *

The doctors wheel me through the halls. I’m in a chair. I’m always in a chair these days. The need to walk has left just as quickly as the need to speak. They allow me my pen and moleskin journal. I show no signs of violence. These are the little trusts afforded me, the posts and slats with which the doctors hope to build a bridge to conversation.

            
I overhear them talking about me. Now they do it as if I don’t exist. I have nullified myself. In preparation? Maybe. Darkness no longer scares me. It is empty. Always empty. And in it I sometimes lie awake all night hoping for the wet sound of His smile, hoping to see proof that this vigil has not been in vain.

Sometimes I believe the doctors. There is a giving pressure in my mind and for a moment Meat’s face almost comes into focus. I see my father not as a devotee, but a mental invalid. I see the Lipstick Man as a shared delusion between us.

            
But these lapses are brief. Micro-naps.

            
The doctor is leaning over me now. “We’re going to therapy this afternoon. It might alarm you, but I believe it to be our only chance to salvage what motor skills you have left. I’ll need you to sign this form. There is a chance you'll become frightened. There is a chance this new approach will cause trauma and disorientation. Are you willing to let me try?”

            
I look into his dirty coffee eyes, the capped teeth, imagining the bones of children crunching between his molars. After a time, I nod.

            
I sign.

           

            *

           

Earl was dead. By his own hand. The flesh of his cheeks peeled up in strips and frozen in place with black candle wax. The same process had been administered across his legs and torso, the flabby white meat risen in dark frozen waves.

            
On the floor of the tenement motel room were five words.

            
The Road MUST be paved.

            
He’d scrawled them in his own blood.

            *

The doctors wheel me before a mirror. It is full length and polished. It is a wonder to see how gaunt I have become, as if a parasite has taken root within my body, surviving off its nutrients. And what is an idea but a parasite? What is ambition but the symptom of a viral infection?

            
The orderlies have already lifted and undressed me, replacing my plain white robe with one stained black as coal. It looks like a cheap costume, but it’s soft, comfortable. There is a hood on the robe, made of thick sable. I am allowed to keep writing through this process. I could not stop if I wanted to. My entire world has become centralized to this journal. If not written here, a voice whispers inside, it does not exist.  

            
The doctor bends before me, telling me to remain calm. He is applying medicine on my face. It smells acrid. It’s cold and oily. The process continues for some time, the doctor’s breath hot in my ear.

I cannot see the mirror.

            
I’m suddenly nervous. Do I still exist behind him? How can I be sure? I feel a peculiar wasting, the minutes and hours and months and years piling higher in me, filling me up, drowning me out of myself. Fatigue falls into me like a shelf of collapsing rock. I think, in this moment, that it is very possible I will die. What body can take such waiting, such watching? Who can endure to call his wife Meat and scrawl ceaselessly on the porch of an asylum?

            
But when the doctor rises and steps out of the way new strength floods the husk I have become. My spine straightens. My shoulders seem to broaden beneath the robe. I am staring at Him. Seeing Him. There in the mirror. In the chair.

            
I am staring at the Lipstick Man.

            
Meat’s face begins to focus in my mind, her full lips and round cheeks, like an ageless French doll. Her dark brown hair spilling in tumbles. Her eyes the green of spring and summer battling for control. She smiles up at me in death. She thanks me for showing her the truth of what it is to be trapped in one’s body, suffocating beneath pounds of flesh. She is happy with Him.

            
Happier than I could ever make her.

            
“So you see, Jacob. This is the face that has haunted you. Your face. You are the ghost that haunts yourself. Your fingers were broken that day. Broken against your wife. You beat her to death. You were sick. So sick. But now you’re getting better.”

            
I see my father striking my mother. I see him lighting the trailer afire with Norma Jean coiled in some mock-artistic pose. I see him cutting away strips of himself in threadbare homage. And I know he is just one, as I am one. A drop in the slowly building multitudes. 

            
“Do you see?” Urgency trembles in the doctor’s voice. “It is you.”

            
The face in the mirror suddenly becomes my own. In cheap robes. With red paint smeared down my chin.

            
“No…” My voice is a gravelly croak.

The doctor bends closer to listen. “That’s it, Jacob. Speak to us.”

            
“No,” I say again, stronger. “It’s me. Not Him. He was there. But now He’s gone.”

            
“Jacob, we know you killed your wife. Scarlett. That’s why you’re here.”

            
The lights above are flickering.

            
“Scarlett,” I say, tasting it. “I didn't kill her. I freed her.”

            
“And this Lipstick Man…”

            
With the utterance of his name the mirror begins to ripple.

            
“Yes,” I say. “The Lipstick Man.”

            
The lights above the mirror go dark.

“He is a fantasy. A delusion created by you to subvert the guilt of murder. The Lipstick Man does not exist anywhere but in your mind, Jacob.”

The mirror resolves into a face, slowly spilling from the liquid, taking shape with silent suction behind them. It pours into the room, immensely tall, immensely powerful, a hooded shadow, a grinning God.

I snatch the doctor’s collar, staring into his eyes. “He is the only thing that exists.”