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Sometimes he looks down at his hands and sees things that he does not like. He wants to burn them, his hands. Tear them off. Shatter them like glass and rid him of them, rid him of their pain and their malice and their cruel wrinkles of age. Ere time cease and skin smooth and blemishes vanish, he may regain some love for them but this is not so; he shall not reconcile with age and he shall not reconcile with how thin and saggy and graying and clotted through with tendon- tissue his hands have become. He will not become archaic, archaic as these hands. he will not succumb and wither with the ugliness of time. he is not a flower, he shall not wilt.
People used to hold these hands, to kiss them, to watch them dance over the marbelite keys of a piano as if they were in some sort of trance, as if they might be immortal. How well that turned out. How truthful their lies seemed. How brutal their truth is now, in the light of day.
Age: A thing to be hated, a thing to be feared, a thing to be escaped. Run, when you see it coming, for it will not cease until you are naught but a bundle of rotting flesh and hungry maggots buried six feet under the dirt, unseeing and unseen and dead. Run, before you end up with wrinkles around your eyes and an ache in your back and plaque in your brain. Run, before it catches up to you and grabs you by the tailcoat and makes you belong to it.
Age is Eidos, is visible, is there. It is also silent. It creeps up on you in your sleep, time slipping through your fingers: an hourglass with a too-wide neck. Always there, behind you, ready, ready, ready to strike and leave you rotted and empty; stomach bloated and flesh sloughing away and decay setting in like a storm to a coastline.
Dorian Gray does not want to have aged. He wishes he could return to that time so long ago, when he was youthful and bright and had so many friends. Lord Henry; he remembers Lord Henry of course, how could he hope to forget such a fellow as he? Basil Hallward, the man with the paints and the kind eyes, the sort that looked deeper into you than you would have liked. He remembers the taste of Basil’s blood, salty and acrid on his tongue. It’s still there, the blood. A thin veneer of it spread over him like paint, tinting his pale skin red with iron.
He remembers Basil. Green and brown and, in the end, so, so red. Red and staring and sobbing and then nothing. Cold and blue-lipped and stiff with the frozen clutches of death. Knife buried deep, so deep, never coming out deep; flesh red and raw and split and weeping tears of iron red. He didn’t mean to, didn’t mean to take that silver blade and watch it gleam in the moonlight, didn’t mean to take that silver blade and hold it above his head, to plunge it down, down, in.
But he did.
No use thinking about it now. Basil Hallward’s body was burnt and his memories turned to lost matter; lost substance. When you cease existence, when your carbon decays, do your memories remain? Or do they fade away, like frost coating a windowpane on a spring morning, lost yet leaving behind a stain?
Does it really even matter? Basil is dead. He can spill no secrets now, from his tea-pot mouth. Dorian Gray may remain a mystery, the man who did not age, then the man who did. He may remain nothing but Dorian Gray, the soulless devil, the one who looked on from his immortal perch until he was stripped of it. The one who has so much blood coating his hands that Napoleon himself would be put to shame.
Dorian Gray remembers when he did not age, when his youth was intact and permanent, when his eyes shone and his skin gleamed and the world was naught but sunlight around him, when he was not dying alive.
Dying.
He is dying, now. Crumbling away like he never did before. He falls upon his couch and his bones feel as if they have cracked in twain, shattered into a million billion irreparable pieces.
He’s dying because he was never meant to live, he thinks. Never meant to be birthed, to grow, to change, to pray to God and make all of his many, many mistakes.
Why should he care? Death is no true end. Death is welcome. Death is a thing he can accept. Dorian Gray is not very good at lying to himself. He knows that he does not want to die, that he wants his youth back; to continue on and on, to never age, to burn as brightly as he did the day he was born.
The clock ticks on and on, the sand falls from the hourglass, grim sounds of passing time reverberating around Dorian Gray’s study. To remind him, remind him, remind him.
Do not forget.
Do not forget the days when you had everything.
Do not forget Basil and Henry and Sybil, do not burn your letters into the ash you shall become.
He burned his letters yesterday. The ticking got too loud, the sand fell too quickly; the letters had to go. He tossed them into the fire one by one, read and throw and repeat. Over and over and over until the memories were gone, until his crippled, aching, old, old, old hand lay empty, too warm by the heat of the flame.
He was all flesh encasing ash then, as burnt as the charred paper flaming flaming flaming in the fireplace.
Would that he burnt with that same light.
He takes time less than lightly now. His hourglass runs out. He spends too much time dipping his fingers in lamp fuel. Humans are flammable, like letters, like paper, like wood. Ignite, and burn, and disappear, and become nothing but ash.
The clock breaks.
Silence is all that remains, nothing to drown out the hissing of the fire that fills his study with tempting, tempting flame.
Tempting.
Lamp oil, fire, flame.
Burn like a letter, burn and burn and melt away.
THE ILLUSTRATED LONDON NEWS For The Week Ending Saturday, December 16th 1915
pg. 5
Obituaries:
Dorian Gray
DIED IN HOUSE FIRE
After a long and eventful life, Dorian Gray (aristocrat, philanthropist, post-mortem accused murderer) died in an unavoidable fire on 12-14-1915. We offer our condolences to friends and family alike.