The Dermatological Theory of Everything
In the spring of a certain year- one of those years that arrives already exhausted from the effort of existing- there emerged, in a small and unremarkable town, a theory so elegant in its stupidity that it was immediately embraced by those who required elegance to avoid thinking.
The theory proposed that the catastrophe which had so recently disturbed the national conscience was not, in fact, the consequence of loneliness, or humiliation, or the slow and methodical construction of resentment in the soul of youth. No. It was, rather, the fault of a small, pale tablet prescribed by men in clean coats and optimistic lighting.
A miracle pill, they called it. It promised to dry the skin until it achieved a moral purity- no oils, no shine, no evidence that the body was, in fact, alive. The young took it with devotion. Mothers approved. Fathers paid. Mirrors, those ancient collaborators in self-hatred, began to lose their authority.
And yet, as the theory insisted, something else was dried out along with the skin- something less visible, less photogenic, and therefore less marketable.
The newspapers loved this. It was a story that required no courage to tell. One could point at a pharmaceutical company- a faceless abstraction, conveniently immune to embarrassment -and avoid the more delicate task of examining a society that teaches its children to measure their worth in reflections and whispers.
In cafés, the conversations were brisk and satisfied.
“It’s the medication,” one would say, stirring coffee with unnecessary violence.
“Of course,” another would reply. “Chemistry explains everything. People are merely containers.”
No one mentioned the quiet boy at the edge of the room who had learned, over years, that he existed primarily as a surface to be judged. No one mentioned the small daily humiliations, the jokes that were not jokes, the friendships that were transactions. These were inelegant causes. They could not be patented.
The pill became a villain of exquisite convenience. It was blamed with a kind of moral enthusiasm usually reserved for historical figures and bad architecture.
And then, in a detail so perfect it might have been invented by a bored novelist, it was revealed that even after all the swallowing, all the drying, all the chemical optimism and the skin had not, in fact, become perfect.
There were still blemishes.
This discovery produced a brief and uncomfortable silence. For if the pill had failed in its primary mission-to eliminate the visible flaw, how could it be trusted to have orchestrated the invisible one?
But the silence did not last. It never does.
Soon enough, the theory adapted, as theories do when they are loved. Perhaps, it was said, the tragedy lay precisely in this: that even after submitting to correction, the young remained imperfect. That the promise had been broken. That the mirror, traitor that it is, had refused to lie.
It was, undeniably, a more poetic version.
And so the town, and others like it, continued as before-cleaner, perhaps, in complexion, but no less troubled in spirit. The pill remained. The mirrors remained. The need to explain the unbearable with something small and manageable remained most of all.
As for the young, they went on examining their faces in bathroom light, searching for a clarity that was never going to be found there.
They would have been better advised to look elsewhere.
But elsewhere is always harder.