‘Being burned is like suddenly losing your identity.’ : A Face in the Darkness

The light in Mark Basham’s apartment was dim, the flattened rays of an afternoon sun filtered through louvered shades. Even so, it was not difficult to see the scars left on his face from a fire that almost killed him a dozen years ago, or the fingerless hands he tried unconsciously to keep out of sight.

Neither the pale light nor the skin grafts of a hundred operations could conceal the terrible things flames had done to him as a child in the small Kentucky town where he was born.

“Being burned,” he said in hushed, almost whispery tones, “is like suddenly losing your identity. One moment your face is there, the next moment it’s gone.”

Photographs of the face that no longer exists, the Mark Basham that disappeared in a flash of heat, hung on two nearby walls, to remind him in duplicate of the features that had once been his. The photographs stamped the room with a dreadful reality.

Mark sat tucked in a corner of the couch that was one of the few pieces of furniture in the apartment, as though by sitting in shadow he was seeking even deeper anonymity in an already lightless environment.

We talked about the face that the fire had left him.

“The doctor wouldn’t let me look in a mirror when they took the bandages off,” he said. “But I saw myself reflected in the plastic above my bed, and I cried. It didn’t seem real.”

He was 12 when it happened. Mark’s stepfather was using gasoline to remove glue from the floor of a house they had just rented. The glue had been used to hold carpeting down. The stepfather left the room to light a cigarette. There was an explosion . . . .

“I remember trying to climb out a window over a clothes dryer. The dryer was hot and I fell off. It was like I was moving in slow motion. When I finally got out, everything speeded up. I was burned black. There was no pain then. Just heat, then chills. The pain came later.”

Mark was burned over most of his body. His mother and brother died in the fire. His stepfather disappeared. He hasn’t seen him since.

Today, Mark is a tall, slim 24. His face scars are muted but apparent. Only thumbs remain on each hand.

He telephoned me first not to talk specifically about the fire but to tell me about an RTD driver who had ordered him off a bus because he didn’t want to look at Mark.

We discussed briefly what he called “my disfigurement,” and the pain the disfigurement was causing him in a society that places high priority on appearance.

“The bus driver wanted me where he couldn’t see me,” Mark told me at the time. “He wanted me out of the way. He said when he saw me at a bus stop, he wasn’t going to stop.”

I offered to go to Mark’s home and talk with him about it. He declined. He wanted a telephone interview. He didn’t want me to see him. I asked him to think about it, and he said he would.

That was a year ago. I didn’t hear from him again until last week. This time a doughnut shop had fired him “because of the way I look.” He invited me to his apartment.

“I don’t go around with a chip on my shoulder,” he said, when I suggested that might be his problem. “People don’t like to look at me. That’s a fact and it hurts.

“Sometimes teen-agers will drive by and holler ‘Hey, Freddie!’ He was the monster in the movie ‘Nightmare on Elm Street.’ Another bus driver thought I had AIDs and didn’t want me to breathe on him. People will sometimes just stop and stare.”

He has difficulty finding work because of the way he looks. He lives on Social Security checks. His housing is subsidized. Sometimes during the day he visits a nearby center for homeless people with mental problems. He feels comfortable with them.

Mark vacillates between hope for the future and utter despair. He denies nightmares, then discusses them. He claims not to recall much of the fire, then describes it in vivid detail.

“I haven’t had a fair shake in life. I want to be around others to let them know that people like me exist. I want a job that will take me out in the open.”

But then he thinks about the 100 skin grafts and the 20 sessions of reconstructive surgery he has undergone and all the surgery that lies ahead.

“Looking back, I would have rather died than to go through all that. I don’t want to go through it again. Just recently I asked a doctor to put me to sleep. I can’t take the pain anymore . . . . “

We talked into the early evening, until the light inside the apartment had grown even dimmer and the photographs of the other Mark merged into the shadows. I asked what I could do for him, and he said, “Help me find work.” I promised to try.

As he walked me to the door, we stopped to look closely at one of his pre-fire pictures. Mark stared at it for a long time and finally said there was one thing about the fire that he could be grateful for. It had left him only stubs for ears.

He looked at me straight-on for the first time and said, “I never did like my ears.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.