the pain master
by Lior Locher
The Pain Master sits opposite you like some satiated mob boss. You pushed too far again, and now you’re back there. And he’s back, too, always. The customary reckoning. Neutral face, clean-shaven. Eyebrows neat, hair lined up like a platoon. He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t have to. You both know the deal. That deal he never explained, but by now it’s obvious. His actions are loud enough. You’ve been through this so many times. And it’s only Tuesday.
No point in eye contact or in avoiding it. What will happen will happen. Like it always does. You focus on your breathing, try to vary it, cyclical and anticyclical with the waves of pain. You call that surfing, your favourite sport. Your only sport. On most days, breathwork is the last thing that fully stays yours before pain takes that too. Before he takes over completely and his rhythm becomes yours.
Playing with your breath gives you the illusion of controlling something. It passes the time until the onslaught dies down, or until you fall asleep for a bit. It’s merciful to be able to take parts of you off the playing field for a bit so they can rest.
His presence lingers when he’s not sitting there, but he never fully leaves. It’s like he can watch your every move, everything you try to do in your body, in your mind. There’s nowhere to go where he wouldn’t also get to. You wake up and face the new pain with the new strength. You never win. It’s not a winnable game, in the classical sense. And yet you try. You have to keep on breathing so might as well.
Infinite games they call them in game theory, the games you win by staying in them. It’s not what you thought winning would feel like. Your life isn’t anything like what you thought it would feel like. The lows used to come with highs at the same amplitude, but the Pain Master broke the dial and now it all plays out in the basement.
He always comes back, and then sits there again, doing his thing that predictably crushes the thing you were just trying to do. You negotiate, you’ll be good this time if he could please leave you alone a bit more, and sometimes it works, and then you believe that you’ve cracked it. That you found a way to live now. You do a thing, with a predictable, favourable outcome. And then it collapses again, for no reason, or no reason you’d be able to recognize.
And he’s back, immaculately dressed, not a stain on his cuffs as he obliterates the rest of your day and the one after that. No sleep this time. Consciousness plugged in fully. He forces you to watch, to be fully in it, every cell of your body, in each excruciating minute. Body and mind are so connected. And for the millionth time, you wish they weren’t, or not quite as much. You try to protect the images in your head, the last place where hope lives. These images are so fragile. And then pain comes and rips each of them out by the root and the bare white walls hurt the eyes you can’t close.
Loss is pain. Grief is pain. Anger is pain.
As this wave dies down you hurl insults at him. You weren’t finished yet, with that particular morsel of life. That was meant to go somewhere. You still had plans with that. You shout abuse, you throw anger, and it ricochets into pain that crushes back into you. His face doesn’t move, the Mona-Lisa-esque smile. Never nasty. Never not there. Never over. There are breaks sometimes, and sometimes they are longer, long enough for you to catch hope. To make a plan. To dream. To do a thing. To then want to do the thing again as it made you feel so alive. To overdo that thing because you can, that day. What is this life?
You’re pretty sure the Pain Master won’t actually kill you, because where’s the fun in that. You need that body so the pain has somewhere to go, and you need the mind to bear witness, to keep inventing new games so pain can destroy them. And your most teenage self knows full well if there’s punishment it better be worth it, so you keep going until you can’t and he finds you again and plucks you right from the middle of another slice of life you can’t hold onto.
In this elaborate hostage situation, the prison yard is a different size each day. Sometimes it stretches all the way to the airport and into another country and you look hot and wear a suit and talk smart and people applaud, but you’re never free and you know it too. You can’t escape your body, because your mind needs somewhere to live in. And Pain is the landlord and there’s always rent due and it’s too damn high.
You negotiate again, knowing full well that at the very end of this, one of you will walk free, and it won’t be you. On a bad day, a properly bad day, you briefly consider surrendering completely. One last pain, the pain to end all pains, and then there will be peace.
Surrender is seductive, just give in, like pain forces you to already anyway. Let it roll all over you, as you withdraw into parts of yourself that then get run over as well, until it all stops. Except it doesn’t. There is always breath, one more breath, oh how it refuses to go. You need energy you don’t have, energy to stop it, and energy to continue. There’s a fragment of an image, a little slice of life that you wolf down before pain can get to it. You stuff your face with it with both hands. Juice dripping down your elbows, staining the carpet. Proving you’re still here, that you’re winning at life at least for a few seconds. This time.
Photo of Lior Locher
BIO: Lior Locher is a former journalist turned writer. After having lived in 6 countries on 4 continents and a brief spot of homelessness, they are now based at the English seaside. They are trained as a coach and therapist and have published 2 books on personal growth. Lior studied writing at Grub Street (Boston), Gotham (New York) and at the Irish Writers Centre (Dublin). They are interested in people's inner dynamics and in relationships between people. and how context shapes who we are and how we change. That also flows into their writing.