Dermaphoria (12 page)

“I want to be special.” You were crying. “You’re always gone and I know you drive for your job and I worry about you.”

“Don’t.”

“I want to. I thought maybe you would worry about me if I were going somewhere like you do. But you don’t call. I’ve never even been here before. You’ve never asked me to your house and you act like you don’t even live here. There’s nothing here and I don’t know if you’re telling me the truth. I just wanted to be special. I thought you liked me.”

“Dee, you’re special, please.”

“Fuck you. If I’m so special then tell me where you go for your job. Why does it look like you haven’t even moved in? What are you doing that’s so secret?”

“Nothing. Desiree, please stop shouting.”

“Quit saying that and tell me what you’re doing.” Your face was slick from crying. You wiped your nose with your fingers.

“I’ll get you a tissue.”

“I want to know.”

“You don’t lower your voice and I’m going to tape your goddamned mouth shut.”

“You touch me again and I’m calling the police.”

I owe you what happiness I had, in what little of my life I can recall. It stands to reason that I owe you my life but, at the very least, I owe you an explanation.

You would settle for nothing less than being completely woven into my life, which meant crossing threads with Hoyle. Segmenting you from my life with the chain was pursuing a mirage, perpetually within sight while perpetually out of reach. Hoyle would find you. You weren’t safe if you didn’t stay away from me, and you wouldn’t stay away from
me if you didn’t hate me. You couldn’t hate me if you weren’t afraid of me. I backed down once in the face of your anger, I couldn’t back down again.

Your eyes were wide and unblinking when I slapped my hand over your mouth, a strip of duct tape in my palm.

Your skin fades from mine like a dimming shadow. You’re gone. I open my eyes and the leaden, gray forever returns, crushing my room. I’m drying up, coming down. Ride it out. Reload. I know my rhythm.

My pants unbuttoned, my shirt folded, one shoe on but the other dangles from my fingers. A minute passes, a day. Was I taking my shoes off or putting them on? Look at my hand, remember looking at my hand, remember remembering looking at my hand. Follow the seconds backward. Another minute passes, another day. Was I taking my shoes off or putting them on?

I’m at the Firebird.

Your name is Desiree.

The last thing I remember, I’d covered your mouth and lashed your wrists with silver tape. I sat on your knees until you quit fighting me.

I was putting my shoes on, leaving to reload.

The Glass Stripper isn’t dancing. Come back later, says the Token Man. Every clock in the world is frozen. The tentative light of either sunrise or sunset mutes the glow and the shadows from the streetlamps.

*

Three jack and Cokes from Lou.

I shove a wad of bills to the Glass Stripper and ask for it all.

My memory was wrong. It was a game. Your pale, naked body slashed the dark, lashed to the legs of my furniture and tensed tight as a coiled snake but too frightened to move, a strip of gray across your eyes, your frozen inferno of copper-colored hair splayed across my wood floor.

The last thing you said was “How do I know I can trust you?”

“You don’t. That’s why it’s called trust.” I covered your mouth with tape after that, after I’d tied you down, not before.

I wrapped an insulator blanket around a drip flask, which I connected with glass pipe to an Erlenmeyer flask over a heating coil. With a liter of water between them, and the temperature kept at a constant, the pressure forced out a single, warm drop three feet above your bare crotch, one drop every five seconds, tap, tap, tap.

I sat on my floor in the dark and watched.

When the first drop hit, your legs stayed taut, a strip of sweat shining the length of both thighs, and you shook your head as though trying to look around you, trying to see something through your blindness. The second and third drops hit and you stopped moving, and the sweat shine circled your heaving belly and your legs tensed with each fresh smack from the flask. The liter could last five hours.

The sweat highlighting your body looked like firefly trails on your skin. After an hour, you were swollen pink and arching your hips in the dark, willing the tap to come faster. I walked barefoot, holding my
breath, and caught one of the drops in my palm. You squirmed, hungry for the liquid tickle and the anticipation made you swell even more and you moaned.

I caught nine drops in my palm and let the tenth one fall, then eight and let the last two fall, then seven. When I returned to a full ten drops in a row, your skin had flushed pink from head to toe, feverish and hot, and I began the cycle again. I widened the choke on the flask so the drops were fatter, came slower and hit harder. I caught a few more warm, falling drops and distorted your rhythm, left you thrashing above the growing wet circle below your ass.

The phone rang, the electronic chirp killing the mood and distracting you. I was expecting White.

“Go.”

I whispered while White spoke.

“I heard,” he said. “Tell me it’s under control.”

“It is. Do likewise.”

“About what?”

There were days, most of them, when I wanted to kill Manhattan White.

“About our Wicker Man.”

“I’m not following you.” He spoke with his mouth full. I heard a television in the background.

“Either follow me, or talk to me at work.”

“You mean you can’t talk.”

No, I can’t. My girlfriend’s naked, blindfolded, gagged and tied with duct tape on my living room floor.

“Exactly. Now, what’s his story? The rest of the employees are worried and it’s a distraction.”

“You setting me up to say something?” He was laughing.

“We had a problem,” I said, “and I called you for help. I need to
know what shape our problem is in.”

“There is no problem. You called us in to take care of the problem and we did.”

“Christ.” My mouth went dry. I’d held Pinstripe’s arm and helped him into the van. “Not like that. You can’t be serious.”

“Check your spine, boy.” The chewing stopped. I heard a door close, shutting out the television sound. “Stop deluding yourself. What did you think we were going to do? What do you think happens when you call us in an emergency? Problems sing, and they sing loud. You there?”

I’m here.

“Say you’re there.”

“Here.”

“Our recent episode. I don’t need to worry, do I?”

“It’s been wished into the cornfield,” I said. “Everything’s gone. I’m just keeping you up to speed.”

“And I appreciate that,” he said. “You’re doing a tremendous job. I should tell you that more often.”

“Right. Thanks.”

“And stop worrying. You did the right thing. And I know you always will.”

“Time,” I said. White hung up first.

I slid the phone away as your body seized up, the veins on your face and neck standing out until I thought they would burst. You were breathing so heavily through your nose I felt my own heart, like it was beating for the first time in hours. I stripped the tape from your lips and kissed you and you started sobbing out loud.

“I love you, Firefly. You are the center of the universe, to me. I won’t let anything happen to you.”

H
OYLE WANTED SKIN AND
H
OYLE’S WORD WAS FINAL
. W
HITE WANTED AN
explanation because White wanted to cover his ass. What was it made from, how and by whom, he wanted to know. You’re experimenting, White said, how did somebody beat us to it? Hoyle had made his directive. Otto and I were fish food if we didn’t deliver, our remains digested and served up on roadside diner specials, our skeletons in a chicken wire coffin.

More news reports were hitting the air and rebounding off middle-class fears and I knew, as did White, as did Hoyle, that for every account of somebody dropping dead or having convulsions in an emergency room, there were five hundred people who hadn’t, and every one of those people who didn’t had paid anywhere from five to twenty bucks for a hit.

“So you’re on top of this, right?” White kept putting me on hold, picking up, asking me questions and then cutting me off.

“You mean, did I see this coming? Or do you mean can I stop everything I’m doing now to chase this stuff down and save your ass with Hoyle?”

“I mean you need to call me in five days and tell me you know what it is and how to make it.”

“I’m not going to tell you that. I’m going to need a sample in order to isolate the active ingredient or ingredients, and see if I can identify
them. And if I can, that’s
if
, there’s the questions of synthesizing it.”

“Shouldn’t you be out tracking down this sample?”

“You’re joking, right? You don’t even have that?”

“Why would I?”

“I had this silly notion that maybe, just maybe, you had your hands on an actual dose or doses of the stuff that’s making headlines and that you want to start manufacturing. That’s just me.”

“Call me when you accomplish something.” White hung up.

The fruits of my labors surrounded me but I wanted nothing to do with them and they wanted nothing to do with me. The club was in a converted warehouse, and the linebacker-sized doormen sporting earpieces and clipboard were giving me the cold shoulder.

“Guest list on the right, everybody else on the left.”

Bribing them was a waste of time. I was older than most of the clubgoers and didn’t have safety pins, nail heads and stereo nobs hanging off my face. My utilitarian civilian wear tagged me as a cop and the irony wasn’t lost on me but I wasn’t feeling the humor, either. I’d be waiting in the non-guest-list line all night as they bumped gaggles of girls and teenage actors ahead of me.

I paid some girl in pigtails and glowing armbands sucking on a lollipop to hang with me in line.

“What’s your name?” I asked. She told me and I immediately forgot.

“You’re a cop, aren’t you?”

Neither my yes or no would change her mind. I was tempted to say yes, just to mess with her but I didn’t want that rumor started.

“No, I’m just not as fashionable as everybody else.”

She still thought I was a cop but, in the spirit of global unity and fighting the establishment, she accepted three hundred bucks to hang
on my arm when we reached the front of the line, flap her eyelashes at the doorman and make certain I got in with her.

I was going deaf from the music and the subwoofers were making me nauseous. The sound system half-ass jury-rigged through the warehouse, lights over the bar and strobes and fog machines—all the electricity made my brain tingle and I could hear the static, smell it and taste it on my tongue like licking a nine-volt battery, and I was parched.

I spent an hour lurking at the bar, looking more suspicious with each passing minute, wondering how to approach someone. I’d pressed thousands of pounds in tablets at Oz, but didn’t have the faintest clue how they were scattered at street level. For all I knew, I’d end up buying from some low-level ant who shared the same chain I did. Some kid approached me with no finesse whatsoever, and asked me for ecstacy.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m looking myself.”

I asked him if he knew anyone holding Cradle and he laughed. The answer was either no, or I was using the wrong name, or both. Things came too easily or not at all. Everyone who thought I wasn’t a cop thought I was some civilian they could dupe. As it turned out, I was wrong about witnessing the fruits of my labor. Most everything I managed to score was a crumbling, poorly pressed tablet with cheap dye that stained my palms. One after the next, I cracked tablets with my thumbnail and I smelled safron or lactose or too much of one thing or another. Everybody said, yeah, I know what you’re looking for, but they didn’t. They thought I was a mark. Back at the bar, some girl with a chrome pin through her tongue and eyes with pupils swollen wide from a battery of drugs leaned into me and said, “You want some Touch?”

I was barely keeping up with the name. I nodded, my instincts telling me I wouldn’t have to come back the next night. I wanted to get out of there. All that electricity was making me thirsty.

*

Otto hadn’t picked up the phone at Oz since I’d returned. I almost caved and abandoned callback protocol, just to get through and quit worrying. This is how people ended up in jail or dead. No, I had to call the main line at the lab, let it ring once, call back and let it ring twice. After ten minutes, I’d call the pay phone down the road, the one in the pristine glass booth at the phantom gas station where he’d be waiting. He wasn’t, and this was the beginning of my worry. People had to be on time, they had to be where and when they were assigned.

I’d left him behind because he wanted to hit Vegas, while I still needed to get back home. I pointed out he had no car and he said not to worry, so I didn’t, but I wish I had. I needed him now. Because of my impulsive attempt to douse your fury, I found myself with no way back to Oz since I’d left you the Galaxie to drive to your parents’ for the weekend.

“How you doin’?” he asked. He was a kid, a little younger than me, dressed more subdued than the other kids at the club, but still looking like an idiot with the fishing hat and wraparound glasses. The girl I’d met at the bar introduced us.

“Spectacular,” I said.

“You a cop?”

“No.”

“You affiliated with the law or law enforcement in any way?”

I could have broken his heart and told him that the question didn’t matter. I figured somebody else would, and that somebody would be carrying a set of cuffs and a microphone wired to a battery below his nutsack.

“No I’m not affiliated with the law or law enforcement in any way.”

“Aren’t you kind of old to be hanging out in a place like this?”

“I’ve got money,” I said, wanting to get this over with. “I’m looking for as many hits of Touch as you can get me, without getting yourself in trouble. Right now, cash. If you’ve got it, then talk to me, otherwise don’t waste my time. I’m buying. Just in case your microphone didn’t pick that up.”

“Easy,” he said, “I ain’t no cop. How much you looking for?”

“I’m looking for as much as I can get.” He lit up when he saw my load of bills. My last stop at Oz, I’d made another deposit to the bank, neatly stacking and ordering the bills sequentially, but I took out my salary before heading back home.

In a men’s room stall, he handed a piece of intricately folded Christmas wrapping and said, “This is all I’ve got with me, but there’s more. You ever tried it?”

I shook my head and opened the makeshift envelope.

“There’s nothing like it,” he said.

I let one of the tablets drop into my palm. It was expertly pressed with no markings and buffered to a glossy blue, the color of your eyes.

“Blue Fireflies,” he said, “or just ‘Fireflies.’”

Indeed, they were fireflies. I know, because I made them.