Dermaphoria (5 page)

M
EMORIES SWARM TO THE BRIGHT POINT BURNING IN THE DARK LIKE A SHELL
of dust around a dying star. I see patterns in the formation, gaps between the humming wings and antennae. The code in the patterns is as real as your skin pressed next to mine, and the code tells me I’m a boy again.

I’ve doubled my hit from yesterday, bracing myself to fall from the sky in flames when the rush wears off, but it’s worth it to feel your arms coiled around my chest, your nose and lips pressed to my neck. It’s worth it to feel the kiss of the universe surging from my stomach, up through my heart and down through my legs.

Jack was right, I can hear the current in the wires. I’ve unplugged the lamps and unscrewed every bulb, but the currents hum like an angry locust trapped in my ears. I can walk my room blindfolded, guided by the drone of the currents and the taste of rancid tin. I stuff a towel beneath my door and cover the wall sockets with pillows, but the sounds intrude the way a leaking pipe taps through my sleep.

I bought a piece of God, ground to dust and mixed with alcohol in a glass bottle the color of molasses. It said “Poison” above the red skull and crossbones, and “Arsenic” below.

“Rat shit.” Dad crouched on the floor of our cellar darkroom, pinching a bead like soft, brown clay between his thumb and forefinger.

I heard them during night, the scratch of their claws and the drag of their tails like leather ropes across our roof. We dripped arsenic onto sugar cubes and smeared seltzer tablets with peanut butter. We planted the bait in pie tins on our roof and in our cellar. Some rats ate the tainted sugar, others ate the peanut butter and ruptured from the inside, their innards swelling out of their dead, gaping mouths. I experimented on my own, my curiosity leapfrogging from combining different poisons to new methods of disguising bait. Arsenic, I learned, was an element, one of ninety-eight atoms composing the entire universe. God, I reasoned, was part arsenic. That part of God killed vermin and sent people into convulsions.

While other kids my age mowed lawns or delivered newspapers, I shoveled hairy lumps of meat from our rooftop and cellar. Storm season had arrived and Mom was terrified of being trapped underground with a single rat, dead or alive, much less a colony.

Dad taught me about the sirens. My job was to open every window in our house when they sounded, and to keep the outside entrance to the storm cellar unlocked. Each second between the sky’s flash, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, and the thunder equaled one mile between you and the wrath of God, and God was nothing if not faster than your change of heart. He could be flooding the next county or burning the next state then, six thousand, three thousand, one thousand, before you can slide the deadbolt shut and whisper for mercy, His dogs are on you.

You haven’t heard loud until you’ve heard God’s jackbooted angels kicking down the door to the sky, ripping yours from its hinges and your house from its foundation. Angels don’t knock or ask for paperwork. They cleave the biggest tree on your property down the middle, blow your fuses, smoke your television, radio and phone lines and leave you for dead.

Sometimes thunder sounded that wasn’t thunder, but a slamming door that made the windowpanes, drywall and picture frames shudder. Mom and Dad never shouted or raised their voices. Anger was a sin. If they didn’t shout, it wasn’t anger. Being drunk was a sin. Drinking was not. Having a drink doesn’t make you a drunk, Mom said. So they drank in secret, each of them hiding it from the other. Following an afternoon of clandestine drinking, they’d be not drunk and not fighting. They hissed through clenched teeth and flaring neck veins. The wrong question, Where’s Dad, What’s for dinner, Can I watch TV, tripped the tension wire. The explosion with a belt or wooden spoon wasn’t anger, but discipline, so it wasn’t a sin, either.

The force and volume of routine activity marked the tension, whether food was served or slapped onto plates, dishes stacked or dishes dropped. The tapping and scraping of silverware were the only sounds during a wordless meal. Their rage was as tangible as a change in the weather. Between the clatter of the coffeepot and the descending silence I counted, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, before a door slammed or a plate exploded without a word. I glazed shattered windowpanes, spackled walls and hung doors without being asked, complicit in whitewashing the quiet hate crushing our house.

In the red glow of the storm cellar, Dad and I heard the sirens. I ran upstairs, opened the windows and grabbed my radio. Dad was gone when I returned. I heaved open the doors leading outside, hail stinging my face and my ears popping, calling for Dad. My voice was a whisper buried in the roar, the sound of a train engine all around me.

Dad stood, snapping pictures beside the pear tree in our yard, ignoring the sirens, the wind, hail and sound of the roaring train. In the distance, a chunk of the sky came loose and fell groundward, dragging the rest of the sky behind. It hit the earth like an enormous black spike, and I saw a house vanish in a puff of splinters. The black spike twisted
and squirmed, the sky fighting to pull it back into place. It fought back. It threw mailboxes, dogs and doors, anything and everything, to keep hold of the ground. Dad finally waved me downstairs, then followed.

We crouched in our red and ratless storm cellar darkroom while God, all of God’s dogs and God’s biggest, fiercest angels kicked and screamed from outside. They tore the inside of our house to pieces and threatened to crush the house itself. They kicked in the doors, snapping them from their frames. They hammered at the rusty deadbolt on the outside entrance and they howled and shrieked at us to open up, raining concrete dust onto our heads, spitting hail through the cracks in our basement. The red lights flared on, then off, then exploded in a rain of white sparks. We couldn’t hear our own voices over their screaming but we never moved, we never let them in.

D
EBRIS RAINS INTO MY EYES
. I
TRY TO PICK THEM CLEAN BUT FIND NOTHING.

The house isn’t shaking and God isn’t kicking the door down. I’m at the Firebird. The shower of dirt is a hive of phantom bugs picking at my skin with a million invisible mandibles. Someone swapped my skull for another during the night. It’s too big for my face, but too tight for my brain. The bones in my shoulders, elbows and knees vibrate within my muscles like rusty hinges. I drink from the tap until my stomach can’t hold any more, but my throat is still packed with cotton, my bandages stuffed with sawdust.

Shaving might as well be eye surgery, my hands quivering like they are. Something darts across my bare foot. Tiny claws and a pink leather tail. Spinal chills kick the phantom mandibles into overdrive. My hand slips and my razor drops into the sink, a layer of spent foam, wet stubble and fresh blood.

They’ve chewed through the damp baseboard beneath the sink. I grab a pair of dirty socks and stuff one into the rat hole and mop my bloody chin with the other.

Jack and the Beanstalk sit together like an old couple. Jack reads a newspaper. Beanstalk sits transfixed by the television static, a pair of headphones clamped to his ears.

“You’re in love, aren’t you?” Jack doesn’t look up from his paper.

I dig change from my pockets for the coffee machine. Maybe Jack catches me staring at his friend.

“He hasn’t spoken since Miles Davis died,” he says.

The coffee machine drones like an earth mover.

“You can’t be troubled,” says Jack. “I understand.”

A cardboard specimen cup drops from the chute, followed by a hot trickle.

“Did you find Desiree?” His paper is years out of date. The front page announces a U.S.-launched missile attack against Libya.

“Yeah, thanks.”

“And you’re in love. Am I right or not?”

“Sure. Sort of.”

“Of course you are. You reek of it.” He folds his newspaper, slowly and deliberately, so someone else can read about the manhunt for Gadhafi.

“It’s beautiful,” he says, “every time is like the first. There’s nothing like it.”

“Right.”

“And the currents?” The same patronizing, metronome voice. “Are they a menace, or simply a nuisance?”

The coffee tastes like dishwater boiled in a discarded tire.

“You don’t realize what’s inside the walls until you can hear it,” Jack says. “Miles of wire, humming with current. Power lines, transformers, radio waves, microwaves, radar. Do you have any metal fillings?”

“I don’t know, I haven’t checked.”

“Keep your vigil or those transmissions unravel inside your ears. You hear every phone conversation, talk show and radio jingle all at the same time and you can’t turn them off. It’s like being a god, omniscient and insane, both at once. That kind of love will drive you mad.”

“I’ll be careful.”

“Careful is for tourists. You’re trespassing on too late. You’ve already said you’re in love.”

“I’ll pick up some foil, make a beanie. Tell me your hat size and I’ll kick one your way. Will that help?”

“No, it will not. Nor will your sarcasm and lack of courtesy.”

“I need to get going.”

“I’m trying to help you, 621. Anything you haven’t remembered yet, you forgot for a reason. Cut her loose. The heartache will be nothing compared to the noise in your head, if you do it now.”

I’m out the door when he shouts, “I’m the only friend you’ve got.”

What they call a gown is a paper bib the color of toilet cleaner that hangs to my knees. The first nurse weighs me, the second takes my blood pressure and a third listens to my heart. The fourth asks about the medicines I’m supposed to be taking but haven’t been. I imagine they build igloos or chisel ice sculptures between patients, and they mark the same clipboard and say the doctor will be with me soon. Two minutes each, over two hours.

A girl lies opposite me, a tube in her arm and another in her nose. The bandages around her head dip to cover her left eye. A woman sits with her beside a small beeping box and holds her hand. Near a fire extinguisher lies a man on a gurney. He is either homeless or dead, or both. Blood from his face and chest soaks through the sheets, growing darker and duller as I watch. They’ll have to be torn from his skin.

We’re in full view of the hospital staff, our bandages, blood and paper bibs, yet we’re invisible. The great antidrama of life among the stucco hives in the hills above the Firebird unfolds while we wait. Someone got engaged or spent the weekend away at a wedding, or a funeral. Someone lost money on a game, colored her hair, got his car
out of impound or got laid. Someone applied to graduate school or drank too much. The mundane details both impossible and unreal compared to my last forty-eight hours.

The Hotel Firebird stinks with the fumes of humanity packed into a brick box, churning out piss, sweat, cum and blood, the liquid of living things. Houses the color of prosthetic limbs, nestled within the calibrated green hills of Shady Pointe, filter and flush that cocktail of stench with extreme prejudice. The odorless nothing I smelled in those hills and at the mall was nothing, neither foul nor antiseptic, but nothing nonetheless. I know, because the smell of nothing is all around here. Every measure is taken to discharge and disguise the smells and secretions of the living struggling for life. Death waits, bobbing in a sealed jar of formaldehyde as half the life here is half naked and wholly alone, ignored by the other half wearing pale green scrubs and living in muted brown homes.

Dr. Stanley examines me without making eye contact. He speaks to the clipboard or to my bandages.

“I see you’re in much better shape than when I last saw you.” He’s four years older than me, at most. His Adam’s apple distends like a mop handle pushing through the back of his neck.

“How are you feeling?”

“I’m cold.”

There’s a curtain to my left, two men talking behind it. One uses his voice for the first time since Death sang him to sleep and a medic slapped him awake, exhuming his rusted throat from the mud and weeds. The voice asks to be discharged.

“It says here your temperature is normal.” Dr. Stanley reads from the communal clipboard. “Fever or chills could be a signal of complications. How long have you been feeling cold?”

“Since I’ve been sitting here in my underwear waiting for you.”

He doesn’t say anything. His Adam’s apple plunges the length of his neck when he swallows.

An orderly steps from behind the curtain. He’s enormous, his skin so dark it shines blue where the light hits it. He fills a paper cup from a drinking fountain and says to the voice, “You’ll be discharged following an interview with another doctor.” The voice says, “It was an accident, I don’t need to see another doctor.”

Dr. Stanley inspects my bandages.

“They itch,” I tell him, “and I’m coughing a lot.”

“There’s early signs of infection,” he says. “That’s not good. After we redress these, I’m putting you on a stronger antibiotic regimen.”

“I’m on one now?”

“That might be the problem. Are you getting enough liquids?”

“What’s enough?”

“Eric, you’re risking a rejection of the skin grafts. Lay off the alcohol, drink more water. Burns like this one disrupt the fluid balance in your tissue. Go easy on yourself. How are you otherwise? Is your memory improving?”

“Some. Hard to say.”

Big nurse says to the voice, “It’s not up to me. We have to report this sort of thing. Sit tight.”

The voice asks for coffee.

Dr. Stanley writes me a scrip for steroids, a fresh battery of antibiotics and painkillers.

Mirrored blisters swell from the ceiling where the cameras hide. I didn’t see them the other day. I stare too long at the overhead chrome, frozen midboil, and the room goes liquid. The gray bucket mop man’s roiling floor tiles throw my footing and I knock a display to the floor, a
chaotic collage of naked women and tropical beaches, a fusion of a travel brochure and medical textbook.

“You need some help?”

I’ve disturbed the Token Man.

“I was here yesterday.”

“Let me punch your card. Your tenth show is free.”

I have no idea what he’s talking about.

“I didn’t get a card.”

The Token Man’s shirt could have come from a queen-sized bedsheet. He pauses in the split moment before giving me the business end of whatever problem solver he’s stashed beneath the counter. His eyes are on me like sniper dots and the chrome blisters log my every twitch. Antennae tickle my neck and ears. At first, I think it’s sweat until the bugs lose their grip and drop down my shirt and struggle to climb out the top of my jeans. I stoop to gather the video boxes, to keep from slapping myself in a frenzy.

“Don’t worry about ’em,” he says.

“It’s no problem.”

“Leave ’em alone.” He thinks I’m out of my head, but he won’t throw me out. He knows I’ve got money.

“Is Desiree working?”

“Must be, if you’re here.” He exchanges twenty dollars for four dollars in tokens. “Booth four.”

The pinpoint of green light from the pony ride coin box lights booth number four. I drop a token into the box and pull my cash as the looking glass slides open.

“You pull your piece, I pull mine.”

Anslinger stands framed and backlit in the pink window with his
silver screen slicked-back hair and pinstripe orchid tie. His dress shirt is the same liquid amber of his eyes, his suit a deep green verging on black, with a camel hair coat draped over his arm.

“Come now,” he says. “I haven’t drawn my gun in two years. You pull anything out and I will shoot you in the belt buckle. Now, what are you doing here?”

The money is a soiled sock in my hand. I want to shrink down and crawl into a crack but not here, not these cracks.

“The doctor needs a sperm sample, but the magazines at the hospital weren’t doing it for me. When did you start working here?”

“When did you decide to stop cooperating?” he asks.

“The cockroaches tell you that? You shouldn’t listen to them. They’re pissed because I’m neat freak. I moved into that shit-hole room and swept up the crack pipes and bread crumbs. I killed one of them, so the whole colony’s got it in for me. It’s your colony, so you already know that.”

“Where you been, Eric? I’ve been hearing crickets on my voice mail for two days.”

“You know exactly where I’ve been. Your spies are in my room and crawling through my clothes.”

“That’s not how I work,” says Anslinger. “I don’t come to you. You come to me.”

“What luck. I just wandered into your office. Or is this where your daughter works?”

Anslinger goes ice water on me, his warm eyes freezing to glass. He’s neither angry nor amused. He stares at the center of my forehead, and there’s nothing behind it that’s any good to him.

“Mention my daughter again.”

The pony box timer counts down with the temperature.

“Go on. Mention my daughter.”

Voices seep through the walls, moaning with pure pleasure but sounding like near death, obscenities serving as endearments.

“Get a magazine,” Anslinger shouts, and hammers the widow to his left.

I hear the door bolt open, the hasty departure of a frustrated patron.

“I spoke with your lawyer,” he says.

“So you know that I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

“I know you’re supposed to be cooperating. But he hasn’t heard from you, either. In a few days, he’s getting a set of binders, all of them thicker than the Old Testament. Every speck of glass we found within a hundred miles of the burn will be listed. We’ve run toxicity reports on the soil and groundwater. Everything. It’s on you. The registration for your car listed the burn site as your address. But guess who owns the place? Guess who’s legally responsible for what went down there?”

Maybe White, maybe not.

“We don’t know, either,” he says. “The deed is held by a limited liability company, represented by a law firm with a private mailbox address in Nevada. The paper trail fades out somewhere in the Cayman Islands.”

“I’m not hiding. I’m trying to remember. I need time.”

“Once the Grand Jury reaches a decision, it’s too late to make an offer. Tell me something useful. Or tell Morell.”

“What if my former employers don’t want me to talk?”

“So you do have employers?”

Shit.

“You’ve been threatened?” Like he’s asking about my paper cut.

“I’m saying what if.”

“If you tell us who threatened you, we know who you work for.” Anslinger slips into his camel hair coat. “And since you told us that, it means you’re cooperating. We’ll want to protect you.”

“You got a card?”

“No.”

The pony box counts beeps and booth number four goes dark. My heart slows down, my hands cease their cricket twitching. I can’t leave, yet.

I drop another token into the box and the Glass Stripper is back, a blow-up sex doll, carnival prize dancing as though the window never opened. Had Anslinger shot me through the face, she’d dance for my bleeding corpse just the same. I slip her the money and she presses her palm against the glass like she’s visiting me in prison. She holds her splayed fingers against the window while the numbers tick down. I press my palm in return to her jailhouse greeting and swallow the burning in my throat. It’s when I know she sees me I want her the most. The lights go out.

The Glass Stripper waves, tickling the air with her fingertips. The slow guillotine descent of the window ends with a bindle in the tip slot. She remembers me.

Please don’t be mad at me, Desiree.