Dermaphoria Page 2

  “Nothing. I swear, my mind’s a blank.”

  “Who’s Desiree?”

  Your name numbs me like an animal dart and drops my thoughts in their tracks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You keep saying that. You’re not helping. ‘Desiree. Goddamn you, Desiree.’” He reads from a photocopy, his voice monotone. “Ring any bells?”

  My pulse races and I feel squirming beneath my bandages like a swarm of larvae is hatching under my grafts. There isn’t a damned thing I can do except wait for them to scar.

  “You’ve got a week, then, maybe,” he says, repacking his files. “Your best move is to make an offer of cooperation. I need to hand them as much information as you can give me, who you were working for, your distributors, your suppliers, everything. Otherwise, get used to your surroundings for the next couple of decades. If I can’t make them an offer before your trial, nothing you remember once the trial starts will help.” As he stands up he says, “Snap out of it,” then drops a business card into my lap. “I’ll be in touch.”

  “Hang on,” I say, then I’m blank. The thought flutters out, circles the overhead light in a long silence before it flies back into my head.

  “Where will I go when I’m out?”

  He’s quiet. I stare down at my forearm. The bandages on my back are damp from the seepage through the mesh beneath them. For a moment, I forget I’m not alone in my cell.

  “I look like a travel agent to you?” He leans into my face. “You see a name tag on me? There a poster of the Caribbean on the wall?” He’s barking too quickly for me to say anything and it hurts to shake my head so I stare at my forearm again.

  “You’ve got a good chunk of cash with your property envelope. I’m sure you’ll get by, just don’t be too frugal. Enjoy your five days of freedom.”

  He raps on my cell door and the noise makes me twitch. A buzzer sounds and the door swings open.

  “Check my card,” he says, stepping out. “The name is ‘Morell.’ That’s me, since you didn’t ask. In the future, make sure you know who you’re talking to. Call me when you settle in somewhere.”

  The guard slams my cell door shut and my heart skips. Morell’s footsteps recede into the din of buzzing doors that sound like the electric flies in my head swarming to the surging lights of my memory. They’re tireless, but if I let them exhaust themselves, they might collapse into a pattern, forming some code in their scattered husks. I stare at my hands for an hour, hoping for a read on my age. If the steel mirror above the toilet is accurate, I’m a human blur. My mug shot is the foggy outline of a nondescript face.

  A nightstick thunderclap against my cell door jolts me out of my knuckle and mirror speculation. A paper plate wrapped in cellophane slides through a waist-level opening. Four fish sticks, a biscuit, a plastic fruit cup and a carton of juice, shrink-wrapped at room temperature. The odor slaps me like the ass end of a summer garbage truck when I tear the plastic away. I flush the fish sticks and breathe into the crook of my elbow until my dry heaves stop. The biscuit and warm juice calm my stomach.

  I stare at the white walls and try to remember something beyond the preceding seconds spent staring at the infinite white cement in front of me and the cement staring back. I log those seconds into my diary and hope for more.

  three

  THE SCHNAUZER BET IT ALL ON A BLUFF BUT THE BULLDOG ISN’T FALLING FOR it. The terrier and the Doberman have folded and all four act like they don’t notice me, sitting stock still so I won’t notice them. They come down from the walls, along with the black velvet clowns. I run my fingers over the unfaded patches of wallpaper, feeling for holes and tapping for hollow spots, checking the picture frames, lightbulbs, lamp stand, air vents, bed frame and night table for wires. I square off with the big-eyed, frowning circus hobos, scanning for microphones and microlenses. I plug the lamp in eight times, testing for juice socket by socket. Two come up dead. I unscrew the faceplates with a dime but find nothing.

  My new cell is room 621 at the Hotel Firebird, a place too much like jail for me to believe I’m out. The hotel warden wears a T-shirt declaring his Vietnam-veteran status and conducts his business through a till inside a chain-link enclosure. Behind him, a massive ring of keys hangs from a nail above a stained baseball bat with “911” carved along its side. Above a small television, a sign reads: “No Visitors After 10 pm, No Loitering in Front, No Change for Vending Machines, Cash Only, No Exceptions.”

  The residents are a mixture of men and women, recovering and relapsing addicts, and those squarely between either distinction. Some of the doors never open, others never close, the dealers and prostitutes working 24-7 for a piece of business or a piece of a mark, some runaway fresh from the bus station. The hallway lights have burned out; I navigate by the blue glow humming from beneath the doors.

  My room has a sink in the corner, a bed, a night table and a small desk with a black-and-white television, a Bible, a deck of cards, a bar of soap, and the stench of every other resident who ignored the soap. Unlike jail, it has a window with a view of the street below. I open the window to let the fresh air in and the human stink out. Looking down to the sidewalk three stories beneath me, I hear an impulse whisper, “jump.” I stand still, let my arms go slack to hear the whisper again, then pull myself inside.

  I sit on my bed with a game of solitaire spread in front of me. I know the rules but don’t remember learning them. The columns of faces and numbers make my head hurt and my bandages itch with static. My notebook awaits the next lucid replay of forgotten seconds, which have felt seconds away for the last hour. A slam of thunder sends the seven of clubs flying. My heart pounds heat to my bandages and blood flares into my new skin. With no forewarning footfalls, a polite knock is a pounding fist is a door crashing to the floor amid airborne hinges and frame splinters, storm troopers storming in from the dark, black armored bugmen aiming laser-guided stingers at my chest, awaiting the queen’s orders over the wires lodged in their ears.

  This time, it’s only a knock. I’m face to face with a pair of Firebird residents who could just as easily need to borrow my soap as kill me.

  “Do you have a tapeworm?” His words are soft, the beats measured like the pendulum swing of a pocket watch.

  “No. Why would I?”

  “Something you ate,” he says. His eyes meet the air to the left of mine as though he’s reading from cards over my shoulder. “Or the Man has you by the short hair of your balls. Or you’re on his payroll.”

  He dips his chin toward his companion, a lanky stalk of a man over six feet with a tangle of greasy hair hanging below his shoulders. His face is the color of a nicotine stain and he has the blank, bloodless eyes of an old photograph, eyes held too still for too long and frozen onto a silver plate the instant after the flash pan sucked the soul from behind them.

  “He can smell tapeworms. He thinks you might be a carrier. Happens sometimes with a new resident.”

  His companion remains silent. He wears a knee-length black raincoat, oblivious to the evening heat. He could be stretched across a set of crossbeams in a cornfield as easily as he could be flesh and blood.

  “Your friend is wrong.”

  I start to close the door when he says, “My name’s Jack.” He extends his hand through the opening and his beefy grip swallows mine whole. His palm is slippery with the accumulated grime of a life spent neither working nor washing. When he lets go, his companion has stepped into my room and Jack follows.

  His silent friend hisses through clenched teeth and slices a finger across his throat, Quiet. He turns my television on to a dead channel and a canopy of white static deafens any long-range listening. The hissing flickerstorm on-screen envelops me. My heart swells as though I’m listening to an orchestra.

  “It’s like music,” says Jack. “The static is hundreds of millions of years old. It’s been flying through space since before time. Remnants of the big bang are strains from the symphony at the beginning of the universe.” He smiles
and says, “I like to read,” then untucks his shirt. “I’m going to show you I’m clean. No tapeworm. No one is listening.”

  “I don’t care. You need to get out.”

  “If you don’t care, then you are most definitely wired.”

  Jack hikes up his shirt and shows me his bare torso in a full turn. Something terrible was happening to the Virgin of Guadalupe. She’d been rendered in bruise-colored ink, wrapped around Jack’s ribs, but her face, body and aura were shredded by a buckshot blast of sores like cigarette burns, some healed to scabs like dots of rust, the rest abscessed and wet, ringed by swollen red stains of infected skin.

  His friend does the same. He hangs his coat on my doorknob and lifts his shirt for a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of his chest and back, a scattering of identical sores across both. The television light behind him glows through his skin like sunlight through a paper window screen. Veins and arteries form a webwork beneath the silhouette of his ribs. The murky pulsing of his heart throbs between dull clouds of lung tissue. He drops his shirt and his shadow on the floor darkens back into place.

  “What happened to you guys?”

  “Bugs. They’re everywhere.”

  Their rooms are infested. They’re being eaten alive but asking about tapeworms. Another memory struggles to take solid form but mudslides apart.

  “Well?” Jack is waiting. I lift my shirt and turn a full circle.

  “I still don’t know what you mean,” I tell him.

  “People come here to go straight. They won’t let us. New residents are sometimes wired with a tapeworm. They move in, ask around for this or that, or maybe someone offers the wrong thing and the Man hears all of it. And somebody goes right back inside. But you’re clean.”

  “I just got out of jail.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “Fire.”

  “Keep clean and covered. Bugs will lay eggs if they get underneath. Give us a urine sample.”

  On cue, his companion produces an empty coffee cup. I ask him if he’s trying to pass a test.

  “No, but somebody, somewhere, is. I connect people with what they want. How about you?”

  “I OD’d the same time I got burned.”

  “Things haven’t been going well for you, then?”

  “I’m saying I’m not clean. I piss in there and somebody gets violated back to jail, I promise you.”

  “Then give us a cigarette.”

  “I don’t smoke.”

  “Five dollars.”

  “What for?”

  He surveys my room.

  “Because you have it.”

  The warden must have rented me one of the Firebird’s nicer rooms. It has pictures and a sink.

  “And what do I get?”

  “You understand, now,” Jack says. “Perhaps I can help. What are you looking for?”

  “Everything I’ve done before I woke up in jail. I’ll piss into any cup, anytime, and pay you ten bucks for your trouble, if you can deliver. If you can’t, get out of here.”

  “That’s hardly necessary,” he says as though talking in his sleep. “I come here to say hello. I introduce myself and show you I’m on the level. I give you some words of caution. I ask you for a favor, as a friend, and you abandon all courtesy with me. Did I hit you?”

  “Take a walk. Leave.”

  “Did I hit you? Did I take your memory?”

  “Now.” They’re not moving. “The fuck you waiting for?”

  “You said ten dollars to know everything you’ve done. We had an agreement. I told you, I’m on the level.”

  One minute passes, then another. No sound but the television hissing. Jack is oblivious to my belligerence, his companion to everything else. The absence of everything prior to the last day succumbs to curiosity and I pay him. Beanpole scribbles into a notebook from his pocket. He tears the page loose and hands it to me.

  “There you are,” Jack says. “There’s a theater downtown. You need to go there.”

  “Which theater?”

  “Twenty blocks from our front door, you’ll see it. Next to a bar called Ford’s. Go inside and you’ll get your memory back. Unplug everything when you return. You can hear the electricity and it’s unsettling. If there’s anything else I can do to make your stay at the Firebird more pleasant, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Godspeed.”

  Beanpole’s penmanship is flawless:

  Speak to the Token Man. Ask for Desiree.

  four

  JAIL MOVES WITH ME, AN INVISIBLE BOX SURROUNDING MY EVERY STEP WITH every tick of the clock. A Mexican man in a brown jacket and a cowboy hat, who hasn’t smoked in five blocks, lights a cigarette. A woman waiting at a bus stop refolds a newspaper she hasn’t been reading. Someone passes me and I count, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, before I look back. If they’re not watching me, they’re watching me. Everyone is the Umbrella Man and he is everyone. Every cough, sneeze, smile and wave means both everything and nothing. The signals are everywhere .

  Inside the theater—XXX 24 HOUR LIVE NUDE GIRLS XXX—the sign above a glass cabinet of cast latex body parts reads, “See the Token Man for Change.” At the far end of an aisle, beyond row after row of yellow, pink and orange video boxes with nude women smiling for a game show but posing for a doctor, sits the Token Man, an obese ingot of flesh with shiny Elvis hair and a silk shirt covered with palm trees and parrots.

  “Something I can help you with?”

  “I need change.”

  “What kind?”

  “I need them to stop following me.”

  The Token Man says nothing. He wears a thick, gold rope around his neck and a gold wristwatch the size of a hubcap.

  “I’m here for Desiree.” Trying to break the silence, I’ve only made it longer. The Token Man crosses his arms, the chair beneath him creaking from the slight shift in his weight.

  “And who said you’d find Desiree here?”

  “Jack and the Beanstalk told me.”

  After another leaden half-minute passes. He asks for twenty dollars in exchange for four brass coins, each stamped with “XXX” on one side, “$1.00” on the other. I’m about to ask for the rest of my money, but the Token Man doesn’t look willing to negotiate. If he’s charging his own separate toll across the river to Desiree, I won’t negotiate, either.

  “Booth number four,” he says.

  A buzzer sounds and I push through a turnstile behind him.

  Booth number four is dark and smells like semen, body odor, pine disinfectant and smoke. I try not to breathe through my nose, and stretch the cuff of my sweatshirt over my bare hand as I slide the latch behind me. I feed a token to a coin meter inside, like the kind hooked to an electric pony outside the supermarket, and a window slides open, flooding booth number four with light from a pink room on the other side.

  A topless dancer appears, hips and ribs stretching through her skin and a cigarette hanging from her candy red lips, and she moves, oblivious to the dull rhythm pulsing overhead. She’s surrounded by lonely men, consumed with their own want, and she knows it. Their wanting hits the glass while her liquid candy smile passes right through. She slips off her panties as though picking her teeth.

  “Desiree?”

  “You got something for me, baby?”

  There’s a piece of paper—Tips—taped beside a slot below the window. I slide a Jackson through. I’m at a bank in Hell. She spins around once, then slides a bindle back through the slot. I want fresh air, a shower. I want to change my bandages and incinerate my old ones.

  The coin box beeps. The woman blows me a kiss as the window slides down, shutting out the pink light. Outside the booth, a man waits with a mop and a bucket of water so dark the mop head disappears beneath the turgid gray murk, shimmering with the pink and blue neon overhead.

  five

  THE WHISPER SAID, “SWALLOW.” WHEN THE WHISPER IS GONE, SO IS THE BLUE pill. I tune out my second thoughts with a solitaire game.

  Reflective reds
and blues shift among the queens, jacks and kings, like sunlight on the skin of some tropical reptile. The black lines float above the colors when I view them straight on, as though cut from the air with a razor. I lie back, staring at the luminous queen of hearts and breathing in the scent of wet asphalt drifting through my window, the smell of summer rain hitting the street.

  A hand beneath my shirt, palm pressing my chest. I swing, backhanding air. I look through my curtains and it’s not raining. Cloudless desert sky and late afternoon sun. I lie back down. I feel the hand of a lover lulling herself to sleep with my heartbeat.

  It’s you, Desiree.

  I feel your hair draped across my neck, your face and fingers on my chest. Your touch spreads across my skin when I take a deep, slow breath, my body like a cigarette glowing brighter with a long drag. Your hand is small and warm with rough fingertips and soft creases in your palm, dissolving the ache in my chest I didn’t know existed until it stopped, an ache I’ve carried for days, maybe my whole life, and it’s gone now. If I could stop the setting sun, I would sit in this minute for days on end.

  Blood rushes to my brain. The moths swarm to the warm light. Your sleeping breath brushes my face and blows the ashes from my memory.

  Sky the color of dead flies, an unbroken sheet of clouds carried on a warm wind that smells of electricity and flowers. Sweat on my face, my back, I’m sweltering beneath my Sunday best with a cold glass in my hands. The jangle of ice and the distant crash of thunder like an avalanche.

  The moving picture stutters and skips, each passing second more familiar than the previous until the streaming rush of memory smoothes into a contiguous chain of moments with your fingers splayed over my stomach, your body against mine.