Dermaphoria (10 page)

I
SLIP MY FINGERS BENEATH YOUR SHIRT TO THE SLICE OF FLESH ABOVE YOUR
hips that feels so good in the dark but you hate so much. The places on you I love touching the most are the ones you like the least. Your touch fades. My dick feels like a prosthetic grafted onto me, devoid of sensation but heavy and rigid like a policeman’s sap. I switch on the lamp and I’m miles above the earth, floating in the center of the galaxy with stars on all sides of me. How did I get here and where did you go? Ten slow breaths and the pale patches of wall come into focus, the square ghosts of the old pictures linger like the afterburn of sunlight when stepping into a dark room.

The bottle of nail polish is a knot of burning yellow from the heart of the sun. One of the stars moves and my brain regains footing. Legions of bugs cover the walls, ceiling and floor, each marked with yellow nail paint and glowing from the black light screwed into the lamp. They tagged me, so I tagged them back. There’s nothing for them to report. I’m not doing anything but lying on my bed with my memories and my hard-on, but it looks like I’m floating in the middle of the universe. Shouting from the room next door, a crash against the wall startles the bugs and the constellations shift. Orion disbands, Scorpio dissolves, the galaxy crumbles.

I haven’t slept in days, since I awoke to my empty brain and, in a blink, those days are gone. The time flies. The time flies feed on rotting
clocks. The time flies are in collusion with the rest of the bugs. Each wave of fatigue brings a riptide of memory pulling me back. I kick against the current, gasping and choking for sleep, drowning in being awake, struggling to break the surface but the memory is too strong.

Hysteria comes in waves. Three-second surveillance loops of black gangbangers knocking over liquor stores boost the signals to earsplitting, tumor-inducing levels. Suburban teenagers cleaning out jewelry boxes and medicine cabinets do not. The transmissions are everywhere, ambient noise I cannot tune out, hard as I try. The frequency peaks and plummets with news of celebrity arrests, kidnapped white children and middle-class overdoses. Homeless addicts and crack-addled prostitutes drop dead daily by the score without a nod from the signals. A politician’s son is arrested for possession and the signals go batshit. Everything on the street was birthed in the boardroom, patented and pumped into the public’s bloodstream, one cure-all after the next. Then the snake oils went rogue, pitching housewives off ledges when their search for More hit a brick wall and they followed suit with the sidewalk. The saviors of spin rewrote history, and the epidemic of middle-class More became an epidemic of color and crime. The story repeated itself year after year, and I could set my watch to the pulsing of a fresh signal.

This one was different. One theory said it was an Alzheimer’s treatment, another said it was for autism. They all said it was in the experimental stages and had somehow leaked to the streets and clubs. None of the reports could agree on what they didn’t know.

One girl clamped herself into a fetal ball and screamed for hours before she opened her wrists in the bathtub. The paper said she’d suffered repeat violations from her stepbrothers as a child. They muffled
her screams with a dishrag pushed into her mouth with a wooden spoon. Young women and men endured similar hallucinations, depending on their memories and experiences. Another boy shattered the bones in his fist, fighting off a string of imagined assailants and taking a swing at a fire door. Users described the sensation of fingers, hands, arms and lips. They felt the warm embrace of their mothers, the womb, an old lover, every stripper who dry humped their crotch, the first time they had sex, or the last. Sometimes the fingers were cold, like the unyielding grip of the dead, sometimes the caressing and stroking wouldn’t stop.

They called it Skin, or Cradle. Derma was the fashionable variant, or “D.” It went by different women’s names in different circles, usually porn starlets. Some called it Pandora, some simply the Box. The slang hadn’t settled. New street terms were sprouting more quickly than emergency room reports. The name depended on your experience, and some people never took it more than once.

The underground’s new drug of choice gave concerned parents, waning politicians and preachers new fuel for their fury, opinion polls and collection baskets. The mob marching with their pitchforks and torches had no idea what they were marching against.

Hysteria drove demand and Hoyle would want a piece of it. If I knew what was good for me, I’d reverse engineer a sample before White came knocking. Staying out of a chicken wire blanket was good for me.

A kiss of sleep touches me on the eyes and my muscles go slack. Something bites me on the chest and I slap myself with the ferocity of a leather belt. Expecting to see a supernova splatter of bug entrails, smoking conductors and resistors in my palm, I only see dark. Even the constellations of starbugs and time flies are gone, the tickle of sleep
frightened into a brain crevice like a feral cat. Another bite on the back of my neck. I stop midswing before I slap my bandages.

I climb from my bed and switch on the overhead light. My display of specimens grows, revealing everything and nothing, depending on how much nanowiring the bugs carry. Dark dots in the corners of my eyes bolt for the cracks and seams, but one freezes in place, trying to blend in, accustomed as he is to avoiding boot heels. I pick up the nail polish and move, keeping my vibrations to a minimum. It will dart for a crack once I’m too close, but I tag it with a quick brush to its back before it runs. I’m getting faster.

Red welts cover my chest, stomach and arms. I feel more on my back. God knows what bug spit is coagulating or eggs are incubating inside the bites, what kind of venom or infection is spreading or whether broken insect heads have lodged below the surface of my skin, feeding off me, growing a new bodies, shitting into my bloodstream as they mature before taking flight out of an open sore. My skin burns. I need to shower and douse myself with vodka and boric acid and burn my sheets.

Someone is listening to me. The waking world floods at light speed through millions of neural checkpoints and one speck out of a billion screams doom. The cracking twig beneath the hunter’s foot, the screaming child two floors below, the person outside my door.

My heart is like a small rabid rodent trying to claw through my lungs, an angry coke monkey locked in a cage, shrieking and climbing up and down my ribs because it keeps pressing the bell again and again and again but nothing’s happening. I move, quiet as the gathering dust, through the labyrinth of creaking planks and press my ear to the door. I hear everything, like listening to the ebb and flow of millions of signals droning through the paper walls of a hornet’s nest. The hissing of water pressure, the shuddering of faulty valves, footsteps above and
below, the leaden clunk of soda cans falling from the vending machine, the coins tumbling through the slots, the twisting coils dropping peanuts or cigarettes. The television in the lobby and a hundred others throughout the Firebird, sitcom laugh tracks, car chase tire squeals, crowds going wild, which sound like big bang static from the dead screens the junkies left on before they passed out. I hear the fights, the phone calls, the electricity humming and shorting, voices and bugs clinging to the two-by-four studs, others chewing their way through and the rats shaving away at the foundation of the hotel, battling the ants for real estate. This is how the Firebird sounds to God.

A sting shoots up the nerves in my leg. I scratch through my pants, hoping to crush the bastard crawling up to my crotch. The dead leather rope tail of a rat slaps my bare foot, the little monster claws gripping my outer arch before it scurries away. I brush my foot against the calf of my jeans, wiping away the tingle from the rat’s tail, and look for the hole where that little bastard rodent comes and goes like it owns the place, when my doorknob moves. Hold very still. Pressing my ear to the door again and the noises come flooding back. This time, my whispered name brushes my ear like a feather. The voice smells me listening, I know it. The doorknob moves when I look away, then stops when I look back. He’s good, quiet as my own shadow. The cops would kick my door off the hinges, God style. The Firebird junkies would wait until I’d left to rip me off. Somebody planted the bugs in here and knows my every move. Somebody out there wants me when I’m in here.

Toe Tag.

Shit.

Goddamned Boo Radley with a chloroform rag and a bone saw.

The knob moves again, the faintest tick like a spider trapped inside the tumbler. The rabid lab weasel locked in my chest fights with the coked-up monkey, both tearing at my insides and shrieking in my ears.

The television will go through the door if I have a running start. Those three or four or five steps might give me away, but Toe Tag won’t expect me to get the drop on him. All I need is an unconscious Toe Tag on the hallway floor, lock pick in one hand and piano wire in the other, to clear things with Anslinger.

I sprint, screaming Fuck you, Boo Radley, and the airborne television’s cord catches my wrist, nearly ripping my arm from the socket. I’m waving through the splintered hole in my door, my hand turning purple from the power cord cinched around the wrist but the hallway is empty. Goddamn, he’s fast.

I’m having a tough time explaining this to Anslinger. As well as being on the Warden’s shit list, I’m in deep with the Firebird residents. A crashing door sounds like the apocalypse to them, and a visit from the law suspends all activity, the buying, selling, shooting and bartering. The Firebird’s lifeblood freezes for a window as crippling as it is brief.

“I do a birth record search on ‘Toe Tag,’ what am I going to find?”

Anslinger wears black today. The kerchief tucked into his front pocket shifts between blue and green when he moves beneath the light. He scans my brain tissue while a pair of plainclothes cops wearing rubber gloves toss my room. They pile their plunder atop my mattress—my clothes, bug spray, yellow marking paint, boric acid, steel wool. They tag my notebook, drop it into a property envelope. A uniform takes notes while we speak. Another snaps pictures of my dissections and diagrams. They’re new to the force, straight from the assembly line. Their fresh static burns my nose and makes my eyes water but my hands are cuffed.

“I’m sure it’s a nickname,” I say. “That name can’t be real.”

“You’ve got great instincts, my man. This retarded savant killer couldn’t possibly have a name like that.”

“I’ve seen him.”

“You mean you think you remember meeting him.”

“No, I’ve seen him,” I insist. “Some details are crystal clear. Others
are sketchy. Things are coming to me but it’s hard. Does this make me cooperative or not?”

“If I come to you, that makes you uncooperative, but my disposition can change depending on what I learn from you. I’m in a good mood today,” he says, “so I’ll cut you some slack in this particular instance. Tell me more. Who looks after this short bus assassin?”

Toe Tag works the muscle for the chain with his stun gun, syringes, plastic bags, draining shunts, bolt cutters and bone saws. He answers to his father, Manhattan White, a ranking executive in the chain that funded the lab. White runs things according to Hoyle’s instructions, who controls the chain and its assets. I started out experimenting and they pulled me in. The money was good and it was supposed to be short-term.

Anslinger leans against the wall, wetting the filter of a fresh cigarette between his lips, James Dean cool. His lighter chimes like a round snapping into a chamber. His tape recorder stares at me with its glowing red eye, a lump of primitive mechanics and magnetic tape. He must think I’m insane to fall for such a cheap decoy.

A field medic examines my bandages, runs a gloved fingertip over the bites on my arms, then swabs one in the crook of my elbow with alcohol.

“Are they infected? Maybe I’m having an allergic reaction.”

“These aren’t insect bites.” He addresses Anslinger instead of me.

The uniform reads my statement, unable to keep a straight face. A bug clamps onto my arm, I think, but it’s medic shooting something into my vein.

“Easy,” he says.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Thank you, doctor,” says Anslinger, but the man’s not a doctor and Anslinger isn’t paying idle courtesy. He’s sending a high-frequency signal that everyone catches at once, everyone but the rookies. The
rubber glove cops drop everything and exit without a word. The field medic slaps his kit shut and leaves without bandaging my leaking injection point. The rookies stand bewildered, not tuned to Anslinger’s wavelength of command. In two swipes, Anslinger rips the notebook and camera from their hands, like pulling the cloth from beneath a banquet setting. He dismisses them both.

The room is empty but for Anslinger and me. The warden’s handyman removed the television and the remains of my door. I hear murmuring from the hallway.

Anslinger crouches to my level. He locks his brown eyes onto mine and stares through to the inside of my head. Blood moves to my brain, fueling my thoughts. Anslinger can read the heat patterns with those eyes. He needs neither a tape recorder nor some rookie’s notes or pictures. Here comes his Big Speech, I think, but he smiles, stands and leaves.

Something bites my chest. I hunch my shoulders to scrape it with my chin but it’s too low. It severs its tracking chip head into my bloodstream then crawls deaf, blind and leaking around my belly, down my back and drops out my shirttail. It sounds like a bottle cap hitting the floor.

My notebook slaps the desk, freed from its brown envelope and one-way ticket to the evidence locker.

“If it were up to me, I’d beat your ass into the dirt,” the uniform says. The name below his badge reads “Officer Lloyd Delgado.” The note taker.

It’s not up to you, I think, though I have the sense not to say it out loud.

“It’s your lucky day.” He hisses into my ear with a voice like a blown speaker. “He must really like you.” As he unlocks my cuffs, he torques my wrist until pain shoots up my arm.

“How do you know?”

“Because I know when he doesn’t.”

I massage the feeling back into my arm. Officer Delgado, Anslinger and everyone else are gone, as though they silently faded into nothing.

The warden steps into my doorway, his jaw set. If he doesn’t kick me out, it means Anslinger had a talk with him.

“You need anything?” he asks.

“A door.”

“I know you need a door.” He looks to his left and right, then speaks in a low voice. “You bring that kind of heat here again, they’ll be carrying you out.” He leaves.

The warden’s handyman, wearing work gloves and a canvas tool belt, props a door in the hallway outside, a spare that’s been collecting dust and mildew in the basement.

“I hear you’ve got a bug problem,” he says.