Dermaphoria (3 page)

J
AIL 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 H
OUR
L
IVE
N
UDE
G
IRLS
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.

T
HE WHISPER SAID, “SWALLOW
.” W
HEN 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.

Damp grass beneath me. The trunk of a tree, the bark as rough and solid as stone, against my back. I smell pears ripening overhead. The horizon snaps blue and more thunder follows. I count the collapsing seconds between the two while the electric air fills my lungs. I inhale the scent of blooming flowers and the wet lawn beneath me that isn’t. I can’t see you, but your leg is over mine, our ankles intertwined, and I feel the slow swell and collapse of your body breathing against me.

Glass to my lips, I taste sugar, lemon pulp, distant metal in the tap water and ice cubes. I dip my finger to flick an errant gnat from the surface.

A hot rain starts knocking the velvet white pear blossoms to the ground. Each drop smacks my skin while you’re curled against me, as though they’re falling through your body and hitting mine. The seconds
between the flashing sky and the thunder are gone, a torrent of rain and pear blossom petals washes over me. Beneath my suit, the hair on my arms stands on end. The glass explodes in my hand and the universe turns white.

I’m blind.

I’m staring into the sun, so I look away.

A throng of people in black surround a casket being lowered into the ground. I’m wearing dark glasses but still squinting from the daylight and I’m thirsty, like I could drink all of the rain in the sky. Flowers cover the grave, morning glories in full bloom, their petals dipped in the darkening sky, washing their silken white tips in the blue evening. They feel like velvet ribbons between my fingers, like the ears of a delicate rodent.

Three crude pills in my palm. Gypsies. I made them from the morning glories in my garden. The daylight fades, leaving the heat stranded behind, and the symphony of crickets scores the encroaching dark. The first flicker of the first firefly is the signal to swallow my Gypsies.

Vertigo seizes my stomach. My face boils in anticipation of retching over my porch rail but the nausea snaps away, leaving me alone in the cloudless, moonless night full of stars and fireflies.

Switching off my porch light switches on the sky and I’m suddenly staring into the center of the galaxy. The stars are close enough to cup between my palms and they drift among the trees, shimmering from the silent singing of the bats, whose music hums against my skin. I spot one of their spastic silhouettes the second before it snatches a star out of my reach. The hazy supernova glows through the bat’s belly before it fades into a flapping black hole in the darkness and the singing begins again.

The fireflies are trailed by shimmering corkscrews of light. They
spin webs among the trees as they move, their threads ending where singing bats snatch the spinners from midair.

One lands on my arm. Another lands on my chest, then another, the dots of light flaring brighter before they fly off, each tethered to me by a rope of frozen lightning, stretching and glowing longer and brighter. The crisscrossing ribbons of light left in their wake fuse into a luminous mesh, surrounding me.

My crying makes the lights brighter. I can’t stop and don’t want to. If every link in the chain of life is this beautiful, then I’ll die of beauty if I ever see the whole chain at once, joining the chain with my link in its place and the chain stretching from one end of eternity to the next. I’ll spend forever staring God in the eye with God staring back.

Beautiful, is all I can think. Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. A small eternity passes and still the word sounds distant and dry, incapable of matching its own meaning.

God’s own clock quicksand slows to an ice-whisper quiet. I follow the smell of morning glories, pear blossoms, wet summer grass, sweet lemon and electricity, everything in God’s chain braided into a single, warm breeze and the chain leads me to you. Your pale skin shines in the dark, and your hands leave dim tracers when you move, shrouding you in the cloudy embrace of your own ghost a hundred times over. Your hair is the color of thread spun from a flaming wheel.

Couples hold hands, children throw coins into fountains, street performers sing, juggle, twist balloons and walk on glass. Mimes mimic the unwitting, women braid hair and paint children’s faces. A shirtless young man wearing fatigues and a rigid, black mohawk, a crushed hat full of money at his feet, juggles torches, stopping to hold one aloft and spit a cloud of fire into the air. A hundred feet from him, a blond boy,
no more than sixteen or seventeen, squirms and writhes his way from a straitjacket.

Between the fire-breather and the escape artist, you sit on the stone edge of a fountain, a paisley kerchief draped over a folding table no wider than a bar stool in front of you.

“Tell your fortune?”

“My fortune’s very good, right now. Thank you.”

You reach for my hand. Yours are dry and cracked, with long nails painted the color of dried blood, an old woman’s hands with a young woman’s face.

“You almost died when you were a boy. You were sitting beneath a tree when it was hit by lightning.”

You don’t know my name, but you know the exploding glass and pear-blossom-petal rain by the lines in my hand.

“How do you know that?”

You don’t answer. You run the tip of your blood-colored nail over my palm.

“They thought you might have heart trouble as you got older, but you’re fine.” You seat me beside you on the fountain. “You’re superstitious around trees, though. Loud noises startle you and you’re always thirsty. It never goes away.”

“And my future? Can you see that?”

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m not drunk. Not exactly. Tell me more.”

You squint, holding my palm up to the lights.

“Your parents were very religious. You lost one of them, one you were close to.”

“You’re slipping,” I say. “That’s vague.”

“It was your father. You were close to him and he died soon after your accident.”

*

Dad told me he could make the stars bleed. He set his tripod in our yard one summer night. We shared soda from a cooler and popcorn from an aluminum stew pot. The stars and the fireflies were our only light, the crickets and our breathing the only sound. Dad smelled like barbershop aftershave and developing fluid. He asked if I wanted to take a picture of my own and I did.

I clicked open the camera shutter and a white wire of light shot across the sky, crumbled into sparks and vanished. Will that be in the picture, I asked, and Dad said yes.

The lightning bugs blinked in the heat like constellations mirrored in rippling water. Could you take a picture of them, I asked. Dad said he’d help me take one myself.

I liked working in the red glow of Dad’s darkroom. He’d converted our storm cellar into a photo lab with safety lights and storage for his emulsions and fixers. The darkroom was our lone surviving father-and-son project. The last thing we’d built together, before that, was a radio from a spool of copper wire and a crystal. I thought we’d need tubes and a bulky wooden housing but dad said no, the signals are everywhere, you just need to listen. The remnants of that project lay in a box beside a stack of magazines, collecting dust.
The signals are everywhere
. I can almost hear his voice.

We worked together, Dad transferring the prints between pans while I rinsed and clipped them to the drying line. The stars shone brighter in his pictures than in life. Dad took long exposures of the sky, and the stars bled in perfect arcs that made me dizzy, as though Dad had photographed the very spinning of the earth. I found my picture, marked by the white slash and hazy burst where the comet had vanished.

The firefly pictures had trails that quivered like an old person’s handwriting and, wherever they had stayed in one spot for more than
a second, bright stains leaked onto the film like car headlights in a heavy rain. The trails stopped and started midair wherever the bugs had blinked off for a moment. I lost myself under the red lights, following the erratic path of a single firefly through its glowing labyrinth, the electric spiderweb twisted in a fun house mirror.

I’d forgotten about that.

“I’ve stepped into that picture,” I said. “What do I owe you?”

“Whatever you feel your memory is worth.” Trails streak from your necklace, from the children running with glow sticks around the fountain.

I empty my pockets into your cigar box.

“Are you here tomorrow?”

“Maybe.”

“I thought you could tell the future.”

“Would you still come looking for me, even if you weren’t certain I’d be here?”

“Yes. I would.”

“Then look for me tomorrow. Maybe you’ll find me.”

A dog jumps from the fountain and the children squeal. Beneath a streetlight, he shakes himself dry in a furious, spastic blast of water. The explosion of drops lit from above looks like the birth of the universe, like a hundred million fireflies hatched in the same half second and blown from the nest, fully grown. A man laughs uncontrollably, wiping the pinpoint flames from his glasses, brushing them from his blond hair, and they cascade to the sidewalk like a shower of welding sparks. The sight leaves me weak.

The man puts his glasses on and I wonder, does he know he’s been kissed by the beginning of the universe.

“That’s Otto,” you said.

Hello, Otto.

“And I’m Eric.” I give you my hand one more time.

“Lovely meeting you, Eric.” The silver wires of your bracelets throw splinters of light into the air when you take my hand.

“I’m Desiree.”

Your whisper brushes my ear. I wrap my arms around you, but you’re gone. Your fingers slip from around my heart, your ghost fades from my bed.

After my heart has bloomed to the size of the universe and all the love from the big bang to the last whisper has been cycloning through my chest for what feels like days on end, the world is one giant prison when the storm dies, at last. The galaxies shrink back to the lump of muscle behind my ribs, the sniper’s target just to the left of my spine. The sleepless night and following day weigh down like a leaden, gray forever. It feels like dying.

I thought I missed you, Desiree. I had no idea how much.