Dermaphoria (6 page)

T
HE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE MAN ON PAROLE AND THE MAN ON DEATH ROW
is sometimes two inches of locked bathroom door or a single moment’s hesitation. The difference between those men and a chimpanzee is 2 percent of their genes and the difference between a man’s healthy tissue and his tumor is even less. Every man and every insect are made from the same six molecules of DNA, the same five atoms. One of these atoms makes the difference between speed and cold medicine, between paint thinner and TNT. Every identical act is distinguished by its intent and every intent is judged by its action. The difference between consent and rape can be a single drink or a single word.

Everything in the universe is everything else. A man is a killer is a saint is a monkey is a cockroach is a goldfish is a whale, and the Devil is just the angel who asked for More.

Doomed but destined to forever want the closest thing beyond our grasp, we fled the trees, stood on our hind legs and reached with our new hands. We learned to sharpen sticks, then rocks, to scream, then grunt, then speak. We were hardwired for desire, and our wanting drove us to evolve, so we evolved wanting. More food, more fire and more offspring. More gods. Gods for harvest, fire and fertility. One day, one god said, No more. No more other gods, no more of More. A million years of More were flushed away, cesspooling nine circles below the earth, a million years too late. Man’s nature has been set to be unsatisfied.

Everyone craves the same grand version of every fortune-teller’s surefire, shotgun guess list—money or love, and there’s never enough. The richest men in the world scheme to become richer. Anyone serving time in a beige office cubicle knows this. Anyone paying mortgage on a beige house, spending what they don’t have at beige strip malls on amusements for their beige children with beige futures, knows this. Every drink, roll of the dice or second glance at a woman whispers More into a man’s ear when he’s not listening to that one god, when he’s looking where, or thinking what, he should not.

I’ve spent my life giving people their More. I’m a chemist.

A woman carries a torch for a lost love and her husband never knows. A man loses a child, a wife or a brother. Maybe it’s his fault or maybe it isn’t. People carry losses their whole lives, loss of a job, a friendship, a marriage, a reputation, a fortune or the life of a loved one. Some have regrets they feel every waking second, and some they feel in their sleep.

Imagine the one god himself has reversed his clock and reversed your regrets. Imagine knowing the bone-deep truth that whatever impossibility would make you truly happy has been granted. Imagine knowing you can once again hold your lost lover or your newborn child. Imagine what you feel during those first seconds of knowing. Now, imagine those first seconds last for days on end.

If you could buy that seventy-two-hour moment for the price of a tank of gas, would you? Go on, give it a try. God said it was okay.

Like I said, I’m a chemist. It’s all coming back to me.

T
HE RIDGE OF YOUR SPINE BRUSHES THE TIP OF MY NOSE, THE SKIN SLOPING
from your shoulder blades grazes my lips, but my arms pass through a hole in the air when I try to wrap them around you. My heart collapses under its own sudden weight and falls into the bottomless black well of my chest. I hold still and feel you again, a warm surge from that bottomless well sets my heart right and you’re once more here beside me.

The blanket fell from my window and now streetlights shine from the mirror. Room 621 glows like the surface of the moon. Another room replaces mine when I close my eyes. Open, close, open, close. One room swaps places with another, my field of vision changes like flipping channels. I’m in your bedroom.

I met you, and now I’m standing in your room, the memories spliced together with the connecting events nowhere to be found. I met you, was abducted by aliens or brainwashed by the CIA, and now I’m standing in your room. That missing stretch of time is in a syringe or on microfilm, trapped in a bell jar within an underground vault guarded by motion sensors and electric fences, but it’s not in my head.

My reflection meets my fingertip with his own, Michelangelo’s God and Adam. The mirror bows like a sheet of taut plastic. I trace figure eights and random glyphs in the glass and my finger leaves a warped trail in its wake, like I’m six years old and playing with a puddle of pancake syrup. The miniature Red Sea converges, each new stickman,
teepee or rocket ship fills in and fades in slow succession. We press palms, my reflection and I distorting each other from opposite sides of the liquid mirror. I’m flying on something, more acid of my own design. I’ve become better and bolder during that hole of haze I’ve leapfrogged between doses from the Glass Stripper.

My reflection says, “She still out there?” I hadn’t seen his lips move in the twisting of the mirror, so I can’t be certain.

“I need to lay low in here.” My reflection didn’t say anything, but Otto did. Blond, wearing jeans, a rugby shirt and glasses as thick as aquarium glass, he sat on a pillow in the corner. He’s staring at his fingers and moving his hands slowly in front of his face, but once he starts talking, he doesn’t stop.

“Chick’s scary,” he says. “The short-haired brunette friend of Desiree’s out there. Hooked up with her and she got space freaky. Cuffed me with these chains held together with a chunk of ice. I’m thinking, ‘Cool, I’ll go with this,’ and everything’s great until she jams a finger up my ass, which I’m absolutely not cool with but I can’t do shit. I want to stop her but, let me tell you, Finnish street names make terrible safe words. Pills she gave me, I couldn’t feel my lips, much less form consonants. And she’s been matching me two for one, so she drops out cold and I’m stuck for two and a half hours waiting for the ice to melt so I can get loose. Finally, I’m rolling her wheezing, naked body off my jeans and looking for my wallet, I see she’s broken a goddamned nail off her examination finger. I’m freaked, like I want to run but don’t want to slice myself up on the inside. Three days of yogurt, prunes and death threats screamed onto my answering machine. We haven’t been properly introduced. I’m Otto.”

“I know who you are.”

“And you’re Eric.” He stands and offers his hand. I think he’s reaching through the glass. I’m startled at first, but he’s standing to one side of the
mirror, beside my reflection. We shake hands, his flesh and bone.

He smacked the mirror with his middle finger. The surface quivered like a rubber sheet, our reflections bursting into moonlit confetti.

“Watch this.” Otto pounded his fist against the wall. Concentric ripples spread across the pictures, window frame and the other walls. They undulated like the surface of a water bed, lapping at the corners.

“Eric?” The walls righted themselves, snapshot frozen, the instant you opened the door. “What was that?”

You’re a silhouette in the doorway, but I can see your eyes in spite of the light flooding mine.

“Just talking to Otto,” I said.

“Come outside, you should meet everyone.”

“One second.”

You blew me a kiss, then closed the door.

My heart beats faster at the sight of you, my blood sings at the sound of your voice and I don’t want to move from this bed. I don’t want to disturb your phantom skin against mine.

“This stuff is beautiful,” Otto said. “Only God could have done better. Is there something I should know about you?”

“You know too much.”

“Relax. I’ve known Desiree since I was a pup. She’s been my best friend since she saved me from three brothers, five sisters and no father.”

“Sad story.”

“But typical.”

“And you’re clean?”

“You mean tapeworms? I’m clean. Desiree sees to that.” Otto dropped his pants and hiked up his shirt. He did not ask me to return the courtesy.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“Just what I said.”

“What’s your relationship with her?”

“You and I have business, buddy. Piles of cash with our names on it.” He buckled his belt. “Quit sniffing my ass and speak English.”

“Are you now, or have you ever been, sexually involved with Desiree?”

“No. Not even close. She’s got nice legs, I’ll give her that. But she’s not my type. She takes care of me and I look after her. I’m protective, that way. If you want her, make your move, but you’d be wise to ditch the jealousy. It’ll cloud your thinking. Besides, she doesn’t know you made this stuff, and you’re never going to tell her.” He tapped the mirror, sending silver ripples through the glass.

“This is good,” he said.

“You see what I see?”

“Yes. What do you call it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Mad Hatter,” said Otto.

“I’m not following you.”

“The best batch in the world won’t go anywhere without a good name. If you’re ever at a loss, you can’t go wrong with a reference to Alice.”

“Thanks for the advice.”

“Can you do it again?”

“These were an experiment. I was trying something different.”

“A fortunate mistake. Can you do it again?”

“Of course. I’m just not set up for it. What little gear I’ve got has miles of wear on it, and the rest is hacked together from scrap.”

I was using athletic water bottles for sep funnels. Junk stores and yard sales had yielded three vintage chemistry sets from which I’d salvaged lab-grade glass. They don’t make those anymore, because of guys like me.

“Let me show you something.” Otto took a candle from the dresser.
There were four or five of them, and none had ever been lit. Its underside had been hollowed out. He removed a roll of bills as thick as his own wrist.

“I can set you up,” he said. “Get you all the gear you want, get you safe and isolated.”

“Put that back,” I said.

“It’s not hers. It’s mine.”

“She holds your money for you?”

He said nothing, tossing the fat roll up and down.

“She doesn’t know it’s here?” I said.

“No, she doesn’t. That’s not all of it. I spread it around.”

“You’re safe until she lights that candle.”

“She won’t. Listen,” he pressed the roll of bills into my hand, “I can unload whatever else you’ve got for three times what you’re selling it for, five or six times what it cost you to make it. I can make it worth your while.”

“I should get out there.”

I don’t remember the occasion, much less the names and faces of everyone present. I do remember your friends coasting on the acid they knew I’d brought but didn’t know I’d made.

They sought me out until I took refuge in your room, and did the same when I returned to the group.
Where did you get this? Can you get more?

Along with the hand-holding circles, face touching, rambling on about the beauty of the universe and the presence of God in all things, they had a Darwinian appreciation for me and my contribution. As my stature rose within the group, so did your proximity to me, from touching my shoulder during conversation, to leaning at my side or sitting on my lap, to holding my hand as you said your good-byes at the end of the night after the Mad Hatters had burned off in a clean, thirty-minute
comedown.

“Are you staying?” You pressed your nose into my neck.

“I’m going to run out for a bit,” I said, and you wrapped your arms around me. “I’ll be right back, I’m just getting some wine.” Your hold grew tighter. You said no.

“I promise, just give me a minute.”

“How long?”

“Half an hour.”

“Take Otto with you. For collateral.”

“Is he staying too?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

You kissed me. For the length of the kiss, the Mad Hatters came back.

“If you follow the news,” Otto rode shotgun, talking in an auctioneer’s blue streak, “busts are almost always in the inner cities. If you trust the numbers about the drug economy, and believe that it’s purely an inner-city problem, then the streets of ghettos and barrios would be swamped with dealers, and the buyers would queue up like an East German bread line.

“The major shit moves through here,” he said. He’d guided me into suburbia. Skin-colored houses with white pickups and boats in their driveways. “And I mean major.”

He reached into the backseat and heaved a black duffle the size of a small tree stump into his lap. Beneath two layers of waterproof canvas and nylon lay an ingot of bills. They were sheathed in plastic, the top layer all Jacksons.

“This time, it isn’t mine. I’m a way station.”

“Zip that up.” My eyes went to the rearview mirror out of instinct. Every pair of headlights was cause for alarm. “Now.”

“All twenties. Nonsequential and unmarked. I’ve checked ’em, I know.” He closed the inner and outer bags and said, “this thing weighs thirty-five pounds. You want to know how much this totals?”

“No.”

“Whatever. You’re the only other person I’ve told about it. I gotta deliver it tonight and they’re going to count it, every last bill. You’ll find out.”

“I’ll wait outside.”

“Relax. You’ll like these people.”

We made two stops, maybe three. Some details are sharper than others, and they all run together. The houses were the same, I remember, white walls, white carpets, and children’s art projects on the refrigerators. Each visit, someone offered us a light beer and a seat on the couch in front of a wide-screen television where I waited while Otto exchanged one bag for another.

Otto’s people drove minivans with baby seats, their floors littered with fast-food wrappers, school newsletters and sports equipment. They owned boats and jet skis, campers and trucks with bumper stickers broadcasting their political party or proclaiming their children’s honor-student status. They wore Little League coaching windbreakers and T-shirts branded with water-ski equipment dealers or lake resorts. They had gold credit cards, frequent-flyer miles, golf clubs, satellite dishes, video games, swimming pools and dirt bikes.

They told sad stories, stories about playing football in high school or sexual conquests in college, about the concerts they’d seen and how much they drank, about the long hair or the earring they once had. They told stories about the muscle car they had as a teenager, about the band they played in or the bike they used to race.

The details are as blurry as they are dull. What remains vivid above all else is the size of the duffle bags Otto was moving, the bets he placed
on games during the stops, and our handshake agreement on the drive back. We were in business.

You were staring at the moon from your front yard when the lights from my Galaxie flared against your hair like a torch.

“That was more than half an hour.” You grabbed my belt buckle and pulled me into you. “I wasn’t sure you were coming back.”

“I thought you were a fortune-teller.”

“People tell their fortunes for me. I just listen, give them a few details and they fill in the blank spots. They think it’s all me, but it’s not. They believe what they want to.”

“You must be good if you make a living at it.”

You took my hands, laced your fingers with mine and pulled them behind your back, locking us together. The tip of your nose brushed my face and it felt cold, so I kissed it.

“You kissed my nose.”

“It was cold.”

“Are you trying to seduce me?”

“You’ll know.”

“Will I, now?”

“Yes. All of your willpower will dissolve when I decide to seduce you.” I kept a straight face for as long as I could, but you started laughing.

I pulled away but you took my bottom lip in your teeth and held me there. You let go after a moment, looking over my shoulder to the Galaxie where Otto lingered.

“Otto, stay,” you said, then kissed me again. “You too. Don’t worry, he’s on the couch.”

I remember my hand on the sweat-slick small of your back, your
wet leg slung over mine and “hold still” hot-whispered into my ear and I did but you couldn’t and you moaned my name, lost in the teeth marks you left on my chest. I drank dark wine pooled in the cleft of your back and licked every inch of you, then held you until your breathing told me you were asleep, but you never let go of me.