Dermaphoria (7 page)

T
HE TYRANNOSAURUS HAD COLLAPSED INTO A MANGLED HEAP, ITS LEGS BLOWN
from beneath it after decades of drunken target practice. Its bullet-pocked body lay in a pile of broken concrete amid spent shell casings, bottle shards, hubcaps and sagebrush, the exposed rebar skeleton baking under the desert sun. Otto emptied his bladder into the monster’s dead, frozen jaw.

“Whaddaya think used to be here?”

He shifted his stance to coat the face and neck while he spoke. The smell stung my nostrils and I moved upwind. Fifty feet from Otto, an empty swimming pool lay in front of a row of abandoned motel rooms.

“A gas station,” I said.

“That looks like a swimming pool.” Otto zipped up and walked to the concrete cavity half filled with tumbleweeds.

“Swimming pools have water in them.”

“Definitely a pool,” he said, surveying from the edge with the gravity of a plane crash investigator. “This was a motel of some kind.”

“I envy your keen sense of the obvious, Otto.”

“Dinosaurs ate all of the tourists, before target practice from the locals drove them to extinction.” He unzipped his pants again, and pissed into the layer of mud below. “Then for a while it was a tumbleweed brothel.”

“What are you doing?”

“Marking my territory.”

We’d been on the road for over three hours, enduring the Mojave heat. The Galaxie had been painted with eight coats of factory crimson and loaded with four new whitewalls. With less than 8,000 miles on a rebuilt engine, it was in perfect working order, except for the air-conditioning. I’d brought a bag full of bottled water, sunblock and spare T-shirts, and had sweat through four of them.

Signs throughout the desert had warned of the dangers of flash floods and hitchhikers. A truck tire had been submerged halfway into the dirt where we’d parked, then painted white, with B
US
S
TOP
in red letters. The road stretched to the horizon in both directions with nobody coming from either. Anyone expecting a bus would die waiting.

“I don’t like being late,” I said, checking my watch.

“Breathe, buddy.” Otto zipped up again. “We’re less than four miles away. Let’s toss the Frisbee.”

“We’re four miles away but you couldn’t wait. Jesus. I don’t want to toss anything, I want to move. Are you finished?”

“Maybe. I want to sniff around for a minute.”

“There’s a chance you might find an actual toilet,” I said. “I’m going to make a call.”

“From where?”

A gas station stood adjacent to the motel, the parking lot more potholes than asphalt. One of four pumps lay on its side, ripped from the ground by a drunken dinosaur hunter behind the wheel of a pickup. Nobody had removed the G
AS
C
OLD
S
ODAS
I
CE
sign at the edge of the highway though someone had boarded up the windows and spray-painted F
OR
S
ALE
across the plywood. The phone booth, however, was pristine, with the receiver on the hook and not so much as a crack in the glass, as though it had been installed that morning.

“There’s a phone,” I said. “Over there.”

“It’s abandoned.”

“I’m not getting an oil change. Wave when you’re done sniffing”

Otto started toward the dilapidated motel rooms and shouted, “Watch for dinosaurs.”

I slid the door shut and sealed out the midday silence of the desert. I heard my blood rushing through my ears, then the hum of the wires, the sleepy rasp of your voice.

“Did I wake you?”

“It’s okay. I was just napping. How did your interview go?”

“It’s in about half an hour. I’m not worried. How’s business on the promenade?”

“Slow night downtown. What’s the position you’re interviewing for?”

“Short-term consulting. Lab stuff I don’t want to bore you with.”

“No, it’s fascinating. You can tell me.”

Christ, leave it alone.

“I don’t know the exact nature of the contract. Are you working later?”

“No, I was hoping to see you. Are you coming back?”

Maybe. I didn’t know where I was going, with whom I was meeting, whether I’d make my next call from jail or the return trip in my own trunk. Throughout the drive, the scenarios ran through my brain in ceaseless succession. Otto was a cop. An informant. He worked for a rival chemist. I should confront him. I should abandon him. Each notion negated by its own idiocy the instant it surfaced.

“There’s a chance I’ll need to meet someone else tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll find a hotel and crash for the night, then drive back tomorrow afternoon.”

“No.” Your plea melted me. “Come over tonight and you can drive back tomorrow morning.”

“You want me to double back to Riverside twice in two days?”

“I want to see you.”

“I want to see you too. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Please. I won’t keep you up late, I promise.”

The feeling of being so wanted was new to me.

“I’ll do what I can. I should go now.”

“Hey,” you said. “What color are my eyes?”

“Come on. Don’t do that.”

In that second, the wire stretching from the desert to your bed became infinite, and every word was a ripple in the middle of the ocean that became a crashing wave thousands of miles away. I spoke too quickly and I could hear my resentment crash down on you from a distance.

“I’m sorry,” you said. “I miss you. I’ll see you whenever you get back, okay?”

“Your eyes are green.”

“Good guess.”

I could hear you smile through the wires.

“Bluish green.”

“You’re sounding like a palm reader.”

I’d taken a photograph from your refrigerator and dropped it into my bag before I’d left, a snapshot of you laughing somewhere warm and sunny with an umbrella drink in your hand, but I didn’t need it. Just as it did when I spoke to you that day from the phone, your face comes into focus more and more as I hold you here beside me.

“There’s a large speck in the blue green of your right eye. A small bump on the bridge of your nose. A lock of your hair always falls over one eye, and you’ve got a tiny mole on your right cheek, right on the
corner of your smile.”

“You have quite a memory.”

“My memory’s terrible,” I said. “But I can picture you when I hear your voice.”

“I’ll help you with your memory.”

“Fill in the blank spots?”

“Yeah. That’s what I’m good at.”

“So long as I can see you.”

“In your mind or in person?”

“Both.”

You sighed, and the waves going over the wire washed me with calm.

“I miss you.” You broke the silence. “Please come back tonight, if you can.”

“I’ll try. I miss you too.”

We said our good-byes. I listened to the electric monotone of the dead line for a minute before I hung up. I opened the glass floodgates and the miles of silence crashed through.

The house had been trashed, abandoned, boarded up, squatted in, sold, reoccupied, raided, reabandoned and reboarded. Otto and I waited on the porch, four miles up the road from the ghost motel. The sky looked bigger, a stretch of luminous blue with clouds so massive I didn’t know how they stayed in the air.

“It’s sturdy,” Otto said, like a child telling himself there’s nothing under the bed or in the closet. “You’ll know when someone’s coming and they won’t be able to get in easily.”

“If the Feds are coming, it doesn’t matter how sturdy it is,” I said.

“I’m not talking about the Feds. I’m talking about people who are
pissed and looking for you. I’m talking about home invasions and payback.”

“Otto, who are we working for?”

Somebody named Hoyle ran everything. The supply chain, the distribution chain and everyone involved. Hoyle’s word was final. Hoyle didn’t want acid. Acid didn’t make people want more acid. Hoyle wanted the things that woke up the slumbering instinct for More, and woke it with a vengeance. Otto had never met Hoyle. He knew someone who had, and for whom we were waiting.

A wake of desert dirt billowed from the tires of a white van. I know that van, though I’ve never seen it before. My memory’s stuck in a loop because I’m remembering things that haven’t happened yet, the order of events from yesterday and the day before collapse into the events prior to the fire. Here and now collide with then and there and, for a second, Manhattan White and Toe Tag are standing in my room at the Firebird with flames engulfing everything while I lie with my arms around you in the middle of nowhere. The moment passes, each note of memory arranging itself from noise to symphony.

Manhattan White approached on foot. Otto made himself scarce. White’s son sat on the open back end of the van, ice-cream stains on his shirt and snot running from his nose. He played with a pair of wire clippers.

“My name’s White.”

We’ve met.

“I’m Eric.”

“I know.”

“You got a first name?”

“They call me Manhattan. White will do. I understand you’re a chemist, Eric.”

“I am.”

“What I want to know is, why?”

“Can you be a little clearer?”

“Why did I drive all this way to meet you? Why should our business back you when I’ve got a hundred guys who can do the same thing? Why is it you’re better than they are?”

“I don’t know who they are, White, so I don’t know if I’m better.”

“I hear you’ve opened a window to God.”

“That was an experiment.”

“Is that what you want to do?”

“What I want to do is something nobody else has done.”

“Again, my question is, why?”

“Couldn’t tell you. Maybe some unresolved questions about God from when I was younger. All I know is I’ve got the focus and the patience for it and there’s not many other jobs that will indulge me that way.”

“We’re not here to indulge you, either, or help you with your childhood issues. We’re here to make a profit and to do so inconspicuously. You’re here to build us a lab, for which you will be well paid.”

“So you say. Let’s have a look.”

White unlocked three deadbolts on the front door. The inside looked as though a family of shut-ins had survived a decade of collective agoraphobia on canned beer, frozen dinners, cigarettes and television, and were finally evicted by a tribe of drunk monkeys driving snowblowers.

“What’s that noise?” I asked. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from at first, but it sounded like a finger squeaking across a wet windowpane, thousands of them.

“What noise?”

“Is there an attic here?”

White looked to the ceiling. “Of course,” he said. “Bats. Don’t worry. They’re harmless.”

“And dirty.”

White pressed the solitude and space the house afforded. I countered with the need to disconnect the gas for the heating and stove because I couldn’t have open flames. I wanted to map the circuits so I could shut down certain outlets and work with the select few I needed.

“That sounds excessive,” White said.

“How many accidents have you had to cover up?” I asked.

“A few. It’s a numbers game and accidents are part of the risk.”

“It’s only a numbers game when you leave it to amateurs or chance,” I said, then pointed to the outlets at floor level. “See those?”

“Yeah, they’re plugs. And?”

“And they’re not grounded, so if you’re pulling too much current from them, they tend to spark. That’s why you’ve got those burn marks on the slots. You can have either fumes or sparks, but you can’t have both.”

“You want to rewire the place and ground the power. Not cheap.”

“For starters. Lesson two: ether. We’ll be using it in quantity. It’s colorless, odorless and inflammable.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Not unflammable, inflammable, so the fumes can, and will, blow.”

“I hear you, Eric. Jesus, fix the sparks, then.”

“It doesn’t need sparks. Ether is heavier than air, so the vapors flow to ground level and then build up. Most lab fires happen when the fumes reach a wall socket and spontaneously ignite. You know the rest.”

Time and materials were needed to prep the place, all of which were alien to White, but my list of gear was old news because he and his organization were in the business of procuring them for their legions of pyromaniac amateurs.

“We got guys everywhere working for us, and our guys have guys working for them. Most of them are runners,” White began.

Runners, or coyotes, who worked at piecemealing together large stashes of matchbooks, road flares and cold medicine to avoid the Man’s eyes. One of Hoyle’s runners, so far down the chain nobody knew his name, used a counterfeit license, provided by the chain, for making certain purchases. He also used it to gain entry into a nightclub where he got hammered on some sugary girl drink, made the wrong move on the wrong woman and wouldn’t take no for an answer until he heard it from the doorman’s flashlight. The cops pulled him over later on a suspected DUI. They seized two gallons of hospital-grade iodine in his trunk. Coyote sobered up in County with eight gangbangers tattooed like a collective flesh-and-blood Sistine Chapel. He didn’t shower for four days pending arraignment and refused to call anyone.

He cut a deal and the DA cut him loose with a tapeworm stuck to his ribs.

“Get the bag, son,” White shouted over to his van.

The boy hopped out, dragging with him a large, plastic bundle. The drooling man-boy moved with an odd grace, shifting his weight and anchoring his feet, hauling the bag from the van. It struck the dirt with a noise like a coconut wrapped in a wet towel. As much as I didn’t want to look, I knew better than to look away.

“My son does all of this,” said White. “Drains all of their fluids out and wraps them up. This happens if you fail a performance review and we fire you, like when this kid got scared and decided he could wear a tapeworm to a drop.”

The head looked mummified, wrapped in cheesecloth or surgical gauze with stains seeping through in different stages of yellow, red and brown. The body was wrapped in a single layer of chicken wire.

“We’ll dump him when we’re done here. Toe Tag weighed his stomach down with rocks so he’ll sink. The bottom feeders get through
the chicken wire and pick the flesh from the bone. There’s catfish the size of dogs in some of the these lakes out here. You don’t want to order fish at any of the mom-and-pop joints between here and New Mexico.”