Dermaphoria

“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.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

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