Dermaphoria (14 page)

I only knew why it worked in pieces, not the whole compound, but I knew it worked. Skin only perceived three sensations, pain, pressure and temperature. The subtle interplay of those very crude sensations could create a symphony of touch that constitute all the physical contact in our lives. And the memory neurotransmitters could be blocked as a side effect or a primary process but in either case, the sense of touch was real, and if the memory neurotransmitters were being blocked, then the sensation of time passing was the same, but the memory of the time that had passed would be totally different.

The original source of the alkaloid still eluded me, but I knew I could synthesize it. The bugs had been talking to me and, for once, it was my turn to listen to them.

I
’D RESURRECTED SKIN OUT OF THE ASHES AND GLOWING ROACHES, MY PARTING
gift to Hoyle. The universe was bright again. I was finished. I could hand Hoyle the keys to a network of laboratories, all six stages removed from everything but his legend, and walk away. I’d become excess overhead and Hoyle would be happy to pay me off and see me gone. One thing I learned from the tables on the Strip, you walk away when you’re hot.

I reached the pay phone at the haunted gas station, sank a pile of quarters and dialed your number.

“Hello?” You said, your voice a sleepy rasp. I hadn’t thought I might be waking you.

“It’s me, baby. Wake up.”

“Eric? Where are you? Where’s Otto?”

“Dee, let’s forget Otto for a minute.”

“What time is it?” Headlights flooded the phone booth. A semi passed on the highway, hauling a load of propane.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s late. Listen, Dee. I’m coming back. The job is almost up.”

“That’s good news, sweetie.” Your lips were half wedged against the pillow, the phone barely against your face.

“No, it’s great news. Dee, I’m a millionaire. It’s why I’ve been working so hard, it’s all coming together.”

“I don’t understand. Eric, honey, can we talk about this tomorrow?”

“No, we can’t. Listen to me, Dee. I need you to come get me.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m outside Palmdale, off Highway 138, near Littlerock.” I told you to look for the phantom gas station and hotel, next to a bus stop where nobody ever waited and no bus ever came. “I need you to come get me. Right now.”

“Eric, that’s two and a half hours away. That’s the middle of nowhere. What are you doing there?”

“I can explain when you get here. Now…please. I need you here. Now.”

“Eric, I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but after the last couple of weeks, you can’t expect to wake me up in the middle of the night and drive halfway to Las Vegas to pick you up.”

“Don’t start with me, Desiree.” I hit the side of the phone booth with my fist. “You’ve got my car, remember? My car. I’d appreciate a little gratitude. I’ll take you anywhere you want, after tonight. We can drive to Vegas.”

“Not Vegas again.”

“We can drive to Vegas,” I repeated myself, louder, “get a nice room for a night or two, maybe three, and fly anywhere you want after that.”

“Eric, that sounds great. But you’re still scaring me. And Otto’s not here.”

“I know.”

“I know you know. Is that all you can say?”

“What am I supposed to say?”

“I thought he was with you.”

“He was, and he ran off. He’s probably coyote meat, by now.”

“Jesus, Eric.”

“Dee, I’m sorry. Please, drive out here. Screw your job. I can take care of everything. Me and the pooch are waiting.”

“You mean you’ve got him?”

“Yes. I told you I had him.”

“Eric,” you said something, the drone of another passing truck drowned you out. “And it’s not funny. You’re supposed to be taking care of him.”

“He’s fine. He’s a bundle of joy.”

“No, Eric, he’s not fine. You left his pills here.”

“He’s all better, obviously.”

“Goddamn you, Eric. Stop playing with me. Stop it. Can you please just once make sense and tell me what you’ve done with him? He’s really sick.”

“What’s the matter?”

“If you had his medicine you’d know. He’s got a tapeworm.”

Y
OUR HYSTERIA ESCALATES TO PURE SOUND, AN AIRLESS ELECTRIC ANGER
stuttering like the shrill shriek of a fax machine in my ear. The film breaks, the receiver blinks from my hand back to the cradle.

New moon black sky of a cold Mojave night, legions of crickets chirping in unison, he’s here, he’s here, he’s here, he’s here, he’s here, relaying my death warrant at the speed of sound. Your dog had clocked every second of my last three days. Along with seventy-two hours of footage logged in his head, he’d enjoyed unchecked access to my financial records and notes—Skin, its molecular diagram and my initial proposal of its synthesis. Your mutt planned to give me those big, innocent eyes and pine for me to take him back to Mommy, to you, and hand over my work on a fuzzy, brown-eyed platter.

I hadn’t slept in four days or eaten in six, or the other way around, I couldn’t be certain. The phone at the gas station was contaminated and Otto was awol, but your dog didn’t know you’d given him up. I needed to eat, pull my head together and make a plan.

The light hurt, like staring into a brilliant white sun flecked with gold and dried ketchup. Hank Williams crooned from the hole in his heart. A roach darted from behind the napkin dispenser, its shadow fluttered in the corner of my eye then lay buried beneath a mound of
sugar and glass shards after I’d swung at it. The waitress dropped the chrome lid of the sugar jar onto my table.

“We’re not going to have a problem, are we?” She was pretty, about forty, the kind of forty the desert makes you. Reptile leather tan and a white apron, a murky rose inked onto her wrist.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’m a little jumpy. I’ve been driving and my rig broke down and I had to walk a long way and I haven’t slept.”

A man sitting at the counter laughed. Cowboy boots and a trucker’s gut.

“You gonna order something?”

“I’m with the circus and my rig broke down.”

“Are you going to eat or are you going to leave?”

I ordered a cup of decaf and a tuna melt, made sure she saw my cash. Stuffing the roll back to my pocket, I felt the loose stash of specimens from my earlier scavenging, the Fireflies. The kid had been more greedy than cautious, and he’d parted with almost three-hundred hits which I’d split among my pockets, turning up a few stray Black Widows in the process. My carelessness would get the better of me, land me in jail or worse. Especially the Black Widows. They’d been an experiment and they’d been mean. We never made them again.

My face down, the white tabletop bleaching my eyes, I stared at the menu and each time I heard the chimes ringing against the glass doors, I counted, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, then slowly looked up to check for cops.

Above the cash register, a stuffed and mounted elk head kept vigil over the customers, a beast like some cross between a deer, bull and moose. I’d seen them in the high desert, almost hitting one while driving through the hills of New Mexico, rounding a black bend in the dead of night with no road shoulder, no room for error, my headlights hit a pair of giant, almond eyes that lit up and hovered in the dark. Now I knew
where visions of aliens came from. I could scarcely imagine the amount of surveillance hardware packed into that massive, alien elk head.

A busboy swept up the sugar and glass, replaced my silverware. Things were falling into place. Your mutt didn’t know you’d given him up. He was only a threat if I served as his courier. I could eat, walk back to the house, grab my notes, retrieve my cash, wipe the place down and disappear. I’d phone White with good news from the diner payphone, rendezvous with him over a tuna melt. With my cash savings and instructions for Hoyle’s product, I could say good-bye to Oz, Manhattan White, Hoyle and the Chain forever.

My food arrived. I smelled methyl chloride residue, used to decaffeinate the coffee. The diner probably held fifty or sixty pounds in their storeroom, enough trace methyl to bind to a hundred different hosts and reinvent the chemical wheel. Nudge a molecule, an atom. The difference between amphetamine and methamphetamine is both minuscule and gargantuan, and that guillotined elk head knew it, staring at me from its cedar trophy mount trying to look stupid.

Turning my back to it, I moved to the other side of the booth and dumped pepper onto my french fries but the Head stared at me in the window’s reflection. Facing me made no difference. The Head didn’t need to see my eyes, all it needed was the proper frequency and minimal interference. Neurotransmitters fire in a symphony code, blood rushes to lobes working in concert to form a given thought, making for cranial hot spots that show up on thermographs taken by black helicopters and stuffed elk heads. A candle is an X-ray, it’s a matter of wavelength. Trying to not think about something, like pinching off a gushing hose, creates more pressure and blasts the thoughts out faster and the place smelled like shit and the lights were too bright and what I could do with all of that methyl chloride and then I got it: the Head heard me.

“I’m not doing a goddamned thing.” Twisted around in the booth
to look the head square in its alien surveillance eyes just as the music stopped, so the words sounded louder than I’d intended and now everyone else was staring at me as well. We are going to have a problem. If I paid up, tipped well and left quickly, they’d have no reason to stop me or call anyone.

Forty bucks for a decaf and a tuna melt, one hand on the door and one step to safety.

“I hope that hunter shot you in the ass and killed all your children.” I couldn’t contain myself.

Walking back, I tried calming myself before the fear flushed fight-or-flight juices into my system, sucking the blood from my hands and feet, flaring my pupils, raising my pulse and temperature. That’s what the helicopters look for, helicopters painted the color of a moonless midnight and fueled on the souls of the dead so their rotors pump the air in silence, their scopes checking for heat and they see a glowing head and torso with no arms or legs floating midair, they register panic and come after you, bugmen sliding down ropes dangling from black helicopters churning out silent hurricanes over the dirt.

A firefly blinked in the dark.
There aren’t any fireflies out here
. As soon as the thought left my brain, the firefly blinked off, stayed off. I walked faster, my sweat freezing in the night air, and it came back, four of them this time, dancing at the edges of my eyes then gone.

They followed me from the diner. They were doing panic recon. The crickets tipped them off. I stood still, cleared my head, starting at the top of the list: television jingles, sitcom one-liners and grade school jokes to bury the blood-symphony of thought giving them nothing to hear but a false alarm.

A tentative step, then a second, then a third until a firefly blinked
on again. The worst kind of firefly, the alpha, the quivering red sniper dot. It landed dead-center on my heart, smoke curling from my jacket as it burned through. Another blinked on, then another, my chest and arms lighting up with angry red pinpoints, metropolitan Hell seen from a burning airplane. The glowing bugs covered me, their hot feet grazing my cold skin as they swarmed to my kill zones, a thousand of them for the thousand snipers a thousand miles away with their night vision scopes trained on my head and chest, awaiting the signal to leave my steaming corpse for the coyotes.

“Pull your goddamned triggers already.”

Nothing. The fireflies gone in a blink. My jacket was cool to my touch in the night air. A cricket chirped, a coyote howled. I measured their sounds for a discernible code but heard none, so continued back to Oz.

The clock read 3:30
A.M.
I remembered something about food and a head with enormous glowing eyes. I’d been abducted. The aliens fed me a tuna melt.

Your dog stared at me from the floor, his pink tongue hanging out of his little salon-groomed, rodent face. He wanted me to pick him up. He wanted to lick me. He wanted a DNA sample from my face.

“No go,” I said. “Mommy Machine sold you out. She must be a prototype because they’re not supposed to fall in love.” He didn’t get it, he just worked those pathetic, cartoon baby seal eyes and twitched his tail. “Are you listening? I know who you are. Mommy caved and told me everything. Mommy’s going to be shut down and sold for scrap.”

My diagram was tacked to the wall, a black marker map of a tryptamine molecule with my insect-inspired brainstorm written below. A green nitrogen roach tapped at its corner. I flicked it and tucked the
drawing into my pocket.

“I wish you hadn’t seen this,” I said. “I’ve got no problem with you. I’m not gonna hurt you, but I’m not taking you with me. Mommy knows where we are and she’ll come for you. You can tell her whatever you want, once I’m long gone.”

Fuzzface barked. I filled four bowls with water, covered the kitchen floor with newspaper, sliced open the fifty-pound bag of dog food and dumped it on its side, then checked all of the locks, unplugged the fax machine and police scanners. I didn’t need them anymore. I changed into a clean shirt then emptied my overnight bag, heading down to the basement to make my last withdrawal.

The projector keeps skipping. It might be my memory, it might not.

My hands shook and I couldn’t hold the numbers in my head. The hairline gap around the edge of the tumbler hissed like a punctured tire. The numbers, six, two, one, crowded each other out of the scant space left in my brain. I couldn’t form pairs and, once I could, I dialed the same six-digit sequence in the same direction, right, right, right. The dog licked my arms and yelped. The sound hitting my eardrums like a knitting needle and when I stomped down on the safe door out of sheer frustration, he ran for cover and left me alone.

If I could shut my eyes for an hour, I could pull it together. I had everything I needed to walk away and give Hoyle what he wanted, but I wasn’t leaving behind $630,000 in the safe simply because I was too wired to remember the combination. Leaving. Left. Left. Left. Right, left, right.

A quick bump and all was right with the world. Right, left, right. The tumbler hummed, the handle gave and I heaved the door open, laughing with relief. A candy bar wrapper, a ballpoint pen and a lone AA battery lay inside the safe. Bundled Jacksons, sequentially serialized, face up, in blocks of a thousand, fifty each—$630,000 altogether gone.
Along with my stomach and pulse. Nobody but Otto and I knew a safe existed in the lab. Nobody but Otto and I knew the numbers for it.

You and your dog had been clocking me from day one, Desiree. You read my mind, used your cards to know every move I made before I made it, didn’t you? Your dog fed you everything else you needed to know and now Otto had jumped ship with everything I’d saved. Otto, stay far away from here because when I call White and ask for Toe Tag myself, I’ll know exactly what I’m doing.

Thunder outside. The universe decided to rain now that I had to walk until sunrise. The house shook from another rumble and your dog yelped and whined, scared out of his wits, afraid of shorting out and smoking his circuits if the lightning came too close. Me, I could dance on the rooftops with a golf club. The wrath of the angels hit me when I was younger, so they couldn’t touch me a second time.

They weren’t giving up, though. The thunder clapped louder and Oz trembled under the boot heels of more angry angels like those who’d chased Dad and me into the cellar when I was a boy, only this one kept shouting my name. I heard it a second time, my name muffled by the storm. Your dog circled my feet, whining. More thunder, then my name again. The gas station phone was crawling with tapeworms, the diner was monitored by the Head who’d signaled the helicopters who’d followed me back to Oz. They were outside. No mistaking it. No mistaking the sound of my name and the meaty end of an angry fist hammering against the door, shaking the windows.

I was too far panicked for more. The next threshold would either be death because my heart or some vessel in my brain exploded or a Zen priest’s calm that preceded some rash, violent flip of a self-destruct switch.

The surveillance dog kept barking, louder and louder, hot puffs of electric dog breath like smoke signals in the cold air, calling them down to the basement. They’d catch me while I stood helpless and staring at
the fading string of air barks from the spy dog. If he saw me leave, he’d tell them where I went, and he’d bark it out in that TV dog bark code. Code. The pulses dissolved midair, the chain never longer than four or five at once, but that was enough. Bark, bark, bark, bark. Long, short, long, long and indeed, I was calm, as tranquil as deep space and just as clear:

The basement lab had a full pound of pharmaceutical-grade MDMA, unpressed and uncut, and twelve pounds of methamphetamine in various stages of recrystallization, together worth over $150,000.

I shut off the cooling.

The six, uncut blotter sheets of LSD had a wholesale value of more than $36,000 for more than five-thousand individual hits.

I opened each of the eight five-gallon drums of ether. The dog would stop barking any second.

Three hundred Mad Hatters awaited pickup, along with an equal amount of White Rabbits and Mr. Toads, as well as a hundred Yellow Submarines and Blue Meanies. Their combined street value came to $28,000. The lab gear was worth just under $75,000.

The barking stopped.

I cut the power.

I had an open gallon of toluene and a one percent chance of not being shot when I opened the cellar door. A quick peek through the cracks and I opened the door slowly—no sparks—and stepped out into the night and my one percent of luck. I dumped the toluene behind me, let it cascade down the steps to the pooling ether fumes below. Your photograph was in my pocket. I kissed your picture once, lit the corner and dropped it onto the concrete stairs. That picture of your face saved me, for a little while.

I ran. Between the flash and the roar, there wasn’t any space at all. The desert lit up daylight for four seconds and I ran as fast I could for
each one. Every night creature imaginable was all at once exposed beneath the screaming light of the burning houses: coyotes, prairie dogs, spiders the size of my open hands and rattlesnakes like ropes of liquid muscle. Without the light from Oz, I would have died.