Mysterious Skin

by Scott Heim

  We entered his apartment, number 703. He shuffled around, turning on lights, then dimming them. I fell into a couch as if it were a pool of warm water. Somewhere, romantic music was playing. Minutes passed. I fought the urge to close my eyes. When he entered the room, I sat up and took a good look at his face. He seemed emotionless, regular, the sort of average joe that crafty policemen might stick into a criminal line-up to help a victim identify a guilty felon. “The bedroom’s this way,” he said.

  More dimmed lights. I saw a bed, a bookshelf without books, and a single poster on the wall advertising a jazz festival, its J shaped like a saxophone. The guy opened a drawer. His hands moved toward my face. One held a miniature plastic spoon, its yellow and red handle molded into the shape of Ronald McDonald’s grinning head. The other cupped a hill of white powder. “Snort this.” I didn’t want to, but I was already fucked up, and the coke looked cute, like glistening grains of sugar. I brought some to a nostril and breathed in. “Again,” he said. Again.

  He snorted the rest. Then he began tearing off his clothes and throwing them, arms flailing. Buttons popped; fabric stretched and ripped. He was evidently emulating scenes from various butch pornos. The polo shirt sailed past my head like a pastel pterodactyl. “Strip,” he commanded. His dick had already hardened. It looked massive, an image from a joke’s unfunny punchline, and it curved upward like a giant accusing finger. “Go down there, boy.”

  I figured I’d been lucky, considering most of the johns I’d tricked with had been older milquetoast types who hadn’t forced me to suck or get fucked. A few had simply held me in wrinkly arms, whispering crap like “You’re daddy’s little boy” or something equally embarrassing. Now, with me drunk and god-only-knew-how-many subway stops from home, those elementary acts had slipped away. I fell to my knees and took his dick in my mouth.

  “You like that, don’t you?” he said. He fucked my face. “Swallow it deep. Moan for me, let me know how good it is.” That seemed sickening for some reason. He thrust it farther, its head tearing at the back of my throat. It choked me, and I winced. I let up a little, pulling my head back, and as his dick slid out I felt him spit on me. I heard the distinct pull of the phlegm from deep in his throat, the pause, and finally the cartoony “phew” as the spit hailed from his mouth. A thumb-sized blob hit my cheek.

  I stood. For the first time, I was scared. For the first time, I was fathoms away from my usual helm of control.

  He shoved me onto his waterbed, the sloshing as sudden and loud as if I’d been tossed into an ocean. He placed a knee on the bed, grabbed his dick, and slapped my face with it. It hit the blob of spit, and a tiny puddle splashed into my eye. “You’re not finished, slut,” he said, then slammed back into my mouth. I was drunk; this wasn’t supposed to be happening. I imagined corkscrewing his dick from his body and tossing it through the window, into his Brighton Beach garden, seven floors below. That image should have been funny, but it wasn’t.

  His arm wrapped around my chest. He flipped me over in one motion, as if my body had been hollowed out. Slosh, slosh. “I’m going to give the slut what he needs.” His thumb wriggled around in my ass crack, then punctured the hole.

  I pictured the black scar on his thumbnail, now fishing around in the place where only one other person had been, so many years before. I briefly drifted back there. “Tell me you like it, Neil, tell Coach how much you like it.” I’d told him so. Had that been truth, or just a stream of gibberish? “Tell me.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s going too far.” My head reeled, and I hoped he could understand the garble. “This is what I don’t do.” I managed to squirm off the bed, my arm held out to keep him away. He lifted his knee and stood before me, eyes flashing.

  The room grew quiet. In the outside hallway, I could hear footsteps, a walk breaking into a run. “You were at that place,” he said. “I know what you were there for. You’ll do what I tell you. That’s what a slut does.”

  “I don’t know why I was there,” I said. “I really don’t.” The door to the adjoining room was cracked slightly, and when I peeked around his shoulder I could see a bathtub’s porcelain edge. “Just wait a minute,” I told him. “Let me piss. Then…I’ll be back in a second.”

  I expected his meaty arm to shoot out and grab me, but it didn’t. I brushed past him, made it to the bathroom, slammed the door. It had one of those old-fashioned locks, a little hook-shaped latch that fit into a silver eyehole. I fastened it and sat on the tub’s edge, breathing. The drug’s grains exploded through my brain. In a matter of hours, I would land in Kansas again. Calm down, I told myself. Calm him down. Be careful, finish, get the money.

  Then I heard him, trying to get in. I looked at the door. The john had wedged the end of a butter knife into the crack, and he wiggled it higher, toward the space where the latch connected door with frame. I actually felt my body tremble. The knife pushed higher, meddling closer to the latch until their silvers struck. The latch came loose, clicking back against the door. A second of silence passed. Then the door flew open, and the john came thundering in.

  He’s going to kill me, I thought. I imagined the thin, pliable shape of the butter knife thudding against my skin over and over, at last breaking through to razor my heart. I held up one hand to stop him. But he wasn’t going to stab. Instead, he tossed the knife into the air. It made a half-revolution, and he caught it again, stepped toward me, and raised the thick handle. It smacked against my forehead. Snap.

  I fell backward. The room spun in a blurry maelstrom, the naked john its center. I landed in the bathtub. My face was turned away from him, toward the gold circle of the drain. I saw stray beads of water, a soap bubble, a black pubic hair. “You’re getting fucked whether you want it or not,” his voice said, and in the cold space of the bathroom it echoed like a barbarous god’s. “And I know you want it.”

  For a second I thought of Zeke, sprawled on his hotel bed, disease dotting his skin. This trick was much worse. I felt my legs being pulled up, slabs of meat a butcher hoists toward the gleaming hook. He maneuvered me into a failed headstand, and the side of my face slammed against the tub’s bottom. Something made the sound of a walnut cracking.

  The thumb pushed back into my ass. Another. Then, unmistakably, I felt him twiddling his thumbs inside me, that classic bored gesture I suddenly knew I’d never make again. The twiddling sent a warm throb deep into my stomach, and I groaned. He took that as his cue to pull my body toward his. My ass became his bull’s-eye. His dick slammed against the hole, holding there, teasing it, and then my tight bud of skin gave way to it. He was inside me. “Gonna show you what that hole was made for.” I tried to move my head, tried to focus on him, only saw the horrible bright white of porcelain and his head’s shadow. The bathroom light crowned him with an enormous halo.

  I felt skewered. His body pistoned back and forth as it had when he’d fucked my face. I moved my arm, attempting to stop even some fraction of his motion. In my position, I couldn’t reach back to touch him. My hand smacked a faucet, and cold water began dribbling from the shower head, seasoning our bodies. My eyes closed. When I reopened them, I saw blood swirling toward the drain.

  The shower of water enraged him, a rage I could feel shooting into my own body. “Slut,” he screamed. From the corner of my eye I saw him reach toward the tub’s edge; close his hand around a shampoo bottle. His arm raised, briefly obliterating the bathroom light. Then his arm came down, curving at full speed and force through the air. The bottle bashed against my head. The arm rose again. The bottle struck again. Blood squirted a red poppy onto the porcelain. Another swing. I thought, It isn’t breaking. It’s shatterproof. His dick stayed massive inside me. The bottle pummeled my head a fourth and fifth time. The noise it made—and I could hear it so clearly, a perfect sound rebounding through my head—was a hollow, almost soft bup.

  The words please stop took form inside my mouth, but I couldn’t say them. The shampoo bottle battered my cheekbone, my chin, my eye. More wat
er needled down. He drilled farther through me, dismantling my guts, his dick seeming to lacerate whatever internal walls my body still supported. Bup. Pause. Bup bup bup. He beat me, matching his arm with the rhythm of his fucking. The bottle dropped, still not shattering, and landed next to my head. I read its label: BABY SHAMPOO. Below that, written inside a pink teardrop, NO MORE TEARS.

  “God, you want it. Take that cock all the way inside there.” His words blended into a moan, a yell, a kind of cough. I felt hot and gluey spurts bulleting deep inside me, bursts of wet heat, arrows aimed for the pit of my stomach. The spurts ricocheted off my body’s ruined walls, staining me everywhere with their deadly graffiti, and if I opened my mouth I knew they would spew out. But my mouth was open. I was trying to scream.

  I still strained to bat him away. It was too late; he had finished. He pulled his dick out and dropped my legs back into the tub.

  Water streamed beside my face. My blood, a granular swirl of soap, and a stray bullet of his sperm blended into it and zoomed toward the drain. I found I could move at last, and I looked up at him. He walked out, swatting the light switch. The darkness wasn’t what I needed, but it was close.

  When I woke, the darkness remained. “I’m sober,” I said, and my voice cracked on both words. I lay on the front lawn of the john’s apartment complex. I couldn’t remember dressing or leaving. Beneath me, blades of grass felt like ice picks. In the mulch beneath a dying bush, I saw a close-up view of pebbles, a screw, coils of tangerine peel, tangled ribbon from a gutted cassette tape, a torn section from a Times obituary…darkness ruffled everything beyond that.

  I sat up and raised my head, counting the apartment’s ascending windows toward the seventh floor. He lived beyond one of those windows. He remained there, perhaps cleaning my blood from his porcelain tub, perhaps washing come from his pubic hair with a handful of baby shampoo.

  Blocks away, the lights from the subway station gleamed their sickly orange. I was an hour’s trip from home, but at least I knew how to get back. What would I tell Wendy? I pushed myself from the ground, and my head throbbed. Pain shot through my stomach, into my chest. My tongue snagged on the razorlike edge from a chipped front tooth.

  To forget the pain, I thought about what the night had done. Everything had been hurled out of balance, a sudden and sickening displacement I could feel even as I walked toward the subway, as I lumbered and tripped like a hopeless drunk, like the person my mom had been when she’d barely survived her worst drinking days. “Mom,” I said aloud. I almost put “I want my” in front of it.

  This is what has happened, I thought.

  The empty subway car shed light on my abraded knuckles, the dribbles of blood on my shirt. I started to count the stops on the way back, but I lost count after fifteen.

  I remembered a detail from the days I’d first had sex for money. Then, when I arrived home from my Carey Park tricks, I’d scarf down whatever food I could find to rid my mouth of their anonymous tongues’ residues. My duty done, I’d ease back into my little life. Those days were a fairy tale now. I spat on the subway car’s floor to hopefully obliterate any smidgeon of virus he might have deposited there. If only I could use some similar gesture for my ass. I was filled with the queasy urge to shit, but I fought it back. I never wanted to touch my ass again. It felt as though something were jammed inside it still, something small yet full of hazard and horror, like TNT or a scorpion.

  When I arrived home, the kitchen clock read 4:45. My plane would leave La Guardia Airport in five hours. Wendy’s bedroom door was closed. I peeked inside, saw her hair jutting from the blanket like a rooster’s crest. This time I deserved the lecture she’d give. I stepped into the bathroom, leaving the light off, taking care to avoid the mirror. As I stripped, each movement made me wince.

  I pulled down the lip of my boxers and stared at my dick. It was repulsive. I hated it. The boxers dropped to the floor, landing beside a green-and-yellow striped shirt I’d worn that afternoon. I sat, picked it up, held it to my face. I breathed the scent of how I was before. Outside, in the street, a woman screamed so loudly it might have been a machine. The screaming continued for two minutes, three, then stopped. In the seconds that followed, the entire world grew incredibly quiet, and I cried.

  fifteen

  DEBORAH LACKEY

  When I arrived home, the only face that greeted me was the one on the television screen. There, the slobbering teenage girl from The Exorcist experienced the height of demonic possession. Brian lazed on the floor watching her, barefoot, his back to me. Another kid sat next to him, hair spiking in precarious angles from his head. A silver necklace, thick as a bicycle chain, sparkled under the stranger’s haircut.

  “You’re sitting too close,” I told them. “You’ll go blind.”

  Brian rushed to the doorway to take my bags. “We didn’t expect you this early,” he said. I explained how Breeze, my ride from the airport, had risked my life by speeding the entire route to Little River. When I glanced at the sofa where our mother usually sat, Brian said, “She’s still at work.”

  Brian’s friend introduced himself. “Eric.” His eyes, smeared with makeup, stared at my skirt’s tie-dyed pattern. He offered his hand, its middle finger bisected by a ring that showed a grinning skull, silver crossbones, and the letters R.I.P. “Happy holidays,” Eric said. “I feel I know you already.”

  I’d heard about him too, via different telephone descriptions. From Brian, Eric was “a friend of someone I’m trying to get in contact with”; from my mother, he was both “Brian’s diversion from studying” and “a tad bit messed up, but well meaning.” I shook his clammy hand and sat beside him; on TV, the green demon snarled at the priest. “If I remember right, this is just starting to get good,” I said. “Worry about my bags later.”

  We watched the movie’s remainder. There was something deranged and distinctly midwestern about a station that programmed The Exorcist three days prior to Christmas. I’d viewed the original at a horror movie festival in San Francisco, but this was the edited-for-television version. Scenes of violence and sex had been scissored into tameness. One line I distinctly recalled wincing at—the demon’s guttural “Your mother sucks cocks in hell”—had altered, and the replacement voice-over growled “Your mother wears socks that smell.” Maybe this change was for the better, considering what Brian had told me about Eric’s parents.

  The demon’s face filled the screen, her cankered skin glowing. Brian grinned at me. “She looks like you did, that Halloween,” he said. “Remember? The year you were the witch.” Yes, I remembered.

  Then Brian turned to Eric. “You know what I mean. That night. In the woods. The second time it happened.” Eric nodded, and their eyes revisited the TV.

  At one point I moved to see my brother better. During the scene where the priest and a friend sneak into the possessed kid’s freezing bedroom, Brian upped the volume. The characters lifted the sleeping girl’s dress to shine a flashlight on her skin, which by now had bleached to an otherworldly bluish hue. Brian’s eyes stayed glued to this scene, entranced, as if they recognized something. The flashlight lingered as a pair of words blossomed on the blue flesh. HELP ME.

  After the credits had rolled and the eerie tinkling piano soundtrack had faded, I climbed the stairs to my room. I began unpacking, layering clothes into my dresser drawers, mixing the smells of my California apartment with the indelible, almost spicy smell of home. A door slammed outside. Through the window’s glass I saw my mother, decked out in her officer’s uniform, rushing from her new Mustang into the house. Seconds later she stood in my room’s doorway.

  “I’ve missed you,” I said. I hugged her, and we sat on the bed.

  As usual when I returned home, my mother and I chatted about the same humdrum things. I answered her questions about the flight, the ride from the airport with Breeze. I assured her everything was fine with my apartment, my retail job, my night class on weaving and looming. She told me she was overdue for another raise at wor
k; she had briefly worried about money when my father’s child support checks stopped coming and Brian had entered college, but all was still manageable. “And I see you’ve met Eric,” she said. “He’s like the new son around here these days.” I guessed by her tone she didn’t mind.

  “Things got a little strange during the summer,” my mother continued. “But Brian’s calmed down now. Maybe that’s due to Eric, preposterous as that sounds.” My mother’s letters and phone conversations had enigmatically referred to these summer “problems,” but I’d never received a direct answer about what any of it meant. I remembered half-jokingly asking things like “Has Brian joined a religious cult?” and “Is he having a nervous breakdown?” only to receive the standard “No, honey, it’s nothing to worry over.” Even now, I could tell, she would promptly change the subject before I inquired. “As we speak,” she said, “Brian and Eric are downstairs, heating up dinner for us.”

  They’d not only cooked dinner, but had draped the table with a checkerboard cloth and lit clove-scented candles. The setup overlooked the window’s wintery view of our empty field, the neighbor family’s barren peach orchard, and, beyond that, the stark grays and blacks of the Little River cemetery. I took my place at the table; Brian sat at my left elbow, and Eric, my right. The last time I could recall all four sides being occupied, my father had been here.

  Brian ladled potato soup from a tin pot. Since I’d last seen him one Christmas previous, he’d cut his hair shorter, lost about ten pounds, and begun wearing things I attributed to Eric’s influence—a dark, bulky sweater, ripped denims, black Converse high-tops. These clothes didn’t make my brother “tough” or “punk” or whatever else he might have been striving for. They just lent Brian an even goofier look. And he’d developed an odd habit—he occasionally blinked forcefully, a random nervous tic, as if attempting to dislodge dust from his eyes.