by Nico Laeser
SKIN CAGE
NICO LAESER
Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Laeser
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design by Nico Laeser
Editing by Kelly Hartigan (XterraWeb)
editing.xterraweb.com
[email protected]
For Jennifer
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
II
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
III
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 1
I am Daniel
In my dream, she is dressed in her white uniform, with a burgundy cardigan over top. Her hair is styled almost like a movie star from the fifties, and if the world suddenly became black and white, she would be indiscernible from any of the leading ladies in any of the old movies that play on daytime television.
Sunlight floods through the window in a wide beam and shines through the side of her right eye, as she sits in her chair, gazing thoughtfully off into the corner of the room. I can see the clear convex cornea of her eye and behind it, the intricate pattern of her iris, a beautiful and delicate flower encased and preserved in resin. The petals of the flower surrounding the black pupil are all the colors of autumn, flecks of green, amber, and every shade of brown. As I stare into her eyes, I feel the effects of inertia as a familiar gravity begins pulling me in toward her, and my heart and stomach tense in preparation, anticipating free-fall.
Her unpainted lips appear soft and are the subtle pink color of Jersey Lilies, contrasting the pale skin of her face, which appears almost white when illuminated by the sun. The soft peach fuzz that blurs and softens the edges is highlighted as a white haze, from the base of her slender neck, to behind her ear. I am envious of the warm and gentle breeze that caresses the topography of her bare skin, her perfect skin, undamaged by the sun and rarely exposed to it directly because she spends her days here, with me.
My name is Daniel. She calls me Danny, and although I cringe inside when anyone calls me Danny, I can’t tell her this. I am in love with her.
I am around six feet tall, and in my mind, of athletic build. My voice is deep and gravelly and this is the voice that narrates my thoughts and dreams, and it is with this inner voice that I tell her every day that I love her, though I can’t say it to her out loud.
***
I awake from the dream, and the room seems dim in contrast to the vivid colors of the dream. I’m moving down the hallway, toward my bedroom, when I see her. Her autumn eyes light up, and the smile I adore spreads across her soft heart-shaped face, held in place by a slender neck, housed in the white collar of her uniform and framed by the same burgundy cardigan from my dream.
I follow the slim arms of the cardigan down to her delicate wrists and tender hands that curl around the handles of the wheelchair that contains him, the pathetic, useless mass, the dormant obstacle that has prevented me from ever having the chance to tell her how I feel. His twisted, gape-mouthed face frames eyes that I recognize.
She points at me and says, “Look, Danny, who’s that handsome guy?”
I see her burgundy arm and slender finger, outstretched over my shoulder, pointing back at the retard. The full-size, badly sculpted clay model of a man is slumped in the wheelchair, and staring back at me, but it is not my reflection that I see in the mirror.
Danny is my prison, my skin cage.
I am his prisoner. I am Daniel.
CHAPTER 2
I am her diary
I lie awake in my bed, studying the decorative moulding that circles the hanging chandelier. The sunlight bounces off the pendant glass, creating long drawn out patterns on the otherwise plain white ceiling. I know, by the position of the shadows and reflections, that I still have over an hour before Cassie and Anna come to get me, and all I can do is wait.
I hate waking up early. I try to force myself to fall back asleep but without success. My mouth seems dry, more so than usual, and there is an itch on my body somewhere, but I’m not sure exactly where. I go to one of the places that I usually go to in my mind, when I have time to kill.
I am sitting outside a hut, fashioned from tall lengths of thick bamboo, staked into the arid dirt and lashed together with strips of the green outer skin from the bamboo. Its roof is made from layered palm leaves as opposed to some of the other huts in the village that have switched to corrugated metal. In front of me sits a boy of indiscernible age, whose name is unpronounceable in English. Our conversation is limited to head and hand gestures, and I copy his movements. We each have a bone handle knife and shape strips of hard bamboo into twelve-inch skewers, much like the barbecue skewers that you can buy in any supermarket back home.
Once we have around forty or so skewers each, we set them aside, and he places the weeds that we collected earlier from the rainforest on the ground between us. It is a type of wild-growing weed that resembles a milk thistle. He cuts the flower part off two of them and hands one to me. He makes eye contact briefly to make sure that I am watching, then he pulls at the cotton-like material, and I mimic his actions. He cuts the heads off all the weeds and places them before me, and I repeat the process with each.
At the end of this process, we have a fist-size ball of fibrous white fluff, and he places a rock on top of it to stop it from blowing away in the blistering hot breeze. He takes the stems of the weed and peels each like a banana, creating long thin green strands and gestures for me to do the same. He takes his knife and puts a small cut into the non-pointed end of one of the skewers before taking a piece of the cobweb-like fluff and pulling it into a ten-inch length. He takes one of the long green strings and slides it into the cut in the end of the skewer, then begins to wrap the fluff and string around the end of the skewer. Every couple of turns, he pulls at the fluff. He ties off the string and cuts off the excess. He takes the completed dart and pushes it into the long bamboo tube before raising it to his lips. He exhales with great force into the mouthpiece. The sound of rushing air is followed by a miniature thud as the dart sticks deep into a cardboard box that reads, “Chri
stian missionaries: relief support.”
***
I hear talking and realize that I have been moved from my bed to my chair and have completely missed the morning’s cleaning ritual and the treating of my bedsores.
“Do you need anything else, Cass?” Anna touches Cassie’s arm and smiles, revealing the dark pink vertical lines carved into the black-brown skin, stretched over her rounded left cheek.
As a boy, I failed to appreciate the power of such a simple gesture: instead, I would find myself staring with morbid curiosity at her scars, which ironically, seemed to appear only when she smiled fully.
“I don’t need anything else right now; thanks, I’ll take it from here,” Cassie says.
“Would you like some coffee?” Anna says over her shoulder as she leaves the room.
From over my shoulder, Cassie says, “That would be lovely; thanks, Anna,” and we follow her out.
As we exit the room, I make a great effort to keep my eyes pinned right or closed, so as to avoid the oversized mirror at the end of the hallway that serves as a crushing daily reminder of the inaccuracy of my self-image.
We move down toward the day room, passing ornate frames housing painted representations of my ancestors, three-quarter-turned figures, each with the same stern glare of self-importance. The centerline, where the textured filigree wall coverings above meet the wood paneling below, serves as the line of symmetry between the frames of the paintings and the frames that make up the relief detail in the wood paneling. The mahogany wood panel wainscoting continues for the lower four feet of almost every wall in the house, including the curved staircase. The same color runs through the wood floor that is polished to a high luster, reflecting an upside-down and slightly darker version of the house interior.
I let myself become entranced by the sound of Cassie’s heels on the wood floor and by the distant sound of Anna’s flat shoes slapping her feet as she lifts each leg, her shoes squeaking at every turn and becoming gradually quieter with the clip-slap of each step.
Once in the day room, Cassie begins my morning exercises, starting with my legs, one at a time, bending and stretching them at the knee; she begins rolling and stretching my ankle as she braces my left leg on top of her bended knee, before doing the same with my right.
She stands up and takes one of my arms. Out of my peripheral vision, I can see her extending and contracting the arm at the elbow, then rolling the ball joint of the shoulder. She pulls her chair close to mine and sits down, taking one of my hands and rolling it at the wrist, before interlocking her fingers with mine and continuing the exercise. I cannot feel her hand in mine, but sometimes it almost seems like I can. I suppose that this is my mind attempting to simulate the sensation, in response to the received visual information. I know that the feeling is not real, but this is still my favorite part of the morning.
Cassie repositions my chair by the table next to the window and moves her chair opposite mine.
Anna walks into view with steaming coffee and sets the cup down on the table. “There you go, my dear.”
“You are an angel.” Cassie takes Anna’s hand in both of hers, and by contrast, they look black and white.
“How is that no-good boyfriend of yours?” Anna asks, adding her other hand to the pile.
“Still no good, but no longer my boyfriend,” Cassie replies.
“Probably for the best. Some men just don’t know how to behave,” Anna says.
Cassie pulls back the corners of her mouth in a pseudo smile. “He’s been calling me, leaving messages, saying he’s sorry, that it meant nothing, and that he wants to talk.”
“That boy is not good enough for you, Cass, actions speak louder than words,” Anna says and moves her hand to Cassie’s shoulder.
Cassie nods. “He said that it was a simple mistake. Picking up salt instead of sugar at a diner is a simple mistake; picking up another woman instead of your girlfriend at the bar—well we both know what they did—that’s not a simple mistake.”
Anna stands there, shaking her head. “You need to find yourself a nice church-going boy.”
“I wasn’t even looking for a boyfriend; he just appeared out of nowhere one day and wouldn’t take no for an answer. He was persistent and he brought me flowers. I figured that he couldn’t be that bad if he was willing to wait more than two months until I would even agree to meet him for coffee,” Cassie says.
“You’re not thinking of giving him another chance, are you?” Anna asks.
“No way, I could never be with anyone that thinks so little of me,” Cassie replies.
Anna smiles and gently squeezes the hand on Cassie’s shoulder. “Mr. Right will come along one day.” She takes back her hands. “I’ll leave you and Danny to it. Let me know if you need anything else.”
“Thanks, Anna, I think we have everything we need,” Cassie says.
Anna exits my field of view.
Cassie’s phone vibrates and travels slowly across the table. She looks at it, rolls her eyes, and touches the screen. It stops vibrating and she leaves it on the table.
“Sorry, Danny, that rotten liar does not deserve any more of my time, or yours.” She smiles and looks me in the eyes. “You know, when I was living in the foster home with Brian, I sent off for a ‘build your own lie detector kit.’ I waited for two weeks until it came and then spent almost three hours putting it together before testing it on Brian.”
She raises the steaming cup to her lips and winces before setting it back on the table, “I asked a few simple control questions to test it out and then got down to the reason that I had ordered it in the first place: ‘did you, Brian, take and read my diary?’ I asked. He denied it emphatically and the lie detector lit up. I yelled at him, calling him a liar, and he broke down and confessed, saying that there was nothing interesting in it anyway. After he promised to never touch my things again, cross his heart and hope to die and all that, he skulked out of my room, and I hooked myself up to the contraption. ‘Am I the smartest, most brilliant person in the world?’ I asked and answered, ‘yes,’ and it lit up again. I stuck out my tongue at the machine and returned to the simple control questions that I’d asked of Brian. ‘Is my name Cassandra?’ I asked and answered, ‘yes,’ and it lit up again. At the time I wondered if I’d wired it wrong, but more likely, it was just a kid’s novelty kit that didn’t actually work.” She purses her perfect lips and blows steam across the surface of her coffee cup before taking a sip.
“At first, I was angry about being duped by the makers of the kit, but over time, whenever Brian would fail to own up to something that I knew he’d done, I would just threaten to pull out the lie detector, and he would own up to it, all in a huff. His first response was always to lie though, about whatever it was, and if I didn’t have the lie detector, which Brian thought of as an infallible tattletale, then I’m pretty sure that he would never have told the truth.” She shakes her head and sighs. “Some people don’t deserve the benefit of the doubt and will only tell the truth if they have no other option. The best thing to do with people like that is to cut them out of your life completely.”
Cassie reaches into her bag and pulls out the book that she has been reading to me. “Let’s get back to a man whose stories are worth listening to—Mr. Tolkien,” she says, opens the book to the page she has bookmarked, and begins to read.
CHAPTER 3
I am worm food
My parents are Robert and Hilary Stockholm. My father was the sole heir to the fortune of Montgomery Stockholm, my grandfather. My mother spent most of her life traveling the poorest parts of the globe, helping under-privileged communities. Her family was also wealthy and took it upon themselves to heal the world one fundraiser or Christian school at a time. My parents met at one of the fundraisers for starving kids in Africa. These gatherings were by invitation only and were usually made up of the incredibly rich, and ironically, most self-absorbed people. To my mother’s credit, she is a second-generation do-gooder. Her childhood was sp
ent living among the people that her parents were trying to help, and as a result, she was denied the rich brat upbringing that the child of such a wealthy family is usually accustomed; instead, she was subjected to a lot of the same hardships as the poor wasteland dwellers of the various third-world countries they frequented.
My mother had continued the crusade to help the less fortunate, and much like her, as a child, I had been dragged along. I was proud of what my parents were trying to accomplish, but at the same time, I felt like my needs were never really taken into account. My summers were spent in one dusty, blistering hot wasteland or another, surrounded by various shades of skeletal kids with bloated bellies and mouths containing sporadic yellowed teeth. In spite of my family’s wealth, I, like little Hilary, was to spend my summers in large tents or huts made from bamboo and leaves or corrugated steel and junk.
In a, ‘what I did during summer,’ essay, I wrote instead, a story of a child whose mother and father were both firefighters. The child was brought along to watch with pride as his mother and father rushed into burning buildings, fighting back the flames to rescue blackened, choking people, before extinguishing the fires to give the people back their homes and cherished items. In my story, the child suffered from the accumulated effects of smoke inhalation, and over time, the flames, blistering heat, and tortured, twisted faces of the people trapped in the blackness, fueled recurring nightmares that replaced adoration and pride with fear and resentment.
I was not starving or dying of malaria, but I was living in squalor and surrounded by pain, misery, and death, while all the other kids from my school were off skiing in the Alps or sunbathing on a private beach somewhere.
Upon returning to school, the other kids would talk about frivolous shopping sprees in Paris or high-class cruise vacations with a stay at some tropical destination. They would show each other what they had brought back, an expensive designer watch or sunglasses or rare, dead-animal-skin jacket. The only thing I would have in common with the other kids was a tan, minus the pale skin in the shape of ski goggles.