Dermaphoria

  In a men’s room stall, he handed a piece of intricately folded Christmas wrapping and said, “This is all I’ve got with me, but there’s more. You ever tried it?”

  I shook my head and opened the makeshift envelope.

  “There’s nothing like it,” he said.

  I let one of the tablets drop into my palm. It was expertly pressed with no markings and buffered to a glossy blue, the color of your eyes.

  “Blue Fireflies,” he said, “or just ‘Fireflies.’”

  Indeed, they were fireflies. I know, because I made them.

  twenty

  I CALLED WHITE TO TAKE ME BACK TO OZ. WE HARDLY SPOKE FOR THE ENTIRE drive. I couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d love to see me fail and have his son feed me to the fish.

  “Where’s your boy?” I asked, but he said nothing. Idiotic small talk and he knew it. He knew I didn’t care, that I didn’t like his son and that the sight of him sickened me. I said “your boy” instead of “Toe Tag.” As well as the name fit, I couldn’t bring myself to use it.

  I leaned against the window and closed my eyes, not to sleep, but to avoid the silence and stilted conversation. When I’d open my eyes, I’d find White staring at me in the dark, oblivious to the road, with the oncoming headlights bouncing off his eyes.

  Three silent hours later, we pulled up to the gate at Oz. I’d installed a transmitter in the hinge that set off a signal when it opened, so I knew from inside, with a three-hundred-yard warning, that somebody was coming through.

  “I’ll see you in a few days,” I said.

  White sped off and left me standing in a wake of airborne dirt, my overnight bag in one hand and my free hand clutching at my collar to ward off the cold.

  I sat on Oz’s porch and thought about how much of my life happened on porches and thresholds: me and Dad taking pictures of fireflies and the stars, you and I drinking wine and watching the sun go down, my first experiments. I was always in front of a house or below it, but never in one, except yours. Never anywhere. Ask me to describe where I live to you and I couldn’t.

  My reverie was interrupted by a barking dog, one that sounded remarkably like your yipping, high-maintenance monster, coming from inside the house.

  I opened up and there it was, jumping up and down in the dark and excited as all hell to see me and I couldn’t figure out why. Regardless, I was pissed to see it and as loath as I am to use lights in the main house at night, I did because I was even more loath to step into a pile of neglected canine shit.

  I couldn’t smell anything and I scanned the bright, empty room for telltale piles but saw nothing while the creature yapped and yapped at my ankles. In the kitchen, a layer of the Los Angeles Times was spread out, the sports section, with a shiny coil covering some NFL player’s head. An empty bowl that smelled vaguely of beef residue sat in the corner beside another bowl of water.

  The note from Otto said, “We’ve got our guard dog until she wants him back. See you in a couple of days.” I wanted to kill them both. I had work to do and the beast was going to make noise, want to play, spill shit and draw attention and I couldn’t let him outside otherwise he’d be coyote meat.

  I found a bag of dog food in the cupboard and refilled his bowl, rolled up the newspaper, threw it in the outside trash, and put a fresh sports page down. Tomorrow, he’d be tethered outside with whatever I could find. For now, I opened a can of soup from the pantry, ate, showered and went to the basement lab to salvage what I could from my notes.

  The entrance to the basement from the outside was via a storm cellar door, but it was bolted from the inside. Within the house, a door in the kitchen led down a set of concrete stairs into the lab that was still my favorite work space.

  I needed time. I was fried from the drive with White and I had to sleep, just a little. Otto was gone and I was on my own. I could sew it up, reverse-engineer the compounds after I’d isolated their active alkaloids. I didn’t have to produce the drug, I just had to be able to tell White and Hoyle that I knew how, and without them knowing the stuff was mine to begin with. They weren’t stupid, they’d figure it out on their own, regardless, but I’ve found the best way to play politics is to not play them at all, that the truth would be the shortest route to my safety. Yes, I’d been experimenting and they knew that, but the notes were destroyed in the fire caused by the crew I hadn’t wanted to hire in the first place.

  Oz was a cubicle, now, a small, gray square of partitions with my calendar and company coffee mug, pertinent memos tacked beside my computer. I was pacing, tapping my fist against my palm and mumbling out loud while the stupid dog stared at me for some attention, flapping its tail. Eat, sleep, run, bark, shit, eat and sleep. A walking ball of appetites indulged, an existence that most of us will never know because in the case of this little monster, someone was there to take care of it. I checked the locks on the doors, then went over my notes as I lay on the couch, hoping to sleep a while.

  A line of white dust was the embodiment of More and the first wave hit me in seconds, my whole body and not my brain, more of everything. More energy, more awake, more ideas, more brainstorms and more happiness. The obstacles hadn’t changed, I still had days ahead of me in the desert Oz, but I could do it. More of you, Desiree. I was filled with a bottomless love for you that I always knew was there but had never tapped into and it was leaking out of every pore and I wanted to laugh at the sun and the sky and every bug crawling along the Mojave dirt because it was all so much and so little at the same time.

  Everything was going to be okay. I would figure things out, bail myself out of trouble and practically print money for Hoyle and then, Dee, you and I would vanish, go wherever we wanted. Get that red-haired Associate guy to set us up and never see the inside of the lab again unless I wanted to, when I wanted to. I promised, I could make everything better because I knew I could, because I was feeling it right then and mother of God, it was good. I wouldn’t make it a habit, and I knew those were famous last words but as good as it felt, I knew it was fleeting and the thing that wasn’t fleeting, that never left, was my love for you and my picture of you and me and nothing else, and that was stronger than the white lines of More but they were there and with just a little more time, I could make Hoyle what he wanted, and I had grams and grams and grams of that more time, stashed in baggies ready for the pickup.

  It wasn’t a vague sense of euphoria, false confidence or a general feeling of well-being. No, it was what God’s own heart felt like the moment he said, “Let there be light” and the center of the universe that wasn’t there exploded and time and space scattered and splattered in all dimensions and Everything began in an instant, the first instant of infinite instants to come. Someone might laugh at the thought of empathizing with God, but I did, I really did. Every moment I’d ever felt a love of anything was coursing through me a million moments a second, independent of the associated memories that spawned them, just the love and happiness untethered, unchecked, ballooning bigger than my chest would hold but they kept expanding, like my heart was the center of the big bang and I was God and more love of everything was going to blow 360 degrees in every dimension.

  I wasn’t afraid of White. He was under the gun from Hoyle, and who was to say what board of directors Hoyle reported to? His corner office, high-back chair and hand-carved humidor came at a price. This would be over soon, but for the moment I just wanted to bathe in the heat and feel the love move through me.

  I came down and I thought I would take a shower and then I wouldn’t have to do any more, but the need was bigger than the fear of Toe Tag or Manhattan White and the Bug Men that were certain to come swarming from the black desert sky.

  My prostate turned into a smoking cinder, like someone had shoved a fireplace poker up my ass and I still couldn’t stop yet all I could think of with each load spilled into the dirt was how much I loved you, and it shot through me like a wave of everything in the universe becoming everything else, even if I couldn’t seem to hold a thought toget
her. Desiree, I never thought it would go that far and I never thought I could go farther than that with you or White. What, were you seeing him, too?

  I had to slow down, slow down, keep the head together. I was trying to think of a fallback plan. Okay, we couldn’t replicate the stuff, we simply couldn’t. I’d made a bunch of good LSD, and I meant solid, and some good X. In truth, I was smart, rationing some from each batch for just such an emergency, knowing that I was doing right if I met quota, kept up with production and made them money, even if it meant sandbagging numbers at the end of every month at the extreme risk of pissing off White if he found out, but I was their goose, their golden goose, and what was good for me was good for the gander and what was a gander, anyway?

  So, I had a big batch all set aside, so I had a backup plan. I could tell White, “Hey, no luck on the shit, but you know what? We’ve got about half a million in high-grade LSD, absolutely clean and I just know we can move it through our Carlsbad and Berkeley connections, right?” They wouldn’t complain. They’d give me more time if it kept making them money, more money than they were accustomed to.

  I had to think, think, think, think, think. What was good for the goose was good for the gander and I was the goose and I could have used some chicken. I wasn’t hungry but I should’ve eaten, and there was that diner a few hours down the road and if I could just wait for the next batch then I could call it a night and walk as long as it took because it wasn’t like I was going to sleep anytime soon. I could get something to eat, and I meant I could force-feed myself if I had to, and then get back to the lab, tell White no go but not make any excuses, because as much as White hated excuses, Hoyle hated them even more and Toe Tag probably couldn’t even spell “excuse” but it was still up to him to pack my empty skull with sand before he ditched me in the lake if my nonexcuse excuses weren’t satisfactory to White and Hoyle.

  Sometimes I envied that clumsy biker with the LSD. Ignorance was bliss, even if bliss meant smoking a hollowed out gecko full of pencil shavings in the desert and surviving on tarantula meat.

  If I lost that batch then I was back to nothing, I wouldn’t have anything to show for everything but I knew the batch had to go for another four hours and I couldn’t stand still and I couldm’t keep moving and I was going to kill whatever kept making that noise. So I did another blast.

  I had stopped combing my hair days ago. If you could have seen me then, Desiree, you would have laughed. Would you remember me? I was the guy who could iron the pleats in a skirt of yours if I had to, and showed you how to use soda water and newspaper to clean glass. I was wearing the same clothes that I’d been in for days because changing clothes didn’t seem to matter, and I looked at myself in the mirror and I thought, yeah, it did matter, maybe I should have shaved and spruced up and I said that I would, after just one more hit, and that was what I did and then the shit I was hitting bored a hole in the bottom of my day and the time just collapsed through the bottom like a rotting grain silo and then I woke up with a heart attack just out of my field of vision and my dick in my hand, saying, I love you I love you I love you over and over to the fucking silverfish crawling in the baseboards and that, my dear sweet love of my life, is how things were without you and I’d done everything I could to keep you from knowing that.

  twenty-one

  ONCE I HAD A SYSTEM, IT BECAME IMPOSSIBLE TO NOT SEE IT WORKING AND it became easier to see other systems, to see the street working, to see the shell of complicity over the machinations of street dealing and know that the Powers were beholden to Powers above them, who were in turn beholden to a row of high-back chairs on a raised dais. Hoyle was everywhere, and he got his cut or you got cut.

  The problem was I started seeing systems everywhere, and the possibility of a threat was no different than the possibility of a system. I had to assume it was real.

  Otto told me about a dealer who used to hang out at a bar. He was part of his own chain. Nobody else in his network knew one another, they were all there at the same time, blending in with his regulars. Every night at 7:00 he played a song on the jukebox, and that song became the code word for that night if you wanted to talk to somebody in his chain. A runner hit a string of other bars, dropping quarters into the Wurlitzers for the waiting zombies nursing tap water or cheap beer. By 8:00, everyone was dispersed, whispering into pay phones and through porno theater curtains. The street came alive with zombies trolling the corners saying “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Phantom 309” or “Paranoid” under their breath, and the long-range eyes and ears, the moles packing tapeworms, could only wonder at what they were hearing and what it meant.

  Another network convened in the same place every week, in the same coffee shop. They’d note the license plate of the first white car they saw that day together, and the first three digits became the code for that week, followed by the last three digits in response. They never told anyone else, and the selection was too random for anyone to intercept and decipher.

  Samuel Morse reduced every letter of the alphabet into a series of dots and dashes, and anything could be a dot or a dash, a sound, a color, an object or a word.

  Knowing these systems, I’d perfected them to hide my signals and cover my tracks. The signals were everywhere.

  My nose burned, my mouth bitter with the faint solvent tang, and I wanted to eat but I wasn’t hungry and anyway, if I tried to eat, everything would taste like ketones. A full liter of meth remained in the lab, sealed in a shatterproof lab beaker like motor oil, the clear luminous brown of an animal’s eyes, zero impurities, waiting to be basified into crystal.

  The word “random” has no meaning for me, and doesn’t exist in the universe that I know. Flip a coin three times and you might get the same result and see no pattern. Flip it a hundred times and the pattern begins to emerge. The trick to burying a signal is to know where the patterns are around you and to hide your signal within them. It works the same way with learning to see them, the coded messages flying around that the senders and receivers think you’re oblivious to, but you’re not.

  I kept running records of utility vehicles at the gas station down the road. I had a clear view with my binoculars of my nearest neighbors, both no closer than a mile, but I watched for plumbers and cable installers, mail carriers and gas meter readers. I checked the vehicle numbers on their 800-lines, and made notes of the mailman’s routes and times. Anybody else—the plumber, courier, salesmen—I checked their listings in the phonebook. I noted on each entry when the radar detector wired to the roof went off, because if it happened enough with a certain vehicle, then the coincidence became a pattern and I saw trouble.

  The reflex was already reflex at that stage, reaching for the glass pipe and the amber resin to make everything okay again, to have every fear and worry gone in a second and the rush of a preorgasm split second sustained for the duration of the night. Any sense of any double meaning that could have sent me running in fear was gone. Otto was a machine spying on me, Otto was working for Hoyle without me knowing, Otto had folded and now Toe Tag was dumping him for the catfish, none of it mattered.

  I had work to finish, with only forty-eight hours left, never mind the first twenty-four were gone in a blast of lust like I’d never felt before, like a marathon blow job during a skydive freefall, and I had to focus on the next. The dog kept piping up, barking and yipping at phantom intruders, nearby raccoons or coyotes. I ignored him, tried to pore through my notes, but could only think of you Desiree, and all the things I wanted to do to you.

  I wrote the words “nobody ever comes” on the bathroom mirror with a bar of soap. I knew the truth, every footstep, rooftop thump, distant car was at best a brain misfire. Every time, nobody pounded on the door, no matter how long I was braced for it. If I heard it, I’d listen closely for the sound again but it never repeated itself. Peaking through the blinds or pressing my ear against the door only encouraged the delusion. Nobody ever comes, and I had to keep reminding myself of that. Stop letting my eyes jump to whatever
peripheral movement caught them; stop scratching. That was tough. If the bugs or rats or snakes crawled to the center of my vision, they were real. But don’t try to force them.

  I felt my skin flush with the hot waves that came from sleep deprivation, the whistling in my ears continued, unabated. I’d lost count of the misfires in the lab downstairs. I sat in the living room, a pulverized gram and a glass of desert tap water in front of me, and a lump of cotton in my nose. I’d drawn molecule after molecule, checked every possible set of notes and sat dry-docked at 98 percent of completion, and that 2 percent made all the difference in the universe. Like I’d dismantled and reassembled an engine, then discovered a shop rag full of bolts with no idea where they belonged.

  I’m sitting with grease under my nails in a pair of coveralls, scratching at my head because I’ve got bugs crawling through my hair and I don’t have the remotest idea where this here oxygen came from, or this nitrogen, it’s got to be from something else. I know I’m wrong. It’s pickup time tomorrow, and I’d better be there with a big pile of skin. If I’m not, the coyote will be singing at the top of his voice a map to Oz.

  The crickets had a code, and I was onto them. I didn’t have any way of looking up the normal cadence of the locusts chirping, but I knew it was some kind of mating call or territorial thing or some way of scaring off enemies, which was ironic given the bats were spitting silent shrieks all over the air and bouncing off each other looking for food and the stupid crickets were all but screaming “Here I Am” to the world of predators at large. Not those crickets, not that night, and maybe that’s why the bats were ignoring them.