Skin Folk (5 page)

She smiled back nervously. The smile quirked friendly lines at the corners of her mouth. “Thanks. Guess I’m on time after
all, then.”

“Job interview?”

“Uh-huh. Marketing. Up at Joint Productions.”

“The design place? Cool. They’ve done some great stuff.”

She looked even more interested, leaned forward a little. “Oh, you work there?”

Shit.
“Uh, no.”

“In the building, then?”

“Yeah. Web design. For, um, Tri-Ex Media.”

She frowned a little, took a bit of a step back. “Another design place?”

“Yeah, sort of. We…”

The elevator stopped and the door slid noiselessly open.

“Oh, my stop,” she said. “Nice talking to you.”

“Yeah. Bye.” If she got the job, that’d be the last civil conversation he had with her. The people at Joint acted like Tri-Ex
Media was the very source and centre of evil in the universe. She’d probably get bitten by the same bug. Artho got out at
17.

Cold air prickled his forearms into goose bumps when he opened the door to Tri-Ex Media. The office was air-conditioned year-round
to protect the expensive computer equipment. The not-so-pricey staff just wore sweaters. “Close the fucking door!” growled
Charlie, his boss. Artho uncurled his spine to stand tall. He stitched a smile across his face and stepped inside, gently
pulling the door shut behind him. “Miss me?” he cooed at Charlie.

People just look really weird,
Artho thought. He contemplated the image up on his screen: a buff, tattooed man in a shoulder stand who’d curled himself
tight as a fiddlehead fern so as to suck his own cock. Well, actually, he hadn’t quite been able to reach it. His searching
tongue was just a few inches away. Probably would have helped if he’d been interested enough in the procedure to have a hard-on.
That was where Artho came in. He giggled, began the process of stiffening and elongating the man’s dick. “Virtual fluffer,
that’s me,” he said, aiming the comment at the general air.

Only Glenn looked up, scowling over the top of his terminal and flicking a lank lick of Popsicle pink hair out of his eyes.
“Yeah? Just keep it in your pants, Mouse Boy.” He grinned a little to take the sting of the comment out.

That uncomfortable little grin. Taboo subject at work, sex. Staring all day at pictures of spread, penetrated flesh—flesh
more shapely than any of them in the office had: plump, perky breasts, impossibly slim waists; muscled thighs and ever-ready
cocks—but
talk
about any of it?

“Hey, Artho?” Tamara called quietly from across the room.

“Yeah?” Today her thick wool sweater had a picture on it of that guy from the Fabulous Four comics, the one who turned into
fire?
Flame on.
Johnny, his name was? Where in hell did Tamara find the stuff she wore?

Tamara pulled the sleeves of her sweater down over her hands, trapped them against her palm with three fingers on each hand,
kept typing with the free forefingers and thumbs. “You doing anything for Easter?”

Easter again. Long-distance phone call from Vancouver Island from his father. “I long to see you and your brother,” he’d say.
But it never happened. And if Artho visited his mother with her stiff, dead, pressed hair and the pale pink lipstick blanching
her full brown lips, she’d ask if he was still working at
that place
and whisper prayers under her breath when he said yes. Aunt Dee would be there too, with her look of fearful hunger and her
Doberman’s knack of going for the soft underbelly of all their relatives:
Uncle James starting to lose his hair; Cousin Melba have neither chick nor child to look after; and eh-eh, look at old Uncle
Cecil, taking up with a twenty-year-old chick in his dotage.
Aziman would be sitting in the basement with the basketball game turned up loud. Holidays always made him morose about his
own divorce. He’d get steadily drunker on Wincarnis Tonic Wine (sugar code 17) while his boy and girl screamed and romped
and fought around him. “No,” Artho told Tamara. “Gonna stay home, where it’s quiet.”

There. The autofellatio man looked like he was sucking his own dick now. It was moderately convincing. It’d do.

Easter meant that Aziman, after fueling himself with enough of the sugary wine, would flare, shouting insults at the players
on the TV, yelling at his kids to quiet down, brown face flushing burgundy with the barely contained heat. Their mother would
make him and the children spend the night at her place. “You can drive tomorrow, when you cool down,” she’d say. Artho hoped
that one day the fire inside Aziman would come busting out, fry away the polite surface he always presented.

How did that Johnny guy’s flame really work? Artho wondered. Was he always flame on the inside?

On his screen, Artho checked out the autofellatio man’s skin and hair; this one was going on the “Banjee Boys” page, whatever
a banjee was, and Charlie thought a light brown black man just didn’t fit the image. Good thing the position the man was in
now obscured that aquiline nose, those thin lips. Smiling to himself, Artho painted another tattoo on the man’s beefy shoulder;
“nkyin kyin,” the West African Adinkra symbol for “always changing oneself.” He bet Charlie’d never recognise it in a million
years.

Charlie came huffing by, glanced at the screen. “Artho, you still working on that fucking thing? Time is money here, y’know.
I want Tit for Twat uploaded before you leave tonight. And no whining at me about overtime, either.”

Artho sighed. “It’ll be done before five.” As if. But so long as it was up and running when Charlie came in on Monday, he’d
never notice.

“Better be. And make that guy blacker. Looks like a dago.” Charlie turned away. Stopped. Turned back and peered at the screen.
Guffawed, “Jesus, Arth! He’s darker than you! Well, whaddya know ’bout that? Betcha his dick’s no match for yours, though.
Eh? Eh?” Charlie cackled and elbowed Artho in the ribs, then shaking his head and chuckling at his own wit, stumped his way
out of the office. He slammed the door behind him. Everyone jumped at the thump. People avoided Artho’s eyes.

Artho sighed and got to work again with his mouse, sticking cocoa-coloured pigment to the man like tar on the Tar Baby. He
ignored the feeling of his ears burning. It went away eventually.

He finished blackening the man up, then opened up the working files Tit for Twat. He imported the new images, new inane text
(
“When Daddy’s not home, see these blond sisters work each other up!”
) The “blond” was bleach, the “sisters” Tania and Raven no relation at all, and they were doing their best straight guy’s
lesbian fantasy. As soon as they got out of the studio, they shucked the whole act like corn trash from corn and hugged each
other good-bye before going their separate ways. Raven was a CGA student, blissfully married to a quiet, balding guy with
a paunch, wore hightop sneakers everywhere, showed around pictures of her kids every chance she got. And Tania, as she walked
out the door, would be peeling off her false two-inch nails, muttering that her girlfriends would never let her near them
with knives on the tips of her fingers.

“… good weekend, Artho.”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Bye, Glenn,” he said as Glenn let himself out.

Artho looked around for the first time in hours. It was well past five. He straightened up, groaning; he could feel each of
his vertebrae popping as he uncurled from the computer screen. And he was freezing. Charlie was long gone. He and Tamara were
the only ones left.

“Lost in the land of skin?” she chuckled at him.

“Yeah. Be done soon now, though.” He set the files to render, moved to the next computer over—Rahim worked at that one, but
he was gone too—and called up Tomb Raider. Artho’d gotten pretty good at the game. Masquerading as the impossibly firm-breasted
Lara Croft, he hunted in a nightmare landscape of demons. He was just killing a ghoul in a spray of blood and bone when the
door to the office whispered open. A tiny face poked round it.

“Hey, Artho?” Tamara said, waving sweater-covered fingers at him. “Relative of yours? This isn’t exactly the place for a kid,
you know.”

It was the little girl, the one from the food court.

“What’re you doing here?” Artho blurted out. “Where’s your dad?”

“Daddy’s always busy making stuff,” came the scratchy response from the tiny face hanging in the doorway. “We do his work
for him instead.”

“Huh?” was all that Artho managed in response.

“Yeah. Each one of us has different jobs. Mine is that I get to go wherever I want, keep an eye on stuff.” The little girl
stalked on spindly legs into the room. Her knees were still ashy, the lenses of her specs still woozily thick. The wormy mass
of her long, messy braids seemed to be wriggling out from their ribbons as Artho watched.

“That’s ridiculous! It’s”—Artho glanced at the clock on his screen—“almost seven-thirty in the evening! You can’t be more
than seven years old! Who’re your parents? Why are you alone?”

“So you don’t know her, then?” asked Tamara. She got up, went and knelt by the child. “What’s your name, little girl?” she
asked sweetly.

“Didn’t come for you. Came for him.” And the child stomped right past an astonished Tamara. “Whatcha doin?” On the screen,
Lara Croft waited to be activated by a mouse click. “Oh,” said the little girl. “Do you like that?”

Artho shrugged. “It’s something to do.”

She turned to the other screen with its bodies frozen in mid-writhe.

“Don’t look at those!” Artho said.

“Just skins sewed together,” she replied, grinning. “Do you like those, then?”

“Artho, do you know this kid or not?”

Artho found himself answering the child instead of Tamara: “No, I don’t like them so much. I like people to look more real.”

“Well, why do you make them look not real, then?”

From the mouths of babes and sucklings. “That’s why they pay me the big bucks,” he said ruefully, thinking of how far his
paycheque wouldn’t stretch this month.

“Do you like people making you be not real?”

Artho thought how he’d been late for work that morning because six taxis in a row had refused to stop for him. Thought of
the guy in the corner store inspecting his money. Of Charlie elbowing him in the ribs a few hours ago. He felt a burn of rage
beginning. “No, dammit!”

The ugly child just stood and stared at him from the depths of her ugly glasses.

“But it’s not like I can do anything about it!” Artho said.

“Do you wanna?” She was shrugging out of her Spider-Man knapsack.

He turned so he could scowl at her face straight on. “Shit, girl, what d’you think? Yes!”

Tamara giggled. Fuck, why was he talking to a kid this way? He started slamming pens and pencils around on the desk.

“Well, change things, then!” the child squealed. She lunged at Artho and swung her Spider-Man knapsack right at his forehead.

It was like slo-mo; Artho could see the oddly muscular bulge of her lats powering the swing, almost had time to wonder how
a seven-year-old could be that built, then he had barely focused on the red and black image of Spidey coming for him, reaching
for him, when
bang,
the knapsack connected and something exploded inside Artho’s skull.

Tamara yelled. Artho shouted, tried to reach for the kid through the stars flaring behind his eyes. Jesus, felt like a bag
of bones the damned child had in there. “Shit, shit, shit,” Artho moaned, holding his aching head. He dimly saw the child
slither out of Tamara’s grasp and run, no, glide out of the room on those skin-and-boneless legs. She had a big butt, too,
that child; as she ran, it worked under her little plaid skirt like that of someone three times her size.

“Artho, you okay? I’m calling security.”

He paid Tamara no mind. He was dizzy. He put his head down between his knees. It was wet, his forehead was
wet
where he was holding it. He was bleeding! Damned girl. He took his hand away, raised his head enough to inspect it.

“Yeah, Muhammed? Can you come up to Tri-Ex Media on 17? We got a little girl loose on this floor. No, don’t know where she
came from. Look, she just hit Artho, okay? I think he’s hurt. Yes, a kid did it, she’s little, maybe six, seven. Little black
girl, school uniform, thick glasses. Says her parents aren’t with her. Okay. Okay.” She hung up. “He’s coming.”

There was no blood. At least, the stuff leaking out of him didn’t look like blood. The liquid on his hand seemed to glow one
minute and go milky the next, like a smear of syrup. “What is this shit?”

“Here, let me see.” Tamara crouched down by him like she had by the little girl. Nancy. That’s what her dad had called her.
What kind of dad let his young kid roam around loose like that?

Tamara frowned. “Yeah, you’re cut, but there’s this weird… stuff coming out. Oh. Never mind, it’s stopped now. How d’you feel,
Artho?”

“What the hell was in that knapsack? Where’d she go?”

“I’ll go see.” Tamara jumped up, left the office.

Artho’s head was clearing. It didn’t hurt so much now. He touched where the cut was, couldn’t feel one. The goop was still
on his fingers, though. He rubbed the fingers together to smear the stuff away. His fingers kind of tingled.