Unseaming (4 page)

His palm still toward you, he takes his other hand, grips a demon-face button centered in his wrist, just below the ball of the thumb. Then he pushes it through his skin and out again, undoes the button as if loosening a collar. A vertical seam in his wrist suddenly gapes, like a new eye opening.

What you should see through that opening is blood and meat and tendons, but instead there’s something in there that wavers like heat shimmer, flutters like a moth, shines without color, and a scent wafts out of sadness and silence. It confounds your gaze, makes your stomach lurch.

Stop it! you say, but he’s unbuttoning his wrist, the skin parting like a cuff, something pale and gleaming and alive revealed underneath. The entire room has become strange, still dark but the darkness somehow agitated, animate.

He says, Do you see her yet?

His face contorts, his neck bulges and suddenly you think of Apeneck Sweeney, Eliot’s mindless brute, zebra stripes swelling along his jaw. Beside you the buttons in the bin crawl over each other, glittering mites that seethe at the lip of their container like spectators crowding a coliseum wall.

Lenahan’s arm gapes to the elbow. He flexes the meat of his contorted forearm. This is not…easy, he grunts, and something bulges through the gap in the curtain of his flesh. It’s a face pushed out as if birthed, Denise’s face, her pink lips parted as if in hesitation before asking a question. Squeezed out from between his unbuttoned skin, her face bows, an empty mask, eyeholes dark. Eyeless because the eyes regarding you from Lenahan’s sweat-sheened visage are not just like her eyes, they are her eyes.

Her mouth is moving, a fish drawing in water. He raises his arm, brings her lips to yours.

* * *

Your lips close with hers. She is almost fourteen. You are eighteen.

You and she are in your room downstairs. Even though your parents are traveling across the country, you have the door pulled shut, the curtains drawn. The radio chatters and croons, you don’t know what’s playing, you’re not paying attention. She’s lying on the rug, her overalls undone, pulled down to her hips, her T-shirt pushed up past her bra, looking up at you. You’re a head taller, about fifty pounds heavier, poised over her like you’re doing a push up. Staring into her eyes, like staring at yourself in an adoring mirror. You tell yourself that’s what you see, adoration, that she could never be frightened of you, terrified of making you angry, terrified of what you’re going to do.

On your bedroom wall hangs a poster of lions in the veldt. The lions are flickering, watching. The bed in your room is not a bed at all, it shimmers in a turmoil of beads and discs and suns and skulls. She stiffens as you push up her bra.

Lenahan again. He straightens his arm, withdrawing the face inside himself like a snail into a shell.

As you sit stunned he takes your gun away, sets it gingerly on the drawing table. He takes your hand, eyes full of sympathy, different eyes now, maybe his own, maybe Willett’s, maybe someone else’s. He whispers something soothing as he guides your hand toward the chest. You have no fight in you. Both of you know why you really came, not because you loved her so but because you feared, you feared the revelation of a secret you kept even from yourself. But there’s nothing to fear now, Lenahan knows, has known, has wanted to meet you all along.

Gold rhomboids practically leap from the bin onto your fingers, but Lenahan isn’t content to wait, he forces you to your knees, shoves your right arm in to the shoulder. You feel something like static, like a jet of water, like a mosquito swarm, then you feel nothing, your arm is numb. He pulls you back, and your arm, like his, sports an array of buttons. A seam runs up the inside, a row of green irises with black pupil insets. He runs a finger along them, they pop like snaps, lift apart like the eyes that line a scallop shell.

When I tried her on, he says, I saw what you did.

He’s pushing his arm inside yours.

The memory. How she stayed petrified, silent, as your fingers pushed inside her.

His fingers, inside yours, wearing your hand like a glove as you relive the memory.

Your knees have jellified. There’s hot pain behind your eyes, sticky tears on your cheeks. To your utter shame, there’s a stirring in your groin, your cock flutters as you relive what you did to her, and are yourself violated.

Lenahan chuckles, his belly pressed against your back, his right arm inside yours, his fingers inside yours.

He used his free hand with the confidence of long practice, unfastening your tainted arm from your shoulder. He will keep what he wants of you for himself, as he did with Willett, keep the parts of you that remember Denise. The rest, he will dispose of how he pleases.

You can’t allow that. You can’t let Lenahan parcel you.

You go slack. He repositions himself awkwardly, reaching for the buttons on the underside of your arm to finish his theft, as you lunge for the gun on the drawing table.

He grunts and tries to pull you down, but you’ve twisted to your feet. You feel the sickening stretch where he’s loosened your arm and stuffed his inside, but the buttons don’t pull free. He’s on his feet now too, pulling at you as you pull away, the two of you orbiting each other in grotesque conjoined dance.

He grabs your collar with his left hand, jerks you toward him, tries to get behind you again. You let him pull you closer, but he doesn’t see you have the gun till you’ve jabbed it under his chin. He tries to grab your wrist but you’re sweat-slick and quicker, pull the trigger one two three, sharp hammer strikes, flares that burn bright spots in your vision.

But the struggle doesn’t stop. Now he has your wrist, tries to pull your fingers open.

Adrenaline clears your head, you see the holes punctured in him, frayed edges like shooting through sackcloth, no blood, something like light but not fluttering out through them, causing your balance to sway, your stomach to heave.

His eyes, green again. He’s using her to look at you, using her eyes that brim with hurt and ache with questions never asked as he tries again to pry the gun from you.

You squeeze again. One of your niece’s eyes goes dark. When he cries out, it’s with her voice.

Rage and fear and years of pent-up shame fuel your own scream. You shove at him, push at him, but neither of you can escape the other. He stumbles, the backs of his knees hit the lip of the bin and his free arm flails. Then you throw your weight against him. He topples, you push and he sits in the carved chest. The living buttons swarm up his thighs and belly. You drop the gun into the seething shiny mass of baubles and grip him by shoving your fingers into the holes under his chin. You feel fibers tear and then your hand is inside the sack of his head.

Images gush into your brain, hundreds upon hundreds, flash memories of men, women, boys, girls captured at the moment Lenahan introduced them to his terrible buttons, shoving in their hands, their feet, their heads, to open them like boots, gloves, hats, coats and expose the twisted, vulnerable things of spirit inside. But what rises topmost is an image of Denise, and you do to him what he did to her, push him down full body until his head and shoulders are submerged, bury him in his own sick magic.

You’re still entangled with him, your face just inches from the sparkling swarm. Numbness spreads along your jaw as the buttons attach.

You jerk back, then scream as Lenahan’s head and shoulders re-emerge.

Every follicle of hair is now a loose thread jutting out from a buttonhole. Huge black stars have replaced his eyes, his mouth sealed shut with a ragged line of skulls, his nostrils plugged with ornate blue knobs. Tiny transparent disks line the ridges of his nose and brows and cheekbones, hooks fasten the folds of his neck. His head could be opened a thousand different ways.

His struggles cease. He smells, not of flesh but vinyl and lacquer. Slowly, painstakingly, you start to extract your hand from him and his hand from you. There’s a weird pressure inside your arm that lessens and disappears as you finally pull free.

Now you see his skin is patchwork, a grid delineated by the buttons, every piece a different shade. Who could tell what skin first was his?

Hundreds of alien memories have faded from your mind before you can pinpoint a point of origin.

He pushed her in, your niece, all the way under, withdrew a button-studded mannequin and undid her from head to foot, pulled her on and possessed her in total in a way you could never do, though something dark and shriveled in you tried. And when he learned about you, what you did, how you destroyed her, he wanted that for himself too, set things in motion to lay claim on the moment of her undoing.

A noise in the darkness. You look up.

There, between rugs hanging like tapestries in a hall of nightmares. Lenahan’s short, strange assistant has returned. She stares at you with wide-set amphibian eyes beneath a too-broad forehead, above a too-small mouth, as rough and patchworked as the creature you’ve just murdered.

Her eyes deep and wet as cavern pools meet yours for a long time. She simply nods.

And now you know how you will see your beloved niece again.

You start at Lenahan’s forehead and work your way down, head to foot, prepare to try him on, see how the seams of a monster fit. You’re sure they’ll fit well, snug and comfortable as a tailored suit.

It’s the only skin you deserve to wear.

Bryan woke that morning drenched in blood from toe to scalp, just as he had every morning for two and a half years.

But this time, scraps of images swirled in his fogged brain, a hurricane rush of faces, a sense of squirming, worms under pressure—
dreaming
. He could remember the dream. His heart started to pound. He had to tell Dr. Patel about his breakthrough.

He groped for the towel dispenser, wiped off his hands, his feet, and sat up. The plastic sheet covering his body crackled as he peeled it away from his blood-sticky skin.

Beside him, Regina stirred.

He’d almost forgotten she was there. He turned, afraid he’d woken her, but no: she was still sound asleep. She fidgeted, eyes moving under their lids, perhaps in muted reaction to a dream of her own, one she’d never remember.

She lay naked between plastic sheets just as he had, slats of moonlight groping through the blinds to stripe her contours, long curvy torso and short legs—and at that moment, the Blessings touched her. Her flesh turned ink black beneath the sheet as blood welled from every pore of her skin. When she finally woke she would be covered head to toe, just as he was.

Bryan felt no revulsion, only sorrow. Every human on the planet endured this now, whenever they slept, whenever they woke.

For the longest time, Bryan had resisted that word, Blessings, whenever he spoke of the bloody awakenings. Amazing, how fast the word caught on once it started happening, once every single human on the planet would rouse from sleep to find every inch of skin slick with blood.

Infernal logic reinforced it—
bless
derived from old English roots that meant
mark with blood
—but Bryan knew it was just euphemism, a way to render the grotesque palatable. He had resisted until prolonged exposure to the usage made him unable to define the phenomenon with any other word.

In the shower, watching the blood sluice down the drain, snippets from his dream returned, resonating with the pink swirl of water. He
had
made progress last night. He had to call Dr. Patel, as soon as the hour was reasonable.

He wiped condensation from the mirror and met his reflection’s eyes. Behind his temples, the sides of his bare head bulged. He knew his skull’s proportions were wrong for a shaved head, and envied other men whose looks were enhanced by baldness. But he had no choice. The Blessings rendered a full head of hair utterly impractical. Even some women had caved, though most had adopted tricks to keep their treasured coifs sanitary. Regina was one who climbed out of bed at ungodly hours to scour the blood from her roots. This was how Bryan knew it was too early to call the professor without having to glance at a clock.