Dermaphoria. Craig Clevenger

not good. After we redress these, I’m putting you on a stronger antibiotic regimen.”

      “I’m on one now?”

      “That might be the problem. Are you getting enough liquids?”

      “What’s enough?”

      “Eric, you’re risking a rejection of the skin grafts. Lay off the alcohol, drink more water. Burns like this one disrupt the fluid balance in your tissue. Go easy on yourself. How are you otherwise? Is your memory improving?”

      “Some. Hard to say.”

      Big nurse says to the voice, “It’s not up to me. We have to report this sort of thing. Sit tight.”

      The voice asks for coffee.

      Dr. Stanley writes me a scrip for steroids, a fresh battery of antibiotics and painkillers.

      Mirrored blisters swell from the ceiling where the cameras hide. I didn’t see them the other day. I stare too long at the overhead chrome, frozen midboil, and the room goes liquid. The gray bucket mop man’s roiling floor tiles throw my footing and I knock a display to the floor, a chaotic collage of naked women and tropical beaches, a fusion of a travel brochure and medical textbook.

      “You need some help?”

      I’ve disturbed the Token Man.

      “I was here yesterday.”

      “Let me punch your card. Your tenth show is free.”

      I have no idea what he’s talking about.

      “I didn’t get a card.”

      The Token Man’s shirt could have come from a queen-sized bed-sheet. He pauses in the split moment before giving me the business end of whatever problem solver he’s stashed beneath the counter. His eyes are on me like sniper dots and the chrome blisters log my every twitch. Antennae tickle my neck and ears. At first, I think it’s sweat until the bugs lose their grip and drop down my shirt and struggle to climb out the top of my jeans. I stoop to gather the video boxes, to keep from slapping myself in a frenzy.

      “Don’t worry about ’em,” he says.

      “It’s no problem.”

      “Leave ’em alone.” He thinks I’m out of my head, but he won’t throw me out. He knows I’ve got money.

      “Is Desiree working?”

      “Must be, if you’re here.” He exchanges twenty dollars for four dollars in tokens. “Booth four.”

      The pinpoint of green light from the pony ride coin box lights booth number four. I drop a token into the box and pull my cash as the looking glass slides open.

      “You pull your piece, I pull mine.”

      Anslinger stands framed and backlit in the pink window with his silver screen slicked-back hair and pinstripe orchid tie. His dress shirt is the same liquid amber of his eyes, his suit a deep green verging on black, with a camel hair coat draped over his arm.

      “Come now,” he says. “I haven’t drawn my gun in two years. You pull anything out and I will shoot you in the belt buckle. Now, what are you doing here?”

      The money is a soiled sock in my hand. I want to shrink down and crawl into a crack but not here, not these cracks.

      “The doctor needs a sperm sample, but the magazines at the hospital weren’t doing it for me. When did you start working here?”

      “When did you decide to stop cooperating?” he asks.

      “The cockroaches tell you that? You shouldn’t listen to them. They’re pissed because I’m neat freak. I moved into that shit-hole room and swept up the crack pipes and bread crumbs. I killed one of them, so the whole colony’s got it in for me. It’s your colony, so you already know that.”

      “Where you been, Eric? I’ve been hearing crickets on my voice mail for two days.”

      “You know exactly where I’ve been. Your spies are in my room and crawling through my clothes.”

      “That’s not how I work,” says Anslinger. “I don’t come to you. You come to me.”

      “What luck. I just wandered into your office. Or is this where your daughter works?”

      Anslinger goes ice water on me, his warm eyes freezing to glass. He’s neither angry nor amused. He stares at the center of my forehead, and there’s nothing behind it that’s any good to him.

      “Mention my daughter again.”

      The pony box timer counts down with the temperature.

      “Go on. Mention my daughter.”

      Voices seep through the walls, moaning with pure pleasure but sounding like near death, obscenities serving as endearments.

      “Get a magazine,” Anslinger shouts, and hammers the widow to his left.

      I hear the door bolt open, the hasty departure of a frustrated patron.

      “I spoke with your lawyer,” he says.

      “So you know that I shouldn’t even be talking to you.”

      “I know you’re supposed to be cooperating. But he hasn’t heard from you, either. In a few days, he’s getting a set of binders, all of them thicker than the Old Testament. Every speck of glass we found within a hundred miles of the burn will be listed. We’ve run toxicity reports on the soil and groundwater. Everything. It’s on you. The registration for your car listed the burn site as your address. But guess who owns the place? Guess who’s legally responsible for what went down there?”

      Maybe White, maybe not.

      “We don’t know, either,” he says. “The deed is held by a limited liability company, represented by a law firm with a private mailbox address in Nevada. The paper trail fades out somewhere in the Cayman Islands.”

      “I’m not hiding. I’m trying to remember. I need time.”

      “Once the Grand Jury reaches a decision, it’s too late to make an offer. Tell me something useful. Or tell Morell.”