Second Skin - Chapter 0005

Chapter 5 — Audience

The cold first arrived through the ears.

Without the hat, they had been exposed to the wind sweeping across the roof, and now they ached in a way that rose from his temples and settled behind his eyes, a clean pain, of pure ice, without anything dirty about it. Sebastian only noticed it when it became too long to fit at the end of the line. Because there was a line. In front of his ears came his ribs, protesting with every breath as if someone had left a closed hand around them and forgotten to remove it. Then came his knee, exposed by the tear in his pants, burning against the frozen gravel. Then came his right foot, where the sole of his shoe now had a hole the size of a coin, and through that hole ice seeped in every time he moved his toes, a timely reminder that it had once been a tooth.

And then the face appeared.

From his forehead to the corner of his mouth, the skin still bore the traces of his tongue: a sticky film that the wind couldn’t carry away, that dried and pulled and smelled of iron and something rotten beneath the iron. He didn’t have the courage to wipe it off. Wiping it off would mean touching it, touching it would mean feeling it, and feeling it would mean admitting that it had really happened and was still stuck to him.

So he stayed where he was. Sitting on the gravel, his back against the metal plate of an industrial air conditioner, his legs drawn up against his chest, his hands tucked into his coat sleeves. Breathing slowly, shallowly, so his ribs wouldn’t complain so much.

I didn’t know how long I had been there.

The gravel had a thin layer of frost that reflected the light coming from below, and each pebble, ten centimeters from his eyes, was almost offensively clear. Gray with white veins. One with a stain of blue paint, dried for years, a splatter from someone’s paint can who once painted something up there. A crumpled cigarette butt, the filter yellowed. He could see all of this. He could see his own hands when he took them out of his sleeves, the red knuckles, a thin cut at the base of his left thumb that he didn’t remember making. He could see the seam of his coat, the head of a rusty screw in the sheet metal behind him, his own breath turning to smoke and dissipating before reaching a hand’s breadth from his face.

One meter. That was all that was left of the world. One meter of clear things and, after that, watercolor.

He knew this watercolor. He woke up inside it every morning: the bedroom ceiling was a white blotch, the door a darker rectangle, and the restless pink figure standing beside the bed was Camila, waiting for him to open his eyes, with the patience of a dog that needs to go out. Every day, before groping for his glasses on the nightstand, Sebastian lived for a few seconds in a world without edges. He knew how to navigate it. He knew how to find the bathroom, he knew that a small figure jumping was his sister and a large, still figure was the wardrobe, he knew how to count the steps to the kitchen.

I’d never needed that kind of training for anything other than getting to the bathroom without stubbing my toe.

On the other side of the roof, a few meters from the parapet, the back of one of Times Square’s giant billboards rose like a steel lattice wall, buzzing. The billboard breathed. A warm air escaped through the cracks, a breath of electronics that had been on for a long time, and the light the screen cast over the square seeped through the edges and tinged the bellies of the clouds blue, then pink, then white, and blue again. Four seconds per color. Sebastian knew why he had crossed that square pushing a bicycle more times than any tourist, and he also knew why, at some point that night, he had tried to count the cycles to have something to hold on to.

He lost count before reaching twenty. He tried again. Lost again. By the third time, he couldn’t tell if he’d even started.

And below that low wall, things continued to happen.

He could hear. No one had taken that away from him.

Roars, still. Fewer than before, or spaced differently, it was hard to tell. A long, smacking sound of glass, an entire facade collapsing in shards that tinkled for a while after the bang. Sirens arriving from afar, still far away, rising through the canyons of the side streets. And a new, repeated sound, no longer a gunshot: something lighter. A dry crack followed by a whistle, a snap and a beep, like a clothesline stretched and then loose, stretched and then loose. Sebastian knew it from a thousand videos watched with the volume at maximum and his cell phone pressed against his ear under the blanket. He had never heard it live.

The sound was what pulled him from behind the air conditioner. He had no courage left; he had already understood that about himself that night. All that remained was the crack and the whistle. He placed his hand on the cold plate, swallowed the groan that his ribs sent up, and went to the low wall, dragging his injured foot, half-crouched, as if being crouched would do any good against what was down there.

The low wall was about seventy centimeters high. He rested his forearms on the concrete, felt the frost bite through the fabric, and looked.

Times Square, seen from above and without glasses, was an aquarium.

Colors floating in dark water. Enormous blocks of light, the panels, which he knew were rectangles but which melted at the edges and bled into one another: a blue the size of a building, a flickering white, a pink that occasionally swallowed everything else. Between them, a floor of nothing. Stains. Shapes that moved and shapes that had stopped moving, and about those he did what he could to avoid thinking.

And, cutting all that out, the blur.

Red and blue.

It moved from one side of the square to the other in arches that didn’t detract from the ground. It climbed up a facade and returned, hovered for a moment and fell onto a black blotch, and the black blotch screamed and fought back and the blur was no longer there. Sebastian saw no arms or legs, he saw no web, he saw no white lenses of the mask. He saw a comet. A quick brushstroke of wet paint that left behind it, for half a second, a streak that perhaps was a web, perhaps was just his eye trying to invent what he couldn’t focus on.

Thirty years of career. Every afternoon, three seconds standing on the school steps looking south. One day. And the day had arrived, it was fifty meters below his elbows, and Sebastian could see from there exactly what he saw from the clouds.

On the opposite side of the square, where the Seventh Street opened to the north, a constellation twinkled.

Hundreds of tiny white dots, flickering on and off aimlessly, scattered across a larger, darker blotch that filled the entire mouth of the avenue. It took him a moment to understand, because the first thing his mind tried to do with it was to turn it into fire. They were flashes. Cell phones. The crowd that had been running away from Times Square twenty minutes earlier, or an hour earlier, or however long ago, had stopped running. Had turned back. Now they were crowding the corners with their phones raised above their heads, filming, because Spider-Man had arrived, and Spider-Man’s arrival meant they could look.

His stomach turned all the way around.

Those people were on the ground, thirty or forty meters from the creature that had ripped a policeman from inside his own uniform. Wearing glasses. With both eyes working. With his phone recording in high resolution, someone surely turning on slow motion, someone surely shouting his name with a faltering voice. Tonight, even before Sebastian entered the door of 6B, it would be everywhere. Edited, subtitled, with music playing over it. He would watch it under the covers, with his cell phone ten centimeters from his face, and he would see for the first time what had happened fifty meters from him.

I was going to watch, like everyone else. Like someone who wasn’t really there.

The anger rose so quickly that he didn’t even have time to feel ashamed of it. Anger at his own eyes, which had never been good for anything anyway. Anger at the tongue that took his glasses. Anger at that crowd of imbeciles with cell phones that he himself would have been, without a second thought, on any other night of his life. Anger at being alive and not being able to see.

Shame followed soon after, and it was a big one.

There were dead people in that square. He had seen a man ripped open at the waist, had seen what was left of the man fall into the snow with the ordinary sound of something falling, and now, five minutes later, or ten, or an hour, he was leaning against a low wall, furious that he couldn’t watch the show. That’s what he was, then. Sebastian bit his lip until he tasted it and kept watching, because he couldn’t do anything else.

Down there, somewhere among the stains, was Frankenstein.

Lying on its side on Seventh Street, where it had fallen when the elastic ripped it from the saddle. Forty kilos of steel and battery, each weld with a story, the panel he had programmed late into the night, the bent-shaft motor he had straightened by hand over three nights. Lying in the street with those creatures walking over it. He tried to find a gray blur among the other gray blurs and gave up, because gray on the ground in Times Square, today, was everything. And the cooler bag had gone into that mouth with the package from Midtown, the express delivery one, the signature on hand by seven. Seven. He didn’t know if it was already seven. He didn’t know if Mr. Williams had already written anything on the clipboard.

His hands trembled. He realized why the frost on the parapet had begun to melt beneath his forearms, and the water trickled down the concrete in thin streaks, and the streaks trembled too. It wasn’t from the cold. It was from something that had stayed with him and wouldn’t go away just because the teeth part was over: his body lifted off the ground, his feet dangling in the void, his ribs slowly giving way. His mouth opening in layers. He discovered that his teeth were chattering and he clenched his jaw, and the teeth continued to chatter inside.

Down below, the red and blue blur struck another black spot, and the roar that followed was different from the previous ones. Shorter. More surprised.

The buzzing started so faintly that he mistook it for the dashboard.

A vibration deep in his ear, directionless, the kind of sound that reaches the enamel of your teeth before it actually reaches your ear. Sebastian thought it was the steel truss, the electric breath on his back. Then he thought it was his own blood. Then the buzzing grew, and kept growing, and went past the point where he could pretend it didn’t exist, and he felt the low wall respond beneath his arms, a subtle tremor in the concrete.

He raised his head.

Clouds. The same low, gray cloud cover as every winter, illuminated from below by the dirty orange of the city, drifting eastward. And in the middle of them, a black dot.

It was growing. It was coming in a straight line toward the square, too fast, much faster than anything licensed to fly that low, and the first explanation that came to his mind was the only sensible one: the police. Police aircraft. Everyone had seen one land on top of a building on the news, with that high-pitched whistle of a small turbine.

What was coming from there wasn’t whistling. It was roaring. An engine too big for the police, and the black dot had already become too big for the police.

It was the light that decided.

A blue line lit up along the body of the spacecraft, vibrant, electric, the way engines light up when someone steps on the brakes in the sky. Not the blue of the panels. A different blue. Colder, deeper, a blue that Sebastian had seen in a thousand videos of landings and takeoffs, in live mission broadcasts, always with the sound cut off by distance. And on the belly of the spacecraft, against that blue, a huge red mark.

And V.

Blurred, without an outline, but a V, and that red. There was no other red like it in the world. It was the red of the emblem slowly spinning in the institutional advertisement on the corner, THE DEFENSE OF THE EARTH BELONGS TO EVERYONE. The red on the shoulder of every uniform, on the packaging of every action figure sold in every store on the planet. Sebastian didn’t need an outline to know. He had spent his whole life learning that red from afar.

The Avengers.

He exhaled without realizing he was holding his breath. Reinforcements had arrived.

And from the other side, almost at the same time, a black stain appeared.

He only saw it because his head was raised and the movement cut off the corner of his eye, the corner that was always the worst. A dark shape coming from the west, between the buildings, like a pendulum. It went up, it fell, it went up. The same pattern in the air that the red and blue blur made down below, the same arcs, that specific way of bending the body at the highest point of the curve that Sebastian would have recognized anywhere in the world, because he had spent hours of his life freezing videos at that exact moment to copy the angle in his physics notebook.

But it wasn’t red. Nor blue. It was black, completely black, and it tumbled into the square like a stone and disappeared among the other stains.

Sebastian stood there for a second, his mouth agape in the cold. Someone who moved like him. And he hadn’t the slightest idea who it was.

The spacecraft landed.

It didn’t land. It stopped in mid-air above the square, at the height of the tallest billboards, and the roar turned into a continuous thunder that made the steel truss behind it sing in a high note and the loose gravel from the roof slide towards the parapet. The wind from the engines reached it, a warm wind with the smell of hot metal, and for a few seconds the blue light from the belly of the craft bathed the facades, the windows, the dirty snow, and the whole of Times Square turned that pool-bottom color, the advertisements swallowed up.

And from the spacecraft, while it was still in the air, a lightning bolt descended.

A red line. Straight, perfect, thick as a column, it emerged from the aircraft at a sharp angle and struck the plaza floor directly on top of one of the black spots. The sound came half a second later: a sharp, enormous crack, a steel door being slammed shut by someone the size of a building, and the black spot simply ceased to stand. It bent or flew away; Sebastian couldn’t tell which.

It was the clearest thing he had seen all night.

A line of light doesn’t need focus. It has no edge for the eye to miss. Sebastian understood then and there, with his fingers digging into the concrete, that the only thing in that watercolor world his eyes could still truly read was light. And that light was ruby-colored. There was only one person on Earth who could do that.

“Cyclops,” he said aloud, to no one, and his voice came out hoarse and cracked and much younger than he wanted it to be.

Scott Summers. One of the coalition’s tactical commanders, one of the most popular, and one of Sebastian’s favorites for reasons he had never been able to properly explain to Camila, who only admitted to one favorite hero, and that hero was red and blue. Maybe it was the visor. A man who carried his own power behind a pair of lenses and who, without them, couldn’t look at the world without destroying what he saw. Sebastian was thirteen years old, wore thick glasses, and had a favorite hero who needed glasses to avoid destroying everything. It didn’t take much to connect the dots.

The shapes began to fall from the ship.

The first one fell quickly, the way someone who trusts the ground falls. A blue blur, a blue he recognized: the uniform. And it was there, with the blue blur plummeting thirty meters and landing in the square without a single sound reaching the roof, that Sebastian had the most idiotic thought of the entire night, a thought that appeared ready-made and without asking permission, and one he would never tell anyone.

I’d like to know which uniform.

The coalition changed uniforms from time to time, and there was a variant for the cold, a thicker fabric, a different cut at the shoulder, and there was an entire discussion in three different forums about whether or not the Cyclops’ winter version had an extra stripe on the side of the leg. Sebastian had read every page. He had formed an opinion. And there was the man himself, fifty meters away, in the middle of January, wearing the answer, and Sebastian saw a blue blotch.

He was that kind of person. Even now. Especially now.

The second form did not fall.

He descended. There was a difference that even a blur showed: the blue shape had plummeted, and this one came through the air like a leaf, unhurried and weightless, a red dot against the dark hull of the ship gliding in a straight and gentle line to the square. Red as fire. Red as hair, he thought, and the thought arrived with a name hanging from it, because there was only one person who descended from the sky like that alongside Scott Summers.

Jean Grey. His wife. If it really was her, and Sebastian would have bet his bicycle that it was, the whole square was about to turn into something else.

After her came others, and that’s when Sebastian lost his way.

Shapes. Two, three, more. One that emerged from the ship and opened up in the air as if flying. One that fell and the ground responded, a thud he felt on the concrete wall. One small and one large, one that shone and one that didn’t. His mind did what it always did: it raced to the catalog. He began to match silhouettes to names, a list of two hundred heroes in alphabetical order that he had known by heart since he was eight years old. He didn’t match any. Without an outline, a silhouette isn’t a silhouette. It’s a blur with legs.

He gave up. It hurt.

Down below, the struggle changed in nature.

Before, it was chaos. A quick blotch against many slow blotches, the red and blue doing the work of ten. Now there was rhythm. The ruby ​​lines began to sweep the square one after another, short, precise, and with each line a black blotch emerged from its place. The dark ropes, those that crossed the air and opened over people like hands, still flew; he saw their streaks cutting through the light. But now the ropes were cut before they arrived. They snapped mid-air and fell.

And between the red lines, something happened that Sebastian took a while to believe: the black spots began to rise.

One. Then two. They would leave the ground and hang in the air five, six meters high, attached to nothing, shaking their limbs like insects in a web that no one could see, and the roar that came from them was different, sharper, thinner, the sound of a creature that doesn’t understand what is being done to it. They would stay there. Waiting. And the red and blue blur would come from the other side of the square like a stone from a sling and pass through each of them, one by one, and they would fall.

One held on. The other hit.

Sebastian watched it repeat itself four, five times, and even in a blur, even without seeing a single face, he understood that he was looking at people who had been doing this together for longer than he had existed. Something planned. A dance that the square hadn’t rehearsed, but that they knew by heart.

It worked. The roars became less frequent. Not because the creatures had fallen silent, but because there were fewer and fewer of them left to roar.

Only one stain did not rise.

The big one. The red and black one, at the center of everything, the shape twice the size of the others, which Sebastian now saw as a dark clot where the two colors never stopped switching places. The red and blue blur didn’t move away from it. It circled around, went in, went out, and with each entry the red thing swelled, cracked the ground, roared with that voice of many voices at once that Sebastian knew all too well.

He pressed his forearms against the concrete until it hurt, so he wouldn’t have to think about his tongue.

That’s when he heard it.

The voice echoed across the entire square—the roars, the thunder of the spaceship, the crackling of the red lines—and reached the rooftop clear as if it had been spoken right beside it. Nothing like the voice from the interviews. Nor like the one in Camila’s drawing, nor the one in the speeches on the corner billboard. It was hoarser, older, and it was shouting a name.

”Carnage!”

A pause in the roars. The time it takes for a blow. Then more words, which the wind caught and undid before rising, something that ended in a tone Sebastian knew from twenty years of interviews: the tone of someone joking with a mouth full of blood. And the red thing’s response was laughter. Layered laughter, with the man’s voice delayed half a second in the background.

Sebastian took a while to find the name within himself.

It wasn’t in the first drawer. It wasn’t with the villains he followed on his feeds, the ones that appeared every week, the ones the city already considered bad weather. It was further back, with the old things. With the newspaper clipping from his school locker. With the documentaries he watched while his mother slept on the sofa, those with grainy images and a deep-voiced narrator, about the years when the city almost fell several times in a row. Carnage. A word that always appeared in those documentaries with the same kind of music underneath. The worst of them, they said. One of the worst Spider-Man had ever faced, back when Spider-Man was just a man in red and blue in a city with no coalition whatsoever.

Decades. That hadn’t appeared in decades. Sebastian had never seen that name associated with anything that wasn’t in the past.

And the thing had said, with its hand closed around his ribs: years trapped in that hole.

A nagging feeling had settled in the back of his ear before he had time to get rid of it. There wasn’t a hole, anywhere, that could accidentally release something like that. There wasn’t a cell, on a planet full of people who knew how to build cells, from which a name like that could walk out on a Thursday in January to eat a policeman in Times Square. Something had happened. Something was wrong long before he turned the corner of Forty-Eighth, and the whole city, with its billboards, its mayoral speeches, and its global security summits, had either not noticed or had noticed and hadn’t told anyone.

He kept the question to himself. It wasn’t the right time.

The other black blob, the one that had arrived from the west, was also fighting. Sebastian would lose it and find it again among the shapes, always in motion, always in the same arcs that Spider-Man made, but against the smaller creatures, far from the red clot. It never stopped long enough for him to try to understand. Only once, when he passed near a white panel and the light hit it from the side, did he see that the black had something red in it. Details. Lines, marks, a design, there was no way to tell. Red on top of black, moving like Spider-Man.

The catalog spun again. Again, it didn’t stop at any name.

And then the snow decided it was its time.

The snowflakes that had been falling sparsely since the beginning of the night suddenly thickened, as if someone up there had opened their hand. Large, heavy, so many that the air became a curtain. They landed on the sleeve of his coat and for a second each one was a perfect thing, a six-pointed drawing ten centimeters from his eyes, clearer than anything had been that night, and then it turned to water. They landed on his eyelashes. They landed on the frost of the low wall and didn’t melt anymore.

And between him and the square, the curtain closed.

Sebastian almost laughed. A sound escaped his nose that wasn’t quite laughter. At that instant, that damned instant, with the Avengers in the square and Spider-Man fifty meters away and Cyclops shooting beams of light that even a blind man could see, the sky chose precisely that moment to take away what little remained of him. The watercolor turned into television static. The blocks of color on the panels turned into embers behind a sheet. The ruby ​​lines still appeared, wider, more diffuse, a red flash that lit up all the snow at once and then went out. But the red and blue blur, that he lost.

He kept his ears.

A roar. A red flash, the crack of steel. A shorter roar. The crack and hiss of the web, the crack and the hiss. A thud he felt on the concrete, something heavy hitting the ground all at once. The voice of layers laughing, and then not laughing. A roar. Silence where before there had been a roar. The thunder of the ship, continuous, now lower. Sirens from three directions at once, from four, from all directions, a wall of sirens rising through all the canyons of the island. A red flash. Nothing. A roar. Nothing.

Nothing.

He waited for the next one. It didn’t come. He waited a little longer, with the snow accumulating in his hair and melting on his neck, and what came instead was a sound he took a while to recognize, because the last time he had heard it was in a stadium broadcast: the crowd.

Not screaming in fear. A wave that rose from the mouth of the Seventh, from the corners, from the stairways, from everywhere where the flashes still blinked behind the curtain, and it grew, and became one thing. Applause. Voices shouting a name. Sebastian heard it rise up the facades to the roof, pass over him and continue to the clouds, and he remained there, his forearms on the concrete, alone, his foot punctured and his ribs aching and his face still smelling of iron.

It was over.

The town square knew. The town square had seen. And he, who was closer than any of those telephones, who had been inside that thing’s hand, who had stepped on its teeth to stay alive, had seen nothing.

He moved away from the wall and sat down again on the gravel, his back against the metal plate, and the snow continued to fall as if it didn’t concern him.

He took the cell phone out of his pocket. This he could see: the black electrical tape holding the back cover, the old crack in the corner of the screen, and above it new cracks, a thin web that hadn’t been there in the afternoon. He pressed the button. The screen went black. He pressed it again, held it down. Nothing. Sebastian knew that device better than the palm of his hand; he had replaced the battery twice with a soldering iron and patience, and he knew that that cell hated the cold, that below a certain temperature it simply stopped and pretended to be dead until someone warmed it up again in his pocket. It would come back. Probably. In the dark glass, ten centimeters from his face, a pale, blurry face stared back at him, and even that he couldn’t see properly.

He put his cell phone away.

He tried to do the usual thing. Go back to the last number. Eighteen forty-seven on the bicycle’s display, at the corner of Seventh and Forty-Sixth. From there, add up what he had lived, what he knew, how long each thing had lasted. He always knew. Even before he learned to read a clock, he knew. He knew how long his mother took in the shower, how long the rice took to cook, how much time was left until Camila was truly asleep after swearing she was already asleep. It was a clock that lived somewhere between his stomach and his chest and that had never, not even once, been late.

He went to look for the watch.

I wasn’t there.

Ten minutes? An hour? Had seven already passed? Camila was already in bed, it was already nine, her mother had already entered 6B and found the covered plate, the note, the half-empty juice, and a house that was too quiet? Sebastian didn’t know. I would pull the thread and the thread wouldn’t lead anywhere. He had the teeth, he had the roof, he had the buzzing and the red lines and the snow, and between one thing and another there were holes he couldn’t measure, as if someone had cut the tape in several places and glued the ends together without worrying about the order.

He stared at his own hands, the only clear thing left in the world, and they were still trembling.

Sebastian Cross had never lost track of time.

Until that night.