Second Skin - Chapter 0006

Chapter 6 — Focus

The wind arrived before anything else.

It wasn’t the wind from the roof, the one that had been whistling through the gravel ever since he sat down there and had already become part of the cold. It was a blow. A displacement of air coming from below and from the front, dry, that threw the flakes back as if someone had opened a door in the middle of a storm. It hit Sebastian’s face, stole his breath for half a second, and brought with it the smell of hot stone.

There was no landing sound. He recorded that later. No thud, no scraping of soles on concrete. Just the wind, and then the presence.

He raised his head.

On top of the low wall, in the same spot where his forearms had melted the frost, there was a stain.

Red and blue.

The same. He had spent the entire night looking at it down there, scanning the square from one side to the other, passing through the black stains like a stone passes through glass, and now it was three meters from him. Standing still. Crouched on the low wall with its knees apart and the fingers of one hand resting on the concrete, in the way no human being ever leans on anything. And it was big. Much bigger than it looked from above. The height of the wall added to the height of its crouching body made it something that occupied the sky, with the orange clouds behind and the snow falling around without touching it, or touching it and disappearing.

It was facing him.

Sebastian didn’t decide to get up. His legs did it on their own, just as they had done in the square: first his hand on the cold air conditioning unit, then his aching knee, then his ribs complaining with a sharp, white pain that he swallowed silently. He stood up. He took one step, dragging his foot, pierced by the gravel, and another, and stopped less than an arm’s length from the low wall, his chin raised, his hands hanging by his sides, unsure what to do.

The stain moved.

One of his hands rose to his own head. There was a short movement, a tug from below upwards, and the top of the stain changed color: the red vanished and in its place was something darker, brown, crumpled, which the wind immediately began to tousle. Hair. That was all Sebastian could see, a brown blur on top of a blue blur, and yet his stomach churned, because he knew what it meant. He had taken off the mask. Right there. For him.

The voice came on top of the wind.

“Okay. I think you dropped that.”

It wasn’t the voice behind the mask. It was closer, without the muffled sound of the fabric, without the distance that existed in all the recordings he knew. A tired man’s voice talking to a boy in the cold, and nothing more.

Sebastian saw the arms rise.

He saw them the way he saw everything at that distance: two dark shapes standing out from the blue, thick, dense, a pair of forearms that seemed to have ropes wrapped around them beneath the fabric. They came towards his face. Slowly. He didn’t move. After everything that had come towards his face that night, there was no reflex left for that, and perhaps it was better that way.

He felt the cold touch on his temples.

Then the weight.

A small, precise weight that settled high on his ears and the tip of his nose as if it had never been there, and which Sebastian recognized before recognizing anything else, because it was the first weight he felt every morning and the last he took off every night. The arms of the glasses slid behind his aching ears. The frame touched his skin and was cold, cold as snow, and there was a drop of water on one of the lenses that trickled down when he blinked.

The world returned.

It didn’t return all at once. It returned like an image someone pulls from the water: first the edges, the outline of a shoulder against the orange sky; then the hairline, dark against the cloud; then the shadows within the face, which ceased to be shadows and became a forehead, an eyebrow, the bone of a cheek. Sebastian blinked twice, because his eyes still didn’t trust him. On the third blink, the face was there, whole, clear, a meter away from his.

He recognized that face.

He knew him from the screens in markets, from press conferences, from documentaries played at a low volume while his mother slept on the sofa. But the screens showed a face the size of a building, or the size of a thumb, and never the size of a face. Peter Parker was in his fifties. Sebastian knew the math by heart, and the math said middle age. But the last few years had been good to that man, that much was clear, and the man crouching on the low wall looked like someone entering his thirties. Smooth skin, without wrinkles, a firm jaw, a red mark on his forehead where the mask had tightened. His brown hair was short, crumpled by the fabric and tousled by the wind, with melting snow in it. Only his beard gave anything away: thick, trimmed close, a shade darker than his hair, it gave his face a weight that the rest of his face lacked, as if it had been left there on purpose so that people would take that man seriously.

And he was smiling.

A small, half-smile, like someone looking at something they find amusing but won’t say what it is. In his left hand, hanging forgotten on his knee, the mask stared at the gravel with its empty white lenses.

Sebastian opened his mouth.

Nothing came out. It wasn’t like against the wall, when his throat had tightened with fear; it was the opposite, everything open and nothing passing through, as if so much wanted to come out at once that the door was clogged. He had questions. He had thirteen years of questions kept in order, revised, rehearsed under the covers, and none of them were where he had left them. There was only one thing inside him now, and that thing wasn’t a sentence. It was a buzzing. A pressure behind his eyes and in the middle of his chest that rose, and rose, and had nowhere to go.

The man’s smile widened slightly.

“Would you like a photo?”

Sebastian nodded. Up and down, once, twice, too fast, his glasses slipping a millimeter and him pushing them back down with the back of his hand in a gesture so ancient it was practically part of his arm.

Peter chuckled silently through his nose and climbed down from the low wall.

It was a descent, not a leap: one foot on the gravel, then the other, his whole body unfolding until he was standing, and suddenly the low wall and the sky and the square ceased to exist, because there was a man six feet tall there and the world was his size. Sebastian had to raise his chin higher. The uniform, up close, smelled of sweat, smoke, and something chemical, and there was melting snow on his shoulders and in the creases of his elbows, and a dark stain drying on his chest that he preferred not to examine.

He put his hand in his pocket.

The phone was where it had been, pressed against his body, and it was warm. Sebastian removed it with unsteady fingers and held the side button with his thumb, and for a full second nothing happened, and in that second he saw everything go wrong: the hero there, waiting, and him with a black brick in his hand. Then the cracked glass lit up. The logo. The loading bar, slowly, the way that device did everything. Sebastian stared at the screen like someone holding their breath in a hospital corridor.

Peter was looking too.

Sebastian noticed out of the corner of his eye and felt his face heat up despite the cold. There was no way he couldn’t look. The black electrical tape holding the back cover together, with a poorly made fold at the corner. The old crack and the new ones on top. And, at the top of the screen, the front camera, which wasn’t from that phone: a lens larger than the hole where it had been fitted, with a darkened epoxy ring around it and a wire from the circuit board showing from the side, because the donor device was from another brand and nothing on it had been made to fit there. Sebastian had spent three nights getting that camera to communicate with that system. It worked. That was what mattered. But, under Peter Parker’s gaze, the device in his hand looked exactly what it was: a patched-up thing for someone who couldn’t afford another one.

The bar finished loading. He opened the photo app with his thumb, touched the front camera icon and saw his own face in the cracked glass, and almost turned the phone off again.

He didn’t turn it off.

Peter, without being asked, crouched down. One leg bent, the other knee on the gravel, until his head was level with Sebastian’s, and the movement was so natural that Sebastian understood, with a slight pang, that he had done this a thousand times, for a thousand children, in a thousand places. It didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all. Sebastian stretched out his arm. On the screen, the two faces appeared side by side: one bearded, smiling slightly at the lens with the ease of someone who has been taking photos for thirty years; and the other, his own, pale as wax, with a dry dark stain from his forehead to the corner of his mouth, his eyes red and enormous behind the thick lenses, and his red hair plastered to his head by the snow.

He tapped the button.

The entire screen flashed white, and for an instant the two faces disappeared in the light.

“Did it turn out well?”

Sebastian looked. The photo was there, frozen behind the cracks. He nodded again, up and down, and this time the movement came with a tightness in his throat that he couldn’t swallow in time, and something warm ran down his dirty cheek and he pretended it was snow.

Peter smiled and stood up.

“Well, it’s time for us to go downstairs.”

Sebastian didn’t have time to understand the sentence.

An open hand rested on his back, between his shoulder blades. That was all. A palm flat against the fabric of his coat, fingers extended but not closing, a grip that wouldn’t be able to hold a bag of rice. And his body lifted off the ground. Completely. His feet left the gravel and he hung in the air against the man’s arm like a forgotten piece of clothing on a clothesline, held by nothing, held by a hand that didn’t squeeze. He felt the grip. It wasn’t finger pressure; it was the entire coat, the wool and the lining and the undershirt, all clinging to that palm as if it were a magnet and he were iron.

Peter took three steps and jumped.

The wind whipped against his face again, but this time Sebastian kept his eyes open, because now he had eyes. The building rose. The orange clouds swirled. And, twenty centimeters from his face, Peter’s free arm stretched forward, his wrist turned, and Sebastian saw.

The launchers.

They were small. Absurdly small. Two flattened volumes attached to the inside of each wrist, the size of a matchbox, painted the same red as the uniform with such precision that they didn’t exist from a meter away. Only up close could you see the seam. Only up close could you see the mouthpiece, a narrow mouth of dark metal, and the flat trigger that Peter’s two middle fingers reached when he bent his palm. Sebastian had read about it his whole life. Leaked schematics, fan drawings, canceled patents, an entire thesis on a forum about the pressure mechanism. None of that was it. The line came out with a dry snap that he felt in the arm pressed against his, and the world shook, and went down, and the fall turned into a curve.

It was gentle. After the night he’d had, it was almost indecently gentle.

And then there was ground.

Sebastian felt the asphalt beneath his feet before feeling a hand release from his back, and he staggered, and a firm hand gripped his shoulder for a second before letting go.

Times Square was upside down.

It was no longer a watercolor. It was a photograph that was too focused, and he didn’t know where to look first. Ten meters away, the asphalt had been ripped open from one end of the square to the other by a straight, deep cut, its edges melted and darkened, as if someone had run a hot knife through a block of black butter. The snow had evaporated within a two-meter radius around him, and the ground was still steaming. Sebastian didn’t need to think. There was only one thing in the world that did that, and he had seen its color from the roof.

Further on, the crater. A sunken concrete circle where the muscular thing had fallen, with half a car swallowed by the rim and the loudspeaker he had seen plummet crushed beside it, covered in snow.

And, leaning against a row of newly erected metal barriers, a truck.

Large, armored, with no windows in the cargo area, its rear doors open and a ramp. Two men in dark uniforms climbed up it, leading a third. The third man was wearing orange. An orange jumpsuit torn at the knees and chest, with an entire sleeve missing, and he walked as if he no longer knew where he was. Behind him, inside the truck, in the dim light of the compartment, Sebastian saw more orange. Three, four, maybe five men sat on metal benches, all wearing the same torn jumpsuits, heads bowed and hands tied in front of their bodies. None of them moved. Sebastian didn’t want to think about what had torn those jumpsuits from the inside.

And, deep down, the spaceship.

It was now resting, or almost, its dark hull a meter off the ground and the ramp open, the blue light of its belly spilling onto the snow. People were coming and going. People in uniform, people in white overalls, and among them, being carried two by two with the care one takes when carrying something that might explode, were tubes. Thick glass cylinders, taller than Sebastian, secured in metal frames with wheels. And inside the tubes, a liquid.

Black.

Not still. Sebastian looked for just a second, but saw that it was moving on its own, slowly, climbing up the glass walls and trickling back down, and that the blue light from the ship wasn’t entering it. It hit the glass and stopped there.

He looked away.

“Are you okay?”

Peter was standing beside him, the mask still in his hand, looking at him with his head slightly tilted.

Sebastian nodded in agreement.

It was a lie, and it wasn’t. His ribs ached with every step, and something inside him cracked when he took a deep breath. But he wasn’t going to say that. He couldn’t speak, to begin with, and even if he could, he wouldn’t. The man beside him had a spaceship, a truck full of people in orange, and an entire square waiting, and Sebastian knew, with a clarity that almost hurt, that every minute Peter Parker spent there was a minute ripped away from something else. He wasn’t going to be a burden anymore. Not to him.

“Good.” Peter looked the boy up and down, a quick, practical glance, like someone who’s done this many times before. “From what I can see, you don’t have any serious injuries, and we already have too many people giving statements. I believe you can be released now, young man.”

Sebastian nodded once more.

And they walked on. Peter started walking and he followed, without anyone having planned anything, crossing the trampled snow and the shards of glass and the stains on the asphalt that Sebastian chose not to look at. They stopped. And only when they stopped did he realize where they were, and he found it strange, because he hadn’t guided anyone there.

Frankenstein was at his feet.

It lay on its side, with the handlebars twisted downwards and the front wheel flipped, the dashboard blank, one tire half-buried in a puddle of dirty snow. Someone had run over it. There was a shoe print on the frame and a car tire mark two hand spans from the battery.

Sebastian bent down.

The first touch was on the battery, as always. The printed plastic cover was scratched, but intact, and the clamps held it in place. He ran his hand over the gray frame as if searching for a broken bone in an animal, felt the weld on the rear, the attachment of Camila’s seat, the motor in the wheel hub. He spun the wheel with his hand. It spun freely, without scraping. He adjusted the handlebars with a tug that made his ribs scream, and the handlebars snapped back into place. Then he pressed the instrument panel.

The screen lit up.

Red. The warning he himself had written was still there, flashing, the warning he never imagined he’d read in that square, and below it the battery number. Eleven percent. Sebastian ran his finger across the screen, closed the alert, saw the engine data return. Normal temperature. Controller responding. He exhaled slowly. The overload had drained the battery like gasoline, but hadn’t burned the rest. There hadn’t been time. He never reached the end of the acceleration, because Carnage’s rope had ripped him from the seat before that, and the thing that had almost killed him had, in the same movement, saved the bicycle.

“Lucky you,” the man had said on the wall. “Let’s consider that you’re lucky today.”

On the other side of the bicycle, Peter Parker looked at the boy.

He had looked before. He had looked on the wall, on the roof, when the photo was taken. But it was the look you give anyone you pull out of the middle of something like that, the look that checks if there’s blood, if there are bones showing, if the person can walk. This was different.

The cell phone. He had seen it on the roof, up close, without wanting to see it: a camera ripped from another device and grafted onto this one with epoxy and patience, working. It wasn’t the kind of thing you do in a repair shop. It was the kind of thing you do on a kitchen table, in the middle of the night, with parts that shouldn’t even be talking to each other.

The bicycle. He noticed now what it really was: an old mountain bike frame, a scooter battery, a hub motor that someone had rewound by hand, a dashboard made from the screen of a dead phone. Each piece from a different origin. Nothing there had been born together. And the boy had run his hand over it as if he knew every screw by name.

And the clothes. The coat two sizes too big, worn at the cuffs. The thrift store pants, frayed at the knees even before the tear. The fingerless gloves. Sneakers with a hole in the sole, on a night below freezing.

He wasn’t a normal boy. Peter saw it the way he would see a wrong move in the middle of a fight: effortless, thoughtless, information that simply appeared ready-made.

He opened his mouth to ask if it had been him. If that thirteen-year-old boy had done all that with his own hands.

“Spider-Man!”

The voice came from behind, from the direction of the ship, loud, cutting through the square.

Peter closed his mouth. He turned his body, and his face came with it, but his eyes lingered for a second longer on the boy crouching beside the bicycle, and in that second there was no smile in them. There was attention. Then he pulled the mask over his head, and his eyes turned into lenses, and the lenses turned to the other side.

Sebastian watched as his back walked away.

He got up with his bicycle. He didn’t call out. He wouldn’t have a voice, and even with a voice he wouldn’t have the courage, because everything in that square said that that man was needed somewhere else and that the boy from Harlem had already received much more than his share of life. He turned the handlebars and rode off in the opposite direction.

The nearest exit was through Seventh Avenue, where the barriers were still being erected. Men in reflective vests unrolled yellow tape from one post to another; behind them, a truck unloaded trestles, and further back, someone was already measuring the gap across the ground with a laser device. They were closing everything off. Forensics, maintenance, whatever came after something like that. Sebastian pushed Frankenstein through the opening between two fences before anyone could close that one too, and nobody stopped him. A boy with a bicycle was nobody.

On the other side of the fence, the world waited.

The crowd he had seen from the rooftop, the constellation of tiny white dots, was two meters away from him and was made up of people. People leaning against the railings, people on top of the benches, people with their arms raised and their cell phones pointed into the square, filming the uniforms in the distance, the spaceship, the cut in the ground, the truck. Nobody was filming the boy. He passed under the raised arms, between a couple arguing about whether that was really Jean Grey and a man narrating everything aloud to his own phone, and the bicycle cleared a path where his body could not.

Exciting, he thought. It had been, let’s say, an exciting night.

The thought came to him fully formed, dry, with a voice he didn’t recognize as his own, and he almost laughed, and that almost-laughing hurt his ribs.

Then the reporters arrived.

There was a line of them along the sidewalk, cameras with white lights pointed at pale faces, microphones stretched out in front of people wrapped in silver blankets. Survivors. Sebastian recognized their faces before he recognized anything else: the fixed gaze, the hands that wouldn’t stop moving, the mouths saying yes, yes, Spider-Man, yes, he got me out of there. A woman was crying as she answered. A man in a suit was showing the size of something with his hands. There were many. There were many indeed, and they all had a better story to tell than a voiceless boy, and Sebastian walked behind the cameras, between the cables and the vans, head down and handlebars in hand, and no light turned on him.

And he arrived on the street.

An ordinary street. Wet asphalt, a convenience store with its door open and the owner standing there looking at the sky, a flying taxi passing high and slowly as if it too were curious. The noise of the square faded into the background, became nothing.

Sebastian got on.

Eleven percent. Almost a hundred blocks. The hills of Harlem, all of them, waiting at the end. He looked at the screen, looked at the empty street ahead, and rested his feet on the pedals.

His night was not yet over.

…

The bedroom door closed with a click that he felt all the way up his arm.

The plastic clock beside the bed showed half past eleven, the red numbers floating in the darkness like the only thing awake in the apartment. Sebastian stood there with his hand on the doorknob, looking at them, waiting for them to say something else. They didn’t.

The battery had died around Ninety-Six.

He knew it was going to end. He’d done the math as he left the square, and the calculation had gone wrong, like everything else that night, and the dashboard went out halfway up a hill, the engine letting out a low groan before dying, and from then on it was just his legs. Forty kilos of bicycle and his own weight on top, climbing Harlem in the dark, his punctured foot filling with snow with every pedal stroke, his ribs marking the rhythm. He didn’t remember the last thirty streets very well. He remembered stopping once to vomit in a sewer, with nothing to vomit. He remembered the building’s door, the elevator going up with its usual grumbling, and him leaning against the Formica wall with his forehead pressed against the cracked mirror.

Camila’s door was closed. He had stopped there for a second, in the hallway, and listened through the crack to her breathing, that breathing of a child sleeping with their mouth open, and only then did he know he was home.

Now there was only the bedroom.

The coat fell to the floor where he dropped it with a dull thud. He didn’t take off his sneakers with his hands. He stepped on the heel of one with the toe of the other, ripped them off, kicked them both under the bed, and one of them hit a cardboard box that had been there since the move. The torn pants fell to the floor. The t-shirt. The fingerless gloves, which he didn’t even remember wearing. Sebastian stood in his underwear in the middle of the room for a moment, shivering, his arms crossed over his ribs, and the winter chill passed over him as if he were nothing.

He fell onto the bed.

The mattress cradled his body with its usual groan. He pulled the blankets up to his chin, both of them, wrapped his legs in them, and lay with his eyes closed, waiting for the warmth to arrive. It took a while. While he waited, he thought of the red lines cutting across the square. Of the black blur that moved like Spider-Man. Of the open hand on his back and the disappearing ground. He thought of the tubes.

After that, he didn’t think about it anymore.

It wasn’t a choice. The exhaustion came from a place deeper than thought and shut down thought along with everything else, like someone turning off a light in a room and leaving it. His breathing slowed. Deeper. His hands, which had spent the entire night clenched on something, opened on their own on the blanket. And in a few seconds, Sebastian’s body completely passed out, the way only a thirteen-year-old’s body passes out after a night like that: all at once, without transition, like something falling.

The room became quiet.

It was a small, dark room, with no light other than the red numbers on the clock, and to top it all off, it was a mess: boxes from the last move that had never been fully unpacked, a pile of clothes on the chair, the toolbox shoved under the table. The living room radiator ticked away in the distance, behind the wall. A car sped past on the street, its light sweeping across the ceiling and disappearing.

And on the floor, the clothes moved.

It was a small thing. A fold in the coat sleeve that straightened itself, without any wind. Then the pants, thrown haphazardly with the ripped knee sticking up, rippled for a second as if something had passed through them. One of the sneakers, under the bed, fell to the side.

Something came out of the shoe.

Small. Black. The size of a walnut, dripping from the hole in the sole like a drop of oil dripping from an engine, only rising against gravity and reaching the ground without making a sound. It stood still for a moment. Then it began to crawl, leaving a wet trail on the wood that dried behind it, towards the bed.

Another one came out of the coat.

It came out through one of the tears, and this one was a little bigger, and slower, and it was stretching a thin filament in front of the body like a slug groping. From the pants, through the open knee, a third one.

They met beside the bed.

There was no struggle. There was no hesitation. Each one touched the other and simply ceased to be a separate thing, the pieces slipping into one another and becoming a single mass, black and shiny, which came together on the ground with a damp sheen and lay motionless, throbbing, if indeed it throbbed. It was still small. Smaller than a closed fist. It would fit inside a glass. And it trembled, the way something trembles when it’s cold.

It climbed up the side of the bed.

It stretched upwards like a drop stretching in reverse, touched the wooden bed frame and gripped it, and the rest of its body climbed behind, slowly, silently, scaling the foot of the bed and then the edge of the mattress and then the fold of the sheet, always along the same thin path, always clinging first and letting go later. It reached the blanket. It stepped over it like a shadow across a field, a black shape advancing slowly over the thick wool, climbing the curve of Sebastian’s leg, the curve of his hip, the valley of his ribs, until it reached the place where the blanket ended and his chin began.

It stopped.

Sebastian’s face was turned toward the ceiling, his mouth slightly open and his glasses still on his nose, because he had fallen asleep without taking them off. His skin was cold. The dry stain on his forehead was still there.

The black mass moved toward him.

It was gentle. That was the strangest thing of all, and no one was there to find it strange: the gentleness. It opened up, spreading thinly like a film of water over the skin, and passed over the chin, the mouth, the nose, the lenses of the glasses without smudging the glass, the forehead, the hair. It circled the closed eyes. It stayed there for a whole instant, covering the boy’s face like a second, darker skin, and nothing about it pressed, and nothing about it hurt. Then it receded. It trickled back down the jaw, the neck, found the gap between the blanket and the skin and went in.

Underneath the blanket, in the dark, it slid down his body.

Over his thin chest, over the ribs that could be counted one by one, over the spot on the right side where the skin was purple and hot. Over his stomach. Up his legs to his feet. It traced every inch as if measuring, as if checking, and then returned. It climbed again. And settled on his chest, right in the center, on the sternum, where the heart beat slowly beneath.

There, it spread.

It opened in all directions at once, thin, and enveloped Sebastian’s torso like a pair of arms encircling someone: around his chest, his sides, his back, closing over his entire body in a single embrace. And the heat from his body passed into it. Sebastian was cold on the outside, but inside there was a thirteen-year-old oven burning, and the black mass drank it in, and as it drank it stopped trembling. Little by little. One wave at a time. Like a wounded animal that has spent the whole night crawling on the ice and finally found a warm hole to fit into, and curls up, and stops moving, and for the first time in a long time is not running from anything.

It stayed like that for a long time.

And then it began.

It wasn’t from above. It was from within. The film on Sebastian’s skin trembled entirely, just once, and then began to unravel, and unraveling there meant something else: it split. In two. Into four. Into thousands. Each piece smaller than the last, each finding a pore in the boy’s skin and entering through it, pushing, forcing its way through a hole made to let sweat out, not to let that in. There was no hurry. That’s what hurt. One piece at a time, one pore at a time, the black substance descending through the skin like ink running down fabric, only the fabric was human and felt it.

Sebastian’s body reacted before he did.

His hands clenched. His fingers tightened on the blanket, his nails digging into the wool. A groan escaped his half-open mouth, low, long, a sound from within sleep, and his legs curled up and then stretched out, and his back arched a hand’s breadth above the mattress and fell back down. The skin of his chest shivered in waves, from the outside in, each wave following a piece that went in. Sweat. A cold sweat broke out on his forehead and lip and trickled down his temples into his ears. The veins in his neck appeared, thick, blue in the darkness. His heart raced beneath the black hand that still covered him, and the black hand felt it, and didn’t stop.

He didn’t wake up.

There was enough pain there to wake a grown man, and Sebastian didn’t wake, because exhaustion had gone deeper than the pain could reach. He lay in the dark, trapped beneath his own sleep, while his body screamed silently. And the substance continued.

It entered through the skin and found the flesh, and mingled with the flesh. It passed between the fibers of the chest muscles like water between roots, thread by thread, black and alive, and where it passed the fiber trembled and then yielded. It descended further. It found the bone. It found the ribs, one by one, and the rib on the right side where something was cracked, and there it lingered, and there it hurt in a way that made Sebastian’s whole body clench like a fist. Then it continued. It spread through the bones like cold spreads through iron, inside, in the marrow, and reached the spine, and climbed it vertebra by vertebra to the nape of the neck, and descended it to the hip, and everywhere it passed it left a little of itself mixed with what was already there, so that there was no longer a place where Sebastian ended and something else began.

And it sank.

Deeper and deeper inside, deeper and deeper towards the center, behind the sternum, behind the heart that beat like a caged bird, in the place where what a person is is kept. The film over the skin was disappearing. Diminishing. A thin layer, then a sheen, then nothing, the boy’s skin returning to being just skin, white and sweaty in the dark, rising and falling too quickly.

The clock showed 11:51.

The room was quiet again. The clothes on the floor were just clothes. Sebastian slept with his mouth open, his glasses perched crooked on his nose, his hands still clasped on the blanket, and his breathing slowly, gradually slowing down again.

And in the middle of it, in the exact center of everything that it was, something nestled, and became still, and stayed.