Second Skin - Chapter 0007

Chapter 7 — Clear

The alarm blared from across the room. It wasn’t the cell phone—that one went silent on those cold January mornings, feigning uselessness until someone warmed it in their pocket—and a boy who needs to get up can’t rely on that. That’s why there was the desk clock: a hand-sanded wooden box, the size of a loaf of bread, with the dial of a broken alarm clock, the mechanism of another, and, on top, a complete metal bell, taken from a third. Three dead and one alive. One August night, Sebastian assembled everything there and placed it far from the bed. To silence it, he had to get up.

His entire body leaped off the mattress in one jerk, head, torso, and blankets hitting the floor—and something small slipped off the edge and cracked on the tile without him looking. The clock’s hammer continued its relentless ticking. Only then did Sebastian look at the table: the clock blared amidst the action figures—the red and blue hero in front, the one with the visor right behind, its paint worn off at the knees. Time: 7:18. And the alarm clock hand, which he had made himself with a pin and a piece of red plastic, was embedded in the third notch.

The first was the usual one, the second said “get up now,” and the third, set that same night of the setup, served only as a theory—Sebastian never missed his alarm clock. He’d lost gloves, hats, the key to the lock, but never the alarm. But it was the first time he’d slept through two alarms without waking up.

The calculation came automatically: Douglass closes at 7:30 a.m. Twelve minutes remained. Get dressed, go downstairs, take the bicycle out of the elevator—maybe ten minutes. He threw himself out of bed.

The shower was the first thing to fall off the list, with no chance of going back. He put on the jeans with holes in both knees: he hopped on one foot as he crossed the room, crushing the clock button. He grabbed the first T-shirt he found; he shoved on the worn-out jacket—two sizes too big, full of new rips—without even looking at the sleeves. He put on the old sneakers: the right one with a hole in the sole, the left one worn down to the point of exposing the fabric. Tying the laces was just a quick knot that could barely hold. The backpack, left on the chair, flew onto his shoulders as he was already moving.

The house slept in silence. He didn’t notice. He crossed the short hallway, passed Camila’s closed door without looking, and entered the bathroom just to turn on the tap and splash cold water on his face—two handfuls, three—rubbing his forehead and mouth until his skin burned. He dried himself with the towel beside the door. He didn’t even look up at the mirror—there was no time to check his own face.

In the kitchen, only the refrigerator hummed, its light off. On the appliance’s door, a magnet held a crayon drawing: a Spider-Man carrying a girl with orange braids, and next to it, a hastily written note, slanted to the right, like someone filling out a form while standing:

“Sebastian, the coffee is in the microwave. I’m taking your sister today and picking her up later, so don’t worry about it. Love, Mom.”

He read it without taking the paper, then reread it. He opened the microwave and there was a brown paper bag, folded three times at the opening in that way only she knew how to do. Without unwrapping it, he stuffed it into his backpack on top of his notebooks, pulled the zipper halfway closed, and ran.

Frankenstein rested against the living room wall, its charger cable plugged into the socket and its display blank. He pressed the button: the screen, mimicking a cell phone, came back to life, displaying “100%”. That battery, dead on the climb up Ninety-Six, was full again. The gray frame bore the mark of a shoe on the tube, a tire scratch near the battery, and the handlebars slightly bent—a repair for the weekend. But it was intact. The previous night had taken many things, but not the bicycle.

He ripped the power cord from the socket, dropped it on the floor, opened the door to apartment 6B, pulled his bike into the hallway, and locked the door behind him. The elevator arrived with the usual complaint. He stepped sideways, handlebars pressed against the Formica, and in a reflection in the cracked corner mirror, something pale, with tousled red hair, brushed past the edge of his eye. He ignored it.

He counted the floors going down. On the ground floor, he pushed the door frame with his shoulder, descended the two steps with the bicycle rolling beside him, and, still with one foot on the ground, twisted the throttle and jumped onto the moving saddle—the same jump he practiced a hundred times a day.

The icy wind attacked his ears first. Without the hat he’d lost the night before, they were bare before they even turned the corner.

Hadley descended, and Sebastian followed. Up above, the morning traffic flowed smoothly, a river of cars thirty meters above, white headlights in one lane, red in the other, the deep roar of engines reaching the ground like the distant buzzing of a swarm. A taxi crossed beneath the fleet, lower than permitted, and disappeared among the buildings. No one up there looked down. There was no reason to.

Below, the street belonged to him. And it was white. It had snowed all night: the thick snow that had closed Times Square continued to fall on Harlem, on the few cars stopped at the curbs with their windows covered, on the sidewalks, and no one had dared—or been ordered—to clear anything. Twenty years ago, snowplows removed the snow before sunrise. Today, the few remaining snowplows dedicate themselves to the landing pads and building ramps, because that’s where the drivers—now “pilots”—are, and the ground floor has become the ground floor again. On the sidewalks, a treacherous layer of fine snow ready to trip up any distracted driver; on the road, a smooth carpet of ice, without tire marks, without salt, hiding every pothole and manhole cover.

The ride to Douglass, which on any other morning would have taken eight minutes uphill and three turns, had become a risk at every corner. Sebastian sped up. It was strange—he would only realize this later—when the rear wheel slipped on the first turn and the frame slid half a meter to the side. He leaned the bike, transferred his body weight to the edge of the handlebars, and the bike followed his command as if it had never thought of anything else. On the second turn, a van parked in the middle of the street forced him to turn onto a side street; he leaned so far that his knee almost touched the snow and came out the other side without lifting his foot off the pedal. A man shouted from a fire escape, the engine roared, and the snow rose in two white wings behind the tires.

“Well,” he thought, with a mixture of shame and pride. “I’ve been a delivery driver for a long time. And, modesty aside, I’m good at what I do.”

Douglass’s brick building appeared on the corner before he could finish his thought, huddled between the housing complex and the self-service laundromat whose panel flashed the temperature in red. Less than ten minutes. He didn’t even check.

The bike rack was on the side of the school, a metal structure under a snow-dripping awning. It was empty: all the bars free, no bicycles, just snow crystals piled up like icing. Sebastian positioned Frankenstein in its usual spot, passed the thick chain twice through the frame, and clicked the iron lock. He was the only one there—he always was—but that morning the solitude felt absolute. Who would be crazy enough to cycle in that New York cold? The winter period had begun, when it snowed every night, and only Sebastian dared.

He ran to the entrance. The two glass doors were still open, letting out a rectangle of yellowish light amidst the cold. He slid across the courtyard, pushed the door open with his shoulder, and behind him heard the click and soft hum of the doors closing on their own. Half past seven. He stopped in the lobby, hands on his knees, the air escaping in clouds, and let out a sigh that almost turned into a laugh.

Ahead, the hallways of Douglass were already back to their routine without him: students in groups, coats buttoned up, a locker banging, a teacher with her arms crossed waiting for the last class to enter. No one noticed his arrival. A boy with wet hair and heavy breathing was just part of the scenery.

Sebastian had his first period free—one of the few advantages of his schedule—and he took advantage of it as always: he went straight to the cafeteria to have the coffee he hadn’t had at home. At seven-thirty, the cafeteria was a different place: half a dozen long tables under fluorescent lights, a mixed smell of bread and disinfectant, the counter closed by the low grate, and few students—each at their own table, hunched over something. Not everyone needed to rush to coffee like him. He chose the end of a table near the wall, sat with his back to the window, dropped his backpack on the bench, and took out the brown paper bag.

Inside the bag, there were two sandwiches wrapped in paper towels: the top one for that very moment, the bottom one for lunch. Between the two, a small note folded in four:

“I’m so proud of you.
Please don’t be late today.
Kisses, Mom.”

He read it, refolded it, and tucked the sheet of paper into his inside coat pocket, deep down, next to his change. A lump formed in his throat and dissolved with the first bite.

He ate voraciously, devoured it in fact, like someone who the night before had stopped to vomit in a Harlem sewer with nothing to expel and then slept soundly for eight hours. He sat alone at the end of the table – Sebastian was still the new kid at Douglass, as he had been at every school, and new kids don’t have anyone to share their morning snack with. He pretended not to care. Or he did care and had learned to put it off.

While chewing, he took his cell phone out of his pocket. He wanted to review the previous night’s news. He had arrived home too exhausted to watch anything, collapsed into bed, and now the whole fight was on the internet: edited scenes, subtitles, soundtrack, everything ready for him. He had been in the middle of that mess, but he hadn’t seen anything: that thing’s tongue had ripped his glasses away and the world turned into a soup of light.

He turned the device in his hand—screen blank, dark, smooth glass, slightly cracked. And in the reflection, a face appeared. His face. Pale, red hair crumpled on one side by the pillow, deep dark circles under his eyes. And in place of the lenses—his thick glasses—nothing. Just skin: the bridge of his nose completely smooth, gray eyes without rims or lenses.

Sebastian frowned. The face in the glass frowned back.

He slowly raised his head and looked around the cafeteria. And there it was. Fifteen meters away, the back wall with the whiteboard: in blue pen, the week’s menu. Effortlessly, he read it: Friday: pizza. The soda machine next to the grate, covered in dust, a sticker peeling off in one corner. At the farthest table, a girl with braids was reading something on a tablet, her metal earring swaying with every movement of her head. The clock above the door, the hands marking the hours. The fluorescent lamps, each with the dark stain of a dead insect inside.

There was no watercolor.

Before, the world ended three meters away from him. It had been like that for as long as he could remember: three meters of outlined objects and then, stains and shapes diluted in an indistinct blur, where he recognized his sister by her size and the wardrobe by its immobility. Every morning he woke up inside that watercolor and felt around the bedside table before anything else, before thinking, before knowing what day it was.

That morning, he hadn’t touched the small table. He’d read the table clock on the other side of the room—seven eighteen, the red hand on the third notch. He’d read the note on the refrigerator without removing it from the magnet. He’d ridden down Hadley in the snow, noticing every manhole cover under the white blanket, every crack in the asphalt, the van on the second corner several meters ahead. He’d seen the girl with the braid and her earring.

He looked back at the dark glass of his cell phone. The face was still there, without glasses, still his own. He ran his finger along the bridge of his nose, where the nose pads left two marks that never faded—smooth. He slid it across his temples, where the arms of his glasses pressed—nothing. He looked at his own hands and then at the other end of the cafeteria: the girl, the whiteboard, the “Friday: pizza”—everything remained clear, insistent.

He had no idea where his glasses were. He hadn’t looked for them. Nor had he missed them.

It made no sense. None at all. You don’t just wake up seeing. That’s not how things worked, and Sebastian knew exactly how everything worked – it was the only thing he considered himself better at than others. The eye was a lens, and a lens with the wrong curvature doesn’t correct its own flaw overnight just because it wanted to.

He stood there, his phone switched off in his hand and his mouth slightly open, searching within himself for some mechanism, a screw, a part, any explanation – but he found nothing. Only the cafeteria, clear and waiting. He took another bite of his sandwich.

It was ridiculous. The whole situation bordered on the absurd, and he was hungry. It was his usual sandwich, but he chewed it slowly, staring at the fluorescent lights as if confronting an unsolvable enigma. Then, with the bread still in his mouth, he pressed the side button on his cell phone until the screen lit up.

The logo appeared. Then, the loading bar, slow as everything else on that device. He opened the video app and typed “Times Square yesterday.” He barely finished typing when the system had already guessed what he wanted – after all, everyone was looking for the same thing that morning. The screen filled with thumbnails and, at the top, occupying the entire width, was the first one.

Sebastian swallowed the piece he was chewing.

In the miniature, a man stood before a row of metal barriers, snow falling around him and an intense blue light illuminating everything behind. Sebastian recognized that light and those bars – he himself had pushed Frankenstein between two of them the night before. The uniform was familiar and yet different: the cut and the embossed web that embraced his shoulders and chest were the same, but all in matte black, with details in bright red – the web, the emblem, the inner stripes of the arms. The mask rested in his hand, and his uncovered head revealed a middle-aged man, exhausted face, dark skin, and short, curly hair, with two gray streaks on the sides, like chalk lines.

The name came before anything else. It came from the list of two hundred names he had been memorizing since he was eight years old – and, for the first time, the catalog stopped at just one name.

Miles Morales.

The other Spider-Man.

It was him: the black shadow that descended from the west between the buildings, swaying on the same arches, bending at the same angles. Sebastian had spent the entire night trying to name it, and the name was there, in the first miniature of the day, waiting to be recognized.

He touched it in the video.

It was a TV interview – the logo in the corner, a caption with his full name at the bottom, posted in the early hours of the morning and already with views that Sebastian preferred not to look at. The reporter was out of frame; only the microphone, with the channel’s foam cube, trembled slightly in her hand.

“Mr. Morales, what happened here tonight?”

Miles stared at the microphone as if he were staring at something he’d already answered ten times.

“What we know so far is this.” The voice was deep and patient, with the hoarseness of someone who had shouted moments before. “Somehow, a group of symbiotes managed to escape. How that happened, we still don’t know. It’s being investigated. I can guarantee that it is.”

“Escape from where?”

“This is part of the investigation.” He didn’t look away. “When we have an answer, you’ll have one. What I can say now is that Spider-Man and the Avengers arrived in time, solved the problem, and people can go home now.”

“Spider-Man and the Avengers.” Sebastian noticed the strange tone, as if he himself didn’t belong to that group, as if that name belonged to someone else and was only borrowed for one night.

While he was speaking, the video cut away.

Not for the reporter, but for the square. Vertical, shaky shots, the crowd drowning out the hero’s voice, who was still answering questions Sebastian could no longer hear. The first scene came from afar, from the mouth of Seventh Avenue, with maximum zoom: giant pixels blurring everything. Even so, it was understandable.

It was the facade of a building. Something enormous was stuck to it, red and black, the colors shifting beneath the skin. An arm extended eight meters high.

And in its hand, a small, dark object.

Sebastian almost choked on his sandwich.

The dark thing hung from the fingers like a rag. The enormous creature opened its mouth—even blurred, you could see it opening in layers, far beyond normal. A tiny point of light crossed the screen, a muffled flash in its throat, then a white mass exploding out of its jaw and running down its entire body. A dark disc cut the image in a straight line, and the arm separated from the rest with impossible precision.

The object fell.

It dropped half a meter, maybe a meter, and a white ribbon caught it in mid-air. Then a red and blue blur appeared off-screen and carried it away, while the person filming let out a scream that crackled in the cell phone microphone. On the wall of the building across the street, for a second, you could see both of them: the figure standing on the concrete and the dark object dangling from his hand.

Four seconds.

Sebastian dragged the video bar back and watched it again. Four seconds. Outside, it lasted four seconds, nothing more than a tiny square on a cell phone screen, a smudge the size of a fingernail—just a dark object dangling from someone’s hand, faceless, nameless, with nothing to suggest that inside was a boy from Harlem, with a delivery bag, promising to be home by nine. He spent the entire night inside those four seconds. He aged within them. And, seen from afar, from a cracked screen in an empty cafeteria, it was nothing. A clip. A fragment of a larger video.

He let the video fast forward.

Other scenes followed, from other cell phones, different angles, and the square disintegrated into pieces: the building wall with four black creatures surrounding a man, him stepping on the arm of one of them as if climbing a step. One of them sliding horizontally along the facade, crossing the avenue without touching anything, disappearing behind a panel. Another plummeting eight stories, the square’s floor opening in a circle, snow rising in a fan shape, a loudspeaker falling from somewhere. Sebastian recognized that hole. He had felt the entire building tremble when it was created, suspended by a hand eight stories away, and he had passed by it the previous night, pushing his bicycle.

And, between one scene and another, black.

Miles Morales crossed the square. Not alongside the other, not beside him, but repeating the same movement—the arches that didn’t touch the ground, the body arched at its highest point, falling onto something smaller and black, disappearing before the reaction. In one of the scenes, the two appeared in the same frame—one in red and blue, the other in black and red—crossing the air of Times Square in opposite directions. For an instant, the movement of Spider-Man, that movement that Sebastian had copied in a hundred notebooks, multiplied across the entire square, as if there were more than one way to be him.

Sebastian was barely breathing.

Bent over the table, his cell phone resting on the brown paper bag, his face ten centimeters from the screen out of habit, though he no longer needed that proximity. The sandwich lay abandoned, his gray eyes darting across the screen without blinking. He saw everything. Every arc, every line, every finger.

And that’s why he didn’t hear.

On the table, leaning against the paper bag, the cell phone began to vibrate. A short buzz against the tabletop. Another. Another. A bell icon flashing at the top of the screen, above the square and the two of them flying, and, under the shouts of the crowd, a soft ring: the alarm for the second period, which he himself had programmed on his first day at Douglass so he would never be late.

The cell phone was vibrating non-stop.

Sebastian didn’t even notice. For the first time in his life, he could see.