Second Skin - Chapter 0011

Chapter 11

The rest of the day passed before him like a blur. History, then English, then something with maps. Sebastian sat at his usual desk, opened his notebook to the dated page, and stared at the board without reading a line, his still-damp hair cooling at the nape of his neck. The teacher spoke. The marker squeaked on the whiteboard. Someone in the back dropped a pencil case, and the sound of pens rolling across the linoleum lasted longer than it should have. He heard everything from afar, from a place where the shower was still running and Brett’s hand was still marking the tile, and he didn’t write anything down.

It was only when he changed classrooms that he noticed. Nobody said anything. Nobody pushed him, nobody made a face. On the contrary: the hallway opened up. Sebastian walked close to the wall, his backpack on one shoulder, and the river of people who had previously passed over him without noticing him now flowed alongside him, with ease. The boy with the braces, the same one who had one shoe on and the other on the floor when the showers still ran, turned to let him pass and stared into his own locker until he disappeared. In the water fountain line, the chubby boy moved out from behind him and went to get a drink upstairs. In the last class, the desk on the right, which always had someone in it, was empty. The one on the left too. Two islands of Formica surrounded him, and the rest of the class squeezed into the remaining space, pretending that this was normal.

He found it strange. Strange because it was everything he had ever asked for, delivered in the wrong way. Six schools teaching the art of non-existence, and all it took was a locker room for the group to solve the problem for him. The invisibility of before came from no one looking. This one came from everyone looking and then immediately looking away.

Not that he cared. That was the strangest thing: he searched his chest for the familiar tightness of someone who’d earned a nickname from the group and knew Monday would be worse, but the tightness wasn’t there. In its place was something else. Deeper and simpler, something that took a while to be named because he’d never felt anything so intense.

Hunger.

The final bell rang at three o’clock sharp, an electronic hum that tried to imitate a brass bell and, at best, sounded like a tired microwave. All the desks dragged themselves out at once.

On any given Friday, Sebastian would have opened locker 14, switched books, and left through the side door—the strategic one, where nobody ever went. But today he went out the front. He crossed the lobby amidst the crowd, between the groups arranging the convenience store and the robotics club members carrying the box of parts to the lab, and the river of people parted for him as it had been doing all day. He pushed the glass door open with his shoulder.

The January cold sank up to my neck.

Without his hat. He’d left it somewhere in Times Square, amidst the trampled snow and what remained of that night, and he only missed it at that precise moment each time he went out, when the river wind met his bare ears and trickled down his collar. He pulled his coat zipper up to his chin. On the laundromat panel next door, the temperature flashed red, and he read the staircase number, each digit, effortlessly—something that had been new less than twelve hours earlier and was no longer so.

Frankenstein waited in the side bike rack, under the dripping awning, the only occupied spot in the entire structure. He unlocked the chain, wound it around the support under the saddle, put on his fingerless gloves, and touched the dashboard. The repurposed cell phone screen woke up with its usual beep: ninety-one percent. He twisted the throttle and rode down to the street.

Harlem passed by him in pieces, as usual. The smoke from Mr. Okafor’s chestnut stand on the corner, the bass escaping from the open-door barbershop, the self-driving van flashing blue at the red light. Sebastian held up two fingers toward Mr. Okafor and didn’t even notice if the wave was returned. His head remained low on the handlebars, and his stomach felt like it was in an unknown place. It wasn’t the emptiness of someone who skips lunch to get ahead on deliveries—he knew that by heart. It was a hole with its own weight, something sucking him in, and the more blocks he descended, the deeper the hole pulled him.

The yellow sign appeared around the corner before he could make any decision. Sebastian braked.

It was rare. Stopping to eat on the street, especially in the middle of the afternoon, with the clock-in/clock-out time looming: eating out meant spending from his expense tracker, who had already postponed all payments until February since Thursday. Even so, he leaned his bicycle against the fence, fastened the chain, and when the glass door opened, the warm smell of grease and the sizzle of meat behind the counter filled the air. His stomach growled loudly before the thought was complete, and he checked around to see if anyone had heard.

The self-service kiosks were on and empty. At the counter, a young woman—very pale skin under the cold light, dark hair pulled back in a high, tight bun, the kind that requires patience in front of the mirror—chewed gum with her mouth slightly open. She stared at the boy who entered: coat two sizes too big, ears red from the cold, red hair stuck to his forehead by the wind—the look of someone who thought he was going to order an ice cream cone and count coins.

Sebastian read the menu on the screen: he checked names, prices, tried to decipher the tiny print of the calories he’d never seen on any counter. “The three-meat one,” he ordered. “With cheese. And bacon. Lots of bacon.” The girl typed. “A bucket of nuggets,” he continued, turning his eyes back to the screen. “The large, family size.” His chewing gum stopped for a second. “Large fries. And plenty of ketchup and mayonnaise.” She asked: “Drinks?” He looked at the price that appeared on the screen and shook his head—at home, tap water was free.

She repeated the order without any intonation—something Sebastian found worse than a joke—and announced the total. He paid with the tips kept in his inside coat pocket—folded bills next to a note also folded in four. An entire afternoon of deliveries summed up in a single order. The number went down his throat and stayed there.

The snack arrived quickly, as always in places like this. The tray was heavy. He went to the back of the room, chose a table against the window overlooking the street, the bicycle rack, and the gray Frankenstein van against the dirty snow, and sat with his back to the counter.

And he ate.

He knew what it was like to feel hungry—he did it every day at seven-thirty in the cafeteria. But this was different. It was his body snatching the food from his hands before he even realized it. The hamburger disappeared in six or seven bites, the cheese dripping down his wrist, the bacon salted just the way he wanted it. The fries vanished while he was still chewing the last piece of bread. Then he opened the bucket of nuggets.

A “family-sized” bucket was made for a table of six people, with hands reaching in from all sides. Sebastian, however, was alone at the back table and attacked the entire bucket: two pieces at a time, dipping them in ketchup, then mayonnaise, back to ketchup, his mouth full while his hand already reached for the next bite. He didn’t look out the window. Only halfway through did he manage to form a mechanical thought: where did all this come from? Could it have been the exercise? He did sit-ups for four and a half minutes, push-ups for almost five, he climbed sixteen meters of rope, and none of that had tired him. Perhaps the fatigue had accumulated somewhere else. Perhaps it was there, at the bottom of the bucket.

When the bucket was empty, he stared at the oil-soaked paper, the loose breadcrumbs, and the pile of torn sauce packets. He wiped his mouth with the napkin. He wiped it again.

He looked up and saw the girl behind the counter watching him. It was no longer the indifferent expression of someone serving ice cream cones. She kept one eyebrow raised, the chewing gum stuck between her lips, and her eyes darted from the tray to his body, and then from his body back to the tray, like someone trying to make up a number that didn’t add up. Her gaze said it all: a child that size, a whole bucket—where was all that? Not a word was spoken. Sebastian also remained silent, piled the trash on the tray, went to the trash can, waved from afar as if apologizing without knowing why, and went out into the cold.

Outside, he unfastened the chain and stood still for a moment, his hand on the saddle. He expected to feel the tightness in the waistband, the brick-like weight beneath his ribs, his breath short—but there was nothing. His belly was flat, his stomach where it had always been, perhaps a finger’s width fuller, perhaps not even that. He had devoured a whole family’s dinner, and his body had reacted as if he had eaten a sandwich. And, believe it or not, he could still eat more. He felt the tug of emptiness with a clarity that frightened him: the hole had shrunk, now it was deeper than it was wide, but it was still there, patient.

He mounted the Frankenstein bike, and the questions came along. Meridian Express was still in the same place, in the back of that red commercial building on the border with Washington Heights—two electric vans in the yard, the steel door. Sebastian leaned his bike against the inside wall, took his badge out of his wallet, and swiped it through the reader. Green. Beep. Three fifty-two.

The warehouse was as usual: the smell of cardboard and tape, an old radio playing salsa softly, Rosa snapping labels without looking up, Denny in the back fitting packages into the van. In the middle of it all, the clipboard, the pencil, the flushed face, and the worn jacket from three winters. Mr. Williams was already looking at the door when it opened.

Sebastian had spent the entire day, under the rug, waiting for that moment. The cooler bag from the previous night had broken open in one mouth—three packages and a handwritten label that read “Midtown Express,” delivery by seven. He didn’t know what Mr. Williams knew, what the Midtown customer had complained about on the phone. He tried three ways to start the sentence while pedaling and gave up on all of them.

Mr. Williams glanced at him over the clipboard. His gaze traveled from Sebastian’s disheveled hair to his worn sneakers, then back up, stopping at his face. Something caught the old man’s eye that Sebastian couldn’t decipher. Then, a short, one-sided smile.

“Good boy,” he said, tapping his pencil on the clipboard. “At least he arrived on time this time.”

He pointed his pencil at the central counter, where an older thermal bag—with a patched strap and a nearly faded Meridian logo—waited. The reserve. Sebastian glanced at the bag, then at Mr. Williams, who was already turning to yell at Denny about the order of the boxes. The rest could wait. Perhaps it was a relief, perhaps not.

“Seven,” Rosa said, syncing the list on his phone without looking up. “Nothing in Midtown today.”

He grabbed his bag, adjusted the strap across his chest, and stepped out the steel door into the darkening afternoon. Seven deliveries: two in Hamilton, one in Sugar Hill, four heading downtown. He mentally mapped out the route before leaving the yard, and the city was there, street by street, one-way street by one-way street. What wasn’t there was the rest.

The slope of Route 145 had never been conquered without the motor. Frankenstein knew: the motor hub would engage on its own halfway up, where his legs gave way. Today, however, the motor started and Sebastian was pedaling ahead of him. He climbed using only his own strength, the hum of the hub sounding in vain, and at the top he checked the dashboard: the charge had dropped less than a point. He stared at the number for a second longer than he should have and almost didn’t see the black ice in the shadow of the church on Route 132. But he saw it, in time, and swerved without thinking.

The rest of the journey was the same. In Sugar Hill, a lady wanted to chat at the door, and he managed to leave after the second sentence. In Hamilton, the doorman signed without looking at the screen. Four packages dispatched to the center in a time he didn’t even time, because he wouldn’t believe it. At half past five, the empty bag rested on the Meridian counter, Mr. Williams alternating his gaze between his watch and the bag, pencil in the air, dismayed: “That’s all for today. Friday is slow. The vans took the rest.”

Sebastian left with seventy-eight percent charge on the dashboard. He had never returned so full of energy.

Six o’clock in the afternoon. Even before him, the door to 6B announced itself: the worn doormat with the “WELCOME” almost faded, the plastic sun glued at a child’s eye level. He unlocked it, entered sideways with the Frankenstein, leaned it against the cardboard box collecting melted snow in the entrance hallway, plugged in the charger. The panel blinked and began to recharge. He locked the door. He tested the doorknob twice, out of habit.

The heat greeted him. The old radiator under the living room window made its usual ticking sound, a sound no one else heard. It had stopped working for a week in December; the caretaker had promised to fix it, and Sebastian himself had opened the valve one Sunday morning with a wrench and a tutorial from the library. He stood in the hallway, his coat still buttoned, letting the heat rise to his face. He didn’t understand why he looked tired when he wasn’t.

On the refrigerator magnet, beneath the crayon Spider-Man carrying a girl with orange braids, a note was tilted:

“I picked up Camila. Shift until eleven. There’s rice. I love you, Mom.”

He read it twice, as usual, and left the note there.

The living room TV was off, a rare occurrence at that hour, and her sister sat on the floor between the sofa and the coffee table, her notebook open on the tabletop, her pencil pressed down with excessive force. Her red braids fell on either side of her face. Her tongue was held between her teeth, the tip sticking out, just as she did when something demanded too much of her. Two pieces of chewed eraser lay beside the notebook.

Sebastian walked around the sofa and spoke from behind:

“So, little one, doing your homework?”

Camila lifted her face and looked at him. It was quick: the look of a little sister who responds by returning to what she was doing. But there was a second when her eyes lingered longer on his face, like someone entering a room and sensing that something has changed without knowing what. Her freckled brow furrowed slightly, then the pencil returned to the paper.

“Try.”

He crouched down beside her, elbows on his knees, observing the sheet. Subtraction problems, a whole column, half filled in, the other half waiting patiently.
“Help me?” he asked.

She looked up at the paper—not at him.
“No.”

She spoke with the conviction of someone who has seven years and a lot of work ahead of her. Sebastian stifled a laugh, lightly touched the tip of her braid with two fingers, and she shook her head to push the touch away without taking her eyes off the bill.
He let her. That was exactly what she wanted, and he knew deep down what wanting it meant.

The room was at the end of a short hallway, just past Camila’s closed door. Sebastian went in and locked his own door. It was small: boxes from the last move were still piled up in a corner, half-open for fourteen months; a stack of clothes strewn on the chair; the toolbox under the desk. On top of it, the wooden clock with the bell on top and, in front of it, the dolls: first the red-and-blue one, then the one with the visor, its paint worn off at the knees. And, next to the wardrobe, a mirror.

It was a long, cupboard mirror with a chipped bottom corner, found on the sidewalk of 86th Street on a collection day. Two apartments away, he carried it on his back for twenty blocks: a full-length mirror was a luxury for those who had spare wall space. Fixed with silicone, it only served to check his coat before going out.

Sebastian stopped in front of him. He took off his coat and let it fall. His t-shirt. He kicked his sneakers under the bed – one hit the box. His pants, with ripped knees, slid to the floor. He was left in his underwear, feeling the cold floor on his feet, and looked at himself.

And he saw himself.

Ribs outlined beneath pale skin, one by one. Narrow shoulders. Knees too wide for thin thighs. Feet almost transparent against the dark floor. Spiky red hair at the nape of his neck, where the wind had dried his bathwater. His father’s gray eyes, frameless for the first time in his life, giving his face an impression of incompleteness. Arms that had only lifted the Frankenstein’s little pieces.

He turned to the side, then onto his back, looking over his shoulder. He raised his arms, squeezed his biceps – there was no muscle – squeezed his thigh – as always. He ran his hand along the right side of his ribs, where last Thursday the skin had been purple, hot, and throbbing with every breath, and found only skin. Not a sign of injury.

He held his hand there for a moment. Then he lowered himself: palms on the ground, shoulder-width apart, body stretched out, toes on the ground. He went down. He went up. He went down. It was exactly like that morning on the court, with the goatee-wearing teacher timing incredulously: without the slightest tremor. His chest touched the ground and propelled his body upwards like a hidden spring. He counted to forty and gave up counting – it didn’t make sense – and continued.

As he went up and down, he stared at the mirror. His body moved in and out of the frame: one instant, high in a flex; the next, vanished beyond the chipped edge. A blur: white skin, red hair, white skin, red hair. Quick. Until, on an upward movement, the blur darkened. Something dark in the place where he was and at the pace he was moving. On the next downward movement, his body left the mirror and the thing left with it; when he went up again, searching, it was him again. White. Red-haired.

Sebastian froze mid-push-up, arms outstretched, heart racing beyond what forty push-ups would justify. He stayed like that. Then he knelt. Then he stood up again. Nothing had changed: the mirror reflected a skinny boy in his underwear, his face flushed, and behind him the usual room – bed, chair, boxes, window with the crooked curtain. He looked at his own hands, pale. He looked at the mirror again. He scanned the reflection, corner by corner; he turned and searched the real room, nook and cranny, like someone looking for a fallen screw.

There was nothing there. But he wasn’t alone. That was the feeling that wouldn’t leave his head, even worse than the blur: the impression of someone in the room. Not behind him, nor under the bed, nor inside the wardrobe: in the room, without direction, a presence on all sides and nowhere. Like hearing someone on the phone before noticing the other person’s breathing. He stood in the middle of the room, in his underwear, arms away from his body, neck slowly turning.

Then the senses became confused.

It began with a scraping. Loud. Close. A rough, rhythmic sound, as if something were scratching the walls and his head at the same time. He spun around. Nothing. The scraping continued – a short stroke, a pause, another stroke – and beneath it, growing louder, a breath. Someone panting. Deep. Through the mouth. Louder or closer, he couldn’t tell, an air that filled the room and pressed against his eardrums like water.

The scraping stopped. Only breathing remained for a moment. A long, relieved breath, someone exhaling. And then a click. A single, dry, plastic click. And the world exploded inside his head. A wall of sound coming from all sides, invading his ears as if they were open holes: voices, music, a chorus of cartoon characters screaming in unison, metal, a thunder effect, all at stadium volume, all inside his skull, pounding against his bones. Sebastian fell to his knees. He had no choice: his legs gave way, he fell, his hands sought the ground and then covered his ears – useless, because the sound cut through his palms like paper. He squeezed his eyes shut. The tick-tick-tick of the radiator began to hammer inside him; the hum of the refrigerator became a turbine. And, above all, crushing everything, the chorus:

“…in New York, nobody gets left behind!”

He recognized that voice.

He knew every note. He’d listened to it a thousand afternoons, from the kitchen, frying pan in hand. It was the theme song for The Adventures of the United Heroes, the afternoon cartoon, those round versions of the Avengers and the X-Men, and the overly broad-shouldered Spider-Man spending twenty minutes lecturing lost dragons. It was the television. The old TV in the living room, on the other side of the apartment, behind two walls and a hallway, where his sister had just put down her pencil, exhaled a sigh, and pressed the remote control.

The scratching was her pencil on the notebook.
The blowing was her.

He realized this while on his knees, his forehead almost touching the bedroom floor, and realizing it was pointless, because the sound continued steadily. He stayed there for a whole minute – or what seemed like a minute – unable to think of anything other than enduring the noise. Camila had left it at the usual volume. He knew it was the usual volume. But in his head, it sounded like the apocalypse.

And, very slowly, it began to fall.
It wasn’t a conscious lowering. It was like the tide receding. The chorus became music, the music became TV static, the TV became that muffled murmur that comes through the wall at the end of the afternoon, the radiator became a simple ticking sound again, and the refrigerator ceased to exist. Sebastian listened to the sound fade away until he formed a complete thought again: I heard her pencil. From here. I heard her breathe.

He sat up, dizzy. His hands were still trembling. He rested one on his knee, the other on the edge of the bed, and he stood like an old man, with the room tilted slightly to the right. The mirror was in front of him. He checked his reflection, the same gesture as someone adjusting their overcoat before going out.

But it wasn’t him there.
It was another being.
Something standing in the same place he was, in the same room, with the bed, the chair, and the boxes behind it. Humanoid. His size. Black.

Sebastian jumped. His whole body landed on the other side of the room in a leap that wasn’t his own, his back collided with the wall next to the door, his shoulder knocked over the pile of clothes on the chair. And the thing in the mirror jumped too. To the same side, at the same instant, its back pressed against the same wall.

He stood there, leaning against the plaster, breathing through his mouth, eyes wide, staring sideways at the mirror. The thing was there too. It was leaning against the wall next to the door, its body twisted in the same way, its head turned towards the mirror in the same manner.

He slowly raised his hand.
The thing raised its hand.
He moved his fingers.
It moved its fingers.
He lowered his arm halfway and stopped, and it stopped at the same point, with the same tremor at the end of its arm.

Repetition. It copied my every move.

The fear didn’t disappear, it just shifted. It left my chest, rose up until it took shape before my eyes, and Sebastian detached himself from the wall. One step. The thing took a step. Another. He crossed the room slowly, feeling the cold floor beneath his feet, and stopped an arm’s length from the mirror—and the creature positioned itself an arm’s length from him, on the other side of the glass.

And then he looked.

It was him. That was the horror: the proportions were identical. Narrow shoulders, thin arms, wide knees, a head too big for his neck, the body of a thirteen-year-old boy who looked eleven. Except he was all black. There was no skin, but a thin, continuous dark layer, like wet fabric clinging to his body, outlining every bone, every rib, and glistening slightly where the ceiling light fell. No hair. No navel. No underwear. Just a solid silhouette, a boy cut out in the darkness.

The head was the worst part.

In place of a mouth, his face opened—much wider than it had ever opened before—almost from ear to ear, and inside, teeth emerged: a single row of long, thin, crooked fangs, too white against the black, some larger than others, projecting out without any order. Between them protruded a long tongue. It descended from the opening almost to his chest, thick at the base and tapering at the tip, trembling slowly, as if tasting the air.

Sebastian knew that language.

He had seen it right in front of his face, half a meter away, eight meters above the Times Square ground, its saliva strands stretched out without falling. He recognized those teeth, that absolute blackness, that upright posture. It was the same creature that crawled down the facades of Times Square on all fours, head down, mouth agape. One of them had collapsed through the wall toward him, teeth exposed, so close he saw the strands of saliva, and it only didn’t hurt him because Spider-Man loosened the concrete. One of them had almost killed him. And now he was staring at one of them, and it was staring back at him.

With the eyes.

Two enormous white ellipses in the middle of the black, without pupils, without irises, empty, pointed outwards like cut-out paper almonds. Sebastian felt his stomach churn—and it wasn’t because of the bucket of nuggets. Those shapes were familiar, more so than his own face. They were graffitied on the wall of 128, watching who passed by. They were on his sister’s three dolls, one of them missing its left hand. They were on the table behind him, in the red and blue in front of the clock. The night before, they had been an inch from his face, squeezing and opening like a mechanical iris.

It was the lenses.

The lenses of Spider-Man’s mask, reflected in that face.

He took another step. The creature did the same. He raised his hand, and in the mirror the black hand rose as well, long fingers. He extended his own, and she extended hers, until the tips of her white fingers touched the cold glass and the black tips touched the opposite side. He looked down at his hand: white. Thin. Theirs. He looked up: black.

The tongue moved.

And from his throat, from a place where he didn’t know he had a voice, came:
“What the hell is this?”