Second Skin - Chapter 0012

The question hung unanswered. Sebastian took his hand from the glass and examined it. The coldness of the mirror still clung to his fingers; on the surface, five oval marks of grease curled at the edges. It was his usual hand: faded freckles on his knuckles, nails bitten to the brim, skin so white that the veins on his wrist appeared blue under the ceiling light. He turned his palm up and then down, searching his left index finger for the soldering iron scar, that shiny mark he’d carried since he was eleven—but the finger was smooth. He saved his relief for later, because, an arm’s length away, the same hand spun darkly in the mirror, fingers slightly longer than his own, attached to a black wrist, a black arm, a boy entirely made of that shadow.

The night before he had seen them in life-size: twice the size of a man, shoulders so wide they wouldn’t fit through a door, one of them lifting a policeman with both hands, like he lifted his sister onto the back of his bicycle. The figure in the mirror was five feet tall, with prominent collarbones and knees too wide for its thighs. On the table behind him were two plastic dolls—miniatures of lifeguards—and in the mirror, a third miniature, one-to-one scale, of a kind Sebastian only knew from watching people kill. Its teeth were thin, crooked, in a single row; its tongue hung down to its chest, moving slowly. Its eyes, white, did not blink.

The scream formed on its own. He felt the air fill his lungs, his abdomen tighten, his throat open to release a wordless sound—and, in that instant, his hands rose. His right hand flat against his mouth, his left hand above it, pressing his lips against his teeth. Sebastian hadn’t commanded them to rise. He knew those hands better than any part of himself: they were precise enough to hold a soldering iron half a millimeter from a track without trembling. But the command didn’t come from him. Nor had it been imposed by anyone—no push, no contact. His internal muscles contracted, tendons pulled at his fingers, all according to the usual wiring. Someone had used that wiring.

He tried to scream through his fingers, but his mouth wouldn’t obey him: his jaw snapped shut, his upper teeth locked against his lower teeth, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, and the scream dissolved into a hiss through his nose, too soft to pass through the doorway.

The word that came to mind was from a cheap movie—”possessed.” There was a demon inside him, starting with his hands. Sebastian recoiled, banged his elbow against the wardrobe, shook his head trying to push his own fingers away, and in the mirror the dark figure repeated the same dance: dark hands covering the row of teeth. It was then, in the midst of despair, that he remembered the obvious: pull. At the first effort, the hands fell from his face without resistance, remaining open before him, obedient and trembling. He tried his chin: he opened it with a snap, closed it, and opened it again. What had held it had the strength of a tired toy servant—it buzzed and yielded when pressure was applied. There had been no struggle there. It was enough to use real force.

The ease, however, did not calm him. Whoever had done that once could repeat it—stronger, while he slept. Sebastian only wanted people: his sister by the hand, the building’s hallway, Mr. Ramirez’s doorbell, his mother on the phone—any adult who would tell him what to do. The key was still in the doorknob, three steps away. He even shifted his weight to his right foot.

” Calm down .”

The TV’s voice came muffled between two walls, distant, with the rounded timbre of a cartoon hero explaining something; everything had always entered his life through that voice. But this other voice invaded his thoughts without passing through his ears—it wasn’t his. It had thin layers, three or four hoarse threads that didn’t form a complete sound, and it dropped in pitch at the end of the word, like the voice of the police headquarters on an old headset when the battery is about to die. Sebastian had the impression that that “calm down” had cost dearly whoever uttered it.

He considered the simplest explanation: he was going crazy. A night like that could deform even an adult—he had seen people wrapped in silver blankets on the sidewalk during an interview. No one would find it strange that a thirteen-year-old boy saw monsters in the mirror and heard voices. It would be relatively good news: madness is treatable, and his mother knew people at São Lucas. But a madman doesn’t raise anyone’s hand—and his hands were still tingling.

His foot returned to its place. In the mirror, everything remained inverted—his right was that creature’s left, the wardrobe had switched sides, the crooked curtain hung in the opposite corner. The inversion was correct; the rest was not. The black film, thin as wet fabric, outlined each rib; the head, smooth and too large for the neck, had no ears or hair; the white, protruding eyes stared at him. Sebastian breathed in short gulps through his mouth, and the creature’s chest rose and fell in the same rhythm.

” Calm down ,” the voice repeated, now lower. He looked up.

The mouth of that reflection moved. The gap between its teeth opened and closed in rhythm with the syllables, its tongue retracted a hand’s breadth and then descended again, while its fleshy lips remained closed in fright. He checked with his fingers: they were dry, stuck together. From the first jump, that reflection had imitated everything—the tremor in his arm, the fingertips on the glass, even the ridiculous dance of a minute before—and, for an instant, it had ceased the copying. It was that thing there that was speaking in his head. He would have to understand it: about his hands, his chin, the state he was in.

The cold rose from his bare feet, which had been resting on the floor since he’d taken off his clothes—it was January, it was normal to feel cold. But the grim sensation was born inside, in his very core, rising up his spine and invading his skin, raising the hairs on his arms. Sebastian knew what that species was capable of because he had witnessed it up close, still wearing his glasses: the policeman bitten at the belt; the thud of the body on the snow; the black ropes ripping open the chest of a fugitive; the woman in the red overcoat, the boy with headphones—all with the same expression of astonishment, interrupted mid-sentence, with no chance of negotiation.

There, however, was no square, no police, no one in red and blue to throw a manhole cover. There was apartment 6B. Her mother would stay at São Lucas until eleven. Mr. Ramirez, from 6A, was a retired man in slippers who answered the doorbell at any hour. The bedroom door was locked from the inside with a key that wouldn’t prevent anything, and on the other side of two walls, a seven-year-old girl laughed alone on the safe side of the sofa. Camila had memorized a list of emergencies, like a multiplication table: call him, call her mother, call emergency services, ring the neighbor’s doorbell. The first name on the list was his—there he was, in his underwear, in front of a mirror, with one of those things inside him.

Sebastian’s knees buckled. Part weakness—he’d had to sit on the gravel of the terrace before; part it only made sense when he was sprawled on the ground. In the square in front, the smaller creatures lined up behind the larger one, heads below their shoulders, short steps, mouths closed.

It was the only etiquette of that family that Sebastian knew, and his body repeated it without asking permission: he shrank, exposed the nape of his neck, offered everything he had at hand in the room, so that no one would have to cross the wall. But the large creature retreated along with him. Knee to knee, they hesitated halfway, palms resting on their thighs—shadow and body falling together. They knelt face to face, separated by a meter of floor and four millimeters of glass, and the gesture lost its meaning, for no one surrenders to someone who is surrendering at the same time.

A minute passed, maybe more. The wooden clock ticked behind him, and Sebastian didn’t turn to check the time. He awaited the real attack, the one that would begin with his hands and offer nothing in return. While he waited, he tested his own body piece by piece, as he did with Frankenstein after a fall: he flexed his toes, touched each tooth with his tongue, closed and opened his left hand. Everything responded—for now.

On the other side, the creature seemed absorbed in something else. Its white eyes narrowed into two slits, its tongue retracted, its mouth closed in a thin line, and for an instant its face became a black mask with two light slits. The film’s glare shifted slowly. At the seams, where the black was thinnest, Sebastian’s pallor showed through, like the worn fabric of an old t-shirt. She advanced on her knees, inch by inch, because her curious side never knew how to keep its distance. He remembered his mother, exhausted on the sofa after her shift, eyes closed, sleepless, gathering strength to go to the shower. The creature seemed to be gathering strength too. For what, he didn’t know, and her shallow breathing fogged the glass right at the level of her stitched mouth.

” Calm down .” The third time it came out firmer. ” I …”

“You’re just like those things from last night.” Sebastian interrupted. Sebastian didn’t want consolation—he wanted to know what was locked inside—and he awaited the counterattack: teeth, hands rising. Nothing happened.

The creature held its gaze and, after a silence, replied in a voice so worn it almost blended with the static of the television:
” Yes .”

That was enough to rearrange his day. Since 7:18 a.m., he had been carrying around a perfect, purposeless internal machine, and nothing irritated him as much as an effect without a cause: thirteen years of thick lenses, and he had woken up reading the clock on the other side of the room; the rib that had been purple on Thursday and was just skin on Friday; his legs conquering the uphill climb of the 145 by bicycle; the endless breath from the sit-ups; the sixteen meters of rope to the bell; the fall that didn’t hurt; Camila’s pencil passing through two walls. Even the nugget container made sense—he had been eating a whole family for dinner and still left hungry, as if he were eating for two. And the smooth finger, where the weld scar was missing. Nothing was broken—there was an extra piece.

This explained the mirror: if the hand was white when viewed from the front and black through the glass, the lie wasn’t in the glass, but at a point between it and the reflection—in the eyes, fixed once and very well known.
“How?” The voice came out hoarse. He cleared his throat and repeated: “How did you end up in me?”
The creature hesitated: the lines of its eyes opened slightly, fixed on his, and Sebastian had the uncomfortable feeling of someone watching someone choose expensive words, measuring the price before paying them.
” When my father held you… They cut off a part of him. I was in that part .”

” Dad …” The word caught in his throat before coming out whole. Only one of those things had held him back: the larger one—two colors dripping into each other—that had licked his face and warned him, in a masculine voice delayed by half a second, that he would be the first to satisfy her desire. Carnage, the name of the documentaries his mother turned off. One of his sons kneeling before the mirror in his room, dressed in his form, pleading for calm. Of flesh and blood, his father had spoken with longing; and at the diner, hours before, without knowing why, Sebastian had ordered the triple bacon burger—lots of bacon.

He knew the severed part by heart: the manhole cover piercing the creature’s wrist without resistance, the fingers still gripping its ribs even without an arm, Spider-Man in the gravel opening each piece of black flesh with damp crackling sounds, so as not to tear the boy away as well. He remembered the hand lying beside it, palm up, withering on its own. He’d thought he’d left it on the terrace. But it had come with him, hidden in his clothes, passed through the gates and past the reporters, cycled almost a hundred blocks uphill, and stopped for a moment in the hallway, in front of Camila’s door, while he listened to her breathing through the crack. Sebastian had brought it home. He’d opened the door with his own key.

He searched the creature’s face for guilt and saw it: the shoulders more worn; now the chest revealed his skin in blotches. Each word cost him dearly. In his stomach, the emptiness of the late afternoon stirred—and he noted it as well. His head, which ten minutes before had only served to feel fear, began to function again. He reasoned: rested, she would hold his hands with the strength of a toy; tired, she would hold them with less. It was a matter of piercing her with long questions, the kind that don’t allow for a simple yes or no, until he exhausted her; then two steps to the coat thrown on the floor, the cell phone in the inside pocket, and asking for help—he didn’t know from whom. Not from her mother, that nurse would handle this.

To the police, yes: he knew the tone of the operators, he would know the exact address, the nature of the incident, and the right word, the same one Miles Morales had used in the morning interview. A day after Times Square, that word would make everything work. The policeman on the corner, on Thursday, had already recommended alerting the coalition. Someone would come. For a brief second, Sebastian imagined who was climbing the fire escape of 419—and felt ashamed of what he had dared to imagine.

” No. ”
Sebastian hesitated before asking the first question.
” Dangerous. ”
He remained silent, staring at his coat on the floor and then at his own reflection in the mirror, until he understood, with a humiliating delay, that his plan had never left his head—nor did it need to. In six schools, in every hallway where he had learned not to exist, there had always been a locked room, the “inner,” where he did calculations, kept the rehearsed questions for Spider-Man, and cursed whoever he wanted without moving a muscle in his face. The creature was there, in that room, listening to everything—including what he had just plotted against it—and yet, he had only said two words. Reflexively, he tried not to think about anything, but ended up focusing on the cell phone, in his coat pocket, and that three-digit number with a clarity impossible to achieve by willpower.

Terror followed immediately. It gripped his chest, quickened his heart, soaked his palms, and for a few seconds, Sebastian felt that this fear was his own—there was no shortage of reasons. But he had spent the previous night studying his own fears and knew the process well: Sebastian’s fear emptied him, left his mind blank and his knees weak; it was a fear that gave up. This one, however, acted in the opposite way. It wanted to sneak through any crack, grab onto the nearest thing and not let go, growing whenever his thoughts touched certain points. Sebastian tested it like someone using a multimeter: he thought of the cell phone—the terror increased; of the word “coalition”—it increased even more; of the glass tubes he had seen in the square, taller than him, carried two by two by people in white overalls, with a dark liquid rising up the walls—and the sensation churned his stomach. The needle didn’t lie: this fear wasn’t his, but it coursed through him like an electric current through a wire.

In the mirror, the creature lowered its head, while Sebastian kept his gaze steady. She hid nothing nor tried to explain herself: she let him feel the full weight and simply remained there, admitting it. When Sebastian brought his hands to his mouth, it was still the same phrase—spoken before there was breath for words. A scream would have brought his sister to the door, the neighbor to the hallway, the whole city into the room.

“What do you mean by that?”
he asked aloud on purpose. He already knew he didn’t need to, and that’s why he reinforced it: speaking with his voice was still only his. The words came one by one, with pauses, and with each syllable the image in the mirror lost a little sharpness at the edges.
” Danger .”
” Separation .”

The last word almost didn’t come.
” Death .”

The creature hesitated. Its hand reached for the ground for support, while Sebastian’s hands remained motionless on his thighs.

Three isolated nouns that, coming from any other mouth, wouldn’t form a sentence. In him, however, they did—and that’s what paralyzed him: along with the words, something else had arrived, an invisible thread connecting one to the other without using a verb. Sebastian knew a weak version of this warning. It was what made him stop halfway up the stairs, certain he had forgotten something before knowing what; what alerted him, when closing the bicycle lid, that there was a loose connector inside, before any test; what generated the tightness in his chest when the body detects the error before the mind.

One part of him warning the other.

But until then it had only been an anonymous nudge, easy to ignore, and this one was loud, clear, with a definite sender—and it didn’t originate from any part of him. He had never felt anything like it, and he understood immediately. The danger she spoke of would lead to separation. Separation, to death. There was something more buried there, deep down, that he still couldn’t decipher.
He also understood, with the tireless calculation of a mind that wouldn’t stop even when kneeling on the ground, what that meant in practice: between the two of them there was a channel that dispensed with words; and, given her state, speaking was the most expensive way to communicate.

“Are you saying that if we separate…” His voice broke. He swallowed hard, gathered his courage, and continued: “…we could die?”

He only realized he was using the plural after he had spoken.

The mouth reflected in the mirror remained motionless. No “yes” came out, neither weak nor drawn out. A certainty came, cold, lodged in his chest, behind the bone, without arguing, without asking him to believe—of the same order as the certainty that a fall from the sixth floor kills. Sebastian swallowed hard, and the snap reverberated in the room.

On the other side of the wall, the television announced a commercial break. Since the morning interview, he’d had a name for it, and old documentaries talked about beings like that disguised as people. It was all just a label on a box he’d never opened. No documentary mentioned that one of those creatures could feel fear, call someone “my father,” or expend its last strength begging a thirteen-year-old boy to calm down. Sebastian frowned at those two white eyes, which opened slightly, hopefully, and of all the questions he could ask, only one came out:
“What are you?”