Second Skin - Chapter 0014

Chapter 14 — Fuel

On Saturday, Sebastian only worked until noon.

He had done it only once, in his first week at Meridian, when he still didn’t know the streets of Washington Heights and Mr. Williams didn’t yet believe that this bespectacled boy would last until the end of the month. After that, never again. From Monday to Friday he clocked in at four and left when the last delivery left; on Saturday and Sunday he arrived while the day was still gray and returned the cooler bag with night already fallen on the van yard. And at night, at home, with his sister asleep and his mother on duty, he would still open his physics notebook or disassemble something on the workbench cloth and stay there until it fell. That’s how the accounts came close to balancing. And that’s also how he learned what Douglass didn’t teach: motors, firmware, schematics that manufacturers erased when a model went out of production, the subjects he truly cared about.

That Saturday, at half past eleven, he announced that he would be leaving at noon.

Mr. Williams looked up from his clipboard as if the boy had asked for the keys to one of the vans.

“Noon,” he repeated. “On a Saturday.”

“I need to take care of something, sir.”

The old man stared at him over the clipboard for a second longer than he usually stared at anyone. Sebastian braced himself for the pencil tapping on the paper and for the usual phrase, the one from the boy who, at this rate, would soon owe him money at the end of the month. The pencil didn’t tap. His mustache twitched, his nose sniffed, and the pencil tip pointed towards the steel door.

“Go ahead. You’ll pay me back on Monday.”

Rosa didn’t even lift her head from the tags. At noon sharp, the badge beeped green, and Sebastian pushed Frankenstein out into the cold with almost a whole day ahead of him and without having told anyone why.

The morning had passed like Friday deliveries: too fast for him to believe. Eleven packages by noon, three more than any Saturday he could remember, with the Frankenstein’s engine humming in vain on the uphill climbs and the dashboard returning battery numbers he’d stopped checking. He wasn’t tired. He’d slept less than three hours, between the wooden clock marking almost four and the alarm, and his body had woken up as if he’d slept nine. That was noted, too.

He didn’t say why he’d decided not to. Not there, not at home. His mother had arrived home from her shift in the early hours of the morning (he’d heard the key turn, from afar, in a sleep that had barely begun) and was sleeping with the door closed when he left; Camila would stay with her, and the note on the refrigerator, under the crayon Spider-Man, only said that he was at Meridian and that there was bread. No police, no three-digit number, nor the word that Miles Morales had used in the interview the previous morning. Leave it alone. For now. It was the only decision he’d managed to make between the delivery note full of questions and the alarm, and even that hadn’t changed anything in his chest: the dread remained, settled in, the way the heater’s ticking lingers in the living room after the family has stopped listening.

It wasn’t an easy situation, and he had given up pretending it was. He was looking for a name for it, because naming it helped with calculations, and the only name that fit came from the stories his mother brought from São Lucas and told in the kitchen in a low voice, thinking he wouldn’t hear. It seemed like he had cancer. You get the thing named, and the name doesn’t say whether it will leave you alive or dead; it only says that something is growing, and that now it’s a matter of time and tests. The article said the rat had died a month after contact. It said the other animals had died after they extracted the substance from them. And it didn’t say why. Whether the creature devoured its host from the inside; whether it needed an absurd amount of fuel to sustain itself and, when the food ran out, consumed the very body that carried it; whether it was another factor, any of the countless ones he had listed on the back of the delivery note until the paper ran out. The text stopped halfway. Nobody had signed it. And that worried him more than anything he had seen in the square, because at least in the square you could run.

That’s what he was doing now. Investigating. With the only laboratory he had, which was his own body.

Sebastian placed the laptop on the counter and opened the lid.

The counter was old, made of thick wood, its top marked by decades of something he could never identify (parallel scratches, round burns, a deep groove on the edge), and it leaned against the back wall of a shed whose purpose he also didn’t know. Probably nobody knew anymore. The place had been closed for many years, truly closed: the sliding front doors locked from the inside with welded iron bars, the high windows covered with sheet metal, the side door bricked up with blocks that someone had laid carelessly and without haste. Whoever sealed it didn’t want anyone to enter. And nobody did, with one exception.

The laptop was the other one, the old one, the one that still turned on. The one on the bedroom table remained face up, waiting for parts he hadn’t bought; this one was even older, fastened with an elastic band and running on a scooter-like cell that he himself had adapted, because there wasn’t a live power outlet in the shed. The screen lit up slowly, gray, then blue, and the fan complained about the cold. It was cold in there, a stagnant cold, different from the cold outside; his breath came out white in the screen’s light.

He had discovered the shed in the first few weeks at Hadley, fourteen months earlier.

It was a November night. His mother was on duty, Camila was at home with the door locked and the list of emergencies recited twice, and he had gone out to find a cheap place to buy dinner for the two of them, with the money his mother kept under the salt shaker, counted and folded in the inside pocket of her coat. He didn’t yet know the street corners. He was walking around the block reading signs, his glasses slipping down his nose and his hat pulled down to his eyebrows, when a man stood up from the entrance of a closed building and stopped in front of him.

Sebastian remembered the man better than he would like. Yellow teeth. A rotten smell that lingered before the outstretched hand, the smell of clothes that hadn’t dried in weeks. Dark skin, long, tangled dreadlocks falling over a coat that had belonged to someone bigger. The man said something, “hey” or “hey, kid,” and took a step, and Sebastian never knew if it was a request, a warning, or something else, because he didn’t stay to find out. He ran. The money in his pocket was dinner for that night. If he lost it, Camila would sleep with the jar of jam and he with an empty stomach, and there would be nothing else in the house until the next day. So he ran, and the man ran after him.

He heard heavy footsteps behind him and a thick breath shouting something the wind didn’t allow to reach him completely. He turned the first corner, then another, and plunged into the first alley he saw, without looking, the way one sticks their hand into a dark hole to retrieve a fallen object. The alley ended at a wall. Before the wall was a tall, green dumpster, and a wooden pallet leaning against it; and above the dumpster, on the brick wall of the neighboring building, was the fire escape, its last section retracted, a jump away from anyone standing on the lid. Sebastian didn’t even think. He climbed onto the pallet, from the pallet to the lid, from the lid to the metal frame, and the ladder descended with a screech that must have been heard throughout the street. He climbed the steps on his knees, two at a time, his heart pounding inside his hat. On the second landing, the ladder passed close to a lower, flat roof, on the other side of a low wall that reached his waist. He climbed over the low wall without knowing whose roof it was and threw himself face down onto the gravel.

And he waited.

The footsteps rolled beneath. He heard them reach the alleyway, hesitate for a moment, and then continue straight ahead, following the street’s contours, as if the man hadn’t noticed the corner, the alley, or anything but his own running. The sound faded until it became the usual noise of Hadley at night: a speeding car passing high above, a siren in another neighborhood. Sebastian exhaled. He lay there for a while with his cheek on the gravel before lifting his head and looking around.

He was on the roof of a low, long shed, with nothing on top but a rusty water tank and his own footprints in the dust. And, a few meters ahead, there was a square iron cover on the ground, a trapdoor, raised a hand’s breadth. Open. He approached on all fours. The padlock that had once locked it was now a rusty lump attached to a chain, and the chain was broken, eaten away at its thinnest link. Someone had passed by there long before, or no one had passed by and the iron had succumbed to time and rain on its own. Sebastian looked at the low wall, towards the side from which he had come, where the street and perhaps the man awaited, and then at the dark square. He lifted the cover with both hands. There was an iron ladder embedded in the inner wall, and he climbed down it backwards, without seeing where he was putting his feet.

Inside, it was dark, with light coming only from the square of the trapdoor above him and the cracks in the metal sheets of the windows. It smelled of wet iron and years of dust. When his eyes adjusted, he saw the size of the place: an empty warehouse half a block long, with iron trusses supporting the roof, and the iron already in flakes of rust that fell to the ground when the wind blew against the metal sheet above. In the back, leaning against the walls, were old machines: large motors like refrigerators, a lathe, things with belts and pulleys, all abandoned so long ago that rust had eaten away at the shafts and welded the gears together. Sebastian, who never passed an electronics box on the sidewalk without sticking his hand in, looked at it and understood instantly that there was nothing there that he could save. Not even a screw. It was all dead for good.

He waited an hour sitting on a step of the stairs, counting the minutes on his cell phone. Then he went up, peered at the street from the roof, returned along the parapet, the fire escape, and the dumpster, and went home by the long way, without dinner and with all the money in his pocket. Nobody was waiting for him anywhere. He never knew what the man wanted.

He returned to the shed several more times after that. Few: in fourteen months, half a dozen, always through the trapdoor, always alone, always without counting. He never found anyone else’s mark in the dust. It was the only place in the city where he could close a lid behind him and be sure that no one would knock.

That Saturday, Frankenstein had been chained behind the dumpster, and he had climbed the fire escape twice, with two paper bags hanging from each arm per trip and his laptop backpack on his back, without the metal complaining any more than it did when he was alone. He hadn’t broken a sweat. He descended the internal staircase with one hand, the bags in the other, and didn’t even notice it until he was at the bottom.

And that’s where he was now.

The article opened on the screen just as he had saved it in the early morning, complete, with the photo of the glass tube at the top and the black substance climbing up the wall. He had saved it reflexively: a dead website usually dies for good, and he didn’t want to have to go down that whole ladder again. He read it once more. He knew the text almost by heart by this point and read it the same way one rereads the manual for a malfunctioning engine, searching for the line that was missed.

The rats and other animals in the experiment hadn’t survived long after contact. The rat, a month. A month of healing, of strength, of hunger, of increasing aggression, and then death, recorded in a line without cause. Sebastian ran his finger along the line on the screen, his left index finger smooth where the soldering iron scar should have been. The text didn’t say whether the creature had fed so much on the rat that the rat died; whether the animal’s organism had failed on its own, unable to withstand what it carried; whether the substance had devoured it from the inside, little by little, the way it came out of it afterward; whether it had been something else. The researchers, if they discovered it, didn’t write it down. The other animals hadn’t even reached a month: they all died after they started extracting the substance from them, and the text was clear about that, with the coldness of someone describing cats.

He reread the extraction section for the fourth time. Painful for both sides. The animal emerging weak and dying in the following days; the extracted part, smaller, slower, only recovering when returned to the main mass. He closed the article.

The folder was in the corner of the desktop, with no real name, just a date. Inside was a text file he had created at four in the morning, copying the questions from the back of the delivery note with burning eyes, and which already had a page. It was the same format as Frankenstein’s log: date, time, what changed, what was tested, what is still missing. The difference was in the object.

He typed, his fingers stiff with cold:

SAT 18/01. 1:10 PM. Warehouse.
Sleep: less than 3 hours. No fatigue.
Vision: perfect. No glasses for 30 hours.
Hunger: since yesterday, 3 PM. Constant. Pulsating. See below.
Strength: 11 deliveries until 12 PM. Climbing the trapdoor ladder with one hand.
Voice: none since last night. Fear (of her): none.
Deadline: one month = 16 or 17/02.

He looked at the last line longer than at the others. Then he looked at the bags.

There were four of them, made of brown paper, lined up on the floor next to the counter, and their smell had already filled the shed on top of the smell of iron: hot grease, bread, salt, the cloying sweetness of the milkshake. He had cleaned the counter before anything else, with a cloth he brought from home, scrubbing until the wood appeared beneath the dust, because he was going to eat on it and because preparing the place was the part of the experiment he knew how to do.

The hunger had been there since Friday at three in the afternoon, when Douglass let him go and his stomach dragged Frankenstein downhill to the yellow sign. It hadn’t stopped since then. It lessened after eating and then returned, and it didn’t return like usual hunger: it was something that pulsed, with its own rhythm, slower than his heart, a pressure that rose and fell behind his stomach as if someone were breathing inside. And there was the other part, the one for which he had no words. He felt that the creature was holding it. He felt it the same way he felt a loose connector inside the bicycle lid before opening it: without seeing, without proof, knowing. As if hunger were a valve with all the pressure on the other side, and a hand kept it half-closed, letting through just enough so he wouldn’t fall. He didn’t know how he knew. He didn’t know how the creature did it, or why, or what would happen if the hand let go. He had tried to write this concept in the file and given up on the third attempt; Every sentence came out as a lie, and he didn’t put the lies on record.

He sighed, and the sigh turned white in the air, and he opened the first bag.

He had done the math before paying, reading the fine print of the calories on the panels of the two fast-food restaurants (two, so he wouldn’t have to recite the entire order to just one person and get a smudge of the gum-chewing girl’s eyebrow in return). Eight large double hamburgers, with extra cheese and bacon. Four large fries. Two large buckets of fried chicken. Four one-liter milkshakes, two chocolate, two strawberry. Twenty-four thousand calories, rounding down. A family of six could eat that in two days, with leftovers. The envelope from the controller, the one that was kept in the toolbox under the bed and which had postponed the purchase until February on Thursday, had returned to the box almost empty; he preferred not to recount.

He had no idea how it was all going to fit inside him. But he remembered the previous afternoon, the family-sized bucket of nuggets disappearing under his hands and his flat stomach afterward, and he looked at the food arranged on the counter the way he looked at a circuit that shouldn’t be working but was. If it was working, what he wanted to know was how far it would go.

He started eating.

The first hamburger lasted six bites. The second, five. It lacked the feeling of fullness, of the bun settling and pressing from the inside, the sensation he knew from the rare Sundays when his mother made lasagna. The food went in, went down, and didn’t arrive anywhere, as if somewhere below his throat his body opened into a black hole that pulled everything in and didn’t return any weight. The fries went down too, in handfuls, the salt sticking to his fingers. The ice-cold milkshake went down a whole liter without pausing, and he realized at the end that he didn’t feel the icy tingle on his forehead that he always felt with half a glass. He opened the second glass with his other hand while still swallowing the last gulp of the first. The eight hamburgers were gone, and he only noticed he was on the eighth when his hand searched for the ninth and found paper.

Then came the chicken, and that’s when things changed.

He picked up a large, golden, still-warm chicken thigh from the bucket and bit into it like one bites into a thigh: along the meat, along the side, without thinking. His teeth grazed the crispy skin, the meat, and continued. There was a sharp, loud crack in the empty shed, and he felt the bone break in his mouth, without resistance, like a biscuit. He stopped. He stared at the thigh in his hand, half the bone missing and the white, broken tip, with his mouth full, and waited for the toothache, the kind that comes when you bite into a stone in your food. The pain didn’t come. Then he realized he was chewing.

He was chewing the bone. He felt his jaw working, his teeth crushing the hard thing into crumbs, and he felt with the same clarity that he wasn’t in control. Just as his hands had risen to his mouth on their own in front of the mirror, his jaw moved back and forth independently, with a force he had never used on anything, not even the jammed bicycle lock. He swallowed. His right hand, without waiting for an order, was already grabbing the next piece. He watched. He watched his own hand bring the meat to his mouth, his teeth cut through bone, cartilage, tendon, everything, and his throat receive it without coughing once. His body ate. He was inside, watching.

The fright lasted only a moment. He could have stopped; he knew from the mirror that one real tug would have made his hand fall. But he didn’t want to pull. Something beneath the fright, and this something didn’t come from him, told him that it was right, that this was exactly how it should be done. So he did what he knew how to do with a mechanism that runs on its own and never fails: he let it run. He followed the flow. He ate the way his hand ate, at the speed it went, listening to his own teeth crunching in the shed like dry branches, and when he raised his head again, both buckets were empty down to the waxed paper at the bottom, not a single bone left to tell the tale. Twenty-four thousand calories. The counter was clean, except for grease and salt.

He stood still for a moment, still startled by what he had just seen, his hands outstretched on the wood. Then he pushed the bags, the paper, the empty cups aside. He lifted his shirt and looked at his own stomach. Nothing. A flat belly, countable ribs, white skin that never saw the sun. He pressed with his hand, searching for the weight, the hardness of a meal that must have been the size of a backpack, and found the usual: a thin boy, with his stomach in its usual place. He wiped his mouth with the napkins. He cleaned his hands, finger by finger, and his chin, and wiped the wood until the grease came off. He didn’t know what to do with the situation, so he did what one does with any workbench after a test: he left everything clean.

She placed her hands on the counter. And that’s when she felt it.

It started at his extremities, his hands or feet, he couldn’t say which came first: a heat rising through his limbs, slowly, like hot water filling a cold pipe. It rose up his arms. It rose up his legs. It reached his chest and face at the same time, and he felt his ears burn and his facial skin turn red without needing a mirror, warm under his cold hand when he brought it to his cheek. A few degrees. He knew what a few more degrees meant: it was the number the Frankenstein screen showed for the engine at the top of the 145, and now the dashboard was him. He sweated on the back of his neck, in the middle of January, inside a shed where his breath came out white. For a moment the bad thing, the valve, the pressure on the other side, rose along with the heat and almost consumed him entirely, a hunger that wouldn’t fit in any bucket, and he gripped the edge of the counter with both hands.

And it stopped. All at once, without gradually descending, as if someone had flipped a switch: the heat vanished. His ears grew cold. The sweat on the back of his neck turned cold. And the hunger, which a second before had almost swallowed him whole, shrank so much and so quickly that he had to search for it to find it: it was still there, deep down, but the size of a coin.

What remained in its place was the phone call.

He had no other words. Since Friday there had been a thread between him and the thing, a channel that dispensed with words, and in the early morning that thread had become so thin that he even twisted it, in front of the screen, hoping it was just sleeping. Now it was thick. Present. Without the current of fear that had risen through him in front of the mirror; no fear, on either side. And there was more, something he took a while to accept that he was feeling: on the other side of the thread, weak but clear, the creature also felt. He didn’t know what. He knew it was felt, and it was a strange way of being felt, nameless, like being in a dark room and realizing that another person is breathing at the same rhythm as you. His emotions were all on edge, the way they are after a fever that suddenly subsides. Hers too. He knew this without knowing how.

She was stronger. He realized this before deciding what to do about it. So he did what he hadn’t done in the previous thirty hours: he asked, on purpose. He didn’t know how to do it properly. He knew she could hear his thoughts, but thinking was still only his, and speaking aloud, in the middle of a closed warehouse where no one would knock, was less costly than cracking open his head. He spoke looking at the clean counter, and his voice came out firmer than he expected.

“Can you answer me now?”

A sound filled his mind. It came from within, bypassing his ears, just as the other voice had arrived on Friday. That one, however, had been three or four hoarse threads that didn’t quite make up a sound. This one was a whole sound. A voice. And with it came the certainty, clear and undeniable, that he wasn’t alone there, even though there was only one body in that shed guarding them both.

” Yes. ”