Second Skin - Chapter 0017

Chapter 17 — Outdoor

The wind came from the front and hit my face like a knife.

It seeped through the gap between his hood and the rubber of his glasses, cut the skin above his mouth, and left his chin numb. Sebastian’s lips trembled on their own, without him telling them to, the way the lips of someone waiting for a bus at six in the morning in January tremble. He bit his lower lip to make them stop and gave up the same second. It was no use. That Sunday morning, with the Cento e Vinte e Cinco still empty on Sundays and the old snow hardened on the corners of the sidewalks, the cold was just information. It arrived, was registered, and then stayed there, without going anywhere.

The Meridian bag weighed heavily on his back. Sunday was small package day: medicine that couldn’t wait until Monday, a spare part, an envelope with a signature, everything that drones couldn’t deliver and vans weren’t worth it. Twenty-odd packages, none bigger than a shoebox, all crammed together, the strap pressing against his chest at every pothole in the street. He knew the potholes. He dodged them without looking.

And he was pedaling.

This was the new part. The Frankenstein had a throttle on the right handlebar, a thumb lever he’d adapted from an old gear shifter, and Sebastian hadn’t touched it since leaving the Meridian shed. On the dashboard, the dead cell phone screen clamped to the handlebars showed what it always showed, green on black: BAT 100% — ENGINE 2°C — 08:51. The engine was at street temperature. It hadn’t even turned a full revolution. And the bike sped down the avenue at a speed that, until Thursday, only the engine could give it, with his legs doing all the work.

He had powers.

The word still came with a cartoonish look, with that good-natured color he’d learned to distrust in the warehouse, but Sebastian had stopped avoiding it. Now he had powers. Now he was different. He was, in a way he couldn’t quite explain even to himself, unique, even though there were half a dozen people in the city with similar powers and one of them was the most famous man in the world. He felt unique nonetheless, the way Camila felt like she owned a cartoon that millions of children watched at the same time.

He had absolutely no idea what to do with it.

He’d spent the whole Saturday pondering the question and returned home without an answer, and the question had slept with him and woken up before him. No one knew the limits of it. The creature had said so explicitly. He himself had tested himself in the shed until the engine fell sideways and the floor cracked, and he’d returned home thinking that was the ceiling.

The ceiling had risen overnight.

Because the night before, after climbing the six flights of stairs with Frankenstein on his shoulder and finding the apartment dark, his mother asleep in her room with the door closed, as always after two consecutive shifts, and Camila asleep with her mouth open on the sofa, he had eaten again.

Forty thousand calories this time. He counted them, because counting was the only way to avoid going crazy: hamburgers, french fries in a paper bag that had turned transparent with grease, two buckets of fried chicken, and two whole, large pizzas, which he ate standing in the kitchen, with the lights off, chewing slowly so as not to make noise. His body did the same thing to the food as it had in the afternoon: it swallowed it on its own, without pausing, without ever giving the sensation of being full. At half past eleven the counter was clean. He went downstairs with the boxes squeezed into two garbage bags, threw everything in the building’s dumpster, went back upstairs and fell asleep before laying his head on the pillow. The controller envelope, in the toolbox under the bed, had become much thinner. He preferred not to check how much.

The Scourge had used that.

Sebastian felt it when he woke up, before he understood: his legs were full, his shoulders settled in a way they never had been, a firmness in his center that hadn’t been there on Saturday. The Frankenstein bike had slung down the six flights of stairs on his shoulder like a backpack. And now, after two hours of straight cycling, going up and down Hamilton Heights, handing it over, coming back down, handing it over again, he hadn’t stopped once to catch his breath.

Two hours was more than any other day for him. On normal mornings, the first sweat would arrive at twenty minutes, cold, and stick to his back until the end of his shift, and by the end of his shift he would stink. It was the rule of delivery in winter: jacket closed on the outside, body cooking on the inside. That Sunday, at the first traffic light he stopped at, early in the morning, on the corner of Amsterdam Street, he waited for the sweat.

He didn’t come.

He ran his hand inside his sweatshirt, at rib level. Dry. The nape of his neck, dry. The collar, where a damp band always formed and then froze in the wind, was just as it had come out of the closet. His body had worked; he felt a pleasant, familiar burning sensation in his thighs, but nothing his body produced was reaching his skin. Something was collecting it first. Collecting it and using it, probably, as it used everything else.

Then, the heat. Or rather, the lack thereof: the sweatshirt didn’t turn into a greenhouse, his face didn’t boil, the cold didn’t penetrate. His exposed skin stung from the wind like anyone else’s. The rest of his body remained at a temperature that neither rose nor fell, as if someone had installed a thermostat in him and turned it to the right number. Sebastian understood heat exchange. He had spent hours thinking about how to remove heat from the Frankenstein’s engine without draining the battery, with fins, with ducts, with a computer fan that never worked properly. What happened inside him was the problem solved. He just had no idea how.

He didn’t know the limits of the Flagelo. He didn’t know the limits of anything. And, pedaling with his head down along the empty avenue, his bag bouncing on his back and the wind whistling against the rubber of his glasses, he found himself satisfied. Satisfied and nothing more. The whole process seemed like magic, the kind he’d known his whole life didn’t exist, and for one morning he let it seem so.

The last package came out of the bag shortly after three, in a building on Convent Avenue without an elevator, to a man who signed on his cell phone screen without taking his eyes off the television. By then the day had turned around. The morning of small packages had become an afternoon of small packages, the sky had changed from blue to gray and from gray to a low, dirty yellow, and the shift, all in all, had been the fastest of his life at Meridian. He returned to the company warehouse, left the empty bag on the counter, swiped his badge on the reader on the door, which flashed green, and left before anyone could talk to him.

The road to the old shed was long. He made it without the engine, with the intact battery weighing down the frame as ballast, and arrived as the lights were already changing. He chained the Frankenstein behind the truck bed, covered the dashboard with the supermarket bag he kept for that purpose, and stood still for a moment in the alley, listening. Nothing. On Sundays, in the late afternoon, the neighborhood had the sound of closed houses.

From there he walked to the building.

In that part of town, a few blocks from the warehouse, the buildings were tall by any standard other than New York City. Ten, twelve stories of dark brick, one next to the other, with the same repeated window and fire escape design, some a little taller, some a little shorter, and between them, where another building couldn’t fit, alleys. Many alleys. Passageways that led nowhere, back areas with dumpsters and barbed wire fences, blind spots that no window looked out onto. Quite different from downtown, where skyscrapers disappeared into the clouds and had landing pads on top: drones didn’t land there, vans didn’t go in, and that was exactly why Sebastian knew every block. It was the part of town left for Meridian.

He climbed up the fire escape. Ten flights of iron that trembled with every step, with hardened snow on the landings and a smell of frying coming from a fourth-floor window, and no one had opened any curtains. At the end, a narrow staircase led to the roof, and he swung his leg over the parapet and stepped onto the gravel.

He stood in the middle of the roof and looked at himself.

I had chosen my outfit the night before, piece by piece, with the care I would use to select components for a circuit. A black hooded sweatshirt, the hood pulled up. An old pair of sweatpants, the only ones in the closet that didn’t get stuck at the knee. Athletic shoes, worn at the soles, with a grip he could no longer explain. On my hands, fingerless gloves: a pair of woolen gloves he’d cut in the kitchen with bread scissors to leave his fingertips free, without knowing if it made a difference. And on my face, glasses.

Ski goggles. He’d bought them at a Lenox thrift store two winters before, for snowshoeing, and he’d never managed to use them: they wouldn’t close over his prescription glasses, and without his glasses he couldn’t see the street. They’d stayed in the drawer. Now they closed. The rubber sealed around his eyes, the yellowish lens made the late afternoon a little brighter than it was, and the wind, for the first time in his life, stopped outside. Again there was something between his eyes and the world. This time he had chosen.

The sun was setting behind the buildings on the other side of the river, in a long, orange band, and on the opposite side, over the Bronx, a sliver of the moon was already visible, pale, still weak. He exhaled, and a short trail of white mist escaped from his lungs and dissipated. The city made its low noise, a hum of a car passing overhead, a distant siren, the wind rustling some plastic object across a nearby rooftop.

He looked at the buildings ahead. One tall, one short, one the size of his own, all close to each other, separated by alleys five or six meters wide, and further on a street, and then more rooftops, as far as the eye could see. If he was going to follow any path with what he had inside him, he first needed to know what tools he had at his disposal. That was how he began any project: he spread the pieces on the table before touching the iron to any of them. That’s why he was on that rooftop.

He went to the edge and looked down.

Ten stories. A narrow alley at the bottom, a dumpster the size of a matchbox, a line of dirty snow against the wall. His stomach churned. He swallowed hard.

From a young age he had been afraid of heights, and it was a fear that hadn’t improved with age: on the subway escalator he held onto the handrail with both hands, he wouldn’t lean against the window of his sixth-floor apartment, and the five-fingered hand that had lifted him from the asphalt on Thursday, his feet dangling in nothingness, had affected him in a place his teeth couldn’t reach. Standing on top of a building that tall, with the wind pushing against his back, didn’t help at all. He took a step back. He sighed.

He crossed the roof to the edge on the other side, where the alley was narrower and the next building a little lower. He sighed again. He closed his eyes. He inhaled through his nose, exhaled through his mouth, and felt the Scourge on the other side, without a word, doing something with the fear. It didn’t move him from there. It lowered its volume, like lowering the volume of a radio to be able to talk. He didn’t know how the creature did it, nor if it was the creature doing it or he himself, with its help. He knew it was helping.

“Okay.” The voice came out in a whisper. “Okay.”

He opened his eyes.

And when he realized it, his legs were already kicking the gravel.

He ran across the roof with unexpected speed, his hood clinging to his head in the wind, gravel flying behind his sneakers, the slope of a skylight passing beneath him unseen. He reached the parapet. He stepped onto it with his right foot and jumped.

For a very brief instant, his body felt light. It was the only word he could find afterward: light, as if during the climb the weight had been left behind, waiting. He looked down. The alley passed beneath him from end to end, the dumpster, the snow leaning against the wall, a bicycle without a wheel chained to a pipe, everything small and clear, and on the other side the wall of the neighboring building came to meet his feet. He landed on the gravel with his knees bent. The impact went up his shins and stopped at his knees, and that was all.

He remained crouched down for half a second, with his hands on the ground, breathing.

Then he laughed briefly and kept running.

It was euphoria that carried him away. He let go. He crossed that slab in a straight line, dodged a television antenna that someone had left there decades before, and jumped again without measuring anything. This time the next building was taller. Three stories higher, maybe four, a dark brick wall rising in front of him, and he hit it.

He hit it with his chest, with his palms, with the soles of his sneakers, and the impact took the air out of his lungs for a second. His glasses pressed against his face. He waited for the fall. The fall didn’t come: his hands had stuck to the brick, his feet had stuck, and before he could think about what to do with it, his body was already doing it. He ran.

He ran vertically. That’s what remained in his memory, with the clarity of a video watched many times: his legs moving as they do on a sidewalk, the brick passing under his hands, the mortar, the rust of a pipe, a dark window opening that he circled without slowing down, the edge coming from above and him passing over it with a push from both hands. His body spun in the air. A full backflip, without him even trying, and he landed on his feet in the center of the roof, the gravel crackling, and continued running as if he had just climbed a ladder.

The next building was much lower. He saw the difference from afar, a two-story drop, and also saw his own mind calculating the height, the time, the weight, the way it always calculated everything. He didn’t slow down. He reached the edge and threw himself forward, letting gravity do the work, and mid-fall he rolled in the air, a slow spin with his arms close to his body, and landed at the bottom with his knees bent and his feet together. The impact was greater this time. It went up his spine, hit his teeth. He felt it and didn’t stop.

There was an iron railing at the edge of that slab, a railing at waist height, and he braced one hand on the cold bar and stepped over it, his body spinning around his hand, and fell onto the roof of the neighboring building, one step below. He rolled on the gravel to overcome the inertia, shoulder, back, hip, and got up already running, with pebbles stuck to his sweatshirt and a stinging scratch on his elbow.

From building to building, it got easier.

Each jump was cleaner than the last. Each landing, shorter. He stopped looking at the ground before jumping, stopped calculating, and his body didn’t miss once. At a certain point he wondered why. He didn’t know how to do this. A boy who has spent his life unable to see a meter ahead of his face doesn’t know where to put his foot on an unfamiliar roof, and yet his foot always landed where it should, his hand always gripped the right edge, his torso turned at the exact angle. The answer came from within, voiceless, and he understood as he ran: the Scourge was guiding him. He still decided. He was still the one choosing where to run, when to jump, but the fraction of a second between deciding and doing was occupied by something else, someone correcting the angle of his arm, the moment to bend his knee, the exact point to release his hand from the edge. His brain and the creature, working together in his limbs like two mechanics on the same engine.

Then came the street.

He saw it from afar: the block ended, and between the slab where he was and the one on the other side there was an entire avenue, sidewalk, lane, sidewalk, at least fifteen meters, and a lamppost planted on the curb, its LED head already lit. A gap that no one crossed. He knew this while running, he knew it with the same part of his head that he had known that no one lifts a ton.

It didn’t stop. It accelerated.

His feet pounded hard on the gravel, stones flew, and the low wall arrived, with an iron railing on top, and he stepped onto the bar with both feet and used it to launch himself. His hood flew back. The wind caught his red hair and threw it in his face, and for a moment, at the highest point, he saw the whole street below: the pedestrian crossing, a man standing at a bus stop looking at his cell phone, the orange light of the late afternoon in the closed shop windows. Then he started to descend, and saw that the low wall on the other side wasn’t going to arrive.

It was about three meters away. He felt it in his stomach before he saw it.

The lamppost arrived just in time. Sebastian struck it with his hands and feet, gripping the aluminum tube like a cat on a tree trunk, and the lamppost swayed under the weight, its LED head oscillating and blinking once. Beneath it, the man at the bus stop looked up. Sebastian didn’t wait to see what the man saw. He bent his legs, pushed the lamppost with all his might, and the lamppost returned the push, sending him flying the remaining three meters and crashing into the facade of the building two stories below the roof.

He climbed. Hand, foot, hand, foot, the cold brick passing by, a window with the curtain closed, an old air conditioner that he went around, and he reached the top with speed, passed the low wall, and continued running through the gravel while the post behind him still swayed.

In the middle of that roof, the water tank.

One of those old wooden ones, with a conical sheet metal lid and iron legs embedded in a brick base, about eight meters of structure between the slab and the top. He climbed without stopping running: first along the ironwork, along the diagonal iron bars that crossed between the legs, his gloves scraping against the rust; then along the side of the tank, his hands stuck to the damp wood, the planks smelling of moss, the iron hoops serving as steps; then along the sheet metal of the conical lid, slippery with melted snow, until he reached the top, where an iron rod protruded from the apex, pointing towards the sky. A piece of antenna, a lightning rod, he never knew.

He climbed on it too.

When he stopped, he was standing on the end of the pole, on one foot. The other didn’t fit. The pole was as thick as a broom handle and held his weight without wobbling, and he stayed there, with his right leg stretched out, his left bent, his arms loose at his sides, not needing them for balance. The sun had just disappeared behind the buildings. Night was taking over the sky from east to west, and the city lights were gradually turning on, floor by floor, window by window, as if someone were switching them on one at a time.

The smile wouldn’t leave his face.

He looked around. He searched for the building he had come from and couldn’t find it: it was too far away, behind other rooftops, other water tanks, other antennas, somewhere he could no longer reconstruct. He had come running all that way. The muscles in his thighs were stiff, full, burning from a whole day of cycling, and the burning sensation felt like the best thing he had felt in years. He stood there, on one foot, with the wind whistling against the pole, and let the time pass without counting.

That’s when he saw the billboard.

Two blocks away, atop a building facing the avenue, stood an enormous billboard, illuminated from below, wider than the building that supported it. And even from that distance, with the yellow lenses of his glasses and night approaching, he could clearly see what was on it. The classic blue and red suit, the one with the webs and the spider on the chest. The usual pose, one knee bent, one hand open toward whoever was looking. And the face uncovered.

No mask. Ever since Peter Parker revealed to the world who he was, long before Sebastian was born, he wore the mask less and less, and in official photos almost never. The face on the billboard was the face Sebastian had seen a meter away from his on Thursday, with melting snow in his hair and the red mark of the mask on his forehead. Only bigger. The size of a building.

Below, in white letters, the phrase.

“With great power comes great responsibility.”

He had known those words for as long as he knew words. He had heard them from his father, in one of the few complete memories he retained of him: the deep voice, the accent that he would only understand years later to be French, and the phrase spoken as if teaching a traffic rule. His father was also a fan. He would come to the cartoons every afternoon, in the episode where the Spider-Man with the overly wide chin explained the moral of the story to a lost child. He heard them now in Camila’s drawings, which were the same, with new colors. And he had read the phrase painted on the entrance wall of every school he had attended, and there were many schools: it was the motto in all of them, ever since a great hero had saved the world and the schools decided that one of his phrases on the wall was worth more than any other.

The words entered him and stayed.

Along with them came fear, a different kind of fear than the fear of heights, more still, sitting in the middle of his chest. Was he worthy of those words? He was thirteen years old. He was a child, he knew that, even though his mother counted on him as if he weren’t. What ability did he truly have, besides climbing a wall? The doubts came one after another, without order, and he couldn’t answer any of them.

He had always dreamed of it. To be a hero. To be on the inside of the yellow ribbon. And he had always known, even in his dreams, that it was a silly child’s dream, and that the distance between him and that was the distance between the sidewalk and the top of a building. Until now. Things had changed overnight, and in three days he barely recognized himself: stronger, with strange abilities in his body, capable of crossing an avenue in mid-air. And yet the question remained. It didn’t seem to be enough. He doubted again, with the same intensity as before.

He stared at the man from the billboard.

How many times had that man fallen? How many times had he gotten back up? Peter Parker was the world’s greatest hero, and Sebastian knew why; he’d spent his life studying why. Spider-Man wasn’t the strongest. Thor was stronger. The Hulk was stronger. He wasn’t even close to being the smartest: Tony Stark and Hank Pym were geniuses of a different caliber, and he himself said so in interviews, laughing. What Peter Parker had was something else, something that made him get up from the ground when he shouldn’t be able to anymore, and that no one had ever properly explained. Captain America had had something similar; he knew from the documentaries. Even Captain America, in the end, had been overshadowed by that man in red and blue.

Sebastian was trapped in that doubt, standing on one foot, at the end of an iron rod, staring at the face of his hero.

The noise came from below.

A garbage bag being kicked. That was the sound, exactly that, the sound of bottles and cans inside a plastic bag being hit by something, a sound he knew from superhero movies, and which in superhero movies always came before something bad. He turned his head. And with the hearing he had now, the hearing that on Friday had brought him to his knees with the sound of a television, he heard the rest: a small, restrained cry, of someone crying with their hand over their mouth.

He jumped.

From the top of the pole to the slab, an eight-meter drop, he landed crouched on the building’s parapet, his legs bent and the fingers of both hands braced against the concrete. He stared at the alley below.

Nobody around. No lit windows on that side, no cars, no doors. The alley was a blind corridor between two buildings, closed at the end by a metal gate, with an overturned dumpster and scattered garbage bags. His face wrinkled behind his glasses. Night was almost upon him, and the shadows of the alley were beginning to blend with what he observed, and what he observed was this:

Five men.

Two with knives, he saw the blades catch the little light that remained. One with a baseball bat. Two with iron bars, or short pipes. They were in a semicircle, with their backs to him, and in the center of the semicircle, with her back pressed against the metal grate at the bottom, was a girl.

About his age, more or less. Light-colored coat, backpack still on his back, his red hair tied back and falling to one side.

The expression on those men’s faces, he also saw it from above, in the remaining light. A smile that shouldn’t be in that alley. A smile that shouldn’t be pointed at anyone, much less at a girl that age. A minor. His stomach clenched.

Sebastian lowered his body behind the low wall and reached into his sweatshirt pocket. His cell phone was there, cold. He took it out, his thumb already on the screen, and before unlocking it, he entered his account information. He did it unintentionally, as he always did: that part of town was far from everything. Far from the center, far from anywhere anyone outside thought was worth protecting. The nearest patrol car was ten minutes away, and that was on a good day. He knew the neighborhood well from delivering so many deliveries there. Ten minutes.

Down below, the men took a step. Then another.

He held the phone in his hand, without pressing anything, and a feeling of helplessness rose from his stomach to his throat, the same feeling he had on Thursday against the wall, the same feeling he had on Friday in the shower with four boys on top of him: that of watching something happen without being able to stop it.

The men were talking. He heard the voices, with that new ear he could even hear the creaking of the bars when the girl leaned closer to them, but the words wouldn’t go in. They came muffled, as if through a wall, and he knew that the wall was his own anxiety, that the sound existed and he couldn’t pay attention to it.

“…nobody’s coming…”

“…quiet, huh…”

A low laugh.

Amidst the fear, Sebastian’s head was filled with the words from the billboard. The phrase painted on the school walls. The times, so many times, he had seen Peter Parker say it in an interview, in an old video, in an appearance where someone asked why he still did that, after so many years, and he always answered the same way, with the same face of someone who found the question funny.

He wanted to intervene.

He wanted to, even knowing it was dangerous, even with five armed men down there and him being thirteen years old and having no idea what to do, even with fear making his knees tremble against the concrete parapet. They trembled. He felt the tremor rise up his thighs and couldn’t stop it.

And then he was no longer alone in that.

He felt the Scourge stir within him, the way he had felt it all morning, voiceless, and felt the creature do to his fear what it had done on the edge of the roof, only with more force: cover him. Place a hand on top. The fear remained, he knew it remained, but his knees stopped trembling. Something warm spread through his chest and arms, a surge he recognized as adrenaline because he had felt it before, on the farm, running through the snow, and now it came in a much larger dose, a dose that no body produces on its own. His senses became strange because of it. Numb and sharp at the same time. He saw the alley with a painful clarity and no longer felt the cold in his hands. And his hands, resting on the concrete, began to tremble too. From something else, this time.

Sebastian stared at the five men.

He put his cell phone away. He straightened his body until he was crouching on the parapet, with both hands on the concrete and his feet on the edge, and felt the wind on his back.

He leaned his body forward.

And the body fell, several floors below.