FRINGE

Dea Anne Martin

What I do is this. I go into a room and I walk to the center. The room has blank walls and a bare floor. Light comes out of tubes running in one long band around the room at the juncture of the wall and the ceiling. The light is always the same in the room. I walk to the center where a chair hangs from the ceiling suspended on wires that are invisible until you are close enough to touch them. The chair is covered with fabric the color of my clenched fist and when I touch it, it feels like a skin. When I get into the chair, it stretches out to let me fill it and it breathes around me. Parts of the chair move away from the rest like fingers and grip me across the tops of my legs and around my wrists and around the top of my head. My head pushes against a hole cut into the back of the chair and two sets of wires are pulled out of the back of my head and brought through the hole. The wires snake up to meet a pair of quartz lenses, screw into the backs of the lenses and then the lenses settle like cold coins against my eyes. There's a socket at the base of my neck. I know it's there because something comes out of the chair right where my neck presses against it and plugs into me. It slides into me like a lover. It feels cold and then it gets warm inside me. I think that I can feel it throb like there was a muscle sheathed tight over it pressing against the muscle inside of me. It hurts when it's inside me. The rims of the lenses hurt my skin. The lenses press against my skin like they were trying to grow under it like dirt and live attached. This is the place where I am given the words that all of us follow. The visions I see here are not my own. Lights flash at the start of it right at the edge of my eyelid. It is silent inside this place like inside a vein.

I remember when I was locked up in a box. I could sit in the box with my legs and my knees propping up my chin. My arms had to stay wrapped around my legs and I could look out of the box because the sides were clear. My teeth locked together like palms in prayer because the top of the box pressed my head down. The box was big enough to hold only me and the air that was filtered in and out. Fresh tattoos burned as the skin pulled across my stretched lower back. The smell of ink attached itself to my skin and entered me through my nose. All I could smell was the smell of my own body. I remember taking a lot of time washing myself before I went into the box, but it wasn't long before smells from every crevasse filled every corner of the box and this wasn't unpleasant but I was frightened because all I could think about was what if I drowned, what if that was how I dies? I smelled piss later and then the metal floor in the box heated up and the heat mixed with the wetness of my piss on the floor and colored the skin on my ass and the soles of my feet. I don't think that I ever smelled burning skin before. My stomach contracted and I was angry that the delicate smell of my own skin burning could make me hungry. I looked out at the others as they looked in. They smiled and I cried. That was the one we called Glass Box Monkey.

When I was hooked in, Our Father Saint Anthony walked out to me. He walked out of New City...flat boxes of bright colors floating in front of me like a painted cloth. He came up to me extending his arm. The dark skin there, like the rest of his skin, was gray tinted as though he'd been dusted with ashes. His clothes were dirty and stiff. His eyes rolled up in their sockets. White half moons drifted under the lids sometimes rolling down to show the dark red pupils. A tube poked out like a worm from the bare skin of his chest. It draped down and branched into three tentacles each capped at the end with a small plastic vial. One was filled with something thick and red. One looked as though it contained water. The other was filled with a translucent yellow liquid that had particles floating inside of it. His arm was extended to me. He pointed at it with a scalpel.

"This is dry," he said. He moved the edge of the blade along his arm from the wrist to the crook of the elbow. The skin parted like the cloth covering a pillow. He prodded the edge of the wound and a little blood seeped out.

"Pain is a liquid that washes you clean!" he shouted. Blood gushed out of the opened arm and swallowed me.

"Dig for it," I heard him say. "Bring back something wet."

So I fell, drowning, into the pain of another.

In this skin I am hungry. Hunger was the signal that I used to come here. This skin moves in a dry white place. It sits with its back pressed against a cold wall. It feels dry and clean and empty. The eyes in the skull follow a cart as it rolls down the hall. The smell of meat leaves the cart and makes a trail that snakes to the nose and then slides in...sinks in like grease into paper. I feel the throat contract and when I looked down, I saw a small puddle of lemon yellow bile. They put needles in this skin but I pulled them out. They stopped with the needles and left me alone here. The floor is cold against the soles of my feet. The tile is cold against the skin latticed with scars that presses against the floor at night. My ribs make a ladder that rattles when I breathe. I have company at night. They whisper to me and fly away when I ignore them. Their leathery wings scoop up the air and scatter it back like rice. This skin is rough and sometimes cracks appear in it as though it were baked. Being in this is like walking on sand and then digging a hole to stay inside. People leave me alone. I came here because I can do what is necessary. Blood is sticky inside me like the inside of a fruit drying in the sun. This skin hears other discuss it and they speak of it being sick, but this skin feels the blood drying up inside it. It feels breath come slow until it leans against the wall silent and calm as an animal suspended in sleep. If the skin fits, wear it. That's what they tell us before we're sent out for the first time, but so many of them fit. I chose to go into this skin but it is getting drier and more quiet all the time. Hunger is making it start to glow at night. and the others group around and are silent and look. I have to dig beneath this dryness. Anthony Abbott has said that when blood has been tainted by fear it must be purified in some way. Our Father Saint Anthony has said that it is a gift to go into the desert...into the loneliness of another skin. The one that was here before me wanted to open to the bone and melt pain like ice. That one was afraid. No one here will allow this skin to surrender its anchor of bone. I've been sent a shard of glass, an error, a blessing. I am pulling away layers from the dried sheath that covers the muscles and beneath these something wet will be found. I am fainting from pain and finally happiness because I feel the space, opening out to the glittering air, that this skin has kept clean and empty all these years.

In my dream, she was sitting across from me on the train. Her legs were folded beneath her clothes and she seemed to float in front of me. Her shoe stood on the floor waiting for her. She held a peach in her hand. There was a wound bitten from it and it seemed to me that the edges of this throbbed. I looked up at her. Juice ran out of her mouth as she smiled at me, thick and clear. She brought two fingers to her chin and took some of the juice on the tips. She leaned across to me and painted a sticky fragrant stripe across my forehead. She said:

The muscle blushes beneath the skin...the juice runs out...the peel is thin...

Heaven is a blade away.

She put the fruit in my hands. I saw that its flesh was bleeding. Blood welled up over the rim of peel surrounding the bite wound. I felt blood slip over my hands. It fell down and then washed across the bodies sleeping on the floor of the train.

"Your skin is on top of you!" She was speaking to me through a window smeared with red lipstick. The glass shattered and fell onto my skin and that shattered too and then I floated in pieces seeping red into the carpet.

Styrofoam has always smelled funny to me and I remember when she cut a hole in it.

"It's too small," I said.

"Shut up," she said and stuffed the piece in my mouth. The piece that she held was the size of a platter. She brought it down over my stomach. I tried to see but I was tied securely to the table.

"Look up," she said...absent. She was concentrating. I remember looking up and seeing the monitor anchored to the ceiling. In the screen, I could see a thumb and a finger reaching through a hole in a piece of styrofoam and at the same time I could feel my penis pulled through. The ceiling was white...blank as milk. The monitor showed the styrofoam platter, skin framing the edges and a penis lolling across its surface. Fingers pulled through one testicle and then the other so that everything bulged flushed and throbbing. It is like an orchid... I thought. I couldn't see anything else. My head wore clamps on both sides. The light was very bright in the room. The fingers came into the screen again and held the penis bending it down so that the tip of it brushed the Styrofoam. Another hand appeared in the screen holding a long needle capped at the end with a plastic cone, like a thimble. I felt a needle push through me and out the other side and I felt something else too and in the monitor the hands seemed to glow and I was crying. I remember feeling happy and peaceful as though my heart had been washed out with salt water and left to dry in the sun. Fingers pulled apart the scrotal skin and pegged it in five places with needles that gleamed and I saw the testicles quivering under the stretched skin like sheathed eggs and every time a new needle entered me I felt as though a moment had opened. I felt clean inside and empty of everything except that for which I was grateful. I remember that my eyes were closed for a long time and then I looked up at the screen. I saw my flesh quivering beneath the surface of the skin...regal...stretched out...like a dinner you look at for a long time before you sit down to eat .

Our Mother Saint Dorothy was balanced above me, muscles stretching out like clay. The blue sky was smooth as paint held in a bucket. She floated there and spinning around her were flat circles all different colors. Sometimes one of the circles would turn its edge to me and fly - slicing through her body. Her skin was dark and shining like bare bone. Her hair stretched in ropes above her, suspending her from the sky. There were needles pushed through her skin and where there weren't needles, welts rose up to knot the surface. She held a large glass jar. Her eyes were red and her pupils glowed yellow inside of that. Behind her I could see the city on fire, the little squares that made it becoming flatter and more gray as it burned.

"The city is empty," she said. She squeezed her nipple, holding out the jar to catch the clear yellow liquid that streamed from her breast. She turned to me and as I held my mouth open, I felt the yellow liquid rush into me and melt out again through my skin. I felt her skin closing around me, moist and warm. I felt dizzy...suspended. The muscles in my arms and my legs started jerking.

"Pain is a stone in the desert," she said. Her voice throbbed like a pulse in my head.

"Find the stone and crush it like a heart baked in fire." She reached out and opened my mouth and put a twig between my jaws. I bit down and felt it snap and went into the hard cell of another skull.

This skin ripples and jerks when a breeze moves across it. Wind circles around the park. The skin jerks like the hide on a cow. It traces the perimeter of the park over and over. I inhabit feet that rattle inside a pair of shoes too large. This skin talks to ghosts. The eyes that I look through see thin bodies, liquid at the edges, stretching out and whispering...asking for things. The eyes burn and twitch. The wind feels hot during the day. This skin lays on the grass at night but the eyes stay open. The eyes stay dry, scraped by the wind. The grass leaves marks on me. The wind settles around me everyday. It holds me like a lover. In this skin I have walked miles in the same places. I need to be in the places that I recognize. I am going to something. I see the ghosts in the tress and I want to fly up to them. I can see buildings burning. I can smell the smoke. What is necessary is that I follow the trail of smoke each day as a different building burns. At the center of each fire I find an egg quivering inside a softened shell, the heart of it pricked with a blood spot. Then I have to carry it back with me - hidden inside me. This skin becomes transparent without sleep. Our Mother Saint Dorothy has said that pain takes on a higher price when it is paid for by others and I imagine that this is true. This skin and these eyes jerk and twitch but the space that they form inside has become still and liquid. Waiting. I feel others touching this skin and when I look there is nothing. In the dreams that I see with my eyes open, there is a kiss that I can feel against my hand - dry lips brushing the skin, and when I look down a blade flashes in the sun and disappears. The quiet center falls out and away and leaves the skin loose and draped across the grass like wet paper. Finished. Like that. I can ebb out of this skin like the blood staining the grass. Happiness washing into the gutters and out through the rest of the city.

I was dreaming that the smell of roses was keeping me awake. I was on concrete, flat as a coin, and the light shining in my eyes made me think about being cut open. I sat up and found her standing in front of me. She stood within the halo made by the light from the street lamp.

"This eye never closes," she said. "The other ones do, but this one doesn't ." She came closer and so did the smell of roses. Her skin was covered with something wet and shiny and I thought it might be oil, but then I saw that her pink skin was covered with tiny holes seeping blood. She walked on broken glass. She held her curled fist in front of my face and opened it. There was an eye set like a stone in the middle of her palm. It was staring at me. Blood seeped up to the edges and ran across her skin and down to the sidewalk. She held up a needle in her other hand.

"I will thread this with your pain and put a seam across my mouth."

She pulled my hand open and shoved the needle up, through the skin and muscle, from the bottom. The light around us was colored with red vapor.

"Go with me," she said...and I felt as though I was dissolving into the air that she was breathing in and out.

I remember the clothes I had...gloves to cover me past my elbows. I had a pair of shoes with heels six inches high and sharp. I remember how my foot settled into each shoe, a foot in pain and safe as a baby. "Swaddling" was a word I thought of often then. I had a mask that I could pull on over my head and seal tight at the sides. My hair came out of a hole in the back and it looked like a tail. It was red then and came to my waist. I shaved it off years later and left it next to a sleeping woman that I had loved from a distance for a long time. There were holes in the mask for my eyes and nose and mouth. All these things were black and leather. I bought them for myself. There was a suit that I wore. This covered me from my neck down to my wrists and ankles. It was made of a fabric just new and expensive and I had the suit because someone wanted me to have it. It was shiny, like rubber. I could ask it not to have pores and then I would be safe, contained, the fabric clamped onto me with the sweat on my skin, my nipples and cunt outlined precisely and sealed. The suit would sometimes conduct a shock to my skin already wet from extended heat. When this happened, a patch of fabric at the site of the pain became translucent and then color blossomed out and brightened then ebbed. Sometimes the suit would be covered with red and purple and gold and dark blue and green and I would stand at the center of the room and feel the air go silent and I would feel suspended and calm like a snake held out to the sun. I used to look at myself in mirrors. I looked at my face and I knew that I had changed but the surface was lying to me. I knew that my bones were turning clear inside their envelope of muscle and that soon the flesh and skin would fall out of the world and leave only bones...clear and silent on a hushed planet.

I saw John of the Ladder. He stood on a platform made of heaped up tires with a piece of splintered wood laid across the top. There was nothing behind him but the flat blue sky and the clouds moving across it in patterns like fixed programs. I could watch the clouds and their motions because I could see through him. He was made out of glass or something that looked like glass to me. He revolved on the platform as though he were attached to a spindle. A ball of light grew inside the clear cavity of his chest, spreading across it like milk, and then it escaped, dipping out and away shredding the opaque sky. The light hit my eyes in shards and my brain splintered as though it were trying to grow a halo. Something warm dripped out of my nose. My eyes were shaking in their sockets and I wanted to close them but I couldn't. When I saw Our Father Saint John again he was surrounded by large transparent globes. More of the globes moved out from behind the clouds. They bobbed up and lengthened out, turning into streams of warm liquid that covered me like another skin of my own. He faced me and held up a steel tube. He drew back his arm and when he brought the tube forward again, it extended, stretching like a finger.

"This is a blessing," he said. The rod shot forward and tapped my chest. Heat blasted through all my bones and every hollow place inside me.

"Pain is a vehicle for your tears," he said. I looked through his transparent eyes to the sky beyond. He inhaled. Light moved across the glass, muscles like oil, and his body shattered in the air. Pieces of him fell around me. "It's a gift," said the shards. I picked one up and made a fist around it. Blood dripped through the gaps in my flesh and I felt the blood of another's broken heart washing around me and filling my mouth.

In this skin I crouch looking out of a tiny hole only large enough to throw a mask across my eyes when the sun comes through. Through this hole I can see the sky, blue or gray, and nothing else. The skin takes on a phosphorescence in this place and the faint glow that it reveals in the darkness causes me pain. I am exiled.Our Father Saint John has said that all the tears we know carve furrows that we must carry forever on our real faces. I came to this skin, a desert for me, to erase a boundary. Contrition is here and for me to know...to take in through the pores of this skin like air. My throat draws shut and my eyes blur and spill. Loneliness feels like thirst inside this cell. The bones that make a cage around this heart feel as though they will crack and splinter. Saint John says, "That which is rigid must be melted away." I am dissolving from the inside out. There is nothing here but the walls, the floor and the ceiling; the air that surrounds me and moves out of this hole; the dim light that throbbing at the margins of the glowing skin that envelopes me; silence like the inside of a bell. I remember rapping the back of my head three times against the wall behind me. My heart melts inside me and runs out through my eyes.

When I woke up in my dream, she was sitting on a ladder looking down at me. We were on top of a building that was old and nearly gutted when I'd lived there before. She held her hand up to the rain.

"These are tear," she said. "This never stops." She opened the shirt that she was wearing and showed me the penis between her legs. She held up a rusty knife and shaved if off as easily as it it were hair. She threw it down in front of me. It made a sound as it hit the roof like the sound of glass breaking. It writhed and started growing. I looked up at her. Her eyes were hooded and black beneath the lids. Blood ran down from between her legs, across each rung of the ladder and finally to me making a pool around my ankles.

"Now I'm like you." I saw her in a red cloth that covered her like a veil. The penis she had discarded stretched and lifted up. It formed a huge arch that was covered with shiny black scales that reflected all the colors there were into my eyes. Sheets of water fell into the space of the arch. I heard her voice.

"Walk through that and change," she said. So, I did and I did.

I remember when they shaved me. It was like this. I was placed inside a harness that suspended me at the wrists and went around my thighs and pulled me open. My toes pointed down like limp flowers. The room was warm. Two of them held wands that they pointed at my skin. Light came out of the tip of each wand. As the light moved over the bared surfaces of my skin I felt it opening the pores and dissolving each hair, bursting and burning. They moved the wands down the length of my arms and then up and around my legs to the knees. The light made stripes of pain on me. They stripped my thighs and my back of hair. The light moved in spirals on the skin of my chest until that was done too. I felt as though my heart was coming to the surface and that it would live outside of me after this. After my testicles were finished, one of them held my buttocks open and the light moved inside. I felt seared there...sealed and I didn't find out until later if this were true. My skin rippled as though it wanted to molt, but as they got to my head, the skin became quiet, finally understanding what was necessary. The scalp was easy. The eyebrows weren't and I remember wondering then if the sunlight would burn my eyes from their sockets. I was smooth. Pain and knowledge coated me like air.

"Do you want it to be like knives?" they asked me. "We can make it be like knives if you want..."

The points of light coming from the tip of each wand narrowed and then disappeared. They cut pictures into me. They rubbed ink into my bleeding skin. They washed the blood off later but not the colors. Someone told me once that our real skin surrounds us six inches away from the skin that we live inside. I heard someone say too that there are skins around the earth like rings or shells. I used to think that my skin needed shredding like any prison barrier, but then it became just a surface to me.

I used to dream about a woman. She was the one that I wanted. Sometimes, her hair was short and brushed back, blond and shining, close against a head that looked serene. Like something made for looking at. Something that is supposed to make you think of other things. Sometimes, her hair was darker and tangled around her head - hiding the eyes that floated inside of something blood-red and distant. At all times I wanted to protect this head, even when I didn't dream and I knew that I was inventing her hair and her eyes out of something that only I could see. When I dreamed about her I knew that she must love me because I needed her so much. She wore a knotted piece of leather around her waist. This dragged the ground and was strange because twisted inside each knot was paper money. The fluted green bows made a pristine trail behind her when she walked. They were never dirty or gone but sometimes a new one appeared. I smelled her skin. Her skin smelled sweet the way skin smells underneath clothes that are clean and the skin is clean too. I feel dirt on her skin. It makes a space between her skin and mine. I call her the woman I loved but I don't know if she was a woman. When I touched her once I felt my love throbbing back at me through her skin. I remember her in a blue dress. She was wearing one shoe and carrying the other because the heel had broken off. I recognized her instantly. I wanted to cradle her head like an egg in my hands. How do I think that I know her? I call her "she" because she was . . . is the source of my duty and so like me. The hope that this is true slices through me but it isn't anything that I can know set like quartz in front of me. I think her skin changes and this is a sign to me that her time here is pushing against a limit. I felt a lump between her legs once but she smiled at me as if this was a joke that any skin could make. It was cold that day and her breath went up into the air forming patterns that promised and left me speechless, feeling my own happiness like a tether. I would like to whisper something against the pale skin of her face. I would like to brush my lips against the place that gets rough along her jaw. I would like to trace the straight and fragile bridge of her nose with my thumb and middle finger on each side. I dreamed that she was sleeping inside a three piece suit and I was happy that she was finally warm. Sometimes her face is a dark spot inside my brain. If her eyes were as round as mine...I think of squeezing my eyes into the sockets that hers rest in now. I could see what the world is like, but mine won't fit there. She's a bridge for me and unknown. Her clothes fall away from her shoulders because she's so happy. I think she's drunk all the time. I dreamed that she was laughing and going up in the air. I brushed the dirty soles of her feet with the tips of my fingers. She was naked in the air and leaving me. I love her. I worry. I wanted her to reach into the cavity of my chest and pull out my heart and clutch it in a bloodied fist. I know there must be veins and tendons around a heart that will stretch out and twist and make a rope. I know that she could pull me at the end of that and I would be happy and safe. I look at her. I tell her that she needs to pull me up like something on a thread beneath her until I can feel my own blood splashing back down on me, coating me like oil. That would be best. That would be easy for you.