Guy leaned forward in his chair. The plastic parts of it creaked.

  “You seem very worried,” he said.

  “I am,” Rebecca said. “How is your patient? The man with the same thing.”

  “Uh,” Guy said. He leaned back again, swung around slightly so he wasn’t looking at her. “I don’t want to alarm you. It’s probably completely unrelated. At least, it seems unrelated. He—Harry—he’s missing. The police are involved, now.”

  Rebecca inhaled.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said.

  “It’s not—it could be completely unrelated.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rebecca said.

  “He complained of these dreams. He wasn’t sleeping. And his house was falling down. He believed that the house was somehow linked to his skin. That they were connected. But the council—he couldn’t get it repaired.”

  “Jesus,” Rebecca said.

  “In the dream—he told me about it—he had to swim to this place. And there he could burn all of his old skin off. Just leaving the new skin. Like I said, it could be unrelated. Psychosomatic. He was a drinker. Quite mad.”

  “Felix’s dream,” Rebecca said.

  “Well, yes,” Guy said, “that’s what concerns me. The problem is—without him here, I can’t continue my tests. So I don’t know much more than when we last spoke.”

  “You don’t know anything? About the cause? Our house—we’re moving. Or whether it’s harmful?”

  “Only a handful of theories,” Guy said. “We really know very little about the skin. It’s the largest organ of the body. We live in it. But we know so little about it, really. We can hide our blemishes, cut off the parts we don’t like. But we have very little understanding of the things that cause the problems. In our skin.”

  Rebecca picked up her bag and placed it in her lap. She opened it and took out the transparent blue plastic sandwich bag with the sheets of Felix’s skin inside. She had saved every one.

  “Would this help?” she said.

  “That’s—”

  “Felix,” she said. “It’s his. All of it that has come off. That I know about.”

  “May I?” Guy said. He reached toward her. Rebecca silently handed him the bag.

  Guy took it and held it to the light.

  “It’s so clear,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Guy opened the bag. He carefully inserted his index finger and thumb into it and pulled out one of the sheets of Felix.

  Rebecca flinched.

  Guy put the bag down on the desk and unfurled the piece of skin. Rebecca recognized it as being Felix’s left hand. The second piece that had come loose.

  Guy lifted it to his face, very close, and looked at it from behind his thick glasses. Rebecca heard him inhale deeply.

  “I can work with this,” he said. “I can work with this.”

  “All right,” Rebecca said.

  “Can you leave it with me?” he said, then inhaled deeply again.

  Rebecca found herself nodding.

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course.”

  I stood and turned off the lamp.

  I left the manuscript open.

  I walked out of my mother’s study. The hard floor felt soft underneath my feet. Like an inflatable deflating.

  My leg really hurt now where I’d dug into it with my thumb.

  I had to sit in certain positions on chairs. And it hurt to walk, too.

  I felt scared. Of my leg and of the manuscript.

  My mother had said that it was a different story. That it was the story of a woman who dies in the car of a man who isn’t her husband. And the husband has to live not knowing why she was in the car.

  This was not that story. It was different. But it had the same characters. And it’d had the same beginning. But then I reread it and it had changed.

  I didn’t know why it had changed. And I did not know why the skins were peeling off in the manuscript. Just like mine was.

  And why the man’s house was so fucked. And why mine was, too.

  I wanted to look at my leg. So I went into the bathroom.

  On the landing I could feel something watching me. The light was on. So I couldn’t see anything that was outside the landing window. The glass was just blue-black, reflecting all the indoors.

  I pulled down the blue jeans I was wearing. I sat on the edge of the bath.

  The hole in my leg was infected. I thought I had cleaned it properly. But maybe I hadn’t. Or maybe it had just got infected anyway.

  There was still a big hole the size and shape of my thumb.

  It was red in the middle. Then up the edges of the hole it was yellow and damp with pus. A little green. The skin around it was yellow too, then red-pink. I touched it right in the middle. It hurt.

  I undressed fully and stepped into the bathtub. I took the showerhead and set it on low but warm. I aimed it at the wound. It stung. Some of the pus and dried blood washed away. But mainly it stayed the same colors.

  That night I was in a windowless basement restaurant, on a date with a girl who was not my girlfriend.

  The girl ordered the Soup du Jour.

  She tried it. Then she spat it out. She called the waiter over.

  “I don’t know what trick you’re trying to pull,” she said, “but I’ve had Soup du Jour before, and this ain’t it.”

  “Hurrrrggggnnhhhh,” I said, flopping my massive whale flippers all over the table, knocking wine and water glasses to the floor. “Weeeoooooooow clik. Clk clk hrrrnnnggg.”

  I was in a waiting room, in a plastic and stackable chair. There were old women in other plastic chairs. There was a table with magazines. There was a man, standing, talking to a receptionist. The television on the wall said: this has been in my family for a long time, but I’d be willing to part with it if the price is right.

  “What do you mean?” the man at the desk said, to the receptionist.

  “Please don’t raise your voice, sir,” the receptionist said.

  “You used to. You used to just fill these out.”

  “Sir,” said the receptionist.

  The man hit his hand on the reception desk. One of the sat-down old women jumped. Then the man made a gak sound and put his hand on his chest, where I assumed his heart was.

  Then he fell on the floor.

  The receptionist said, “Sir?”

  The man rolled backward so he was on his side, facing me. He still had his hand on his chest. His body started spasming.

  Then he closed his eyes and stopped.

  Then he opened both his eyes and winked at me. So I grinned at him. Then he closed his eyes again.

  “Sir?” said the receptionist.

  She kept the same face on her face.

  She picked up the phone on her desk and said something I didn’t hear.

  A doctor came out of the hidden doctor area. She knelt down beside the man. She checked if he was breathing then his pulse. Then she began to perform some kind of violent-seeming resuscitation technique.

  The receptionist was out from behind the desk now.

  “Don’t hurt him,” I said. She ignored me. Then she stopped.

  “He’s gone,” she said.

  “What?” I said. “No, he’s not.”

  “You called the paramedics?” she said, to the receptionist.

  “They’re a minute or two away,” the receptionist said.

  “He’s not dead. He’s pretending,” I said. They ignored me.

  I stood outside and smoked while watching the man—now zipped into a specialist dead person blanket—being loaded into the ambulance.

  It drove away, silent.

  One of the old women turned to me as we began to file back into the waiting room.

  “Why did you say that?” she said. “It wasn’t funny. It was just disgusting.”

  I felt embarrassed. I didn’t want to talk to the doctor anymore.

  So I didn’t say anything. I just limped away from the doctor’s, back in the direction of the house.

  At the front door, unlocking it, I noticed that more roof tiles had fallen to the gravel.

  The tiles were all shattered.

  The walls were peeling away from themselves.

  I told my grandmother the story about the man.

  “I thought he was pretending,” I said, “because of what my brother said.”

  “Do you think he was actually dead?” she said. We were sitting in her living room. It was raining.

  “The ambulance people said so. So did the doctor. They put a sheet on him.”

  “But he winked at you,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “It sounds to me like he was still alive,” my grandmother said, “and just pretending really well.”

  I said, “Beats moi.”

  We sat for a little while without talking, listening to the rain.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Me too, I think,” I said.

  “I think—” she said, then stopped.

  “What?”

  “There are lots of universes. There are all the universes, with all the possibilities in them. And humans can imagine all of those universes.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “That’s what I think ghosts are,” she said.

  We sat in silence for a while again. Her cat was on the windowsill, watching the rain. It was coming down harder now. My grandmother had finished her coffee. I didn’t touch mine.

  Slowly I watched her fall asleep.

  Once she was, I stood and carried the two coffee cups to the kitchen and drained them and rinsed them and put them into her dishwasher. The cat had followed me into the kitchen. I put some biscuits into its bowl for it. Then I stroked it as it ate the biscuits.

  My grandmother’s study was upstairs. So was her bedroom. She could still sleep upstairs because she could still walk up stairs.

  When the cat was done eating I went upstairs to see if I could fix the bed that my grandmother had been complaining about. She had said that it had been sliding across the floor in the night. There was probably something wrong with one of the legs or something.

  The cat followed me upstairs.

  I could not see anything wrong with the bed. It was sturdy to the touch. I lifted it and jiggled each leg and they were all firm.

  I didn’t really know what I would do if I found something wrong, anyway.

  There were huge piles of books on either side of the bed. The bedspread was covered in pictures of scarlet macaw parrots flying. Or sitting down on branches. It smelled good. When I stopped moving the bed, the cat jumped up on it and walked around and then sat down. I sat beside it for a while, stroking it until it fell asleep.

  I stood and walked quietly into my grandmother’s study. I didn’t want to wake the cat or my grandmother. There were even bigger piles of books in the study, leaning against bookcases that went all up the walls. There was a desk with a very old computer and a printer, and behind it a big window that looked onto the garden that made the room bright. It was very quiet except for the rain. There was a thick wad of paper on the desk.

  I sat down in the chair in front of the desk and looked out of the window for a while. Then I looked down at the manuscript. The title said: Fables / Aphorisms: A Memoir. I turned to a random page.

  Fable 8

  This is a true story: Tsutomu Yamaguchi worked for Mitsubishi. He was a businessman. He was on a business trip. He was on a business trip to Hiroshima. He had been on the business trip for three months, and this was the last day of the business trip. So Tsutomu Yamaguchi was walking with his two colleagues—Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato—to the train station, to go back home.

  But Tsutomu Yamaguchi realized that he had left his travel papers at work.

  So, alone, he walked back. He could not travel without the papers.

  When he was by the docks he saw a plane fly overhead. Then he saw two small parachutes.

  Then he saw a flash in the sky.

  Then the flash in the sky knocked him clean off his feet.

  The eardrums of Tsutomu Yamaguchi exploded. And his skin was burned all over. He crawled to a shelter where he rested a night. Then he went out to find his work colleagues, Akira Iwanaga and Kuniyoshi Sato. They had survived the bombing, too.

  So they all three returned home, to Nagasaki. There he was treated for his burns. And the day after, Tsutomu Yamaguchi went back to work.

  And—at eleven in the morning—when the same bright flash happened in the sky, and knocked him off his feet, all Tsutomu Yamaguchi could think was: again? Again?

  Fable 13

  This is a true story: on a farm lived a pig. In the pen next to the pig lived a scarlet macaw parrot.

  The farmer fed the pig every day from a big pile of the most delicious barley. It was the best barley on the farm. The pig boasted to the parrot that it must be the most-loved animal, because it got to eat the best barley.

  “The farmer must love me very much,” said the pig. “Certainly the farmer loves me more than you.”

  “That does seem to be the case,” said the parrot, sadly.

  The pig ate so much of the delicious barley that it got fat. But still it boasted.

  “I am very fat, and very, very loved,” said the pig. “You are thin, and loved less.”

  “That does seem to be the case,” said the parrot, sadly.

  One day, when the pig had eaten half of all of the delicious barley, the farmer came to the pigpen with shears. The pig was too fat to move. The farmer chopped off the pig’s head with the shears.

  Then the farmer took the pig to the market to be sold and eaten.

  The next day, seeing that there was plenty of delicious barley left, the farmer brought some to the parrot.

  But the parrot refused to eat it.

  “Why do you refuse to eat the delicious barley?” said the farmer.

  “Because,” said the parrot, “I know that if I eat the delicious barley, it will make me fat, and then you will cut off my head.”

  “What a clever parrot you are,” said the increasingly fat farmer, his mouth full to the brim with the nearly irresistible barley.

  Fable 21

  This is a true story: when the bomb hit at the school, children were cooked as if microwaved.

  They stayed alive because their insides were alive. But their skin boiled on their faces, began to melt off.

  Their faces and their forearms, too. Their little legs.

  So the schoolteacher—her skin also melting—took the classroom scissors and went to their throats one by one.

  I put the manuscript back together. She was meant to be writing a memoir. This didn’t seem like a memoir. But it didn’t seem to matter.

  I went back to check on the cat. It was still asleep on the bed. I sat down beside it. Then I gnashed my teeth at it like I was going to bite its head off. As if the cat were the pig from the fable, or John the Baptist.

  Then I kissed it on its sleeping head.

  Downstairs my grandmother was still sleeping, too. I went to the kitchen and made her a glass of water. Then I carried it back to where she was sleeping and put it down beside her. And then I let myself out of the front door, locking it behind me.

  Sometimes I wondered when would be the last time I did that.

  I limped back to the house. It was still raining but I had sunglasses on. My hair was all wet. I slicked it back like a movie Italian.

  In my grandmother’s favorite field, I saw a small woman deer, chomping excess foliage.

  I stood there for a while in the rain looking at it.

  It did not look frightening. It looked small. And far away. And like it was meant to be there.

  A car passed. The deer deer-ran away, out of its field and into dense trees.

  I heard the passing car stop, then reverse back to me. I turned around. It was the metallic-blue car. The one the boy and girl drove around.

  The window went down.

  “Why are you standing in the rain?” the girl said.

  “I’m looking at this deer,” I said.

  “I don’t see a deer,” the girl said.

  “They’re very sneaky,” I said.

  “Want a ride?”

  “I thought you were cross with me,” I said.

  “You can’t stand there in the rain. Looking at an imaginary deer.”

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  The girl looked over at the boy.

  “We’re going to drive into the ocean,” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Can you run down that deer first?”

  I rode in the back seat. The boy and the girl sat up front. I did finger guns at the deer field as we drove away from it. The rain on the soft top of the car was making a good sound. My wet clothes were making the tan leather seats dark.

  We took the bridge over the estuary, past the strange birds and electricity pylons that lived there. The bad neighborhoods at the edge of the town. A roundabout with drive-through restaurants and a bowling alley. Then we drove through the forest, to the ocean. The infected hole in my leg hurt through my saturated jeans.

  They stopped the car in a car park that faced the ocean. The boy leaned back and opened his hand at me. Inside his hand was a blue circular pill. I took it without saying anything. I crunched it up in my teeth.

  I said, “Thanks, Felix.”

  “That’s not my name,” he said, “that’s a cat name.”

  “And I suppose yours isn’t Joanna,” I said, to the girl. She didn’t say anything. We sat listening to the rain for a moment.

 

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