Bedbugs (3 page)

M
an, I’m telling you, I could barely contain my excitement as I raised my new hands up in front of my face and looked at them. I flexed the fingers, thrilled by the taunt pulling of my new skin.

It was exquisite beyond belief!

My hands—Derrick’s hands, really—were trembling as I reached out to touch something . . . for the first time . . . with someone else’s hands.

I picked up the paring knife I had used to cut and peel the skin. Turning it back and forth, I hardly noticed the light reflecting off the blade because I was so entranced by the way the skin on the back of my hands shifted with every subtle movement.

I can’t tell you how excited I was, but I stopped myself because I knew I had other things to take care of, first.

Unrolling my new skin gloves, I carefully laid them aside while I cleaned up. It took a bit of doing, but I scraped most of the flesh off the bone before grinding everything up in the garbage disposal. The bones knocked around some, making quite a racket, but I made sure it all washed down completely. Then I took my new hands—because that’s the only way I could think of them—and went into my work room.

I tell you, I was so excited I was dizzy. I felt like I was drunk or tripping or something as I pulled the skin gloves back on over my own hands and wiggled my fingers to make sure everything fit perfectly.

Custom made!

Once I was ready, I picked up a pencil, tacked a clean sheet of drawing paper to the drawing board, and began to draw.

At first I couldn’t stop staring at the back of my hands.

Just like when I was a kid, I watched the skin shift and slide across my muscles and tendons as I drew. I was amazed how the skin still felt supple and alive. I could almost feel it bonding with the flesh of my own hands—my less talented hands.

This is it!
I told myself—
the moment I’ve been waiting for my whole life! I’m going to draw what I see inside my own head with someone else’s hands!

But it didn’t work out quite as I’d planned.

The sketch I started working on that night still seemed flat and uninspired. The spark wasn’t there. I had to remind myself that I was too excited, that I was distracted by watching the way my new hands moved; but deep inside, I started to feel this gnawing worry that I still didn’t have it. The picture still looked like it was being drawn by . . .

Me.

It’ll take time
, I told myself, hoping I could calm down enough to concentrate.

That made sense.

Right off the bat, I couldn’t expect to be able to feel and touch and control things the way Derrick did. I had to adapt to this new way of feeling and manipulating the world. Everyone’s hands are different.

After all, art doesn’t happen overnight.

After trying for an hour or so, I carefully peeled the skin gloves off my hands. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with them afterwards. I knew if I left them out, they’d rot. I wondered how to go about drying them out, maybe tanning the skin like leather so they would retain their suppleness.

While I was wondering what to do, the phone rang.

It was Alice, calling from Florida. She had just gotten a call from the Maine State Police, informing her that someone had broken into the house and killed Derrick. The gardener had found him that afternoon. I tried my best to sound upset and supportive when she told me she was flying back in the morning. I even told her I’d pick her and the kids up at the airport.

What a guy, huh?

After I got off the phone, I toyed with the idea of wearing Derrick’s hands when I picked up Alice and the kids at the airport. I was curious to see if she’d recognize her husband’s touch when I hugged her, but I decided that wouldn’t be such a good idea. I had no idea what else to do, so I put Derrick’s hands back into the freezer for the night so they wouldn’t rot.

T
he next few days were tough if only because I had to act a lot more upset about Derrick’s death than I actually was. As expected, the cops came around and asked me all sorts of questions about how Derrick and I got along, about where I was the day he was killed, and was there someone who could corroborate my whereabouts—things like that.

I held up perfectly, I must say.

One time, a couple of days after Derrick died, when I was heading down to the police station to be interviewed, I did wear Derrick’s hands. I was a little self-conscious about them, but no one even noticed.

But every night, when I put them on and sat down at the drawing board, I started to get some pretty unusual sensations. My drawings didn’t appear to be any better than before, at least not to me, but there was a feeling inside the gloves, inside my own hands when I was wearing the skin that was . . . well, strange.

I had finally come up with a method of preserving the skin. Every night, before I began to draw, I would take fifteen or twenty minutes to rub hand cream into the skin. I didn’t scrimp, either. I bought the most expensive kinds of hand cream available, and I spent a lot of time, working it into the thirsty pores. Over the next few days, I learned a lot about emollients and whatever. Night after night, it seemed as though the new skin—my new hands—became increasingly supple and sensitive. Touching things—anything—became a thrill. Vibrant ripples of pure energy tingled from my fingertips, up my arms and neck, all the way to the center of my brain.

Let me tell you, it was exhilarating!

I could barely concentrate on my drawing because I spent so much time simply
touching
things . . .
feeling
them as if for the first time.

And that’s what it was like.

For the first time in my life, I felt like I was
really
feeling things. It was just a matter of time before I could translate what I felt onto canvas and paper. Soon, I would have it all—my brother’s talent . . . maybe even the fame and money I deserved even more than he did!

But gradually—and I’m not sure when, maybe a month or so after Derrick died—something happened. It seemed as though my own hands inside the skin of Derrick’s hands were changing. At first, all of the sensations were pleasant—warm and moist, comforting, almost as if this new layer was my real skin; but after a couple of nights, the feelings turned more intense. The gentle warmth got steadily hotter until it began to feel like there was a slow-burning fire, smoldering deep beneath my skin. Every time I flexed my hands, watching the veins wiggle beneath the extra layer of skin, I gloried in the way the outermost skin—and I no longer thought of it as Derrick’s skin—stretched and pulled.

One night I had been drawing, lost—as always—in watching the way the skin on the back of my hands moved, when suddenly my hands felt like they had burst into flames. At first I tried to ignore the pain and keep drawing. Then I tried to endure it. After a while, though, I couldn’t stand it any longer. I put my drawing pencil down and started to roll one of the gloves off, the one on my right hand. Over the past few weeks, the skin had been treated so well that it usually rolled right off. This time, though, when I lifted the top edge, the skin caught. When I tried to pull it down, the skin on my own wrist started to rip.

Let me tell you, I panicked.

It took a great deal of effort to sit back, take a few deep breaths, and then try again. I sure as hell didn’t want to damage the hands. Where was I going to get another pair like this? I thought maybe it was just a matter of decay, but when I took the edge of the skin on the other hand and lifted it up, I once again felt my own flesh lift with it.

This can’t be happening
, I told myself.

Someone—I think it was that lady shrink I talked to a while ago—told me that I was imagining all of this. That Derrick’s skin had rotted away by then, and I was pulling at my own flesh. I listened to her, but like all that transference stuff she’d been talking about, I think she was wrong.

I lowered my drawing light and shined it straight down onto my hands, looking closely as I tried several times to peel back the skin. Each time I got the same result. The skin wouldn’t roll down. It was fused to my own skin. Hell, I can’t deny it; it looked like it had
become
my own skin.

I’m telling you, I was some scared at first, but the more I thought about it, the more I started to accept it.

This ain’t so bad
, I told myself.
In fact, isn’t this exactly what I’d wanted all along?

Why have hands that I have to put on and off like gloves?

Why not make them permanent?

Didn’t I want to feel the way Derrick had felt, and be able to control my pencils and brushes the way Derrick had controlled his?

I had wanted Derrick’s hands, had coveted them so much that I was willing to kill him to get them. So what was so wrong if his skin was permanently attached to mine?

We’d been twins in the womb! We shared everything else right down to our chromosomes. Other than the women in our lives, there wasn’t anything we
hadn’t
shared!

The only problem was, no matter what I did—whether I massaged hand cream into them or held them under a steady flow of cool water or held them inside the freezer—I couldn’t make that burning itch go away. It penetrated all the way to my bones, bringing tears to my eyes. I told myself that I’d eventually get used to it, that this was just a stage as Derrick’s skin and mine fused, but I didn’t sleep much that night.

The pain—oh, the pain!

It was a pure, silver singing inside my hands, and it never let up!

T
hat next morning, a couple of weeks after Derrick’s death, I was supposed to be at a memorial service being held in my brother’s honor at one of the art galleries in Portland. I forget the name of the gallery, but I’m sure the invitation is still on my desk, back at my apartment. Everyone was going to be there—a lot of important people in the art community as well as Alice and Derrick’s kids. I’ve been trying to feel bad for them, losing their father like that, but pity just doesn’t seem to be inside me.

When I got out of bed that morning, hardly having slept a wink, I considered calling the gallery and canceling. I was supposed to say a few words about my brother, but I hoped Andrew—the gallery director—would understand that I was still too shattered and couldn’t cope with doing it.

Before I dialed the gallery, though, I started thinking about how suspicious canceling out might look. Sure, the cops had stopped asking me questions, apparently satisfied that I’d had nothing to do with my brother’s murder, but I couldn’t be sure. They might still
think
I
had
done it, and they might just be waiting for me to slip up so they could nail me.

Maybe they even recognized Derrick’s hands!

So I determined, no matter how bad the pain in my hands got, I’d go through with this farce of a memorial service.

The problem was, I had no idea how bad it could get.

Even before I walked into the gallery that morning and saw how many people had gathered to honor my brother, my hands were clammy with sweat and trembling deep inside. I shook hands with as few people as possible, but couldn’t help but notice the startled reactions most of them gave me when we clasped hands.

Being one of the guests of honor, as it were, I had to sit in the front row along with Alice and the kids. Every wall in the room was adorned with Derrick’s paintings. None of them were really very good, I thought. I would do much better.

Andrew spoke first—a bit too long, I thought—about how he had been one of the first people in the “Art world” to recognize Derrick’s extraordinary talent, and how we and all of humanity have suffered a great loss in such a senseless, brutal act of butchery. I could hear people sniffing back their tears, but I hardly paid any attention to them. I couldn’t stop looking down at my hands. They felt like they were on fire.

I tried rubbing them, scratching them, folding my arms across my chest and pressing them against my sides—
anything
, but nothing would relieve the pain and burning itch. It got so intense I thought I was going to scream.

I didn’t notice when Andrew stopped speaking, but after a moment or two, I noticed that the room had fallen silent . . . a hushed expectancy. I glanced around and realized that everyone was staring at me.

A boiling blush raced up my arms and across my face. My heart was slamming hard inside my chest when I realized that Andrew must have introduced me. I shifted uncomfortably in my seat, preparing to stand, but I wasn’t even sure my legs would support me, much less carry me all the way to the podium.

The crowd was utterly still.

A steady, low, throbbing sound filled my ears as I inhaled and held my breath. I took a single step forward. My shoe, scraping across the carpet, made a sound like the rough scratching of sandpaper. Cold sweat broke out on my brow and trickled down the sides of my neck.

I wanted to scream, I tell you, but as I made my way up to the podium, I noticed a glass pitcher and several clean glasses on the small table beside the podium. The pitcher was filled with ice water.

That gave me an idea.