Dermaphoria Read Online Free

covered. Bugs will lay eggs if they get underneath. Give us a urine sample.”
    On cue, his companion produces an empty coffee cup. I ask him if he’s trying to pass a test.
    “No, but somebody, somewhere, is. I connect people with what they want. How about you?”
    “I OD’d the same time I got burned.”
    “Things haven’t been going well for you, then?”
    “I’m saying I’m not clean. I piss in there and somebody gets violated back to jail, I promise you.”
    “Then give us a cigarette.”
    “I don’t smoke.”
    “Five dollars.”
    “What for?”
    He surveys my room.
    “Because you have it.”
    The warden must have rented me one of the Firebird’s nicer rooms. It has pictures and a sink.
    “And what do I get?”
    “You understand, now,” Jack says. “Perhaps I can help. What are you looking for?”
    “Everything I’ve done before I woke up in jail. I’ll piss into any cup, anytime, and pay you ten bucks for your trouble, if you can deliver. If you can’t, get out of here.”
    “That’s hardly necessary,” he says as though talking in his sleep. “I come here to say hello. I introduce myself and show you I’m on the level. I give you some words of caution. I ask you for a favor, as a friend, and you abandon all courtesy with me. Did I hit you?”
    “Take a walk. Leave.”
    “Did I hit you? Did I take your memory?”
    “Now.” They’re not moving. “The fuck you waiting for?”
    “You said ten dollars to know everything you’ve done. We had an agreement. I told you, I’m on the level.”
    One minute passes, then another. No sound but the televisionhissing. Jack is oblivious to my belligerence, his companion to everything else. The absence of everything prior to the last day succumbs to curiosity and I pay him. Beanpole scribbles into a notebook from his pocket. He tears the page loose and hands it to me.
    “There you are,” Jack says. “There’s a theater downtown. You need to go there.”
    “Which theater?”
    “Twenty blocks from our front door, you’ll see it. Next to a bar called Ford’s. Go inside and you’ll get your memory back. Unplug everything when you return. You can hear the electricity and it’s unsettling. If there’s anything else I can do to make your stay at the Firebird more pleasant, please don’t hesitate to contact me. Godspeed.”
    Beanpole’s penmanship is flawless:
    Speak to the Token Man. Ask for Desiree.

    four
    J AIL MOVES WITH ME, AN INVISIBLE BOX SURROUNDING MY EVERY STEP WITH every tick of the clock. A Mexican man in a brown jacket and a cowboy hat, who hasn’t smoked in five blocks, lights a cigarette. A woman waiting at a bus stop refolds a newspaper she hasn’t been reading. Someone passes me and I count, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, before I look back. If they’re not watching me, they’re watching me. Everyone is the Umbrella Man and he is everyone. Every cough, sneeze, smile and wave means both everything and nothing. The signals are everywhere .
    Inside the theater— XXX 24 H OUR L IVE N UDE G IRLS XXX —the sign above a glass cabinet of cast latex body parts reads, “See the Token Man for Change.” At the far end of an aisle, beyond row after row of yellow, pink and orange video boxes with nude women smiling for a game show but posing for a doctor, sits the Token Man, an obese ingot of flesh with shiny Elvis hair and a silk shirt covered with palm trees and parrots.
    “Something I can help you with?”
    “I need change.”
    “What kind?”
    “I need them to stop following me.”
    The Token Man says nothing. He wears a thick, gold rope around his neck and a gold wristwatch the size of a hubcap.
    “I’m here for Desiree.” Trying to break the silence, I’ve only made it longer. The Token Man crosses his arms, the chair beneath him creaking from the slight shift in his weight.
    “And who said you’d find Desiree here?”
    “Jack and the Beanstalk told me.”
    After another leaden half-minute passes. He asks