Dermaphoria Read Online Free Page A

for twenty dollars in exchange for four brass coins, each stamped with “XXX” on one side, “$1.00” on the other. I’m about to ask for the rest of my money, but the Token Man doesn’t look willing to negotiate. If he’s charging his own separate toll across the river to Desiree, I won’t negotiate, either.
    “Booth number four,” he says.
    A buzzer sounds and I push through a turnstile behind him.
    Booth number four is dark and smells like semen, body odor, pine disinfectant and smoke. I try not to breathe through my nose, and stretch the cuff of my sweatshirt over my bare hand as I slide the latch behind me. I feed a token to a coin meter inside, like the kind hooked to an electric pony outside the supermarket, and a window slides open, flooding booth number four with light from a pink room on the other side.
    A topless dancer appears, hips and ribs stretching through her skin and a cigarette hanging from her candy red lips, and she moves, oblivious to the dull rhythm pulsing overhead. She’s surrounded by lonely men, consumed with their own want, and she knows it. Their wanting hits the glass while her liquid candy smile passes right through. She slips off her panties as though picking her teeth.
    “Desiree?”
    “You got something for me, baby?”
    There’s a piece of paper—Tips—taped beside a slot below the window. I slide a Jackson through. I’m at a bank in Hell. She spins around once, then slides a bindle back through the slot. I want fresh air,a shower. I want to change my bandages and incinerate my old ones.
    The coin box beeps. The woman blows me a kiss as the window slides down, shutting out the pink light. Outside the booth, a man waits with a mop and a bucket of water so dark the mop head disappears beneath the turgid gray murk, shimmering with the pink and blue neon overhead.

    five
    T HE WHISPER SAID, “SWALLOW .” W HEN THE WHISPER IS GONE, SO IS THE BLUE pill. I tune out my second thoughts with a solitaire game.
    Reflective reds and blues shift among the queens, jacks and kings, like sunlight on the skin of some tropical reptile. The black lines float above the colors when I view them straight on, as though cut from the air with a razor. I lie back, staring at the luminous queen of hearts and breathing in the scent of wet asphalt drifting through my window, the smell of summer rain hitting the street.
    A hand beneath my shirt, palm pressing my chest. I swing, backhanding air. I look through my curtains and it’s not raining. Cloudless desert sky and late afternoon sun. I lie back down. I feel the hand of a lover lulling herself to sleep with my heartbeat.
    It’s you, Desiree.
    I feel your hair draped across my neck, your face and fingers on my chest. Your touch spreads across my skin when I take a deep, slow breath, my body like a cigarette glowing brighter with a long drag. Your hand is small and warm with rough fingertips and soft creases in your palm, dissolving the ache in my chest I didn’t know existed until it stopped, an ache I’ve carried for days, maybe my whole life, and it’s gone now. If I could stop the setting sun, I would sit in this minute for days on end.
    Blood rushes to my brain. The moths swarm to the warm light.Your sleeping breath brushes my face and blows the ashes from my memory.
    Sky the color of dead flies, an unbroken sheet of clouds carried on a warm wind that smells of electricity and flowers. Sweat on my face, my back, I’m sweltering beneath my Sunday best with a cold glass in my hands. The jangle of ice and the distant crash of thunder like an avalanche.
    The moving picture stutters and skips, each passing second more familiar than the previous until the streaming rush of memory smoothes into a contiguous chain of moments with your fingers splayed over my stomach, your body against mine.
    Damp grass beneath me. The trunk of a tree, the bark as rough and solid as stone, against my back. I smell pears ripening overhead. The horizon snaps blue and