Bedbugs Read Free Page A

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