Bedbugs Read Free Page B

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