Three Dream Busts later, Brittany was dispirited and exhausted. She’d almost fallen off the bed during the last one. She was certain that Dead Gopher Man would come over and hit her, or at least drag her back to the middle of the mattress, but he didn’t. She could hear him across the room, eating something right from the pan, muttering to someone she was now convinced was not there. So she scrunched herself back onto the bed using the side of her head and feet as pivots, raising the middle of her body like a big inchworm, wriggling backward, her ankles aching against each other and the black hood riding up so far onto her head that she could now see through the airholes if she moved her eyeballs down a little.
She lay on her side. Dead Gopher Man was somewhere in the room behind her. When she tilted back her head and looked down through the breathing hole, she saw a big window with a naked tree, a pond and a playhouse behind it. There were walls inside at both ends. It was lit from above and looked clean. Was it a cage? A playroom for a toddler? Where were the toys?
Soundlessly, Dead Gopher Man came into her view. He had his back to her and he was looking through the glass. He looked neither tall nor short; neither fat nor skinny. He wore a jacket like Daddy did sometimes when he picked her up after his work. With his cap and bandanna gone she could see his short, white, brushed-back hair. It wasn’t a hairstyle you saw a lot. When he turned to the side, his face looked kind of tight and mean. He was holding something in one hand that looked like a little girl’s dress — pink with white trim, like you’d wear to church. In the other hand was some kind of white lacy thing. He was looking at the playhouse behind the glass.
Then he turned all the way and looked at her. She closed her eyes. But she did see his face first — a regular face, maybe a little thin, with brown eyes. It was a serious face, one that you wouldn’t want to talk to if your mouth was full of food. That was a big thing with her dad. Dead Gopher Man looked like he would spank you for anything. She started sobbing again, thinking of her dad, and the way he was big and strong and would beat the crap out of this guy if he was here. He was never there when you wanted him to be.
Maybe just one more big giant Dream Bust would work and she’d open her eyes to find all of this gone.
She opened her eyes again and looked down toward the breathing hole and she didn’t see the glass cage at all, but instead, a face up close and looking in at her. Then she smelled his breath again. She tried to keep her body from shaking as she scrunched her eyes shut hard and sobbed, but it didn’t do any good at all.
Hypok rearranged the hood over its head, just to make sure it was getting breath and not looking out. Then he took out the big scissors and cut the nightgown from neck to hem, then the sleeves, then he peeled it away like a skin. It shivered and pressed its hooded head into one of the pillows. Its skin was pale and perfect, its panties white. He wanted to see and maybe touch what was under those. Hypok put one of Valeen’s old dresses on Item #3, touching it as little as possible but consuming every inch of it with his eyes. When it was arranged, he stood and looked down at it, pleased.
He went into the bedroom and got his good skin from a drawer in the old dresser. He took off his clothes and stepped through the leg openings. He didn’t look in the mirror because he’d seen himself enough times in all these years to have the image branded in his memory: the raw pink stretchy patches that invaded all of him except his face and neck and hands, the lesions, the rock-hard scars left by two-plus decades of chronic psoriasis that no amount of Lidex or UVA baths could control let alone cure, the vanishing wilderness of his original skin, his birth skin, his good skin, the way God had intended him to be before his mother got to him with the spray. No, he didn’t even look. One worked with what one had. The cards one is dealt. He slipped his legs into the thin cotton suit, pulled it up snugly to his waist, then over his shoulders, then put his hands through the armholes and stretched them out straight to bring the thing taut against his back. He reached down to his crotch and zipped himself all the way up to his chin and in.
Now he looked in the mirror. And there he was, newly hatched in a skein of overlapping bright silver blue metallic scales that housed him in a supple, holographic shimmer. He gave a turn. The polyester scales picked up the dim light and gathered it into a rainbow of reflected color. Next, the booties and gloves. And a lingering final assessment in the glass: yes, reptilian and celestial all at once, he thought, essential and ideal, yet tactile and present. The best he could be. Hypok transcendent. Touchable.
His heart was beating slow and smooth as he went back to the living room. He finished the tequila and poured more. He felt capable with the good skin on him. His shoulders were relaxed, loose and low, and his neck was strong but flexible. He walked, feeling himself. His head was quick on a neck this powerful, and it was pleasurable to feel it swiveling left, straight ahead, then hard right, as he took the measure of his environment. He felt like he could smoothly glide around any obstacle — rock or brick or branches. He felt as if he could enter a swamp, slowly and noiselessly, and account himself well in the mysteries of dark water. Item #3 was behaving now, curled into itself atop the old red blanket he and his sisters had slept under all those years ago, its hooded face toward the tank. Moloch stared at him from the depth of the pool. Hypok reached up and turned on the video recorder.
He gulped the tequila, set the glass on the chair arm, then guided himself down beside the Item, lying between it and the glass. His scales slid without resistance against the wool. He basked for a moment. For a while he watched the unmoving head of Moloch and sensed the breathing behind him. To his heightened sense of smell, the old blanket smelled like it did three decades ago — of thickly fatted mammal and juvenile human females. But thirty years ago was right now. And right now was the past, too — all the way back to the black sloughs where life begins — and whatever future he chose to take. He reached down to the floor and got the two remote exposure controls. These he transferred to his left hand. Without looking he reached behind himself with his right arm and set his brightly scaled hand on the small of the Item’s back. It began sobbing.