think that she must belong to some sort of religious order. Her attire was completely out of the ordinary but no one in the crowd seemed to notice, and she was completely bald.
I wanted to give my attention back to the skydivers, but I couldn’t. Not with her behind me. A few moments passed, with me trying not to look at her again, before I could no longer stop myself. All the other people had their faces turned up into the sky but she was looking directly at me.
“What do you want?” My voice was steady; I simply wanted an answer. She said nothing but continued to smile.
“Can’t you speak?” I asked. She shook her head, then held out a note. I hesitated before taking it.
It read:
When I looked back up, she was gone. All I saw was the crowd of upturned faces.
I read the note again, not believing she could know of my imperfection. It was on my chest, hidden under my shirt, and I was certain I’d never seen this woman before. But even if I had somehow improbably forgotten a previous encounter with a tiny bald Asian woman in a robe, there was no chance I would have shown her my scar.
I started to weave through the crowd, looking for any trace of her-a robe slipping through the masses; the back of her head-but there was nothing.
I put the note into my pocket, taking it out a few more times during the day to assure myself that it was real. Dwayne Michael Grace must have been feeling unusually generous, because he bought me cotton candy from the concession stand. Then Debi hugged me, and it was almost like we were a family. After the show, we attended an exhibition of lit paper lanterns floating down a nearby river, a display that was quite beautiful and unlike anything I had ever seen before.
When we got home late that evening, the note had disappeared from my pocket even though I had been extra careful.
I dreamt incessantly in my coma. Images reeled into each other, competing for the center ring of the circus.
I dreamt of a farmwoman heating bathwater. I dreamt of the blood from my mother’s womb. I dreamt of the flabby arms of my dying grandmother, pushing me up into the blue blue sky. I dreamt about Buddhist temples near cool rushing rivers. I dreamt of the little girl who was sold by her mother for meth. I dreamt of the twisted furnace of my car. I dreamt of a Viking warship. I dreamt of an ironworker’s anvil. I dreamt of a sculptor’s hands working furious chisels on stone. I dreamt of flaming arrows bursting out of the sky, I dreamt of raining fire. I dreamt of glass exploding everywhere. I dreamt of a delirious angel frozen in water.
But most of all, I dreamt of the gargoyles waiting to be born.
It was after the incident at the airfield that stroking the birth scar on my chest became a habitual action. I never noticed I was doing it, but others did. Dwayne hated it, slapping my hand away from my chest while telling me to “quit playing with yourself.” Then he’d smoke more drugs, making it difficult to take his criticism seriously.
When Dwayne and Debi died, I lost my only remaining relatives-from my mother’s side, anyway; my father’s side was nothing more than a question mark. I was placed in a group home called Second Chance House, which only made me wonder when I had had my first chance. It was while in Second Chance that I obtained most of my government-sponsored instruction. I went to high school classes fairly regularly, even though I found them boring, and acquired the basics in math and the sciences. All my hours in the library were not wasted. Long before anyone tried to teach me anything, I had already taught myself how to learn.
With the help of the other kids at Second Chance, I soon discovered a variety of drugs with which to experiment. Although disgusted by crystal meth, I was intrigued by marijuana and hashish. In fact, I’d received early encouragement towards these substances from my aunt and uncle who, not realizing that people could actually survive without chemical assistance, were trying to protect me from anything harder.
I also discovered a third hobby to go with libraries and narcotics: the miracle of making the sheets sing. It began by trading exploratory blowjobs with my new best friend, Eddie. This is the sort of thing that teenage boys do: they dare the other to kiss
By seventeen, I’d moved on to indulging my sexual curiosity with one of the counselors. Being a ward of the government was not without its advantages. Sarah was a troubled adult if ever there was one: an alcoholic in her mid-thirties with a cheating husband and an early midlife crisis. I provided her with consolation and excitement, and she provided me with sex. It did not hurt that my handsomeness, which hitherto had been little more than chubby-faced cuteness, had bloomed. My cheeks had acquired striking angles, my hair had curled pleasantly, and my body had made the transition to graceful muscularity.
When it came time for my discharge at eighteen, I had two talents. One was smoking drugs, the other was fucking my counselor, and I needed to convert one of these abilities into food and shelter. It did not seem that consuming drugs would be a well-paid occupation, but it was easy to find some work posing nude for $50, as the world is not short of middle-aged men who will pay boys to stand naked in their living rooms. I had no moral judgment about it; I was too busy calculating how many hamburgers fifty bucks could buy. From there it was a short jump to $150 for photos involving sexual activity and-since you’re already posing for stills, anyway-it makes a lot of sense to double or triple your income by acting in videos. Besides, who doesn’t want to be a movie star? Each shoot took, at most, a couple of days; more often, simply a few hours. That’s good money for an eighteen- year-old with no skills and, as simple as that, my career in pornography had started.
II.
Light spread across the insides of my eyelids and I awoke to the snake slowly swimming up my spinal cord, swallowing it with her disjointed jaw. There was the flick flick flick of her tongue as she hissed, I AM COMING AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT . The voice was feminine-this is how I knew it was a she-and her tongue tickled each vertebra as she searched her way towards the top of my spine. When she reached it, she licked at the undersocket of my skull, and then twisted a few times to let me know that she’d nestled in. Her scales chafed my internal organs and my liver was bruised by her casually wandering tail.
I was lying upon an air flotation bed that reduced friction and facilitated healing; my bandages lightly fluttered in the upward draft. On each side of the bed was a railing, painted white like bleached bones, so that I could not fall, or force myself, out. I soon named this bed the skeleton’s belly and I lay in the wind that rushed through its rib cage, while its very bones prevented me from wandering off to find a new graveyard.
I was off the ventilator but there were still enough tubes sticking out of me that I looked like a pincushion doll. The tubes twisted in circles around, around, around, and I thought of Minos presiding at the entrance to Hell, directing sinners to their final destinations by curling his tail around their bodies. For every coil of the tail, that’s one ring deeper into Hell. So I counted my lovely tubes, in simple curiosity: how deep was the grim sorter of the dark and the foul going to send me?
