Dermaphoria by Craig Clevenger Page B

in two days, whether you remember anything or not. And if you do consider moving, let me know this time.” He leaves.
    “They can still track me,” I say to his back.
    The drones in my head explode into a furious, flapping cloud. Thismust be what a brainstorm feels like. Like missing the first bug hidden in plain sight, I had been looking everywhere except under my nose. A stretch of bites covers both forearms, a finger’s width from a vein. Big, small, small. Small. The different-sized bugs make the different-sized bites, unless I’ve picked or scratched and inflamed one of them, which destroys the sequence. Small, small, small. Small, small. Small, big, small. Small. Small. If they can track me, I can track them.
    They could be sex toys or time machines as much as pipes, lined up on shelves labeled “Not for Sale to Persons Under 18 Years of Age” like rows of sleeping, mutant genies below a mural of Jimi Hendrix. Smaller pipes, along with scales, mirrors and scores of paraphernalia are spread beneath glass cases like alien medical instruments.
    A display of makeup sits atop a jewelry case. I grab a bottle of nail polish the luminous yellow of a school crossing sign. I hand it to the white kid with dreadlocks behind the register and ask for a black lightbulb.
    I can tell my room is different. Everything is shifted so slightly.

    fourteen
    T HEY PREACHED A RMAGEDDON, THE COMING RACE WAR, THE OVERTHROW OF our Zionist-occupied government and they stank. I see balls of fog in lieu of faces, like my jail-cell mirror reflection. They were target practicing in their living room with a pellet gun. The row of shredded and tattered stuffed animals is on my right, then my left, and the walls change color as one time and place bleeds into the next, the details slipping from beneath my memory like mercury.
    You stroke my wrist, back and forth, the way you did when you couldn’t sleep, so you wouldn’t let me, either.
    Their nicknames fit them too well or not at all. Pinstripe, Gash, Flash, Joker. They sounded like dwarfs, or candy bars. Ashtrays, cheeseburger wrappers, razorblades and hamster pipes on the coffee table, scorched foil and dried blood in the bathroom sink. A mound of underwear below the empty cardboard spool soaked up the toilet overflow. Iodine stains on the ceiling, the stench of brake fluid and road flares, the burn marks outnumbered only by their excuses for the damage. Silence drooled from their open mouths when I asked them the molecular weight of carbon, the vapor pressure of toluene or theflashpoint of diethyl ether.
    The Chain was going about it all wrong, I’d told White, trusting amateurs scattered among unconnected labs. Amateur cooks don’tfollow formulas as they should. They don’t master the basics and think they can improvise. They create emergencies, which create problems for everyone.
    “You will work in teams of two,” I explained. “One team will tear strikers from the matchbooks—“
    “Can we use matchboxes?” one of them asked, cutting me off.
    “Yes. You can use matchboxes. Two of you will tear strikers from the books.”
    “Or the boxes.”
    “Or the boxes,” I paused, waiting for the next interruption, which never came. “And two of you will sand the strikers with a Dremmel.”
    “What’s a Dremmel?”
    “Don’t mind him, he’s new,” another one said.
    “You’re all new.”
    “Nuh uh. I’ve been doing this shit for years.”
    “Not my way, you haven’t.”
    “You need to relax, man. I can handle this.”
    I hadn’t driven that distance to take shit from some toothless tractor-pulling tweaker.
    “Explain that.” I pointed to the scorch mark on the coffee table.
    “It was an accident.”
    “And that?” The rust-colored fog stained into their ceiling was from evaporated iodine. “How many accidents have you had?” I kicked a glass bowl, already cracked from sloppy handling and coated with the residue amateur cooks leave for cops to scrape up. That seemed to