Peel Back the Skin

by Anthony Rivera

  But in a way, I was grieving. Dreaming myself into Big Joe’s world was my attempt to move past my guilt. The Joe Durrenmatrix was a language of symbols for understanding our marriage, giving its lack of resolution a new story.

  There was so much to take in at first. Rain. Horns. Rude pedestrians. Fifty-cent hamburgers and soda-fountain milkshakes. Like being in a foreign city in a foreign time. Annoyances like wet clothes, indigestion and brain freeze showed how deeply I’d embedded myself in illusion.

  But I quickly discovered my subconscious had other plans besides letting me play in dreamland. My being here fit into a larger design. My name was still Jason, but I had a role to play. I was Big Joe’s personal assistant. I looked like Tommy Kirk and spoke like Wally Cleaver, the epitome of good grooming. Because my mind had no frame of reference for my character—he didn’t exist in the show—my interactions with co-workers sounded wooden, my fellow dream actors lost in their parts.

  Still, the staginess of events suggested we supported a storyline building toward a powerful revelation. We were in a whodunit directed by the divine presence in me, and the divine spoke through Joe Durrenmatt.

  I pulled him aside one day. I still wanted to tell him about Alex Gilroy. I didn’t know why, but I sensed a link between the mystery and my personal contribution to the compendium of wicked acts stored in Big Joe’s mind. He nodded and drew me behind a curtain. We were in the apartment of someone we had come to question.

  Even in black and white, the sight of someone whose intestines had been ripped out with a Bowie knife was a ghastly one.

  “Actually, I’ve been meaning to talk to you, Jason,” Big Joe said.

  “About what, sir?” I asked.

  “My daughter. You…intend to marry her?”

  A rosy glow colorized his cheeks.

  “Tomorrow, sir. With your permission, I aim to propose to her tomorrow.”

  So that was the revelation, I thought. The discovery of murder, the stilted conversation, the absurdity of discussing nuptials near a mutilated corpse. These were contrivances of the divine presence speaking to me through the sepulchral voice of Joe Durrenmatt.

  I was to marry his daughter.

  Anjanette.

  Or, Angie the redo.

  I almost cried out the first time I saw her. I thought my dead wife had entered Big Joe’s office. She was Angie with a pixie haircut. Our history together came to me in a flash. We had been dating for two years. We went on Sunday picnics. I modeled for her sculptures. She didn’t have tattoos but didn’t need them. Anjanette was Angie’s “Light” sigils personified.

  After that initial shock, I fell in love with Anjanette. She was what Angie could have been if she’d believed in herself. She didn’t need to drink to convince herself she deserved to be loved. Her beauty grew out of inner harmony, not in accordance with the fashion industry. Because of that, she could tease shapes from raw stuff. From Anjanette’s “E.T. hands” flowed the music of the earth.

  I marveled at my subconscious for giving me this renewed Angie. In doing so, I purified myself because we mirrored each other. We formed a ground of creation in which she loved what she made, and I loved her without the guilt of being an unwanted child. We weren’t bound by need, we were free. And that’s what I wanted, I guessed, at the core of this whole drama—to experience what it would feel like for us to love each other unconditionally. Through Big Joe, my god power told me this was why I was dreaming this dream. To rewrite our marriage. To enjoy the Great Adventure I had been denied at birth.

  So we spoke no more about wedding plans in the dead man’s apartment. Big Joe patted my shoulder and it was back to business. We both forgot I had meant to talk to him.

  That night I lay wide awake, worried about waking in the real world. I wanted to stay in dreamland forever. I would have gladly died or slipped into a coma as long as I spent my last hours with Anjanette in a dream of timeless love.

  If I died, no one would miss me. My adoptive parents were dead. Angie’s family hated me. Except for Olin, all my friends were the social network kind.

  What a disappointment I must be to him, I thought. He’d invested so much in me. After Angie’s death, Olin took over the bills and mortgage. He pushed me to finish my novel. “The story, man,” he kept saying. “The story will get you through this.”

  I remembered how he looked at me when I told him the autopsy results, like a father impressed by his child’s progress report. He thought I’d handled the news well because I was following his advice. The more he checked on me though, the more he saw the truth.

  I could tell Olin wanted to control me like he controlled the nation’s flow of information.

  Looking back, I wish he could have.

  * * *

  When I proposed to Angie, we were staying at the beach. She spoon-fed us Ben & Jerry’s ice cream while we snuggled in bed watching a horror movie. She thought I was messing with her until she slipped on the ring and studied herself in the mirror.

  It was her mirror image I looked at now, under an equestrian statue by the light of a full moon.

  We had the park to ourselves. The park where we took our Sunday picnics. Anjanette wore a head scarf and parka to fight off the chill. She didn’t kiss hungrily like Angie, but as if tracing an arcane emotion on my tongue.

  We separated. She looked at me curiously. I reached for the ring in my pocket. A car drove past us on the embankment behind me. Its high beams slugged across Anjanette’s face. At the same time, the skin under my right eye twitched. I turned to hide it from her.

  I pocketed the ring. I couldn’t think of a worse time for my old tic to come back, the one that started after I knocked out Alex Gilroy. I wondered if it was connected to my compulsion to tell Big Joe about my adolescent misdeed. What could a thirty-one-year-old crime have to do with the Great Adventure?

  Anjanette strained to see me through the afterimage on her eyes.

  Her father’s voice echoed inside my head. Tell me. Tell me.

  I touched the incriminating flesh. What was my tic telling me?

  Anjanette seemed as surprised as I was when the words, “And now back to you, Bob,” trumpeted from my throat.

  My voice rang like a radio deejay’s in a cathedral. In the moonlight, Anjanette’s face went bone-white. I drove my fist into her solar plexus, doubling her over and knocking her into the statue’s plinth. I smote her head against the concrete base. Then I threw her facedown on the ground.

  Blood darkened the back of her head scarf. Her “E.T. hands” shaped lumps of pain in the dirt bordering the path. My voice boomed. “Police are still chasing leads in the brutal slaying of a woman in the Wentworth District.”

  I kicked Anjanette in the ribs.

  “Live at the scene is correspondent Steve Dunthorpe. What can you tell us, Steve?”

  I turned her over and dragged her to a bamboo stand.

  “Bob, I’m standing at the spot where twenty-nine-year-old Anjanette Durrenmatt was viciously assaulted and murdered.”

  I hiked up her skirt and spread her knees apart.

  “The daughter of defense lawyer Joe Durrenmatt, this young woman was a promising sculptor before the fateful night that would end her life.”

  I fought off the nails slashing at my face.

  “The killer raped her—”

  She kneed me in the balls.

  “Correction, the killer punched her repeatedly and then gouged out her eyes.”

  Anjanette’s screams pounded into me like vibrations of a brutal orgasm. My thumbs smeared with her eyeball fluids, I seized her throat. I had to re-grip because of the blood and sweat on my hands.

  Red tears colorized her cheeks.

  I slipped off her heels and chucked them into the bamboo.

  “Police are searching for a man she was seen with earlier this evening.”

  Only the moon saw me leaving the park.

  “This just in. A second murder has been confirmed.”

  I walked up to a t
ransient sleeping in a doorway.

  “Police say the man was beaten by an unknown assailant, then left in a street near the park where Durrenmatt’s body was discovered.”

  A bicyclist saw me dragging the smelly corpse. I chased him down.

  “Yet another body has been found. A teenage cyclist died of blunt force trauma to the head.”

  Dead storefront windows watched me take off on the kid’s bike.

  “We’ve just received word of a fourth victim.”

  An old lady stepped onto her front porch.

  “An elderly woman has died of deep wounds to her chest and abdomen that appear to have been inflicted with a garden hoe.”

  I swung the hoe at her cat, too, but Kitty scurried under a car.

  I coasted into the field of an elementary school. Two young lovers sitting near the playground watched me dismount. The boy got to his feet. He was big, over six feet. He dodged my swing and kicked me. I stumbled back and fell on my bike. As I lay on the crossbar, he punched me in the face repeatedly. I blocked one of his blows and twisted free, then pinned him to the ground.

  I don’t remember much after that, except that when I heard the girl’s footfalls on blacktop I spat out a chunk of the boy’s face and gave chase. Catching her near a stairwell, I spun her around and shoved her over the rail. She bounced off brick wall, then tumbled into shadow. A glowing exit sign at the bottom lit up a sandaled foot.

  “Two teenagers were slain outside an elementary school.”

  Around the corner I came to a movie theater.

  I parked the bike and shot the ticket girl in the face. A packed house was watching Elvis Presley. Elvis was singing to a puppet that he didn’t have a wooden heart. I fired my gun into the crowd. Screams triggered a stampede for the exits.

  After shooting several runners, I pocketed the gun and blended with the fleeing moviegoers.

  Out in the parking lot, people sobbed and hugged.

  “We’ve just received news of a shooting at the Oldmark Theater,” I said. “The killer is armed and dangerous. Repeat. Armed and dangerous.”

  Sirens wailing nearby, I set off on foot.

  Tears stung my eyes. I felt trapped in a serial killer’s psyche. I felt apart from him and yet one with him, two minds in one body prowling the streets for more victims. Why would my subconscious do this to me? What was it trying to teach me? Why would it make me shed the blood of innocents?

  Why would it make me kill the woman I loved?

  I tried to convince myself I hadn’t caused real suffering. What happened here was an illusion, it did not belong to space-time.

  But I had felt pain here, and if these people were figments of my imaginings of pain, then I was hurting through them. I saw their faces, heard their screams, felt Anjanette’s terror and agony beneath my fingers. Only a little while ago we were to embark on our Great Adventure. I would have chosen death over reality to rewrite history with her. Now all I wanted was to return to consciousness.

  Wake up!

  But I couldn’t. I was a wooden puppet dancing to the divine presence singing through Elvis Presley. I danced into a cul-de-sac toward the door of a blue house. From the darkened pane my tear-streaked face grinned back at me, an omen of Damien-like proportions in the mirror that never lies.

  I realized who had made my dream a nightmare. It was the thing that watched me behind my web browser when I surfed for porn on the Internet. The thing that smiled when I rode my bike behind Alex Gilroy, clutching a rock. The thing that existed before words and rules were poured into me, before I became Jason.

  The thing that was not me, Not Jason.

  The door was unlocked.

  I entered a vestibule. White walls, red carpet. Red, like Anjanette’s tears. Not Jason looked at me from the hallway mirror. I wanted to blast his grinning, twitchy face with the gun he had magicked from Anjanette’s engagement ring.

  Instead I climbed a staircase and shot the woman sleeping in the nearest bedroom.

  “The killing spree continues.”

  I moved on to the room at the end of the hall.

  Anjanette had prevented me from raping her, but the girl blinking at me under a hanging mobile of Escher’s Drawing Hands looked too young, too timid, to keep me from dancing to Not Jason’s strings.

  I tried to convince her I didn’t have a wooden heart.

  Not Jason giggled in the girl’s dressing mirror.

  “I am, however, getting wood,” I said.

  I unzipped my pants.

  “Notice something?” I paced before the foot of her bed. “Everything is in color now. Like in that movie, Pleasantville. Roses are red. Teardrops are red. Your sheets will be red. Guess I don’t need this anymore. Don’t even think about it.” She was eyeing the gun I’d placed on the nightstand.

  “Or will your sheets be red? Tell me, are you intact?”

  The girl started crying.

  “Now, that will only make it sweeter—”

  The Drawing Hands mobile caught my eye again.

  I grabbed a permanent marker from the nightstand.

  On the wall I drew:

  ITISMYWILLTOGETOUTOFTHEJOEDURRENMATRIX.

  I fell into a vortex of shapes and colors.

  The chaos blinked and a room materialized.

  “And now back to you, Bob.”

  * * *

  My head ached. My throat was parched. My clothes were damp with sweat.

  I reread Olin’s note:

  Dropped by today but you were asleep and I didn’t want to disturb you. Peace.

  Peace? He had given me anything but.

  He had switched my TV to a twenty-four-hour news station. The droning bulletins must have influenced me subliminally, turned me from Joe Durrenmatt’s errand boy into Charles Manson’s golem. The latest report concerned a female jogger who had been raped and murdered in a city park. Live at the scene was correspondent Steve Dunthorpe.

  I looked around the room at the food cartons, the bottle of Jack. The mail Olin had stacked next to his note on the coffee table. It wasn’t fair, I thought. I deserved better than this. I hadn’t asked for Angie to be taken away from me. I didn’t need scowling, thick-lipped Steve Dunthorpe reminding me, like Mick Jagger, that rape and murder was just a shot away, even in dreamland. For a moment, I wanted to dream myself into the TV and strangle Steve Dunthorpe.

  Then I realized that, without my will, the TV had no sigil potential. The magic only worked if I sent a request to my subconscious. How, then, had my dream gone wrong?

  A vision flashed before me.

  The face I had seen in the mirrors of the blue house.

  Not Jason’s.

  He was why I had wanted to tell Big Joe about Alex Gilroy. My god power hadn’t spoken to me through Not Jason, it had tried to warn me about him.

  Not Jason was the negative space from which my domestication into society began, at birth. He was my dark half. Our duality transcended space-time. It survived my entry into the projection of desire I called the Joe Durrenmatrix. My opposite drew power from the magical intent supporting my dreamland. I had given my worst enemy the key to paradise.

  Not Jason seethed with what Buddhists called “mind monkey”: restless, capricious, uncontrollable. He was my pussy-crazed, gun-toting, TV-news-recycling murder monkey.

  He had taken Anjanette from me.

  I wasn’t ready to let her go.

  I would take back the Joe Durrenmatrix. I was the stronger of two principles. Not Jason had desire, but Jason had focus. We were like super-humans battling for dominion in the video game of my subconscious. I had the advantage because I understood the programming language. As I had used a sigil to escape, I would use another to control Not Jason.

  To be safe, I put on Joe Durrenmatt, Crusader of Justice and wrote a note asking Olin to let me sleep and leave the TV where it was.

  I waited for Picasso’s ghost.

  * * *

  At first I thought the girl had screamed. I picked up the old-fashio
ned telephone on the nightstand. My gun was gone.

  “Police. We’ve got you surrounded,” the voice said on the other end. “If you haven’t touched the girl, we can settle this peacefully.”

  He said goil, not girl.

  I slammed the phone down and picked up the permanent marker. Under my escape sigil I drew:

  Or, ITISMYWILLTOSTARTTONIGHTOVER, and waited.

  The phone shrieked again.

  I waited.

  * * *

  The cops booked me without incident. Unless you count the tasing, nightstick beating and group pissing I took before a cheering mob in the police station parking lot.

  A Brad Pitt look-alike named Chuck interrogated me. “Tell us about the goil,” he said. “Did you touch her? Where did you touch her? Was she pretty? Did you get a good look at her meat coitains?”

  I couldn’t answer him through the duct tape. All I could do was protect the shard of glass he’d stuck in my mouth. I was Horton the Elephant guarding the nest egg. It didn’t break, not while Chuck’s cohorts beat me with brass knuckles, whipped me with belts and pounded on me with socks full of 9-volt batteries. In a grisly parody of motherhood, Chuck made me suck his nipples while he strangled me with his t-shoit.

  I didn’t get a phone call. I didn’t get to use the bathroom. I did get a close look at Chuck’s eyes. They were the eyes of a coked-out gangster. All my tormentors looked that way—not human. Savages. Murder monkeys.

  I’d made a fatal mistake coming back here. Not Jason had corrupted my dream of bliss and harmony and made it a wasteland of madness and murder monkeys. My sigils couldn’t stop him. He controlled the illusion. He had taken the place of the divine presence and mocked me in the costume of law and order.

  “Let’s test yer gag reflex.” Good old Chuck.

  His index finger tasted of blood and urine. Tears salted my lacerated face as Chuck raped me orally. It was justice, in a way. I didn’t deserve Angie. To deny her death, I’d tried to immortalize her in a fantasy and then watched her die all over again. I was the other half of Not Jason, who attacked boys with rocks and got off to pictorial simulations of women being raped. Now I too was the object of his hatred and depraved lust.