Читать книгу Dermaphoria - Craig Clevenger - Страница 10

four

JAIL MOVES WITH ME, AN INVISIBLE BOX SURROUNDING MY EVERY STEP WITH every tick of the clock. A Mexican man in a brown jacket and a cowboy hat, who hasn’t smoked in five blocks, lights a cigarette. A woman waiting at a bus stop refolds a newspaper she hasn’t been reading. Someone passes me and I count, one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, before I look back. If they’re not watching me, they’re watching me. Everyone is the Umbrella Man and he is everyone. Every cough, sneeze, smile and wave means both everything and nothing. The signals are everywhere.

Inside the theater—xxx 24 HOUR LIVE NUDE GIRLS xxx—the sign above a glass cabinet of cast latex body parts reads, “See the Token Man for Change.” At the far end of an aisle, beyond row after row of yellow, pink and orange video boxes with nude women smiling for a game show but posing for a doctor, sits the Token Man, an obese ingot of flesh with shiny Elvis hair and a silk shirt covered with palm trees and parrots.

“Something I can help you with?”

“I need change.”

“What kind?”

“I need them to stop following me.”

The Token Man says nothing. He wears a thick, gold rope around his neck and a gold wristwatch the size of a hubcap.

“I’m here for Desiree.” Trying to break the silence, I’ve only made it longer. The Token Man crosses his arms, the chair beneath him creaking from the slight shift in his weight.

“And who said you’d find Desiree here?”

“Jack and the Beanstalk told me.”

After another leaden half-minute passes. He asks for twenty dollars in exchange for four brass coins, each stamped with “XXX” on one side, “$1.00” on the other. I’m about to ask for the rest of my money, but the Token Man doesn’t look willing to negotiate. If he’s charging his own separate toll across the river to Desiree, I won’t negotiate, either.

“Booth number four,” he says.

A buzzer sounds and I push through a turnstile behind him.

Booth number four is dark and smells like semen, body odor, pine disinfectant and smoke. I try not to breathe through my nose, and stretch the cuff of my sweatshirt over my bare hand as I slide the latch behind me. I feed a token to a coin meter inside, like the kind hooked to an electric pony outside the supermarket, and a window slides open, flooding booth number four with light from a pink room on the other side.

A topless dancer appears, hips and ribs stretching through her skin and a cigarette hanging from her candy red lips, and she moves, oblivious to the dull rhythm pulsing overhead. She’s surrounded by lonely men, consumed with their own want, and she knows it. Their wanting hits the glass while her liquid candy smile passes right through. She slips off her panties as though picking her teeth.

“Desiree?”

“You got something for me, baby?”

There’s a piece of paper—Tips—taped beside a slot below the window. I slide a Jackson through. I’m at a bank in Hell. She spins around once, then slides a bindle back through the slot. I want fresh air, a shower. I want to change my bandages and incinerate my old ones.

The coin box beeps. The woman blows me a kiss as the window slides down, shutting out the pink light. Outside the booth, a man waits with a mop and a bucket of water so dark the mop head disappears beneath the turgid gray murk, shimmering with the pink and blue neon overhead.