LITMIR.BIZ

       The Skin You’re In

      Knock knock. Who’s there? Clayton. Clayton who? Clayton gone away not coming back, all eaten up on the inside by the dreaming thing he let into his head that didn’t mean to get trapped here, drawn out by the raw wound of the man’s mind, blazing like a lamp in one of those border places where the skin of the worlds are permeable, exactly like the walls of a cheap motel if the walls of a cheap motel can sometimes turn to a meniscus you can push right through by accident. It only wants to get home, and it doesn’t know how.

      The dream navigates the city in Clayton’s body, pulling on his thoughts like strings in a labyrinth to guide it through the streets. His muscle memory manages the brute mechanics, shifting the stick, applying the brake, obeying the rules of the road.

      All the rules. All the definitives. Car! Tree! Traffic light! Bus stop! Things are only one thing even if they are categories, species, of themselves, because the names lock them in even more specifically. Elder! Poplar! Oak! Black Gum! White Cedar! Basswood! It feels suffocated by the rigidity of the world. And yet … there is evidence of the dreaming everywhere. There is a world beneath the world that is rich and tangled with meaning. Clayton knew this.

      Clayton’s thoughts are fuzzy things, flickering beneath the surface, keeping them both alive. It has to hold onto them, to steer him through the world, to make the words in Clayton’s mouth come out in the right order.

      The ghost nerves sometimes fire in the reconstructed flesh, like when he passes by the corner café and his hand flies to his mouth in an automatic gesture for cigarettes. Or his head turns to watch a woman’s hips rolling as she walks down the street ahead of him.

      There are other places with strong personal associations, layers of meaning mapped onto the city that make it more navigable. They pass a hospital and the dream is struck by Clay’s memory of the smell of the detergent. Bundled-up sheets, stained with shit or blood or urine. The fierce heat of the laundry and the rush of steam from the dryer doors. He got fired from the hospital for stealing a stained sheet, pinning it up at an exhibition. He called it ‘Sick’.

      The dream takes comfort in Clayton’s memories. It seeks them out, and that they are not exactly as the man remembered gives it hope, that perhaps the world can be twisted and bent.

      It can sense the unconscious currents beneath the city, like the gas pipes that puff thick plumes of steam into the streets.

      There are lines of associations. There are nested fears. The giant black fist suspended on cables in the square among the high-rise buildings, a monument to the boxer Joe Louis, but also to power and fear. The curved towers of GM’s headquarters nearby, a cluster of glass dicks nudged up together for safety, every window lit up, thrusting defiantly into the darkness.

      The currents are crude and subtle in the billboards shouting slogans that say one thing, but mean another, tugging at desires and anxiety, but also alive in the graffiti, the squiggled tags that writhe with look-at-me, acknowledge-me, I’m-here.

      And art, most of all.

      The dream and Clayton sit on a cool marble bench in the central courtyard of the Detroit Institute of Art, which Clayton never visited because he didn’t like the formality of it, when he thought art should be rough and ready, and they stare at Diego Rivera’s giant frescoes of men and machinery and feel the churning beneath. All the galleries are like that, dreams seething beneath the surface of the paint, under the skin of the bronze statues. Clayton was so close. But he didn’t know how to cut through.

      The dream thinks it does. You need life to make life. ‘The birds and the bees’, to steal a thought from the man it is inhabiting.

      Eventually it has to leave the art museum. The needs of the body are a nagging constant. So they are behind the wheel of the truck when it sees the boy, half-collapsed against the side of the bus stop, his head resting against the scuffed-up Plexiglas. It stops the car and watches the boy sleep. There is no-one else around. The boy stirs and his leg kicks out, once, reflexively, like a rabbit or a dog. Or another kind of animal.

      It climbs out and goes to get something out of the toolbox the man keeps in the back.

      It remembers this from a dream Clayton once had.

      ‘Get up!’ Shaking the limp boy by his bare shoulders, his skin still clammy from overnighting in the freezer in the basement. The boy’s head lolls back on his neck, and the dream weeps with frustration, its tears shattering like glass on the cement, among the detritus in the tunnel, the trash and condoms, the old tires, bits of chalk left over from a mural of a girl’s face, smiling down on them with serene encouragement in the quiet and the dark.

      It brought him here to unveil him, close to the physical border between Canada and the United States, in the hopes that borders overlap.

      It can’t understand what’s wrong, why he won’t get up, maybe wobbly at first on his new legs, like a faun, before he begins to bound and leap and fly, and then his very being, the fact of him, will rip through the skin between the worlds, let them slip away, back home. Or bring all of the dream crashing in on them.

      It has been so very careful, so patient. Flesh is messier, and has its own challenges, but it is not so very different to working in metal or clay or wood. It followed the instructions on the package of chemicals very carefully. A day to prepare, a day to bind. Maybe that was its mistake. The choice of materials, the freezer, keeping the deer in the refrigerator, the plastic wrap mummifying the boy, suffocating him. Perhaps he opened his eyes in the ice chest, battered his

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