THE FINITE
The moment Xavier snipped off my finger, the process kicked into high gear. Rather than bringing me back to the life Xavier had in mind for me, the pain sent me completely in another direction. With the snap of the scissors, I flew above myself and saw out over the top of everything.
“You did what you wanted, but there wasn’t much to it,” I told Xavier on the drive to the airport, my finger bandaged. “I’m staying in Dayton because out here in the boonies I’m able to see the changes coming more clearly.”
“It’ll get easier,” he said.
The slot machine spun.
“Skrip,” I said.
“Well, yeah,” Xavier said. “We cracked that one a year ago. Pun intended. You’ve been stealing it from your dad for weeks.”
Xavier, what have you been doing?
From my back they pulled plate glass, pieces large and small. But the black, glassy dust glittering my skin in a way tweezers couldn’t pinch, all that they had left in for my body to retain or reject. So far, it has retained.
In the days after photographs of my back were leaked, I was offered $80 billion in separate competing contracts for the pattern on my back, the rights to take samples, to patent the black, iridescent qualities, and so on. Elizabeth Casey. She was dead, except for whatever part of her had gotten into my skin and gotten under theirs.
In the first weeks, Michelle liked to remind me of soothing.
“This is called soothing,” she said, rubbing lotion across my shining back.
“What?”
“What part of you do you want me to pay the most attention to?”
“What parts of her are in me?”
“We can’t know right now, but they’re trying to find out.”
“It’s probably the wrong question.”
“It might be, yeah.”
“If I sold the pattern rights, I could fund a few thousand kids’ food programs or jump start the Congo’s space program or what, save how many rich people’s lives? Today.”
“You say today because —”
“Because tomorrow, different people line up, so that doesn’t work. I’m finite.”
“It’s such a relief to hear you say that.”
“I can catch the baby turtle on its flipper path to death, or I can catch your cousin. How do you like that?”
“You’re a marketing genius too.”
“Pick.”
“And we pick your pocket accordingly.”
“Well, not incredibly accordingly.”
“You’re the —”
“You really need me to be the something of something, don’t you?”
“But I —”
“The plan is to be the nothing of something. I’m the weird dream of something.”
That Spring, I managed to check my father into rehab during a horizontal snowstorm, and he played it off so well I thought he’d passed through his gut-level addiction to painkillers, but a month later, with the plowed snowbanks melted, he found the new pain specialist in town who kept his prescription pad by a vase filled with yellow and sunset-red pharmaceutical company pens.
An afternoon when he was out seeing his doctor, I used a spare set of keys to let myself into my father’s trailer. I gathered his medication bottles, a sheet of paper and a blue magic marker and charted their labels, counted the pills. As I turned to my laptop, the ceiling closed in, and before I objectively acknowledged it was happening, my heart was racing. Through the beginning of what I knew was going to be another attack, I searched my father’s pills’ generic and proprietary names and made notes on the number of milligrams he was swallowing, their habit-forming potentials. As I worked the searches I felt calmer, until a page loading error whipped me into a panic. It doesn’t take longer than an instant before the mind is forcing itself back into the narrowest of possible spaces. The skrip, I'd discovered, had always been for me.
To be continued
Art through AI