Pasha Malla
The Withdrawal Method
THE SLOUGH
i
"1 SHOULD PROBABLY tell you," she said, swallowing coffee, "that I'm about to lose my skin."
"What? Is that an expression?"
"No, not an expression. People's skin cells rejuvenate every seven years. Usually it's gradual, but I've been using something to make it happen all in one go."
"What?" He put down his knife and fork. There was something suddenly disquieting about the idea of bacon. "How does this work? What do you use?"
"It's a topical cream," she said.
"Topical? Do you mean like up-to-date? Current?"
"What are you talking about?"
"No, but this cream — where do you get it? Do other people do this?"
Her arms, those two pink Ls that began at the sleeves of her T-shirt and ended clutching cutlery on the tabletop, seemed normal enough: not peeling, not cracking, not even dry. "I got it at a specialty store. It's — "
"Is this going to happen like a snake? Like you'll just drop your skin and then it'll be sitting there in the shape of you?"
"I can't believe you're making a big deal of this. It was going to happen anyway."
"Right, so why not make a goddamn spectacle of it? Jesus." The lump of scrambled eggs on his plate was a jaundiced brain. The bacon looked like strips of pig, sliced off and then fried in their own sizzling fat. "When is this going to happen?"
"When?" She shrugged and took a bite of her toast. He waited, watching her jaw work. Nothing flaked away from her chin or cheeks; no skin snowed down onto her empty plate. She stared back at him. "Any day now."
"Like, maybe tomorrow?"
"Like, maybe today."
HE HAD FELT, lately, that his life had become a raisin — if only he'd got to it sooner, when it was ripe from the vine and bursting with juice! But no, it had shrivelled. If he handed out his life to trick-or-treaters at Halloween, a retributive bag of feces would appear flaming on his doorstep. Or maybe someone would pee on his mail.
She, on the other hand, was always up to something new. For the past few months she had been working toward a distance-education master's in film something, film and feminism. So there were countless DVDS that needed viewing. That evening they sat on the couch together to watch the next off the pile. It was a Hitchcock picture, and after some business in a hotel the action moved to a train.
"Oh, I know this one," he said.
"No, you don't," she said, putting on her glasses, getting her notebook ready. "Hush."
"No, I do — it's the one where the one guy kills the other guy's wife or something, and the other guy has to do it too. Kill the first guy's wife, I mean."
"That's Strangers on a Train. And you only know it from that Danny DeVito movie."
"Possibly."
"This is different. It's about a woman who goes missing. She's a spy."
"Oh, right," he said, and within minutes was asleep. The dream he had involved Alfred Hitchcock and something about a riding crop, and snakes, everywhere, shedding skin after skin. He had to fight his way through the papery wisps of them hanging like streamers in the air. Was she in it? Maybe. Or maybe he was trying to find her.
When he woke it was to a puddle of drool against his cheek and her undressing.
"What's going on?" He sat up and wiped his face on his shoulder.
"The movie's over. I'm going to take a shower."
"No, not with the movie — with you, with this skin business? What is this about?"
"You're still on about that?" She sighed, standing there in her underwear: the pink of her body banded twice in white cotton. And then she disappeared down the hall and the lock on the bathroom door went click and the shower went whoosh and he was left alone with what was on the only channel they got on their broke-dick Tv: figure skating.
"Why?" he yelled at the bathroom door, the shower hissing back at him. "Why?!"
WHAT WAS THE reason they had moved in together? He couldn't remember. Peer pressure, maybe, from married and responsible friends. Or mutual coercion. Or Catholic guilt, although they weren't Catholic.
At any rate, here they were, and there shouldn't be secrets, not in relationships — wasn't that a basic tenet, like not poisoning each other's smoothies and alternating turns cleaning the oven? What had she been getting up to in the bathroom? In the mornings something would happen in there and she would come out riding the gusts of an expensive smell. In the evenings the shower would come on and fifteen minutes later she would emerge towel-turbaned and otherwise naked. But now there was this business with the cream and the shedding skin — not the life he had signed up for. They'd engaged in talk of "some space," sure, but he also felt a right to know, after seven years together, what was going on.
The following night she disappeared into the shower while he sat watching figure skating again. Twenty minutes later here she came, a rosy fakir, all loofahed and nude and clean with steam billowing behind her. She sat on his feet and got out a bruise-coloured nail polish, while on the TV the figure skaters ice-danced and he waited for one of them to fall. He looked down at her feet, up her legs, her stomach and breasts, all the way to her face. From head to toe her skin glowed in one taut, moisturized, perfect piece. Back on the TV, a fellow in a sequined pantsuit was spinning an equine-looking woman by the legs, round and round, to "Devil with a Blue Dress On."
"Come on, fall," he said, slapping the coffee table. "Fall, you fuckers. Fall, fall, fall!"
One by one her toenails went purple. By the time they were dry the skating program was over. Someone had won: there were flowers and a microphone thrust at the winners' weird smiles. He switched the TV off, and unspeaking they clasped hands and stood and went to the bedroom and had sex there, on the bed. He climbed on top and she said, "Plow me, baby!" and he said, "Okay," and plowed her for all he was worth.
But the plowing seemed mechanical. They were doing the right things and making the right noises, but there used to be a time when she'd flip him over and grind away on top and they would come together like champions. Now, not so much: she lay there with her knees in the air and when he finished it was onto her belly with a gasp. She patted his back, twice, and he rolled off and she rolled away, wiping his sperm from her body with a T-shirt.
They lay there side by side in the dark until her breathing slackened and he knew she was asleep. He began sweeping the sheets for flakes of her. Nothing, not even that improbable bed-sand he had experienced with previous lovers, way back when. But who was to say that he wouldn't wake to a husk of a woman beside him, the new version off in the kitchen crafting a morning latte?
He reached over and ran his hand along her thigh, up her stomach, her breasts, shoulders, neck, face, the skin smooth all the way. He felt for a rift from which the whole thing might be beginning to peel away, like cling-wrap from a ham. He would flatten down the loose edge, tuck her back into herself, and there would be no more talk of new anything and that would be that. But there was nothing; she was seamless. Casually, his hand drifted to her crotch, to the soft frizz of her down there. Her chest rose and fell, steady as waves. He lay his palm like so and eased a finger in, just to see: things were damp inside, and warm.
"WHAT I WANT is a record. A document."
Finally, they were getting somewhere. "Explain," he said.
"Think of all you've done in the last seven years."
He thought for a while, and then stopped, because it was depressing.
"Okay, notyou specifically, but… anyone. People."
"You."
"Me, sure."
"I would think of all you've done in the past seven years, but it would involve that yoga instructor who was on the scene for the first few months when we started going around together — before you ditched him, thank Christ — and that makes me sad for you. It makes me want to take you in my arms and kiss you." He shuffled his chair over, leaning toward her, puckering his lips. "Very quickly, and very hard."