Cricket

Jimm Montague was inordinately proud of the doubled “m” in his name, and especially the effect it made when combined with the capital “M” of his last name. His signature was a portrait of the Himalayas, a series of evenly spaced ocean waves rolling across the page. He even contorted the “i” and “o” and “n” into similar waves, to enhance the effect. Only the “t” in his last name interrupted the roiling sea of ink, and he crossed it in anguish, leaving the remaining letters of his mark with no more than a few careless scribbles to ration among themselves. He did not care about his name past the “t”, and liked his friends to refer to him as Monny. It was his secret desire to one day sign his checks and documents as “Jimm Monny”, and make an unblemished ocean of his name.

But for now he was Montague, and to change that he would need to get richer. Today, getting richer entailed peeling the skin from a young woman’s living body, and Jimm licked his lips in nervous anticipation. The woman in question was Klara Kardashian, the third generation of American nobility to fly the Kardashian banner. She had signed all the appropriate paperwork, with only minimal bribing of her publicity agent. Jimm suspected that the agent, a short and balding man, hated his client, and wanted to make her look as ridiculous as possible while still keeping his job. Jimm, for his part, didn’t care how silly she looked — he was making money and history at the same time. His procedure was foolproof, and she was the fool to prove it.

She entered the room, and he studiously ignored her studiously maintained beauty, trying to maintain a clinical disposition. Klara was already scrubbed clean as burnished bronze, and wore a thick bathrobe while standing barefoot on the laboratory floor. The cold, fluorescent lighting and complete absence of makeup on her face toned her sensuality down from cartoonishly ludicrous to merely overpowering. Rumors and tabloids held that her parents had paid a geneticist to construct her this way, while a fairly small but devoted contingent of fans insisted that she came by her appearance naturally. Neither was unbelievable — her mother dominated magazine spreads well into her fifties. In the laboratory, surrounded by men and women in hair nets and surgical masks and far from the peeping eyes of cameras or the press, Klara dropped her public-appearance cheery disposition and radiated nerves and anxiety.

Jimm handed the final contract to her on a clipboard, along with a monogrammed pen to sign it with. “Name here,” he said, carefully staring at the page and not the robe.

She scrawled her name with absolutely no grace — of which Jimm took note — and clicked the pen closed. “How long will it take for me to recover?”

Jimm flashed her his most disarming grin. “Oh, a couple hours of standing up, after which we’ll give you a bed to rest in and some sedative to help you sleep. Tomorrow morning you’ll be good as new.” He inspected the contract page, not sure what he was supposed to be looking for. “Better, even.”

She sighed the sigh of the temporarily unpampered elite, and then turned toward the contraption in the middle of the room. “Do I get in now, or…?”

“No, no, no. This way first, please.” Jimm led the way with a wave of his hand. He noticed her dragging her feet, and ascribed it to worry. Perfectly natural, he thought it, and also damned inconvenient. She might, after all, throw a fit and storm out of the room, and if she left in the middle of proceedings, well — best not to think of it. Images of mangled animals rose from his subconscious, and he forced them back down. He had personally inspected every failed experiment to confront himself with the reality of what he was doing. Innovation was messy, it was harsh and it left bodies in its wake. When Jimm Montague thought of scientific progress, he thought of the atom bomb.

He led her to a closet-sized box of plastic sheeting, little more than tarps stretched over a frame of PVC piping. A pair of nurses stood by the stall, one holding the nozzled end of a thin hose, the other with one arm resting protectively on the cart the hose was attached to. “First we’ll treat the skin, both to make things smoother and to help the nanomatrix work faster when we get to that part.”

Klara stared at the stall like a cat eyeing a bathtub. “So you want me to take a chemical shower?” Jimm nodded encouragingly, and gestured over another nurse, who was holding a plastic bag. The bag turned out to be a sort of balaclava that went over her head and face.

“The mixture is non-toxic, but can be a real pain to get out of hair and the like,” Jimm said. A fourth orderly shoved an air mask up inside the balaclava, and muzzled her with it. The straps pulled tight and her head was sealed off from the outside world. “This is just a precaution,” he continued as she took an unsteady breath from the air hose that was now her lifeline. He had been worried at first that her body hair would complicate things, until her publicity agent informed him that she waxed regularly. Of course she did, he thought later, they all do. Silly, silly, silly. He couldn’t make mistakes like that, they marked him as a lower class.

Klara gulped from her air supply, then shed the bathrobe. Nude, she stepped inside the stall, and the orderly with the cart began twisting valves and pushing buttons, causing the machinery to whir to life. Jimm carefully lay her breathing tube over the top of the stall to keep it out of the way. The second nurse stepped forward, and began to evenly coat her body with a light misting of orange liquid. The noise echoed around inside her plastic mask, deafening her, but at a hand gesture from Jimm she began to slowly turn around so that the spray covered her entire body. The liquid was very cold, and tingled slightly as it touched her skin. She imagined it seeping into her like a sponge, but when she looked down through the clear plastic window of her mask, she saw thousands of tiny orange droplets clinging to her body. They seemed to cling to her like leeches, sucking away her heat. The cold was so sudden that she didn’t even have time to shiver. Pimpling with goosebumps, her skin shrunk to hug her rib cage more tightly. The chemical shower was brief, and in less than a minute the nurses turned off their machine, gesturing for her to step out.

She reached up to undo the straps biting into the back of her head, but Jimm caught her hand and stopped her. “The machine will be full of nitrogen,” he said, shouting slightly so she could hear. “You should keep that on until we tell you.”

“Okay,” she said, her eyes flashing with feral light. Again, Jimm worried that she would panic, but instead she just put one unsteady foot forward, then looked at him for confirmation. “Now the machine?” Her voice was distant and muffled behind the mask.

Jimm gave her a thumbs up, and followed behind her with the cart. He tried not to feel like a voyeur as he stared at the chemical on her skin, waiting to see if it would irritate her or begin to dry away. The warm glow of the chemical mixture melded with her cultivated tan to give her the appearance of a living statue, made of some exotic metal. Klara, for her part, felt nothing. Years of photoshoots had numbed her to the novelty of parading around naked in front of dozens of eyes, and all of her anxiety stemmed from the strange chemicals coating her skin, the plastic seal around her head and the gleaming machine that she was walking toward.

Outside the machine she turned towards him, poking her belly with an experimental finger. She felt nothing. “What’s happening to me?” She relaxed her belly and poked it again, and this time the hundreds of droplets across it shook with the reverberations of her poke, catching various lights like the sparkling gems of a wind-chime. They didn’t congeal into larger drops, like water, but stayed small and alone. Surface tension held them to her pores.

As soon as she touched her skin, Jimm jumped. After the second poke, he grabbed her hand and furiously gestured to her to stop. Another hand wave brought a nurse with an aerosol can, who reapplied the chemical cocktail to the place on her abdomen where her finger had brushed it clean. She barely noticed, staring at Jimm, waiting for an explanation. When she repeated her question, Jimm shrugged angrily. “What does it feel like?” he asked.

Klara thought for a moment. “Like acupuncture,” she shouted.

Jimm stared at her for a moment, trying to contain his disgust. “It’s a kind of chemical acupuncture,” he finally said, and turned her by the hand toward the machine. “Go in. Feet where the feet stickers are, hands on the handles. The rest will take care of itself. Just close your eyes, and try not to worry.” He winced at these last words, as they might incite her to worry. It was with a sigh of relief that he watched her turn and take the two steps up into the machine. Nervous, primal energy clotted in her body and made her heart skip, but she fought down her instincts and took hold of the handles and put her feet on the stickers. One nurse ran in and flipped fastenings over her feet while another locked cuffs around her wrists. A third briefly disconnected her air supply to run it through a specially made hole in the wall of the machine, and for a moment she panicked as she couldn’t breathe. She saw red and thrashed against her bonds until the nurse reconnected her air, and she took three gasping breathes before looking around. Jimm grimaced at her apologetically, then cupped his hands around his mouth. “Try to relax your muscles,” he yelled, “it makes things easier.” She wanted to yell back, but a burly man in a surgical mask grabbed her head and pushed it into place, strapping down her chin and forcing her to breathe through her nose.

The machine turned on as the nurses finished tying her down and fled the room. The last one out bolted the door, and she heard the hiss of gas filling the chamber. The walls were transparent glass, the floor under her opened in various hatches and trap doors to allow a host of mechanical arms to rise up around her like snakes. She stood about two feet above the floor level of the laboratory, imprisoned in a glass cage. LEDs flickered around the peripherals of her vision, and she could barely see the vague forms of techies and nurses running about in the dimness of the room beyond. Outside, Jimm was kicking himself for not putting a PA system inside the machine to allow him to communicate with her, and he made a note on the back of his clipboard to do it later. A moment later, she realized why he told her to relax her muscles, as the machine began to pull on her hands and feet and head.

It pushed her feet together until she stood straight, and pulled her hands apart until she was spread-eagled. Out of site, behind a computer terminal, one of the machine’s operators crossed herself unconsciously, then immediately dropped her head under a wave of shame and self-loathing. Inside the machine, Klara struggled to control her breathing as nitrogen filled the room. Her eyes stayed wide with fear, and she shook uncontrollably. The roar of the nitrogen pump hurt her ears, and she sighed with gratitude when it stopped. For a moment nothing happened, so she looked toward Jimm. He gave her two big thumbs up and a cheesy smile, at which she realized that they must be waiting for her to get herself under control. So she forced her eyes closed, and began to take deep, even breaths of air through her nose. She tried to imagine her yoga instructor’s voice in her head, guiding her through the inhales and exhales. She occupied herself with this for several minutes until she felt calm enough to continue. Then she opened her eyes just in time to see a long, silver knife finish drawing a red line down her left side.

She mastered her shock before it had time to move her body and potentially shake the razor. Of course, she knew what was going to happen, but she had expected to be able to feel it. Instead she only felt the faintest tug as another knife, wielded by a robotic surgeon, traced a line just under her breasts and around her side to just behind her arm. More tugging on her back told her that further razors worked there, and the tugging sensation traveled up her shoulders to just beneath her neck. She carefully held her breath and shut her eyes as a razor traced its delicate line over her collarbone, just beneath her vulnerable neck. These blades were laser guided, and each had multiple doctors carefully monitoring them, Jimm had assured her. Still, she worried. The blades traced rectangles on her outer thighs, ending just above her knees. She looked down, peering over the edge of her mask, to see mechanical arms take hold of the newly loosened flaps of skin on her legs, and begin to lift them upward while a large flat razor separated skin from flesh. Almost immediately under the razor was a nozzle, which held the key bringing the entire operation together: the nanomatrix.

Klara was not a biologist and did not care about the specifics. As far as she was concerned, the nanomatrix was some dark magic fashioned of aborted fetuses and zombified viruses, and she was fairly close to the truth. The nanomatrix would settle into the wide expanse of exposed flesh left behind as the machine flayed her skin, and regrow what was lost so quickly that there would barely be any bleeding. Jimm told her that it would take only a couple hours before she was able to touch the new skin, and within twenty four she would be completely healed. He also told her that he had tested the nanomatrix on himself. All this ran through her mind and unconsciously out of her mouth as she watched the strip of skin peel away from her leg, about four inches wide at the base and growing in width as it traveled up her hip. It left behind quivering red meat that glistened with blood and bile and nanomatrix, and gradually dulled to brown as new growth shot over it, consuming the nutrients mixed in with the magical spray. As further sections of her skin were cut loose, more nozzles followed, careful to cover all of her exposed flesh in the strange magic before it could bleed — much.

She would not lose and replace all of her skin today. The knees, shoulders and inner thighs were all too complicated to cut around — something to do with the skeleton — and didn’t contain all that much skin anyways, so the knives did not extend past those marks. Her nipples, too, were left attached to her body, small razors carefully cutting neat circles around them. “After all,” Jimm had said, “you wouldn’t want to risk them not growing back.” He had laughed, although she didn’t find it funny then and didn’t find it funny now. And, of course, the blades would never venture up her neck, where a sudden gasp for air could leave her bleeding from the jugular. Perhaps in the future, the process would be refined to remove more skin, she thought, and suppressed a shudder as she watched the machine slowly and easily peel her breasts and stomach.

Jimm, watching the procedure with both awe and horror, dreamed bigger. He imagined sticking Klara on a spool and making one single cut along her whole body, then peeling her like an orange. He imagined an improved nanomatrix regrowing her skin so quickly that by the time he had peeled her round once, she was fresh and ready to keep going. He imagined spinning her around and around, making a big long sheet of skin to be tanned into leather — for the ultimate goal of this arduous study in body horror was leather. Imagine, he had said over and over, a line of highly exclusive, Kardashian-brand handbags, gloves, shoes, belts — all made from Kardashian leather (or Aston, or Hampton, or any other celebrity name). Imagine the price! Imagine the allure! Imagine the demand, always greater than the supply! Most people he pitched the idea to would recoil slightly in disgust. Clothes made from a celebrity’s skin? You really think people would buy that? Jimm didn’t blame them; he thought it sounded disgusting, too. But he knew it would not sound disgusting to the upper-upper-class elites that would be his target market, and the investors he pitched the idea to, themselves upper-upper-class and not at all disgusted, but instead already envious of the hypothetical customers who would own these products, agreed.

The procedure ended, and the chamber began to fill with air again. Klara repressed the urge to vomit as she watched the last folds of her skin disappear into the floor and out of sight. They would be treated, measured, cut, stitched and embossed with the Kardashian logo, and auctioned off for several millions a piece. Hundreds of millions, probably. Billions? Maybe. Half of the money would go towards her estate. She looked down at her chest to see small white globules of flesh begin to form on the thin layer of what was left of her skin. She grimaced — this was going to be one hell of a tan line. But she knew how to turn these kinds of oddities to her advantage: she would wear a dress designed to show off the bizarre patchwork of skin left over from this procedure when she auctioned off the leather. Cameras would eat her alive.

The door opened to admit a swarm of nurses, who kept a firm grasp of all of Klara’s limbs as they loosened her restraints, just in case she stumbled or lost consciousness. Guided by their helping hands, she wobbled down the stairs to the laboratory floor again, where she was greeted by Jimm Montague’s cheesy grin. Her glistening red hips twisted and bulged with the movement of her legs. Her shoulder muscles were visible outlines sliding over her back as she pulled herself upright. The burly nurse from before reached around her head to loosen the mask and pull it off, and she tasted the stale, regular laboratory air with relish. She was still deathly cold, but at least now things were working in reverse and she would soon be warm again. “I think I’m gonna be sick,” she said to Jimm.

He nodded. “No problem, we’ve got a baggie here just in case that happens.” A nurse shoved the plastic baggie into her hands. She nodded, and shook. Jimm couldn’t take his eyes off her midsection, which shone with the light of bare flesh. It undulated as she breathed and rippled with the beating of her heart. She would be like this for hours before she was healed enough to put on a hospital gown, lie down and get some sleep.

Klara’s agent entered the room, informed by a secretary outside that the procedure was over. He stopped in his tracks when he saw Klara, and his jaw hung slack. It took several beats for him to recover, by which time she was standing on her own, motioning to the nurses that she didn’t need their help. He approached her and asked, “are you feeling okay?” When she nodded, he turned halfway toward Jimm, and pulled his eyes away from the partially vivisected woman with a combination of relief and regret. “I guess you really pulled it off, Monny. No pun intended.”

Klara’s ears prickled as she heard the nickname. “Monny,” she repeated. Jimm nodded unconsciously. He liked the sound of it in her voice. “Jimm Monny.” She rolled the sounds around her mouth like a gumball, twisting them with her tongue, sending them careening off her lips. He wanted to catch them with his own mouth and taste the sweet, delicious flavor. The circle of her voice sounded like the ocean in his signature, and he could almost feel the sea spray on his face and arms. It felt like heaven, it felt like bliss. And it was his. This was his fortune made. Finally, after so many years, he would stand on the shore and look out over the waves, and he would see his name written on the horizon. “Jimm Monny. Jimm Monny, cricket,” she said, and smiled a vicious, vindicated little smile. She didn’t even glance in his direction as she swept past him towards the outer hall, full of scorn. He stood there, demolished, clipboard limp in his hand.