Jack O'Connell - The Skin Palace

“Where did I go?” Leni says and starts to laugh.

“Does Hugo know you moonlight here?”

The laughter stops and Leni says, “Hugo forgot to renew his Leni license. I’m a ward of the state now.”

Sylvia doesn’t want to fight. “I turned around for a second,” she says, “and you were gone.”

“Yeah,” Leni says, “That’s my story too. So how’d the night go? Get anything good?”

Sylvia squints at her and Leni makes a face and says, “Pictures, Sylvie. You take any good pictures?”

“Yeah. I think I did.”

“Where’d you get the jacket?”

“Long story,” Sylvia says. “What the hell are you doing in there?”

“What do you think. It’s a peep booth, you know. People get to peep at me.”

“No, no. I mean, how did you know I was out there? How did you know I was at the flea market?”

“The flea market?” Leni says.

“Isn’t that what they call this place?”

“Not that I know of. And I didn’t know you were here. I thought you saw me come in or something.”

Sylvia gives her a disgusted look. “Leni, the guy out front called me by name and told me to go to booth seven.”

Leni screws up her face as if to say this is ridiculous. “Hey, Sylvia, I make it a rule that I don’t talk to the greaseball toy cops at this hole, okay?”

“Then who—”

“Look, you got about a minute before the window closes, all right? And I’ve got to tell you something.”

“Wait a minute,” Sylvia says.

“You need to be at the Skin Palace,” Leni interrupts, putting both her palms flat against the window and leaning forward, “at midnight tomorrow. I’ll have something to show you that’ll clear everything up.”

“What is it?” Sylvia says as the window partition starts to roll down.

“Midnight, tomorrow,” are Leni’s last words before the window is completely blocked and the booth is in darkness again. Sylvia reaches out and touches the coin box and then, without thinking, she starts banging on it with her fist and to her shock the partition begins to roll back up.

But when the window comes clear again and the red and blue lights go on, Leni is gone and the viewing room is empty.

Sylvia stays in the peep booth for what seems like a long time. She sits on the wooden stool, leans down on her thighs. She stares out into the viewing room and hopes that someone will walk in and start to talk to her through the speaker, start to explain the last three days as a practical joke or a punishment for sins she doesn’t remember committing.

But no one comes in and no one comes to call her out and she just continues to look into this square box, this vault of soft white walls. It reminds her of a school trip she took as a child, maybe twelve years old, when she went to a pathetic zoo about fifteen miles outside the city. The class walked through a nature trail and, except for a timber wolf who was kept chained to a tree, all they saw were signs hanging on fences and nailed to posts that said the animals had been temporarily vacated. She wondered all day what that meant. The words carried this vague but definitely threatening aura until she began to think all the animals had been sacrificed in some kind of terrible ritual. And at the end of the trip they visited the reptile house which was steamy and dank and muggy. And the whole class walked single file through a corridor that twisted every few feet and on either side the walls were fitted with glass windows, like in an aquarium, only these windows were all streaked and smudged and you looked in on rocks and dirt and broken-off tree branches. And you tried to find the snakes or toads or lizards that were trying to hide inside their tank, under fluorescent lights, trying to blend their colors with this shabby environment they’d woken up and found themselves in one morning.

That zoo trip still makes her shiver and she blocks it out of her mind and tries to imagine lying down on the viewing room floor, just stretching out on that bearskin and falling into a long and dreamless sleep.

But she can’t fully conceive of the sleep. She can only imagine waking up naked and having the peep booth crammed with voyeurs who are gawking at her the way she gawked at those snakes and lizards. Wondering how the hell did she end up in this position?

When her legs start to cramp, she gets off the stool and stretches. She turns to leave and hears the metal shutter roll down behind her.

She walks out a rear exit of the flea market into an alley and finds Propp sitting on the ground, leaning against the bricks. She moves over to him, looks down on him. She won’t even ask if he knows Leni. If he set up their meeting in the booth. She doesn’t want any more denial tonight. She doesn’t want any more sentences that turn the facts around and make her question herself and everything that seemed to be true.

“You finish up your business?” she asks.

He shakes his head and puts out his hand and she pulls him up to standing.

“Things didn’t work out exactly as I’d hoped,” he says.

He starts to walk and Sylvia follows and says, “You know, you really shouldn’t slag Hugo Schick the way you do. You two being in the same union and all.”

“I knew you’d think that,” he says, “but I’m not a pornographer, Sylvia.”

“So what is it you sell to these guys, Mr. Smith?” sarcastic on the last two words. “Tours of the underworld?”

He stops walking and says, “I sell them Terrence Propp prints.”

She looks at him, confused, and he just smiles and starts walking again.

“I was supposed to be a dealer with some connections to the mystery man. Only nobody’s buying these days. They suddenly think I’m a fraud. They think Propp is dead and I’m trafficking in second-rate imitations.”

“That’s hysterical,” she says.

“Not when you’re trying to buy film on your good looks.”

“This is going to sound a little cruel, but don’t you find it just a bit ironic?”

He lets out an annoyed sigh and says, “Irony is a constant once you reach my age.” Then he just stares at her and when he speaks again the tone of his voice is completely different.

“Don’t you wonder why I brought you here tonight, Sylvia?”

Now it’s her turn to give a stare. “You live underneath the streets in an old diner, hiding from everyone. I should try and figure out your motives?”

“I brought you here,” he says, unchallenged, “for two reasons. The first was simply to show another world, another dimension, that’s operating, at all times, separate from your world—”

“You know so much about my world—”

“—It’s dark and it’s hidden. And for a stranger it can seem obsessive. Insular. Unsettling and alienating. Parts of it might even seem brutal and perverse. To someone like you, Sylvia, everything would look angled and shadowed and haunted.”

“What’s the second reason?” she says.

“That’s a little harder. I wanted to show you that within those shadows, inside the brutality and perversion, you can find moments of humanity if you train yourself to look closely enough,” he reaches out and touches her camera, “and you can capture them. You can hold them. You can make a rosary of these images.”

“A rosary?”

He nods.

Sylvia shrugs, “Why should I want to?”

Propp squints at her like the answer should be obvious.

“To gain grace,” he says.

“Grace?”

He makes a kind of awkward, noncommittal shake of his head, pushes his hands in his pockets and takes a step toward the mouth of the alley. Then he turns back and like a teenager impulsively asking for a date he says, “You want to go to the movies?”