Source: I Remember by Baden Abroad
Skin Game (Extract)
The skin, white and flickering, faintly moist in the bright light, taut around a skull in which two large sockets hold two dark orbs, irises deep and black. The skin fascinates, hums a reverberating message, plays an offbeat tune. I listen with my eyes.
I won’t bore you with her exact words because: 1) the plan as she outlines it is easily summarizable in far less space than she takes to describe it; 2) speech never reads as well written down as listened to; and 3) her linguistic exhortations lack the cool coherence of the pattern that is subtly rippling over her skin, which is what I’m most interested in, and this interest puts a faithful rendition of what she is saying beyond me. I get the gist. If you get the gist.
Her skin—a skin she shares with her twin, of whom more anon—is not anything supernatural, nor with respect to it is advanced science at work, nor are we located in a futuristic scenario, or on a different planet, or alternative universe, all of this being real and verifiable: she is sitting directly across from me now, after all, mouth moving in the formation of the plan. And the skin, apart from a thin layer of makeup, is natural in the strictest sense. You could, if you were a close observer of human nature, find such skin in any banal place in any weather, or on any occasion anywhere if you happen to bump into one of the few people who share this characteristic pallor. If you were looking. If you were really looking.
Adjectives slow us down, so to get them out of the way: flat, sickly, pale, light, sticky, matte with a touch of sheen (a paint company might patent the effect for a niche product or household part). And so on. But for the most part more of a process than a thing. Revealed in change, in action
So, not a disease to be sure, nor a simple genetic aberration—the point is personal—there is something underneath which plays itself out on the surface of a certain type, and if given enough free reign inscribes itself on their very skin. As if, if we look closely enough, we can see every thought settle there the moment it arises. And so settle the thoughts of this plan softly over Kim as she imparts it, and I watch her moving without moving, or moving on the surface, as the ocean does, ever-changing and ever the same, her skin a motile rather than a static presence, not simply something on which there is movement or underneath which there is movement, or a biological addendum to a part that moves, but a moving independence that yet maintains the coherence of her as subject moving in tandem with that of which she is composed.
Source: Skin Game – Paul R. Buckle Archive
