Freedom From Layer Disorder

There were two women with the same thing.
Neither got better. They had kids and the kids
didn’t get better either. Just slowly faded out.
It was our first priority to try to stop just the top
level from spreading. We attempted to do this
dance on the walls to distract the patients from
too much brooding over the fact that they were
seeing the bedding through themselves.

Without much success I’m afraid. But who
gets excited by that kind of display this many years
after that Lionel Ritchie video with the people
and the room and all that eighties joie de vivre?
They began to behave like trapped wild animals
looking for a way out of their cages. The medication
was for the one who kept ripping his arms on the
brackets. He would just hang there mimicking

us. It took half the staff pulling together
to finally get him down. Near the end you only knew
they were near you from the sound. Some of the more
advanced cases learned that in those final stages
you can down several gallons of plasma and look
like a blood beast with no distinct outline
sloshing around the corridors and operating
theaters. One used to dip her female parts

in the open thoracic cavities of heart patients
under anesthesia. She would vanish in less time
than it took to convince oneself she had never
been there. Once the story leaked we began
to be asked how the public should react.
As if we ourselves might know or knew
what drove the public to learn what in
what degree. Finally all we could do was hear

the end coming and try the few remaining
tricks to stop the top layer from causing more
pain than necessary as it fell away. Soon things
beneath began to change. Then once inner
strata started peeling they each in turn told us
the same cold story. They told us they had become
the missing child and the search party both.
Until those who wanted to stop being people

underwent the first tentative passes at the secret
procedure we managed to prevent any inkling
of what we were attempting from reaching
the ears or eyes of anyone who might not have
since left us as yesterday’s headline.
Say something to me said one room. Another said
does this mean I’m still me? All of my former parts
are what? Off? Just that much smaller that I can’t see

or feel them as if they were still feet or lips or fingers?
We understood that what we needed in order to show
justification to a large portion of the public was the whole
thing reduced to a simple formula. The broad strokes
and only the broad strokes. So a man was now
an elevator at the cost of the head he might have
lost in any case? It was he himself who authorized us
to do that which we eventually assigned the code

name Architecture Times Quarterly. Through a series
of ATQ experiments on terminally vanishing
patients we were able finally to successfully apply
many of the last intact and usable layers in a way
not at all dissimilar to the same procedure we had used
before to stain the feet for removal. In the end the result
as you know was not the same. The walls discolored too
quickly. The escalator with growing hair incident.

And with the press back to their interminable sniffing
we nearly took the program fully underground. Almost left
the building and burned every page in the journal
that went deeper than the surface levels. So. Fifty years
after the dye that had passed through those two women’s
systems seemingly without negative implications
and to no one’s detriment we began to see the warning
signs. That and a man who changed his mind about going

up and down. A choice which he made himself between
his conscience and that of his god. The women
were the pioneers pressing beyond the threshold
of what seemed possible. The men may too have
sacrificed themselves to the accumulation of knowledge
but men are like that and they were in a different facility
miles from ground zero. We kept the sexes separate rather
than risk any questions like why is the exterior of the middle

school sweating that way? Or why does my kitchen make
me hot? The heroes if you will of those first tentative steps
should be well remembered in history. If not for them
we might have a completely different and arguably less
effective way of addressing the problem should it ever be
necessary to re-skin any of a thousand varieties of old
and deteriorating structures. Thank you for your time
and attention. And thank you Emily for the use of your hall.