Unseaming Read Online Free PDF Page A

Blessings rendered a full head of hair utterly impractical. Even some women had caved, though most had adopted tricks to keep their treasured coifs sanitary. Regina was one who climbed out of bed at ungodly hours to scour the blood from her roots. This was how Bryan knew it was too early to call the professor without having to glance at a clock.
He resolved to use the time for an early morning jog, donned sweats and shoes and snuck out. Halfway up the stairs to the parking lot, he stopped short. A derelict lay curled in fetal position on the landing. If it weren’t for the wet rasp of the man’s breathing, Bryan might have thought him dead.
Unwashed for weeks, the accumulated residue from the Blessings masked the man’s features in a gruesome black crust. As Bryan stepped around him, the bum’s eyes opened, twin ovals of bloodshot pink in the scab of his face.
* * *
     
On the first day of the Blessings, billions woke up screaming.
Every human on the planet had emerged from sleep looking as if they’d crawled from a blood-filled tub. This happened to newborns and elderly, tribesmen and movie stars, prisoners and dictators, soldiers and presidents.
On that morning, two and a half years ago, Bryan jerked awake as Regina shrieked in his ear.
He and Regina first met at the fitness club downtown. He worked as a reporter for the smaller of the city’s two metro papers; she worked at a bank branch only a block away. At their first conversation he had felt a fierce attraction to her—dark hair with exotic blond streaks; green almond eyes; quirky lopsided grin; a head shorter than him but not at all short on curves. He found everything she said fascinating, and she appreciated, and reciprocated.
Within two weeks they became intimate. At four weeks out—the night before the Blessings—they were still in the giddy exploratory stages. Her olive skin fascinated him; it tasted oddly sour and salty; he wasn’t sure if he liked the flavor but took every opportunity to re-evaluate the taste.
They fell asleep on her sofa that night, limbs tangled together, neither the least bit concerned about personal space.
She woke first, and screamed at the sight of his blood-covered face.
He had practically leapt from the sofa, and seeing her dripping with abattoir residue, revulsion struck ahead of thought and he shoved her away, so that she fell onto the glass coffee table—which shattered beneath her.
Miraculously, she wasn’t cut, although at first it had been impossible to tell. Once they were clean, once it became clear the blood came from neither of them, once the television news showed them that something had gone wrong not just in Regina’s living room but all over the world, then their panic changed, and to each other they could be civil, even tender. He apologized repeatedly, and she told him she accepted.
But seeing each other, feeling each other’s skin that way overwhelmed their fledgling attraction, almost severed it. Neither wanted to touch the other, not then, not for weeks, not for months.
* * *
     
That morning , Bryan’s profession had meant that he couldn’t stay home, couldn’t recover from his freak-out. He had to get to his cubicle, man the phones, conduct interviews, shove aside his own confusion and despair and charge ahead, write something to help the paper’s readership make sense of things, or at least understand they weren’t alone. He had endured this before, when the twin towers collapsed, and closer to home, when a crazed gunman killed thirty innocent young students at Bryan’s alma mater.
But this was worse, far worse.
Too agitated to stay put in his chair, he hadn’t noticed the blinker for new voicemail till after he finished his first interview: an insincere message of all-is-under-control from the city’s audibly frightened director of public safety.
The voicemail came from Sukhraj Patel, sleep specialist, his odd friend of more than five years.
“It happens in your sleep, Bryan. And only in your