“Sh sh sh,” she said. “I want you to listen to me. What you’re experiencing is perfectly natural. In fact, there’s a medical term for it. ‘Sloughing.’ This happens after your body experiences an inflammation outbreak, and has calmed down. What happens is, all that flared-up, panicky skin, essentially, dies. So once the new skin is ready, your body decides to LET GO of all that old skin. This is why it’s happening now. Because your body is calm.

“This is good.

“It’s not anything you’re doing or eating or drinking. And it’s not another disease. We’ve done the tests. We know everything you have, and it’s not that. You’re fine. Just keep doing the sweatsuit bleach method I told you to, till the dupilumab starts kicking in.”

I hung up. Went upstairs. Did as I was told.

Capful of cleaning bleach in a lukewarm bath. Soak for fifteen. Then full-body triamcinolone lather while skin still wet, sealing in the water / splash o’ bleach. Bleach to kill the potential for any bacterial development—what happened when the skin was open/didn’t heal right. What caused the spread of not only eczema but infection. Infection, cuts not healing, what had led to the fever, hospitalization. Cuts’ inability to heal on their own the first sign of cancer.

Once lubed, I slid into the Everlast, extra-thick rubber sweatsuit I’d copped—the kind boxers ran in to cut weight, cuffed at ankles and wrists and waistband. To seal in the moisture.

Then straight to bed.

•

The next morning I got awoken by the birds out back, who stayed posted in the driveway-side tree my van’s mirror always got snagged on.

Who got to chirping, into my window, first thing.

That avian alarm.

Got the coffee water going, rolled a cig, and popped out back. In search of a patch of direct sun.

The only goal now was going daytime.

Getting em daily rays.

Lack of sunlight from being full nocturnal an auxiliary if nonetheless critical piece.

It went, in the ma’s esoteric, Waldorf-teacher view: rock, plant, animal, human. The ‘kingdoms’ did. In that evolutionary order.

My year of stationary nocturnality had turned me full fossil. Worshipping the moon so long had turned me rock, fkn cratered out. Skin no longer photosynthesizing. Just hardening, cracking, and flaking off like layers of sedimentary strata.

And it was still on that.

I was getting ahead of myself, tryna fuck/go-animal before I’d become-plant.

I had to become a plant again.

The thing with tools was, you had to use em.

You neglected em, they stopped working.

Tools enjoyed being used; you stopped using em they stopped being tools.

My van was a tool.

I needed to start using it again.

To find a use for it.