Untitled — “In a Film an Old Man Said”

Translated from the Persian original.

In a film an old man said, I don't know why people first went after skin, or when it was. He meant animal skin. I don't know whether it was to keep warm in the cold back in the cave-dwelling days, or to preserve food, or what. But the first time I saw animal skin was on mannequins in shops, and the first thing I understood about it was that it cost much more than the other clothes that do the same job. Back then, when I thought about human skin, I saw that people realized its importance very, very late. Now, never mind cleansing and makeup and all that, there's surgery and all kinds of products for protecting skin from decay, like creams and sprays and foams and liquids and so on. They were probably caught up in more basic needs. I myself have rarely given my skin priority as a personal purchase, and I always think most of these products are advertising, their effects mostly suggestion, and when they do work it's only in the short term. But the next day, when I went to a pharmacy to get something and happened to see a display panel for one of the skin products in a corner of the pharmacy, I went over to it and looked at the faces of the man and woman on one of the packages, and it struck me that human skin does something far more important than keeping the body warm and covered. That night when I got home I paid the bathtub a visit and spent an hour tending to my skin with natural or sea salt and hot water, and I felt something had gone missing from my body. That night before bed I went to change my clothes and noticed an extra zipper next to the zipper of my clothes. The difference was that it seemed to be made of something else, as if it belonged to my body. I opened it carefully, but I wasn't sure I was doing the right thing. When I unzipped it there was no bleeding and no pain, but it was as if I grew bigger, as if I became much bigger than I had been, I became light. At first I thought the day's events had brought on my usual hallucinations, but it was my own skin, I was sure; the scars from childhood still showed on it. Naturally I tried to enjoy my bigness and lightness, but I was neither so light that I could fly, nor was the skin so loose anymore that I'd be willing to wear it. An idea came to me: I'd go back to the tub and somehow pull it back over my body, the way it was before. I was on my way when suddenly a voice in the room, which was completely dark, caught my attention. The voice said, it's no use. Already scared enough, I asked, what? Who are you? And what's no use? It said, I am your skin. It said, I come off your body only once. It said, you shouldn't have touched me. I asked, then what was that zipper for, and how am I supposed to live from now on with this weight and these dimensions? My skin said, this state and these dimensions are no longer meant for the Earth; a special time has come for you, you must be ready to go. I said, please, I have so much left undone, I can't leave you that easily. I said, I'm still young, this skin, look at yourself, you're full of freshness, where would I leave you and go? It said, it isn't you who came out of me; you had grown a little bigger than me, like a mother when, at seven months or nine, her womb grows too tight for the fetus. I said, so that refutes Stephen Hawking's theory. It said, don't be upset, everything has been thought of; you'll experience freedom again, a bigger and more advanced kind. I asked, what becomes of you? Is this what they call dying? Then what happens to Stephen Hawking's theory? It said, no, dying is the last thing people know about the world after skin. I said, just one request, can I take one scent with me? Because, my dear, you know I can't stay alive without your scent. It gave me a little of the scent of your clothes to take, and told me, you're going to a place where the power of scent doesn't fade. It said, scent isn't in bottles; scent is the essence of skin, rising from the soul. It told me a secret. It said, even Stephen Hawking took a scent with him, and still no one knows why, or whose.

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