TheBanyanTree: A Mystery Solved

[Monique Young]

Not a real mystery. There's no butler, no GSR to look for, no dead bodies
lying about. I suppose it's not that interesting of a mystery. But it has
reassured me that I'm not just growing old and decrepit for no reason at
all, which I find to be a great comfort.

                There is a miracle product called Dermablend that I've been
using for awhile now. It helps to disguise the fact that my skin is, at
least to me, hideously disfigured. There are areas of my skin that have
pigment, and areas that don't, and since this is my face and neck, it's
rather obvious. More sun means the areas with pigment get darker, while the
other areas stay the same, and if I plan it all properly I can achieve quite
a ghastly patchwork appearance. The Dermablend doesn't hide all of that, but
it does blend it together so it's not as noticeable. From a distance, I may
even look normal. 

                Before I move on to the main mystery, I recently realized
why I have such a fear of my own appearance. (Ah, if only I could be a
vampire, and not see my own reflection!) When I was growing up, a process
that took many long and painful years, my mother was very camera shy. If a
camera were to be anywhere in the immediate vicinity, she would shy away
from it, she would use both hands to cover her face, she would declare
herself totally unsuitable to be photographed, she would, she'd threaten,
break the camera for sure, with her astoundingly bad looks. She obviously
saw herself as horrible in every aspect of her appearance. 

                One of the most common things I heard as I was growing up
was, "You look just like your mother!" Oh boy. You can imagine how happy
that made me, considering my mother's insistence on her hideousness. I asked
her about it once, as a child will when faced with confusing information.
"If you're ugly, and I look just like you, then aren't I ugly too?" This was
a serious question, of course. She assured me that it was "different," that
we looked alike, but that we were completely different.

                I may have been young, but I wasn't stupid, and her argument
convinced me only that what everyone had said was right: I looked just like
her, and since she was hideous, I must be too. Her declaration that it was
not so meant nothing: parents are supposed to lie to save their children's
feelings, and I hadn't that much faith in their honesty as it was. I trusted
more the words of strangers.

                Back to my mystery. So there I am, wondering why my skin has
turned against me. Do I not have enough problems, being my mother's
daughter, without this too? Is this what happens when one gets old? Or when
one has spent too much of one's misspent youth on the beaches of California?
Could it have been prevented by lack of my own stupidity? Granted, these
questions don't really keep me up at night - there are far too many other
things to cause me remorse to worry about such a minor issue, but still, it
was something else to add to my list of negligible crimes.

                And then I remembered the chemical exposure. Many years ago,
in a land far away, I wore a military uniform five days out of seven. We
were at peace, in a manner of speaking, but that didn't prevent us from
pretending to have wars every month or so to keep up appearances of being a
warlike nation, always on the alert. And one day I realized that the skin on
my face and neck, the areas most exposed when I wore my fatigues, was akin
to alligator skin. I could be wrong, for I've never been that close to an
alligator. But it was scaly and rough and red, and it was not normal. At
first I'd thought I was developing bad skin, but it was much more than that,
and as days passed I kept expecting to see alligator ears sprout from the
top of my head and my skin to turn from an unhealthy pinkish red to green to
match the scales I was developing.

                I went to the doctor. He was mystified, or at least he
pretended to be. "Chemical exposure," he pronounced, peering at me with
slits of eyes. "From what?" I asked, since it wasn't my habit to expose
myself to chemicals, other than the requisite tear gas for gas mask
training. 

                He stopped peering at me and looked away. "I don't know," he
said, "but we can fix it."

                Ooooh, they can't tell me why, but they know what to do? I
should have been suspicious. I should have pressed for answers. I should
have asked, "What has the military industrial complex done to me? Am I an
experiment? Shall I expect a future filled with flashing lights and dark
subterranean basement experiments? (I'm obviously not well versed in these
things.) But I did none of that. I said, "Okay."

                And they fixed it. 

                And I recovered and went on to live a fairly normal life,
depending on one's definition of normal. Still looking like my mother, a
fact of life which couldn't be changed, but at least without alligator skin.

                And now this. I'm certain the odd chemical exposure incident
is to blame. Hopefully my limbs shall not fall off anytime soon.