THE DRY MAN
wheeler antabanez

Until his mid-twenties, the one who was to become known as the Dry Man, hadn't had much experience with body lotion, lip moisturizer or any other beauty products. For many years, his only toiletries consisted of a bar of soap, a can of shaving cream and a disposable razor. He kept his hair clipped short, didn't wear jewelry and always dressed in muted tones. Perhaps it was this simplicity and lack of attention to his personal appearance that kept him single for so long. When he finally did manage to attract a member of the opposite sex, it was she who turned him on to the pleasures and benefits of well-hydrated skin.
At first he did benefit. His skin had never felt so sleek and alive as when he slathered his entire body in cocoa butter. After toweling off from his nightly shower he would rub himself with lotion and not need another application for at least twenty-four hours. When he leaned back on his computer chair at work his back didn't itch anymore, and when he removed his dress shoes at the end of the day there were no longer a snow bank of skin flakes covering his socks.  He began applying lip balm throughout the day as well and it had never felt so smooth or natural just to simply smile.
His girlfriend noticed these changes and began to enjoy his touch, which was no longer papery and dry. True, his newfound hygiene wasn't enough to keep her exclusive, after all she was young and free, but what he learned from her had helped him to be more comfortable in his own skin, and for that he was grateful. She couldn't offer him a committed relationship, but she had given him the gift of hydration so he didn't begrudge her when she inevitably moved on. Over the years there were a few hopeful starts with various other ladies, but none of these trysts amounted to much of anything and he eventually resigned himself to being alone.
By his mid-thirties, the Dry Man had acclimated fairly well to a solo lifestyle, but all the while he was progressively increasing his moisturizing habits to an unhealthy degree. He lived alone in a small apartment with no pets. He kept his refrigerator sparsely stocked with TV dinners and other prepackaged, simple to prepare meals. He awoke on time every day from an untroubled sleep, slathered on his ritualistic cocoa butter, applied his lip balm, dressed in his conservative suits and put in eight hours at his cubicle. In the evening he would come home from work, prepare himself a quick meal, take a shower, towel off and then apply a liberal amount of cocoa butter to his entire body. From head to toe he would work the lotion into his skin until all of it had absorbed and then he would swab several layers of balm onto his lips and the areas around his mouth.
Once properly hydrated, he could finally relax, but before sitting down to watch his shows, his ritual demanded that he take the time to set up what he called his hydration station. This moisturizing tableau consisted of a one-liter bottle of orange flavored seltzer, a tube of raspberry lip balm, and thirty-two ounce container of cocoa butter. From the seltzer he would take frequent sips and whenever his skin felt dry, he would pour a dollop of lotion onto his hands to properly lubricate. In the early years of this routine he had only moderately moisturized, but over time he had progressed to the point where he was applying the lip balm after every sip of seltzer, and lubing his hands with cocoa butter every five minutes or so. Maybe if he had found a partner there would have been someone to caution him from indulging so freely in this hydration obsession, but love wasn't in the stars for the Dry Man and his nights remained his own.
One would think that after so many applications of cocoa butter his skin would be left feeling oily and wet, but the actual results were quite to the contrary. It seemed the more lotion and lip balm he applied, the faster his thirsty skin would drink it up. It got to the point where he carried lotion with him everywhere he went, including work. Throughout the day he would take several bathroom breaks, locking himself into a stall and smearing cocoa butter on his back, trying to cover as much skin as he could without removing his shirt and tie. These eccentricities did not go unnoticed by his fellow employees, who always whispered amongst themselves whenever they saw him taking the lotion bottle into the bathroom.
Eventually, his coworkers came to accept these daily forays to the bathroom and ended up tolerating them for years, even as their frequency increased. Early on, the matter had been investigated and it was deduced that he was in fact only applying lotion to his body and not doing anything nefarious or sexual. This deduction was accomplished by a small troupe of giggling male office workers who were sent in as spies to ascertain exactly what was happening in the bathroom. By taking turns peeking through the gaps in the stall, they were able to catch glimpses of the Dry Man struggling to reach up under his shirt in order to cover every inch of his back with cocoa butter.  Then they saw him pull up his pant legs as high as they would go so he could rub lotion over his calf muscles and hydrate behind his knees. They reported their findings to the rest of the office, confirming that he was only rubbing lotion on his skin and not doing anything sexual, prompting one woman to say, "His skin must be exceptionally dry if he needs to use that much lotion. We should call him the Dry Man."
Of course, the name stuck. 
The Dry Man’s hydration obsession was beginning to cause minor disturbances in his life, but despite his ever-increasing trips to the lavatory he was still able to get his work done in a timely fashion, so his coworkers allowed themselves to get used to his eccentricities. In the parlance of addiction his life was still manageable, but as you can guess this perilous equilibrium between hydration and sanity was quickly tipping towards uncontrollable lubrication.
In his thirty-ninth year, his need for hydration finally cost him his job. He had been taking lotion breaks a little too often lately and when he was discovered fully disrobed in the bathroom stall on his lunch hour, applying cocoa butter to every part of his body, it was simply too much for management to forgive. His actions having finally been brought to light, the Dry Man was forced to explain to his supervisors that his act was not one of sexual perversion, but an unfortunate case of an extremely dry epidermis that required almost constant hydration. He begged his bosses not to terminate him and tried to make them understand that if this hydration was not applied on an hourly basis it would cause him to practically writhe in his own skin. His bosses were not appeased by this information and he was promptly fired without severance pay. He left that day a broken man, realizing that he had a serious problem and wondering what he was going to do to support himself.
On the way home, still shaking from the confrontation, these anxieties led him to do something he had never done before; stop in at the liquor store and buy himself a bottle of strong drink. He wasn't sure what kind to get and he eventually settled on a pint of vodka because it was clear and didn't look as menacing as the brown liquors. He wasn't much of a drinker, perhaps taking a glass of wine on special occasions or enjoying a microbrew at the company holiday party, but tonight he was feeling down and needed something strong. Before going back to his apartment, he also turned in at the drugstore and bought two fresh bottles of cocoa butter along with two tubes of raspberry lip balm. This exchange drew smirks from the teenagers behind the counter who were familiar with his purchases and assumed he was using the lotion for other purposes besides hydration.
Locking the door to his apartment, the man could feel his itching, flaking skin, which hadn't been freshly lotioned since being caught several hours ago in the bathroom at work. The safe period between applications of cocoa butter had long since elapsed and he was frantic to rehydrate. Ripping off his suit and throwing the crumpled dress shirt into a pile on the otherwise neat floor, the dry man cracked open one of the cocoa butter bottles, unscrewed the pump top and dumped a quarter of the contents directly on his head. He then took his hands and began rubbing the sloppy beige lotion onto his entire expanse of skin, luxuriating in the healing hydration as his flaking crust was appeased with its necessary chemicals. His body was so dry from the time between applications, that he was forced to slosh more of the cocoa butter out onto his hands so he could continuously apply it to his back, struggling to rub lotion into every pore.
Having performed this lubrication ritual to excess and after numerous applications of raspberry lip balm, the Dry Man finally began to feel like himself again. As he stood naked in the middle of his small apartment, he closed his eyes and searched his entire body with his mind's eye, seeking any dry spots he might have missed. Finding none, he opened his eyes and began putting on his pajamas. Once he was dressed and comfortable, he lined up his seltzer, the now half empty cocoa butter container and the bottle of vodka he had purchased. Clicking on the TV, he turned the volume low so he could just barely hear it and then set about applying another coat of lotion to his hands and face, which had partially dried out while he was settling in. Feeling hydrated again, he sat back on his couch and reached for the vodka bottle. Cracking the seal on the plastic cap, he tentatively smelled the liquid inside. It reeked of medical disinfectant and he tried to think back, wondering if he had ever tried this type of alcohol before.
Taking a sip from the pint bottle he almost regurgitated at the strength of the vodka, but managed to choke it down. The liquid fire burned through his hydration, prompting him to uncap his lip balm and apply it liberally around his mouth to combat the heat from the alcohol. "Yuck," he bitterly exclaimed, setting the bottle down and reaching for the cocoa butter. After applying another coat of lotion on his hands, lower back and elbows he began thinking about the job he had lost today. Most people finding themselves newly unemployed would be scared to lose their house, their car, or the clothes off their back, but not the Dry Man. He voiced his fears aloud to the TV. "What if I can't afford cocoa butter? My god I'll dry up if that happens." With these thoughts he turned again to the bottle. The slight sip he had taken was warming him from the inside, and although it had been unpleasant to choke down, he needed escape so badly that he was willing to overcome his dislike of alcohol just for the oblivion he knew it could offer.
In one crazy swipe he took the pint bottle off the table, unscrewed the cap and poured the contents down his throat. It didn't burn as bad when chugging it like this so he didn't stop until the entire bottle was empty. Then it did burn and badly, but within a matter of minutes he was too insensible to register the fire in his belly. Never in his life had the Dry Man taken in this much alcohol and it caused him to pass out, his tongue lolling out of his mouth as he slumped over on the couch.
Fifteen minutes later, in a state of extremely groggy drunkenness, he was awakened from his stupor by the incessant needling of the telephone ringing on its cradle by the side of the couch. His coordination was failing him, but out of habit he reached for the phone, knocking it off the hook by way of answering it. It took some time for his fumbling drunken hands to find the receiver, but once he got it to his ear, he managed to greet the other person on the line without slurring, "Hello?"
"Hi this is Sharon from the office, how are you? I just wanted to say that I'm so sorry you got fired today. How are you holding up?"
Sharon was a middle-aged, divorced mother of two, who sat across the room from his cubicle. She was one of the few people in the office who didn't refer to him as the Dry Man. She had been watching him for almost two years, thinking he was eccentric and weird, but kind of cute in a plain, harmless sort of way. With the encouragement of her non-work friends, she had been recently building up her courage to talk to him on a more intimate level, but had waited too long and was now reaching out by telephone as a last resort. "Are you OK?" She asked, "I feel really bad about what happened to you."
The Dry Man, who was usually so tongue-tied around women and who had all but given up on love, suddenly perked up from his drunkenness and sat up on the couch. Switching the phone to speaker-mode so he could apply more cocoa butter to his hands and body, he began a rambling explanation of why he had to use lotion on his skin at least every hour. By talking very fast he found that he could keep his slurring to a minimum and, as the conversation progressed he was reasonably sure that Sharon had no idea that he had just guzzled a pint of vodka, or had been drinking at all.
On the other end of the phone, Sharon was taking in this explanation of why he had to apply so much lotion with a quiet acceptance. She was fully aware of the reason why he had been fired, as was everyone in the office, and she was well acquainted with the Dry Man's frequent bathroom breaks. It was hard not to notice when he would return from the lavatory smelling strongly of drug store fragrances, and have unabsorbed lotion streaks in his hair with cocoa butter stains spotting his suit. Sharon was a compassionate woman who had some slight OCD issues of her own, so she was able to empathize and look past the Dry Man's strange proclivities. After hearing his chaotic, explosive explanation, which she naively attributed to emotion rather than alcohol, she sympathized even further with the Dry Man and asked him if he would like to come over to her house for a nice home cooked meal. "Also, you can bring all the cocoa butter you need if it will make you more comfortable. I have some brand-name skin lotion here if you need it, but something tells me I probably don't have enough to keep you happy."
The Dry Man considered her offer through the haze of vodka clouding his brain. He had secretly snuck glances in Sharon's direction and her small attempts at flirtation had not gone unnoticed by him; although at the time he had always been too shy or too preoccupied with hydration to reciprocate. The vodka was giving him confidence, however, and although a small voice in the back of his head was telling him that it was a bad idea, he found himself agreeing to meet Sharon for a nice home-cooked meal at her house just across town.
After hanging up the phone, the Dry Man drunkenly removed his pajamas and repeated his full hydration ritual, dumping out cocoa butter onto the top of his head and then slathering the lotion over every inch of his body. When it had absorbed into his skin enough where he felt well lubricated, he commenced gathering his suit off the floor and clumsily put it back on. If he hadn't been drunk, he never would have put on his crumpled suit and probably never would have agreed to go to Sharon's house at all.  But as he struggled with his shoelaces, the drink in him gave a false confidence that propelled him blunderingly forward. Grabbing the keys off the hook by the door, he stepped out into the hallway and promptly blacked out. Staggering down the hall, leaving his apartment door wide open, the Dry Man had no clue what he was about to get himself into.
He awoke the next morning on a hard bench in a small concrete jail cell wearing an orange jumpsuit. Looking around, he struggled to make sense of where he was. Reaching back into his memories from last night, he could find no explanation as to why he was waking up in prison. The holding cell where he was confined was a very small single occupancy with painted cinderblock walls, a toilet/sink combination, a solid metal door with a thick glass observation window and a food slot that was currently locked in the closed position. The Dry Man sat up with a groan and put his papery hand to his throbbing head. "What happened?" He muttered aloud, but before he could think too much about why he was locked up, the fear hit him. "What if I can't get cocoa butter in here?" His hands went up to his cracked lips, "what if I can't get my lip balm?"
Just then a rattling of keys could be heard outside the cell and the food tray slot opened with a jarring slam. A pair of cruel brown eyes looked in at the huddled Dry Man on the bench. "Breakfast burrito?" The guard quipped as he slid a plastic tray containing different compartments of unappetizing mush through the slot. "You're gonna love the food here Drunky! A-one, first-class cuisine."
The Dry Man rushed at the door causing the guard to instinctively flinch back away from the food slot. Placing the tray on the ground he implored the officer to tell him how he had ended up in this jail cell. The guard gladly imparted the Dry Man's infraction with a righteous, sadistic glee. "You're a drunk. You were driving. Want to guess how many people you ran over? With blood alcohol like yours, it's a miracle that you didn't kill yourself as well. Sorry Drunky, but it looks like you are going to be here a long time. And guess what, drinks aren't on the menu. No booze allowed!"
"Please sir, please. I am sorry! Please, can you bring me some hand lotion or lip balm? I have a very rare condition and I must hydrate my skin."
The guard chuckled softly and put his face closer to the slot. "Sorry Buddy, but you're going to have to get used to not getting what you want in here. That's just the way it goes..." With that, the food slot slammed shut and the chuckling guard sauntered down the hall. In his cell, the Dry Man withered to the floor and went insensible once more, passing out into oblivion.
The first thing he felt upon waking was an incredible thirst and he fumbled about for the usual bottle of seltzer he always kept by the bed. Instead of a cool, bubbling seltzer his fingers blundered into the pile of coagulating gruel on his food tray. Flinching from the detestable mush, he began groping along the floor but soon recoiled from the dry concrete as it sought to rob his hands of whatever precious moisture they still contained. He brought those dry husks up to his face and felt around his mouth where he encountered coagulated blood and shriveled skin around his badly desiccating lips. His tongue felt like sandpaper on the roof of his mouth and his back was tortured by a stale, restless itch that couldn't be scratched away. His worst fear was coming true. He was drying out.
Pulling himself upright with a tremendous effort, the Dry Man made an attempt to take a drink from the metal sink, but could only choke down a few sips. His throat was so incredibly parched that it felt like the skin of his esophagus was peeling away. Splashing water from the sink onto his arid, flaking body, his peeling skin absorbed the moisture like a sponge, but was almost immediately dry by the time he sat down on the hard jail cell bench. What the Dry Man did not realize was that he was long past the point where he could rehydrate with mere water. Without his daily dose of theobroma cacao, lanolin, mineral oil, sodium lauryl sulfate, propylene glycol, benzyl benzoate and methylparaben, the key ingredients of his beloved cocoa butter, he was going to stay dry and become dryer still.
As he sat on the bench, head in hands, a restless agony crept over his body. He could feel every inch of his skin evaporating and cracking like a low-tide mud flat on a hot summer day. Looking down at his arms, he saw that where he had doused his skin with water, the drying effect was especially predominant, causing the top layers of his skin to slough off in thick parchment sheets. In a fit of desperation, the Dry Man cast off his jumpsuit and fell back to the floor. He crawled to the food tray and began scooping up globs of the putrid jail food, applying it to his face in an attempt to treat his rapidly crumbling epidermis. The breakfast on the tray consisted of a yellow slush somewhat resembling scrambled eggs, a portion of runny black beans, something that looked like oatmeal and a crust of stale bread. Wiping the eggs and oatmeal on his face brought a small modicum of relief and the beans smeared on his back brought a momentary reprieve from the maddening chalky itch, but his discomfort soon returned in spades as the food lost its moisture. His skin had reached such an advanced state of desiccation that it rapidly absorbed whatever greasy hydration the jail food had to offer, leaving behind a scab-like layer of thick-crusted food that covered most of his body.
As the Dry Man lay squirming and naked on the dusty floor, the food slot was suddenly opened with a bang and the same sadistic guard peeked in, his disembodied voice requesting the tray back. When he saw the Dry Man flopping in agony on the floor covered in the remains of his breakfast, he let out a chuckle and then spoke mockingly through the slot, "Looks like you're having fun in there. Decided to wear your breakfast instead of eating it I see, interesting fashion choice Buddy. The nut jobs on the twelfth floor are going to love you. You're going to feel right at home up there with the rest of the lunatics. Pass me that food tray."
The Dry Man writhed on the floor, his skin beginning to peel back in earnest now as it rubbed against the concrete. If the Dry Man hadn't been covered in jail food the guard might have seen that he wasn't simply throwing a tantrum, but was in fact shedding strips of dry skin that in some places exposed brittle bones under paper thin, desiccated muscles. If the guard hadn't been so casually brutal by nature, he might have noticed that his prisoner was actually in serious trouble. But the cell was such a mess and the guard was so inattentive that these warning signs went unheeded. After repeated instructions to hand over the food tray, interspersed with threats of violence, the Dry Man, in a Herculean feat of strength driven by fear managed to pick up the tray with one depleted hand and was just barely able to pass it through the food slot. As the tray was yanked from his withered grasp, the Dry Man managed to whisper with the last of his parched voice, "Please... Cocoa butter. Please..."
The guard gave him a quizzical look, noticing for the first time that beneath the smeared food, this inmate wasn't looking too good. At that point anyone could have seen that the Dry Man was in serious trouble and needed immediate medical attention, but this particular guard was a long standing veteran in the Sheriff's Department and had seen enough death, depravity and violence on the job to no longer care about prisoner welfare. "Not looking too good Buddy. Looks like you're withdrawing pretty hard from the booze. I guess I better get you to the nurse before you go and die on me. Not that I care one way or the other, but if you do croak it will mean a lot of paperwork."
With that, the food slot was slammed shut and the guard made his way down the hall, collecting more empty trays as he went. When he had reached the far end of the long cellblock, he rolled the food cart out of the way for the trustee to take back to the kitchen and got ready for the relaxing portion of his shift. Earlier, he had withheld two meal trays as punishment from some unruly prisoners in the back of the wing. This withholding of food was one of his pet tricks for dealing with troublesome inmates and he often ate the meals in front of the hungry prisoners as further torture. Today, however, his feet were tired so he sat down at his desk, slopping up the disgusting jail food which he had come to love over the years. He cleaned the food off both trays, drank several cups of coffee, put his feet up on his desk and then promptly fell asleep, snoring lightly while dreaming about his fat wife's chubby sister and all the things he'd love to do to her.
A couple hours later, the next shift arrived waking him from a deeper slumber than he had intended. He had just enough time to wipe the crust from his eyes and regain his feet before the relief guards entered the cellblock to prepare for the shift change. Following procedure, he briefed the officers as to the new intake and filled them in on the details of his rather uneventful night shift. "There's a real cuckoo clock in cell Five B, a drunk admitted last night for killing a pedestrian. I gave him his food tray this morning and when I went to collect it he was wearing his breakfast. Keeps begging for hand lotion or something. You might want to call the nurse and have her take a look at him. Last I checked he wasn't doing too good."
The relief guards registered this information without comment. They too were veterans of the county jail, and over time, had become almost completely uninterested in the plight of their prisoners.  They began their bed checks at the first cells by their desk and made their way down the long corridor of the cellblock, one officer on the left side of the corridor and the other officer on the right. This section of the jail was known as D Wing. It was reserved for single cell admitting, protective custody and solitary confinement. Each cell housed one inmate behind a thick steel door. As they made checkmarks after each prisoner’s name on a clipboard, they slowly made their way down the hallway, confirming the prisoners were in their cells and still breathing. Midway through their bed check they came to the Dry Man's cell. The guard checking the left side of the hall suddenly called his partner over, "Take a look in this cell." The other officer crossed the hall and his partner leaned aside to let him see through the window.
The guard peered into cell Five B with a puzzled look on his face. Inside, on the concrete floor, was a discarded orange jumpsuit lying next to a pile of gray dust. The observation window offered a complete view of the small cell, but no prisoner could be seen. "Go sound the alarm and get the Warden on the radio. Looks like we have an escape."
As the first officer took off running down the hall towards the panic alarm, the second guard removed a key from the clip on his belt and unlocked the holding cell door. Entering the tiny chamber, he left footprints on the dusty floor as his movements kicked up clouds of fine gray ash into the air.  Scanning the entire cell, looking for a place where the prisoner might be hiding, his mind raced to understand where the prisoner had gone. Not finding any satisfactory explanation as to where the inmate could be, the officer turned his attention to the pile of dust on the floor, crouching down for a better look.
Focusing in closer on the dust, the guard began to make out strange shapes that looked like they had been pressed into the mound. It seemed in places as if the dust pile had been somehow molded to resemble human bones. The guard could make out the shape of a femur pressed out of either fine sand or possibly fireplace ashes. As he crouched there pondering the strange dust, the shape of a skull became apparent at the crest of the mound.
Shifting his weight, and getting down on his hands and knees, the officer moved nearer to the delicate skull shape, wondering how the missing prisoner could have crafted something so fragile and detailed out of a pile of ash. He was so taken in by the mystery of what he was looking at that he didn't even notice the slight tickle in his nose caused by the dust he had inadvertently kicked up into the air. He leaned in really close, peering into the hollow eye sockets of the skull. Before he knew what was happening, without time to stop himself, a mighty sneeze burst forth from his nose effectively eradicating what little remained of the Dry Man.