...each a bed with an individual history of loving and dying that did not include me—or in the former case only as a footnote. Each with its semen stains and blood stains—mostly someone else's semen, someone else's blood. And each, I knew, with its own residue of human flesh embedded in its core. The dead skin of sleepers!
    I know all about this special mystery: the dead skin of the sleepers. At one point in my pointless life I tried my hand as a vacuum-cleaner salesman. Part of the pitch was showing the customer all the dead skin our Super-Hoover could suck from their mattresses. This was intended to appeal to the horror the middle-class have of their own flesh. It was considered a very big selling point. Every night, it seems, we slough off skin, the dead skin from the outermost layer of the epidermis (the layer called, paradoxically, the “horny” layer), and this dead tissue slides and slithers down through the fabric of the sheets, filtering and weaving on down, on down through the mattress cover,  down,  down, finally