You know the feeling when skin burns and starts to slide off.

For example, it was my last day in Nigeria. I had a 10 a.m. plane back to Lagos to connect with my flight to Ghana. A taxi was supposed to pick me up at 6:30 in the morning for the drive back to the airport in Kaduna.

My watch woke me into darkness. I had a moment of confusion about where I was.

I finished the packing I'd begun the night before and started running the taps to fill the bathtub. It would likely be a long and grubby day of traveling. The trip up a week ago had been lengthy and somewhat harrowing. The plane had been late leaving Lagos, and I had stood out on the tarmac in the shade under one wing with the other passengers while they completed preparations for us to board. After an hour in the air, we descended into the high plateau country of the north. The plane groaned and creaked like an old house as we came down, passing scarcely a hundred feet over the broken shell of another airplane that had crashed there only a few weeks earlier. It lay in several torn pieces at the end of the runway like some kind of scarecrow, a shredded metal omen to all comers.

From Kaduna I had caught public transportation for what was to be a three hour car trip to a nearby town. The trip stretched well into the night, as the car in which I was riding was stopped repeatedly at police checkpoints. Young men in army fatigues, toting large guns, placed nail-studded boards across the road to stop passing cars and shake them down for bribes. After several such stops, the frustrated driver of the car mouthed off to some policemen, and they dragged him out of the car to beat him up. They were all shouting at the rest of us, and I found an automatic weapon aimed at my head. One of the people in the car was a cop from Lagos, and he managed to talk them down before things got any uglier.

I was ready to be out of there and on to Ghana.

I sat down into the bathtub to rinse off before getting dressed. There was no shower head, so I was running the cold and hot water taps to fill the tub. The small hot water heater was clamped to the wall just over me, and the flow from the faucet sent steam billowing up in lithe ghosts. Suddenly I slipped on the slick porcelain, and my foot slid directly under the hot water. A shock went through my leg, and a sensation of intense cold. I could feel the skin separate almost instantly, hanging loose against the flesh like an old sock. The entire top of the foot was a single large blister, a loose and wrinkling sack, even before I could get the foot under cold water. It began to fill with clear fluid and grow painful within a few minutes.

This struck me as a rather serious medical problem, but it was 6:15 a.m. and the taxi was coming. I had a long and tiring day of travel ahead before I would be able to take care of the situation. The only thing to do was put on my sock and shoe and walk on the foot. Sometime during the plane ride to Lagos, I felt my sock get slushy and knew the blister had broken open. It was six hours later, in the guest house in Accra, when I slowly peeled off the crusted sock for my first real look at the damage. My foot looked like meat. It wasn't contained, enclosed in healthy skin -- it bore more resemblance to something you buy, cook, and devour.

In a church in Italy I once saw an urn said to contain the skin of a man flayed alive. It sits beneath a gruesome mural of the torturous moment when his flesh was first excrutiatingly exposed to air. I wondered about the curled human parchment in that urn. Most of the damage you take in your life is written on the book of the skin. It bears the marks of scrapes and burns, moments of careless or willful destruction, stupidity or bravery. It is a catalogue of the cruelties of a lifespan, and a concealment for the blameless body beneath. A uniform for employment in the human race. A cloak of invisibility for angels come to earth.

Shed it and air is acid. Remove it and see the sun as a searing poisonous ball. Expose the unmarked inner flesh and feel the relentless agonizing chafe of the imperfect world. You cannot escape from it without bloodshed.