Authors: Jennifer Pelland
He finished his food bar, washed up in his small bathroom, and took the elevator down to the ground for his first visit to the outside world of San Antonio.
The door slid open to a riot of color and sound, and he stepped into a large indoor pedestrian thoroughfare. The walls flashed a variety of images his way, and as he turned to face each, different sounds broadcast in his head: the field of grain had a soundtrack of twittering birds; the crowd of naked, dancing people was accompanied by tribal drumming; and the light brown, broad-featured woman’s face filling another wall said, “…and in day two of Merrick-watch, we’ve just received a report that he’s entered the St. Mary’s Street Mall.”
Her face disappeared, replaced by an image of his new body, standing in front of the open elevator, looking straight at himself. He raised his hand and tentatively waggled his fingers, and the image on the wall waved back. He couldn’t even begin to imagine how that was possible, so he didn’t try.
Several of the pedestrians in the mall turned and stared.
On one of the walls, the speaker came back and said, “And in related news, the New British Museum of Gibraltar is threatening to sue Jean-Pierre Paredes de García for as-of-yet unspecified damages. For centuries, they have been studying counterfeit Joseph Merrick bones…”
A pack of boys ran over, wearing nothing but scores of multicolored ribbons streaming from their long hair and body paint on their naked skin. As they swarmed around him, Joseph realized that they weren’t painted—the swirls of color were embedded in their skin. He supposed it wasn’t any stranger than having four arms. “Excuse me,” Joseph said. “Can you please tell me how I could get outside?”
The throng of boys shrieked and whirled and herded him through the building, and when Joseph looked back, he saw that they’d collected a train of followers, all murmuring and pointing at him. But escape was just ahead in the form of two glass doors, which slid open at their approach. Joseph soon found himself standing in the delicious warmth of the mid-morning sun.
He looked up, up past the video walls, the spires, and the gondolas, all the way to the brilliant blue above. From here, the dome was practically invisible. If he unfocused his eyes, he could pretend that there was nothing between him and the sky.
But that wasn’t the world he was living in. Out there, there was ice. He found himself shivering despite the warmth, and wrapped his arms tightly around himself, clutching at perfectly matched shoulders that felt utterly unfamiliar and wrong.
No, he was going to enjoy this body and this opportunity. He would not waste a single moment on things he couldn’t change. He let out a long breath, then said, “Thank you. My map will guide me from here.” He looked down at the scroll and decided he would visit the Spanish Governor’s Palace. The thought of seeing something that had been built over a hundred years before he was born sounded appealing.
But he wasn’t sure how he was going to get through this crowd.
Why did there have to be a crowd? Hadn’t he already had more than his fill of staring crowds?
Someone plucked at his sleeve, and he turned, his disquiet replaced by confusion the moment he caught sight of the offender. Its arms, legs, and head were swathed in red and blue fabric wraps, but its torso and pelvis were bare and devoid of any genitalia, or indeed, of any definition at all. From inside the mummy-wrapped head, a voice said, “I can’t believe it’s really you.”
“Please, I’m no one,” Joseph said, trying to pull back and finding he had nowhere to go.
“But you wore that body.” Wrapped fingers pointed up at a wall, and Joseph’s gaze followed. Splayed across the wall was a black and white moving image of his old body. No, an approximation of his old body. There was something not quite right about it…
“That’s the movie,” the person said.
“Movie? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
He looked back up at the wall just as his counterfeit self cried, “I am not an animal! I am a human being!”
“I never said that,” Joseph said, bewildered.
The wall changed to an image of the New York he’d woken up to just yesterday. Dr. Pemberton stood in front of the picture window and said, “Really, it would have been far more ethical to simply leave him in here. You can’t expect the man to adjust to this kind of social and technological advancement. I was very careful to craft a world that would be reasonably familiar to him, yet exciting and new at the same time. If there’s been any injustice, it’s been at the hands of the authorities who pulled him out of here.”
Joseph spun away, unable to look at the façade he’d been imprisoned in, only to be confronted with a wall-sized view of María Luisa making love to him. “Who did this?” he cried, pointing angrily at the screen.
He saw María Luisa on another wall, and turned. She smiled, her face radiantly unscarred, and tucked her now-whole leg up underneath her. “Well yes, of course I feel badly for using him like that, but I couldn’t think of any other way to raise the money for my plastic surgery. Can you believe that Giancarla actually offered him free surgery his very first day in the house after a year of denying it to me?”
María Luisa had only lain with him for the money? She knew it had been his first time, and still, she… She…
Joseph felt something wither deep inside.
He had to get out of here. He had to get away from these horrid walls and their incessant betrayal.
The half-mummy tugged at his sleeve again, and he yanked his arm away. “Stop staring!”
A violet-haired woman snagged him by the arm and drew him close. “Are you kidding?” she asked, her eyes sparkling aquamarine inside of a half-moon of bone ridges. “You’re the most fascinating thing to come along in weeks. I’d love to have sex with you. I want to compare you with him.”
She pointed to another wall.
Joseph hesitated, then with great reluctance, looked up.
There was his old body, sitting sprawled in a chair, with its overgrown right hand cupping a violet-haired head between its legs.
Joseph felt his breakfast rise up his throat, and buried his face in his hands to fight it back down.
Fingers reached for his waistband, and he slapped them away. “Leave me alone!”
“Oh, come on,” the violet-haired woman said. “I want to do a taste test. Surely I’m prettier than that plain little bring-forward you were straining on top of last night.”
“But I’m normal now,” Joseph said. “Why won’t you all leave me alone?”
“You’re famous,” his old voice slurred from a wall. “Enjoy it.”
“You’re disgusting,” Joseph snapped, his hands balling into fists at his sides. “Depraved.”
“I’d think you’d be happy to see your body getting so much affection,” Jean-Pierre said. “Surely you would have wanted the same back when you were trapped in it.”
“Never! I would never have defiled a lady in that way.”
“It’s not defilement if she asks for it.”
“Allowing a lady to touch that body is defilement enough.”
“I find it sad that you’re so ashamed of who you were.”
Joseph glared speechlessly at the image on the wall, then turned to the violet-haired woman and whispered, “Take me to an elevator.”
Her aqua eyes twinkled. “Elevator sex. My favorite.”
She took him by the hand and helped clear a path through the crowd, which was getting thicker by the second. Hands plucked at his clothes, and by the time they were alone in the elevator, he was missing most of the buttons off of his shirt and one of its sleeves. “Does this go to spire seventeen?”
She pointed to a 19 etched into the wall. “No, but you can catch a skyslip to seventeen from the top floor.”
“Top floor,” he said in what he hoped was a sufficiently commanding voice that the elevator would obey it. “Please don’t let anyone else on.”
The woman grinned and sunk to her knees. “Ooh, a time challenge.”
As she reached for his waistband, he collapsed to the floor, his knees tucked against his chest.
“Oh, um…” The woman stood and backed away, clasping the vee of her neckline together in a sudden burst of modesty. “Are you all right?”
“No,” Joseph mumbled. “I’m not all right. How could I be?”
“I…I though you were going to let me—”
He looked up at her, momentarily speechless, then said, “How could you stomach doing that to him?”
She shrugged. “It was new. It was different.”
“That’s all?”
“Novelty’s a rare thing here.”
“And so even though I look normal now—”
“—you’re something new. You don’t fit. That’s sexy.”
He looked down at his black shoes. They were so covered in other people’s prints that they looked gray.
The woman squirmed. “Um, if you’re not going to let me…uh, then I’d like to get off.”
He nodded.
She stopped the elevator and made a quick exit. When the doors closed behind her, Joseph eased himself to his feet and continued the trip to the top of the spire in silence.
Was he really ashamed of his original body? It was as God had made it. But if God hadn’t seen fit to make it appealing to the fairer sex…
No, that didn’t make sense.
None of this made sense.
At the top floor, the doors opened, and a gaggle of excited faces looked in at him.
He wasn’t sure how much of this he could take before he broke.
But he had been through worse.
So he straightened his shoulders, stepped off of the elevator, and did his best to ignore the small crowd as he touched the glowing panel and said, “Computer, transportation for one to spire seventeen.”
“Hey, that’s where I’m going,” said a bald, snake-patterned man. He appeared to be nude, with no arms and one solid leg as wide as his hips. Upon further inspection, Joseph was able to discern that he did indeed have limbs, but they vanished when held tightly against his body. He didn’t look very hard to see what had happened to the man’s genitalia, if indeed he were a man. He was learning not to assume anything in this future.
A gondola for two pulled up, the number 17 flashing on its doors as they opened.
“I’ll wait for the next one,” Joseph said.
The man smiled and flicked out his forked tongue. “I only bite if you ask me to.”
Behind him, he heard another man say, “I’ll go to spire seventeen.”
“Please, go right ahead,” Joseph said. He turned to wave him onto the gondola, and froze.
The face staring back at him was like a teenaged version of his own, back before the bony lumps had blossomed to their full size and the swelling under his lips had rendered his speech almost completely unintelligible. “No, silly,” the man said. “I meant I’d go with
you
.”
Joseph had to struggle to find his voice, finally stuttering, “Ah— Actually, I’ll t-take this one,” as he backed onto the waiting gondola.
The doors closed, trapping him with the snake man, and he prayed to a God who he hoped could still hear him that the trip to spire seventeen would be a short one.
The snake man shook his head. “So unimaginative.”
Joseph closed his eyes and leaned heavily against one window. “He did that to himself on purpose, didn’t he? He thinks my old body is fashionable.”
“You’re the latest trend. I think we’ll be seeing a lot of that. I’m hoping it blows over quickly. I always hate it when everyone starts looking the same.”
Joseph said nothing, just waited silently for the ride to be over.
“You must be used to that kind of attention, though,” the snake man said.
“I never liked it.”
“Don’t worry. It’ll pass. It always does.”
Joseph opened his eyes and looked at the man with weary gratitude.
The man smiled, and Joseph noticed a stirring at his snake-scaled groin. Ah, there were his genitals. “So, would you like to—”
“No thank you.”
The snake man shrugged. “Fair enough.”
The gondola pulled up to spire seventeen, and the snake man was kind enough to let Joseph take a solo elevator trip down to floor 130. LeShawn and two other young, soft-faced men sat in the middle of the bare floor, staring into space, doing, as LeShawn had promised, nothing. Joseph grabbed a handful of food bars from the cupboard, then disappeared into his bedroom.
“Computer, is it possible to lock the door?”
The wall read, “Locks engaged.”
“Computer, tell me, how did María Luisa record our…congress?”
“She enabled my recording abilities.”
“Is it possible to shut them off? I don’t want to be recorded without my consent again.”
The computer helped him set up encryption based on his brain-wave pattern, and recommended that he opaque his windows to prevent camera-bots from peering in. “Suggest replacement imagery.”
He hated himself the moment he said it: “Give me the view of New York City that I had in my tank.”
Joseph glanced briefly over his shoulder to ensure that the view was in place, then kept his back to it as he made the wall teach him everything he needed to know before he dared venture out again.
* * * *
He’d gone through two meal bars and countless hours of programming by the time the door started flashing. “Giancarla,” it read.
“I’m not coming out,” he said. “I’ve seen enough.”
The door flashed again. “Giancarla.”
“I’ve locked it. Please, just leave me alone.”
It flashed again. “You’ll need to come out some time.”
He closed his eyes. She was right; he couldn’t hide in here forever, no matter how badly he wanted to. He paused the program he’d been watching on life outside the dome, had the computer replace the fake New York City view with a blank opaque wash, then unlocked the door.
Giancarla stepped in, clutching a satin wrap around what he assumed was a still-bare torso. The snakes on her head had been replaced by a symmetrical series of orange lumps, each with a flashing green spot at the very top. “Well, I saw María Luisa’s little recording. I assume that’s why you’ve locked yourself in here.”
Joseph stared down at his folded hands. “She used me.”
“Good for her,” Giancarla said. “She’s learning how to get ahead in this world.”
“And you used her, too,” Joseph said, not daring to look up as he said so.