Otto has been out of a job for three months. He used to work in a lab himself, growing stem cells into human body parts to be used for transplants. Then his job was outsourced to a lab in Brazil. The manager who escorted Otto and his box of personal belongings out to the parking lot told him the new lab was run mainly by robots. “It’s just skin,” he told Otto. “It grows itself.” The box of Otto’s personal belongings still sits by the door, where he dropped it when he came in that day.
Otto decides the rash is probably from a lack of exercise. He puts on a layer of sunscreen and goes for a long walk, past rows of coffee shops full of other unemployed people and bus stops with homeless men sleeping on the benches.
When he comes back, he is sunburned despite the sunscreen. He closes all the blinds and has a cool shower, but it doesn’t do anything to soothe the burning in his skin. He goes to bed and has nightmares about a world in which the sun never sets and is always at high noon. He scratches at himself in his sleep. He doesn’t see the skin flakes fall to the floor and skitter away. He doesn’t see them join together into a blob and creep under the bed.
The next day, after peeling off more chunks of burned, dead skin and dropping them on the floor, where the blob consumes them when he’s not looking, Otto goes to a walk-in clinic. He asks the doctor for cream for his rash and sunburn. She writes him a prescription to make them both go away. She tells him she saw a show about a rise in solar flares. She says maybe this could be the cause of the rash and burn. She says the sun is going to collapse in on itself and suck them all into it. She says it’s going to be the opposite of the Big Bang. She says then things are supposed to start all over again.
Otto doesn’t know if that means the world will never end or it will never begin. He asks the doctor if she made the show up, if it’s really just a placebo. The doctor adds a note to the prescription and says she’s stocking up on drugs for when the end comes. She says she doesn’t think it’ll be long now. She says Otto should make sure to use all of the cream. Otto imagines what would happen next if this were a video on one of the porn sites he follows.
Otto goes to a nearby supermarket to get his prescription filled. The supermarket is identical to the one in his neighbourhood. The pharmacy inside is in the same place as the one in his neighbourhood. Even the pharmacists look the same. Otto browses the magazine aisle while he waits. All the same actors are on the covers. He doesn’t even need to read the articles to know what they say.
When he goes home, the blob of skin has shaped itself into a small child, a toddler. It hides in the closet while Otto makes himself a sandwich. It eats little pieces of dandruff, forgotten hairs, a toenail, and grows larger.
Otto takes off his clothes and rubs the prescription cream all over his body. He doesn’t want to get any on the couch, so he stands while he watches the latest episode of Beat the Geeks. Actors pretending to be government officials present scientists with fake meteorites holding fake alien fossils. The scientists hold each other and cry.
The winning actor is announced at the end of each Beat the Geeks episode. The actors thank their agents and talk about how the show was a great opportunity. Videos behind them show the faces of the scientists when the hosts break their disguises as cops or university janitors or homeless people on the street and tell them the truth, that everything is fake.
Otto never watched Beat the Geeks when he was still employed as a lab assistant. He was afraid he’d see himself on it one day. But now he can’t get enough of it. He’d watch it every waking minute if he could.
When he goes to sleep that night, the creature creeps to the side of his bed and breathes in his breath.
When Otto gets up in the morning, he finds the creature sitting on the couch, going through his box of personal belongings from the lab. It’s fully grown now, but not quite formed. Its skin looks melted, and hair juts out of its body in scattered clumps. But Otto can tell he’s looking at himself. It’s even wearing the pants and shirt he wore the day before.
Otto stares at the creature and it stares back at him. He yells at the creature to get out of his place. It yells the same thing back at him. He says he’s calling the cops. It says the same thing back to him. He calls the cops. It goes back to looking through the box.
By the time the police arrive, the creature has grown to look like Otto even more. He can’t tell the difference between them anymore, and neither can the cops, two female officers. One of them asks if Otto and the creature are twins. Otto says he doesn’t know who or what this thing is, but he wants it gone. It says the same thing about him.
The cops ask for ID. Otto pulls out his wallet and shows them his driver’s licence. The creature pulls out a wallet of its own and shows them its licence. Otto recognizes it as an old one he'd put in a box in the closet for safekeeping. The cops give Otto and the creature their business cards. They tell Otto he’s going to have to work this out with himself and then they leave. Otto thinks about double dates.
He doesn’t know what else to do, so he sits beside the creature on the couch. They look at each other for a while. Otto tells the creature he’s not going anywhere. He doesn’t have anywhere to go. It says the same thing back to him. He picks up his tablet and they watch the news and a shopping show and a basketball game and more shopping shows. They watch tornadoes destroy trailer parks on a weather show, and they watch sharks attack scuba divers on a travel show. Then they watch the same news shows and shopping shows again.
During all this Otto notices the creature scratching a rash on its arm. His own rash is gone. He wonders if it was the cream or the shower. He wonders if maybe he’s the creature, and it’s him. Then he wonders if he’s on a new show. Perhaps the new trend is making fun of the unemployed. He looks around for cameras but can’t see any. But that doesn’t mean they’re not there.
That night, it crawls into bed with him. It lies on its side, facing away from him, and sleeps. He thinks about rubbing the prescription cream into its skin. He thinks maybe this will make it go away. But he’s afraid to touch it.
In the morning, it wakes him up by telling him about the dream it had. The world was empty except for it. It wandered around the city streets, doing whatever it wanted – eating food, taking clothes, driving cars. Never seeing another human being but its reflection in store windows. Otto had the same dream, but he doesn’t say anything.
Otto watches the creature dress in one of his suits and put on his favourite tie. He watches it print off a resumé and leave. He stands at the window and watches it go down the street, then he goes back to bed. He looks at the cops’ cards and tries to masturbate. He thinks about the cameras. He can’t get it up. He goes back to sleep.
He wakes in the afternoon but doesn’t get out of bed. He thinks maybe the creature is gone for good now, but it comes back in the evening. Its tie is loose around its neck, and its breath smells of alcohol. It sits on the couch and stares at nothing. “It’s tough out there,” it says after a while.
Otto heats them cans of soup for dinner. They don’t speak as they eat. They go to bed together after dinner. Otto doesn’t dream at all that night.
In the morning, the creature dresses in the same suit and puts on Otto’s favourite tie again. It prints off more resumés. It goes out the door and down the street once more. Otto doesn’t get out of bed. He lies there and doesn’t think about anything.
When the creature comes home, it looks at all of Otto’s porn sites. Otto closes his eyes. When he opens them again, the creature is sitting on the couch, but it’s dressed in a different shirt and tie. Otto must have slept all night and the next day. The creature watches Beat the Geeks. Hidden cameras film cancer researchers watching a fake news show about a cure for cancer being found. The researchers cry. An actor comes into the room and says he’s the head of human resources. He says the company won’t be needing them anymore. The cancer researchers cry some more.
Otto sees the box of his personal belongings back by the door before he falls asleep.
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When he wakes, it’s night. He doesn’t know how long he’s been asleep this time, but he’s sore all over and thirsty. He tries to sit up but he doesn’t have the strength to move. There’s enough light from Beat the Geeks in the other room that he can see the creature leaning over him, watching him. Its breath smells of alcohol. Its skin is sunburned, patches already peeling off.
It’s a special episode of Beat the Geeks. The show secretly revisits the scientists it had tricked in the past to see what’s happened to them. The astrophysicist sits on the bench by the ocean, alone, staring up at the sky. He talks to himself, but the microphones can’t pick his words out of the wind. The alien researchers study new meteorites. They keep the fake ones with fake alien fossils on a shelf in their lab. The fruit-fly researchers say fruit flies can conceive of an afterlife, but that doesn’t mean they believe in it. The researchers say they’ll keep up their tests.
Otto waits for the host of whatever show he’s in to step out of the closet or climb in through the window and point to all the hidden cameras.
He imagines a world somewhere out there in the universe where he is alone, with no double lying beside him.
He imagines a world where he’s still working in the lab, growing body parts for other people.
The creature leans down toward Otto, and he closes his eyes. He feels its breath on his lips.
He imagines a world where anything is possible.
The FURIES
Maybe I was the one who made the Furies. Maybe we all made them. I’m not sure how it happened and I was there when they were born. But I wasn’t the one who set them loose on the world. They did that all on their own.
I’ll tell you the story as best I can, but I was on a lot of drugs back then. We all were. Designer drugs. Different from the ones I’m taking now. Who can say what they did to my memories? Do you really know what everything you’ve taken has done to your mind?
Some of you may be thinking I shouldn’t tell anyone what I saw. What if they come for me next?
But that’s exactly why I am telling you. Because I’m afraid. Not afraid that they’ll come for me. I’m afraid that they won’t come.
I guess I should say I’m sorry, even if it is too late.
Anyway. This is the way I remember it now.
* * *
THE WAY the Furies began was with another model shoot. It was a small job, a day’s worth of work to profile a new line of Dior ties for women. The ties looked just like men’s ties except for the patterns, which were some intern’s idea of what women would want to wear: Medusa heads and bloodied mobs of women tearing people apart and Amazons and that sort of thing. The ties were just accessories but they were Dior, so that still meant an ad buy and marketing campaign, even if it was only at the back of magazines.
One of the agencies I sometimes worked with hired me to manage the campaign, and because I’d blown all my savings on a hazy, summer-long trip through Thailand and Cambodia, I signed on. I won’t mention the name of the agency because no one there was to blame for what happened next.
There’s not much you can do with ties in a photo shoot, so I knew I’d have to get creative. As soon as the agency texted me the contract, I went for a drive in my Tesla. I’d bought the car with money the same agency had paid me to do the Green Coffin campaign. You may as well live life while you can, right? I didn’t have any destination in mind. I just drove to see what the night held.
The bigger agencies have location scouts and professional networkers for jobs like this, but all I had was me. That was partially why I took the drugs. Sometimes I felt like different people and I could see things from their perspective. It seemed to work out all right most times, so I didn’t feel any need to change.
I’d started driving at night after my mother was killed in a car crash. She’d been coming home from her shift at the club, driving her Cavalier that cost more to fix than monthly payments on a new car would have. But who was going to loan her the money? She looked like a welfare junkie on paper, because her income was mostly cash. A guy who was getting blown by an escort he’d met on Tinder ran a stop sign and T-boned her. I hadn’t even recognized the car in the tow yard afterward when I’d gone to pick up her things. It was just a crumpled mass of metal and broken glass stained with different fluids. It was something that shouldn’t have existed at all. That was when I decided to get into the commercial photography business. I wanted to make the world look better than it really is.
The night drives were where I got most of my ideas. I’d once organized a Polo underwear shoot in an abandoned farmhouse I’d found on the side of a country road. Another time I set up an H&M shoot for their website in a decommissioned submarine turned party boat. I’d learned about the sub from a group of men on a bachelor party who were stopped in the middle of the street, trying to bring the would-be groom in the limo back from an OD. I’d even once done a Prada wedding dress shoot at the scene of a fifteen-car pileup that had killed three. The world is a constant disaster, and the only way to escape it is through the dreams we sell each other.
So I drove around at night, which wasn’t that bad given my terrible insomnia in those days. Between the drugs and jet lag and parties, it was a wonder any of us slept at all. I don’t sleep much these days, either, but for entirely different reasons.
The Furies shoot happened the way it did because I was following a fire truck with lights and sirens going when I heard the story about the bones on my phone’s news stream. The Tesla’s speakers made it sound like the voices of the newscasters were inside my head. Construction of the new Heritage Park Mall had been delayed because workers had uncovered the fossilized remains of some sort of dinosaur. The fire truck stopped in front of a burning church at the side of the road right after that, and the voices in my head fell silent as my phone’s battery died. Maybe that should have been a sign to me, but signs only become clear afterward, when you look back at the ruin you made of your life.
I kept on driving, past the burning church and through the night to the mall. It was maybe half an hour down the road, if I recall correctly, which I may not. The mall was being built in some neglected farm fields outside the city, where there was nothing else in sight. Like it was a mall for ghosts, or people who no longer existed or didn’t exist yet. I didn’t recognize any of the plants growing in the fields around the mall. I didn’t know if they were crops or wild, mutated growths of some sort.
Maybe half the mall had been completed and the parts that were done looked like any other mall in any other part of the country. The wings that weren’t finished were just metal beams sticking out of the earth, like the skeleton of some massive creature beyond my understanding. The mall was lit up where it was done, but the lights were all off in the parking lot. There was a ring of lights blazing like small suns at the far end of the mall, though, like some sort of modern Stonehenge. I drove over to them, across a parking lot so empty it didn’t even have lines yet.
The pavement ended twenty or thirty yards before the lights, fading away in muddy earth. I left the Tesla at the edge and walked the rest of the way. The ground sucked at my feet, like it was trying to pull me down, and I tried not to think about what it was doing to my Kenneth Cole shoes.
The lights ringed a great pit in the ground, but that was all I had time to see before glowing wisps of light came out of the mall’s skeleton. The silvery wraiths transformed into two security guards wearing jackets with reflective stripes. Their jackets were stained with dirt, as if they’d fallen to the ground and hadn’t bothered to clean up afterward. They were pointing handguns at me like they were cops or some other people who thought they were important.
“This is a secure site,” the closer one said. “We could legally shoot you right now.”
“I don’t know how secure it is if I could drive right up here,” I said. I didn’t address the rest of his comment, because experience has taught me it’s never a good idea to argue with people pointing guns at you.
“
Is this some sort of test?” the other one asked. He spoke with a British accent. “Because we should have been warned there was going to be a test.”
“How much to let me see the bones?” I asked.
They looked at me for several seconds, then glanced at each other. And I knew I had them. Security guards are never paid enough to actually care about security. They can always be bought.
“Are you a thief?” the first one asked.
“Why would I be here if I was a thief?” I asked. “The mall’s not even done yet.”
“He means an antiquities thief,” the British one said. “We were warned people might try to steal the bones and sell them.”
I didn’t know why anyone would want to steal dinosaur bones, but who knew why any of us wanted what we did. I shook my head and slowly reached into my pocket to take out my wallet. They watched me but didn’t say anything. They didn’t lower their guns, either.
“I just want to look at the bones,” I said and took out two hundreds. And they put away their guns and came over to take the bills out of my hand. I stepped to the edge of the pit and looked in without any more problems.
The pit was maybe fifteen or twenty feet deep. The bones jutted out of the ground at the bottom, only partially uncovered. If they were from a dinosaur, then it was a dinosaur unlike any I’d ever seen or imagined. The bones were great black shiny things that curved and twisted like tentacles frozen in mid-movement. I say shiny because they reflected the light like they were made of glass or chrome or some such material. Some of them reached for the stars overhead, while others wrapped around and through their fellows. Each of them was at least twice as tall as me and it looked like only the tips of them had been excavated so far.
Has The World Ended Yet? Page 10
