NothingSpecial: gender-bending transformation stories, comics, and occasional poetry =^_^=
The origins of the virus still haven't been definitively nailed down. It was a basic fact that the initial outbreaks were in east Asia, but between the high population density and the lengthy incubation period it was so perniciously hard to track that by the time anyone caught on, it was almost impossible to say beyond that. And the theories were all over the map.
With a big, life-altering issue which can affect anyone, regardless of class, race, sex, or age, and which requires extraordinary measures to properly combat, everyone wants someone else to blame for it, and the scapegoats they prefer tend to be those they already dislike. Public-health officials suggested that it was a freak mutation spawned in an open-air fish market; conspiracy nuts said it'd escaped from a Chinese bioweapons lab; and the really bizarro types thought that it was a secret genetic-engineering project by Japanese or Korean idol agencies gone out of control.
Its effects were much clearer, but no less bizarre for it. In most cases, it was like a light flu or a bad cold: respiratory transmission with a lot of hacking, coughing, and sneezing to spread itself, plus a fever, chills, shakes, and general feeling-like-crap into the bargain. It was unusually contagious, but not really dangerous, and otherwise pretty normal. Much less normal was the completely different course it took in a certain percentage of patients.
It began, generally, with a heightened sense of smell and breathing tremors so rapid they nearly cleared the subsonic range, accompanied by behavioral symptoms that promoted the spread of the virus: mild euphoria and impaired judgement, semi-compulsive grooming (licking the fingers and/or the back of the hand and running them through the hair,) and urges to engage in close physical contact, increasing the chances of respiratory transmission or salivary transfer.
This lasted for a few days to a week – same as the "flu" stage in normal patients – before the immune system caught up, ending the primary infectious period. But the virus had one last extremely surprising trick up its sleeve in these cases. Patients reported experiencing not the exhaustion felt normally, but a pleasantly drowsy, almost irresistable urge to just sleep. That was when the real weirdness started: nothing less than a full-fledged metamorphosis.
The extent of the changes varied widely, even with similar viral loads; but at a minimum, the canine teeth became pronounced fangs; the ears migrated to the top of the skull and became broad, thin, and triangular, with greatly increased mobility; the coccyx unfused and the end of the spine grew out into a lengthy, flexible tail; and the altered appendages gained a dense coat of hair in a wide variety of colorations.
In short, the affected patients became catgirls. Really, seriously, actual catgirls, like a damn anime come to life. That wasn't always the end of it, either. It wasn't uncommon for patients to end up with whiskers, or cat's eyes with colored sclerae and slit pupils, or longer, thinner tongues with a rougher surface, or to have their hair change to match or complement their fur. Some manner of behavioral changes were almost certain, though the details varied greatly.
Somewhat less common were more substantial changes; the feet and/or hands becoming fur-covered and more paw-like, with a digitigrade stance for the legs, stubbier fingers and toes, claws instead of nails, and those squishy paw-pads; the whole lower half becoming fur-covered and more animalistic; or the development of multiple sets of breasts. Some patients even became fully anthropomorphic cat-people, with a feline muzzle and a full-body fur coat.
It was unclear why it did this; it couldn't help spread the virus, since the infectious phase was nearly or totally over, and there didn't seem to be a latent third stage that'd require such bafflingly specific alterations in the host. The lack of any obvious explanation gave rise to a lot of wild speculation even outside of the tinfoil-hat crowd; it was generally seen as a freakishly pronounced example of virii as vectors for horizontal gene transfer, possibly interacting with some pre-existing genetic marker in affected patients – but even that didn't explain the mechanism for such a rapid and extensive change in body structure.
This had evolutionary biologists all in a tizzy trying to work out the full implications, while geneticists tried to isolate any such key factor in hopes of working out a means of prevention; the scientific community of the entire world was in an uproar. But for about forty-nine percent of the population, the biggest issue wasn't any of this. It was the fact that affected patients always ended up female.
It happened over the course of a few days, right along with the rest of the changes; it was all very well-documented, since the medical world was laser-focused on this thing. Facial structure softened, shoulders narrowed, hips widened; fatty tissue deposits accumulated under more prominent (and sensitive) nipples, developing into full-fledged breasts. Testes withdrew into the body cavity and changed into ovaries; the urethra separated from the glans as it shrank down to form the clitoris; and so on and so forth,° until there was no trace left of male anatomy.
° (Believe me, you have no idea just how many seemingly different parts of the body are actually homologous until you see it laid out in excruciating detail on the evening news.)
To an extent, this was a boon for attempts to control the spread. Some guys are of the mindset where they won't inconvenience themselves to save their life, but their manhood is another story. Performatively-macho types who might not want to comply with basic, wussy precautions like wearing a face mask, washing their hands, or giving people a little space on the bus were a lot more willing to listen to reason when the stakes involved a week of acting weirdly huggy before ending up with a more-than-usually-literal pussy.
But it wasn't that simple. There were still plenty of dolts who wouldn't play ball, certain that it could never happen to them; and when they caught it they'd pretend they hadn't until it was undeniable. And they weren't the only problem children; idiot fratboys daring each other to contagion parties as a hazing ritual, sorority sisters who wouldn't miss spring break for the Black Plague (let alone one that might, at worst, affect their ability to rock a bikini,) and crazed soccer moms who'd heard it from a friend who heard it from Facebook that they could regain their lost youth° all played a part in keeping the virus circulating, spreading, and (God forbid) mutating…
° (Which wasn't true as such; the rumors stemmed from cases where the mass of a patient's new tail and breasts – be they former males or women who'd ended up with extras – plus fat burned in the change was debited from their less flattering regions. The virus did seem to make the most of what it had to work with, but it couldn't turn back the clock. That was, anyway, probably the next best thing to them.)
There were also a surprising number of guys out there who wanted the sex change and considered the cat features either a small price to pay or an added bonus (plus, even more oddly, a few who wanted the ears and tail and felt the sex change was worth it.) They usually tried to avoid exposing other people while attempting to be exposed themselves, but public-health officials still asked that they desist and wait for the pharmaceutical industry to harness the virus's unusual properties safely after careful study.
For most of us, though, the equation was simple: be a dumbass and run a significant risk of losing your block and tackle and spending the rest of your life on the other side of the fence, possibly with a swanky new fur coat; or put up with a pile of inconveniences for months on end and have a chance to keep seeing that familiar mug in the mirror…but no guarantee.
It was shaping up to be a royally shitty year.
And when I first thought that to myself, I wasn't in my wildest flights of fancy imagining that it might involve literally running out of toilet paper – but life is just full of surprises. For reasons that still escape me, huge swaths of the population reacted to the lockdown orders with a form of panic where they decided that:
Which, as any sane person could've predicted, resulted in a huge run on the stuff, despite the fact that A. nobody's water was getting shut off in the first place, B. they'd be fine with a few weeks' worth of mostly non-perishable groceries, and C. nobody needs to use the bathroom that often unless they're already sick. And when the supply chain hiccuped in response, the panic intensified, to the point where not only was there no paper of any kind on the shelves 95% of the time, stores had to ration what they did get in to keep the hoarders at bay.
By the tail end° of the week, I was half-convinced I'd be ambushed between the car and my front door by roving post-apocalyptic gangs of toilet-paper hoarders who'd knock me to the ground and tear through my groceries in search of their precious quarry, then leave me to die. Instead, I ran into Nicole coming back from the mailboxes, which was just as well; I hadn't bought any toilet paper this trip anyway.
° (Ever since the pandemic hit, I couldn't stop noticing things I thought or heard or said that were not intended as puns, but in some dumb, torturous sense now vaguely-not-really counted as such. That wasn't even referring to the virus, but "tail end" automatically registers in my brain as a pun now. It drove me crazy.)
She was one of my neighbors, the next apartment over in our little townhome complex. She wasn't the post-apocalyptic warlord type; more the easy-going retro-hippie eccentric type. She was also a cat lady, in the classical sense that she had more cats than was probably reasonable. (As I recalled, the current tally was four; she'd nearly gone on the warpath when number five ran afoul of a late-night mystery joyrider last fall.)
She didn't quite fit the stereotype, being a lanky twenty-something in a long patchwork-quilt skirt, a tube top, sandals, and a bandana for a head-covering, rather than a frumpy upper-middle-aged woman with severe glasses and an unfortunate hairstyle, and she actually kept her pets in line and cleaned up after them, so her apartment didn't absolutely reek of cat piss. Still, you didn't have to see the "Love to eat them mousies" print hanging in the entryway to get the vibe of someone in thrall to Toxoplasma gondii from her.
"Hey," she chuckled, waving me down. "What spoils do you bring from the field of battle?"
"Peanut butter, frozen veggies, and a little extra dry soup," I said. "I got most of what I figured I'd need the first couple days, when everyone was going crazy over T.P. I'm just lucky I hung onto my tax refund; wasn't expecting to have to use it for this."
"Not bad," she said, stopping the prescribed 6' away from me, hip cocked and hand resting on it. "Beat 'em to the punch while they're looking the other way. I like it." She gave me a sly grin, one canine just creeping over her lower lip; I couldn't help thinking that she looked almost feline herself. It seemed fitting.
"And you?" I asked, wondering if there'd been anything like a rash of pet owners making runs on kibble and litter. "All good to go? Anything you need…?"
She laughed and shook her head vigorously, her long flaxen hair flying around her face. "You kiddin'? I've kept stocked up on essentials for years. These Johnny-come-latelies don't even know from prepping – water and paper, sure, but what about candles? Matches? Canned heat? Medical supplies? Hah. All they know is what clickbait tells 'em."
"…What've you been prepping for?" I asked, suddenly wondering about the lack of candles or canned heat in my own apartment.
She shrugged. "Well, this, apparently. Or, y'know, alien invasion, or whatever. Can't hurt to be prepared; that's what they taught us in Scouts."
"Well, it's just staying in for a while," I said, a little defensively. "It's not like the utilities are getting shut off."
She shrugged. "Not yet, no. But you know how it is around here – one minute it's spring, then next thing you know it's fire season and they're doing planned outages for line cleanup and all that jazz. That throws people for enough of a loop in a normal year, and this time around they'll still be figuring out this lockdown stuff."
"You think it'll last that long?" I wasn't optimistic about this being over in the immediate future myself, but I'd been kinda holding onto the hope anyway.
"Who knows?" she said. "But if civilization collapses into ruin, at least me and the kitties'll have a stockpile to help us through the transition back to a hunter-gatherer society."
"…Suppose so," I said, wondering exactly how tongue-in-cheek she was being. I shifted the grocery bag in my arms; the weight was beginning to wear on me. Behind me, I heard the Gutiérrezes pull in, at the opposite end of the lot. "Well, I, uh—"
"Man, though," she said, "all this fuss…I guess for guys it's a bigger deal, but isn't it weird how even a lotta women are so freaked out? Like they think they're losing something if it gets 'em. I dunno, you ever think it might be—"
She stopped short, waving hi around my shoulder. I turned to see the neighbors disembarking – Frank, and his son Alex. Until a few months ago, there'd also been his wife…hell, I never could remember her name. Alice…? I never heard why they'd split up, but it was none of my business, anyway…
I nodded hello, and Frank gave me a friendly little wave as he hefted some groceries out of the saddlebags on his bike. (The wife had gotten the family SUV, apparently.) Alex glanced warily at us before running ahead to get the door for his dad, and they went inside.
"Man," said Nicole, when they'd gone, "I feel for the kid, but I do not miss her, lemmetellya."
"Eh?" I said, a bit surprised; she wasn't usually the vindictive type. "She give you trouble about the cats or something?" I never had known what to make of Mrs. Gutiérrez myself; I was no expert at reading people, but it'd always felt like I was looking at a mask when I spoke with her…not that we'd interacted much.
"Nah," she said disdainfully. "Well, I don't think she liked the kitties, but she was dead convinced that I was screwing her husband."
I frowned. "Why?" (And how had I lived here for three years without ever picking up on that?)
She gave me a shrug and an I-dunno grunt. "Search me, man. I mean, he's not bad on the eyes, but dude's like ten years my senior and part of the fuzz. Never even caught him eyeing me up or anything, but every time I saw her she was givin' me the evil eye like I was some brazen hussy."
"…Huh," I said, after a moment of searching for something to say; I had nothing constructive to offer, and no intention of getting dragged into whatever weird soap-opera nonsense this was. Luckily, Nicole didn't seem to be expecting any more from me than that. "So, uh, what were you saying, again?" I asked, hoping to change the subject.
She thought back, looked briefly embarrassed, then shrugged and grinned sheepishly. "Y'ever wonder if it wouldn't be simpler to just…get it over with?" she said, a bit hesitantly. "Like, so you end up with ears and a tail, big deal – and then it's done, right? You don't hafta worry about it anymore, or jump through all these hoops…you ever think about that?"
For a moment I just stared at her, turning the question over in my mind. "Honestly, I'm kinda surprised you haven't already," I said at last, wondering how I'd escaped from one weird, awkward conversation into an even weirder, more disconcerting one.
She glanced away, embarrassed again, her cheeks slightly flushed. "I, uh, can't say I haven't toyed with the idea," she said, clasping her hands behind her back and squirming a little. "It'd definitely be kinda awesome. But, well…what if something really crazy happened? Like, you went full cat? Even that might be kinda cool as an experience, but…who'd work the can opener or change the litter if I couldn't?"
"Well, uh, yeah, there's that," I said with a shudder. "Plus, you might spread it to people who don't want it, and you might not change even if you get infected, and…and…" It was one thing to think, in the abstract, that she might actually go for that, but I wasn't expecting her to admit to it so readily. Sure, it wouldn't be as weird if you were already female, but…just giving in? Changing yourself like it was nothing?
Even without the hypothetical risk of "really crazy,"° you could still end up with your whole body altered; would it really be so great, having the vessel you'd spent your entire life in reshaped around you, just because you thought you wanted some snazzy new "accessories…?" And what about the behavioral changes? Sure, they weren't always pronounced, but on some level, wouldn't that mean that you weren't really you anymore…?
° (There were no recorded cases of anyone turning fully into a cat, thankfully. But the virus was so poorly understood, and its known effects so wild, that it was nothing like certain that "human-sized anthropomorphic cat-woman" was the limit.)
"Yeah, I guess so," Nicole sighed. "It just seems silly, having to go to all this trouble to avoid something that isn't really all that bad…"
"If it helps," I said, "think of it as giving everyone who doesn't want that a better chance to stay as what they are." I shifted the groceries to my other arm. "Hell, you have my personal gratitude, for what it's worth."
She got a mischievous expression; there was that fang – er, canine – again. "Oh, I dunno," she said, scuffing her sandal on the pavement, "I bet you'd be cute. …You know, if it did get you."
I squirmed a little, bouncing uneasily on the balls of my feet. "I, uh, hope I never have to find out."
"Um, well, I didn't mean it like that," she said apologetically. Her hand wavered upwards as if to rest on my shoulder, but we were too far apart. "It's just…you know, it wouldn't be the end of the world, would it? And if anything really crazy happened, you could always live with me and the kitties."
I felt some sympathy when I noticed her trying to comfort me; she was absolutely the touchy-feely huggy type, and while I knew I wasn't, I could imagine the whole social-distancing thing being hard on her. I wished I could help, but there was no way to know if either of us was a carrier; besides, she did have a whole houseful of cats to pet. Still, I felt for her…
…but that was quickly obliterated by the full-body shudder I experienced at the second part.
It was one thing to have her try to comfort me over something I already knew was very possible, something I'd had to consider myself; but having her raise the specter of something much, much worse out of nowhere and then try to make me feel better about that was quite another. The thought of not merely changing from an ordinary guy into something else, but losing my humanity entirely – of becoming some tiny, ridiculous creature and spending the rest of my days crapping in a box and being laughed at on YouTube and never even comprehending what I'd lost – gave me a rampant case of the heebie-jeebies.
"L–let's hope not," I stammered uncomfortably, trying to put it out of my mind. I started edging toward the door, hoping to get out of this conversation and into the safety of my apartment before she managed to deal any further blows to my sanity. She gave me another apologetic look and a friendly wave goodbye before heading back to her own place, humming quietly. I didn't realize until after she'd gone inside that the tune was "Ev'rybody Wants to Be a Cat."
Well. That conversation was going to be rattling around in my brain for the rest of the day/week/month; but at least it was over with. I hoisted the groceries back up from where I'd let my arm sag to and prepared to finally go inside, set them down, and spend the next few minutes letting my shoulders recover. That was when Parker strolled over.
Parker was the last resident in our row, and one of the low-key annoyances in my life. He wasn't a bad person, in the grand scheme of things, but he possessed a combination of attributes that endlessly rubbed me the wrong way; or rather, a combination of attributes that I wouldn't have had a problem with if they weren't filtered through his personality.
It was fine, f'rexample, that he was a gym rat; good for him. But his habit of very definitely not-quite humble-bragging about it at the drop of a hat got under my skin to a degree that I found a little surprising. Similarly irritating to hear about were his professional success (as an up-and-coming junior manager in the sales department of some big firm down in Rancho,) his social life (he'd been to Cancún twice in the past year,) and his trendy consumer electronics (he'd waylaid me for a solid half-hour over the holidays to demonstrate his new "smart door.")
(That last was the most active irritant; partly because people who think that buying a lot of expensive gadgets makes them "tech-savvy" annoy me on a professional level, but mostly because his apartment full of Internet-of-Things things generated so much wireless crosstalk that I couldn't get reliable reception with my laptop from the far end of my couch.)
"Yo, bro!" he called out, in that too-chipper type-A fresh-young-sales-guy voice, coming considerably closer to me than 6' away. "Workin' hard, or hardly workin'?"
I tried not to glare. I felt the bag slipping in my grasp again; I could've sworn I only had some light groceries in there, but it felt like the bagger must've slipped a few bowling balls in as a prank (doubtless as a stress-reliever, after a long day working a service-industry job during a global pandemic.) "…Hey," I said, wondering how to end the conversation as quickly as possible, without looking like I was doing it.
"Man," he sighed, preparing to introduce the thesis he'd spend the next fifteen minutes expounding on if I let him, "this lockdown business is a drag. We're stuck doing virtual client meetings at least 'til they come up with a rapid test, all the good bars are turning people away at, like, a fraction of their capacity, and almost none of the gyms are are even open. I don't know what I'm gonna do with myself for the next couple months."
"Weren't you just telling me the other day how you had, like, six million streaming services?" I replied, edging away from him; he followed without even thinking about it. There's something about his type that just makes them close the distance; it'd always felt…I dunno, predatory to me, even with no hostile intent. Dogs don't respect your boundaries because they don't understand personal space; salespeople don't respect them because they understand, subconsciously, that it puts them at an advantage over you.
"Yeah, man, but…you know…!" he complained. "It's just not the same. You gotta get where the action is, you get me? TV's all fine and dandy for watching on the treadmill, but it's no substitute for getting out and living. It's gonna be all I can do not to go totally stir-crazy…"
He was close enough that I could smell his cologne, or body-spray, or whatever it was. I leaned backward, trying to maximize the distance between us without triggering his stalking instincts, and shifted the groceries in front of myself defensively. It wasn't like I had no sympathy for the guy – like Nicole, he was just too naturally social, and it probably wouldn't be any fun for him – but for crying out loud, did he have to get all up in my business over it!?
I wanted to sigh, but I also didn't want to breathe in any more of his air than I already was. "I mean, I wish I had better news for you," I said, "but…we're all stuck with it right now. Probably the only people who'll be getting out much for a while are the ones who've already changed – or the ones who don't care what happens to them. You could take your chances and risk ending up…well, you know…but you'd put other people at risk, too."
Parker's usual demeanor was the typical corporate-sales brand of aggressively unflappable confidence, but I saw uncertainty flicker briefly across his face. Then it was gone, as he forcibly reasserted the self he chose to present to the world. "Nah, man," he said. "I mean, maybe that's fine for some people, but I've got too much put into staying in shape to lose it all, you know?"
He didn't actually gesture down at himself, but he might as well have. I declined to review the evidence, and merely nodded; then I stopped and thought about it. "Wait," I said, "why would that make you lose…?"
He considered it for a moment. "I dunno, man. Just, you know, most of them aren't exactly in top shape, judging from the photos."
I wasn't sure whether to be more confused over whether that was really his biggest concern, or what his standards even were here; come think, I didn't really know his taste in women. It was hard to square that with the pictures I'd seen on the news or the Internet – the virus didn't turn back time, and it wasn't just turning plain-Janes into supermodels willy-nilly, but it generally did what you'd consider pretty good work (if you wanted that,) and it certainly wasn't making anyone less good-looking.
Or was it a matter of his preferences? It seemed entirely plausible, with Parker, that it might just be more about the thought of going from lean and fit to soft and rounded, after what was probably years of blood,° sweat, and tears poured into pursuit of the former. But was it even true that someone who'd bothered to keep themselves in shape would have that taken away from them and end up as a generically soft, curvy marshmallow of a woman…?
° (Well, probably not blood.)
I had no idea. It simply hadn't come up in my own research, not being terribly relevant to me; and the official research efforts were much more focused on detecting and stopping the spread of the virus than on the why and wherefore of its symptoms. Undoubtedly there were people on the Internet trying to work out, after the fact, what the correlation was between what you found appealing in a woman, how you might hypothetically picture yourself as one, and how you ended up when the virus was done with you, but I didn't know anything about that…
"Well, most people aren't that fit to begin with," I offered, after a long moment of trying to untangle my thoughts on the subject. "So it doesn't prove much one way or the other."
He considered that for a moment, then shrugged. "Ehh, maybe. Either way, it'd be a drag having the power to open the pickle jar taken away, or reach the top shelf, or…" He trailed off, trying to think of any other crucial manly abilities that were in jeopardy, while I tried to remember the last time I'd had to open a pickle jar. And did those even have to do with how fit you were? No amount of exercise would make you taller…
"Still, though," he mused, unable to think of any more obvious ones,° "you gotta kinda envy them the freedom. We're gonna be stuck inside going crazy, while they can just get out and enjoy life, get in on the action…"
° (At least he hadn't brought up the ability to pee standing up…)
"Dunno that there'll be that much 'action' until things get more under control," I said. "I mean, they're still supposed to follow the containment guidelines in a mixed crowd, 'til we figure out if they can still transmit the virus after being changed. Probably will have an easier time of it, but not by that much – and that's not counting all the stuff they have to adjust to."
"Yeah, I guess," he sighed. "You're kinda lucky yourself – you never get out anyway, right? Guess it's no biggie for you, then." He gave me a thoughtful stare. "And you sorta already walk around on your 'paws,' come to think of it…"
"…What?" I stared in confusion, trying to figure out what he meant by that.
"You know, man, the foot thing. Look, you're doing it right now."
Okay, I was bouncing on my toes again, and maybe that did sort of look like the way cats walked, but it was just a nervous tic, really. I'd fallen into the habit ages ago; kid-me got bored of turning around like usual when I forgot what I'd come into a room for and had to retrace my steps in hopes of remembering. This way, I'd reasoned, I could just quick-pivot mid-step, instead of halting, shuffling around, and starting forward from a standstill. It'd felt kind of fun to me, too – lithe and springy. I felt silly about it now, of course, but the habit was still ingrained, and I couldn't be bothered to break it…
But it was patently absurd to think that, because I had some odd habits that sort-of resembled something completely different if you squinted just right, I'd have an easier time adjusting to a full-body metamorphosis that was tangent to both; so absurd, in fact, that I didn't want to dignify that with a response. "A–anyway," I huffed, "those are the options. You can take your chances, but the risk is on you. It's your choice."
Parker looked surprised for a moment, then laughed. "Nahhh, man! It'll be fine; we're still young and healthy, right? We roll up our sleeves, get through this, let it burn itself out, and then we can all get back to living how we want – eh, killer?"
He gave me a "playful" punch to the upper arm. It'd merely have annoyed me under normal circumstances, but after ages of standing around hefting a bag of (apparently) depleted uranium, I flinched so hard that I almost buckled, and had to scramble to avoid spilling my groceries right out of the bag. I ended up dropping it onto the pavement, but it landed right-side-up; thankfully, I didn't have anything breakable inside.
He reacted with the mild surprise of someone who considers slugging people in the shoulder to be normal human interaction and "helpfully" knelt down to pick up the bag, putting himself even further inside my personal space. As I rubbed my aching bicep, he stood back up and gave it a curious heft, surprised that it wasn't heavier. "Man," he chuckled obliviously, "you oughta join us at the gym sometime. Might do you some good, bro."
"I'll keep it in mind," I hissed, fixing him with a withering glare as I took my groceries from him and staggered into my apartment.
I locked the door behind me and heaved a sigh as I finally set the groceries onto the counter. Between the nightmare Nicole had conjured living rent-free in my brain and Parker's insistence on getting within coughing distance, I was now a twitchy, addled mess, on top of being physically pooped-out from the shoulder-strain and all-around drained from the whole pandemic-shopping-trip experience. Hell of a way to spend a Saturday, I griped to myself. I put on coffee, got the groceries squared away, and sank into the recliner with another long sigh – not even 1:30 and I already felt like I needed a nap.
Well, at least that was (mostly) it. I had a freezer full of meat and mixed veggies, a pantry full of assorted rice and soup mixes, cereal, and coffee, and probably enough of my other essentials (luckily, I'd already been stocked up on toilet paper.) I wouldn't exactly be eating well for the next couple months, but I'd lived on much worse in college. I'd need to do runs to the corner store for milk, fruit, and other non-freezer perishables, and I'd still have to make periodic trips to the laundromat, but I should get through this without having to leave the house otherwise…
It'd certainly slash my fuel expenses. Bryce had dragged his feet on it, with much insistence that in-person customer care was our key competitive advantage and hand-wringing about BPAs not getting done, but once it was clear that A. the state health department was Not Funning Around, and B. a lot of our clients (mostly white-collar office environments) were going work-from-home for the time being, he relented. Come Monday, my commute would stretch from my bedroom to the coffeemaker and back, possibly with a stopover in the bathroom.
On which note, I hit the bathroom to wash my hands. Couldn't hurt to be careful; God knew how many other people'd had their fingers all over the credit-card terminal at Safeway. But it nagged at the back of my mind that I'd been in much closer contact with Parker than anybody at the store. Damn it, why did I just stand there letting him into my personal space? Either of us could be carriers; the responsible thing would've been to back off and explain to him why this was a bad idea, so why hadn't I done that? It wasn't as if I liked being up-close and personal with other people, let alone my annoying neighbor…
But, well, doing that would be hard.° Much easier to just stand there silently waiting for other people to get their own act together and behave the way they ought to, for once, without my having to get involved. Easier to wish that I could trust people to do the right thing, and to gripe about the fact that I couldn't, than to actually entrust myself to them…
° (In the modern sense of "mildly uncomfortable and awkward and you worry that you'd look like a pedantic twit.")
Hell, it's enough of a challenge entrusting myself to me these days. There were so many things I had to keep track of – did my face mask fit right, or was the elastic all stretched-out? Was I stocked up on hand sanitizer? When did I last wash my hands? How close were all the people around me? – that it seemed almost inevitable I'd ultimately fail. Who could keep track of it all, 24/7? How long could I really expect to keep making my saving throw against disease? How likely was it that in a week, a month, a year, I'd still see myself in the mirror…?
Shaking my head, I glanced at my reflection. There I was, the same me I'd known my whole adult life…more or less. The face looking back at me was definitely more "nearly thirty" than "mid-twenties" these days, the bags under my eyes were more noticeable, and the facial hair'd had to go for a mask to fit properly around my mouth and nose…but still, me as I knew myself: not notably handsome, or in particularly great shape, or possessed of any remarkable features beyond the one eye that always looked bigger than the other through the thicker lens in my glasses (hereditary vision issues, thanks, Grandpa…)
It was framed by a thatchy mess of dark brown hair that I'd really intended to get cut, as we entered the warmer months, but had put off until, suddenly, all the barber shops were closed on account of plague. I wondered, off-hand, how badly I'd botch it if I tried to do the job myself…probably better not. I didn't exactly have any hot dates lined up in the near future, but Bryce would be sure to make some stupid remark about it if I showed up on the morning Zoom call looking like a toddler who got ahold of the scissors. Still, it was already down to my jawline, and getting to be kind of a pain to manage.
Okay, so this wasn't much to write home about. But it was me, dammit…! This was my own body, the self I'd known my entire life – how could I not get attached to it? How could I not want to save it from being fundamentally altered by some strange disease? How could I ever consider just…just…
"You ever wonder if it wouldn't be simpler to just…get it over with?"
I could see myself wince in the mirror, and I felt a shudder running up and down my spine at the thought. It was weird and uncomfortable enough to hear Nicole talk about it in the context of her own life, but did I ever wonder about it? Of course not; not seriously…
…
…There's this thing your brain does, when you're in a position of having to take care to act safely, where it runs a sort of parallel thread of cogitation on what'd happen if you didn't. It's the part of you that, when you're standing at the edge of a cliff admiring the view spreading out before you, can't help but think about leaping out into that expanse, soaring out into space, being embraced by the sky as the wind rushes all around you…
…and it's the part of you that doesn't think about how the ground factors into the equation. But the ground is still there, and the rest of your brain knows that. You'd never actually jump, and your own instincts keep you safely back a few yards from the edge, just in case; but once the thought enters your mind, trying to get rid of it is like trying not to think about pink elephants, and all you can do is ignore it and focus on doing the sane thing instead.
I don't know if anybody knows why the brain does this. The best I've got for a theory is that it's because you're so focused on doing the sane thing – like it's just a sort of equal-and-opposite reaction to the attention devoted to that. Is it just that your brain has to model what you're trying to avoid in order to work out how to avoid it, and sometimes that bleeds over into your conscious mind…?
Well, that's all it was, in any case: one of those Newtonian counter-urges, unasked-for, annoying, and irrational. Okay, sure, it would be nice not having to bother with all this; and it wasn't like I was one of those neurotically-macho posturing types, too insecure about their manhood to even consider the possibility without retreating into defensive rationalization; to be honest, I'd never felt like that was the core of my identity, it was just what I was. So maybe, from an outside perspective, it was semi-understandable that Nicole might not see a problem with projecting her own viewpoint onto me…
But if you thought about it rationally? It'd take a lot of getting used to what'd be – at a minimum – some fairly fundamental changes to my body and sense of self; it'd add a pile of new complications to my life even once I had adjusted; the matter of altered instincts raised philosophical questions I wasn't very comfortable with; it'd put me into a very different social context when I already wasn't great at dealing with people; and…
…And, well, you just didn't do that. You didn't go radically and permanently altering yourself for the sake of short-term convenience; that wasn't normal. It wasn't sane. Okay, maybe if someone saw in this a chance to be what they'd always wanted, it might be understandable;° but for the rest of us!?
° (But, let's be clear, irresponsible towards everyone to whom they might spread their infection.)
Shaking my head, I shoved it all to the back of my mind and went to pour myself some coffee. Brooding wouldn't make it make any more sense; the best I could do was to just ignore it and focus on the sane things, like mellowing out with afternoon coffee, deciding what to make for dinner (tuna casserole – cheap, easy, and made almost entirely with dry or canned goods; it'd likely be a staple for me until this whole thing was over,) and murdering things with imaginary heavy ordnance.
I settled in at my desk and spent a couple minutes catching up on e-mail and forums as I nursed my coffee. A message from my sister asking if I wanted to get together once lockdown ended, chatter about movies I had no plans to see and TV shows I didn't watch, and so on. Nothing new to report, I thought to myself. No great surprise there; I wasn't exactly going to great lengths to keep in touch these days.
The electronic-music forum I frequented had a thread for shows that'd been cancelled or pushed back, but those kinds of acts didn't really come through my area much. I felt mildly irked by the cats on the banner, which was itself annoying; I had nothing against cats, but I'd started reflexively associating them with the pandemic for obvious if not really sensible reasons, and it irritated me to have my thought process hijacked like this…
As I slipped on my headphones and prepared to drop out of the world and chill with brooding ambient industrial and heavy weaponry for the next couple hours, I caught movement out of the corner of my eye. Out the window, perched atop the rickety wooden fence 'round my "back yard,"° there was a cat. Not one of Nicole's; the neighborhood had a substantial population of strays, to the point that the animal-services department had begun trapping and bringing them in for The Operation and…well, I wasn't sure if they were adopted out or released back. All I knew was, we never seemed to have any fewer of them.
° (At least, that was what the landlord called the 7' x 18' patch of scraggly sod ringing the bare concrete micro-patio.)
It was a good-looking specimen, for a stray: well-fed but not fat, with a full coat of sleek black fur, and no scars or injuries. I couldn't tell its sex from this angle, but it carried itself with the same irritating air of detached poise and casual dignity that all cats strive to convey, in between spastic freakouts. It noticed me looking at it and very pointedly didn't look at me; after a minute of this, it contrived to indicate that it was leaving, but purely of its own accord and not because it cared what I thought, leapt over the fence, and padded off.
Typical, I thought to myself. That was always the way with them, carrying on like they're above it all, in need of nothing and no one, and all places are alike to them…until they're cozying up to whoever mans the can-opener. I wondered what they thought they were accomplishing by it; the whole facade falls apart the minute they're exposed to catnip, a laser pointer, or even their own tail. The whole world knows they're absurd little critters – so why all the pretense?
I shrugged it off and plunged into FPS mayhem, but I felt strangely out-of-sorts. I glanced at my work laptop, propped up against the wall in the corner, charging. It was weird to think that, for the next few months, I'd hardly even leave this room except to run errands or make dinner. It wasn't as if I liked commuting an hour-plus each way, I was totally fine working from home, it was just…a little weird, was all.
But it'd be fine; I didn't really need to get out that much. I didn't have anyplace to be or anyone I was desperate to hang out with, and the less I had to be around people, the fewer opportunities they'd have to annoy me. I had stuff to keep me busy here, projects to work on around the house, and I could get anything I needed by mail-order; plus, it was only a couple months. I'd be Just. Fine.
During a lull in the action, I glanced back at the fence. Are cats happy with their lives? I wondered, out of nowhere.
…Am I happy…?