They reached the top floor, which had a long glass pyramid of a skylight in the ceiling. The light that came in was milky, given the clouds outside, and the hallway was a mess, but Stefan fell in love. Whatever the flat was like, the place had a feeling he liked.
Only one couple of prospective tenants remained, a young man and woman. They were both overweight and gasping, and stopped outside the door of the flat to catch their breath. As the husband-agent unlocked the door, the couple looked at each other, nodded, and headed back down the stairs.
“I’ll take it,” said Stefan.
~
The grocery store was like a museum to Stefan. Every product on the shelves was a parallel universe version of something familiar. None of the packages had French on them, for starters. Even the brand-name products had slightly different names. Many things were completely new to him. He spent an hour walking up and down the aisles, in the end collecting only a small handbasket of goods, surprised at how startlingly unhealthy most of the offerings were. Chocolate, which seemed to be considered a food group here, had its own aisle, as did liquor.
He paid for his groceries, and his heart tripped over itself when he saw the total. It was still impossible for him not to convert prices into Canadian dollars. After putting the deposit and first month’s rent down on the flat, he had little money left.
Walking home with his groceries, he passed a natural medicine shop. He was intrigued by the age of the shop and its hand-painted sign: “Alchemist”. He went in. The bell over the door alerted a woman who emerged from the back room. Stefan smiled and nodded at her, and browsed around, feeling her eyes on his back.
Each shelf held different sorts of remedies in plain brown bottles with scrawled names and complex Latin ingredients. “Energy Tablets” said one bottle. “Brain Formula” read another, which contained some sort of liquid. He read others—“Weight Melter”, “Beauty Amplifier”, “Woman’s Friend”, “Easy Dreams”—and stopped when he found “Men’s Sex Charger”. He moved away from that section, picked up the brain and dreams remedies, then quickly snatched the sex bottle, and took them all to the counter. The woman’s face was blank as she rang the items in at an old cash register. When she reached the sex pills, she looked up at him, then back down at the bottles, which she put into a small white paper bag. Stefan hurried out of the store and walked back to his new flat.
The sun went down as he started up the stairs, and by the time he reached the top the skylight was completely dark. He unlocked his door, enjoying the feeling of the large mortise key, which looked like it belonged to a castle or a monastery. The electricity in the flat was controlled by a card meter, and he’d forgotten to buy cards, so he put his groceries away in the dark. The gas, however, worked, so he made himself a pot of tea. The bed-sit was small and, like most rental flats, furnished. But Stefan chose to sit on the floor and leaned against his duffel bags, drinking tea until he was sleepy.
~
Stefan left the flat in the morning to buy a newspaper and a red pen, since this was the day the employment supplement came out. He took it back to the flat and read through it while eating a bowl of porridge. He ate his breakfast and read through all of the employment listings without circling anything with his pen. He took his bowl to the tiny kitchen and washed it, then returned to the paper. Again, he found nothing listed that he was qualified for. To stave off panic, he occupied himself with reading the rest of the paper.
At the back, he saw an ad that intrigued him. It read “Date-A-Processing—let us find your perfect match through the latest technology, M4W, W4M, M4M, W4W.” He looked up the address on his map, and decided that this might provide a good distraction. Besides, he thought, if somehow it worked the way they claimed it did, he would meet his perfect match.
The agency was an easy walk away, but it took Stefan several minutes to find its door, which it shared with several other businesses. He pressed the button next to their name, and a moment later the door buzzed and opened. He was greeted by a young woman in heavy glasses, who led him up to the second floor. “I’m here for the—”
“Matchmaker’s, aye?”
“Aye. Um, yes,” said Stefan.
“Please fill this out, then take it with you into that room over there when you’re finished.”
“Okay,” replied Stefan. He looked at the clipboard he’d been handed, which was filled with a vast array of questions about every aspect of his physiology, tastes, and experiences. He didn’t understand some of the “Do you like to—?” questions, so he answered those with a “No”.
“Hello,” said a tall man in a lab coat, entering the room. He took Stefan’s clipboard and looked it over, while Stefan squirmed in his chair. “Ah, looking for a man. Alright. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Right then, could you please remove your shirt, shoes, and trousers?”
“Um,” said Stefan.
“Then step up onto this platform,” continued the man. Stefan did as instructed, and as he stood in his boxers (which were not from his “public display” collection, as he hadn’t planned on this), the man stuck electrode pads to various parts of him, then flipped a switch, which made his body jerk into a taut, upright stance. The man passed a white hula-hoop over his body like a magician, then put it away, yanked the electrodes from him, and consulted with a small white box, poking at its buttons until it coughed out a small piece of paper the size of a receipt.
“Here you are,” said the man. “Your profile.” Stefan felt disturbed at being reduced to a piece of paper—and such a small one. “We’ll put this through the system and see who your perfect match is. When would you like to meet—” He checked the paper. “Him? Tomorrow night. Are you free?”
“Oh. Uh, well. Yeah, I guess I’m free.”
“Perfect. Pick you up about eight?”
“Sure.”
“Great. He’ll see you then. Just pay at reception outside, and let us know how it goes.”
“Right,” said Stefan.
~
“And that’s when I knew we had to break up,” said Stefan’s date. “I mean, he was a right bastard. And a terrible dresser.” He looked at Stefan. “No offence.”
“What?”
“Well, you know. What is that, linen?”
He looked down at the rough white shirt he wore. “Uh, no, it’s hemp.”
“Mmm,” said the date, returning to his salad.
Stefan wondered if they’d put his profile in backwards. Maybe I can get my money back, he thought.
“So do yeh want tae huv sex? We both ken this isnae going well, but that’s my Thursday night shot anyway, so we might as well. Yer kinda cute enough and all, just a bit too weird for me.”
Stefan didn’t remember talking for long enough to establish his weirdness, though he didn’t doubt it was there. He considered the offer for a fleeting moment. It had been a long time since he’d had sex. “No,” he said, deciding out loud, “we’re not going to have sex.” He looked around for the waiter and made a frantic gesture of signing his hand to get the bill.
~
After a hasty and mutually noncommittal goodbye, Stefan and his date headed in opposite directions. The streets were filled with various groups of people, each with some excuse for getting—or already being—drunk. Stefan watched as a group of lads in dress shirts and jeans encountered a throng of young women in very short skirts and thin tops that rose high above their bellies. Fitness seemed to have no relationship to the amount of flesh the women showed, or the amount of bravado the men displayed. Stefan felt as if he were watching a nature program, as he tried to pick out which ones would be successful and which would get spurned. In the end, the two hormone-filled clouds passed through each other, and both groups remained intact, calling back at the other as they got further away.
A hen party bumped past, the women’s tinsel-trimmed bee wings flicking against him. The bride-to-be was their queen, marked out with extra tinsel and sequins.
There was a roughness to the night life that Stefan
found jarring, yet longed to be a part of. He walked away from it all, back toward his flat. He reached home, but didn’t take his shoes off. He paced back and forth in the flat, and opened the cupboard to take a look, even though he knew he had nothing to drink in the house.
His eyes fell on the small brown bottle full of liquid marked “Men’s Sex Charger”. He picked it up and shook it, then opened the cap and sniffed it. It smelled of cherries and alcohol. He took a sip of it. It tasted much like a cough medicine Delonia gave him as a child once, when she finally acquiesced and bought medicine to stop him from keeping everyone awake. He licked the stuff from his lips, and liked what he tasted. Making an imaginary toast to the ceiling, he downed the rest of the bottle. As the last of the liquid left his mouth, he read the label on the back of the bottle: “Take two drops once per week. Do not exceed recommended dosage.”
Stefan put the bottle down and poured himself a pint-glass full of water, then drank it down. He searched his mind for facts about poison. Milk, he thought, then filled his glass again with milk from the fridge and gulped that. It was no use: his mouth still tasted of cherries. He looked about the flat frantically, stopping only to listen when he thought he heard growling. Then he realised that he was the source of the noise. He ran to his door, unlocked it, and looked out into the hallway. Maybe someone was out there, someone who wanted to have sex. But it was empty. He climbed up on the banister and reached for the hinged part of the skylight. He swung it open, grabbed the edges, and pulled himself up—somehow. The tiny rational part of his brain that remained tried to tell him that this was a bad idea, but it went unheeded.
Stefan stepped out onto the slick black slate tiles of the roof and looked around at the other buildings lining his street, all of them with the same old tiles and clay chimney-pots. The air was full of thick mist, which gave the moon above a halo. Moondog, he thought, that’s called a moondog. So he bayed at the moondog, which he was sure would understand.
He dropped back into his building and ran down the stairs to the street. Growling, he covered block after block, with no idea how much time passed. Where to go? he wondered. Then it came to him: Calton Hill. He’d heard that at night men went there to meet each other. He ran in that direction.
He passed by a church and headed up a gritty path. He walked up it, peering into the darkness, trying to find signs of men. He followed along a wet stone wall overgrown with green, and climbed up the hill. Someone moved to his right in the bushes, but when he turned to look, the man moved away. Oh, Stefan realised, I’m still growling. He did his best to stifle the impulse as he continued on. He reached the top of the hill, an open expanse featuring several classical buildings—the dome of the old observatory, the stone cylinder memorials, and the orphaned columns of an incomplete replica of the Parthenon. He climbed the tall base that supported the columns and looked out over the spires of the Old Town that poked through the fog. He looked at the moon and took a deep breath, about to howl out again. But before he could, he noticed someone looking up at him. Stefan let the breath out with a big smile. “Hi,” he said.
“Hiya,” replied the man.
He’s plain-looking, thought Stefan, but he has nice eyes. He’ll do.
Stefan jumped and the man caught him. Stefan laughed, and kissed him furiously.
“Tastes like cherry,” said the man.
Stefan silenced him with more kissing.
~
Light soaked through the thin orange curtains of the stranger’s room. Stefan looked around and saw an alarm clock. Its white flip-numbers read “11:20”. Stefan looked at the stranger, who, now, didn’t seem even remotely attractive.
The man felt him stir and opened his eyes. “Morning,” he said. Stefan forced a smile. The man stood up and trudged, naked, out of the room. His pudgy hairiness repelled Stefan; there was nothing remotely sexual about him. Stefan looked down at himself, also naked, and felt equally repulsed. He heard the toilet flush and some noise from the kitchen. A few minutes later, the man returned with two cups of coffee. He handed one to Stefan and sipped at his, then took a cigarette from the pack on the bedside table and lit it. “Want one?” he asked. Stefan shook his head. The man took a long drag, then put the cigarette down in an ashtray. He leaned over to kiss Stefan, speaking “Good morning” in a cloud.
Stefan jumped up. “I, uh—” he stammered.
“Oh. Okay. I get it. No problem.”
“Yeah,” said Stefan, pacing around the room, his bits flapping as he tried to find the various pieces of his clothing that had been flung about the night before.
“Maybe I’ll see you again sometime,” said the man.
“Yeah, maybe,” said Stefan, in a way that sounded more No chance in hell than he intended. He pulled on his clothes and waved to the man, who stayed in bed. Stefan burst out the front door.
A few blocks from the house, Stefan stopped, leaned with his hands on his thighs, and sighed. He looked at his hands.
He could see through them.
He searched himself, and found that all his body parts had become translucent. He panicked, and ran down the street until he found an open patch of sunlight. The effect was worse here; he could barely see himself at all.
He ran toward home, but didn’t know what he could do about this there. On his way, he passed the alchemist’s. It was closed, but he saw the woman inside who’d served him before. He knocked frantically on the glass pane of the door. She squinted, unable to see him, then cautiously moved toward the door while he continued banging. She finally caught sight of him and let him in.
“What’s happened to me?” asked Stefan frantically.
She grabbed his face, turning it back and forth. She took his hands and flipped them palm up, then palm down. “Looks to me like you’ve got a case of sex poisoning.”
“What?”
“You’ve had sex with someone you oughtn’t’ve. And you’ve lost some of your essence.” She rummaged around the counter in front of her and produced a large clear bottle of lozenges. She counted some of these out onto a square of waxed paper, which she folded into a packet for him. “Suck on one of these every hour until you go to bed tonight. No more Sex Charger for you. That’ll be two pound fifty.”
“Thanks,” he said, paying her.
She led him out, holding his translucent arm. Before locking the door, she said, “And stay off that hill.”
~
Stefan took a walk that night before bed. He was nearly restored now, though his innards still felt hollow. He decided to walk the length of the Royal Mile, since that was supposed to be lucky, and he felt he could use a dose of luck. He dutifully spat on the Heart of Midlothian, the brick shape laid into the ground in front of the cathedral, which was also supposed to be lucky. The crowd was thick here, gathered around one of the remaining buskers who’d stayed on past the end of the Fringe Festival to earn a few more pounds. Stefan crossed the street. He stopped to look at the large concrete base of a statue oxidised green by the elements. The figure wore a loose toga, which fell from his oversized, bulky frame, exposing what looked like a pair of sagging breasts. Propped between one hand and his thigh was what looked like a stone tablet. “Hume” read the plaque under the figure. Whoever Hume was, Stefan thought, he probably wasn’t happy about the breasts.
“Who are you?” asked the statue.
Stefan looked at it, surprised. Perhaps it was another busker wearing greasepaint. That would be an awfully big busker, thought Stefan. He figured he should answer it. “My name is Stefan Mackechnie.”
“That’s just an idea,” said statue-Hume, “and ideas are subject to change.”
“Who are you?” asked Stefan.
The statue’s face, green-streaked black metal with white bird droppings, scowled as he thought. “I don’t remember,” he answered.
The busker up the street finished his act and the crowd flowed into the street. Stefan stopped talking to the statue and moved on.
Thirteen
Take M
e to Your Team Leader
Stefan put his hand under the shower head. The water was still cold. The shower’s controls were set into a plastic box like a radio, and its lights were on. Stefan fiddled with the dials, but wasn’t sure what the icons beside them were supposed to mean. One icon looked like flames, but Stefan was pretty sure the device was limited to issuing water. He thought the other, a spray of blue bullets, might have something to do with the water pressure, but no matter how he adjusted it, the shower head continued to drool.
He scrubbed his head over the tub, and tiny filaments of hair covered its floor. He’d had his floppy hairdo cut off in favour of the local style, a close-cropped electric razor cut. It looked tidy, but he felt uncomfortable seeing his hairline so clearly, like the vanishing wetness in the sand as the tide goes out.
His job interview was in three-quarters of an hour. He couldn’t wait any longer for the water to heat up. Bracing himself, he threw off his dressing-gown, jumped into the shower, and screamed as the shower head released a high-pressure jet of scalding water.
~
“Your background check came back spotless,” said the young man interviewing Stefan.
“Well, in UK terms, I’m only a month old,” he answered.
“Do you have a National Insurance Number?”
“I contacted them, and they said they couldn’t give me one until I had a job.”
“Ah, well you can’t start work until you have a National Insurance Number.”
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