He wanted to say something stupid about his ethnicity at that point. But I’m Thai. Like that would be news to them. Like that made him different from everyone else with tan skin and black hair and dark complexions who would want brown eyes if they could get them. Like stating his ethnicity would change what was technologically possible.
He chose the darkest color he could, a deep, vibrant blue. In any other context, it would have been beautiful.
“I still don’t think I’m going to be up to going out this week,” he tells Zara, when she prods him to resume their relationship as perpetual drinking buddies.
He hasn’t tried a mirror yet. He doesn’t know what he looks like. But it doesn’t matter; he doesn’t want the staring, the fascinated questions from people who assume they’re making small talk. The silent judgments from people who assume he did it for enhancement.
He also doesn’t want people to know this part of him before they know his name, to see it splashed across his face without him choosing to tell them. Doesn’t want to try to meet new people when this will inevitably and painfully be a conversation starter, his new acquaintances stepping on a land mine they don’t even know is there. “I like your eyes.” “I had cancer.” “. . . Oh.”
He foresees some awkward silences coming up in his dating life.
He wonders if this would have been easier if he’d been in a relationship when it happened. If a boyfriend looking at him like he was just the same would have made him feel so. Or if that person looking at him ever so slightly differently would have magnified every feeling of alienation.
He’s started wearing sunglasses outside all the time, now.
He began paying attention to the transhumanist movement after his diagnosis. Zara knew about it, of course, and had her typical libertarian stance. “Hey, as long as they’re not hurting anybody.”
He read up on some of the politics online. People wanting to modify themselves. People wanting to modify their children. Other people claiming the right to hate and condemn them for it. It struck him as just as senseless as most politics.
The idea that he’d be entering this world involuntarily—the enhancers’ realm, the political imbroglio—disturbed him. That he’d have to claim a stance, take a side, defend the technological advances by virtue of their medical purpose. Be grouped with the believers by default.
He shut his laptop. He had enough to worry about—he didn’t want to deal with this, too. Not yet.
He assumed, from the beginning, that the new eyes would be better. Of course he did; that’s why people chose to get them sometimes.
But they’re not. They’re just different.
Sure, in every objective sense he can see better. No glasses, and once the photosensitivity dies down, the detail he perceives is startling, especially texture. His vision is better than perfect. But the impression of flatness has persisted. His doctors tell him that no testing has shown anything less than normal depth perception, so maybe it’s all in his head—but doesn’t all vision happen in your head anyway? If it’s in his head, doesn’t that make it real automatically?
Despite the perfect vision, he constantly feels like he’s seeing everything through a slightly dull filter, like someone fiddled with the brightness and contrast settings on his monitor. Nothing he can pinpoint, but it drags at him. Sometimes, some three o’clocks in the morning, he wants to claw out his new eyes and scream.
Sleeplessness.
The bouts of insomnia and anxiety started before his surgery. It wasn’t nerves; he trusted his doctors. Instead, he would wake from cluttered dreams and stare into the darkness.
He’d stretch his eyes wide, willing the pupils to dilate, to suck in as much as they could possibly see.
Then he’d turn on the light and let the flash burn his retinas, let the purple splotches appear and his eyes tear up, wanting to hang on to the feeling.
The first time he looks in the mirror, depression smothers him, like tentacles wrapping thickly around his heart.
He’s been mentally preparing himself for the color, for the metallic sheen. But the shape of his eyes is different. He hadn’t expected that. They look wider to him, perpetually surprised, slightly goofy. He hates it.
Maybe the effect will diminish. The skin around the implants is still red and a little puffy, as if irritated at the interlopers. He knows how it feels.
He’s never thought of himself as vain. He’s always been decent-looking, but was arrogant enough to believe it didn’t matter. That he didn’t care. That appearance isn’t what’s important.
Until now, when he looks at his face and sees a freak.
Now he realizes he is vain, has always been vain, and maybe there’s not a damn thing wrong with that.
He feels a sudden stab of guilt and empathy. He’s only been able to tell himself he’s indifferent to his looks because he’s been lucky enough to be satisfied with them. He closes his eyes, shutting away the image in the mirror.
He’d cry, but his tear ducts are gone.
“Look out!” Yoshi bellowed in his ear the week before his surgery, as a troll burst through the wall. On the screen, his avatar ran.
Life and death, he thought. Such a simple decision to make.
His had been simple, too. “You’re so strong,” his mother kept telling him. “Your father and I talk about it, how brave you are.”
Brave? Why? The doctor had told him he had cancer, and this was what needed to be done. What would they have expected him to do instead? Say no?
Life and death. It made things easy.
His avatar ran around the corner and dropped its hands to its knees, panting.
My days are like yours now, he thought at the computer-generated character. The troll swings its club, and so we duck and kick and run.
But it’s not the fighting that’s the hard part, is it?
The pain improves; the headaches lift. He’s doing dishes one day when it strikes him he’s forgotten about his eyes for the last few minutes. He hadn’t realized that until now he’s been constantly aware of them, a low-level hum of discomfort, of difference.
As the days go by, it happens more often, for longer stretches. He’s surprised sometimes when he catches his face in the mirror—his self-image is still one in which he has human eyes, and when the reality reminds him, his mood twists into depression.
But even that changes. The first time he looks in the mirror and doesn’t notice his eyes, he realizes it happened five minutes later, and it jars him.
The human mind is infinitely adaptable.
Cancer.
When other people said the word, it was this huge, ominous, grave thing. People died of cancer. People lost loved ones to it. People wrote sad books and movies about cancer, and somebody always died and it was always tragic and noble and had important messages about the meaning of life.
Having cancer was different. He didn’t feel particularly tragic. Or noble. Or enlightened.
It was just shitty.
He was fortunate to have a good prognosis. He’d slog through it and out the other side, and life would go on.
Life goes on.
His friends and colleagues get used to his eyes far faster than he does. For a while he watches for them to be still looking, still gossiping, still curious, but eventually even his paranoia has to admit that he’s yesterday’s news. The realization is somehow both relieving and depressing. After all, he still has to deal with his new eyes, and now he has to deal with them alone.
He starts seeing a therapist once a week. She’s a very pleasant person who listens to him ramble and asks him gentle questions that make him feel less stupid. He’s always more at peace after his sessions with her.
He starts forgetting to wear the sunglasses. He finally signs back on to his gaming group, and his friends greet him with whooping cheers for about thirty seconds before they’re all focused on the game again. Their lack of continued concern is somehow both liberating and slightly disappointing. He files that away to
talk to the therapist about.
A good part of the time now, when someone does a double take at him on the street, he doesn’t remember why until he thinks about it.
“This is just something I have to get through,” he told his parents once.
He hadn’t thought that statement would be so full of raw truth.
A year passes.
He remembers thinking last year that in a year none of this would matter. He was both wrong and right about that: it matters, and it doesn’t. The cancer changed him, but he adjusted. Nothing is radical. Nothing is revelatory. But nothing is inconsequential, either.
It’s just . . . life. Like everything else.
He’s started dating again. There haven’t been as many awkward silences as he feared. It turns out he can say, “I had cancer in my eyes, but I’m okay now,” and then smile and change the subject. Zara turns out to be right that his eyes probably attract more people than not, and he’s learned not to mind.
He thinks about going to a rink and trying skating. Just for fun. Who knows, after all these years it might be more pleasant than painful. Zara offers to go with him. “I’ll fall on my ass so much, I’ll make you feel great. Instant moral support.” He smiles. He doesn’t have to decide anything now.
He starts struggling to find new things to talk to his therapist about, and they drop to meeting once a month, then as-needed. He keeps her card taped to the fridge.
Sometimes he sees transhumanist rallies on television or chances across articles on the Internet. He’s still not sure how he feels about them. He’d say he’s indifferent, but as a man with a fake leg and fake eyes, he’s one of the media-dubbed “cyborgs” already.
Well, screw it. He’s indifferent. It feels satisfying, somehow, to claim his right to have no political feelings about the technology in his body.
At night he sleeps well. And in the morning, he opens his eyes and goes about his day.
LIZ ZIEMSKA
The Mushroom Queen
FROM Tin House
IT’S THE MIDDLE of the night and the woman can’t sleep. Perhaps it’s the full moon, or the fool moon, the kind of moon that keeps you awake thinking stupid thoughts. She puts on her glasses and sees that it’s 2:55 a.m. The man lies beside her, generating too much heat. There’s a small brown dog nestled into her armpit. A white dog sleeps at her feet. She’s wedged in like a crooked tooth.
For about an hour now she’s been thinking about the two races of man. One race is very, very slow; they crawl upon the earth like slugs, leaving silvery slime trails wherever they go. The other is very, very fast, about as fast as electrons, and when they pass by they leave a radiant residue, though you can never be sure if you’ve actually seen them, or if there’s a smudge on your glasses picking up the light in a funny way. The two races live side by side, completely unaware of each other, sucking on the same earth.
But on the night of the fool moon, a special moon that occurs once per decade—or every 9.3 years, to be exact—when the moonrise lag is equal to the moonset lag, causing great upheavals of the deep, cold waters of the Pacific Ocean, the slow race can sometimes catch up to the fast race.
All of this is just nonsense, of course. It’s the duration that’s the important part here. Nine-point-three years is a long time to be married.
The woman sighs, digs her toes into the fur of the white dog. She looks out the sliding glass doors at the garden in moonlight—they still don’t have curtains. It really is beautiful out there, like a scene from Last Year at Marienbad, her favorite film, but enacted with owls, rabbits, voles, and coyotes. A tiny, mournful cry reaches her through the partially opened door, some small furred thing losing its life out beyond the chicken-wire fence and the scrub grass, where the man keeps the pile of lumber that once was the trellis under which they were married.
A bit of white flashes by in her peripheral vision—a flap of cloth?—then disappears behind the farthest clump of jade plant.
Kicking off the blankets, the woman rolls carefully from the bed without disturbing the dogs and the man. She shakes a sweater from a pile of clothing the man has left on the floor, where the jeans and underwear he shucked off still retain his shape, as if his body had dematerialized. She walks to the door and looks out. It’s the one thing they had agreed on, a luxury but well worth it: the lawn, the decorative clumps of shrubbery, the drooping leaves of the Mexican bamboo, the flax. And then she sees it again, a figure in white moving very quickly across the grass, diving behind the nearest jade plant. It is coming closer to the house, where the dogs and the man lie paralyzed in sleep.
The woman slides the glass door open wider and steps out onto the deck, closing the door behind her so the dogs won’t get out. She stands there under the moonlight. It has a definite tone, like minute silver shavings striking glass, a tone that shifts as the silver bounces off her head, her shoulders, her upturned face. The moon is past its highest point; she can feel her energy weakening. She thinks again about the two races of man. What if the fast race can sometimes clean up the messes of the slow? Her toes grip the worn redwood boards.
She steps off the deck onto the lawn. What is wrong with her marriage anyway? Nothing that she can point to, no crimes, no infidelities. Some petty cruelty in times of stress, but who isn’t guilty of that? Nevertheless, she feels restless, bored, slow. There’s nothing wrong, but everything’s wrong: she’d like that on a T-shirt, please. For months now she’s been fantasizing about being more than she is, but it isn’t coming true. What if she could step into the fast, fast world without being missed? What she wants now, more than anything, is a placeholder, someone to keep her life intact while she goes on a little reconnaissance trip.
The woman reaches the jade plant just as another woman steps out to face her. They are nearly identical, mirror images, though the doppelgänger, as befits a creature of the moonlight, is more glamorous-looking than her sun-fattened twin. Even so, to examine herself three-dimensionally is unnerving for the woman. Mirrors don’t tell half the story. Is this really how her nose looks in profile? The skin of the other is beaded with tiny water droplets, her white cotton nightgown translucent with moisture. The woman reaches out to touch her, but just as she’s about to make contact, the other one grabs her by the throat and tosses her into the jade plant. Our woman is gone. Her double crosses the lawn, steps onto the deck, slides open the door, dries her feet on the pile of discarded clothes, and climbs into bed.
The big white dog lifts his head and wags his tail. Then he stops, sits up, and looks again. He’s confused. His eyes tell him one thing, but his nose, the more reliable source, tells him another: she may look like his beloved mistress, but she smells, definitively, like rabbits. There’s nothing the white dog loves more than killing rabbits.
He wags his tail again. The woman sleeps. Maybe his nose is wrong. He’s getting old, almost six, though not very old for his breed. He has another six years in him, he can feel it, but things are starting to break down. He can’t bank the curves like he used to while chasing the neighbor’s cat off the lawn. Thank God the mangy creature was taken out by coyotes (tracked, tricked, cornered, and devoured—he had heard it all one night). Thank God he didn’t have to suffer the humiliation of another failed chase, the cat’s mocking glance as it jumped onto the fence and disappeared into the street, where the dog could not go without a leash.
The woman digs her toes into his fur, like the other one had done. She turns onto her side, pulls the blanket up to her chin, tucks the brown dog, that small, furry shithead, into the curve of her body, like the other woman had always done. Everything checks out, except for the strange straw-and-dandelion smell of rabbits. Perhaps, like his hips, his nose is starting to go.
Our woman, the original, sinks into the soft, moist ground at the base of the jade plant, terrified. She tries to scream but soil fills her mouth. She opens her eyes, but there is nothing but darkness, no air, no sound; the world is extinguished. And yet she lives on, packed in with the weight o
f the earth; no longer merely slow, she is immobile.
The small brown dog knows of course that the creature in bed with him is not his beloved mistress, but he also realizes that it would be dangerous to let on that he knows. This “woman” is so much a copy of his woman that it obviously took a great deal of effort to pull off the stunt, and great effort usually comes with great desire. The small dog knows there’s nothing more dangerous in the world than desire. He also knows that to raise an alarm about this fake would be to risk the life of his true mistress, who is obviously being held captive somewhere.
What he needs to do now is to convince this dimwitted white brute to stop sniffing her like she’s some kind of rabbit he’d like to snatch up in his teeth and shake to death. That stupid white fluff likes to leave his rabbit carcasses all over the lawn, those pretty little brownish gray rabbits that come to feed on the garden and leave their delicious little pellets behind for the small dog to find and eat. That’s what the dumb white leg-humper is missing: this fake woman doesn’t smell like rabbits; she smells like rabbit poo.
Some fun facts about fungus, the most prevalent organism on the planet.
About 250 million years ago, a meteorite struck down around Siberia, creating tidal waves, lava flows, hot gases, and searing winds. The land grew dark under a cloud of debris, causing 90 percent of its species to die out. Fungus inherited the earth.
Animals are more closely related to fungi than to any other kingdom. Millions of years ago, we shared a common ancestor. Man is just a branch off the fungal evolutionary tree, the branch that evolved the ability to capture nutrients by surrounding its food with cellular sacs, or stomachs. As animals emerged from the water, they developed a dense layer of cells to prevent the loss of moisture. Fungi, on the other hand, solved the problem of moisture retention by going underground.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 Page 12