Dr. Identity

by D. Harlan Wilson

  At last Dostoevsky removed the entire peel from the banana. He placed the peel in a Ziploc bag, sealed it, and deposited it in a desk drawer. After inspecting the banana for brown spots, he shoved the whole thing in his hairy mouth.

  He burbled something at me. I couldn’t decipher it. He burbled again. I still didn’t understand. He swallowed half of his oversized mouthful and explained, “I said—bananas are my favorite fruit. Because of the potassium.”

  I nodded and smiled politely. “Potassium,” I echoed. I didn’t like my officemate. Then again, I didn’t hate him. That’s more or less how I felt about all human beings. “Are you teaching this afternoon?”

  He swallowed more of the banana. “I’m supposed to be. I’m holding office hours instead. Nobody’ll bug me that way. I haven’t had a student-thing visit me on its own time in years. What about you?”

  “Yeah. Advanced Neuromanticism. But I really don’t feel like teaching. I’ll probably send my ’gänger instead.”

  “Haven’t you already used it once this week?”

  “Yeah. But I’m just not fit to deal with my student-things’ hoo-hah today. I’m hung over or something. Screw it. I’m sending my ’gänger.”

  Dostoevsky shrugged. He swallowed the remainder of his banana and belched.

  I got out of my chair and opened the closet standing next to my desk. Inside were two androids hanging there like window-store dummies. One was a replica of Dostoevsky, the other of me. Dostoevsky enjoyed taking his android home, dressing it up like a go-go boy and sodomizing it; consequently he named it after his boyhood lover, Petunia Littlespank. I lacked the penchant for that kind of activity and named mine after the thing that plaquedemia had stolen from me: Dr. Identity. Tall and broad-shouldered with sharp, birdlike features, the android wore a Saussurian suit that changed shape, color and texture depending upon its proximity to other en masse fashion statements. Right now it was a neon green zoot suit like mine. Dr. Identity’s eyes were florescent white and it had a scar on its forehead, the aftermath of having a wen removed by a discount street surgeon. Except for these latter two abnormalities, I was the spitting image of my ’gänger.

  According to the department’s faculty and student-thing handbook, assistant professors like me were allowed to use their ’gängers for only one class session per week, unlike full professors, who could use them for up to seventy-five percent of their classes. Today was the first time I would violate that stipulation. Most likely nobody would suspect the offense, and if they did, it wouldn’t merit more than an invective. And I was no stranger to invectives.

  I reached around Dr. Identity’s head and switched it on. Sound of a fuse shorting out…Then its incandescent eyes opened, and its stiff limbs came to life.

  “Hello,” it said.

  “Whatever,” I said.

  “Say hi to Petunia for me!” Dostoevsky chirped.

  Dr. Identity stepped out of the closet and dusted itself off. “What day is it?”

  “Thursday.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “Save it. Here.” I handed it the half-finished lesson plan I had drawn up. “Start out with a short lecture on literary representations of contemporary cyborg bodies, using Dick and Gibson as historical reference points. Then discuss the science fiction genre’s employment of Keatsian tropes and what they connote in terms of postcapitalist reality. Make sure to mention texts in which Keats appears as a cybernetic organism. After that you can do what you want. Tell jokes. Pick your ass. Just don’t let anybody leave.”

  Dr. Identity sighed. “Okay. But for the record, I disapprove.”

  “Duly noted.”

  “People don’t like you around here as it is. Especially Hemingway.”

  “People don’t like anybody around here. And Hemingway’s a jackass.”

  Dostoevsky removed an orange from his drawer. As he had told me many times before, it was his second favorite fruit—because of the vitamin C. He peeled the orange with the same calculated fastidiousness as the banana.

  It was at this point that our resident lobster decided to make an appearance. A few days had passed since we last saw her, although we frequently heard her squeaking and growling inside of the walls. Dostoevsky and I named her Lucille after the star of the twentieth century television show I Love Lucy, which we both, coincidentally, had scholarly and extracurricular interest in. More than that, however, the lobster resembled Lucille Ball’s hairdo in certain crouching positions. We had been trying to kill her for over six months now. But she was extremely quick, agile and easily upset. The creature crawled out of her hole and scuttled up the wall that Dostoevsky’s desk was pushed up against, leaving a slimy brown residue in her wake. I carefully leaned to one side, opened a drawer, and removed a machete. Dostoevsky froze in mid-peel, chin wrinkled, eyes bulging. Dr. Identity froze, too, its eyes darting back and forth between me, my officemate and Lucille.

  The lobster haphazardly scrambled across the wall, then retired to a ceiling corner. Breathing deeply, she wiped her brow with big red claws, like a boxer between rounds.

  “Toss your orange over your shoulder,” I whispered to Dostoevsky.

  He turned his head and looked fiercely at me.

  “She wants the orange,” I assured him. Actually I wasn’t sure what she wanted. But the orange might distract Lucille, if only for a moment. All I needed was a moment…

  An agonized expression overcame Dostoevsky as if relinquishing the orange was comparable to losing a limb. He bore his rotten teeth, knitted his burly monobrow.

  “Ditch that orange, sucker,” I said. “Do it.” I tightened my grip on the handle of the machete.

  My officemate tightened his grip on the orange. “I won’t do it. You can’t make me do it.”

  Even when he was trying to speak softly, Dostoevsky had an annoyingly resonant voice. At the sound of it Lucille stopped fidgeting and cocked her head, glaring at Dostoevsky with two beady, onyx eyeballs.

  I peered at Dr. Identity, pushed out my lips, and nodded.

  The android lashed out. In one quick, fluid motion it slapped the orange out of my officemate’s hand. The fruit splattered against the wall on the other side of the office. Dostoevsky yelped. Lucille hissed. Cocking my blade, I slipped past Dr. Identity, leapt onto Dostoevsky’s desk and swung at the lobster. She dodged the blow and the machete slammed into the wall. Shards of plaster showered my face as Lucille hopped onto the ceiling and tore across it. I spun around and swung the machete up into the ceiling, missed again, made to hop off of the desk and tripped over Dostoevsky’s head. Moving in fasttime, Dr. Identity strode forward. It bent over, threw out its arms, caught and positioned me on my feet.

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  “My eye!” Dostoevsky clutched his face. The toe of my shoe had tagged him below his left eye and mauled the surgically implanted bag beneath it. “I just had this thing upgraded! Do you know how much this model costs?” He pointed helplessly at the damaged good.

  Lucille emitted a high-pitched squeal from behind me. I slowly turned my head and looked over my shoulder. She lingered just above the spot where the orange had struck the wall. Her pointed head was arched up and she stared at me as if I had washed down one of her parents with a large glass of sauvignon blanc. Antennae menacingly waved back and forth.

  I smirked.

  Lucille shrieked.

  She opened her claws and leapt at me…

  It was a close call. I barely managed to duck my head out of the way. I felt one of the lobster’s cold, brittle legs pass across my cheek as she sailed by…and landed on Dostoevsky’s face. She didn’t let go. Dr. Identity and I stared blankly at Dostoevsky as he jumped out of his chair and began to stagger around the office. Arms flailing over his head, he cursed, he cried, he smacked himself, he accused us of sabotaging him, he accused us of being jealous of his eye bags…

  Eventually Lucille grew tired. She unfastened her grip and fell to the floor, taking her victi
m’s spectacles with her. Dostoevsky’s face was red, scratched and swollen. And both of his eye bags were ruined now. He stood there in a daze, blinking, gurgling…Then his eyes rolled back into his head and he fainted.

  I tried to stomp on Lucille as she hastened back into her hole.

  01

  ADVANCED NEUROREALISM – 3RD PERSON

  Dr. Identity marched down the hallway carrying a briefcase in one hand and a box of homemade powdered sugar donut holes in the other. The briefcase contained three items: poorly constructed lesson plans, a hippopotamus whip, and a portable battle axe. The donut holes were for the student-things. Dr. ——— made this seemingly altruistic gesture at least twice a week to his classes, all of which met before 3 p.m. Generally speaking, student-things didn’t fully awaken until about 5 p.m. The donut holes were meant to perk them up a little with a sugar high. It didn’t always work, but the odds increased on the condition that, in addition to coating them in sugar, Dr. ——— also laced the donuts with ephedrine.

  Between classes the hallway was a bee’s nest of activity. The dogs of plaquedemia were everywhere, zipping in and out of offices with heaps of books and papers crammed beneath their armpits. Dr. Identity nodded politely at Dr. Poe, Dr. Woolf, Dr. Byron as they bumbled passed. It didn’t nod at Dr. Stein. Dr. ——— had rewired his ’gänger to treat her, if only in passing, with an air of enmity and contempt. Like the modernist author she represented, “Gertie,” as she wanted to be called, was an arrogant, insecure primadonna who, similar to most plaquedemics, lacked the capacity to discuss anything but herself and her scholarly work. And there’s absolutely no excuse for holding a book the likes of The Making of Amerikans in high regard…

  Dr. Identity only passed one other ’gänger on its way to class, a Charles Dickens lookalike with burning, bleached eyes like its own that had no irises, only small dark pupils. It was the one way to distinguish an android from its human counterpart. The two species hadn’t always resembled each other. Just under a decade ago, androids were large, obsidian stick figures that consisted of little more than circuits, transmitters and relay switches. Once the government became a sheer corporate enterprise, funding for certain media-related technologies skyrocketed. Suddenly the exteriors of the android and the human were virtually indistinguishable.

  When it arrived at the windowless steel door of the classroom, Dr. Identity rearranged its posture and methodically cracked its neck. Its pleasant smile melted into a cold, thin slit.

  Its eyes blazed with white light.

  The door squeaked open and the ’gänger stepped inside the classroom and slammed and locked the door behind it. Tardy student-things wouldn’t be able to attend today. Present student-things wouldn’t be able to leave until the period ended. Even using the toilet was forbidden: student-things were required by the university to have catheters taped to their legs during business hours for just such an eventuality.

  Dr. Identity’s Saussurian suit shapeshifted when confronted by the student-things’ fashion statements. For females, this consisted of lace-up tube tops, Daisy Dukes and thigh high heels, despite numerous rolls of fat and patches of cottage cheese. Males, on the other hand, were caked in vast folds of denim and canvas; their heads and sneakers barely peeked out of the getups. The student-things who had sent their ’gängers to class for them dressed likewise.

  Student-things were not allowed to miss class except for deaths in the family, religious holidays, and exceptionally creative lies. Mere sickness, however life-threatening, had ceased to be an acceptable excuse. A surprising number of students skipped anyway and sent ’gängers in their stead. Penalties included irreverent tongue lashings, brutal ass kickings, expulsion from the college, and public executions, depending upon the individual professor’s policy.

  Not all student-things could afford ’gängers, but most of them could, and the underprivileged few who couldn’t took out loans to pay for them. Corndog University was a private liberal arts institution, a honeymoon suite of the Ivory Towers. Young, mediatized men and women couldn’t become student-things here in the absence of sufficiently stockpiled bank vaults. More than that, though, it cost money to dress like glamtrash whores and overblown dirtbags.

  Confronted by the student-things’ imagistic brutality, Dr. Identity’s suit began to bubble and fizz and change color. Its tie leapt out of its vest and morphed into a lightning bolt, a hissing snake, a flailing tentacle, a sig heiling arm and hand…The fabric of the suit rippled and undulated. Its puffed up shoulders rose, fell, gesticulated…Once the suit popped like a flashbulb, exposing the silhouette of Dr. Identity’s machinic skeleton. Then it abruptly calmed down. Acclimatized to the vogue of its new environment, it was no longer the chic, sharp-looking zoot suit it used to be. Now it was a ratty, nappy-looking burlap ensemble wracked with fleas and smelling vaguely of manure. As it placed the donuts and its briefcase on a podium and prepared to address the class, Dr. Identity negotiated the new outfit by mentally dulling its sense of smell and touch.

  The normative state of a student-thing’s existence was a primitive state. Most of the males chased after the females. A few couples were having sex. Other males merely goosed, pet or made suggestive remarks about the objects of their desire. Or they masturbated quietly in the corners of the room while staring disinterestedly at the walls. Some females engaged in vicious catfights, biting and tearing each other’s flesh off with sharply filed teeth and nails. It was a typical pre-class spectacle of sex and ultraviolence. And when Dr. Identity strode into the room, the student-things didn’t skip a beat, ’gängers routinely not receiving a lick of respect.

  In a loud but peaceful voice, Dr. Identity politely asked the student-things to stop antagonizing each other. It addressed a number of them by name, explaining that their conduct, if it failed to alter significantly in the next few seconds, may lead to a reduction in their overall grade for the course. Nobody listened, as Dr. Identity expected. But its program dictated that it always attempt to reconcile classroom nativism by means of the agreeably spoken word before resorting to more effective tactics.

  The android gave the student-things one last chance to cease and desist. Again nobody listened. “Please St. Hellagood,” it said to a young man standing in front of the podium who was nailing goose eggs into his scalp with a ball-peen hammer, “I implore you to take your seat and set an example for the rest of the class. I have donut holes. I’ll give you an extra one if you do as I say.” Buddy Hellagood paused for a moment and cocked his head as if contemplating obeisance. Then he swung the hammer between his legs, doubled over onto the floor, and started to dry heave.

  Dr. Identity’s eyes dilated until they were black. A series of switches and transmitters clicked like insects inside of its skull cavity.

  Its eyes whitened. The android opened its briefcase, removed the hippopotamus whip and cracked it, screaming inarticulately at the top of its synthetic lungs. This eruption preceded a long-winded, foul-mouthed, highly articulate tirade during which Dr. Identity’s whip ebbed and flowed over the heads of the student-things, occasionally digging into one of them. Soon the android began to parade around the room, raining blows on everyone. Not until it had managed to beat and strangle nearly half the student-things to within an inch of their lives did everybody settle down.

  Dr. Identity loosened the whip from the neck of the student-thing in its clutches. “Right. Take a moment to pull yourselves together. Today’s lecture will begin in…forty-five seconds and counting.”

  As it wound the hippopotamus whip around its elbow and thumb and then draped the weapon over its neck, the student-things crawled into their seats, groaning, coughing, bleeding…Some were in worse shape than others. St. Yaketyak was unconscious and had to be resuscitated with smelling salts and assisted into his seat by his peers. St. Boozealot’s neck bone was sprained and had to be set in place with a popsicle stick and scotch tape. St. Blinkenod bled from multiple wounds; she licked them clean and bandaged them with torn up pieces of
paper and scratch-n-sniff stickers. St. Plainjane and Bonk’s ’gängers lay motionless in two crumpled piles on the floor. Dr. Identity had snapped their necks and stomped on their heads. They were legitimate kills. Ersatz professors were allowed to assassinate ersatz student-things just as non-ersatz professors were allowed to assassinate non-ersatz student-things. Given the proper circumstances, such behavior was encouraged.

  The instant forty-five seconds had elapsed, Dr. Identity picked up the box of donut holes and delivered them to St. Raviolo, a pale-skinned female sitting in the front row. “Pass these out please, young miss.” Like most of her counterparts, St. Raviolo possessed breast as well as love handle implants, the latter of which came into vogue last week and spread throughout the entirety of Bliptown with locustlike speed. Dr. Identity regarded her love handles idly before returning to the podium.

  “Now then,” the android intoned, gripping the handle of the whip with one hand and its tip with the other, “as you have no doubt discerned, Dr. ——— is incapacitated and unable to attend class today. Hence I, Dr. Identity, am here in his place…again. I realize that I have already substituted for Dr. ——— once this week and that doubling up, as it were, is generally considered to be atypical and, in some circles, illegal. Nonetheless I ask you all to bear with me during this troubled time.”

  The student-things stared at Dr. Identity like deer. A few of them had already fallen asleep in spite of their consumption of donut holes; heads tipped over their shoulders or buried in their arms, they snored soft, velvet sonatas.

  Dr. Identity nodded. “Thank you for your support on this matter. Let’s begin today’s lesson. The topic is cyborg bodies. Would somebody be so kind as to inform me to what degree you have addressed said topic this semester?”

  The student-things stared at Dr. Identity like deer. One of the sleepers slipped out of his chair, slumped onto the floor…