Unwelcome Bodies

by Jennifer Pelland

  “Maybe you were tired,” a voice slurred.

  Oh God. No.

  Joseph looked up in horror at the nude monstrosity staring back at him from the door.

  “Life wasn’t worth living anymore,” his old face said. “You just wanted to go to sleep forever.”

  Joseph surged from his chair and flattened himself against the back wall. He opened his mouth, but all that came out was a rattling squeak.

  “Oh, that’s right, you’ve never seen yourself from the outside before.” He ran his grossly deformed right hand along the lumps and knobs of his skull. “It’s magnificent. I love it.” His normal left hand grabbed his unblemished genitals in a tight grip and said, “And so do all my dear friends.”

  Joseph felt his gorge rising and gagged into his hand. That body was a nightmare come to life, a gross parody of humanity, a perversion of nature. How could anyone have stood to look at that…that…him? It was a true horror. He’d never understood that until now. He’d been protected from the full impact inside that twisted shell.

  “You can’t have it back, you know.”

  “I don’t want it back!” Joseph shrieked.

  Naia advanced on the intruder and said, “Mm. Paredes, please. I don’t know how you got in here, but—”

  “Call me Jean-Pierre.” The name came out with a spray of saliva. “Oh, how I love how this body sounds.”

  Naia turned to Joseph and asked, “What is he saying? Can you understand him?”

  “Right now, you’re the only one who can,” Jean-Pierre said. “But soon enough, they all will. I’m not keeping this body to myself. I want everyone to get a chance to play with it. Let them bring on whatever punishment they will—it’s worth it.”

  Joseph extended a shaky finger. “Make him leave.”

  “Stay here. I’ll get help.” Naia dashed into the hall.

  “Ah, and now we’re alone,” Jean-Pierre said, his lips stretched so tightly over his twisted, jutting teeth that they looked like they would split at any second. “Come, let’s have a gentleman’s agreement on this. You can keep my boring old body, and I can keep this marvelous thing.” He shuffled forward, holding out the grotesque mass that was his right hand.

  Joseph was still screaming long after Naia and several others dragged his old body out of the room.

  * * * *

  “You’re going to have to get used to him.”

  Joseph sat on the floor in the corner of the room, clutching his knees tightly to his chest. He looked up at the dark-skinned man staring down at him and tried to remember if he’d seen him before.

  The man squatted down next to Joseph, his four long braids each swinging like the pendulum of a grandfather clock. “He’s the hottest thing around. You’ll see him on all the walls. There’s going to be no getting away from him.”

  Joseph shuddered. How could his old body be even more repellent to him now that he was no longer in it?

  “We’ve found you a host mother. Giancarla Baratella. You’ll be her ward for a full year, at which point you’ll be able to apply for legal emancipation. It was tough to find someone willing to take in a bring-forward wearing a contemporary body, but thankfully, she stepped up. She’s friends with Jean-Pierre, but she’s agreed to keep you apart.”

  How could anyone consider living in his old body to be entertainment? What kind of a world had he been brought to?

  “Also, we bent the rules a little bit for you. We don’t normally allow bring-forwards to meet until they’ve had several months to acclimatize, but we’re giving you one evening of overlap with Giancarla’s current bring-forward. In exchange for spending a few hours with you tonight, she’s getting emancipated a week early.”

  He was cured, in a way. He should be happy. Why wasn’t he happy? All he’d ever wanted was to be normal. He ran the fingers of his left hand along his new thick lips, searching for the telltale swelling that had haunted his face all of his life and not finding it. Why wasn’t he happy?

  The man sat on the floor and said, “Personally, I’m against the overlap. I strongly believe that immersion is the key to a successful adjustment. But I was overruled.”

  Joseph looked up at him, and did a double-take. The man’s face was peppered with symmetrical purple bumps that looped across his forehead, cheeks, and chin. What kind of pox—

  Would they still be troubled by pox in a future where brains could be exchanged between bodies? He asked, to be sure.

  “They’re decorations,” the man said. “I got them from a scar artist. They’re a pretty mild modification. Your host mother, on the other hand…” He shook his head and grinned. “I can’t wait until you see her.”

  Joseph let himself be led to an elevator by the man, who introduced himself as Rodrigo. He’d never been in an elevator before, and felt hardly anything as they rose to the top floor. In fact, he was just about to denounce the experience as a hoax when the doors opened, giving him a panoramic view of the bubble city of San Antonio. All around them were great white needles jutting into the sky, with scores of gondolas racing from needle to needle in a never-ending stream. Beneath the towers was a maze of blocky buildings, each with moving images on their walls. Tiny dots swarmed between the blocks, and Joseph was shocked to realize that they were people.

  “The towers are living space, the bases are shopping and work space,” Rodrigo said. “And if you look closer to the edges of the dome, you’ll see the farms.”

  Joseph just nodded dumbly, entranced by the spectacle. It was an impossible city, just as impossible as the circumstances that had brought him to it.

  “You’ve probably never been this high up,” Rodrigo said.

  Joseph shook his head and reached one hesitant finger out to tap the glass. “Are we safe?”

  “Absolutely. You couldn’t break the windows if you tried.”

  A flash of blue caught his eye, and he looked to his right to see a thin ribbon of water winding through the city. He’d only ever read of water so blue.

  “You should take a walk around the city,” Rodrigo said. “There’s a couple of buildings down there that are from around your time. Earlier, even. Like the Alamo.”

  “The Alamo?”

  Rodrigo grinned, a slight chuckle escaping from his closed lips. “Let’s just say that San Antonio is a city of last stands. Mexicans, ice…” He waved a hand and trailed off.

  Joseph looked back down as one of the far-below walls filled with an image of his former face, and he forced himself to look up at the sky. Just under the dome, a flock of sparrows was circling.

  “Like I said, he’s everywhere. Your old body’s a hit. Come on. Let’s get a skyslip.” He touched a small glowing panel and said, “Computer, transportation for two to spire seventeen.”

  A small gondola pulled itself from the stream and anchored itself against the outside wall, which slid open with the barest whisper.

  Joseph stepped through the doorway, tentatively putting one foot on the floor of the gondola. It was rock-steady. Rodrigo nudged him the rest of the way on, the door closed behind them, and the gondola was off.

  Joseph gripped the walls, unnecessarily, as the ride was as smooth and steady as the elevator had been. “I don’t understand any of this.”

  “You probably never will.”

  Joseph turned to look at him, but Rodrigo’s gaze was far away.

  The gondola pulled up against another spire, and they took its elevator down to floor 130. “The floors are small up here, so Giancarla has the entire one to herself. At least you won’t have to remember an apartment number.” Rodrigo’s expression grew clouded, and he said, “Immersion is tough. The next few days will be—” He stopped, blinked, and snorted out a laugh. “I was going to say they’d be the hardest days of your life, but considering that we’re talking about your life…”

  “Ah,” Joseph said under his breath.

  “You’ll be fine,” Rodrigo said. “If what I’ve read about you is true, then you’ve dealt with worse. Just rem
ember, no matter what anyone looks like, they’re human, and they’re healthy. Just like you.”

  The doors opened, and Joseph once again found himself clinging to the walls. In front of an expansive view of his old face stood what he could only assume was a woman. She spread all four of her spidery arms wide, and with a grin that literally went from ear to ear, she said, “Welcome home!”

  “Good luck,” Rodrigo said.

  Joseph cast him a stricken look, then took a deep breath and forced himself to step off of the elevator.

  The doors closed behind him, trapping him with this voluntary freak. “Ma’am, I—” He gaped at her, at his old face staring back at him from the wall, and looked down at his sandals. The world tunneled in tight around him, and he blinked hard to keep from passing out. “Please, ma’am, is…is it possible to make that image go away?”

  “It’s a magnificent view. You should be proud of it. But yes, if it will make you comfortable. Computer, show windows.”

  Joseph peeked up and was relieved to see that his face had been replaced by a series of massive picture windows. If only the woman’s face were so easy to replace. A mouth that large belonged in a nightmare.

  She stepped forward, the mass of snakes sprouting from her scalp writhing and hissing as she did so. “It’s wonderful to meet you, Joseph.” She flicked a particularly aggressive snake away from her face with her whip-thin fingers. “They’re getting to be such a bother. I’m thinking of taking a cue from Jean-Pierre and replacing them with some bony protuberances. Tell me, did they hurt? It’s been so long since I’ve experienced pain that I’m almost hoping that you say yes.”

  “Don’t listen to her.”

  Joseph turned and saw a mercifully normal woman limping toward him on an artificial leg. She was wearing a dress that covered far more than any he’d seen so far, yet still seemed improperly short. The brown hair hanging in her face did little to conceal the large burn scar covering her right cheek.

  “Ah, let me introduce our other bring-forward,” Giancarla said. “This is María Luisa Bonilla Hidalgo. We got her from the World Trade Center, South Tower. That’s the fashionable tower this season. Even better, she was undocumented, so she never showed up on the lists of the missing. Isn’t that fabulous?”

  María Luisa shot Giancarla an ill-concealed glare and said, “Joseph, we need to talk. We don’t have much time.”

  “You show him his room,” Giancarla said. “I’ll see if I can’t find a way to get the computer to spit out some authentic Victorian cuisine for dinner. Or would that be Edwardian?”

  María Luisa took Joseph to another seemingly blank spot of wall and placed her hand on a glowing panel. Yet another invisible door slid open, and she ushered him through it into an empty, white room with a giant window for its outside wall. “Computer, sofa for two.”

  Joseph jumped back as a spot on the floor bubbled up into the shape she’d commanded. She sat, and patted the cushions next to her.

  “I don’t understand this,” Joseph said, gingerly taking the proffered seat.

  “I don’t either, but you get used to it, more or less,” María Luisa said. “You get used to it as much as you get used to anything around here.”

  “I feel like I’ve been dropped into a dream. None of this seems real.”

  “I felt the same way at first. Sometimes, I still do. Just take your time, and don’t let anyone talk you into anything that doesn’t feel right, especially Giancarla.”

  “Talk me—?”

  “She’ll want to take you to parties, show you off, use you in any way she can to gain status. But you don’t have to cooperate. Legally, she can’t force you to do anything. Just be your own man.”

  Joseph looked down at his brown hands. He wasn’t sure how to be his own man while wearing someone else’s body. But nothing would get him back into his old one. Nothing.

  “Giancarla only took you in to annoy Jean-Pierre’s father, you know.”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “No, of course not.” María Luisa folded her hands in her lap. “He’s the best plastic surgeon in the Protectorate.”

  “Plastic—”

  “They call themselves ‘body sculptors.’ They take healthy people and turn them into monsters. Giancarla’s a plastic surgeon too—one of the best, but not the best, and it sticks in that massive craw of hers. She only took me in to try to start a fad. ‘Amputee chic.’ It lasted about three months. Then she tried making burns fashionable.” María Luisa rearranged her hair to try to cover more of her scar. “But will she fix me? No. She claims it’s bad for business.”

  Joseph opened his mouth, but didn’t know what to say, so he closed it again.

  “All you need to know is that she’s going to use you. I don’t know how, but she will. If you’re lucky, all she’ll do is pump you for information on Victorian deformities. But I doubt it’ll be that easy. This isn’t altruism, Joseph. Never forget that.”

  Joseph felt his heart sink into his stomach. “What in the name of God has happened to these people?”

  A strange expression settled on María Luisa’s face. “Do you believe in God, Joseph?”

  “Of course. With all my heart.”

  María Luisa looked out the window. “It’s been a long time since I’ve heard someone say His name. I tried praying when I first got here, but…” She shook her head. “I don’t think He can hear us anymore.”

  Joseph grabbed her hands, shocked by his own forwardness. “I don’t think I can do this alone. Please, I beg of you, don’t leave tomorrow. Please stay.”

  She smiled sadly and pulled her hands from his grip. “They won’t let me. If I’m not at the transport to the ag-op first thing tomorrow morning, they’ll bring me to it by force.” She rolled her eyes. “Me, a city girl, raising chickens. But at least it’s as far away from these people as I can get.”

  “But…” He looked around the strange, bare room with its strange, extruded sofa, and his hands fell limply to his sides. “What am I supposed to do?”

  María Luisa rested a soft hand on his knee and said, “Do whatever it takes to survive.”

  * * * *

  She showed him how to control the furniture and walls in his room, helped him order some appropriately modest clothes, and then left him alone.

  Joseph buried his wonderfully smooth face in his wonderfully normal hands and let out a long sigh.

  For the first time since he was a tiny boy, he was completely normal. Only he was living in an abnormal world. He’d gone from one world that had no place for him to one that he couldn’t find a place in.

  Voluntary freaks? He shuddered.

  No, no, he wouldn’t judge them. He couldn’t. Not after all he’d been through. After all, he’d attempted to make a living by exhibiting his deformity, touring Britain with people of all shapes and sizes: bearded ladies, two-ton men, the limbless, the foreign. At least these future bodies were deliberately chosen. At least they could be easily fixed.

  And this particular future body was magnificent. He wondered just what he could do in it. Did they have sports in this future? Could he go running? Play badminton? Swim?

  Could he even find himself a lady friend?

  He clapped his hands over his suddenly-warm cheeks, then let himself smile.

  Smiling. That was also something he hadn’t been able to do since he was a small boy.

  He stood up and said, “Computer, silver wall.”

  A warm brown face smiled back at him.

  He could get used to being a Negro, given a little time.

  And in exchange for this body, he would get used to this future. It seemed a fair enough trade.

  * * * *

  Dinner was llama curry. Giancarla wrinkled the flat spot where her nose should have been and said, “British food from your period looked so inedible that I decided to make something from a century later. Apparently, Indian food will be all the rage in late twentieth-century London.”

  Joseph had
to admit, the curry was delicious. And it had been so long since he’d been able to chew normally that he’d forgotten what a simple joy it could be. He wondered how much food this body’s stomach could take, because he wasn’t particularly eager to stop filling it.

  Throughout the meal, he did his best to look at Giancarla without flinching, but it was difficult, especially when she opened her massive mouth to put another bite of llama in it. And the room again looked different. The square dining table hadn’t been here earlier. The same went for the thick navy carpet. And the walls were projecting a brilliant view of the night sky, complete with fiery, twinkling stars, which made it feel as though they were eating out of doors. María Luisa had already told him that it wasn’t the actual view, but he didn’t care. It didn’t make the sight any less magnificent.

  Giancarla folded the spidery fingers of both sets of her hands together and said, “Well, now I understand why Jean-Pierre asked me to reset his body last week. Oh, the modifications he wore. He was my finest creation.”

  Joseph put down his fork. “I thought his father was a surgeon.”

  “We prefer to be called sculptors,” Giancarla said. “His father cut him off when he reached adulthood, so he came to me, and I’ve been doing his work ever since.”

  Joseph felt a knee brush against his under the table, and widened his eyes at María Luisa, who winked back at him.

  “Would you like some body modifications of your own?” Giancarla asked. “I’d be more than happy to run some designs past you.”

  María Luisa’s mood abruptly soured, and she silently touched her burn scar under its curtain of hair.

  Joseph looked from her to Giancarla, and shook his head. “No thank you. This body is healthy enough.”

  “Of course you’re healthy,” she said. “I just wondered if you’d like a different look. I could understand if you wouldn’t want to wear Jean-Pierre’s face.”

  “I’ve had surgery before, and I mean no offense to you and your profession, but I would rather not repeat the experience.”