Хэнк Грин - A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor

“Under the bed.”

I looked, and indeed, there was a neatly folded stack of clothes—jeans, a shirt, a hoodie, underwear, and a bra.

As “Senses Working Overtime” finished and a fucking John Mayer song started up, I yanked the clothes on as fast as I could, trying hard not to look too long at the new and unfamiliar parts of my body. The needs of the bladder can outweigh a lot of weirdness. It was a bar … There must be a bathroom. It didn’t take long to find it. Past what was probably once the sound booth for the dance floor, and just before another secondary bar area (which was unlit and creepy), a door opened into a shitty little bathroom. I pulled down my pants and squatted. The paint was peeling. Graffiti announced “For a good time, call your legislator,” and “Go Fuck a Tacos,” and “Accept Jesus”—there was a diversity of opinions among the people who previously peed here.

I was working very hard not to look down at my left leg, which was beautiful and smooth and not made out of me. The bathroom was stocked with toilet paper, and I was flooded with a surprising sense of relief. At least there I was intact and still all the way human. I was kinda shocked by how much that mattered. I felt strong enough to stand up and look in the mirror.

It took me nearly a decade to become comfortable with my attractiveness. For a long time, I was afraid of it. Or, rather, I was afraid of the attention it brought me, and uncomfortable with the idea that I could have power over someone just because of the way I looked. I realize now that power you can’t control isn’t power at all.

But after a solid year of becoming a combination social media starlet and political pundit, I had looked at my own face a lot . I had gotten more comfortable with the knowledge that looking good meant more people paid attention to me. I had realized that I needed to use every tool I had, and it was no use ignoring one just because I hadn’t done anything to deserve it. What had I done to deserve any of the advantages I had?

What I’m trying to say is, I had become a fan of my own face just in time to lose it.

I looked in the mirror, and my strength dissolved. I jerked my gaze down to the sink as my knees went weak. In the glance, I had seen the left side of my face, an inhuman mask from my hairline to my chin. I held the sink in my hands, both for support and just for something to clench my fists against, and then I looked up and kept my eyes on my face.

My ears were still mine, but my left cheekbone and all of my jaw had been replaced. I tried to find the seam between the new skin and the old. But it blended perfectly. It was not a mask on top of my face; it was my face. This was my face now. I stopped pulling and just looked.

My right arm, the one that was still made of me, looked strong and toned. Stronger maybe than I remembered it looking.

My eyes, at least, looked like my eyes. I didn’t have eyelashes on the left side, or an eyebrow. But everything moved like it should. “So this is my face,” I said, both to help myself accept it and to test how my mouth worked with half of it made of the smooth, rippling stone. The inside of my cheek felt slimy and cold against my still-real tongue. But I wasn’t done. I pulled the T-shirt off over my head.

My body had apparently been burned bad enough that much of my stomach and chest was covered in the stuff, and that included my left breast. The replacement looked like a mannequin boob. It wasn’t just the lack of a nipple that made it feel fake; it was fake. I held both of my breasts in my hands and then my brain just closed down. I stopped being able to feel anything. I pulled on the shirt and walked out of the bathroom.

The Alexa was playing Rihanna, and a little monkey was waiting outside.

“Hello, April,” it said, its voice rasping terrifyingly from its throat. “I am Carl.”

APRIL

“Hello, Carl,” I said, like I was in a dream.

“We thought it would be best if you went through that alone,” it rasped. The voice was so deeply inhuman that I couldn’t help but take a sharp step backward.

Then the music dimmed, and the speaker on the bar in the other room boomed, “Sorry again—we can use this voice if that is better.”

“Jesus Christ, this is really fucked-up, you know?”

“Yes, we do, we’re sorry. We’ve asked a lot of you.” It was still the speaker in the other room, but I looked straight into the little monkey’s eyes as it talked. Its face was pink, haloed by tawny fur. Its eyes were the color of toffee.

“I honestly can’t say which voice is creepier.”

“Yes, we weren’t sure either.” This time the words came tripping inelegantly from the monkey, like a frog that had been punched in the throat, and my face scrunched up again.

“No, no, that one’s worse. That’s definitely worse. Can I go sit down?” I was feeling weak.

The monkey ran into the other room and then hopped up onto the bar by the smart speaker.

I followed and took a seat at the bar. Somehow, this felt more normal. At least sitting at a bar is a normal place to talk to a stranger, even if that stranger is a monkey speaking through an Amazon Echo.

“May I ask, how you are feeling?” the speaker asked.

“Why do you keep switching back and forth between ‘we’ and ‘I’?” I asked, trying to deflect.

“You don’t have words for when a single consciousness can exist in multiple physical bodies. There is only one consciousness, but we thought it might be confusing for you if we used ‘I’ to refer to an entity that exists inside of several distinct physical entities. By saying ‘we,’ we make it clear that there are other bodies, which we thought would be more honest.”

“Then why use ‘I’ sometimes?”

“We keep forgetting because we feel like an ‘I.’ ”

“Then you should use ‘I.’ ”

“But that would be confusing.”

“ALL OF THIS IS CONFUSING!” I yelled, and then I grabbed my head, which hurt. “Can you turn the music off?” It was too much. Rihanna disappeared.

Then I felt rude, so I explained. “I’m scared and confused and also alive. You haven’t given me a ton of time to handle this.”

“I’m doing this the best way I know how. What is the last thing you remember before this place?” The little head tilted to the side in curiosity.

“Seeing Carl … you, I guess. Seeing you in the Dream lobby. And then waking up and not having legs or an arm or half my face. FUCK! Why are you a monkey!?”

“I needed her hands.” Here the monkey held up the little pink hands and wiggled the elongated fingers. They were shockingly human.

“Why didn’t you just use a human?”

“That would have been wrong,” the speaker said, as if it were obvious.

“What day is it?” I asked, still trying to get my bearings. “What month? How long have I been here?”

“A long time. This has had to happen in secret and it has had to take time,” the speaker said in Carl’s voice.

“So everyone thinks I’m dead? My parents? My friends? Maya?”

“Yes, it will be hard to reintroduce you to the world now that you have been gone so long.”

“What? Why?”

“You will be more to the world than you are to yourself.”

I actually laughed. “That’s not new.”

“It will be like that but more so.”

“OK, but can I call my parents? Or text them? They should know I’m OK. If I’m OK. Am I OK?”

“You have a lot of questions. But I also need to better understand your mental abilities. I propose a game. I will ask you questions, and for every question you get right, I will answer one of yours.”

“Um. OK, then.” I was surprised that Carl was suddenly interested in answering questions.