Chapter #6What Becomes a Boy by: Seuzz   Once Marc is asleep, you start to experiment with yourself.
He has left you in two pieces: the bulk of you inside the plastic bin and a chunk of you sitting on a piece of glass atop his desk. At first you have a hard time coordinating your motions, and each time you try to move, both pieces will sliver and quiver. Only when you relax and try to imagine yourself as having a human body—as having hands and feet and toes and fingers that you can move individually without moving all of yourself—do you begin to have some success.
So you imagine the part of you sitting out on the mirror as a hand—cut off from yourself, maybe, but still attached as though by thread-like nerves. You curl it up into a little snake—though it's more like a large, fat slug—and slither it over to the plastic bin that holds the rest of you. The bin's surface is slick and smooth, and you have to press yourself tightly against it to get any traction, but slowly you inch that severed limb to the lip of the bin and look down at yourself.
At the same time, though, you're looking up at yourself.
Whoa! Vertigo! The shock almost unhinges you.
You're looking down into the box and up out of the box, which puts the box between you, in a sense. No, it's like it's inside you, inside your mind! You are holding the box—the three-dimensional thing, not an idea of it—inside your mind, so that the box is everywhere inside your brain and at the same time your brain is everywhere inside the box.
It's like I am the box! you think with a dizzying euphoria.
Then you steady yourself.
From inside the box you stretch a pseudopod, like a tentacle, to grasp the lip of the container. As you grip it, you let the limb stretch and thin until from the force of gravity it snaps. There is no shock when it does, and it is only by looking at yourself that you see you now are now three detached objects: one inside the container and two clinging to its lip. Working the latter slugs like hands, you drop them onto the desk and send them slithering over the desktop. This gives you a view of the inside of the plastic bin and a view of the room beyond. The panorama is not seamless, for your three eyes (if you think of them that way) do not join the visuals up. But when your two slugs creep over the game board and around some kind of playing piece, you get that same sense as you got when looking down into the box—the sensation of a mind swallowing whole a bit of the world.
Your drive your slugs to the edge of the desk, merge them, and drop them with a dull plomp onto the carpeted floor.
You hesitate, wondering if you can possess another person with only part of yourself. But it's a worthwhile gamble, you decide. As this Marc goober is isolated and available, you try for him.
Across the carpet you wind your way, then crawl up a bedpost to the edge of the mattress. Marc's head is hidden behind the dark lump of a massive pillow—really, this is what it must be like being a mouse—and you slither onto a sheet before approaching him from underneath his chin. Onto his pillow and directly into his face you approach, then sit to ponder how to enter him.
His face is half buried in the pillow, with only one nostril exposed. His lips are tightly shut. Inwardly, you grimace. But seeing no other option, you thread out the thinnest tendril you can manage and put it up his nose, feeling for the tender tissues where you can push in.
He sneezes.
For a moment all is confusion, and inside your box you quiver and shake like a platter of Jell-O that has been dropped onto the floor. Marc snuffles and snorts and turns over and turns over again before settling down. You do nothing, though until he starts breathing deeply and regularly again.
Then he begins to snore.
You raise your slug up for a better look. He's now laying on his back, mouth dangling open. Hhhhnnnnnrrrrkkkkkhh! he says.
You probe his mouth with a thicker pseudopod, worming it down past his teeth until you hit an obstruction, then probe over and around it until you find a way deeper in. His snores mix with choking sounds, and when his jaw starts to work, you throw the rest of your slug into his mouth; the rest of your body pulses against the side of the plastic bin in sympathy. Marc begins to shake and choke and gasp, and you're squeezed and buffeted on all sides by hard, almost bony muscles. You concentrate on the slug, and fear envelops you as you realize that you can't feel it anymore. It seems to be dissolving.
Then it's as though something very heavy has attached itself to you—grabbing at you, pulling at you, dragging you under as it sinks. You flail and kick, and something in the room falls over with a soft thump. You are choking, coughing, gasping and—
Holy fuck!
* * * * *
You are sitting up in bed, the sheets wound around your legs, as you pant and gulp into the darkness. The muscles in your arms give out, and you fall onto your elbows. You swallow a couple of times, and blink.
Inside the plastic bin, you lie very still. Inside the bed, you catch your breath and look fearfully around.
Am I really here? you wonder.
You start by flexing your toes. You rotate your feet. You pull your legs up, bending your knees. It feels very natural, very familiar, but you wonder at how strange it is, too. These aren't my legs, you think. But they feel exactly like they are.
Tentatively you raise a hand to your face. You turn it this way and that, and flex your fingers. You stroke your face—the cheek is smooth. You touch your hair—it is short and spiky. You swing your legs out of bed, take a deep breath, and stand up.
You sway on your feet, and you also sway inside the bin.
You stumble forward and lean over the bin, gripping the back of a chair. You are overwhelmed by that same feeling of vertigo, that sense that the space between your two sets of eyes isn't between your eyes but is somehow inside your own mind. You shut your eyes and swallow; and from inside the bin you see the eyes clench shut in the face that looms over you, and you see a flutter at the throat. With a trembling hand you reach in and scoop yourself up. You are cool, smooth, and a little slick as you press yourself to your chest.
I'm holding myself, you think with a gulp. You totter back to the bed before you can collapse.
You rest there for a few minutes, waiting for the shakes to go away, then straighten out the disorganized covers. You curl up with your other body still pressed to your chest and try to relax and focus. I've got a body again, you tell yourself. This is what I wanted.
Now, what exactly have I got?
The body, as you touch it and stroke it, feels natural and alive. The muscles are bigger and firmer than your old body, and it's a lot smoother (no chest hair or five o'clock shadow, for a start) but it feels like you are a body, and not merely sitting inside one and driving it.
But what else have you got? There wasn't anything else to get inside that wolf except vague memories of tastes and odors. But with Marc Garner there's like a wall between you and—
Wait! Marc Garner! The last name, that's something you didn't know before! You shut your eyes and concentrate, asking yourself questions. Each answer comes almost as soon as you ask it, exploding in a soft burst that fills your mind not only with the answer but with associations.
So when you think of those girls—Jessica and Eva, Marc's sisters, they're a set of triplets—you get not only the facts but the flavors of those facts. You remember the excited play when growing up, the hair-pulling fights, the teasing of the girls' friends from school, the shrieks when accidentally bumping into each other half-undressed after puberty hit, the competition on the soccer field (they played soccer in middle school! that's something else you now know about them!), the vicious oneupsmanship around the dinner table and the unshakeable loyalty at Westside High ...
You press your new hands into your new eyes and think deeper and deeper. Marc Garner, captain of the WHS boys' soccer team; his best friends and teammates Marcos and Austin; his other teammates, most of them good friends; his friends Anthony and Geoff and Martin and Kelsey and Amanda and Olivia in the AP classes that he takes; his girlfriend Hannah—Oh! that sets off memories of blowjobs and better! The presentation he has to give in English, the Sunday School lesson he has to give in church to the little kids, the equipment problem he has to talk over with Coach Gellman. Replacement cleats, repairs to his bike, the money he needs to get to Kelsey for next weekend's party ...
Your limbs and eyelids have been growing heavier as you drift through and over these matters. Now you lose all feeling in them, and feel yourself capsizing.
But even as your senses fade, Marc Garner's mind blazes to life all about you like a star-drenched sky, but one clustering so near that you just have to stretch yourself out to grasp and pull it all inside you. His body is asleep now, you realize, and his mind—utterly relaxed so it can no longer fight you—is completely open.
With your other body you grip him as tightly as you can as you feed on his mind and memories.
You are digesting him.
You are becoming him. You have the following choice: 1. Continue |
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