BEASTLY
It’s been almost an hour with my knees tucked up under my chin as I try not to watch what is going on through the wooden slats. Impossible.
I was put here by a panther. Not an actual panther – they wouldn’t be seen dead in this joint. No, this one is a pure XX dressed like a cat. This XX (a rare breed) is astoundingly beautiful in her basic form, but then she had to go and ruin it all with the skin-tight catsuit and stick-on whiskers. Felid Identifiers really rattle my chain. Why would you want to impersonate a predator? But hell, what do I know? Not much it seems, judging from what’s happening on the other side of these doors.
The Felid has her prey – a sunburnt sweet potato of a man – pinned face down over the armrest of an uptight-looking black sofa and she’s remonstrating with him about his spinelessness and inability to resist locust bread. I get that; I struggle with cicada croissants. The hips don’t lie.
Opera plays quietly from behind gold curtains that belong on a stage. It’s in Old Italian but I can just about make out what the soprano is furious over: her lover visiting Pleasers. How ironic. I don’t go in for all this copulation bull, not even to stimulate endorphins. Go for a run instead, that’s what I say. Not very 3005 I know, but that’s the way I am. I still believe in good old-fashioned love, just leave the dirty bed sheets out of it.
The sunburnt potato is unaware of me, but I’m aware of the sneeze that is threatening to burst forth like one of those aliens that runs the vaccine joint up on Radisson. I grab the first thing in front of me (an old-school latex nurse’s outfit) and cover my mouth. It’s no use. Best case scenario: he’s going to think the cat has a mouse lodger with a rubber allergy.
‘What was th –?’
CRACK!
She whips him across the backside with something that looks like it has been stolen from a museum.
‘Can you tell me when the whip was invented?’
The man gulps. His tropical shorts quiver around his ankles as he considers the question.
‘Er, fousund ears ergo?’ he muffles into a golden cushion he’s holding to his face.
CRACK! Leather meets flesh. Actual leather! The use of illegal substances against human skin is making me nervous.
‘Stupid XY; think again!’
‘Four fousund?’
CRACK!
A pause for us to feel his pain, followed by the balm of explanation, the salve of knowledge.
‘Over ten thousand years ago. Can you tell me where?’
‘No.’
CRACK!
‘No, Mistress!’
‘China. You must have learnt about it in school.’ The panther pauses, giving us time to picture a place I only know about from history books. It looked rather spectacular: all that red and marching and uniformity. There was discipline then. I’d swap this desert outpost for China any day.
‘It was the first invention to move faster than the speed of sound. 1,194 kilometres per hour to be precise. Isn’t that neat?’
He moans his agreement.
CRACK!
‘Yes, Mistress; that’s real neat.’
Yanking his head backwards, his chubby cheeks almost pierced by her acrylic talons, she hisses, ‘Call yourself a good pet owner?’ before nipping his earlobe.
‘I am a bad pet owner,’ he says, serenely. She purrs, pleased with him.
I don’t scare easy, but this is dangerous talk. What if the rhino guarding the door hears them? And I know this is what the XYs paid for, but really, it’s too much pain and I’ve endured a bullet ant initiation ceremony in the Brazilian Amazon.
I’ve seen a lot in my time – I’ve had a career dedicated to the study of the narcissistic evolution of our species. You may have read my paper in Your Eye. Yet, to see such detached behaviour up close like this, in the wilds of Sagev, well, it sure redefines what it means to experience the separation of the soul from the body.
‘Fight back!’ I whisper.
I am not alone in this cupboard. There’s a white fur coat tickling my neck. A dead thing, hanging in a wardrobe. ‘Sorry,’ I say, in case the polar bear’s ghost is sitting there. Let’s face it, the chances are high.
SLAP!
She’s whacked him across the face, and he is actually thanking her. Some humans have evolved much more slowly than others. It’s hard to watch, but I can’t move; I promised the XX.
‘He startles easy, this bad mouse,’ she said as she shoved me in here almost an hour ago. ‘Sit down and keep quiet Anthropologist. It’s time for you to take your head out of books and do some field work. I don’t wanna even hear your desert dust breath. Understood?’ Then she popped her cat teeth in her mouth and chomped twice close to my face. I was too scared to protest.
This was not how things were meant to go. I was meant to be her saviour, not some sleazy voyeur stuffed in an oversized shoe box that’s filled with stilettos and the ghosts of dead members of High Society. I look down at my dirty toenails and rubber flip-flops and swallow my fear. Damn, I’d kill for a drink right now.
*****
Two hours earlier.
‘That dog just shoved this piece of mutilated wood in my hand on the way in, like he was an evangelical preacher spreading the New Word.’
‘Actual dog or Identifier?’
‘Don’t be a kid, George. Just an Identifier, I think. Goddamned suck-ups, it doesn’t win over the Beasts no matter what they do. Don’t they get that they don’t see us? He was wearing Air Walkers under his fur trousers. He looked the part though, great canines. I know because he snarled at me as he handed this over.’
‘Maybe he was being friendly.’
I watched George waterboard his stack of pancakes with maple syrup poured from an obese human-baby pot.
‘I’d like to go out there and make him snarl with his gold chain,’ I told the artificially coloured soya-cream sundae between my palms. ‘He even had the gall to bark at us to “scan this code if you want all your dreams to come true.” Bloody savage. That code’s the only free thing in this vice-ridden hole.’
‘What are you on about?’ I heard through the mouthful of food churning between words.
I threw the flyer across the table. It fluttered high like a butterfly about to commit suicide in the air conditioner above us. George caught it one-handed and gave it a cursory glance, not even enough time to register the history of Animalarchy encapsulated in a PVC-clad Hispanic XX reclining on a chaise lounge.
‘Actual paper. Old school. She’s hot.’
‘Real nice, real gentlemanly of you, George.’
I grabbed it back and stared at Mistress Michelle’s perfectly formed mouth – open just enough to reveal a pink studded tongue and extremely large teeth – and that outstanding jawline.
‘It’s about dehumanisation. Who cares if it is a man, woman, or a zebra!’
George dropped his fork, caught the eye of two badgers sitting close by who looked up from their plate of frogs sprinkled with berries and seeds. Tourists too, perhaps. Luckily, they didn’t appear to speak the same language. George flashed them a tight smile and sighed nervously.
‘Are you trying to get us arrested?’
‘You are missing the point. Here, everything can be bought, even a human being – especially a human being. Sagev is the epitome of all that is wrong with humanity. Oasis in the desert? Bullshit! It’s just where they pen us when we are getting restless.’
I studied the flyer (and the smaller photos dotted around the main one). Mistress Michelle could be whatever you wanted her to be – a maid, a WWIII nurse, a prison guard, even a homely 2080’s housewife bent over a yam boiling in a pot. The caption: Thanksgiving Dinner with ALL the trimmings. To experience Mistress Michelle all you had to do was book a slot in advance and choose your desired character.
‘It’s obscene, is what it is. This poor –’
‘Hot vessel.’
‘Shut up, you pig!’
‘Clover!’ he gasped, then turned to the badgers. ‘She meant that as a compliment.’
The badgers shrugged and went back to dismembering their plump amphibians.
‘Doesn’t it matter to you that a human is reduced to a slot machine?’
‘Ker-ching! Everyone’s a winner.’ George rubbed his beard and chuckled.
Bloody Homo Sapien! That smug smile was enough to make me want to smash his diabetes-in-a-glass-of-orange-juice over his head. It was not her fault she was born into a life where her body was a product. So many XX’s get the same treatment. The only way to survive is to be genderless. She could join us in The Valley of the Saps for the excavation and then, well, maybe we could take her back to Sanctuary with us – help her start again. We could work out the details later; all that mattered now was rescuing her from a constant game of STD roulette.
*****
It hadn’t been an easy ride getting into this wardrobe. First, I had to lie to George and play tired, when in fact I was sparkling with righteous energy and e-numbers. As we’d walked back along the neon Strip, I’d yawned several times at clowns on stilts and crowds of winners who would soon be losers again. My performance was flawless as I stumbled into a hyena in uniform. His hand hovered over his taser, but he must have decided I was too high on supressors to waste the energy. Not that George noticed; he was too distracted by the entrance to our hotel.
The Middle Ages, the humans-only hotel at the far end of The Strip was where anyone over thirty got to stay in case we died in our sleep (it made sense, Sagev is a place for fun, not chutes and incinerators). Outside, gas-fired torches blazed to try to conjure a time when humans used fire. Doormen wore chainmail and helmets that had the dual purpose of shielding their shame and their pity for the guests who arrived wide-eyed and excitable. Inside, a receptionist rushing to her post almost poked me in the eye with the tip of her lilac conical headpiece.
‘Oh forsooth, forgive me tardy footstep-ary!’ she said in a terrible English accent.
A court jester sat in a corner playing a lute, his eyes as dead as a shark offering payday loans in the infamous downtown Paris aquarium. The odour of yeasty beer and unwashed bodies puffed from aromatizers. And yet, even here, surrounded by history, the roll of the dice and whirl of the slot machines could be heard. Perhaps they pumped that noise out everywhere – a never ending enticement, or a suggestion of escape from the clutches of some imaginary king, hovering by the entrance to the troughs and shoving an all-you-can-eat platter of pineapple under passing guests’ noses.
‘I am cooked,’ I told the dungeon-designed elevator doors.
‘But we were going to hit the roulette tables and spend our per diems?’ George coughed, his tell was self-conscious amongst all this fakery. That was one thing to hold on to – my fellow academic with his thick-rimmed glasses and maple syrup drizzle down his tattered Brother Biden t-shirt. We were nothing like these humans; we were simply passing through en route to discovery and, as a side-angle, to save a Pleaser from a penthouse prison. I’d let him in on the second plan when it was actioned. Need-to-know basis and all that.
‘How about we lose all our Bit tomorrow night?’
He groaned – less out of disappointment and more from the bag of sugar fermenting in his stomach.
I stepped into the dungeon lift. Igor, the bellman, turned to face me with his terrible stage makeup and asked, ‘What floor m’lady?’
As the doors closed, I saw a drunk pig Identifier challenge George to a joust in the Camelot Jack-fruit house.
‘Lead the way my porcine pal,’ George slurred back.
In preparation for the rescue, I took a moment in my crate. I sat on the end of the bed and stared at my avatar filling the Welcome Wall. A line-free version of my face kept repeating, ‘I’m Dr Clover Bellwood and I’d like to make my stay even more exciting with tickets to see my own species punch each other in the face repeatedly until one lies bloody and unconscious in the Big Fight. Or, how about, “Knowing Us, Knowing You: the musical fandango” where humans sing about copulation? Performing tonight in Club Copa. Free ketamine cocktail on entry. I know what I, Dr Clover Bellwood wants, I want fun times.’
I searched for the remote; those clever chambermaids-in-waiting must have hidden it on purpose.
Still on hold to the code that would make my dreams come true, I looked at my rucksack, lying on the sofa like a mummified corpse. I was just coming to terms with my jealousy towards an inanimate object when a deep voice said, ‘Good evening. How can Mistress Michelle make all your dreams come true tonight?’ The voice huffed, like it was angry or was a large animal struggling with the language but surely not, not here in The Middle Ages.
‘My Companion’ (I thought it best to lie for appearance’s sake) ‘and I were wondering if we could book the Mistress to be the, let’s see, the Horny Housekeeper at 11pm?’
‘Sure can. Just how horny do you like your housekeepers?’
‘Oh, you know, the usual amount; turned on by dust, aroused by unwashed coffee mugs, that sort of thing.’
The voice made a sound that was pure rhino in heat. ‘Well, aren’t you cute,’ it said, as if I might make a tasty hors d’oeuvre. ‘Room 7555. It’s four hundred Bit for forty minutes. Pay me on arrival. Use the code, “Appliances”.’
He hung up.
I killed an hour watching a comedy about a dog cop and his mute human assistant – the dog deserved a Boner at next year’s awards. I drank most of the mini bar and I lasered my teeth to try to get rid of the stench of whiskey.
When the time came, Igor raised his already raised eyebrow as he pressed the button for the top floor, a smile upon his scabrous lips. I would have liked to slap it off his face, but I couldn’t be sure all those scabs were just makeup.
I had big plans for the rescue until I saw just how big the rhino I’d spoken to on the phone was. This dame must be pretty special to have her own Beast here. Randy was his name and he looked down on me immediately. In fairness, there was no other way he could look at anyone being six-foot-nine standing on his hind legs. He didn’t behave like a rhino. For starters he was deferential and asked if my Companion and I would like an iodine infusion, ‘Or perhaps something stronger?’ before entry. I explained my Companion had been taken ill and it would just be me looking to enjoy the lady’s saucy organisational skills. He looked confused and then somewhat terrified.
‘That ain’t gonna work. Mistress Michelle don’t like women.’
‘That’s OK. I’m not a woman. I’m MX.’
He looked confused as if his Sirius1 chip was frying.
‘Well, you sure as hell look like an XX and she only does them if they are part of a package.’
‘I see. Well, may I negotiate with her? Maybe she’ll “do” me once she knows I’m Non.’
His eyes darted from my tie-dyed top to my khaki shorts, but they froze on my legs.
‘You can try, but you ain’t gonna get nowhere.’
‘Randy!’ A commanding voice, emanated from behind the large white door. ‘What’s the hold up?’
The rhino paled and snuck into the room, only to emerge minutes later, shaking his head. ‘I’m sorry but –’
I ducked past him and burst through the door before it closed and there she was: Mistress Michelle, removing her woollen skirt and court shoes to the theme music from one of those old films that they discovered after the War. The one where the children fly these things called ‘kites’ and sing about it like they are on primo suppressors.
‘I am here to rescue you.’
The rapidly disrobing Horny Housekeeper turned round and grinned in a way that was both amused and irritated. In that look was a thousand conversations had between women of all ages across the world and time – in kitchens, in bars, in huts.
‘Are you now? Just how do you propose to do that?’
This XX was past her prime – maybe thirty times three-six-five – but she wore her age like vintage silk. Pure class. She was still in the shirt and pearls of the character I’d ordered but from the hips down she was naked. It was hard to know where to look, so I settled on the sculpture of our overfed Leader by the window. Every house had one, but I liked how she’d turned its face away, snout raised and gazing down in judgement on the gamblers below.
‘I can give you a minute to get changed, but then we have to haul ass. Your pimp will be back soon.’
She sighed and tapped her wrist.
‘Tick-tock lady. We haven’t got time for messaging. We’ll contact your clan later.’
She rolled her eyes.
‘Sit down.’
One more tap on the wrist and the music stopped. I did as I was told, but I kept one eye on the door in case the rhino burst in and charged, one hand on the taser I had hidden in my waistband. She slid into the loveseat opposite me like a snake getting comfortable on a branch.
‘I can wait while you put knickers on.’
The semi-naked goddess looked quizzical.
‘Ah, you mean ‘underwear.’
‘Yes, underwear, whatever, let’s move.’
‘I don’t wear any. Now, listen honey, why you really here?’
‘I told you, to save you.”
‘From what, exactly?’
‘Pleasing.’
Mistress Michelle sat back, expressionless. She studied me for the longest time, until I started to feel like I was the one who was naked.
‘Do I look like I need saving to you?’
I had to admit that the answer was no, but what did five-thousand square feet really tell you about a person? That flawless skin, bright smile and glossy black hair was not an indication of a good life. There are tribes of Voluntaries in jungles who have nothing, materially speaking, and yet they are unencumbered by what we consider to be success.
‘Don’t you want a different life than one where you sell yourself for money. The purest happiness lays in working hard and living frugally.’
‘Where do you hear that crap?’
‘I read it in a book.’
‘Hell no! I love sex and I love the weird and different ways people love it.’
‘But you are worth more.’
‘More than what?’
‘More than using your body as a way to earn a living.’
Mistress Michelle made an odd noise at this, like a cat stuck in a tree but too proud to call down for help.
‘Tell me something sugar, you ever lift a plate, driven a glider, dug a hole for Bit?’
‘Sure.’
‘Well, that’s using your body to make a living.’
‘That’s bullshit.’
‘Look at it from another angle then. You like what you do?’
‘I love it.’
‘And what is that?’
‘I’m an anthropologist and an activist.’
‘So, you study and save people?’
‘Yes.’
‘You should be a zoologist now, baby. We are all animals. The word comes from the Latin Animalis meaning ‘having breath’. You breathin’? Then you an animal. The monkeys in the Tree House have at least got that right.’
‘Screw the Bonobos.’
Mistress Michelle looked around, a skittish twinkle in her eye.
‘Please don’t talk like that.’
We stared at each other in silence. I thought she was going to use sign language but no, she just sat back and smiled, as if now she had seen it all.
‘A naive idealist. Never thought I’d see the day. Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you.’
She got up and crossed the room and poured two whiskeys. She handed me one without asking if I’d like it. I got the feeling you did not say no to Mistress Michelle.
‘I am not naive, Mistress.’ That amber liquid went down in one gulp and she refilled my glass. ‘Life, human existence must be about more than fighting and fornicating and eating fruit. Then all we are doing is distracting ourselves until the end. We have to transcend the body.’
‘Listen to you, talking like there is more to life than cells and decomposition. You are going to get yourself in trouble if you keep thinking. How about I relax you and cheer you up?’
‘No thanks. I don’t go for anaesthesia.’ I stood up. ‘You coming or what?’
She put down her glass so slowly that I thought I’d been drugged. She leaned forward and stared at me. It was touch and go as to whether I was going to be kissed or slapped.
‘You ever struggled, Anthropologist?’
‘Yes.’
‘Like what? Bad grades, mean friends, parents who didn’t understand your love of screech music?’
‘I got lost in a jungle once and had to drink my own urine to stay alive,’ I told the darkest pupils I have ever seen. It was my toughest story, the one that had people putting me on pedestals in their heads. The Mistress didn’t even blink.
‘And how did you survive?’
‘Well… I got rescued by some passing hawks.’
‘So, the Apex rescued you. And you call that surviving? Spoken like a true MX. Your lot are no better than them with your superiority. I am keeping our species happy, distracted. In my way, I’m rescuing them.’
‘No lady, you are commodifying the flesh, the emotions, helping to destroy the one thing that makes us human.’
‘And what is that?’
‘Empathy.’
‘Look around you,’ she almost yelled, ‘You think there is any empathy left now that we have been furious at each other for so long? All that’s left is the dull thud of our hearts beating to different rhythms as we cancel each other out.’
Randy pounded the door.
‘Everything alright in there, Mistress?’
‘Sure is, Randy. This one needs a stern talking-to is all.’
‘Humans, all you do is talk.’
Mistress Michelle got up and stripped. Then she stepped into a black lycra catsuit. Her body was a sculpture with a blood supply. I fought the urge to get up and stroke her arms.
‘Everyone has a price,’ she said.
‘Not me.’
‘You think I need rescuing, but I rescued myself a long time ago. And what I am doing now is rescuing others. Not everything is clear-cut in this life, professor. I stop loneliness, keep people from killing themselves, I give others courage. What have you done, except have a closed mind?’
Randy pounded the door once more and tip-toed in making the bookshelf wobble.
‘Mistress, your regular is on his way up.’
‘Thank you, Randy. We’re out of time but I haven’t finished with you yet,’ she said, before she ushered me into this cupboard, where I now sit, waiting for Daniel to feel suitably chastened.
The consensual beating at an end, ‘pet’ and ‘pet owner’ sit side-by-side on the edge of the uptight sofa. Relieved tears flow down Daniel’s sun-kissed cheeks; she strokes his neck. The XY weeps like an abandoned child as he recounts his week with the bigger boys in “creative services”. Apparently, the peacocks in his office want him to deliver on a pitch about a breakfast cereal but, try as he might, he can’t come up with a winning tagline for oats rolled in palm oil. All he wants is to work for alpacas on the local insect farm but feels trapped by bills, the state of his receding hairline and his demanding dog who wants him to sleep on the floor from now on.
‘So, what you gonna do come Monday morning, Daniel?’
‘I’m gonna say, “Palm oil can’t be made to look delicious and no, Bruno, I am keeping the duvet”.’
‘Out you come, Anthropologist,’ Mistress Michelle calls out after she shuts the door on Daniel.
I don’t want to leave just yet. I fake a gentle snore in the hope that she will give me a few minutes peace. But I’m shit outta luck.
‘You can’t pretend to be asleep in there,’ she says, flinging open the wardrobe doors and wearing nothing but a smile and some whiskers.
Photo by Monica Silva on Unsplash