Accessing the Future: A Disability-Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction (27 page)

You take a picture of it, and after cross-referencing with the company catalog Lyric declares, “The animal base is no dragon, which is a fictional creature, but a rare gliding lizard once populous in woodland areas of Southeast Asia.” In the ad, a mountain climber stretches his limbs up a wall of rock; perched on a ledge just above him to the right is the draco-child, a beautiful, intense look on its scaly face, the leathery membrane stretching from its ribs lighting up like gold and ruby in the late afternoon sun.

You think of your own Animal’s wings, of how impossible they are.

Lyric:

“The keywords you have entered are ‘I’ and ‘damaged’, question mark.

“Do you want to ask,
Am I damaged?

“Do you want to ask,
Have I damaged?

‘Damaged’, adjective:
defaced, mutilated, mangled, impaired, injured, disfigured
. Latin
damnum,
meaning
loss
or
hurt.”

The delivery men bring the Animal to your house in its narrow cage. The releasing officer comes to oversee the transfer, and before the men remove the cage cover, he plays a holographic presentation enumerating do’s and don’ts. Do switch on the electric field around the cage to keep the Animal from reaching past the bars. Don’t forget to hold the taser baton at all times within sight of this experimental Animal because it doesn’t respond to verbal commands. Do give the right dosage for sedatives when necessary. Do not starve the animal so that it can live to its maximum lifespan of—

Lyric highlights the keywords, and you pause the presentation. “Three years?” The typical Cosmetic Companion™ is good for five to six years before termination is required.

“Less,” replies the officer, honest as usual. “You never know with these trial items.”

“Foot,” you say, remembering the missing hoof. “It’s missing. What happened?”

“Oh, the original client needed it less mobile, fast. The drugs took too long to work.”

Your heart sinks. “Wings?”

“Technically still there.”

They give you an enormous starter pack of specially formulated meals to feed it; you’ll have to buy more at the company store to get an employee discount when the supply runs out. They hand you a data stick containing the official Cosmetic Companions™ manual. Finally they show you how to use the baton. It’s heavy in your hand as you grip it to trigger the switch. The men remove the cage cover to reveal the crouching Animal, and your hand flaps anxiously, waving the baton. A tiny streak of blue lightning crackles across the tip. You almost drop it to cover your ears, and you notice the cautious way that the Animal raises its head toward you, listening and watching. Its pupils dilate, its veined human hands and jagged fingernails scrabble quietly on the cage floor.

Truly up close, without the shield of fiberglass, the Animal’s stench is a cloud so dense you can choke and drown in air.

It is with great difficulty that you convince the delivery personnel to give it a bath before they leave. “Have to see,” you tell them awkwardly, trying to explain that they need to teach you the exact steps in bathing the creature without having to reveal that you didn’t even learn how to take a proper bath by yourself until you were a teenager, and only thanks to the step-by-step graphics that your parents had to make for you.

They laugh at your apparent lack of common sense as they open the cage and lock a harness-type leash around the Animal’s neck and shoulders. It starts to struggle when it realizes that it is being led out of the cage. The baton crackles with blue lightning and it heaves itself up on its hands and leg, hobbling slowly so as not to put weight on the amputated hoof.

You watch as they yank the leash to make the monster move faster. It falls forward on its injured leg with a whimper, the sound simultaneously high-pitched and cavernous. One of the men throws a sack onto the Animal’s head. Suddenly its wings vault out—what’s left of them—and claws like hunting knives spring from the metacarpals barely a moment before another man strikes the creature with the baton.

“That was close!” The releasing officer laughs in relief as the Animal crumples to the floor. “Didn’t know those claws had grown back!”

The men struggle to secure a muzzle around its mouth and to tie its wings. When the seizure subsides, the men drag the beast across the bedroom floor and into the bathroom where they hose it down with soap and cold water. You watch the soap and water drench its fur and run down its scales and around the tattered leather curled tightly on its back and down a tense leathery tail. You do not look at its eyes, nor do you watch them replace the dirty bandages on the amputated hoof. You move away to do something irrelevant, like search for an old quilt that you can put in the cage.

They warn you against untying its wings until you have filed a request for a Cosmetic Companion Vet to clip its claws for you. They switch on the cage’s electric field before you can find the perfect quilt, so after they leave you switch off the field and push in your old comforter, summer-yellow despite the years.

The Animal doesn’t move, stays down with its face to the floor, so you reach out and brush aside its damp hair (deep and black) to unlock the muzzle. Just as carefully, you untie the knots from its wings.

A flash of leather, luminous black. Your right arm feels the impact—a slicing heat near your elbow, another at the forearm—but the iron bars catch most of it. There is surprisingly little blood, and the cut flesh begin to throb only when you stop staring at the gashes.

The Animal retreats into its cage, and you sit there looking at the hunched form as you staunch your wounds with the bright yellow quilt.

Your father, confessing:

“I told the group that your mother and I were thinking of having a second child so that you wouldn’t grow up alone, and that woman with the brother, she said no, we shouldn’t, it wouldn’t be fair to the new kid. I don’t know why, but for some reason we believed her. At that time it was so easy for us to believe what everyone else said, because we didn’t know enough not to.

“So we had only you and I didn’t want you to grow up. I wanted you to be Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, a happy child who was content looking at pictures of animals and listening to music and people’s voices. That woman whose brother pulled a knife on their mother, the problem was that he had grown up, he had gotten too big to control. And that’s the scarier problem, right? Who controls, whom to control.”

It is not at all like Pirate Parrot Polly. Polly is the Cosmetic Companion™ that Rae bought her niece some time ago. Meeting them was one of the recommendations from the company-mandated mediation and counseling you had to go through as a result of an incident that took place not three months after your mother died. The incident involved the layout artist to whom you were an assistant; he had given you an earful about a row of data you had encoded erroneously in the new holograms, and you responded with what Rae called a meltdown. In fact what you suffered was an inexplicable rage at the piles of words that your co-worker had dumped on you, and what you actually threw at him was an ancient stapler.

The first framed photo you noticed in Rae’s living room was an old blown up one of herself and her sister taken back when she wasn’t quite herself yet: that is, when she was still the younger brother of Jenny’s deceased mom. Brother and sister had the same happy smiles. All the other pictures included little Jenny—baby Jenny with her mother, Jenny and Aunt Rae at a talent show in a special school, Jenny and Polly in a playground. In person, Pirate Parrot Polly seemed unreal even as it squeezed past your knees to run away from Jenny.

Polly was about the height of a toddler—the standard size of a Cosmetic Companion™—but without the clumsiness. It rushed around Rae’s apartment playing tag with her niece, tickling her with the fingers on its wings, and cheating by flying to its perch well out of the little girl’s reach.

“Polly, come down!”

“Arrr, you come up and catch me!” squawked the parrot. It looked like a mascot in a kids’ show with its bright green bird-head and its feathery human child-body, which had on a tacky blue jumpsuit.

“Okay, Polly, up, up,” said the girl, standing on a chair.

Pirate Parrot Polly unclenched the talons of its feet and flapped down to the girl, giving her a hug. “It’s okay, Jenny, I am here.”

Rae was beaming as she turned to you and said, “You know what? You should consider getting your own Cosmetic Companion™. Polly has helped Jenny so much with her speech, her gross motor skills, her sensory processing disorder…”

You stared at the perfection of her lips, nodding as she talked so that she wouldn’t notice how hard you were clenching your fists to stop them from blocking Polly from your line of sight. The thoughts in your head then weren’t in words, of course, but had you been able to articulate them, they would’ve come out as,
Why would anyone want a Cosmetic Animal? Pirate Parrot Polly is scary as hell.

But Jenny looked so happy with her chatty bird friend. Your parents would have bought you one, too, debts be damned, had the Animals already existed in the country a decade ago. And it’s likely that you would have been happy too, and you might have even grown comfortable with words—
It’s okay, I am here
—but that is an alternate reality that you have no access to, and therefore to fixate on it is futile. The reality that has become yours is one where you exist just outside the realm of language, but the validation of your existence lies within it, and you feel like you must always keep fitting yourself in it somewhere. Sometimes you want to talk to Rae about language—how expansive and liberating it is, and also how limiting. Language is a culture that both includes and discriminates. But images aren’t as confining as words, and the way images are manipulated is only as dangerous as words are manipulated, and the point is just that you are tired of having to change just so you can speak the same language as everyone else.

In that apartment, watching Jenny and Polly play, you were seized with a frustration that was impossible to explain. “Rae,” you called out, and Rae glanced up from knotting her little niece’s hair.

I am here, you wanted to say. Instead you told her that you were hungry, so you and Rae and Jenny shared a reheated pizza while Polly ate vitamin birdseed.

“Owners of Cosmetic Companions™ are mandated by law to feed their Animals only their special meals. Their food has to remain different from humans’, and Cosmetic Animals International cannot be held liable for any Animal behavior resulting from deviating from the law.

“Animal-food only,” Lyric rephrases. “No people-food.” It repeats this for you each time you run the data from the Cosmetic Companions™ manual. It’s a provision in one of the contracts that you signed. You run the manual through Lyric several more times anyway, because your Animal has refused its specially formulated meals for two days, and you still don’t know how to get it to eat. It sits in its cage hardly moving when you’re around, which is fine; you have not been so foolish as to come too near again. You know it must be weak by now, but when its food arrives it hardly even raises its head. You scour the Cosmetic Companions™ forums but none of the participants own one from the experimental series, and none of the regular types have ever had appetite issues. Obsessed with this problem—and the wounds on your arm, which are at least healing well enough—you have not left home at all, not even to work.

On the third day that the Animal refuses to eat, though, you decide that you need to go outside.

One of your neighbors has just arrived from work. He is just about to open his front door when he sees you walk past, and suddenly he is upon you, regaling you about trains. He talks about trains all the time—he’s why you knew about the derailing that worsened the traffic—but you don’t really understand much of what he says even as Lyric tries to translate. He talks too fast and you listen too slow. You do know that he is older than you, that he is very good at math, and that he keeps track of how much he has saved each month because he wants to go to Japan someday so he can see the old bullet trains up close. You and him are the only ones in the rowhouse complex who have stable jobs. You don’t know yet where you want to go someday.

When he finally disappears into his house, the sunlight has turned golden from the afternoon clouds and the rush hour smog. Even the pavement seems to glow. There is one fracture that you follow, and by the time you raise your head, the sun is lowering itself below the skyline, and you have wandered far beyond your street’s transport stop and ended up near the highway. In the distance, perched on the wall at the entrance of the most exclusive village in the metro, is the holographic Dragon Dagger—Cosmetic Companion™
in all its scaly splendor.

Thanks to Lyric, as always, you find your way back home, to where your Animal still won’t touch its food.

That night, it prowls into your dream. It unfurls its great wings. At certain angles their unfathomable blackness yields into the red-gold of Dragon Dagger’s scales, and at others into the emerald sheen of Pirate Parrot Polly’s feathers. Where they are torn, the night begins.

One hoof is still gone, but with the tattered wings stretched out the Animal can still stand, towering, hovering, over the landscape of a disintegrating world: glaciers, magma, swamps opening up like overripe fruit, mountains falling apart and catching the stars. In the starlit destruction you wonder—in the dream—if the monster can do, and become, anything it desires.

Your mother, confessing:

“When you were very young you needed to get rid of almost half a dozen baby teeth, your dentist would strap you really tight to the chair and ask your father and me to weigh your arms and legs down even more so that you wouldn’t be able to fight. Of course, you fought all the more. As you grew older, we had more choices—restraints or sedatives.

“It was the same when we had the doctors put a tracker in you. Harmless procedure but you were screaming like crazy. We decided to get you one after I almost lost you in a mall. One moment you were beside me as I was rummaging through the discount bins, and the next you were gone. I combed through every rack of clothing in that huge store hoping you were still, all the while fighting to keep my panic down. I was about to ask the manager to send out the mall bots in case strangers were leaving with you, when one of the sales clerks found you in a changing cubicle. You were dancing in front of the full-length mirror, slowly, studying your hands and arms as you stretched and folded them in time with a melody only you can hear.”