BEAT THE GEEKS
Carl notices the rash during an episode of Beat the Geeks . This is the season of the reality science genre. Actors infiltrate science classrooms and seduce the profs with articles secretly written by their rivals and teams of relationship therapists. The actors break up with the profs in their classes by reading their e-mails aloud, until the profs throw their laser pointers at them or run from the room. Other actors pretend to be grant administrators. They drop by labs to tell researchers they’ve won millions in funding. They say with a straight face nothing is more important than the researchers finding out whether fruit flies can conceive of an afterlife. Hidden cameras record everything. Viewers vote on which actors did the best job. The winners get spots in real movies. Websites keep track of scientist suicides.
Carl watches an astrophysicist hold the hand of a woman in a black dress as they sit on a bench by the ocean. The astrophysicist tells her the latest theory about the universe, that it’s infinite. He says this means that anything imaginable — and lots of things that aren’t — is out there somewhere. He looks up at the sky and says somewhere the two of them are sitting on this same beach on another earth, having this same conversation. The woman is actually a transsexual, but the scientist doesn’t know that. She looks over her shoulder, into the hidden camera mounted in the collar of a black Lab eating a dead seagull, and smiles. The astrophysicist keeps staring at the sky. He says there are an infinite number of them playing out this very scene throughout the universe right now.
By the next morning, the rash has spread across Carl’s body. He scratches at it on the way to the shower, tearing off flakes of skin that drift to the floor. He leaves them for the silverfish to eat. After his shower, he checks his favorite porn sites before getting dressed. There are more than a thousand updates since he checked last night. He gets ready to masturbate as he skims through the pictures and movies, but there’s nothing he hasn’t seen before. He makes scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast.
In the afternoon, he watches a show in which actors posing as lab assistants add chemicals to scientists’ experiments to create humorous results, such as explosions that set the scientists on fire, or fumes that cause the scientists to hallucinate and call their department heads to tell them what they really think of their lab space. Carl wonders if the rash has something to do with his unemployment.
Carl has been out of a job for three months. He used to work in a lab himself, growing stem cells into human body parts to be used for transplants. Then his job was outsourced to a lab in Brazil. The manager who escorted Carl and his box of personal belongings out to the parking lot told him the new lab was run mainly by robots. It’s just skin, he told Carl. It grows itself. The box of Carl’s personal belongings still sits by the door, where he dropped it when he came that day.
Carl decides the rash is probably from a lack of exercise. He puts on a layer of sunscreen and goes for a long walk, past rows of coffee shops full of other unemployed people and bus stops with homeless men sleeping on the benches.
When he comes back, he is sunburned despite the sunscreen. He closes all the blinds and has a cool shower, but it doesn’t do anything to soothe the burning in his skin. He goes to bed and has nightmares about a world in which the sun never sets and is always at high noon. He scratches at himself in his sleep. He doesn’t see the skin flakes fall to the floor and skitter away. He doesn’t see them eat the silverfish rather than the other way around. He doesn’t see them join together into a blob and creep under the bed.
© Peter Darbyshire
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