To the host, Carl said, grinning far too hard, “Just show me to my rooms and I’ll get out of everyone’s way. Jones is on his way up with my luggage. This is going to be such a fun year, roommate!”
The host didn’t hear him, missed the joke. He was already looking over Carl’s shoulder to where people were crowding up the narrow staircase, trying to push their way inside. Because heaven. Because drinks. Because loneliness and flesh pleasure. Because the invite said, “Levitate, my friends! Let us see the soles of your feet!” Because Mayflower, where they all worked, was pure shithouse. The future was ripe for sexual conquest, and they were busy greasing up their parts.
Carl knew he wasn’t the type to get fondled when he passed out. Mostly it was because of his face, thanks to his job. Rough on the eyes, tough to the touch. Scratchproof, though, which was a bonus. Particularly if some long-shot apocalypse reared up and he had to go face-first into the bramble or some such. For now, partygoers pressing in behind him, he could do nothing but raise his arms and surf forward into the mob, hoping with all his might that the wave would carry him, safe and sound, back home to his bed.
In some ways, it was inevitable that Carl, a few nights later, would take a picture of his balls and send it to the Mayflower email list. After a hot bath, he propped up his phone in the dank zone and captured the crag and the woof, the topographical crimson scorch. He got the shot, pressed “share,” and released the picture into the ether. It felt all right. A certain unburdening. Maybe even like postcoital clarity, chaste and lonely as it was. Afterward, he was tempted to stand at his apartment window and listen through the glass, into the pulse of the evening, as his message landed at key email terminals throughout the metropolis.
If you counted from the beginning, going back to the supposedly sunny morning when Carl was born, this was day ten thousand seven hundred and something of his tremendously joyful stretch of time, his project aboveground.
To hear his mother tell it, because certain mothers break into story when you enter their homes, the birds were in ecstasy the day he was born, squawking over the hospital. The air was so crisp and cool that day, his mother would add, that you felt hugged by the wind. Her phrase. When little Carl was born, the whole neighborhood, per his mother, held its breath. Someone new is among us. Someone special. It was a revisionist birth narrative, likely concocted when it struck Carl’s mother, poor thing, that her son was just another piercingly boring need machine, underperforming and overwhelming, programmed to crave so much from her that she would soon forget her interests and reengineer her whole self in order to supply the mothering that would keep her child, at the very least, out of jail, out of a coffin, and out of the sex-change doctor’s office. At which point she would subtly punish him with nearly imperceptible indifference and ambivalence. Parenting! As far as motives go, his mother had a pretty good one for her wholesale, self-serving fictionalization of Carl’s birth, and he forgave her, not that she ever asked him to, for glorifying his unremarkable debut.
In his twenties, just before his mother died, when she was listless and storied out, staring through a different hospital window as if surveying the land for her own burial, Carl finally Googled the weather on the day of his birth. And, well, lookee there: rain, rain, rain, ash, fire, murder, murder, rain. A godless Tuesday. Unprecedented torrents flooding down from the north. Dirt and mud and broken trees and houses split in half. Sunshine, maybe, but not in his part of the world.
And birds? The Internet had little to say on the matter.
As it turned out, Carl’s photo backfired. The folks at work who opened his attachment—the upper-level creatives at Mayflower as well as the engineers holed up in the silo in Albuquerque—mistook it for an image of Carl’s pitiful neck. Or maybe a scalded bit of acreage under his arm. In other words, no one seemed to see anything uniquely scrotal in the photo. Just grim, if understandable, symptom documentation from a man who was perhaps Mayflower’s most martyred employee. Slash medical subject. Slash guinea pig. Slash hero. Slash fool. Carl the Boiled, as he had started to think of himself. Taking one for the team.
At work the next day, expecting to be shunned and sort of figuratively barfed on, maybe swept into the farewell room, where underachievers got hand-stabbed by Kipler, the CEO, Carl instead collected a few drive-by hugs. He was heavily touched, right on the body, by people he’d hardly even met. A kind of unprecedented love was brought to bear all over his person.
“Oh, my gosh,” Kora, from Nutrients, said, holding him at arm’s length and staring wildly just above his head. She was always the one putting the needle in and sometimes forgetting to take it out.
“Carl? Honey?”
“I’m okay,” Carl whispered, suddenly shy.
“I know!” Kora said. “You are! You will be! You are so brave. I can’t believe you are being so open about what this is doing to you. It serves them right.” She shook her fist.
Kora the Explorer. He wouldn’t think of her that way anymore. He actually appreciated her kindness, if misdirected. If incorrect. Did it matter?
She squeezed his waist, and he felt himself pee a little. His bladder seemed to belong to someone else entirely.
Later in the morning, an older man ducked into Carl’s cubicle, a man who seemed to have been designed, by experts, to embody sorrow and regret. He shook his head with deep, theatrical empathy. His name was maybe Murray. Maury? Perhaps it was Larry. He was a tech. He performed overnight adjustments to the computer displays that were slowly roasting Carl’s face, in the service of the greater good. Money piles for Mayflower. Loss of bodily function for Carl.
“I’m just thinking about you and feeling for you,” the man said to Carl, stooped in a kind of prayer bow. “And knowing that there’s no way I can really know, I mean, I can’t…” He paused. “What you’re going through. None of us can.”
“Everything we can’t know,” Carl said, shaking his head as cheerfully as he could. “Maybe it’s time to cry uncle. Mysteries one, us nothing. We lose!”
The man dipped his head again, pressed his hands together.
“Anyway, it’s what we signed up for, right?” Carl said, trying and failing to picture the exact moment when he’d agreed to take part in the experiment. Had it ever happened? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d written his name, said yes, nodded his head, assented. Maybe by simply staying alive he implied his agreement and cooperation? Simply by walking the halls at Mayflower, and not crawling into a hole, he was saying, Yes, yes, please test your equipment on me. Especially the equipment that burns. I would be most pleased if you would.
How sweet of this man to visit and thank Carl for his service. The old Carl would have smiled and thanked him, but his thanking utensil, connected inexorably to his face, was broken. He had the paralyzed head of a mascot. What he needed now, in order to engage in human congress, were emoticons on Popsicle sticks that he could wave around, lest everyone start to think that he was dead on the inside, too.
Boiled Carl, alpha tester in this freak show, wasn’t exactly sure how the whole UV feeding thing had even come about. Why would Mayflower’s cold commanders, motherfuckers extraordinaire, reveal their true road map to him, anyway?
He’d joined Mayflower’s wearables team five years back and had been whiteboarding applications that tracked emotions, or tried to, so that the world’s feelings could finally get accurately logged. And mined. And then probably ransomed back to the people who had the feelings in the first place. Using the data they collected, Carl’s team had been able to match users’ emotion narratives—the plotted vectors of what they felt over the course of days and weeks and years—with those of other users. Maybe even in their own apartment building. Certainly in their neighborhood. Unless they lived in the middle of nowhere. Or unless their feeling vectors were highly unusual. Carl’s team proposed a kind of mood pairing. Who else is bummed out? Who doesn’t give a shit? Who feels pretty good today, maybe borderline ecstatic, even though something bad happened in Angola? Who’s lost the taste for staying out late, wants to be alone and would like a silent partner in solitude? Who eats his daily caloric value in one sitting at 3 a.m. and has a special reaction to that?