Protelean

They met in the hallway after the last evening session. Caleb’s head is swimming, from the vibe in the room or from the presentation or both, and when he looks up this guy is there, he’s been there on the periphery of every panel and every meet-and-greet with his tight red tee shirt and his short, neat beard. Not talking, just watching. He’s either pretty dumb, or pretty smart.

Caleb shouldn’t even be here – he lucked into one of those department-wide drawings where the first choices couldn’t make it. The second choice was out on maternity leave, leaving Caleb to represent his department solo. The other lucky few have ditched him here, and all these crowds and talks leave his skin quietly crawling with thoughts of germs – other tech-type people’s germs, which are probably worse than just garden variety public transit contagion. Other sickly types, bleached by blue glow or extreme-sports suntanned. This guy is all muscle, built thick and solid, and Caleb can’t quit looking at him while they talk – Caleb’s eyes keep sticking to the buzzed nape of his neck, the crook of his elbow, the way his lanyard hits the middle of his chest. The guy is a lot more intimidating in motion.

Then he asks him, after that, what he does, and Caleb tells him – he seems interested in Caleb, in what Caleb does, in everything. They get a couple pitchers of beer and those slivers of raw tuna down in the glass-walled restaurant and for the first time in the last 48 hours Caleb starts to unwind a little – out from under the noise of the crowd, Nathan elucidating at length some business problem that really isn’t super lucid. Something compellingly empty that sounds smart. He asks smart-sounding questions, and Caleb gives smart-sounding answers. It’s like a game of ping-pong, volleying bouts of who knows what. The best part isn’t that he can follow what this guy is saying and make smart answers at suitable times. The best part is he’ll never have to see him again – he never needs to know anything about him. He can tell him anything – he can shittalk his boss, now, or gripe about the internships that have chewed him up and spat him back out, or effuse about the marvels of Bluebook. This guy is going to forget him.

It’s hard to pinpoint the source of the diffuse warmth in his body now, the exhilaration of somebody else seeming interested, somebody who looks at Caleb when he speaks and seems pleased by the things he says. He’s blunt, and a little intimidating, he grabs on to Caleb’s arm as he speaks the way you’d manhandle furniture, idly. He’s not somebody Caleb would eat lunch with or pick a corporate swivel-seat next to in the company town hall. He’s scary. It’s fascinating.

Nathan finishes his drink for him in one swallow.

After they’ve paid the tab – Nathan’s credit card must be a company card, because it’s pretty fucking sweet – he pulls him into the bathroom and sucks him off. His beard is scratchy, and immediately afterward he bites Caleb’s thigh through his jeans. It leaves a wet scuff on the denim.

*

Nathan’s hotel room has a fucking amazing view – he knows this because Nathan tells him so in as many words, in between yanking off his lanyard and sticking his hand down his jeans. His mouth is rubbed raw from grating against beard.

Uneasy on his feet, Caleb feels drunk, but he’s not drunk – he’s exhilarated, from the conference and from being in his element, from getting to present, from other people listening to what he has to say. From Nathan’s hands and Nathan’s mouth, Nathan’s thick leg pressing between his knees. It feels like getting caught in a friendly tornado. He’s never been with a man before, and Nathan is the test case, that’s all.

Nathan is all hands, all warm muscle, pressing him against mirrors. He’s almost clumsy with him despite his big, expansive grace – it flashes through Caleb’s mind that maybe he’s got a girlfriend, maybe that’s why this is happening so fast and Caleb is nothing but a cheap weekend fuck, but he is ready to be nothing but a cheap fuck because this is nothing he would ever do. Everything about Nathan is discreetly expensive – his tagless shirt, his jeans, his belt, his shoes, his drinks and his wallet.

Something’s overloading, because it hurts – the first few fumbles with Nathan’s big hands are absolutely unreal against his hypersensitized flesh but to be touched is too much, he turns him over against the bed. Caleb’s not sure whether to start talking or what, just to break up the silence, tangled in his wadded-up jeans with Nathan on top of him, handling him with weird methodicality – his dick, his balls, the soft parts of his leg.

Caleb flings an arm out to keep himself up without straining something and Nathan rearranges him gently against the bedspread, so gently. His big hand is between his legs, making Caleb’s heartbeat surge and shudder, making him feel readier than he’s ever been for anything. All right, he can do this. He’s game for anything right now, he’s easy and relaxed and well-prepared–

“You’ve never been fucked before, right?”

Caleb cannot breathe, his heart is pounding, his dick is hard again against Nathan’s cupping hand. “I haven’t.”

“But you’re curious?”

Caleb’s tongue is wet in his mouth; it falters at the back of his teeth. “I am.”

“All right, okay.” Nathan twists a finger inside him and finds something that makes Caleb see stars.

*

It’s late morning in New York, but Caleb’s on the other side of the country and has been for almost two days, so that knowledge programmed into his biological clock doesn’t do him a lick of good. His keycard and badge is on the end table, broadcasting his identifying information for all to see, so at least he knows his own name. God knows where his phone is. Things had gotten blurry there, toward the end.

Everything is denser and brighter than the night before, the star of pain located somewhere behind his right eye and the slip of brown skin he can see out of the corner of his vision when he rolls over. This room is nicer than his own hotel room by leaps and bounds. Somehow he expected to wake up alone.

“I don’t know why I did that.” Caleb presses the back of his head against the luxury pillowcases and kneads at his face with a hand.

He doesn’t expect an answer.

“Because it was fun? That’s why people climb mountains, isn’t it?”

He can’t tell if this guy is making a low-key joke or what – that he’s Caleb’s mountain, or Caleb is his mountain, or something about climbing or rocky protrusions or what. Caleb’s face goes from scrunched with sleep to blank.

“No, I mean because I’m usually straight. In general, that’s not what I – do. It was good, but that isn’t why I came here.” In case Nathan thinks he braved a nauseating cross-country flight just to hook up? He could have done that in New York. He hasn’t been back to this part of the US since his folks were still around.

“Are you positing that it’s gay to hang out and knock back a few drinks with a cool guy from your same industry?”

“It’s pretty gay to have sex with him,” Caleb says ruefully. This is the first time in ten years his back hasn’t hurt when he woke up in the morning.

Nathan laughs. “So you’re not as straight as you thought you were. This has been a voyage of discovery.” Unspoken, don’t freak out on me. “The new environment made you more ready to adapt to new factors. Does that sound plausible to you?”

He doesn’t sound like a tech guy any more, he sounds like a guy who reads a lot of articles. Caleb’s own hysteria scratches at his throat. He’s being unreasonable. There’s a gulf of wiggle room between the stuff he normally thinks about and the stuff he only sometimes thinks about – chipper sexually adventurous women, versus depersonalized gifs and stills of well-built guys jerking off. And even that’s not so hard to reconcile, it’s not like he’s jerking them off, it’s just what he would do if he were a sturdy built guy with killer thighs for a day. He’d probably jerk Nathan off right now, if he wanted him to.

Nathan rubs at his belly with a broad, lazy hand, and the disturbance makes Caleb cringe. He doesn’t even know what he did to make it hurt like this – but his stomach is aching, and his legs are sore, and he’s wishing he remembered what the fuck they even did.

He can’t remember if Nathan came in him. No – now he’s sure, the moment he tries to move, and it’s unsettling. They must have fucked twice, because he distinctly remembers Nathan wearing a condom, and he distinctly remembers Nathan taking it off to come on his back.

Caleb scrunches his eyes shut, then open, then shut. “How long was I out for?”

Like he was under anaesthetic. Out.

“Not a long time.” Nathan sits up. He is scrolling through naked pictures on his phone – some girl, intensely pretty. Caleb sits up too, and Nathan sticks his arm out. “How did you fuck up your back?”

“What?”

“Your back.” His bracketed hand traces parallels down the track of Caleb’s spine – thumb and pinky finger along two thick scars.

Caleb suddenly feels very, very tired. He wants to roll over, to whip out his phone and put a solid wall of distance between himself and a guy who all things considered is nothing more to him but a stranger.

Nathan’s exacting touch turns into something more gentle, rubbing a warm circle against the middle of his back, and Caleb can’t stand it. He blurts out what he always says.

“I was in a car accident.”

“Must have been pretty bad, huh?” Nathan leans down and presses his mouth to Caleb’s shoulder before sitting up in one sinewy motion, like a crunch. Maybe he’s somebody famous, and that’s what the whole joke is. Maybe he’s somebody from Caleb’s department that he’s never talked to before, and now he knows what his dick looks like. Maybe he’s a corporate saboteur.

Nathan is sparking a lighter. Caleb doesn’t even know where he got a lighter, if it was on the bedside table or what.

“Hang on, you can’t smoke in here–”

“Why not?”

Caleb jerks his face upward to the discreetly expensive ceiling. “It’ll set off the smoke detectors. You’ll get a fine – they make you pay a fine.”

But the words fall out hopelessly and Nathan is already taking a huge, theatrical toke. Maybe he’s famous and he doesn’t have to give a fuck about a $500 fine or whatever this would be. Great.

Nathan turns to him with thin smoke spilling from the corners of his mouth, looking halfway between a dragon and a turn-of-the-century novelist. “So what do you do? That’s such a shitty question, isn’t it, I mean, what are you doing–”

Caleb tries not to wrinkle his nose, tries to keep his face a stiff mask of easygoing banality. “I told you, last night.” He thinks he told him. “I’m a developer. I sit in front of a computer all day, just like you.”

He doesn’t want to get into recapitulating what he does at that computer because it occurs to him now that Nathan might do something cooler. They lie there a long time, Nathan exhaling sweet smoke, his eyes on Caleb’s body like a consideration.

“Huh. You wanna go again?”

“Sure,” he says, but mostly he just wants a cup of coffee. Caleb always thought weed was supposed to make you sleepy – not that he’d know, he didn’t exactly have a rowdy undergrad experience. Nathan sucks in one last big breath of smoke and sets aside his joint to smolder.

if they reenact last night – Caleb will at least know what happened. He can yank it back into the realm of conscious memory and hang on to it for a while. Caleb reaches out uncertainly, not sure of what to touch or what not to touch, and Nathan catches his wrist smoothly – it sends a spark of arousal straight down through all the low-key discomforts and directly to his crotch. He must look rattled, because Nathan gives him an encouraging smile.

“What did you say your name was again?”

Caleb doesn’t get to answer before he tosses him down like a painless prank and rolls over, leaning in close enough that Caleb parts his lips and slackens the muscles at the back of his jaw in expectation – hope, maybe, that this stranger will kiss him. He’s still a little smoke-smelling, sweet and dizzy, and there’s another less weedy herbal smell to him like the crushed garnish from last night’s drink.

Something in Caleb wants him to struggle. Maybe he wants Nathan to subdue him. Fucked up, if true.

Nathan is between his legs now, propped up on an elbow, trying to maneuver Caleb’s calf back into some impossible position – Caleb feels exposed, like a turtle on its back, trying not to reflexively kick out and nail him in the bicep or the face.

“Come on, man. Keep your legs up.”

“I can’t, I’m not that flexible–” Caleb is laughing, why is he laughing? Nathan’s body weight is straining on top of him, his big forearm barring Caleb’s hands back behind his head. Caleb is exposed here, more than he was last night, in the full light of morning – his nipples are inexplicably hard and his dick is expressing only mediocre interest. Mediocre is right. By comparison Nathan’s body is beautiful and terrifying.

Caleb might never do anything like this again. He should at least maximize the experience.

Nathan buries his face against the prickling side of Caleb’s neck. Caleb goes rigid; all the muscles down his arching body voice their complaints. Caleb bends against him and feels the awful sensation of shifting bone.

Nathan’s scratching beard withdraws from him, and then, his whole body. “Never mind. Rain check, whatever. You need a shower, dude.”

*

Caleb hopes despite himself that Nathan will follow him, and it’s a little disappointing when he doesn’t. The bathroom is all ghost-gray tile with only a ledge to differentiate the shower space from the place to shave or pluck your eyebrows or whatever. There’s a little silver razor and a cake of soap, both untouched, and Caleb appreciates the gesture.

He fucked up his knee somehow, maybe when they were fuck-fighting or whatever that was back there, maybe – he rubs at it gingerly under the spray of hot water,

Nathan came on him, and some of it’s still there – he doesn’t know why that’s not something he’s ever considered. It’s an unpleasant stinger to something that hasn’t felt real since it began. Caleb braces a pinkening hand against the gray tile and lets the water run down between his eyes, willing away the smell of sweat and the touch of someone else’s hand.

*

So he picked something up on the flight home or on the meet-and-greet floor – stiff joints and a low-key headache that follows him to work and back home again. His stomach keeps giving these intermittent rattles of hunger.Caleb is pretty good at taking care of himself as far as remembering when he needs to eat; he definitely outstrips some of his peers in that department, as far as being prepared if not his actual metabolism. Maybe it’s jet lag, or the change of seasons. He keeps granola bars in his desk drawer, and big dishwasher-safe canteens of water. He takes a half-hour break for lunch, even though it pretty much physically pains him to do so. He adjusts the height of his desk chair and tweaks the alignment of his ergonomic keyboard.

Caleb takes a pull from a water bottle on Friday morning and a flap of skin from the inside of his cheek sloughs off in his mouth.

Caleb is brushing his teeth later, maybe Sunday morning, when something makes his gorge rise – the taste of fake mint or the sensation of bristles swiping against his gums trips some sick reflex. There is a clearly differentiated bead of pain on the right side of his stomach, right under his ribs where any residual softness sits on his pale lanky body. Caleb palpates at it with two fingers – is appendicitis the one where it hurts worse when your fingers stop pressing? Or is that a hernia? At first there’s nothing – and then there’s something, something rolling like cartilage under the surface, he tries to tent it between his fingertips – and then it’s gone. But not the pain.

It could be unrelated. It could be a pulled muscle, or a lurking bruise, or a swollen gland, or just about anything else. It’s probably not related to whatever might be wrong with him after a single bad-idea fuck. It’s nothing. It’s hardly there at all.

He has health insurance. What the fuck is he afraid of? He types “sti testing” into his search bar and hits enter. That’s one of the nicer things about Bluebook; it always knows where you are.

*

He makes his appointment with the doctor. It’s all through one form, with another form to key into when he arrives at the clinic, and the cozy blues and greens of the user interface almost make it possible to forget what he’s there for.

He looks Dr. Lee in the face and forgets what it is he came here for. The doctor is a man, not good-looking but endearing, and Caleb feels a clench of disgust that he doesn’t know who it is who’ll be examining him.

Not him. Let it be somebody else. Somebody else is going to tap a sample of his blood and somebody else is going to swab his dick and check his pulse and ask him if he’s ever traded sex for rent, or if he uses drugs, or if he remembers bleeding during sex. Caleb ends up saying no a lot just then.

Six hours later, he logs on and checks his results and there is nothing wrong with him. His iron is good. Blood sugar, testosterone, thyroid: fine. Nothing is perforated or inflamed or torn or exhibiting an immune response.

There is nothing wrong with Caleb. For thirty days he has stomachaches and headaches and cold sweats in the night, but there is nothing wrong with him.

*

Caleb’s apartment is a five minute walk from the water, and a five minute walk from the Bluebook campus where he works. The morning before he is sent for, he wakes up by the ocean on a concrete-lined path. He doesn’t remember how he got there. Caleb is lying in the dirt and trash with his hand under his cheek.

There’s a police officer not ten feet away, looking pretty goddamn inconvenienced and all ready to dial it in. Caleb staggers to his feet, and starts walking with as much purpose as he can muster. Between his legs is a lick of dull pain.

When he gets back to his house a long black car is waiting out front with an open door, one of those by-the-minute ridesharing things with the blue decal on the back window. He has never been in a limousine before, and the way to christen his inaugural trip is by vomiting on the interior.

He tries to catch himself but can’t. It’s the grainy brown-black of coffee grounds and it tastes foul on the floor of his mouth. There’s a thick fan of paper napkins in the leather divider and Caleb cleans up as well as he can. His fist leaves a red smear on the upholstery and the driver doesn’t respond. Caleb can’t see her face.

“I need to go to the hospital,” he says, to nobody in particular, and pulls the door shut. His stomach churns, and a creeping border of fuzziness has taken over the edges of his vision.

Oh, he thinks. I’m sick. There are seats back here for four people, and Caleb is alone. He might as well put his feet up.

Closing his eyes is painless. All he wants is to be without pain.

*

When he next opens his eyes he is not in a hospital. At first, it looks like another hotel room.

The room he is in has no windows. No view. There’s a flatscreen display built into the far wall, displaying the image of an empty desk, and a lattice screen set into the cutaway wall behind that, white on white and lit from behind. There is a woman in his room too; she is also dressed in white, white jeans and a white sweater, and is picturesquely thin to the degree that she hardly seems to be in the room at all. It’s impossible to feel fear at the sight of her, only dull recognition.

Caleb sits up, and dizziness sweeps him. He lies back down again. His body feels stiff and puffy, like he’s been kept on ice, and his joints are noncompliant – he tries more cautiously to bend a finger, the middle two fingers on his right hand. He can do it but not without pain. There are no cuts on his body, no needle marks, nothing new that hurts that hadn’t hurt before. It’s hard to tell if somebody drugged him, or if he’s just naturally shitty-feeling, like usual. Whoever brought him here didn’t bother taking off his shoes.

He can blink; he can roll his tongue against the back of his teeth and swallow sharply, forcing a little saliva down the back of his throat. He can speak: “Help.”

The woman in white has dark hair pulled up away from her face, and the look of someone concentrating on an unpleasant task, like she might be biting her tongue. Despite the furrow between her black brows she is painfully beautiful. She doesn’t look like anyone he knows.

“Help,” he says, maybe six feet away from her and prone on a bed that isn’t his. There is a pain in the upper right quadrant of his chest, like a knot. Caleb shuts his eyes, tries to will the patter of discomfort away, opens them again. “I shouldn’t be here.”

(Caleb can sit up long enough to bend sharply over the edge of the bed and cough up about a few tablespoons of black mucus.) “I’m sorry, but help.”

Maybe two or three feet away, now, she’s setting down a cork-bottomed glass carafe with a cup for its lid. The light catches it and sends a skewed pattern of bright spots shimmering across the bedspread.

Caleb reaches out flailingly for her wrist. He could probably walk if he needed to, actually – walk gagging, but walk, he just needs to get up. A pang of transparent discomfort ripples across the woman’s face – of course it does, she’s just been subjected to bodily contact by a strange man – and she peels his fingers off her arm like a bandage before fleeing.

The door closes behind her with deafening solidity. If there’s a lock on it, it isn’t from the inside. Maybe he was always meant to be here.

Caleb lies back in private despair for maybe two minutes, but it feels like an eternity. He’s prepared to lie there for much longer, but a human shape ducks into frame on the webcam view filling the wall – it sends a jolt running through Caleb like the jolt of a live wire. He hadn’t realized he wasn’t viewing a still image.

“Oh hi,” Nathan says from on the computer screen, “you’re awake. Sorry!”

His hair is shorter now, his beard is longer. He wears glasses. But it’s him. He’s not hard to recognize – the fuzzy quality of the past weeks, whatever dragged the veil over one bad night on the west coast, muffled the memory of what he actually looked like. But Caleb knows the sound of his voice.

*

“I just want to talk to you. Don’t go haring off into the wilderness just so you don’t have to answer a few questions.”

“I need to leave. I don’t know if I gave you the wrong impression, but I don’t want to stay here.” When he feels in his pockets he can’t find his phone.

Nathan rubs his palms together. “Whatever you’re freaking out about, it’s not going to happen.”

“What am I freaking out about? Why don’t you tell me?”

“I’m not going to murder you,” Nathan says too loudly, with weird emphasis. I’m not going to murder you. “And I’m not going to rape you, either, so get over yourself. You already met my girlfriend. I’m just going to do some questions.”

Girlfriend? Caleb thought he had a maid, or a really dedicated personal assistant. He thinks about how Nathan’s fingers had felt inside his body. He thinks about the thin woman in the white dress and wonders if he’s done that to her too.

“There are people who know I’m missing,” Caleb says, knowing it’s in vain.

“Come on, dude. Up and at ’em.”

*

Nathan marches him from the guest room directly out the front door, down the grassy slope to a crater of charred earth. Caleb’s sneakers keep slipping, and it makes his head ache. Only the fear that he’s walking to his own grave keeps him pinchingly alert through the fog of fatigue – none of this makes sense, the sequence of this makes no sense. There are no fences and none of the outbuildings he’d expect to accompany a corporate lair. They could be upstate on an old family farm, or in Canada somewhere, or on another continent. Nobody could tell. Breath only comes in sharp, irregular hitches, and the taste of black bile is still thick at the back of his mouth.

Nathan leads him down on the worst tour he’s ever been on, with weird serenity directly to a single blackened patch of earth. Caleb doesn’t know what he’s supposed to be seeing. A hole in the wet ground, with about two inches of rainwater at the bottom of it. Which came first, the house or the hole in the ground?

Caleb asks him what he’s supposed to be looking for, out in the mud and the grass and the setting sun. His stomach rattles with hunger and he can feel his guts start churning.

“This is where history gets made,” Nathan says. As if it’s obvious. “Show and tell’s over, dude.”

*

This is not a hospital. He is standing in his muddy sneakers in the middle of Nathan Bateman’s luxury kitchen, with his back to the morgue-sized refrigerator.

The floor plan of Nathan Bateman’s house is not what Caleb would have expected. It’s not the semi-cliche wide open spaces and yoga balls and beer pong tables that drew Caleb to Bluebook in the first place. It’s not warm. It’s not humane. It’s as coldly lived-in as a piece of workout equipment; the patio is littered with barbells and empty glasses. It’s a guy’s house, despite the presence of a woman in it – it smells like clean glass and red meat.

Cannibalism sounds like a way better option than whatever is actually about to happen to him. Looking out the windows there’s nothing but perfect landscape. There are no fences, no guard towers, and no cops.

His host is wearing cuffed-up sweatpants and a sleeveless tee shirt printed with a grainy flying saucer that says I Want To Leave. Ditto. It must be 60 degrees in here, but he’s sweating. “Listen, I know this messed you up. But we can salvage this. If you let me take some samples, we can figure it out.”

Nathan’s hand traverses the flat plane from his shoulder down to his stomach and some part of Caleb still understands it as erotic, some part of him tries to respond. The touch of his hand shakes the bolt loose on the floodgate of Caleb’s memories. He remembers Nathan palpating him afterward, he remembers–

Magazine articles and Wikipedia. Every online publication from Wired to fucking Cracked has written about his boss. His picture’s been in GQ, clean-shaven and smiling, so why didn’t Caleb remember his face? Why didn’t he recognize him? Why didn’t anybody else? He remembers Nathan’s tongue probing in his mouth, the hard lock of his lips smothering an exclamation, the scratching wet heat of his mouth – like something had squirmed–

“What kind of samples?” Caleb’s shoulders are stiff, in a defensive posture despite the heap of pain in his grinding joints. “You mean like when you accessed my medical records.”

It’s a bluff, a shot in the dark. It’s what he would have done. Nathan’s body language expresses no surprise, but he does nod.

“You’re smarter than I thought you were.”

“Well, thanks.”

“As far as being thorough goes, I should have taken you home right there. I wasn’t thinking about the future right then.”

“You should have told me who you were.” He wouldn’t have told anyone. He might even have liked it. Caleb’s voice is thready; Nathan inclines his head.

“Would it matter? How would that have improved the experience for you? It took you a week just to log on to the web portal and you didn’t even look for an appointment time. You were never going to go to a hospital unless I gave you a shove in the right direction. Now you’re here.”

“You don’t know anything about medicine, do you? You – you did Bluebook when you were thirteen, you didn’t go to medical school–”

Nathan exhales dismissively. “Specialization is for insects.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me–”

“What I’ve got is a couple of peppercorn-sized cysts right around here.” He waves his hand in a nonspecific fashion over a sector of his torso, a little under the ledge of his ribs. If there’s anything to be seen there, Caleb isn’t seeing it. No lumps, no shudder under the skin. “Can’t even feel them. It’s disappointing. But they’re all there, and they’re doing their job.”

“Cysts from what?” Maybe Nathan has cancer. Maybe Nathan brought him here to heist his organs. It was probably in the onboarding paperwork somewhere, permission to operate.

“You know The Thing? Kurt Russell, The Thing. Thing’s in the ice, Norwegians dig it up, it thaws out and facefucks everybody.”

“Yeah, I saw The Thing.” Caleb has not seen John Carpenter’s The Thing, but he’s getting the picture. “You’re fucking kidding me. This isn’t extraterrestrial, this is – you gave me a fucking disease. I want you to get it out of me.”

Something in his mind pops. He needs to kill it. Whatever may or may not be inside him, he needs to kill. Nathan’s lips are webbed with burst blood vessels. Caleb can’t stop looking at him while he talks.

“This kind of thing, it seems like a cheat not to pass it on, right? I want to see what it did to somebody who didn’t start out with a turbocharged immune system. Kick them out of the liver, they’ll migrate to your lungs. Or your stomach, I’m not sure. You got some unprecedented life forms. Are you really going to let that all go down the drain for the sake of personal comfort?” Close to Caleb’s face his eyes are shiny and he’s handsomer than ever, framed by his wild beard. There’s something distracted in his face that wasn’t there before – he’s still pushing Caleb around like furniture, lifting up his crampy arm to drape Caleb’s hand over where his liver presumably is. Somberly enough to be yanking Caleb’s chain even though he knows he isn’t, he hopes he is – Nathan says, “I made more life, didn’t I?”

“You didn’t,” and Caleb is shaking his head, dull anger keeping his voice small and tight. Nathan’s hand is on the side of Caleb’s neck. The touch does not reassure him. “You didn’t make anything.”

Nathan didn’t even create life, he just took it from one place and shunted it into another. He probably couldn’t create life if you paid him to.

“Listen, dude, this is the important part. Consider some factors for me. You don’t smoke. You don’t drink. You don’t go out. Eight hours a day you sit at a desk, you come home, you sit on your couch and jerk off. You don’t get sick much, do you, Caleb?”

Caleb begins to laugh. It’s a nasty, aggressive sound, even issuing from his own throat.

“You think I’m full of shit, but give me 24 hours. You’re going to start feeling it too, you’ll feel a lot better – eyes better, lungs better, good joints, good at fucking. And I mean, how do viruses do it? They don’t think. They don’t go ‘huh, this looks like a good place to get started’, they don’t wait around for that golden opportunity. They just go. It’s automatic.”

“I thought you were a software designer.”

“Heuristics, dude.”

There’s that cold sweat again, prickling along his forehead. He hasn’t eaten in 72 hours, his body is screaming at him to do something about it. Nathan tosses him a plum from a bowl on the counter. It hits him in the chest and rolls off under a table.

Caleb bends down to pick it up, and his vision strobes out. When he wakes up again Nathan is carrying him up the stairs.

*

Nathan makes him a drink he can’t swallow from a wedge-shaped bar built into the wall and brings him into a little white room to show him his record collection. All the vinyl is spilled out on the tabletop, burnished and shining. He must be leading up to something or this doesn’t make sense. He must be taking a detour en route to somewhere else. Maybe he’s distracted himself. Maybe he’s lost on the way to some other room.

Nathan fumbles through the paper sleeves of his record collection one-handedly. His other hand is on the back of Caleb’s neck; he’s talking but Caleb isn’t listening.

When Caleb turns his head, the black motes of dying blood vessels start dancing at the corners of his vision and the glass panels of the walls and doors seem to flash and reflect. Nathan is trailing off on some grand statement, but it’s hard to give a fuck; the sound comes back in on, “I just want you to have a general idea where I’m coming from,” a faintly tipsy-sounding drone. Nathan himself isn’t looking at his record collection any more, he’s palming uneasily at his own hip.

There is a star of pain in Caleb’s chest, burning brightly. He has to swallow before he speaks. “Why sex?”

Nathan’s brows arch in perfect good humor and it makes Caleb’s throat go sour. “Why not sex?”

“You could have put it in my drink and left. Or shared me a needle or something, I don’t know. There’s lots of possible transmission vectors for anything hardy enough for fluid transmission.”

Nathan shrugs, but it’s less smooth and more spasmodic, a mechanical jerk that is not the least bit easy-looking, the opposite of effortless.

“I was drunk, and you looked good.”

(Maybe Nathan is losing control of his body too. He tries to counterbalance it with barbells and green smoothies and slow suicide by cirrhosis but he knows it’s happening and he’s afraid. Maybe he’s hoping for a test case, maybe he needs a specimen to practice on. Caleb seldom drinks and all his veins are close to the surface. A nurse told him once that he gave blood well. He hasn’t logged any sick time in Bluebook’s internal systems since he got there, and Nathan would know that. Caleb is the test case. Here they are.)