Squirreluccino

     Mich picks me up and we drive way out to the edge of civilization to visit our friend Lee in the hospital. It’s the same complex where I had my foot treated for a while; the last time I was here, it was Colon Cancer Awareness Month, and in front of the main entrance stood an enormous inflatable colon you could walk through. I describe it to Mich and she says, huh. 

The woman at the front desk directs us to the ICU. I’m surprised to see that we’re nearly the only ones in the entire building wearing masks, despite the recent uptick in COVID cases. 

We hear Lee talking before we reach his room. When we enter he hangs up and we sit down. He actually doesn’t look too bad, despite what he’s been through; emergency surgery in which they removed his spleen, part of his stomach, and a “ton of gook” that had collected in there, obstructing his bowels. They aren’t sure what the underlying issue is yet; the biggest concern is cancer, of course. Tubes sprout everywhere and machines whir and beep quietly in the background. 

I tell him about the inflatable colon and he says, huh. I make a note to work on my delivery. He warns us that if we hear a sound like rain it’s just him urinating into a tube attached to his penis with a  condom-like thing. I’m looking forward to hearing it, I say. 

We all chat a little while. They are both native New Yorkers and still sound it despite being in Oregon for decades. Lee especially sounds like he just got back from a Brooklyn Dodgers game and is going to stop at Katz’s for a quick nosh. Today he is somber but in decent spirits. I’ve spent so much time in his position, in a bed just like this one, with well-meaning visitors nattering on, that I feel like I’m inside his body, feeling my back get sore from lying down too long, shivering beneath the paper thin sheets. 

At some point his nurse comes in and takes his vitals and says it’s almost time for the shift change, and less than a minute later the new nurse comes in and takes his vitals again. She is tall and voluptuous and very pregnant; as she squeezes past me I find myself sweating at her exquisite ripeness. 

When she leaves, the conversation starts slowing down. I hear a sound like rain hitting the window. “There it is,” Lee says. Mich drives me home, chattering pleasantly about her own health issues. As someone who has struggled with a chronic illness most of his life, it’s interesting seeing everyone else around me starting to catch up. Not gratifying, exactly. Not really.

I feel drained by the visit, and anxious to wipe it from my memory completely. Although it’s a beautiful night I don’t feel able to do much other than flip through the Facebook dating app I’ve been using for the past week. I’ve done online dating before, of course (my misadventures on OKCupid have been distilled in my book Pomeranian, copies available upon request), but since I’ve only recently acquired a touch screen phone I’m still new to the world of dating apps. It’s a much more streamlined experience than I’m used to; there isn’t room for much information, you’re just encouraged to look at the picture and swipe left with your finger to dismiss it, right if you think they look interesting. Some people do write descriptions, but after a week of going through these, and not getting a single person liking me or responding to my liking them, I’m ready to give up, and find myself flipping through the dregs of the site rapidly, barely looking at the faces, which are by now nearly all either unattractive or so fake looking you can tell they were either created by or heavily modified by some computer program. 

        One of these latter causes me to stop though. Her –its?- face is so robotic, so caked in make up, her body so perfectly plastic, that it almost takes my breath away. I feel a weird nausea, like I sometimes do when I get a peek into the seedier corners of the uncanny valley. Digital filters and effects and emojis all make me sick, but this seems somehow even worse. Beneath her picture he description reads:

        For lease by ower: 1986ish model-original features. Dual front airbags. Suitable rear cargo. 

        And so on, getting a lot of -yes, mileage out of the used car analogy. Beneath that, she makes a statement about not having any tolerance for bullshit, followed by, “Yes I have a pet squirrel.” 

        Sure enough, scrolling down I find a photo of her sitting with a gray squirrel on her head. The squirrel is much too large though, the size of a cat, and has obviously been added digitally. Her face is the same as it is in all her photos –not just similar, but exactly the same, as if the same image has just been altered slightly and placed in different locations. At the bottom of her page is a collection of her photos from Instagram, and sprinkled among the weird, robotic images of her- buxom but always fully clothed, and almost always sitting in cars- are more images of the squirrel, though in all of these the squirrel looks normal-sized. Here is the squirrel poking out of a pocket. Here the squirrel is sitting on a steering wheel with its nose in a glass of foam which she explains the people at Starbucks prepared –she says they’ve dubbed it a “squirreluccino.” All her Instagram photos are accompanied by long, extremely filthy captions. She says she wants to make people laugh, so there are plenty of examples of raunchy humor –she describes “the gluck gluck sound a gal makes when her mouth is full of (here she has, er, inserted an emoji of a zucchini)” but the captions beneath the squirrel photos are oddly chaste and self-deprecating. 

        “Just a slightly overweight squirrel who is too lazy to walk, chilling in my pocket,” reads one. “Your dose of squirrel content that none of you asked for,” she says, before describing how distraught she was when the animal went missing for two weeks, then showed up at her door as if nothing had happened. “It is her house…I’m just the peasant that feeds her and pays the bills!” 

        She complains that the squirrel tore up her $119 Miss Me jeans in order to make a nest, and the photo of her wearing the torn pants is not at all provocative. None of them are; her perfectly-proportioned body has all the erotic charge of an inflatable doll. Meanwhile, she makes an elaborate home for the squirrel from pieces of cat trees. The squirrel is never named, though she calls it a her, and the photos are a few years old –a Trump 2020 sign is clearly visible in one. 

        The entire thing is so utterly strange to me, someone who only chooses to scrape the surface of the web. Is this a real woman, probably a prostitute or stripper, who really just wants to make people laugh and share her life with a small, furry creature? Or is this all some strange AI project, possibly a scam or prank of some kind? I’m baffled but fascinated, despite (because of?) my repulsion. I suddenly remember Lee, a real life non-robotic human who is stuck in the hospital with tubes coming out of him, and think I should shoot him an email, but instead go back to looking at the pictures, reading every one of the captions, most of them awful –“What can I say, I’m just a girl who likes sunsets, tacos, and getting my back blown out.” Finally I realize this whole thing doesn’t really lead anywhere healthy, and after one last look into those empty, blackened eyes, I finally swipe left. 

Budgie

         The heat wave came as predicted and since it was too uncomfortable to leave the house at night I decided to wade back into the tepid water of the online dating pool. My experiences over the years had grown increasingly depressing as I’d gotten older –it had been two and a half years since my last miserable coffee date- but I was feeling desperate and besides, I had a smart phone now and so had access to a whole exciting world of dating apps I’d never tried. By the time the heat wave lifted I had not had a single person show interest or respond to me. I expected it to be sad but was still taken aback by the deafening silence but I just unhooked my little droid-like air conditioner and, with uncharacteristic optimism, rolled it back into the closet.

        A month ago, I doctor had told me my foot was healed up and I could take the boot off at last, after six long months of hobbling along. Two days later my wound had opened right back up again and I was in worse pain than I’d been before I started seeing him. He had told me to come back in a month, but when the time I came I couldn’t do it. I knew if I went into that office I wouldn’t be able to hold in the rage I had at what an inept, uncaring piece of shit he was. I knew I needed a new doctor –I was in intense pain, and afraid of getting another infection- but I found myself paralyzed. The idea of rolling the dice and picking another doctor at random from the internet –like online dating, come to think of it- was too daunting.

        When I woke up this morning, the sun was blanketed by smoke from the inevitable fires from the North. An eerie golden light fell across the sidewalks and the sun turned the color of stagnant urine. I got out of bed and pain shot up my leg. I looked at my foot and while it didn’t look swollen or red, it seemed somehow more misshapen than usual. My heart started to race; what if I had the infection I’d been dreading? I had been feeling a little off physically the past few days, though at the time I’d chalked it up to the changing weather. Tense with dread, I got online and made an appointment at the urgent care center I’d last visited two summers ago for this same exact problem. It’s a miserable little office but it’s very close to both my apartment and the Safeway where I get my prescriptions filled; I can get there on the streetcar.

        The waiting room there is tiny and so was the doctor. He was very young, I felt like I was talking to a small child. He was nice enough and said he didn’t think it looked too bad but he took a sample and gave me a prescription for antibiotics and the number of the wound care specialists. My foot doctor had never had me go to any wound care, had said he didn’t think it was necessary. As he spoke, I found myself fixated on his shoes. They were very smart brown shoes, and I told him I liked them and asked if they were comfortable. He didn't respond so I just thanked him and went and had breakfast while I waited for my script to be filled. As I was taking the streetcar back to Safeway the doctor called; I was terrified. I was certain he’d got the lab results and was going to tell me to check into the hospital immediately, even though it was Sunday and there was no way he could have gotten them so quickly. 

        Instead he said he’d shared my pictures with the wound care specialists and they had recommended some different dressings I could try; he apologized and asked if I could swing by the office so he could give them to me. I told him I was nearby and twenty minutes later I went back in and undid my dressing (which I had done myself) then watched as he struggled to wrap my misshapen foot with the new dressing, which he kept dropping on the floor. I sighed and told him that if he got a new one, I’d do it myself. He seemed relieved and told me I probably didn’t need to take the antibiotics after all, that they were really just a precaution.

        I left the clinic and resisted the urge to run back into Safeway for a bottle of wine and instead got onto the streetcar to go back home. I felt so drained I could barely stand up, and the afternoon had grown humid and oppressive. After a few stops a guy in a wheelchair hauled himself on to the streetcar. He had no legs below his knees. When I got to my stop, he looked like he wanted to get off seemed confused and disoriented. I asked if he needed the ramp and he said yes so I hit the button and waited as he rolled himself off. “Thanks bro,” he said, his mouth twisted in a snarl of anguish.

        When I got back to my building, I saw a new-looking birdcage filled with supplies sitting in the trash room. A piece of paper on top of it read

GOOD STUFF

BUDGIE DIED FROM HEAT

Please Take Food is Fresh

One of my neighbors walked by and said, “Well that’s fucking depressing.” I agreed and went upstairs and wished I knew what to do about anything. 

Feathers

      In the street in front of my apartment this morning is a pile of feathers about the size of a reclining body. They are small, white feathers, some of them tipped with brown. Aside from the pile, feathers also line the curbs up and down the street, thousands of them, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, caught in the cracks of the asphalt and the corners of the buildings and under the parked cars.

     When I come home from work, the pile has mostly disintegrated but feathers remained in clumps up and down the block and even around the corner. There are too many for it to have been just a few burst pillows, it seems like a truck must have dumped its load. How do they transport large quantities of feathers, I wonder. I picture barrels; maybe a barrel somehow rolled off the back of a truck and dumped its contents.

     Later that night I run into the Cherokee woman from down the hall smoking in front of the building. I want to ask her about the feathers, but she's bursting with excitement, having just gotten back from a Willie Nelson concert. He played with his son, and she says at one point between songs his son had looked over at his ninety-year old father and said, "I love you, Dad," and the entire place had burst into tears.

     My neighbor has kids and even grandkids herself, though you would never know it to look at her; she looks younger than I am, and is incredibly sexy. She's very gregarious but only releases personal information a morsel at a time. She lives in a two bedroom unit on my floor with her brother and her 22 year old son. Her brother usually comes down to smoke with her and for a long time I assumed they were a couple.  Once last week, I had stepped out of the elevator and almost walked into her as she stood there on the phone. "Oh hold on a sec, it's my beautiful neighbor," she said, and gave me a huge hug and kiss on the cheek. I knew it didn't mean anything but it was still nice.

     After listening to her chatter about Willie for a while, I head in and take a shower and go to bed. I fall asleep fairly quickly but an hour later I'm awakened by a woman crying out. The sound comes from outside, probably through an open window of one of the other apartments. The woman cries out again, and again, and continues to do so for a few minutes until one final shriek. I haven't heard anyone having sex in our building for years, and while I usually find it annoying or disturbing, I'm strangely touched by how joyful this woman sounded, as if she was about to burst into peals of laughter.

     I can't fall back asleep and start to feel crushed by my isolation. I read for a while but every time I turn out the light I'm assaulted by waves of loneliness and self-pity. Eventually I sank into a morass of miserable dreams.

     I get up early the next morning and sit on the balcony with my coffee and listen to the pigeons fussing on the ledge above me. When I leave for work the feathers ae still lining the street, tenaciously clinging to the weeds, to the curbs, to the bases of the signposts and electrical poles, quivering in the breeze but stubbornly refusing to let themselves be carried away.