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.