TOUCH ME EVERYPLACE
by
Michael Cadnum lives in northern California and is a poet and novelist. He is the author of eleven novels including St Peter’s Wolf, Ghostwright, Calling Home, Skyscape, The Judas Glass and Zero at the Bone, and an illustrated book based on Cinderella called Ella and the Canary Prince (Cobblestone Press). He has also published several collections of poetry, most recently The Cities We Will Never See.
Cadnum is terrific at capturing in his short fiction the character of disturbed and displaced persons. As in this tale.
What it was like was, they put me in a big scoop like a detergent powder spoon, bright blue, and when I tried to climb out they put a giant strip of sticky tape over me. And then it was like a ride in a helicopter, which I have never been in, except higher. Way higher, up where you have to breathe air through a tube.
Which is what I did while my sweat got all frosty. They carried me into a bright room like a bowling alley, and I was terrified. The whole spaceship started to vibrate and I could tell we were going somewhere, and then they carried me still in the big plastic scoop all the way down a corridor to a room. And there it started, the ordeal.
Some of it I already told the proper authorities, some of it not. They undid the big sticky tape and then they lifted me out. I already told investigators about their hands and what they used for fingers, little pliers. Cold, too. What I didn’t tell was what everybody probably already figured out on their own. They took off all my clothes and touched me everyplace.
Not only my private parts, which is what people expect. Naturally the creatures would take off clothes to touch the places clothes usually cover. My penis they looked at, and all the other parts, and my muscles – which I have a lot of – they felt those too. And also they touched under my tongue and my nose holes and in my ear.
You might think, well an ear isn’t so bad, but an ear is an orifice. Imagine if you were sitting on a bus and someone put a breast nipple in your ear, for example. Even if it was a pleasant breast, if you weren’t asked you would think wait a minute.
Ever since the elevator accident I have seen what is going on. You might have heard elevators can’t fall nineteen storeys, they have brakes. And I would explain that they do have brakes, that the brakes slow the falling box of people – or in my case one person, yelling – from about sixty-five miles per hour to about ten. And I would argue that the impact is still unpleasant and damaging, not taking into consideration the fall, which doesn’t do the human nervous system any good.
Which is why the court was going to award me punitive damages. The elevator company, a very famous one I agreed not to mention out of court, compensated me handsomely.
But to go back to the spaceship: when they were done they took me back to the Wendy’s parking lot where they found me in the first place. I was dishevelled, but if you saw me you would think, this is a man who is always not quite tucked in, so you wouldn’t give me a second glance. I went to the proper authorities and I was on television and in the newspaper. I didn’t want to talk about it except to say they came and got me and felt me and went away. I could have talked about every little detail, but I didn’t.
But then I woke up one morning and decided to make my life better. I vacuumed and I dusted. I washed out the tuna cans before I squashed them. People in my position don’t think why me, they think: I know why me. I was conspicuous in some way, and I didn’t want to be any more. I bought new shirts and new pants. I decided to dress my age, which is not so old, but still. I wore a necktie to Safeway sometimes, and you could tell the women in the deli section thought it was an improvement. I still have the limp, but I improved.
Friends would see me in the library and ask, and I would say I was OK, thanks for inquiring.
For a while I was recovering from what happened, and didn’t take showers three times a day so I could feel myself. It took courage but I could eat and excrete and think about resuming normal relationships with people, even women. I have some personal qualities, although I always thought talking about your virtues automatically reduces them by half.
I called in for the new software, which is what I do. Companies send me the beta versions and I run them and I say they work and they make a funny noise. But after a while I noticed.
The UPS people stand in the lobby and they push buttons on an electronic clipboard, and they leave yellow UPS Post-its on the outside of the mailbox doors. And you think they do this because they are lazy or in a hurry and have to pretend they used the lobby phone to call up people and tell them there is a package.
But I knew there weren’t any packages, that there were real UPS people, and then there were these pretend deliverers who were out to make sure I could still function, if you call getting dressed and using a mailbox key functioning, which I do. They were probably doing this all the time I lived in this apartment building, ever since the one on Shattuck Avenue burned down with me barely making it out alive. Maybe before. Maybe some of those tar-brown vans with no doors were totally empty, without drivers, even, motoring around on telepathic control.
If you stop to use your eyes you see there are way many more people than there have to be. In Safeway there is the guy shaking out the string bag full of russets and there is the guy in the back room checking off potatoes on a list, and then there is another guy, in a green apron like the others, not really doing anything, watching people.
So I decided I would let them know what it was like. I didn’t plan. I just decided to act. I grabbed one in the lobby just standing there looking at a list of names we keep in a metal frame behind glass because sometimes someone wants to deface a name or add a drawing. I went up nineteen floors and carried the person down the hallway. I say carried and person because these are useful words people understand. But I have pains in my lower and middle back, and also this UPS-oid was stabbing me with a ballpoint pen.
I got him into my apartment. He was a very muscular one, like a male person, and hairy. He shouted and wrestled. I was very patient because I did not want to cause any terrible repercussions between far-away galaxies and my own planet. What I said was, ‘How would you like it if I did this?’ probing his belly button with my finger.
That was just an example, and the muscular one hit me a lot on the head and on the upper part of my shoulders so I got a pair of pliers out and said, ‘Or for example if I did this?’ taking hold of that dangling thing in his throat, what I always called the gilly-woggle, just as a sample of the outrage.
Because by now I was mad. I had repressed a lot of the anger, got way out of touch with it. They say ‘repressed’, and they mean like when you press all your clothes with an iron and fold them, and press the folds, like with hankies, so they will stack up neatly in the top drawer. I had done that with my feelings, and shut the drawers really tight.
After a while he lay still, not because I stood on him so much, which I did, but also because I told him he was just going to partake of more reciprocal treatment and see how he liked it. He was tired or frightened, or both.
Naturally, after it was all over and I wasn’t all that satisfied, major misunderstandings took place. For one thing they came again and took me to a large facility on Earth, this time, and they were really lost about what to do with me. You could see the extent of the problem. Doctors were confused, if they were human physicians, knowing there was nothing wrong with me, or not confused, just wanting to make me watch television, if they were not human psychiatrists but the other kind.
This is why I was patient so long, wanting to avoid hurting feelings, and being polite, too, because there isn’t enough courtesy; you hear butt and ass on the radio, and I say why bother turning on the AM/FM if people are on there talking like your friends.
I used to not care that progress had stopped. Germs don’t die when you take a pill. Even bullets don’t work that well, policemen having to shoot every bullet in the gun before the robber falls down. You paint a wall and after a short while you have to paint it again. I don’t like to be dramatic, but the only thing that works sometimes is common sense.
So I have taken over this facility until delegations are formed or committees and investigators arrive and the authorities start to exert some authority. When was the last time you felt there was someone in charge?
This won’t be a help, generally. Here I am in one small office, with a very obsolete computer and a grip exerciser I found in a drawer, and what can I do to help the situation worldwide? People pound on the door. Some of these are actual, genuine people, and earnest. I have these syringes of a colourless chemical, a very strong tranquilliser, judging from the effect on various personnel earlier in the day. If anyone needs calming, I am ready.
But if we show these curious visitors how to act they will stop probing and sneaking. When I fell nineteen storeys I was yelling. What I was yelling was not a word, just a noise. Now I am ashamed at the memory. So I turn on the mike and speak slowly. I enunciate.
And I say: Sit down and be quiet. I know what you like to do, so line up and stop talking. One at a time. If you want to, you can touch me everyplace.