User:Griffin/Suddenly Spotty

"Mister Durham, what do you think caused this to happen? Do you believe that a higher power was involved in this miraculous transformation?" The reporter, who had introduced himself as "Marcus," was dressed out like a wannabe Italian papparrazo. It was a little much by my reckoning, and this didn't make me inclined to be charitable. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's someone who has to put on airs. What tore it for me was that the question sniffed of agnostic-baiting, which has never sat well with me. Therefore, I gave him my best cheetah leer, which is a look that can send strong men into fits of panic in the right context, and I began to throw off on his impossibly dumb question in classical style.

"Well," I started out, pausing for a moment to get into my best whiskey-voiced Brooklyn twang. I positioned my paws comfortably out in front of me with the left bent coquettishly and my right turned to the side to aid in my elocution. I continued, "there is a problem with that question, you see. Before I start to answer you, though, let me give you a little backgroud: not long after the universe we know was created, there was this dragon, and he ruled over a little kingdom populated by sundry animals. All animals knew how to talk then because it was still Man's responsibility to try to teach them, and all things lived longer lives and had more time in which to learn. Now, ferrets were known in this time as ferocious debaters--" "Sir, please," Marcus said, holding up his hands for me to stop. Satisfyingly enough, sweat had begun to pop out on his forehead, and he realized I was jerking him around. Men who are truly full of bologna can't stand it when you serve them top-class salami. "I didn't ask for a bunch of fabrication," he said. "I was just asking if you ever thought--"

I rolled my eyes. "Look; I come from a strict Presbyterian background, and all this stuff I've been struck with over the past eight months flies in the face of everything I was taught. I don't think that a person in my position is obligated to think, and trying my best not to has been keeping my head bolted to my neck lately rather than whirling around somewhere in outer space. I can tell you my story or not, but I'm not here for playing word games or intellectual card tricks."

"Okay! Jeez!" he shouted, putting his hands up defensively. Then, with the air of someone treading on rice paper in hiking boots, Marcus took a breath and started over. "Perhaps you could try sharing your earliest memories of these events."

I dropped my head down and to the left as I thought about that, drawing my right paw up to me and setting my left elbow to take stress off my bone structure. As the memory surged slowly back to me, my eyes drifted up to the ceiling, and then I bent my neck to the right as if in a swallowing motion as I satisfied myself that I had put it together. "Well," I started, using a much friendlier tone this time. I set my posture in a more symmetrical and close-together version of the one I had used earlier when ridiculing him, and I continued, "it was actually a long while before I realized anything was different. You see, it was in the wee hours of the morning, and it was completely dark. I wasn't very lucid at all, so you can imagine I would end up laying there for hours before I realized exactly what was going on. I mean, it's not every day that you wake up and find that you've turned into something that looks like a wild animal.

"Now, my first feelings upon awakening were that my muscles weren't working like they normally did. For example, I had a feeling that my hip flexor muscles had been cranked to a higher amperage than usual, and I had a sense that my quadriceps had become strong and powerful enough that I could kick a good-sized hole in the world."

Marcus interrupted with a politely raised hand, so I paused for a moment to give him room. "Okay, so what you are saying is that you had a distinct sense of change in the way your muscles worked. "

"Yes," I replied. "I also had a sense that I didn't have anything there to hold up my gut, but there was also a sense that I didn't have as much anyway." I thought for a moment about how to describe it. "It was kind of hard to articulate, but think of your insides as being like a noodle, and the noodle rests on a large plate. But then think of realizing first that the plate you have to put it on is a lot smaller, but then you feel kind of relieved because then it occurs to you that there isn't as much noodle there anymore anyhow." I looked up at him to see if he was following me, knowing deep down it was a highly tortured analogy.

Marcus was actually nodding his head as if understanding, though. "I can see that, actually," he said. "I mean, a lot of people don't know it, but I was--do you mind if I interrupt?"

"No," I said.

He went on, "well, this doctor I was interviewing not long ago was telling me about how they use interoception to treat people with panic disorder. I asked him what it was, and he started telling me all this stuff about how," he started gesticulating with his hands, "we get feelings of nausea, thirst or hunger. We don't have it in our list of everyday senses, but we do get these feelings and know what to do with them." He gestured with both hands down at his own belly. "I would think it would have felt cooler around your middle, like that part of your body wasn't pumping out as much heat."

I regretted snapping at the guy earlier. This guy was actually explaining this better than I had, and I was starting to warm up to him. "Yeah, that's about right actually. You know, I would have thought you'd be more curious about my tail."

He shrugged. "Well, I've never had one," he said. "It's kind of hard to think about if you've never had one."

I nodded energetically. "Oh, tell me about it," I said. "That was another reason that it took me so long to get clued in what was going on. Now it's like, when my body is checking itself, it says, 'okay, all five limbs intact' and never says anything about it to the forebrain. I can feel my tail having a kink in it, being stepped on accidentally, but I never actually have the feeling of it being there versus not being there." I chuckled softly. "I didn't find out about it until after I figured out what was going on."

"When was that, actually?" Marcus asked me.

"Well, let me continue just telling everything in order. I mean, I have it here. Basically, that was the first stuff that registered with me, but I didn't make very much of it. I just knew that I was feeling weird, so I just laid there on my side breathing for two hours while my mind wandered. I guess part of me knew something was amiss, and I was a bit afraid to find out what exactly it was. I mean, I think you would be in my situation.

"I guess the first thing that gave me cause for worry was an uncomfortable feeling of my whiskers sticking against the covers." I twirled my whiskers for him illustratively, illiciting a reserved chuckle. "I was once about as smooth as a doll-faced hentai chick," I continued, "so it was quite unnerving. Now, like I said, it's not every day you wake up suddenly in the body of some quadrupedal creature that it's scientifically impossible for you to become, so what I was worried about at the time was that somehow I had suddenly grown a lot of facial hair overnight. It wasn't some attempt to rationalize or anything; it wasn't like it occurred to me to think, "I haven't turned into an animal," because it hadn't occurred to me yet to wonder if I had.

"Now, I'm sure you heard about the shooting incident. Yes, that's how my circumstances ended up being broadcast over the media before my parents could so much as think of trying to cover it up. It was really the most horrifying thing that has ever happened to me, and I still get anxious talking about it. You see, it had just started getting light outside, and that was about the same time my father came to get me out of bed. As the light got good enough for me to see by, I realized I was feeling really thirsty, and I started pulling the bedding material off of me, which was turning out to be an unusually awkward endeavor. When I got my first look at myself, let me put it to you simply: I panicked.

"You panicked?" Marcus asked. His eyebrows moved up and down thoughtfully, and they wove themselves together. He cocked his head to his left with his eyes pulling slightly to his right as if he were trying to form a mental picture of the scene. Using his left hand to carry his speech as if he were using it as a sort of metronome, he said, "So you started screaming, and that's when your father came in with the .22 and famously--"

I waved my paw dismissively. "That's not quite right," I interrupted. I retreated back into my head and tried to pull it up. "It was just light enough for me to see," I said, sounding distant even to my own ears, "and for an instant there...I thought there was something in bed with me." I made pointed eye contact with Marcus, here. "I know it's hard to believe, but I still hadn't really swallowed what was going on. I think I decided I was dreaming or hallucinating, so I just got up and started getting dressed." I chuckled at myself. "Struggling into those old jeans was a comic masterpiece. I mean there I was trying to pretend everything was normal because my brain was just so completely clouded with cognitive dissonance, and then my father came to the door to ask if I was alright. 'I'm fine,' I said. 'Just had a bad dream.' I guess I sounded as freaked-out as I actually was because I think he just lurked around the door and never actually left. He said something to me about breakfast, and he shouted something down at Mom."

I looked up, and my surroundings registered with me. "Okay," I said to Marcus. "Who paints their office wine-red with nicotine-stain-white moulding and trim and then puts in green faux leather upholstry?" I looked around. "I mean, it doesn't look bad, but it's a little distracting for an office, isn't it?"

Marcus looked uncomfortable for a moment, and he made a shrugging gesture with his hands. "Well, this actually isn't my office, really. The guy who is usually here works for Archives and History, as you can see from the books here." He gestured around at the book shelves. "I just don't have room where I usually work," he finished, looking a little chagrined.

"Well, I guess a history type would tend to want more colorful surroundings," I admitted. I respected his honesty, though, because he could have just said he had borrowed it for the low-slung--and highly comfortable--couch I was laying on. "But I don't even know how long I spent in my room trying to dress myself. I just know that my father eventually burst in. He got one look at me, squawked, and after a heart-stopping moment he was back with the .22 trying to blow my head off.

"From there, it's kind of blurry for a while," I lied. "I mean, when you have to beg for your life when it's your own dad, and he doesn't recognize who you are..." I stammered lamely for a moment. "W-well, your mind kind of writes it off as a mistake and tries to throw the memory away," I finished lamely. I trembled gently as a chill flushed over me. The memory really just flashed through my mind so blindingly, when I tried to revisit it, that it hurt. It was like the memory was too glaringly bright for me to look at it directly, and I didn't like the bits of it I caught in sidelong glances. I couldn't believe that I had cursed at him, condemned him and tried to make him feel small. I had just been so scared.

"You don't have to talk about it," Marcus said.

"I have a friend I try to talk about it with," I said, feeling embarrassed with myself. "Anyway," I continued, "the next clear thought I really have is when I was rubbing my bruised head and trying to help my father explain things to a police sergeant. I think he's Lieutenent Hooks now."

"Give him a while, and he'll be Captain Hooks," Marcus quipped.

I chuckled, "Yeah. Anyway, after that awkward, little discussion, I was on the EMS wagon heading toward Duke, and that was the first time I really felt proud to have been born to my father. He held my paw the whole way, and he kept asking if I was okay. I kept telling him I was fine, but I think I was really just so far gone in shock that I didn't care about anything. Once Old Man Endorphin hits, you're just thanking the Good Lord you're alive.

"When we got to where we were going, there was a lot of awkwardness. You see, they didn't want me walking on all fours through the hospital because they were afraid I might pick up an infection, and they didn't want to hurt my back making me walk upright; therefore, they just took me in on a gurney even though I was perfectly capable of getting around on my own.

"And then there was a really funny episode I remember: the UNC grad student who was put in charge of me--I don't know how he got into Duke in one piece--wanted me stripped, but my father threatened to kill him. I just wanted any chance they could give me to get back to normal whatever they had to do, so we hit a three-way compromise by just having a hospital blanket laying over me.

"I learned a whole new compassion toward lab mice during all of that, though. I swear, if you would pardon me please for doing so, I was put through so many different scans over the next few hours that it's amazing I haven't come down with some weird cancer from it; I can't even remember the names of all of them. I remember looking at the results of the Ct scan, though. From what the doctors explained to me, my whole brain mass has somehow been compacted into a smaller space, and they can't quite figure out why there haven't been any cognitive effects from it. One guy even admitted out of sheer frustration he hasn't ruled out magic.

"Anyway, by the time my younger brother came and got us, I was bone tired. All I can remember after getting home was the taste of green Jell-O and chicken boullion, Mom looking worried and then the blissful feeling of my own bed."

Marcus raised his eyebrows again. "Green Jell-O and boullion"?

"Hospital stuff," I explained. "You don't want to know."

"It really wasn't until the next morning that it really came home to me what had happened," I said. "I just sat in front of my bedroom mirror for an hour that morning, making different faces and posing a lot."

"Just trying to come to grips with it?" Marcus asked rhetorically.

I cocked my head to the right as I tried to construct a better explanation. "It's not so much that," I replied slowly. I had to think for a heartbeat or so, and I elected to answer a rhetorical question with a serious one. "I've really tried to think about this because I still do it. Pose and make faces in front of the mirror, I mean. It's just that for years I looked a certain way and moved a certain way, and what terrifies me is losing the person I was before. At the same time, I'm eager for the new person to live, and it's like I'm trying to make peace between one part of me that wants to run away from this and another part of me that wants to embrace it."

He scratched his chin thoughtfully. "You know, I never thought of it that way," he admitted. He scratched down several notes, seeming caught up in his own thoughts momentarily.

I kneaded the couch thoughtfully for a second, reflecting on the memory. I had been fascinated with how I could rotate my ears almost 180 degrees, and I had experimented unsuccessfully with trying to turn one to the front and the other to rear. I had stripped myself naked and spent several minutes taking up various different poses and watching the muscles play and flow over my new body.

"Hey, careful not to rip--" Marcus started.

I held up my paw to remind him I was wearing mitts, and I chuckled softly. "I do have to eat with these paws," I explained. I realized they were making my digits feel cramped at the moment, so I took them off, sticking them into the small side-pocket of my harness. "Anyway, suddenly waking up in the body of a cheetah felt like getting out of a Pocono and hopping into a Veyron Bugatti. You think you were in good shape before, but suddenly you have more power under your foot than you really know what to do with, and you know it without even having to touch the accelerator. You can tell it doesn't jump from 0-60. It glides.

"But after my session in front of the mirror, I had a full day ahead of me. The first big thing of the day was my trip to the hospital, but getting ready was a pain. The biggest hassle was trying to get me into an outfit that actually fit on me. I wasn't born a professional nudist, you know. Fortunately, my mother had thought ahead and hauled down a big box full of my old stuff, and we managed to find a pair of black soccer shorts that I hadn't worn since I was 8."

"But why did you want to wear clothing at all?" Marcus asked. "I would think the fur covers everything."

I almost rolled my eyes, but I remembered my manners and just shook my head in the negative. "The tail does if I have it down all the way," I said. "The fur doesn't have anything to do with it. It's serviceable as protection against the sun, but that's about as good as a mud wallow come to think of it. Humans really insist on wearing clothes because skin that has sweat glands tends to stick to near-about everything except wood, and the only feasible means of keeping it sanitary and not stinking awfully is to spend a lot of time rolling in mud, ash and sand. If your body isn't smeared thoroughly in mud and ash with some of it caked into the sparse hair surrounding your sensitive regions, you have to worry about the god-awful sun bearing down on you. Humans don't wear clothing entirely out of decency, you know. It's just incredibly unpleasant to try doing without it.

"What I found out that day was that clothing doesn't work as well if you have fur. To get an idea as to how unpleasant it was for me, try getting your hair shaved into a buzz-cut, and put on one of those caps that fit to your scalp. Whenever the fabric would catch at my fur the wrong way, it would stab uncomfortably into my flesh. I thought at one point later on of trying dipilation, but fur just grows back far too fast for any of that to work.

"The trip to the hospital was entirely as stressful as you might probably expect. Fortunately, they had to wait for me to fast for a while longer before doing anything substantially unpleasant, but I was nearly anemic by the end of the trip. However, the guy who had analyzed my brain scans from the day before was very nice, and it was very interesting to hear him ramble on about how the procedures worked and how they had been developed.

I started squirming uncomfortably beneath my harness, and I started removing it. "Excuse me," I asked Marcus. "Do you mind if I remove this thing and set it down next to the couch?"

Marcus shrugged. "Sure," he said, looking around the room searchingly. "As long as you wouldn't feel too dressed down or anything." As I started to remove it, he stood up to take the harness from me, and he nicely set it down out of the way between his office chair and the couch. As I stretched out comfortably with my hind-legs out a little bit to the side, he readjusted his suit and sat back down, and I was now wearing just my fancy, customized orthopedic dog shoes.

"Anyway," I continued, "Dr. Joyner tried to explain the scan results to me, and the best I can tell about my brain is that it has somehow compensated for the lower mass by simply having more hook-ups between neurons, and a lower proportion of it is just taking up space. I have less brain in here," I said, tapping myself on my temple, "but what I have simply does more. Kind of how bird brains manage to perform better than a lot of mammalian brains in spite of being a whole lot smaller in terms of absolute size.

"As much of a movie cliche it may sound like, they actually had me run on a treadmill for a while. It didn't have anything to do with what I'd turned into, though. It was a stress test, which is sort of a standard part of the procedure. The catch, though, is that I had to do it once on all fours and once on my hind-legs. Ironically, I could actually move fairly quickly even on my hind-legs compared to a human, but it's highly uncomfortable without that big pelvic bone humans have. If I tried doing it on a regular basis, I'd have a severe hernia within a month."

"However, the stuff I had to do at the hospital was a picnic compared to the press conference I had stupidly agreed to." I shook my head in disgust. "I am sorry, but that whole affair didn't do much for my opinion of journalists."

I flipped over on my back and stared up at the ceiling, laying my head on the soft arm of the couch. Marcus' pen scratched noisily against his notepad as he took down several notes. Marcus struck me as nice as reporters went; he was curious, and he was idealistic. The fiends I had met that day at the press conference had been either bored and disinterested or absolutely insensitive.

"They were like animals," I said.

Marcus' pen stopped scratching for a moment. "Well, I agree that first-line reporters can be a menace," he said. "They almost have to be. People usually don't want to talk when they are just coming out of a trauma, but that's when they have events fresh in their minds."

I chuckled. "Either way," I said, "they didn't get much out of me." I rolled my shoulders against the couch in a sort of shrug. "I tried to answer their questions, but I was never even given a chance to compose myself to respond before someone else wanted to jump in. It was the most disorderly, uncoordinated rabble that I have ever seen.

"For example, at one point someone asked me if I felt any different. I was starting to explain the sense of my muscles being in hyperdrive, but before I could even start somebody usurped the one from before with a question about my tail. But everyone just seemed to be confused when I tried to say it seemed almost like I'd never been without one, and then there were all of these personal questions.

"But I've realized that the kind of question I always hate the most is the kind that ask into my religious beliefs. My religion is boring. It's supposed to be boring. We don't want interesting people. We want the interesting people to go and annoy someone else. We're dour and dull. Most of us are unpleasant, and we like to sit around reading books and doing boring things."

I cranked my head up to make eye contact with Marcus. "This one guy who would not shut up kept making these really stupid allusions to Revelation 13 that demonstrated his total lack of any nuanced understanding of the book. That almost compelled me to leave. I knew he was trying to hoodwink me into drawing attention from the 700 Clubbers and make more news. Thankfully, the others eventually muscled him out of the conversation.

"Anyway," I continued, focusing back on my chosen spot on the ceiling, "I don't need to describe a press conference to you in any detail. Eventually, I was allowed to talk long enough to tell essentially the same story I was telling you earlier about what happened that first morning. I didn't have any funny tingling sensations or feel any of my bones crunching. I didn't feel dazed or confused except for completely ordinary reasons.

"I did get into one interesting exchange with someone who apparently had some background in psychology. He threw some light on why it had taken me so long to realize what had actually happened. It seems like the human brain is geared to either reconcile conflicting information or throw it out as meaningless noise. Apparently, we get hallucinations and delusions that we don't even know about because we forget about them or dismiss them as fantasy so quickly that they don't resolve themselves into what we accept as actual fact. Three different people can literally have three different experiences of the same series of events because their minds throw out different parts of those events as if they had never happened at all."

I looked at my paw in wonder. "Bodily, I am a four-legged animal," I said. "I cannot escape that fact. But you know, Marcus, there are times when I roll out of bed, and I stand up on my hind-legs. I search everywhere for clothing I have packed away. I wrap a towel around myself, and I climb up into the attic to find them. I realize my old clothes don't fit anymore, and I think I've gotten sick. Sometimes it takes only seconds for the fantasy to dissolve. On occasion, it goes on for hours like one weekend when I just crawled out of bed and started doing homework, and then I got hungry and went off looking for something to eat. I went for a tumble down the stairs trying to walk down them on my hind-legs.

"Anyway, the press conference ended with a lot of people yammering at once, and my parents took me out to the local park for some down time. I was really glad to go somewhere I didn't have to deal with people for a while, but I got into some really serious trouble with my parents that evening. I guess I just needed to be alone for a while and have a chance to straighten myself out."

"That was when you disappeared for three days?" Marcus asked.

I nodded. "And I can't tell you how relieved I am to have a chance to tell that story," I said. I turned over on my side and kicked the shoes off of my feet, and then I got down onto the floor and sat back on my haunches. I held my head up straight, and my ears were forward and erect. "It was over the succeeding week," I intoned, "that I became a cheetah."