Usurper
A story of being homeless and of being housed
NOTE
You will need to equip yourself with an ordinary six-sided die in order to read this story as intended.
You may of course read it without rolling the dice at one point - I can't stop you, how could I? - but the randomness is built in to how it is intended to develop.
It's like those old 'Choose Your Own Adventure' stories but you don't get to choose.
Monday is for measuring out retribution
On Monday I see her as she’s taking out the plastics for recycling. She pushes them into the container and walks away. I go to check because there is so much more to learn from someone's plastics than from anything else they might have.
People with homes, people in their lovely apartments, they think their books, their clothes, their collections of things they keep, say so much about who they are. The truth is the opposite: these possessions tell only of what the world wants them to be. The plastics that they cast away tell me who they really are - malleable, mouldable, subject to stress and melting but resilient. I should know: I am cast out and I’m increasingly made of plastic.
Accrual, I call it. Consuming the plastics so they become me. We all do it, but I do it faster, this accrual. Don’t be surprised at my choice of fancy words, by the way, because once I had a good education, I lived in a fine apartment. Once I had a partner and the beginnings of a family. But catastrophe came, and bills, and then more catastrophe, and I lost my refuge and I was alone and out.
Now I’m homeless, a word that means so much more and so much less than it says. The Spanish-speakers among us call themselves los sintecho – those without a roof – and that is really what I am. I’m without a roof, subject to whatever drops on me from above. Loose change, rain, insults, piss, random blessings. They fall on me and nothing stops them because I’m roofless, ruthless in my determination not to perish out here in the heat, in the cold, in the hunger, in the thirst.
Is it right that I’m out here, without a home and without a roof? The passers-by seem to think it’s right because they walk on unconcerned, so everything must be correct. If it were as wrong as I imagine it to be, then surely they would stop and cry out in anguish at my suffering, the suffering of all us sintecho, and they would do something, more that is than tossing me a few coins or a slur or a troubled look that turns again quickly back to habitual blankness.
At the corner of Bakeland and Hogan is the plastics recycling container, the special dumpster marked all in yellow. It’s my favorite. I linger here sometimes just to scent the acrylene and breathe in the aromatic molecules, the clingy organic compounds that swim in air and long to run in the blood of a living thing.
She was here just before, taking out her plastic waste: the one who occupies my place. The usurper. Of all the passers-by, she is the least concerned. Or the most unconcerned. The one whose blissful existence is most untouched by my small terrors out here on the street, the one who walks in a fluffy blithe cloud of comfort. She sees nothing but hope where we see only dust. I want to be like her. I want to like her. I want to be her.
So I make accrual work for me. The alchemist Kekulé, when he created the first organic molecule, the benzene ring, dreamed of worm Ouroboros, a serpent eating its own tail. I see the same potent beast made of dream as I pull her plastics out of the trash: a bottle of fabric softener, a tub of icecream. I rub them hard and breathe in their aroma, their stray molecules. I hug them close and feel them sweat through my skin. And, yes, I even chew them and feel the particles drifting through my mouth and into my saliva and down into my stomach where they will also become me.
Nobody looks at me as I accrue this usurper to myself, nobody sees my alchemy at work, just as nobody witnesses my suffering. The sun burns down on me and I have no roof to stop it as I accrue her being into mine. Plastics hold so much of us, and we of them. Sooner or later it all becomes a unity.
Tuesday is for tender thoughts of home
Grace checked her latest posts on Insta, uploaded photos of her cat Mr Mickles dressed as a Viking, a medieval jester, and as a Civil War Beau. All was well: there were many many likes and comments of approval, and expressions of sweet envy of Mr Mickles for having such a nice Mommy, and envy of Grace for having such a lovable boy to share her lovely home. All was well.
This review of her cosplay adventures with Mr Mickles and the delightful tickles she felt from seeing all those hearts and XOXOXOs cheered Grace up considerably. The streets were getting her down. Lately, whenever she went out into the neighborhood, to jog round the park, to pick up groceries from the corner store, or simply to dump her trash, she felt a certain unease. There was some... hostility toward her in the city streets, diffuse and fungible. A tightening in the chest. It was like the air had come to hate her, but perhaps not only her.
Could air, the very atmosphere of a place, come to hate its inhabitants? That seemed bizarre, quite implausible, but she felt that somehow it was true. On days when the sun shone there was a brownish-yellow mist and the air tasted synthetic. On days when it rained, the rain was slick and greasy with something inimical to life.
So Grace now decided, sipping on lapsang souchong in her kitchen, that from now on she would stay inside as much as possible. Get groceries delivered, exercise in the living room by the bay window, order a treadmill for jogging, socialize at home – or if that wasn’t possible, organize more Zoom chats with her friends. Dating likewise – online, and if the date turned out special, a theater trip or a nice restaurant in company could be just the thing to take the edge off the outside.
That would leave her commute to work and taking out the trash as the only irreducible moments of necessary encounter with unease out there. But otherwise her life would be lived snug and safe at home, in her beautiful roomy two-bedroom apartment facing southwest with views over eastern downtown and the picturesque corner of Bakeland and Hogan. An enviable location. That was how the real estate guy had described it: an enviable location.
That decision taken, she picked up her phone again and checked the latest on Insta. More likes and comments: “Simply gorgeous kitty in a gorgeous home! You must be so happy! KittyCat HappyFace HappyFace Heart Kiss” The warm lapsang souchong flowed into her like liquid approval and for now she was content in her lovely sunlit kitchen. Bright yellow tulips set in an ornate Ming-replica vase blessed her table. They were so pretty and bright. And they would never need watering.
Wednesday is wide open
To eat plastic is to eat the future. This is what I believe. One day the real new Us, the perfect humans, will be able to eat plastics in the same way that we flesh people can eat flesh.
For now, though, I just chew it a while, then I have to spit it out again. Chewed strips of polyethylene in the gutter, yellow and white, bits of icecream logo still visible but distorted by toothmarks and torsions. Torn swatches of new flesh, jerky of the synthetic.
Accrual is working on me. I ingest her plastic, I become the usurper as my flesh becomes her nanomolecules of consumed life, her scoops of icecream dessert my how yummy, her soft polyester-wool hybrid jogging pants and sweatshirt top tenderized by the fabric softener whose bottletop I chew, the familiar aromatic polystructure taste now seasoned with the bitter chemical tang of the gummy liquid residue.
It’s working. This is what I believe. By accrual of the plastics my flesh will become new, and I will be the usurper. There will be no need for any coercion, any violence. She will simply go away, I will become her, and then my lovely apartment will become mine again.
For now, though, there is the constant gnawing and there is the roofless sky. My body’s fleshly stink grows, the grime of me is in my every pore, and I cannot breathe for my own unsheltered anxiety. Dread needs a roof to hold it up, to keep it from crushing you.
Theo the ex-cop came over to my spot outside the ATM last night and wanted to fuck me in the ass. I said no because his stink is greater than mine. It looked like there might be some unpleasantness, and Theo is not the type of guy to get into any unpleasantness with.
So we settled on a blowjob. His come tasted of plastic. He gave me a granola bar as payment. It tasted like plastic.
Thursday is threaded with braids of memory
On Thursday evening Grace was completing 10 kilometers on her new treadmill, delivered Wednesday and installed by the bay window with a splendid view southwest over Bakeland and Hogan and over downtown’s clustered towers beyond. Just as she was reaching halfway, five kilometers out to the edge of the park, starting her five kilometers back, a strange figure shuffled up to the recycling container on the corner below the window and started rummaging through the yellow recycling bin for discarded bags.
The sun was declining behind ragged strips of black cloud over downtown and its distant evening stillness, and the street scene outside her window was radiant with golden light, except for this one grubby figure all clad in black, bent over into the container and dragging out bags full of plastic waste.
It was disturbing enough, when you are just trying to keep fit, to have to see something like this, and to have to puzzle over the meaning of being so marginalized, so outcast, that it scrabbled for such worthless things, things which you could get just for the asking. That was disturbing enough.
More than the humdrum ugliness of it, though, was the nagging sense that this was an episode Grace had known before: someone cast out, or maybe betrayed, by her and by her alone. She knew that there had never been any such person in her past, but the memory, or the ghost of a memory, persisted still.
Meanwhile the dark figure went on scavenging for plastic waste below her on the corner, moving unhurried with the sadness of a dog.
8.5 kilometers. One and a half to go.
The figure, hard to say but probably a man, paused in its searchings. Maybe it had enough plastic. It, or he, looked up then, just as the sun slipped below the OneBank Tower, and the dark came upon the street corner and slipped through the window into Grace’s living room.
The individual was looking up at Grace’s apartment. But not at her living room bay window, not at her, but looking to its left, to Grace’s right, to the spare room window on the corner of the street.
This room was empty, equipped as a guest bedroom with a kittybed and kittylitter box for Mr Mickles. But now, looking at the figure, the man or whatever, looking so intently into that window, Grace felt that there was a child in there, a child that was a lump of flesh, unable to move. That was her child.
9 kilometers. One to go.
Grace stopped jogging, and stood to look at the face of the figure at the plastics bin. It seemed so familiar, like...
The treadmill was set to keep going no matter what. It ran backward, pulling Grace’s stationary legs back and away from her. She fell onto the floor, and she was sobbing with pain. But she hadn’t hurt herself in the fall. That was not the hurt.
The treadmill ran on until it completed the 10 kilometers, then stopped.
Grace lay on the floor with memories invading her from all around, her lovely home now penetrated by the gaze of a figure, a man maybe, who sought unspoken retribution for her, and a child that was a limbless lump in the spare room calling for her to come and be its mother.
Friday is fated
I‘m not what people imagine I am. I’m not even what I imagine I am. I’m different to all these imaginings. I am myself and I am my history. I was somebody once and now I’m a nobody. So somewhere on the road my history stopped, my life path ended, and I drifted offroad into the wilderness.
But I didn’t end. I became stronger, a ruthless no-one. I accrued new substance and became more perfect under the sky.
Today the San Mateo Mission van stopped by and they invited us to the community center for a shower and a change of clothes. Normally these zealots repel me so much that I scuttle out of sight until they’ve driven away with their vanful of godmeat.
But today was different. The old guy, the pastor or whatever with the dandruff, wasn’t there. There was a young woman driving the van, and she put on some music while the volunteers fanned out to chat to the sintechos.
Por el suelo hay una compadrita
que ya nadie se para a mirar
Por el suelo hay una mamacita
que se muere de no respetar
It was fated that I should hear that song at that time. It was fated that I should climb in the van with Verónica and go with the other gobbets of godmeat to the San Mateo Mission. There I heard a sermon about freewill and destination, but I wasn’t listening. I was tasting the old food and it was a betrayal of my new self but it tasted good.
A shower and a change of clothes into jogging pants and sweatshirt, gray and uniform, while my own black jacket, sweater and sweatpants got laundered. Fresh now, free of grime.
Por el suelo camina mi pueblo
por el suelo hay un agujero
por el suelo camina la raza-
Mamacita, te vamo’ a matar
Back at the corner of Bakeland and Hogan where they drop me, I feel stronger than ever. The old and the new harmonize in me, flesh and plastic. It’s time to reclaim what was lost.
I wait until a neighbor walks out the street door and I spring up the steps and push through before it closes. I walk up the stairs to the second floor. Apartment 4. Bright yellow door. I hear a machine that hums inside, and a cat miaowing just on the other side of the door.
It’s fated that I should stand here in front of the number 4, and it’s fated that I should feel doubts. I knock three times. There’s a pause, the machine goes on humming. I complete the sequence and knock a fourth time.
The door opens and my fate bursts into fragments like a ruby shattered with a hard steel hammer.
At this point, roll your dice. Alea iacta est - the die is cast. The number will indicate the ending that has been fated to you.
You may of course read the other endings, I can't stop you, how could I?
You may reject any or all, choose any or all, make up your own ending, but that changes nothing: the number on the dice is the number fated for you.
It is your ending as ordained by randomness, fate or predestination.
1
The door opens a crack. There’s chain. The woman’s face is at the space.
“Oh, it’s you,” she says.
“It’s me,” I say pointlessly.
A pause stretches out through the door and into the hallway. She moves her foot to keep the cat inside, sweeps her leg back so the cat is pushed inside.
“What do you want?” she says at last.
“I just wondered how he was,” I respond. “Parental concern, all that.”
She sighs, angered. “He’s just how he always was.”
“Oh,” is all I say. “That’s what I wanted to know, really.”
The pause extends. A neighbor comes out of apartment 6, an old guy. Beige door. He looks over at her with a question in his eyes. She smiles back reassuringly. It’s all okay here, thanks. He goes off, walking downstairs with a warning look in my direction. Whatta ya gonna do asshole? Beat the new human, the new strong unbreakable species? I forget him instantly.
“So... the same,” I say. It’s not a question.
“The same,” she says. It’s not an answer.
“What d’you think you might do?” I ask.
She looks down. Then back up to me. “Well... with your help... I could end it.”
“End it?”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
The next pause is a void. Whole worlds fall into it. The cat wanders out into the hallway.
“Okay,” I say at last. “I’ll help you end it.”
The chain comes off and her door opens. I walk inside.
2
The door opens wide. A cat slinks out. There’s nobody there.
“Hello?” I call into the entranceway. I peer in. There’s nobody in the living room. There’s an exercise treadmill running. It says there are 10 kilometers left to run.
I go in, close the door behind me. Yellow plastic tulips on the dining table, a hot cup of some kind of infusion steaming on it. I taste it. Funny, orangey or something. It doesn’t taste like I like things to taste.
There’s nobody in the kitchen. Nobody in the main bedroom. That just leaves the bedroom on the corner, the corner where the plastic recycling bin stands outside on the street.
I go towards the door to that corner bedroom. I hear something breathing inside. Labored breathing, like someone with asthma. Heavy, gasping breaths.
There’s nobody else. I decide that I have to stay to take care of things.
3
The door opens a crack, held by a chain. There’s the woman’s face in the space.
“Oh... it’s you,” she says.
“Yes, it’s –“ I start to reply, but these are my last words.
With a heartstopping shriek she swings the door wide, grabs my freshly-laundered jacket, and pulls me in. The door slams behind me.
She has a knife. She plunges it once, twice, three, four times into my chest. Ribs and sternum crack with the force. The pain is unbearable.
I’ve barely started dying when she pulls off the jacket, hikes up my sweatshirt, and begins to carve strips off me. She starts chewing these strips of my flesh, furious and devoted. She spits them out when the substance is consumed. She knows how. She wants to accrue my power.
A knock on the door.
“Everything alright in there?” comes the quavering voice of an old man.
“All fine, Mr Dinklater,” she calls back, my blood dribbling out of a full mouth. “I fell down on the exercise treadmill but I’m fine now.” She spits out the swatch of spent skin, and it lands next to my eyes, which are quickly dimming in the pain.
She consumes me utterly over the course of the weekend. The cat licks my blood. She is now me, and I am her. By Sunday night the hard work is complete, my jaw is sore from chewing.
We are one flesh, a flesh made of meat, plastic and grace. She goes on to tell you my story. She is, and I am, we.
4
The woman’s face is at the crack where the door is held by a chain.
“It’s you... What do you want?”
“Grace, I want to tell you that I made a mistake. It doesn’t matter now what happens, I just want you to know that I loved you and I love you now.”
There is a pause, filled with questions that are discarded without utterance.
“And just what do you expect me to do with that? After all that happened, after you walked out...”
“Grace, I’m so sorry. If we could talk, I know that... I know that I can’t make it alright, but maybe I can make you see that I’m new now, I’m not the same.”
Grace disappears for a moment, and I hear her sighing. Something asthmatic wheezes further inside, but it’s softly laughing.
The door is unchained. I walk inside and the cat leaps up to greet me. It digs its claws into my knees and lets me know I’m welcome.
5
“Who’s there?” comes the woman’s baffled voice from behind the door. Eye in the peeper.
“I’m... a neighbor,” I say. “I live in the neighborhood. I just wanted to say hi.”
“Which is it, you’re a neighbor or you live in the neighborhood? They’re not the same thing, you know.”
There’s a pause. I’m required to make a distinction.
“I live around here in the neighborhood,” I say. “I’ve noticed you around sometimes and you seem... I dunno, you seem sad. I just wanted to talk to you and say it’s gonna be alright.”
“It’s gonna be alright?” She sounds relieved.
“ I mean, probably. I don’t really know,” I say. “But probably, yeah, it’ll be alright.”
The door cracks open and her face is there behind the chain.
“How do you know I’m gonna be alright?”
“I just... feel it,” I lie, winging it completely by now. “I sense that there’s a great contentment coming your way, a great happiness.”
Her face behind the doorjamb lightens and she smiles at me.
“That’s so good to know,” she says. “You know, I’ve been so worried, there’s so many strange people out on the street and I feel so frightened sometimes...”
A door opens behind us. Number 6, beige door. An old man steps out and eyes me suspiciously.
“Everything alright, there Grace?” he asks her heavily, shuffling fussily toward the yellow door of apartment 4.
“I... uh... I’m not sure, Mr Dinklater,” she says, flustered now. “This person just...”
“What do you want here?” he demands sternly. Clearly he’s one of those who believes a sharp tone is all that’s needed to deal with any difficult situation.
“I just wanted so say everything’s okay”, I say, without much conviction.
Mr Dinklater, that valiant old protector of his damsel neighbors, takes another step closer. The door closes softly and the woman is gone.
“You betcha everything’s okay,” says the old man. “We’re all fine in here, and we don’t need any strangers on the property, thank you.”
A cat miaows behind the door. Inside I hear something breathing heavily, asthmatically, a little further off. Old Dinklater’s glare intensifies. A finger is raised. He means to stare me out of here.
So be it. I turn around quick and walk down the stairs. The front door slams behind me and I’m out on the street once more.
6
The woman’s voice is heard through the door: “I’ve called the police.”
Sure enough, heavy steps are heard on the stair behind me.
“POLICE! Freeze or I’ll –“
I freeze. Three quick shots enter my center of mass from the left side. My ribs are ruined. The pain is too much for one life to contain and so it stops.
I sink down on the hallway carpet, and little tiny pellets, miraculous colors of magenta and vivid yellow and brightest green, bleed out of me into the deep cream wool carpet.
My voice resounds in the small granules of plastic floating in suspension in the sea. My voice is the waves crashing on the shore, and the magenta and yellow and green sparkles that wash up there on the beach.
That is where you hear my story, when you lay your head on the sand and the sparkles of plastic go in your ear and seep into your skin. They tell you this.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:
William Pauley III, whose story The Lump from DOOM FICTION inspired one element in this tale.
The David Cronenberg film Crimes of the Future (2022) inspired the idea of plastic-eating as a future modality of life.
Lyrics of song from “Por el Suelo” on the Manu Chao album Clandestino (1998)
[Lyrics in English in the first comment on this YT page]
This was fun! I rolled a six, but being such a fan of your writing, I of course rolled the die over and over so I could read the other endings. Did I have to roll the die and wait for the numbers to come up? Oh, we'll. Too late.
How many rolls of the dice are we from being ourselves homeless? I used to ponder this years ago as I ran along the Santa Ana River whose western side was lined with a two-mile stretch of homeless encampments. The realization always powered my runs. Slack off on running, lose your fitness. Lose your fitness, lose your wife, ad infinitum.
Luckily, I haven't rolled snake eyes ten times in a row as some people have. There but for the grace of, etc.
BTW, the meditation on plastic is lovely. I wish you could go back in time to nudge Paracelsus and show him what's up with a crushed 2-liter bottle of Sprite.
I didn’t roll any dice, because I don’t play like that. But this is excellent