Suits

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They give me a suit with long white fur and a set of fake teeth that are so big I can’t talk with them in my mouth. Before I put the suit on, I have to take off my bra and underpants and struggle into this tiny little microfiber unitard-they made me watch a video, and the video said the microfiber unitard is very important for hygienic reasons-and I have to have my hair knotted up tight under a mesh cap so that no one can see it.

The teeth are veneers; they’re grafted onto my real teeth with dental cement.

The suit was made to fit me so exactly that they have to whipstitch me into it when I finally have it on.

I ask if it’s a yeti. No, it’s not a yeti.

It is my suit. No one else will have a suit like mine. And my name will be M, and no one else will have that name. When I enter my habitat, things that are for me will be labeled with an M, but otherwise, they expect I will forget how to read. No, let’s be more accurate: I should try to forget how to read. Think of M as a symbol, a shape notched into a cave wall. They hope I will eventually be able to sense what’s mine by smell, but, well, this is the first time they’ve tried this, so who knows what’ll happen, eh, M?

My name is Michelle. I can’t pronounce it anymore-you can’t even say the letter “M” if your lips can’t meet one another around your giant fucking fake teeth. I haven’t taken Ancient Greek since high school, but I remember, suddenly, the term “labial consonant,” which has been stuck in the lint trap of my frontal cortex for almost a decade.

I want to ask if anyone else in the terrarium will speak English but the word “English” has a dental consonant in it and that’s no good either.

I want to say, “I didn’t think a costume was in the contract,” but have fun with that one, M.

Besides: everything was in the contract.

*

They give me a habitat.

Really, they give me a corner. It has huge blue elephant leaf-type trees leaned up all along the wall, and instead of dirt there is an enormous pit full of little kernels of soft blue foam. The suit has only three sloth-style glove-sleeves sewn onto each hand with all 5 of my fingers stuffed awkwardly into them, but I can still manage to move the kernels around and reconstitute them loosely into hills and rifts and dugouts. But mostly, I just bury myself underneath the foam and practice jumping out and startling people.

My caseworker fucking hates this.

Hey, let’s talk about my caseworker. Her name is Mary. She has shiny brown hair and skinny leather bows on the toes of her flats and I absolutely love the way that she says her own name-Mary, with a cute little Midwestern vowel chirping right in the middle of it. I should just admit it: no one has ever been nicer to me in my entire life than Mary has. She’s so nice that every incredibly invasive question she asked me during the interview phase seemed totally okay.

Things like: When your father kissed you goodnight as a child, did you ever practice kissing him as if he were a boy towards whom you had romantic feelings? Gosh, haha, that’s a really personal question; I’ll just give you a minute to think about it.

And: If I were to tell you that in the course of these tests we had clandestinely impregnated you, what would your first response be? Oh, gee, but we’d never do something like that!

So Mary really wants me to stop jumping out of my pit. I’m pretty sure she’s a grad student, and I’m pretty sure that I’m her thesis project, but none of us really know what the Facility is all about, just that they are paying us, get this, $200,000 a year each to be here, and that we were the only ones they wanted for this “unique endeavor.” They never say experiment-just endeavor-but that’s about the size of it. So far, Mary’s just spent a lot of hours trying to get me to interact with the other people in the terrarium, using my food for the day to assemble these deeply condescending breadcrumb trails over to the other habitats.

Oh yeah: the other people in the habitat. I know their names are R and V and L and O because they each get a food barrel once a week with their letter stamped on the side. I get one too, and it’s always full of clear blue gel capsules and absolutely nothing else. O’s is full of something that looks like applesauce; L’s is full of tiny beetles that he only started eating once he figured out he could smash them into the paste with his shell; R’s is full of thick, metallic silver fluid.

I don’t know what V eats. I’ve never even seen V.

Mary must think I totally love these gel capsules. She goes absolutely crazy with them, putting them inside of her ears and inviting me to pick them out, playing peek-a-boo with them in her palms like I’m an infant. The gel capsules are supposed to be custom designed for me just like the suit and the habitat, but the casings taste like something between envelope glue and cucumber water, and I can’t even chew them with my giant teeth.

I want to steal some of O’s applesauce, but I think O is just a little kid, and I’m not that far gone yet. I’m vegan, so obviously I’m not interested in L’s beetles, and R’s mystery fluid looks like bleach swirled with liquid mercury.

V’s habitat is a perch really high up near the ceiling that no one can reach, so I don’t even know what V has.

(Basically I spend most of my sessions with Mary thinking about petty larceny.)

So when Mary leaves the terrarium at the end of the session, she always looks like she’s going to cry. She probably did semesters abroad during undergrad, spoon-feeding Peruvian infants or cuddling apes in the Congo, and this is not what she dreamed for herself. I wonder if she remembers what I looked like during our interviews; I wonder if she remembers that we both showed up to my intake exam wearing the exact same clearance-rack cardigan, and whether she noticed on my forms that we’re about about the same age.

She pets the side of my furry head and smiles at me sadly, and then tosses a handful of gel capsules into my foam pit with a resigned sigh. But no matter how goddamned sad she looks, I know she designed even this as an educational game for me. I am supposed to master my unique morphology, use my teeth and my sloth fingers and whatever else it takes to find every last one.

*

One day I look up from the bottom of my pit and there is O.

I’m still semi-asleep when I open my eyes and see him. (Did I mention how much I sleep? Jesus do I sleep. 16 hours a day, at least seven of them engaged in high-octane lucid dreams and at least 3 not sleeping at all, but playing an elaborate game with myself where I try to move as little as possible for as long as possible, like a damn possum.) So that’s why I don’t jump when I see him. I sit up slowly, letting the kernels roll off me in every direction, and when I recognize him, I try my best to close my lips over my teeth. I could tell from across the terrarium that O’s suit has a spherical helmet that encircles his whole head, but up close, I can see that it’s actually made of tiny octagons of tinted plastic like the surface of a housefly’s eyeball. The rest of his suit is covered in a dense layer of bristly dark green hairs with a bead of sticky resin clinging to each one.

I thought I had the worst suit but, Jesus, O definitely has the worst suit.

“Hi,” he says. Under the helmet, his voice sounds like it’s been recorded on a Dictaphone and replayed inside of a bag full of Styrofoam peanuts, but I can still tell that I was right: he’s definitely a little kid.

I point to my teeth, shake my head no and try to send him a telepathic message: I’m sorry, kid, but I can’t talk to you.

But O takes a step closer to the edge of the pit anyway, kneels down, and reaches towards me. I think he’s trying to help me get out, but then instead, he puts his entire neoprene-mittened hand literally inside of my mouth, feeling each tooth individually with his fist like a stalactite.

“Whoa,” he says. “Cool.”

I think O must be about seven. He’s not quite old enough to be embarrassed about picking a wedgie-his suit is skin-tight and definitely prone to them-but when I smush up a handful of grass and use it to write on the smooth white plastic wall of his habitat, he can read it. His habitat’s really just one long patch of this grass with a bunch of innocuous but absolutely colossal green bugs swarming around inside of it; no toys, no nothing.

So I write, “Did your parents send you here?”

He says no.

I write, “Why are you here, then?”

“Iunno,” he says.

The grass doesn’t really wash off the wall that well, and we’re running out of room fast, so I start drawing pictures instead of writing. Oh my god, but does O love this. I’m drawing a picture of him with a big question mark next to it when he just fucking jumps in and starts scribbling everywhere, ignoring my attempts at communication completely. He traces the outline of an angular gun and sketches a few dozen bullets spewing out of it at all angles, making little pew-pew-pew gunshot noises as he draws. When he’s done, he looks up at me, and even with the helmet I can tell that he’s proud.

I point back to my sentence: “Why are you here then?”

O lets his hand fall to his side for a long minute, his giant round head tilting down towards the floor. He grabs another handful of grass and draws the shape of two angular wings and a rudder, two round turbines and a cockpit pointing down at a slant towards the ground. It’s a pretty good drawing for someone his age.

Then he makes a heavy, straight line at the nose of the cockpit, tracing it over and over, until he goes nuts and makes the line scribble out of control, eclipsing the airplane and the ground and all the space around it in one dark cloud.

When he’s done, he stands next to it and points. It takes me a while to get it.

“SCREEEBOOMCHHHAHHH!” he yells, pinwheeling his arms wildly as he runs into the grass.

*

So my mother shot herself in the head in our apartment. That doesn’t mean I’m like O. So she shot the cat, too, but that’s hardly the same thing as surviving a plane crash, as being orphaned and stranded in the ocean and having your name broadcasted all over the news. She was crazy and drunk and 26 was stupidly old for me to be living with my mother anyway and I shouldn’t have still been taking care of her, I should have had my own place by then and a real job and fucking one way better than barbacking at a theme restaurant based around, of all things, the concept of a goddamned Viking funeral banquet which gets substantially less cute after the first time you wear a breastplate in public and-look-it is just really not even kind of the same thing at all, not at all.

So the next time Mary comes, I follow her evenly spaced trail of gel capsules over to R’s habitat. She tries to look subtly pleased, but I can tell she’s so delighted she wants to to pop. R’s habitat is just one gigantic pod suspended from the ceiling, and his caseworker is a skinny British guy who’s trying to coax him out of it.

“No.” R yells in a big meathead-guy voice from inside the pod. “Absolutely goddamn not.”

The pod looks like it’s made out of orange silicone, and it has a thick blue jelly leaking out of a slit at the bottom. R shifts his position inside of it, and I can see the outline of a shoulder and a profile and a gut. He’s either obese or a Wrestlemania type. Maybe both.

R’s caseworker pinches the bridge of his nose and sighs. “Can you do anything for me here?” he whispers to Mary in his clipped British accent, absently patting at his shirt pocket for the pack of cigarettes that he wasn’t allowed to bring into the terrarium.

Mary gives this smug little hair flip and a smile with her lips sealed together. “I think I can.”

She takes my hand-it’s an awkward operation, what with my three little sloth fingers and her five regular human ones, but I’m being cooperative. “I’ve found,” she whispers to the other caseworker as we walk towards the side of the pod, “that non-verbal communication is often the best way to develop new methods of social interaction.”

“Who the fuck is out there?” R yells. “Jaerret, I can hear someone out there.”

Jaerret smirks. Mary ignores him. “M,” she whispers, “I want you to go up to the pod slowly and just…” She makes a weird up-and-down hugging motion, like she’s squeezing out a giant udder with her whole body.

But before I can-and, let’s be clear, I wouldn’tve-a long blue arm prods out of the slit in the bottom of the pod and lays its palm flat on the floor. Then a shoulder squeezes out and then a head, with a lot of muffled grunting and huge gross plops of the blue jelly. The pod shifts and strains and finally, literally births R onto the padded floor, where he lies on his back with his eyes closed for a long moment. Then he groans and yells decisively: “Motherfucking POD.”

Then he opens his eyes, blinks a few times, and points directly at me.

“Hey. Hey, hey hey, you. Yeah, you. Give me your suit.”

He wriggles towards me. His suit is made out of one huge sleeve of blue Lycra that makes him look like a worm, so when he finally gets to his knees, and then his feet, it’s pretty impressive. I was absolutely right; he is an NFL player at the least, maybe a NFL-gone-corpulent-mafia-boss. “God damn it, Jaerret,” he says. “Why don’t I have a suit like that?”

“We’ve been over this,” Jaerret says. “These suits are all uniquely designed to address your particular emotional morphology. The habitat serves to amplify their-”

“Is she the one with the ball pit?” (I have no idea how R can tell that I am a woman.) “I want a goddamned ball pit!” he roars.

“R-”

It’s not a ball pit, I think. Can he even see through that mask?

“Shh,” Mary says, gesturing for Jaerett to do the creepy milking thing again.

“Hey,” R says, “Do those teeth come out?”

I shake my head yes. They told me they would. They better. I try to think of some sort of non-verbal signal for but only with dental cement solvent, so no funny business, guy.

But then suddenly R’s just totally looming over me, jelly sliding down the thin blue Lycra mesh that covers his face. He has a set of tiny chinchilla ears sewn onto the side of his head, but otherwise he still looks mostly human in his suit: I can see the protruding shape of his brow bone and the wet droop of his lower lip, and I can see exactly how he’s looking at me.

“Take them out and give them to me,” he says.

I take a step back and put a hand over my mouth.

“R, I don’t recommend aggression as a method to-”

“Shut up, Jaerret!” R starts clawing at his own face, now, trying to pry the mask of his suit off so he can put on mine. But his fingers are webbed over in the blue Lycra like the rest of them, and he really has to stretch it to get his arms up there. Even when he does, he can’t get a good grip on anything -it’s like he’s trapped in a full-body Chinese fingertrap, except made out of Spanx. While he’s clawing frantically at himself, I’m looking for seams or zippers, wondering how in the hell he must go to the bathroom in it and drink his barrel full of silver liquid in it and, I don’t know, jack off in it if he still’s into all that. I’m not crazy about the mechanism for using the bathroom that my suit came installed with, but man.

“Jaerret, help me!” R screams. He’s slipped on the jelly and fallen onto the floor by now, and he’s scrambling around down there like a giant wet beetle.

“No,” he says calmly. “This will be good for you.”

“Jaerret!”

I try to make a sound, like, just help him, you maniac, but Mary thinks I’m crying and starts shushing me and rubbing my back. She gives Jaerret a reproving look.

“Fine,” he says, rolling up his sleeves.

It happens, predictably enough, in less than a nanosecond. Jaerret grips R’s elbow and, of course, R’s arms suddenly erupt through the suit and he reaches up and puts both his hands around Jaerret’s throat. Mary gasps aloud like a Disney princess and I grunt incoherently and, out of nowhere, a tiny dart zings through the air and lands straight in the throbbing pulse in the side of R’s goddamned neck, knocking him out instantly.

*

The next day a crew of men in white plastic suits come and take the pod down. They use a cherry picker, and when they’re done, they throw it in a heap at the side of the terrarium to drag out later. Then they wipe up all the jelly with towels.

*

The day after that, we finally see V. She’s hung herself by her own tail from a perch at the edge of her habitat. Her suit is covered in incredible long, silver feathers and it leaves her whole face exposed. I watch her talons draw small circles in the air high above me. Her body twists around her tail like an empty playground swing, and then it unwinds and twists around again.

*

The day after that, Mary and the other caseworkers gather us into a circle at the foot of a waterfall that looks like they’ve filled it blue food coloring. They have clipboards and concerned expressions. It’s clear we need to have a talk.

It’s the first time I’ve seen L since we moved in. His suit is essentially a giant hollow yellow egg, and his caseworker has to roll him out of the lagoon where he’s been floating and then prop him up with a rock. L has something like a snorkeling mask with a kazoo attached to it strapped to his face, but even with it on, I can tell that he does not give a fuck. I wonder if he’s something like the control group, if they let him keep books and shit inside his egg to keep him occupied.

Mary starts the meeting. “We know that we need to address what’s happened here,” she says, unfolding a piece of pale green stationary from her pocket with trembling hands.

She reads, in her sweet little Iowa pageant queen voice: “V had a history of suicidal behavior. Before she entered the terrarium, she was the only surviving member of a suicide cult, and it was thought that she had an epiphany during the death ritual and decided to live. However, after recent events-” She flips to the other side of the paper, pausing, “-we have obviously been forced to reevaluate this position.”

O raises his little mittened hand. “What about the pod guy?”

Mary strokes his helmet. “Oh, honey, R is fine. He violated his contract. He had to go away for a while.”

“No, but I mean? Is, he, um?” O searches for the words in the air in front of him, grasping with his little mittened hands. “When do you think, um? Why did he…do…uh, how…?”

Mary takes a deep breath. Then L the egg guy’s caseworker, a blonde chick with fierce Nordic eyes who looks like she benchpresses stuff, turns sharply towards O and yips at him, her voice sharp and quick.

“R was a criminal, O. Jaerett thought he was hot shit bringing someone in who survived a damn prison riot, and Jaerett didn’t think that his subject, gee, I don’t know, maybe did just a little of the bludgeoning and head stomping and guard-murdering and such? Huh? Didja, Jaerett?”

Jaerett’s sitting on a rock just outside of the circle, so maybe he thinks we can’t see it when he slips his middle finger out from his fist and scratches his nose with it. I wonder why they’re even keeping him around.

“What Sonja means to say,” V’s caseworker says, “Is that the Facility did its best to take every precaution to ensure that your cohabitants would be productive and considerate members of the terrarium, and above all, that no one would endanger the general safety of our environment.” She pushes her glasses up on her nose and knits her fingers together in her lap; she’s a grandmotherly type, even if she is only 20-something, so it doesn’t look unnatural. “We do still believe that this will be a safe environment in which you may explore and evolve for as long as you see fit.”

“I…Um. Can I leave now?”

Everyone stares at O. Even L the egg guy pops his face out of his suit a bit and tries to look in O’s direction.

“I wanna leave,” O says. “I wanna go home.”

“O,” Mary says. “You’re a special case.”

“But it’s boring here,” he says, kicking at the fake dirt with his rounded neoprene boot.  “I think I had an uncle.  I mean, I don’t really remember him, but I think he had a trampoline, maybe.”

I’ve developed this nervous habit of chewing on the sleeve of my suit. Under the fur, there’s a layer of thick goretex or something that I can’t seem to break through, but if I gnaw at it long enough, I can feel the teeth scrape a little against my skin: just this slight little cushioned poke. I find it bizarrely comforting, like a reminder to myself that my body’s still under there.

Except this time I break all the way through the goretex and feel my tooth graze the surface of my arm. I yelp.

O’s caseworker clenches his jaw in my general direction. He’s a huge muscular guy with a Bavarian-looking unibrow, and his hand is clamped on O’s shoulder hard.

“M,” he says, “No.”

I look up at him, my slobbery lips still wet against my fur. He glares at me and clutches his knees with the palms of his hands, leaning forward like a dog trainer chastising a nibbly Shih Tzu.

Then he fucking says it: “Settle.”

I take my arm out of my mouth and put my hand down on the rock next to me. I hear a growl come out of me that I didn’t know was in me: long and slow and walrusy.

“Maybe we should break into our caseworker groups now,” Mary says with a twinge of desperation in her voice. “Groups? Everyone? Groups please?”

*

They power the terrarium down at night.

Lately, they’ve started projecting an image of the moon and a few low-rent planetarium constellations onto the ceiling. They’re trying harder to landscape the areas between our habitats, too: they’re probably just realizing now how much it looks like a mental ward inside of an IKEA. Stretches of white plastic cobblestones wind through fields of shorn green sod. Bright, fake purple flowers light the way from my pit to O’s patch to L’s lagoon to the gray circle of concrete where the pod used to be.

I stand in the circle and hook one of my claws into the rip in my suit. I can feel the scratch of the claw’s fingertip against my arm; it’s sharp and it looks like a real animal claw, but I can tell now that it’s plastic. I drag at it a little, and a teardrop-shaped rip in the goretex sprouts like a wound.

There’s a breeze in the terrarium somehow, and I can feel it, I can feel it right there, on that centimeter of myself. The grass in O’s patch is stirring and the water in the lagoon is folding over itself in small ripples and even the stars shiver: the projector must be hung on a wire somewhere.

But I can’t go any further. The ceiling is probably something like a two-way mirror; the moon is probably a porthole to someone with a clipboard, watching.

Why else would they call it a terrarium?

*

I bury myself under the foam to think.

If I find a way to make the rip in my suit big enough, I could stuff O inside like a baby kangaroo and rush one of the caseworkers as they come through the door.

If I could rip the suit off entirely and then, naked, knock Mary out with a rock and steal all her clothes, I could probably make off in whatever stupid VW Bug or pink Mini Cooper she has the key to in her stupid purse.

But what about O.

I could use L’s egg like a bowling ball and knock all the caseworkers out in one incredibly deft Looney Tunes-style roll.

I could find a way to scale the terrarium walls at night and put my fist through the moon-porthole and grab whatever throat I find on the other side.

But then I start to think: my suit isn’t equipped for this. I’d need spikes or bigass horns or sticky bug-paws or eight legs that would somehow give me incredible speed. The suit I have is exactly the one the wanted me to have. They will never modify it, and I don’t care how many educational games Mary plays with me, I will never magically evolve my way out of it.

I remember during the interview phase they asked me exactly one predictable question: If you could be any animal, what would you be?

I’m trying to remember what I said. Maybe I did say a yeti. Maybe I said a polar bear or an anglerfish or a sloth. It was the week after my mom’s funeral and things were still chaotic for me. I mean, the mortgage was due. The probate lawyer tried to explain everything but he was wearing this awful joke tie shaped like a trout and he spoke in half Latin, half English and, Jesus, I just couldn’t. I just wanted it all to be done already; to just skip this meeting, this year of my life, to just be right now whatever the fuck I would become on the other side of this.

I think I said I wanted the teeth. I think I said I wanted something with long heavy fur, absolute pounds of fur, deep and white enough to erase me.

*

Okay: I could tell them I want to leave. I could tell them to cancel my check and put me on a plane. But that seems entirely out of the question.

*

The next morning, there is a situation.

O is gone.

His giant Bavarian caseworker is livid. I’m just gonna go ahead and call him Igor because, well, obviously. I’m gathering from the snippets I catch of his barking at Mary that Igor actually is the uncle that O was talking about going to live with, though I doubt seriously that he has a trampoline like O said.

Mary puts her tiny manicured hand on Igor’s elbow and nods consolingly. “Just take a deep breath,” she says. “We’ll find him. Let’s just calm down and examine the perimeter.”

I look too. I follow them around like a hairy white ghost. Even when the caseworkers give up and start to search the rest of the building, I lower myself into L’s lagoon and slide my six fingers along the mossy concrete floor at the bottom, feeling for a crack or a drain or a door. The lagoon water melts the foam kernels in my pit down into a paste but I don’t care: I part the stalks of the elephant grasses along the wall, scanning for the glint of a knob or the outline of a removable panel. Igor accidentally left a tall ladder propped up against V’s old perch, and I scramble up there too: it’s just a cluster of black, leafless trees and trailing heaps of white seeds, no place really to hide. I look out over the room. Even from all the way up there, I can’t see anything.

Except the pod bunched in a corner behind a tower of empty barrels, snarled and orange as a mandarin rind.

*

O doesn’t startle when I climb inside.

They’ve hosed it out, but there’s still a faint blue glow over both of us as the light from the room streams through the silicone. His helmet is cracked into two pieces and he’s hugging both of them to his chest, a fresh pink wound trickling on his forehead and tear tracks smudged in marionette lines between his eyes and the corners of his mouth. He’s the kind of kid that, when you look at him, you know exactly what he’ll look like as an adult. His eyes are green and open.

I want to tell him: I’ve read somewhere that children are the only ones who survive plane crashes. It’s because they’re so small that they’re cocooned in their seats-nothing sticks out that could snap off or break or burn. They are the exact right size to survive these particular disasters. Maybe we are all-

No.

I want to tell him: I am not a chupacabra. And you know what, neither are you. No one can make you into a monster or a beast and underneath it all you are still-

God, no.

I want to tell him: things will change. You will change. You just have to wait and try and give yourself a place to rest and someday you will become-

*

I can’t. I can’t say anything. Not with the teeth.

So instead I take O’s hand and put it inside of my mouth again. My tongue is still mine, and if I try, I can still form a sound with it deep in the back of my throat. Maybe he will feel it, I think, the shape of the only word I want to say. But when I do it, the sound comes out humming, like a song.