Not Entirely Myself Today

By Erin Halfelven

 
I hurried home that evening because I had finally done it. I had lost my mind.

And I'd definitely overspent my budget. Ever since skinsuits became more reality than fantasy, I wanted one. Never mind that the good ones, the ones that I wanted, cost more than a top-of-the-line luxury automobile, I wanted one.

After I sold my first book, You Gotta Listen, all I could think about was spending my advance on something I really wanted. But $5000 doesn't go very far when what you want to buy starts at $300,000. The wanting just made me ache inside.

I turned a frugal lifestyle into a pinchpenny mania. I ate a lot of steam noodles. I went for walks for entertainment. I lost nearly thirty pounds, which was also good since the less of me there was to cover, the less my favored skinsuit would cost.

I amused myself mostly by daydreaming about the suit I wanted.

And I wrote. Being a writer meant having to have input, so I couldn't really live like a hermit in my fifth-floor walk-up in the East Village. I had to get out and around and meet people and find out what they said and thought and felt. So I could write it up for my blogs that became my books.

I had the good fortune to have become a regular blogger on one of the online magazines, Raze, so I got a regular paycheck. That and the ad revenue from my standalone blogs, the occasional freelance writing assignment and income from my books actually made it seem possible that one day I would be able to afford my dream skinsuit. Yeah, right, maybe before I qualified for Social Security.

But I persevered. I haunted park benches and bus stops and subway platforms during the day, cheap coffeehouses with free wifi in the evening, and I wrote down what people said, what I heard them say.

"Mavis," one lady said while waiting for her chocolate nonfat mocha latte at Perky's Junior on West Twenty-Fifth Street, "Mavis, that wanna-be son-in-law borrowed another t'ousand rainbows off my little Belle."

"A gigolo is a man what borrows money from a woman and don' pay it back," said Mavis. "Vi'let, tell your idjit dotta that women don' have to pay for sex. It's our birt'right to sell it, but we don' gotta buy it."

"I tried that," said the first woman. "She won' listen to me. It's like talking to a wall what you painted yourself."

"Well, for God sake, tell her at least she don' have to pay retail! Get a discount!"

That one went into How to Tawk New Yawk, my second book. I got a $20,000 advance on that one. I still had the first advance, and I resolved that I would not spend that money but let it accumulate. I knew what I wanted.

My third book slid on the advance-o-meter, back to $10,000. Collections of blogs, the publishers decided, had run their course. So I added new chapters in between the blogs about conversations I overheard. I called it, Uncommonly Wise - The Secret Knowledge of the People.

When it went to the third printing, Vic Larkin tore it apart on his nationally syndicated talk show as being "mawkish" and "cheap sentiment that smells like a tallow candle." There's no such thing as bad publicity for a book, and suddenly, we were sniffing at the edge of the New York Times Bestseller List. My bonus clause in my contract kicked in, and I raked in another $50,000.

I took my agent out to dinner with $200 of it, but the rest went into my bank account. I got a raise for my regular blogging, and my pay for freelance went up. Traffic peaked on my own website, and t-shirt sales and coffee mugs, as well as advertising, more than tripled my old monthly take. My publisher offered me a contract for my next book, which wasn't even written yet and I asked for a $30,000 advance — and got it!

"Shooda ast f' fitty, Reed," my agent Lem Schneider said.

Yes, I'm that Reed Dana, the writer one reviewer called, "The Man with the Golden Ear." I have a peculiar talent, I hear exactly what people say, not what they think they mean, and I can transcribe it. Most people listen to meaning, not sounds, without even being aware of it. It does have its drawbacks.

"Pardon?" I said. Much of the time I had no idea what Lem meant, I think his mumbling is what made him a great agent—half the publishers he talked to weren't sure what they had agreed to, and Lem was always ready to slip a zinger in when it came time to type it up.

"I said, we should of axed for fitty," he said a little more clearly.

"Thousand?" I squeaked.

"No! Lobsters! Big green ones wit' deir clothes taped shut! Ya know what they get f' dem mobsters in a Pawk Avenue Beeftrow? Waddaya nerts?"

I took a moment to work that out and realize that Lem was putting me on; big green monster lobsters with their claws taped shut sold near Park Avenue for maybe a couple hundred apiece but not a thousand. Lem's a hoot, and I've no idea where he's from, but he's been in the city forever. He's the main reason why my books about how people really talk always sell.

So, there I was with a bit over $100,000, after expenses, in my special bank account. I tried to tell myself that I was nearly a third of the way toward my goal. But it wasn't true, price hikes in the luxury goods market were a given and recent markups on the suit I wanted put it nearer $400,000 than $300,000, plus the hidden expenses for anything like that. In reality, after three years and some incredible luck with my books, I was probably less than a quarter of the way there.

With continued good luck, I might be able to afford my suit in another six to ten years. Or I could borrow the money.

I checked with a bank. They'd loan me money if I wanted to buy a car or property, or even to take a world cruise. But not to buy a skinsuit. I got the distinct feeling that anyone who would buy such a thing was not considered a good credit risk by the financial community. Not that writers topped their list anyway.

I considered buying something less than what I really wanted. A full mask would be about $120,000, or $160,000 for a torso suit. I might be able to borrow enough for one or the other, then save up to add pieces as I could afford them. Face mask or lower half-torso or upper half would be about $90,000. Any of those, I could afford right now, but in effect, they would put me a bit further from my ultimate goal.

I pulled up all the catalogs on the internet and looked at everything again. I had all the best sites marked; NuYu, SkanDeep, Flesh Fashion, Body Rapper, and Trés Nu. I had their offerings memorized, with their claims and consumer ratings organized in little spreadsheets I kept up to date.

I even had the medical pseudo-flesh sites marked. Most of the fashion sites were associated with one or more of the medical ones. Plastic surgeons had been almost out of business since the boom in organic nanofer replacement skin. And other nanofer applications had made artificial kidneys, livers and other internal organs not only possible but reasonably cheap—about the price of a new car.

Browsing such sites, both fashion and medical, occupied six or seven hours two or three times a week usually and was one of my chief joys in life. But now, now that I could actually get partway to my goal, frustration ruined my pleasure, and within half an hour I surfed away from the displays and options.

Almost at random, I clicked one of the ads on the bookmarked page. It was to Smart-R-U, a site I'd visited before, for cheap nanofer clothing, not skinsuits.

And there it was, a substitute for a torso-fitted skinsuit. They called it a SmarTorsolette, made of active nanofers woven into a chest-to-hips corset-like garment. I almost always have the sound off when surfing because AI-generated voices are torture to me and most websites don't have good enough sound editing that I don't hear the clicks and pops of patches or the strange hums and whistles caused by tone-altering software.

But the text claimed that the SmarTorsolette would fit anyone, the first time, and that the longer it was worn, the better it would fit. I read more.

It wasn't a skinsuit because the outside of it looked and felt like cloth, not skin, so it did not come under FDA regulations for skinsuits. That was their rationale for being about three percent of the cost of a real torso skinsuit: $5500. $5500!

That's still a lot of money, more than I made in a couple of months in my day job as a blogger, which I usually did at night of course. More than what I'd made off of some of my books. Still....

I have to explain something here. If you've bought any of my books, there's a picture of me on the back cover or the inside flap of the book jacket. That picture is not me. That's Walter Koenig, the actor, from his college yearbook taken way back in 1956, more than sixty years ago. That's why the funny collar on my shirt, his shirt, and why the picture is black and white and not a holo. I think the hairdo is called a duck's ass.

There are no pictures of me that weren't taken for medical reasons; at least, none since I've been an adult. The left side of my face around my eye is covered by a handprint-size port wine stain, a reddish birthmark. All of my face and down my neck onto my chest, shoulders and back is marred by acne scars.

My mouth is twisted from surgery as a child to repair a cleft palate, and my eyes are not level with each other. I’m a walking advertisement for some second-rate horror movie that will never be made, the grandson of both Freddy Kreuger and Alfred E. Newman, if you know who they are.

Now, believe it or not, I've actually gotten used to the way I look. I'm not going to win any beauty prizes, but this is New York, nobody stares at me. In fact, nobody looks at me at all, unless they need to, which is an advantage for someone who makes a living by eavesdropping and reporting on it. I'm the invisible man.

So, unlike what one might think, a mask is not the first thing I would want to buy. No, I've always had more of a problem with body image. I'm a little less than average height and a bit less than average weight. After my noodle diet got rid of my paunch, I’m skinny and bony. I've tried exercise and muscle-building programs, but I don't seem to be able to stick to them. I don’t really want to be muscular, anyway.

The kind of body I've always wanted is one that is slender and sleek, like the high fashion models one sees in advertisements. And there's another minor problem, those models are women, and I'm male. But I envy their bodies.

It's not that I want to be female particularly. I don't seem to have much in the way of libido, no sex drive to speak of, so.... Well, I'm not sure exactly what it is. Gender dysphoria was all the rage a few years ago with people changing sex right and left, up, down and sideways. Heh.

A drag queen named Fuzzi Bijoona down on Eighth gave me a great quote on changing your sex: “A pick-up truck ain’t no sports car even if you slap on a few flamin’ dee-cals. Cut it off, sew it up, do what you has to. If you is what you ain’t, you ain’t gon’ be happy wit’ a coat of paint.”

I considered it. Surgery was actually cheaper than one of the suits I so coveted. Getting bits carved off did not appeal to me, still doesn't.

But a slender waist with hips swelling below and a bit of curve to the bust. Okay, now that idea did make me hot in a vaguely sexual way. And while a skin suit is a bit more than a coat of paint, it’s still not major surgery or as-near-as-matters irreversible. I mean, you can take a suit off and be your own beater pick-up truck self again.

As you may have guessed, I'm an introspective sort. I'd done a lot of thinking about this.

I'm not a coward. I can venture into some of the sleaziest neighborhoods New York has to offer, and I don't worry much about getting hurt. I don't appear to have money, and like I said earlier, people tend not to look at me.

Like most people, I'm complicated, and I contain contradictions.

I didn't really think about such things as I surfed the Smart-R-U website. I thought instead about the quality of the product and the range of different garments and styles offered.

The SmarTorsolette alone came in fourteen different versions, not counting colors. The Windsor models were the cheapest, from under the bust to just below the waist, starting at around $5000. But the deluxe model that came from the armpits to over the hips went for $12000.

I read more. The garment could be augmented with nanofer hosiery or something they called bootserie - high heel boots with built-in hose in different patterns and colors. These thigh-higher boots connected right to the torsolette and made a single garment. Similar gloves and sleeves could cover the hands, arms and shoulders. They even made a wig, hood, collar, mask combo to cover the head, neck, and face.

And it all looked like clothing, not flesh, so the FDA would not come into it.

I added it up. A complete body-covering suit would cost me less than $60,000! I could afford that!