This piece is an autofictional seed for the Autofiction x Worldbuilding submissions call. It inspired this other piece.

EMPATHY

“I’m telling you, this is one of the best ones I’ve come across so far,” he said, sliding the apparatus across the table to me.

“What happens in it?” I asked.

He smirked. “Come on, you know better than to ask me that,” he said. “Ruins the fun. You gotta let it play out.”

“Hey, you got me crushed in a landslide,” I protested. “Forgive me for being a little cautious.”

He made a mock-guilty face. “Sorry, couldn’t resist. But it was kinda neat, don’t you think? Got your blood pumping, at any rate.”

“You actually like that shit?”

“I mean, no, but…strictly speaking, it isn’t actually about having fun, isn’t it?”

“Yeah it is!” I blurted. “At least that’s what normal people use it for.”

“Well, personally, I think ‘fun’ is a facile way to think of it,” he said. I scowled. He could be pretty sanctimonious for someone who wasn’t above dropping you inside a war crime for a prank. “It’s about feeling things we really don’t get to feel in our daily lives anymore. Our society is too comfortable and even-keeled, and you need a balanced diet of emotions – negative ones included – or you get psychological problems, I really believe this. I figure, if you’re just looking to get amused, you’re not really getting your money’s worth.”

“What the hell is money?”

“Sorry. Must’ve picked that up someplace. Anyhoo…” He made a gesture of supplication. “I solemnly swear that nothing fucked up happens in this one. It’s more like a…um…how do you describe it.”

“Sounds like one of those artsy ones where nothing fucking happens.”

“I mean, yes and no,” he said. “Stuff happens, but it’s just like…not the focus. It’s just vibes. It’s a very crystallized, very immaculate vibe. You may like it or not.”

Great. With this guy you were either getting pranked or getting bored to death. Whatever. Like I had something else going on right now? I plugged the apparatus into all the right brain-holes and felt the familiar sensory-derangement nausea as focus blurred and colors dimmed.

Violently wrenched from depths of time, yanked through an infinitely narrow hole punched in the universe, streams of information from a long-dead planet in a galactic backwater began pouring in, groped among my neurons, found purchase. Perception, sensation, memories all rushed forth in great billowing streams and painted themselves over my mind’s eye.

It was hot. That was the first thing I noticed. Not as hot as I’d ever experienced, but hot enough. The sky here was blue, the sun white. There was that familiar prickle of nausea slowly dissipating, the alarm blare of irreconcilable alienness fading into echoes, as the alien mind you were merging with settled in comfortably on top of yours, grooves interlocking, conceptual gaps closing, the machine forging an equilibrium with miraculous precision. I reached into my host’s brain and pulled out the words for the things I was looking at. Tree. River. Dragonfly. Rocks. Identities, memories and conceptual schema began filling in, and my merge supplied a metaphor for how it was happening– “like a fresh Polaroid”.

I was called a human. I was additionally called a man. I was young enough, shabbily clothed in a pair of cutoff jeans, a tank top, and sockless feet inside a pair of old hiking boots laced tight. All these words appeared in my head as if they belonged there.

I was standing on a long sloping rock pile that covered the entire shore of a river. Beside me was another young man similarly clothed (although in full-length jeans, which I noted with derision – wasn’t he as hot as I was? How could he stand it?). We’d gone on a trek through the woods to get here. I could feel dirt, bark, pollen, and little bits of bramble and thorn on my clothes and in my exposed body crevices. And from the radiant heat of the sunburn I could feel forming on my neck and shoulders, I imagined we’d been doing whatever we were doing on the rockpile for a good long while.

In a moment my short-term memory caught up, and I knew what we were doing out here. We were collecting rocks. I was going through an extended period of unemployment. Unemployment – I rolled that concept around in my head. I’d been unemployed before. I’d been unemployed and underemployed enough times to have opinions on the best times of year to be unemployed. Summer was definitely it. It was like you were on summer vacation again. That very same feeling of sparkly, time-dilated dreamspace that used to grip you during summer vacay as a kid, well it came right back. You were out and about during the day, and you saw all the other employment-challenged wandering around, and they seem like figures out of the same dream. These guys were makin’ it, and you would too. Whereas being down and out in the wintertime meant hustling in the cold, shuffling down a sleety street past the other poor souls who aren’t inside generating economic activity, who have no heat within themselves but have to keep kicking themselves ahead or they’ll freeze in place. Much

That’s where I was at. That’s where my buddy Ryan was at. I said “my buddy” effortlessly, and felt it, too. The ability to have this kind of relationship to someone who died while my planet was young was something I’d never gotten over. Ryan hadn’t had a proper job his whole adult life. Hence why we were collecting rocks. We had a scheme; it was mostly Ryan’s, to be honest. The whole western riverbank had been covered with dumped granite leftovers from some project or another. That slope was covered with money. Some of the chunks of granite had geodes inside them. But we didn’t know which ones, nor were we interested in finding out. We were leaving that a tantalizing mystery. We’d been loading up as many unbroken granite stones as we could comfortably convey in wagons pulled behind our bikes, taking them home, and selling them at the flea market. Each one was bundled with a rock hammer, which we bought in bulk from Mills Fleet Farm. We charged $10 for the set.

Some buyers took the rock home and broke it open there, like it was a Christmas gift. Quite a few handed us the money and began hammering away right there at our rickety card table. We’d have to show them where to hit it so it would split nicely and not just take chips off the surface. Once split, some rocks would practically burst magnificent purple crystal arrangements; some a couple of pale lavender nuggets like bleached Pop Rocks; some would just be kind of sparkly inside; many would just be blank gray stone. That uncertainty seemed to hack the same brain mechanism that got people to gamble, and netted us more than we would make just selling geodes, and with much less work.

We were picking up rocks, more or less at random, off the hillside, filling various bags and boxes with them, and using those to transport the rocks to our wagons which were already hooked up to our bicycles and chained to trees right next to the bike trail, a little ways away through the woods. Our bikes were our only transportation today, since Ryan had the only working car between us, if you took a bit of liberty with the term “working”, and since we needed it to take our rocks to the flea market, it was being driven as little as possible. And we were working some distance apart, without speaking much, saving our breath. We’d done our part to liven up the unpleasant work by getting stoned in the woods before we arrived. Ryan was the only person I knew who still smoked brick weed. Nuggets were the unquestioned standard now, and I didn’t even know anyone where one got brick weed anymore, but Ryan and his dad had a ton, and we’d been smoking it pretty much constantly that summer.

The punishing sun buoyed the characteristically logy schwag high. Sweat beaded on my bare arms from shoulder to wrist. I felt like every cell in my body was permeated with that earthy forest-green, and that the heat was squeezing the smell out of my pores. I tried to keep my mind on the rocks – the quicker we were done, the sooner I could get out of the heat – but my mind wandered, and I got engrossed by things I saw: piles of soapy foam in the river, sticks floating by, raptors crisscrossing overhead. I found myself staring at the rocks still lying on the slope for many minutes, trying to figure out if there was any way to tell from the outside whether they were geodized, vaguely trying to train my intuition to only pick up the good ones. There was no reason to exercise this kind of selection, in fact, part of the appeal was that you might get a bad rock. I told myself I was putting myself in the customers’ place.

“I think we have enough for now,” Ryan said at long last.

I nodded and grabbed the closest container, a canvas sling with straps designed for hauling firewood. Grasping it with both hands, I hoisted it up to knee level, where it swayed dangerously and tried to take out my kneecaps as I made my unsteady way up the slope toward the clearing where our bikes were parked. Ryan did the same with a medium-small plastic tote, but he had overloaded it, and a few rocks came tumbling out and bounced down the slope half a dozen times each to splash in the water below. We struggled up to the clearing and loaded them into our bike trailers, drained the remainders of QuikTrip cups in the shade (filled with Gatorade and only a splash of Rooster Booster – caffeine dehydrated you quicker), and then set back off again.

The loads in the trailers were heavy, but doable, and we got into a nice rhythm, the both of us. Ryan, who had once studied to be a DNR officer, but couldn’t enter that field anymore after his assault charge, was chatting about how much red osier dogwood there was in the woods now, how it was invasive, growing so thick we weren’t going to be able to walk this way anymore soon. He’d done a controlled burn during his internship but it clearly wasn’t enough. He cut himself off when he spotted something crawling across the bike trail and squeezed both his brakes in a death grip, his trailer jackknifing behind him and dragging him almost off his feet until he planted his heels and winced when the trailer hit him in the back of the calf.

What had stopped him was a centipede or millipede, I didn’t know how to tell the difference. It was about the length of a finger and almost as thick, black with brilliant red bands. He scooped the creature up and let it crawl around his wrist. “You know what we should do? Do you have anything to put this guy in?”

I told him I still had my QuikTrip cup to refill later.

“Good. Bang him in there. And let’s look to see if there are any more.”

Ryan explained that pet shops often sold African giant millipedes, as first-time pets for kids. They were easy to feed, easy to house, couldn’t bite, and if the kid accidentally killed one, who’d care? “This isn’t one of them, but it looks practically the same,” Ryan said. “Only difference is they have some kind of spray that’ll irritate your skin, but that’s only if you piss them off and deserve it.” He popped the millipede into the empty cup. “I know a shop that’ll sell these”.

We stopped the bikes, parked them in the shade and spent the next hour combing through the nearby trees and bushes for more millipedes. We ended up finding five total. Ryan promised we could get $5 each for them, easily. Not bad at all, and now that we knew where they were, we could come back with more containers and really clean up.

As luck would have it, this pet shop Ryan had in mind was in Highland Park, which was both not too far away and right on the bike trail. With the loads we were hauling, though, it was no Easter parade. The Neal Smith trail went up a cloverleaf ramp connecting to the sidewalk that we’d have to take over the 6^th avenue bridge, and we had to slow to a crawl to make the tight turn, and then we had to switch to the lowest gear to get up the incline, and my dehydrated muscles shrieked at me the whole way up. We inched our bikes onto the sidewalk over the bridge, piloting gingerly between the chain link fence and the concrete partition, but no matter how carefully we pedaled, our trailers’ wheels banged and ground against both surfaces. I began to worry. If one of our wheels bent, or tires popped, that would be a whole afternoon’s worth of rocks we wouldn’t be able to transport.

A woman was crossing the bridge on foot in our direction. She stinkeyed us as we approached. We were over halfway across already and couldn’t do anything about it. She was obviously not going to be able to let us pass no matter how flat she squished to the side, so she had no choice but to wait for a gap in traffic and hop over the divider. An oncoming Silverado honked at her. She flipped him off. We pedaled quickly to get past her as fast as we could, but she was pissed off anyway. “Take the road next time, assholes,” she called after us.

After we crossed the bridge it was only a couple blocks north to Highland Park. I pushed my fatigued legs past the red line to get enough momentum to make it up the gentle slope. Once in the neighborhood Ryan pointed out his pet store and we chained our bikes up to a 2 Hour Parking sign in front. It was a dingy little hole that specialized in fish and aquarium supplies. The entire back wall was taken up by fish tanks, with a smattering of small animals taking up the aisles. The front windows facing the street had heavy shades on them, and despite all the aquarium lights and heat lamps for the reptiles, it was strangely dark in there, and an unhealthy mold smell permeated everything. A man dressed like a mechanic scrolled his phone behind the counter. Ryan, who seemed to know this guy already, went up to the register and presented him with our five millipedes.

“One of those boys is dead,” said the guy.

“Okay, well toss him out obviously. That’s still $20,” Ryan said. “$5 each.”

“I sell them at $5 each,” mumbled the guy. “I don’t buy em for that much. You understand how buying and selling works?”

“You could probably sell these guys for more money,” said Ryan earnestly. “Look at the size. Look at the pretty markings on him. These are great specimens.”

“I buy in bulk, normally,” he said. “This many is barely even worth my while.”

While this negotiation was happening, I wandered up and down the aisles. The reptile enclosures gave off some heat and humidity, but compared to outside it was like a refrigerator in here. I could feel layers of sweat I brought in from outside congealing into a gray film, but I was too tired to be self-conscious about it, and it already smelled funky in here anyway.

I stooped and examined terrariums full of anoles, leopard geckos, tarantulas, snakes. There was a long box on the bottom shelf with a motor-bubbled pool containing a couple of turtles. Neon-colored tree frogs gulped silently at me from several little tanks filled with fake moss and overwatered plants. There was a tall box on top with a couple of tiny orange chameleons being sold for a ton of money. I lingered over this one for a long while. I had always been fascinated by chameleons. Mainly their eyes. They didn’t have eyes remotely similar to any other lizard, or indeed, any other creature alive. They had a full 360 degree field of vision, and could both move and focus their two eyes independently of one another. They could even “zoom in and enhance” like their eyes were the CCTV in a cop show. What a trip it must be to see like that. I thought about that sort of thing all the time: what it would be like to see UV radiation like a rattlesnake, or feel the magnetic field of the Earth like a migratory bird, or smell a seizure coming on like one of those trained dogs. At times, having the brain I did felt like a massive hindrance.

I found a doorway off to the side. There wasn’t a door, curtain, any other kind of obstruction, but I still couldn’t tell whether this led to part of the store proper, because the room beyond wasn’t finished at all. It was nearly empty, with a cement floor and off-white painted brick, and the only thing in it was a washer/dryer hookup on the far wall, and a cage full of rats. My heart jumped. I loved rats. I used to own three – Nacho, Eliot, and Danzig, the last one named for a brown devil-lock that ran down his back – and I was still a bit sore about having to give them up to move into my current apartment. They were beautiful, affectionate, they did funny things constantly, and they were smarter than pretty much any other pet that size you were likely to find.

But my excitement flickered out when I took a critical eye at how they were housed. The cage was only one single level. Nothing for them to climb on or explore. There were no toys, burrows, hammocks, or anything enriching in the least. At least a dozen rats were kept like this – this number of rats should be distributed across at least three cages this size. But the worst part was the floor. The rats were walking around with their bare paws on a mesh of chicken wire, the same wire the cage itself was made of, probably cutting themselves and getting bumblefoot. The soft paper bedding that they should’ve been walking on was all contained in a slide-out metal tray underneath the wire, no doubt to make cleaning easier.

I was not a person used to confrontation, but I did not hesitate for a minute to stomp up to the counter and give that guy an unmistakable we’re-getting-into-it look. Ryan, baffled at my inexplicable agitation, tried his best to rubber-stamp his millipede sale. I interrupted him.

“Are those feeder rats?” I asked. “I didn’t see a price tag.”

“No, they’re domestics,” the pet man said, completely nonplussed. “I wouldn’t put feeder rats out on the floor.”

“Well then we’ve got a big fucking problem,” I said. “Your rats getting sick a lot? Dying?”

“They’re small animals,” the man said. “They get sick over like, anything and nothing. You’re gonna get some dying, can’t avoid it.”

“They can’t get at their cecum, retard,” I hissed. “Rats are like cows and rabbits. They don’t digest their food all at once. They poop it out the first time as cecum and then reingest. Only these rats can’t do that because your dumb ass decided to put them over a wire grate. Their cecum drops through it. They’re probably all malnourished. Did you even realize that?”

“If you don’t approve of the way I keep my animals,” the pet man said distractedly, “you are welcome to open your own pet store.”

I was a little wrong-footed from the lack of traction I was making with him. I’d wasted a full head of steam. The one time I’d let myself righteously fly off the handle at someone who deserved it, and it was like arguing with a boulder. I fought back the urge to backpedal by storming ahead as best I could. “Either you don’t know how to keep rats, or you don’t care. Are you a moron or a piece of shit? Which one is it?”

The pet man glanced back at Ryan, who was standing behind the counter helplessly, the whites of his eyes showing all around, the QuikTrip cup full of millipedes making rhythmic rocks in his hand. “I think we’re done here. You and your buddy can leave. I don’t want these.”

“Okay,” Ryan said. “Can I bring you some later?”

The pet man jerked his head in the direction of the front door. I knew Ryan was thinking the same thing I was: we weren’t fighting him on this. We looked like shit, probably seemed crazy as fuck, and we had dope on us.

Ryan was mum as he peeled the lid off his QuikTrip cup and dumped the millipedes in the gutter. He was too nice to say anything about me gypping him out of his sale. I knew he could’ve used that money. I could, too. Flea market wasn’t till Thursday and I had no prospects. That brief animating flash of anger had left me, and my energy crashed, and my body felt like dead clay, and I throbbed with dejection and shame. I jumped into a diatribe to fill the air. “What’s that guy’s problem, anyway?” I said. “I was trying to do him a favor. His rats have gotta be dropping like flies in there, you’d think he’d want help keeping them alive long enough to sell. Plus they’d probably sell better if they were better behaved. If they actually had a cage they could run around and climb in they’d be a lot happier, make better pets. He’s sabotaging himself so bad being so cheap. It’s so fucking stupid.”

Ryan finally took heart and chimed in, suggesting we should open a pet shop. We’d be good at it. We talked about every uncommon pet we’d have in it – salamanders (Ryan actually had a couple at home, fished out of a pond), degus, shrimp. We’d build massive Habitrail mazes for the rodents and put them in the window as a selling point. We definitely wouldn’t have hermit crabs, they were unethical. The way home was downhill and we had enough breath to continue the conversation all the way back to the trail uplink.

Everything cut off there. The whole blue-skied, white-sunned world vanished in a split second, its innumerable alien bizarreries existing now only as half-remembered dreams. “Well,” my friend asked, “what did you think?”