Sci-fi: Philip Polyp

Philip Polyp, a sentient face-mole sheared off Annie and elaborated under the Lifeless Laws’ wide mandate squiggled down 42nd passed chrome vibetrains and shaggy parasols newly opened in the cracked walk’s exposed black earth fed by flood from below. 

“Beauty Mark!” Annie shouted her term of endearment twenty five paces behind her face lifted discharge, the apple of her over-eye made fleshier and from whom she was attempting to squeeze out self-love.

Philip was brown allover with the texture of gooseflesh interrupted with indeterminate pink oraface, grinning with lolling loose tongue now in its rolling gallop. “The blue sky is purple!”

Animoids, Zoogirls, Bingbots and Bongs pedestrianized variously in the August haze with metropolitan mingles of carbon and silicon sweat dripping down the guttercatches. Urban excreta abounded as they crossed the border from Crawhole to Ganymede’s Cavern (Old Good Times Square), a neighborhood packed with pop and shiners. It was Philip’s first time, giddy with stimulation. It paused in the outpour from a finished screening under the shadow of a glossy overhead, a red-light revival theater running Tickle! Blearyeyed Condoms and Jacks wobbled out, blinking towards the ozone. The human morass. For a moment, oraface pursed, Philip let the pushing, passing, errant limbs, wobbles, slines and toves brush its pacadermis, purring at a frequency lost in the general metropolitan vibration.

“Gotcha!” Annie hugged, panting, her brown Polyp caught and only when her heart was to its flank did the purr, heard, moderate her smile to a straight crescent, a sliver of concern, her lips white.

“The first time under a porno house,” she said with a streak of scandal, “and you’re titillating with the Glocks.”

The doorman behind the glass glared out at her slur, a hurt tinged with nostalgia, flipping the neon to Closed. It was eight in the morning. The projectionist needed sleep.

It was three weeks since Annie had Philip seared from a pinky-nail sized growth on her face and Dr. Goldberg who assured her everything was on the up and up had taken out the mandatory micrometer while the steaming mole lay in the drip pan and frowned at the output: a micron and half over the flesh threshold for guaranteed personhood.

“I don’t understand, it’s exactly what you told me wouldn’t happen,” Annie said.

“It’s the law, I’m afraid,” said Dr. Goldberg, still peering in the pan with genuine curiosity. “You needn’t really worry, provisions exist. There a gaggle of mistaken moles in Sloatsburg, you need only sign away—” he fingered a tile. “Mathilde, we’ve a mismeasured mole, if you’d bring in the paper for Patient Annie—”

She put her hand on his wrist and he started at the touch, a jump that rolled the mole in the pan with pops and sizzles from the site of its severance. “Can I see it?”

The doctor narrowed his eyes and held forth the brushed chrome pan which magnified in elongation every angle of the brown nub.

Pinching gently she lifted it to eye level and rotated it by rubbing to its original orientation. A charmed look on her face, she pressed the mole against the site of its removal just moments before, a circular shadow the flattened imprint of its sprout. It had been with her as long as she remembered and its backside, still warm from the zapper, brought an instantaneous blush to her cheek.

“Now darling,” Dr. Goldberg cooed, a redoubling of paternal authority after the little jolt of contact, “it’s not just a gallbladder one can safely jar. Plenty of people feel the way you do with cosmetics. It’s a human mole. Won’t survive in vinegar. Needs fresh air and care and—” 

“I’ve always been disparaged, doctor. Worst of all by myself. Bilbo my manager too, says it bars me by the CG budget alone from playing period pieces on the cast, like having too perfect teeth. Why? Historically the radiation wouldn’t grow a mole so large, at least in the popular imagination. My boyfriend Andy who tongued it like a third nipple love it, then later felt ashamed of me on the naked street because I had a nipple on my face exposed for all the eyes, snappers and portholes to ogle. I’d snag it combing and just in the mirror I’d see it and. Nothing but grief. But.” She tilted her head, all the while speaking her eyes were crossed to focus on the polyp pinched so close to her face. “The idea of it grazing dumbly some face turf upstate in a sterile body farm? You understand it’s a part of me.” 

The nurse Mathilde appeared in the porthole smiling with a readpad and stylus. Her face dropped reading Annie’s and from behind the Doctor’s shoulder blades in frown.

Waves of shame flushed Annie as she remembered Mathilde by her posture more than her features (softly erect as if draped over her spine more than stuck through with it) at her last operation smiling, standing four years ago while careless Sven held her hand, a squeeze, and Mathilde made the uterine prick (it was the government concession to a woman’s right that led to the mandate of conserving precious flesh by parliamentary compromise—due to the radioactive shrinkage of gonads from the vaporated stratosphere, the thinner fertile flock was insufficient for the vast society. Everything over the legal limit: offed limbs, overgrown toenails, all organic throwaways were given individual life and put to work however useless with the blindness of intergalactic bureaucracy). That was that and there was no doubt in Annie but an ocean of feeling—as she left then, she turned and gave Mathilde a long hug, the cool itch of rayon against her cheek: she’d aimed her head in that hug towards the breasts for deep reasons. Now the same nurse was watching her mourn a mole.

“I’m sorry you prepared the paperwork,” she said, a professional tone creeping in defensively. “I want other options.”

“Doctor,” Mathilde turned to him. “We can deal with the post-op just us girls. I know Paz is waiting in bay five with a prolapsed sense of courage, just wailing.”

A smile of magnanimity, he made a twenty degree bow, eyeing his notes to cover the abruptness of his turn. “Have a wonderful afternoon.”

Mathilde saddled beside Annie on the lined medbed.

“My first cosmet was this yellow rose grafted into the vein around my collarbone that blooms, perfumes and drops pedals depending on my mood.” She pulled aside her scrubs’ strap to show a quartersized rosehead snug sideways in the fleshy gap between shoulder and chestplate. “So many times, I can’t tell you, I held the clippers there when it was a black and barren sprig and I couldn’t say why. But I realized, and it took a whole lot of lying to my psychonaut before I finally did, that this rose blooming and wilting here was just another part of myself to get to know. Yes, I got it on some bender mixing stims and downers but it was something I’d once wanted. When I told Jebbut the Tat to make it move depending on my mood, I never thought I’d never known my mood.” Mathilde interdigitated with Annie’s idle hand. “Pay Jebbut a call, he’s an artist. Bring the mole.”

That very evening through the Saint Marks Fleshpot past streetsmells, throngs and tugs Annie went, her fingers still pinching the severed mole in her pant pocket, and found the portico garden level with a Trans-Pacific hotdog and papaya stall grubbily inscribed on an overtouched plaque “Jebbut the Tat.” Buzz.

There is a tact to being the right size. Human beings are just ideally proportioned to the properties of carbon, fuel and flint, to trees too, to have the minimum sustainable fire just large enough to warm a body on a chilly night. It only takes a couple of steps from there to colonize the metasphere. That’s what Jebbut explained in what must have been his living room, strewn with beancans and socks and all variety of body mods and plug-ins, human addendums, readouts and pricks, pins and cues and the piercing, cutting, jolting tools, surgical instruments to play god on still life and, winning, loupes, monocles and scopes to finely discern beauty’s marks. He made Philip Polyp the right size, a greyhound and a half, and sent Annie out that same night to love her Philip.

“I’m Philip Polyp,” it said awakening on the cobbled street by the line of sonambs and droppers waiting for their krauted dogs and sweet juice, a light lunar storm drizzling stardust.

So here they were on 42nd going to Bilbo’s office all the way West on the Hudson Sludge Luge so she could show him her new face and he could update her physonimical docket that bodycasters would pour over fitting her into dramatic sceneries and radvertisements. Philip couldn’t be left home alone or it’d make pellets and soak through weewee pads, gnaw on her leather loveseat and cry. Besides she had grown accustomed to its company, mewing and lowing the mews and lows her body stifled, its nervous system an overanimated elaboration of her forehead where all the dust of life’s journey stuck in her eye had struck as well. When the aggressive riverside geeze, needling for cutlets, honked at their lunch as they watched the solar ooze darken Nuevo Nuevo Jersey—and Philip shrieked and burred in horror at their beaks and menace—Annie saw it was her everyday fear that in her primebody she’d repressed. In fact ever since the mole was removed Annie felt less fear herself, felt less shivers when the subway doors opened and the AC struck her skin; and when her thigh by an accident of nocturnal spasm would have previously bourne a streak of pleasure, it was Philip who cooed, snoring at her feet. It was as if she had made a ghetto of feeling on her forehead.

“Annie and—” Bilbo’s eyes wobbled over his mustaches as he saw the brown blob. “Well come in you,” he paused, “two.”

She sat and Philip in her lap on a swan chair in Bilbo’s office, the 39th floor with windows facing west, decorated in Miami Vice revival, flamingos and polyurethane palms, and adorned with the trophies, medals and pedigrees of a glitzy career as facemonger.

“It’s my little golem, Philip Polyp. I got the cosmet: a new face. I need new photos.” Annie smiled and Philip smiled.

“I see,” Bilbo said with concern, swinging his feet off the granite desk to stand, coming around with fists on hip and smearing his professional eyes over their features. “Your face looks good, Annie. But your—”

“Philip,” it said.

“Yes, Philip. Philip is hideous.” He frowned gently, placing his rear on the front of his desk. “You went to some crack Tat? You’ve grown attached?”

“That’s not how I see it, Bilbo. We were attached.”

“Uh huh.” He swung around and binged expertly some bongs until his desktop readout glittered with glyphs. “This afternoon, you’re booked for the faceplate of Sashay. Make sure your little friend stays out of the render. Ask her after for headshots, on me.” 

The holographer was Brrtz, an Italian-American Lazy Susan with a soprano-range vox box noted for her rotational acuity behind the camera. Annie sat modeling in the kiddie pool. Pose. Pose. Pose. Philip was rubbing on the linoleum, licking the caterer’s fingers to his nervous chuckles and unbridled enjoyment.

“What’s wrong Annie?” Brrtz asked.

“It’s my mole,” she said, “I just have a different gravity without it. I’m learning how to hold my head.”

An off-duty assistant coming in for a forgotten charger saw Philip Polyp romping and joying in the off section, snapped a couple of pics on her phone. Word got around. When Sashay came out it wasn’t Annie on the cover but Philip, with a feeling grin. 

Annie sat in her loft, switched her TV to 2D to cook while she watched and saw. The war was on the television as usual and the bug leaders chittered. The government announced that because of their faster reflexes, the new class of fighter pilots would all be pregnant women. Then she saw Philip Polyp come on, whizzing through some wheatfield in the Middle West, its hum at just the frequency of her severed joy. It had been a hard couple of months since Philip left, signing the contracts with its tongue. She didn’t feel a thing. She cut herself on a paring knife preparing bruschetta and only noticed because of the blood in the dishwater. Philip’s legal guardian, the credits in the mail meant she’d never have to work again. She went into the 42nd street theaters with glocks, cocks, squeegees and spews and couldn’t grow a single goosebump. As far as Frankburg, Cerius-1 and La Florida, people saw Philip Polyp and they softened. It reminded them that somewhere in Eden, there is a worm.

(for Annie B.)