Cause & Effect
Effect
“It’s my face, I promise,” he wants to tell the woman in blue, to move things along. Even if he’s not entirely sure that’s true, that the face in the photo is his. What might’ve been gangly in a way that’s charming when the body was fifteen and still fitting into itself is now gaunt and sucking its eyes back into its skull, its lips back into its gums, its manhood back into its pelvis.
The woman’s eyes pinch as she raises his driver’s license and compares a high school body to the bony creature in front of her now. “Headed to Bellbank?”
She’s yet to hand back the license and boarding pass.
“No.”
“No?”
“Well, I mean, yes. But Bellbank’s just the layover.”
The woman in blue doesn’t care. She lowers the license and hands it back at last, along with the boarding pass. “Go on ahead.”
Seth fumbles the license and boarding pass into his pocket and pushes his rolling carry-on forward. He joins a line of passengers corralled in by chains strung between waist-high poles. SHOES OFF. BELTS OFF. WATCHES OFF.
The instructions rotate on saturated screens above Seth. Other people in blue bark the words too, as if the neon visuals were insufficient. Two girls ahead of him squat to untie their shoelaces while they wait. An older man behind him loosens his belt buckle. Metal clinks against metal. Then he unlatches his watch.
SHOES OFF. BELTS OFF. WATCHES OFF.
Take nothing off—that’s what Seth would prefer. He waits until he has to, until the two girls ahead of him are peeling plastic bins off a stack and dumping their purses and shoes inside. Then he takes reluctant, nauseating action.
SHOES OFF.
He presses the toe of his right shoe onto the back lip of the left shoe, prying the stiff material so that his foot slips free while the shoelaces remain tied. He repeats the action and slides out his other foot. His toes scrunch, then relax. Socks on carpet, soft on soft. Except the carpet isn’t as soft as he hoped. It’s thin and trampled stiff by boot soles marching thousands of other socked feet across it. Seth’s socks are new, still pillowy around the heels. The cotton cushions his feet as he leans his weight into each one. Cotton on carpet, soft on stiff. BELTS OFF.
Please, no. Not yet.
WATCHES OFF.
Seth picks at the strap around his wrist until his watch unfurls and falls into his other hand’s palm. He moves to the bin stack and drops the watch into the top container. Then he shimmies the bin free, sets it on the conveyor belt, and dumps in his shoes and backpack. The belt purrs the bin toward a row of spinning cylinders. A man in blue is unsatisfied. He scrapes Seth’s things closer to the gobbling box. The bin scuffs over synthetic rubber and mottled metal. Invisible fingernails graze across Seth’s brain.
BELTS OFF.
Please, not yet.
“Belt off, sir,” the man in blue says, nodding at Seth’s waist.
Please, don’t look there.
“Belts off,” the man in blue repeats louder for the passengers behind to hear.
Hurry up. People are waiting. No one cares. No one’s looking. Nothing is going to happen. No one is going to happen.
Seth’s fingers run along the strip of black leather cinching his body together; his nails click when they reach the metal buckle. He pulls at the leather until the metal prong pops loose. The buckle lifts. The belt slackens. Seth closes his eyes and slides the leather strap through the loops of his jeans. The dull, rubbing friction of leather on denim on skin chafes against his nerve endings. Finally, the belt is free. It swings from his hand like a slaughtered snake, which he quickly disposes of in his bin. Now his jeans hang slightly lower, drooping just beneath his underwear’s thick waistband, hugging his hip bones. So much weight sitting on one place. So much touch. So much looseness. So much heat and air and movement, he imagines a finger dragging a path around the circumference of his pelvis, leaving a trail of rising gooseflesh in its wake.
Do you like that?
The man in blue slides the bins down the conveyor belt and onto a set of spinning metal cylinders that spit the bins into a cave of scanners. Cut off from his possessions, Seth steps into a new line and thumbs the license and boarding pass in his pocket. Smooth plastic, slick paper. An identity and a place to go.
The line moves forward. The passenger ahead of Seth steps into a giant glass case rounded like a fishbowl and raises his arms in unmoving surrender. A contraption like a vertical windshield wiper slides back and forth within the glass panels, bouncing waves of energy off the man’s body, taking invisible, invasive readings of everything in and on him. He smiles at the people in blue as he steps out the other side. Apparently, the man consents to these readings.
Apparently, everyone does. Seth shifts his weight again. Soft on flat. Cotton. Carpet. Paper. Plastic. These are the sensations he can identify as he waits. To identify is to control. Cotton. Carpet. Paper. Plastic. Denim. Flesh. Breath. Sweat. Heat.
Do you like that?
“Step inside, please.”
Seth follows the woman in blue’s instructions. He steps into the glass case and places his socked feet on the painted yellow marks.
“Raise your arms,” the woman says.
Seth raises his arms.
The hem of his t-shirt rises.
Seth stops breathing.
A sliver of his stomach is now exposed.
A fever scalds his belly, blaining the ribbon of visible skin from the inside out. Can the woman in blue see the sunburn sizzling just above his jeans? Can she see the humiliation as it blisters? Can she see the history searing between his hip bones, scarring itself a permanent home?
The windshield wiper whirs around Seth, taking its readings. The woman in blue frowns at her monitor as he steps out the other side of the case.
“Step off to the side, please,” she says, pointing to a mat a few feet from the machine. “I need to do a manual search. Is that okay?”
Is “no” an acceptable response?
He nods.
“Okay. Hold your arms out like this.” The woman in blue demonstrates. Seth replicates. Then her gloved hands invade. They tap along his skin the way raindrops do, but hands don’t have the same intentions as raindrops. That is to say, raindrops never have any intentions. That’s why they’re trustworthy. But the woman in blue is just doing her job, isn’t she? She squeezes both of his ankles. A job, not a want. Her gloves pat his arms, his shoulders, down the sides of his torso. Then the hips.
Do you like that?
Seth flinches. “Don’t.”
A few passengers turn around. One girl slips her hand into a pocket bulging with a phone. YouTube views tick upward in her eyes.
Fear of arrest, or something much worse, stings Seth’s tongue and swells it up. The pinkish deformity lolls behind his teeth, bulbous and heavy and impossible to push words through. Now muted, he can only apologize to the woman in blue with his eyes.
The woman’s face is neutral, but something gentle relaxes the lines in her forehead. “It’s okay. You’re all good.”
Seth grabs his belongings from the bin and speeds toward the terminal’s nearest restroom. His shoulders smack other people’s. His carry-on bumps into trash cans, chairs, legs.
Do you like that?
His socked, unshod feet—collecting food crumbs, spilled soda, and scraps of toilet paper as he locks himself in a stall—answer the question for him.
Cause
In slow motion, Seth grins.
His chest arches back. His arms flail toward the ceiling. He dances.
The people are pink, stained by party lights, striped with strobes. Glitter freckles their skin and bleeds down into the cups passing from hand to hand. Ambrosia bubbles in these plastic chalices. It tastes like bitter sunshine on the tongue.
In slow motion, Seth sings.
The roof of his mouth dries out. Vibrations prickle the base of his jaw. Up and down. He and fifty faceless people go up and down. Singing. Laughing. A boy smiles at him. Electricity sears his throat and lower parts. The song swells, and so does his chest.
In slow motion, Seth turns.
Ruth, his friend, is not next to him like she promised she would be. Storm clouds of hair float past his line of vision. In the gaps between them, clarity strikes, lighting up faces and possible exits. He ventures forward in search of Ruth, following the clarity that strikes a path forward and dodging the storm clouds. The glitter stings his arms. The ambrosia calcifies in his stomach. The volume of the music is one degree too hot. The fabric of his sleeves picks at the insides of his elbows. He scratches. This place doesn’t feel fun anymore. Why did he let Ruth convince him to come? She thought he needed to get out more. But why? By whose standards? In slow motion, Seth tucks his hands under his armpits.
Bodies press against him. Raceless, genderless, creedless. They are blank canvases of flesh and heat. A wall of skin links together around him. Glamor turns to gore in the kaleidoscope he peers through.
In slow motion, Seth freezes.
“You look lost,” a voice says, too close to his ear. The heat of its breath has access to his very skull. “Relax a little.”
The voice supplants all other sounds. It siphons the lights of the room into its darkness.
Then, in slow motion, a hand touches him in a place it should not.
Seth wants to break the hand apart as it touches him again, to pop all of its little bones out of their sockets and stomp on the hand until its skin is branded with the print of his soles. But his own hands are still shackled in his armpits.
“Do you like that?”
No.
Yes.
Is that bad?
Is this bad?
No.
Yes.
At double speed, Seth stumbles backward.
Sound and sight roar back toward him. The wall of skin relinks, severing him from the voice and its hand. At last, his own hands break free of his armpits and reach for his neck to cut off its cry. He barrels through another wall of skin, and a new hand brushes over his arm. It’s the boy from earlier.
“Hey,” he smiles.
Seth yanks his arm back. “Don’t touch me.” He draws up his shoulders and slips further into the crowd, thinning himself like a playing card, shuffling himself in and out of the deck. Eventually, he cuts into Ruth. She looks up at him. Immediately, she knows.
Consequence
Seth wriggles his feet back into his shoes and leaves the stall. He stops by a sink and splashes water onto his face, trying to wash off Ruth’s consolations and the miserable clear coating accumulating at the base of his eyes. The water beads on his skin and drips back into the restroom’s sink, where the damp pulp of what used to be a paper towel clings to the sink’s scratched interior. He watches the droplets roll off his nose and soak into the pulp, wondering if he cried now, would he be able to tell which droplets were sink or salt in origin? He leans down and presses his forehead against the faucet spout. By leaving the water running, he can feel the spout’s metal skin vibrate as thousands of tiny water feet march along the inside of its neck, rushing to spill out into the bowl below. The vibration tickles his forehead and comforts him the way a hug or a kiss goodnight might have when he was eight. His face contorts. Is this it now? Is the comfort of a humming faucet all he can tolerate? The water pouring into the sink turns salty after all.
At the echo of a rolling carry-on entering the bathroom, Seth retreats to a stall. Too weak to keep standing, he lowers himself to sit on the tiled floor, revolted by the scattered paper towels lying inches from where his legs sprawl out. As soon as he can shower, he intends to scrub so hard that his topmost layer of skin will scrunch off, leaving behind throbbing pink flesh yet to be blemished by heat and sweat and dirt and touch. Then, under the spray of water that erases all bad things, he will shove a finger down his throat to force up the grief that’s been poisoning his appetite, and he will use his fingernails to scrape the blueness off the surface of his eyeballs and flick it away in great big globs. Everything will swirl down the drain, and when he’s done with this purifying shower—skin shed, insides purged, blueness removed—he will sling himself upside down like a side of cow meat in a walk-in freezer, bloody and bare and numb.
Seth draws his legs up to his chest and tucks his head between his knees. In this dim little burrow of flesh and flooring, he can see the shadowed faces of the tiles he’s sitting on. He imagines he can see something clear begin to ooze into the grout canals that frame each square. Maybe, he hopes, it’s him. Maybe, he hopes, his whole body is finally leaking its coating and everything it preserves underneath.
