Leon was a rock. Sometimes. Other times, he was a horse. At times, a cloud. Never an idea, like the economy. Never a feeling.
Leon was a lot of things, sometimes.
This time, he was a rock, in a small pile of rocks, on a mountain (big pile of rocks). And what a pleasant pile of rocks it was—below him, everyone was supportive, like the heavy angular slab. Above, everyone depended on him, like the round skipping stone. He was not being used by anyone so much as he was being useful.
Here, he found peace.
Until Peace found him.
Leon could no longer sense the slab below him, nor the stone above him. The bodies he used to orient himself in the world were gone. In their stead, he felt an irregular rhythm which he could never, as a rock, have known was a human foot, kicking him again and again along a hiking trail. He would not recognize his place in the world until he was still.
It calmed him, though, to know, from experience: nothing lasts forever.
When Leon did stop, he was a laptop. A SteelForce 3000, with dual microprocessor and high-definition video capabilities. Electricity surged through his circuits, filled his screen, and overflowed from his keys. He felt such pure joy from the sensation that he couldn’t help but let a little ding out of his soundhole.
It reminded him of his mornings as a horse. Leon would plant his front hooves forward and raise his rear end. He’d feel his muscles and veins organizing themselves in the stretch, directing pathways for energy and blood to travel where needed. There was something about making a home in a new body, exploring a new form, like water being poured into a glass, that gave him great pleasure.
When Leon’s webcam turned on, he saw a finger jabbing into him. All of a sudden, that juicy, juicy electricity flowed out of him like an unplanned bathroom break, and though he was still a laptop, he felt a bit like a rock again.
• • •
Peace was a short queen. A thick, curly-haired Filipino American.
She was a Scorpio (private, severe, obsessed with death), a middle child (basically a Scorpio, for siblings), a cat person (basically a Scorpio, for pet lovers). She was type A (personality), type A (blood), and the type to never back down from a challenge.
She was all these things, all the time.
Never change, they wrote in her high school yearbook. Never could, she thought.
Peace, cross-legged in her home office chair, sipped her tea and stared at the laptop she found on her walk. The facts didn’t add up.
The facts: Peace went hiking, saw rock, kicked rock. Rock became laptop. Rock plus kick, generally speaking, did not equal laptop.
Also a fact: pre-kick, Peace did say the words, “I wish I could kick my laptop instead.” Peace would never do that, of course. She was considered a High Performer in her workplace, and High Performers didn’t kick laptops, even if they wished they could. Even if they’d received an email on Friday afternoon that inspired violence.
Rock plus kick plus magic wish, she guessed, maybe, could equal her laptop. If the world were magical and illogical, which, too bad, it wasn’t. It was defined clearly, and with purpose.
For example, laptops beep-boop, connect to the internet. They don’t grant wishes. Ergo, this wasn’t a laptop. It wasn’t even her laptop.
That was her laptop. On Peace’s desk, to the left of the SteelForce 3000, was an identical SteelForce 3000. Peace wrote FAKE on the phony’s screen in red marker, but otherwise, they had the same model, the same serial number, even the same stickers, stuckered under the keyboard.
The stickers: a cat, a Filipino flag, and the word PROUD, in big bubble letters with a torn edge. It used to say PROUD VEGAN, which was true, until she got dared by her drunk coworkers at happy hour to drunk-eat a chicken wing.
• • •
Eat! The! Wing! Eat! The! Wing!, they chanted that day. They knew she was a vegan, and they knew she was the type to never back down from a challenge. What a sick thrill they must have gotten, forcing Peace to pick between selves.
She sank her teeth into the saucy meat chunk and clamped her eyes shut. How could anyone ever eat this stuff, knowing that factory farms GMO’d chickens to be thrice their natural size so that Americans could enjoy thrice the breast meat? Big-ass chickens, bones crushed under the weight of their supersized bodies, hella skin disease from being pressed up against each other’s shit and piss in tiny cages. Peace knew her coworkers wouldn’t stop staring until she finished the wing. She licked a glob of sauce off her lip. It wasn’t bad, actually. She couldn’t taste the chlorine they’d soaked the chicken corpses with at all.
Stomach spasm!
Panic inhale, panic exhale. Accidental burp. Small quantity of vomit, kept secret in mouth. Small quantity, reluctantly swallowed.
Fact: normally, drunk burp plus tiny vomit equaled big vomit.
Also a fact: Peace heard Marco snicker.
Marco, who slathered all that pomade in his hair, suppressing what she knew were full, black curls like hers.
Marco, who over-pronounced every word he said, trying to hide his thick FOB-y accent. He always talked over Peace in meetings to say exactly what she said, but with the unearned confidence of a man.
Marco, who “joked” to coworkers that Peace was not a real Filipino because she didn’t know any of the languages, and when she angrily confronted (emailed) him about it, he replied with a list of hiking trails that she could visit to calm her mind.
As a nation, Peace thought, the United States must abolish ICE: a disgusting and oppressive organization. But if it had to exist, she’d call them on Marco.
After hearing him snicker, Peace knew which self she wanted to keep.
Peace loved meat. Always had. She only ever gave it up because of her college roommate, who, come to think of it, was kind of pushy.
Meat made her strong, it gave her energy. It did not make her armpits stink at all; in fact, she always thought it made her smell better, more powerful.
Peace missed meat so much! Specifically, chicken. Specifically, how her dad used to make it: marinated in garlic, soy sauce, vinegar, brown sugar, and served with rice and cut-up tomatoes from his garden. She wished she hadn’t gone vegan before her dad passed away—she’d not gotten that form of love from him in a long time, and now she never would again. Fact: she chose some trendy, fake-ethical lifestyle over what could have been a few more moments of her father’s affection.
Before she knew it she had gnawed and lapped off every bit of flesh from the bone. She slammed the little wing down in victory. Her workmates cheered. Marco shut his ass up.
#
Peace was proud, but Peace was not a vegan. So, she tore the sticker and discarded the piece that did not describe her.
If she didn’t? That’d be so fake. Like getting a tribal tattoo and not being in a literal tribe. Playing pretend!
“You are not my laptop. You are pretending. What are you, really?” Peace asked aloud.
“Are you interested in the latest update?” asked the laptop via pop-up window.
Fact: what she said, plus what the laptop said, technically equaled conversation. She checked her surroundings, and once she was sure she was not in some sort of Japanese prank show, clicked YES. She wanted the latest update.
The laptop beeped. Booped. Connected to the internet.
And downloaded the latest update.
Whatever. What was she gonna do with two laptops anyway?
She wished it was a cat instead.
• • •
Leon licked his paw, which he would never have done as an egg, a cloud, a rock, a horse, or a laptop. This was a new urge, a cat urge, to clean himself with his tasting organ.
The open mailbox in front of him got up from its chair—no, not a mailbox. A human girl with her tangled hair in a bun and her mouth agape. It always took a few moments for Leon to adjust to his new body—the Steelforce 3000 object recognition software still lingered in his head.
Not to worry. This, like all other things, would come to an end.
Leon’s ears perked up. He had heard nearly every sound over the course of history—sobbed when humans uttered their first word, danced when they beat their first drum, gushed when they first created the genre they called dubstep. And yet; he had never heard a song as beautiful as this.
His legs moved, trance-like, towards the mailbox/girl, drunk on the sound.
“Pspspsps,” she sang. He hopped into her lap to see if a lesser distance would cheapen the tune, only to discover: it did not.
“You are a cat,” the girl said, examining him closely.
Leon was a cat. And then a stapler. A song.
A dash of salt! Sprinkled into and made indistinguishable from tamarind soup, swallowed, and converted into calories. A thrilling journey through the various states of being.
The ghost of Peace’s third-grade teacher Mrs. Feldman! No one had ever wished Leon into another plane of existence before—how wistful he was for a husband he never had, much like enjoying a good cry.
The rapid-fire changes dizzied Leon, but as the girl wished, scribbled, and diagrammed furiously in her notepad, Leon could not help but feel gratitude for the opportunity to experience so many mind–body combinations. He went from Leon the Candles to Leon the Romantasy Novel, from Leon the Chocolate-Covered Strawberries to Leon the Small Pink Bullet-Shaped Buzzing Device.
And finally, he was Leon the Man, but Polite, Extremely Respectful of Boundaries, and Non-Murdery, and Also Hot, Maybe, Whatever, Not Important.
The girl handed Leon a towel. He wrapped it around himself, shaking from the cold of nudity and also from transitioning out of being a vibrator. The girl backed away, so he backed away, too.
“My name is Peace. And I come in Peace, ha ha,” she said.
“I am Leon, pleased to meet you.”
Peace asked Leon if he identified more as a person or a thing. She wanted to climb up the appropriate decision tree regarding the use of him as a vibrator, hoping to arrive at sex stuff: okay and not sex stuff: unethical.
He cocked his head, brain still buzzing, then said, “I identify as a man. Polite, extremely respectful of boundaries, non-murdery, hot, maybe, whatever, not important.”
Peace dragged her hands down her face.
Through the gaps between her fingers, she said, “Right, but you’ve also been a laptop, a rock, and a dash of salt, and if you can be all of those things, you aren’t really any one of those things.
“Spoons can’t be forks—if they want to be both, they have to be neither.”
Leon stared blankly at her.
Peace continued, “Understand? You are neither spoon, nor fork. You are some sort of spork.”
Leon closed his eyes, digested the information, and nodded, understanding.
“Okay. Let’s try again. What are you?” Peace asked.
“I am some sort of spork.”
“Jesus,” she groaned, “New question, what were you, at first? Before anyone ever wished you to be anything. What was the original, elemental you?”
Leon felt compelled to stroke his chin. What a neat human gesture. It was like massaging words into his mouth area. He then rubbed his temples, massaging words into his brain area, surprising himself yet again at how naturally humanity came to him.
“The first thing I was, was an egg,” he said.
Peace nodded, clicked her pen, and began writing anew.
He went on, “Not long after, I made contact with a sperm and became a fetus. Eventually, a small, wet baby. One of five wet, sticky babies, actually. My mother’s name was Camille. My father: Leon. The seven of us were so cramped in that dreary, gray London apartment. Flat. London flat. But life, I find, is not about where you are, but what you are. And what we were, was …? Happy. Until they died! My parents, in an automobile crash. And guess who was in the car that killed them? My one true love, who, by the way, I was forbidden to see, as her family was staunchly supportive of the Conservative Party and mine, of Labour! Tell me, Peace, do you think I will ever love again!?”
Oh, Leon could have gone on forever, trying on different accents and gesturing dramatically with his big meaty hands. What a goddamned thrill! A rush to the head it was, being human. His history, though improvised entirely, felt so essential to how he viewed himself. As a rock, whether he was igneous or sedimentary was of no import to him—most rocks acted rocklike. As a human, every attribute imbued him with meaning. Leon was no longer just a man, but a Londoner—in love, in grief, and in search of his siblings, who, he decided just then because it so excited him, were separated from him after the automobile crash.
All of the biographical bits of trivia he invented had a weight to them; arrangeable like machine parts, their joints clicked into place, becoming an assembly more magnificent than any one part on its own.
He loved it all so much—the sheer possibility—that he couldn’t help but purr and lick his little paw.
• • •
Hate liars. Love cats. Here for a long time, not a good time. That was the bio on every one of Peace’s social media profiles. When she wished Leon could be a cat, forever, so that he would finally shut up, it was so her. So Peace.
Coffee on the conference room table the next day, so beige from the milk it was almost white, was so him. So Marco. Peace never understood why Marco bothered drinking coffee if he didn’t actually like it. Why pretend? Just do cocaine instead. Then she could really call ICE on him.
Marco, asking Peace about the weather—Peace, pretending not to hear Marco—so them, waiting for their manager, Charlie, to join the conference call. In classic Gemini fashion, Marco was using the gift of speech to talk about something as superficial as how warm it was today, as opposed to yesterday, which was, what, a little less warm?
She felt her blood pressure rising.
Her hatred towards Marco felt irrational, yet inevitable. If she had been born in a different century, on another planet, pursuing a different profession, she felt like there would still be a Marco, interrupting her during meetings, and laughing at the way she pronounced her last name all Americanized—Labrador, like how you would call a white family’s dog. In caves, arguing over what to kill for dinner, in high schools, kicking each other’s chairs, out in space, vying for planetary dominion—she felt like there would exist, everywhere and at all times, a game of Marco Peace-o: the universal call-and-response of two mortal enemies, dancing like opposite magnet ends, attracting, repelling, attracting, repelling, so as to perpetually be in vicinity, but never in tranquility. Always, forever, into infinity.
“Let me begin,” Charlie began, “by saying: we are a family. That means as manager, I’m sort of the papa of the team. And the staff are my children, my babies. You both, in particular, are my best babies. My number one and two …”
Marco hit the mute button on the conference phone and turned to Peace, grinning.
“Who do you think—?”
“You’re number two,” she interrupted, forehead pressed down on the table, waiting for Charlie to get to the point.
“… and as in all families, Papa must think about who will take his place when he gets promoted to Regional Papa, fingers crossed. And the who that I picture has always been you: Marco and Peace, Peace and Marco. Hand in hand, work husband and work wife …”
Peace picked up her head and squinted at the conference phone, mouthing what, mouthing the. Marco clasped her hand lovingly. Peace sunk a pen into his arm.
“Fuck!” he cried out, laughing a little.
“… so imagine my embarrassment when the current Regional Papa told me she saw two of my more diverse staff, at the bar last week, highly intoxicated, screaming at each other about chicken wings! Care to explain yourselves?”
“Charlie, I can assure you—” Peace started to say.
Marco hit the “unmute” button and chimed in, “Charlie, I can assure you, Peace and I will apologize to the Regional Director immediately, and reiterate to her that our unprofessionalism should not reflect upon you as a manager.”
Peace was in the middle of saying a thing, and he interrupted to say the same thing, louder. She thought of that whatever it was at home, masquerading as a cat, and the way it refused to acknowledge itself as an imitation. How cute, that the two of them could fool themselves into thinking they were doing anything but cosplay. Peace knew better. She knew exactly who she was. Every action, every decision, diligently taken into account.
“Marco, I appreciate you saying that so eloquently and with such confidence, as you always do. But I’m going to have to revoke your status as High Performers.”
Peace gasped.
Fact: Peace earned a High Performer rating in every performance review since she joined the firm, due to her reputation as a driven and organized person. The High Performer rating was a deciding factor in all promotion decisions, it was a shoutout in the company newsletter, and it was a guarantee to a twenty-five dollar Starbucks gift card. But most importantly, it was a consistent and regular confirmation that she was of value.
Also a fact: Peace came out to her father as a vegan when she sat down for an elaborate and carnivorous spring-break-welcome-home dinner. The food was already cooked and plated—she felt like a huge brat, and apologized immediately. It was no big deal, she backtracked. She could eat meat at home and be vegan at college. In response, her father took her face into his hands and said, “Anak, it’s okay. Vegan, vampire, I don’t care what is your diet. I just care what is your truth. No half-half. Stay here, I will go back and make you some human blood. Or salad? Which one are you again?”
Was Peace of value if she wasn’t a High Performer? Or would that be half-half? Saying she was one thing, when there was evidence pointing otherwise? Would that be pretending?
Marco noticed the awkward silence that followed, and stumbled to respond to Charlie, riffing on process improvement this, driving results that, until Charlie said he had to run.
Boop, said the conference phone, disintegrating Charlie into a million pieces and flinging him somewhere across cyberspace. Marco looked at Peace, sighed, and collected his coffee mug, pen, and notepad, which Peace realized was filled completely with doodles.
Peace did not move for some time. She was waiting for a boop of her own, so that she, too, could disintegrate into a million pieces. It would be an opportunity to put herself back together; this time, correctly, and in the way she envisioned.
• • •
Leon glared at Peace from behind the living room curtain. This was the first of many cat behaviors he was surrendering to. Soon, he would be licking his paw, purring, napping, etcetera.
Peace, returning from work, spotted Leon, grabbed him by the armpits, and embraced him on the couch. As his cat fat spilled uncomfortably around Peace’s arms, Leon tried to remind himself: nothing in this world was forever.
This was a lie, of course. Leon was a cat, forever, just as Peace had wished. The opportunity to be anything else was long gone—even in death, his wispy ghost essence would, he assumed, take the shape of its container: tiny, furry, quadrupedal.
He considered running away from Peace, but he had been a house cat many times before—he knew they valued, above all else, a curious combination of luxury and vengeance; regardless how far away he ran, he would always be compelled to return, eat out of her hand, and bite a finger. He would never fully escape once his cat-ness fully took over.
So Leon stayed, and watched Peace watch television.
She watched a lot of what the television categorized as Murder Mysteries with a Quirky Female Lead. And when she finished those shows, the television recommended her similar shows, under similar categories, starring similar actors, written by similar people, all of which she watched dutifully. She listened to music in a similar fashion, stuck in an infinite loop of consuming and being suggested a genre called indie alternative dreampop. The streaming data flowed from her phone to her ears to her brain and back into her phone.
Peace once asked Leon what he was. Leon didn’t know, didn’t remember. He was whatever anyone wished. He never wondered why, or what deity made him this way—he simply was. It was satisfying enough for him to be anything at all.
Peace, on the other hand, thought she knew exactly what she was.
When shopping online, she was beholden to brands—when online dating, beholden to types. She added to carts and swiped on human bodies with startling speed and self-assuredness, saved songs to playlists without waiting to hear the ending. Leon never once saw her try on a hat to see if it suited her—she knew exactly who she was and always would be.
How curious! She was a human, with the power to be vast, to be limitless, and she chose to be specific? Oh, how Leon longed to feel change once again, how he longed to show her what was possible! To hell with—Leon coughed lightly, then violently, until a hairball escaped his throat.
To hell with specificity!
One night, when Peace fell asleep, Leon sought his revenge. He pounced through the house with precision and fury, stomping on her DevaCurl shower products, gnawing through her Swedish minimalist furniture, and throwing the full weight of his body at every mirror he could find. For a moment, he became distracted by a ball of yarn, pawing it back and forth, following it with his eyes, until Peace opened her bedroom door and shouted,
“Stop!”
Leon did not stop. He pounced onto Peace’s desk and clawed the stickers off the SteelForce 3000: PROUD, Filipino flag, cat. She chased after him, but he was too quick, too sure of purpose. Branded company swag: torn up. Pictures of her family: peed on. She didn’t need these things, these shorthands for her identity, tiny boxes to shove herself in.
“I wish you were a rock!”
Instinctually, Leon braced his body, ready for his bones to become rigid, but they never did. Oh, to hear a wish, without granting it! How freeing! It wasn’t his choice, of course—he was less of a wild horse and more of a free-range chicken. Roaming, in captivity. But after millennia of being told what he was, this mode of defiance felt distinctly like progress. Like change.
He leaped onto the living room table, and eyed the remote control, the device that kept his owner locked into a cycle of bright images and identity-based reaffirmation. If only he could remember the password to reset her account or opt out of recommendations. If only he could remember how to use the remote at all! Hazy and lazy, his brain gradually became. He mashed the buttons. That one was for forward. That one, backward. This one: pause? Paws.
Leon licked his paws. Purred, napped, etcetera.
• • •
Peace held the cat up to the light and it sang a sweet meow.
What an ungrateful little shit. She gave him a home, and he destroyed it! All over the house: tipped chairs, torn fabric, food scraps, fecal matter, shattered glass, a dead bird from outside. Was he mad at her?
Peace did him a favor! A few weeks ago, she asked what he was, and he didn’t know. He was whatever anyone wanted. Open to interpretation, like an empty wall on a city street. By wishing that he was a cat, forever, she commissioned a mural. Who knows what they would have drawn on there otherwise?
Marco, for example, always greeted Peace in the office by saying, “Hey, what’s up, dude?,” in a surfer accent. Which was a dig, right? At her Filipinoness, Filipiniality, Filipinaeity, whatever the hell the proper word was—how would she know? She was morena, she could never pretend to be anything here other than something-American, never considered that her brownness was an identity that could be faked. And still, Marco kept insinuating that she was whitewashed. Meanwhile, his light-skinned ass probably held the blood of a Chinese tycoon or Spanish conquistador, and he had the nerve to hint that she was the faker?
Her dad was dead. The language that he spoke best died inside of her years ago. She grew up seven thousand miles away from most of the people who knew him. If she was not absolutely clear about who she was and who she came from, people like Marco could fill in that blank themselves. She refused to let anyone perceive her without her participation. Was this excessive? Overdramatic, maybe? Hell, yeah. She was a Scorpio.
The cat crawled into her lap and she shoved it off—it was dirty, and it had wronged her. She sighed and pulled it back in for an embrace, because she loved cats, always had. She pushed it off again when it licked her face. Its mouth smelled like dead bird.
In the bathroom, Peace splashed her face to remove the stink. When she looked up, the mirror was not on the wall, but on the floor, in many pieces. Her ear was in one piece of glass, her bottom lip in another. She toed the shards together to try and recreate her face, but gave up. The image in front of her would never match up to the one in her head.
Peace had suffered from OCD (self-diagnosed) since she was a kid, and it was acting up again. She picked up a glass shard and threw it in the trash. Fifty-three more shards plus twelve-ish bottles of hair product squeezed out onto the tile that she had to mop up. What else was there? Stain removal, cloth mending, replacement shopping, this in the trash, that in the trash. Head craned down, she trailed around the house, counting each item that needed trashing. The count reached the dozens, and her heart quickened. It reached the hundreds, and she gnawed at her lips. When the five hundreds came, she realized she wasn’t counting trash anymore, just counting. Counting and walking, aimlessly around the house.
By the thousands, she reached her home’s front entrance. The cat was below, pawing at the wood. Did it want to go out? Peace turned and pulled the knob. The cat looked up at her and coughed.
Then bolted out.
Instinctively, Peace gave chase. The plush lawn was pleasant to run over, but the solid pavement punished her fluffy thighs, which she only ever used for modern activities such as standing and sitting. Her lungs shrank, shriveled, and expelled dust from her childhood. She wanted to stop, desperately, but she couldn’t. She had to go after it. It was her cat.
Well.
Unclear what it was, really. Big subject of confusion for her. For him, too, honestly. Sure, a minute ago it was her cat, but it wasn’t just a cat, it wasn’t ever just anything. Anything it ever was, was asterisked by the potential to change. A rock that could be a laptop, a staple that could be a song. That was the most consistent thing about Leon. Change. Even after she wished him into a cat forever, he still managed to flit back and forth from cutesy to chaos, from quiet blob to quick blur.
Peace got about halfway down the street before stopping to plant her hands on her knees. She panted and watched the cat turn a corner.
Yes. It was her cat, once. But it was also a lot of things.
• • •
A month later, Peace was asked to submit a self-evaluation for her quarterly performance review. What qualities did she possess that made her eligible for the title of High Performer?
Fact: she was driven.
She typed the word driven.
Fact: she was organized.
She typed the word organized.
Fact: a week passed before Peace even attempted to clean her house. Every day, she came home and tiptoed surgically through the debris to her bedroom, where she shut the door and laid in bed for hours, scrolling mindlessly on her phone. She didn’t wash her hair, cook any meals, or go outside. She only ever got up to peek out her bedroom window, looking for stray cats. A stray cat. She saw it once, in her yard, and never again. It curled into a ball and rolled around. Then it unraveled and stretched into a yawning, sturdy bridge. When it retracted, it shifted its weight onto its back legs, and stood upright. Like a human. She called frantically, Leon! Leon!. In response, it sat and licked its dirtiest parts, before darting off into the distance. Peace recorded the time and location of this encounter in her notepad and pulled a chair up to the window.
That wasn’t the behavior of a person who was driven or organized.
Backspace, backspace, backspace.
Peace thought very hard about what to write. She needed words that were accurate, that would be resilient when scrutinized against her present behavior and life history—words that would perfectly encapsulate the real, authentic, elemental Peace.
She shrugged, and typed the words driven and organized.
• • •