The Favourite

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Louise Osborne

__________

Nigel had arrived early at the office, equipped with a coffee from his local barista. As he
walked past the boss’ office, he could see her through the gap in the doorway. The boss was
sitting behind a large solid-looking desk with her head down fiddling with her phone.
Pausing, he heard her mutter, ‘It has to be done. He’s a liability. He said it’s untraceable,
himself. There, it’s sent.’ He couldn’t see who she was talking to, if anyone. She had finished
whatever it was she was typing into her phone and put it down. Then she picked up the
internal telephone, ‘It’s done. Bring it up.’ She leaned back in the tall leather chair and swung
her feet onto the desk, clasping her hands behind her head. Nigel pushed on before he was
noticed.

He was unlocking his own office when a lab tech rushed past him, coat buttoned tight and
clutching a small box tight to his chest. Nigel flicked on the computer and watched the same
numbers as the day before scroll past his eyes, the light of the screen reflecting on the blue
grey iris of his eyes. He rubbed them. Staring wasn’t fixing the anomaly. Neither had sleeping
on it. The lab was grossly overspent and no indication of how. He picked up his coffee and
sipped the comfort of daily life. Yawning, he closed his eyes for a moment.

He looked at his watch. His meeting time with the boss was a little later but he really needed
to reconcile this now and he knew she was there. He stood up and walked along the tile lined
corridor passing shut wooden door after shut wooden door. It was too early for the other
workers. The boss’ office door was almost shut when he got there, he swung it open and
stepped inside. Immediately he felt a sting in the back of his neck, ‘What the…’ Turning he
saw a security guard turning pale and holding a hypodermic needle in his hand.

The boss jumped up from behind her desk and ran across the room. She looked alarmed,
which wasn’t a look he often saw on her face.

‘Shit,’ was all she said, as she guided Nigel to a chair and sat him down.

She picked up the internal phone, ‘How long?’

Things were obviously off track but Nigel was scared to ask. ‘I don’t usually knock. Should I
have knocked today?’

She didn’t answer Nigel’s question. Instead she turned to the security guard, ‘Lock the door,’
she directed the guard. ‘You can stand outside if you want but let the lab in when they arrive.’

Nigel felt a surge of panic flowing in his veins, mixing with the contents of the syringe. As
the guard left, he made an attempt to get up and follow him, but the door slammed shut.

He turned to the boss, ‘How bad is this? Am I going to die?’

‘No, well not as such. But you’ll have to stay here. I’m sorry.’

Nigel, sitting down again, fixated on the wall clock. A very long ten minutes later the man
from the lab he had passed earlier arrived. He was looking flushed and fidgeting wildly with
his lab coat buttons. Nigel could hear a sound like a large truck reversing outside the
windows, along with other heavy equipment being moved into place.

Nigel was starting to feel giddy, and could feel the sweat on his forehead. He caught his
reflection in the mirror across the room, his pallor was more than a little grey. He could feel
his strength leaving him and he slumped in the chair. The man from the lab started to gently
remove his clothes from him.

‘You’ll overheat. Trust me.’

‘Trust you? What have you done to me?’

He hadn’t the energy for further accusations. He felt feverish and was slowly shrinking into
his own mind, only able to focus on the discomfort and nausea. His thoughts turned inward as
the room and its inhabitants faded and the voices were becoming distant; he could feel his
stomach churning.

The boss stared at him, horrified and mesmerised.

How long now?,’ she asked the man in the lab coat.

‘Not sure. Perhaps not long.’

‘Will he still be able to talk?’

‘No.’

‘How will he look?’

‘I’m not quite sure. He’s bigger than a mouse.’

Nigel dared another glance at the mirror. His blood ran cold despite the fever. He looked at
his hands. His whole body was now an unnatural grey. His face and torso were bloating, and
the outline of his limbs seemed to blur. The boss watched on; he could see the same look of
fascinating horror on her face. He looked at his own feet with blurry vision, they looked
webbed and seemed to be growing more and more like flippers – was it his fever and distorted
vision? His limbs seemed to be engulfed by his increasingly distended body. He tried to
scream. A grunt came out.

‘His vocal chords are regressing,’ said the man in the lab coat.

The moans and grunts dwindled into silence.

He could see himself reflected in the eyes of the boss who was up close inspecting him.
Despite his transformation into a streamlined body with shimmering grey skin, his face
somehow had a vestige of humanity with blue-grey irises peering out from under his cheeks.

‘I can still see him,’ she spat out, frowning.

‘I’m not sure why the head is that way,’ the man in the lab coat offered meekly, ‘The facial
structures may not have had the needed flexibility to transform. He is an adult.’

‘I can still see him,’ she snapped. ‘This is a problem.’

‘He can’t vocalise. Even someone close to him wouldn’t believe it actually was him.’

‘I’m not taking that risk. Get him in the tank. The kids wanted a pet, there it is.’ She waved a
hand towards the external office door, before looking at Nigel again.

‘What can he understand? Can he understand me talking now?’ she asked, leaning across the
desk, eyes fixed on Nigel’s.

‘It’s hard to say without a way to communicate. Most of the neural rewiring is peripheral. It
may be like locked in syndrome, if you want to look at it that way. Amnesia is possible after
the shock to the system.’

Two men came through the French windows with a canvas stretcher. They rolled Nigel on to
it and carried him out the back to a massive glass tank that was nearly full with water. He was
lowered in and then the tank raised and manoeuvred onto the waiting truck. The doors
slammed shut, leaving him in darkness.

Nigel was unable to think although fully conscious again. Feeling afraid and anxious, his
mind froze. They are going to drown me.

Oddly, he began to realise, the cold of the water didn’t seem to bother him at all. He didn’t
even feel wet. He was struggling to come to grips with what had just happened to him. His
body moved when he directed it, but it was a new sort of movement that felt both sluggish
and fluid. It was like his body flowed against the horizontal force of the water rather than the
decisiveness of stepping against hard ground. The force was on him, rather than him applying
the force.

Nigel was momentarily distracted by the sensations competing against the spinning wheels of
thought in his mind and the flooding panic. His fear returning, he tried to scream, to yell, to
plead but no sound came out. Not even a whisper.

He could feel and hear the truck moving. The vibrations caused the water to ripple around
him. But at what speed he didn’t know. Nor did he know where he was being taken. He was
alone. He was alone in a way he’d never known.

His mind and heart were racing. He kept pulling images of home into his mind and the
sounds of familiar spaces. It was all so clear but he could not will himself back home. He
even thought of the familiar scents of home, funny as he didn’t normally think of memories
in terms of scent – was this his new body and his new mind releasing things that had always
been there but hidden?

What do I do… I can’t ask to go home. Desperation sank in. He had no voice. No-one will
understand me if I use this body. HEAR ME. Please someone hear me. It was my life.

The powerlessness combined with the terror of what would happen next was too much
making him slump against the wall of the tank. The tiniest dash of hope that perhaps all
would be returned to him remaining beside him like a ghost. He waited with spectre of hope,
waiting in fear of the completely unknowable.

Time passed and eventually he felt the truck slowing and come to a stop. Voices, muffled,
were audible outside. Light flowed in as the doors swung open. The men looked at him; he
saw no recognition of his humanity reflected in their eyes.

‘The tank is ready. Get him in there.’

Panic rose again but no voice came out. Nigel shrunk back in the transportation tank, the
wheels still spinning inside his mind. Would he be treated with kindness? Would he be
subject to more experimentation? Where was he? What was he? Where was the world he
recognised and knew? His people. His life. His home.

Once more he found himself lifted, with the water rolling against him as they transferred the
whole transportation tank onto a motorised trolley. Now he could see where he was. Green
lawns and shrubby gardens stretched to the horizon and a gravel drive led to large iron gates
some way away. The trolley carried him around the corner of a stone mansion with gabled
windows towards a pair of green French doors.

His eyes tried to grasp at the gardens as they disappeared from view and the doors shut. Not
with an illusion of escape, but somehow the open space was less threatening than being
locked up inside the house.

He was manhandled onto a sling and raised into the air once more, the water pouring off his
back and head, before being lowered into a large aquarium. There were rocks, a cave, and a
platform. A new home?

Doors slammed shut somewhere outside the tank. The lights turned off. He retreated to a
corner of the aquarium. It was over, but what was it that happened? What was it that was
over? The thoughts swirled chaotically in his mind as the calm water swirled around his
body. One moment he was in his own world, drinking his daily coffee and staring at the same
computer screen he stared at every day… and the next stripped of all routine, all familiarity,
even his familiarity with himself. It was like his life had been erased; it had never been, and
he had never been. He was now simply a reflection of other people’s perceptions of him.

Dazed, his mind continued to reach back to what home had been. A bed. A companion. A
common language. Warmth. Favourite foods. A sense of safety. A place with known rules
and few surprises. A place of empowerment and belonging. A place of autonomy.

He couldn’t sleep. Time elapsed in the darkness, perhaps a night had passed and lights came
on again. The inside door was flung open, and two children scrambled through it excitedly
chattering.

‘What do we call him?’

I have a name, thought Nigel with fury.

‘Can we play with him?’

I don’t want to play. I don’t know you.

‘Throw him a ball.’

A ball? What am I to do with it?

Nigel had never been afraid of children before. He knew nothing of the boss’ children,
whether they were cruel or kind, spoiled or thoughtful. He studied their faces and expressions
looking for clues.

Perhaps if they understood how I feel, if I could communicate my thoughts somehow…

He opened his mouth to protest but there was no sound again, and his mute response was
taken as consent.

He tried a gesture of what had once been his hand to try and signal his uncertainty and his
fear. But the intent was lost in transmission; his listeners had no sense of his message.

They giggled, ‘he’s waving at us.’

So he sat, not dumb but dumbfounded with no way to move the contents of his mind out into
his environment; no way to connect with these other living creatures so close and yet so far
from himself.

Their empathic muteness overpowered his vocal muteness, without reaching them on their
terms he could not reach them at all.

‘He just sits there.’

‘Yeah. I don’t think he’s very smart. I thought dolphins were smart.’

‘Do you think he’s happy?’

‘He has everything he needs in there. He’s waving at us. He must be.’

‘Ok. Throw the ball then.’

What life would this be?

Nigel woke up. The coffee had spilled across his desk.

The lab accounts are overspent, on what though…

A bird tapped on the window like a finger on a tank. He stared back as it examined him with
one eye and then the other.

I had better go see the boss then…

__________

Louise Osborne‘s Chess doing his favorite thing, listening to New Orleans jazz on WWOZ90.7.

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Louise Osborne is a behavioural biologist, writer, and meditation mentor. Her work can be viewed at www.sapphoandthemountainhare.com.au. She grew up in Scotland and now lives on the Shipwreck Coast of Australia. Louise lives with Chess DeBunny in his house, he lets her stay as he can’t reach the cookie jar without her. 

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