The Metamorphosis but Make It Millennial

Autolysis

Our team was seated in cushy office chairs around a circular table, listening to Logan talk. I could just barely make out the pastels of a Florida sunset poking through gaps in the blinds. I was so exhausted. I felt dead. A single fly buzzed around the room.

Look everyone, Logan droned on, I know the client is asking us to boil the ocean here, and we’re tired from all the OT, but we’ll make it work. Take the weekend to recharge. Go enjoy an afternoon at the beach, and we’ll sync up at our Monday stand-up.

I stood up, and grabbed my briefcase, which had nothing important in it but still felt important to carry. Trish, who sat across from me, grabbed her black cardigan, and together, we got on the elevator.

So Greg, are you coming to Sandra’s party on Saturday night?

She’s moving to another firm. Should we really fraternize with the enemy?

We’ve eaten lunch with her every day for the past year. The least we can do is show up to her party.

What are you bringing?

I was thinking a bottle of wine. You know how Sandra likes her wine.

A fly landed on Trish’s dirty blonde hair, and she swiped it off. I wondered if it was the same fly from our meeting. Perhaps it was going home to recharge as well.

Damn, I was thinking of bringing wine, too.

So that means you’re coming?

I love nothing more than hanging out with my coworkers outside of work.

Please come. I don’t like these people either, but I feel bad for Sandra. She’s worried no one’ll show up.

I’ll be there. I’ll be there.

Excellent. See ya tomorrow night, then.

Trish rushed out the door before I could return the goodbye. I stood there for a moment, and the elevator doors shut. Only the fly, and I, remained.

That first fly was an annoyance. The second, a suspicion. By the time the tenth arrived, it was a confirmation. A confirmation that I was dead. Not sure for how long.

Looking back on it, I could have died at any number of points on that Friday. Maybe it was after my morning run, or during our daily stand-up. Perhaps it was during my lunch break, or my afternoon meeting with Logan to talk about my future with the company. It really was unfair, dying on a Friday. How was I to enjoy my weekend, dead? Not that I had enjoyed a weekend in the years since I started working for a consulting firm.

I took the job because the interviewer seemed enthusiastic about my unique skill set. We totally need someone with your worldview on the team, he’d said to me in my final interview. We’ve got English majors, business majors, a few STEM people, but we don’t have anyone who studied anthropology. And it says here you’re fluent in Spanish, too?

I told him I was and gave him a brief summary of how I used those skills on my senior thesis on the attitudes of conservatives toward Spanish in the Panhandle, and as the words came out of my mouth, they felt like nonsense to me, a garble of academic jargon barely comprehensible. The interviewer nodded like he understood, eyes wide and impressed, and said, Your skill set would be useful here for sure.

I’ve never used Spanish at work.

The lie I told myself–I’ll take this job, work for a year or two, and then I’ll get my master’s in Latin-American studies. Five years later, I was trapped in the corporate lattice. Even though my LinkedIn clearly listed me as a senior consultant, I did not know what my job was. I fussed over PowerPoint slide orientation and attended expensive conferences in cities like Chicago and New York, where I busied myself doing nothing. I accepted the job with the idea it would allow me to travel, but I didn’t realize the special torture that was traveling to cities only to stay inside conference centers for a weekend.

Dying wasn’t exactly what I meant when I said I wanted to use my degree after graduation. And I wasn’t exactly using my full degree, just a blip on it, a forensic anthropology unit from Intro to Anthropology. Now that I was dead, I reviewed the stages of bodily decay. I was in Autolysis now, and depending on when I died, would enter Bloat soon. In all honesty, I was excited by all this, anticipating what would come next and when. My death had clear stages I could track. I had gained back some semblance of control.

On Saturday, I woke up to a cloud of flies zooming around my head. I was stiff all over. I had started decomposing. More accurately, I was self-digesting. I was motherfucking self-digesting. Isn’t that amazing, that even though I was totally and completely dead, my body was cannibalizing itself? I was turning myself into energy for what remained of me.

I forced through the stiffness and sat up. The ocean outside my window was especially blue that morning. I hadn’t gone for a proper swim in years, but I got up most mornings for a run along the beach. Today was no different.

I examined myself in the mirror, and other than the flies, I looked pretty much like myself. The bigger changes would come later. I slipped into my Nike running shorts, made sure my Apple watch was hooked up right, and started out for my Saturday morning 10K run.

Maybe it was the wind, or the speed, but the flies left me once I started out. The waves licked the hard edge of the sand where I ran. There were a few families on the beach and flocks of squawking seagulls. I thought I saw one eyeing me, but they stayed back, too. When I got home, I checked that my run had been logged on Strava. It had, and people had already started giving me Kudos. It felt good to start my Saturday so productive and even better for everyone to know about it.

Even though I desperately didn’t want to go to Sandra’s party, I didn’t think dying was a good enough excuse to miss. I ran through Total Wine & More and grabbed a Zinfandel I hoped Sandra would like.

The party was everyone from the office, so it felt like Friday 2.0, just with more booze. I tried to join conversations, but it was all about Sandra leaving. It struck me that we talked about her like we talked about dying, in euphemism. I passed away. She wasn’t passing on an opportunity. She was moving on to better things. I was moving on. She had been rolled off every project to date. I would soon be rolling in my grave.

Drunk Trish told me about the coworkers she wanted to fuck, and I nodded and laughed at the right points. I was almost normal. In that nighttime Florida humidity, every insect found me. Mosquitoes attempted to suck me dry. Flies settled up and down my arms. I stationed myself by a citronella candle and still they hunted me down, their new life source.

On Sunday, I called my mom, lied about having gone to church, and then explained that I was dead. That’s nice, honey, she said, do you think your insurance will cover that? I’ll ask on Monday, I responded.

Bloat

On Monday I did not have time to be dead, so naturally, I went to work. It’s not like I had much of a work-life balance before. Bloat had begun, and I was starting to smell and swell. Flies bore into my body, making homes in my crevices. Over the weekend, I bought an XXL suit at Goodwill to fit my new body. I slathered myself with deodorant before leaving and hoped I wouldn’t get fired. Blood started seeping from my mouth, and I made a mental note to buy alcohol-free mouthwash next time I was at Walgreens.

Lisa noticed the new suit and asked what was up.

Must have eaten too much fried food at the party, I said. Just feeling a little bloated.

I’ve got some Pepto if you need it.

Thanks, but I think I’ll be alright.

Work was surprisingly normal, and for once in my life I welcomed the ennui. It soothed my anxieties about being freshly dead.

After work I met with my trainer, Brady. He told me not to worry about the sudden apparent weight gain, that we’d convert it into muscle soon, but I doubted that. It was leg day, and he had me stretch before working through what I assumed was an excruciating workout, though I felt nothing. On each machine, I left a slimy snail trail behind. I wiped it down as a courtesy.

That night, I lay in bed surrounded by flies. I amazed myself at the organism I was becoming. The flies procreated on my body, laid their eggs, became maggots, molted, and died. I was a marvel of biology, a host to a whole colony. I was a fly factory. It was the most productive I ever felt in my entire life.

On Tuesday, I FaceTimed Andrea, a friend I met studying abroad in Bolivia. Back then, she had been passionate about healthcare in rural villages. We had talked about applying to the same master’s programs. She was now working for our corporate office in New York.

Andrea was always trying to get me to transfer, telling me she could pull strings to get me a cushy job with her in Manhattan. It pissed me off, the implication that I couldn’t make it to New York on my own.

She seemed unfazed by the flies buzzing around my head. No, she was enthused by it all, saw me as a project, a branding opportunity.

You totally have to come to New York and open up a bakery in Hell’s Kitchen. You can sell shoofly pie. It’ll be all over Instagram. You might even win a James Beard or something. I was fucking this guy working over at Condé Nast. Maybe I could get Bon Appétit to do a write-up on you. Please, you’ve got to come to New York. We’d have so much fun here.

I’ll consider it was all I could say, and that seemed good enough, because she launched into a summary of her life in Manhattan, her favorite nook of Central Park, which Lady M was the best. She kept talking and kept circling back to my flies but never back to me.

Or no, you should totally start a YouTube channel. Those are botflies I see, right? The ones burrowing into your skin. You totally should make pimple-popping videos but with flies. We could call your channel The Bottom with Botflies. People would love it. I read this thing on LinkedIn where corporate execs are bringing in people with huge pimples to squeeze them. It’s like a stress ball but human. Totally therapeutic. You could make videos for that. It’d go viral for sure.

Wednesday at work was particularly trying. The client wasn’t happy. Logan wasn’t happy. So we weren’t allowed to be happy.

After work, I sat on my yoga mat and pressed play on my phone. The meditation practice began. Harry Styles told me to close my eyes, so I did. Flies swarmed around me. These flies are just clouds passing by. Note them, and let them go, I said to myself. Note them, and let them go.

I breathed in and out to the counts of the narration, or at least imagined the breaths. I emptied my mind of the day, of getting yelled at for misspelling the client’s name on a PowerPoint twice, about the traffic jam on the way home from work, about passing Publix and not being able to go in and buy a Pub Sub. I emptied my mind. The flies kept buzzing. I noted that. They were clouds in the sky of my mind, sliding by, harmless.

The house was silent except for the flies. The more I noticed them, the louder they got. They roared. I snapped up, grabbed a magazine from the coffee table and started smashing it across my whole body. I screamed, flattening flies until there was a splattering of guts oozing out onto my TJ Maxx carpet.

There were too many. I couldn’t kill them all. They kept screaming, and I wanted to cry but couldn’t. My tear ducts stopped functioning long before I’d died. I lay down and tried to meditate again. Every time Harry Styles told me to breathe, I got pissed.

I cannot breathe, I thought. Where is the meditation app for the dead?

On Thursday, I stared in the mirror for an hour before going to work. The sulfur my body was producing bronzed me. I always wanted to be the buff, bronzed beauty. Now, I was. Like Brady. I was beautiful.

Logan asked me to stay after the stand-up for a quick chat.

So, he said, we’ve noticed something’s up. Everything okay?

We sat across from each other in the conference room. His smile was so welcoming.

Well, I said, this is going to sound crazy, but I died last week.

I knew it, he said. Oh, this is perfect!

Perfect?

Well, not perfect, I mean, the smell isn’t great, definitely not good for the office ecosystem, and you know we can’t give you a private office until you’re on the right spot in the lattice, but I mean, for diversity, this is good.

This is good? My dying is good?

Well, see, we were talking to Andrea up in New York. You know Andrea, right? She said you knew her. Anyway, we’ve got this big diversity summit happening in June, to coincide with Pride Month and everything. We’ve got people from almost every minority going, but we don’t have a dead guy yet.

You don’t have a dead guy yet.

I stared at Logan and thought, Is this what I want to become? The no came so quickly, I couldn’t believe I hadn’t reached this point sooner.

Logan, I said, I quit.

And I got up and left. Without my briefcase. Without anything.

On Friday, I did nothing but lay on the beach with my new bronzed body and watch the seagulls circle above.

Active Decay

I was still getting up for my almost daily runs and meeting with my trainer. No longer bloated, my skin leathered. I looked like a deflated balloon.

After one too many seagulls divebombing me to nibble on my skin, I’d taken to running in my neighborhood. I passed rows and rows of houses filled with strangers, who I’d never been curious about before, but suddenly felt an intense urge to know. Who were these people I’d lived so close to for years but never even seen?

On one of my runs, I was about a mile away from home, enjoying the rhythmic patting of my shoeless feet on the pavement. Since I couldn’t feel the sun-soaked asphalt, I’d stopped wearing my Nikes to run. It was freeing.

As I passed a fenced up yard, I heard barking. Then I saw it, a massive German Shepherd, yelping at the fence line, eager to get out and chase me, the mobile wishbone.

I sped up a little as I passed the house, hoping to get my stench far enough from the dog that it would leave me alone. Then, I heard it, the insistent snarling, the fence breaking, the pounding of four paws fast approaching.

I sped up, trying to escape the barking dog. Others joined it, and soon I was being tailed by a force of dogs of all sorts. There were Chihuahuas, bulldogs, and golden retrievers. I saw from the corner of my eye socket an Alaskan Husky, which seemed a cruel choice of pet for the Florida heat.

I sprinted. I was almost home, but they were still there, that first German Shepherd at the helm. Just outside my apartment, it tackled me, forced me to the hard asphalt, and started ripping at my chest. It reached its jaws in and pulled out bits and pieces of my innards. I felt nothing but humiliated. The other dogs joined. They tore me apart, organ by organ, until all that was left was bone. Bone with an Apple watch.

I got up and walked the final few yards home. Inside, I took off my watch and soaked my bones in the bath. When I was finished, I checked my phone. Someone commented on my Strava-logged run. Those are some fast splits you’ve got there.

I deleted the app.

My hair lasted longer than I expected. My teeth did, too, but they eventually fell out. I collected them and placed them under my pillow. Maybe, I thought, just maybe the tooth fairy is real, and she can bring me a retirement plan and insurance.

 Skeletonization 

It was unfortunate I couldn’t have died in October. I would have been a hit at Halloween parties. But instead, I was a skeleton in spring.

All I wanted in college was time—time to read and study Spanish and travel. And now that I’d been given it, I was miserable. No job. No need for food. Enough savings to pay my rent for two years, tops.

I spent some of those early days in the ocean, feeling the rush of saltwater blow through my ribcage. I thought about just walking out until the sea floor dipped into the abyss. I could sink and sink and sink until I hit the bottom. I could recline on the ocean floor and bathe in the sea snow, those flakes of detritus slowly raining down to the great below.

I stayed at home reading, but quickly hit my Goodreads goal of twenty books a year and lost interest again. I walked in parks a lot. I finally went to Disney and Universal. I drank butterbeer at Harry Potter World, even though it just dripped through my jaw bone onto the floor. I rented a Lamborghini in Miami and drove to Key West. Speeding along the highway, my bones whistled. I played with Hemingway’s polydactyl cats. They loved the way my bones tasted. I giggled as their sweet papillae-covered tongues tickled my skeleton.

On one of my park visits back home, I stumbled upon a massive Live Oak. Its octopus arms seemed to stretch on forever. I got close and hugged it. I wanted to be enveloped by something so old but so alive.

I rested up against the trunk. It was so cool in the shade. Clouds slid through slots in the tree’s many branches, momentarily covering up the blue sky. The grass poked up through my ribs and the holes in my pelvis. I thought I felt something, a beetle maybe, crawling up my spread-out arms. The flies had long left me, and I welcomed the company of these other insects. It was there, staring up at the sky, and I was struck by inspiration.

Bees would find me. They would make me their host and honeycomb the space in my rib cage until I dripped amber. My body would become a factory for generations of bees. This is where I’m going to spend the rest of my life, I thought, not as an empty promise, but as an actual declaration. I had no want for food or water. I could stay here the rest of my waking hours. I imagined the tree growing around my skeleton, absorbing me until we were one, until I was whole again.