So I buzzed my way to this tall corporate building in the city center the next day. Up the elevator at the thirty-ninth floor I found the offices of Grummel. Well, a branch of Grummel, anyway. And apparently a new branch. The waiting room was sterile and nascent, and the desk where sat the receptionist had smelled up the entire vicinity with new mahogany. The receptionist was pale and frumpy, like human cottage cheese. I flicked a smile to her while I signed my name and she buried her eyes in her coffee cup.
There was one other person sitting in that waiting room, wearing a musty trench coat, ripped up sneakers, and bulbous sunglasses. He looked like some after school special antagonist. He was unkempt and glowed in the bright lights of the waiting room like an alien or a vampire, keeping some thin lipped grimace as he surreptitiously watched me from the corners of his eyes behind those goofy sunglasses.
I made sure to sit across the room from him, at the extreme diagonal in the box of eight chairs. But, just as my butt hit the seat, his left his seat and sat next to me.
“Harlan.”
He leaned in when he introduced himself, an effluvium of booze and the sea all about him.
I nodded in reply.
“You know you’re probably either really lucky to be here, or about to get really fucked up,” he said.
“Fucked up how?” I ask.
“Oh, I don’t know. But you are aware of Grummel’s reputation, right?”
“Sure, sure.”
“Well, what then? What have you heard?”
I told him I’d heard he prides himself to be a wizard. Harlan chuckled an unearthly chuckle. No vivacity or humor in it, just remote interest maybe. He proceeded to explain that Grummel wasn’t a wizard, and that I should refrain from calling him such things. Scientist neither, he continued. He’s a visionary, an experimenter. He called him some other synonyms, but I don’t remember what they all were because I was watching the saliva building at the corners of his mouth like he had rabies. We both ignored each other for a bit, then he tried talking to the receptionist, telling her to buy some plants for the waiting room. He didn’t suggest or ask, he demanded plants be bought. She didn’t answer and he proceeded to stare at her through the sunglasses. At some point his pupils turned from his gaze and fixed on me from the corners of his eyes without him having moved any other muscle. He thought I didn’t notice, but I started to burn up as I sensed him staring at me. A whole minute might have passed while he scrutinized me. Then he leaned back.
“I’m going to ask you a question… uh,” he prodded my shoulder.
“Joe,” I said. My name was Joe back then, you see. I wasn’t always Zig.
“I’m going to ask you a question, Joe. If, hypothetically, you had fornicated with every woman on earth except that there receptionist, would you venture to fornicate with her in order to complete your conquest?”
“What conquest?”
“Isn’t that obvious? Having sex with every woman on earth.”
“Your question doesn’t make sense,” I said quickly.
“Why not?”
“Because the hypothetical is impossible. As soon as I even plugged ten thousand women there would be girls just blossoming into adulthood. And ones that had died. And babies would just keep coming and growing at a rate impossible to deal with.”
“That’s why I said hypothetically,” Harlan explained. “You don’t need to give me an answer. I know the answer, and the answer frightens the shit out of me. You would fuck that receptionist. Of course you would. Because there would already be worse that you would have done.”
The receptionist looked up at this point. I tried to smile at her, which only made her attention focus on me.
“Hard to believe that you could do worse than that, huh?” Harlan persisted. “Fact is that after a while, after screwing so many women time after time- billions mind you!- that she would be maybe even attractive. How? Because your standards would have deviated after so much of the same thing. Hell, you would probably even start trapping squirrels, sheep and other things to have your way with. You’re a sick son of a bitch, Joe!”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, hypothetically I mean. Look I’m just frightened is all. I have to be. Otherwise I will just let go, you understand?”
I told him no. The receptionist continued to stare at me as if I had started the conversation. I kept my head down.
“Would you believe I’m immortal, man?” Harlan said.
I ignored him at this point. His talking was making the receptionist focus some deep hatred on me. But he continued to rant about immortality, mentioning and correlating silly combinations like gods, zygotes, rechargeable batteries, seers, mammary glands, and colonoscopies. All the while his head was still and staring seemingly off, but I knew that those pupils were watching me from the extreme corners behind the sunglasses. Suddenly the connections became less vague and more personal.
“It’s true. All true,” he said.
I didn’t know what he meant was true.
“All of it.” He shook his head. “Grummel, man. Did you know his company has its fingers in scientific research, product placement, even foreign trade? He’s an experimenter, man. And do you know what I am? An experiment.”
When he said this last line he stood and raised his hands like he’d won an award, startling the receptionist and myself. When he went to sit back down he pulled his chair from the wall and placed it in front of me so he could look directly at me. Which he didn’t do. Instead he stared over his right shoulder, straining a gaze at me behind the sunglasses.
“What would you say if I told you he’s found- no not found- formulated the fountain of youth? I don’t care what you’d say. He has. I’m walking proof that he has.”
At this point he leaned off balance as if he were sneaking up on a rabbit, the rabbit of my doubt. And he was going to use his words to pounce on my doubt rabbit.
“It’s like this, you see. Life is trying to beget life. But we haven’t figured out how to do it internally, only externally between two people. So what he’s done, as far as I can understand (he speaks a lot of jargon, that Grummel) is made it to where my body reinterprets the sex I have from being an extroversion to an internal re-spawning. Doesn’t make sense, eh Joe?”
I shrugged.
“Sounds crazy. But let me tell you, feels much less crazy. It’s a difference between knowing and feeling. Yeah, I mean I had to be injected with some formula. Everything needs a kick-off, right? But now it’s all up to me for the maintenance. And what is that maintenance?”
He had the rabbit now, bewildered and incapable of escape. What was he going to do with this doubt rabbit, though? Kill it or screw it?
“It’s a game, I tell you. A game. That’s what makes me know I’m an experiment. Because I can fail. And the game has very specific rules, you see? I have to have sex with a new mate every twenty-four hours. That’s the perpetuation.”
“Why a new mate?” I asked. Doubt rabbit foreplay.
“Something about the genetics, man. I don’t know. Same genetics twice is no good.”
“How do you manage that?”
“Well, Grummel offered me other rules, too, you know? He