Mr. Glome’s Follow Up

I made it through all the Monday classes. Worked on what was becoming a full page colored pencil drawing in Design, failed to come up with a monologue in Drama, Played Exploding Kittens (SFW edition on NSFW cards) at lunch, and managed to give as well as I got in English.

I should probably mention something about Intro to Physics. Yeah, I should really get around to that.

Tech that night was finishing painting the platforms. I had brought a smock and packed my painting jeans (which were also now my period jeans) in my pack. I changed in the changing room, which seemed both appropriate and lonely. The play list was Alice and Chains, the work was exhausting.

Autumn and I chatted on the way home about Pokemon, her parents latest argument (something to do with money, but she didn’t know what), the last Muppets movie, the upcoming Star Wars movie, and the Chinese position with regards to Taiwan juxtaposed against the Bush Doctrine. I’ve made one of those up. Guess which!

She didn’t want to go home, but felt like she should go home, and so she dropped me off. Mom wasn’t home yet, so I made a snack and went up to my room to chat on the server or do whatever teenagers do when bored. I was trying to figure out if I should masturbate first and then do homework, or homework first. I walked into my room, threw my pack on my chair heard an “Ooof.” And shrieked.

Mr. Glome picked my pack off his lap and set it down carefully, “Miss McKinnon. How are you?”

I tried to decide whether to be mad at him, taking up more than a couple of seconds, before deciding to push off the decision until later. “Dirty. Wait here while I take a shower.”

“Certainly.”

“On my planet, it’s customary to shower alone.”

“I’m aware of this.”

“It’s also customary not to look at people through the wall of their house as they shower.”

I got the impression that he was doing his best not to look amused, which tilted me a little further toward feeling angry.

“I gather you wish me to observe this custom?”

I gave him a tight smile, “Please.”

I closed the bathroom door, stripped, and washed a gallon of black paint off of my hands, arms, face and hair. By the time I was clean the water had taken away all my vinegar. I had accepted that, whatever he wanted to talk to me about, it was something at least moderately important.

I came into the bedroom in a towel, pulled clothes out of the closet and off the floor, and went back into the bathroom to change. When I came back out Mr. Glome was twirling around in my chair. “I’m back, you can stop being bored now.”

“Of course Miss McKinnon. I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m here.”

“My guess is this is a follow up appointment. You’re going to see if I can extend my knees all the way, and whatever.”

It would be really gratifying to say that this deduction took him by surprise, but it didn’t. “You understand that it’s far more complicated than that.”

“I do, and you already know it. Do I have to take my clothes off for the examination?”

“Not at all,” the alien’s eyes disappeared and left holes in his skull you could see light through. “Pulse eighty nine, lungs clear, liver and kidneys healthy, ovaries in good shape.”

I sat on the bed and swung my legs a little bit. Mr. Glome’s eyes returned, and he pulled out a tablet and started writing things down. “Any pain over the last four weeks?”

“My period felt I was getting scrubbed out with a steel brush. Otherwise a headache now and again, but that’s all.”

“Good,” The alien stood, “I have to palpate the region.”

“What does that mean?”

“If means I’m going to skoosh your scar and see if it hurts.”

“I thought I couldn’t feel it.”

“You can’t. This will be uncomfortable in other ways. May I?”

I didn’t feel like trusting the thing, as calm and urbane and likable as he—it—was. “What’s in it for me.”

“You might like to know if you have an infection and are likely to die soon.”

“Would be convenient. Palpate away.”

He stood and came over to the bed and then his head disappeared, followed shortly by his arms and then most of his upper body.

For no reason at all I flashed to a childhood memory. The first time I had seen a dead animal. It was a cat that had been plowed over on the side of the road. I was walking with my dad in the summer heat. I pointed at it, and said something, and he told me not to touch it and just kept walking. I remember feeling confused and dirty. I guess I would have been around four years old.

But the memory was different that time. I don’t remember what I was wearing or what I looked like, but in my memory flash I was a little girl, not a little boy.

And then that feeling left, Mr. Glome came back, and I could remember it correctly again. “What the hell was that?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you what you might have experienced. I wouldn’t have any context. But everything there looks good. You appear to have healed very nicely and will be making a…” he gave a soft chuckle, “‘full’ recovery.”

“Not feeling very full right now.”

“I may have mentioned that I don’t have any context. I can assume one of any four genders.” The alien sat down in my chair again, and spun his hands 360 degrees (in the wrong axis) as he put them on his knee. “You have questions.”

I nodded a bit, and took some time to compose my thoughts, “So, I have a gender lobe? What else do I have?”

“All the normal things that you wouldn’t be able to see or touch. You evolution matrix, your temporal sense, things like that.”

“Is there…” I paused and then rushed into it, “Is there a sexual part?”

“Sexual organs? I’m afraid Vonnegut was wrong about that.”

“No, like… like my sexual attraction… corpus… thing?”

Mr. Glome sat forward and put his chin in a hand that had first too many, and then too few fingers, “I’m afraid I don’t understand what you mean.”

I was feeling on the verge of tears, and fresh and clear at the same time. I still looked away and ran my fingers over the bedspread, “Is there something that could make me gay?”

“Oh. Yes. I’ve heard of homosexuality.”

“Or bisexual, whatever.”

“These terms mean little to us, so I’ll try to understand what I can. I don’t believe there is anything in your hypercortex that controls your sexual gender preference. I could always be wrong. I have a joke for you, Miss McKinnon.”

“What is your joke, Mister Glome.”

“What do you get when you cross a cow with an octopus?”

I shrugged.

“A visit from the ethics committee and an immediate revocation of your funding,” He smiled and his lips disappeared behind his teeth. It made him look like a particularly proud skull.

It was hard to laugh in the face of that, but I gave it a try. “I understand. This is some Nuremberg type shit.”

“Indeed it is. As much as we might learn, cutting into a human just to see what makes you tick would be both wrong and terrible. But Miss McKinnon, I don’t believe that you are suffering from any damage to a homosexuality part of your brain.”

“Oh.” Well there goes that theory.

“Did you have any homosexual thoughts while you were a boy? Do you have new thoughts? Do they cause you distress?”

“Are you writing a dissertation?”

“I have a report. There will be a paper. My name will be on it. You can choose not to answer.”

I let out a deep sigh, gave up on decorum and laid down on my bed. I found myself on my hair, and fluffed it out from under my back. “I didn’t have old thoughts. I do have new thoughts. I was distressed. Now?” Eye roll, directed at the universe and my place in it, “Now I don’t know. I want them to still be distressing. I want to want to not think them. But they’ve came so much I couldn’t stop them.”

Mr. Glome paused for a second. I couldn’t see but he made it seem like he was writing things down. “My insight, Miss McKinnon is thus. You were a boy. You may not have been a homosexual boy. You are a girl now. Being attracted to boys would not make you homosexual.”

I flopped my arms on the bed. After a long moment I said, “I’d come to pretty much the same conclusion.”

The alien stood, “I’m afraid I have to go. I’ll be back to check on you in a few months. Shortly before my capture.”

As weird as this conversation had been, talking to him had made me feel better. I didn’t want it to be over. “Is there a way I can contact you?”

“Easily arranged. Write me a note.”

“How do I get it to you?”

“Just write ‘Dear Mister Glome’ at the top of the note.”

“Then what?”

“Then write the note. I’ll be watching.” And the alien disappeared again.

There was a thing he said that I should have found important. I lay there for several minutes trying to remember what it was. I gave up when mom came home and we got dinner.