Three of Me


# Three of Me

Being three of me is just about my limit. Sure, like most enthusiasts I've tried four instances and found the experience manageable for a few minutes, but two of me were in similar situations and I had a hard time not mixing everything up. Three is just about my limit.  A lot of times it's smart to stick to a smaller number, because after they mold you it's tough to get your money back, and then storage becomes an issue.

Alisha is coming over in about an hour to return a piece of broken art, so I'm cleaning the apartment, two of me, while at the same time I'm driving to pick up toilet paper, paper towels, dishwashing liquid, cat food and cat litter. 

I'm the source, and the me that's driving is me1 and I'm at home, and me2 is scrubbing the toilet and I'm standing in the kitchen wondering what else there is to do. 

Everything's mapped to all of us, by that I mean the sensations we feel. My right hand, for instance, is pulling a the fridge door open, gloved and scrubbing a toilet, and on the wheel of my car at the same time. 

Maybe you're wondering, "does me1 feel your other two hands"? While technically the answer is yes, me1 is just one of my containers. I'm the one feeling everything -- containers feed their senses to me. If I were picking up the cat food in person it would be about the same experience. Being three of me is like being three of me no matter which of the three I am. 

You probably know what it's like, most of us own a container or two by now.

The piece of broken art Alisha is coming by to return is one I haven't seen for years. It's fired clay in the shape of a kneeling man, with a leg missing. I broke the leg moving it off the firing shelf and onto the sculpture cart. I pulled it down through the shelf instead of pulling it over the edge and down.

The leg snapped off. 

I felt bad about it so I put the pieces in the cart and left, and didn't return to pick it up. 

Yesterday I got a voice message from Alisha telling me she'd collected it for me and wanted to bring it back, since she'd be in town. 

"Should I pack it?"

I looked her up again, sifted through her recent pictures, then replied carefully.

> Alisha - Got your voicemail. What a surprise hearing from you again! I remember the sculpture you described, how odd you'd run across it so long after our class! I look forward to seeing you, maybe we should catch dinner? Or buy it (haha)? 

> Let me know if you've figured out what to do about the missing leg.

She responded with a picture of herself smiling. It made me nervous.

I've gotten to the store and finished the toilet, and in the kitchen I've put down the garbage bag and started drinking a beer. This beer is new, a brand I've never tried until about a week ago, it's called Thirsty Genius and this batch has a fruity nutty identity and I can't go more than a few hours without opening myself another one. I have this experience with any beers in my fridge. I’m sure at some point I’ll have a problem but not now, I’m still young.

I park next to a black vehicle where a soccer family loads groceries, or rather the mother is loading and the children are fighting in the backseat. The father sits behind the controls staring out the viewport, probably wondering how his life got here. I often have that thought about the people I see, that they're wondering how their life got like this. But then people think too much about their lives, because in the end everyone goes to the same place (dies), or gets uploaded and lives in a container on Puerto Cosmos (a planet). Really the only thing anyone should be thinking about is why they don't have enough money to be uploaded, or to have other containers molded, or how to get the money before it's too late.

I start the shower, not because I think Alisha and I will  be using the shower, but there's always a chance. Also one of the last things my father told me before he died was that no matter what else I did before a woman came over, cleaning the bathroom mattered a million times more. A few days later we were at a baseball game and I was in the bathroom while my father drove one of his containers to get us some hot dogs. He was concentrating on that when a foul ball found him and killed him where he sat. A few rows up, the container dropped the hot dogs, sort of folded up and fell, sliding down the grandstand and knocking over a beer seller. I was watching the urinal screen as I peed, and saw it all. Incidentally the Cubs lost.

I scrub with the rough side of a sponge dipped in detergent, and watch grime disappear under bubbles through lab-grown eyeballs. I get a big whiff and it's like I go woozy, and because in the kitchen I'm drinking beer and at the supermarket a guy  in a scooter is pushing carts past me and reeks of body odor, there's a weird overlap of tastes and smells and I guess it's just one of those situations where you have to step back and reevaluate your current goals.

Next to cat food and cat litter on the list I add condoms.

Then I'm in the store, getting to the beer first. Beer wasn't on the list, but there was only one left in the fridge and I knew I'd want one later. Sometimes when I was nervous or excited I drank, it was a tick. She wouldn't notice. Right? Beer, then toilet paper, then - there was a whole other list of things I was supposed to get, yeah? The bleach I was using was out, wasn't it? More bleach.

I walked to the cleaning aisle and pulled down a jug of Clorox. In the kitchen I was making a tuna sandwich, and in the store I walked to the family planning aisle cradling the bleach jug like a small child. I had the smell of it in my nose because I was cleaning, and also ammonia - which I didn't remember using but - ammonia -

I got woozy in the store, and in the kitchen I put down the knife I was using to spread the tuna and mayo. In the bathroom I felt my eyes go heavy and blood fill my eardrums, then I was falling into the shower, and there was a thud that was probably my right temple striking the soap rack - but I didn't know if I was hearing it from there or from the kitchen. 

Actually then it was a lot like I wasn't in the bathroom anymore at all. Not like when you unplug a unit, and it's in the closet and you feel like you're just yourself again, and that thing is in there and in your memories and that's all, but this was sort of like having a dark blank spot where one of my containers used to be. It was a cloying empty space, and I felt like I was able to do less because of it.

_It's dead. Your container's dead._

“No, no! I’m gonna be in so much debt.” I stopped making my sandwich and ran into the bathroom. I myself slumped forward into the bathtub. The cleaning products I’d been using, ammonia among them, were scattered in the bottom of the tub, some of the bottles open and contributing each’s own toxic mixture to a bootleg sludge of chemicals. My container’s head was dunked in that mixture.

My face was dissolving away. 

“Shit!” I got so mad that I’d done this that I screamed and yelled at the top of my lungs, then finally covered my face so I could re-enter the bathroom to do something with the container. 

I had to hide it before she got here, I had to - I had forgotten about my supermarket self. I tapped back in. I was still where I was, just standing there, holding an armful of bleach and other things. I looked around. Some people were staring but not too bad. They were also shopping, which was good. Fine to leave for now.

Back in my real body I ran into the bathroom and pulled the body that looked like mine out of the bathtub. My head was dissolving, dripping and becoming puddles of goo on the tile floor.

The smell from the dissolving container was rank as well, it smelled like feet and warm beer. 

I wrapped the bathroom rug around my container’s head and then propped him up against the closet by the wall.

My phone vibrated. There was a text from Alisha.

>About 15 minutes away. It’ll be nice to see you again!

“Fifteen minutes? Fuck. No, that’s too soon.”

What was I in the supermarket to get? Condoms? That was pretty optimistic at this point, wasn't it? I was almost fully about to drop into panic mode, where I knew that for the next fifteen minutes it would feel like I was clawing for air or drowning in something.

What was I going to do? Who was going to care about being able to manage three of me? Like that was going to be a turn-on for Alisha? Everything about the plan for this evening was ridiculous. I let the apartment get disgusting and thought I could get out of it by splitting myself up. But how did I think that was a path toward success? Procrastinated myself into a jam, and now there's this...plastic and biomechanics corpse, wrapped in a rug. Much heavier than my own flesh and blood inert body, I was certain. Something that, if someone were to park, and come to the door, and be invited in, and see propped up against the closet by the wall, could not be taken for anything else as the yet-to-be-disposed-of body of a murdered chap. I had to get it out. I had thirteen minutes.

One option I had was to use the other container to move the dead one. Which meant that I'd have to leave the Walmart, drive or run home fast enough to leave me time to dispose of the inert container. If it happened I didn't make it home from the superstore in time, there was a chance that Alisha would see me leaving my apartment carrying a dead body. 

I considered as well just sabotaging the entire plan. I’d text her an amended address so she wouldn’t arrive. I’d turn the lights out and pretend not to be home when she rang. These thoughts are what ended up calming me down, because it felt funny to me to give up just because I’d been extremely cavalier with something I owned. Five thousand dollars down the drain, and then wrapped in a rug. But hey, someone who makes that particular mistake must be positioned pretty well.

As myself in the Walmart, I was now ambling slowly toward the home goods section, where there was a box filled with rugs. I looked through them, but then thought one more time - _there’s not enough time._

Still looking at the rugs, I came up with an idea. At home, I pulled the rug with sizzling plastic corpse through the living room and to the bedroom. I could stuff the rug in the closet and I could get myself under the bed. I’d turn the lights out, hide a key outside and lock the front door, then return to the bedroom and slide under the bed. My other self would return from the store with a new rug, and upon seeing her waiting on the porch would act normal. I would make it act normal - I had no choice.

In the Walmart I pulled one of the rugs out of the box. Five by eight feet. Brown checks. I couldn’t tell how heavy it was, but my container seemed to have no problem lifting it. As I walked up to the checkout line with our items, I notice there are little kids in the booster seats of shopping carts, and they’re staring at me. They’re looking at me, and they’re afraid.

“It’s okay.” My container squawks my words out loud into the store aisle. Heads turn to assess the situation - a man’s container was addressing children in the checkout aisle. Worth keeping an extra eye on, if not a straight up follow. That had been one of the arguments against containers at the beginning, that disturbed people would use them to approach children in public, hiding behind a detached avatar. I made my container bow slightly, and grimace with embarrassment. Then I turn and pretend to be checking out gum, but I’m holding his rug and it starts to knock things to the ground. There’s a magic 8 keychain and a deck of cards. The kids are up off their feet and over near me, bending down to help.

“Let him do his own driving,” the kids’ mom said. “I want to see. They say people can do everything they normally can and that they feel just fine doing it, but I have concerns.”

The cashier looked at me and nodded. “I’ve been reading on consumer reports that some people have a hard time controlling them, but it’s usually in response to some wreck they caused while at home, controlling their container drunk or something.”

“I’m not drunk,” I make my container say.

They don’t pay me any mind. The kids leave the items I knocked over on the floor and I want to to, so I just stand there until the cashier points at the floor and at me and says, “I want to see you drive it.”

I reach down to pick up the deck of cards, but I’ve forgotten that I’m holding the carpet - trying to buy something large is appearing to me now as an obvious mistake. One that looked like it was about to cost me a lot of time.

