Billy Song

Running Errands

Jen wakes up to more itchy bites. She’s ruled out bed bugs, for which treatment she’s spent thousands. The photos she posted to the “What’s Eatin’ Me” Reddit have yielded no answers. She made an appointment with her PCP and she’s seeing him today. It’s her day off and she’s running errands.

First, she goes to the UPS store. She needs to return an electric toothbrush to Amazon. She bought one, was told it was lost in transit, bought a second, and then both arrived. Because the toothbrush has an embedded lithium ion battery, the shipment requires a color label warning about the battery. The UPS associate prints the shipping label and the battery warning, affixing them to the package. “I used to worry,” says the associate, “whenever I handled one of these packages, that the battery would explode and burn me horribly.” He gives Jen a receipt with a tracking number. “Now I make it a point to tell the people in my life that I love them, in case I never get another chance.”

Next, Jen stands in line at the pharmacy, a long line made longer and confusing by people needing flu shots or consultations or who are browsing the nearby aisle, peering through locked display cases at geriatric gummies. The PA system blares an automated voice, “help needed in aisle six,” and “help needed in aisle nine.” Too many people are pressing the red customer assistance buttons because now the automated voice can’t even finish a sentence, “help needed… help needed… help needed.”

Jen passes the time by scrolling through social media. She watches videos of well-lit influencers crying to the camera. She watches twelve videos of people crying before she gets to the front of the line. She gives her name and date of birth to the pharmacist, who retrieves Jen’s normal anxiety medication plus a new seizure medication. But before she can pay for the drugs, she’s told to speak to the head pharmacist. She walks over to the narrow consultation window. “It’s very important that you practice abstinence,” says the head pharmacist “Cybersecurity abstinence. Too many people are straying outside their software ecosystems.” Jen promises him she’ll only install authorized apps.

Jen goes to a psychic, an old woman, who leads them through beaded curtains to a table where they sit. She holds Jen’s hands and closes her eyes for a long time. “Keep doing what you’re doing,” says the psychic, “it’s working for you. And don’t worry about that thing.” The psychic lights a cigarette and exhales smoke with relief. “Sorry for the smell. Not the cigarette, I mean, I live next to a big Bradford pear tree. You know that tree?” Jen shakes her head. “It smells like jizz. That’s why they call it the cum tree. If I smell like jizz, that’s why. And it makes me want to smoke.” She rotates the hand holding the cigarette. “Maybe there’s some association there.”

Jen goes to the optometrist to update her vision prescription and browse new glasses. She puts her chin and forehead on a machine that the optometrist uses to toggle different lenses. “Better or worse,” he asks, several times, moving Jen closer and closer to the right prescription. “We want those headstones to look nice and crisp.” The machine clicks as the lenses rotate. “Names, dates and epitaphs.” Jen reads letters off the eye chart and has the most trouble distinguishing between “B”s and “E”s. The optometrist replaces the eye chart with a picture of a smiling woman and a little girl.

“That’s my wife and daughter,” he says, his voice breaking. “They were brutally murdered. For the last year I’ve been physically and mentally conditioning myself through body-building, tactical driving classes, weapons training, hand-to-hand combat training, so I can get vengeance on my family’s killers.” He fits Jen for contact lenses and reminds her to come back within 30 days for adjustments.

Jen eats lunch at what Yelp calls a “diaspora cuisine” restaurant. Afterwards, she goes to a CPA to get a head start on her taxes. A service dog lies at the foot of the accountant. He looks over Jen’s W-2 and admits he can’t be certain if Jen is real or a figment of his imagination. “Jojo here is trained in reality testing, isn’t that right boy?” The dog goes up to Jen, sniffs her and places his paws on her lap. The accountant says she passed the test because if she hadn’t been real, the dog would not have responded to what would otherwise have been an empty chair. The accountant begins going over itemized deductions when a colleague enters the room and asks to borrow the dog.

Jen goes to the hospital to see her PCP. A nurse leads her into a room where she sits on an exam table with disposable paper and waits. She looks at more videos of influencers crying. In between there are targeted ads for vigilante clothes touting ripstop fabric. When the doctor arrives, Jen rolls up her sleeves and pants to show him the insect bites. He leans in to look at them and frowns. “Excuse me for a moment,” he says.

The doctor returns with an entomologist, who shields his eyes with his hand as he enters the room. He tells Jen to cover the bites back up because he doesn’t want to see them. “I need to be objective,” he says. The entomologist refuses to even examine Jen and instead suggests sleeping in her bed tonight so he can receive the bites himself. Jen agrees. That night, Jen sleeps on the couch.

In the morning she wakes up with several more bites on her lower back and her heels. She looks in the bedroom and finds the entomologist still asleep. She tries gently at first to rouse him, clears her throat, puts on gentle piano music and eventually starts clattering pots and pans, slamming kitchen cabinets and proceeding to make breakfast. She shakes the entomologist by the shoulders to no avail. He remains asleep, breathing softly, his mouth open, drooling. He seems so peaceful and probably needs the rest, Jen thinks, so she goes to work.

Jen is an engineer at a company that makes the computers embedded in sex toys. “We don’t make the cock,” Jen has fun correcting people, “just the brains that go in the cock.” At work she slaps the insect bites instead of scratching them, a technique she learned from a tattoo artist.

When she returns home that night, the entomologist is still asleep and unresponsive. So finally she asks a doctor to come examine him. The doctor takes the sleeping man’s pulse, raises an eyelid and shines a light, lifts his shirt to listen with a stethoscope and admits he has no idea what’s wrong with the guy but that maybe “sleeping beauty,” he says, “just needs a kiss,” winking at Jen. He charges her $800 for the visit. 

Jen searches the entomologist’s pockets for clues to where he lives and if he has a friend or family member she can contact. His wallet contains nothing except a punch-card for burritos and is one burrito shy of a free one. She thinks about what the doctor said and hovers close to the entomologist’s face. His lips are cracked and dry and white stuff streaks the corners of his mouth. Jen closes her eyes, takes a deep breath and kisses him. Nothing happens.

Jen rents a hospital bed and installs it in her living room for the entomologist. She places him on a feeding tube.

One night she entertains a date in her apartment. The date asks, “who’s that?” pointing to the hospital bed.

“Oh, him?” replies Jen, “He’s just an entomologist.”

The date says, “doesn’t seem like he’ll be identifying bugs anytime soon.” Jen forces a laugh. The date, feeling her unease with the joke says he’s earned the right to make jokes at unconscious people’s expense, since his own mother lay unconscious in a bed before dying. “What a terrible experience,” he says. “I never want to be in a hospital ever again.” He repeats, “ever again,” looking off into the distance.

When it comes to dating, he says the goal is to end up in a committed relationship, settle down and start a family so that at the first sign of any deteriorating condition that might require hospitalization he’ll have someone to shoot him in the head at point-blank range. “This is a dealbreaker for me.”

He asks Jen about her own intentions with dating and she replies pretty much everything he just said with the exception of a less grisly alternative for ending his suffering.

“It’s not just my suffering, it would be to end the suffering of everyone I love.”

Jen suggests assisted suicide clinics in Scandinavian countries.

“That would cost a fortune. A bullet is a lot cheaper.”

“Why can’t you just do it yourself?”

He shakes his head, “because I wouldn’t get into heaven.”

Jen points out that he would be dooming his future wife or children to hell.

“Not necessarily. You can commit murder and as long as you seek grace and repent, it’s all good.” He lists Paul and Moses as examples.

Jen thinks about this. “Well, all right,” she says and commits to a second date.

END

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Billy Suiren Song is a 40-year-old Taiwanese-American, San Francisco-based writer and poet who holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of San Francisco. Through my 501(c)(3) arts nonprofit, Decentered Arts, he hosts a weekly writers group and organize monthly open mic events, fostering community connections within the Bay Area literary scene. His work typically confronts addiction in its different forms, from illicit substances to technology to consumerism, using humor.