Salamanders
Gina had heard about P.O.V. Swap Therapy™ from her sister, Cassie, a plant-based intuitive healer and peddler of therapeutic oils who safeguarded her home with crystals. Gina and Cassie met every Tuesday morning for tea in Gina’s kitchen, which was pristine, with white countertops, stainless steel appliances, and compartments within compartments so that every mixing bowl and steak knife had its own place. In that crumb-less world, Cassie looked like a crystal-studded cockatiel in a mumu; her hair even fanned up into something resembling a headdress. Gina, on the other hand, kept her curly brown locks pulled back in a tight bun, like always. She didn’t trust anything that combined the words “healing” and “energy.”
“This is science,” Cassie reassured her. She placed a business card in Gina’s hand, cocooning Gina’s fingers within her own. “And you need this.”
In addition to a phone number, the card contained three questions:
Are you in a relationship?
Do you feel alone?
Are you often ignored or misunderstood?
Gina checked all three boxes.
Gina was initially drawn to her husband, Michael, because he was predictable. Michael wore slippers well after they wore holes, rode his exercise bike for 30 minutes every day and drank one glass of red wine each night with dinner—no more, no less. Gina admired his discipline.
Before she met Michael, Gina had been a rudderless art student. She had a thin portfolio of half-finished work by the time she met Michael at the student bookstore.
“They’re parthenogenetic,” Michael said.
“Excuse me?”
“The females can produce offspring without meiosis.”
Gina thought he’d mistaken her for someone else.
“It means they don’t actually need sperm,” he continued, grinning. It would have seemed creepy had he not looked so young. “Some scientists believe there have been all-female societies of salamanders for millions of years!”
Gina stared at the lanky kid in his button-down t-shirt and too-short jeans—whom she later learned was a PhD student studying wildlife biology—and wondered why he was telling her all of this.
“Sorry,” he continued, face shiny, cheeks flushed. “You looked interested.” He pointed to the spotted salamander on the cover of the textbook he held. Gina realized she must have been staring.
Gina was charmed by his politeness and earnest interest in salamander trivia. She liked the way his hazel eyes seemed to change color as he talked, like a mood ring. Three years later, Gina had a degree in interior design and a ring on her finger. She and Michael rented an apartment two blocks away from his job as a research biologist at the city aquarium, and Gina found sporadic work in corporate office design. She didn’t love consulting, but it kept her busy as she supported Michael’s ambitions.
Their life together was a series of patterns imprinted over divisions of time. Mornings began with coffee, Wednesdays a trip to the grocery store. Gina had her bimonthly book club and quarterly design conferences, while Michael had weekly department meetings and semiannual seminars. Sex was scheduled into their shared calendar, which made it predictable and efficient. Gina found she preferred it that way. Their relationship wasn’t passionate, like Cassie’s had been. But it also wasn’t barren, like Cassie’s had become. With Michael, sex was a topic reserved for salamanders. He’d return from work each day with charming tales of his fertile amphibians, most of them female, one of whom he’d named Gina. She was his favorite.
A few weeks before Gina first learned about P.O.V. Swap Therapy™, Michael had told her yet another story about Gina.
“The little minx!” he laughed after sipping his wine.
“Tell me more,” Gina urged from the other end of the table. She loved his stories of Gina the salamander. It was the only time words poured out of Michael’s mouth like a flash flood roaring through a tight desert canyon. With Gina the salamander, Michael transformed back into the young and excitable PhD student with whom Gina had first fallen in love.
“We now know that Gina has mothered dozens of baby salamanders with genetic material from five different males! Can you imagine?”
“Wow.” Gina leaned over her pot roast, which remained untouched. She stared into Michael’s hazel eyes, searching for hues of violet and green. But his irises never fully met her gaze.
Michael picked up his knife and fork and angled them over the brown lump of beef on his plate, but dropped the utensils before he could cut it. Instead, he looked up at Gina. His smile had faded. “She stole genomes from their sperm, then stored them in her body until she was ready to fertilize her eggs.”
His eyes matched the pot roast on his plate. Gina shifted uncomfortably in her chair. Michael’s meaty gaze seemed to target her as he spoke of Gina the salamander. She felt as if he was accusing her, Gina the human, of stealing sperm and silently plotting her own pregnancy without him, as if that were possible. Human Gina was 42. And she would never dream of silently plotting anything against Michael. He had once explained that having kids was not conducive to his career, and Gina acquiesced without a fight.
“Five!” The smile returned to Michael’s face. He cut off a corner of his pot roast and stuck it in his mouth.
“What a hussie,” Gina joked.
Michael continued to smile. He looked down at his plate and chewed the dry corner of meat.
“I’m a bit jealous,” Gina added. She made her voice low and sultry. She never did that. She wasn’t sure where that was coming from.
Michael sipped some wine to wash down his food, then took another bite. “What?” he said with a mouth of chewed meat. He had not heard a word from Gina the human.
The morning Cassie first mentioned P.O.V. Swap Therapy™ to Gina over tea, Gina figured it was a hoax. Anyway, she didn’t think she and Michael would qualify, since he wouldn’t be back in the city for another two months. But Cassie insisted she try.
“He’s a toad, Gina.”
“That makes him sound slimy.”
“He has no idea what’s going on with you.”
“He’s just quiet.”
“He has the listening skills of an ant.”
“Which is it, ant or toad? He can’t be both.”
“Does it matter? He’s not a husband.”
Cassie didn’t agree with Michael’s decision to take a three-month research fellowship over 400 miles away to study a threatened species of mountain salamander.
“There’s nothing for you there,” she said while gripping Gina’s shoulders. When Gina explained that Michael’s job as a research biologist meant he had no choice but to leave the city for work, Cassie shot back: “No, Gina. The most important thing is his relationship with you.” Cassie had recently been dumped by her husband of 15 years and was perhaps unreliable counsel in this regard. She sipped her tea then turned to Gina. “I’m sure Michael’s affair is much more benign.”
Gina raised an eyebrow. “Michael has issues… But for a man who’s spent his whole career studying the same species of rare amphibian, I don’t think loyalty is one of them.” She re-crossed her legs and smoothed her skirt.
Cassie squeezed an amber dollop of agave nectar into her tea. “The imagination does wild things, Gina.”
“Not with Michael, it doesn’t.”
“Hm,” Cassie hummed, staring down at her drink as she swirled the steaming liquid with a metal spoon. “We’ll see.”
When Gina called the number on the back of the business card, a scientist named Dr. Armani expressed interest in Gina’s situation precisely because of the distance between her and Michael. The distance would allow scientists to test their technology across a geographic divide. P.O.V. Swap Therapy™, Dr. Armani explained, used neural technology that worked like an EEG but looked more like a bicycle helmet. Basically, with intracortical microstimulation, the helmet could trace sensorimotor information in one participant then transpose that transsynaptic activity onto the brain of another.
“It’s really very simple,” the doctor went on. “Your active thoughts will emerge like pictures in the mind of your partner, and vice versa.”
Scientists had tested this remote technology with mice to some success but had never tested it on humans, so they were starting light: one 10-minute session, five minutes per partner, each day for four days straight.
“Forty minutes total. Of course, you’ll come into the lab for some brief instructions, and to pick up your intracortical-microstimulation device,” Dr. Armani added. “Then you’ll return at the end of the week for your debrief. We can put Michael’s device in the mail today so you can begin as soon as next week.”
Gina hesitated. “I’m not sure it will work for us. Michael and I never talk. Not deeply, anyway.”
“But you won’t be talking. You’ll only be listening—both of you.”
“On the phone?”
“If you’d like.”
“Listening for silence?”
“Listening for thoughts.”
It didn’t make sense.
“Are you saying we don’t have to be on the phone for the therapy to work?” Gina asked.
“We recommend talking on the phone to confirm your availability and your intentions,” Dr. Armani explained. “But technically, you don’t have to be on the phone. Our hypothesis is that you don’t need contact—physical or otherwise—to connect.”
We could be part of history! was how Gina pitched it to Michael over the phone. She wasn’t surprised when he responded with silence, then asked, through sporadic static and clipped words, to pau--- the con-----tion unt-- he retur--d to the city. Gina complied, hung up, then sat in the quiet of their empty apartment. She felt resentment toward Michael, as she often did, when she sat alone in their vacant apartment and he spent time with his beloved amphibians. Gina the salamander is the lucky one, she sighed. Then she thought: Gina wouldn’t put up with this. She would take what she needed. Gina sent a follow-up email to Michael the next day, imploring him to reconsider.
Michael sent a one-word response: Fine.
The first day of P.O.V. Swap Therapy™, Gina rode a rickety elevator down to the basement floor of a nondescript office building with toothpaste-colored floors. At the end of the hall, five metal folding chairs lined each wall, eight of them already occupied by people who had also signed up to gaze into the mind of their significant other.
Gina sat at the end of one row. Her grey sweater brushed against the tanned arm of a woman in a neon-yellow romper who appeared to have arrived straight from the shores of Club Med. The woman in neon smiled, then looked at the man next to her. He had a belly as big as a bowling ball, which stretched the buttons of his pineapple-print t-shirt. He stared at a phone. The woman rolled her eyes.
“We’re here because he doesn’t know how to communicate,” she said, jabbing the air with her thumb in his general direction. The man sat slumped in his chair and didn’t look up.
The door at the end of the hallway opened and a man in a white lab coat holding a clipboard emerged, followed by a young couple. “Remember, it’s not the helmet, it’s you,” he said, flashing a bright set of chompers. The couple locked eyes, then grinned. “Alright, you two, see you tomorrow.” He had a smooth baritone, like a radio host or a lounge singer–a man of many talents, to be sure. There must have been a good reason why he was here, doing this, Gina thought. She took it as a sign that P.O.V. Swap Therapy™ was a worthwhile pursuit.
“Wexler?”
The woman in neon stood and hoisted a purse onto her shoulder then smiled at Gina. “It was nice to meet you,” she chirped. “Jerry,” she whisper-screamed at her slumped-over beau, then crossed her arms. The man dropped a leg to the floor and proceeded to slump along behind her as she scuttled up to the man in the white coat.
“Right this way,” the man crooned before shutting the door.
Gina scanned the room and noticed two middle-aged men in matching khakis reading magazines, as well as an older couple doing a crossword. As her eyes panned left, the woman seated across from her cleared her throat.
“I couldn’t help but notice you’re not here with anyone.” The woman had a slight build and an angular, chin-length haircut, which accentuated her large eyes. She was probably in her mid-40s but had the air of an over-caffeinated child. It didn’t help that she wore overalls and Crocs. “Are you participating in the trial on your own? How fascinating!”
“No.” Gina smiled. How could she possibly peer into her own mind with her own mind? “My husband is on a research trip out-of-state. We’re trying the therapy apart, as an experiment.”
“Wow!”
“Yeah, we’ll see.”
“They let you take the helmets home?!”
“He’s a scientist, so they consider it a ‘peer review.’”
“Incredible!”
Gina pursed her lips and tried to grin.
“She doesn’t mean that.” A voice emerged from an open newspaper beside the woman with angular hair. The newspaper folded over to reveal a woman with a drop fade and track pants. “She can’t handle long silences, so she feigns interest in others by asking questions and raising the pitch of her voice. But really, she’s completely uninterested in everything you have to say.”
“Fuck you, Molly,” the woman with angular hair muttered. She opened her mouth to speak, then sighed and re-crossed her leg away from the other woman’s sandal as the woman in track pants raised her eyebrows with an I-told-you-so look, then went back to reading the news.
It was then that Gina wondered whether allowing her husband to peer into her mind was really a good idea. She was desperate to know his thoughts, but what would he see in return?
“Wissler-Vitello...”
The couple in khakis stood with eager grins. They held hands as they walked toward the man in the white coat, just as the woman in neon and the man with the bulbous belly exited.
“So wonderful to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Wexler. Remember, this is a week-long process, so don’t be too disheartened by anything you may have learned during your first session. We’ll see you again tomorrow. Welcome, Wissler-Vitellos!”
The woman in neon smiled brighter than her romper as she floated down the hallway toward the elevator doors. Her husband dragged his feet behind her, not once looking up from his phone.
Later that day, after meeting briefly with Dr. Armani and getting a helmet of her own, Gina sat at her kitchen table and stared at her hands. They looked dry, with lines like desert canyons, crooked and cracked. Normally, Gina worried about leaving marks—fingerprints, smears, smudges—on the white surface. When Michael came home from work and noticed even a small smudge of grease, he spritzed the tabletop with cleaning solution then wiped the prints away with a paper towel. He never blamed Gina for anything. But Gina always felt guilty when he cleaned, like she should have noticed and cared enough to wipe all evidence of herself away. Now, she thought, it was fortunate her skin was too arid to be seen.
Gina forced her hands beneath the table, then stared at her cellphone: a dark rectangle surrounded by shiny, pristine white. She recalled what Dr. Armani had said: Make sure you’re comfortable. The device works best when you’re your best. Gina wasn’t sure what that meant, but she liked her kitchen well enough. She took a deep breath, then called Michael. The fact that he picked up was the first mark of success.
“I’m in a qu--t conf----ce r--m,” he confirmed.
“A conference room? I can’t quite make out what you’re saying…”
“Yes, a quiet conf----ce ---m.”
“Ok, a quiet conference room…”
“YES.” Michael’s voice, though calm, sounded loud.
Gina’s body grew tense. Michael seemed annoyed. Gina decided not to ask Michael to repeat himself anymore. “Ok, good. Do you have the helmet?”
“The what?”
“The helmet!”
“My god, Gina, y-- d--’t ha-- to yell.”
Gina was embarrassed by her outburst. She wanted badly for the procedure to work. She wanted to connect with her husband. But she feared it was pointless, or a scam, like Cassie’s courses in intuitive healing. Nevertheless, she put five minutes on her phone’s timer, then tried to think about Michael, just as Dr. Armani had instructed. She drew a blank.
“Did you see anything?” she asked after the timer went off.
“I ------- -- weren’t sup----- to talk.”
“Yes, you’re right,” Gina’s voice fluttered. “We aren’t supposed to talk.”
They made it through the second five-minute stretch in silence. And in the blank walls of Gina’s mind, where Dr. Armani told her she’d see visions take shape as Michael’s desires unfurled—she saw nothing. Gina worried, as she often did, that she was doing something wrong.
“I know we’re not supposed to talk, but do you think it’s working?” she asked.
“Look, Gina, I do-’- wa-- to ---appoint -ou, bu-—”
“Never mind!” Gina interrupted. She felt a visceral sense of opposition to whatever he was about to say. “Never mind, I don’t need to know. Let’s go back to being silent.”
“G-na, -’m concerned—”
“Stop!” Gina was spooked by her own urgency, as if her thoughts were not her own. “This is a scientific process, and we’re going to follow the protocols, then reassess at the end of the week.” Michael was the scientist. Who was she to bark commands? “Dr. Armani said we don’t have to be on the phone for this to work, so let’s commit to a time and agree to wear our helmets then. How’s 5 p.m.?”
“Fine, -ut—”
“Ah!” Gina took back control. She felt powerful. She liked it. “That’s all I needed to know. I don’t think we should talk anymore. I’m confirming 5 p.m. Now I’m ending the call.” And she did.
Gina considered what Dr. Armani had said about feeling comfortable in her space but didn’t know what to do about it. She had learned how to organize a room, but she wasn’t sure, anymore, how to make one feel comfortable. She called Cassie.
The following day, Cassie arrived a few minutes before Gina’s session with a sage-colored shoulder pouch and a plastic wagon with two trash bags, like New Age Santa tye-dyed in earth tones. She set a row of cola-colored stones atop Gina’s bedframe— “to remove unwanted energy”— and removed at least a dozen pillows from the trash bags, which she placed on top of Gina’s bed. Then, like a ribbon dancer in slow-motion, Cassie waved a smoking bundle of dried leaves around Gina’s bedroom “to cleanse the space.”
When she finished, Cassie clasped both hands and bowed, slowly backing out of the room. After clearing the doorframe, she stood and popped a hip. “I’ll be in here if you need me! Just sipping my tea!” She held up a mason jar.
Gina closed the door.
This time, at 5 p.m. sharp, Gina set her timer and tried to clear her mind, hoping a vision might stir. She pictured Michael’s marbled eyes, the way they shifted in sunlight from green, to tan, then back again, sometimes showing specs of violet. She loved the way the colors morphed. It was the only part of Michael that seemed to change…
Gina then pictured Michael at work… or, what she envisioned when he told her stories of work… She saw Gina, the salamander, in Michael’s palm just below his pinched grin, looking back at Gina with bedroom eyes, sneering, that minx…
The timer went off.
Gina opened her eyes and noticed chipped paint on the ceiling above her. She felt strange lying in bed, wearing shoes, smothered by pillows, surveilled by a phalanx of smoky quartz. As her nostrils sucked up clouds of cedar and white sage, Gina questioned what she was doing. But she took a deep breath, kicked off her shoes, reset the timer, and closed her eyes.
She breathed deeply, sucking in the woody air, sending it back out as breath. After several cycles, Gina began to see shapes emerge behind her eyelids…
Dark, amorphous figures flickered, like shadows cast on the walls of her mind… Tan and blurry… Then singular… A shadowy figure emerged, its surface glistening like a wet river stone reflecting afternoon sun…
As the curved surface gained more definition, bright, translucent colors popped into view: mossy greens, school bus yellows, popsicle reds, autumnal oranges… The colors twisted as they moved across the large shape, curling in one direction, then bending in another, as if slithering—wait, they were slithering, like salamanders… dozens of multi-colored salamanders slithering across a damp surface…
Of course, Gina smiled to herself. How predictable.
Coils of salamander tails, sweating swamp water, flicked droplets as they continued to twitch their tongue-like bodies across that space… She could feel it, the smooth, wet surface dripping with amphibious squiggles…
The timer went off.
The door swung open.
“So?!”
Gina was stunned.
“You’re glowing!”
“It was… great.”
The next day was the same. Cassie pranced around the room with ribbons of smoke then poured herself some tea. Gina pictured Michael, his eyes, his lab—then closed her lids and began to see her, Gina, along with dozens of her salamander friends.
Wet squiggles… coiled tails… pops of color… slimy bodies slithering over one another… no beginnings, no endings, just cores, heartbeats, moving as a single mass, writhing over a curved surface, as if hiding something, or protecting it…
It looked like a body… a woman’s body… yes!… somehow Gina knew it was her body, clothed only in multi-colored salamanders and their mucusy outer membranes… They curled and unfurled all over her skin, pitter-pattering their sticky little salamander feet across her ankles, her hips, her thighs, her breasts, twisting in rows, constricting her body beneath their stickiness, like rope…
The timer went off.
“Well?” Cassie cracked the door and grinned like a jack-o-lantern with all its teeth. She lowered her gaze. “You look awful.”
Gina breathed heavily.
Cassie walked over to Gina’s bed and slammed both palms into the fluff that flanked her. “I knew it!”
Gina pushed Cassie away like an excess pillow, then sat up. What if it wasn’t her?
The next day, despite some trepidation, Gina prepared for her last session with Michael. Just as she’d hoped, Michael’s visions continued where they left off:
… the squiggling mass of salamanders closed in around her skin, holding her tight, forcing stray curls of soft, wet skin to pile on top of one another, on top of her… sending bodies slithering down the multi-colored mass on her belly, inching closer to the space between her thighs, the warmest, darkest space they could find… which is what amphibians do… what Michael wanted them to do… she felt her body begin to burn, and suddenly… the squiggling mass was inside her… squirming… crawling in… slithering out… Gina’s skin tingled and sweat… her body swelled with amphibious life… she could no longer differentiate the parts from the whole… all she could see… inside… outside… was Gina…
The timer went off.
Gina opened her eyes but stayed in bed. As she stared up at the crack in her ceiling, she grew worried. Michael’s obsession with salamanders was unhealthy. He spent too much time in that lab.
In the kitchen, as blue lotus petals unfurled in her teacup and a bit of smoky quartz grew warm in her hand, Gina struggled for the words to describe her experience to Cassie.
“It was….” Gina didn’t want to say she’d turned into a salamander. She focused instead on the feeling. “Sexy.”
Cassie let tea dribble out of her mouth, back into the jar. “Sexy?”
“Yeah.”
“Michael?”
“I know… but it was.” Gina sat up straighter in her chair then took a sip of tea. She didn’t fully believe herself, but she wasn’t sure how else to explain it. “I felt powerful.”
Cassie covered the bottom half of her face with her jar, obscuring her reaction. She took a sip then shrugged her shoulders. “Well, at least he wasn’t filling your brain with lizard science.” Cassie snorted. “My god! could you imagine?”
Gina recrossed her legs.
“I’m excited for you,” Cassie said as she gathered her sacred objects and walked to the door. “You look happy.”
The day of her final debrief with Dr. Armani, Gina rode the rickety elevator down to the basement floor of that nondescript office building with a sense of hope. But as the elevator doors parted to reveal the puckered face of the woman in neon, Gina realized it would not be a day for niceties. The woman—who today wore a hot-pink t-shirt with the phrase “Boss Lady” on it—charged into the lift before Gina had a chance to exit, leaving the man with the bowling-ball belly sighing loudly beside her neon afterglow.
“Jesus, Eleanor,” he grumbled under his breath.
“What, Jerry. What. Am I too much? Do you want to smother my face with a pillow?!”
Gina slinked past the couple unnoticed as the man let out another dramatic sigh.
“I never said that.”
“Well, you thought it!”
The elevator doors closed.
She suddenly worried what Dr. Armani might say. She tried to shake it off. So what if her husband fantasized about her as a salamander? He was a biologist. It made sense.
At the end of the hall, Gina sat across from the woman with angular hair and the woman in track pants, the only other couple in the silent waiting area. The woman with angular hair wrinkled her nose and moved her hands apart, as if reverse-engineering a clap, and mouthed the words: “we’re separating.” The woman next to her looked up, and they both fell silent.
“I’m sorry,” Gina mouthed after the woman in track pants looked back down.
“It’s a good thing,” the woman with the angular hair mouthed back.
Gina thought again about her most recent session with Michael and worried she was a fool to feel optimistic.
“Anansi?”
Gina slithered down the hallway toward Dr. Armani’s office.
“Hello, Mrs. Anansi,” the man in the white coat murmured. “Dr. Armani is waiting for you.”
Gina had never heard him so somber. She wondered if the lab knew what happened during her sessions with Michael and the man in the white coat felt embarrassed for her. Maybe the helmets had recorded their thoughts, and now both Dr. Armani and the man in the white coat believed she’s married to a man with perverted salamander fantasies.
“I’m so sorry about all this,” Dr. Armani said as Gina sat at her desk. Dr. Armani’s long, dark, silky hair was tied back in a ponytail behind her pearl earrings. “You’ll be happy to know we received Michael’s intracortical microstimulation device in the mail this week, fully intact.” She smiled. “It’s good to know they travel well.”
Gina stared at the doctor.
“The helmet,” Dr. Armani emphasized, noting Gina’s confusion. “It was returned to us early this week. We must have had the wrong address.” She turned her palms to the ceiling.
“Right.” Gina forced a grin. “The helmet.”
“I know, it’s little solace for a whole week lost, but the good news is we corrected the address we had on file and, with your permission, can send the device to Michael today.”
Beads of sweat collected at Gina’s hairline.
“Are you alright, Mrs. Anansi?” The doctor cocked her head, hollowed her cheeks, and examined Gina like a biological specimen.
“No. I mean, no, I don’t want to continue with the therapy.” Gina stretched her mouth into a line and shrugged.
“I understand,” Dr. Armani said. She seemed sympathetic as she stared at Gina, eyes like two dollops of caramel floating in cream. “Not everyone is willing to share their private thoughts with another.” Dr. Armani handed Gina a stack of papers and asked for her signature to formally terminate the procedure. She smiled. “We’ve had three cancellations already this week.”
As Gina signed the forms, it hit her that there would be no final debrief because there was never a procedure. Michael would never know what was on her mind. Gina would remain alone with her visions, alone with her thoughts, isolated in a sea of slippery, slithering bodies.
Gina thanked Dr. Armani for her time, then thanked the man in the white lab coat for holding the door. She stared at the toothpaste-colored floor, feeling her nylons swish, listening to her clogs clip-clop, as her thoughts turned to Gina. She wondered what was on that salamander’s mind. She wondered whether Michael even cared. Then she wondered if it mattered. She was his specimen; he was only there to observe.
Gina closed her eyes and imagined what it would feel like to live in a parthenogenetic world, taking what you need, storing it in your body, creating life on your own terms, on your own timeline, for yourself. She opened her eyes, lifted her head, stepped into the elevator, then pressed the button for the ground floor. As the rickety cab rumbled up the elevator shaft, Gina bent a knee and leaned against the greasy, metal handrail, gripping it firmly with her clammy hand.