On the overcrowded maglev streaming through the city, a man of Orlanda’s rough height positioned himself directly in front of the door. He was too close for comfort but with the car packed there was hardly any wiggle room and Orlanda felt awkwardly stuck.
Symbolic, she thought, of the bigger stuckness. She had been brooding, and fairly aggressively, about the latest confrontation with her boss. Harold – and why all egotistical shmucks had to be named Harold was a great mystery to her – had called her into his office just that morning. It was the latest in a long series of squabbles over her commitment, her focus, her loyalty. Even her choice of shoes which he saw as lacking luster. But the most annoying thing of all was that she was never quite sure during these sessions whether Harold was berating or seducing her. Dressing down or undressing. Such was the insidious evil of all Harolds everywhere.
All this in spite of the fact that the work in her nanolab was going well. It was thanks to her that the company would soon have the jump on a system that could inject nanobots into the mucosa through a nasal inhalant. And not just fix-it bots either but neurobots, linguabots, calculobots. You would soon be able to learn Portuguese just my shoving a tube up your nose and shpritzing.
So what was his problem?
Orlanda was getting good and worked up in the privacy of her own brain about all this when a boy wearing SimSpecs entered the train. He was braying at some dumb virtuality inside of them as he wedged in behind her and pressed Orlanda like a pressed leaf against the man facing her. Naturally she jostled and adjusted and made the best of it, but no matter how hard she tried, she could not move far enough away. Not in body nor in mind. It was like pressing your face up to a mirror, she thought. And suddenly the anger at her boss, the regret at missing that promotion, and the delicious idea of getting her resume together…all these were squeezed out by the man before her.
The trip between the lab and the burb where Orlanda lived was not that long. She could have walked the distance in an hour and done more for her heart. But she had gotten lazy in many ways and the train was only one example. And now, trapped too close to a total stranger, only one thing loomed. Orlanda tried to ignore it, tried to inch away from it physically and mentally, tried to daydream around it. But it was rush hour on the maglev and there was no leeway for any of this. No way out. No ignoring it.
There it was right there in front of her.
That nose.
Too close, too looming, too present.
In fact, as the train swooshed forward riding the thinnest cushion of magnetized plasma, the nose seemed to be poking her, probing her, pinning her back against the boy standing behind her.
Repulsive, she thought, and rude too.
Orlanda might have screamed at this point but she stifled it. Instead, she closed her eyes, dreamed of dinner, wondered what was on the Glob that night, and prayed for the next station. But it was no use. Think of anything, she thought. Even of Harold with that slightly leery frown he could muster while finding faults. Or the way he would lick his lips with a wormy tongue as he waited for her to explain herself.
But that was no good either. Peeking out from under closed lids, it was still there taunting her. There was no avoiding it. And so, like a phobic facing her fears, Orlanda opened her eyes full bloom and looked directly at it. The offending organ only seemed to look back daringly but Orlanda was stubborn as well and faced this nemesis with the courage of a grunt.
It was a wide nose, an impressive nose, grand as a monument yet familiar as a cough. Even mysterious in a mysterious sort of way. Close in like that, Orlanda had to slightly cross her eyes to resolve it. And that, in turn, narrowed her peripheral vision to the point that the nose was soon all there was and all that mattered. The stranger had, in a sense, become a nose. Just that and only that.
All this was no idle speculation since Orlanda, of course, knew a thing or two. In fact she had commissioned the Nasal Metrics study to help in the design of a delivery system that would work in most noses. She knew all about nares flares and nostrilosity and canal ratios. But all this was technical, knowledge about rather than knowledge of, distant and rational.
Yet here before her was the real deal, burly and blunt. Orlanda suddenly felt she knew very little about the object of her own research. What little snigger of fate, she wondered, had delivered her to this nose at this moment? Orlanda started to shake her head at the irony but that meant almost rubbing noses with the stranger and so she held perfectly still and studied it instead.
The nose before her began between the eyes at a dent in the brow ridge. Just like all noses. Fair enough. Yet only slightly below this spot she observed a telling ridge. It was a small edge formed by skin pulled tightly over a misplaced bone. Hint of a former trauma, a childhood accident perhaps. Had the man fallen off a hoverboard or a bike? Or had he been punched by a local bully? And if that were the case, had this nosy fellow punched back? Orlanda for her part would probably not have. She hated confrontations, never felt comfortable making her case, arguing back. Maybe that was just the kind of drive that Harold had been complaining about. Except that she knew the rumor about the woman in the Genelab with no IQ who had gotten the bonus because she wore tiny skirts.
Fucking Harold, Orlanda thought.
But back to the nose.
It boldly thrust downward after this ridge, then up and off the plane of the face, leaving the cheeks behind as it soared frontward, putting the tip slightly out of focus. At this point, it veered somewhat jauntily to the left, the leading edge of a great ship slightly off course. Who would own such a nose, she wondered as a sway rocked her back and gave her a wider view. Selfish man, brunt of a man, always looking out for himself. Rich perhaps, but through the consistent abuse of others.
That was a fancy way of putting things, she thought. Orlanda had her research but no poetry. She never read Rostand on the subject, never heard of Tycho Brahe and his copper knob, knew nothing of the theores of Galton or the bizarre ideas of Freud’s contemporary, Wilhelm Fleiss, regarding neurosis and the nasal passage. Still, she thought, as any fool can see…this is the nose of a man who looks down at others over it. And she suddenly understood why Harold always insisted on standing over her while she sat in the chair.
At the tip, the stranger’s nose widened into the popular bulbous wedge. Some Darwinian somewhere would know the adaptive purpose of the nose bulb, but Orlanda did not and up close and personal like this, the bulb seemed absurd and clownish. There was a small pale hair sprouting from the end, something a spouse would point out for removal. Aha, she thought. Not married. Too self-centered, too used to having his own way.
The two orby bumps on either side of the nasal tip where smooth like stones on the shore. There were a number of blackheads on them and a teensy scar on the left one. More trauma. Ex-wife hits him with a pan, the goat. For cheating and calling it self-expression.
Perhaps the nose was the ultimate repository of life’s experiences, readable if one only had the key. Orlanda did not but that did not stop her from developing an opinion. This man was a Harold, he had to be! His nose gave him away and at this point Orlanda had to fight the urge to give the stranger’s nasal tip one mean motherfucker of a gnaw.
Then she notices some asymmetry at the nostrils; one was oval and the other one round. Pretty common, which is why the applicator tip had to be morphic. Fit all holes, so to speak. A few hairs at the edge guarded the entrance against pollen dust, but nothing worth taking a clipper to. The applicator had to be long enough to bypass these. Deeper inside, blackness disappeared into the block of the man’s head and Orlanda wondered where they might lead if followed. Up to the eyes, back to the brainstem, inwards to the soul? And what would you find there, pray tell? A wee homonculus preening in front of a teensy weensy mirror?
Why oh why had she not walked home?
The wind of a maglev passing by in the other direction rocked the car and the boy with the goggles teetered, sending Orlanda and the stranger into a bobble. When they recovered their positions, Orlanda noticed a tender beige fur covering the entire nose, underlaced with delicate red streaks. It was amazing in a sense…the more you looked, the more you saw. But it was revolting in another…both the saw and the seen went downhill after the initial curiosity.
She first thought Harold would help her, guide her career. He was well known in the bot biz for managing new products. But when she instantly rebuffed his early advances, he became more interested in her failures than her successes.
The train swooshed like a comet around a bend in the track. The station was nearing. The nose did not budge. Defiant, dramatic, daunting. Orlanda developed the urge to do something. Anything. Make a move. Flick it, take a nip, fibble it with all fingers. Something! Talk back, refuse to be victimized. Take a stand! Tell Harold to go fuck himself. Maybe even quit and go to one of the other nanoworks. Start fresh, out with the old, today is the first day. That kind of thing.
The holophonics announced the next stop.
This was it. End of the line. Orlanda felt that she could not take another minute of it. She ran a dry tongue across the tops of her lower teeth. She clenched her jaw. Something would have to be done. Life as it was could not go on. She knew then and there that she would simply have to take a bite out of this man’s nose. There was no other way. It was too tight in the train to sing to it, dance on it, pinch or twist it. There was no other way to change the course of her life. A dramatic move, even if a criminal one, was needed. Right here, right now. Take a stand!
Orlanda stood there, teeth at the ready, in a kind of paralysis…enthralled, readyset, poised. A woman determined to do a thing.
And then the train bounced lightly and the station lights flooded the car, and the blur of standers filled the windows, and the black hole in the center of the Milky Way hiccupped. And the owner of the nose who had not moved in seven minutes, amazingly, flipped around and faced the door as he prepared to exit the car. His rear profile revealed an entirely new and unexpected shape. The nose was actually quite a bit longer than Orlanda had originally thought. Wedgier, like a prow. Orlanda shuddered. The nose that she had come to know so well was not quite what he thought it was. Not bulbous and roundymoundy at all. But stern and French. This was a face-forward, unwavering nose, an arrow through a chaotic life.
Admirable even.
You had to see it from a new angle to see it better.
The insight suddenly filled Orlanda with a sense of relief. And she knew in an instant what had to be done.
The doors opened, the crowd pushed. The stranger, being right near the door, got off first and breathed a sigh of relief. Then the boy, shoved by the exiters, pushed Orlanda out of the car against her will. The doors closed and Orlanda was standing flatly on the platform as a new crowd gathered around her all nosey and bothersome. Orlanda stood there for a long time until she came to a final resolution. The whole thing was out of hand. A waste of the time of one’s life which, after all, was all one had. Offensive, oppressive, and a bunch of other sives. Something had to be done.
All right, Orlanda thought to herself, that’s that.
Done.
Decision made.
From now on, I walk home from work.
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