It wasn’t easy to meet people.
First you wanted someone who’d get past all the things that most people couldn’t get past about you. That was already a big one, especially for someone like Rakim. Then you needed someone who’d be willing and able to get past the quirks that made your individual personality as unique as it was beyond that. You wanted someone who wouldn’t act normal for a while only to get you used to them until you figured out they were the world’s foremost severed finger collector and they’d always pictured you in their fridge. Finally, you wanted someone who made you feel good about yourself, who cared about how you were doing beyond your use to them.
Oh, it helped if you had enough in common with them to run into them in the first place.
Typically people in his situation would’ve gone to meet people at bars, for all the good that did him. Rakim didn’t drink, and he wasn’t about to start. His mother had never made a big deal about it one way or the other but after all the compromises he’d already made he figured had to draw the line somewhere. He’d never even had alcohol, didn’t know what he was missing, and he just couldn’t imagine caring about whatever it could bring him enough to make the decision to compromise for it. He had to hold on to something.
Once, a guy he’d gamed with online for a while asked him if he wanted to come over.
It seemed like an appealing opportunity to him. The gesture hadn’t been overtly romantic, although they’d both talked about how they were looking for another guy openly. There was a definite possibility of it in the subtext, the way Rakim was reading it, but with an ‘out’ for them to keep it as a platonic evening of gaming, if that was all that naturally came of it. It was a way to put himself out there without having to really put himself out there, and a way to get to know someone before really signing up for anything, fitting for a skittish newcomer to these things.
His name had been Ogun. Ogun’s dwelling had been an interesting place.
Rakim took in his living space, sitting perched on the arm of his couch like a gargoyle. Posters of Robert Johnson, Donna Haraway and Sun Ra shared the wall with Da Vinci sketches and alchemical symbols here and there, giving the room a cheap, eclectic atmosphere. The living room, kitchen and bedroom were an open concept, the washroom barely separate from them at all. Everything seemed packed just a little too close together, as if it had been forced together just a bit too roughly for comfort, but it was being graceful about it and promised you that you’d get used to it if you gave it time too.
“Sorry about the mess,” he’d apologized, looking around with suppressed panic as if he’d just remembered that he’d been going to have someone over but hadn’t finished picking things up before he did, belatedly moving a few things out of the way as the bat had walked in as if he had been vainly trying to empty a flooding boat with a spoon. “No worries,” Rakim had reassured him, used to small spaces from his own apartment. “Thanks.” Open books, tools, wires, disassembled pieces of electronic equipment and half-finished electronic projects littered so much of the floor that you could barely set foot on the ground itself around them.
“I’m kind of always working on something, you know?” Ogun gestured at the mess that his daily life consisted of. “So I keep putting stuff away but I keep having to take other stuff back out as I go,” he grinned, “like a perpetual motion device.” Rakim nodded. “That makes sense. Why put everything away if you’re only going to have to get it right back out, right?” Ogun chuckled. “I know, right? Oh, can I get you anything? Beer maybe?” The bat tried not to make a face. “Hmm, do you have anything else?” He tried to sound casual, not wanting to ruin his chances by seeming rude. “You don’t like beer?”
Ogun did a facepalm, pointing his other finger at his guest as if he’d just realized something obvious. “You don’t drink!” Rakim looked sheepish to have been found out. “Nothing wrong with that,” his host waved aside. “You can drink if you want,” the bat offered, “I can live with that.” Ogun frowned. “No, let’s see...” He looked around his dwelling briefly as if he was trying to remember something. “Ah! How about this?” Ogun pulled an old hookah out from a cupboard. “Have you ever had some of this?” Rakim looked intrigued. “I’m not sure. What is it?”
Ogun pulled out some green, dried up plant matter that the bat had never seen before. “It’s new,” he explained, “I got it off this octopus I know.” His guest tilted his head almost like a bird when he was curious about something, he noticed. “What does it do?” Ogun grabbed some of the plant matter to start grinding it as they spoke. “She said it’s supposed to make you more empathetic or something.” This piqued Rakim’s interest. “How does it work?” Ogun was now loading the hookah with some of the powdered plant matter. “It gives you, like, some kind of chemical boost for empathizing, so it makes you want to do it more to get more of the boost.”
Rakim seemed impressed. “That sounds neat, actually!” Ogun was glad. “Feeling courageous, then?” He took out his hookah lighter. “You don’t have to have some just because you’re not drinking, just so you know,” he made sure to specify, not wanting to come across as pushy. “Nah, I’ll give it a shot!” It seemed that he had the bat’s enthusiastic consent for this much so far, in any case. “All right then! Let’s see how this goes.” Lighting up, Ogun started by taking a long draw himself before handing the hookah to his guest, breathing in then slowly exhaling at the ceiling as Rakim followed suit.
“Wow, this stuff’s pretty good,” Ogun admitted before taking in a second draw.
“Oh, you’re switching!” Ogun looked puzzled. “The head you’re drawing with, I mean,” the bat explained. “I’m sorry, I hope I’m not being rude.” A look of understanding dawned on Ogun’s faces as Rakim’s turn came again. “Oh, you mean my heads!” No one had ever explained head etiquette to Rakim. “I guess I sort of take it for granted by now,” Ogun’s lion head continued while his ram head drew and his dragon head coughed. “Well, when I’m not being reminded of it, I mean.” The bat looked sheepish as he took the hookah back from his host. “I didn’t mean to remind you, though.” It could be unpleasant to be reminded you were different.
“Well, I know I have them,” the dragon head rasped amusedly as it was Rakim’s turn to cough. “Believe me, I’ve been reminded in much worse ways by other people before,” his ram head continued bitterly as Rakim tried not to stare, fascinated to see the chimera bring the hookah so that even the snake head’s maw on his tail could draw from it. “There’s nothing wrong with asking questions when you’re trying to understand something, right?” Rakim hoped that the Ogun’s attitude would be as enlightened as that when he would realize that the bat could have his own set of questions to answer for him, he thought to himself. “I’m glad you think so.”
Ogun shrugged. “It just seems easier to give each throat a chance to recover, I guess.” Rakim nodded. “That’s why you do it with talking too, isn’t it?” All four heads nodded. “People tell me I never shut up,” his snake head hissed, “I don’t really have to maybe. I don’t always think about what it’s like to carry on a conversation with only one throat.” Rakim couldn’t stop himself from grinning. “You have throat privilege!” All four heads laughed. “Well, if I ever talk your bat ears off, check my throat privilege, Rakim.” He discovered he liked saying his name. He liked how saying it felt in his mouths. “I’ll make sure of it,” the bat assured him.
“Oh, we were going to play something, weren’t we,” his lion head remembered, “that was what you came here to do, isn’t it?” He handed Rakim the hookah so he could start digging around for his gaming devices. “I almost forgot,” his dragon head apologized, “I don’t know why, my mind’s been all over the place recently,” his ram head continued, “so it’s hard to keep track sometimes,” his snake head finished. “No problem.” Some people found it disorienting to have to keep up with Ogun, but Rakim loved it. “It’s all good.” He loved listening to people. “So, what would you like to play?”
His guest gave a cursory look to his collection. “Oh, you have Aero! And Sonic, and Demon’s Crest!” There were so few games where you got to play bats. “Firebrand’s not quite a bat though,” the lion head pointed out. “He’s got leather wings, close enough,” Rakim shrugged, “I take what I can get,” he finished, tongue firmly in cheek. “They always have to give bats awkward controls, though,” the dragon head lamented. “You noticed that too!” Rakim had always privately regretted this. “They should make a game where you play a bat who has awesome controls, don’t you think?” “Maybe we should make one,” he answered the ram head.
Rakim hoped to God that, when the time would come for it, Ogun would not find his own controls too awkward to play with.
“You guys don’t have it easy either, come to think of it,” the bat continued. “I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where you played a chimera. Most of the time they just make you monster characters,” he noted. “That’s true,” the snake head acknowledged, “there’s a few where you can be like a lion or a dragon, but never the whole shebang. Of course when we do appear we’re usually boss monsters,” the lion head grinned, “not just regular enemies.” Rakim grabbed a controller. “I’ll show you who’s a boss at gaming, buddy,” he winked at his host, “if you give me a chance to.” Ogun grabbed a controller of his own. “Challenge accepted,” his dragon head smiled.
“Do you mind if I put on some music?” the ram head asked him after they’d been playing for a short bit, “or do you want me to leave the game music on?” While Rakim did enjoy the game music, he was more curious about what kind of music Ogun liked to listen to still. “I love music!” he chirped. “Go ahead.” Rakim’s mind drifted away from the problems in his life as smoke, gaming and music filled the air around them, giving him something else to breathe for a change. “Oh this is pretty good!” he exclaimed. “Glad you like it,” the snake head said. “What is it?”
His lion head nodded at one of the posters on his wall, keeping his other eyes on the game. “It’s called Sun Ra. The guy who played it was into some pretty weird stuff,” his lion head began. “He basically started Afrofuturism, well people credit him for it anyway,” his dragon head went on. “I’d never heard of it,” Rakim answered. “See, most of the time, people think of Africa in terms of nature, and the West in terms of technology, because the West has money, and Africa doesn’t. Technology doesn’t have a nationality, though,” his ram head explained, “it just does whatever people make it to do,” his snake head completed.
“Ideally,” Rakim nodded, struggling with his controller to perform a difficult maneuver.
“So he tries to make us imagine a world where Africa does have technology, to show that they’d know what to do with it if they had it, to make other people picture it as something worth doing, to highlight the contrast that still exists for now so people will be likelier to correct it,” his lion head picked up. “His name sounds Egyptian,” the bat observed. “Well, he liked to talk about immortality sometimes,” his dragon head replied, “it was one of his things.” Rakim was putting two and two together. “And the Egyptians had that thing about how they had to keep people’s bodies intact so they’d come back into them later on.” Ogun grinned. “There you go.”
Rakim came up to a point in the game where he was restarting from a saved state. “Video game characters are kind of immortal, aren’t they?” Ogun scratched his lion head. “I guess they are, aren’t they?” The bat was amused with himself for having come up with the analogy. “Don’t you wish you could save your game in real life? Be able to restart from before making a mistake?” The chimera had to admit that did sound like it would’ve been convenient to have been able to do that. “I guess until we can do that, we’ll have to be more careful not to make mistakes in real life than in video games, won’t we,” his dragon head reflected.
A different artist came on when Sun Ra’s smooth tracks came to an end. “This is ‘Crossroad Blues,’ speaking of mistakes,” his ram head informed his guest. “What do you mean?” the bat asked. “It’s a track about a guy who sells his soul to the devil to become a great musical success,” his snake head answered. “After he made it people started thinking that’s what he’d done to get as good as he did! Can you imagine?” Rakim couldn’t believe it. “You mean people took it completely literally like that?” Ogun chuckled. “Yeah, people tend to do that with a lot of metaphors, it turns out.”
This reminded the bat of something. “Someone once told me some people believe music itself is the devil.” Ogun tilted his ram head at Rakim questioningly. “Do you?” Rakim smiled. “I did say I love music, don’t I?” Ogun looked at him slyly. “Ah, but maybe you love the devil for all I know.” Should he or shouldn’t he? “Well, that depends.” Too late, he did. “Are you the devil, Ogun?” He realized he liked saying his host’s name too. He’d better have liked it – it was too late to take back. The chimera seemed surprised, but not for long. “Well, that depends,” his lion head answered.
“Are you up for making some mistakes?”
