Unorthodoxy

By Joshua A.H Harris

The surviving son of a germophobic mother, Cecil Reitmeister embraces all forms of bacteria and formulates an elaborate plan to lead humanity out of the Anthropocene and into a new era of interspecies harmony. His idiosyncratic plan requires years of experimentation and precise manipulation of his microbiome, the totality of microorganisms prese

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atmosphere Press
• Release date: Nov 12, 2019
• ISBN: 9781646068470

Book preview

Chapter 1

Summer 2012

Berkeley, California

I slide my hands into the brine and begin to massage cabbage leaves as early morning sunlight breaks through a crack in the heavy curtains covering my living room windows. The ultra-bright white line cutting across the floor promises another hot, humid day, but the air in here is still thin, cool. Gray-white scum has formed on the water’s surface and gathers on my hairy forearms as I reach deeper into the green bucket. They say the top mold should be discarded, but I know better. This batch has been fermenting for eight days, and I can just begin to feel its power. It’s blooming for me; it dreams of finding a home in the folds of my intestines, the ripe core of my precious microbiome. And oh, how I long for it. I close my eyes and finger the filigreed edges of the decomposing leaves: so smooth and fine, like perfectly decaying skin, so raw and alive and extraordinary.

The microbes celebrate with me in the dark depths of the bucket, feeding on my dead skin cells and offering their all-powerful services in return. I slow my fingers down and concentrate on this moment of communion with the Everything, focusing my brain like Leeuwenhoek’s microscope on the sublime interconnectedness of all living beings. A tidal wave of euphoria builds and then suddenly breaks over me, washing me away into a sea of clarity. Nobody understands yet, but what I’m doing will save the world. When I think too hard about my future, I find it hard to breathe. I pull out a large, dripping piece of cabbage, slurp it down, and lick the salty-sour water from my hands. The tang has intensified, but this batch isn’t quite ready yet.

Until tomorrow, my friends, I whisper into the bucket.

Outside, a young couple passes by with their screaming newborn, as they do every morning about this time. I peek through the curtains and watch them juggle their stainless steel coffee mugs, bags of fresh pastries, and extra-loud bundle of pink joy, passing it from one milk-stained shoulder to another. The parents’ eyes are bloodshot, like four red marbles, but their feet seem to float above the sidewalk on clouds of postnatal bliss. I find myself wondering what that tiny, warm body would feel like in my arms, but such dreams are incompatible with the Plan—my destiny—so I quickly return the imaginary baby to her exhausted, joyful parents and get back to work.

I check on an open vat of beet-and-pear kombucha and a large ceramic vessel of yogurt covered with dead and dying flies next to the front door before turning on the Today Show for company. By this point, I’ve been through a ton of hosts, but the current couple, a buxom blonde and a salt-and-pepper, ex-golf pro who never stops smiling, seems to have the best chemistry of them all. He’s smiling now as she jokingly applies a touch of ruby red lipstick to his lips. Lucky guy, just look at the way she watches him dab Kleenex on his picture-perfect mouth. She giggles; oh she’s been a naughty girl. I wonder if they sneak away after the show, climb into bed, and exchange secrets like jewels, clutching them to their flawless chests as they drift off to sleep, fake-tanned legs intertwined. I look around at the containers of rotting food in my dark living room and try to ignore the stink of loneliness so familiar it feels like family. If I stick to the Plan, I tell myself, someday I’ll be an even luckier guy.

I switch off the TV and walk into the kitchen—my mother’s old kitchen, I should say, though she’d hardly recognize it now.

No disinfectant here, Mother. I run my index finger along the soiled countertop and suck the dirt from my fingertip.

She whispers back, Get in the bathtub—I try to block her out—and scrub your toes!

She was a difficult person to live with, and that’s putting it mildly. She’d scour me raw and slather me with sanitizer every chance she got. Even now, nine years after her death, she still won’t leave me alone. It’s as if the walls of this old house refuse to let her go. I wish she’d finally give up, but somehow she persists, the indelible memory of the only person who ever truly loved me. Perhaps her love was just too much—for both of us.

I open the back door. It’s time for my bio-soldiers to come home and share the spoils of their nocturnal adventures with me. Marcus, Cassius, and Denarius spill into the kitchen, their thick nails skittering across the linoleum. I fall happily to my hands and knees, to be licked and to lick.

What have you found for me, my beauties? Marcus, my affectionate English Mastiff, rubs up against my face. I want all of your amazing, invisible treasures. I roll with him, nibbling at his coat.

Cassius and Denarius, slobbery bloodhound brothers I saved from the pound, jump in. My dogs, my family, my loyal conduits to new germs, worms, and fungi; they help me every day in my mission to create my microbial kingdom. With each lick, each exchange, my bacterial garden flourishes, and I grow stronger. I’ve trained my soldiers well, encouraging them in all forms of garbage exploration and carcass revelry. It didn’t take much; wild dogs love to hunt at night.

My neighbors disapprove of my dogs’ nightly expeditions, but what do they know, with their sterile houses, guts, and lives? Mr. Montague, King of the Antiseptics—my term for the world’s population of sanitizer-addled mysophobes—and my neighbor since I can remember, yells at me every chance he gets. "God damn you, Cecil, clean your house, your dogs, and your disgusting body. Your mother would be ashamed." Sometimes I ignore him; sometimes I lunge toward him and growl. He thinks I’m feral, but I don’t care; I know he’s dying inside, one squirt of Purell at a time.

My gut is gurgling wildly, so I extract myself from our dog-human-microbe lovefest and descend the narrow flight of stairs to my repository. It’s quiet down here in the basement except for the low, never-ending hum emanating from the pit latrine behind the bookcase. I think the cockroaches are the noisiest inhabitants—click, click, chomp, chomp, flutter, flutter, flutter—but one can never be sure. It took many days of hard work with a pick axe and shovel to dig the hole for my latrine. It’s almost full now, but somehow the soft, brown peak never quite reaches the top. I wonder which creatures I should thank for the seemingly perpetual capacity: the aforementioned cockroaches, the flies, the rats, or the trillions of bacteria reveling in my accumulated waste?

Symbiosis, I sing into the darkness. It’s a truly beautiful thing.

A pull-chain light illuminates a large bookcase containing row upon row of Para-Fix™ stool collection kits, each carefully labeled with the date and the time of preparation, along with my initials. A tag hangs from each plastic container recounting the exact type and amount of food I consumed the previous day and the color and consistency of the fresh specimen. I’m approaching my five-year anniversary, a real milestone if I do say so myself. In another five years, I’ll contact the world’s leading microbiologists. Can you even imagine a whole decade worth of fecal records? They’ll run tests on my samples, and then they’ll rerun the tests because they’ll be so blown away by the results.

His bacterial diversity is off the charts, the scientists will exclaim. He’s discovered the human body’s da Vinci code! They’ll weigh and measure me. "Are you sure these results are accurate? How can he be so healthy and seem so young?"

Perhaps there will be doubters, scientists unwilling to accept the new reality, maybe even a full-blown backlash: He’s a liar. It’s a hoax. He forged those test results. He’s dangerous. He should be locked up.

Paradigm shifts can be tricky business.

But then I imagine a brave scientist—perhaps a young woman still working on her PhD with nothing to lose—undertaking an independent review of my samples. Afterward, armed with charts demonstrating her definitive results, she’ll hold a press conference on my front steps.

This courageous man is no charlatan; he’s going to change the course of history and save the planet, too.

After her announcement, reporters will overrun my house, desperate for any information on the Plan. She and I, now holding hands, barely escape. By then, I’ll surely have finalized my manifesto, and we’ll email it to every newspaper in the world from the copy shop on Solano. The following day, talking heads on network news channels will loudly debate whether I, Cecil Reitmeister, have instantly become the most influential scientist/philosopher of all time. My flock of followers will grow rapidly into a vibrant, unstoppable grassroots movement, which in turn will balloon into sophisticated, biomedical healing organizations. I’ll begin to preach my message of interspecies harmony to stadiums overflowing with adoring fans. They will throw rose petals at my feet. I’m loved, admired, and respected, and the renegade female PhD student is there, stage right, blowing me kisses.

The current phase of the Plan, however, is much less glamorous; it requires patience and strict discipline. I carefully remove a sterile specimen collection container from a tightly sealed Tupperware bin. There can be no contamination of the stool sample—that would be tragic indeed. This is high-level, scientific experimentation and documentation in action. I place the collection cup into a slot in a bucket specially modified for this purpose and squat down in front of the bookshelf. Quite the view. At first, it does not want to come out. But then, as I do every morning, I think of Mother, relax, and release.

After carefully labeling my specimen and dumping the remainder of my discharge into the latrine, I climb back upstairs and pull on shorts, a faded blue t-shirt, and a pair of worn Converse All-Stars. I go into the backyard for my workout. Rigorous exercise is a required element of the Plan; not a day can be missed. The dogs exit with me, lounge in the shade of the fence surrounding my yard, and watch. It must be great entertainment for them. I run fifteen laps clockwise around my small yard—tracing the deep track I’ve worn around the edges—then counterclockwise fifteen more times. My body gleams as slick sweat breaks over my dirt-streaked skin.

Next, I lift weights. Seven years ago, I built a shed next to the immense avocado tree in my backyard. It’s actually more of a corrugated steel roof half-assedly propped up on some posts, but it hasn’t collapsed yet and it protects my gym equipment from the rain. I have a bench press, a set of rusty free weights, and a couple of jump ropes.

I even dragged an old, full-length mirror out here because I once saw Arnold Schwarzenegger flexing in front of one on TV, though I don’t look much like him. Sure I have blue eyes and am about his height, 6’2", but my muscles don’t bulge like his. In fact, most Antiseptics would say I’m sick-person skinny, like I should be hospitalized, but I’m the opposite of sick; I’m strong in a sinewy, highly tuned machine kind of way. Also, the Governator’s face was finely chiseled when he was young like me, whereas my excessively sharp angles—including my crooked nose, which has leaned to the left since birth—make me look more like one of Picasso’s deranged cubist masks. In fact, only one girl at Berkeley High ever managed to look past my unusual facial features long enough to even talk me. Her name was Samantha Hanson. She was a dork too, but for one magical night, we were misfits in love. I even got to second base. When Mother found out, she scrubbed me so hard that my sheets were streaked with blood the following morning. But enough about that, I’m feeling too good to talk about Mother.

Back in the kitchen, I crush up seven ounces of raw almonds and pour them over a bowl of kimchi—an excellent balance of pre- and probiotics. My bacteria deserve only the best. The dogs are sleeping now, but my colony of flies is awake and buzzing everywhere. I’ve read that flies represent persistence and self-determination; I like that a lot. As I eat my first bite, a small guy with glistening auburn eyes, a hairy body, and a golden posterior lands on my left forearm. I let him crawl across my wet skin and watch him press his sponge-like proboscis against me to investigate. It’s nice having a few friends with strange noses like mine. Where have you been today little musca domestica? The sewer? Mr. Montague’s trash? A dead bird in a nearby park? What riches have you brought to share with me today? Each time he rubs his tiny legs together, I can almost feel bacteria raining down on my skin, like a sudden, brief storm over an empty expanse of the Pacific Ocean. He sucks up a final sip of my sweat and flies away. After finishing breakfast, I remove my sweat-soaked shirt and let more flies land all over my pale body. They’re ticklish little buggers, but it’s worth it; there’s no more effective creature for sharing microbiota than the trusty housefly.

I pull on a dry t-shirt and wait by the front window, peering through the curtains every few seconds. Today is Monday, Jackson’s day off from the lab, and he should be here any minute. Jackson is—how should I say—my dealer? No, that’s just weird. I knew him in high school, so he’s more like an old friend. But in truth we weren’t really friends back then, and I’m not sure he considers me a friend even now. So I guess he’s like an old friend, but he just doesn’t realize it yet.

After a while, he pulls up in front of my house in his old convertible Camaro and removes two boxes from the trunk. One’s filled with groceries. The other, a Styrofoam affair decorated with biohazard stickers, contains my Treatments. I remove the chain, disengage the two deadbolts, and open the door. Three flies buzz out into the warm sunshine.

Hey, buddy!

Here’s your stuff. He holds the two boxes out to me, but I don’t take them.

Come inside. Come on. I turn and walk back to the kitchen, leaving him little choice.

Okay, but I really can’t stick around. I’ve got a lot of stuff to do today.

That’s what you say every week. Let’s just have our Monday beer like always, I’ll give you your money, and then you can take off, okay? Relax for a second.

He sets the boxes down on the kitchen counter. I really have to run.

Come on, man, you know how…well… I really wish he didn’t make me beg for his company every damn week. It’s just that…you’re my—

I know, dude, I know. Okay, just the one beer. Relief washes over me. I gotta talk to you about something anyway, he continues, but you know I can’t stand it in this house. And today it smells worse than ever. He looks like he’s about to gag, but he’s just being dramatic.

Really, I hadn’t noticed. Sensory fatigue, I think—olfactory adaptation, in scientific terms. The human body has such amazing capacities, wouldn’t you say?

No answer.

You’re right, though, my food prep area tends to get a little funky when it’s hot like this.

Yeah, ‘funky’ is the understatement of the year, man, it’s unbearable—like those stinky melons in the Asian markets, but on steroids and mixed with pig shit.

Durian?

What?

That stinky fruit, it’s called durian.

Whatever, man.

They recently discovered it’s a combination of specific chemical compounds that produces the fruit’s powerful smell, not just a single one.

Jackson nods as he pulls his shirt over his nose and mouth.

Can we just go outside?

He’s pretending to gag again; a less reasonable person would get offended.

I rummage through the box of groceries until I find the two Sierra Nevadas. The backyard is already sticky hot, so we walk straight to the workout shed. I offer him the bench; he leans against the fence instead. He used to run track in high school, but he’s gotten soft since marriage. He sports a plain white t-shirt, and he slicks back his jet-black hair with pomade; I think he’s going for a fifties throwback look. He married a Jewish girl from the City, and they live in Oakland now, but he’s never brought her over to meet me.

One beer per week, and wow that first sip always tastes so right. As the first cool wave of pale ale slides down my gullet and floods my stomach, I imagine my microbes down there getting loose, maybe organizing an impromptu social hour and getting a little raucous. I wonder if they feel like dancing. I know I sure do.

Thanks for the beer, Jackson.

No need to thank me, dude, he says as a ray of sunlight glints off his bottle into my eye. You wrote it on the list, and you’re the one paying for ’em.

Well, thanks anyway.

So like I said, I need to talk to you. My boss keeps asking me weird questions, and he’s watching me all the time. I can still get your groceries, but I have to stop stealing from the lab.

It’s not stealing if no one wants it anymore. I don’t like where this is going at all. It’s more like recycling; that’s not illegal now, is it? Denarius approaches slowly and nuzzles my bare leg. I scratch him behind his ratty ears.

Jackson shifts his weight from one foot to the other. The legality of it doesn’t really matter. I just don’t want to get fired. There are too many lab techs out there looking for jobs.

Denarius peeks up at me sympathetically; he always knows what’s going on. You can’t back out now, I say. That would completely mess up the Plan.

I don’t give a shit about your ‘plan,’ man, never have. I’m only doing this for the money.

"How can you say that? You’ve been instrumental in getting us this far, and you’re going to get tons of credit when this thing takes off. In just a few years, we’re going to be running a worldwide institute, with hundreds of thousands of people signing up every day. We’ll be an overnight sensation. And you’ll be my right-hand man, my number two. We’re going to bring humanity into what I am tentatively calling the ‘Era of Unity’—a time when all beings live in a state of sustainable, everlasting peace. Familia omnes."

"Familia what?"

"It’s Latin. It’s my—our—battle cry. It means, ‘we’re all family.’"

"Listen, Cecil, I’ve never really vibed you on all this stuff. Sorry. And now, I’ve got more important things in my life. I didn’t tell you this before, but my wife’s pregnant. She’s really pregnant, like eight months along. I have to quit taking clean samples for you. In a hot minute, I’m going to have a family to support."

Congratulations, but I don’t see—

Plus, I still don’t really believe it’s healthy for you to be sticking other people’s shit up your ass every day, and I don’t really get how it’s connected to saving the world. I mean what doctor ever told you to do that?

No doctor would ever prescribe my Treatments. That’s the problem. The science on this is completely upside-down. I follow Jackson’s eyes as he glances toward the driveway. So you’re just like all the rest of them—completely unwilling to think outside your own little cat box. I thought you were better than this. Go ahead, go shit in the corner now and cover it all up, Jackson. Make it all go away!

Come on, Cecil, don’t be an asshole. I’ve been pretty cool about this arrangement.

One of my grief therapists, paid for by the state after Mother’s death, told me to stop talking if somebody called me an asshole, but I haven’t seen him in years.

"How can I explain this to you so that you’ll finally understand? You have forty trillion bacteria living all over your body, completely outnumbering your human cells. They control every aspect of your health, from obesity to anxiety, epilepsy to cancer, Alzheimer’s to autism—the list goes on and on. You have to understand this stuff, man. It’s basic human physiology. So much of your body is made up of resident microbes that—"

Yeah, I know, dude, I’ve heard your little lecture before.

So what’s your problem? Do you really want to be like all the other Antiseptics, walking around mindlessly annihilating what little life you have left in your body—killing, polluting, and starving every bacteria that comes your way? It’s disgusting and amoral. You feed them processed sugar. You sterilize everything you touch. You pop antibiotics—those tiny nuclear bombs—like they’re Mike and Ikes. Your body’s a barren desert, Jackson, and mine—well, mine’s becoming the most extraordinary rainforest that’s ever existed. ‘Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die’—it’s straight-up Darwinism, you remember him, don’t you? That’s why I still need you. Don’t you get it, after all these years?

He shoos a fly off the rim of his beer, pours a bit out into the dirt at his feet, and then takes a swig. "Granted, you look as young as you did in high school, which I admit is pretty weird, but do you really think it’s because of all this crazy shit you’re doing around here? You really think that has something to do with your ‘treatments’? His attendant air quotes set my blood boiling. Come on, that’s just genetics. That’s just plain ol’ luck."

"Wrong. You can change your luck. You can change your fate. Look at me: I haven’t been sick in years. Not a sneeze. Not a cough. Nothing. Can you say that? Do you remember how weak I was in high school? And I had those terrible allergies. The school