Sleeping as Others

By Estlin Adams

John wakes up one morning in the body of the man he had slept with the night before. His sensations, memories, personality, and soul are his own, but he inhabits the body of the previous night’s trick, whom he had barely known. He then has to live with the knowledge he’ll become any man he sleeps with—any man he sleeps as—as the men already in his life need him to remain who he is. Landing somewhere between Fight Club and Being John Malkovich, Sleeping As Others combines philosophy, fantasy, and physiology into a uniquely queer sexual adventure.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rebel Satori Press
• Release date: Mar 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781608641963

Estlin Adams

Estlin Adams is a full-time teacher, a part-time writer of eco-, erotic- and literary fictions, and a year-round mountain-bike commuter in America's old industrial Midwest. As a fifty-something queer otter and a lurker on dating- and hook-up apps, he does not share his characters' sexual schizophrenia, as far as he knows.

Book preview

SLEEPING AS OTHERS

Estlin Adams

Queer Space

(A Rebel Satori Imprint)

* * * * *

Published in the United States of America and United Kingdom by

Queer Space (A Rebel Satori Imprint)

www.rebelsatoripress.com

Copyright © 2022 by Estlin Adams

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted in newspaper, magazine, radio, television, or online reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or information or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

The following are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-60864-196-3

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022930896

TABLE OF Contents

Chapter 1: Orientation

Chapter 2: FAQs

Chapter 3: Our Buddies, Ourselves

Chapter 4: A Different Dimension

Chapter 5: Gay Gospel

Chapter 6: Simons Say

Chapter 7: Most Dads Like Me

Chapter 8: The New Jan Brady

Chapter 9: John, Solo

Chapter 1:

Orientation

It started with his leg being, for the first time ever, too long for his bed. John stretched it out in his groggy state, retracted it from the mattress edge. He wondered idly why, suddenly, he didn’t fit a bed he’d slept in for years. He yawningly went back to sleeping. Then he noticed the hair—or rather, that where the hair should have been—was stubble-free. Fingers scratched thighs and the insides of knees that had been scraggly since junior high: nothing—as smooth and clammy, in fact, as someone else’s skin he’d remembered feeling, very recently. Still under the covers, lights still off, he awoke far enough to inventory to his body: nails longer than they had been. Waist, somehow, narrower. The tuft of hair over his belly, gone. No traces of razor stubble there, either. Fingers traced the hip bones, skidded past where his appendectomy scar . . . should have been, and continued on into the hollow between legs left much more muscular than he’d last remembered. Pubes curled around his longest, groping fingers—and he clearly he had to stop and switch a light on.

This wasn’t a true, Kafkaesque experience, he thought. He was still human—just not the same human he had always been.

He and the mirror weren’t on speaking terms, but with a few photographs unfixed, some beads knocked out of the way, and a tee shirt rubbed repeatedly over cloudy opacities, a face gleamed back at him while his eyeballs worked, for their part, on fixing and focusing the reflection. The blinking being looking back had narrower, beadier eyes and a perpetual expression of sarcastic, quizzical confusion. Quivering eyelids and pupils gaining and shrinking again made him think those peepers lacked glasses they had grown accustomed to. Over the lips, moist and full enough to remind him, again, of someone or something, no mustache intruded into the space beneath a flatter, thinner nose. A pointier chin scarcely needed a daily shave. A beauty mark aped some boy’s version of the distinguished marking of Madonna or Marilyn Monroe. Almost immediately, he puckered what felt like someone else’s lips.

He was once again wondering what or whom that mark reminded him of when he noticed his stoop. He was angled down to see himself better in the mirror. He had always looked directly into it, often with his date or his trick on his arm. Now he was looking down into it, and he was alone this weird morning, without the trick, who must have slipped out, sometime in the night. John wondered, palm and fingers moving back and forth across the strangely stubble-less face, eyes blinking in disbelief at the man reflected back before them: why had the guy left? Why wasn’t he himself this morning? Why, in fact, and this was a head-scratcher, in a head full of chestnut hair combed to have a part in an unfamiliar place, why was it not his own face looking back at him?

Why was it, instead, the face of the man he’d slept with the night before?

Starting to sweat, to worry he’d not yet in fact woken up, he explored the rest of the body that was new to him—or, not new exactly, just that all the attributes had been reattached to himself, that he had felt on a partner’s body, just hours before. More muscle tone here, longer legs here. Less give and flab to butt cheeks here, longer distance from the head to the ring of the circumcision, there. This familiar scar missing, but that beauty mark added. The mark of a mother who thought the hair should be parted there, not here. The hole in the ear lobe on the left, where an earring must recently have been, though John didn’t remember wearing one and didn’t remember last night’s man (what had been his name?) wearing one either. Early-morning existentialism threatened to be the mental exercise of a day when he didn’t recognize himself in his own mirror, in his own room. He looked around quickly at the posters, the dresser, the tee shirts on the floor: it was the same place he always woke up in. It just looked to all appearances that he wasn’t any longer the man who had lived there. He’d brought someone home, it seemed, and then woke up as that someone.

Some slaps on cheeks once again chased the notion all of this was a dream. Some telescoping around his eyes established that he wore no virtual reality lenses; what he was seeing was real, even if it wasn’t really him seeing it. Some rethinking reminded him he had never gotten mystery man’s number and couldn’t call him on his phone. But then again, how was he going to answer his phone, if it seemed John was occupying his body? Fingers, tapped on a hairless chin, accompanied forced recollections of the late night and the wee hours, some point in time which must, in theory, explain the present. He, John, had bought the beers, started the small talk, noticed the birth mark, sized up the man as he’d chosen a song from an electronic jukebox mounted on a wall. He’d decided to let birthmark man pick him up, to see where he took him, to see what John was like with. . . a man whose name started with a T. That man’s lips, reflected still in the mirror, snarled up into a chortle that he couldn’t even remember T-man’s name: Toby? Not Tony; he would have remembered if The Ordinal Tonys had gained one more Tony that night. No pockets, no jeans to have pockets, no I.D. to look up Trent’s name. Trent? The eyeballs swelled in the mirror in what looked like recognition. Slightly tighter focus brought it out with a sigh: Brent, that was it. Or, maybe that wasn’t it, after all. In the mirror he caught a critical glint in the eye of the man whose face he still couldn’t, even in this weird instance, match with his name.

Two random thoughts occurred to a brain still addled with the seeming transformation. At nineteen, his freshman-year roommate had woefully told him the story of the trick, a man of the then-unfathomable age of thirty something, who had forgotten his roommate’s name the morning after. John had commiserated in late-teen angst at the sex-partner who’d shared Tony’s body, but then had cared so little he hadn’t retained Tony’s name. But on this transformative morning, blinking in mirrors, decades and decades later, John more cynically said to Tony, as if that Tony were present and could hear him, which would he rather have, if at nineteen he had had his druthers: the fuck or the name? The forgetful man who had been great in bed, or the mediocre man who remembered his moniker the next morning? John reached down to measure head to circumcision scar on this new dick again, thinking, the one who had been great in bed, definitely. But did it still hold true when it wasn’t just his name, but the whole body that went along with it, that had been forgotten, or had seemingly disappeared? It must be that a bit more manual measuring had to go into trying to answer the questions. It must be that there were other Tonys, and other tricks who might after all have been named Tony, all in the same story.

The other random thought that hit him originated with a Bill Cosby comedy routine from the eighties, back when Cosby had still been sex-scandal free. The father had asked his inexplicably shaved son: Boy, was your head with you all day today? He fixed his eyes in the mirror again, said to himself: John, was your trick with you all night last night? Was your body always with you? Was his body always with you? Chortling self-consciously again, he knew it had sounded funnier as part of the Cosby routine. He faced the more serious business of looking out of someone else’s eyes this morning. Why was he no longer himself? Where had the man gone who he had been all his life up until some point late in the evening? And more immediately, he thought, looking for clothes to fit a suddenly bigger frame—how am I going to put in a day’s work, if I’m not going to be myself today?

2.

Problematically, I THOUGHT. Ineptly, even. Dressing for work had been odd, as newly hairless tawnies now stretched an extra inch and a half past the ends of my pant legs. It reminded me of the end of seventh grade, when all my compatriots asked if I was preparing for a flood. No, I’d just grown that much since the previous school-clothes buying season. Peachfuzz—thick for a thirteen-year-old’s ankles—had bunched out over not-high-enough hightops. Now I had the serious problem of ill-fitting pants and shirts stretched beyond the point where wrinkles from the waistbands usually began. I would have to look like a strange charity case again, and would have to wonder, for a different reason this time, why I persisted in dating, nights when I had to be at work the next day. Then again, perhaps I now had more reason to go out the night before, if a different me had to go to work the next day.

Driving was odd as the controls seemed to have reversed themselves and found their ways into the wrong, unfamiliar hands. My impulse to hit the turn signal flipped on the wiper blades. My other wrist was very slow to adjust the radio dial and set the GPS. Halfway to work I watched myself execute a wobbly turn in what felt like the wrong direction, and it hit me: Mr. Trick last night must have been left-handed. My wiring must have been reoriented over night, leaving me a southpaw. I mimed signing my name—what had been my name—on my palm. It came out all wrong. Odd, too, how much of my brain and my orientation had gone into this new body, what I guess I should call this new host, and how much of the host’s personality had come along for the ride. Pulling backwards to my senses into a parking spot, I caught myself reasoning, if I was a lefty now because my trick from last night had been a lefty then, was I necessarily still gay?

Yep. Packages within work slacks bulged pleasingly on angular coworkers. Perfect globes of asses stretched denim when their owners stood up from stools. Odd features I’d never thought to find attractive would suddenly leap to the attention of the new me and the old me: suddenly the eyelashes on an otherwise undistinguished face would arrest my attention and I would lose my train of thought. Not that I wanted to, but I wasn’t going to lose my hard-earned gayness that easily, it seemed.

Most of my fellow cubicle creatures just took it to be someone filling for John for the day and only looked me up and down for the familiar clothing on an unfamiliar face. Upper lips settled in briefly ironic hmms and dimples tightened in humphs when, forgetting I wasn’t me today, I lifted my eyebrows or nodded my chin in casual greeting. Several coworkers rushed up to tell me something, then hushed it up in a non-verbal never-mind upon seeing, inexplicably, someone else in my place.

The bosses hadn’t looked in yet, as I already wondered, how was I going to explain this to them? The clients, for their part, weren’t repeats, so they wouldn’t have known if their case worker had been on the job for five minutes or twenty years. I obviously knew my stuff, and answered their questions, trying to hide the fact the voice coming out was a tad more treble, the pitch a bit shakier, the tone less throaty, than my own voice had always been. It’s weird trying to hear oneself talk for the first time, while you’re also trying to sound authoritative in your new voice to clients who don’t know your new voice from your old one. I kept catching a mistaken ventriloquism voicing my own, but my new voice, all as one.

I was also hopeless at jotting down notes as to what people were telling me. You try suddenly switching to your non-dominant hand in the middle of note-taking, your wrists and fingers clearly on different wavelengths than the brain and the guiding eyes. The left hand just couldn’t keep up. The right sat there twitching until I would hide it in my lap, so I covered my quirks with probing but irrelevant questions, as if I hadn’t been writing because I’d suddenly thought of something important—not because I just couldn’t write. A woman’s big brown eyes kept trying to regard me with a reproving smile, but eyebrows would lift, incredulity would settle into her facial lines, each time I dropped the pen, each time a letter refused to form itself out of scrawl, each time I paused to hear myself talk in not-myself’s voice. I gave up and just kept fixing those eyes as I tried to answer her questions, recommended her plans of action with her insurers and beneficiaries. Acceptance and indifference were fighting it out in those pupils. By the time I’d answered her last questions, incredulity had won.

John, what about the—wait, where’s John today?

Shit, and the boss has to stride in as I’m already in brown-eyed lady’s quizzical sights. He’s paused in the corridor between cubicles, a vision in khakis and eyeglasses resting—speaking of visions—more than halfway down the bridge of his nose. His hazels, more confused than her browns, fix on me as he stands equivocally at the cubicle’s edge.

John is, and I look down at the chicken scratch I’ve jotted on the notepad, as if it will answer his questions. Coming in . . .

Trailing off isn’t pleasing the client or the boss, both of whom look at me as they trade their own questioning glances back and forth. "You’re John," says the lady, glancing down at the blank on a form she clutches in her hands. Sure enough, my name is neatly typed on the case worker line.

The other John, ma’am, I say to her and to him at once, comes in after lunch. More than one John at a place like this, of course. She’s not buying it, and neither is he. I do have what used to be the most common given name around before we were awash in Taylors and Megans, and this should at least buy me some time. Of course, it also starts to connote a different, unwanted kind of workplace for the client in question. A respectable place shouldn’t have too many johns around.

I wasn’t told we’d have a substitute today, the boss says, still eyeing me, khakis pleating pleasingly over those trim hips of his. He’s trying to remember interviewing me, even seeing me before. The office isn’t that huge, but the place has a quick turnover rate, and it’s possible one of us has been managing cases here indefinitely without attracting Luke’s attention. I watch this dawn on him as he scratches his chin, checks his wristwatch, dimly produces a mild smile for the client, whom he’s just now realizing he’s thrown off by voicing his doubts. If I had known, he manages to say, I wouldn’t have told Sean he could come in.

"Sean," I say involuntarily. It’s my weirdest utterance yet in a strange conversation. They both look at me silently. I’m as certain she’s second-guessing ever making the arrangements I’m recommending, as I am certain that he’ll go check the personnel file the second he leaves the cubicle. I stammer out something about being able to help Sean and asking when he’ll be arriving, but I’m sure the boss is already forming the mental question he’ll be asking next, how do I know which Sean? For that matter, how does he know which John? It goes unspoken, now as always, that they send the gay kids, and the kids who might be, John’s way. So, was this new John’s direction the way to send clients like Sean now? Or might the old John, or some other john, be the right way to re-direct the special and the maybe-special ones? Sweat beads out on my forehead and I reach for more forms from the shelves behind the desk to avoid their awkward glances. Luke decides he’s caused enough weirdness and excuses himself, nodding to the still-flustered brown-eyed lady and saying as he turns on his heels, Sean will be in at three.

Brown eyes soon departs, and I’ve systematically undone three appointments’ worth of building up her trust. I’ll have to gain it back when, if ever, I am myself again. All my attention is on Sean, whom I should have remembered was coming in that afternoon. He is to be one of the only repeat clients of the day, and the only potentially special one, and perhaps the only one who’ll know exactly how much John is supposed to know about him. He’ll also know the person betraying that knowledge today just isn’t that same old John.

3.

But I thought I was going to have another conversation with John.

You are.

Well, where is he?

Here. It’s me. John.

No, I mean John. The case worker I’ve talked to several times. Harrier, shorter guy than you.

Harrier?

Yeah, no offense. Blue eyes. You must be new here.

No, I’ve been here . . . a long time.

I guess we’ve just never spoken before.

No.

You’re even using his dick-phone?

I’m sorry? What?

That thing you just hooked up. I’ve seen John use it. It must transcribe things people say.

Yeah. I—John uses it regularly. The Dictaphone for sessions with clients. It just jots down what it hears people saying.

The dick-phone. Yeah.

Dictaphone. Company name for the device.

Dick-phone, for people who. . .

People who?

Speak dick.

Oh. Like an Anglophone speaks English. A Francophone speaks French. A dick-phone . . .

Exactly.

So I guess that’s what this transcript is.

And I guess that’s what we’re talking about.

And I guess we’re the kind of guys who talk about. . .

Yeah. . . . we are, aren’t we?

Well, we don’t have to talk about that if we don’t want to.

Well, of course not, but we’re both the kind of guys who would talk about that more than .. .

More than . . .

More than, say, he would?

Ummm, yeah, if you mean him, chewing his pencil over there, trying to look like he’s not listening to us. Yeah, we’re . . .

yeah, we’re . . . ?

Those kinds of guys.

You and John?

What?

You and John are those kinds of guys?

Yeah, John and I are practically the same guy. And over there, he’s not. And you’re . . .?

Sean, yeah. Speaking into the dick-phone, too.

Speaking into the dick-phone. But not everybody who speaks into it . . .

And not everybody who speaks it.

Is.

Is that kind of guy. Gotcha. They just speak like they are.

Yeah.

Okay. Creepy.

So, you haven’t been . . .

Haven’t been. . . No. Wait.

Wait? What?

How do you know about. . .? You must know that from the device.

We . . . .We take notes, yes, . . . on clients’ actions and their . . .

And their . .

Their self-harm.

So John specifically dictates for complete strangers to read about my. . . self-harm

No, not for . . . strangers.

For all of you, then? For you? For anybody?

No. John dictated that stuff . . . for himself. For the dick-phone.

Which still doesn’t tell me how you know about it.

Well, I didn’t have to read it.

You didn’t have to. You already . . .

I already . . . could see it . . . You kind of learn to read people, like they’re transcripts, too.

People are transcripts?

People’s bodies, their body language, it backs up, or gives away what they’re telling you.

How so?

Well, those scratches and bruises would have a lot to say to a nurse. You’ve had scabs, bruises before, in places you could reach, but that others could, too. You’re a bit laid back at the moment but your arms and shoulders are tenser than your torso.

Yeah.

Your autonomics are all over the map.

My autonomics?

Unconscious gestures, facepalms, tapping fingertips, and blushes. They tell people things.

Shouldn’t they be on the dick-phones then, too?

Well, now that I’ve said them, they are part of the transcript.

So in a way, I don’t have to actually say a word.

In a way. You’re jumpy, hyper aware of surroundings, looking at him.

Him again?

Him again, probably because he’s obviously still listening.

But not one of us.

No, he’s not one of us. I don’t think.

You don’t think?

Let’s, leave him out of this. Out of us. What do you most want to hear from, or most want to tell, some guy like me?

Hmm . . . . How hard it is.

How hard what is?

This. . . . I›m not sure why I do it. I don›t know why I do it where people are going to be able to see it. I don›t know why I keep doing it. I know what it›s going to feel like and I do it anyway. I when the pain will start to be sharper. When the arm will start to ache. And then I can stop feeling everything else and just feel, for a minute, holy fuck that hurts. Nothing else but the pain.

So the pain focuses everything. It’s like there’s nothing else to feel, nothing else to worry about.

You did talk to John about me. You read the transcript.

No.

You did. How else would you know?

I didn’t have to. I can’t say I’ve never been there, if you know what I mean. . . . Have you told others, what you’ve told me?

John told you about that, too.

No.

Yes. He must have.

No, he . . .

Didn’t have to? How? Is there some sign of that, too?

Well, some of us give ourselves away, right? Not necessarily in words.

Maybe in autonomics?

.

Maybe in autonomics, but don’t get overly concerned about them either.

Why not?

Because if you’re consciously aware of them, they’re not autonomic. they’re just something else you’re, or maybe we’re, self-conscious about.

We’re, you and me?

Well, certainly me. It sounds like, you.

And John, too?

John . . . can disclose what he wants to to you.

Disclose what he wants to. But I thought you said you—

Are John. Yeah. But John didn’t . . I didn’t . . .

Disclose before?

Didn’t. Disclose last time.

But maybe the dick-phone says so. Maybe the autonomics say so.

Maybe the body says so.

That’s a scary thought. Maybe you have to read it right.

Speak the language. Dickphones, speaker and listener.

Speaker and receiver.

Maybe not receiver. But I think we’re on the same wavelength.

And you didn’t disclose.

Not in words. Maybe neither of us had to.

Maybe we can just read one another. Transcripts, right?

Well, not trans-scripts, right? Unless we’re trans.

Right. I’m not trans.

I’m not either.

But you say that, looking at your body . . .

Yeah. . . . I do. How about that other thing?

The . . . other thing you’re going to say John didn’t tell you about?

He didn’t have to tell me.

You just know.

No, I do know. You told me.

You’ve got to stop with that shit. When would I have told you? Why won’t you just tell me you’ve talked to the other John? About, everything, it sounds like.

So, then . . . ?

So, then, he’s kept his hands to himself.

Every night?

. . . Okay. You’re going to tell me if that ever changes, right?

Well, I’m going to tell John. Who I guess is telling everything to tell you. He’s not keeping things to himself, either.

No, he’s . . . not keeping them to himself, either. Never mind.

Wouldn’t have to. Got it. It’s on the transcripts.

Anything else we should be discussing here, Sean?

It’s hard. . .