Lizard Man
Fiction: A Japanese researcher struggles with an inhuman transformation.
This story originally appeared in the collection Quarterlives by Cairo Smith. Find it online in Kindle and paperback formats.
“I could be a superhero now.”
These are the first words Takumi Hashimoto spoke as he lay on the floor of the Reptiloptrion Chamber, on the fifth floor of the Miraitech Research Institute in Tokyo. His colleagues had rushed in, white with fear for his safety, the second the Reptiloptrion Omega Field had decayed to tolerable levels.
“Oh, Takumi,” said lab assistant Yui Nakamura, whose pantsuit silhouette and occasional contributions had always impressed the young man. “When we built the Reptiloptrion Omega Ray, we only thought it would contribute to understanding the science of reptilian mutations! We never thought one of our own scientists would be caught in the Omega Chamber just as we activated the field!”
“Shut up, Nakamura,” said the hard-nosed senior researcher, Satoshi Watanabi, a cigarette smoking on his lips. “Hashimoto, what did you say?”
“I said I could be a superhero,” said Takumi, “like the Tokyo Five.” He didn’t feel like a superhero. He felt massively ill. His reputation as an unflappable wisecrack, however, was essential to his office persona, and this seemed as good a quip as any to maintain it.
Once they determined he was not radioactive, they got him to the doctor. “Well,” said Dr. Tatsuya Mori, who had consulted with Watanabi for several hours and come away scowling, “you’re either going to turn into a lizard or you’re not.”
“You don’t know?” said Takumi, who tried very hard to smile and keep his cool so everyone would like him always.
Dr. Mori flipped through the many, many pages on his clipboard. “Time will tell,” he said, almost shrugging. “The brain and nervous system will remain human, your associate tells me, but the rest we cannot predict.”
“He won’t!” Misaki Yamamoto exclaimed to the doctor, throwing her arms around Takumi. Misaki, twenty-three, was Takumi’s on-again-off-again hand model girlfriend of one year and four months. When she had gotten the call about Takumi from Miss Nakamura, she’d rushed from her modeling job in Shinjuku and arrived at Keio University Hospital, where Takumi was admitted. She had told them all she was his wife to get past the guards.
“Won’t what?” said Takumi, glad to feel her fragrant embrace.
“Won’t turn into a lizard!” said Misaki. “You’re so brilliant and tough, Takumi, you can beat any odds. I believe in you! Won’t you try, for me?”
For the first time since the Omega Ray fired, Takumi felt fear. He did not mind the thought of becoming a lizard—he could accept it with a certain quiet dignity—but the thought of disappointing Misaki was almost too much to bear. “I promise,” he said. “I’ll do all I can, and I’ll win.”
The only person who knew anything about reversing the effects of the Reptiloptrion Field was Satoshi Watanabi. “We can try,” he said to Takumi, when the handsome young man had returned from his week of recuperative leave. “It could take years, or decades.”
“Then we’d better start now,” laughed Takumi, who was aware of Miss Nakamura’s nearby gaze and wanted very much to seem like a stud in her ingenue eyes. “Do what you will to me.”
In the next twelve weeks Takumi Hashimoto was subjected to two-hundred needle pricks, twelve IVs, a chest surgery, a head surgery, fifty grueling sessions under the anti-ionizer ray, and thirty-five electroshock convulsions. He took it all with a smile, though with each new jab and electrical shock the smile gained a sorrow deep within.
On week seven, a small patch of skin on his forearm turned to scales. It had little sensation, lacking attunement to heat and cold, and shortly after it formed he accidentally singed it on an electric stove. He began to wear long-sleeve shirts to conceal the transformation, though of course at work he shared every new detail with his team. “I’ve been doing new extrapolations,” he would say to Watanabi, carrying full stacks of notebooks into the office. “I think I can calculate how long we have until the process is complete, until it begins to slow down. I think I might barely get more than a few scaly spots, in the end.”
“We can’t know, Hashimoto,” the man would say to him, scowling and smoking. “We just can’t know.”
Yui was in charge of applying the convulsive shock electrodes to Takumi’s body, and at first Takumi took pleasure in the intimacy of her supple touch. He had stopped making love with Misaki weeks prior, for fear she would discover the scaly spots on his arms and chest. Eventually, his sorrow from the pain of the treatments was too great, and he no longer felt more than passing relief from the lab girl’s skin on his own.
On the twelfth week he arrived on Monday morning to find the lab dark and Satoshi Watanabi not smoking. “Sit,” said Watanabi, and gave him the news. The owners of Miraitech had decided that the Reptiloptrion project was a bust. Funding for all staff was to be sundowned, and the fifth floor was to be opened up for experiments in anti-aging serum.
“But, our work to reverse the condition is part of Reptiloptrion,” said Takumi. He did not say ‘my condition,’ lest those strange floodgates of sorrow choke his throat. “What happens now?”
“Perhaps in some years, some decades, research will resume,” said Watanabi. “The company does want to track your condition, and if you agree to see a Miraitech doctor once a month they will give you a lifetime monthly pension of 138,000 yen. Since you waived your right to settlement when you joined the firm, they want to do a little something to help you along.”
It was enough for a small apartment’s rent and some money left over for groceries. It was also a sixth of his current researcher’s salary. “Can they keep me on?” he asked, seeing new shapes in his superior’s face. “I’ll work in anti-aging. I have a versatile background.”
“They’re not even keeping me on,” said the non-smoking man. “Go home. We did what we could. It’s done now.”
Takumi went back to his nice Shibuya apartment and sat with his nice Hi-Fi, his nice computer, his nice Walkman, his nice Nagel, and his nice bonsai collection. It would all have to go. The scales had spread along much of his chest, and a new twitchiness in his forearm muscles made clear that the changes went deep. That part of his body was cold, always cold, and no amount of heavy sweater layers could ever warm it up.
So, he took a hot bath, as had become his nightly routine, and for the first time he wept until he choked and could not see. When he collected his senses he called the hand model Misaki Yamamoto, and even though it was eleven at night he asked her to come have dinner. She accepted, and he called for delivery from the fanciest place he knew was to her liking, Kyubei. When the boy arrived on a moped with the bag, Takumi tipped like it was Christmas.
Misaki showed up looking like a million bucks. They ate at his dining table, keeping the lights low, and he felt ill as he lied about the cure effort carrying on. “I want you to know,” she told him sweetly, having seen a trace of the scaliness at his wrist, “I won’t judge you for having symptoms, flare-ups, as long as you’re working to cure it.”
He didn’t know how to begin to work to cure it. The rice and wasabi made him sicker still, and he only ate the tops of his nigiri as she finished her maki. Then he brought her to the bedroom and tried to make love. He started slow, removing his shirt, and she kept a brave face as she stroked the green-scaled patches where abdominal skin had been. More than once, he thought he caught her gagging.
Takumi marveled at her magnificent body, illuminated blue and pink by the skyscraper signage out the window. Then a horrible thought of impregnating her with a half-lizard fetus came into his mind, and he could not go on. He waited, brave in silence, till he thought she was asleep, then he held his face like a child and sobbed even more.
Five weeks later his bank account was spent and the lavish biotech lifestyle had to end. His transformation had progressed, exceeding the pace he’d predicted in his Miraitech notebooks. He could barely stomach anything but raw fish and meat from the local market. Through an ad in the paper, he had sought a friendly soul who could help him sell his belongings. An estate sale company responded.
“It’s an oven in here,” the workmen loudly complained to Takumi on arrival. Though he was cold already, he agreed to turn the heat down, and he shivered in the bedroom in a state of chattering agony as his possessions were auctioned.
“I wonder who died,” he heard a suited man say, flipping through the CDs. “He must have been young, and successful. Poor guy.”
The next day Misaki left him a voicemail and told him, with all the Cartier work coming up, she would not have time for a regular relationship. It was a breakup in so many words. The first time Misaki had dumped him was a shock, and the second had felt like failure, but the third possessed a certain inevitability that numbed him as he let the cassette tape play. Misaki Yamamoto had barely loved him as a man, how could she love him as a lizard?
There was another message, from a slick suitor friend of Yui Nakamura who had often hung around the Miraitech fifth floor and regarded Takumi as a rival. He did something in consumer product marketing for Sony that often took him over to America. “Hey, Takumi-san. It’s Daichi Kurokawa,” the message played. “Yui mentioned a little about what you’re doing lately, lizard-wise, and I think the guys at KK Sentai would love to hear about it. This could be big. We can set a dinner. Page me.”
Takumi reviewed his daily calendar with aching hands that had grown thick, sharp nails. The calendar was empty. Two days later, stuffing hot water bottles into every pocket of his heaviest coat, he left his unfurnished apartment and took the train to the Iowa Steakhouse in Roppongi.
His back cramped painfully when he tried to sit straight, so he spent the metro ride bent over forward with his arms on his knees. This was quite comfortable. When walking, he had to keep his head low, and he felt people in the station avoiding his path as he moved like a hunchback.
He bowed to Mr. Fujimori and Mr. Taniguchi from Kabushiki Kaisha Sentai when the waiter led him to their table. Bowing was a relief from the pain of standing upright. His legs did not want to bend the human way, and so there was a lengthy and embarrassing scene as he contorted himself to force his knees under the table. Daichi, watching all this, looked smarmier than ever.
The dinner was a coursed prix fixe that had already been ordered. It began with bread, which tasted like sand to Takumi, and he forced just enough to be polite down his throat as the pleasantries turned to business.
“Daichi says you may be interested in the Minor Force Sentai,” said the large Mr. Fujimori, and this was the first Takumi had heard of it.
“He says right from the very start you felt this accident, this origin story, could lead to a heroic career,” the small Mr. Taniguchi added.
The men ordered sake for the table. Takumi had not had a drink since the mishap in the Reptiloptrion Chamber, but he gave a toast of “Kanpai!” with the others and swallowed what he had been given. Very quickly he felt like he had made a grim mistake.
“So, what can you do?” one of the men asked. He had forgotten which name went with which. “Climb walls? Spit poison? Do you have super strength?”
“I mostly just get cold,” Takumi mumbled, feeling his lips turn stiff and his thoughts slow. More than cold, he felt seriously sick, and it was hitting him before he could find the wherewithal to make it to the restrooms. “I have noticed a twitchiness in the reptilized muscle, which could mature into increased reactivity if I, I need to excuse myself. Forgive me.”
He lurched from the table and made it halfway to the door before he vomited. It was a pastelike substance, mostly sake and chewed bread, with very little stomach acid mixed in. It barely missed a lady’s shoe as it hit the floor of the steakhouse. He did not have the strength to stand, but he needed to run, so he kept to the ground and sped for the exit in a swinging, undulating crawl as patrons screamed. “Takumi!” Daichi shouted, but in his shame the young man could only think of flight.
Before the frigid night could hit Takumi took the train home, pretending to be drunk in recline on the subway seats so he would not have to bear the pain of sitting upright. At his corner market complex, he bought a whole plucked chicken from the toriniku-ten clerk, then rushed it up to his apartment and ate it raw, bones and all. Fed, he turned the thermostat as high as it would go and fell into a fifteen-hour sleep.
When he woke, he disconnected his answering machine, in fear of receiving any messages he could not bear to listen to. He did not plan on ever plugging it in again. Without observers, he felt no shame in crawling, and so he moved to the kitchen and vomited again into a dustbin. This vomit consisted only of chicken bones, and was not accompanied not with nausea but pleasant relief. His nails clicked on the tile as he moved, and he had a vague sensation that the scaliness of his chest had finally moved upward to a space.
It was just as well that he was not tall enough to see himself in the bathroom mirror, he decided. There was no use to observing what he already knew. Crawling back to the bedroom, he found an overdue library book beneath the bed, a translation of The Metamorphosis he had checked out in the first weeks after the mishap. Reading the tale of Gregor Samsa in the subsequent hour only confirmed what he had already decided. He would reach the roof of his apartment tower through the emergency stairwell and leap to the ground.
It was reasonable, and it was an act of control. There was little else he could control in the face of the degeneration. His main concern was the chance of injuring or scaring a passerby as he landed. To this end, he would wait until the early morning and choose to jump from the least accessed side of the tower. The only thing stopping him was his appointment with the Miraitech doctors. He had agreed on the phone two days before to make it in for his checkup that afternoon, and he hated canceling appointments with all his being. He couldn't stand to leave a bad impression.
Takumi hoped he wouldn’t see Yui at the Miraitech complex. This was his main thought as he took a private cab from Shibuya to Odaiba. Without next month’s expenses to think of, it was easy to budget for small niceties like a cab, and the driver was too polite to ask him not to crouch on his stomach on the backseat bench while they drove.
With Herculean effort he rose to human height and clopped in dress shoes from the curb to the first-floor labs. “Welcome, Mr. Hashimoto,” said the secretary, visibly uncomfortable at the sight of him. At least she still knew who he was.
The front desk people put a sticker on his shirt that said ‘Research Subject,’ then they opened the doors to the west wing so he could amble through. Frigid again, he fell to a crawl as soon as he left their eyeline, curling up on the waxy paper cover of a medical examination table. Soon, dangerously cold and alone, he fell into a coma-like hibernal sleep.
A hand on his side, shaking him, roused him awake. “Mr. Hashimoto, how do you feel?” a woman’s voice asked, and it had been a long time since he had heard that question.
“Cold,” he said, barely lucid.
“I can imagine,” she said with kind urgency. He heard the door shut, and a vent began to blow warm air from the central ducting into the windowless exam room. Then he felt the woman climb onto the table and press her body tight against his back, her arms around him.
“What are you doing?” he asked in his slowed state. Her body heat was like a stone in the sun, salvation.
“Getting you warm,” she said, close behind him.
“You’re not Dr. Kobayashi,” he said. “Are you a specialist nurse?”
“I’m Dr. Sato,” said the woman, who seemed just a few years his elder. “They asked me to replace Dr. Kobayashi on this case. My background is herpetology.”
Takumi already felt more lucid, more himself. “I hope I’m not troubling you,” he said, as they lay still together.
“This is why we’re here,” said Dr. Sato.
The herpetologist lay with him for quite a while and asked him many questions about his living conditions, his difficulties, and his goals for the future. In his vagueness she seemed to suspect his plans, and her voice changed subtly with concern as they discussed his financials. It seemed like she knew him inside and out before she ever rose to show him her face.
It was a lovely face, lovely all the more for the lack of repulsion in her gaze. She was small, with the faintest hints of creases at the corners of her mouth and at her eyes. Her lab coat said her first name was Miho, and her left fourth finger suggested she was unmarried. “The most important thing we need to do is find you an apartment before your lease runs out,” she decided. “I’ll start to look around in Koto.”
“Why Koto?”
“Because I live in Koto,” said Miho, “and you need someone checking in on you. How are you getting home after this?”
“I arranged for a cab.”
“Good. I’m going to give you my number, and when I get home at seven tonight I want you to call me and tell me that everything’s alright.”
“I’m not a child,” said Takumi.
“No,” said Miho, “you’re not. You’re a very brave man.”
He could see her sweating in the heat, but she did not complain. She examined him from head to toe and asked many more questions about what he ate and how much water he drank. Then she wrote down some suggestions on a pad for the timing and nature of his meals. “This is all guesswork,” she made sure to stress, “which is why it’s so important that you call me if you feel unwell.”
“Are you getting paid for all this, beyond the hour of our visit?” Takumi asked.
“Let me worry about that,” said Miho. “You have enough to focus on.”
He kept his word and called her that night, and through a few moments of small talk was able to determine she lived alone. He liked talking on the phone, with her. His voice and wit were the same as always. He could almost imagine he was a human.
She found a basement apartment for let two blocks from her own, and gave him the owner’s telephone number. After Miho toured it on his behalf, Takumi committed to the lease, sight unseen. She asked him to wait four more days before hiring a car to travel to Koto and move in.
When the fifth day came he packed all his things in a duffel and convinced the driver to go up and retrieve it. He moved alone in the halls, as much as he could, so he could scurry at his own quadrupedal gait. In the cab, the smell of the sporting bag reminded him of tennis with the Miraitech young research cohort, and he wept as he thought of never playing tennis again. Weeping was common for him now, even with the reduced tear production of a reptilian lacrimal system. Weeping was the price of not resolving to die.
“Are you an actor?” the cabbie asked, looking at his face through the rearview mirror. “Are you doing a monster movie?”
“Yeah,” said Takumi. Everything was easier with ‘yeah.’ “I’m doing a monster movie.”
Miho Sato was waiting at the side street curb outside the beige brickwork Koto apartment building. “Modern apartments for rent, studio and up,” a sign announced in English and Japanese. The neighborhood was calm and sedate.
She took the duffel and the fare was squared and they were alone. “Come on,” she said, leading him down a flight of stairs to a half-basement single-bedroom apartment. “I want you to know this is all experimental. Anything that doesn’t work, we can change.”
‘Experimental,’ the first two months of his transformation, had meant needles and electrodes and false hope and agony. Now it meant something else. As she opened the door, a wave of soothing dry heat washed over him. Then he saw what had been done the past four days.
Instead of vinyl, the flooring of the apartment was organic stone cladding, like you would find on the accent wall of a sixties apartment complex. A humidifier was running, as was a long row of full-spectrum UVB lights. He recognized the style of the lights from his time tending the fifth floor’s cages at Miraitech. A couple additional heat bulbs glowed in the midcentury ceiling fixtures.
“We still need to get you some plants,” said Miho Sato, shutting the apartment door, “and you have to tell me what material you prefer to sleep on.”
He turned to her and saw in surprise she was undressing. She removed her wide leg palazzo trousers and white button-up top, leaving on a red two-piece swimsuit underneath. “I know Miraitech has a dress code,” she said, “but it’s hot as hell in here.”
For the first time outside of a bath he felt comfortable enough to remove his own heavy coat. She busied herself, instead of fussing over him, as he worked out a way to get the sleeves past his taloned thumbs. He appreciated that. The stone felt good on his skin, his scales, and he was amazed how easy it was to move around on the mortared cladding. “How did you do this?” he asked, not hiding his lizard gait from her.
“I got a grant from Miraitech,” said Miho. “I told you not to worry about it.”
He watched her bend down over the duffel in her swimwear to extract his belongings. “I’m doing better than poor Gregor Samsa,” he said, “for all that’s happened.”
“Things do get better,” said the young doctor with the black bob and pale hips, “bit by bit.”
“How often will I see you?” he asked. “How often can I see you?”
“You’ll see me,” she said. She turned to him with a smile and did not glance away. “But you need to find meaning in your own life, too.”
“Not as a superhero,” said Takumi. “Not as Lizard Man.”
“No,” said Miho, “as Takumi Hashimoto, and all he is.”
Futurist Letters is an independent publication and a labor of love. It is entirely user-supported, and any patronage you provide is greatly valued. Paid subscribers have the ability to comment and browse the article archives.
If you liked this post, please consider sharing it with some friends, or on social media. You can also follow Cairo Smith on Twitter, Instagram, and Letterboxd.