J. E. Landau

My boss got de-domesticated. It’s all bullshit, of course. Just alpha male marketing spin, like nootropics and boner pills, for guys who are insecure. I figured that I couldn’t judge too much, back then. I got my face chopped up in my teens, around the same time I got top surgery. We all do what we have to do to reinforce our identities, feel okay in our own skins.

Michael was out for a couple weeks, and then he came in, vacant look in his eyes. The guy I sit across, Khary, from tilted his head a little, and I looked over at my boss. I didn’t make eye contact, just flicked my eyes up and down, and he’d had the works—hunched over posture, heavy brow ridge, thicker jaw. Real caveman package, like he was ready to swing around a big bone club. But he had a backpack in his hand, and while he was stomping through the office I could see the stretch marks on his face, where they’d smoothed out the skin to make it fit whatever they’d done to his skull. He was somewhere between cro-magnon and Kardashian, in the great tree of humanity.

Khary rolled his eyes after the boss passed, and I grinned. The rest of the day actually ran better than usual. Michael didn’t leave his office much, and we didn’t have any bullshit meetings, and I wrote code. Not that much code, but, you know. I wrote some code.

At the end of the day, though, he comes out of the office, and he’s looking around. It was weird, you know, Michael was never the smiling type, he was always the type of guy to scowl over a cup of coffee. I think if he could have, he would have grown a beard, but I never saw him with one, so I figure his face wouldn’t handle it. But when he came out of the office, he was barely emoting at all. He just looked us over. His blue eyes scanned over us, and I wanted to crawl out of my skin.

I could say that it was like looking at the eyes of an animal, but it wasn’t. If you’ve ever owned a cat or a dog—my parents had both—then you’ve seen how they look at you. They’re expressive with their eyes, you can see that spark of intelligence. I assume they evolved to look that way so that we’d like them, and maybe it’s different if you look at a wildcat, or something. They’re domesticated, same as you and me.

But Michael didn’t look like that. His eyes moved over us, and I could see that they were moving, and focusing on me, but I didn’t see the emotions that you get out of the eyelids. There was none of the tensing and twitching in his face that tells you what people are feeling, and none of the expressiveness and liveliness you need to assure you that yes, you’re looking into the eyes of another intelligent being, the same as you.

His eyes were completely dead, and when I made eye contact with him, I felt a wave of disgust wash over me. I think it was the uncanny valley. Human beings have a sense for when we’re looking at something that’s just like us but not, which is the instinct that made us kill all the neanderthals. Or that’s what they say online. I wanted to get away from him, in that moment. I wanted to get out of the office, to run, hide, form a band of people like me. Because he didn’t seem human, in that moment. He was wrong.

And his eyes passed away, and I realized just how tense I was, and I didn’t relax until I was home, sitting in my living room, in my underwear, with my laptop in my lap and a joint in my hand, reading posts from people just like me, with friends and family and colleagues who got the treatment. And, you know, at the top of the page, there it was, advertised to me.

Of course, it’s not like getting de-domesticated is the only thing people do to themselves. I get work done, from time to time, but I’m more casual about it. I’m just trying to build myself up as male, you know? I don’t want to be the lord of the cave, wearer of pelts. And nobody talks about the animal people, the vampires, the machinejobs in polite company. I take pills that make me hairier and shots that make me bigger and hornier, I don’t try to turn back time on anthropological history.

I spent that night doomscrolling. Reading about a “community” of people like you is alright, but it’s like junk food. It leaves you feeling sick and tired, and then you wish you’d stuck to your real world friends, face-to-face.

The next day at work, I came in a little late, but I don’t think Michael noticed. He was all shut up in his office, and I had no idea what he could possibly be doing in there, but that was okay. I worked on the code. Database management software is important, but it’s not very exciting, so I didn’t work that hard, and I took a lot of breaks for coffee and shot the shit with people in the breakroom. Normally, Michael would be hovering around, checking up on everyone. But he was in his office. And nobody wanted to see him.

“What do you think he’s doing in there?” Khary asked, as we typed away. “I wonder if he’s still sleeping it off.”

“Nah,” I said back, “I bet he’s trying to figure out how to talk again. You see his jaw?”

And I felt a little bad. It was just stupid tribal thinking, like we were out on the savanna, mocking another tribe for being a little different, so that when we fought them we wouldn’t feel as bad. And, you know, I’m white. Khary is Black. I don’t want him to feel like I was just itching to hate anyone who was a little different.

“Nah, you’re right,” Khary said, with a chuckle. “I bet he’s learning to speak again. I’ve seen it online, you know?”

“Yeah.”

We typed quietly for a while longer, and I took a little break, where I pretended to work by browsing news websites on my phone with the code editor open. “Oh shit,” Khary said, while I was reading an article about some actor’s plastic surgery. “Michael wants me in his office.”

“Good luck,” I said, and Khary just nodded. I feel like, once upon a time, he would have joked along with that. But something about the idea of being alone in a small room with Michael felt incredibly threatening, like being locked in a cage with a wild animal. Michael wasn’t a wild animal, he was our boss. I had to get out of that mindset.

Khary walked towards Michael’s office, the only private space in our open floorplan. Privacy is for management, these days. Khary looked tense, I noticed, and I could see a little bit of sweat on the back of his neck. He stepped into Michael’s office, and I watched then for the whole ten minutes he was in there, pretending to be reading the news on my phone while pretending to work. And then, Khary came out.

He looked scared. His face was all twisted up, and he seemed red in the face. He walked back over, and sat across from me.

“What happened?” I asked him.

Khary’s hands were shaking, I could see from underneath our screens. I couldn’t see his face. “He told me I needed to step it up,” he said.

“Did he yell at you, or anything?”

“No,” said Khary. “But something—something about him…”

“Yeah,” I said. I knew exactly what he meant.

My first personal meeting with Michael was a couple days later. In the mean time, I partied with people, I worked, I lived my life. I saw a few other people with the neanderthal package in bars. But not many. And I never saw the same ones multiple times. It was strange, like people who got it withdrew from the world. But I also saw them on the news, in politics and culture. They were everywhere when I watched TV, in ads.

You’ve been domesticated. Break out. Said the man on TV. And his eyes were dead, too, but over the camera it didn’t look so bad, and he’d been prettied up, and his brows looked natural.

Michael sent me an email, asking me to go into his office, and I did. I was nervous, too, but nobody had walked out actually hurt. I wasn’t going to be in physical danger, and if Michael touched me, I’d sue. So I walked over to his office, with the drawn blinds, and stepped inside.

It was an entirely normal corporate office. Actually, besides the blinds being drawn, I don’t think it changed at all after Michael got de-domesticated. He still had a little statue on his desk of a guy on a cycle—I don’t know if Michael cycled, but his office was full of pictures of people in motion, running, cycling. I think he was a sports buff.

“Sit down, it’s time for your performance review,” Michael said, without looking up. His voice was a little uneven, but it didn’t seem like he was having trouble talking. I took a seat, pulling out one of the little chairs on the other side of the desk from him. Looking at him up close, I could see that the rest of his body had changed, too. He was bulkier, more bent. His hands still looked dexterous, but his wrists were thicker. He looked at me with those dead eyes, and seemed to be scanning up and down my face. I tried to look as calm as possible. “You’re not performing well,” he said. “You need to do better.”

“Okay,” I said, since I wasn’t sure what to say. I’d had these conversations before, but they’d always had a certain level of smarm to grease things. My boss would say a bunch of platitudes, and then they’d tell me the bad news, and then they’d say something condescending. Michael didn’t do that, he just got right into it.

“You need to write more code,” he said. “Otherwise, I will fire you.” His voice was mostly flat, and there wasn’t much intonation in it at all. His body language—I don’t know if I was reading it right, but it felt like he was trying to be casual. He seemed to be moving with ease, conducting himself like he was just walking in the park. Or maybe intimidating. Maybe I was just afraid of him.

“I can do that,” I said.

He nodded, heavily. His face remained unchanged. His weird face, that was too heavy, too stiff. “Okay, do that,” he said. “Go away.”

And I got up, and pushed my chair back in, and he went back to looking at the desk. It was so strange. He didn’t try to extract any assurances from me. My hands shook a little when I got back to work, and Khary gave me a knowing look. A knowing look! It’s amazing how much we communicate with our eyes. And how much is lost when they’re held still.

And for that quarter, I worked damn hard. When Michael called me into the office for the next review, he just grunted at me. “Good enough,” he said. “Keep doing it.” And I left. And that was that.

And the office has been more productive than ever, and I’m still shit scared of him. I haven’t done anything about it, of course.

I’ve done some reading, you know, and de-domestication is bullshit. The process is just a bunch of random procedures put together, so people can feel like cavemen. You’re just messing with a person’s brain, and their hormones, and their face and their bones, making them look and feel like what they expect, like a de-extincted dinosaur. The truth doesn’t matter. The marketing is what matters.

But I’m obviously domesticated. Every time I go to work, there’s a good chance that I see Michael, and I look at him. And I feel hatred, and fear, like I’m on the plains fifty thousand years ago. And I don’t do anything about it. I don’t know if Michael feels the same way about me, but he’s not doing anything about it either. We’re both domesticated.