Just the Humidity

A short story about self-doubt, aging, and demonic sex dolls

via

It was supposed to be a night of celebration. Charlie was with his wife, Halle, having drinks on the crowded outdoor patio at Coda, a popular Miami jazz lounge. Tables were hard to come by at this hour, despite the sweltering swamp-like summer humidity outside, but they found one and, drinks in hand, took a seat, eager to get the night started. There was a lot to celebrate. Halle just completed her first trimester (she was drinking one of those new herbal faux tequila cocktails) and Charlie just got promoted from junior analyst at his financial firm to senior analyst - a substantial pay raise and his own office. They were beginning a new chapter in their lives. Family, stability, love. It was all on the horizon and the view was beautiful. As Charlie watched the band play, admiring the drummer’s hand speed and beat agility, he thought about how fortunate he was, took a long sip of his Old Fashioned, and felt a heavy anchor of dread crash into his gut.

But he hid it. He leaned back, caught Halle’s eye, caressed her hand, and smiled as he felt the dread anchor barrel into his stomach and strangle his heart.

“Gonna be a great night,” he said.

He hoped it would. Friends were coming to meet them shortly, and he and Halle were going to break the news, make it official. A baby was on the way! Big promotion! They were looking for a house now! It made Charlie nauseous. He knew it shouldn’t, but it did. He wanted this. Yes, he wanted this. At the age of 35, it’s what he should want. And with Halle about to be 35 in a few months, they didn’t have a lot of time to not want it. It, and everything that came with it, was the right thing to be doing. Family. Stability. Love. Family. Stability. Love. What else was there?

But that dread in Charlie’s gut sat there - big, heavy, and going nowhere. He drained what was left of the Old Fashioned, annoyed by the bitter orange taste and regretted not getting something simpler and citrusier. Maybe it was just the damn humidity, he told himself. Some of the tables had big fans next to them, including the table next to him.

“Why can’t this place have more fans in the summer,” he said. “Nobody knows how to do things right anymore.”

After seven years together, Halle could see something was bothering Charlie and it wasn’t just the humidity. She also knew asking what was wrong wouldn’t get an answer, and that usually it was nothing and sometimes Charlie just had to stew for a little while. One of his not-so adorable quirks.

“I think you need another one,” she said with a wink to let him know he can get loose tonight. “I’ll get it. Stay here so we don’t lose the table.”

She got up and went towards the bar, disappearing in the crowd of people that seemed to have doubled since they first arrived. Charlie took a breath, exhaled, and wished he was in a better mood. But his introspection was interrupted when the man at the next table backed his chair up and bumped into the back of Charlie’s chair.

“So sorry, bro,” the man said. “So, so sorry, bro. You okay? Really sorry.”

Charlie was more bothered by the over-emphatic apology than the chair bumping, as if the man thought he was some hyper-sensitive, papier mache personality-type who would be infuriated by getting bumped into in a crowded place - but he appreciated the gesture. He waved his hand, smiled, and nodded - the universal “all good” sign.

“Bro, we’re about to leave,” the man said. “Want our fan?”

The man turned the fan around to face Charlie and the rush of cold air hit his face, cooling all the sweat droplets on his forehead, turning each one of them into tiny pockets of cold therapy.

“Thank you!” Charlie said, unable to suppress an overeager smile.

The man smacked Charlie on the shoulder too hard the way friendly drunks do.

“Don’t mention it, bro!” the man said and left with his group.

Charlie leaned back and took in the breeze. Suddenly, everything seemed better. He could feel the bulk pile of dread in his gut deteriorate. He felt lighter, more in tune with now. The band was playing a fast-paced piece with a smooth rhythm and a lot of percussion. He loved it. Now was a good time - he was crazy to think otherwise. He was gonna be a dad. Halle was gonna be a mom. They were going to have their own house. He was good at his job and he liked it. Everything was great. A bright, happy future. Maybe it really was just the humidity getting him down.

He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, soaked in the cool air, and chuckled thinking about how something as complex and powerful as the human mind could be overcome by something as simple as hot moisture in the air.

And then the cool breeze stopped. A saran wrap of sticky heat immediately enveloped him like a used condom. A tight little ball of rage sprang up in his chest. Who and why? He opened his eyes and saw a young man, 20 or so, at the next table turning the fan towards himself and his three friends, who were each just taking their seats. Charlie was shocked. How could one just take a fan from somebody - without even asking? Clearly, the fan was being used. But this person, and the people he was with, took it - just like that, without asking, without hesitation. What the hell was wrong with these people?

Charlie looked at them: four, beautiful youths, each one of them with bright, shiny skin, perfectly coiffed hair, healthy BMI and body fat percentages; the two men with shoulders like 90s padded blazers and chests like chiseled cinder blocks; the women with beautiful legs that you couldn’t not imagine grabbing you by the neck and pulling you in, complemented by vibrant breasts too perky to be supplanted by implants just yet - and everyone dressed in casual clothing that emanated too cool to care because I look naturally good. Looking at them, Charlie felt double his 35 years of age. Being so close to them made him feel like he was violating a sacred social norm. And when he stood up, he felt the fat jiggle around his belly, felt the softness in his arms and chest, and realized he hadn’t been to the gym in three years, probably couldn’t run a quarter-mile without stopping a few times, and was dressed like a man who doesn’t know how to dress for a night out, who put on what he thought people who go out wear, and, as a result, looked like an aesthetic insult.

Standing above the youths’ table, he felt like a hated middle school principal who wanted the admiration of his students as a way to cure the lack of camaraderie he felt as a child, but whom his students despised even more because this need was so transparently obvious to even the dumbest sixth grader. And the way these youths each looked at him, with scolding eyes on beautiful faces, as if he was committing a blasphemous act by being in their presence, confirmed this feeling.

But Charlie was hot and he wanted the fan back.

“Excuse me,” he said, his voice shaking. “I was using that fan.”

The youths looked at each other, each with the exact same annoyingly perturbed look.

“But you’re alone,” the young man who took the fan said.

Charlie recognized the stupidity of the young man’s answer, but he couldn’t get over how similar they looked, despite each having different physical features. It was like they were connected to each other on some subconscious level, an invisible trough they each fed from for their emotional and intellectual fuel, each receiving the same input and, as a result, delivering the same output. On the outside, they were different, albeit merely in shades. On the inside, there was no discernable difference whatsoever. If one felt a certain way, they all would. Charlie could see that and was mesmerized. Spectacular simplicity. Harmony and convenience wrapped up in a pretty package for easy consumption and easier existence. That’s when an ugly realization took hold of him: He envied the youths because they were still at the stage where connections could be made effortlessly like that. They weren’t under duress from various obligations that dominated every aspect of their lives. They were only concerned about how they were perceived among each other, which was easy for them because they already achieved the most important part: The look. Everything else stemmed from this without effort. Some say superficiality is bad. But for those who can utilize it, it’s liberating. You can’t drown if you stay on the surface. Profundity is where danger lies.

Charlie wanted to be one of them. He imagined himself taking off his external self like an old coat, tossing it aside, and joining their table - shiny face, broad shoulders, swimmer’s waist - talking about nothing, thinking about nothing, just vibing.

The young man who took the fan spoke with a smirk.

“Can you hear me, sir?” he said. “You’re, like, just you. And we’re, like, all of us.”

The young man looked at his fellow youths with shrugs and raised eyebrows, as if this was so obvious of a reason, he was flabbergasted just having to explain it. And each of the others returned the exact same look in perfect synchronization. Exact same shrugs. Exact same eyebrow raises.

Charlie admired them even more for their complete lack of logic and self-awareness that created a void overflowing with ego and self-interest. It was morally ugly - a society can’t function that way, but individuals and small groups indeed succeed that way. It was intelligent self-preservation and he wanted to self-preserve with them.

“I’m not alone,” Charlie said. “My wife is getting drinks.”

The four youths snickered and rolled their eyes in unison.

“Wife?” they each said. The concept was foolish to them and Charlie agreed.

A wife? A kid? A house?

Why?

Great questions Charlie had no answer for and was afraid to ask until now.

He didn’t want to turn the fan back around. He wanted to leave - alone. Go somewhere and think. Figure it all out. Come to grand conclusions about why he felt the way he did about his life, the upcoming changes, and about these people who, twenty minutes ago, he would have abhorred, but now maybe loved. He couldn’t give up now, though. He was stuck. He got this far. He had to continue. He turned the fan back around toward him and said in his best angry dad voice: “I had the fan first, okay? It’s mine,” and sat down at his table.

The cool breeze once again chilled the sweat on his skin and he felt better. He tried to grasp this feeling tight, wrap himself in it to forget everything else. But they were murmuring at the next table. The sounds wouldn’t leave his nervous system alone - they danced up and down his spine, into and out of his brain, mocking and teasing every nerve fiber. Charlie couldn’t make out the words because the fan’s whir in his ears, but he could hear the anger and ridicule. And then the fan’s breeze stopped. They, once again, took the fan back.

Charlie stood up. He looked at the youths, admired the glistening skin on their faces, and imagined how they would look with blood splattered all over them. He imagined how the buoyant hair of the young man who kept taking the fan would look with a caved-in forehead under it. He imagined how the other young man would look with a stomped-in mouth, coughing up his own teeth. And he imagined how terrified the young women would look when they see their boyfriends deformed and destroyed. But then again, why should they get away scot-free? This was 2025. They could get it, too - and he imagined grabbing them by their hair and tossing them across the room, their lithe bodies spinning in the air like perfumed boomerangs before crashing into the wall, breaking all their delicate, underfed bones, those beautiful legs mangled like bent wire hangers. Or maybe before he threw them at the wall, they begged him for forgiveness, and he’d take them both home to do with them what their boyfriends could no longer do, never could do, because he was the ultimate Man and such creatures are rare in our world today.

Now both of the young men stood up and placed themselves territorially around the fan. Charlie stood up, too, and was taken aback when his eyes didn’t meet theirs without adjustment. They were both significantly taller than him. And what Charlie had thought were slim and slight bodies were actually wide and muscular. They were bigger and better than him. Moreover, their posture and movements suggested they were warmed up, agile and ready, whereas his body was awkward and stiff, weighed down by fat and stress.

“We got a problem, bro?” the young man who had been in charge of fan-snatching said.

“Bro, we got a problem?” the other said.

Their voices were exactly the same. The way they moved was exactly the same. Charlie wanted to ask them what it was like to be so much in lockstep with another person. There must be some wisdom in there. But it wouldn't matter. Such wisdom would be worthless for him at this stage in his life, like telling a dog the meaning of life. There would be nothing he could do with the information.

But what if he were to get in a fight now? Just throw a punch, maybe break a glass over one of their heads. Start small, end disastrously, blood and carnage everywhere. People would record it. The video would go viral. He’d get fired from his senior analyst job. Halle would be so furious and embarrassed, she’d have a miscarriage. She’d leave him. He’d be all alone - for the first time in a long time. What then? Complete course change. No longer falling into a pit of debt and burden, back pain, and bruised pride for two weeks of vacation per year. He’d be free - rescued from impending doom. He’d have time to get shiny skin and a swimmer’s waist like them. He’d be able to sit at this table with them. Be bros with the young men. Have sex with the young women. Have sex with the young men, too, why not? That’s what they did nowadays. They’d all just laugh and fuck and think about nothing, talk about nothing, and enjoy the cool breeze of the fan forever. Some old loser would try to take the fan back and they’d stop him, each one of them connected and operating on the same, low-frequency wavelength, dim light bulbs flickering weakly but joyously.

“I do have a problem,” Charlie said. “In fact, I have lots of problems.”

“Yeah, you do,” the fan-snatcher said.

“Yeah,” the other one said. “You do.”

Now the girls stood up. They were angry and flailing their arms.

“Kick that motherfucker’s ass!” one of them said.

“Yeah!” the other one said. “Kick that old man’s ass!”

Charlie couldn’t help but think the girls looked like possessed blow-up dolls and he imagined being in a horror movie, imagined them giving him a blowjob and then chomping off his dick, blood spurting everywhere - the sad sack murder victim in the bad horror flick. And then the dolls say something like, “At least we got him off!” hahaha. He chuckled out loud and thought about how everything was dull, made from something else that was a copy of something else, made from plastic and put into plastic packages, plastic on plastic wrapped in plastic, even the people, even the sex, even the fantasies. He grabbed his empty glass and smashed it on the fan-snatcher’s head. Thick pieces of glass dug into the kid’s forehead, causing his gaping eyes to flood with blood. Shocked by the blindness and pain, the fan-snatcher fell to his knees, screaming. The other young man freaked out at the sight of blood and ran away screaming. The girls attended to their friend, extremely careful not to get blood on their clothes, and one of them cursed Charlie out when she saw that some blood got in her hair. Charlie just thought of the demonic sex doll and laughed.

There were no repercussions for Charlie. No viral videos, no job firings or miscarrying wives. Hardly anybody in the place noticed and the police weren’t even called. Halle ran over, shocked, of course, but Charlie took the Old Fashioned in her hand and drained it in one gulp before telling her what happened. On the way out, a drunk guy patted him on the back.

“I saw them harassing you, bro,” the guy said. “You got ‘em good!”

Halle felt proud of her husband and he felt proud of himself. That night they celebrated.

The next time Charlie saw blood was about six months later when his son was born. The screaming baby covered in blood made him think of the screaming young man covered in blood. And underneath all the joy he felt as he held the tiny little person in his hands, he felt that dread again. But it wasn’t for himself - it was for his son who would be just like that young man and then just like himself because that’s just what happens, copies of copies wrapped in plastic, everyone taking and not knowing why.