MUSIC & WRITING

1.                          Hot Tuna

 

     “Poo ten dollars!”

 

       The old woman at the jajangmyeon stand could tell I was ready to blow.  Sweaty brow, pinched scowl, the puckered ass of an unwilling prison punk. I tossed the dough into an empty kimchi container that served as the tip jar and headed for a smudged plastic curtain.

 

     Any other day I wouldn’t have cared, maybe shop around for a free pissoir.  But I was running late, and you couldn’t be late to the CET, they locked you out. 

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     Thanks to a sea change at the American Psychiatric Association getting the therapist license I’d studied nine years for hinged on passing the Canine Empathy Test.  Fail it again and my options were limited to bad and worse.  It was my last of three attempts, and the anxiety was taking my irritable bowel syndrome to a whole new level. 

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     Two-week-old tuna.  Don’t eat it, even if you’re too busy studying to go grocery shopping.  Now I was paying for it.

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     The “bathroom” was a hole chiseled through the asphalt into a sewer pipe exposing an underground trickle of sludge.  The little river of excreta wouldn’t overflow until the monsoons came, and by then all the food stalls on Market Street would be safely stored away.

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     Because of my allergies I’m a pack rat for take-out napkins, if I wore a bra there’d be a wad tucked in my cleavage.  I cleaned up and hurried back onto the busy street, threading my way past produce laden wheelbarrows and bots flashing ads for anti-fungals and neurochip upgrades.

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     On the M Train I sat next to a man I immediately recognized as schizophrenic.  There were more and more of them.  This one had taken the stabilizing chip out of the back of his head and was twiddling it between his fingers while he responded to the voices in his head.  I couldn’t blame him for wanting a break from reality.

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     I sat back and mentally scrolled through the thousands of canine faces I’d memorized over the last few weeks.  Dogs.  So many dogs.

The trick was differentiating between them.  I might see 200 schnauzers, so I had to have a mnemonic trigger for each one, the tell of a particularly long whisker, or a freckle on a snout.

 

     It wasn’t the right way to pass the test, and I had paid Rufus the Mooch dearly, everything left on that semester’s loan, for the dog photos and their corresponding contentment levels.  But I didn’t have the aptitude they were looking for.  Cheating was the only way.

                        ---

     The administrative district was cleaner than the hive of tubode buildings where I lived, but the skyscrapers were dingy even here.  The glass towers were mostly retrofitted inside with photovoltaic resins making the opaque windows look like kohl blackened eyelids.

 

     Into a building, “Canine Empathy Test today” flyer taped to government-issue double doors.  I knew the corridors of the Department of Education well enough by now to find the men’s room and make one more attempt at evacuating whatever bacterial nastiness I’d ingested.

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     In the hallway, the same losers who’d failed the first and second times were waiting around for the proctor to show up.  How many of them were trying the same scam as me?  It was impossible to know what data streams they were staring at behind unfocused eyes.  Most likely it was the same battery of dog faces I got from the Mooch, each one categorized in one of four groups: angry, sad, happy or ecstatic.  My advantage was a fairly good memory.  Not photographic, but better than most because I read books and could manage prolonged concentration on one task.

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     The little proctor finally showed, a robot clacking along in a cloud of certification holograms: the Seal of California, the F.B.I. notarization and swirling .gov firewall symbol.  It remotely unlocked the door and held it open with a rubber tipped retractile claw.

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     “Good to see you, Kyle! Good to see you, Lindsey! Good to see you, Terrance!”

 

     I winced when I heard my name, and not just because I go by Terry.  Facial recognition software was seldom appreciated, especially in a situation like this.  The proctor might as well have been reading off a list of people with STDs.

 

     We sat dour faced, tuning out the robot’s voice as it repeated the rigmarole about the testing procedure.  It began the scan and jamming of electromagnetic frequencies, one thing the government got right, and the individual desk surfaces lit up.

    

     I drew a blank. 

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     None of the dogs was familiar.  The weenie dog I was looking at was none of the weenie dogs I’d memorized.  The Shih Tzu was a different shade of taupe, the Chinese crested wasn’t as well coiffed.  Either I’d had a stroke or the American Psychiatric Association, in all their wisdom, had come up with a new version of the test.

 

     The thing was it didn’t matter.  I probably would have failed even if the APA hadn’t changed the test.  We all would have.  Only a fraction of a percent passed, and they always passed the first time around. 

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     Nine years of higher education.  Then the new rule was put in place.  Too many people were clogging the gates to the middle class, despite how expensive the master’s degrees were.  The guard dogs of academia needed a new plan to narrow down the playing field, whittle down the numbers of applicants to the bourgeoisie.  Research had proven that regardless of a therapist’s education, it was only innate hyper-empathy that mattered, so now to get your piece of paper, your ticket to the middle class, you needed only six years of school, and of course to be able to pass the CET.  Once you passed, sure, go ahead and get the PhD, climb the ranks.

 

     To 99.9 percent of the population, the dogs all looked the same.  To me, try as I might to distinguish their distress and contentment levels, they all looked like they were either smiling or about to attack.

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     Nine years of school, and all I had to show for it was diarrhea.