Yacare Caiman (Little Reptiles #7)

You could still do it.

Over there, on those metal shelves lining the cinder-block wall, you’ve got the whole building’s supply of aerosol disinfectant, drain cleaner, and double-A batteries. Six cases of off-brand nondairy creamer, too; they’re stamped do not store at high temperatures, so you figure the stuff must burn. In your pocket, sweat-slick and warm: the souvenir lighter from Angkor Wat that you scavenged from Barb’s wastebasket. It’ll still cough up a little flame after a good shake.

And yet: doubts persist. Because maybe all this change is only temporary? And so the right play here is patience, not strategic arson, not sacrifice? Which would be a whole lot better, wouldn’t it?

So, yes, you could do it, and you might. But you don’t, not yet.

It started on a Monday. That much you remember clearly. The Old Man was due back from his tropical vacation, and HR had issued a reminder that he could be “mercurial” in times of transition. You’d all been on the business end of his black moods a time or ten, so by 8:30 that morning the air on the twenty-sixth floor was already spiky with fear-stink. Barb had pitted out her blouse. Malik was yanking out eyebrow hairs. Scoob was doing his gyan-mudra thing. Ted Heep’s knee was jackhammering away. Kevin was practicing smiles, in search of that sweet spot between unctuous and self-subordinating. Desirée was quailing in a bathroom stall, humming cereal-ad jingles from her childhood. Angie, the Old Man’s executive assistant, was holding up crossed fingers and intoning Tanned and rested, tanned and rested. Even Maija-Liisa, who was and maybe still is the EXVP of Market Penetration and so had less to fear than the rest of you, was in her office fussing with stress toys and looking green around the gills—so to speak. You? You were busy at the copier, trying to lose yourself in the ritual of clearing a complicated paper jam. You’ve always been good at being invisible, at blending in.

Crack of nine, the elevator bonged, and out came the Old Man.

Well, sort of. Out came someone wearing the Old Man’s khaki trench coat and brown trilby and tortoiseshell glasses, carrying a briefcase and a bag from the bagel place downstairs, walking bipedally—all of which was customary, expected. But this individual was at least a foot and a half shorter than the Old Man you were used to, and it also had the body of a mottled-brownish-black crocodile-looking thing. Stubby limbs, powerful tail, fearsome jaws, apex-predator eyes—the whole nature-doc deal.

You tried not to show surprise, fear, anything. Didn’t want to risk giving offense. Maybe this was something the Old Man couldn’t help? Like Angie’s webbed toes? Or Malik’s hair pulling? Or Kevin’s love for Ayn Rand? Or Maija-Liisa’s penchant for interrupting group conversations by saying Okay, confession time, and then recounting in rich and careful detail a recent night of sexual swashbuckling—involving, say, a tango de ocho with a traveling gaucho circus or somesuch, when the discussion had been about, say, the endless construction on the Beige Line tracks or when it might be safe to swim in Municipal Asset River again?

This new Old Man clomped past you toward his office, clumsy in his wing tips but coldly, ruthlessly watchful as he took all of you in. You tried not to focus on his claws, his teeth. The way his banded tail undulated over the checkerboard of carpet squares was mesmerizing. You felt chills.

Several of you noticed a dark spray-pattern on the bagel bag. Once the Old Man’s office door clicked shut, Ted Heep poked his head over the partition and whispered, Was that blood? and the rest of you were like, Jesus, Ted Heep, don’t say shit like that out loud.

You hunched over your personal devices, scoured the web for explanations. You shared guesses in whispers: maybe the vacation was just a cover story for an xtreme body-mod surgery? Or maybe he was getting his game face on for the VealeCorp takeover talks? Maybe he was actually at home, bedridden with island dysentery or rum tremors, and the board of directors, in their inscrutable omniscience, had recruited a mottled-brownish-black crocodile-looking thing to sub for him? But nothing truly seemed plausible, let alone satisfying.

The Old Man stayed in his office the rest of the day; meantime, there were orders to fill and markets to penetrate and paper jams to clear and xtreme customer-driven strategic power solutions to leverage, so that’s what you did. You’re still proud of that—how you all stayed cool, kept the wheels turning, upheld the Pledge of Consistency & Progress! you’d all recited from the HR binders you got on your first day here.

Angie brought the Old Man his lunch as usual, except instead of a niçoise salad from Christelle’s it was a sack full of squirming rats from PetFrenzyMax. You tried not to hear the little guys skreeting as she passed by, held your breath in the wake of rodent pee that trailed behind. Angie noticed you noticing and said loudly that nothing was wrong, everything was regular and quotidian and nonterrifying, and the Old Man was just very hungry from catching up on paperwork plus teleconferences with sales and legal and the takeover team at Lambbreaker & Sons, and shouldn’t such stalwart reliability be reassuring and not a trigger for rumors, fear, or distraction?

She had a point; a lot of things weren’t suspicious. Maija-Liisa entering his office at three to talk market-penetration strategy? Not suspicious. Her still being in there at EOB? Not entirely unheard of. You did feel her absence at the break-room birthday party for Scylla, the Gen-Z girl who ran the company’s social—she of the blue hair, tattooed ears, steel-spindled cheeks, and unnerving iconoclastic self-possession—because usually ML would drop everything and beeline to the break room when cronuts were involved. Still, though: big picture, it had pretty much turned out to be just another day.

Kevin BackRibbed the group at two a.m.: Blotches on lower jaw, smooth snout, eye-ridge lumps, abundant osteoderms . . . O. M. = Yacare caiman! or maybe Spectacled, which is morphologically v similar.

And you were all: Jesus, Kevin, don’t say shit like that on an archivable electronic medium.

it’s *good* news! he wrote. Smaller than black caimans, less likely to hunt large mammals!

And you were all like, what about that pool of blood in the bagel place, Kevin?

<<shrug>> Opportunistic predation? The world’s just like that sometimes?

OMG guys, Desirée wrote. ML hasn’t BR-ed us 2nite. ML, u there? u OK?

You all quit typing and waited, waited for that trademark BackRib clank-splat alert and a message from her. It never came. But you needed to get to sleep, so you told yourselves she’d surely be in the office tomorrow with one hell of a confession time cued up. She was out there living—living! in a way the rest of you tended not to!—and definitely was not at this very moment being ground to bits by the Old Man’s gizzard stones.

In the morning you glanced into Maija-Liisa’s glass-walled office and found it arranged for her customary Morning Think: high-backed chair turned toward the view over Light-Industrial Zoning Bay and gently rocking, mug of tea on the sill, aromatherapy diffuser sending up gentle curls of steam. You were grateful for this tableau of normalcy, all of you, and settled into your own work with purpose and care.

So later, when Maija-Liisa emerged from her office and headed for the Old Man’s with a stack of marketing reports in one claw and a five-gallon bucket of snails in the other, her jawline showing a row of fear-some teeth and a sinister croco-smirk, her favorite sleek purple Ginevra Scanello sweater-dress hanging on her like a PetFrenzy rat-sack, and the deadsoul orbs of her eyes freezing you as she passed, it didn’t seem like the end of the world. Truth be told, most of you had worked for stranger management teams. Kevin once summer-interned for the Golden Past Party, for meat’s sake, and the shit he saw there was unreal.

On Wednesday Malik went into the men’s room as Malik and came out as caiman-Malik, a pee stain sopping one leg of his sagging khakis. This was especially disturbing for reasons none of you could put into words.

There’s a silver lining here, Ted Heep said. At least Malik doesn’t have to worry about the trichotillomania anymore. You know, on account of reptiles don’t have—

And you were all like, Yes, we fucking get it, Ted Heep. Even though you knew he was kind of right: silver linings are everywhere, or just about, and isn’t appreciating them really the key to surviving—to thriving!—in this wild world?

The following week brought nontrivial corporeal adjustments to seven vice presidents, a swath of midlevel management, and that mail-cart kid, who, to be brutally honest, you’d always found a bit too nakedly aspirational.

After them went Marty, the gummy old accountant who’d kept his job through decades of mergers, consolidations, and layoffs. You shrugged that one off. Seventy-four sharp new teeth? Marty was probably ecstatic.

Not that anyone asked him. The caimans, you’d found, didn’t invite conversation. They mostly just worked. Occasionally they’d fight for proximity to the Old Man. Not infrequently you’d catch them eyeing you in a way that gave you spinal shudders and perineal tingles and chilly sweats. Like they couldn’t wait for you to run, like they were fantasizing about the adrenalized chase, the lunge-and-snap, the wrenching death-roll, the spiciness of the cortisol flavoring your muscles, your blood.

Barb changed when she was up on the roof sneaking in a few afternoon hits on her pipe. She came back down sans both pieces of her pantsuit, which would’ve been more shocking if reptile nudity hadn’t become common on 26.

Still, none of you could look away from her. There was something alluring in the patterns of her scales, which suggested authority, fertility, velocity, strength, freedom; the blacks were deep and strong, the browns coffee-rich, the tans edging toward gold. Barb had become the most intense, assertive, pansexually desirable, and lethal version of herself. It was the effect she’d sought but never achieved with all the tattoos she’d kept hidden at work.

You think about Barb sometimes, wonder if she can appreciate the beauty of her own scutellation without the benefit of an anterior insular cortex. Even now, you hope she can.

Why them? Ted Heep whispered as you shook nondairy creamer into your midmorning coffees. Why them and not Angie, when she’s in the Old Man’s office most of the day And has to sit in the conference room taking notes during long meetings where there are slicks of blood and scraplets of fish all over the table, snack-rats racing around the room, beady reptile eyes all the fuck around her? Why them and not her? Them and not us?

And you were entirely in synchronous approximation of: Those are good if prolix questions, Ted Heep. We don’t know.

Malik in the bathroom, Barb on the roof, Ted Heep mused. What if it happens when you’re not working hard enough?

You have a very small data set, Desirée said, which sounded harsh but was a shrewd observation nonetheless.

Still, none of you took a break the rest of the day. You took work home. You sat awake most of the night, terrified of sleep.

Late-night BackRib from Kevin: have you noticed they’re bigger

Scoob: no i have definitely not noticed that

Desirée: i am applying my focus to my work

Kevin: angie got them coatis for lunch today. coatis! isn’t it an amazing testament to the power of the market economy that you can acquire feeder coatis in this city?

Ted Heep: While I’ve historically been a bit lukewarm on mercantilism, I agree that—

Jesus, Ted Heep, you all thought, that’s so fucking not the point.

That was the last BackRib Ted Heep ever sent. Next day when you got to work, you found pieces of him scattered around the east conference room and upper management gnawing away. Maija-Liisa and the VP of Finance fought impressively over one of his legs. Afterward they rubbed their snouts together to clean off the gore.

It figured that Ted Heep would be the first of you to get eaten. That fucking guy.

You gave them a wide berth, wide as you could without calling attention to yourselves. You kept your voices down and the machinery unplugged whenever possible because loud noises irritated and disoriented them. But it was inspiring, how much work was still getting done. The conference rooms were always busy with meetings, lunches, plausible-deniability workshops, document production for the lawsuits with Amalgamated Bavette and Chuckflap.com, and so on. After the last of the custodial crew went croco, the rest of you pulled together to pick up the slack, clearing pathways through the dry gray hillocks of poop and sweeping up leftover bone fragments, claws, nails, teeth. Grunts and bellows sailed through the air, and it was hard not to get caught up in the fervor. Plus, the Old Man’s moods had stabilized, and that felt like a gift.

There was one day when Barb—radiant, charismatic Barb—was walking through the office swishing her tail with such self-actualized ebullience that it thwacked across Scoob’s desk and all his stuff went crashing to the floor: monitor, keyboard, phone, pens, stapler, worry beads, all of it.

You watched Scoob closely. He briefly surveyed the mess, then looked up to watch tantalizing Barb waddle-striding away, then noticed Malik deadeyeing him from over the partition. A profound moment followed: Scoob gave Malik a quick nod that signaled deference, submission, full acceptance of his status as a prey item. He knelt, cleared a space on a carpet square, and settled into it. And why not? Until someone made him their elevenses, he could type and staple and take orders and cajole vendors and monitor OEM channels from the office floor just as easily as from a desk, right? Didn’t your HR binders say that Adaptation + Accommodation! is a sign of strength? They did!

After a few weeks you got used to the smell.

One afternoon you noticed a shift in the energy on 26—more eyes on you, a down-throttling of the usual buzz-and-rush, a certain electron charge in the air that you sensed as preprandial chemosignaling. No surprise, really—caimans can go weeks without eating if they need to, but a fast-paced contemporary business environment is demanding for any creature, no matter how low its basal metabolic rate.

Angie hit the group with a BackRib: omg help me guys, she wrote. ive cleaned out all the pet stores & unlicensed zoos. They’re so hungry.

You group-brainstormed while maintaining the outward appearance of leveraging xtreme customer-driven strategic power solutions:

Scoob: maybe the port? wharfrats & whatnot? gulls?

Kevin: maybe the squirrels in Bituminous Coal Memorial Administrative Unit Park?

Angie: takes too long to catch them!!

Desirée: that new Plankton-Iz-Wein District town?

Angie: won’t fill them up

Kevin: there’s a preschool on Infrastructure Ave

Brief pause. It was like you could hear Angie’s thinking-sounds.

Angie: I’m fucked

You: I’m so sorry you’re in this position Angie. It must be scary and destabilizing for you but please be assured that we all respect and value and support you and want to help you Adapt & Accommodate! & make the best of what is almost certainly the New Normal.

You know she appreciated the support, but she didn’t come back, and by 3:30, the twenty-sixth floor was a soundscape of gnashing and bellows and wetness and bone-snaps as Kevin went the way of Ted Heep.

There’s a lesson here, Scoob whispered from his carpet square, but Malik spun in his desk chair and snapped his jaws in a show of awesome bite force. Scoob clammed up and refocused on his goal of getting to Inbox Zero.

Desirée you just kind of lost track of. There was a lot going on.

Eventually you couldn’t take the BackRib silence anymore, so you got up your nerve and RibEyed Scylla, the social girl, who’d been working remote since cronut day. No one had demanded her presence on 26, so she just kept weaving social-media magic from her squat in Lower North Factory Flats on a pirated Wi-Fi connection. I’m not going to sit around all day in an office with a goddamn crocodile in it, she wrote. You appreciated her conviction, her verve.

The downside, she said, was that she hadn’t gotten paid since then, either. Payroll must be fucked up. Are you getting paid?

You weren’t sure; you hadn’t checked in a while. You wondered, momentarily, how much money you had left.

I’m coming in tomorrow, she typed. Fuckers need to pay me.

After Scylla chucked the RibEye, you sat there and thought about how much you were looking forward to seeing her, and how that may have been why you forgot to tell her there wasn’t just one caiman anymore. But you figured she’d figure it out.

She figured it out. She bonged off the elevator with a bagel bag in her hand, swept her eyes over the sea of scales and claws and teeth, shook her head, and gave a same-shit-different-cataclysm kind of sigh.

She approached you in your cube, waved a dry bagel. This is insane, she said. The only shmear they have down there now has big bloody chunks of raw piranha in it.

We prefer to think of it as Amazon lox, you told her.

She scoffed and tossed the bagel away. It landed near Scoob’s square, and he kicked it down the aisle. Food sources attract attention.

Barb runs payroll, right? she said. Where is she?

You pointed to the biggest conference room, which Barb had claimed as her own after a series of ruthless territorial battles, including one that sent a bloodied Maija-Liisa slinking away to a supply closet in the west annex. The scars and slashes in Barb’s scales, you and Scoob had agreed, added a patina of street cred to her beauty. Doesn’t she look—? you said, but Scylla was already in Barb’s doorway demanding that her labor be appropriately remunerated.

Barb cocked her head and gave a curious chirp that you hadn’t heard before. She stared at Scylla with something like disbelief, even wonder.

Barb can’t work the mouse, you called to Scylla. Or type. Because claws.

Fine, she said. Slide over, Barb. I’ll do it.

What happened next shocked you: Barb slid over. Just wheeled her chair a few feet to the side, careful not to catch her tail in the casters. Scylla brushed a bloody tuft of fur—capybara, you could tell from the color—off Barb’s mouse pad, and after a flurry of clicks and keystrokes, she gave a grunt of triumph and stood up to go. This is my two weeks’ notice, Barb, she said from the doorway. Retroactive to two weeks ago.

Then Scylla turned to you. Why don’t—?

But she stopped herself, shook her head, and strode off to the elevator. It bonged, tolling the end of something.

You turned to find Barb had slid up next to you in your cube. It was the closest you’d ever been to her, and a warm calm swam through you, like you were finally where you were meant to be, like this was what the world had always had in store for you. Barb, you said, Barb. You watched her jaws part, feeling as clear and dreamy as Municipal Asset River was, back when you were a kid and it had a name.

But a crash and clatter broke the moment. You jumped away from Barb, a reflex, as you saw Malik with his jaws clamped around Scoob’s abdomen, whipping him back and forth in a wicked death-roll. A row of cubicles fell amid the furious lashings of body, limbs, neck, tail. There were sounds of tearing and gnashing and frothy gurgles issuing from Scoob. A voice in your head, ancient and atavistic, said, Run. You are alone, and you are prey.

You bolted. Away from Barb’s snapping jaws, past all of 26’s caimans turning their heads toward you. You made it to the fire stairs just as the first ones roared forward and smacked into the door, and you descended, leaping, pivoting, taking the turns with a grace you never knew you had. Down, jump, whip around; down, jump, whip around, all the way to the bottom, where you sprinted along a hallway, burst through the door to the maintenance room, locked it behind you. You breathed in the smells of sweeping compound, metal shelving, ammonia, old cardboard, and dirt-stiff mops, and tucked yourself into the dim light and the steady HVAC hum.

After a week or so—it’s hard to know—you started hearing caiman bellows echoing in the stairwell, leathery bodies brushing up against each other in the hallway, claws raking down the metal door.

You’ve thought a lot about what Scylla was going to say to you. Your favorite version, the one that makes sleep possible, that keeps the terror a step or two away: Why don’t you come with me right now? Free yourself, quit this Pantanal of horrors, give up your shitty sad expensive efficiency in Outer UpNoWeZo, come join me and my intrepid band of anarchodigitalists in our squat in LoNoFaFl, and help us build an egalitarian anticorporate social-media empire. In winter we can xtreme-telecommute from Baja, where we will sleep in sturdy beachfront palapas and build sandcastles and knock them down and build new ones, over and over. In this way we will know freedom and peace, and the shrimp tacos will be fresh and plentiful, and by the time spring comes, maybe people will have begun to act like fucking people again. In the good way, I mean.

Once, Ted Heep’s reedy voice intruded into your head: Why didn’t your flight instincts send you to the lobby, where you’d have had at least a tiny chance of darting past the hundred preoccupied coffee-breaking caimans to the revolving door and to Freedom, such as it is?

Well, Ted Heep, you thought, I guess one never knows one’s instincts are flawed until it’s too late. And maybe that’s why so many things end up as some other thing’s meat.

Speaking of which: your food supply—the former maintenance crew’s stash of SinewBars and SaltedTripeDiamonds—is nearing its end. And a few minutes ago you heard a scratching sound that may have been clumsy reptile forelegs trying to work a key into a lock. You looked mortality in the eye, and then your gaze landed on the supply shelves and their gloriously flammable contents.

Maybe the caimans still haven’t figured out the revolving door. And you doubt they’ll think to look for fire exits, especially once the alarms start blaring, what with those reptile brains of theirs. So maybe if you torch this place, you save the world? Maybe that’s your task, your purpose? Maybe that’s where you’ll find meaning, at least in the moments before you’re carbonized? And maybe that’s what life’s really about?

You could do it. Barb’s old lighter still has some fire in it.

You flick it a few times, just to make sure.

Read more from Issue 19.2.