HOMUNCULUS

I am an expert on your disease. I give you license to wallow in it. Your disgust perpetually betrays you—all of you—to whom I am Disease Incarnate. You will not face the truth: I am the rancid index of your own moral leprosy.

So begins my Testament to the World, clandestinely scrawled on a tablet between exhibitions. Six days a week I sit in my glass cage, on display to the curious. Once an hour the curtain rises, and a fresh crop of spectators files past, eyes bulging. By human standards, I am both freakishly short—just under one meter—and grotesquely misshapen, an unfortunate hybrid of scrawny and bulbous. But my most distinguishing feature—indeed, my raison d’être—is the array of pustules, lesions, boils, blisters, carbuncles, rashes, and sores that covers my body. I sit almost naked beneath a blinding lamp, on a perch with a grilled platform under which rest dishes to catch my drippings. The air stinks. I wear only a flimsy loincloth—a ludicrous and hypocritical gesture of “decency.” There is simply no end to the throngs who pay to stare at me, to participate in my degradation.

I was created to play this role. Near the turn of the last century, when science had finally cured every known affliction, a group of researchers met with some government officials at Global Parliament Headquarters. These men and women faced a choice. Either they could eliminate all traces of the pathogens they’d isolated and contained—or they could keep samples in secure storage for safekeeping, study, and “unforeseen circumstances.” They chose the latter. In less than thirty years, a new generation of researchers hatched a plan of their own—to genetically engineer a living test subject to infect with their stockpile. They lobbied the GP for funds, vaunting the project’s scientific and educational value. The floodgates opened. It took five years—and two unspeakably repulsive failures—to produce me. Like any newborn, I was coddled and spoiled. Then, eighteen months later, they pronounced me “mature”—and gleefully shot me full of chicken pox.

Of course, that was only the beginning. We continued with the basics—influenza, streptococcal infections, gastrointestinal viruses. The protocol never changed. I would lie suffering, motley with electrodes, beneath a plexiglass bubble while, outside, a team of technicians gawked and jotted notes. Eventually the experiments grew bolder; some even included surgical procedures. An induced episode of bronchial hemorrhaging, for example, would be followed by cracking open my ribcage—the better to study my traumatized tissues. Then, suddenly, we changed tacks again. The GP must have cut the lab’s budget because one day the surgeries came to an abrupt halt, and the scientists confined themselves to experiments that could be conducted on my skin. And so I became the recipient of eczema, scabies, ringworm, shingles, scleroderma, psoriasis, rosacea, and a long list of others. Oddly, these conditions inspired an especially high level of sadistic zeal in the staff.

Such was my life for many years. But at last the time arrived when either the novelty wore off or the money ran out—or both—and I became irrelevant, obsolete, an embarrassing reminder of the folly of my creators. I believe they would have killed me had it not occurred to them that the exploitation of human weakness is always a lucrative business.

I was sold.

They call this place a museum, but of course it’s nothing more than a zoo for human outcasts. People come from all over—respectable, middle-class people—to stand in line, buy tickets, and see the awful monsters.

You don’t suspect I have a mind. To imagine that I look back at you, that I see your true motives in all their wretchedness, that I judge your hearts as harshly as you judge my body—these are the intolerable insights you guard against. Your defenses are strong. I am stronger.

My days pass with cruel monotony. Each morning I wake in my cell, a large stainless steel cube adjacent to the glass cage fitted with a cot, a food trough, and a vacuum toilet. My meals are dumped in through a pipe that empties into the trough, clean blankets drop down the laundry chute once a week—my old ones, I believe, are burned—and bathing consists of being blasted at unpredictable intervals by a remote-controlled water canon mounted on the ceiling. There are no doors or windows, only a drain in the floor. When the lights come on, it is morning; when they go out, it is night. In between, I’m expected to follow a strict regimen—one hour of preparation, twelve hours of “performance” in the glass cage, three hours of down time, then sleep. Except on the rare occasions when a gruff voice shouts at me through a vent in the wall—“Stop shitting in your display case!” or “Keep your fucking loincloth on!”—I have no direct contact with another living being.

The performances themselves are mostly a boring ordeal. A group of up to one hundred people files past every hour; as a rule, it takes about forty-five minutes for the crowd to clear, leaving me intervals of a quarter-hour to myself. There is a rhythmic structure to the routine—periods of observation alternate with periods of contemplation. My viewers don’t seem to know that I see and hear everything they do, making me, in effect, an invisible observer in plain sight. I look into the faces of the men and women who stare at me as though looking into a grotesque mirror. I register each wave of emotion, every flicker of fear and hatred. I have conducted such study for years, and it has been the ripening of my thoughts on the matter that has led me to write my Testament. Often, instead of simply pondering during those brief periods of solitude, I now dash back to my cell to scribble notes on my tablet.

You have visited on me all the dirt of your bodies. On me you have spit, scraped the heels of your shoes. But you worship me without knowing it. I am the herald of a new Gospel—a Gospel of Filth! Day after day you do homage to me—the very god of your rotten soul-sickness.

I came to the museum little more than a tortured animal. My thoughts—such as they were—can only be described in the most primitive terms. But after I’d been here almost a year, someone—I still don’t know who or from what motive—began dropping reading materials into my cell along with my blankets. At first these consisted mostly of pictures with single letters or words printed underneath. Later I received periodicals, instruction manuals, and finally proper books. In this way, my benefactor gradually led me though the alphabet, vocabulary, sentence structure—until I could read anything he sent me.

Then the real adventure began. Not only did this stranger have wildly eclectic taste, he also possessed a keen instinct for intuiting my evolving interests and curiosities. So it was that—after laying a foundation with primers on history, science, art, and philosophy—we set out on a journey across the highest mountaintops of human intellectual achievement. Schopenhauer taught me to flex my Will; Hobbes honed my Reason; Freud bequeathed me Insight; Sade stoked my Libido. My mind blossomed. Through the prism of my new knowledge, I learned to see the world around me for the first time—and to think about what I saw.

Only gradually did I come to understand the power I wield—and might yet wield—over humanity. I reach people at some deep, primal level; and I do so effortlessly, simply by virtue of my existence. Reactions to me—even when outwardly subdued—are always spiced with violence. In some, I trigger a charge almost sexual in its intensity. Certain men, I have noticed, will, while staring at me, contort their faces into a mask of contempt, then reach around a woman standing nearby to give her breast a pinch. And there will occasionally be a woman—always the one who most hysterically demonstrates her disgust with me to the crowd—who stays behind after the others have left, leans against the corner of my cage, gazes at me with slack-jawed rapture, and kneads her groin with her fist. Her moans fog the glass. I’ve even seen a few ladies succeed—as far as I can tell—in bringing themselves off.

It was during the most recent such episode that I vowed at last to escape. That night I found the tablet and the pen.

There is a breach in the laundry chute. I’ve planned everything perfectly. By the time you discover my Testament, you will already be too late. From now on, I will work only in darkness. I will hurl back upon you not only your diseases—but also the knowledge that goes with them.

You will all be infected. I will be avenged.