My Fairweather Flesh is almost as expensive as my shitty apartment. My bank account bleeds monthly. Maybe it’s good I have two careers. Sometimes you have no choice but to live two separate lives. To keep a family together, they say you need a Fairweather suit. I’ve been told I’m nothing without mine. Well, I’m something. Just not something the world wants me to be.

“It’s going to be nice this Saturday,” Maisey says from the other end of the couch. She’s wearing her Wednesday worst. A big baggy T-shirt and the same panties she had on yesterday. Her attention divided between three different screens. Why do we always look like shit when we’re home doing nothing?

“Is it?” I ask, mostly out of pretense. I check the weather report as often as anyone.

“Wind’s gonna be low,” she says. “Air quality good. Might rain a little in the evening, but the pH won’t be so bad. Even if we get caught in something, wouldn’t be devastating.”

“We should plan something fun then.” What else am I supposed to say? When you’re in a relationship, you have to seem proactive about plans. Cover up ambivalence with enthusiasm. Don’t let anyone see how passive and distracted you really are.

“Already spoke to my mom. The family wants to do a picnic in Rafferty Park. Chase and Bryan are both free. Grandpa too,” she says. 

“What about Chase’s girlfriend?” Neither of us are fans of Chase’s girlfriend. 

“Don’t know. Not a dealbreaker, though, right?”

“Nah. Not at all. We’ll have our suits ready,” I say.

“Yay!” She gets so excited when we have plans. I guess it helps to have something to look forward to.

A good Fairweather suit makes you remember. Action and reaction rely on muscle memory. Remember this: The body is the mind. Not the other way around. Don’t be fooled into thinking they’re separate. When you are bonded to the flesh, your mind changes with it. Without our suits, we are simply ourselves. Fairweather uses the body as scaffolding to turn us into something better.

“My suit’s always ready,” Maisey reminds me. “Better go check on yours.”

No, we don’t wear them every day. They hang in our closets, realer than our realest clothes. Suits of synthetic flesh, worn over a layer of breathable mesh. Miracles of biological science, genetically engineered to be the perfect symbiotic garments.

The full suit is a big deal to put on. So we only wear the faces to work. Five out of every ten days we have to show our faces. Eye-contact. With other humans. Faces, no bodies: the new business casual.

When we commute to the heart of the industrial complex, we take the underground. Two or three days a week doesn’t seem like a lot. But not wearing the suit every day makes them last longer. Helps preserve the integrity of the material. Extended wear can wreak long-term havoc on Fairweather Flesh. Better on the wallet too. Sending out for repairs can be a bitch. Best to stay out of bad weather too. A coworker of mine who walks to work got caught in an acid rain shower a few months back. Her suit was ruined.

At the office, no one looks at your real body. Some people think we’re not allowed to look at real bodies. Like there’s something wrong with the body you were born with. So maybe it’s not perfect. Maybe you let it go a little bit. It’s still yours. It’s still you.

You have those few whackos who take the job way too seriously and actually do wear the full suit every day. Hurts me just to look at them. I imagine these psychos coming home from the office and keep their suits on straight through bed time. I imagine them having sex with the suit on. Bodies in bodies inside other bodies. Those people scare me.

Special occasions, you have no choice. You have to wear the whole thing. Holiday parties, family events, birthdays, anniversaries, vacations. Fairweather head-to-toe. It’s a given. Christmas and New Year’s—the whole holiday season is a fantastic parade of Fairweather fare. Every adult portraying their optimal selves. Pretense at its peak. Performance for performance sake.

I know a little something about performance. I spend my non-working work hours locked in a soundproof room, recording tracks and writing lyrics. Stuff no one in my social circle cares to hear. I have a little audience. Don’t think I do this for nothing. They’re just not the Fairweather suit-wearing kind of audience.

It’s easy to forget there are whole segments of society that do not partake in the Fairweather movement. Poor people, mostly. The unemployed. The homeless. Children. And people too sick or old to give a fuck. Death is near and I guess you finally realize the body you’re losing is the only one that actually mattered. You chose not to love it, and now you have to live with that. 

My real hair is long, greasy and disgusting to most people. My favorite clothes are rags. Baggy, second-hand. But, naturally, more comfortable than the compulsory uniform. More forgiving than a secondary self. Or is the suit the primary? I don’t know. It’s easy to lose track when it comes to alternating selves. 

It’s strange to think no one knows what any of their coworkers really look like. Sometimes you even forget what your family’s faces actually look like. I don’t think I’ve seen any of my cousins’ true faces in over a decade.

My oldest cousin is my best friend. But he’s not like an in-real-life friend. Which, I’m sure you know about. Close as kids. But then he got married and moved so far away. Now I only see him on his streams, when he goes live and spouts fanatical bullshit. He’s a could-have-been cult leader who never got his big break. But of course, he wears the face when he interfaces. Clean-shaven and young. I imagine his real IRL beard is much more salted and peppered by now.

My coworkers, don’t even get me started. They’re a bunch of fake idiots. That’s fake and idiot. I don’t mean smart people pretending to be dumb. That’s more or less what I’m doing. Or maybe I’m a dumb person pretending to be smart. It’s hard to keep track. Like I said. Day in, day out. Up becomes down. Down becomes up.

The underground is rough. I can’t take it. It’s dirty and it’s smelly. They say our suits will soon have some kind of augmented reality built into them, so we don’t have to experience the unpleasant sensory assault of the work commute. Don’t know how they will get it to connect to our eyes and brains. Either way, I’ll still know what’s out there. The brain doesn’t forget.

I close my eyes for the agonizing ten-minute span when our commuter train goes briefly above ground, when I have to look at the imposing city skyline. The capital. Where all the (in)action happens. Where all souls go to die. I know there’s no danger there. The machine is a safe machine. I know nothing will hurt me. But I still feel the fear. The mind still remembers where we’re going. Work. Work. Every day, we go to work.

Maisey works in building one. I work in building three. All five buildings are identical. Brutalist architecture, inside and out. Upside and down. The walls look and feel like they’re made of bone. Her walk is short. Maybe a hundred paces from the first elevator which we embark on together. I have another (again, agonizing) eight minutes to walk by myself. My stiff and increasingly inflexible aging body in motion. Can you see it now? With each step I am reminded of my tight and tired limbs. My feet, sore—from what? I mostly sit all day. My toes wish for grass instead of linoleum. As we emerge from that first elevator, I say bye to Maisey. She no longer knows me. I am not a person she loves when coworkers might be around to see her.

I can’t help but squint in anticipation of the fluorescent bulbs that stud the low ceilings of the concourse. I’m carrying a heavy backpack filled with corporate tech. My skin feels dry and frozen underneath the mesh net, underneath the face. I spend every single one of these eight minutes staving off a panic attack, talking to myself in the calm voice, lying to myself that it’s all going to be okay, the soft soothing baritone that I’ve developed as a coping mechanism more than an actual speaking style, that every one says is so luscious and soothing and I should be like a public speaker or something. And I laugh it off, take the compliment, even though I want to remind them that I am one—I am a singer, a musician. I do use my voice to convene with the public. You just never get to hear it. Is it my fault that I have no choice but to use this blessed voice more often to assuage my own constant percolating anxiety than for what it was meant for?

I look like a fucking crazy person, talking to myself, sotto voce, my phone in my hand, my finger hovering over Maisey’s number, just in case I need to call her, to tell her I’m gonna need to change course… it’s too much, call the ambulance. The big one has arrived.

Work is work. It’s another day. And everything goes fine. Just like she always assures me it will. I talk to maybe one and a half people. I recall not a single word.

Time to go home. “How was the day, sweetie?” Maisey asks as I meet her outside building one.

“It was good.” I smile. The face does, I mean.

Friday’s here before you know it. Time passes both fast and slow when every day is the same. The weather feels like it’s finally taking that positive turn. We play board games and watch a little television. “Do you wanna take an hour to do your music?” she asks. It’s the last hour we’re conscious. That last hour that I have to be alert. Always the last hour, offered up for my art, on what feels like a silver platter, one I can’t even bear to hold. For I have no energy, no concentration left for anything.

“Nah,” I say. I actually snuck in some lyric-writing on my lunch break. I’m good for today. Why don’t you go wash up. Let’s get these faces off.”

“Oh, yes, yes yes, yes yes.” Her staccato yesses, uttered in what feels like half a second, emblematic of her astute agreeableness, a trait that does not go unenvied. “We should give em’ a good charge for tomorrow. I’m so excited.”

“Me too.”

Sleep comes like a cloud. And I temporarily exist again. The weekend alarm is one hour later than my regular alarm. Sometimes, they are automatically the same. The brain is stupid like that. Light is light. Time is an invention.

⁂

I want to toss this fucking suit out the window. Wearing the whole thing hurts. Some people say they like it. Better than their actual skin. That it’s the only time they like how they look. And if you look good, you feel good. Is there something wrong with me, that I prefer looking sub-good?

Putting on a synthetic skin is a much more private experience than putting on clothes. When it comes to lovers, you casually watch one another dress. Perhaps casually have your tits out while you scour the bedroom for your bra. But after morning sex on a good weather day, where you have big family plans, you roll out of bed and cinch up your suit in solitude.

I always shower first to get it over with. Maisey’s taking her turn now. I return to the bedroom. We have a walk-in closet. I pull it off the shelf. Close the closet door. I am naked and I take a deep breath. First the mesh. Then the flesh. It fuses with your body. Very Cronenberg-esque. It’s a living-costume, really, almost with its own intelligence. Sometimes I get the urge to talk to it. It’s all muscles and tendons and skin. I am the bone. It molds itself to you and infiltrates your cells so it can transform you. It uses your body as scaffolding for something better.

“So handsome!” I emerge to find her already suited up. She loves my Fairweather look. 

“And you look gorgeous, sweetie.” 

“As my boyfriend, you’re contractually obligated to say that, I know. But thank you.”

“Think the weather’ll hold up?” 

Forecast got a little more iffy than we’d hoped. There might be some dark acid rain-bearing clouds coming in. “I sure hope so,” Maisey says. “I’d hate to see Grandpa have to sprint half a mile back to the car.”

“Why does your Grandpa even bother anymore? I don’t know anyone else his age that still puts on a show like he does. This Fairweather business isn’t for seniors. At some point, don’t you just have to let it all go?”

“Let what go?” Maisey says, genuinely confused. 

“The whole body thing. Like caring about how you look…”

She wasn’t paying attention. She was lost in her phone again, scrutinizing the hourly forecast. Ugh. Never mind.

I often fantasize about a big acid rain storm. I’m talking the kind of apocalyptic shit that most people have nightmares about. The kind of event they make you insure your suit for. In fact that’s the only way to get your insurance money back for your suit. If a natural disaster destroys it. You get a big check in the mail. And then you gotta go through all this paperwork to get a new one. Takes weeks. Your job doesn’t even want you to come in if you don’t have a face. They have a special sort of leave-code built in for suit-related incidents. Shit, I’d be in heaven if I could work from home and not have to get dressed for weeks. I wonder how many songs I could write.

The family looked amazing. All shined up. All bright. Big cooler full of raw hamburger meat and hot dogs. Big thing of potato salad. The works.

“Look at all the people playing games! I’m glad we brought the cornhole,” Maisey’s mom says. 

“And the frisbee,” her youngest brother says. 

“It’s days like these that make me feel like a kid again,” Grandpa says. 

“You mean back when the weather was always good?” Chase says. 

“It was more than the weather that was good in those days,” Gramps laments. 

Her family—a bunch of talkers. They don’t really talk to me, though. Not really. Not directly. They don’t care about my life or me as a person. I suppose I’m more of a prop than a guest at these functions. I’m the boyfriend. It’s the one thin strand that connects me to big-brother Chase’s otherwise pretentious bitch of a girlfriend. We both are here as accessories. Doing our best to drown out the noise.

Speaking of noise, don’t worry. I won’t subject you to the same mundane suburban gossipy minutiae that I’ll have to endure. I’ll spare you the gory details. Conversation basically consists of job talk, then dead relative talk, then sick pets, then ailments, then who’s having a baby, who’s gotten fat and needs to put an order in for a new suit, who’s poor, who’s got a lazy fiance, then more job talk, then money talk, which oddly enough is not quite the same as job talk but similar, and then politics. Occasionally there’s the oh who’s that actor who played that character in that one movie. And sometimes I’ll chime in with the answer. Or if I’m feeling particularly indignant I’ll just take satisfaction in privately knowing the answer but saying nothing.

You see, as long as I work and have a job and maintain my status as a fully functional member of society—in other words, a man with a suit—then I remain a welcome guest at these functions. Supposedly.

A few hours go by and I want to hang myself. The clouds are coming in. And everyone is getting a bit frantic about the impending weather. My attention has been fixed on the band. About a hundred yards from us there’s a makeshift stage, where a bunch of suitless kids are playing pre-meltdown alt-rock. The kind of stuff I grew up on. My own stuff isn’t quite as derivative, but I admire their style. I want to detach from the family retinue and join them on stage. It’s all I can think about. Their singer is struggling. I’m sure they could use me.

The only people really focusing on the aural entertainment are the ones who are without families and without suits. The sorts of people I mentioned earlier. The jobless. The friendless. The aimless. The creative wanderers who drift in and out of reality without having to be two people. 

The energy around me has changed. They’ve run out of conversation topics. And my aloofness starts to be a pain point. Maisey has already given me the business several times for my terse responses and my general lack of engagement with all the family small talk.

“Do you think we should start to pack up soon? Hello?”

“What? I don’t know,” I say. “I mean, sure, whatever you guys think is best.”

“You’re not even paying attention. Why did I even bring you?”

“Bring me? Didn’t we plan this together?”

“Um, excuse me? Shit! Shit!”

I realize someone has felt the first drop, and people have begun to scream and shout. The acid rain hits fast and hard, and it doesn’t just ruin the suits. It ruins the day. 

“What are you waiting for, grab a bag. Get the stuff, we have to get to the car pronto!”

“Why don’t we just ride it out under the tent by the stage. See where all those people are? We don’t have to go all the way to the car,” I suggest. “The clouds will clear out in an hour, tops.”

“Everyone is leaving! Let’s go! Why are you being so stubborn? You think we want to hang out with those people?”

“Those people? You mean the musicians?”

“You know who I mean. The people with no suits.”

“You know, Maisey—do you even know who you’re talking to? You know I’m a—”

“Oh please, not with my family here. Not this argument again. You know what, fuck this. I’m done. Chase and his girlfriend are already in the car. I don’t have time for this. I’m not ruining my suit because you want to listen to some crappy music. No, put that down. You stay if you want to. Stay!”

They leave me standing there. I’m in a daze. My eyes begin to sting from the acrid air, but in a weird way it feels good. It doesn’t hurt like they say it does. There’s an aspect to it that makes me feel more alive than I’ve felt in a while. I feel the burning drops already piercing the dermis of my suit and I can’t help but love it.

Fuck this, I say to myself. I’m going to join those creative bastards down by the stage. These are my people after all! I may be a working schmuck, but that’s not all I am. 

And so I find myself sprinting, elated, lighter than air. I look over and see Maisey and her family stuffed in the protection of the van. I watch as they argue with one another over whether to ride out the storm or just give up and head home. I realize I don’t give a fuck what they decide to do.

I shout to the lead singer. “Want some help? I can play.” 

“What,” he says. “You want to join us? Do you sing too?”

“Hell yeah I do.”

And so someone from the band hands me a mic, and another person fashions me with a beat up bass guitar. And we’re all out of tune, but I don’t seem to care. I join them in a spontaneous free-style medley, part covers, part improv, and it’s like incredible. How is it I’ve forgotten how fun bad weather can be?

The spirit of the storm has taken over the stage, the crowd is loving it. It’s all people wearing rags. Being themselves. Not caring what impression they’re making. And I feel my suit melting off me. My arms and my legs, peeling off in bitter shreds. My face has come loose, and I pull it down, I peel it off, as I belt out verse after organic verse. I’m wailing, shaking my wet head like a dog, and my long hair comes free through the synthetic material. I’m now mostly naked except for sizzling mesh and musical instrument. And it is all perfectly fine.