Side Effects May Include:

I am eroding. Time and space flows over me, a river of life and opportunity and experience has discarded me into its abyss. As I stare through the screen of static and noise and reruns from the early 90’s on an old antenna-fed channel, I become dulled, lesser, a pale stone perched atop the pebble gray sofa, sinking, settling, weathering away. I run my parched tongue across the dry-rotted, deep-fried crust of my lips. I let out a long, disparaging breath, the cackling of an unseen audience filling the room from the flat screen television before me.

No one laughs that way, not really. Not at jokes like these, if they could even be called jokes. Even good comedy doesn’t provoke the kind of laughter it used to. Clean, good old-fashioned humor has taken a backseat in the dark upper corners of the crowd, afraid to be seen. It’s beaten into submission and replaced with dark humor, warped realities painted with smiling faces and fake families. Maybe I am being biased. Maybe I am just tired. I haven’t slept in at least two days, possibly longer. Maybe I am just bitter, or just done feeling anything at all.

Except the mass in my thigh. I can feel that. The cancerous, inoperable tumor. They call it the Great Saphenous Vein. As it provides blood flow from the ankle to the groin, it is known as the longest vein in the human body. My unwelcome mass has decided to wrap it like the 1979 Mountain Green Chevy Nova my father folded around a red cedar. To remove it would end the same way his life did; I would bleed out.

I found out three days ago. Or has it been four now? I shoved a bag of tortilla chips and cans of assorted drinks off of the cushion beside me and checked my phone. Dead.

How long have I been awake?

“Have you been losing sleep?”

Great, so we are adding voices now.

“Are you facing a life-threatening illness? Are you feeling defeated, depressed, and alone? Then give us a call today for this one-time, super-special, limited, exclusive offer now. When all hope seems lost, let us lend you some of ours. Try Chromatin now!” The man on the screen was dressed in medical garb, a stethoscope draped across his shoulders. The symbol of medicine was embossed on the front, the caduceus; two snakes wound like coils around a staff topped with wings. Something seemed off about it, but the screen flashed to a list of hundreds of ailments that scrolled across the screen so fast, that I was only able to pinpoint a few. Diabetes. Hyperthyroidism. Ebola. Herpes. Cancer.

“Yeah right,” I croaked aloud. I half expected an applause or laughter sign to illuminate overhead to cue the crowd. This had to be a joke. A late night infomercial prank for someone. A marketing ploy to lure people in for a placebo trial. How could one pill claim to cure all of these wildly different issues, including the leaching mass devouring my leg? I stared off in thought, my eyes sore and puffy. The neon lights from across the alley of the local bar blinked on and off against the wall through the window. Dust particles caked the air as the bright red glare would reveal them, hovering like spores.

On. Off. On. Off. Visible, invisible, and back again. Over and over.

“So, what have you got to lose?” I blinked and did a double-take as I realized the actor-for-hire doctor on t.v. was staring at me. How long had I zoned out? It felt like an hour had passed, maybe longer. Maybe I was just snapping back from my trance on a different commercial break. It must have just caught my attention as it replayed on another run. The idea was too ridiculous otherwise. Yet as I sat here and looked back with uncertainty, Mr. Chromatin man stared back, glancing down to my right with a nod before looking back at me and pointing up at the bold yellow numbers on the screen above him.

The man on screen had gestured toward my hand, the one holding my phone. The dead phone. I held it up, starting to feel goosebumps run down my spine. I pressed the power button once more to see the mirrored black glass light up this time.

“What the…” fell out of my throat. My vision shimmered with fireworks. Taking a deep breath, I tried to shake the tsunami of blood that surged into my heart. Why would I call this wacko phone number? This was just crazy.

“You want to be cured, don’t you Kyle Bassman? You are one phone call away from ridding your leg of that horrid cancer. Erode it with irido-crystal technology!”

“My name. How did you know my name?” I tried to find the remote. It was the lack of sleep. I was going nuts. Delusional. Paranoid. Exhausted. This was all just a hallucination. I kicked away pizza boxes, tv dinners, a few bottles of whiskey, a pint of ice cream, some stale cheese balls, and a prescription for painkillers strewn about my feet before finding the remote underneath the coffee table.

“Don’t be foolish, Kyle, let us help. Call now!” The man yelled with a manic bout of laughter. A whole crowd began to laugh off screen. It sounded like hundreds of people. I was in the sitcom now as I desperately crouched down to grab the remote. Misjudging how far I had gone, I slammed my head into the underside of the table, stars dancing in the vastness of darkness that found me.

I came to lying down on the couch. It felt like only a moment had passed, my head throbbing with a growing goose egg on the top of my skull. I went to touch it before realizing my phone was back in my hand, a call still running up the time with nothing but beeping on the other end. It tallied 37 minutes as I hung up the line. How was I on a phone call for that long? Did I butt dial someone, or answer a call in my sleep? Opening the call history, I realized it was outgoing, and the large yellow numbers that were on my tv earlier now resided at the top of the list before me.

Before I could even begin to digest what was happening, a knock at the door shook me straight to the floor in fear. It was a single, resounding boom, then silence. I waited, trying not to move as I listened for any other sound whilst determinedly trying not to create any myself atop the trash pile.

“Thank you for your order, Kyle Bassman,” the man from the commercial proclaimed. What in the hell was going on? It just isn’t possible. This was all some insane joke. But by who? I hadn’t even told my mother my diagnosis yet.

After a brief moment, footsteps trailed off down the hall. I clambered to my feet and rushed to the door, flinging it open to see a white coat disappearing towards the elevators. I was done with this game. Racing down the hall, I slid around the corner and crashed into Ms. Frost’s apartment door before launching to the closing elevator doors. All I saw as they closed was his smile, and that logo again.

That’s what was different. The snake tails ended with feet, as if evolved to stand up.

My leg throbbed horribly. I had overdone it for sure, the pain pulling me out of the moment. I was suddenly so very tired. I slid along the wall slowly until I made it back to my door, number 42. There, at the side of the entryway sat a package. A box, wrapped in plain brown paper. It reminded me of the old parcel deliveries that were wrapped with twine. No way was I about to open that thing.

As I limped inside to find my pain meds, I heard a scuttling of feet, a scraping noise from the box. There was something inside, and it was alive.

“Yeah, not happening,” I slammed the door shut and swung over the back of the couch, reaching for the medicine I recalled seeing roll underneath. Patting about blindly, my hand felt something foreign. My throat closed shut, my eyes growing blurry with tears as overwhelming fear struck like lightning.

I couldn’t believe what I was seeing as I placed the brown box on the coffee table gently. It was so light that if something wasn’t rustling inside, I would have thought it to be empty. Wiping my eyes clear, I peeled back the only visible fold of paper on the box and watched as it popped open effortlessly, like a container of Chinese takeout. Peering inside over the rim, I felt my jaw slack as I tried to process the contents inside.

Within the box sat a little green chameleon. It’s orbital eyes shot about like pinballs, taking in its surroundings, as confused and bewildered as I felt. What was going on? This was the most absurd and bizarre string of events I had ever experienced. I wanted to laugh at the audacity of it, scream at the insanity of it, rage at the preposterous notion of it. Despite that, all I could do was extend a finger like a branch for the chameleon to ponder climbing.

“Some kind of pet therapy, huh? You supposed to bring me hope? Save me?” I asked it as I felt the very last of my hope shed away like a molting of skin. The chameleon spun its eye about like a rotary phone dial before reaching for my finger, shaking back and forth like a leaf in a strange kind of dance as it clamped on. As it did, I felt its little hand clasp on with tiny nails, but the grip was unreal. And getting worse. “Hey there little guy, you going for blood or what?”

Sharp stabs were my reply as blood began to drip into the box, its claws having pierced the skin and the fingernail on the adjacent side. That should be impossible. I reacted with a jerk, slamming my hand onto the table to fling it off, but the chameleon held on, just staring at me now.

“Ow, what the hell?” More needles punctured deep into my hand as it climbed up with vice-like strength. I reached for it with my free hand to rip it off when I realized something else was happening then. Scales covered my arm. I began to turn green and my fingers melted together into the shape of a clawed oven mitt. The chameleon began to go vitiligo, as pale as my own skin, as if pulling it out of me. “No, wait. Stop! Stop!”

I felt my legs begin to collapse and shrink. My kneecaps snapped backwards, my skin turned to soft plates, my tongue rolled from my mouth and limply unfurled down and across the room as my face started to crack and stretch and extend. I could suddenly see all around me at once, and yet nothing about it made sense. Two entirely divided worlds colliding in my mind, two sets of vision, two Chevy Novas drunkenly swerving blindly.

“Chameleons are said to hide from death. They steal, enshrouded in a new shape, overlooked by Death himself. Congratulations Mr. Bassman, you are healed! We at Chromatin have pierced the veil, no pun intended. Thank you for your patronage!” The man from the commercial boomed loudly over me, suddenly so large, like a skyscraper. I couldn’t speak. I sat, frozen, jaw clamped shut, my tongue balled up in a knot in my throat.

The doctor smiled as he gently placed the two chameleons in the plain box, wrapping it carefully and walking out into the hallway, his next stop already waiting for a cure just two floors up.