"Alright, how 'bout this one" began Mark to the four faces opposite him, "the TransDem guy thinks we should use the chronivac to understand other people in addition to having fun, right? Well, I want you to make me black for a week"
"Black?" asked Tony, "as in african american?"
"Exactly"
"There's no way just you can be black unless I do it to. I don't think you can have people recognizing that you're black who see me as white"
"So, you'll try it too?"
"Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how I get treated."
"Jack?"
"Sure, I can finally save on sunscreen"
"How 'bout you, Jeff?
"I don't know . . "
"Afraid?"
"No just . . just not that excited about it"
"Well maybe whatever makes you feel not so excited should be confronted by trying it"
If Tony had had an overbearing expression to match his slightly harsh words, Jeff might have refused but it wasn't. Tony regarded his friend with a faint smile and a tilt of the head. Come on. Join us. Jeff smiled back and nodded. Eric would never have chosen to do it on his own, but with all the others signed on he felt pushed into it.
First were Mark and Tony. As brothers, Jeff agreed that they have similar appearance. The chronivac had 50 different african tribes to which the boys could change their ancestry, at least physically. Jeff told them that they could pick a tribe or they could choose one at random and the chronivac might make some changes to their bodies besides skin and hair or it might make none. The St. Martin brothers stripped and agreed to let the chronivac choose at random. They both stood before the emitter and Jeff hit the enter button. The emitter glowed yellow and the brothers felt the usual electric wave pass through them. As they looked down, they saw their skin darkening, but it didn't just become mocha or even dark brown. Mark and Tony darkened till their skins were pure, obsidian black, even their penises. Nothing else about their bodies changed below the neck except that their pubic hair become even coarser. Their slender, muscular bodies changed not at all. But each felt his nose flatten a bit and his nostrils first flare out tremendously and then stay that way. Their eyes went from gray and green to chocolate brown. Their already full lips thickened much more and their hair grew out. First their short cropped hair turned black and more coarse and then it started to grow. At first the growth was slow, but the pace at which their hair shot outward quickened and finally it ended with both St. Martin brothers sporting ABA style afros ten inches out from their heads.
Tony and Mark laughed and hugged. This was pretty good. Their slender, athletic bodies were unchanged and the changes to their faces only changed them from being strikingly handsome caucasian boys to being strikingly handsome negroid boys. Jeff informed them that their ligneage now traced to a certain equatorial saharan tribe.
Next was Jack. He stripped and also chose to accept the random choice of the chronivac. He felt the electric wave pass through him and saw his skin start to darken but the process didn't go nearly as far as with Tony and Mark. Jack skin turned from fair and freckled to a medium brown. His wavy red hair became coarse and short but was still reddish. His eyes went from blue to brown. His nose flattened and widened and his lips switched from being too thin to being thick and full. Jack laughed in mock frustration looking at his reflection in the mirror "Jesus! Even black I'm still a carrot top!"
Next was Jeff and unlike the others, his body changed significantly. His penis grew longer and his gluteal muscles burgeoned out back of him. The fat simply disappeared from his body and his skin darkened just a little short of the tone of Mark and Tony. His hair became black and coarse and grew out into long dredlocks and his cheekbones grew more prominent while his nose flattened and lips thickened.
"This is great!" he mumbled and noticed that his voice had grown considerably deeper as well.
Last of all was Eric. His reservations had melted away with the benign changes or, looking at Jeff, improvements to his friends. He stripped and stepped in front of the emitter. He felt the electric wave pass through him and then saw his skin quickly become dark brown. But, quite the opposite of Jeff, Eric didn't become leaner. He became fatter and he changed shape dramatically. From a big bellied small bottomed type, Eric morphed into a huge pear shape. His hips expanded both outward and backward at a fantastic pace while his chest and shoulders slimmed slightly. He didn't slim much in any particular location, though, because Eric's weight zoomed up past 3 bills. Finally, his nose flattened and lips thickened but more than had any of the others'.
"Aw! No! No! No!" complained Eric and to his continued horror, his voice was higher pitched than before. "Why is it always me?"
Jeff told Eric that his ligneage now traced back to a certain tribe, the members of which were now for exceptional . . girth.
"I can't play defensive line like this!"
"Sure you can" said Jeff with a slap to one beachball buttock. "You can be the wideguy runstopper"
Eric moaned and the others smirked.
"What about our families?" asked Tony. "We haven't all changed as much as the reubenesque boy here" he also gave Eric a slap on his massive rear "but as much as our family ignores us, even they'll notice the differences" he said, tapping his afro and then Mark's.
"Your family will see you exactly as you were before but everyone else will see you as you look now"
"I don't want anyone to see me the way I look now" moaned Eric.
But all five of them tested this attribute of the chronivac's work. Mark asked his sister Cindy if he could use some of her sunscreen and she passed it over to her brother who couldn't possibly have need of it. He asked her if she thought he needed a haircut. "Why? It's only a quarter inch long? Are you going to shave your head?" Ten inch afro'd Mark just smiled at her.
Eric had had to tie three of Tony's sweaters around his waist just to be able to walk home. He could get his pants higher than his mid thighs, his hips were so expansive. But when he waddled in the front door of his house, his parents greeted him as though he was the same old Eric.
Jack went with his parents to the nudist camp that weekend and his mother and aunt gabbed for what seemed like forever about what kind of sunscreen Jack should wear and whether they should keep track of his freckles as the first sign of melanoma. At the same time, black boy Jack was circulating through the resort getting wide eyed looks from blase nudists who weren't used to seeing blacks at the resort. Jack spent some time by the pool and on his way to the diving board overheard two girls his age talking to each other. "See. It's a myth. Theirs aren't any bigger."
People at the naturist resort went out of their way to be polite to black boy Jack, but they made him feel like a freak for being brown skinned. The girl at the buffet counter made a point of handing him things in a way that avoided actually touching Jack's brown skin. A mother and father by the pool with their two very young boys let the boys play as all sorts of people approached and passed by but when they saw black boy Jack heading their way, they shepherded the boys off to the side.
There were girls who seemed to find his dark skin exciting and exotic and others who seemed repelled at the sight of him. School was more of the same for Jack who found that one teacher seemed antagonized somehow by him but that the others reacted in a curious way. They had the lowest of expectations for black Jack and they wouldn't criticize anything he said in class. He decided to test this phenonmenon. He intentionally wrote a terrible english paper and the teacher still gave him a B+. He raised his hand in class and gave the most ridiculously wrong answers he could think of. Freckle faced Jack would've received cutting remarks for such dumb answers. Black Jack was told "Good try" or simply no with an immediate switch of focus to another kid. The patronizing nature of it infuriated him and by the end of just one week, Jack had become a worse discipline problem than he'd ever been before.
Jeff had very little problem with the way he was treated. Jeff was a superb athlete and played on every team possible. He didn't care all that much about his classes. He wanted to get good grades in them, and if a teacher was going to go extra easy on him out of some idea that only poor schoolwork could be expected of black boys, well, that was fine with Jeff. Jeff also reveled in his new cool status. His muscular, dreadlocked presence in the hallway was virtually unchallenged for status in the school. In the locker room, he luxuriated in his new body and smirked at the surprised looks from white boys at the size of his penis.
Eric's experience was humiliatingly the opposite. Kids openly laughed at him as he pulled clothes on and off and waddled to and from the showers. Eric found that he could just barely squeeze into the steel tube and formica style desks the school. He also noticed that teachers reacted with wonder that he said or wrote anything other than completely stupid things. Like Jeff, this didn't bother him. If they wanted to give him better grades than he deserved, he'd take 'em. Why not? Even some of the teachers joked about his yard wide backside. At first, this shocked him. But as the week went on, Eric found himself joking about his fat ass, too. There were only so many options for a student to establish a niche if his appearance was less than desirable. Clown was one. And as the week wore on, that's what Eric became, the class clown who made jokes about himself before anyone else even got to take cracks at him. But in football practices, he was deadly serious. He had to get used to his new bottom heavy body. He wouldn't admit it, but Jeff had been right. With his huge mass and low center of gravity, Eric made an excellent run stopper in the middle of the line. He had a pretty good game on Friday. The single worst part may have been squeezing his giant ass into the white spandex uniform pants and waddling out in front of a smirking crowd. It was a road game, and the other team's fans were absolutely brutal in their jokes about his corporeal excesses. But he forgot that as soon as he started playing. He enjoyed the fact that with his new body, no individual offensive lineman could move him off the spot he defended, but he found he tired out very quickly and being taken out of the game on some passing downs suited him quite well. The team won and Eric was tremendously proud that he'd been able to make the best of his temporary situation and help the team.
While the teachers had a default position of low expectations that they applied to black boys Jack, Jeff and Eric, htey couldn't apply it to Tony. They didn't know what the hell to do with Tony. Here was a pitch black boy, of striking appearance, and with such an afro, who was . . brilliant. Tony's teachers stared in open wonder at him as he finished math tests early, still getting 100% right and spoke in perfect, polished english answering the most complex questions. Here was their dream, a black boy, and they didn't come any blacker, who was smarter than any of the white boys. But their reaction came to seem to Tony like just an extension of their expectation that Jack and the others would be stupid. They had never fawned over him like this when he was white. In fact, they regarded him as something of a nuisance. They knew they were boring him. They knew they weren't helping him reach his potential and wiseass Tony gave them a hard time for it. But they positively reveled in black Tony's intelligence. Jack even told Tony of having heard one teacher refer to him as "super nigger" to another teacher when she didn't know black Jack was within earshot.
"You are one fucked up white bitch to call my friend Tony a nigger!" Jack shouted at her. She was a teacher he'd never liked white or black. He got in her face and shouted expletives at her in front of an increasing crowd of students. The vice principal came up and was about to haul Jack's brown ass to detention but the teacher, not wanting to have the issue become anything official, had the vice principal let him go.
The other attitude that amazed Tony was that of his few fellow black students outside of the chronivac created ones. He thought they might regard him with respect or maybe even pride that one of their own was as smart as any white boy. Instead, he heard them mumble "Uncle Tom" and "incognegro" under their breaths at him. One kid, Malik, was particularly insistent in his contempt for black intellectual Tony. But he just been switched into Tony's phys ed. class. And by the end of the week when class came around, Tony had had enough. They were doing floor hockey that particular day. Tony made of undressing right next to Malik and standing over him while Malik was tieing his shoes.
"Are you more black than me, Malik? Huh? Take a look at me! Are you more black than me?"
Malik was quite a bit lighter skinned than Tony, but no shorter than Tony and about the same weight but not in nearly as good shape. But he had never been confronted by a smart kid and wasn't sure how to respond. When he stood up, Tony stepped forward and pushed his chest against Malik. "Let's see how stupid does against intelligent today, huh Malik" The gym teacher stepped in before there could be a fight, but didn't save Malik a beating. Tony fought furiously to get the hard plastic ball that served as the puck and ran straight for Malik every time. He steamrolled him, throwing his body at Malik as fast as he could and whenever Malik got the puck, Tony was on him in a flash barreling into Malik, crunching him against the folded up stands in the gym.
The last time, he took the ball/puck and whipped a pass across the floor to Jeff. He stood over Malik and vented.
"You know what you are? You're a white supremacist! That's what you are! You should wear a klan hood, Malik! You have the same opinion of the intelligence of black men as the klan! Go join the klan, Malik! That's who thinks like you!"
Tony was ambivalent about meeting Claire in his jet black state. It felt like putting one over on her. He didn't want to risk odd differing reactions, her knowing that he was black with an afro, his parents thinking he had peaches and cream skin and short cropped hair, so he met her at her house. To his surprise, and delight, nothing seemed different. They talked and kissed and talked and kissed and groped and kissed and talked. He felt such love for her at that moment. She touched him without the slightest interest in his skin or race. They were sitting on the floor beside her bed looking at a huge coffee table book on astronomy her parents had bought when Tony asked her.
"If I were white, you'd still feel the same way about me, wouldn't you?"
She laughed. "If you were anything I'd still feel the same way about you. I'd know you anywhere. I'd see it in your eyes. I'd see you"
Going home afterward, Tony felt so content. He also thought of the scene in Heaven Can Wait with Julie Christie and Warren Beatty. She said she'd know him from his eyes and at the end, after even he doesn't know he used to be the guy she'd loved, she does.
Mark's experience was similar to Tony's. Teachers acted as though the same intelligence he'd shown the week before with white skin was suddenly a sure sign of God himself having bestowed a gift upon Mark. Anti-intellectual attitudes among the handful of other black students seemed to be less prevalent in the 7th grade than they were in high school because Mark didn't get any flak from the other black students about doing well in school. Mark noticed that the other 13 year old boys in gym class acted as though his black penis was an incredible organ. They weren't that impressed when it was white just the week before.
At ballet school, Mark's jet black skin was quite a problem. The typical ballet tight is sort of translucent. Mark had been to class all week wearing black tights and a white leotard. When time came for the school's performance on Friday evening, he only realized when he dressed in the white tights that he had to wear for his role as the prince, that his ultra dark skin left the exact outline of his dance belt showing beneath his tights. But it was too late to do anything about it. Mark danced his parts, leaping with gusto and lifting his partner with apparent ease though he barely eclipsed her weight. All the while, his outfit had the school's instuctor near tears every time Mark spun and showed the audience even more than they usually saw from a ballet dancer.
The instructor apologized profusely to the remaining audience members milling about afterward while helping Mark off with the crown that restrained his afro. Mark just laughed at it though. He was quite comfortable as a ballet dancer and quite comfortable black. Maybe being 13 years old helped. He was not so threatening to cashiers and clerks of skeptical attitudes as his older, more physically threatening brother. But still, he noticed a weird paranoia in stores when they went to the mall. He noticed that some cashiers actually tried to avoid touching his pure black skin. He noticed young kids who hadn't seen many blacks openly staring at him. Little things happened like a girl in the mall walking past the book store where he and Tony were looking and laughing out loud to her mother. "Mom! That boy had giant lips!". He thought he heard two boys sitting on a bench at the mall rating all the passing girls out loud, calling out "Six" or "Four" as they walked by, say "fucking niggers" under their breath as he walked by with Tony. He told Tony and they marched right up to them but the boys ran away, running into the women's bathroom, of all places, because it was the nearest escape. One of the girls they'd insulted saw the whole thing and pulled a security guy out of an adjacent store and had him there when they tried to sneak out.
All five thought they'd learned something, some more than others, when they stripped in front of the chronivac. For Jack, Mark and Tony, the differences that flowed through them after the electrid pulse seemed relatively minor. Jeff would look back wistfully on his time of athletic prominence. Eric was ecstatic to lose the shape that had gotten him the nickname "rerun".
"You don't know how great this feels, to not be such a fat ass anymore" he exulted.
"Yeah, not such" smirked Jack.