Etta just stared at the amazingly good looking, blond haired blue eyed 11 year old boy in front of her who had just told her that he was really her 25 year old boyfriend. She fixed him in a quizzical squint with her hands on her hips. Seriously?
“I’m Merritt Sivertsen. I’ll prove it. Ask me anything about our time together.”
She just shook her head slightly. “I didn’t sleep with some . . kid.”
“Seriously. Anything. The more intimate the better, things only Merritt Sivertsen would know.”
She continued walking to the car muttering under hear breath. “There must be some other boys hiding in the bushes who put you up to this.”
He hurried alongside her. “Please. Give me a chance. I’m Merritt Sivertsen and I know the most important thing about you that you don’t think anyone knows.”
“I haven’t got time for this,” she said and brushed him aside to open her door.
“You’ve got five minutes more time than your car says because you always set it five minutes ahead,” he said rapidly before her door closed. “You told me that outside a Costco when we ran through the parking lot to get to your car as a rainstorm was starting and I thought we'd have to drive through it according to your car!”
He got the last words in just before she got the window all the way up. Vroom, she started her car, a late model Camaro, the engine rumbled to life.
But she didn’t shift out of park.
He saw her take a deep breath with another shake of her head.
The window cracked open an inch. He saw heard her still looking straight ahead mutter. “I can’t believe I’m taking this seriously.”
“Okay,” she said turning to the gap in the window. “The last time we made love, what did you do for the first time?”
“Doggy style anal!” he replied right away.
She stared at this boy a second. “How . . . ? Alright, and why did I say we did that?” she demanded.
“You. . you joked that it was only fair that I give it once considering I did ballet and must’ve gotten it a hundred times!”
Now she stared at him with her mouth hanging open. She motioned for him to go around to the other door. He heard the mechanical click of the door unlocking. He pulled it open and jumped in anxious to further prove that he was really 25 year old Merritt Sivertsen but felt not even 11 years old, completely ridiculous in the low slung seat of the Camaro, which left him barely able to see over the dash.
“I know it seems incredible but I really am Merritt Sivertsen. I’m only . . . temporarily this boy,” he said gesturing to his body with both hands.
“Temporarily?” she repeated with a shake of her head as she put the car in drive and made her way out of the parking lot into traffic where she soon stopped at a light.
“Okay, if you’re really Merritt,” she said turning to him, “Then where were we the next to last time we did it?
“Right here,” laughed Merritt patting the seat he was sitting on. “At that cineplex a couple miles north. We got there thinking it started at 7 but it didn’t start till 7:30. So . . . “
The light changed and Etta angrily accelerated, chirping her tires.
“How the fuck are you that gorgeous boy then, Merritt?” she demanded.
“It’s . . . complicated.”
“Oh, it is, is it?” she snapped sighing, overwhelmed by the circumstance.
“Hey, I’m not exactly floating on a cloud here.. For the moment I’m stuck in the body of an eleven and a half year old boy! And, oh yeah, I just spent the past week as a captive, under restraint with a fucking chastity belt on in an insane asylum waiting to be raped by billionaires and who knows, maybe Senators at an Eyes Wide Shut style party somewhere in the area. I only just escaped a few hours ago!”
“Seriously?” she asked pulling over onto the side of the road where there was a wide shoulder.
“Yes! And now the cops are after me. Do a U turn and at the light take a right,” he directed with hand gestures.
She pulled a fast u-turn and made the turn he suggested. As they spoke he sprinkled in more directions. “Straight through this one . . . get in the left turn lane . . . take exit B at the next pair”
“As crazy as it may seem, what I am right now isn’t the biggest news here. A couple of the . . field guys, maybe they’re wet work guys, too, visited my apartment and I recorded them saying that the honeypot likes Sivertsen for real. “
Her cheeks reddened.
He waited. She wouldn’t look at him. And he waited.
“Etta . . . whatever they have over you, we can get rid of that leverage.”
He waited.
She just drove in silence but he could see tears were welling up in her eyes and she was taking deeper breaths. At a stop light she finally responded without looking at her diminished boyfriend..
“You know how fucking crazy it was? I wanted you to be disgusting, to be an asshole. That’s the truth.. That’s how twisted it’s gotten. When they told me, here’s the guy. I-I wanted not to like you. I wanted to just . . . “
She waved her hand.
“ . .to just go through the motions. Guys don’t even notice it. And it’s-it’s easier that way. No internal conflicts. Just doing a job. But when they gave me your picture . . “ she glanced over at him sitting so low in his seat. “What used to be your picture. When they gave me that and I saw your eyes, what used to be your eyes and they told me your code name was ‘Boyscout’ . . . I almost knew.”
He waited.
“Etta-“
She chuckled, “So now you know that your girlfriend was only pretending to like you at the very start . . . .like the first ten seconds-“
“I never pretended to like you.”
“And how did you feel when you heard, which two guys was it, the one tall guy and the one short one?”
“Yeah, I think.”
“Did you hate me when you heard? When you thought you’d only be tricked?”
“I felt like I . . like I should hate you only it-it didn’t feel real all the way. Not to me.”
They came to a stop sign and she turned to him, again.
“Merritt, I wanted to tell you so many times. I wanted to lay my cards out on the table. But what would you have said, huh? What would you have said?”
“I don’t know. But I know what I say now.” He undid his seat belt, leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.
She pulled the car over and they kissed some more. When they finally separated he told her, “Let me get back to being myself before we do that again. Anyone sees us, it’ll be hard to explain . . . “
A few minutes later he directed her to pull into a certain strip mall lot. He had her park on one side of the rectangular building and got out. “I’ll just be a minute. I don’t want you to park right next to my car, just in case. I’m into the woods on the other side.” With that, he looked around, shut the door and loped off behind the building.
Etta actually backed up several feet. To see what he did. There was no one around. She could just make out that there might be a car behind some brush at the far end of the parking lot. She saw little Merritt drop to the ground then slide to one side. Then she saw him jump to his feet. She heard a sound that might’ve been the closing of a car door and 30 seconds later, there he was running up to her car door.
“Hey, you moved,” he noted as he jumped in with a laptop computer under one arm.
She watched him inspecting it.
“So is that the thing that turns you into such a pretty boy,” she said tousling his wavy blond hair.
“It can do a lot more than that.”
“It looks like just a regular laptop with . . that,” she said pointing to the emitter antenna plugged into one USB port.
“It’s not,” he told her inspecting it some more and turning it on. “Damn, the battery’s run down. I’m not gonna change myself back if the power’s low.” He turned it off and shut it.
“You could charge it with the car. I might have an adapter here, somewhere.”
“Yeah, but . . do you have a place to go, a room, an apartment, maybe someone else’s that the people who sent you after me don’t know about? Somewhere where we’d be safe?”
She looked down for several moments, thinking.
“We’ve got a couple possibilities. One’s this mansion that a friend’s supposed to be constantly house sitting for some state department guy who goes on all these trips. But she mostly just shows up on the days he’s due back. We could try that.”
Merritt nodded and she pulled out of the parking lot heading purposefully in one direction.
“So . . tell me,” she asked mid way there. “How is it that you wanted to look like that? I mean, I’m not complaining,” she said reaching over and squeezing his cheek.
“Hey!”
“You are soooooooo cute. But why that?”
“I wanted to get close to Carruthers and Fairfax and another guy who turns out to be Jacobs, at the NSA. I wanted to record them plotting the shit they’re doing. They meet every Thursday at the Yale Alumni Athletic club. And they’re all sick pervs.”
“How sick?”
“They have video of boys being raped on their computers.”
“ . . . oh . . . “
“Yeah, that’s entertaining to them. They’re that sick.”
“So . . . you turned yourself into the prettiest boy ever to be around them?”
He nodded. “Something like that. It was the only way I could figure that they’d want me around but wouldn’t feel at all threatened by me so that I could stay around them and record them.”
“What happened?”
“It was working perfectly. I undressed in front of them. I was in the showers with them. I was in the sauna with them. Believe me. They did not want me to go anywhere. But I accidentally exposed my recorder in the sauna. They drugged me and I woke up restrained in a padded cell in an insane asylum stuck as the little boy I am now.”
Etta pulled over at the side of the road along a ridge.
“What’re you doing?”
“My friend told me that this is where I could see the lights of the house we’re going to, if someone’s there and it’s lit up.” Etta pointed into the dark woods where they were supposed to look. There were no lights, even in the distance.
A few minutes later they drove up to the end of a cul de sac winding through the woods to a mansion with an odd combination of brick and tudor looks to it.
“Um, there’s a pool out back,” she started.
“So what? I won’t be dipping even one tiny toe in that pool. The water’s gonna be real cold this time of year.”
“Yeah, well, you see, my friend told me that there’s no extra key under the mat or in a flower pot. It’s at the bottom of the deep end of the pool.”
A minute later, Merritt was around the side of the house where chain link fence met the siding. He untied his sneakers.
“You made yourself so ridiculously cute we all just want to get you out of your pants,” chuckled Etta.
He rolled his eyes, shed his clothes and jumped over the fence then ran a few strides and dove into the pool with minimal splash.
He went straight for the bottom of the pool. The water was ice cold. He could barely restrain the impulse to gasp. The light was pretty poor as there was only a full moon and a nearby streetlight to give background light. The pool itself wasn’t lit. He ran his hand back and forth along the bottom till, finally, it hit something near the filter intake. It was a small plastic bag with something in it. Merritt grabbed it and zoomed back to the surface and then to pool’s edge from where he climbed out gasping.
It seemed even colder to be in the open air. He ran over to the fence, oblivious to being naked, and tossed her the bag.
“Go wait for me at a slider door,” she told him then got the laptop and a few more things from the car and went in the front door. The alarm system code was in the bag as well. She entered it and flashing red lights quieted down.
She got a blanket and a towel from a hall closet and let him in a slider door immediately wrapping him in the blanket and her arms and drying his hair with the towel. Maybe his little body was just exhausted but from the moment she wrapped her arms around him to get him warm he started descending toward sleep. He gave her instructions about hooking up the laptop to be charged but even his voice had no energy now.
“I’ll prove . . turn back . . . myself . . got some ideas . . protect you . . . never let them hurt . . you.”
And he was out. Even her running the towel through his thick, wavy blond hair, again, didn’t wake him.
She turned on the heat in the place and used the bathroom. She went back to him and he was lying there on a couch wrapped in a blanket sound asleep. She gathered him up, and with some difficulty carried him up to the master bedroom and slipped him under the covers of the king size bed there.
She brought the laptop there too, undressed and slipped under the covers herself at first only back to back with him. But the next morning, she woke up deliciously warm, spooning with her arms wrapped around her temporarily smaller boyfriend, her lips pressed to the back of his neck.
She sighed. This felt so absolutely wonderful. Yeah, he was whatever he’d said, 11 or 12 years old physically but it was really 25 year old Merritt somehow crammed into there. She didn’t feel guilty at all caressing him.
And then the doorbell rang.
“What?”
It rang again.
She jumped out of bed and grabbed a bathrobe giving him a slap on the rear as she went by. “Get up, Merritt!” then hurried down the stairs.
At the door was a guy in a security guard uniform. It wasn’t a gated community but a security guy went through every day checking on every house. He explained that he was just checking in. She was cheerful and open with him.
“And, I just checked in with the folks next door, they said there was a boy with you.”
She nodded. “My little brother, Marek.”
“Is he around?”
“Oh, sure,” she smiled, turning it on for this guy and she could tell it was working as she took a couple steps to the bottom of the stairs.
“Marek!” she called up. “Listen to your big sister for once and come down here right now! Marek!”
He had a notepad out, “So . . Elzbieta and Marek Sobieski. Is that right?”
“Yes
In short order, a slender boy in striped pajama bottoms with a thick crown of wavy blond hair came charging down the stairway and jogged up to her. She pulled him to her side.
“And you’re Marek?” asked the security guy.
“Yes, sir. Marek Sobieski.”
“Well, you two must have the best looking parents to have a daughter like her and a son like you.”
Both shrugged bashfully and in short order he was gone.
“Let’s go upstairs and I’ll change back,” said Merritt looking up at Etta. She was wonderfully voluptuous to his diminished, 11 ˝ year old boy eyes.
Before they could even turn toward the stairs, the doorbell rang again. The looked at each other in surprise. It was a heavyset woman who turned out to be one of the other neighbors. She pointed in the direction of her house but you could barely see it through the woods. She fawned over Etta but even more over Merritt and invited them to a barbecue that afternoon.
When she was gone, Merritt sighed in frustration. “Another person who’s seen me as an 11 ˝ year old boy. Dammit.”
Etta laughed. “Did you see her looking at your abs?” she laughed running her hands over the skin of the eight squares. He swatted her hand away.
“Let’s go upstairs,” he said running ahead of her.
When she got up to the bedroom, he had the laptop turned on at a small desk in the bedroom and was seated at it typing away.
“See, this is what I am now,” he told her pointing to a picture of his present five foot tall, 82 pound self. “And this is the real me,” he said pointing to another picture over a label of “ORIGINAL PROFILE”.
He typed away a minute more, mostly clicking boxes among choices on various menus.
“Okay,” he finally said jumping up from the chair and dropping his pajama bottoms. “Now you’ll see me revert to my real self.”
He pressed START and in response to the ‘Are You Sure?’ prompt, pressed YES. In just a second, he grew to his full six foot one height and physically matured to 165 pounds and got back his own face and hair.
He turned to Etta and grinned. “Ta da!”
She was transfixed, eyes wide and jaw hanging open sputtering only sentence fragments. “You were just . . .! A second ago . . . and now you’re!”
He took her in his arms and pulled the bathrobe off her. They made love for an hour finally relaxing amid the expensive sheets and thick blankets.
“I have some ideas how to get you out of all this,” he told her. There are a lot of things that we can do with the Chronivac that I haven’t done.”
“Does that hurt to change like that?”
He shrugged. “No, not at all.”
“Do another one,” she pleaded.
“I’m gonna have to change back to little 11 ˝ year old Marek, anyway. Where’d you come up with that name?”
“What? Sounds kind of like Merritt and it’s Polish like Elzbieta. You’re supposed to be my little brother, after all. But how about doing another one. Show me what else that Chronivac thing can do.”
Merritt agreed but didn’t want to put a lot of time into it. He told her he’d only go to one of the profiles he’d already done before. He let her pick. She chose right away. He just shrugged. Okay.
He went through the menus, made the requisite choices and got up from the chair at the desk. He pressed START and answered YES to the prompt of “Are You Sure?”.
The electromagnetic waved passed through him. Immediately he felt the need to bend forward and lean onto the seat of the chair onto his knuckles. She circled around back of him and snickered. “Your buns are getting flatter and flatter.”
But then his hips got wider and wider. His whole upper body became spectacularly muscular and his arms lengthened. Then his legs clearly shortened and between those legs his penis became tiny.
Etta chuckled. “I thought you’d get bigger.”
He shook his head and now his head changed shape, extending upward as his nose completely flattened and his nostrils became bigger and bigger. Then, as his whole body started to cover over with thick dark hair his face and hands blackened and his moth expanded outward. He let out a grunt and a minute after change had started, Merritt was an eastern lowlands gorilla tipping the scales at nearly 500 pounds.
Etta shook her head at the sight of him. Her Merritt, her handsome, slender Merritt rendered a gorilla in just a minute. She watched him slap at his pot belly, the part of his transformation that he liked least.
Etta pressed a hand to him in multiple places. He was real. It wasn’t a suit or a hologram or something. Merritt was a gorilla.
“Did that hurt at all?”
Merritt shook his somewhat conic gorilla head.
“Can you think clearly in that body? How much do you weigh?”
Merritt first nodded then pointed to the display on the screen in the information under the heading of DESTINATION PROFILE it said that subject will weigh 477 pounds.
“Do you – do you have gorilla instincts? Do you want bananas and have no interest in steak. If-if you were a dog, would you want to chase cats? “
He nodded.
“How strong are you?” she asked and he picked her up with one gorilla arm with relative ease to show her.
She was fascinated with his face and hands and how human and yet not human he was in this temporary identity. When the 15 minutes he’d set for this transformation was up she watched with rapt attention as he transformed from largest of apes back into her slender, track star boyfriend.
He talked with her about his ideas to get her free of them and what he wanted to do with the Chronivac to stop the scumbags who’d infiltrated the NSA. They looked up and suddenly it was 2 o’clock and they probably needed to make an appearance at that neighbor’s barbecue. But first he needed to become improbably good looking 11 ˝ year old Marek again.
He set the Chronivac menus and also had it give him some clothes, shorts and a shirt from the Polo web page and a to pair of sneakers. Etta laughed at his instantly going from her boyfriend to her little brother again.
“C’mon, little brother,” she said with a tug at his small wrist.
“Okay, sis,” he answered and sighed, almost getting his reluctance out of himself in that one breath then ran ahead of her.