It was Tuesdays on Earth that Dave usually felt most dead. On Mondays he would take his snazzy aluminium folding bike into work, whistling in and out of cars with a gentle grace, like he was proving to them that the only power source anyone needed was a pair of well-honed quads rather than an inline four-cylinder internal combustion engine. His breakfast ticked all the macros, his supplements were complete and his guided meditation holistic. He’d switch on his usual podcast, clip into the pedals and listen to two wise men reminding him about his personal journey on his bicycle journey, and that self-actualisation was just another episode away. You just had to believe.
By the time Tuesday came around, he felt like he was crawling out of a badly-dug mob grave and not even being slightly excited that he’d survived the night entombed in soil and surrounded by worms. Life, despite all appearances, wasn’t Dave’s strongest point.
‘I love this ride into work. I really do. I just hate everything about it.’
He enjoyed being alone in life to some extent. No noise, no distractions, no bother. He could focus on his hobbies, his job and his hobby that apparently was his job — or vice versa depending on the day. He had a very neat plan about where he wanted to get to by 35 and each day got him a bit closer. Also closer to the loosely-packed grave. Each Monday was another step forward. Each Tuesday was basically surrender.
Now this Tuesday turned out to be slightly more deadly than most. He wheeled his bike down the side of the office building, parked up in the basement, slowly removed his helmet and stared at the floor. He inhaled deeply. He was tempted to make a gentle, mouth-wobbling, fart-like noise on the way out but instead told himself, on exhale:
‘My growth mindset will carry me through the day. Whatever that actually is.’
Most Tuesdays involved trying to get over Monday. A Monday in the office staring at a screen, moving numbers in cells, moving people in cells, enthusiastically draining his Aeropress coffee from a novelty pink mug emblazoned with the words:
BOSS BITCH ENERGY
He liked the irony, despite most people not really understanding it, even when he explained that it was a joke.
His cursor hovered over the word Exit.
‘I still don’t understand your mug. Is this what irony is?’ said Derek. Derek worked in his team, doing something involving carefully moving hand-crafted pixels around a screen, creating avant-garde art to advertise a brand new type of cleaning sponge on Instagram.
‘It’s a joke, Derek.’
‘But you aren’t a bitch, Dave.’
I can be, Dave thought to himself.
‘Dave. I’m not sure this is a great message - to have this sort of energy in the office. We must be allies.’
I am an ally to my chameleon at home, Dave thought. Even though a chameleon doesn’t know what an ally is. He just blends into the background. Millions of years had taught the chameleon that being ignored generally got you ahead in life.
Dave had a terrarium at home. He liked people not to know that he had a little glass box in which he curated moss and grass, moved little ornaments and twigs, and spent hours with tweezers to make it look like a lush vista on an alien planet. He dreamt that he could shrink down to the size of a tiny insect and live there, where the moss grew high like huge trees, tiny pebbles were huge rocks and slightly bigger ones were boulders the size of houses.
In his terrarium — this beautiful gold-rimmed glass box of delights — lived a chameleon. He told himself it had been a birthday present. In fact, he had bought Tom Hanks himself.
On most Tuesdays, when others would all head to the organic salad bowl bar for lunch to discuss the pros and cons of brown rice as a base grain rather than quinoa, Dave would grab his bike and cycle home quickly just to make sure Tom Hanks was doing OK. Each time he imagined the scene as he came in and acted so surprised: Oh Tom, where are you! I can’t see you! Have you escaped? Oh no, wait — you are just camouflaged. Oh you cheeky fella. This is a surprise. Each time, when he found Tom sitting on his log, that fleeting moment of dramatic joy lived up to his enthusiastically manifested imagination.
Tom Hanks was a chameleon. Like the real Tom Hanks, Dave explained to himself. No one had asked why he was called Tom Hanks, as no one knew that this was his hobby. To everyone else his hobbies were just like everyone else’s: fibre, cold-plunges and a five-year life plan.
Today, to escape Derek and having to spend his lunch moving his 300 remote workers and their timesheets around in Excel, Dave had decided to go home slightly earlier to feed Tom Hanks. He mainly ate worms, but not just any worms: silkworms, calcium worms, earthworms, buffalo worms, morios, butter worms, mealworms, wax worms, bamboo worms and pachnoda grubs.
Worm. Wormier. Wormery.
He walked into his pretty average apartment with a pretty average living room and, with an above-average skip in his step and a broad smile, declared:
‘Oh Tom. Where might you be? Have you escaped? Have you gone missing? Or are you just blending in... Oh you are so cheeky!’
‘Wait — I can’t see you at all... oh, oh, oh — fuck, where are you?’
He pressed his nose against the glass. There was just the perfect manicured alien landscape, devoid of life. His stomach turned inside out as he threw his bag off his shoulder and peered around the glass case.
This was not the chameleon’s skin cells — the iridophores — in overdrive, rendering Tom Hanks totally invisible. No. He was gone.
‘Dave.’
Dave looked around. There must be someone else in his room. Someone had broken in. Someone was committing a crime. They must have stolen Tom Hanks as part of a vast exotic animal trafficking operation. He was next. He was going to be shipped to Florida to be kept in a private zoo. He was going to be a sordid exhibit for horny old ladies to ogle at.
‘Dave. It’s Tom Hanks.’
From across the room came a voice — not from the sofa itself but inside his head. But at the same time the voice came from his chameleon, who was sitting on the sofa looking like this was a very casual and normal way for a chameleon to relax, but also looking like a chameleon who had been placed on the sofa and didn’t know what a sofa was.
This must be stress. I haven’t drunk gin in two days. I must be stressed. I must be drunk. I must be hungry. I must be lonely. I must not have had enough fibre today. Oh god. Dave hugged himself.
‘Dave. Despite my form, it’s not actually Tom Hanks — but I think, to make things easier for you, if you called me Tom Hanks that would help. Whatever a Tom Hanks is.’
‘You see I am God. More precisely I am the God of Earth and I need your help.’
Dave looked around. This must be that YouTuber doing a prank. They broke in and I’m being filmed in 4K. I’m being live-streamed on TikTok. This must be a prank. I’m going to be on YouTube, and I’m going to get ten million views and then maybe I can be an influencer and get a swish car and a nicer house. This is actually great. I’m positive this will end well.
‘DAVE. I CAN HEAR YOUR THOUGHTS. STOP. NO YOUTUBE. JUST THIS TUBE.’
Dave looked at Tom Hanks. In his tiny webbed foot he was holding a gossamer-thin piece of string which extended up to the ceiling, and possibly through the ceiling and beyond.
‘Dave. I need your help. I picked you because you have BOSS BITCH ENERGY. I don’t know what BOSS BITCH ENERGY is, or if it’s a joke...’
‘It is a joke,’ Dave muttered.
‘...but I need the Boss of Earth right now to help me. You see, I had a report to hand in about what’s been going on while I’ve been asleep - it’s incredibly critical for you to climb into this tube and come with me back to the office.’
‘My chameleon is God,’ Dave said, hoping someone could hear him.
‘Technically no, but also yes. If I say yes, will you believe me?’
‘Fine. Do a miracle then.’ Dave stared at Tom Hanks. His big weird eyes rotated around the room. Dave thought if he could do the same, maybe he’d know what was going on. He imagined his eyes absolutely gigantic, on the side of his head, rotating around and around...
‘LISTEN. I am a speaking chameleon. Isn’t this enough? I can also make you fit in this tiny tube. We can fit in the tiny tube and then we can get going. I’ll explain everything on the way.’
Dave sat next to Tom Hanks on the sofa and looked him deep in the eye. Dave looked resigned to the situation.
‘Fine. But explain this tube to me before we do any further.’
‘Oh,’ said Tom Hanks with a glimmer of pride in his voice, ‘actually I’m glad you asked. You see, no one has asked me about the tube in the last 4 billion years. I’m pretty proud of this tube.’
‘Because?’ Dave peered a little closer at Tom Hanks’s webbed foot and the semi-transparent thread in its grip.
‘Because I used it to bring my first life to my office. Plankton, I called it. I wasn’t supposed to — you’re never really meant to bring anything to work — but I was just so proud of these little single-celled guys wobbling around, propelling themselves with gay abandon in the primordial soup.’
‘The office? Wait — you work in an office?’ Dave’s brain ached. ‘I work in an office.’
‘Snap. So I made this tube and I sucked up one plankton and kept it in a little mug on my shelf. I wanted to show everyone, but before I could, the God of Alpha Centauri 2323255123 popped into my office to tell me that his life forms had just solved interplanetary space and time travel as well as the creation of silent but also odourless flatulence, and wasn’t that so cool.’
Tom Hanks seemed sad — which is a surprising emotion for a lizard. Lizards generally always look sad, so you assume that’s the neutral emotional gear for all cold-blooded creatures. When they actually seem upset, the look on their faces leaves you devastated.
‘I mean, I had two billion years of just warmish rocks. His planet sprouted life after about five minutes and then invented faster-than-light travel by the weekend. What was I meant to do? I waited and waited, and one day I threw a lightning bolt in frustration down into a pond of goop and — poof! Plankton was born.’
‘And you sucked it up and brought it to work?’
‘Yes, and everyone ignored me at lunch and just wanted to peer down at Alpha Centauri 2323255123 to see his little twerps self-actualising as a hive mind. Boring, I say. Boring.’
Dave started to laugh. At least this was interesting. It was either some kind of stroke or he was actually sitting in the presence of God. Always say yes to new opportunities, his podcast hosts would say. Seize the day. Manifest your dreams. Believe in yourself and whatever comes your way. Take the leap...
‘Well, let’s make today less boring — let’s go up this tiny tube, God. I’m ready. I have absolutely no idea how I’m going to fit, but I’m sure it won’t be painful...’
Tom Hanks smiled.
Dave’s existence shrank to the width of a single plankton.