Chapter 33: Joel X Homer

Joel didn't have very many memories of what his family was like before the breakup. But one anecdote in particular continued to resonate with him all this time later. Once there was a stray tomcat lurking around outdoors, yowling on a nightly basis. This tomcat appeared obsessed with the family cat, who was female, and spayed. One day, Joel came home from school to discover the tomcat raping the family cat, having somehow managed to get inside the house.

Joel was still too young at the time to have any concept of what sex was or why it existed. What struck him about the tomcat's actions was that they didn't seem to be borne out of cruelty or anger, even though by any visual definition, he was violently assaulting the family cat. He seemed just as miserable throughout the whole ordeal as she did. Biologically, as Joel came to learn, studying the subject in the weeks ahead, male cats were normally only ever attracted to female cats in heat. Joel suspected that the tomcat had gone so long without sex, it had become physically painful for him.

Joel learned many things throughout this incident. This was the first time he truly understood the limitations of the Internet, as searches on the subject either wouldn't function at all or would get him to places he didn't much care to see. The otherwise abandoned school library quickly became Joel's main source of extracurricular information. This became a source of pride as people could tell that Joel was learning, though they had no idea what subjects he was learning about.

But more directly, before feeling any physical sex drive himself, Joel understood the act in purely mechanical terms. He learned that humans were supposedly unique, in that they could breed at any time they chose. Joel found books that argued that this freedom to reproduce at any time was what made humans special. Joel found this argument persuasive, but not for the stated reason of human' having greater sexuality. To the contrary. As Joel compared these biological facts with early human history, he observed that a lack of a predetermined regular sex drive granted humans the power to plan their reproduction- an excellent fit for the extraordinary intelligence of humans, their main other biological advantage. A poor cat would have no choice but to engage in sexual reproduction even in times of famine, when there might not be enough food to care for kittens and the desperate mother might have no choice but to devour their own. Humans, however, could abstain according to material conditions.

All of this research had a haunting effect of Joel's psyche. The tomcat was captured, castrated, and then became a family cat in his own right. The house cat who he had raped was not bothered by his presence. Indeed, she seemed so upbeat when he was around that her own happiness was the main reason he was accepted into the household, and not banished to the outdoors. The former tomcat, too, seemed considerably more mellow and happy than he was when he was supposedly free to live on his own terms.

This was contrasted to the increased fighting of Joel's parents at the time. Joel came to learn that the main cause of these arguments, whatever the surface excuse, was always sex. Joel's father wanted more of it, while his mother had lost all interest in it. The strange part was, that much like the tomcat, Joel's father didn't exactly seem interested in the act for pleasurable purposes. He just felt like sex was owed to him, as if it would fix some sort of gaping hole in his psyche. Whether that hole was caused by the relationship with his wife or some other life problems, Joel still wasn't sure. Maybe it had been both.

Joel often wondered during these dark times whether his parents, like the cats, would have been happier if they had been castrated. And as Joel became an adult himself, he would ask that same question regarding his own life. His experiments with masturbation had a fatalist edge. Joel just wanted the process to be over with as soon as possible, because he saw it purely in terms of stress relief. Concepts like lube baffled him. Why would he want to do it any longer than was absolutely necessary?

Such an attitude did not do wonders for Joel's endurance. This was perhaps why he had the habit of engaging the act with women like Huma, who derived enjoyment from factors beyond the mere act of penetration. Joel always felt dirty after such encounters, not out of any sense of shame, but because the experience reminded him of how much of a slave he was to biological will. Joel had taken to smoking after sex, and only after sex, because he found the toxification of his own body after the fact to be a comforting means of reasserting control. Joel's body could destroy him pointlessly- yet so too could Joel destroy his body. This was a recent habit that coincided with his joining the Rainbow Shirts, as Iowa had long since banned the sale of cigarettes.

This habit was also generally confined to the morning after. Joel had woken up to find that Huma wasn't there. No doubt she was in a hurry to put together her video, even in these crude environs. When he heard knocking at the door Joel had assumed Huma had come back to the room because she had forgotten something. Normally Joel would have been more guarded than that, and simply pretended like he had already left. But that was just another reason for him to mistrust sex- it had a habit of causing a dangerous decrease to his paranoia.

"Why are you here?" asked Homer Ikari in a menacing tone, quickly cornering Joel in his own hotel room. Joel was, to his great embarrassment, only wearing pajamas.

"I have no idea what you mean," said Joel, avoiding Homer's gaze.

"I gave specific instructions for you to wait until I got here," growled Homer. "Jerry Shankar is dangerous and flighty. Do you have any idea how long it took me to figure out his alias?"

"Well it's not like there was any reason to hurry," said Joel. "It's not like he was going anywhere."

"Of course now we'll never know," said Homer. "Right when I was ready to hire him, his website goes dark! And then I find out that you've mysteriously chosen this exact moment to take a vacation!"

"How did you find me?"

"There's a bug on your car."

"That seems uncalled for," said Joel.

"Literally everyone in the Rainbow Shirts has one," said Homer. "It's for our own safety. This was all in your contract. I'm pretty sure you're tracked people with them too."

"I must have forgot."

Homer threw his hands up in the air and sighed. For the first time he took a close look around the room. Slowly a look of mounting disgust spread across his face.

"Did Huma drag you here?"

"Ah," said Joel, laughing nervously. "Is it that obvious? Would it help if you talked to her?"

"No," said Homer, "no it wouldn't. I don't know why I bother confronting either of you. It's not like you have any shame. It's my fault for stupidly telling you what was going on."

"You had to tell me something," said Joel, creeping up closer to Homer from behind. "We were all set to attack Oregon."

"No we were not," said Homer. "You know as well as I do that-"

Mid-sentence Joel grabbed Homer and locked him into a big hug. Homer struggled, flustered, but the larger man didn't want to exert force enough that he would risk hurting Joel.

"I'm sorry," said Joel.

"I don't believe you," said Homer. "This affectionate cat stuff might work on Barack and Huma but it doesn't work on me. Now knock it off."

Joel slowly backed away from Homer, having determined, to his own relief and appreciation, that Homer had arrived unarmed. If Homer had been so aggrieved as to be violent, that would be trouble. But absent such a dangerous countenance, the plans would most likely proceed as expected.

"Don't tell Huma I was here," said Homer as he marched out the door.

"Understood sir," said Joel, giving a mock salute as he slumped back down to the bed. He started looking around for the remote, wondering if there was anything interesting on TV. At least it wouldn't take him long to look. There weren't as many channels on Iowa TV compared to the Internet-powered stuff back East.