Every morning: the Ritual of the Pills. A bowl of high-fiber cereal with skim milk and a tall glass of water to go with it. Wait thirty minutes. Take pills. Go on with life. It’s a ritual I never fail to go through. I’m a more devout pill-taker than I ever was a Catholic.

There are four pills in my morning cocktail. One keeps my heart from spasming out of control. Another keeps my kidneys open so that I flush toxins effectively—and piss no less than fifteen times a day. The third helps prop up my half-dead liver and keeps the toxins from seeping into my brain. And the last one is the greatest insult: a multivitamin to keep me strong and healthy.

Every day I wake up at seven. I have two alarm clocks, and one of them is across the room, plugged into a pair of extra-loud stereo speakers. I wake up at seven without fail. If I don’t wake up at seven, the Ritual will be interrupted, and the gods of cardiac arrhythmia, of kidney failure, of liver failure, of rickets may well smite me. Mine is a Greek- or African-style church: a church of a great many small gods. The god of fiber keeps the pills from eating holes in my stomach or boxing my fragile kidneys. The god of water makes sure my blood stays relatively nontoxic.

I don’t resent these gods; after all, they are my salvation. Except, that is, for the dark god Tafataol, the Satan to my new god Procainimide. I do resent Tafatol, for it was his evil wrath, and of course the infinitely more evil wrath of Long QT that necessitated my salvation in the first place.

“Your fainting spells make me a little suspicious,” the doctor said, “I’d like to run some tests.” The dreaded incantation that conjured my problem into existence.

“According to the result of the tilt-table EKG,” the doctor told me, “you have a prolonged QT interval. This may be causing ventricular arrhythmias, which are probably the reason for your faints.” That was a nice way of telling me that I was going into cardiac arrest for seconds at a time every few weeks.

“We don’t consider an implantable defibrillator a wise option,” the doctor informed me, “Because of that congenital defect in your ribcage. We’d like to try a course of medication instead.” And just like that—like a missionary doctor who gains the respect of some African tribe by doling out quinine and curing their malaria—the good doctor converted me. Now, I am a devoted follower of Pillism, and I forever will be. Those who fail to observe the Ritual will be smitten by the wrathful gods, and the punishment is always death.

Burt moves. A lot. From the constant tremors in his palsied legs to the jerky contractures of his arms that start up whenever he gets upset, his body is in constant motion. The cerebral palsy imprisoned him in a wheelchair, and the Tourette’s confined him to his parents’ living room, where he sits every sleepless night, his skeletal face illuminated by the harsh glow of the television, his hooded eyes blinking slowly, closing every few minutes before a palsy tremor races up his spine and shakes his whole body like a one-man earthquake, rousing him.

His doctor tells him that his insomnia makes the Tourette’s worse. Involuntarily, he clears his throat, mutters something, and his arms jerk briefly forward. Then he sits back, looks up at the doctor with red-rimmed, dark-shadowed eyes, and gives a thin-lipped smile that manages to look exactly like a frown. He explains to Dr. Gorman that he can’t sleep because of the palsy tremors, and that the muscle relaxant still isn’t working. Dr. Gorman adjusts his dose and sends him on his way.

And Burt sits for three or four hours every night, propped up in his chair, legs trembling, arms jerking intermittently, laughing hollowly at David Letterman’s jokes before finally passing out sometime around the beginning of Andy Griffith. And when his father’s swollen prostate sends him on one of his many late-night trips to the bathroom, he stops habitually in the doorway of the living room, sighs, carries his stick figure of a son to his bed, and stands in front of the toilet, cursing God and waiting for his evil prostate to relent and give him relief.

In the morning, Burt wakes up as usual, clumsily pushes his covers off—sometimes getting interrupted by a Tourette’s twitch or a palsy-quake—and laboriously drags his atrophied legs across the bed before dropping them into the stirrups of his wheelchair.

Once upon a time, Burt had been able to walk. It had been, as Burt had termed it, very much a “palsy walk,” but with leg braces and, on bad days, a cane, he had been able to walk several miles at a time. Then, one August, the sticky heat had made him woozy, and after a brief rest against the wall of a cemetery, he had turned to go on, and his legs had refused. At first, he thought the joints of the braces might have seized, but then a spasm had run through them, so violent it made Burt think of a violin string, over-tightened until it finally snapped and flailed crazily. For several seconds, he had danced with wide eyes before falling painfully to his knees and toppling face-first onto the sidewalk.

Now, Burt cannot even stand, and his nose is twisted, and pebbly as the skin of a basketball. The neurologist told him that the part of the brain already damaged by the cerebral palsy might have suffered a minor stroke from the intense heat. Another neurologist told him that he had been misdiagnosed, that he did not in fact have cerebral palsy, but a rare form of muscular dystrophy confined to the legs. Those were the only two neurologists Burt had paid attention to. After them, he had given up. He lost his job, moved back with his parents after only two years on his own, and started living off their food stamps and his own disability checks. He knows that the shame and the stress are what makes his Tourette’s so much worse than it used to be, but he can’t help but feel that way.

Burt wheels himself into the kitchen, and then through it into the living room. He should eat something, but he just can’t stand the thought of another bowl of generic shredded wheat, or worse, his mother’s All Bran. Burt gets diarrhea whenever he eats All Bran, and the gymnastics it takes to get onto the toilet are just too humiliating to contemplate.

He wheels his tiny legs up under the table and rests his bony hands on the varnished pine. They clench into involuntary fists for a moment, and he clears his throat even though he doesn’t want to. It’s Saturday, and his mother’s big Friday dinner is already behind him, and church an eternal twelve hours away. There is nothing to do today but watch television. His mind, he knows, is growing atrophied like his legs.

There is a pencil sharpener on the table, a little blue plastic one, the kind with a blade screwed into it at an angle. His father has a set of jeweler’s screwdrivers, and Burt knows where they are. It would be easy to roll into his father’s office, open the middle drawer, get the screwdrivers, go back to the kitchen, unscrew the blade, and run it across his skinny wrist. Maybe the Bible is wrong, and in those few minutes before he bleeds to death, he can get God to forgive him and let him into heaven in spite of everything.

Burt turns toward the kitchen. His arms jerk. He clears his throat. His legs vibrate for a moment. Then he turns back, and switches on the television.

“I want to show you something,” Nala said as soon as I was through the door. With predictable excitement, I followed her into the bedroom and licked my lips as she undid the zipper on her rubberized safety suit. I started to get confused when she stopped halfway down her back. I blinked, trying to re-direct some blood to my brain.

“What are you showing me?” She gently tugged the back of the suit open, the way Superman always pulls his shirt open to reveal that big “S.” I still didn’t see anything. I told her as much.

“Look closer,” she said. I paused for a moment, and walked stiffly up to her, suddenly aware of the absence of something. I brought my face as close as I dared to her back, and for a second, I still didn’t see anything. Then, I realized what was missing. She didn’t smell like anything. Usually, Nala and all the rest of her species smelled like sweet, semirotten fruit from a distance, and like acrid ammonia closer up, although it’s not considered wise to get that close too often. But Nala didn’t smell like anything, even from a handbreadth away. Then, I finally saw what she was pointing out: a long, inflamed scar running from the base of her neck to just below her shoulder blades. The angry orange of the scar slashed down the brilliant yellow of her back, bisecting one of her iridescent ring markings, the one that I always thought looked a little like Antarctica. It took me a few more moments to process what I was seeing.

“You didn’t!” I gasped, standing up and stepping back a few paces. She zipped her suit back up and turned to smile at me. Those fangs that had once terrified me so much were harmless now, just interesting dental decorations. And I could touch that brilliant, flamboyant skin without getting sick. I could touch her. It’s impossible to understand how truly important touching your partner is, until you find you can’t do it without poisoning yourself. “So I guess the chess tournament was just a cover?” Her smile widened. I wanted to smile, too. I wanted to laugh giddily. I didn’t.

“I thought it’d be a nice surprise. Happy birthday.” It’s not every woman, human or otherwise, who’ll have major surgery as her boyfriend’s birthday present. It was still engraved on my brain: that scar where her venom gland used to be, and the total absence of odor. No more venom meant no more monthly trips to the doctor to check for liver failure or kidney failure or any of the dozen other symptoms of toxicity. No more constant paranoia. No more safety suit!

“Jesus!” was all I could say. Nala got up and crossed the room to the closet I’d set aside for her, and that’s she’d failed to clutter up like my previous girlfriends. She pulled the door open, and there it was, sticking out like a sore thumb amongst the drab pastels of her safety suits: a real dress. “Jesus!” I said again. Then, I watched silently. Nala stripped down and squirmed into the dress. It was a flower-print thing, a sort of feminine counterpart to the Hawaiian shirt, but a hell of a lot sexier. Now that she wasn’t wrapped in a thick layer of neoprene, I could appreciate her curves, the pretty yellow skin, the modern-art ring-markings on the tops of her breats (there’s one in there somewhere that looks just like the letter Q).

“You got your gland excised for me?” I stammered. She smiled at me and walked over. Finally, I wasn’t separated from her by the suit. Finally, I could feel her warmth as she took me in her arms. We were about to have our very first anxiety-free kiss. Her lips stopped short. She fixed me in a meaningful gaze, and grinned. “Just for you.”

“It’s an awesome gesture. You’re the most generous thing that ever was.”

“Well, perhaps not,” she said, “My birthday’s coming up, and I have an idea for a present.”

“What?” She stroked the top of my arm and yanked out one of the hairs.

Commonly-known fact: Nala’s species is toxic to humans. Uncommonly-known fact: they’re allergic to us. As I lay naked on the bed with Nala applying hot wax to every square millimeter of my dander-causing hair, I began to wonder if it was worth it.

Little Tyler looked around nervously, his eyes as dull and empty as always. Tim dragged him into the reception area by the hand, a scowl engraved on his face. He marched up to the reception desk, hoisted Tyler by the armpits, and sat him down in front of the receptionist.

“I want a refund,” said Tim. The receptionist’s eyes flashed red, and she continued staring into the middle distance. After a few minutes, her eyes turned green and she looked up at him, a well-practiced frown on her face.

“A refund, sir?”

“Yeah. My son’s a dimwit.”

“I beg your pardon?” Tim unlovingly shoved Tyler across the desk. Tyler looked up, confused, looking like he was going to start crying.

“He just stares off into space during his reading lesson, and when I went to get him his first neuro-implant, the doctor wouldn’t do it because he said he had an ‘abnormal brain.’” Tim started to raise his voice. “What the hell does that mean? I paid for a gifted child, and a gifted child’s what I’ve come here to get!” Tyler was crying now, his mouth a big toothless cavern. Tim ignored him.

“What is your child’s name?” asked the receptionist.

“Tyler Bernard Horton Conway.” The receptionist’s eyes went red again as her mind floated off into the main database. They were green again a moment later.

“Sir, I read here that, although you did order a gifted child, the warranty you purchased guarantees only normal-level brain function. Now, if he had somehow become mentally retarded, the warranty would cover you, but in this case, there’s nothing I can do.” Tim’s face went red and he pounded his fists on the desk.

“Look here!” he bellowed, and then turned to Tyler. “Stop crying, young man!” Tyler stopped immediately. He’d had enough harsh spankings to understand that his father meant business. “Tyler, what’s the capital of Argentina?” Tyler’s tear-streaked eyes looked up at his father, then flicked over to the receptionist. She stared at him blankly; she wasn’t in the business of getting friendly with products.

“Bwenos Awes,” said Tyler, sniffling. Tim’s face creased in disgust.

“You see how long that took him? The boy’s a moron! I want to talk to your superiors.” The receptionist barely suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. Those eyes went red for a moment as she contacted them, and a moment later, a hologram of a sharply-dressed man appeared behind the desk.

“My name is Herman Coll. I’m head of the public relations department. How may I help you?” asked the hologram.

“Yes! My son is an idiot, and I specifically requested a child of above-average intelligence.” The hologram turned red, then blinked green.

“Sir, as Mrs. Richardson has already informed you, you purchased a warranty that guarantees only normal intelligence. If you wish to dispute that warranty, I can direct you to the correct people, but I should warn you: GeneTopia’s lawyers are well-engineered, and they have never lost a case.” Tim scowled at the hologram. Then he scowled down at his son, who was busy sucking his thumb. He turned to the hologram.

“Can I trade him in?” The hologram smiled.

“Certainly, sir. That’s GeneTopia policy: trade-ins always welcome.”

“Fine. Then take him back. I want a son who can think.” A representative in a black jumpsuit appeared from around the corner and led little Tyler away. Tyler cried and cried, screaming “Bwenos Aweeeees!” until he disappeared down the hallway.