Don't Clean the Aquarium!

by Osier, Jeffrey

  "You! Boy! What do you see all around you? Food! Remember this! Your mind is the prisoner of your flesh, and of the flesh of whatever will one day eat you as well as everything you have ever eaten. Food, boy! Next time you think of your mother, ask yourself what is eating her in her wet, soily pit and what it's chosen to do with all those thoughts of hers."

  And then the sinewy face exploded with laughter.

  "Now! Go home and eat your dinner!"

  I looked away, back to where the Big Ol' Clown Lady had been sitting, to where the pile of dismembered limbs—mine—had rested at her feet, but there was only another rusted, garbage-laced armature; twisted, headless, lifeless. I looked back up at the talking face, but it too was dead, lost beneath the swarm of feasting flies.

  I stumbled back down the hill, cowering beneath the screeching, wrinkled, milk-clouded canopy of a sky, averting my eyes from all that scattered, thinking meat, my mind whirling too fast to rest on a single thought. I worked my way along the path, trying to narrow my tear-clouded vision down to the piece of path where my foot would land next, trying to drown out all that buzzing and screeching with the sounds of my weeping. Occasionally something big would swoop near me and I'd feel the brush of its wings and think of my mother and the bird she had turned into in my dream.

  Soon I heard a rumble, a drone. Cars, moving down Route 31. I looked around me. I held up my arms and examined them. I was whole and alive and it was getting dark.

  I moved quickly along the road after that, knowing I was in trouble, knowing that I had no excuse, no explanation, for my absence. But as I hurried, I began to realize that, of course, there was no need to worry. My experience… down there, had been a dream, this hurrying, the realization itself… it was all a dream. And as I drew closer to home, to the light in Mrs. Carver's living room, I began to comprehend the vastness of the dream, realizing that all of this, extending—of course!—back to my mother's death, was a dream, from which my mother herself would awaken me.

  But once inside Mrs. Carver's house, examining the stress and anger on the faces of Mrs. Carver, Aunt Paulina, and my father, feeling the depth and the resilience of the illusion surrounding me, I began to fear that the dream wasn’t going to let go of me at all.

  Which, of course, it did not. By the time I began to accept the idea that my mother was truly dead and buried and that her death was not just a dream, I had nearly forgotten the events that had triggered the conviction in the first place. I saw the Big Ol' Clown Lady again, frequently for a time, but less and less as she grew older and less able to move around town. I always felt extreme physical discomfort upon seeing her, but I suspect now that through most of that time I did not understand why.

  Nor could I understand, lying there with my empty Scotch bottle, in my buzzing motel room, why the mention of her name should, twenty years later, bring this strange memory gushing before my mind's eye. But gush it did, as I sprawled there in the dark, the room spinning in one direction, my body spinning in the other, while the darkness filled with visions of that secret realm the Big Ol' Clown Lady had once shared with me.

  The next morning, hung over, depressed, lonely for my sweet wife whom I should never have left back at home, I checked out of my room and shambled to my car. I took a drive through town, past my old house and through subdivisions that used to be the farms and fields that had once separated us from the outside world. Somehow, I ended up on Route 31, moving ever farther from the expressway ramp that would lead me home. I had to see… had to know that even there, the relentless march of development had left its paved, uniform traces.

  But there it was, an outrageous incongruity, more overgrown with weeds than ever, as though it was trying to disguise itself as part of the forest preserve that it had once framed. I pulled the car over, got out and just stood there, searching for the path.

  I found it, and farther along found what I was sure was the rock we used to hide behind. How small we must have been for three of us to hide comfortably behind it. And then I went beyond the rock, where the weeds and trees seemed to blend into a pained, twisted landscape of crippled limbs and razor-toothed leaves. Had a botanist ever wandered through this horrifying latticework? Hadn't anyone ever noticed that here, along this stretch of land, grew plants that surely grew nowhere else in the world?

  I scraped my jacket against a sharp tooth of rusted metal. It was one of the armatures, a bare metal statue, nearly swallowed within the trunk of the black, twisting tree. I looked around me. They were everywhere, mirroring both the shapes of men and the plant life around them. But they were small, and it was clear that they resembled humans far less than they did the trees. Would I have even made this comparison had I not felt… known… of their secret nature?

  The path led me directly to an open, desolate patch of ground, where I came upon an almost flattened sheet of rust, all that was left of the tanker, aside from the tiny scattered specks of rust, ground into the gray earth.

  I wandered back along the path, the whole experience and the memory that triggered it now overwhelmed by my hangover. I stopped and vomited up my entire breakfast. When I finished, I had a throbbing headache. I looked around. I was on the wrong path. No matter, I supposed, I could still see Route 31 through the branches.

  A bit farther on, I came across a bulldozer, tilted onto its side. Weeds spread over it and a gnarled tree sprouted up through the cab. Rust spread across the surface, radiating like millions of capillaries, so that where the capillaries had not thickened into solid patches, it appeared almost like a delicate, bloodshot membrane.

  Within the darkness of that cab from, I thought I heard a sound. I approached and peered down through the broken glass, trying to identify that sound—when something flew out, striking my cheek. The sound continued, louder even as I moved further and more quickly away from that abandoned bulldozer.

  I stumbled and fell atop a cracked slab of concrete. I stood, brushed myself off and took a good hard look around me. There were more of these slabs here, and another overturned bulldozer, its surface rusting away in complex, intertwining strands.

  So they had tried. Perhaps more than once. What could possibly have happened here to stop them?

  Her voice hit me like a wave, scraping through the rubble and concrete, hissing through the vegetation. Laughing at me…

  I ran. I refused to look behind me, refused to look up at the sky that had been casting a gray pallor all morning but which now seemed to be turning the world into a sienna haze. I refused to acknowledge the swarms of insects that were erupting at my feet, slashing against me as they rose, their buzzing harmonizing with the laughter that chased me.

  I could see Route 31 up ahead, but was I getting any closer? For a time, as the laughter got louder and the eruption of bugs grew thicker, the highway actually seemed to be receding. But then, just as I had on an afternoon twenty years before, I burst through the membrane and rose up onto the flat surface of the old highway. I leaned against the car and retched up… something. Had I been swallowing those bugs?

  As I got in my car I noticed a sign that I had not seen before. It informed interested parties that this land was for sale. It had probably once provided the phone number to call, but the sign was being swallowed by monstrous weeds hugged at it from every side, threatening to pull it down into the depths of the Big Ol' Clown Lady's blight.

  I turned the car around and drove down Route 31 towards the expressway. All around me were new subdivisions and shopping facilities and beautifully landscaped corporate headquarters. I kept telling myself, "See? See how tenacious we are? We build and overrun and wipe out and overcome…"

  But Route 31 was an old road, potholed, whole slabs of it crackling away, and small black twisted things grew inconspicuously along the edges…

  Someday, of course, that blight would be bulldozed away, muscled out of existence and replaced by a mall, a country club, a housing development. Wouldn't it? How could it not be? How could it continue to grow thicker and darker and m
ore out of place, when civilization was edging up against it, hungry for the land?

  I tried to tell myself it would as I raced down the expressway, looking in the rearview mirror constantly to assure myself that nothing was following me.

  But something was wrong with the hood of my car, my six-month-old Buick Regal. The front end was decaying, and that decay was reaching out towards me, across the hood, like millions of tiny capillaries.

  They didn't look much different from the trails of blood I saw whenever I looked at myself in the rearview mirror, blood that trickled and smeared and puddled across the meat of my horrified face.

  THE HIVE

  There were more than a dozen of us. When the midday sun filled the Hive with amber light, we were an army, running and howling over the flagstone floor of the courtyard, beyond the grip of our parents and immune to the retreating shadows.

  But at night those same shadows would advance and we would retreat, hugging the pant legs of our mothers or fathers or whomever of our elders we could trust in the darkness. We became dependent on the protection of these loving giants who ignored the hunger that lived in the shadows, who triumphed in the apparent silliness of our terror. We were children, after all.

  And if every once in a while one of us came screaming to our mothers with blood-soaked splinters in our skin, it was because somehow—in ways they did not bother to construe and we were too small to comprehend—we had been bad.

  It is the earliest family vacation I can remember. I was four years old, an only child, and my mother had told me I would be spending my days playing with other children—my cousins. I would meet my grandparents as well as aunts and uncles who’d heard all about me and were dying to meet me. I would play on the same stones and under that same tree as my mother had so many summers of her own childhood. And if my mother seemed to twitch a little as she told me these things, how could I suspect it was because she was afraid: for me, for herself, of her own memories. And if my parents fought almost the entire drive, then it was only because my father didn’t really care whether I had fun with my cousins or not.

  That drive took an entire day, and by the time we arrived at the Hive, it was dark and I had already been asleep for hours. As my father carried me in his arms, I awoke to see more stars in the sky than I had ever seen in my life. The night was so loud with the calls of bugs and birds and dogs, it was hard to imagine those cries were coming from the surrounding forest—which after all was no more than a distant, uniform blackness. Maybe all those animals were calling down to us from the stars. The universe was immense, and yet—in my grogginess and in the warm protective grip of my father—so intimate. I imagined all those creatures perched on stars, babbling away, talking about me: Look, there he is now. Do you think he can hear us?

  Compared to that display, the shapeless black mound we were approaching was too insignificant to warrant my attention. I rubbed the top of my head against my father’s neck and laughed a sleepy, satisfied laugh.

  And then we were inside. Here the darkness was deep and intrusive, and the light searing and unkind. I shut my eyes, but I continued to listen: to the whispers, to the shouts, to the clatter of shoes on wood and stone, to the hum of electric lights, to the creaks and groans of the Hive itself.

  As I pretended to sleep, I felt myself poked, heard the cooing of adults swarming around me. I was afraid my father would let go of me, relinquish me to one of those hissing, ogling strangers. I was not too young to sense that their attentions towards me were somehow proprietary. I shut my eyes tighter, clutched my father more ferociously.

  In response, they all laughed.

  I had never been around so many children. There were babies and wobbly toddlers, but they were kept out of our reach and didn’t interest us anyway. Because of those babies, and because our parents were so preoccupied with each other and with all the old people who lived in the Hive, my cousins really did run wild and unattended. I was the youngest allowed to run with the other children, and so I occupied a position of some distinction: though bullied by some, I was under the protection of most. I was the easiest to carry and to lift into the lowest tree branches, and I could fit into the narrowest, most inaccessible passageways.

  Seen from inside, the Hive seemed enormous to me, a self-contained world. How could a house be so gigantic? And yet, it wasn’t really a house at all, but rather a nearly circular fortress with a spacious courtyard at its center. Nested within its great outer wall and extending along three-quarters of its circumference was a double row of tiny, unconnected one-and-two-room houses. Running between the rows of houses was a real street, a patchwork of wood planks and flagstones. This covered avenue could be accessed from two entrances, one at each end of its extremes. One was wide and bright and inviting. Just inside this entrance were the houses in which my parents and I and all of my cousins were staying. The other entrance was dark and rank with the smell of decay.

  Along most of its length this avenue was wired with light. But as one moved deeper, the light dimmed until the houses were lost in darkness. Here the windows and doors were broken or rotted away. We would march down the center of the avenue, holding hands, leaning into each other, toying with our fear as we neared the avenue’s darkest stretches. We teased the darkness. Smelled the rot.

  And listened.

  For this is where we heard the voices, the groaning and grinding of the things that lived in the wood. The first time I went on one of these expeditions I cried the whole way down the avenue, not because of what I heard or saw or anticipated but simply because everyone else, even the oldest among us, was so afraid. I was too young not to know better. We were here because it scared us. We stepped up to and even into the darkness because something—I’m not sure if any us knew what—could happen to us if we ventured too far.

  I had the unshakable fear that whenever the lights above flickered, they were about to flicker out for good, plunging the avenue into darkness. I was sure that in the dark and the rot would spread like fire, back down the way we’d come.

  Out of the crooked window of our own little house we could see the center courtyard and the Great Tree. We heard the chatter of my aunts and uncles and cousins, who were staying in houses near our own.

  Farther down was the house of our grandparents, more rundown than ours, the lights dimmer and more untrustworthy. Deeper into darkness the houses were even more decayed, their occupants more ancient and forbidding. They would invite us inside, sometimes with their words nearly lost within death-rattle wheezes, or sometimes with whispered lullabies that made my skin crawl. And their hand motions were always so crude, so stiff and puppet-like, they confirmed something I had always suspected of the world but had never been able to verify until now: the reality of certain people or things was dependent on how wide my eyes were open when I looked at them, and whether I was sleepy or afraid or sick to my stomach.

  The centerpiece of our world was that great, all-encompassing tree. Not only did it seem to be the most gigantic living thing in all creation, but I was convinced that it was truly conscious of my presence, and of my almost constant need for reassurance. It was warm to the touch in the same way my parents were warm to the touch—a purposeful, protective radiation. Did I say it was the centerpiece of our world? No, that isn’t quite true. Because it bathed me in its radiance, I was sure, as I had never been and as I would never be again, that I was the centerpiece of the world. My parents had always treated me as though I were the single most significant part of their lives, but I was beginning to sense their occasional distraction, their irritation. The tree seemed to care for nothing but me, and recognized and magnified my importance.

  We loved to play beneath the tree, to bathe in the sunlight it filtered upon us, to climb those accommodating branches. We would search out its soft, moist places, where we would rest our palms, our cheeks, and listen for those intoxicating atmospheric disturbances that were beyond mere sound. And it was high in those branches that the world of our parents and all the
pains and failures that filled our fragile little lives faded out of existence. The tree was the world, its branches the continents, its leaves the oceans and we . . . its attendant angels.

  In spite of this, the tree was contained fully inside the Hive. The tree anchored itself to the inward-sloping walls, it pushed against the chaotic patchwork of amber-colored glass that made up the ceiling above it. But the tree’s thin, winding extremities were no match for the Hive that surrounded it. And because the tree was so clearly ours, and the Hive so clearly our parents’ and grandparents’, I could not look at those branches, twisted and flattened against the glass and wood above us, without feeling the anger of tested loyalty. If the tree was a prisoner of the Hive, then so were we.

  At night, when the tree grew cold and indifferent, I would turn to my parents. I’d wait for that moment when one or the other of them was free to cuddle and indulge me. At night, the three of us finally alone together in our tiny two-room house, I could feel the stress between them. My father wanted to leave, wanted to pack our bags and sneak away next morning before anyone awoke. He would argue with my mother, bringing it up again and again as though he couldn’t remember having spoken about it a few minutes previously. “Not just yet,” she would answer. And he would always want to know “Why?” She always had the same answer, repeated so often that sometimes I felt like answering his question myself. “Not until you talk to Grandfather,” she’d say. I realize now she didn’t mean our grandfather, but rather her own, a man I had yet to see, but of whose presence I was acutely aware.

  Listening to their nightly bickering, I always sided with my father, because I thought that in the nighttime the Hive was the most frightening place in the entire world. But the next day, running across the flagstone courtyard or playing in and around the tree, I could think of nothing more wonderful than to spend the rest of my life in the Hive. Night and day then: the intoxication of one was canceled out entirely by the dread of the other, a dread that could only be cured by the dawn of a new day.