And then she kissed me. Her lips and tongue were soft and moist at first, and then they seemed not to exist as separate entities at all. It was just the two of us, our faces connected by the desperate fusing of soft tissues between and within us. I would have to say, all pecks and slobbers and hickeys and drooling chewers aside, it was the first real kiss of my entire life. I could feel her exhale into my face, could hear her sigh and knew at once what that sigh meant as she scooted closer and put her arms around me.
And then we heard it. We pulled apart and looked around us at the glimmering island. The ground movement, which had seemed like mere extensions of that momentum between us, had stopped suddenly. Behind Colleen there was a swirling of light rising from the ground. I pulled her towards me and turned her around.
We both saw it stand. Neither of us screamed or tried to crawl away. We both froze, no longer two individuals with lives and priorities and problems or even identities. It seemed to suck all that away from us as it rose before the gigantic moon, so beautiful, so graceful, so much more than a collection of ribs and tendons and incomprehensible tangles.
Had I stood and tried to touch him, I'm not even sure if my hands would have rested upon any surface or whether they would have just drifted on through intertwining strands of liquid light. He seemed possessed of no definitive, contiguous form, but rather seemed like a series of similar but distinctive images cross-dissolving, one into the other, sometimes sharp and focused, and sometimes obscured by swirls of haze and white, snaking smoke. At one moment he almost appeared to be a man, but that illusion was lost in the next moment, when he seemed to resemble a glass Scorpion fish, a dimly perceived figure within a mass of sharp, threatening barbs. Forms seemed to grow and wrestle their way out of his core, each one overpowering the last only to be pushed away or swallowed or dissipated by the next. But this was surely the Trilobite Man, the thing I had spent the summer lovingly unearthing with my bare hands, around which we'd spent so many days and evenings, withdrawing deeper and deeper into the world that was now so clearly weaved by the Trilobite Man himself. It was a world in his own image: a reflector of broken, dancing light, ever changing, more hypnotic and all-encompassing as it drew power from . . . where? From the moon? From us?
Or was it only me?
The moment I admitted this possibility to myself, the Trilobite Man seemed to twist in space and suspend within its anatomic maelstrom the semblance of a face, a face that for just an instant struck a familiar, horrible chord within me. But there were thousands of faces there, and then none at all, as it twisted again and arched its body beneath the moon while two great appendages rose from its mass and grasped for the moon, or maybe for something greater and farther and more impossible to reach than our simple, tarnished moon.
And then I heard the shouts. I tried to tell myself that they were merely another variation on the animal sounds that filled the night around me. But they were familiar sounds, and they were getting louder by the moment. Colleen and I sat up.
They were running along the pathway, then stumbling down the slope towards the river's edge, breathing in desperate gasps. I saw dark shapes splashing across the shallow river. I pushed Colleen back under the drooping branches of the Great Weeper and then watched as Kevin and Ralph leaped up onto the island, their faces full of terror.
"What the hell are you guys so—"
And then I heard another shout.
"You can't hide from me you dirty little motherfuckers!!"
Amazing Grace. It couldn't be! I looked around. No glimmering canopy, no ocean stretching to the horizon. No Trilobite Man. And no moon.
He charged across the river, shouting like a man chasing the last barrier between himself and starvation, hungry, savage and completely crazy. He fell into the river, roared as he pushed himself up and then staggered, breathless, dripping and wild-eyed onto the island.
In his hand was a baseball bat. My baseball bat.
"You sons-a-bitches think you're pretty damned funny, doncha? Huh? Doncha? Funny and smart and too fast and just too fucking clever for me, huh?" The air filled with the stench of beer belches and body odor. I looked around me and saw, for what seemed like the first time I my life, the flood lights illuminating Cunningham Beach, the headlights over on Aurora Avenue that backlit the power lines that ran along that road.
We did not run. We just spread out, trying to keep a little distance from each other and the bat. This is how people die. How could I have forgotten this?
"That's my bat, sir," I blurted, feeling a little nauseous and giddy, "That's my bat and I want it back."
"You want it back, huh? Catch!"
He lunged forward. There was no mistaking his intent. I jumped out of his way and fell backwards over something that was just now rising from the ground.
The Trilobite Man was still the same flurry of glimmering lights and ghostly, transparent barbs in which solid flesh and bone seemed to dance a ferocious metamorphic dance. As an overall form he was vague and confusing, but there was no confusing what he did to Amazing Grace.
He skewered the fat man where he stood, driving a thick, pointed glass appendage into the man's crotch and up through his body until it emerged out of the broad (and broadening) forehead, where the tip seemed to soften, twisting around wormlike for a moment and then receding back into the head. By this time Amazing Grace's feet were off the ground, kicking in a desperate attempt to reach the dirt again. The night filled with his screams, the screams of a man very much alive.
He was screaming for us to help him.
I looked around. No more flood lights, streetlights, headlights, power lines, only a swollen moon low in the sky and a chorus of laughing insects applauding Amazing Grace's performance.
The bat flew out of his hand and caught Ralph in the temple. Ralph went down. Colleen darted out from the Great Weeper and kneeled at his side.
Something that I swear to you was not me convulsed inside of me at that moment and I reached down for the bat, the Louisville Slugger my dad had bought for my twelfth birthday.
The mighty arm or leg or tail or whatever it was, twisted this way and that, playing with the thrashing, screaming man skewered upon it. Amazing Grace looked into my face and I could see, in the bloody mess spreading out over it, the desperate pleading of a small child.
I wiped the desperation off his face with the baseball bat. I hit him hard enough to send any man flat on his back, but Amazing Grace had all kinds of support now and it was no problem for me to haul off and swing the bat a second time, as though his head were the juiciest slow-pitch in the history of softball. I did not miss. Once I followed through and turned back to him, there was very little left of Amazing Grace's head.
Somebody screamed. I guess it was probably Colleen.
I began beating Amazing Grace's huge body until the bat splintered in half. Somewhere along the line Kevin got a hold of the smaller half and we were both pounding away at the thing that only a moment ago had been a ferocious, drunken man whose only intent was to kill us. Now he was something less than a body. I remember the moment at which he plopped into the dirt but I don't think I understood what that meant at the time. I stabbed some part of him (it didn't really matter which part by this time) and began jumping up and down on him. I was screaming curses but I don't know if they were directed towards Amazing Grace or even if they were made up of words. I know only that I was not alone in this. Kevin was there, too, screaming and tearing away at the flesh, trying to obliterate all traces of that thing that, hard to believe, had once been a man.
It was exhaustion that stopped us. I don't know who went down first. All I know is that I was sitting up and looking at what seemed almost like a mirror image of myself. It was Kevin, sitting up and looking back at me. In between us, spread out through the rocks and dirt, was a bubbling, hissing mass of bone and flesh and viscera and—so it seemed—something more, something still alive, swimming noisily within it all.
I turned around and saw Colleen and Ralp
h. Her head was bowed and she was crying. She refused to look at us. Ralph, covered with blood that surely was not his own, just stared at us, not in horror or disbelief or even anger.
Nothing happened. I stood and all around me were those lights and automobile sounds and the smell of sewage. It had all drained away: the rage, the magic, as well as the Trilobite Man who had threaded it all together.
I looked at Kevin. "Why did you bring him here?"
"I didn't think he'd follow us. I didn't think he could find us here."
I shook my head and motioned around me. "Find us where?"
And then I walked away, splashed through the shallows and up the slope and down the path and through town and onto Ellsworth and up to my porch and through the front door and up into the bathroom, where I washed it all away. When I went back downstairs, I found that my sister Jeannine was the only one up. She asked me if I wanted to split a frozen pizza with her. I said sure. We sat there together and she kept me up until four in the morning, explaining life to me.
All four of us showed up at the beach the next day. Ralph and Colleen were back together, in a renewed and somewhat defiant display of affection. Everybody seemed to be in good spirits and we spent an hour and a half over by the high-dive, showing off and generally making idiots out of ourselves.
Not a single word was mentioned about Amazing Grace or the Trilobite Man or the island. All that afternoon, and on almost every afternoon from then until school started, I was sure one of them would quietly bring up the subject to me, but no one did. I could sit across from any of them and talk for hours and I couldn't see it shadow their faces for even a single instant. It was as though it had never happened.
The local paper wasted a lot of ink speculating about the disappearance of Amazing Grace. A police investigation was conducted somewhere along the line, but it never came close to us, not even to Marty Hiatt, who—had he ever considered it—would probably have had as much reason to kill Amazing Grace as anyone in the world.
Junior year was pretty good, got better as it went on, and I even managed to get over Colleen. I grew another two inches and my hair grew another six inches and I guess you could say I turned into a real asshole. A slightly smarter version of Todd Delaney, I'm afraid.
Late the next summer, I went out to the island again, all by myself. Near the shade of the weeping willow there was a shallow form protruding from the ground. It might have been a skeleton, but whether it would have been a man's or not I couldn’t say. It might have been Amazing Grace. It could have just as easily been the Trilobite Man. Maybe it was my imagination, or just a complicated tangle of tree roots riding along the ground level.
But there, alongside it, in stark contrast to the dry, clay-lightened dirt, was a small black form, no bigger than a quarter. I picked it up. My fossil trilobite. The creature's delicately etched impression had worn almost completely away. I rubbed it with my thumb and then dropped it into the enigmatic tangle at my feet.
When I stepped to the island's edge I looked up the slope and saw the barbwired top of the chain-link fence that enclosed Cunningham Beach, saw the power lines stretched above it, and heard the shouting of kids at the beach and the droning of hundreds of cars beyond it.
I turned back, retrieved the little black stone, and put it in my pocket.
HORIZON LINE
There was a moment—a single, irretrievable moment—when the numbness that passed for strength and the immobility that passed for resolve vanished, and he wanted to cry out to the young couple in the boat, beg them to take him back. They would have laughed, cursed him, but maybe they would have taken him back to the ship, where he would have been ridiculed and perhaps even arrested for breaching his contract, but . . . would have at least been taken away from this horrible place.
I will surely die here, he thought. But what had he expected? He'd envisioned the atoll as something delicate and beautiful, the plants and animals living on it and in the waters within and beyond its borders so exotic, so . . . precious. But the rock beneath him was hard and dangerously slick, and the living things so numerous and congested upon and between those rocks that he could not take a single step without crushing something. Fat, shapeless white worms splattered beneath his shoes.
His gear and provisions had all been stowed away in the "cottage"—really the tumbled ruins of what might once have been a lighthouse, overgrown by algae and the plants that rooted among the algae and whatever tiny creatures could nest and hunt within that clinging matrix. The smartest thing would be to go inside, try to straighten it up a little, unpack, lie on the bed and rest until this wave of panic and regret passed. But he was restless, and terrified of the prospect of living so alone on this ring for the next forty days.
So he decided to walk a lap around the atoll. He estimated the diameter to be a little less than a half a mile at its widest point, but he couldn't remember the formula for estimating its circumference. It didn't matter. The band of rock never seemed to widen to more than thirty or forty yards, and it was this distance that mattered most. He was pinned between two bodies of water and there was no place he could go, not even the cottage, to escape their pressure.
The atoll had no name. The Great Southern Ocean was full of such formations, and none of them had names—at least none that were publicly known—and most of the formations themselves were so small that they showed up on no maps that he had ever seen. Their very existence was not widely known; they were merely part of a phenomenon that revealed itself to those in need of it, through untraceable whispers and infiltrated dreams.
Crabs climbed the mosses from out of the ocean, but none ever ventured farther than a few feet from the edge of the rocks. The animals from the lagoon, more primeval and wholly unfamiliar to him, seemed more courageous. With their intricately segmented shells and their cumbersome arrays of legs and feelers, these arthropods—no two of them alike—were like holdovers from some shallow Paleozoic sea.
His footing was awkward and he kept falling, so that by halfway around the atoll he was exhausted and riddled with bruises, abrasions and spasms. But he didn't regret the walk. He needed pain. He needed exhaustion and exasperation.
He looked across the lagoon at the cottage, so small and overgrown that it was barely distinguishable from the plant-choked rocks surrounding it.
He'd made nearly one complete circuit when he saw the mist beginning to rise from the lagoon. It drifted over the water and out towards the ring. The air was warm that day but the mist, once it finally reached the shore and brushed against his cheek, was even warmer. Much warmer. And within those stretches of mist, tendrils of color that appeared almost solid—deep blues and crimsons, pulsed in and out of existence.
By the time he reached the cottage, the mist seemed to have merged into a single, nearly comprehensible form, an organism, an intelligence, diffuse only to maintain its omniscience.
He reached out, grabbed at a patch of mist and closed his fists on nothing at all. He then forced himself to go inside, unpack and organize his provisions for his . . . hermitage, for this self-inflicted punishment for which he had paid every cent he had, every possession he owned, and all traces of an identity that had ceased to exist the moment the boat pulled out of port at journey's beginning.
They were out on the rocks the following morning. Tall, slender, humanoid, and, except for the meager strands of blue and crimson suspended within them, virtually transparent. Dozens of them, rising from the lagoon, diving back into the lagoon, languishing at the edge of the stagnant ocean, their only purpose seemingly to catch and lovingly bend the sunlight as it passed through their bodies, leaving glistening arcs across their surfaces. They were like angels of molten glass, graceful as they stepped and slithered among the plants that lined the rocks, all beneath a sky of pure, unblemished blue. Even without eyes it was obvious that they were all turning to look at him as he stepped out of the cottage, the smaller ones scurrying away, the larger ones slowly shuffling out of his path as he stepped among the
m. He was enthralled and fearless.
"What do I do now?!" he cried, at them, at the flawless sky and whatever intelligence might reside there—or beneath the surface of the ocean or the lagoon. Forty days—thirty-nine now—to consider his sins, to pinpoint and purge all that was despicable in his nature, which would leave him with . . . what? He didn't know how to spend his time and he had no idea what he would end up with when it was all over.
So he walked. Another full circuit around the atoll, every once in a while breaking into a run and only stopping when the footing became too treacherous. By the time he made it back to the cottage he was scraped and bloody and drenched with sweat—the obvious action at this point would have been to strip and bathe in the lagoon, but it was too alive, too active. And the ocean was so dormant—motionless, that in the distance it looked almost like a viscous desert on some dead world.
He went inside the cottage, figuring to eat a little dried fruit and then sleep away the hottest part of the day, but just inside the doorway he discovered one of the Transparents, kneeling before his open traveling bag.
"What the HELL are you doing?" he cried.
He lunged at it, reached for its throat, only in that last instant wondering just what kind of surface he was about to touch—or plunge through.
It seemed almost to evaporate in the instant his hands would have closed around its throat, bathing his fists in an oily mist. It was behind him now, smelling faintly of fish and lagoon water. He whirled, thrashing blindly and catching the Transparent—which was solid after all—across the flank with his elbow. It faltered slightly and he, taking full advantage of that, kicked it out the open door of the cottage.
There. He could have slammed the door, turned away, but instead he looked out and watched the Transparent struggling to pull itself off the rocks. Part of its arm and hip were seeping into the tangle of plants.
He leaped out of the doorway, his feet landing squarely on the chest of the fallen Transparent, half-expecting it to rupture beneath him. It didn't—not yet. He jumped up and down on it, screaming hysterically at the others, stirred on by their cringing retreat. He'd expected them to charge him, tear him apart. He had clearly misunderstood. Beneath his feet the Transparent leaked away, leaving not even color, not even a thin surface membrane. It left behind nothing at all—except a mess on his shoes and pant legs. Its consistency was only slightly thicker than water.
Don't Clean the Aquarium! Page 16