He marched into the cottage and up the stairs, throwing himself on the bed and only then kicking his shoes off and nudging them to the floor. Outside he heard a soft but shrill chorus of whistles. He rolled off the bed and went to the window. Down below, in the spot where he had stomped the Transparent to death, an array of glimmering, oily globules rose from the tangles and rolled—amoeba-like—into the outstretched arms of the Transparents kneeling before it. Seven had come forward to collect the remains in their arms. When they walked away towards the lagoon, the crowd parted for them. As the last of the seven passed, the others fell in behind, until the entire group was entering the lagoon as a single, orchestrated unit. There their forms seemed to merge, to become the water itself, a solitary mass that then disappeared entirely amid the turbulence of an exploding gas bubble.
His first few days were troubled. Still unsure of the ultimate repercussions of killing the Transparent, he didn't leave the second floor of the cottage for three days. He paced, stared out the window, nibbled, and rummaged through the paraphernalia left behind by other pilgrims. Most of the books and journals were decayed beyond recognition. There was an old computer in the corner, draped beneath canvas and encrusted with mold. He shook it from side to side and heard a sickening, sloshing s ound from within its shell.
And there was an embroidered notebook, neatly wrapped in plastic and almost perfectly preserved, though its design and the delicate calligraphy that filled its pages seemed to indicate an unimaginable vintage. It was a woman's notebook, a chronicle of the miserable life that had driven her here, and the oppressive sense of scale the ocean, with its all-consuming, 360-degree horizon line, had laid upon her. But she had known the Transparents as well. To her, they were angels of salvation—gentle, watery souls there to douse the smolderings life had scarred her with, to lift and caress her and free her of the gravity that had been tugging her graveward for her entire life.
The moon seemed impossibly large and bright out there. With no reference points on the horizon, should it have appeared so large? Shouldn't it rather have appeared smaller? And the terrain of the moon itself—it was as though it was so close that he could make out each individual hill and valley, along with forests, rivers and great, decaying monsters.
It was the cool night air that finally drew him downstairs and out of the cottage door where he discovered, resting on a particularly elegant formation of rock, a single Transparent, staring at the ocean.
He expected it to slide off the rock and slither back into the water. But it only looked at him with a delicate turn of the head, otherwise remaining motionless. It was small, a child—sexless, unthreatening. Perhaps it was some kind of angel.
When the Transparent turned away, tilting its head towards the moon whose light illuminated its liquid skull, he felt a profound sense of release. He thought of the woman's passionate journal entries. He sat on the rocks, nestling within the wet vegetation and scurrying worms and crustaceans, and he, too, looked up at the moon. And his skull, too, felt as though it were illuminating the night air.
He fell asleep and awoke a few hours later, to the sound of animals killing and devouring each other on the rocks—birds and crabs and other, darker things that had emerged from the lagoon. He was alone.
But when he ventured out after sunset the next night, he found the small Transparent, seated alone on that same rock and staring at the ocean.
As he sat, the Transparent turned and seemed to focus on him intensely. Its colorful organs, glowing with moonlight, pulsed and quivered, sending ripples through its deep, clear flesh.
"I shouldn't be here," he said, not to it or even to himself. "I thought I needed this. I thought I'd . . . lost all hope and that it was either this or kill myself. I thought: I can give it all up, I can sacrifice my identity and the assurance of ever having a roof over my head once I got back . . . if it means I don't have to feel that bad ever again. But I was wrong. I don't want to be dead and I don't want to give up everything I've just signed away. I want it back. I'll go see a million therapists, I'll go until I find the one who gives me the right justification, the right excuse, the right prescription to just pull me out of it. I don't want to be in this place. It was better being me at my absolute worst than being on this smelly, slimy ring of rock with these . . . I don't know . . . HEY! What are you anyway?" shouting at the Transparent. "Some kind of jellyfish, right?"
The Transparent was still looking at him, and for a moment he thought it was going to speak. Within its torso, strands of its organs had encircled into a loose, pulsing knot—a heart.
It rose, stepped up to him and reached out its glimmering arm, palm up. "What?" he asked. But it did not move, did not answer. Reluctantly, he touched the Transparent's hand with his own, felt the other's close on his, and was brought to his feet.
"Where are we going?" knowing exactly where they were going. It led him to the edge of the lagoon and beyond, up to its knees in water while he still perched on the rock.
It yanked at him and he relented for just an instant, and so hit the water belly first, mouth open in the middle of a shout. He sank, touched bottom and stood, coughing and gasping as his head reared out of the water. That water was warm, much warmer than the night air. It felt wonderful but even so, it was only with another tug that he let himself be pulled under again. Once there, it was hard to reconcile the fact that he would ever have to resurface again.
The Transparents were all around him down here, vague and vigorous irregularities in the moonlit water itself. They surrounded him, directed him, and yet when he needed to take a breath, they gently prodded him to the surface.
After that he swam freely, more relaxed than he'd ever felt underwater, examining the mouths of grottoes, the soft translucent tubules that branched through the water like a circulatory system. He watched the schools of fish that swam among those tubule forests and the invertebrates cluttering the bottom. Towards the darkness at the center of the lagoon, movements of light and shadow seemed to be on a greater, more ominous scale, and he imagined he heard deep, pulse-locked rumblings, the purr of a living engine, the groans of the intelligence that dwelled in the deepest reaches of the lagoon and lorded it over the atoll.
He stayed near the shore, not trusting his endurance. When he swam to the shoreline, no one prevented him from getting out, and as he staggered back to the cottage, there was no trace of the Transparents anywhere.
As he collapsed on the bed, he wondered for just an instant how many days had passed and how many he had left. He'd been here less than a week, and he'd already lost track of time.
And so he adjusted, quickly developing a routine: rise in the morning, eat and then go out to sit at the ocean's edge, looking at that horizon line—so clean and sharp in his imagination but an unfocused haze to his eyes. He would ignore the Transparents entirely during this early morning meditation, though he was always aware of them and the attention they paid to him. Once his breakfast was digested he would begin the regimen that took up a greater and greater part of his day as his strength increased. He would run a third, perhaps halfway, and after awhile all the way around the ring and then dive into the lagoon, swim across to the opposite end and resume the run. As he grew more exhausted, his footing grew worse and he would fall, pounding dangerously at his bones—even his skull—but that wasn’t enough to stop him. The promise of the warm, caressing waters of the lagoon seemed to override all concern, as though there was no injury that the lagoon could not heal.
Occasionally he would tread water at the center of the lagoon, turning as he did to take in this new horizon line. From here the view was different: the horizon was no veiled transition of blues, it was a series of jagged slashes between the gentle, unblemished sky and the black, life-choked rocks. This particular horizon line reminded him of something, something doctors had always goaded and prodded him about, but which he had never been comfortable thinking about himself until he'd entered these waters. The doctors had always loved to hear him tell ab
out that moment, had so many questions about the way he told it or the way he hedged around really telling them about it, about Jeremy. But he could still barely share that with himself, let alone with a therapist eager only to get a handle on him, give him the key to maintaining himself with the least amount of effort. But he shared those memories—in silence—with the water, where they made a quiet kind of sense, where he began to realize the benevolent indifference the universe attached to his sins.
He would sleep away the hottest part of the afternoon, or if not, read the woman's journal. None of the other journals were worth the trouble—men's mostly, whiny weaklings in love with their own suffering, for whom the experiences on the atoll seemed to add up to nothing. No doubt many of them hadn't made it. Encrusted in the rocks along the ring he would occasionally find skeletons, and there were probably many more that he wasn’t even aware of.
But he wondered . . . did any of them ever make it? Did the boat ever really come back?
In the evenings he sat beneath the unwavering moon. It seemed to drift aimlessly across the sky, and though its face seemed to alter subtly from one night to the next, it went through no cycles, remaining full and bright, as though its light-side could not bear to turn away from him.
Every night that single Transparent returned, always sitting on the same rock. Had it begun to take on the characteristics of a she in response to an unstated inner need of his, or because he'd begun referring to it as a she? Seated so elegantly across the rock, her flesh making radiant magic out of the moonlight, her form so perfectly sculpted in what could have only been a response to his own imagination, he sometimes found himself consumed with what in another life he might have called lust. His mouth watered at the sight of her, his eyes teared, his heart and muscles wrenched in hopeless, unappeasable longing. But his penis seemed to have shrunk nearly out of existence during the boat trip out here, and not even the effulgent splendor of his Transparent confessor could coax it out of hiding. So instead, he talked to her. And in his mind, at every pause, she made a perfect response, her voice soft and deep.
What all did he tell her? There was really nothing to tell, was there? Most of his life had been a monotonous routine, his greatest tragedies those of his own making, his most relished victories bitter and pre-emptive strikes against other people. He exaggerated and lied his way through his life, finally realizing that the most enjoyable form of therapy was to either invent something from scratch or switch his own identity with someone to make himself the admirable hero of an anecdote he'd otherwise remembered with bitterness and jealousy. She never questioned or doubted. The perfect audience.
There was nothing you could do.
I would have done the same thing.
How very interesting. Please . . . go on.
And then they would go for a swim. He would lose track of her once they submerged, and she would become just one of many in those pure moonlit waters.
The days were so alike that only two things distinguished them: the entries in the woman's journal he would read on a particular day, and the stories he would tell his Transparent-confessor that night.
Oh . . . but there was one other thing. She, his confessor, seemed to be growing larger as the days progressed. He assumed it was a gradual transformation, because he never even noticed at what point she became taller than he. Only a little bit at first, but now it seemed as though she were at least a full head taller, and growing at an ever faster rate.
His few dreams were usually inconsequential—always about people he'd once worked or gone to school with, in neighborhoods he'd lived in as a child. And then, one night, he dreamt of the atoll, of the cottage. Its most immediate distinguishing feature was the absence of the Transparents. As he walked among the rocks, he realized that the atoll was stripped clean, lifeless. The lagoon was dry, and the deep center was now a yawning black pit, the rocks surrounding it gashing a dramatic spiral into its depths. The ocean was reddish-brown, a perfect reflection of the sky. Inside, the cottage was as it must have once been, the furniture gleaming and intact, books on shelves, kitchen and bathroom fully operational, and on a central table in the upstairs room, the computer. His dream self walked up to it, sat down and turned it on. On the screen there appeared a textured surface—rock. There was a coughing, spewing, and blood splattered against that rock while something small and pink bounced against the rock and fell. In the center of that blood-splatter, a perfect stencil in the shape of a hand, its little finger missing. As the red oozed towards the center, the hand retained its shape as it slowly shrank out of existence, an infant's grasping hand, consumed by blood, as the screen hissed and faded to black.
He awoke from that dream just before sunrise, his neck wrenched and his mouth bitter with the taste of blood.
This morning the sun seemed to emerge from the depths of a vast pink tunnel. Concentric arcs billowed over it, and he was at first confused, wondering if perhaps he was still dreaming. It was as though he was inside of something; that this atoll and the ocean were beneath an immense bowl, and the sun was no more than a traveling light, delineating the contours of that bowl.
But of course they were only clouds. He'd almost forgotten what a sunrise could look like on a cloudy day. And of course, it looked just like this. Didn't it?
That night, when he went out and saw her seated upon her rock, he didn't want to talk. No complaints, no lies. He wanted to draw close to her, to lie with his head on her lap, to shut his eyes and forget that he would ever have to leave here, that somehow he would be irrevocably changed and would be dragged off the ring and away from her.
Has anything good ever happened to you? he imagined her asking. Were you ever truly in love, did you ever have a moment of bliss, give or receive a single tender gesture or word? I dare you to actually remember the best, most beautiful moment in your entire life.
"The most beautiful moment in my life?" he asked her, though she had said nothing at all to him, and made no indication that she understood or even heard him. "That's funny, because everything good that's ever happened to me sooner or later ended up going bad. I held onto good things until they went bad—until they had no choice but to go bad. If I were to . . . Wait. Yeah, I can think of something. Sure I can. This is going to sound stupid, I realize. Inconsequential. But it'll have to do. Okay?"
I'm ready whenever you are.
"Years ago—I was still very young, I'd gone through some very miserable, frustrating experiences . . . I'd been despondent for weeks, for months, and suddenly, one day, I just seemed to pull out of it. I was elated simply because I no longer felt depressed. I decided to make a symbolic gesture to myself, to prove to myself that in spite of everything that had been happening to me over the past year, this elation, this boost of confidence was real, not a phase, or as one of my friends so cheerfully put it, that moment of euphoria before I blew my brains out. I chose the most beautiful woman I knew, someone I'd gone to school with who'd just recently moved to the same city I was living in, and I decided to ask her on a date. And so I did. And lo and behold, she said yes.
"I had this friend, a percussionist in a band. I had no idea what kind of music they played, but he told me they were giving an outdoor concert in the mountains in a couple of weeks. Why not bring her to that? It seemed like a reasonable idea.
"It was really pathetic the way I prepared for that, so meticulously planned out every detail, drove every one of my friends nuts asking for advice and then turning around and explaining to them exactly how it was going to be. Everything was so perfectly crystallized in my imagination there didn't even really seem much point in tainting the experience with the real thing.
"But finally the day came. Well, first of all, she was new in this part of the country. She'd come from out east, where we'd gone to school. The altitude at city level was still aggravating to her. And now here we were, driving mountain roads, climbing mountain stairways to this cliff-side band shell, and she could barely breathe. Well, she was exhausted and really pis
sed off by the time we made it, and by then the crowds were huge. It was cold and there was nowhere left to sit. We had to stand. When I told her I knew someone in the band she just scowled and looked away.
"And the music! Jesus, they were loud. Loads of percussion, grating machine noise, and just about the most insane rasping vocals I'd ever heard. Under other circumstances I think I might have liked it, but she hated it. I wished the concert had been after dark so that I wouldn't have had to read her distaste so clearly. And the audience was full of agitators, peripherals of the band I guess, shooting water jets, fireworks, whipping around flaming torches. It was insane. Finally, some kid right next to us, a boy about seventeen, got his hair caught on fire. Well, that was it. She went nuts. I had to get her out of there, she was so scared and pissed and disgusted.
"But instead of going back down to my car, we walked to a picnic area and sat for awhile. It was snowing now, coming down pretty hard. And yet it wasn't that cold or windy. It was actually very pleasant. I knew the date was a bust and that, if I stopped long enough to think about it, I'd see that this whole experience was just more proof of the same hopeless stupidity that had plagued everything else that I'd done all year. But we talked, reminisced about school, talked about our lives—our very distinct and never to be intersected lives—and just . . . talked. We sat in a gazebo for about an hour like that, and at the end of it, I guess we both felt a little better. We got up to leave and then, when we were about fifty feet from the gazebo, she stopped and I stopped and we talked some more and I apologized for bringing her to this stupid concert. She shrugged it off so beautifully, as if to say it wasn't your fault, I had a nice time just knowing you wanted me to have a good time. God . . . And the snow was falling around us and I looked at the gazebo over her right shoulder, and I looked at her and . . .
Don't Clean the Aquarium! Page 17