"Snow was collecting in her hair, melting on her nose and cheeks. There, on her long . . . perfect eyelashes, snowflakes were collecting, clinging. It gave her face a kind of . . . I don't know. Radiance doesn't seem to do it justice. And in that moment I saw her as she would look in twenty, thirty years, still just as beautiful, standing in this same spot, her hair gray, her face etched and wrinkled, snow falling around her, snowflakes still searching out and clinging to those gorgeous, sweeping eyelashes."
He laughed and threw a stone into the ocean. "I'll never forget that moment—and I'm not even sure why. If I forget everything else that's ever happened to me, even if I forget who she was, I'll still cling to that one vision. Stupid, isn't it? So stupid I've never even said it out loud before."
Did you ever see her again? he imagined his confessor asking.
"No. I had to leave that city soon afterward, and all my inconsequential fantasies leading up to that date, all the friends I'd driven crazy yapping about it . . . they just disappeared from my life."
He'd been looking out at the ocean, at the haze around the moon. He turned to her now and found her standing, something stern and menacing in her bearing.
"What?" he asked, looking up at her. She was at least ten feet tall. She turned away and marched towards the lagoon. When she was up to her knees and he reached the shoreline, she turned and held out an obstructing arm.
"Don't go. Not yet. I want to talk some more."
He took one step forward and she struck him across the face with an open palm. He fell against the rocks, his wrenched neck suddenly throbbing with pain so intense he was sure it was broken. Slowly, trying in vain to minimize that pain, he stood. She was gone.
He slept little that night, in fits and bursts, while the pain got worse, and then, towards dawn, began to ease up. Finally, at sunrise, he fell into a deep sleep that held him under for several hours. It was the buzzing that woke him this time. He sat up screaming, but there was nothing there.
The air was cool that morning; tendrils of cold whipped across the rocks, whistling, shrieking past his ear. He returned to the cottage twice to layer his clothing a little more, and each time it seemed a little colder than before. The eastern horizon looked as though it had hemorrhaged gray-black blood, darkening sky and ocean and spreading as he watched.
The ocean had just come to life. That storm . . . it reminded him of something. What? His whole life he'd had a talent for losing himself in the suggested images in clouds. What did he see now? Was that a face, a cluster of smashed faces, a body crushed upon the rocks, a crowded insect hive?
No . . . It was a brain, convolutions twisting into ever tighter, labyrinthine patterns, expanding to fill that bowl that was the sky above him. Jesus Christ, he realized, this island . . . this dainty little ring of rock is about to be wiped clean. And me with it! He'd never seen a storm approach so quickly, rolling in on itself as it rose, separating into innumerable lobes. Oh, he had no doubt. This thing could think. How could it not?
Great fish leaped out of the water, a glistening whale with what appeared to be gigantic feathers growing out of its flank broke the surface to let out a single agonizing scream before gravity pulled it back under.
The rocks were almost deserted, except for thousands of annoying white fist-sized worms that had at one time been only a marginal denizen, food for the sea birds. Now they were everywhere, impervious to the cold and the raging sea water. He tried to avoid them as he made his way back towards the cottage, but they were impossible not to step on, and impossible to get any footing on. The only safe way of moving now, with the wind so powerful, was to go on his hands and knees, but that would have meant touching them, looking at them from just an arm's length away. He had to walk, and yet it was not possible.
He was on a vulnerable peak when the wave hit him and carried him into the lagoon. With the sweatshirts and vest it was hard to swim in this suddenly turbulent water, especially as the wind and the invading seawater drove him further and further towards the center of the lagoon. At least the water here was warm, at least thirty degrees warmer than the air. He pulled off the vest, let it float away, and tried to conquer the turbulence by swimming through it. This lagoon had been good to him, it was warming him in the wake of the approaching storm—it would buffet him, and those who lived down there would surely never let him drown.
He was being blown towards the far shore, away from the cottage. He fought against the waves and the rain, but it was all he could do to keep from being pulled under entirely.
The wind and water hurled him onto the rocks. He crawled on his belly, never mind the worms, trying only to keep from being thrown into the ocean or back into the lagoon.
He looked up into the sky and screamed, "I want my money back!" and then plunged through the underbrush, head first into a pit of rising water. He found a perch and settled securely into a depression in the rock.
So familiar . . . What was it? He wiped the slime away from his body in the darkness, and felt the tough shards within that slime scrape at his clothes and skin. What was so familiar about this? The thunder, the torrents of water . . . no, it was something else, clinging to his skin, clinging to those rocks. And it was the buzzing. It took him a long time to distinguish that sound, but once he did, it was impossible to mistake it for anything else.
He scooped away a crushed white worm from beneath him and held it in front of his face, trying to catch just the barest outline of it in the darkness. No use. But he could feel it. Armored, segmented legs, struggling out of a larval goo, the needled tip of its abdomen tapping against his palm.
He screamed and tried to flick it away. The slime flew off, but the thing within it—oh, he knew what it was—remained. He let out another scream, and this was all the prompting it needed to plunge the stinger deep into his palm.
And then, they began swarming, hovering, diving, perching on him and creeping into his clothes, stinging him over and over, exactly as they had that day, only now it was dark and he was alone. There was no one here for him, just as there might as well not have been anyone there for Jeremy, and the whole thing came flooding back to him now. Not the detached, well-rehearsed story he'd been forced to tell a hundred times, but the terror and the burning pain, the ferocity of the damned insects, that hopeless assurance that no one was going to come, no one was going to pull him out of this one. It was only him, and he could do nothing. He resigned himself to it and let himself die. Or so he hoped.
It was the sunlight that woke him, a shaft of light pouring through an opening only a few feet and a safe crawl away from where he had huddled through most of the storm. The wasps, or whatever the hell they'd been, were gone. They'd emerged out of the innocuous worms he'd been seeing on the rocks ever since his arrival. Jesus, they'd been there at his feet the whole time, just waiting.
The atoll was stripped clean, a ring of featureless rock. The lagoon was sealed shut by a translucent membrane, thin but impenetrable, its surface laced with innumerable strands and vessels of red and blue. He crawled out onto that membrane, because the air was still cold, the membrane warm, and the movement of fluids within its vessels gave a sadly familiar aura to this now barren and dismal world. The sky was gray, the sun could have been anywhere, and he could not escape even for a moment into that warm, safe water. Could not rupture the membrane.
Spread beneath its surface he saw two disintegrating sheets of paper and an embroidered notebook cover. He'd unsealed that woman's journal and left it for the elements to destroy.
He'd always thought that if his provisions were to fail him, he would scavenge from the rocks, if the Transparents were ever to desert him he would have the notebook and its passionate confessions to keep him company. But he had none of that now.
He called out to them. To her. He knew they were down there somewhere—or maybe they were the membrane itself. Yeah, that made sense. Was that the pressure of gas erupting beneath the surface making the membrane roll and ripple like that, or was it the s
ubsumed Transparents, now a single organism, breathing? He pressed against it, trying to reach around it, pull it nearer, enwrap himself in it, but there was a definite resistance there. It wanted no part of him.
The membrane sent rippled , pushing him, lifting him and throwing him towards the shoreline, until he was hurled onto the rocks.
He was still there when darkness finally spanned the sky and the moon appeared, a dull sliver glowing behind the clouds. Why am I not dead yet? he wondered. The forty days are never going to end or else they ended a long time ago and no one is ever coming to get me or they were coming to get me and the storm blew them off course or pounded them into the ocean. Why . . . Why did I ask for this? Why couldn't I have committed myself or killed myself or worse yet, just gone on with my life? Found a new place to live in a new city, found a new companion for myself, a new livelihood? What is penance anyway? When the crime is just the corrosion of my own soul, the awareness that the good in me is dead and has been dead for a long, long time . . .
He staggered to the edge of the lagoon, and began walking along the shoreline. Surely by the time he made it around once, something would happen. Surely by then, if he called to them, if he reminded them he was here, they would return. She would return, and listen. This time he would tell the truth.
"You never let me finish, you know," he cried. The only reply was the gentle undulation of the membrane. "You realize almost everything I ever told you was a bunch of shit. Lies . . . All that crap about people wronging me or mistreating me or not appreciating me. None of that was real. No one ever really did anything too bad to me. The worst thing anyone ever did to me was see the truth. The real me. And you know what that is? I've never done a single thing in my entire life, never raised a finger to help anyone, never had a decent thing to say to anyone . . . Nothing. I've led a monumentally worthless life. You know the boldest thing I've ever done? Turn myself in to your employers. Sacrifice everything I ever had or would ever have just so I could punish myself. Here! And for what? "
But that wasn't it, was it? That was always the cushion, the padding, the scar tissue, with which he secluded and cradled . . . the Memory.
"Okay. I did do one thing. Once. Hear me out there? I did do one thing! It's on all my charts! I told you the best thing that ever happened to me, the most beautiful moment in my life, remember? And it was so trivial I'd never had the guts to say it to a real human being. But the worst moment of my life? Jesus, everybody I've ever known knows something about it. Since it's the only thing that's ever happened to me, it's all the doctors ever wanted to talk about. I've told it a million times and I figured that I could get here and my suffering would be so great that finally, I wouldn't have to say anything about it anymore. But I was wrong. I have to talk. I can't stop talking. And if I have only one thing to say, then I guess I just go through my whole life, telling that same thing over and over and over again. Fine! Okay? Ready?"
He stood on a rise, cupped his hands around his mouth. "I was a cub scout! Can you believe that? I was a fucking cub scout! Me . . . and Jeremy. He was my best friend. He joined the cub scouts because I did, just so we could be together, compete to see who could get all those shitty little arrowhead patches the fastest.” He stopped and took a deep breath. “But I don't mean to say it like that. We were snotty little brats, we were just the kind of kids that I would never be able to put up with now. Too hard to maintain, too loud and energetic and . . . out of control. But that was . . . I think . . . the way we were supposed to be. To have been anything less than that then would mean that I'd have been the way I am now for my entire life. At least I was a colossal pain in the ass when I was a kid. Considering all the dullards I've met in the world, to have been that wild and . . . alive, that was a real accomplishment.
"Anyway . . . Jeremy and I were cub scouts. One year we all took a trip down to a state park, with cliffs and a man-made lake and a man-made waterfall . . . a very cool place. We were there just for the day. No real provisions, no real supervision, only a few dullard parents to keep an eye on us. We weren't supposed to wander off. You know, we were supposed to be `good.' I mean, they take a bunch of eight-, nine-, ten-year-old suburban kids into a place like that and tell us to behave in an orderly fashion. Idiots. And of course they were our parents or our friend's parents, so we tried to listen to them, but it was impossible. A bunch of us were at the top of this cliff, and out on the edge there was this cactus in bloom. This was about as far north as you'll ever see a wild cactus, and none of us had ever seen one before. We decided to pick it. I crept out to the edge of the cliff, but it was already sloping downwards, I was losing my footing and I still couldn't reach the thing. I gave up. No one else even got as far as I did. But Jeremy, he was always a little bit crazier than the rest of us, and those last two feet I hadn't had the guts to creep, he did, and he managed to reach the cactus. And he gave it a good hard yank, thinking, I guess, that the thing must have been rooted pretty securely there. Which it wasn't. It came up like nothing at all, and Jeremy hadn't expected that. He lost his balance, started to slide, turned back to us, reaching out—for one of us, for a plant, anything to grab onto but there was nothing there and besides, he was only grabbing with one hand because he wouldn't let go of the damn cactus. He didn't even shout at first because he was just sliding and I think he must have thought he'd catch himself before he fell too far. When he screamed, we knew.
"We ran down a nearby slope to get a look at him. He'd fallen onto a ledge about forty feet down. He was hurt but when we called out to him he answered. He was conscious. He knew what was going on, but he was hurting. And . . . there was something else wrong. He was calling out for help in a way that meant he was worried about more than just getting off the ledge.
"I panicked. What the hell was wrong with Jeremy? We couldn't leave him there like that. I told the other guys to go get the adults, because it was obvious we were never going to get out of this without getting them involved and getting our asses kicked for it later. But I couldn't get to him from downslope like this. There didn't seem to be any way of getting to him . . . except to go over and make the same fall he did. Like I could do it and not get hurt.
"But see . . . I did it. I ran back up there and, without even thinking about it, I went right over that cliff, sliding downslope almost the whole way. I don't know how I did it. I was like a . . . I don't know . . . spiderboy or something. Anyway, here I come, I can see the free fall ahead and I see Jeremy right under me, right on the edge and I shout out to him, 'Out of the way, stupid!' He looks up, sees me falling, catches the landslide I'm bringing with me and rolls out of the way.
"And that's when the screams really started. I landed on that ledge feet first. Wrenched my ankle a little, but otherwise, perfect. But Jeremy's screaming. I look at him. He's rolled to the very back of the ledge, right into the wasps. Jesus, they were all over him. And he's screaming 'Get 'em off me! Get 'em off me!' and I'm still not thinking. I have no fear of anything at this point, so I grab him and pull him away from the swarm, and of course, the swarm follows him. Now they're swarming both of us. We're swatting at them, screaming, trying to kill them or scare them away but they just keep on coming. And that buzzing . . . it sounded like laughter, like they were really enjoying themselves. I don't remember how many times I got stung before they finally quit. Way, way too many times, but not half as many times as Jeremy. I'm feeling awful, but Jeremy, he's really sick. He's getting sicker by the moment. I find a spot away from the edge and away from the wasps and I drag him over there, try to sit him up, try not to panic, try to talk to him, but Jeremy . . . something's going very wrong here. His tongue is growing, his eyes are turning red and bulging and his breathing is getting bad. And he's afraid he's dying. But of course he's not dying. Everybody gets stung by wasps, don't they? I mean, sure, there were a lot of them, but how could he die? He survived a fall like this, and to die because a bunch of bugs stung him? What kind of bullshit is that? So I try to sit him up, but he won't sit. He ca
n't. He's lying down and he's shivering and he's calling out to his mom, and shit, his mom is a hundred miles away and our scout leader doesn't even like him very much and Jeremy's reaching out for someone and I'm the only one there. He grabs a hold of me and I grab a hold of him and he just lies there, his head in my lap, looking out at the edge, waiting for the adults to come rescue us. And oh, God, he's looking worse, sounding worse by the minute. Choking. And he is dying. He's fucking allergic to the little bastards. And he's dying and he's looking up at me and he's begging me not to let him die and he's telling me to get his mom and asking me 'When are they going to get here?' and then . . . I can't understand him at all.
"They had to get the rangers—or whatever they were—to rappel down to us. I guess it must have taken a long time to find them, I don't know. But I was watching the sky change color over the edge of the cliff ledge. It was like the edge of the world, and beyond it, everything was just getting darker and darker. He was long dead by the time they got to us. I'd been talking to him the whole time. See . . . I'd been too stunned or too embarrassed to answer him, console him while he was babbling to me but now that he was dead I couldn't stop talking to him. And I wouldn't let go of him."
He laughed, stepped off the rock and continued to walk around the lagoon. "They tried to pry him away from me, and I wouldn't let them do it. I don't know . . . I was too freaked out to know what I was doing. I was ten years old for chrissakes. When one guy tried to grab me and pull me away, I bit him. I bit down on his little finger. I bit his little finger off. I used to tell the doctors that I bit it off and then spit it in his face but I probably made that part up.
Don't Clean the Aquarium! Page 18