"But anyway, that's it. My big, valiant moment of glory, and it turned out to be the worst moment in my whole life. How do you make up for something like that? Jeremy wouldn't have even joined the cub scouts if it hadn't been for me, he wouldn't have had to get that cactus if I could have gotten it and he wouldn't have rolled into that wasp's nest if I hadn't decided to go down there and 'rescue' him myself.
"You know, sometimes, I think about that day, trying to look at it from every angle and trying to figure out what I did wrong, what I could have done right, trying to find some kind of useful lesson in there, but there's nothing. Just this: sometimes I run it all through my head and I end up thinking, 'Well, at least I bit that asshole's finger off.'
"And that's IT."
No reply from the sealed lagoon. They knew better. The only cure for him was the immemorial one—annihilation. And that was just what They had prescribed for him. Annihilation. He could see his end so clearly now.
He collapsed on the rocks, a dramatic swirl with arms out to his side, as though uniformed attendants would break his fall, catch him and set him gently in a bed. But no one caught him. He hit the rocks and all the wounds that the lagoon water had washed away with its magic—in the feet and elbows and knees, in his skull—all returned now. He was hungry. He was cold. What was left of the cottage was halfway around the atoll and he didn't think he could even remember how to stand, let alone walk.
So he didn't.
When the sun rose the next morning the sky was clearing. He could see it. He could feel himself on the rocks and wondered when he would finally decide to move. But the hours passed, the sun glared down on him, and he did not feel the inclination to move. There was such a security in being so immobile, in fitting—molding into the rocks so snugly, and he began to wonder if perhaps he was only imagining the hunger and thirst and that, in reality, he was dead, and that, if he tried to move and couldn't, and then realized he was dead, he would panic. So he didn't try. He felt random sensations: heat, the pressure of the rocks beneath him, but no pain of any kind. It was all he could do to remember where he was and why he was here and why it should even matter whether he did remember. When night came again, and he had gone an entire day without moving, he looked upon it as a kind of victory.
In another day life began to creep out of the lagoon and out of the ocean and claim territories on the atoll. The plants reasserted themselves and the fresh and saltwater creatures began battling for dominance. But he paid no attention to this. He was nothing more than a part of the territory the plants and animals were laying claim to; first the creepers and mosses and worms and bugs, then the crabs from the ocean and the primeval arthropods from the lagoon began to claim niches for themselves on his body. By the end of the third day, he seemed to be growing into the rock.
A part of him was aware of the war for dominance being waged on him, but seldom and then only vaguely. It was then not so much the degradation he was suffering that bothered him as the fact that he was still aware of it—or of anything at all. And then he would fade away, sometimes thinking that perhaps these were not the thoughts of a man, but the thoughts of a mineral, that he was and had always been a rock, only now awakening from a nightmare in which he had been a brittle, disposable vessel of flesh and blood.
On the fifth day, as the plants began to anchor and hide him and the tiny animals ran rampant over him, as dehydration began to reach critical levels, the membrane across the lagoon began to break apart. Within hours it was gone, all its constituent parts broken down into organisms no larger than a child's thumbnail, each one transparent with threads of crimson and blue dancing within. Some began creeping ashore in an orderly procession, covering his body and slipping into his mouth, where they would secrete fresh water directly into his throat, while others spread across the flesh to protect the old wounds and seal the new ones. The tiny Transparents held vigil on him for the next ten days, at which point a boat whistle sounded out on the ocean, and a small craft approached the atoll, and a young man and woman got out and began calling to him in a name he would have no longer recognized had he been conscious enough to hear it.
It took them, and finally three others as well, half the day to find the body. This trip out they had recovered three live ones out of over a dozen scheduled pick-ups. For the rest, the pilgrimage had been a very expensive, slow and probably tortuous form of suicide. For those three who'd survived . . . who could say? It wasn't the crew's job to bother with that kind of stuff.
She had been the last one to speak to him before the boat had taken off forty days ago. He'd stood on the rocks watching them, looking confused, as though he had no clear idea of what was happening to him, as though someone else had planned this for him, had drugged and shanghaied him. She'd felt worse for him than for most others, because he seemed less pathetic, less despicable than so many of the others she'd seen. To think that he was lost, he of all of them, was almost too much. Long after they'd dragged the lagoon and the rest had wanted to give up the search, she continued searching the rock formations.
And so she was the one who first saw his hand, withered and pale, hanging out of a mass of tangles in a recess among the rocks. They spent the next hour pulling the plants away, scooping away the colonies of things living on him, only to discover that he was virtually lodged to the rocks. The slime covering him made it impossible to get a grip on him and it seemed for a while that they would have to chip him away and drag him back to the boat with twenty pounds of rock imbedded in his flesh. But with the plants gone and the skin exposed to the sunlight, the slime melted away and they were finally able to pull him cleanly away.
He let out a scream when they got him to his feet, and began to cry furiously, though without ever opening his eyes or thrashing those scabbed, emaciated limbs.
The Transparents began to resonate the moment they heard his cries— resonate and merge, climbing and rolling over the terrain to watch the little boat and its howling passenger meet up with the larger boat and then drift away, towards the horizon line. Then the Transparents slipped back into the center depths of the lagoon.
He slept for three days, while he was cleaned and pumped full of drugs and fed intravenously. Towards the end of that sleep he had a dream: he was in this very bed, awake and alert as the room was overrun by grime-encrusted demons who dragged him out of bed, beat a hole through the floor with their hammers, and hauled him through the opening and into the underworld, so crowded with demons that the very cliff walls seemed to be composed of them. He was dragged into a dark room deep, deep within the earth, his head laid out on an iron slab. There they crushed his head with repeated blows of the hammers. He actually watched it from near the ceiling of the room, his floating spirit bobbing quietly lest the demons impacted in that ceiling should notice him. A bleached white skull was laid out on the slab, so pure and unmarked it looked as though it had been freshly molded. The liquified flesh that puddled around the shards of the crushed skull now drifted across the slab and crept up the new one, where it began to hiss and effervesce. He was held up by two demons while two others twisted the new head onto the shoulders and then threw the whole twitching mess into a stream of bloodied water that had now appeared, running down the center of the room, over a ledge and into a great wet darkness . . .
. . . He was standing in the snow, on a level stretch halfway up a mountain, shivering cold. His head hurt so badly in so many places that he could think of nothing but the demons' hammers. Then he realized that it was the newness of his skull that pained him so much, and that when he opened and shut his mouth, his muscles were teaching the jawbone how to move. He could hear the buzzing—could see the wasps swarming in the treetops not far away
"Don't be afraid of them," she said. He turned slowly, recognizing the voice but unable to place it until he set eyes on the young woman he had brought to this mountain some fifteen years before. He was disappointed—he'd been hoping it would be his Transparent-confessor. There, over the woman's shoulder, was t
hat same gazebo, more rundown than before, and she too was older, far older than she should have been, and far different from what he'd envisioned on that day.
He stared at her, waiting for a word, a smile. But her expression was sad until her eyes roamed and she spotted something behind him. She nodded. "Don't look at me," she said softly, "look over there."
And so he turned, afraid that the sound swelling behind him was the swarming wasps, but as his eyes scanned the mountainside, it seemed to be eroding, hazing over, until finally it became the ocean, a calm, dark blue ocean with a horizon line that slashed across the much-lighter sky. And as he turned further, the sky darkened, the ocean lightened, the horizon line diffused until all he could see was a soft blue oblivion.
"Here he comes now," said the voice. It was not the dream voice; it was higher pitched, almost a young girl's voice. The oblivion was not so soft anymore. Everywhere, that white glare, and moving within it, an unfocused face—blond haired and blue-eyed and, just possibly, familiar.
"Good morning. Can you hear me all right?" He could feel her breath against his face. She drew closer now. "Nod or speak, whichever's easier." He was aware of doing something, but he was still too unformed to recognize whether he'd said a word or merely moved his head.
"That's good. You're on the boat. The same boat. I was the one who dropped you off, remember? I'm the one who found you . . . It's okay if you don't remember. You were . . . really sick . . . but you're better now."
Another movement from him. He recognized it: expelled air, molded by the larynx and tongue, buzzing between his lips.
She drew even closer now, and he could feel her hair against his cheeks. "Your name is Jeremy now. Can you understand that? That's your name. Can you say Jeremy? "
He swallowed and struggled with his lips. "Bu-badda-ba."
"Very good," she purred. "That's very good. We're going to have you up and walking in the next day or two. Won't that be nice? We're going to work on your new signature then."
He turned and looked at the rest of the room. A bare, ugly room glaring with white light. On the wall, a porthole, a window on a ship's cabin. The glass revealed nothing except the reflection of room light. He looked back at the face, only a few inches above his now. She was smiling at him. No, he had never seen her before. He would have remembered her.
"And then," she said, her voice clipped as she stood straight and backed away from him, "we're going to have to do some paperwork."
And with that she opened the cabin door to walk out of the room. He couldn't find the strength or even the words to call her back. Please don't go. Stay and talk to me. Tell me who I am. Don't leave. Not yet. He turned away wincing as the door swung shut. He was looking at the glare on the porthole glass when he heard the click on the wall outside the cabin and the room light shut off. The glare disappeared from the glass, and he could see the clear, perfect blue of the sky, small and out of reach.
From the vantage point of the ship's deck, the sky wasalmost totally clear, its only blemish a lone cumulus cloud, drifting on the westerlies at an altitude of 6,000 feet. Within those glowing billows of water droplets, shadows deepened and dimmed in complex patterns. To look carefully at that cloud, one might have seen faces—dead, swollen faces; young faces of flawless beauty; ancient, all knowing faces—or perhaps a menagerie of animals, the twisted wreckage of ancient machines, rock formations, or bold sweeps of light and darkness that conveyed dread and love and crippling hesitation and the exhilaration of having waited an eternity to take possession of the trillions of cells that it was now turn to call your own.
But Jeremy, wired, tubed and strapped to his bed, couldn't see any of that.
Not yet.
Don't Clean the Aquarium! Page 19