Myco told her that the older the tree was, the more likely it was to be biologically diverse. She searched for the base of a redwood that looked about three cars across, and briefly shone her headlamp to check the coloration of the bark. The “newer” trees, only a few hundred years old, would have reddish brown bark while the eldest would have shifted to a stony gray.
Her tree finally presented itself, after forty minutes of hiking deeper into the grove. Light had simply ceased to find a home. To her right she saw the outline of the blockage, a tree thick as a blue whale reaching up to heights she couldn’t perceive.
She ran her hands across the bark, imagining herself at the foot of some planet-traversing colossus who was standing still to allow her up for a visit.
She used a pair of night vision-equipped Zeiss binoculars to scan the base for a solid climbing branch on which to start. The best option was about one hundred and forty feet up, though several epicormics presented below that. She thought of “Cristoff’s” ruptured eye and wrong-angled bone shards and immediately canceled any thought of risking the lower points.
The best solution was to shoot a weighted fishing line over the good branch, then use that line to pull a rope back up and over. It was a patience game, and she set herself to it, unpacking a crossbow with a pre-threaded dull-tipped arrow.
Four tries and she found purchase. After that it seemed easy to rig up the rope and lock in her climbing saddle and Jumar ascenders.
She began her climb beyond the world of the humans, praying that the tree’s nightlife would yield something Myco needed. She stopped at each major branch and briefly flipped on her headlamp, extracting a plastic container with a micro-fiber lid as instructed by her mysterious correspondent. The lids allowed oxygen in, but nothing, even water, would find its way out.
At mid-height she managed to pry loose a tent spider entrenched in a bark pocket. Its eyes gleamed purple in her headlamp.
She scored fragments of lichens, some shaped like leaves of lettuce, others like tiny clothespins, and still others that looked like green beard hairs.
Just before breaking into the crown she spotted an inverted blackened chamber about three feet wide, the damage from some fire that likely burned before the birth of Christ. Tucked just inside the fire cave she found a blind salamander, its damp wet skin speckled with orange dots. She grabbed a chunk of moist canopy soil to include in its container so that it might survive the voyage.
The salamander wiggled in her fingers. She stared at it, wondering how the hell it got up here.
Speaking of which, how did I get up here?
Strung between two branches, hundreds of feet above the Earth, staring at some tree lizard. Way out of cell phone range and one mistake away from instant death. So far from home, from Henry.
Aside from the thought of her son, she was filled with exhilaration rather than fear. This was a world so few had ever seen. And she was going to save it from her terrible species.
Emboldened, she pushed upward to the crown. The moon was there to greet her, blindingly bright and so close she could touch it.
Amelia was confused during her descent. Happy, ecstatic really, but confused. She felt as if her time in the crown was a dream. Beautiful to be sure, but… those things couldn’t have happened, right?
She’d been gathering more samples—a variety of berries, more lichen than she could count, even a bright white worm she spotted nosing out of the canopy soil. But then she’d… what?
Shimmers of light. She’d found the trunk pool. Dead center in the crown, the main trunk had collapsed inward and hollowed out, allowing water to collect there.
She’d reached in with a plastic sample container and immediately felt a sting in her exposed fingers. Was it the cold? But seconds later her hand filled with warmth. It spread up her arms and unfurled in her chest. She’d closed the sample container and tucked it into her pack.
Then she remembered feeling an overwhelming sense of joy, and safety. Thoughts of rotten Grant or all the pigs snorting around down on Earth turned to sand and were blown away. A dumb grin slid across her face and the moon blurred through her tears—a white puddle surrounded by oil.
But did she really unhitch her tree saddle and carabiners? Did she really let her body drop into the trunk pool, and float there, picturing herself as a tiny red hummingbird sitting in the palm of a kind and loving God.
It seemed insane. But when she reached up to feel her hair, it was still sopping wet.
“I had a moment of rapture,” she thought. And she didn’t care if it was real or not.
She descended carefully, methodically, and placed her cargo in a safe place before the sun cracked the horizon.
After cleaning up and communicating her drop spot to Myco, she drove to Toby’s parents’ house to pick up Henry. She still hadn’t slept, but she couldn’t wait to see her son. There was something so lovely about him. She smiled at the thought of him and her chest ached in his absence. She sped across Eureka, keeping an eye out for the erratic driving of the tweakers that inhabited early morning commutes like this. Not that she hated the tweakers. Everyone had their problems.
Jesus, what?
Amelia had been clean of the poison of drugs for a long time now, but she could swear she was being washed over by waves of euphoria. She wrote it off as sleep deprivation and adrenaline.
But when she got to Toby’s she found that instead of honking and waiting for Henry to come running out, she practically jumped out of her car and ran to the front door.
Shit. I’ll have to talk to the parents.
I love the parents.
Oh, God.
Thankfully only Henry emerged from the front door. Amelia saw him recoil as she crouched down to sweep him up. What a boy…
“Momma, you smell funny.”
“Well, kiddo, you smell, too. You smell great. God, I just love you SO MUCH!”
She kissed him full on the lips, a big wet smacker that she was sure would have embarrassed him if Toby were watching. Oh well, she’d slap one on adorable little Toby too.
She set Henry down. He looked up at her, his brow furrowed. “You okay, momma?”
“Yes, honey, I’m better than ever. You want to go get some pancakes?”
With that he nodded “Yes” and took off running for the car. He never got pancakes. High fructose corn syrup was a poison, one of the favorites of The Machine.
But it felt so right to make him happy. She wanted to hold him close and kiss him all over his little face.
He was already buckled when she got in the car. He was rubbing his sleeve back and forth on his lips.
“It tingles, momma.”
“Bad tingles, like burning?”
“No, like peppermint. It’s kind of nice, I guess.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yup. It’s really nice, actually. Really nice.”
She and Henry were barely eating anymore. They felt constantly tired, though they found they were happy just cuddling and drinking water. Lots of water, to the point where Henry would laugh at the sloshing sounds when either of them moved around.
Their temperatures ran hot, but never to the point where she started thinking Emergency Room.
Amelia did worry when the sores appeared on Henry’s chest and arms. They reminded her of the splotches on the tweakers that tried to shoplift at the grocery store she’d worked for. Her boss had told her that was caused by battery acid in the meth.
She applied A & D Ointment to Henry’s sores and got a cool washcloth for his forehead. That seemed to give him more energy. He asked her to tell the story again, about climbing the great tree and meeting the strange creatures and swimming in the sky pool and saving the woods.
He loved the story. He loved her and told her so, over and over again.
He was dead when she woke.
She could tell right away. She was so hot—sweating under the blankets—that his body was like ice against her chest.
And something was
very wrong. Because his chest was not expanding, but his belly was. His abdomen was thrumming like it was filled with boiling water. Worse, while her animal instinct got her away from his body, she found herself back in front of the sink, refilling her favorite glass with tap water. Good God she was thirsty.
And happy.
Happy? Fucking Christ—Henry is dead. Something is moving in his belly.
They’d both been crying for days now, but they were tears of overwhelming joy, at their luck that they might be alive and filled with so much love.
Amelia wanted true tears. Part of her brain was screaming, begging to collapse to the floor, to crawl back to Henry and wail.
What was happening?
For days now, their lives were only bed/water /love. They’d heard helicopters roaring overhead last night, and it was a wonderful sound. That man should fly was so amazing.
No. Henry is dead. Nothing is amazing. Figure out what’s going on.
Drink some water.
No.
Go to bed.
No.
She hadn’t turned on her computer since sending her last email to Myco. What a beautiful name. What a great man! Amelia wanted to scrape all this love out of her skull, but it came at her in insistent waves.
Myco had responded: Your woods are saved. Your collection efforts provided us with not just one, but two viable interests. Rest assured that this grove will be protected for some time to come, though public access will be greatly reduced. However, the trees will be saved, and I would like to let you know, in the confidence afforded to Assemblage members of course, that one of the lichen you provided us may hold the key to boosting white blood cell counts in patients with severe immune deficiencies. The other sample of interest was a microscopic parasite found in the water sample you provided. We expected protozoa but actually discovered a never-before-seen type of copepod, a tiny shrimp-like creature. We can’t tell whether it has been self-sustaining in the tree for thousands of years, or if it was just recently dropped there by a wet-winged osprey, but we do know that it possesses an ovipositor for egg delivery and that the eggs have this miraculous viral coating that likely induces confusion in the host. It’s similar to how a parasitic wasp breeds, but it is so streamlined. You’ve done our group a great service and we believe that this little management tool may help us to control invasive fish species off Florida and elsewhere. Congratulations!
She deleted the message.
Henry’s body was twitching under the blankets.
Drink more water.
Get in bed. Love your son.
Protect him.
She refused the voice. It was a virus. Myco’s precious streamlined management tool had killed her son, and it would kill her too. And for the first time in her life, she could embrace her death.
But not Henry’s. Poor Henry.
Before she died she was going to send a message to some of the piggies. Somehow they’d led her to this terrible place. All these humans…
Amelia cleaned herself, ignoring the shifting in her own belly and the “love” that whipsawed around her brain.
She dried and put on her only perfume and spotted a few sores blooming on her skin. Nothing some foundation couldn’t cover up.
She slid on a short skirt and an old black t-shirt. It fit perfectly—the last few days’ fast had done right by her looks.
No underwear. None needed.
She would walk to the outskirts of the grove, where she guessed gun-sure soldiers and salivating business men were already setting up perimeter in anticipation of harvesting what she’d found.
There was an old redwood stump there which had refused to die. It was fifteen feet across and rimmed on all sides by new redwood trunks growing from its edges. The locals called these “fairy circles” and a few romantic visiting botanists had termed them “cathedrals.”
She would claim this cathedral as her own and would invite every last man to join her.
She licked her lips in anticipation. She was already wet. Her upper thighs tingled. Like peppermint. It was really nice.
Humanity needed a management tool. And she would give it to them.
With love.
You had the brilliant idea this morning, at dawn.
You rose to a noise from outside, a trashcan overturned by wind, spilling fetid food for early-rising dogs. In this moment—sleep a mucous haze over your dilated eyes, mouth tasting soured bacteria, hearing the clang of metal against concrete—the idea landed.
It was genius, the answer to every question you’d ever given up answering, the unifying concept that could surely explain God to the world in a way that we could all agree on.
This idea was too big. Maybe it’s the sheer processing speed required. Synaptic overload. That Ambien you took. Your brain couldn’t hold it. The further your eyes opened, the more this idea slipped away like the organs of a suddenly skinned man.
Then you were Awake—not in some grand spiritual sense, but the corporeal—and the brilliant idea was gone.
All that remains is this phantom feeling that you knew… something.
Tears come. They are extra-salty; you drank too much wine last night.
Skipping your morning habits, you shelve your shower and your half-conscious masturbation and instead sit at the kitchen table with a pad of paper, scrawling words like “stardust” and “sub-cellular.” But they’re never more than words.
You head outside; start knocking over trashcans. Perhaps there’s an auditory trigger? Each can produces a clang before fast-food bags tumble free and grease their way into the gutter.
Nothing.
The world needs this idea.
You drink, smoke, meditate.
You create Goldbergian devices—alarm clock/sewing machines that drive needles into the soft pads of your feet, causing you to wake suddenly.
Months pass. You can’t focus. Your job’s terminated.
Despondent, walking home, you barely notice the semi-truck running a red as you shuffle through the crosswalk.
The horn sounds. Headlights fill your vision.
The brilliant idea is there, glowing, closer, closer, almost within your grasp.
Then it hits you.
Minna knew that her fits were a blessing. She’d never stated this fact to anyone. Not her husband Jakob, nor her son Garin. Not even to her mother, who Minna knew viewed the writhing black-outs as a curse which might one day steal away her precious child.
At the funeral Minna had wondered if her mother might still be alive, had she understood the nature of the attacks. Perhaps the heart-crushing stress of caring for a tormented child would have been alleviated if Minna could have explained the glorious glow that she felt during the fits.
Her mother could only have seen the child, and later the young woman, in a state of extreme duress. Eyes rolled white. Teeth gnashing. Back arched in a contorted “U” that threatened to snap the spine and spread open her stretched-thin belly. She could never have known the sights, the glow, that Minna had experienced as her body bore its own assault.
Inside that state Minna had seen new worlds. Alien languages formed by numbers and angles and whorls, and images of a galaxy in which forces shifted gloriously. Minna had seen these images from so great a distance that all the chaos and movement had been reduced to simple truths, which she later learned to speak about and document to great effect at the Technical University in Darmstadt.
As a child she called these things she’d witnessed The Beauties. As a woman she relented and referred to them under the name which her male counter-parts at University used: Physics.
But in her heart, still: The Beauties.
And the things she witnessed during her fits served her well, or as well as they could. Her brilliance with the language of movement allowed her occasion to matriculate and complete a doctorate at Technical. Although she was forbidden from filling an academic post, the sheer value of her knowledge permitted her to work—always unofficially—alongside minds like Hemh
oltz and Muller. She aided Wuerzberg with his radar research at Telefunken.
She was afforded little to no wage for these efforts, but found the opportunity to test the ideas of Prandtl, or dissect the effects of flow velocity, too alluring.
It was her chance, in each of these studies, to speak the language of The Beauties outside of the blinding moments in which she’d envisioned them. It felt heretical to do anything else.
And now her talent with “physics” had brought her to Nordhausen in the Harz Mountains, as the primary member of an airborne weapons development group.
It was here that she’d had her most recent and terrible fit. Terrible because during her last attack the glow had abandoned her.
She’d seen nothing, knew nothing of the fit until it was over. And instead of coming to with an even more keen sense of how the world was, indeed, in exact order, she woke to the realization that something inside of her had broken.
She’d pleaded for her husband Jakob then, called out for him to lift her from the floor of her small house. Such was her agitation upon recovery—she had forgotten Jakob had perished three years before in France, when the war had not yet seemed real to her. She’d called out for her son Garin, too, who had been away working as a guard at the Maidanek camp for as long as Jakob had been dead and buried.
Minna was finally found there on the floor, soaked through from exertion, by a Nordhausen guard on night duty.
She’d asked to be shipped out of the mountains, to see a doctor better than Kuntzler, who she knew was fiercely held in the grip of alcohol at most hours, but due to “security reasons” she was never allowed to leave the factory grounds.
She knew too much about the weapons program to risk transporting. Kuntzler assigned her to two days of bed rest and left it at that.
Since the day of that empty, thieving fit she had been unable to move her left arm, and the left side of her face was nearly dead to the touch, its eyelid drooping so heavily it obscured and twisted her depth perception.
We Live Inside You Page 10