Entropy in Bloom

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  It would be a shame to waste her climbing lessons. And she’d been dreaming of these trees, somehow still standing proud for another thousand years, after all the little piggies had destroyed each other. In her dreams the skyscrapers fell and the redwoods swayed in the moonlight, returned to their post atop the world.

  She responded to Myco—Please check Assemblage regularly. Location of samples to follow.

  After sending was confirmed she crawled into bed with Henry and spooned him, despite a few sleepy grumbles. She pulled the blankets tight around the two of them and kissed the back of his head.

  I’ll protect us, Henry, from these humans.

  ALL OF HER GEAR was black, from boots to ropes to pack. Even her Treeboat, which would allow her to sleep in the tree hammock-style if needed, was damn near invisible at night.

  Dusk had passed now, and her anger was shifting to nerves as she tried to recall climbing techniques. She moved quietly. The yielding forest floor, rich with decomposed needles and ferns, absorbed much of her noise. Where moonlight broke through the thickening canopy it revealed large clusters of redwood sorrel, the heart-shaped leaves still glowing emerald green in the slight illumination. It was beautiful.

  I will save this place.

  She picked a full moon night, thinking it would give her better natural light once she cleared the canopy and reached the crown. Until that point she’d have to stay to the shadows.

  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 microfiber 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 businessmen 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.

  Swimming in the House of the Sea

  The retard is finally asleep, which is great because now I can head down to the hotel swimming pool and relax. I can finish off this gut punch of a day without thinking about the blown engine on my sedan, or the lung-sucking heat tomorrow’s sunshine will bring.

  It’s time to get this nasty, reeking desert sweat off my skin and just float in the clear, chlorinated water. I picture myself, arms and legs extended wide, a big floating X in Hawaiian print shorts. I’ll close my eyes and hover there in the safe, sanitized water, floating static and alone while the world rotates around me. I can let the cool water roll into my ears and amplify the sound of my heart.

  I grab my plastic key card with its generic sun-and-palm-tree logo and the words “Casa Del Mar Resort Hotel—Bakersfield, CA” across the top. I slip it into my swim shorts pocket and seal the Velcro shut. I don’t grab one of our ratty, dishrag-thick room towels; there should be some plushies down by the pool.

  I take a quick look at my brother, Dude, who is seventeen and still wearing pajamas with Looney Tunes on them. His too-far-apart eyes are twitching beneath his eyelids, which I read as deep sleep. The sound of his breathing fills up the room, eclipsing even the hum of the air conditioner. His thick snore is the final nail in the coffin of my evening’s eligible bachelorhood. Even if I could find a girl to hook up with in this festering armpit of a city, I can’t bring her back to the Snore Suite at Casa Del Mar.

  I close the hotel door behind me, clipping off the sound of my retarded brother’s stertoric breathing. I hate the sound of Dude’s breathing, when he’s asleep. It’s like he has to fight the air to pull it in, all sniffles and snoring and open-mouth rasping. Or, as my dad once said to my mom, before their divorce two years ago, “Maybe Dude can’t breathe right because God wants him to stop.”

  “Stop what?” asked Mom.

  “Stop breathing, living, all of it. Maybe God’s hoping he’ll give up and die.”

  Dad was a charmer back then, right before the marriage fell from its hippie foundation. Mom decided that Jesus was her new savior, and told Dad that he had to stop making acid in the tub. Dad got turned off by Mom’s newfound fire-and-brimstone, her nightly Bible readings, her orthodox self-improvement. He shuttled his drug engineering to placate her and secretly reinvested his energies in the pursuit of free love.

  Free love turned out
to be an ex-Hell’s Angels harem member who claimed to have been in a gang-bang with Sonny Barger and Bob Dylan back in ‘65. Her name was Jasmine and she still lived in LaLaLand, Dad’s preferred real estate.

  Jasmine lets my dad drink Jack Daniels from her cooch.

  Dads will tell you this kind of shit after a divorce. They think it affirms a newfound buddyhood. The illicit info just bugs me out, but I don’t tell him. He seems happy, to a degree. The older I get, the harder it is for me to question the guy’s decisions. He’s just some older version of me that got caught up in responsibility barbwire.

  My mom’s Christ fixation popped the wheel on their party bus. Dad scoped out the life ahead of him, realized living with a bum, a mongoloid, and a Bible-thumper wasn’t going to cut it, and bailed. His decision to run makes sense to me, but it kills the odds on us ever being buddy-buddy.

  I only have to see him once a month anyway, when I pick up Dude in LA and bring him back to my mom’s place in Modesto.

  I run the errand for Mom, Dude’s custody deal stays smooth, and I get free rent at my mom’s townhouse in lovely northern Cali.

  The free rent soothes the sting of being a twenty-one-year-old college drop-out, and it opens up a lot of bonus cash for things like clothes, weed, and new tattoos. So, to supplement my video store-clerk income, I make this long, hot drive once a month.

  It’s retard trafficking, and I dig the kickbacks.

  Casa Del Mar is a shade short of seedy. The wallpaper varies, floor-to-floor, and there’s an odor hovering in the air, with the particles of carpet sanitizer. It’s the smell of trapped people, desperation; it’s the smell of nervous drug deals, inescapable affairs, lonely masturbation, junk-food binges that spray the air with fructose and crumbs. It’s the smell that’s coming from me, the stale sweat that a bad auto-breakdown in the middle of the desert has soaked me with.

  I can’t wait to get clean; there’s just one more set of stairs till I hit the lobby floor and the swimming pool. The elevator is, of course, stationary for the time being, although a lovely computer-printed sign did apologize for the inconvenience.