by Jeffrey Ford
“What do you think of that?” he asked.
“How?” I asked.
“Well, the guy on the show said he thought it had developed this ability through evolution over millions of years as a defense mechanism.”
“Oh,” I said. I finished my pudding and went to bed.
This is a very vivid recollection for me, and in later years I wondered what the hell this radio show was he’d been listening to. I remember that one other time when he came home and I waited up for him, he told me about a show he’d listened to where they spoke about the fact that Catholicism was actually based on a mushroom cult and that all the stuff in the Bible was a secret code for information and stories about sacred mushrooms.
UNDER THE BOTTOM OF THE LAKE
Under the bottom of the lake, in a grotto guarded by stalactites and stalagmites, like the half-open maw of a stone dragon, on a pedestal that’s a tall white mushroom, there sits a bubble of rose-colored glass, within which swirls a secret story, told once but never heard. It’s been there for so long that no one remembers its existence. I’m not even sure how I’m able to tell it, but then I’m not really remembering it, I’m making it up as I go, which allows me to know it all in the moment that it comes to me. Perhaps in the grotto of my imagination there was a glass bubble, containing a secret story, the story of, but not in, the bubble of rose-colored glass, and I have inadvertently knocked it over while groping blindly through my thoughts and now that story, the story about the grotto under the lake, has been released into my mind and I’m hearing the words of the tale now as I tell them. This tale can tell me nothing about the story contained within the rose-colored bubble but only about its existence and about the grotto that was like a dragon’s mouth. Still, there are methods to get at the story in that bubble under the lake. What’s called for is someone to discover it. For this, we’ll need a character.
Here’s one, easy as could be—she comes toward me out of the shadows of my mind, a young lady, perhaps fifteen, maybe sixteen. One moment, please…. Okay, her name is Emily, and she has long red hair, green eyes, and freckles across her nose. She’s dressed in denim overalls, and beneath them she wears a T-shirt, yellow, with the word “AXIMESH” in black block letters, showing just above the top of the overall bib. On her feet, she wears cheap, coral-colored beach sandals. She’s got long eyelashes, a hemp necklace with a yin/ yang pendant, and, in her back left pocket, for good luck, there’s a piece of red paper folded into the figure of an angel. When you pull on its feet the wings flap and the ring that’s the halo above its head separates at the front and turns into two curved horns, sticking up.
I know she’s walking along the sidewalk in her hometown, moving her lips, silently talking to herself, staring at the cracked concrete beneath her feet, but I don’t yet know where she’s going. Wait…she lifts her head. She hears someone calling her name. “Emily!” She turns around and sees a boy of about her age approaching from behind. I see him, and the instant I do, the dim nature of my imagination pushes back in a circle with these two as its center to reveal a perfect blue day in a small town. I see and hear them talking within that portal of brightness, and he’s asking her where she’s going. “To the cemetery,” she tells him. He nods and obviously decides to follow her.
The boy has large ears, that much is clear. His hair is cut close to his scalp, and his face could either be construed as dim-witted or handsome, depending on how you construe. I’m no judge of looks. He’s got a name that begins with a “V,” but I’m not sure what it is. It’s sort of exotic, but since I can’t think of it, I’ll call him Vincent just to have something to call him. I know he knows the girl and she knows him. They more than likely go to school together. I think they’re in the same math class. She’s good at math. He’s not very good at it, and the teacher, an old woman the students call the Turkey, for the wattle beneath her chin, once gave him a zero for the day as a result of, as she said, his “gross ignorance.” Emily felt bad for him, but she laughed along with the other students at the insult.
Emily’s grandmother has recently passed away and Emily is telling Vincent that she’s going to the cemetery to pay her respects. Vincent’s wearing the same expression as when the Turkey calls him to the blackboard and sticks a piece of chalk in his hand and tells him to solve a fantastical division problem—one number as long as his arm going into another number as long as his leg. He wants to do something in both instances, say the right thing, do what’s appropriate, but he’s not sure how to so he just keeps walking beside Emily. When they stop at a corner to check both ways before crossing, he reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pack of licorice gum and asks if she wants some. She says okay and takes a piece.
As they cross the street, I start to lose sight of them, so I lean in close to the circle of light in which they are walking, and…aghhh, shit, I’ve knocked it onto the floor of my imagination and it’s cracked. Their story is leaking out and I’m missing some and knowing the rest too fast. The light that had been in the bubble of their scene slowly dissolves. Hold on while I try to find them again. I can’t see at all, but I know there are cars going by on the street every now and then. I hear a dog bark and someone’s using a lawn mower. I smell crumb cake. There’s just a flash of light and in that moment I see the sun in the leaves of an oak tree. But now, darkness…
Okay, they’re now in the cemetery. They’re walking among the gravestones and Vincent is telling Emily about how his father, whom he calls his “old man,” is getting a divorce from his mother because he drinks too much. “My mom says he’s screwed up because his old man was addicted to drugs from the war and was crazy, beating him and shit.” Emily stops walking and looks at him. He’s surprised that she’s stopped and wonders why she did. “That’s terrible,” she says. “Which part?” he asks. “The whole thing,” she says. He says, “Yeah,” and then stares at a gravestone with the last name CAKE inscribed on it and eventually, after a long time, a tear appears in the corner of his right eye. Emily steps close to him and puts her arm around him. Vincent blows a big black bubble with his licorice gum, and when it pops it reveals this scene that had been swirling inside of it.
Emily kneels on the ground in front of a headstone with the name JUDITH SOCHELL carved into it. This is the gravesite of her grandmother on her mother’s side. Vincent stands a few feet behind her and chews his gum. He’s watching the trees blowing in the wind at the edge of the woods in the distance and wondering how long it will be before his parents discover he hasn’t given them his most recent report card. Every now and then he turns back to see if Emily is crying. She isn’t; instead she’s remembering her grandmother in her final days—wasted, wrinkled beyond recognition, and always shivering and shaking as if naked in a blizzard. The old woman had lost her mind years earlier, had grown so feeble of intellect that at the time she died she could speak only one of four possible words: “eat,” “no,” “go,” and “more.” And the one she’d chosen for her final utterance, “more,” was whispered to Emily as she stood holding her grandmother’s bony hand. At the moment of the old woman’s death, the girl remembered a story Grandma Judith had told her about a man who’d exchanged his soul with that of a mythical bird—a strange story that made no sense but was full of tragedy and sorrow—but Emily doesn’t think about that now. As bad as she’d gotten, though, and up until the very end, Grandma Judith was still capable, even with wildly shaking hands, to form the origami animals and figures she’d made from the time she was a little girl. During the wake, when she did remember the story, Emily put a specimen from her paper menagerie in the coffin with her grandmother, a piece of light blue paper folded into an amazing bird with wings that moved when its feet were pulled, a head that bobbed up and down, and a beak that opened and closed as if saying, “What a world. What a world.”
Vincent’s getting bored. “Come on, Em,” he says.
“Shut up,” she tells him.
He walks over to and looks more closely at an old, jagged-topped
tree stump jutting four feet out of the ground. Only when he’s upon it does he realize that the stump is made of stone and that there’s a name chiseled into it. The moss that lightly covers it makes it look like the real thing, but in fact it’s a marble grave marker.
It’s later in the day now and Emily and Vincent are approaching a ruined mausoleum at the edge of the cemetery near the boundary of the woods. The columns of the marble structure, looking like the remains of a miniature savings and loan, are statues of women in togas, and their arms and faces, some with missing noses, are covered with green mold. Branching cracks run throughout the walls of the tomb, and pieces of it have crumbled off and fallen in chunks on the ground. The name above the portico where there’s been a mishap of stone says AKE, but years ago it read CAKE. Don’t ask me how, but I know this is the final resting place of Cassius Cake, a prominent member of the Cake family that still resides in Emily’s town.
My imagination tells me that Cake made his fortune manufacturing medicines of an opiate nature, derived from giant mushrooms, to be used on battlefields, and that on his estate, which lay by the lake, on the other side of the woods, the boundary of which his mausoleum now abuts, there was an aviary in which it was rumored that he kept a single exotic bird, so beautiful the sight of it could make you weep. The iron gate to his death chamber has long since been rusted and chewed by Time, its lock broken.
Vincent takes Emily by the hand and they enter that dim place of long-ago death turned to stone. The only light inside is offered by the setting sun seeping in through the diffuse colors of a stained-glass window at the back—a scene of a brightly feathered bird, rising from sharp-tipped, swirling flames. Once inside, the boy and girl turn to face each other and kiss, and it breaks across my consciousness like a wave that this is not their first kiss. I see them in another place, a small cedar attic in one of their homes, kissing. So they know each other better than I thought. At this very moment, she’s thinking of her grandmother’s skull under the ground, and he’s thinking of his father’s skull ablaze with liquid fire, no bird rising from it. He’s about to move his hand down her back to rest it upon her rear end, but she turns away and points to a perfectly round hole in the floor, directly between the sarcophagi of Cassius Cake and his wife, Letti.
Emily gets down on all fours and peers into the hole in the marble floor. “There’re steps,” she says to Vincent.
“Okay,” he says.
Then she stands up and pulls a pack of cigarettes out of the bib pocket of her overalls. She takes a cigarette from the pack and offers one to Vincent. He says no because he’s a runner. He runs the one hundred for the school track team. He’s not the smartest kid in school, but he might be the fastest, save for Jordan Squires, who’s the best at everything in school, even kissing, as Emily well knows.
“Let’s go down there,” she says, pointing to the hole in the floor, with the two fingers holding her cigarette.
“Why?” asks Vincent.
She doesn’t have a ready answer, so I whisper to her just to coax things along, “There might be treasure.” She ignores my suggestion and instead says, “I want to see what’s there.”
Vincent smells danger, but the scent of the smoke from the cigarette confuses the acrid aroma for him and he thinks he smells the possible deepening of his bond with Emily. In a way he’s right, because Emily’s testing him, seeing if he’ll follow her anywhere, even underground in a cemetery. They descend into the dark through the circle of nothing that’s the hole in the floor. At the bottom of the steps, they find a passageway, and the rock walls glow with phosphorescent lichen. They…
I’ve lost them again, and instead I have a very strong vision of a soldier lying wounded on a battlefield, being administered, by a medic, a small cup, like a shot glass, of orange liquid. Now I see the soldier’s right leg is half of its former self, the bottom half blasted off and blood and bone showing through a shredded pant leg. The medic’s shaking with fear and is barely able to get the medicine into his charge without spilling it. I see the man’s face for an instant beneath his helmet with the red cross emblazoned on it and notice two weeks’ growth of beard and dark circles around the eyes, but that’s all I see, because just then a bullet pierces his back, rips through muscle and bone, and deflates his heart. He falls backward, out of sight. Shells burst overhead. Machine-gun fire and the screams of the dying echo across the misty marchland. The wounded soldier who’s just been given the dose of Cake’s Orixadoll thinks he’s dying, but the feeling he has is just the hallucinogen kicking in. A feeling of warmth descends upon him. He no longer hears the sounds of war, but instead can make out, faintly, the voice of Judy Garland singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” When she sings the part about lemon drops melting, he realizes he feels no pain, and his vision sharpens into a circular field, a tunnel. He’s flying through an underground tunnel, the walls of which are lit by phosphorescent lichen. Up ahead he sees a girl and boy in his path, and he blows around them, through them, lifting their hair and stealing their breath for a moment.
“What was that?” asks Emily.
“Underground winds blowing up from hell,” says Vincent like he knows what he’s talking about. Emily considers what he says, but then remembers that he’s good only at kissing and running. They move on, and I’m stuck here watching them walk through a tunnel. I’m going to have a smoke while I wait for something to happen.
With my last drag I blow a smoke ring and inside it I see Vincent stop walking and say to Emily, “Let’s go back.”
“No,” she says, “this tunnel leads somewhere. Somebody made this tunnel. Don’t you want to know what’s at the end?” At this point I’m pretty sure they’ve traveled under the woods and are down under the bottom of the lake.
Oh my God, a realization just exploded in my mind like one of those shells in the scene with the dying soldier. I get it now. I see Vincent’s old man at the age Vincent is now, creeping through the woods at night. He comes clear of the trees and moves across a vast lawn in the moonlight. Ahead of him is a huge cage in the shape of a beehive where silvery beams from above glint off the thin brass bars. He approaches the cage, and inside he sees a beautiful bird with trailing plumage sitting on a perch. It has three long thin feathers, ending in pink pom-poms arcing off its forehead, and its beak is like that of a peacock. Even in the dark its colors are resilient—turquoise, orange, magenta, and a light, light blue like storybook oceans. But Vincent’s old man as a young man has a bow slung over his shoulder and he’s holding an arrow. He sets the arrow and aims through the bars. He releases, the arrow pierces the chest of the bird, it screams once, a shrill cry like the sound of a newborn baby, and then all its beautiful feathers burst into flame. Vincent’s old man turns and runs across the moonlit lawn, Cake wakes in his canopied bed and clutches his chest, Emily calls over her shoulder, “Look at this,” and points ahead to a grotto surrounded by stalactites and stalagmites; a dragon’s mouth inviting entry.
I’m so close now, but instead of following Emily and Vincent to the white mushroom and the rose-colored glass bubble, I’m in Cake’s bedroom, and he’s fallen onto the floor and is flopping around in pain, clutching his chest. His wife rolls over to his side of the bed, and says, “Cassius, dear, you’re making a racket. I was having a perfectly delightful dream.”
“Letti,” he croaks, “Letti, over in my dresser is a dose of Orixadoll. Get it. Hurry.”
“Oh, you’re in pain?” she says and smiles. Slowly she gets out of bed, slips on her slippers, and drapes her pink silk wrap around herself. Cake is still doing the landed bass, thumping the floor next to the bed, gurgling and grunting. Finally she returns. He reaches his hand up to her and into it she places, not the dose of his own medicine, but instead a tiny woman made of folded yellow paper. He holds it where he can see it. “Call her,” says Letti, who then goes back to bed. A half hour later, after she’s returned to her dream of a city with circular walls, he finally expires.
Back in the gro
tto there is an enormous white mushroom, perfectly formed, that serves as a pedestal for a rose-colored glass bubble, and Emily and Vincent approach it cautiously. This is something I hadn’t been aware of before, because I was seeing the scene under the bottom of the lake from a distance, but the white mushroom gives off a kind of perfume—a sweet, tantalizing scent, like the aroma of orchids, but more substantial, more delicious, so to speak. That fungal reek, I’m just realizing, not smelling it but “understanding” the aroma they are smelling, also carries a soporific effect and Emily’s long eyelashes are fluttering. Vincent yawns and forgets all about his anxiety due to being underground and in a mysterious grotto. Instead, he’s hungry and finds himself wanting to take a bite out of that big luscious white mushroom cap that’s grown as high as his chest. Emily’s more interested in the rose-colored bubble, and as she reaches for it, Vincent spits out his licorice gum, leans over, and sinks his teeth into the marshmallow meringue of the fungus.