The Drowned Life

by Jeffrey Ford

  Over a long lunch, we made our introductions. Mr. Susan asked us to call him Andre. He was a somewhat older fellow with a sprinkling of gray in his mustache and sideburns, very fit and with an easy smile. When asked what he did, he let us know that he was in the chemical business.

  The short, squat Mr. Mutandis, a man of many chins and a high red color in his face, asked us to call him Mr. Brown. It was an odd request, but the three of us agreed. Once he saw that we would honor his wish, he told us that he had been the proprietor of an orphanage, which had recently burned to the ground. I asked if anyone had been injured. He shook his head. “No,” he said, “but many died.” With this pronouncement, he checked the time on his pocket watch, which he kept on a chain in his vest pocket.

  Mrs. Gash, or Lenice, as she let it be known was her first name, shook her head and said, “That’s terrible.” Mr. Susan winced, a candied carrot half in his mouth, half out, like a short orange cigar. “You know,” said Brown, “when our metal man lifted the top off that mutton dish and the steam rose up, the aroma was near identical to that emanating from the ruins. Ghastly.” With this pronouncement, he shoved a piece of meat into his mouth and began chewing.

  Lenice Gash had very fine features, dark eyes, and short, light brown hair. My first impression of her was that she was as serious a woman as she was fetching. She told us that her husband was a man of God, and that she was a simple homemaker with a young child. “I miss my baby,” she said to us, “but I’m delighted to be here. I feel better already.” I told her we wouldn’t be too long away from home. “That’s right,” said Andre. “Think of it as a vacation.”

  When it came my turn to divulge, I told them very little, and what I did give up was a sheer lie. “I’m a circus performer,” I said. “I ride horses, standing on my head.” Even Brown seemed impressed. “Please, call me Denni,” I added.

  After we’d finished with the food, we pushed our plates back and continued the conversation. We discussed our journey in the submarine, the natural beauty of the House of Four Seasons, and then in whispers we had our way with Ima.

  “She seems very sweet,” said Lenice, “if you’re on the right side of her.”

  “And very gruff if you’re on the left,” said Brown.

  Andre took a long toke of his cigar, nodded slowly, and, staring into the trees, said, “Oh, yes, she, he, whichever you prefer, is some grim business indeed.”

  “Whoever put the metal man together did a better job,” said Brown.

  “But perhaps she can cure us,” I said.

  “Why did you say she?” asked Lenice.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  Of a dark, chilled afternoon, we stood at the bar to the left side of the path on the way to Lookout Hill. Mrs. Gash served as bartender. Andre had a whiskey neat, and Lenice and I sipped some dark red wine, slightly sweet and spiced perhaps with nutmeg and cinnamon. Looking back toward the forest, I saw a silver fox slip in among the trees and tried to point it out to the others but was too late.

  “I smell snow,” said Andre, resting his drink and turning up the collar of his long coat.

  “I’ve not been able to get warm since autumn arrived,” said Lenice. “I sleep with three sweaters on and two comforters. Do you think snow is possible here?”

  “I smell a conspiracy,” I said. “Do you notice how Brown rarely joins us now but for meals? On my way to the big pond yesterday, I saw him walking with Ima and he had his arm around him.”

  “I’ll tell you,” said Lenice, “from the very instant I saw the first yellow leaves begin to drop in the forest, I’ve experienced a growing sense of something….”

  “Doom?” asked Andre.

  “Not doom,” she said, shaking her head. “Definitely gloom, though. As though the charm of the House in spring and summer were a mere trick; a ruse or trap. I miss my child.”

  “Boy or girl?” I asked.

  She was about to answer, but then she stopped and stared into the sky. I looked up, expecting to see the old turkey buzzard circling, but it was an empty gray expanse. The wind blew fiercely and threatened to steal our hats.

  “Yes, I’m ready to return to the city,” said Andre.

  “Are we cursed and don’t yet know it?” asked Lenice. “Is that what this is about?” There were tears in her eyes.

  I put my arm around her and she turned and kissed me full on the mouth. We stayed pressed together for a very long time. When we broke apart, Andre lifted his glass and said, “To winter and Mr. Gash.”

  We were there, by the bar, drinking in silence, when the snow began to fall.

  My bed has a canopy and the spring rains thrum upon it and run off all sides, creating a shimmering veil through which I view the day. The rain is strange here—wet yet unable to soak fabric. It splashes against my palm but dries immediately. Across a short stretch of wild grass (for my bed is positioned in a meadow) sit a desk, a chair, and, next to them, a dresser. There’s a mirror atop the dresser in which I see the outline of my reflection made liquid by the rain as I sit, propped upon the pillows, writing this letter to you. In the bottom drawer of that bureau, a field mouse has taken up residence in a nest of dried grass and leaves.

  There’s no toilet to speak of here, but a short dash to a copse of trees will bring me to a rather crude hole dug into the earth and a little pine stump, upon which I can prop myself. The trees that aren’t pines offer nice broad leaves, perfectly soft to the touch. If I were to quit my bed and travel in the other direction up over a small hill and then down, I’d come to a tall hedge, one part of which opens like a door and has a lock. The meadow that is my room is wide, and yesterday, I traveled back away from the bed and discovered a small waterfall with a pool beneath it with goldfish and lily pads. In the House of Four Seasons, everything outside is inside, and as old Ima, the hermaphrodite therapist—split straight down the middle so that one side is male and the other female—said upon our arrival, “May the therapeutic nature of this house drive those dark things within you…out.”

  The air was dense, weighted down by heat and high humidity. Even the butterflies and dragonflies by the pond had lost their frenetic flutter and moved as if swimming through water instead of flying in air. All of us, including Lenice, had stripped down to our underclothes and left our things scattered among the flowers in the meadow. Spencer arrived with glasses of lemonade on his silver cart.

  “I’m going in,” said Brown. He stood, removed his shirt to reveal his voluminous lard, and began stepping backward away from the pond. Then he yelled something incomprehensible and took off running, jiggling to beat the band. When he reached the water’s edge, he leaped, made a meager arc, and came down flat on his stomach, water splashing outward in every direction. We laughed at his performance, but when the water was calm again, we noticed he had sunk out of sight. A small disturbance of bubbles broke the surface.

  “For a man who oversaw the charring of orphans, he certainly has some fun left in him,” said Andre.

  “I find him quite handsome,” said Lenice.

  My attention was stolen by the recognition of an army of ants, marching single file through the grass beside my left arm. I called to the others to come and see. They knelt down beside me and put their faces close to the ground.

  “The detail of the House is staggering,” I said.

  “Down to the last ant,” said Lenice.

  Andre stood up and looked toward the pond. “Hasn’t Brown been down for quite a long time?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. But instead of diving in to find him, I ran to where he had set down the book Ima had given him. Opening it, I skimmed the pages. Every single one was perfectly blank.

  Brown came up with a splutter and a splash of water, and I dropped the book. Before turning around, I heard Lenice ask him how the water was. “You must come in,” said Brown. “I feel as if I’ve been reborn.”

  Mrs. Gash rose, walked slowly to the water’s edge, and stepped into the pond. With slow grace, she l
owered herself into the cool liquid, sighing in her descent.

  “That does it,” said Andre, “I’m going in.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  At one point in the long hot day, while we were splashing one another and laughing, Ima appeared on the shore. He had his arms folded across his chest, the mustached half of his face turned to us and set in a grimace.

  We boarded a stout, crystal submarine at the wharf in the city. I took one last quick glimpse of the spires and smokestacks, the soot falling like black snow, the pale faces of people trudging off to work past crumbling brick facades, and then the captain, a genial man with a beard and a peaked cap, sporting a blue uniform with gold epaulets, like someone from a children’s adventure story, said, “All aboard.” And we four passengers climbed down a crystal ladder into the clear belly of the ship as if we were stepping down instead into the dark brown water of the river itself. Once we were seated in our crystal chairs, more comfortable then you would imagine, the captain locked the crystal lid through which we had entered and took his own seat at the front of the ship, the crystal board of crystal levers and buttons spread out, nearly invisible, before him.

  The propellers turned with a whisper-whirr and we descended, not so much diving as slowly falling, like in a dream, away from the dim sun and into darkness. The captain lit a single taper by which to see and called over his shoulder, “Make yourselves comfortable, my friends. I’ll try to point out the sea life when we encounter it.” We four passengers had been instructed not to speak while on this journey, but were assured there would be plenty of time to get to know one another once we had arrived at our destination. Before long, the brown harbor water gave way to a clear blackness, like a night sky. The sound of the propellers lulled me, and I half-dozed, studying the backs of the two men in front of me and the profile of the young woman to my left. Three men and one woman, I noted to myself, and then fell into a brief sleep.

  When I woke, it was to the sound of the captain’s voice. “To the starboard side, my friends. A perfect specimen of a merillibus dachinasis.” I looked, and there, swimming by, was a huge, brutish creature, whose body was clear as a jellyfish, like the submarine, but whose eyes and inner organs glowed brightly with a blue phosphorescence. Then I turned all around to see more glowing fish dotting the blackness like stars and planets everywhere and away into the distance.

  It was Andre who found the skeleton buried in the sand of the dune where he often went to meditate in the mornings. It was dressed in a heavy coat and still wore galoshes. Its hat was attached by a chin strap and there must have been scalp upon that skull for many strands of long blond hair hung down below the brim. The day he brought us to see it a thick fog hung about the House.

  When we notified Ima about Andre’s find, he/she spoke from both sides of her/his mouth at once. The manly side said, “Eddings, Eddings, poor Eddings,” and its feminine counterpart said, “I have no idea who it might be.”

  Brown stepped forward and said, “All right then, who’s Eddings?”

  Our therapist then turned his male side to us and, smoothing his mustache once and adjusting his monocle, said, “She was a spicy little dish.” Then he smiled. “I thought she’d returned on the submarine,” said Ima. “Some just can’t bring themselves to leave.” We gaped in awe at the impertinence of our keeper and had a few choice words for her rougher side when he left. Before long, Spencer came chugging along with the silver serving cart on wheels. It was a sin watching him try to get it up the dune, but eventually he managed and took the fetid remains away on the very cart that would that night ferry our mutton to the forest.

  Birds flew overhead. Brown and I sat on a high-backed love seat in the middle of a field of yellow Johnny Bells, watching Andre fly a kite Ima had given him for admitting that his expertise in chemistry had to do with making explosives. The late spring breeze was cool and refreshing.

  “Maybe a dream,” whispered Brown.

  “Huh?” I said.

  “No, something about the kite, its image of an octopus, its snapping tail, reminds me of one of the children from the orphanage.”

  “They had such a kite?” I asked.

  “No, this little boy, he had eight arms. Or eight half-arms, each with one fingernail on the end. He was a darling, but his parents, young as they were, would not keep him.”

  “What kind of orphanage was this?” I asked.

  “Very, very cleanly. Fresh straw every other day, clean drinking water, cabbage soup with a gob of fat in it every third day and a slice of hard bread. Yeah, that boy was a whiz at putting together a puzzle.”

  One hot night right on the cusp between summer and autumn, I lay in bed and listened to the crickets sing and watched a lone firefly signaling to itself in my dresser mirror. There was moonlight but no moon. I’d just woken from a dream of the circus, watching a young woman fall to her death from the trapeze. The fact that I’d lied about being able to perform stunts on the back of a moving horse made me somehow culpable for her accident, and I was being pursued by clowns. I shook my head and got up. To drive off the heat, I went back to the pond with the waterfall in my own room and slipped out of my nightclothes and into the water.

  Eventually I moved beneath the falling sheet of coolness, letting it splash upon my head in order to drive the bad dream away. When I opened my eyes, I found I had passed through the curtain of water and into a little tunnel that lay behind it. I saw the passage was not very long, for there was moonlight shining upon another cascade of water falling at the other end. I swam the secret passage, and once I reached the other end, moved through the refreshing veil only to find myself in a pool nearly identical to the one in my own “room.”

  Although I was naked, I crept out of the pool and looked around to see where I’d gotten to. There was a meadow, well lit in the moonlight, and off at not too far a distance, I saw a canopied bed. I crept closer, realizing I had infiltrated someone else’s “room.” I determined to, without waking the bed’s occupant, simply take a peek and see who my next-door neighbor was. I inched toward the bed from behind the headboard.

  It was everything I could do not to gasp upon finding Lenice, naked, in bed with another. Just as I hovered over them, Spencer’s eyes lit up. I knew he knew I was there. His left hand’s three articulated digits, which rested upon Mrs. Gash’s creamy white breast, gave the slightest squeeze, and his lightbulb eye closest to me blinked on and off with a conspiratorial wink. As I backed away, a tiny blue cloud issued from the hole in the back of his head. I ran so fast through the moonlight beneath no moon, it was as if I were perched atop a charging horse.

  I was up to my waist in snow, every step forward a great effort, and the ferocity of the blizzard nearly blinded me. I held the bomb in one gloved hand and Lenice by the other as we made our way through the forest toward the limit of the House of Four Seasons. It was farther than ever I could have imagined. I stopped and looked up, shielding my eyes, but could not find Andre anywhere around me. I called his name but could make out no reply above the shrieking of the wind. My arms and legs and feet and hands were numb, I could feel frostbite sinking its fangs into my face. Then I realized I no longer had Lenice by the hand. I turned around and saw nothing but white. The fact that I was trapped within an artificial world quickly filling with snow, in a cave at the very bottom of the ocean, made me know the absolute truth of loneliness. I wanted to stop and give in and be found, as Ima said, “in the spring when all this melts,” just before she slammed shut and locked the door to her concrete bunker of an office. Instead I pushed forward, hoping to find the boundary so I might blow a hole in it and escape.

  The submarine rose into a cave beneath the sea and finally surfaced in a subterranean grotto of stalactites and stalagmites and a small land bridge leading to a rock wall containing a metal door. “All ashore,” said the captain. He opened the lid and climbed out to stand atop the crystal submarine and help us, one by one, step clear onto the narrow rock path. Once we were together in
the dripping cave, he led us to the door. Two short knocks, three long, a short, and a long followed by a quick tapping of the fingernails, and the metal door creaked open. We were met by the startling figure of Ima, hunched and wrinkled, dressed in a colorful, billowing dress, bearing a pattern of flowers and snowflakes, and split down the middle with a line you could trace with your fingernail. On one side of her head, the gray hair hung long and was gathered in a pigtail with a piece of pink silk ribbon; on the other side his hair was trimmed short. One side a mustache, the other none. The male eye held a monocle. On the female side of the smile, gold teeth flashed. One arm was muscular and its opposite was delicate, tipped with red-painted cuticles.

  “Very good, captain. They’re mine now,” Ima said, and the voice was coarse. “Come in,” she then said, in a sweet grandmotherly tone, and turned that side to us as she pushed back the door and, leaving the captain behind, we entered a small, dim room made of concrete. Beneath one bare electric bulb that emitted a kind of muddy light, there were four chairs set up in a row, facing a single chair. We took the seats that were obviously ours and Ima took the other.

  In the next few minutes, Ima told us in her sweetest voice all about the House of Four Seasons, and then assigned us each a daily task. Mine was to write myself a letter each morning of my stay at the house. I was told to relate to you all that went on the previous day. The young woman was to pray for an hour each morning. One of the other gentlemen was to meditate, and the other, the short, heavyset one, was handed a fat book titled The Gilead and told to read fifty pages of it each day before breakfast. “Back in your usual lives,” said Ima, “your thoughts are scattered, your souls are shattered. Here you must piece yourselves back together. The cycle of the seasons will be the thread that holds the shards. From it, from them, you will create yourselves anew.”