Fungi

by Orrin Grey

  Finally, the following fall, a father and son came upon skeletal remains. When the county came out, sheriff deputies and forensics, they took snapshots, just in case there had been foul play. Mom insisted on viewing the pictures. The coroner was concerned that they might be too gruesome. A positive identification wasn’t dependent upon her recognising the faded and broken clothing — though the vest would have been evidence enough. She took the half-dozen photos closer to a window, away from the glare of the fluorescent lights, and, one by one, studied them. At one point, she exclaimed — I believe I got her meaning, although some specific words can’t be translated — “Look! There! A morel growing next to the foot.”

  We buried what was left of him in the National Bohemian Cemetery off of Peterson Road.

  The last wild mushroom I ate was in 1999. Mom sold the house, designated a teardown. The property it sat on was worth more than the wood and stone and seeping basement with its fungal matter. She went back to Czechoslovakia or, rather, the Czech Republic to live comfortably in a small house next to a forest where she hunts routinely, when she isn’t too busy playing games on the Internet. Mom is addicted to the computer. She e-mailed me a photo of a cluster of leopard mushrooms, no good to eat, but beautiful, nevertheless.

  I live alone in Chicago and shop at Whole Foods, where a package of buttons costs about $3.60. I throw them into scrambled eggs, not so much for flavour but for the aesthetics. There is no more taste to them than the Styrofoam carton they come in and the texture is disgraceful — limp, without body. There is no there there.

  Last Saturday, I was driving back into town after a conference and, off to the side of the congested Dan Ryan in that toxic netherland between the berm and guardrail, I spied a shaggy ink cap, distinct even from a distance, next to a discarded Starbuck’s cup. The traffic was bumper-to-bumper. It would have been nothing to stop, open the car door and jump out and pluck it. I was so tempted; I actually put the car into PARK. I couldn’t think of why I wanted it so much and the more I pondered, the more I lost my nerve. Maybe it was the tears, blinding me. It was hard to breath (breathe?).

  Since then, I haven’t been able to get mushrooms out of my head. I see them everywhere. Cropping up in dark cracks. I am haunted by them. They are in my blood, running through my veins, feeding off the detritus inside of me.

  OUR STORIES WILL LIVE FOREVER

  By Paul Tremblay

  Paul Tremblay is the author of the novels The Little Sleep, No Sleep Till Wonderland and Swallowing a Donkey’s Eye, and the short story collection In The Mean Time. His essays and short fiction have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, FiveChapters.com and Best American Fantasy 3. He is the co-editor of four anthologies including Creatures: Thirty Years of Monster Stories (with John Langan). Paul is currently on the board of directors for the Shirley Jackson Awards. He fears many things, including the return of his banished uvula.

  12C. THE INK SMUDGES on my hastily printed out ticket evince my personal demise, which may or may not be Icarian. Clearly, the fickle process of evolution has left our DNA an amino acid or two lacking that we would choose to pay for the following privilege: to accept the temporary cattle branding of regimented seat assignment letters and numbers, to guzzle three-dollar diet sodas with ingredients found to be lethal to rats, all the while hurtling through the stratosphere at five-hundred-plus miles an hour.

  All of which is to say: I hate flying.

  As the tin can with wings lumbers down the tarmac, I try to ignore the in-the-unlikely-event-of-an-emergency instructions the attendant mimes through with all of the enthusiasm of a proctologist. Instead, I focus my anxiety into a singularity of hate for two passengers: One is the loathsome man across the aisle who does not believe that the pre-flight instructions to power off and unplug his electronic device for thirty nanoseconds apply to him.

  The other passenger is in the seat to my right. He is a blond, short-haired young man, likely only in his early twenties (hints of post-pubescent acne ring his hairline), and he wears a brown sports coat with suede patches, as dark as commas, on the elbows. As one of the last passengers to board the airplane, his attire was what I first noticed. More noticeable was how he poured himself into the seat next to mine, followed by his awkwardly pommel-horsing into a fetal position with a near perfect face-in-hands landing. I assume he suffers from some form of illness. I do hope that it is of the self-inflicted kind rather than the result of an exotic contagion. I have yet to get a waft of alcohol emanating from his prone form, but, to be honest, I generally make it my business to avoid wafts when possible. Reaching above my seat, I adjust the oscillating blasts of circulated air accordingly.

  During takeoff, the noises of structural stress, my alarmingly increasing angle of elevation and the contemplation of the physics of flight send the frightened rabbit in my chest scurrying for safety within the tightening warren. I make silent and embarrassing offers to propitiate the new gods of flight.

  Oh, please, oh, please, oh, please ….

  With some secret state of collective horizontal finally achieved, the pilot turns off the “buckle seat belts” sign and I exhale for the first time in thirty-five thousand feet. My blond neighbour puts down the grey, flimsy, plastic seat-back tray and leans forward on it; his head burrows deep inside his crossed arms, as if the tray is a desktop and he is a recalcitrant student brazenly napping in front of the teacher. I resist saying, “Excuse me, sir, but I do not think that is a load-bearing tray. Not that I’m implying you’re a fathead.” I vow to use my imagined quip in an as-of-yet unwritten story, which elicits a coy smile and an air-leaking-out-of-a-tire giggle. My compactly prostrate neighbour has the final, checkmate laugh, however, as I spy a politely discrete vomit bag on the floor under his shaking tray. With nowhere to go, I sidle in place (Does this count as in-flight exercise? One must worry about being still too long at these altitudes, as clots will form in the legs, then douse their merry way through the circulatory system to the lungs, heart, or brain … ). If I could move into the next longitude away from his, I would.

  The captain’s garbled voice transmits through static-filled speakers, which does not reflect well on the aging electrical system of our intrepid airbus. Whether or not he’s employing a two-wave radio or tin cans and string, the captain gets his message across: a forewarning of turbulence ahead. His syllables and syntax lilt in a practiced manner, one likely honed and focus-grouped to project a Zen vibe quite the opposite of what one associates with impending fiery obliteration. I confess to my ignorance concerning the science of flight, as I do not understand why, if the pilot knows there will be turbulence, that it simply cannot be avoided, like a car (a traditionally proper mode of transport) avoiding a pothole. Well, the plane rumbles through that first pothole and the next. As we dip and dance our merry way through the bumpy air, I imagine the overhead compartments straining against their overweight carry-on cargo, never mind the accumulated weight of us chattel sitting politely in our seats. Each jarring disturbance vibrates in a chain reaction of terror through the plane’s floor, shaking and twisting my seat, tilting and torquing the entire cabin, and, please, there’s no chance of my looking out the portside window to see the impossibly thin wings vibrate like tuning forks. My hands ball into impotent fists and I begin to sweat, to be blunt, in places that I didn’t think I could sweat.

  I slowly lie back against the headrest — slowly, because I’m afraid a hasty, too-quick movement might be the tipping point in our catastrophic equilibrium and, yes, it’s utterly irrational and narcissistic to believe that my smallest movements and panicked thoughts would have any effect on the chaotic environment around me, however, under these circumstances, I do believe, which makes everything worse. My fear breaks down the very core of my inner self, id and ego with their knees comically clacking together. The next turbulent bump is particularly forceful and I’m convinced I can see into the future, that the next jolt will lift us from our seats, crack the cabin. The fault line will be in the section ahead of
me, the lights will go out, there’ll be a terrible bright light, then a sucking coldness and a plummeting, and I won’t even be able to scream before the blackness.

  I close my eyes and catalog the millions of people who have flown successfully. I focus on individuals and the secret lives of airline pilots and attendants for whom flying is a quaintly quotidian occurrence. I remind myself of the unblinking statistics: that even if one plane per day were to dart into the terra firma, it still would be safer to fly than to drive. However, like most Westerners, I’m functionally illiterate when it comes to mathematics and statistics; the numbers bring no comfort to my fearful lizard brain.

  What feels like years later, the captain announces that we’re safe to move about the cabin, as if we are aboard a luxury liner and the decks drip in golden sunlight. Preferring to lead my fellow passengers by example, I remain seated and make busy with my lecture notes, my raison for placing my own bacteria into this flying Petri dish of death.

  I’m a minor author, much to my constant consternation, but a proud autodidact. Tomorrow morning, I’m to give a lecture on a collection of long-dead minor authors at a minor literary conference. At least, I’m assured, the hotel will feature adequate amenities, if I ever get there and this trip affords me four days away from my day job: an IT gig that is barely worth mentioning, so I won’t. My lecture is an elegiac lament concerning literary heroes forgotten by history and a rant aimed squarely at the innately ethereal, impermanent nature of postmodernism, particularly as how it relates to our eroding Gothic fiction tradition, postmodernism being antithetical to timelessness in literature, to the nature of narrative itself, with its proclivity to promote the motifs of the mass popular culture and media of the ‘frivolous now’. I hope the irony of my using PowerPoint during my lecture will not be lost on the students.

  I’m not so adamantine as to realize that the war against postmodernism is long lost; we are all fated to reside within its blurry boundaries. To wit: I’ve placed myself in the belly of this aerial torture chamber with the hope that my lecture will get me seen, that my network will have expanded, that perhaps some of the students in attendance will sum up my ninety-minute lecture as a perky Facebook status update, or a one-hundred-forty character tweet including the phrase, “It rocked!,” which would then, if I’m fortunate, result in my Amazon sales rank ticking up a few notches, like the doomsday clock. It doesn’t get more hellishly postmodern than that.

  Another announcement over the intercom breaks my reverie. Regimented by time and tradition, the attendant is making his first run with the drink cart: a cumbersome metal beast that renders the aisle impassable. How is that not a breach of safety, a breach of in-the-unlikely-event-of? I’d continue, however, superstition precludes me from using the word breach again.

  My blond neighbour unexpectedly animates at the enticing offer of overpriced beverages. He breaks etiquette by demanding two cups of water. The attendant reluctantly obliges, passing two wide-mouthed plastic cups. The blond man inhales the first cup of water then re-assumes his head-on-desk position, cradling the still-full second cup. Perhaps the blond man deserves pity. Perhaps he’s not hungover or virus-riddled, but, instead, like myself, suffers at the knotted, white-knuckled hands of aviatophobia. Regardless, remaining in my seat to obsessively watch his second cup of water slide and sway in the not-so-gentle, unseen, gale-force breezes through which we rocket has edged me beyond my limit, particularly when (after drinking my own cup of water) the pressure in my bladder has surpassed undeniability.

  The sloth-esque drink cart finally finishes its labourious passage. I unbuckle my safety belt (a laughably flimsy and frayed strip of nylon), which brings its own twinge of warning within my system that I should not be doing this, that now will be when the bad happens. Walking down the aisle, I grip seat backs and rappel toward to the plane’s tail. One attendant sits in a compact bench seat that has folded out of the plane’s rear panel. Doesn’t she realise she’s sitting on a flimsy, manufactured ledge, one that leaves her permanently dangling above a precipice? She reads a gossip magazine and does not watch me origami myself inside the phone booth-sized restroom. If only there were an “S” on my chest to reveal; of course, the flying issue would remain. I slide the accordion door closed and engage the lock and its Occupied signage.

  The roar of engines and violently parted air is amplified here, inside this weakly lit metal box. What if it’s all gone when I open the door, and it’s just me and this restroom, an elevator with a cut cable, forever descending? The now-familiar tremours of turbulence rumble through the plane. I teeter and bump into the shrinking walls and ceiling of the restroom. After urinating while precariously balanced above the metal toilet (I’ve never felt more vulnerable or ridiculous), I wash my fogged glasses and splash cold water on my face and beard. The second of two staccato jolts launches me into the sink and mirror. A red light above the restroom door blinks and the captain announces that we are to return to our seats, lift our trays and buckle our safety belts. I clutch the edges of the sink and stare into the mirror at the hunched, ascetic, dripping, terrified me, Quasimodo without his bell and belle and I ask myself why I agreed to do this, why I’ve ever agreed to do anything, as it’s now painfully clear there is no point: I wrote a ninety-minute lecture on authors and books someone read once upon a time while arrogantly promulgating an ideal of deathless, timeless prose. I, myself, write penny dreadfuls of varying levels of monetary and personal success and failure. That I ever existed in the first place will not matter and I will be forgotten in a blink, as we all will be, and this, this is all an infinite jest, and it’s here in the bouncing ball of the airplane restroom that I’m staring at the truth of our human condition, and it’s one of existential, nihilistic, and cosmic aloneness.

  Perhaps I should simply return to my seat.

  I spill out of the restroom as I attempt to gain equilibrium, the plane lurching and tilting along with my frantic corrective movements, as though I am the fulcrum of the plane’s lever. The cabin lights flicker and the atmosphere ionises with my thick worry and the whimper of mortality. My traitorous feet fail me now; they won’t take me down the dark and treacherous aisle; they deny the folly that returning to my seat would result in safety and salvation. There’s a stomach-shriveling dip and a teeth-rattling bang, a bang implies impact with something. Can there be a bang if there’s no solid mass with which to impact? The groans of steel, alloy and plastic are the death throes of our technocratic civilization!

  Then the plane stills. The resulting silence within the cabin is as uncanny as it is unexpected. I stagger toward my seat and past scores of passengers who have taken a posture identical to my blond neighbour: leaned forward, arms and heads down on their trays despite the captain’s clear instruction to fold them into their upright positions. I dare a look back to the plane’s rear and do not see the attendant in her seat. Perhaps she is hunkered with the other attendant at the front, behind the velvet blue curtain of First Class. Am I missing something? Am I flying with inveterate rule breakers or is there a new crash position that is blissfully unknown to me?

  Almost to my seat and the plane is again buffeted by turbulence: an unrelenting, almost-tidal attack. A plummeting drop followed by a sudden overcorrection in our upward trajectory that lifts me off my feet. My loose lecture notes, which I left on the seat, explode into the pressurised air; the effluvium of my literary life’s mission statement billows and spreads throughout the haunted cabin. I cannot collect those notes now and I briefly mourn the slipping away of ideas, those soon-to-be forgotten dreams, as I scramble into my seat and fasten my belt with the shakiest of hands. The next body blow cuts the main cabin lights and translucent oxygen masks drop from hidden ceiling compartments. In the odd under-glow of the aisle’s emergency lighting, the masks are jellyfish divining the deep.

  As I desperately fumble with the tentacled mask, an arm reaches across my lap, fiddles with the latch and gently unfolds my service tray. The blond man without sitting up,
without lifting his head, places his vomit bag on my tray and says, “Take this if you want to live.” His clichéd line, one uttered by many a steroid-fueled American action hero, notwithstanding, I open the crinkly bag and empty its contents onto the tray: a dark lump, the size of my thumb, with an exterior that appears to be oily or moist, but is, instead, flaky and dry to the touch. Thick-stemmed and capped off at the top, it looks like a mushroom.

  I turn to say something to my neighbour and, in the dim lighting, with his brown tweed sports coat, he looks like a mound of soil, of peat, of earth itself. I ask, “What is this?” There is no answer and perhaps there is an answer. Perhaps there’s the tip of a brown tendril peeking out between his lips or it might be a shadow. Cupping the mushroom in my hands as if it is a robin’s egg I wish to return to its nest, I briefly survey the cabin and see my still fluttering, dying-bird notes and the sway of the oxygen masks, none of which have found their intended purchase upon the gentle faces of passengers. My other neighbours are motionless, moldering, indistinct lumps.

  The plane swoons and powers into a nosedive. Something breaks somewhere inside of me and outside of me. Without forethought, driven by hardwired instinct, I put the mushroom in my mouth. It disintegrates into mulch shards. Its earthy taste and smell, that of wood, soil, plant, and something else I can’t quite identify, but which strikes me as anciently familiar, fills my mouth: immiscible with my saliva while, at the same time, deeply soothing, and sinking beyond tongue, palate, esophagus, membrane and directly into my bones. I lean forward, falling like an aged — but dignified — conifer, and come to rest with my head and arms on the tray, which is as comforting as a bed of moss, and I close my eyes.

  Somewhere beyond the physical realm, I can see the never-ending future: The plane will, in moments and in memoriae, lose all power and it will crash. There will be no survivors, but, as promised, I will survive. I will not scream and I will not be alone. Everything onboard the plane will be incinerated in chemically enhanced fires that will burn beyond temperatures of contemplation and cleanse us of our old bodies. Scores of investigators and inspection teams will then overlook us, us underneath our new soil: the ash of the wreckage, the ash of our everlasting rebirth. We will all become one. Our filaments will twine together, forming our network of hyphae, our mycelium with a reach that will extend for miles and for centuries; you will not be able to determine our method of growth, or how we grow, or how we communicate. We will not be anthropomorphised, as we will be, simply, beyond. Our fruiting bodies will confound, belying our true size, which will be measured in hectares. Our language will be time itself. We will communicate and we will commune in the tongues of geological age. We will extend rhizomorphs deeper into the earth and we will grow to be as big and as old as the world. Our reach will be as unlimited as our appetite.