Thirteen Specimens

by Thomas, Jeffrey

  But I felt a heightened unease now, as if I might be the next creature to be crushed on this new black road.

  I was just short of the gate. So close. But I knew that now it really was time to turn back.

  Before I did, however, I craned my neck to gaze beyond the gate (which, rusted brown as it was, looked like it had been woven out of those ugly vines). Shortly past the gate, the road veered to the right, running off toward another huge building belonging to the factory complex. I wouldn’t have expected to find one this size so distant from the rest of the factory city. Some of its blank, black windows had been shattered. A dumpster overflowing with sodden cardboard and pink insulation like masses of rancid cotton candy sat below an elevated loading dock. With the sun sinking behind it, the building was foreboding, like a castle or a fortress abandoned to its ghosts.

  In the nearer distance, though, just beyond the gate in another dirt clearing overgrown with ectoplasmic strands of grass, was a capacious white cylinder or drum, so large that a little shack-like structure of metal and wood clung to its side like a parasite. The steps up to this shack were swallowed up in thick weeds that I never would have waded through, for fear of ticks, however much I might like to have a look inside through its broken windows. Or its door, if that were unlocked.

  Stenciled on this immense white tank was the word: METHANE.

  I was no scientist, but I couldn’t see the connection between methane and the manufacturing of plastic. If that was what Odyllic had in fact produced. Just because Farmer Plastics had created such materials, and Lethe Toys had molded toys from it before Farmer, didn’t mean that Odyllic had necessarily followed suit. To tell the truth, I was not sure just what Odyllic had manufactured.

  I steered the stroller in a half-circle, pointing it back the way I had come. The road stretched out so far ahead of me that I couldn’t even, as yet, see those freight cars grazing in the grass. I walked more quickly now than I had while advancing down the path. I heard a crow caw, somewhere off toward the train tracks. I gazed up. There was an object poised on a vine-like line of the telephone poles that stood alongside the train tracks. It glistened green like one of those old glass telephone transformers that I had tried to shatter with rocks as a kid. But instead of being attached to the crown of a telephone pole, it was poised directly on one of the heavy black wires. The setting sun made the green, glassy object sparkle. But it was too far away for me to make out, and it was too late for me to try. I quickened my pace even more, but regretted it when I scuffed my sneaker and lurched forward over the handles of the stroller.

  Though the stroller’s bundle was safely belted in, a small baseball hat fell onto the black asphalt. I had to walk around the stroller to squat down, retrieve it. I turned toward the bundle to replace the little red cap.

  The blue furry doll was Grover, the puppet character from the television show Sesame Street. The doll had been one of Logan’s favorites; nearly as big as he was. It had rested beside him in his hospital bed. I had even considered putting it in his coffin, but Pam had thought it was too bulky to fit in there with him. His coffin had been so small, I have to admit.

  “Sorry,” I said, fitting the cap on Grover’s head again and pulling the soft baby blanket around his hirsute face. I gaped up at the sky. “Jeesh – we really need to hurry, don’t we?”

  I half expected nocturnal, flesh-hungry undead corpses to come staggering out from in-between those derelict freight cars. But I saw no one, and when I reached them I knew I was as good as home. A little further, and I was at the start of the access road. Across the parking lot, onto Mill Street, and back to the porch of my little white house.

  I unlocked and opened its door, then closed and locked it again behind me. For some reason, I turned to peek out the small window in the door. (My headache had become so intense that I actually leaned my forehead against the cool glass.) The street was silent, devoid of traffic. I felt like the last man on earth, shutting himself in against the awakening terrors of the night. But the only remotely sinister thing I noted was the muted caw of a crow.

  DOOR 2

  I looked up the word Odyllic in a book. I had a lot of books, so while I didn’t find it in a conventional dictionary I did finally find it in a book called Devils & Demons, another kind of dictionary, by two French authors. J. Tondrieu and R. Villeneuve. Why I even thought to look it up in there I don’t know. But it said that “odyllic force” was an energy that flowed forth from every form of matter. It sounded like the Force in the Star Wars movies, to me. It was claimed that odyllic force could be harnessed and utilized to “create great power”.

  Did you know that in 2003, the largest living life-form on the Earth was discovered? In the Blue Mountains of Oregon, researchers for the Forest Service realized that a single gigantic underground fungus, spread out over an area equaling 1,800 football fields, was strangling the roots of fir trees with its web of tendrils, called rhizomorphs. It was postulated that the fungus had been created through the “sexual recombination” of two forms of mushroom – eight thousand years ago. Was I understanding that right? That this plant, this living thing, was eight thousand years old?

  An interesting note – and if reading about these garroting, tree-murdering tendrils hadn’t already caught my attention, the following tidbit of information surely did: branching off from this gargantuan organism, aboveground, were clusters of honey-colored mushrooms.

  Now, granted, the filaments I had seen linking tree to tree in an immense latticework, along that newly paved factory access road, had been clearly aboveground, not hidden from view below the soil as was this fungus I had read about in a magazine while sitting on my toilet, in an episode that to me was clearly a case of profound synchronicity. But surely the things were related, if not quite the same? No, there could be no doubt – the mushrooms made it conclusive. So, then...was the web of tendrils I had seen in the woods, and all the blooms of mushrooms, a single living entity as well?

  And what would have spawned it, nourished it to such extensive growth? The “sexual recombination” of two kinds of mushrooms millennia ago? Or maybe something far more recent, in this case? I recalled the sluggish little trickle of a stream, blanketed under garish lime green scum. Surely that stream was polluted. But could the pollution itself have mutated some local flora? Inspired it to such rampant growth in a shorter span of time than eight thousand years?

  Though it had been several weeks now since I had pushed Logan’s stroller down that road – my walks in the intervening time extending no further than the far border of the factory parking lot – my interest in Odyllic became very peaked as a result of chancing upon this article.

  But there was more synchronicity in store for me. There is no coincidence, I was coming to believe. There is a mechanical system to space, time, and matter – even organic matter – an order, however tangled, that encompasses everything in an interconnecting web like a fungus. If humans were ever to find the means by which to wrap the strands of this web around their fingers...and then, jerk those filaments like the strings of a marionette...then even God would jump and dance to their tune.

  I had become restless this night, pacing the small rooms of my too-small house like a lab animal in its cage. I had dozed off and on for hours in front of the TV, channel-surfing, watching bits of music videos (my attention span was too fleeting for me to even watch one of these visual hors-d’oeuvres in its entirety), shards of documentary-type shows (flash of a gory surgical operation, flash of a gilded sarcophagus’ face), fragments of crime programs (photos of murdered bodies could always persuade my thumb to pause in its key-pressing). I needed to stretch my limbs, to move, but this rabbit warren I was locked up in afforded me so little space to do so. How had three of us ever lived here together?

  I went into the tiny bedroom that had been Logan’s, where Grover sat on the bed with a book about himself open in front of him. Though it had grown dark outside, I hadn’t tucked him in yet. My parents had always made me go to bed w
ay too early, even while the sun was still shining in the summer, and I had vowed never to be so harsh.

  “Come on, buddy, time for a walk,” I said, scooping the limp-limbed doll into my arms.

  I wheeled Logan’s stroller down the road. Behind me, my house dwindled in the gloom like a small plastic toy house.

  There was a moan in the air, growing subtly louder as I pushed the stroller along the sidewalk. Floating, wavering, mournful. In the winter, during a storm, it became quite pronounced and very eerie. Tonight was warm but there was a breeze, and this breeze was blowing across the top of a cell phone tower, four of which rose like the masts of a ship just down the street from my house. They were more or less identical, each topped with a triangular arrangement of panels, but only one of them seemed to let out this moan when the wind raced across the top of it. What would the users of cell phones in this area think if they put their little phones to their ears and only heard this melancholy wail pouring forth?

  One time, I had ventured across grass right up to the fence, garlanded with barbed wire, that surrounded the base of one of the towers so I could read the placard posted there. It said, “Radio Frequency (RF) emissions may exceed FCC standards for general public exposure. For Your Safety: Maintain a minimum distance of 7 feet from all antennas. Do not stop in front of antennas.” I thought that bit was amusing. “If you are reading this,” it should have added, “it’s too late.”

  Further down Mill Street. By the side of the road I spotted a familiar white object; it was a plastic water bottle like a runner or a bicyclist might carry, squashed under a car’s tire. I saw it here and there on my walks, like a piece of flotsam that washed up repeatedly in the tide. Blue words on the bottle said, “Clean Up Your Assabet.” Ha, ha. The motto referred to the efforts underway to clean up Massachusetts’ Assabet River. I found it ironic that this item intended to draw attention to a conservation project had itself become a piece of litter.

  Onward. The parking lot was ahead. It was, actually, only one of the factory’s lots, and not the largest. Standing at the edge of the most spacious of these, rocketing even taller than that copse of cell phone towers, was a brick chimney like a cannon aimed at heaven. I could see it from my porch. It was a lone sentinel, staring down imperiously, presiding over the whole of the factory city. Though Odyllic had shut down, I had seen cloud-sized bundles of steam piling out of this chimney last winter. Did a sketchy maintenance crew still need to run boilers or such to keep pipes from freezing, until the complex could be sold yet again? Or were there small pockets of the factory city where work of one kind or another still went on? More on this soon...

  I crossed to the other side of Mill Street. I would actually need to cross another, diagonal road before I reached the outskirts of the lot. Waiting for a single car to pass, I stood near the outermost of the Odyllic structures, and what must have been the smallest. And most modern; I’m certain that it hadn’t existed when Farmer Plastics had owned the property. It could only contain two or three rooms, the outside of the flat-roofed little box composed from vertically-ribbed concrete, looking like corduroy or corrugated cardboard. I glanced back over my shoulder at the building, orange-pink light from a street lamp glowing dimly on its surface. One face of the building was entirely made of glass, and a door into the concrete box was situated in the middle of this. The door was glass, too. Even from here I could see the gold letters stenciled on the glass door gleaming in the street lamp’s murky illumination. The letters read: DOOR 2.

  Why they should label this as the building’s secondary door, I didn’t know. The only other door into the box was on one of its windowless sides, and it was metal and nondescript and sported no letters at all. It hardly seemed like the primary entrance.

  As near as I could tell, this building had been used for meetings, a miniature conference building. I had often looked through its glass, if only from a distance, while walking by. Though there was no furniture in those few rooms now, I could easily imagine long tables resting on the bare carpets, plush chairs ringing the tables, and interchangeable men and women in funereal business suits seated in those chairs, reading the future of company stocks in the vapors from their lattes like soothsayers.

  The one lonely car had swished past. I left the tiny, abandoned conference building behind me, crossing into the fissured and littered parking lot, which yawned like a black lake under the night sky.

  There was a figure moving across the parking lot in my direction, silhouetted in the glow from another street lamp. A tall lean figure. I changed the angle of the stroller. I wanted to turn right back the way I had come but I couldn’t do that; it would look cowardly. I wished I had seen this dark form in the parking lot before I had crossed the street.

  But as the person neared me, and I neared them, widening my angle of approach as much as I could, I saw that it was actually two figures, two forms. The person had a small dog on a leash, and this was why they were in the lot. Such an innocent and prosaic activity put me much more at ease. Now I could hear the tinkling of the dog’s ID tags, and could see that the person wore a baseball hat. By the time the individual spoke to me, I had already figured out that it was a woman.

  “Your baby likes a nice night stroll, huh?” the woman asked me.

  She stopped. I stopped. I hoped she wouldn’t come close enough to look into my stroller. Her dog peered at me attentively, its leash taut. I gestured toward it. “So does yours.”

  The woman glanced over her shoulder toward a long factory building which formed one of the lot’s borders. It was white with windows trimmed in an innocuous sky blue. Along its face were planted a row of hedges that were overgrown, in need of shaping, reverting back to something wilder. Facing me again, the woman moved toward me. I dreaded her approach. In a lowered voice, flicking her head somewhat to indicate the structure behind her, she said, “Not a good idea to bring your baby around this place, though.”

  “I live just down the street,” I said in a lame explanation or excuse, regretting then that I should divulge such personal information.

  Her little white dog, shaggy as Grover, sniffed loudly and aggressively at my sneakers. I love dogs, and even small animals like cats. I used to have two pet mice as a boy. But there is something unnatural about small dogs that grates on me. They are a travesty, mutations fabricated by man, an insult to their proud wolfish forbears. There is something about them that makes me want to squash them like bugs, even though I would not deliberately squash a bug.

  “It’s just that this place isn’t safe, you know?” the woman said in a near whisper, now that she was close. I could see, under the bill of her baseball hat, that she had an attractive face. Short brunette hair. She had a runner’s body, a bit tomboyish in dress and carriage.

  “What do you mean?”

  But I could tell that she had made out Grover’s blue, bug-eyed face at last. I prayed that she assumed it was merely a toy resting beside a child, that somewhere in the bundle of blankets there was a still a baby, but when her eyes returned to mine I knew she realized the truth.

  I stammered, “My son died two years ago.”

  “Oh...I’m so sorry. That’s terrible. What...”

  “Leukemia,” I told her. “He was three. He’d be five now.” I looked down into the stroller. “He’d be too big to need this.” After another awkward beat: “I was laid off five months ago. I had more time around the house – my wife left me last year – and I was cleaning out the basement. Found the stroller. It made me feel good to get out, you know, go for walks. So I...I started taking this...with me...”

  “I’m really sorry. About your wife, too. I know how you feel – my husband left me a year ago, too. He wasn’t sympathetic to me at all. He knew I had medical issues and he didn’t stick by me. People are so disposable now...”

  “Right.”

  “I used to work for these assholes.” She cocked her head toward the white building with the blue-trimmed windows again, her voice dropping even lower as sh
e took a step even closer. The dog kept snuffling at my feet. “It made me sick...but even the doctors can’t pin it down. Either that, or they’re all paid off, and knowing this place I wouldn’t doubt it.”

  Her words were finally getting through to me. “You worked for Odyllic?”

  “For two years. In the office...but I got sick, and missed a lot of work, so they fired me, even though it was their fault, of course...”

  “So, what did they do in there? What did they make?”

  “Oh, these, I don’t know, little plastic beads...green plastic crystals...they sold them to places that heat them up and mold them into things...”

  “Oh, yeah, okay – sure – I used to run the third shift soda plant operation at Sunderland Farms right here in town. Those crystals sound like the pellets we’d melt down to mold into soda bottles.”

  “Yeah, who knows, maybe your place got their crystals from them. And some of their crystals could be melted down into plastic sheets...you know, like cellophane or shrink wrap...but when they did that, the plastic was clear, not green anymore.”

  “Yeah?” I said dubiously. I admittedly knew nothing about cellophane films, but I wouldn’t have imagined them finding their origin in plastic pellets. “So...ah, is this place entirely closed down or what?”

  “Ha,” the woman said. She had almost snorted. She had a bitter, ironic grin. “Ha,” she said again, and her eyes glittered intensely under her bill. “They supposedly went bankrupt a couple years ago, right? But I know there are still things going on in there.”

  “What kinds of things?”

  “Who knows? Research? Military research? They were always very secretive, believe me. They only wanted their employees to know one part of the elephant, not to see the whole picture, keep us blind, you know? But I live over on Willow Street, in a second floor apartment, okay? I can see the office building I used to work in. There’s always a gray car parked there. It’s a make of car that I’ve never seen before. Sometimes there’s another car that’s almost identical but slightly different. Only once did I see both gray cars there together. Company cars. But I’ve never seen anyone get in or out of them. Kind of a silvery-gray...”