Thirteen Specimens

by Thomas, Jeffrey

  Or was this just a casting? Only a manikin, a model? What else might they have done to Marsha and her dog?

  Finally I was able to break the spell, back away, into the sunlight again. I closed DOOR 5 gently, as if I had intruded into Marsha’s house and didn’t want to wake her and the dog from their nap.

  I anticipated turning around and seeing that white security truck bearing down the road toward me. Seeing someone crunch out of the bushes, pointing a handgun with a silencer. But the grounds were as deserted as ever. I hopped down the grate-like steps, jogged back to the stroller, and buckled Grover in. I had seen enough. I had seen too much. It was time to get home before I was seen, in turn.

  The walk seemed longer than it had before, as though the access road had mysteriously doubled in length. The suffocating heat inside the shack had started a headache to brewing. When at last I arrived at the start of the access road, the headache had already increased to a dizzying level. I reached up a hand to touch the lump, around which the pain was centered.

  I felt a wetness there, and jerked my hand away, expecting to see blood on my fingers. It was a clear, watery fluid, but I was certain it had come from a little sore I had touched in the center of that knob-like swelling.

  I arrived at my little house on Mill Street and locked my door behind me, but without any sense of relief. I rushed into my bathroom to have a look at my reflection. There was, unquestionably, a fluid seeping out of a ruptured little wound in the growth on my forehead.

  In the kitchen, I snatched up my phone and dialed my doctor’s office.

  Over the receiver, there came only an oddly distant moaning or howling sound. It took me several moments to understand what I was hearing. It was the sound the wind made when it blew across the top of that cell phone tower down the street.

  “All right,” I said into the phone. “Okay,” I said, as I returned it to its cradle. I smiled grimly, struggling to stay tough, to keep my fear at bay. I would not let them terrify me, to beat me down, however hard they might try. “All right,” I said again, to Grover this time, who sat at the kitchen table in Logan’s old high chair, which I had found in the cellar when I rediscovered his stroller.

  After that, I did not attempt to contact my doctor again.

  DOOR 6

  It is suggested that 1 in 150 American children are afflicted with autism. Some have attributed the shocking increase in autism since the late 1970s to a better understanding and clearer classification of neurological disorders. Others, however, point to the use of vaccines. A preservative called thimerosal, a component of numerous vaccines, has been shown to be a major source of mercury in children, who by the time they reach the age of two have absorbed amounts of mercury exceeding established safety guidelines.

  Did you know that a Japanese acetaldehyde plant owned by a company named Chisso dumped tons of mercury compounds into the Minamata Bay, leading to the poisoning of anywhere from tens of thousands to two million people, who ate fish from the bay and from the Shiranui Sea, which connects with it? Since the 1950s hundreds of Japanese have died from this mercury poisoning, others suffering impaired vision and convulsions, with mothers giving birth to twisted, deformed children. I first read about this appalling environmental disaster when I was a kid, in a copy of either Life or Look magazine belonging to my parents. I can still recall my fascinated repulsion viewing photos of the victims...stark black and white photographs, luminosity dancing with darkness, like images painted in silvery mercury on a slab of black obsidian.

  Do you think the medical community and the pharmaceutical companies would ever admit to being responsible for autism in 1 out of every 150 American children? Imagine 1 out of every 150 sets of American parents filing lawsuits. Against the insurance companies, too, who I believe pressure the medical folks into using inoculations that mix various vaccines into one cocktail, to minimize office visits and thus the amount of visits these insurance companies have to pay for. The American health care system could be harming more people than it helps, says I.

  Thalidomide. Lead. Asbestos. Radon. Cheeseburgers.

  Formaldehyde is another component of vaccines. We are already being embalmed from the time we are infants.

  Carcinogen nation. Carcinogenation. Carcinogeneration.

  Says I. Says I angrily. Screams the angry pain the pain the pain in my skull.

  A crashing clattering thump made me turn away from my fiftieth or so look in the mirror that night. It had come from my front porch. I whisked into the kitchen, picked up my flashlight in one hand and my claw hammer, the first weapon I spotted, in the other. Then I crept into the livingroom, where the TV was on with its volume turned low; Grover was sitting in his plastic rocking chair while a Disney video played. “Shh,” I said to him, as I tucked the hammer’s handle under my waistband and put my hand on the knob of the door to the front hall.

  I barely peeled aside the shade in the front door’s little window, peering out at what I could see of the porch from this limited angle.

  Even though I couldn’t see much of the porch, I realized now what the sound had been. It had happened numerous times before on windy nights; Mill Street seemed to channel the wind down its length. Once, after collecting my mail, I had seen a cloud of dust like a sandstorm blowing down the street toward me and had ducked inside with something like fear. The sound I had heard was simply one of the two white plastic chairs on the porch, having once again blown over and across the worn boards.

  And tonight was particularly windy. On the news I had seen a satellite picture of a hurricane spinning and spiraling in a vortex off the coast. Its furthermost tentacles were reaching this far inland. Intermittent curtains of rain had been pelting the house, and though there seemed to be little in the air at the moment, the wind remained a consistent roar. Out there in the dark, the cell phone tower was wailing like a god in its death throes.

  I was watching the sodium glow of the nearest street lamp, to see how much rain was falling through its aura of light, when something large and glittering and amorphous floated into view and wrapped itself around the telephone pole upon which the lamp was mounted. My first impression was of an immense, gelatinous ameba. A violent electric shiver crackled through me.

  Then, I realized it was simply a sheet of cellophane or some other thin plastic wrap, blown along in the wind like a parachute. Embracing the pole, it continued to flutter and ripple until at last its slick pseudopods let go of the pole and the sheet was swept out of view.

  I decided to brave the elements, and step out onto the porch to have a better view of the storm. To be on the safe side, since I hated to leave Grover vulnerable, I locked the door behind me, knowing I had a house key secured in my wallet.

  Immediately upon stepping out onto the porch, I saw that both my white plastic chairs were still, rather remarkably, standing upright. One of them blowing over was not the sound I had heard. At this revelation, I thumbed on the switch of my flashlight, and pulled the hammer out of my waistband. My gaze narrowed with a hunter’s tension as I surveyed the black air churning all around my house.

  A movement overhead drew my gaze. High above, another huge sheet of plastic film was soaring through the air. A giant, airborne jellyfish.

  Unmindful of the irregular raindrops that spattered me, and my hair as it whipped across the great bulge on my forehead, I stepped down from my porch onto the sidewalk. Down toward the end of my street, where the little conference building squatted, and where Mill Street met with the road across which lay the wide parking lot, I could see the air was full of more ectoplasmic apparitions. Swimming, tumbling, quivering through the air, advancing down the street toward me.

  A grim smile on my face, I gripped my hammer more firmly and began walking along the sidewalk to meet the storm of plastic. Defiantly, I pointed the beam of my flashlight into its vortex. Soon, it was all around me and above me. A membrane tried to wrap itself around my legs but I jerked out of its grasp, kicked it away, and continued onward.

&nb
sp; By the time I had passed the conference center, and stood at the edge of the road facing the black void of the parking lot, its borders uncertain in the night, I had become a little less cocky. The plastic wrap was everywhere, more and more of it, and here I was out in the open, and suddenly a great sheet of it slammed into me and enfolded me. I wanted to shout or scream but the film was taut across my open mouth. Plastered to my mouth as if to gag me, to my nose as if to suffocate me, pressed hard against my eyelids as if to bind me. It wanted to seal me, coat me, make me into something else, a mere effigy...

  Somehow, I struggled free of the jellyfish creature and I even swung the hammer at it in a mad arc but it was already racing off down Mill Street. The thing’s attack had unnerved me, awakened in me a desperate need to find shelter until the shoal of these ameba things had been swept away. Across the street I could see the somber dark shape of the brick warehouse. It was closer than my house. Almost in terror now, as more of the things whooshed past me, almost enveloping me again, I broke into a run across the road, across the parking lot to where the warehouse stood in its center like a stone castle on an island. I skidded to a stop on its cement ramp, went down on hands and knees, and scampered through the hole that had been broken open in the garage door labeled DOOR 1.

  Once inside, the first thing I did was sweep my flashlight’s beam across every wall, into every corner, even across the ceiling. I saw no other people in here with me, lurking in the shadows, either hiding from the tempest themselves or waiting for me to arrive. There were no coyotes. But there were those green plastic dolls, over in the corner. I couldn’t see them from here, but I knew they were there. And after having seen Marsha, I did not wish to examine them again, did not want to imagine what they might possibly, truly be.

  Instead, I remained close by the hole in the door, hunching down low again and peering out into the storm. But I shut my flashlight off, so that the plastic things would not see me in my shelter, would not rush to get inside with me...or cover the door, sealing me in here until something else might arrive.

  The air was full, absolutely full of the plastic. It was like being in a bathysphere at the bottom of the ocean, gazing out into their midst.

  And then, I saw distant lights shining through the plastic depths. Two small lights, like will-o’-the-wisps. Like moving stars. They were slowly bobbing in my direction. They were flashlights, two flashlights in the hands of two people calmly crossing the parking lot through the chaos of the plastic hurricane.

  I was glad I had extinguished my own light. But I was not glad to be trapped, now, in this structure, even without the opening sealed over. If the two unseen individuals should come directly to the warehouse – as it appeared they would – then there was no back way out for me.

  I held the hammer ready, bouncing it in the air to acclimate myself to its weight. Come on, then, I thought. Okay...come on, then.

  Rain water soaked my clothes, trickled down my face. At least, I thought that was water dribbling down from the bulbous mass at my hairline. It might be more fluid weeping from the lengthening ulceration in its center, like a crack in an egg.

  I watched, watched, bounced the hammer, but then I realized the flashlights were veering off, away from the warehouse, and then turning away altogether, as if returning from where they had originated. And that direction, I judged, was the access road at the far end of the parking lot.

  But even after the two floating, seemingly disembodied lights had gone, I still remained inside the brick warehouse until the air began to clear of the migration of giant amebas. The wind died down a little, as if it had moved along with them, as if they generated the wind themselves, and at last I ducked through the opening in the garage door and stood in the wet air.

  Like dead things, some of the sheets of film lay snagged in bushes, in trees, around more telephone poles. As I walked back home, I saw them festooning people’s hedges, shrouding their cars. But no one’s house was as shrouded as mine. When I saw it, I had to stop and stare for a few moments before I could will myself to go any closer.

  My house was almost fully engulfed in the plastic membranes. My house glimmered and glistened with its new translucent skin. My house was like a huge soap bubble that at any moment might pop and disappear and take Grover along with it. Leaving me nothing. Truly, finally, nothing at all. In desperation, in fury, I charged at my house.

  I snatched plastic away from the supports of my porch. I hurled myself through hanging curtains and taut webs, grabbed hold of it, balled it up, cast the balls aside, digging my way deeper. I raked the vinyl siding with the claw of my hammer, not caring if I cracked the material (it was only more plastic, after all, a plastic house) so long as I tore the ectoplasm away.

  I went around the back, balling up more and more. I carried back armfuls and shoved them down into the trash bin my collection service dumped every Wednesday. I compacted them into the bin with violent downward shoves. It felt good, felt good like killing something. I thought of all the products this stuff must engulf and seal. Items brought into people’s homes. Food wrapped in this tainted, insidiously poisoned skin as invisible as the ones who dispersed it to the public...

  It took quite a while. I guess I was noisy, opening up my clattering ladder and propping it against one side of my house and then another, so as to pull down the sheets adhering to the roof. I saw a few lights go on in the houses of my closest neighbors, saw a shade peel aside and a dark face framed in the yellow square, but I was too intent on removing every last scrap of the plastic tonight. It couldn’t wait until tomorrow. I didn’t want to be inside the house with that stuff clinging to it.

  At last, I folded the metal ladder away. In the time it had taken me to unveil my house, the night had calmed a great deal and it had stopped raining. The clouds were even breaking up, showing the pure black of the heavens behind them. Stars sparkled there, in those torn gaps. I gazed up at them, and I saw one bright star suddenly shoot behind a patch of cloud. The star reappeared in another section of clear sky. Having zipped into this section, it then became stationary again. Not a UFO. Not an airplane. Not a star. I was not frightened, just fatalistic, knowing now that I couldn’t ever really know anything. Everything was too big, too powerful, for me to understand. I would not even try. This fatalism gave me a calm, a calm after the storm, and wearily I mounted my front steps to return inside my house. I had my key out and ready to insert into the front door when something directly before my eyes seized their attention, focused them with an almost painful jolt of the muscles that tethered them into my skull.

  Yet it was only the metal number, bronze-colored, that was fixed to the front of my door below its little window. I had seen it countless times, but it was as if I were seeing it for the first time, as though it had been affixed there tonight during my absence. But it hadn’t been, of course. It was simply the number of my house. I lived at 6 Mill Street.

  Still, I knew what this meant. As much as it was possible for me to know anything. Oh yes, I knew.

  This was DOOR 6.

  “All right,” I said to the door. Still calm. Grim smile again. “Okay.” But before I went inside, I used the claw of the hammer to pry that number off. With a savage tug, I dislodged it, and I heard it clatter down the steps behind me. Now, satisfied, I let myself inside my house.

  Grover still sat obediently in front of the TV, but the movie had long ended and rewound itself. With the VCR no longer running, the TV screen showed nothing but a bright uniform blue, like the purest of cloudless skies...Grover staring contentedly into it.

  DOOR 7

  Then, it isn’t then. It is now, now.

  Did you know that Pam and I needed to have a repair done to our car, and we took it to the dealer where we’d bought it, and to kill time while we waited we walked down the highway in search of diversion, stores to browse through, but this obscure stretch of highway had little to offer, and we walked and walked? And it was snowing lightly, and the snow that had accumulated over the nig
ht was thin but wet and clinging, it was like a glue poured over everything, it stuck to bushes that reached out toward us their branches thick with white blobs like the biggest pussy willows ever, and a man’s discarded glove at the edge of the road was coated so that it looked like a severed and bloodless hand. Further on I saw a child’s smaller glove that was only partially coated, and the blue color and flattened look of the glove made it appear like a hand of a child’s corpse blue with rot and deflated with decay, or is it better to say that the hands of corpses can sometimes look like gloves? Since corpses predate gloves we mustn’t put the horse before the cart, or the chicken before the egg. And at last we found a place that called itself a “spa”, So-and-So’s Spa, and it must have been some missing link between the drugstores of old with their soda fountains and the modern convenience store, spa apparently an archaic term because it was an archaic place, it was in a kind of time warp, we sat at the counter and ate hamburgers and drank coffee and behind the counter hung knickknacks like nail clippers and nonprescription reading glasses packaged on sun-faded cardboard with obsolete-looking art design as if this merchandise had hung there unsold since the early 1960s. And then we walked all that way back to the car dealer and later in our marriage it would have been unthinkable to spend all that time walking on gluey snow along a desolate backwoods time warped highway just for a greasy hamburger and bad coffee in a spa but it was the first year of our marriage and we held hands much of the way back and it would have been unthinkable even a few years later let alone now. And the blue glove makes me think that blue might be the color of decomposition more so than green even though green is the color we associate with rotten slimy things and even though blue is the color of the sky and the sea but green is not the color of death but of life green mold on bread and the scum on a pond are not decay but thriving life money is said to be corruption but money can make life prosper green money is the seed and the fertilizer and the crop all in one and they call money bread green with living mold fed to sea gulls clear and green hover and spin in the air on strings that go way way up so high I can’t see the fingers they’re knotted around but the puppeteer hand of God has manicured fingers and a Rolex watch and gold cufflink and a gold ring with a big green emerald.