The stench from the gelatinous form was at its strongest down here. Fishy, but musky as well. They weren’t the first to have approached it. A man in a yellow windbreaker, presumably the owner of one of the boats, was poking at the lumpen bulk with the spurred end of a gaff.
“What is it?” Erin asked the man.
He glanced at them over his shoulder. “I thought it was waste from your restaurant,” he joked. Then: “It’s got to be a decaying whale, this big. I called the police to see about getting it out of here. I think they’re going to call the MBL people at Woods Hole, to see if they want a look at it.”
“MBL?” Dot asked.
“Yeah, the, um, Marine Biological Lab. Like in Jaws,” the man replied.
“You sure it isn’t a squid?” Erin asked him.
“Well, I mean, I can’t say. But in June a big blob like this washed up in Chile. Did you read about that? They said they thought it was a giant octopus, but it weighed tons. It turned out to be a decomposed sperm whale. So that’s what I think this has to be.”
“Maybe pollution in the water is killing them,” Erin said in a sympathetic tone, her hand cupped over her nose and mouth. She looked up at several sea gulls spiraling in the sky above the mass in the water, crying out perhaps in frustration, eager for the humans to back off from the fleshy island so they could investigate it themselves.
“I don’t know how something this size can float,” the man said, straining with the gaff to prod at the blob again. “It must weigh tons, too.”
“Shit,” Erin whispered. The blustery voice of Anoush could be heard from above. “Dot, we gotta go!”
With the sky a heavy iron gray, and the sea like a vast pool of melted metal, Dot was reminded of the ocean on whose shore she lay in her dreams, and occasionally at orgasm. Never orgasm brought on by another, however, only by her own hand. Except for one occasion. The last time she had had sex was with the waiter Josh, in fact. They had gone out for Chinese food and had had too many Mai Tais. At her apartment, he had told her his fantasy was to go to bed with an Asian boy. She joked that with her small breasts and hips, it would practically be the same thing. They had ended up in her bed, both giggling as she struggled to roll a condom onto his semi-erect penis, and he had entered her from behind, and he’d teased her that her vagina was so small it felt like an anus, and she had found him to be a very good lover for a man who liked men and when she had climaxed she had been transported, for just a moment, to the edge of the living sea, an experience brought on for the first time through the interaction of another body...though she had experienced it several times when masturbating. They had never repeated or spoken much about their foolish experience, except to joke about it to laugh it off, and she had never told him about being projected to that other place for one jolting instant.
“Dot!” Erin hissed.
The gelatinous mass was gray like a fallen piece of that gray sky. Gray like a coagulated fragment of the gray sea itself.
“Hey!” Anoush shouted down from the railing.
Dot wrenched her gaze from the subtly bobbing, floating blob. Lifted her eyes groggily to her boss, scowling above her like a father scolding his child for oversleeping because she might be late for school.
3: Web Strands
While Dot was immersed in her navigation through the Internet, there came a familiar brisk rapping at her apartment’s door. She left the intimate blue pool of her computer’s glow and admitted her mother, Mai. Dot saw that she still had on the white nurse’s aide uniform that she wore to work at the Hawthorne Nursing Home.
“Hi, Cherry Blossom,” she teased her mother. It was what “Mai” meant.
Mai slapped her on the arm, her large eyes narrowed in mock anger but her closed lips subtly smiling, and jetted into the kitchen at her usual hurried pace to open a plastic bag on the little second-hand table she had helped her daughter find for her apartment when she’d moved in two years earlier. “I stopped by the market and bring you some food,” she said in the sweet sing-songy voice that Dot was so fond of but had vowed never to duplicate. Unlike her mother, Dot had no accent at all...never having visited her parents’ home country.
“What if I already ate?”
“Did you eat?”
“No.”
“See? So I brought you food. You aren’t a good cook like your Mama.”
Mai had brought her two banh baos, which were steamed buns filled with bits of pork and hard-boiled egg, and a banh mi, which was a spicy sub inspired by the baguettes of Vietnam’s French colonists. While Dot didn’t care for all Vietnamese dishes, her mother knew she would eat these items.
“It’s raining pretty bad out there, huh?” Dot said. Her mother had brought in an umbrella with her. “You shouldn’t be driving around in the rain, Mom. You should have gone right home.”
“Gone home to what?” she said.
Dot smirked bitterly. “Did you leave him his dinner so he won’t bitch you out when you get home?”
“I left him dinner all set to heat up. He won’t miss me. He doesn’t care when I get home. I went home early on Tuesday night...I was so sleepy. He saw me come in early, never asked me why I’m home early.”
Mai worked more overtime than her daughter did; Dot wasn’t surprised to hear that she had finally burnt out on Tuesday night. Her father, by contrast, never took on overtime. Her mother had worked two jobs up until about a year ago. Her father would never have pursued a second job to help pay their mortgage and bills.
“What are you looking at?” Mai asked, peeking into the other room.
“Um, a whale carcass or something washed up against Pickering Wharf last night, right outside The Pier. Needless to say, nobody wanted to eat outside today. It might even be a giant octopus.”
“Oh!” said her mother, as if alarmed.
“I’m just seeing if I can find out about...stuff like that. This guy said a carcass like this turned up in Chile in June.”
“Sounds yucky.”
Dot laughed. “Yeah. It was yucky. Maybe it’s part of a dragon, huh, Mom? Maybe it’s part of Godzilla.”
Mai swatted at her arm again. “Stop it – I’m not Japanese. I hate that.”
Dot offered her mother tea or coffee, but she declined. “I stopped for coffee on the way here.”
“Oh yeah? With Boon?” Boon was a Laotian coworker, her mother’s closest friend.
Mai averted her eyes. “No. With a man who comes to see his poor mother. His name is Lee.”
“Lee? Is he Chinese?”
“No! He’s American...”
“Mom,” Dot cut her off, grinning incredulously. “You went out with some guy?”
“Don’t say that! We had coffee. No big deal. Just friends, okay? He’s coming to see his mother a lot...”
“So who’s idea was it to go for coffee?”
“Lee’s idea.”
“Is he married?”
“I have to go home...very tired.” Mai flashed toward the door, scooping up her wet umbrella.
“Mom, come on...is the guy married?”
“Yes. He’s married. Stop it, okay? Just friends. Bye-bye. Eat your food and get some good sleep, okay?”
And then Mai left. And Dot turned back toward her computer, amused by her mother. Happy, actually, that she had gone out for coffee with some man she’d met at the nursing home...and sorry that her mother had to return home to her father. It was just possible that Dot had less love for him than her mother did.
Dot knew that her father often called her mother a “fat pig.” Mai had weighed 98 pounds before becoming pregnant with her only child. She weighed 110, now. Dot considered her mother to be very pretty. In a kind of reversal, Mai wore her hair long and dyed brownish while Dot wore hers short and naturally black. Her mother favored tank tops with spaghetti straps, colorful capri pants and platform clogs. Dot’s father had once scoffed, “Dresses like teenager.” On one occasion, Dot had dared to taunt her father that her male friends were surprised to hear tha
t Mai was 43, and that they found her very attractive. Her father had only grunted and said, “Ha. Blind.”
Her mother had told Dot that her husband had never said the word “thanks”...had never said, “I’m sorry”...had never said, “I love you”...and as far as she could recall, had never even used her name when speaking with her.
“I’ll never marry a Vietnamese man,” Dot had told Mai once.
“Not all Vietnam men like him,” Mai had said.
“I’m not taking any chances,” Dot had persisted.
But she turned away from her concerns about her mother for the moment, as she seated herself again in front of her hypnotic monitor. The banh baos and banh mi would wait.
After typing in keywords pertaining to “mystery blobs,” Dot had very quickly found several online articles about the rotting mass washed ashore in Chile. The thirteen ton blob had been suggested to be an Octopus giganteus at first, but had ultimately been dismissed as the less exotic carcass of a sperm whale.
Not entirely satisfied that this explained the mass washed into Salem Harbor, however – despite their resemblance to each other – Dot broadened her web search. She came upon a site dedicated to cryptozoology, the study of controversial animals most scientists claimed not to exist except in misinterpretation and delusion. Here, she located a very detailed article on what were termed “globsters” – decomposing enigmatic carcasses washed up around the world throughout the years.
Many of the “sea serpents” shown in the photographs on the site were basking sharks, which when the bulk of their flesh decomposed looked uncannily like prehistoric plesiosaurs. Other of these alleged sea monsters had probably been rare beaked whales. But what interested her most were the more shapeless masses that had been recorded. There were photos of several of these amorphous hulks. Apparently the best known of these had washed ashore at St. Augustine, Florida in 1896. There was a photo of that “globster” (described as being pink), with a man standing atop a pool of flesh with a huge spherical section in the center, a rope lashed around it.
The twenty-one foot long, sack-like blob was without eyes, bones, even an identifiable head. Shortly after its discovery it too had been dismissed as a whale...but tissue samples reexamined in 1957 had been reclassified, by some, as being from an octopus after all. Whatever the thing had truly been, Dot was intrigued by that photo of the man in his conservative, old-fashioned suit and hat standing next to the great mound of flesh, as ambiguous as something made of raw protoplasm, some primal matter that could not be contained in any one definable form.
That night she dreamed of that and the other “globsters” she had read about. She did not have the sensation of being bodily transported to the living sea, as she had dubbed it in her mind; this dream was of a more conventional sort, but still unnaturally vivid.
In this dream, Dot was alone on the sand of a more earthly ocean...standing beside the indistinguishable mass beached at St. Augustine. It was 1896, and she wore clothing contemporary to that time; a long skirt, a blouse buttoned tightly against her throat. She did not know if she were an Asian or not.
There was no one else on the beach, no one to watch as she stepped onto the great spread carpet of flesh, partially buried in the sand. No one to see, as she unbuttoned that tight collar. Removed all the heavy, constrictive clothing. The boots from her feet. She felt the coarse grains of sand between her now bare toes. The fibrous flesh of the mass against her soles. Her short boyish hair ruffled in a cool wind that blasted her bare skin with the rustling roar of the sea.
Reaching to the top of the central orb of flesh, which rose to the level of her shoulder, Dot probed its summit with her fingers and found an opening which she pried open further. The scientists had not discovered a whale’s blowhole, and they had described the meat as so tough that even an axe made little impression, but as she kneaded this opening she was able to widen it easily, until she could thrust her whole hand, then her arm to her elbow...to her shoulder...inside it. The tissues became increasingly elastic, a fishy/musky scent rising strongly from the widening orifice, overpowering but not repelling her. Now Dot lifted a leg, and pressed her bare toes against the rough skin of the mound. She hoisted herself atop it. The wind skimmed across and encircled her naked flesh, as if to help boost her up.
Once atop the mound, Dot inserted one of her legs into the opening. It was warm inside, almost hot, and humidly damp. Clinging to the curved top of the mass, she lowered her other leg inside it as well...and then began to sink within it. Her pelvis was enclosed. Her waist. She sank to her armpits, her small breasts being gently pressed by the slick interior.
And then she let go of the sides, thrust her arms straight above her, closed her eyes and held her breath and sank down into the mass entirely. She didn’t see it, but knew that the orifice closed again, disappeared, above her head.
There was an interval of hot darkness, of perhaps movement through the depths of a lightless ocean of liquid flesh. Dot kept her eyes and mouth tightly sealed, but groped above her head with her outstretched arms. At last, just as she thought her lungs would explode – or she would have to open her eyes and see things that might frighten or horrify her, hovering luminous around her, and suck in that liquid flesh until it drowned her – her hands touched a solid, pliant ceiling. Her fingers danced across it, located a puckered orifice, worked it open. Then, kicking violently, she shot her body upwards, and into the light of the sun.
Dot hoisted herself up until she was buried only to the waist in a huge lump of indistinct meat. But like a string of circus clowns emerging from a miniature car, she couldn’t imagine how her body could have been contained in this mass, which measured only four feet at its highest point. Nevertheless, she pushed herself up, until she could pull one bare leg and then the other out of its sucking interior. She stood beside the blob now, her nude body slick with that fishy musk.
She was standing near the Interview River, in Tasmania. In the distance, she saw cattle grazing. It was 1960, and she was still twenty-three years from being born. Her mother, Mai, had been born in this year of 1960.
She returned her gaze to the mass she had emerged from, like a vast womb without a body to house it.
The thing was twenty feet long, and had to weigh tons, humped like a turtle without head or limbs. There seemed to be a coat of hairs across its surface. She reached out her hand and stroked its side, smoothing those greasy bristles.
After looking around her a last time, Dot climbed onto the blob’s back, and inside of it once more. The secret opening closed and sealed without a trace behind her.
When next she emerged, having experienced less panic this time during the interval of dark swimming, Dot found herself at Muriwai Beach, in New Zealand. It was 1965. The juices from this globster’s interior rolled slowly along her limbs, down the curved slope of her lower back, trickling into the cleft of her bottom.
Another brief journey through the portal of flesh. She stepped out into Tasmania again, but this time it was the year 1970.
At last, Dot found herself emerging onto the beach of Bermuda’s Mangrove Bay. The mass that enclosed her was only three feet thick. Instead of rising up from it, she found herself lying on her side within it as if it were a cocoon, which she parted open like a pea pod and wormed her way out of, until she could stand on the sand above it. Looking down, she saw its torn seam resealing itself neatly, leaving no visible scar. The thing possessed five fleshy “arms,” perhaps, so that a witness had described the mass as looking like a “disfigured star.”
It was as white as the flesh of a goth. A chunk dropped from on high by a bloodless and decomposing god.
It was 1988, she knew from her reading, or by some intuitive biological clock tuned to the collective unconscious. She would be in existence, elsewhere in the world. She would be five years old. Her mother would be twenty-eight. Mai would have immigrated to America by now, having escaped the Communists at last. The Communists who had kept her as a prisoner, at one point i
n her life, for eighteen months working barefoot on a farm. She would have met and married Dot’s father by now, the first Vietnamese man who had courted her here. She would have married him out of disoriented loneliness in this new country she had stepped foot in. It would be a mistake, Dot thought, though she herself would never have come into existence had these events not unfolded.
Dot had turned a slow circle in the sand, taking in her surroundings, shielding her slanted eyes with her palm, letting the sun dry the moisture on her slender frame. At last, though, she returned her attention to that disfigured star of flesh, so that she could open it again like a coat and wrap herself inside it.
The mass was no longer there. Could it have been dragged out to sea again in so sedate a tide? Afraid of being stranded here in this place, this time, Dot whirled around in the sand. Squinted farther out to sea. There was nothing. She had been born here, and abandoned here, and there was no going back home again...
Awakening from her dream, Dot clutched her blanket very tightly around her body, which felt naked although she was not.
When she arrived at Pickering Wharf for work that day, Dot found that the gelatinous hulk was no longer in the water among the legs of the pier and the moored yachts. Rushing into The Pier to seek out Erin, she found Josh instead and asked him if the marine biologists from Woods Hole had arrived and collected up the blob already.
“No,” Josh told her. “I guess it washed back out to sea last night, during the storm.”
4: Disfigured Star
Lee Todd stopped for coffee along his way to the Hawthorne Nursing Home to visit his mother, something he did several times a week. As he stood in line at the counter, breathing in the warm brown aroma, he missed having Mai at his side, her head coming up only to his shoulder. This was where they had stopped for coffee last week after he had seen his mother, and after Mai’s long shift had ended.
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