socially isolated kind of a person inside, if that’s still a part of who I’m going to be. I can’t help but feel like a moth inside his cocoon, wondering what kind of butterfly will emerge.
I hadn’t bothered calling most of my family, because I knew by now most of them couldn’t understand. A few of the few I called showed, but even the ones who did wouldn’t sit near me, save for my gay cousin, Alan. Alan likes me because now he isn’t the family’s black sheep, just “blue gray to match my eyes.”
By and large, my funeral was filled with white coats, colleagues- but they came, and that meant something.
Near the end of the ceremony a woman snuck into the back. She was dressed in black, with a veil, and I’d have sworn it was my mother if it weren’t for the protective goggles keeping out so much light. I thought I could talk to her afterward, but after the eulogy, she was gone.
Day 20
My hair has started growing back. Right now it’s just peach fuzz, but it feels good not to be bald anymore. I left the color the same; it was always the same color as my dad’s hair, and I wanted to keep it, but it’s coming in softer and straighter. Alan really wants to take me wig shopping, but for now I just want to see what it does.
And my eyes are finally healed enough to ditch the glasses, and adjusted enough that I can see clearly, so for the first time I’m really seeing myself in the mirror. I tweaked my eye color away from brown, but I was purposely nonspecific. They turn out to have a greenish hazel center, and a silvery blue corona.
But staring in the mirror, I’m not the man I thought I’d be. Echoes of my former features still wash over my face, like my nose, still broader than my wanted, my lower lip still poutier than I’d pictured. Some of it is probably swelling, and will go away, but… I maybe overestimated the amount of change I’d see.
I could have surgery, I suppose, but that feels like it would be too shallow; like it’s one thing if a transgendered person gets breast implants, but it’s another if they opt for the double Ds; it’s the difference between chasing perfection with a scalpel and just trying to be complete. Maybe this face is just me, and maybe this is the me I should try to get comfortable with. I guess time can tell on that.
And my mother called. As soon as I answered, she hung up, but it’s the first time in a a long time that she's called me.
So I decided to take a walk, just around the block. Half of my consulting physicians would have conniptions if I told them, but I decided I could bundle up, and not let anyone breathe on me, and be relatively safe.
Outside, everything is different. For the first time I feel I’m seeing a new world, with new eyes. And I hope I’m not the only one who does.
Table of Contents
Leaving Lost Atlantis
Dear Jean,
I’ve tried not to be bitter. I haven’t always been successful. But I held my tongue when you told me, in front of our daughters, that I was a failure and a fuck-up. I gritted my teeth and bore your insults when you berated our sex life in front of my coworkers. I bit through my lip when you told me you’d fallen in love with someone else (and you took pains to tell me it was the first time you’d felt anything like love in a very long time). So it’s with some pleasure, but only a modicum of bitterness that I’m writing to tell you you were wrong: I found Atlantis.
I know I’ve been missing for a while, and I’m sure you’re pissed as hell. I wanted to write sooner, but I couldn’t. And I feel bad about missing my support payments. If you want, you can claim the life insurance policy I had through the school and my pension, too- just tell your lawyer I faced “imminent peril” and did not return; I never got around to taking your name off them- to be honest, I didn’t have anyone else I’d have wanted the money to go to. But it’s not like you ever needed your share of my pittance from the university; your new “love” has more money than I’ll ever see. Taking me to court for support, and for custody, after the divorce was settled- that was spite, and I don’t understand it, frankly. You left me- what was there left to be spiteful over?
I don’t want to be followed, but I’ll say it was in one of those old books I was chasing. I lost the eBay auctions to collectors, but it turns out most true collectors are happy to let an expert give his opinions on occult artifacts. Information from those pinged off things I’d already read, and I pieced things together and, well, I figured out where the island had been.
Now I don’t know what made me do it. I’d had other leads before that came to nothing, and I still had money left on the grant from the university, I could have rented one of those new unmanned submersibles, really put on the Ritz, but somehow I knew that I couldn’t let the school know where I was, or what I was doing. So I emptied my savings and chartered one of those little one-man subs. It was cramped, and smelled like rotten fish inside it, but it got me under the sea.
The whole way down, in that stinking sub, I thought it stank because it leaked, and had probably killed its last inhabitants- that not only was I not going to find Atlantis, but I was going to drown like a fool. I was doing my best to steel myself against impending failure, when I saw them: pillars on the sea floor.
The first few looked just like the ones at Stonehenge- obviously man-made, but otherwise sort of innocuous- too perfect to be naturally occurring, but showing no purposeful placement. But as I drew closer, I could see they were covered in hieroglyphic markings, sort of a simplified Cyrillic alphabet. The letters glowed blue, and there was a bright flash, and suddenly the pillar was covered in English characters, and they swirled together into a large message that read, “Hello. Please disembark at left.”
I guided the sub to a small empty space that seemed designed for accepting small vessels- the underwater equivalent of a port. Via radio, the ship’s crew were adamant that I not leave the little sub, but I told them it was designed for this sort of thing. I adjusted the gauges inside the sub, so the pressure slowly came down until it equalized with the water around us, then the sub began to fill with water.
In the meantime, I readied and checked my equipment. It was going to be a strenuous dive, nearly 600 feet down, but nothing I hadn’t been through before (of course, the last time I’d dived down to that depth I’d suffered from severe nitrogen narcosis and couldn’t remember anything that happened- though that’s far from atypical).
My sub was at the bottom of a low hill maybe ten meters tall- a good sign, I thought, since pressure lessens going up rather than down. But I swam over the top of the hill, only to be confronted by a deep depression in the ocean floor. I could see the same bluish glow as the pillars had given off, but not much more despite the lamp in my hand. I continued down.
The depth gauge at my wrist read nearly 200 meters, but still I swum down. I began to panic; I hadn’t calculated a dive this deep, and soon my breathing gas mix would become a liability; then a calm hit me, and I knew it would be all right. I was meant to find this place- it all was happening for a reason (I realize now this was just nitrogen narcosis, and its accompanying euphoria).
At 260 meters, or about 850 feet, I felt something brush my leg. Then something struck me in the shoulder, or rather bumped into me at speed. I spun around, trying to get my bearings, but the light barely penetrated the water. I could make out a humanoid arm or leg swimming past, but at such a rate and speed there had to be dozens of them around me. Suddenly, inside my head I heard a voice say, “Do not fight. We will not harm you.” Of course, this was completely contradicted by the throbbing pain in my head that accompanied the message, so intense that I peed myself and passed out.
I awoke with holes beneath my jaw, and lungs full of salt water. I wanted to struggle, but I’d been strapped to a table, and I think I was also sedated, because even when I moved, my muscles responded only weakly. Raw panic gripped me, and I fought to keep myself from throwing up, when of their own accord, my lungs pushed the water up, then sucked another “breath” in, all through the new slits in my neck.
I was suddenly aware that there were tw
o people in the room. One of them was a woman, and looked every bit like a woman on the surface, aside from the fact that her hair splayed in a halo from her face, playing gently in the ocean currents. She smiled, and said, “Welcome to Atlantis,” though this time her voice in my head was gentler.
“You should not have tried to swim to us. You nearly died, and we were already on the way to get you.” She was an ambassador of sorts. She told me that when the sub’s parent vessel couldn’t raise me on the radio, they’d remotely recalled the sub and left.
I found that she could hear thoughts I wanted her to (though I had to work a little to restrain certain thoughts- I accidentally told her she was cute). I still haven’t learned enough about them to know if it’s a naturally evolved telepathy or some kind of technology they haven’t explained to me yet, but it seems both passive and intelligent; they don’t have to concentrate, and at the same time they only broadcast what they want known.
But the reason I’m missing, and the reason I couldn’t write, is Atlantis has rules about contact with the outside world. They let me in, but I couldn’t leave, couldn’t write. I had to appeal directly to their ruler to have an exception made. But after poring through their histories, I can
Selected Short Stories Featuring New Corpse Smell Page 2