Opercula

The teachers made a strong effort to create a respectful silence around me. They knew my classmates would talk. Would whisper. These teachers, the braver ones anyway, gave little speeches occasionally. They talked about “delayed development” and “transgenic differences.” How not everyone’s body will bloom at the same pace. They would talk about famous late-bloomers. Great, inspirational success stories. Sometimes though, they confessed, and they would always admit this last part almost under their breath, a strong voice collapsing into a whisper, a person just doesn’t bloom at all.

They were trying to ward off meanness. I get it. But meanness (and trust me, I’ve encountered it) happens outside of the gaze and earshot of teachers. Publicly, everyone at school’s a perfect angel, nodding along with the sermon. The worst offenders usually applaud the preacher.

I used to sit in class and daydream. Instead of focusing on what numerical identity the mysterious Secret Agent x had decided to assume today in algebra class, I would steal peeks at my blossoming classmates. I would notice Oleanna’s branches, the recent growth spurts on both sides of her body. They were long and luxurious, to her knees. Once again, she would be in season. She would bring forth the loveliest fruit. Just look at our yearbook if you don’t believe me.

She was probably the most fertile girl in our school. And I always ended up sitting near her. She wasn’t mean at all. Not publicly anyway. But still. Some days I hated her. Those were usually the days when I would catch a peripheral glimpse of her picking one of her juicy dark berries and tossing it back through her perfectly glossed lips. She knew how many guys and girls were transfixed in those moments when she would taste herself and then smile her mysterious Mona Lisa smile. Other days, I didn’t hate her at all. I admitted the truth to myself. I just wanted what she had.

Of course, my parents had taken me to the usual specialists. My siblings, my younger brother, my older sister, were both branched, and my older sister had never had any problem bear fruit. I was happy for them. My older sister wasn’t nasty about it at all. She’s even tried to help me, massaging my opercula. And my mother gave me the usual liquid supplements which are supposed to help the growth-challenged. We tried everything on the market.

The specialist doctors did all the usual scans. They said everything was in the right place. They did some exploratory visualization with fiber optics and newer technologies and then even gave me a dose of nano-bots to assist in my germination. They didn’t help at all. They told my parents it could come right at any time. Nobody knew why I hadn’t even been able to bring forth one branch from a single one of the many gill-like openings on either side of my body. I was a barren waste. My mother and father both promised they would never put me through the agony of transplantation. You could always tell when someone had transplants. There were horrible stories about what happened when the body rejected the branches. Sometimes they grew in the wrong direction, into the body instead of the world. Rumors abounded that those branches came from cadavers. Those were the fruits of the dead. Yuck. In the end, the medical consensus, the recommended course of action? Home schooling. Hide her.

I began to stay in the house all the time. I joined some support groups but this was on my phone, not in real life. I became close with some of those kids and even a few of the adults. Half would preach that were would be a cure soon. And about half would say we’re okay just the way we are. A few were just as silent as me. Being fertile isn’t everything, they would say. Food can be grown anywhere. We don’t even need the transgenic fruit to survive. For the vast majority of human history, people were not half-trees. Great minds and spirits of the past did not produce fruit. Well, not literally. Not on a single day of their lives.

True, there was that recent argument that Jesus had been the way we are now. “I am the vine and you are the branches.” And other quotes like that. “Eat of my body and drink of my blood.” I think it’s funny that today Jesus is always portrayed in visual art as a total fruiter, and yet when you look at the art of the distant past, he was just like any other human.

There are still countries, I would tell myself, that have resisted the transgenic revolution. These were usually smaller countries, many of them dominated by some of the newer religions that were catching on. I can’t tell you how many times in my fantasies I saw myself moving to one of those countries, perhaps finding my great love there looked exactly like me. I knew that when I was older I could always fall back on visiting one of those dating sites exclusively for the non-germinating. But I didn’t look forward to the experience. I tried to imagine myself falling in love with someone just like me. It made me feel so weird. It made me want to just float out of my body.

Actually, if I emigrated to one of those non-transgenic countries, my foreign love wouldn’t even have opercula. He would be a “skinflint,” to use the horrible term the fruiting use to insult the fruitless. Would I be as accepted as I am? Would my love want me to undergo painful surgeries to remove my opercula, so my body would look like the cultural norm? Wouldn’t my lover want my body to look like a body he grew up fantasizing about?

Things all sped up when my sister had gone from being engaged to actively planning her wedding. I can still see my mother and her sitting before that glowing screen, oohing and aahing at the various wedding dresses with their golden and silver body trellises. There were nectar supplements to assure a bride had a bountiful harvest on her body for her wedding night. Some brides-to-be grew their branches very long in the back in preparation for the big day, so they could be woven into the train of the wedding dress. The groom would then harvest these on the honeymoon. Some guys got so hot for that ritual. They would trade stories. I hated overhearing those conversations.

I remember the day I left. I had been watching a scene in a movie in which a very beautiful young man was sunning himself on a dock. He was about my age. He was famous. He was absorbing the light he needed to complete his natural fruition. His branches were strong and wiry, like a second musculature outside his already chiseled body. He had gone through his latest seasonal flowering and now he was bearing fruit. Some sort of miniature pear-hybrid all over him. I had to turn it off. Because I imagined the look he would give me after seeing my body. And then how quickly his gaze would avert itself, knowing where not to look ever again.

I went into the river on a summer night. It was warm water, or warm enough anyway, and I had no fear of drowning. Like virtually all non-germinaters, my malfunctioning opercula hid functional gills. True, these were vestigial, but I could submerge for extended periods. This is why people like me had even been banned from the Olympics. Our unfair advantage.

I had swim googles on. And a strong waterproof flashlight I had only recently purchased. I wondered what my family would make of that, when they saw the last purchase I had made. I hoped they would not follow me, not create embarrassing MISSING notices. I wasn’t missing. I was gone.

I swam towards the Deadlands. The area of no video cameras, the area we are forbidden to inhabit. The area which the last great war had destroyed. It had once been a metropolis swarming with life. It was a long journey, but I made it. I didn’t really care what happened to me then, the night I swam away, but that has changed now.

I had to leave the river and walk the last fifty miles or so. Down the dead highways. I thought they were pretty. The desolation. The wildflowers everywhere taking back the roads. The animals come to look at you. They’re no longer afraid.

I don’t want to go back. This is home now. My problem now seems small in comparison to those faced by the war survivors here and those crazy enough to come live here. I’m able to help people here. People with greater challenges than me. Skinflints abound, but so do variant transgenic beings of all stripes. We have a loose form of government that’s almost no government at all. We are blocked from receiving news from the outside world. Our technology only operates within the Deadlands. The outside world doesn’t want us to know anything.

I hope my sister had a beautiful wedding. I hope she has a lovely marriage. I hope her children bear fruit and their children bear fruit. “Long vines to you!” as the wedding toast goes.

One night the jamming of signals they do out there must have gone down. Because an iffy signal bled over onto my screen and we were suddenly watching their t.v. for a short while. Instead of our home grown programs. It was a beauty pageant. A glittery affair. Vines everywhere. Some of my friends were over, and their children, and we all gathered around to watch the girls strut and flounce to show off their fruits.

Many of those in the room had never even seen fruiting bodies. There were squeals of laughter and disgust from the kids. Parents chided them. These older ones looked at my opercula in the flickering light from the screen and deeper lines formed in the brows of some of my friends. “You okay?” they asked, as true friends do.

“Of course I’m okay, stupid!”

We all laughed.

Later that night, after they had all left, I went into my bedroom at the rear of my house, and sat on the edge of my bed facing a pier mirror. That mirror which had just always been here in this house that we found, that was ours for the taking. That mirror which had probably belonged to someone who died a hundred years ago. I like that mirror.

I no longer wear the clothing they wear in the outside world, with openings for branches. I wear whole garments now. But I was naked.

I held a pair of pruning shears in my right hand, and as I looked in the mirror, I clipped each branch that had begun to grow from each operculum.

I felt good doing it. And then my lover came into the room. He was monstrous. He was beautiful. He was the sun in the night.

“Do my back, darling…please?”

He smiled as he took the shears tenderly from my hand.

83

Eighty-three days
outside spring, she picks up

the bag of birdseed
larger than her back.

She’s defected
from the human thing,

family, friends, neighbors,
class reunion in the Milky Way.

She has so many children,
colors, speed, terrors.

Come close, she whispers
in her backyard. They do.

We don’t need to know
each other to create

meaning, to feel love.
The sounds in cold branches

where they perch and wait
feel more like her name

to her, than the one
the kindred strangers call.

The cold branches
that will gather snow

when she’s gone,
and the miracles

of dark peeping
things almost children,

bits of sky

their eyes,
are all the love

that’s fraught enough
to call home.

Cherryborg

    


PATIENCE

The patience of a bar of soap
melting in your hands,
that’s as good
as it gets.

The patience of nearly-extinct parrots,
their beaks wired shut,
shoved into shoeboxes
and smuggled north.

Be quiet, be still, survive.

The sense you get
watching the television news
that you’re being kidnapped
each night.

There’s nothing to be done with that.

The sense the merry-go-round
is speeding up, the population’s
exponential increase,
the gunfire and satellites,
drones carrying anthrax soon,

drones singing in your ear

buy this, flee this,
merry christmas,

the president is hiding,
now you hide,

quick, soon anyone
will be able to kill anyone else
anywhere,
with a button press,

even a third grader
will be able to take you out,

anyone with a phone,

the rise
of the Dark Empire

of the forgotten grandmothers

begins.

Gift

Jason.

It would be so easy to say it’s all Jason’s fault. After all, he was the one who retrieved the package from our mail box. While Sarah and I were still at work, he opened it and read the instructions and blindly did what they told him to do. But it’s what any kid would do. We remind ourselves of that. When we get to really arguing. When we get ugly with each other. Hundreds of times we’ve reminded ourselves.

And I’ve looked at that set of instructions hundreds of times. It’s a single sheet of paper that arrived folded in the package. It looks like any other goofy set of instructions telling kids what to do with a toy. Large, hand-drawn comic book style instructions with black and white drawings show you how to put the contained “seeds” in a filled bathtub. Kids can’t wait to see the seeds “COME ALIVE.” They can’t wait to see the “MAGIC SWIMMERS!!!” promised. The words under the drawings are in several languages, so kids around the world can understand no matter where they live. No matter which country.

I’ve never seen the seeds. I have to imagine them. I have to go by what Jason tells Sarah and me, when we ask him to repeat the story. He hates telling it now. He’s almost a year older.

He’s started talking about leaving. At his ridiculous age. Where would he go? How would he live? He carries a heavy load of guilt, we know. We keep telling him that it’s not his fault when he talks about leaving. Or when he hints at doing something worse. I take him by the shoulders and tell him. “It’s not your fault.” But, really, a tiny voice deep down inside me screams that it is his fault. It totally is, kid. You did this to us.

Jason says when he placed the seeds in the warm bath water we were at work. It was late afternoon. He had just gotten home from school. They were in the mailbox inside the envelope addressed to him. It was a label sticker, not handwriting. Later, we noticed his name was actually spelled wrong. His birthday had been less than a month before, so he figured it was just one of his uncles who had sent them. Perhaps the young uncle who travels a lot with his army job and is always late with birthday presents, when he remembers them at all.

Or it was just some sort of free promotional gift for something he had filled out somewhere. Some contest or other. He didn’t give it a lot of thought, he admitted. He just wanted to see what would happen.

It was slow at first, Jason said. Nothing seemed to be happening with the seeds. They just sank to the bottom of the warm tub and rested there on the bathmat doing nothing whatsoever. “What a rip!” Jason thought. He went downstairs to watch t.v., made a t.v. dinner, texted a bit with his friends. Then he ran back upstairs to the bathroom and looked.

And they were swimming around in there. Little black aquatic creatures. One for each seed. Five of them. Not like fish. Too many tiny little limbs attached, he said. And the shapes of their heads were different. It wasn’t all that exciting. He ran down to the basement to see if we still had the aquarium. He wasn’t sure if we had donated it to Goodwill after the last of the goldfish deaths.

When he got back upstairs, and he assured us it couldn’t have been more than five or ten minutes later, there were no longer five of the things in the water. Now there were at least a hundred of the small black creatures swimming in the tub. And he saw the drain cover had been removed. Partially. The tub was slowly draining. He watched as the black creatures swam with everything they had in them for the drain. And down they went. It wasn’t a random sort of swimming. It was directed. It was intelligent. And they were gone in seconds. He watched them go.

He watched them go.

He said he had no idea how that happened. The drain cover being partially open. Sarah slapped him once. Hard. She slapped him hard across the face when he said that part, when he repeated the story. When he said that he didn’t know how the drain cover was open. I don’t think she knew why she slapped him. We all knew by then that he hadn’t done it. They had. I think she slapped him because he had mentioned the moment when things truly became irrevocable.

We saved the envelope they came in, but the return address was fake. When I searched online, I saw how many other people had received the package too. Many of them had different fake return addresses, but no small number had our same fake address on their package too. The address in Idaho. It said it was a “toy company.” The government had begun collecting the packages. By then, we realized the government was also rounding up those people who had received one of the packages and that those people were not returning to their lives. Not even their children were returning to their lives.

So we chose to be one of the families who remained silent. We chose to proceed with our lives.

I remember when we first noticed it in our drinking glasses. It would form a black gelatinous mass on one side of a clear glass. Perfectly circular. Smaller than your pinkie fingerprint. You could turn the glass away from you and the mass would swim across and paste itself against the side of the drinking glass nearest your face. Even with a magnifying glass, you couldn’t see any distinguishing features, any sense of a tiny animal or animals in the mass. You would see see nothing in the filtered water container in the fridge. It looked like crystal-clear water. And when you filled the drinking glass and sat down to watch your favorite television show, it would be there within minutes. On the side of the glass.

Well, of course you didn’t drink it, you’ll say to yourself.

But if you didn’t drink it, the pain would start up inside. Inside your guts. Sometimes in your head. In your brain. It felt like knives twisting or sometimes like hot coals placed inside one of your organs. Other forms of pain were something new on earth. Like nothing anyone on earth had described in any medical textbook. I know because I would type words in the search bar. The only matches were people describing similar pain that started only with this year. It was dangerous to confess such things on blogs or websites. The government was tracking us all down by then. I stopped typing things in search bars.

So we did as our bodies told us.

Soon, we learned the pain would stop if we walked outside the house.

If we walked a certain direction, the pain increased. If we walked the other direction, it relented or completely disappeared. You’re getting warm. Warmer. Warmer. Very hot. No, you’re cold. Go back the other way! You’re feezing! You know this game. Cold hurt like hell.

So now we leave the house when we’re told. All three of us, Sarah and Jason and I.

Remarkably, we are still able to keep our jobs and Jason goes to school every day. Except for the days when the pain tells him to stay home “sick” and then go out. While we are at work, he goes on what we now know are missions. We go out in the evenings. Sometimes in the middle of the night, Sarah just leaves. I say nothing when she slips out of our bed and begins dressing. She says nothing on the nights that I get into my clothes at two or three in the morning and leave as fast as I can, to stop the gnawing pain.

We don’t talk with each other about the places we go on these “guided journeys,” or the things we must do. The things the pain makes us do. Because on the few occasions we have tried to pool our information, the volume on the pain was turned up to its highest level. We are still allowed to have normal conversations, to pretend that life continues as normal. But it’s a hollow thing, an exercise in calming our own nerves at the dinner table. It helps to pass the time.

I think we’ve all thought of suicide by now. Probably we’ve all thought of familicide too.

You probably would too. In our shoes.

There’s always the government. We could go to them. But the pain would be excruciating. And nobody has seen any of those people return. The word on the street and online is that those people were probably all seen as collateral damage. They’re just gone. It makes sense.

I don’t want to tell you all the things I’ve done. I don’t want you to hate me any more than you already do right now, as one of the uninfected reading my words.

I don’t want to tell you how I’ve had to open my mouth and disgorge a dark, gelatinous fluid into the food of my coworkers kept in the little mini-fridge we share in our university office bay.

Only the oldest colleagues in my office still leave their food out of their sight. That generation doesn’t seem to get what’s happening. The younger coworkers are well aware. I’ve seen some of them eyeing me. They talk to me differently now. A few of them do, anyway.

I’ve started to get the pain around them. They know, you see. They know which ones know. Just as they know if I try to talk to anyone.

I know what I’ll have to do in a matter of a very short time. The pain increases and the thought forms in my head. When they approach and speak with me. The ones who have guessed I’m on the new “down low.” They might have already spoken with the government. It might be too late.

I know what I have to do.

Unless my young colleagues are better organized than I am. Part of me, and it’s a large part, hopes they are. Hopes they win. I’m tired.

But for now I must go and have another ordinary afternoon, stand before my host of angels, my paying students, and explain William Burroughs (how ironic, right?) to the innocents in a way that the words will walk carefully on society’s eggshells, and yet still perhaps give them a hint of a warning that the safety they are feeling is a safety within a placid dream that someone other than themselves is dreaming.

Judging a Book by its Cover

(I thought maybe I should do a series of brief write-ups detailing my reactions to the covers of books which I have not read.)

I think we should slightly tweak the word serendipity to produce a word meaning "the faculty or phenomenon of finding v̶a̶l̶u̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶a̶g̶r̶e̶e̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶s ̶ WEIRD OR BIZARRE THINGS not sought for; also : an instance of this." I'm thinking serendopeity.

Okay, there's the obvious (so tired) yuk-yuk inherent in the title, bringing unavoidable thoughts of  diminutive pubic freeloaders.

I'm wondering if Mr. White has a flair for coming up with such vaguely disquieting book titles, since he's also the author of How to Catch Bottomfish.

I wasn't sure, at first, if this was actually the cover of a really cool novel about the perils of fast love in the city. Because I could see a hipster novelist going this way with the cover design of such a book. Nothing wrong with a lark like that.

But no. The crab you see on the cover is the sort of crab the readers of this book are presumably attempting to catch. It's a Pacific Coast guidebook.

I haven't read it. I am judging this book only by its cover.

I have to say that my first impression is that I feel huge empathy for the crab. I don't even need to consume entheogens to say that. The crab seems to feel the menace of the human pursuing him. You just know he would be looking over his crabby little shoulders in terror, if he had  crabby little shoulders to look over. The photograph is like the poster for a Hitchcock movie with an all-crab cast produced for a viewing audience consisting solely of crabs whose greatest fear is crabmen. Those boots are absolutely terrifying in this photo.

I also find this cover a little funny. Because we know catching crabs is going to involve a lot more work than walking on a beach and stalking a crab who just happens to be taking his morning constitutional there. Usually, we are going to need to go to Crabsville, the bay or the ocean, the tidal estuary and so on. 

Part of me wonders if the crab in the photo is dead. Have the eyes lost their magic luster of life? Does the crab look a little too dry to you? True, some of the appendages are dug down into the sand but that could be the photographer making life look more like art to look more like life. Look what creepy Matthew Brady did on the battlefield. Need I say more?

Would I read this book? Hell Yaw, Son. Don't think that means I want to catch or stalk or otherwise impede the life narrative of crabs in the wild. I just read everything. To see what's going on over there. 

I'd like to think the crab pictured on the cover of this guide is still alive and enjoying the Pacific froth and protozoa and algae as much today as he was in his crab salad days (oops, wrong choice of words). But my guess is he was whacked shortly after signing off on the release form for the photograph.

On the brighter side, I do think he will have descendants who will live to see America, the Vegan. And I don't think it will be that far off. McDonald's will probably be more about hydroponics than hydrogenated oils.

But now I have succeeded at doing what I set out to do with looking at this book cover, and that is get hopelessly lost and totally lose my thought trail.

Thank you very much, How to Catch Crabs.

People Talking in Their Sleep

"The diamonds and emeralds, the rubies! That little dog is not your dog, that dog was always mine, he loved me more and you hated me for it!" an eighty-five-year-old man in pineapple-pattern pajama bottoms growls and punches his pillow, which this moment is a brother who has been dead since 1969.

"I'm the Queen of Snow Peas!" a four-year-old girl exults, so proud to be handed the crystal scepter and see those countless green minions, who stretch to the horizon now, jumping up and down and cheering her, just before she rolls out of the top bunk and crashes to the floor, waking up crying and screaming for her parents, from the pain, but mostly from the sudden revocation of royalty.

"I always will, Essie, I always did love you…your brother is a liar and I killed him cuz he poisoned you against me….put 'em in a garbage pile….like a carrot!"mutters  someone in New Jersey who thrashes under a blanket, as a dark nurse stands in the dark doorway, half watching a CSI rerun on a television in a room across the hall.

A woman who has become her long-dead Yorkshire terrier in a series of dreams chases the sled on which she (as a six-year-old girl) flies so joyfully down a snowy hill in a cemetery near her former home, long-razed, where a strip mall now stands, barking merrily all the way down.

"Yes, I used the toothpaste to masturbate," an astronaut-in-training reverted to his eleven-year-old self abjectly confesses to his father, who is a mouse twice his size, standing before him, next to his mother, who is now younger than he ever remembered her, platinum blonde and dangerously alluring in a way that he knows only from photographs in a family album that was rarely brought out.

An eleven-year-old girl who has recently studied the history of American slavery is shouting out numbers, bidding at a slave auction on all her classmates, white children who have become African-Americans, but still look exactly like themselves, had they been born black, in another century, and not ten or eleven years ago in a Connecticut city with the highest per capita income in the state.

"Be quiet, I am punishing you," a thirteen-year-old boy tells his little sister's favorite stuffed animal, a pink rabbit, in a dream, but the lagomorph fights back, and soon he is on his back and the pleasure is everywhere until he is woken by something like a bee sting and the thrashing of his necklace, its crucifix, so tired he had been last night that he had forgotten to remove it, and now his fingers discover (his eyes with the girlish lashes are still closed) it is wet with something he is sure must be blood and probably the blood of weeping Jesus his grandmother in the mental hospital warned him about.

A homeless man wrapped in several blankets on a park bench that overlooks a river whose hard surface deer now cross, going from blue forested island to blue forested island, freezes to death in the night, but not before reciting The Gettysburg Address to perfection in the presence of his parents, who keep nodding approvingly and smiling, though he murdered them seventeen years before for drug money.

Period

The night is crisp

if you listen.


The leaves finished

with competition

on the branch


drop,

one by one


into the water


to see what buoyancy is.