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.