Reef Mind, page 2
“Poor thing.”
The boy’s mouth opened again into a silent scream.
The pain was a rod connecting my eye to my brain then, an unheard frequency vibrating it to such intensity that my eyes watered. I clenched my fists as the fit passed in the way a set of particularly choppy waves hits a body-boarder. My entire body erupted into goosepimples.
Get away from that gross thing.
The thought was mine, from some animal part of me. The part that is disgusted by sickness, or sometimes the elderly. The part of me I push down with a robust sense of shame. I realized that I was, for some reason, afraid. And this fear was muted by the pain in my eye, dampening it. I’m dying. I’m sick, like this kid.
The thought had been so urgent that I looked up as if Matt had spoken. He saw the shine in my eyes and took it as grief for the boy. In that moment, I realized that Matt didn’t understand me.
He didn’t see the fear of a captive before him, probably hadn’t figured out that I was ill. The guarded shell I’d put around myself was being gnawed away by the passenger in my mind, and I could no longer pretend to be the Amanda that Matt liked to be with. Our pursuit of a good time had avoided the requirements of true intimacy, and now, vulnerable, I had a real reason to grieve.
I wiped my tears and moved with a determination I felt compelled to. Matt only looked relieved.
The boy was light. Easy to pick up. He was still, and rested his head on my neck, below my chin. He could have been sleeping. I felt a tightness in my throat.
“It’s alright, honey.” I walked down the stairs to the first floor and waded into the street.
***
I loved when the dawn light dappled Matt’s sleeping face, his closed eyes inches from my own. I rested my hand on his bare chest. Any child of ours should have your nose, the curve of your lips.
If I could . . .
AMANDA
I TOOK THE boy to Windansea Beach. I sung him a lullaby. It seemed the right thing to do. The villi all over him kissed at my bare skin where I held him. I set him down on a clear spot, a rock above the water. The coral wall loomed over us. I was shivering and wet.
In my mind, two images appeared: a bright-faced smiling boy with the wind of the Pacific Ocean in his hair; and the creature below with skin marred and squirming. The pain again. I pressed the heel of my hand against my eye, but one was enough to see the terrible metamorphosis of the child beside me.
The boy’s bones cracked and snapped inside him, ballooning his little chest. His ribcage sprouted, popped several joints, and heaved upward of its own volition, leaving beneath it the former meat overcoat. It crab walked toward me just as the head it left behind turned and let out a raspy noise. A fragment of a small voice.
The unraveling of the boy before me destroyed the mind I had, smashing my sanity to bits. This thing replaced my love of the ocean with a vast and dark fear and a more incomprehensible silence, like a night without stars now dominated the ruin of our insect-like civilization. I put my hands in front of me—knowing full well I could not have moved to defend myself in any way.
The pain behind my eye flashed bright, and I wondered if I’d go blind. Instead, a high and barely adolescent voice spoke inside my head. It knew my name.
“You killed him,” I said aloud.
An inhuman noise vibrated inside my skull in response, the bloom of pain behind my eye unbearable. I felt the reproach in it, the defensiveness.
“Necessary? How is this necessary? What are you?”
The villi all over the boy’s tattered skin gave off their purple light, flexing and stirring, as if testing the air like antennae seeking purchase. There was no blood. The small remains were pale as fish meat. So too, fear drained from me; perhaps because I could no longer maintain it. I felt the probing again, the unbidden images.
I felt pity for this traveler before me, the depths of its ocean invaded, boiled, made foul.
I was made to understand what was devouring me from the inside.
Tears of fury filled my eyes. Exhausted, I lowered my forehead to the rock.
It was pitch black when I finally awoke, stiff and uncomfortable. Trembling in the cold, I looked down at my hands. My fingertips were pushed through a small skull, holding it like a bike helmet. The skin had squirmed away from him, then, leaving only this.
Purple pinpricks of light dotted the coral shelves.
Raised bumps dotted my skin. I said nothing about them to Matt, adhering to some sort of instinct I had made peace with.
***
We lived, in those following months after the boy, as simply as we could. I remember Matt with his head in his hands, a bottle of tequila on the ground, a black cell phone next to it. It had finally stopped working. He’d been checking it obsessively for news. Survivors. Anything. He took a drink, then looked at me with shining eyes, mourning the loss of a world he knew and trusted.
I walked over to him and wrapped my arms around his head. I let him press his forehead against my chest. At first, he was willing to sink into me as usual, until I felt him stiffen, lips parted against the side of my breast.
Horror trembled in his eyes. “Amanda?”
He saw my pebbled skin, bloodless but inflamed. They were all over my stomach. Did it hurt? I don’t know. It was different, but not exactly pain. Matt fretted over me.
I sat by the window in the light and would not move, not even to eat. I stopped going to the bathroom, I guess. I didn’t think of such things until Matt reminded me of them, and I grew annoyed. The bumps warmed in the light. They were tender to the touch.
In the days that followed, my skin grew fingers.
***
Matt?
Is he even in the room with me anymore?
It’s lonely.
MATT
I KNOW NOW that barracuda rarely pick fights they can’t win.
They’re still unnerving fuckers, with their dark eyes and needle-sharp teeth. Sometimes they follow me around when I’m outside, hoping we’ll be predatory comrades. If I stand still, they get bored and float on. They’re attracted to the glint of shiny objects because they can’t see for shit.
Amanda noticed that right away. She slipped out of her bracelets—I thought she was having a fit—and tossed them. The calm of the restaurant imploded when the window shattered.
The first stupid thought I had was, are there flying fish in La Jolla?
I’d been fishing in the Cove and had never seen one, so it didn’t seem like an altogether idiotic thought, but, the fish streaming through the window like ravenous eels had shimmering scales and teeth, and it wasn’t until one of them clamped down on the golden cuff-lined arm of a teen girl and started tearing at her that we realized the danger. Three feet long, mouths like scissors. Moving through the air like it was water.
I didn’t fight back. I didn’t move at all. It was like watching a play. A diner with a fillet knife jumped over a downed chair, weaved around a few screaming bodies on the ground, and sliced a large fish down the side. The wound was a thread, then parting lips. The barracuda floated to the ground. Fish caught in boats gasped and struggled. But this one didn’t. It didn’t make any sense.
“Are you seeing this?” I asked, but Amanda didn’t answer. She was tugging my arm, trying to get me to leave. It just didn’t make any goddamn sense. “Look at them!” I said, louder. “They’re breathing!”
***
The air had changed. It felt thicker to me, at first. Richer. And then came the lightheadedness. It was a flood of oxygen and something else I don’t understand. It shimmered in the air sometimes, like rainbows on an oil spill.
I’m told it was what helped the fish leave the water. People started passing out, and the mass exodus to higher ground started. I fit a respirator to my face, one that was programmed to filter the air and prevent hyperoxia. That was how I stayed with the EMTs until the end, pulling bodies out of shops and hotel rooms.
The problem at that point wasn’t always sickness. People who passed out were preyed on by opportunistic creatures. Crablike things, carnivorous fish. They’d drag people away, out to the ocean, I think. I don’t know why. I learned to use a harpoon. We all did, operating like primitives for a while as we adjusted to the new paradigm. The first guy that learned guns didn’t work anymore was chewed up by a Great White. An airship with teeth raining blood and fleshy chunks on the landscape. It terrorized hikers on Torrey Pines for weeks.
The coral towers that grew from the water took over the coast. Satellites from space compared it to the Great Wall. Every beachfront was like this. Even places that hadn’t seen many coral gardens at all, places where ecologists lamented we’d killed them off. The outline of every continent was slowly enclosed in a cage of calcium carbonate.
A coral invasion. That was the last thing I heard from the news. Humanity used to be so connected. We carried the world in our pockets.
We thought we knew everything.
***
I don’t know why technology stopped working. Machinery, gadgets, appliances. All of the progress of industrialization was wiped out. Even the respirators and air filters stopped operating. Maybe that’s because technology isn’t alive. The coral can’t use it. It manipulates the living. Invades it.
Alters it.
***
Like I said, Amanda got sick. We’d adapted to the lack of electricity with battery powered air filters and lamps, which would eventually run their course and die forever. I’d nailed boards over the windows. Flickering shadows sometimes eked through the slats, making spears of sunlight blink over the hardwood. I scavenged for provisions before barring the door to our apartment. I didn’t think anyone would try to hurt us.
It was for me. I was afraid I’d abandon her.
***
I used to hate funerals, but I see now that they’re cathartic. They provide a space, I guess, that says you can blubber and look the fool and nobody will give you any shit or call you weak or nuts. Loss is hard, but loss without the chance to say goodbye is worse.
When my mom died, the church she grew up in held the service. I don’t remember much but the toll of the bell, the black cassock the priest wore, and the candlelight that blurred and stretched in my underwater vision. Several old women shook my hand outside, most of them wearing black lace on their heads. I think they shared condolences or told me that the world was still good.
The sky was bright blue despite my sorrow. I resented it, somehow. The months that followed were akin to a fugue state. No real memories, just the aftertaste of a long sorrow. Misery upon misery, the soft and pliable world now full of sharp edges.
Losing Amanda was worse than that.
***
The top of my wife’s head pulsed like a newborn’s soft spot for weeks, her eyes squeezed shut, her mouth stretched in a rictus of pain. I heard the papery noise before the bloodless split as her skull grew white organ pipes in a crown around her head.
When I dared to glance back at her from across the room, her head was back, her mouth slightly open, one hand resting palm up on her knee, the other covering her crotch. I took in the curve of her tanned legs, her spread open thighs. I was struck by grief, my stomach feeling the way I did when I missed a step. It curbed my arousal, made me sick with the realization that we’d never make love again.
Through the windows of Amanda’ skull, fiery orange polyps wormed out. I thought that was it. I thought it was over. But she was not dead. Instead, her hands rose and pawed the air, feeling for me. “Matt?” she asked. She said my name in this way several times, but I couldn’t touch her.
I wouldn’t.
***
Newborns slide out of someone’s flesh in a sandwich of blood and shit. I saw it in ambulances more than once. Life struggles and breaks through. Why is it so violent?
I was witnessing the birth of a new world in La Jolla and didn’t know it. Or maybe I was in denial. I didn’t ask for it or expect it. Just as I didn’t ask for, or expect, a daughter.
You.
I knew people who wanted kids and couldn’t have them. And people not looking for them got them. Those same people, whose hearts made room for something they didn’t expect, lost those precious little lives when the coral emerged.
It’s enough to make me drink, though I don’t anymore. Amanda wasn’t a drinker, but she did have a few when tempted to melancholy. She had trouble with children. She loved them too much. And she’d lost three herself. A womb is often a grave. One that many people have to carry around. Isn’t that fucked up?
I learned that she’d had two miscarriages and one stillbirth. The ex-husband—I never learned his name—left. She tied her tubes. Took care of her mother, buried her, swore off love. There was no family behind her or in front of her, she often said.
“Just me myself and I until the end of the world.”
“But I’m here now,” I reminded her. And when she didn’t answer, I added, “right, babe?”
***
Amanda stopped asking for me. Her long vowels turned into clipped consonants before going mute. Perhaps she gave up. Or she could no longer speak. Her throat was colonized by a wriggling invasion of fauna that cast bioluminescent shadows on the roof of her mouth. But her head turned in every direction I was, a skeletal smile that knew me and knew I was watching all of this. Her bones had grown to encase her skin, and then sprouted: Her ribs into shelves, her spine like a row of stegosaurus columns.
I left when she began to bloom. The polyps in her eye sockets puckered at me as I broke down the door.
Does she hate me now?
Can she feel anything?
AMANDA
SOME PEOPLE MIGHT call pregnancy a sickness. Others take a more nuanced view. And then there’s someone like me, chasing after it.
My body changed. There were physical difficulties, even pain. I accepted this with a sincerity that looked like madness to others. I know this because I was made responsible for their feelings on the matter. Oh no, what is that? they would say when they saw it under my skin, the conical shape of an elbow gliding from my belly button to my ribs. Perhaps they’d be startled by the lurch my midriff made on its own. Weird, they described it. Or alien.
Not as startled as I was to experience the sensation of total loss. The denial as the ache intensified up my back, the sheer horror of absent movement, the groaning of acceptance. The collapse of a dying star into blood.
Isn’t there always a change to the body before it can share itself with another? Puberty before sex, sex before pregnancy. I was done sharing. Or, trying to. I thought I was done with change.
The coral sickness had me from the beginning. It was a sudden thing at first, nothing dramatic. An itch that spread and burned and then finally blossomed. A thing that just is. And with it, a me that is devastated, collapsed, as if I slipped through my own fingers.
I have mentioned before, my desire for self-destruction.
The winter waves of the Pacific Ocean could get twelve feet high. I used to wait for it, those wonderful sets, in the early morning. At five or six am, arrested by a consuming melancholy, I’d clutch a water bottle and stare into the damp fog. I almost wiped out.
I paddled out into the freezing waters, my limbs going numb, my hair plastered to my face in the damp, the fog heavy and thick over the beach I left behind. The first wave hit me hard and I rolled under it. It dragged me far, far out. I don’t know how far, but enough that I wondered if I’d end up dead. I struggled to my board, gasping, and managed to kick out as the second wave came. And that one I cleared, with a manic burst of lightning speed, the saltwater burning the inside of my nose and throat. I overtook two lifeguards on jet skis. They followed me as I slowed, until, breathless, we all stopped near an alcove of rock. I remember laughing.
They scolded me and then hired me. I met Matt shortly after.
Where is Matt?
I have to find him; this devastated me. The me that is stripped down to the bones. The me that will have life from the jaws of death.
When I came to myself, by the window in our apartment, it was only to a part of myself. My neck, which could move, even without sight or sound but some sense that compelled me to turn. My left arm, which could feel the hardening of my skin, or lift to touch the bones of my face. My hand could feel the windowsill, my skin sensitive to the air outside. The rest of the body—numb to sensation.
I try to call for Matt again but cannot. So much of my body is annexed by a nightmare. I am a damaged glove that something works to fill from within. The pain behind my eye is gone, replaced by a wet presence that reassures me I am alone, that my husband has fled. It shares this information intending to reach my most personal center, to hurt my heart. In the way a tone of voice reveals the sly intent to insult and terrorize, the feeling I am flooded with is deliberate.
Anytime now. The certainty of the nightmare’s climax is growing near. I clench my fist, mind desperate to exert my will, a flicker of a flame before a deluge. Why me? Why that little boy? Why? Why?
Again, that sense of teasing fear, the smug presence growing confident. Like it’s savoring its meal. But it is not mere meat this thing is after, otherwise, why would my mind be intact? Matt mentioned lions—slaughter by such a beast would be more merciful than this. I am made to know my weakness. I am made to know that this thing wants me to understand everything that is happening to me.
My horror, outrage, and misery boil over in tearless agony. My head rolls back on my shoulders, my mouth open in a silent, unvocalized scream.
The fingers all over my skin strain and then drive sharp nails into my body—now suddenly, horribly full of sensation. With my soundless exhalation of ecstasy and terror they burst forth from me into thousands of wriggling children.
***
It didn’t snow in La Jolla until the corals bloomed and spawned. Neon colors shot upwards like so many fireworks and settled, in some places, to blanket the ground in a multicolor cloak. I am in that storm. Blue and green, swarming from the window of our apartment. I see the ice cream shop below.
