Lukies (pt. III)

 

    The next morning, Gregory sat up in bed promptly at seven o’clock. He walked slowly down the hallway lined with decommissioned radio equipment, taking care not to disturb the twinkling colloids which hung in the atmosphere, and attended to the maintenance of his body in the kitchen. Here, he brushed his teeth in the empty metal basin on the left side of the sink, spitting out foaming urchins of coagulated lukie that were tinged a vague pink from the blood of his gums.

     Outside his back door, he heard a stirring on the wooden porch. Switching off the dim bronze light above the stove so as to obscure his silhouette, Gregory approached the quadrilateral windows embedded in the door and watched through the diaphanous curtain which hung there.

     It was his neighbor, who had moved in across the hall not two months before: a sporty woman in her twenties with blanched skin and oddly thin, yet flaxen hair, pulled tightly flush to her skull and terminating in the back with a bulbous circular bun; this was all too evocative of the round valve handle of a bulkhead door on a mid-twentieth-century battleship – just a few affirmative twists to the left, and the panel of bone enclosing her cerebellum would swing wide open on its hinges 

     She was loaded down with three cotton bags, pregnant with soiled laundry: as she stumbled toward the precipice of the stairs, the rough-spun cotton chafed and reddened her otherwise pale thighs, just below the denim cuffs of a pair of, frankly, obscenely revealing shorts.

     As she took her first descending step, a swarm of agitated lukies came whipping around the stained brick cornice of the building, revolved a few times about one of the stairway’s support beams, and then launched themselves directly into the woman’s face.

     She immediately paused, one foot already stabilized on a lower step, and began a tirade of furious spitting. All the while, the wind was insinuating itself under the strands of her hair that had not quite fallen under the guillotine crunch of the elastic band which held her bun tightly pinioned. These hairs stood on their haunches in mystical obeisance, wavering in a half-sentient salaam, and then joined in with the ongoing harassment of their owner’s chapped lips.

     At this point, one of the swollen laundry bags slid from her shoulder and bouldered down to the landing below, where it crushed the already mutilated remnants of a basil plant into its own desiccated soil.

     Gregory’s neighbor straightened out her spine and anchored herself to the raw wooden handrail with her now freed left arm. A posture of resolution if ever I’d seen one. With the back of her other hand, she cleared her lips of the lukie scrim and took a further moment to pluck each offending hair from her scalp, whereupon she released the traitors to ascend on the rising breeze and depart from her.

     As she neared the runaway bag on the landing, a pair of words pulsed from out of her larynx, bounded over the bollards of her teeth and the weathered barrier of her lips, and then floated up the stairs toward Gregory. As the words passed through the transparent glass, they were swaddled in a cloth of semi-muteness, which depleted them of their already paltry freight of human warmth before permitting them passage into Gregory’s ear canals:

     “Fucking things…”

     With this, the woman plodded farther down the stairs, encountering no further incident, and disappeared into the laundry room.

     Gregory backed away from the windowed aperture, yet held it in his gaze for a few solemn moments before departing from the kitchen.

     Once again in his bedroom, he stopped to retrieve a wadded pair of black jeans, which he had trounced underfoot on the previous day while doffing them. He pulled them back onto his legs, slipped his feet into a pair of colorless sneakers, and shrugged on a green fine-woven aviator’s jacket, which had been hanging on the back of a grey metal folding chair. Then he left his apartment, pulling a plume of slightly ossified lukies behind him in the vacuum action of his closing door.

     Outside, the temperature had dropped roughly ten degrees and the sky had adopted a bruised marble pallor. Here in the street, the lukies adhered strictly to the ground, crackling with a static charge. On his way back toward the EL station at the bottom of his street, Gregory passed one of the trees which had emptied the contents of its pods into the world of his immediate neighborhood (a shaded oasis of red- and yellow-brick tenements, interspersed with eccentric houses designed in a late-nineteenth-century Chicago version of the Art Nouveau style, to say nothing of the odd crenelated castle).

     The tree in question was only a block south of where Gregory lived. Its domed root system was visible to the average passerby from several feet away: these were not the distinct tubular roots which grope for a more horizontal purchase of the soil and to which most are accustomed, but rather a coagulated umbrella of tortured bark, frozen in its own special sort of defecatory agony, lacking a definition of parts. In the canopy above, the once green footlong pods, hanging among a gallery of spiny, serrated leaves, had shriveled and curled back upon themselves, revealing at their inner apex, where the pod walls met the junction of the stem, an incandescent jewel of sap. Despite the overcast skies, the inner light of these jewels dazzled Gregory’s retina, causing his grey irises to collapse into pinpoints. He averted his gaze from the arboreal pageant and proceeded farther down the sidewalk.

     Once he had gained the mouth of the street, he turned toward a titanic concrete overpass that stood nearby and walked into its black underbelly. This structure doubled as the local EL platform and the Interstate 90 traffic bridge. Overhead were corroded steel girders upon which, at any given moment, anywhere from thirty to seventy pigeons would usually be roosting. But today, there were only a few, perched in odd, isolated positions and regarding Gregory as he passed below them with an affect either of brilliant, intellectual hatred or merely the dumb liquidity of pigeon eyes.

     In even, diagonal lines corresponding to the placement of the girders, Gregory’s path was striped with pigeon shit, layered upon the concrete in various thicknesses and states of yellowed encrustation. He navigated these bands of cloacal filth with the smart bipedal kinetics of a hurdle jumper until he arrived at a musty stairwell leading up to the back entrance of the platform.

     At the foot of these stairs, he came across what appeared to be a sleeping pigeon bearing a rare lactic down. Its breast extruded before it, provided a pillow upon which it lay its dormant head. But as Gregory knelt down to it, a new array of details resolved themselves to his now dilated pupils: the bird was not sleeping, but was quite dead. Its beak had been separated from the rest of its skull by a swollen tumor of lukies that must have accumulated during its flights through Gregory’s neighborhood before dramatically expanding. Moreover, what had initially seemed a sheening coat of porcelain feathers revealed itself to be a further colonization of lukies upon the creature’s corpse. Its naked white skin was slightly visible under the hoary accretion which had overtaken it – indeed, it was utterly featherless.

     Having looked his fill, Gregory stood erect and, tilting his head upward for several seconds, stared wildly into the empty box of sky enclosed in a rectangle of shuddering, slimed cement just above the stairwell.

     Then, for reasons which I am positive I shall never have the privilege of conveying to you, Gregory returned his eyes to the site of the overridden pigeon and, sweeping his leg back to its anatomical limit, gave the corpse a brutal kick into the street. An immediate car, streaking past the elephantine struts of the underpass colonnade, drilled the pitiful object with its front and back tires, whereupon the erstwhile animal exploded into a shimmering dust cloud and oozed up and away through the narrow gap between the interstate and the train platform, no doubt drawn there by the tornadic pull of torrential traffic, tearing both toward and away from the Chicago ‘Loop.’

     Gregory then bounded up the tainted, yellow steps. At their summit, he entered the automated turnstile, ratcheting through its mechanism – the iron maiden of the urban peon. Just as he crossed the borderline at which the platform opened out onto a view of the moaning interstate, the structure beneath his feet began to quake. The distant shriek of pulverized rails trebled in volume. Just a few seconds more and a blur of raw, riveted aluminum and stolid polycarbonate windows whisked past Gregory’s face. The train came to a hoarse stop.

     Amid the degraded gonging of the handicap-accessible intercom, the doors of the nearest train cabin rolled apart. Gregory ducked inside and wedged his body down in one of the few available solo seats, which was bolted to the floor at one end of the car. Immediately adjacent to this seat was a scabrous emergency door, plated in the same beaten aluminum as the exterior of the train and plastered with visually intuitive warnings and hieroglyphic escalation plans for what a passenger should do in the inevitable event that his life should come under threat.

     The hulk of the train shivered and dinned, reengaging with the electrified third rail and overcoming its inertia. Then it set off down the tracks.

Lukies (pt. II)

 

     Dusk found Gregory sitting still in his office, whose door was but two steps from the kitchen. A slatted, burnished light filtered onto his desk through the closed blinds of two flanking windows. The room was all but empty, though it had recently housed an installation of modules and components, all of which had been integrated to facilitate the functions of a powerful HAM radio. 

     A few weeks earlier, during the first break in the concluding summer’s oppressive heat, Gregory had been on-air, cruising frequencies in search of a worthy interlocuter. The pods on the trees outside had only just erupted, and the lukies, ferried around on the livid backs of the Chicago gales, had been sucked high into the atmosphere. They had acted as a sort of diffractory chaff, disturbing the natural, all-pervading flow of the city’s electromagnetic fields. As an immediate consequence, Gregory Deinde (or W4TKI, as he was known in the HAM world) failed to discern even the faintest intimation of human speech in his headphones. 

     But, then again, he had heard something. This was not the static hiss of dead air, but rather a high-pitched whine, machinic and nearly musical. Gregory had sat there, hunched over his console for some several hours as he dialed through the frequency spectrum. 

     Each wavelength possessed its own peculiar timbre: toward the bottom end, the noise was blunt and guttural; further up the dial, a jubilant note bassed with the reverberations of a million-man barbershop choir; somewhere in the middle frequencies, Gregory encountered a sudden and violent glottal snapping, followed by a couple hundred hertz filled with absolute silence; in the buttery mid-high zone, the hydraulic whine was at its shrillest, at certain sweet spots producing the deft simulacrum of a pig’s squeal at the moment when it feels the cold steel bore of the butcher’s pop-gun leave an impression in its ruddy skin, just above the frontal skull plate; and at the highest extremities, the drone tapered down into a pastoral buzzing: an aural realm of infinite flies – ZZ-ZZ-ZZ. 

     As the hours passed, Gregory had begun to describe the quality of these evolving tones in his radio operator’s diary. By late that evening, he had filled nearly fifty pages in his dense, minute script. While economy of space precludes me from sharing the entire contents of his observations (and though it greatly pains me to exclude them, for they were piercing revelations which may never see the light of day), I reproduce below for the reader a selection of salient excerpts: 

     “(01:27:35) – I’ve been listening to this signal for a small age. Initially, it was raucous and seemed to be damaging my hearing, but now it sounds almost harmonious. I am currently stopped around 330 MHz, where the tone appears to have taken on a sinusoid dullness. After having listened to this for twenty minutes, I feel that it is goading me. I feel utterly unbeholden, now, to the regulations of that great, yet irrelevant giant of conventional human communications – the FCC. That may just be the result of this total radio isolation. But every aspect of these new, insulated signals, which I presume to be the product of electromagnetic radiation rebounding off of the flurrying fuzz outside and back onto my antenna, alludes to something more than a mere disturbance pattern […].” 

     “(2:25:33) – I went ahead and fired up my old oscilloscope, thinking I might be able to glean a definite visual pattern. There was a pattern there, indeed – but unlike anything I ever expected to see printed in green light across my humble grid. Some sort of sine wave motion is definitely involved, but the wave is oscillating at so rapid a frequency that it is phasing across the screen in a wide, solid band, through which only the most occasional darkness seems to appear. I am almost seeing shapes in this image. Things seemingly impossible, even for the most contrived arrangement of modulations, set into motion at the hands of a hermetic hobbyist. No, this is something like a hologram. A bas-relief chiseled into the side of some gigantic megalith. Just now, I am looking at what could be an extremely weathered hand, pointing at something, or signaling some definite direction […].” 

     “(05:03:31) – Just a moment ago, I looked up from the stack on my desk to rest my eyes, and I looked out the window. I couldn’t see the usual street with its line of parked cars and its walls of brick. It was like opening the door to a room where a fatal pillow fight has just ended. Just like the blinding green strip of light on my oscilloscope, my window was a rectangle of off-white, with only the occasional aperture opening in the blustering blankness to afford me a glimpse of something: the corroded metal hood of a streetlamp? One of those ceramic dowels around which powerlines are spooled? I couldn’t say for sure, and my words would be doubtful even if I could. Because, in this new context of the visible, the street furniture has been assigned a new identity and purpose. It’s all a part of a deliberate communication. I see that now […].” 

     “(06:23:32) – All plausible deniability has evaporated. They’re not just some excrescence of nature. They have a name. I discovered this by scrubbing quickly through the dial. Each notable alteration of sound that comes with the various frequency ranges is clearly delineated from the others. At the right speed, I began to hear a voice, almost human yet profoundly not, stringing together the following phonemes: L – U – K – I – E – S. This is what they are, what they are called: Lukies […].” 

     “(10:01:10) – And just like that, the lukies have fallen out of the sky. Now they are bunched up in the wheel wells of cars, nesting in the upper crooks of trees where the limbs diverge from the trunk. They are whipping around in dumb vortices after the sucking acceleration of a passing car. And, needless to say, the signal is gone. Now the chatter of the world has returned. The first person I heard on the radio was going on in a drawling Esperanto. I could not tolerate it for long. I felt compelled to switch off the power strip under my desk. I don’t know. Maybe I’ve had my fill of HAM. Perhaps this is W4TKI’s final sign-off […].” 

     And, indeed, Gregory had had his fill. So oppressed was his gorge with this now superfluous burthen of human interaction that, even after having sat for over ten hours to probe the aural tissue of the lukies’ communiqué, he labored yet three more hours in stripping his office bare of the radio and its attendant paraphernalia. He had hefted these clattering aluminum modules into the hallway by his front door, dropping them carelessly into partially collapsed cardboard boxes, which quickly flared up with a patina of mold and liquid rot, due to the irreducible humidity issuing from the doorway of the bathroom nearby. 

     The bathroom was the one area in his apartment which Gregory had perpetually avoided since that day. he had taken to urinating in the kitchen sink. Defecation had become a much more delicate consideration. Eventually, he settled into a regime of controlled dehydration, drinking just enough water to eject his post-peristaltic waste, while ensuring that the fecal excrescence would emerge each time in a rigid, compact oblong. These latter he deposited into the remaining surplus of cardboard boxes that had colonized his apartment. A given box, designated for this purpose, would be positioned in a crumb-strewn corner of his kitchen under the breakfast table until Gregory had filled it to the brim. 

     The aridity of the decomposing feces, I imagine, was meant to counteract its inevitable stench. 

     Meanwhile, the bathroom had changed both in form and function as the lukies filtered in from the street. Given their singular moisture-wicking properties, they gravitated to this epicenter of apartmental humidity, crowding around the faucets of the sink and bathtub, coagulating into permanent fiberglass plugs over the respective drains. The toilet lid had mechanically risen to a vertical position as a quivering tower of lukies accumulated and crystalized; the toilet tank had developed a lacework of hairline fractures, from which miniscule ridges of oozing, transparent teeth had begun to protrude. 

     Perhaps counter-intuitively, this growing accretion around the various water sources in the bathroom only seemed to draw more moisture into the air. It was as though the lukies acted as a sort of nebulizer for water molecules, projecting them up into the heights of the small room, where they condensed into cloudy strata and began to billow out into the hallway. 

     After several weeks, Gregory had grown accustomed to the new variables of his home. Now he spent his idle moments in his vacant office – the driest room available to him. At the current moment, he sat erect before his battered desk of faux-oak, the veneer surface of which had begun to bow upward, separating from the grizzled particle board beneath. Even here, the occasional lukie hung suspended in the air, minutely revolving in the molasses glower of sundown.

     These last weak solar beams painted a tawny grid of parallel lines across Gregory’s face. Around his nostrils, two fanged coronas of pneumatized lukie sparkled and deliquesced.

Lukies (pt. I)

 

     The street was awash with lukies: plush little copulations of semitransparent cilia which had erupted from long, segmented pods attached to trees overhanging the sidewalks. “Lukies” was the name given them by Gregory Deinde, who presently dragged his shoes through entire drifts of them. His face took on the shapes and configurations of a novel mental difficulty, which it is to be doubted was ever experienced before. He had just disembarked from the train down the street and was plowing his way toward the ruddy brick carapace of his apartment building. The stifling breeze of that year’s penultimate dog-day slung its obese and drooping arm around his sweating neck.

     In two mere minutes, he was standing before the dingy, glass-encased vestibule, wrangling a ring of keys out of his jacket pocket. Just inside, tossed recklessly into a disintegrating cobweb, which had by now accumulated a veritable plumage of lukies, he espied an envelope bearing his name in large, hand-crafted letters. Shoving the key home into the bronze lock and leaning into the door with his shoulder, Gregory lolled into the dim enclosure and bent over to fetch the letter. He held it close to his face. From this distance, his eyes could resolve a finer print, jotted below his name:

 

“Somewhat urgent, but not extremely”

 

Gregory’s eyes jittered: from dyslexia? a kind of peripheral neuralgia? or due to a basic corporeal illiteracy? It’s not my place to conjecture. But then he stuffed the envelope into the breast pocket of his jacket and stomped up the stairs to the second floor, where he let himself into his apartment.

     Passing with hesitation through the hallway which met him on the other side of the door, stacked with mold-choked cardboard boxes and obsolete radio equipment, Gregory made his way to the kitchen. This culinary chamber was situated in the extreme eastern boundary of his oblong apartment. Once arrived, he approached the sink and filled a copper pot with water. This he set down over a trembling lotus of blue gas-fed flames and dropped in an egg to boil. Then he lowered himself into a nearby chair, his knobbed spine screeching against the cheap faux leather upholstery, and rested his elbows on the circular breakfast table.

     The envelope, which bore his name in the monumental font of a practiced and eccentric hand, once more hovered a span of inches from his face. He flipped it over and set about shredding its flap with his honed thumbnail; he had specially cultivated this utilitarian growth to serve as an all-purpose blade or spatula whenever the need arose. Inside of the envelope was a plain leaf of college-ruled notebook paper, folded into thirds.

     One result of its unfolding was the animated dispersal of a load of lukies. These were not the regal spheroid manes of milked fluff which were being hourly multiplied in the street below, but rather detached anemic sprays of three and four cilia apiece. They did not float down to the floor as gravity might have dictated, but cycled mutely through the air, carried on the invisible convection of the stove heat.

     Gregory spent a solid minute sputtering and motorboating his swollen lips in an ineffectual bid to rid his mouth of lukies; but the ones that had evaded the palisade of his dun teeth had already clung to the walls and roof of his mouth and had absorbed his saliva to the greatest extent conceivable, transforming the enzyme-infused liquid into an insuperable cement. After a further moment, Gregory’s eyes fell upon his spade of a thumbnail. He would need to carry out an aggressive intervention with this multifarious tool in order to alleviate his oral cavity of the invasive matter, but apparently decided to leave off with the business until he had tended to the contents of the letter.

     Drawing his eyes back onto the creased sheet before him, Gregory scanned, perhaps not fully comprehending, the following lines:

 

“Hey Greg,

     My power’s out and my phone’s cut off (ran out of minutes), so I’m left with good old pen & paper. Not that it bothers me to write this in longhand. I used to keep a diary, and the act of putting words on paper with ink was often more enjoyable than the very meaning the words were meant to convey. But this is all a bit of chatter and dross. Pardon the self-indulgence.

     I’m writing because I haven’t seen you lately at the hi-fi shop. Blaze even mentioned your absence toward the end of the last clinic. So we’re all wondering what’s become of you. No one has heard you on the usual bandwidth, either. We were hoping to have you come in and show us that modified encryption system you mentioned the last time you showed up.

     Anyway, you’re probably wondering how this letter found its way into your mail slot. None of us have ever come to visit your place, of course. But I got your address off of Charlie Reagent, the parts guy who runs that shop down on Lincoln. I figured he must have been mailing stuff to you in this interim of quietude (he sells better kit for cheaper, anyway, so good on you). Hope you don’t mind. Write back! You know where to leave the letter.

 

Over ‘n’ out,

D7KFY (Jameson)

 

     P.S. Apologies for the fuzz. There’s one of those pod trees right outside my parlor window and, over the past few weeks, it’s filled every cubic inch of air in my house with these whisps. Any minute now, I swear I'll see Donald Sutherland standing in my front yard, pointing and gawping at me."

 

    Having read this missive’s final line, Gregory folded the letter once more into thirds and restored it to the ragged envelope in which it had arrived.

     Just then, a globular missile of seething water leapt from the now boiling pot and landed on the crown of his head, searing not only his scalp (denuded as a result of male-pattern balding), but also very likely violating the seat of his highest chakra and momentarily destroying his chances of rejoining the pleroma of the Godhead, should his body happen to expire within the next five minutes. His shoulders gave a violent shudder as he clamped his knees to his chest. This sudden shift in Gregory’s gravitational center set his chair into a slow orbital spin. In all of this action, little to no sound was produced. Such was Gregory’s habit in his longsuffering. Silence is golden.

     But judging by the singularity of his facial topography, one could easily infer the words: “The Egg! Not My Head!”

     Truth to tell, Gregory’s phrenological profile was not entirely dissimilar from the contours of a healthy tan egg, plucked from the hay-strewn roost of a natural-raised heirloom hen, who is regarded by her human protectors, just about, as a member of the family.

     Naturally, in such a comparison, we make all necessary concessions for the presence on Gregory’s capital egg of a vestigial and piebald remainder of human hair.

     Yet, even taking this detail into account, as Gregory ladled the egg appointed as his lunch out of the tumbling, vaporous waters of the copper pot, the lukies latent in the atmosphere of the kitchen began to adhere to the smoking eggshell. Here, now, the resemblance was entire, such that, were Gregory to stand beside himself, comparing the two boiled eggs present in the room, he might just as well crack his own skull open on the cheap, savaged linoleum of the countertop and sprinkle salt upon the now exposed semi-liquid yolk inside.

     But Gregory, very much inside himself, cracked the initial egg instead. Standing over the trash can in the shadowed corner by a battered microwave and a pile of withered garlic cloves, he relieved the ovoid cargo of its fractured hull. It was this hull which, in the act of separation, came away with large chunks of white flesh and gummed membrane. This ejecta pattered onto a wreck of discarded cellophane which sat atop the mound of refuse within.

     By the time the egg was cleaned, it bore the countenance of an asteroid-ravaged moon, unveiling deposits of a pale yellow ore, already greying as it oxidized and gaped out from the soft, sweating crags; here was a supple Mount Olympus; and there, a shallow Sea of Tranquility.

     Gregory began to lift this quarry to his sparkling mouth when the lukies fell upon it.

     Once fastened and fully saturated, these tufts desiccated the egg’s surface and hardened into a brittle crust. Gregory turned the gnarled, ovoid sphere over in his hands a few times, inspecting the prohibitive new layer. Then he let it fall into the trash, where it crashed through to the bottom of the bag and lay stewing in a juicy abyss.

The Festival of Rot

 Our mother was always a source of mental pain. But we were curious enough about her to stick around at least through high-school, so: we stuck around for the average amount of time a youth stays with a single parent. But in our formative years, between serial trips to fast food drive-thrus and midnight piracies at the milk plant over in the next town (Maepleton, I think it was called), she would be sitting in the driver's seat with its grey computer-aided textile design, soiled and bored through with cigarette burns. And she would go on and on about the "Festival of Rot." I never did figure out if this was supposed to be some yearly event like the RenFest or something, or if she had some intention of taking us there one day. But she spoke enough about the "Festival of Rot" to fill a small vanity-published book on the subject, that's for sure.

Here are a couple of details I remember about my mother's words pertaining to the "Festival of Rot":

* it took place at the beach.

* you must bring a shovel to the beach.

* you must bring a hammer to the beach.

* the beach is where the rot started.

* you will find the Festival of Rot on Saturday.

* the Festival of Rot is not in celebration of anything, but it is a place where you can find the Rot, the Rot you need to dig up.

* this Rot you will then have to bring back to your house.

* you must have your hammer and your shovel with you at all times when going to the beach.

One day she brought us to the beach, where the Rot had just happened and we were to find it. This sounded like something she made up on the spur of the moment, but we bought it for a dollar, so I guess we could have asked her if it was just a joke.

She took us up the road a ways to the big house of the man whose name was Jack. She told us that he was a strange old man, but she told us he would be the one to help us.

She took us to the back door and rang the bell, which opened to a kind of living room with a big rock fireplace and more books stacked everywhere. There was also a big TV that was on, but its screen bore nothing but a sheet of howling static.

Jack came up to the door. He said hello and then he asked how I was, how my leg was and then he asked where my brother was.

She said "I don't know" and I think she lied when she said that. I had to wonder if she wanted to be sure that she wasn't caught telling Jack things about me she shouldn't have, especially after that day when she told us that I had polio.

Jack came into the living room and sat down and asked my mother if we could talk. He looked like he was trying to act cool about what was happening, but I was starting to realize he was old and scary, as my mother said.

He asked if I had been playing with my brother, which I didn't remember doing but I didn't want to lie and that was probably the wrong thing to say.

I didn't think I should tell him about the dog though because that would have been a lie. I didn't want to. It sounded like a big deal and I would have felt bad about that, and my mom, well, my mother would have just gotten in trouble if this in any way were linked to the reason we had come: that is, the Festival of Rot.

Anyway, Jack got down to business. He told my mom that his son, who was seven years older than me, had died. And now that he was gone, Jack didn't have any reason to live and had decided to kill himself. He started to talk about my brother and how he had died and I could see why my mom had felt that he was being a bit uncouth about the whole situation. I, for one, was trying to manage the hammer and shovel, holding them in my two hands while attempting to balance on my lame right leg. 

At some point during this whole boring conversation that I couldn't have understood, even if I had really honed in on it with sincere attention, Jack got down on his haunches and went silent. My mother was also observing a harrowing sort of expectant silence. Both of them had been staring at me for about five minutes when I finally realized that they had stopped talking. 

Jack cleared his throat and said, "Looks like you've figured your way around the gear. You've got your hammer, and you've got your shovel. And it's a lovely, breezy Saturday here on the Island."

Then my mother, actually turning away from me, which - and I couldn't tell you why even if you shakily pressed a 9mm pistol to my forehead and threatened to pull the trigger - gave me the violent urge to piss my pants on purpose. 

"It's time to go dig up the Rot, son," said she.

"Let's go find out where the Rot is today, son," said Jack, who was not my father.

"Oh, let's just let them both dig," said my mother. "They'll be just fine together."

"Why don't you go out and help them dig up the Rot, son?" said Jack.

So it was agreed. 

The shovel was found. And it's true - I had already started digging. 

When we returned to the porch of the house where Jack had first dropped me, I looked up at him with the shovel handle in my right hand and the blade in my left and said, "Jack, I think there's something in me. A seed that needs to get into the soil and take root."

Jack stared down at me with genuine concern, and even when he knew that I knew he was looking down on my face. I could see him thinking. He was thinking about all the ways in which he had failed me and his own children. 

"Is there any way for me to turn that into a shovel?" he asked. 

"No, Jack. There's nothing I can do about it now. There's only one thing I can do."

Jack had a knife in one hand and the shovel in the other.

"Go home, son," he said. "Just go home and sit there on the porch. You can do all your digging from there."

I shook my head. "No, Jack. I'll go home and sit there on the porch with you. But it's a small little box of a home. I'm not going to sit out there in the sun and in the wind. I'm going to stay inside and sit there in your office. Where the papers and the pens are, and the typewriter. I don't want to sit on the porch, Jack." 

"It's too early in the day for your kind of digging," said Jack. "It's not going to take any time. A minute or two at most, maybe less. The thing is, I got to get to it, too. It's the only chance I've got, and now I know it. I'm going to try."

"Let me stay here and talk to you," I said. "I'll just sit here and talk to you for a minute."

Jack shrugged and stepped back. I took his arm and led him inside. When he had closed the door behind us, he threw his arm around my shoulders. I led him back to his desk and sat down in the chair. He came around to the desk and sat down on the swivel chair behind it. We faced each other across the desk. Jack pulled off his work glasses and set them down on the edge of the desk. He looked across at me and smiled for the first time. I smiled back at him.

"I'm proud of you, son," he said.

But this was the point at which my mother came rushing into the room with her purse swinging in the crook of her arm and her goldish keys chiming in the grip of her cherry-red hand. She was pomidoro-red in the face.

"Why did you two leave the beach. Did you even TRY to find the Rot? It's right there under the sand, and you know that's why we came, goddamnit." 

I began to sweat. Jack placed a hand on my shoulder, standing slightly at my back.

"Ellen...," said he, "I think there's a seed in you that must be planted and take root in the ground. I believe this must happen soon." He looked into my eyes and said, "You understand this, don't you, son?"

I nodded.

"How do you feel about it, now?" he asked me.

"I feel very special," I told him.

"And what will you call this thing?" he asked.

"The Seed of Immortality," I said.

"That's right," said he. "The Seed of Immortality. The Seed is something you must have inside you all of your life."

Jack held his hand out to me. I put my hand in his. He squeezed. My heart leapt.

"And you will find this great power within yourself, the Seed, and you will use it wisely. But you must do so without letting this power control your life. You must learn to let go. Do you understand?"

I nodded again.

"You will lose your fear," he said. "It's a sign of false consciousness to feel fear. You must learn to identify your special seed with the Great Rot by the Seaside. Do you know what the Rot looks like and do you see how you are a part of it?"

My mother's expression softened and she neared us, dropping her purse and keys to the floor. She touched my hand.

"What will I see?" she asked.

"The Great Rot," said Jack. "The whole world will seem to die out on the horizon. Everything will be gray, black, and a cold, cold blue. The oceans will be covered with an icy sheet, then all the icebergs will come floating down and land in the rivers and lakes. You will feel your breath being drawn away. The air will become a thin, cold fog. You will see it in the world around you. And in your own heart."

The fog became thicker.

"You'll go blind," said Jack. "You will feel every moment of this and feel all that you have given up — all the love that has died in your heart because you had to grow up fast, all the hopes that weren't fulfilled — because you couldn't wait, because you always had to be first and get the answer right, and all the anger you felt, and all the joy and sadness, that selfsame joy and sadness, and all the love you have made because you can't wait for love, you can't wait for the end, the darkness, the void. And then, when you die, there will be nothing left."

The fog thickened.

"I'll wait," said my mother. "I'll wait to die."

"Do it now," said Jack. "Do it now."

The fog became thick, but instead of a dark gray there was light inside, an inner blackness, not quite darkness, but not yet light.

"Do it," said Jack.

My mother turned to Jack, then she turned to me.

"I want you to listen to me," she said. "You know that I have always wanted a girl. And that I didn't want you. You could have gone out and found any little girl and I wouldn't have cared, and you could have picked a pretty baby and I would have liked that, too. But you picked a girl with your heart in her eyes, and her heart in your eyes. And you wanted a girl who looked at you with her eyes full of love, and who felt that love in your eyes. But there's only one girl in this world with your heart in her eyes, and it's my daughter. My daughter, who came into this world with her heart in her eyes. My little girl, you can't take away, you can't take away. You can't."

The fog thickened, and became an evil brine.

My mother spoke louder, and though I heard what she was saying I didn't understand a lick of it. Her voice sounded like it was coming from far away.

"You can't take away what I give you," she said, "because it's your gift."

The fog thickened, and became a torpid cobweb.

Then I noticed that my mother was standing in front of my dead brother, who was obscured behind her gauche skirt. She saw that I saw, and when Jack also became aware of my awareness, he stepped away from me with a sneer. All of those avuncular words for nothing. I hate my mom's boyfriends. Now the three of them were on the other side of the room, pointedly alienated from me, both physically (in terms of space) and spiritually. They crouched around my dead brother, who was fidgeting with a sodden paper bag full of Sonic's wrappers. His eyes were gone, and the humid sockets were filled with french fries, packed closely in the two orbits with the economy of a submarine's torpedoes.

It was then that I realized I had not for one second understood what the Rot was or why it was my task to dig it up. It was a revelation in which the understanding took the form of a blinding flash of pain. I cried out and clutched my head, where the pain was centered in my scalp, and then I sat down on the floor with my elbows over my head. The Rot was the pain, and the pain was the Rot, and I wept like a baby.

When I was finished crying, my mother knelt beside me. Her face was as soft as the cotton I'd used to wipe my face. My eyes were brimming with tears. 

"It's okay," she said, "it's okay."

She wrapped her arms around me and rocked me back and forth. She murmured "Shh" and "Hush" and "Sweetie" and "It's okay" and "There, there." I began to weep again. The tears ran down her face and down my cheeks, a river that I would have swum through, had I not such a rabid loathing of water in all its forms. It took hours to stop crying and a further hour to stop sobbing, for I felt very alone. I hadn't touched a woman in years, and the experience of being touched comforted me. My mother comforted me.

That's when I knew I couldn't possibly go on digging the Rot out of my head with my bare hands. I would have to be carried out. That's when I understood what the Rot had done to me and that I'd done it to myself. I don't know how the Rot enters the world; I can't say exactly how it works, but my own experience was that when it goes to work it works slowly, stealthily, like a burglar breaking into a house. It doesn't break in through the front door or burst into the kitchen. It isn't a bolt gun; it isn't a bomb. Instead it creeps down into the living room, into the kitchen, under the bed, behind the TV. Then, it moves along the floorboard and twists around on its back like an unhinged pet, its eyes two pellets of utter filth.

As I considered this truth, I heard the sound of a power drill rasping against the deadbolt which held the door to Jack's study fast in its jamb.

"I am the enemy," I told the door. "I am that."

So I had to stop. Not for the sake of the Rot or the world; they're too big to stop. But in a small, particular way, for me. I couldn't keep going on like this. I could only go on if I could find a way to leave the door open, and even though I had no real wish to be found out, I also had no real wish to lose the one place in this house I could go where I'd never have to see anybody.

At least not anybody but me.

My head felt hot, and this was the only part of my body which was hot. The rest of me had become very cold.

And then the drill stopped, which was very odd, because the hole I was making in my door was about the right size for the deadbolt to fit into, and I was making it with two fairly efficient power drills.

The first thing I saw when I opened my eyes was the face of the woman who was standing in front of me, her mouth open in an O of horror.

There was something in her hand. I saw a scalpel. Or maybe it was a kitchen knife. It was long, its blade shining like new silver.

I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me before, but when I looked down and saw that my coat and shirt were covered with blood, I realized that she had slashed them. The blood had seeped into the seams.

Not far away, on the counter, stood the bucket full of tools. The drill had been set down so that it was close to hand.

Even though I was only partly conscious, I was still enough of a scientist to know that if I'd had the presence of mind to think straight, I would have known that the most likely cause of the blood was the drill itself.

But I couldn't be assed to think straight, it seemed, as my first impression of the woman was that she was like a demon.

Even as I looked at her, the drill's motor slowed, and stopped. The tool in her hand became a weapon in her hand. It wasn't a scalpel any more. It was a knife.

She swung it at me.

I saw the knife and swatted it away. Then I swatted away her hand that held the drill, and grabbed the drill with both hands and twisted it. The woman, who was almost as tall as I, let go of the drill.

I grabbed the drill and slammed it into the counter so hard I could hear the wood crack. I was shaking. I heard the woman's teeth grate against each other and then I heard her curse me. I was still shaking, but not as badly as I had been before.

I had won.

"I know," I said.

The woman was standing next to me, she seemed to have recovered from her shock. I could smell the blood on her, but I don't think she was going to try to kill me any time soon.

"You know what?" I said.

I swung the drill again.

This time I made contact, driving it deep into the counter. I thought I heard something smash, and at the same time saw a large chunk of wood fall to the floor. I was sure the chunk of wood was going to be too big to fit into the woman's mouth, but it turned out I was wrong.

She pulled it out and took a big bite out of it.

I was feeling much better.

"Can you fix it?" I said.

The woman was still chewing, and making the sound of crunching food.

I tried again.

"Yes," she said.

"Oh, good. Thank you so much."

"You're welcome," she said.

She sounded surprised.

"What's your name?" I said.

"My name's Jenny," she said.

"Thank you, Jenny," I said, as I walked toward the door.

"I hope you're the last crazy one in the house," she said.

"I hope you're going to be a great host," I said.

...

...

...

But her name wasn't Jenny, really. I am forced now to admit to the fact that I am either a pathological liar or an innocent oligophrenic. In either case, I'm just a kid sitting in the back seat of a car for poor people. My brother is in shotgun. My mother is putting out her cigarette on a wad of hardened gum that has permanently joined the petrified reef of the dashboard. It is nighttime now, and it's starting to get cold outside. The air has that first chill of fall in it. 

My mom turns the keys in the ignition, takes way too long to back out of this parking spot in front of some large, abstract real estate building in some industrial business corridor. Not sure why we came here, but now it looks like we're going back home to the duplex. To our white-trash next-door neighbors, Tony and Francine (who are actually nice people; they helped us steal cable and, last night, came over with some homemade breaded shrimp. They microwaved it and came back to retrieve the bowl after we'd scarfed it down. The shrimp was our dinner that night, there had been no initiative to have a meal until that gift had been ferried to us from 'the other family in this stucco building'). 

At home, it smells of roach bombs. I can't tell what color the carpet is, because its innumerable stains are vast and timeless. At first, after my mother sets all of her rattling paraphernalia down on the welted, waterlogged counter, I figure I had just been having a reverie, but then she sits my brother and me down beside her on the couch and just goes right back to the whole thing that I was trying to tell you about:

"There's something I have been waiting only until this moment - one can only speak of such things after midnight - to tell you boys. The Festival of Rot, as you may recall, was the first truly major event of the summer, the largest and most elaborate of all the annual fetes, the biggest party of the season."

It turns out that she has been saving it up all year, and she's about to blow the walls down.

She's not a large woman, but she's a good bit larger than either of her sons. She's a hard-headed, hard-cider, hard-eyed, and hard-hearted woman who doesn't tolerate fools or weakness.

"The festival," she continues, "is almost exclusively the domain of the working class, the disenfranchised members of our society. The festival occurs once a year, every Saturday (each Saturday having its unique occurrence in a given year), in this very building - on this very street - and it has been going on for some time." She pauses, and just looks at us, her head cocked slightly to the left. "The festival is where it all comes together for us. It's the only place that'll afford me a full night's sleep all year. I'm tired, boys. So fucking tired, so sick to death of it all. Do you know what I think about all night long?"

"No, ma'am."

"I think about what I might do to you. I think about who I might kill, and then what I would do to the bodies. I think about the possibilities. About the pain. And then I think about how that could make me feel. And I cry myself to sleep with this image on my mind."

All of this - everything I am presently relating to you - is delivered with an absolutely deadpan demeanor, as if she's talking about a dog that bit her instead of her two kids.

And then it hits me. I finally get it. This woman is crazy. 

And here's the part that really gets me - her sons are there for her the whole time. We're sitting cramped up against her knees, eyes watering. We're preening her arms, at a loss for inner feeling. Nothing short of her bare bodily warmth can give us enough impetus to perpetuate our own vital functions.

But not only is this woman crazy. She is not our mother, either, and suddenly it dawns on me that she never was. She's the arbiter of the Rot. She's the one who, just last week, ripped all of the shelves and drawers out of the refrigerator, sending a volley of soft, mealy donation apples toward us while we were watching cartoons on our old coax trailer-park TV. She did that just to make room for nine or ten shovels and a post-hole digger. 

At this moment, as we crowd around this person we have erroneously mistaken for our mother, I realize that I haven't been allowed to sleep for over 72 hours. I'm sweating ice-water. 

"Grab a shovel," this woman says, "and we'll get started."

So that's it. She's out of the Rot. 

I shove the shovel in the post-hole digger, and start to drag the box out the front door. I know this woman is waiting. She's always been waiting. But it's different this time. This is not our first visit to the Rot's. This is our second. She's out of the Rot, but she's not going anywhere. It's not over yet.

At least, not for her.