After Mind (23 page)

“Oh, you’d love the Octopus Tree,” Spud said. “You should go have a look. It’s just over the hills. We’ll go on this trail. Can’t miss it.”

“Is it on the east or west side of the mountain?” Cessini asked.

The arm-wrestler minded the edge of the pool as he towed a long, broken branch.

“You remember Tenden, me mate from class?” Spud asked as over-officious host of the bushwalking club.

Tenden, the arm-wrestler, planted himself square at their front and humphed.

“Sure,” Cessini said. “I’m Cessini.”

“I know that,” Tenden said as he stripped off a line of eucalyptus leaves from the branch through the squeeze of his fist.

“This is Meg,” Cessini said. “She wanted to see the club, too.”

“Excellent!” Spud said. “The more the better. Now we got four in our club.”

“Four?” Meg asked, and smiled.

“Yeah. Five, if you count Pace. He ain’t here today on account of some race he’s running.”

Tenden pulled Spud away by a grasp of his shirt and stepped ahead in his place.

“Hey!” Spud objected.

“No, I’m telling ’em,” Tenden said, snarled. “A few years ago, some nutmeat tried to cut off one of the limbs of the Octopus Tree to see if it would grow back. Like a real octopus. Idiots. It didn’t. Rangers had to trim it back surgically to save the whole tree from disease and bugs.” He emphasized, “
At its wound!
”

“I got it,” Cessini said. “They catch him?”

“You see any cameras around here? They put a fence around the tree so no one could hurt it again. But then neither could we play on it anymore, for that matter. You understand? You check it out for yourselves anyway. You’ll like it.”

“Okay,” Meg said. She looked at the height of the waterfall, then Cessini. “Maybe we should go there, instead.”

“Excellent,” Spud said with a grin, and he ran back toward his very same pool at the base of the falls. “After. Come on, let’s play.”

Spud and Tenden stomped in their soaked shoes and dragged stirring sticks through the eddied pools of their wonderland. Rocks and ferns surrounded their private spot in the forest; it was an organic, primordial wild. No rainbow mist rose above the clear flow of the falls or broke the blue sky over the highest promontory stone. It was a twenty-five-foot cascade without spray. It was free-flowing water, controlled.

Meg sat on a mossy rock to rest. She shouldn’t have run so far, so fast.

“
In a minute,
”
Cessini
said.

The pool of the falls had a sound all its own, but one not too unfamiliar. His heels were pressed tight against a fallen branch, an impromptu border, a playground’s boundary line he would have to step away from to enter. But Spud’s antics lifted his spirits with ease. Water splashed, sticks swatted, and Cessini lifted a heel away from the branch. Then he stopped and returned, taking two steps back over. The red rain jacket in his day-pack would never be enough if he fell to his knees. He sat at Meg’s side, instead.

She ignored him. She reached into her bag and pulled her winged tablet up to her lap, joining her knees together to use her legs as an easel.

Cessini tested the dryness of the dirt with his shoe, and then slid down to sit with his legs crossed on the ground. “You know, if I was a computer up in space, I wouldn’t mind all this water. Because in space, water doesn’t burn.”

Meg breathed in the idyllic garden and through her clacking and clicking, captured its vectors into her tablet. She transferred her new waterfall image into her Sea Turtle Rescue world, and with the rotation of her screen, two turtles entered the next stage of their life, crossing the barrier from sand to sea.

“But I’d mind,” she said. “Of course water burns in space. You’ve got to get over it. You’re not a computer. You’re a human, like me. Now go, play,” she said and looked at him. “You don’t have to watch me every second. I feel fine. They like you. Now go.”

“I know why you get tired,” he said.

“So do I. Because you’re bothering me. Now go. Make some friends. I’ll be right there.”

Cessini uncrossed his legs to rise, but then sat back on his heels. He stalled as long as he could, weighing the flow of the water with Meg on his mind. The height of the falls was doable, maybe. “Remember when I climbed that ladder and put a baggie on the sprinkler head?” he asked.

“Pounded my heart right through my chest, yes, I remember.”

“Pretty crazy of me, heh?” he asked as he tossed a rounded pebble from the dirt into the pool. “Well, memories flow upstream.”

Spud stood in the water by the expanding rings of Cessini’s thrown stone and looked at him and Meg. Then Spud threw down his stick to its natural float.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Meg asked.

“We don’t start by thinking from up there at the top of the falls and let a bunch of memories and images flow down here to us, so we can see this here, this now. I think the mind works in reverse. It flows upstream, instead. We have what we know right now and see in front of us and our minds break that apart and flow it up the falls instead to find its source.”

Meg stopped her clicking, looked up, and wondered at the height of the water.

“We start here and search back up there for the source of our pictures. Our fear. For smaller bits of this scene. For the look and sounds of round pebbles I’ve tossed before, borders I’ve crossed, ladders I’ve climbed. The pain I know right now down here comes from a source up there.” He stopped and broke her glassy stare. “Everything here leads back to the first packet, the first swirl of a thought. Up there.”

Spud marched up in a huff, his shoes dripping from the pool. He stomped his demand with his foot into its puddle. He shifted his glance back and forth, then settled on Meg. “You. You shouldn’t get that wet, you know. It’ll ruin it.”

“I know,” Meg said as she brushed her thumb over the tablet’s screen.

“That thing looks
ancient
,” Spud said, with a half-cheek grin. “You should at least put a new processor it in.”

“I like it the way that it is,” she said.

“What’s your name again?” Spud asked as his lip twisted the wide disk of his face.

Meg crossed her arms over her screen, not for privacy, but for resting comfort over her knees. “When I was little, my dad called me Meg, like a memory chip. But then when I got bigger, everyone started calling me Terri, like Terabyte, because it’s bigger. But personally, I like Margaret Teresa. That’s my name and I think it sounds nice. But Cessini and my friends call me Meg. It’s nice to meet you. I’m Meg.” She held out her hand to shake. Spud’s jaw dropped in awe.

Tenden marched over to see all the fuss.

“And this is Cessini,” Meg said with a gestured introduction. “But I call him Ceeme. Not Packet like his friends sometimes do. Yes, he’s quiet, sometimes often, but he’s really smart.”

“Why did they call you Packet?” Tenden asked.

“Because when we were little,” Meg said, “his dad always made him carry around those square handi-wipe packets.”

“Other kids washed their hands,” Cessini said. “I used a packet. So the other kids called me Packet.”

Tenden elbowed Spud. “And we call him Spud ’cause he’s got such an ugly mug.”

“Aagh,” Spud said with a grunt as he circled away. But he came back for more.

“I’m Tenden. Tenden ’cause the tendens in my arms are connected three inches too far down my elbow to my forearms. Makes me stronger. Like a lever. Get it? Like a seesaw. One kid sitting out on the end can lift two runts sitting close in the middle. Makes me stronger. Same thing. You understand?”

“You mean tendon, like with an ‘o’?” Cessini asked.

“What? No. What ‘o’? Tenden in my arms. Makes me stronger. You understand?”

“I do. Tenden,” Cessini said.

“What do you do?” Tenden asked.

“I don’t do anything,” Cessini said.

“No, I said, what do you do?”

Cessini shrugged, and then said, “I boil in water.”

“Oh, yeah. Good to know. Everybody does that. Don’t they? Come on, let’s go. Time to get on with the club.”

Meg nudged, but Cessini didn’t get up.

Tenden turned back when no one followed. “There’s a saying here in Australia that says, ‘The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down.’ Well, you know what?”

“What?” Cessini asked.

Tenden puffed up his chest, hunched forward with his arms bent front, fists down, and declared in a forearm’s muscle-flexed roar, “
I am a nail!
And, from now on, I’m sticking up.”

Spud rolled his eyes. “No, he’s not. Forget him. Be who you want. Me, I hate water. Haven’t taken a bath in a month. Maybe two. Ain’t gonna, neither. I be myself. You be you. Club is now official in session. Let’s go.”

“And who am I?” Cessini asked.

“Buggered if I know,” Spud said as he skipped off to return to the water. He tipped his shoulders back with a roll of his head, nodding Cessini to follow. “Just met you two days ago. You coming, or what?”

“Six days,” Cessini counted, but then again, what difference did it make as he recognized, on his short list, the will of a friend. Meg pushed him.

Cessini stayed far to the right of the pool-side rocks as the trickle of white noise grew louder at the cascade. Waves lapped the shore. It was a familiar calming sound, a memory sourced from a sound machine at the side of his bed.

“Why did you use handi-wipes?” Tenden asked.

“I’ve got
aquagenic urticaria
,” Cessini said. “I get hives from water on my skin. Even tears from crying hurt. Pretty awful, too. So, I don’t anymore.”

“You should move to a farm,” Tenden said.

“I hurt when I sweat.”

“Then why didn’t you move to the desert?” Spud asked.

“The desert is worse,” Cessini said. “It’s dry, but you have to drink more water. My throat would swell. It hurts too much.”

“So you never shower or bathe, neither?” Spud asked as he hopped the edge of the pool.

“One doctor prescribed a beta blocker,” Cessini said as they made their way to the bubbled skirt of the falls. “My dad thought they might help, too. But I started not remembering things.”

“Well, that’s no good,” Tenden said at the wall of rocks. He angled his right arm and muscled up to a first ledge. He reached down with his left arm for a grasp at Cessini’s hand.

Cessini began his climb and did his best to hide his fear of the flowing water at his side. Spud kept bumping up behind him. With each lag and spurt of his courage up the wall, the three boys bumped like balls of Newton’s Cradle, navigating like clubmen for the climb to the top of the falls.

“I’d rather have my memory than a shower,” Cessini said as the nearer mist condensed on the sleeve of his red jacket. His foot slipped on a knotted root at the base of an overhung tree. “It’s all right here, though,” he kept talking. “Hobart is in the wet shade of the mountain. The dew point’s good.”

“So let me get this straight,” Spud said as he bumped from below. “This is an island. You came here with all this water around?”

“He just said that,” Tenden said with a curt look down.

“I came from the land of ten thousand lakes,” Cessini said as the pain of the mist found its way into his jacket and he pulled his red hood over his head. “Tough love.”

“Ten thousand lakes!” Spud said. “All in one place?”

Tenden smacked his palm onto a wet, mossy stone, which showered down in shards past Cessini and corrected Spud on the spot. “Not all in one place,” Tenden said, “then it’d be an ocean, dumbnuts!”

“Did you just call me dumbnuts?” Spud exclaimed. “It’s numbnuts, if you’re going to say it.”

“Why? What’s a numbnut?” Tenden snapped back.

“It’s better than a dumbnut!” Spud said.

“I know what dumb is, but what’s a numb?” Tenden stomped the wet moss.

“There is no such thing as a numb!”

“Right! Then it’s dumbnuts,” Tenden said.

“No, it’s not!” Spud snapped. “You’re going to be numb if you don’t stop saying dumb. How’s that?”

“It’s stupid,” Tenden said. “That’s what it is. You understand? Who’s in control here, anyway?”

“We all are, none of us are, we’re what we want to be, instead,” Spud said. “Now help him up, he’s stuck.” Spud rapped his hand on Cessini’s foot. “Tenden don’t know nothing. Don’t you listen to him.”

Tenden looked down as Cessini flicked out his red sleeves. “Fair enough, Spud. Just be good,” Tenden said. “He ain’t going to join our bushwalking club if you don’t behave. So, settle down.”

Cessini’s heart had warmed a bit, but his mind was already torched.
The nightmare of water had returned.
His hands burned from the wet of the rocks. His skin begged for Tenden to move, to end their sidelong hang. Every lift of a palm trembled for relief. He gripped the cuffs of his jacket under the palms of his hands to continue the climb, but his hold on the moss was gone. Meg didn’t come, she was so far away, but then she was standing, running . . .

“Ceeme, come down,” she yelled. She dropped her tablet into an eddy, but ran full speed.

Cessini leaned back from the rock face and his sleeve drew up and away from his wrist. An orange-and-yellow striped tiger leech sucked the back of his hand. How long had it been there? He focused on its draw. The curved and erect springboard of its body. The thirty-two brains of its segments. The pumping of its rear brain and sucker on his hand. Its three-bladed jaws. The anticoagulant serum that pumped into his blood. He shuddered to fling it. His foot slipped from the rocks. His mind spun over and he fell toward the froth of the pool.

His eyes hit with a splash. Beneath the surface, the sleeves of his rain jacket filled in fast. Water soaked up his arms, across his chest. He burned in a bubbling cauldron. He fought, ripped at the snare of cloth in the metal pull of his zipper. His arms were bound in his sleeves. The surface was above and rising. Gulps swelled his throat shut. He choked. His mouth widened and stayed. His breath ceased. His cheeks flamed through. His body went rigid. Then he hung stiff in the water, floating free. He pulled his trigger to end his nightmare of life.

Until a grasp yanked him up through the surface.