Shoggoths in Bloom (6 page)

The whale rolls again, water beading, streaming off her hide. She looks at him. Waiting. Where do they go?

“Hey Morgan, you think you can find this place again?”

“We charted it, didn’t we?”

“Yeah,” Cully says. He stands, hand on the rail for balance. He promised he would pay, and he’ll never find his way back here if he doesn’t settle his debt. “I guess we did. I guess you’ll find it no problem. Christ, it’s beautiful here.”

He wants to pull off his wife’s glove, and kiss her long brown hand. He wants to smell the roses on her skin, the salt sea in her hair. More than anything, he wants to go home.

The whale squirms, a long slick convulsion, and rights herself. She glides away from the Sweet Katrina, her breath and her baby’s breath trailing behind them. She’s done waiting for him to figure it out.

There’s fish here for the taking, and Morgan knows how to find them, and Pen will keep him on. There’ll be money for the boys for college, money for Pen and Cindy to retire on. They won’t have to leave the island. They’ll sell the boat to Morgan, eventually, and Cully’s sons won’t be fishers. They’ll get city jobs. He won’t see it, but they’ll grow up fine, they’ll be okay. On land.

He weighs it in his hand and hates it, while the whales turn like wheels in the ocean. On land.

“Cully—” Morgan says.

The whales are sounding. They show their flukes, monuments against a perfect sky. They’re diving now.

Cully lets go of the rail. Paid in full. He goes under.

He goes on.

It’s autoerotic asphyxiation, but nobody’s admitting that.

The children get jump ropes or neckties or shoelaces, or they just do it to each other, thumbs under chins buried in baby-fat. With childish honesty, they call it the pass-out game, the fainting game, the tingle game. The something-dreaming game, too.

When it’s mentioned in the papers, journalists coyly obscure the truth. With Victorian prudishness, they report that the children strangle each other to get “high.” Because society thinks that children that young— nine, ten—aren’t supposed to experience erotic sensation. The reality that kids don’t always do what they’re supposed to—am I the only one who remembers my own confused preadolescent sexuality?—gets disregarded with fantastic regularity.

But the truth is that they do it for the tingle through their veins, the arousal, the lightheadedness, and the warmth that floods their immature bodies. Like everything else we do—as individuals, as a species—it’s all about sex. And death. Yin and yang. Maybe if we admitted what was going on, we’d have a chance of stopping it before more die.

It’s the things we don’t talk about that become the monsters under the bed.

The game is autoerotic asphyxiation. You would hope the smart ones wouldn’t do it alone, wouldn’t do it at all.

But my Tara was as smart as they come.

Tara must have learned the game at the hospital, when she had her implant finalized. It was the cutting edge of therapy, a promising experimental treatment. An FDA trial; she was lucky to be selected.

The implant is a supercomputer the size of the last joint of my thumb, wired into my daughter’s brain. Tara has RSD, reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome, a disease resulting in intense, uncontrollable neuralgia. Which is to say, her nerves hurt. Transcendently. All the time.

The implant interrupts the electrical signals that cause the brain to register the sensations. The computing power is quantum, supplied by a Bose-Einstein condensate, and no, I don’t know what that means or how it works, any more than I know how a silicon chip works, or a vacuum tube.

What matters is, it worked.

Two weeks after Tara returned to school, I got a phone call from Silkie Mendez’s mother. I was still at work; Tara was in after-school enrichment, and her dad was supposed to pick her up. I’d get her after dinner.

It’s the real mark of domesticity. You become somebody’s mother, somebody’s father. A parent, not a person at all.

But at work, I still answered my phone, “Doctor Sanderson.”

“Jillian. It’s Valentina. We have to talk.”

You get to know the tone, so-carefully-not-panicking. A mother scared stiff, and fighting with every ounce of rationality to over-ride the brain chemicals and deal with a threat to her child with smarts rather than claws and teeth. “What’s wrong?”

Her breath hissed over the pickup on her phone. Cell phone, I thought, and there was noise in the background. Human bustle, an intercom, stark echoes off polished tile. I’ve been in private practice since my psychiatric residency, but you never forget what a hospital sounds like. “Val, is Silkie okay?”

“She will be,” Val said. The sob caught in her throat and she choked it back. “The doctor says she—Jillian, uh, she’ll be fine—”

One thing I’m good at is getting people to talk to me. “Val, just say it. You don’t have to soft peddle, okay?”

I heard her gulp. She sniffled and took a breath, the phone crackling as she pressed it against her hair. “Silkie says Tara taught her how to hang herself.”

First, there’s the pressure.

A special kind of pressure, high under Tara’s chin, that makes her feel heavy and light all at once. She kneels by the chair and leans across the edge, because if she faints, the chair will roll away and she won’t choke.

She’s always careful.

After the pressure she gets dizzy, and her vision gets kind of . . . narrow, dark around the edges. It’s hard to breathe, and it feels like there’s something stuck in her throat. Prickles run up and down her back, down her arms where the pain used to be, and a warm fluid kind of feeling sloshes around inside her. She slides down, as things get dark, and then she starts to dream.

But not like night time dreams. These are special.

When Tara dreams the special way, she hears voices. Well, no, not voices. Not voices exactly. But things. Or sees things. Feels them. It’s all jumbled together.

But there’s a sky, and she walks out under it. It’s not any kind of sky she’s seen. It’s big and pale, and seems . . . flat, and very high up. There aren’t any clouds, and it looks dusty under the big red sun.

It might be a desert. She’s read someplace that deserts have skies like that. And it’s not just a picture. Tara can taste it, feel the pebbles under the soles of her shoes, the heat baking off the cracked tarmac. Except the tarmac isn’t really tarmac: like it, but chocolate-brown, or maybe that’s the dull red dust.

And Tara doesn’t think they have people like Albert in the kinds of deserts she’d get to on a plane.

As for Albert, he’s a long segmented being like a giant centipede, though he can’t be a centipede because of the inverse square law. Which says that if you breathe through a spiracle, you can’t breathe if you get that big. Of course . . .

. . . he isn’t necessarily an Earth arthropod. And when she watches him, she sees all his segments swelling and relaxing, independent of each other. They each seem to have a top and bottom plate that slide rather than one hard shell like an arthropod would have. So it’s more like armor than an exoskeleton. And Albert isn’t his real name, of course, but Tara doesn’t know his real name, because she can’t talk to him.

He has a lot of legs, though, and lots of little fine claws and then two big bulky claws too, like a lobster instead of a crab. He chitters at her, which freaked her out the first few times, and grabs her hand with one knobby manipulator. It’s all right. She’s already reaching out, too.

I didn’t call Tara’s father, just arrived to pick her up at the usual time. I’d talk to Tara first, I decided, and then see what I was going to say to Jerry. He’s a good guy, works hard, loves his kid.

He panics. You know. Some people do. Tara doesn’t, not usually, and so I wanted to talk to her first.

She sat in the back, big enough to be out of a booster seat but not big enough to be safe with the airbags yet. She was hitting a growth spurt, though; it wouldn’t be long.

RSD has all sorts of side effects. There are people who think it’s psychosomatic, who dismiss it, more or less, as malingering. I got some resistance from my mom and my sister when we decided to go ahead with the surgery, of the she’s-just-doing-it-for-attention and she’ll-outgrow-it sort.

My Tara was a brave girl, very tough. She broke her arm on the playground a few days after her eighth birthday. I didn’t figure out there were other issues until the cast was off and she was still complaining that it hurt. And then, complaining that it hurt more, and the hurt was spreading up her shoulder and down her side. And her right hand was curling into a claw while it took us nine months to get a diagnosis, and another ten months after that to get her into the trial, while she suffered through painkillers and physical therapy.

I watched in the mirror as she wriggled uncomfortably under her shoulder belt and slouched against the door, inspecting bitten fingernails. “How was school?”

“Fine,” she said, turning to look out the window at the night rushing past. It was raining slightly, and she had rolled her window down to catch the damp air, trailing her fingers over the edge of the crack.

“Hands in the car, please,” I said as we stopped under a streetlight. I couldn’t see in the darkness if her eyes were bloodshot, or if those shadows under her chin were bruises.

Tara pulled her fingers back, sighing. “How was work, Mom?”

“Actually, I got a call from Mrs. Mendez today.”

Her eyes widened as I pulled away from the stop sign. I forced my attention back to the road. “Am I in trouble?”

“You know it’s very dangerous, what you taught Silkie to do, don’t you?”

“Mom?” A plaintive question, leading, to see how much I knew.

“The fainting game. It’s not safe. People die doing that, even grownups.” Another stop sign, as she glared at her hands. “Silkie went to the emergency room.”

Tara closed her eyes. “Is she okay?”

“She will be.”

“I’m always careful, Mom—”

“Tara.” I shifted from second to third as we rolled up the dark street and around the corner to our own house, the porch light gleaming expectantly by the stairs, light dappled through the rain-heavy leaves of the maple in the front yard. “I need you to promise me you’ll never do that again.” Her chin set.

Wonderful. Her father’s stubborn mouth, thin line of her lips. Her hair was still growing back, so short it curled in flapper ringlets around her ears and on her brow.

“Lots of kids do it. Nobody ever gets hurt.”

“Tara?”

“I can’t promise.”

“Tara.” There are kids you can argue with. Tara wasn’t one of them. But she could be reasoned with. “Why not?”

“You wouldn’t believe me.” And she didn’t say it with the petulant defiance you might expect, but simply, reasonably, as an accepted annoyance.

“Try me.”

“I can’t promise,” she said, “because the aliens need me.”

Albert chitters again. It’s hot. Really hot, and Tara wants water. But there never seems to be any water here. Albert tugs her hand. He wants her to follow. She goes with him and he takes her the same way he always does. Toward the big steel doors, and then down into cool darkness, the hum of big fans, and then he’ll bring her underground and there will be a thing like a microphone, only at her height, not a grown up one. And she’ll talk and sing into it, because that seems to be what Albert wants her to do, while luminescent colors roll across his armor plates in thin, transparent bands.

She’s never seen anything alive here. Except Albert.

She talks into the microphone, though, sings it silly songs and talks about things. Her mother and father, and the divorce. The time in the hospital, and the friends she made there. Insects and arthropods, bicycles and card games. Her friends and teachers, and how happy she is to be back in a real school.

Colors rippling across his carapace impatiently, Albert waits. They’ve done this before.

I blamed the implant. Nobody likes to think her kid is experiencing symptoms of undifferentiated schizophrenia, after all. I rescheduled for the next day and took the morning off and we made an emergency appointment with Dr. al-Mansoor.

Tara waited outside while I went in to talk to the doctor. She looked bleary-eyed under the scarf tucked over her hair, the flesh slack over her cheekbones and shadowed around the eyes. I like Dr. al-Mansoor. And it was pretty obvious she hadn’t planned on being in the clinic at seven AM to see us, but she’d managed to get there.

I put a cup of coffee on her desk before I sat down. She took it gratefully, cupping lean fingers around the warm paper, her wedding ring flashing as she lowered her head over the steam. “You have a concern, Jill?” she asked.

Her given name is Hadiyah, but I always have to remind myself to use it, even though we’d gotten to be good friends over the last four months or so. I think she respected the questions I asked. None of the other parents were in the medical profession.

I looked down at my own coffee cup and cleared my throat. Best to just say it. “I think there’s a problem with Tara’s implant.”

They’ll catch her if she tries it here. So Tara sits and folds her hands and tries not to rock impatiently, first in the waiting room and then in the office while Mom and Dr. al-Mansoor talk, mostly over her head. There’s a dollhouse on the ledge, though, along with some other toys that Tara is mostly too old for, and Tara busies herself with the dolls and the furniture until she gets bored, and starts running the red firetruck back and forth along the ledge. She stages a four-alarm fire and a rescue, complete with hook-and-ladder work on the dollhouse, though the sizes are off and the dolls have to make a death-defying leap from the second floor to be caught at the top of the ladder by a half-scale fireman.

She’s totally lost track of the grownup conversation, and they’re not talking about her now anyway but about some other girl in the trial, though Dr. al-Mansoor is very careful not to say her name. “She hasn’t had any similar ideations, though . . . ”

The conversation stops, and Tara looks up to find Mom and Dr. alMansoor staring at her. “Did I do something wrong?”