(Stonington, Maine, 9/30/2012)
It was almost an hour past dark by the time we made it back to the attic. I can only be sure of the transition by recourse to my watch. In its current condition, the sky is hardly a help. So late in the day, we shouldn’t have been that far from the attic, not so far as the docks at the end of Seabreeze Avenue. But we needed food. I’m sick as a sick dog today. The pain has been a hammer pounding my entire body, glass and razors in my joints and lungs and belly, but I didn’t dare fix until we got back here to sanctuary. The dope is as good as any toxin out there in the turmoil at the end of the world, which is to say it will get you killed. Sixty-Six hates when I call this that, the End of the World. She never says so, but she makes the face she makes whenever she disapproves of something I’ve said. I think of it as her Disapproving Face. Anyway, I fixed almost an hour ago, and now there’s only the music of Hell seeping in through the walls and the open window. Never mind the season; tonight it is too warm to shut the window. Still, despite the heat, Sixty-Six keeps her hoodie on. I’ve stripped down to my bra and panties, and I’m still sweating. Drips of me, of my internal ocean, splashing against the dusty floor as I write this. My ocean is clear, though, not the sloshing putrescence of the bay, of all the sea surrounding Deer Isle. We found a tidy cache of food in the harbormaster’s office—cans of meat and vegetables, mostly. We filled our packs, and it should keep us fed a week, at least. If we live another week. Sixty-Six seems indifferent to survival, and, at times, fuck but I wish I were, too. Then there would only be the monotonous rhythm of pain and the freedom from pain the dope brings, the heroin’s euphoria, our days on the street hunting down the demons (I do not mean this word in any conventional sense; no other seems to fit, that’s all), gunfire, the hilt of my holy khukuri in my hand, slashing the air, slashing flesh that isn’t flesh. Matter, protoplasm, Urschleim, but not flesh. The stink of ozone when I have no choice but to resort to those intangible weapons folded up inside me. The howling, capering abominations. But we’re home again, “home” again. Me and taciturn Sixty-Six. There’s a crooked stack of books beside her mattress. She reads. She reads as much as I did, before. We found the public library our first week here, not long after we found each other, and it was one of the few instances when she’s seemed happy. She used a shopping cart to haul away dozens of books. Now, I think they keep her company much more than I do. They are her solace. I want to talk about what we saw down there this afternoon, how we found ourselves hemmed in and almost did not make it back. But that is the one subject I can rest assured Sixty-Six will never discuss: whatever’s happening here. The sea is the color of semen. The sea is the consistency of jizz. The scrotum-tightening sea. It smells like sewage. It steams and disgorges demons. “Demons,” with scare quotes. All but shapeless shapes that burst when shot or cut, their constituent molecules thereafter slithering back into the semen sea to reassemble and gather themselves for a new assault. Sixty-Six calls them shoggoths, a word she’s taken from old horror stories, turns out. I don’t care what the fuck they are. They pop and slither off. There’s a pretty picture drawn nice as nice can be, isn’t it, Bête? I spend my days hoping you are safe, that they are doing you no harm. I spend my days in slaughter, in a charade meant to convince the few survivors in Stonington that we have their irrelevant interests at stake. That we are more than two lost souls, refugees ourselves, sent here to topple the dominoes just so, perpetuating calculated chaos, perhaps for no other reason than because curious men and women desire to see the pretty fractals that will follow from our efforts. Last night, Sixty-Six was reading The House at Pooh Corner, and since she doesn’t seem to mind my talking while she reads (so long as I don’t expect replies), I rattled on for a while about Tuscaloosa and mine and your time at the university. Oh, she did find it odd that we chose to go to school in Alabama, when she knows (I do not know how) that we might have had our pick of the Ivy Leagues. Anyway, yes, I talked about fossils—how we were the first to find the blastoid Granatocrinus granulatus in the Fort Payne Chert; how, as undergraduates, we named Selmasaurus russelli, a new genus and species of plioplatecarpine mosasaur; the papers we delivered together on mosasaur biostratigraphy at annual meetings of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (Ottawa, Austin, Cleveland, then Bristol and our first trip to England); taking part in the dig that produced the tyrannosauroid Appalachiosaurus, our small role in some of the preliminary examination of the skeleton while it was still in the matrix and plaster field jackets; the mess with FHSM VP-13910, how we prepared it and first saw it for what it was, a second specimen of Selmasaurus, but the credit going to others and all our work and insight left unacknowledged; collecting Oligocene fossils in the White River Badlands of Nebraska; standing in the wooded gully at Haddonfield, New Jersey, where, in 1858, the first American dinosaur known from more than a few scraps was discovered; how we were the first to happen upon and describe the remains of a velociraptorine theropod from the Gulf Coast (even if it was only a single, tiny tooth). I went on and on like that—Ditomopyge, Carboniferous chondrichthyans, Globidens alabamaensis, the Pierre Shale at Red Bird and Pottsville Formation at Morris, that skull of Megalonyx jeffersonii we prepared but were afraid we’d screw up and so didn’t finish (one of many failures, I admitted), freezing strip mines in the winter and blistering quarries and chalk washes in July . . . and on and on and on. She heard, but I’m pretty sure she didn’t listen to a word of it. She is a master of compartmentalization. Anyhow, I don’t care what William Faulkner said, Bête. I think the past is the past, for us, and we can recall those days, but we’ll never go back to that life we cherished. Will we. No. Science and reason are being demolished around me. Paradigms are being reduced to matchsticks, to splinters. Incommensurable topsy-turvy. I hope you are safe, sister, and that they are keeping their promises. I’m doing everything I’m told. To the letter. I am obedient. But that’s always come easily to me. Not like you, sweet Bête. But I know even if I do not die here, if we ever are reunited, there is no going back. Now, returning to the matter of the Semen Sea, here is what we think we know, pieced together from hearsay, frightened confessions, newspaper and other local periodical accounts printed in the weeks before it began (Commercial Fisheries News, Compass Classifieds, The Deer Isle Chronicle, Island Ad-Vantages, et al.) from captains’ logs we’ve recovered off derelict fishing boats: On the night of August 20, a chartreuse light fell screaming from the sky. It is agreed the light did scream, or whatever cast the light screamed, as it fell into the bay somewhere beyond Burnt Cove. But the sun and the stars were still visible until the twenty-seventh, when the visibility zero-zero began rolling in from the east, so not from the direction of Burnt Cove. Empty boats, dead fishermen found floating or washed up to make a feast for crabs and gulls and maggots. The greasy rains and the sickness that came after them, the plague that killed more than 78 percent of Deer Isle’s population before we arrived, the whatever-it-was the CDC couldn’t even slow down before it claimed most of their team, too. The stars coming back . . . wrong; unrecognizable, alien constellations spinning overhead. Yes, I do sound like a madwoman, and I don’t expect any of this will ever be made public. If it is contained, if it ever ends—The Event—they’ll be sure no one talks, I think, even if it means murdering everyone who survives. There will be a mock-rational explanation. Mock science everyone will want to believe, because believing the truth—even were it not concealed—would be intolerable. But enough for now. Sixty-Six has dog-eared a page and put her book away. She wants me to turn off the Coleman lantern. I need the sleep. Tomorrow will be at least as bad as today, as bad as yesterday, as bad as day after tomorrow. Or worse. Night, sister. Sweet dreams.