a great many baboons. The rest lay stunned atop of it or hidden within the tall blue grass contemplating what to do next. Arnold and I were quick to exploit the opportunity to get away. Through the arched opening into the health farm, we arrive at the scene of a ghost resort. Not a jaguar nearby.
We head down into the underground tunnel system through the triangular hole aside the White Oak Leaf. I attempt to relocate where it was that I first met Baba Azul—the hidden bathroom I’d left my highlighter yellow boardshorts in. Reaching at the cave walls with little recollection as to where the bathroom lies is fruitless.
Nothing’s wedging open. Arnold inquires about what I’m searching, and I reveal my bid for safety is a secret bathroom on the other side of these walls.
“Safety?” he says carpingly. “We won’t be safe till Tommy’s gone.”
“He did this?”
“I’ll bet ma writing hand he did.”
Arnold assures me he knows where he’s going. The calmness from the health farm quickly dissipates underground. As we push onward, the hulking tread of a beast stomping the ground and the loud strung–out breaths of the uncommon kind follow closely behind. We rush ahead attempting to lose the pursuant stalker. Perhaps we have but the echo from its movement lingers uncomfortably tight. Through guidance from the spiraling jet black lamp posts, with sculpted jaguar heads at each end, and glowing mint green orbs to light the way, we manage to find the Lemon Room.
The stalker grows silent as do we. We each nudge open one of the mustard yellow swinging saloon doors. From outside the doors nothing looks unchanged. However, as we step inside the chandeliers rise to greet us and an optical illusion turns our bodies, our clothing various shades of gray. Something about the yellow lights from the floating crystal chandeliers does seem off. The lemon shades they’d once emitted have been overturned by titanium yellow. We are transported into a monochrome world where any object is a bleak canvas for black and white to tame.
I begin wildly kicking over every bench lined up in the middle of the hall for I know there’s a key under one. I promise Arnold we’ll be safe if he follows me through to the end of my violent wreckage, but he’s bound to the notion there’s no safety while Tommy’s around. Arnold stops at the Lemon Room showers at the front of the hall as I bulldoze my way to David’s locker.
A thin platinum rectangle skids like a fidget spinner from the leg of a bench as the bench tumbles like an IED blasted Humvee onto the wall. I snatch the key and emplace it into the slit of the adjacent gray steel locker. When I eject the key, the locker door lowers itself a level below. Ahead of me is a mountain of gray clothes with spectral traits to tell its units apart, but their size for a start.
I cast out heaps of laundry into the hall till I’m a foot deep into David’s locker and a pile the size of a termite mound has formed all around me. Arnold shouts he can’t find it, though I can’t imagine what he can’t find or what anyone would expect to find in the showers, but a seedy drain clogged with friable hair.
“En route!” he hollers.
“Get your ass over here! Help me plow an entrance through these clothes will ya!”
As his footsteps approach my position, his voice dials–in an annoyed tone with some waggish gibberish to remind me there’s a comic persona trapped somewhere inside him. “I don’t get it. Magumga should be here.”
I blindly throw a motorbike finger glove behind me at the scaling pile of gray clothes. As I turn to face Arnold, tittering with the question of why someone named Magumga would hide in the shower, a silverback dons the glove on its left shoulder. Its frown tells me I’m done for. Its rumble of 95 decibels nearly rockets me into the hereafter. Its thickset fangs facilely pierce my grit.
The ounce of grit I’ve left climbs lickety–split from six feet under once Arnold fires a gunshot at the gorilla’s right arm. The silverback owns its aggressive stance, settled on all fours, with no sign the round or its sound’s made impact. I bring forth the brain, aiming it high at the gorilla’s widening jaws.
The steady flickering gray mist pecks the gorilla’s face only slightly before its giant hand backslaps me a breadth away. I grip onto the Lemon Room’s satisfyingly rubber floor. I focus my blurred vision on the tall shadow above me. I must’ve been in the black for a minute too long because another voice has entered the space.
“You fired five shots! How could you miss?!” a man cries in a high–pitched voice.
“With all due respect laddie, I fired four!”
Arnold takes his final shot at the spine–chilling gorilla. Its facial skin has been stripped back to reveal its skull, animated despite the death penalty common sense would entail. Alive and well, the gorilla beats its fists on the ground like a toddler on a drum.
How could the brain serve me as a bomb?
I search the ground for where it may’ve rolled and find it at the foot of a new man. His profile’s as gray as an actor through the silver screen in the era of silent films. He’s short and beefy with a neat comb over and undercut, abruptly serious hooded eyes, a button nose, and an unbroken circle of heavy stubble; within which a twitching smile reads nervousness. There’s a darker hued portion of skin with irregular borders over the right side of his cheek and neck—ever imperceptibly slight.
His active wear is that of a pro runner who’s done well enough for himself to be endorsed by the most lucrative brands. The highly burnished silver metal bands clamping his wrists and ankles claim him as a member of Celeres. If I’m to believe their reputation, touted by Zorian, this man’s basic training has prepared him to fight and win against anything under the sun.
The man picks up the brain at his feet, winds his arm, and throws it at Arnold, driving his whole body into the throw. Arnold instinctively drops the gun, exchanges it for the brain and aims it at the gorilla, extending his right arm and squeezing both hemispheres with one hand. He squints in a slump, away from the protrusion of mist that rockets out of his hand. At the same time, a bench leaves the gorilla’s hands and flies straight above us hammering three crystal chandeliers. The gorilla’s skeletal face, barely a face but a savage grim remnant of one, zooms through the flickering gray mist toward Arnold, swiftly deteriorating within it.
The chemical undoing of its skull is not fast enough to stop the gorilla from taking one last token with it into the grave. Its massive jaws clamp down on Arnold’s fist and Arnold’s right hand is plainly separated from him. Amazingly, it continues to grip onto the brain. From the disembodied hand, the brain’s aimed low. The gorilla’s headless corpse sways from side to side momentarily before it decides to tumble down toward me onto a bed of clothes. I roll from the falling body and lucky I did so. The gray mist eagerly attacks the ground where I lay, where the gorilla now lies.
Arnold’s gone into shock. Cowed into silence, he pales at the sight of red blood gushing from the stump where his right hand just was. I briefly see the red too, made possible from the gray mist exposing a network of conductors underneath us. The entangled wires near the headless gorilla are throwing up electrical sparks that interrupt this gray illusion indecisively. The blue–gray mist works to snip some of the clutter out of existence. The Celer puts an end to the hazard by stomping on the frigid hand and forcing it to loosen its grip on the brain.
The hole the mist has made, however, engulfs the lower half of the headless gorilla. Its upper body is instantaneously lit up in high flames. The fire bounding over it, working to touch the ceiling, works overtime to craftily defeature the creature into a spongy texture suchlike burnt marshmallows.
There’s no longer a gray filter to mask the lemons from which we must make lemonade. From behind the Celer, where three crystal chandeliers had crashed upon the jelly–like pale yellow floor, three explosions occur successively emulating the gorilla’s blinding blaze. I retrieve the brain and shoot its flickering blue mist into the wall of clothes in David’s locker. From the corner of my eye, something unhurriedly floats over the tips of the fallen chandeliers’ yellow flames.
It’s Tommy. His eyes as threatening as ever, flashing electric green in the presence of a burgeoning thick black smoke. The boy remains in his olive green greatcoat and colonial wear with a white powdered wig now carefully fitted to his noggin. He paddles and kicks through the air as if suspended in water. The Celer madly tells us to hide but I’m already two steps ahead of him, lifting Arnold from under his armpits, and dragging him toward David’s locker where a path now stretches to the end of a blonde wood room.
“See this!” The Celer rotates his wrists in front of him to show off the chameleon metal bands, no longer silver, encompassing half of his forearms. “You can’t hurt us anymore! You’re feckless without power!” he shouts with a wan smile.
Tommy snorts with laughter. Now floating at the edge of David’s locker, he performs a breaststroke in the air and glides toward the wall opposite the locker. “Get a grip Percutio,” Tommy says triflingly. He bores into the Celer with annoyance riding his clenched lips. His stare briefly leaves the Celer to unemotionally eye Arnold and I—shaken but unpacified—inside the locker, then drops to the burning headless gorilla evoking a gag from him. “That’s disgusting.”
For the chance he’ll be the first to ring in and answer the milestone question on a hit quizzical game show, Tommy slaps the air downward with his right hand and abruptly halts, suspending his hand smack above where the big red answer button would be. His hand compacts into a fist. The ground below the Celer promptly collapses and he looks stunned, eyes widening as he attempts to pull himself out of the incidental hole Tommy’s fathered. Tommy slowly raises the palm of his hand toward the ceiling. “Egregious. Grievous. Garbage.” In front of his eyes, he firmly rotates his palm to face the ground and clutches the air.
In a flash, the ceiling crashes over the Celer and blockades us inside David’s locker. Scarps of metal and flint rubble tumble riotously into the room, forcing us to retreat further inside. I’ve dragged Arnold deep enough to where all around us—as the cloud of dust irritatingly tickling my throat settles—a floor–to–ceiling coconut white bookshelf says, ‘Stay, read, and sip some dark roast coffee…forever and ever.’ The shelving bows outward like the mainsail of a schooner tackled by the whirlwinds of a supercell thunderstorm.
David’s library is a rare conglomerate of books in Sacramento green hardbound covers that mosey in the tens of thousands range. Ending an inch above the bottom of each book’s spine is a crosshatch pattern of sleek black dots, gleaming faintly as if freshly painted on.
The rocks upon the locker entrance form a still wall momentarily. The actions happening on the other side of the wall start to gently topple the foremost stones with grueling anticipation for the reveal of a mole. I leave Arnold at an edge of the high bookshelf, sitting upright with no sign of life roaming the winter wasteland that’s his eyes. Walking up to the breaking wall on the balls of my feet, I near my head to a copper sheet of metal at the root of some tremorous movement. The sheet belts my face and slumps on the floor. Tommy’s head pops in through the hole behind it, perfectly crafted to include the fit of his wig.
“Meow,” he murmurs unexpectedly, making me think it’s time to retire these cat ears of mine shining like trillion brilliant cut diamonds by virtue of the library’s telling white light.
Stupefied by his eyes, I might as well be in an inverted armlock. The electric green, radiant light emanating from his eyes, burn into mine. Though never blinding. Tommy’s face retreats into the hole and a swirling collage of debris follows him out. Any significant barrier was emptied from the entrance hall of David’s locker. A small ruin of ravaged clothes and a scattered trail of Arnold’s blood sits tight, signing the path into this library.
Tommy peeks his head in before floating on by, bent on what I feel is our hellish demise. I continually stumble backwards till I can no longer fall back. I’m aside the disturbing visual of Arnold getting paler by the moment as he can’t function or think to stop the blood loss in his right arm.
“Oh, how I’ve dreamt of this…since I was three,” Tommy says winded as if pain suddenly struck him. As he approaches the last few steps toward me, he daintily lowers his feet to the ground. His eyes center on mine—at no time straying from them—till he’s in my reach. I cautiously circle him at the center of the room as he stretches his fingers and then makes a gentle fist, one hand at a time, with his thumb wrapped across his fingers. His left hand is scabrous and lumpy whereas the fingernails are fine and sharpened like arrowheads. I position myself with my back purposely facing the entrance as I hold steady.
Make a run for it, even if it means leaving Arnold behind.
“For thirty–nine years, I believed you to be dead and for the past twenty–five, since leaving the otherworld, there’d been whispers you may still be out there. How Koata? How does one mysteriously vanish at the drop of a hat? You must’ve been taken, tortured even…for the knowledge your father passed on to you. But you weren’t, were you? Here you stand perfectly fine. Say it’s truly so!” he bawls snappishly.
“I’m only eighteen. One whole year I spent trapped in a kitchen,” I say filled with gall, restraining with a head gate my urge to squawk, ‘The sole reason I got booked in the first place is you!’
“You do seem quite young to be him but, I see him in you. The same face captured in photographs surfing mere days before disappearing. I pray you’ve a better explanation than I can muster, blessed father,” he says longingly, turning to face me.
Tommy jumps at the chance to hug me. Before I can tip my head to the side in confusion, I’m cinched in this boy’s arms, unable to stop squirming. “We must destroy magumga,” he says delicately, releasing me with a sigh of disquiet. The look of torment in his eyes beclouds his overbearing thirst to meet me.
Arnold, suddenly cognizant, grabs a book from the bottom shelf. He attempts to knock out Tommy while his back’s turned. His left hand rides the air forward with his grip on the spine of the book. Midway into the throw, the book holds onto him. A slimy thick teal secretion from the book’s cover has sown itself to Arnold’s palm, causing the book to dangle merrily from it.
Tommy nearly turns his head round when I grab the sides of his shoulders and half–wittedly submit to calling him— “Son!” His eyes flash and through the window of a child’s imagination, I see a glint of hope—bootless hope. For what his eyes speak is a malady of the mind—the tooth fairy is real.
Baba is to the jaguars as I am to him.
Whatever I am to him, my response seems to have affirmed all his notions about me.
“I burned to embrace you the minute I saw you on the cliff but the jaguars—they’re after me. Their drones have had their prying eyes on me ever since I escaped Neptune’s penitentiary—Cabrini Dream Khayhím. When I found you, I couldn’t let them think you had anything to do with what I’d done.”
“How do you keeping finding me?” I ask hard–pressed.
“The face of your watch and compass are made from the lucid body of an aluxo–tez. Something that if you saw in person, you’d mistake for a species of snail. When ripped from its shell, its body slowly hardens, and its white spots dissipate. People tend to flatten the body, then use their fingers or small bursts of air to stretch it out into an assortment of shapes.” Tommy rhythmically taps the bulbous case of my Gulixua watch with the lengthy fingernails of his left hand.
“For centuries aluxo–tezes were used as hardy glass in jewelry. Your father repurposed them as trackers. You see, I have three receivers here under my lapel—pearly orbs extracted from under the shell of three separate pregnant aluxo–tezes.” He turns his greatcoat’s lapel inside out flaunting Orion’s belt against a dark yellowish–green cloud of ionized hydrogen.
Pinned to it, the aged blue hair pin fitted with three white pearls my sister wore on her wedding day. Or could it be a replica? “There you have it. Three fossilized eggs from an aluxo–tez. For the longest time I couldn’t get a reaction—not one out of these cuties. That’s until I came here to Neptune. Then, miraculously this middle one started to work. I’ve been hot on your tail ever since. The center egg must come from the exact aluxo–tez your watch and compass are made from because it’s led me right to you. I can always teach you how it works later.”
I never took the watch my father gave me to be anything more than a watch. But how else would Tommy have been at the cliff, in the bushes, and here now—at the same time as I—if not for a tracker? Of course, there’s the possibility of coincidence. Or if not coincidence, some other reason I can’t reason to smoke out right now.
“I couldn’t protect you then, but I can now. This is our chance to get out,” Tommy says with urgency.
“I can’t leave Arnold here,” I answer inimically, staring blatantly at Tommy’s corroded left hand—a complete parity with crispy buttered bread. Except the bread’s skin and the butter’s acid.
“It’s a fresh wound from when I attempted to take back magumga,” he says in a fearsome whisper. “A deterrent was emplaced around it. An unquenchable blaze. Though it didn’t dissuade me from trying to steal it again.”
“Where is it!” Arnold cries petulantly, unable to hold his breath any longer.
“What is it?” I pine.
We naturally form a close triangle with our bodies facing each other based off Arnold’s position on the ground. Tommy’s gaze falls upon Arnold's absent hand, and he casually remarks, “Rough day, huh?”
“So, itching to find out what it is?” he swiftly shifts focus. “The strange fruit I stole from Felix after its prior guardian, Leto, was fired by Baba for biting it. It’s now in the hands of Pilot Dice, who consecutively stole it from me using slick talk, approximately forty–eight hours ago when I returned here to rescue you…and to retrieve my Sir Isaac Newton wig. Felix originally kept it in the communal showers’ subbasement.”
“The wig or the fruit?” Arnold asks stubbornly.
“The fruit.”
“My premonition was right,” Arnold whispers under his breath.
“It hasn’t been in the subbasement for over a year because of organ traders like you,” Tommy says, peering haughtily down at Arnold.
“Organs?!” I question agog.
“Yes, organs. You possess the brain,” Tommy nods to the Abraxas Blue cradled in my palms. “Magumga resembles another organ but in fact, it’s more akin to a fruit. I guarantee that fruit is the reason all these animals are currently going berserk. How they got out, I stand to reason. No one who’s held onto magumga for more than a minute can resist squeezing from it its nutrients and absorbing them, either through skin like lotion or plain ingestion. I’ve firsthand experience with it and let me tell you, there’s no getting by what that fruit wants and what magumga wants is to get inside you.”
An odd shriek, as loud as a car horn, comes from the book holding tight to Arnold. Arnold’s furiously ripping its pages with a fervent gnashing of the teeth. The book tremors and sings horribly to the tune of each tear. I instinctively attempt to stifle the noise from Tommy’s ears with my palms. He isn’t as surprised as I at the selfless gesture. I reset and worry about my own hearing as Tommy reasons to protect his own.
So close is the sound to the mating call of a greengrocer cicada—the autotuned conception of a wailing monkey and the rattling noise from an accelerating vehicle with dangerously low levels of transmission fluid. Arnold wraps the loose pages over his stump with his mouth to soak up the blood. He does this until there’s enough paper encompassing the wound to resemble a maroon papier-mâché cast. His blood manages to dilute the words on each page, making them impossible to relay.
The booming wails die out as Arnold slams the book shut. Its heavy teal goo doesn’t letup to free two birds of incommensurable feathers. For it to release him, Tommy informs Arnold he must return the baby xoder to the exact location on the bookshelf where he got it. As Arnold does this, the sticky teal substance recoils itself into the book cover like a hoisted mud turtle retreats into its shell. The slick sheer residue left on his palm, he squeamishly transfers onto his tuxedo jacket’s left lapel.
“Feel better?” Tommy sneers at Arnold, ready to get a move on in explaining this organ. “I hate fruit and I devoured magumga like a panda guzzles bamboo. Impossible to resist. Felix is the only person known to have bypassed its possessive allure. The consumer who ingests it, like I, involuntarily gargles the juice in their throat, tastes around twenty–five exotic and plummy flavors I relate to the native plants of the Congo, before swallowing pandora’s box. The box opens itself in about a day after its digested.”
“The organ is power. That’s the root of Baba’s ability and yours!” Arnold accuses.
“Am I missing something?”
“Magumga. It translates to Triton in Saul Tails. The language mermaids use to communicate with other species who like us have developed speech,” Arnold says, his face paper white.
“Triton’s one of Neptune’s fourteen moons. The jaguars imitate life in their hierarchy of fourteen classes which all house one organ fairly named after each one of Neptune’s moons, given their keepers state of residence is a place called Neptune. A place that was once inhabited by mermaids after the great flood and abandoned after the basins sank,” Tommy says, his voice sharpening.
“Magumga, or Triton, is the Caesar’s organ. A golden fruit framed like a gallbladder. A week before you got here shit hit the fan when Newton here sprung up the theory there’s a burglar amidst his class Mercury, after their inherited organ Despina disappeared.” Arnold’s tone hardens. “Despina’s the form of a compass rose figured on the lid of a miniature wooden barrel, engulfed in a clear gel–like substance that retains the shape of a human heart. It leads its possessor to their heart’s desire. Tommy believes it may be in the hands of a herald or group of heralds seeking the other classes’ organs.”
“Am I wrong? Only a jaguar from Mercury could’ve taken Despina. We’re the only ones who knew of its whereabouts,” Tommy says in a low voice.
“These organs were inherited from who?” I ask, locking eyes with Tommy, then Arnold.
“The founders,” they echo cohesively.
“They’ve found us,” I say aglow as I hear David shout from outside his locker, “My clothes! Christ's blood! Is that a burning ape?!”
The locker’s subsequently occupied by David and three Celers armed with pure gold M16s, distinctly aimed at Tommy. Among them, Leto and the Celer who’d just been buried alive by Tommy, shrouded in soot. Before any combative phrases can be exchanged, Tommy manipulates the galore of books in the room to come hurtling at the Celers like shuriken. At the same time, David’s body erupts into scraps of red meat that forgather in a beastly pile at his disembodied feet. Everyone alive in the room is bespattered in David’s blood.
Thousands of books continue to spring from their shelves as one Celer’s impounded in their pages and teal goo. One of his arms struggles to slip past a crack in the cluster. It moves in the open, in the same fashion Tommy wound his arm to manipulate the books, as though he were spinning a lasso in preparation to restrain a wild horse. A reversal of time sends every last book flying back onto their shelf. David’s body’s rebuilt like an arena housing a mosh pit for pink clay. His blood upon us—withdrawn. Under the vanished cluster of books is Leto gasping for breath.
His sphere’s grown.
Irate, Tommy prepares to repeat his attack, raising his arm till Baba’s voice derails his train of thought. All but the Celers and David seem to be aware of the transmission. David’s cognitive functioning is on pause. He gives a shuddersome stare denoting zombie to the exposed ceiling of interlaced white duct work and yellow piping above. A thick stream of saliva waterfalls gracefully over his lower lip. His nose appears to be broken, his left shoulder’s been dislocated high and aside his neck, and his right foot’s been reattached to his body backwards. Unsettled, I listen to what Baba has to say. Meanwhile, the Celers scramble to retrieve their weapons scattered about the floor.
“I’ve been privileged to have served you as the twenty–sixth Caesar of the Jaguar branch. As you’re all aware by the melody Zorian’s sung, a new Caesar has been chosen to take my place. Effective immediately, Baba Mora will succeed my position as Caesar in this most unfortunate of circumstance. A word of caution—Koata Califf, as suspected when seen conniving with prisoner 1313 at the foot of the cliff on which he murdered his two friends, is not to be trusted.”
“They’re not dead!” I shout as if every jaguar would hear me and side with me. The nerve of him to single me out. A beef between us, created solely by his delusion.
The Celer covered in soot secures an M16 and immediately targets Tommy whilst staring at me. “Is it God? What’s he saying?” he snaps, raising his chin and stretching his neck over his rifle.
With ease and neglect, Tommy spins a finger and the M16’s snatched from the Celer and dropped into my hands. The Celer reaches for it, daunted but mindful about his next move.
“Now to address the man of the hour—Tommy. Welcome back to the home you’ve forsaken. As you attempt to finish what you started, I caution, you too be weary of the man you call father. You were not created by love, but through an unspeakable horror. Though you do not yet know it, I empathize with the monstrosity you’ve become, for from a monster you’re begot. May this be enough to redirect your anger and for what it’s worth, I give you my blessing to satisfy whatever vengeance arises from it.”
I’m shoved onto a school bus into what I fear is the unknown but get dropped off at a memory of my former self; what’s old and raunchy. Except Tommy’s beside me and Arnold lies on the wall ahead of me. In a garden lit by moonlight, an endless row of brilliant pink wind chimes, powerfully lit from their core, steal my interest, suspended on a high ledge above Arnold.
My heart starts to hammer. I dizzily follow Arnold’s frightened gaze. Not far to the right, the cries of a woman grow increasingly desperate. She’s pleading helplessly for the man plunging into her from behind her stripped body to stop. My stomach churns. Though her copious ugly tears aren’t enough to screen her beauty and her swelling cries not enough to void her humanity, the man’s blinded by his lust.
Tis only passion.
“You fucking slut! Who do you think you are?”
Specks of spit from the man douse her face. The woman attempts to fight back, striking the man forcibly in the gut with her knee, but because she’s hopeless, it’s hopeless. When she turns from him, the man tugs her by the braids like a dog on a leash and violently thrusts himself upon her, both landing on the ground. Her arms reach for a helping hand, but no one extends one. Another attempt to scream gets buried under the man’s palm as he takes her from the back. Weak sobs barely escape her as I look behind me to trace the row of undergarments leading to a torn red dress.
Above it, among the many blue rose bushes and imported date–plum trees lie a massive crowd of jaguars. Hundreds stand there, staring in shock at the scene. A few try and turn their heads away, but curiosity snaps their neck back in place. Several twitch, abhorred but compose themselves long enough to see what I know—that it’s me. Unlike me, they can’t seem to look away, though their faces read contempt for a falsehood I know ends.
They know not what they see. What they’re witnessing is an intimate moment, consensual between lovers, based on a kink. Before the curtain’s pulled on an act I inspired with almost incredible fatuity, the scene ends, and I’m left looking like the culprit of what’s socially improper in the eyes of truth and what’s a violent and criminal act without context.