Gregor gave the block a final push down. The stonefish squirmed a little beneath the pressure and a clear liquid shot into the air. Catching what little light there was in that place, it shone, glittered like a handful of diamonds tossed into the dark.
“That’s your classic proteinaceous toxin right there. Verrucatoxin, son. The vee-tee-ex. Delivered deep into the victim, which in this case would be you. Studies galore on VTX, yessir, but the mechanisms at work resist understanding. You will experience intense pain, massive damage to your cardiovascular system, truly horrifying convulsions. The lore around this fish is chock full of broken spinal cords, bursting eyeballs dribbling down the face like egg whites. Hallucinations, existential despair, paralysis! That’s if you’re lucky.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Just getting started, son. This is a fish that pretends to be a piece of the world, right? A stone. What’s less threatening than that. Unless one is dropping on you from a height, nothing. A building block of the planet. Doesn’t move or react to anything. Just sits still and will do so until moved. Sits forever. Becomes home to little plants. Algae. Smaller critters. Lovely.” As Gregor spoke he slowly dropped a gloved hand before the stonefish mouth and waggled his fingers in a slow rhythm. The fish wasn’t fooled, but the wide, wide mouth slit parted enough for me to glimpse the ribbed interior.
“But! Get within consuming range of the stonefish and find yourself sucked instantly within this gaping maw!” Gregor poked at the lower lip and the fish clamped its mouth shut, rolled an eye upward in irritation, it seemed to me. Gregor voiced disappointment. “Come on now. Gape! Gotta love the English language. Gaping maw. Say it with me now! Gaping maw! No? Well, suit yourself.
“It’s a live feeder. The sudden vacuum it creates brings prey directly to its stomach. One second you’re alive and swimming along, oblivious, the whole fishy deal, and in the next second you’re alive and still oblivious and fishy but with one critical difference. You are now food. A meal. Not even a meal! A meal has time to sit on a plate but you, you’re in its guts already, a part of the stonefish, soon to be stonefish proper and maybe a leetle speck of stonefish shit.”
Gregor removed the foam block as he spoke; the venomous spine retreated within its black, knobby sheath of skin. The stonefish relaxed and the spines folded back down to merge with the body. The eyes closed. It became, again, a slightly damp rock encrusted with vegetable matter and slimy deposits drying in the air. The dim light, the overpowering odour of brine and rot, and the sight of Gregor mooning over the awful fish was doing nothing for the growing migraine pulsing in my temples.
“This is all fascinating,” I said. “But why show me this thing, Gregor.” He picked it up again, brought it closer to me as he moved around the examining table.
“One last thing!” he chirped. “There’s a trick to making them pop out, but there are switchblades in its face, for fuck’s sake! Lacrimal sabres, if you want to get technical. Right here—” he rubbed a thumb across a depression below the left eye “—and of course another on the other side.” I gagged a little at the pungency of the white filmy fertilizing slime. Gregor chuckled at this, then turned back to the tank, dropped the stonefish into the water, where it sank exactly like what it pretended to be.
“Why am I showing you this beastie, you ask. Come on, let’s get out of here. It stinks.” Once outside he spread his arms wide and spun once, twice, on the trail. The man was light on his feet. I’ll give him that.
“Look at all this, Den. This literal magnificence. Layers upon layers of complexity. Nested biospheres, symbiotic systems feeding and seething and webbing it up for shits and giggles. Go deep or go high, doesn’t matter, as above so below as affirmed by the mystical teachings of all ages, the macro is in the micro! Densely packed information expressed in frantic fractals across all media. The Buddhists called it the Ten Thousand Things but the world is so many myriads on myriads more than that.”
“Fine,” I snapped. “But what does this have to—”
“I got tired, Den. Worse, bored. I saw disengagement everywhere. Especially within myself. I tried to justify it, find work arounds, anything to keep living. The Struggle, right?”
“Jesus, man. If you say so.”
“Frustrated with me already, huh? I get it, can’t blame you; I’ve been alone here, mostly alone, for a long time. But you’re going to be here a while, too, Den, so let me be up front with you from the start, get the annoying shit out of the way so we can move on into something constructive, something revelatory. You know, for your article. So close, now. Say. You don’t look so well.”
“I’m not,” I said. The migraine was coming on full strength and I only wanted a cool, dark room. My vision was quickly becoming prismatic and painful, and there was a twinge in my left knee suddenly. I mentioned this as well.
“Let’s get you back to your room.” He placed an arm over my shoulder and gripped my elbow with his other hand. The gesture felt protective and a little anxious and vampiric all at once. “Could be we’ve overdone things today. My fault, my fault, I’ll own it. I’m just stoked to get things started, is all.”
“You know you make zero sense, right?”
His pace quickened; I was swept along, faint. Gregor’s nickel tour hadn’t brought me far from the medical pod and we were soon approaching the sliding doors.
“Believe me, I do. I will, though. Once I’ve explained things better.”
“The stonefish, Gregor. Jesus.” The twinge I’d felt in my left knee grew more pronounced. Beyond a mere hint, now.
“Sure thing, bud. The stonefish. You came here to find me. I came here to find someone, too.”
“The sasquatch.”
“You’d think so, right? Famous futurist, exhausted with the world, retreats to the woods to go all paleo and pursue boyhood obsession? Good narrative. That’s the tasty stuff. But, no.”
“No? Wait, what?”
“No, I came here to find someone. And I found them. I did. You’ll meet them soon. But they were here, too. Dem bigfeets! Only, they weren’t what I thought they were. What anyone ever thought they were...”
We were back at the med pod by this point, Gregor bustling me inside, helping me back into the bed. My skull a fire, my knee a bright point of light in the dimness of the room, and something in my guts that was very sure of itself and twisting, twisting. From these sensations came a moment of revelation and, like a fool, I spoke it aloud.
“My knee isn’t really fixed, is it.”
It wasn’t a question and couldn’t have been. I stated it in a flat voice, my tone even and calm, even as my mind grew unsteady, verged on panic. Gregor hastily pulled a blanket over me. His callused hands adjusted my neck on the pillow with that surprising gentleness. The line of his mouth was grim, and a corner of it twitched. In that moment he seemed a wound spring.
“Oh, it’s fixed. Right as rain. You’ve no worries on that account.” That twitch. A lie, or at least an evasion. “Rest is all you need. I pushed you too hard today, Den, and for that I apologize, again.” He pulled a small cart near the bed and from one of its drawers extracted a sealed hypodermic. “This will help, and take care of the headache. A little sleep, and while you’re out, I’ll cook us up something good. You probably haven’t eaten a decent meal in a while. It’s the First Law of the Universe: Everybody Hungry. How’s that sound?”
“The food? Or the...what did you call it?”
“The First Law.”
The needle slid in so cleanly I didn’t notice. I mumbled something about the stonefish again as the drugs went to work. Whatever the stuff was, it had a different quality than the morphine, though perhaps it was derivative. I’d been through so much, I’m not sure I could have known a difference if there was one. Probably it was morphine, again. Gregor’s face loomed before mine, all canyons and compassion and blue, watering eyes, then receded. I sensed he was moving away, toward the entrance.
“Those cryptids you thought I came here for, Den
. The stonefish was their first lesson, and now I pass it on to you. I’ve shown you the thing, listed its traits for you, impressed upon you the extent of its powers to harm, to hide, to hunt. Take everything I’ve told you, Den, and scale it up. Scale it all the way up. Beyond a simple but nasty fish. Scale what the stonefish is to this place, and then beyond this place. Scale it to a world, but don’t stop there. Keep scaling up. Up, up, and all the way.”
The anaesthetic drift was strong but I managed to moan something in response. A rejection of the idea Gregor was planting. A desperate refusal.
“That’s us, Den. This is the skin of the stonefish.” I heard his knuckles rap on a wall, and knew the wall was not only the wall. He meant the wall and he meant us and he meant everything. Every last thing. Then I heard his steps receding down the hall, trailed by an anguished whisper.
“Welcome to Stonefish House.”
***
He was like that, I’d find. He’d made of Stonefish House a stage and most interactions with Gregor Makarios there had the feel of an interactive play. Most, not all. It wasn’t that I experienced my time there as a totally scripted one, but there were elements of it that hummed with intention. I was the acolyte and my role was to be prepared. Stonefish House was my schoolhouse, boot camp, and crucible. Gregor the alchemist at his Great Work. The place his laboratory, but more, floorboards for him to obsessively tread, passing on his mad lessons to his audience through story and demonstration and revelation; a staging ground, a place from which Gregor expected to move to whatever came next.
He spoke in air quotes almost exclusively. For Gregor, most things required that kind of lazy qualification. Nothing, to him, was so much a sure thing that he could relax the crooked hooks of his parenthetical fingers and let them drop to his sides. He was forever clawing at the air as he spoke, if not literally, then in his tone. I became adept at hearing his fingers making their cages around an idea, or an object, or a person, a sense of identity. In this way, he rendered the world meaningless, or as close to meaningless as made no difference. In this way he tugged and tore at the face of the world. In this way he forced the Stonefish to shed its reeking skin.
Outside the shitbox, night has fallen again. In the street below, I hear the regular slow sloshing of individuals moving through the flooded streets to unknown destinations, rest or crime or pleasure. Sometimes there are two or three of them, arguing and muttering. A drone will pass overhead, humming, and they holler useless abuse at the oblivious thing and I am reminded of Gregor, on his way to getting properly drunk, yelling at the trees as the moon rose over Stonefish House.
He was many things, I found. He presented as a collection of paradoxes. Paranoid but engaged with the world and the things of the world; apathetic generally but deeply concerned about specifics; mostly foolish in his mannerisms and speech patterns in order to distract, with varying success, from his surprisingly deep store of serenity and a kind of resigned wisdom. Gregor Makarios knew things, and he wanted me to know them, too, even if I couldn’t believe them.
I couldn’t. Not then, not even up close as I was. Not even when contemplating the already weird occurrences that had brought me there, to his doorstep.
It’s a different story now, though.
***
The meal Gregor prepared for me while I slept was more than decent. The ingredients he sourced and chose, the skilled preparation, his deft plating, all of it was a surprise and a delight and almost did more to unsettle me than the tank full of stonefish or the nighttime monster assault had.
I awoke to a tall glass of cool water on the bedside table and a note from Gregor. Soup’s On! and a hand drawn map to the commissary and dining room. I left the med pod, my knee still aching a little, a kind of phantom twang I had difficulty believing was real. It would come and go and manifested not so much as pain as a nudge, or hint, of something changed. Outside, amber light pierced the treetops at a low angle, humming shafts of illuminated mist and pollens. An unseen raven croaked somewhere in the branches above. I had slept through the rest of the day.
Gregor greeted me enthusiastically as I entered the spare dining area. “I see my pharmacological skills haven’t failed me; you’re just in time for dinner.”
“I had a dream,” I said, aware in one second that I had, and forgetting it in the next.
“Did you now?” He directed me to a table, pulled out a chair for me. “Well, you’re awake now, unless I miss my guess. Have a seat.”
“Very formal. Nice centrepiece?” A small holo-emitter on the tablecloth displayed a three-dimensional rendering of a famous Goya. “Is that supposed to help my appetite or put me off the food entirely.”
“Poor old guy, huh? Imagine never needing to eat before that moment, and then, hey oh, here’s your first meal, tuck in, pops! It’s my little meditation. If it bothers you I can turn it off.”
I reached for the emitter and turned it ninety degrees. “Nice bum, for an old guy.”
“That it is, that it is. The holo artist had to make their interpretations, obviously, but I’m glad they went and tightened him up at the rear, as befits his status. I hope you’re hungry, Den.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I could eat.”
“I’ll bet you could.” Gregor poured wine from an unusual carafe, shaped like a double-helix. “I’ll be right back with the first course.”
“I can already smell it. What have you done in there?”
Amazing things, I was to learn. Gregor brought out the first two plates on a large platter.
“Here we have for starters pickled vegetable summer rolls of avocado and Thai basil, with an almond butter dipping sauce, and to hint at the main course we have some prawns wrapped in prosciutto with a roasted garlic aioli.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Best he could manage was bread and raw fish, Den. Enjoy.” He plucked a prawn from the plate and popped it in his mouth. “Damn! See, now that’s a bit of all right.”
He was understating it, and to great effect. Next up was a pickled beet and radish salad with a goat cheese croquette and nasturtium dressing, and something I couldn’t recognize.
“That’s pumpkin seed,” he said when I asked. “Pickled, also. I do enjoy pickling things. More wine?”
“Please. This is insane. I’ve never tasted anything like this back home. Where are you getting this from, Gregor?”
He settled back in his chair and put fork to mouth, chewing thoughtfully. “Am I wowing you, Secord? Are you learning something.”
“I’m learning I’ve never eaten well before.”
“Hm. That may be. So, enlighten me. Post-scarcity not working out so hot down south?”
“It is and it isn’t,” I said around a mouthful of salad. “It’s just that priorities have changed. There’s a lot available but most of it is, well...”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. And besides, the interesting stuff is all in the noönet.”
“Again, hm. You’re destroying that. Slow down!” Gregor topped off his own glass, took a long sip, then left for the kitchen again. But I couldn’t slow down, at all. The feeling of filling up with genuinely nourishing food was thrilling. I thought of our family meals at the crèche, the instant this and pre-wrapped that, and wondered at what we were doing there.
And then Gregor was back, with more, and more, and I experienced a kind of low-grade epiphany: he would always present with more. Indeed, he already had, and I was now aware that this was his mode of being: everything would be too much of a muchness. The tour of Stonefish House, his stream of information branching away and away again into other streams, the overloading of the senses he seemed to generate with ease, until I was dizzy with data and unsure of my place in the world. Here, he was doing it with food, but I was finding, and would become ever more aware, that he did this with everything.
“For the main, we have here a risotto of roasted garlic, spring peas, and locally sourced Dungeness crab, followed by a sockeye salmon, lightly smoked on a cedar plank w
hich, I may add, I cut myself, and that’s a charred lemon aioli for dressing.”
I could hear his air quotation marks floating around the crab, and the salmon. “So, you want me to believe you went out and caught these crabs yourself? And the fish?”
“That’s not what I want you to believe per se, Den. There are other, more pressing things I need to convince you of, but yes. Yes, I went out and acquired these, after a fashion.”
The thing was, I did believe him. Tasting (and I’m sure, now, that this was all to plan) was in this case believing, because the salmon in no way had that flat printed protein flavor I had become used to. There was a richness to it, and a delicacy as well, a fresh, revitalizing quality that hummed in my mouth. The creature on my plate had been swimming, and not too long ago. I was tasting life, or what remained of it. This was real food.
“It’s amazing, Gregor.”
“Ah, you’re welcome,” he said around a mouthful of cheesy rice. A large flake of crab meat had become suspended in his beard, and he picked up his napkin to dab at it, then popped the meat in his mouth once he had it free. He smirked. “We try not to waste things here. I’m glad you’re enjoying the meal, Den.”
“I don’t know that enjoy is the right word. This is a revelation.”
He made his hands into two little guns and pointed them at me. “Over a decade of practice made almost perfect. And it’s the least I can do for you here, Den. The least of the revelations I can provide. Will provide.”
“Oh?”
Gregor leaned toward me where I sat, stuffing my face. He made a tent of his fingers and gathered up my gaze in his own. “I will, Den. Reveal things unto you, my son.” I swallowed, hard. The salmon had been expertly de-boned, but something stuck in my throat all the same. “This is a place of revelation, as I’m sure you’re already somewhat aware. You will need to be ready. Can you be ready?”
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