The Pilgrims of Parthen
By Kristopher Reisz
Copyright 2013 Kristopher Reisz
Originally published in Fungi, edited by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Orrin Grey
I knew Macy was leaving even though she wouldn’t say it. She hadn’t grown up here, just come up for school, then stayed for me. But she’d graduated a year ago and still couldn’t find a graphic design job here. She had to borrow money from her mom to mail resumes to Boston and New York, all over. Somebody would snap her up soon; her ideas and art were too striking to ignore.
When she headed somewhere new, she wouldn’t want me tagging along. Why should she? I hadn’t had steady work since the Cherokee Bluff subdivision went bankrupt. At first she was supportive, but as summer wore on, she didn’t talk much and never smiled. Her mind seemed a million miles away, already in Boston or New York. She’d stay up late, watching TV, so she didn’t have to come to bed until I’d already fallen asleep.
Once, I built up the courage to ask her straight out if she was leaving. Macy couldn’t answer. She said, “I just want what’s best for both of us. I’ll always care for you, Austin, you know that.”
I knew it. But I also knew she had bigger dreams than I could offer her. Macy was leaving, and I could’t blame her.
In wilting August, I bumped into Everest, a 400-pound drywall man who’d worked on Cherokee Bluff too. Neither of us had heard anything about the backpay we were still owed. After Childress Development went bankrupt, nobody could reach Mr. Childress, just his shitheel lawyer, and the lawyer never said anything.
Everest’s eyes crinkled asking me to let him know if I heard about any jobs. “It doesn’t have to be drywall; I’ll do whatever. Concrete, electrical work, whatever. And if your uncle needs another set of hands, I’m his guy. Tell him, okay? He knows I do good work.”
I promised to talk to Uncle Chuck. Everest had kids, and if anything, he was in worse shape than me. As he walked away, I pulled the last ten out of my wallet. “Oh, hey, remember that time you got lunch and I didn’t have any cash? I can finally pay you back.”
Everest shook his head. “Naw, brother. You keep it, okay?”
But I pressed the folded bill into his hand. “It’s your money. I owe you.”
It was a lie--we both knew it--but lies make things easier sometimes. Everest gave me a bear hug, then leaned down to whisper, “Listen. If you really need some money, you know parthen? That mushroom the news keeps talking about? It’s growing everywhere in the Cherokee Bluff houses. The shit’s going for thirty dollars a button right now. It’s risky, but you gotta do what you gotta do.”
Stories about parthen had filled the news for months, usually with scowling congressmen and scramble-faced DEA agents. A hallucinogenic mushroom, users dreamed of a city--always the same city--an alien ruin on the shores of a dying sea. Doctors didn’t know what to make of it.
I was too chicken-shit to sling drugs, but I indulged occasionally. The news called parthen an epidemic threatening America’s youth, but the news was always finding something to threaten America’s youth with. Last summer, it’d been Haitian gangs and shark attacks.
When I got home, Macy sat at the computer, printing out more resumes to send to graphic design firms and textbook publishers. I made some soup, sat on the couch to eat, and tried to think of something to say to make Macy smile. I told her about the parthen.
“Seriously?” She twisted up the side of her mouth. “You thinking about. . . trying it?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Mr. Childress still owes me backpay. Least he can do is give us a fun Saturday night, right? I mean, if you want to try it.”
Macy glanced at the computer screen and stack of envelopes. “Yeah,” she nodded. “That prick owes us a Saturday night. Let’s call it karma.” She grinned, making my heart trill.
Saturday, we headed out with crowbar and bolt-cutters on the floorboard. The subdivision’s LOTS STILL AVAILABLE sign was knocked into the mud. The roads were paved, but there were no streetlights. Stakes and guide-strings showed where flagstone paths and a community duckpond would have gone. Between lots filled with hip-high weeds and pallets of bricks, half-built houses sat abandoned with their silver insulation exposed. When the headlights touched them, they glowed with a luminous fragility, like fetuses in jars.
“Whoa, hey, somebody’s here.” Macy pointed toward a light in the window of one of the houses. It winked off almost as soon as she spoke. A red F-250 was mostly hidden behind the house. It looked like Everest’s truck. Poor guy must have been squatting in one of the empty houses. It explained how he knew about the parthen being here. “I think it’s fine. Let’s just try the houses on the other end.”
The first neo-colonial we broke into had six inches of water standing in the basement. I slogged through, swinging my flashlight beam into the corners and between the joists. I found them on the wall below the laundry room hookups: a column of leathery, shelf-like mushrooms clinging to the mortar. They were the yellowish-white of bad teeth. Peeling them off the wall felt strangely cathartic, like peeling dead skin off your fingertips.
Back at the apartment, surrounded by the scraps and stubs of Macy’s art supplies, we ate the parthen, one button apiece, then lay on the bed holding each other. The mushroom worked quickly, eager to welcome us. By the time I swallowed the last bite, my skin tingled. Scientists said parthen created the illusion of kinesthesia, the sensation of moving, even as we laid still. Me and Macy laughed, our faces buffeted by a wind that wasn’t quite there. Momentum squeezed our stomaches and the blood drained from our limbs and faces. My fingers woven with hers, we hurtled forward so fast I blacked out.
When I jerked to, I lay in the sand on the edge of a dying sea.
The glaring sun ate up a quarter of the sky. The ocean had pulled back, leaving a dry plain of cracked mud stretching to the horizon. Salt and clay lingered on the air. Beside us rose a freestanding arch of smooth stone. Macy reached toward it.
More arches snaked between the dunes, leading to a city of pearlescent domes. It looked magnificent and heartbreaking in that dead, still place. There were people making their way towards it like pilgrims. They were all naked, and innocent and beautiful in their nakedness.
The city pulled at me and Macy both. We passed beneath the second, third, fourth arch, all mottled brownbluegreen. Each arch had a slightly different shape; each shape echoed the one before it.
A man touched my shoulder. “You can’t reach the city going that fast. We can only reach it by going slow.”
I didn’t know what he meant. I wasn’t sure if he was real or a hallucination. Smiling vaguely, I kept hiking across the hot sands. A few minutes later, something soft pressed against my ear. I turned, and it was my pillow. I was back in the apartment. Macy sat propped on an elbow, staring around.
“Arches,” I said, and Macy turned, noticing me. I swallowed to moisten my throat. “In the middle of nothing--like a desert--there were arches leading to a big city.”
Macy nodded. “Like Shinto gates, almost. But they were stone. I felt one. It had tiny fossilized creatures in it. I felt it, Austin. I could feel the texture of the. . .” She squeezed my arm, then pulled away. She jumped up, then sat back on the edge of the bed. “That was another world. A whole other world.”
Pulling off my t-shirt, I mopped the sweat off my neck. “You really think so? I mean, it’s not just some hallucination?”
“It can’t be. We saw the same thing. I felt the stone. It has to be real. A real alien planet.” Leaning back against my chest, she wrapped my arms around herself like she used to. “We have to go back. You have more parthen, right?”
The mushroom’s name came from a biological word, “partheno
genetic,” meaning “virgin birth.” Parthen reproduced asexually, so every fruiting body was a clone to every other, a precise genetic melody played over and over. The first troops had appeared along the shores of Lake Michigan and marched steadily southward through the Rust Belt. Drug task forces tried all sorts of different fungicides, but nothing could stop it. It liked pine barrens, abandoned husks of homes, and shuttered factories where the soil should have been too sick for anything to grow.
The city became known as Parthen too. She was a virgin, a pristine place aching to be taken. We couldn’t reach her though.
There were thirty-six arches leading to the city. The second time we took the mushrooms, we awoke under the lowest arch, just like before. Together, we set out for the city. The drug’s effect only lasted an hour or two, though, and we weren’t even halfway there when we tumbled back to Earth. The next time, I flat out ran until my
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