Chemical Gardens

by Gina Ranalli

  Blindly, we go right, then left, then right again, sensing the important thing is to just keep moving. Occasionally, Pawn will yell a direction and none of us bother to argue. We trust her.

  When we arrive at yet another dead end—maybe our sixth or seventh—we stop, trying to catch our breath.

  “What if there isn’t a way out?” Whey asks, bent over, hands on knees. “What if we just keep going in circles?”

  Pawn ignores him, her nose pressed close to the wall, examining it. She pokes it with her finger tip. “Ro was right. It’s spongy. Some kind of organic matter.”

  “I knew it,” Dose says. “We’re in something’s ass, aren’t we? Fucking gross!”

  She shakes her head slowly. “I don’t think its intestines, but it’s definitely alive.” She looks at us. “I think we might be running through…brain canals.”

  “What?” Whey squeals. “The brain of what? It wasn’t attached to anything!”

  “I can’t explain it,” Pawn says. “But this seems more like brain matter than anything else.”

  “Oh,” Dose says, “what are you, pre-med now? You’re a fucking guitar player!”

  She ignores him. “The point is, no matter what it is, it’s soft. It’s yielding.” To prove her point, she curls her hand into a fist and slams it into the wall, where it disappears up to the wrist.

  “That’s disgusting” Whey says.

  Pawn’s hand makes a wet farting sound as she pulls it from the wall. It’s covered in pinkish gray goo which drips to the floor with lazy plopping sounds. She opens her fist to reveal more of the goop inside it. It looks like a ball of jellied SPAM and I fight the urge to gag.

  Dose says, “You want us to grab balls of brain and throw it at that thing?”

  “No,” Pawn tells him, letting the brain matter fall from her fist. “We have to go through it.”

  “What do you mean, through it?” I ask fearfully, though I already know the answer and certainly don’t care to hear it verbalized.

  “We’re never going to find our way out of the maze by running through these canals,” she explains. “All we can do is go straight. North. That way.” She points to the wall in front of us.

  Whey lets out a groan of misery and I battle with my gag reflex, turning aside and bending over with a violent case of the dry heaves.

  “Dose,” Pawn says, “you’ll have to follow one of us since you won’t be able to push through on your own.”

  “What will keep bag head from following us?” Dose asks.

  Pawn hesitates, thinking, before replying, “I don’t know. I just have a feeling that he won’t want to contribute to the damage we’ll be inflicting on the brain.”

  “He doesn’t exist outside this thing,” I cough, still bent over.

  “Exactly,” Pawn says. “That’s the theory anyway, but I have no way of knowing for sure.”

  As if on cue, the Sac-Man roars around the corner and skids to a stop, breathing hard, certain that he has us trapped.

  “No time like the present,” Pawn says and runs into the wall, pawing out brain goop in an attempt to make a tunnel.

  “Man,” Dose says, “Withering Skin better fucking sign us after this.”

  The Sac-Man takes a slow step forward. With every breath he sucks in, his whole head collapses inwards with papery rattles. When he exhales, the bag billows out again, almost to the point of popping. I’m reminded of the time I saw someone at a show hyperventilating and holding a paper bag over their mouth. The image is utterly terrifying and I spin around, diving at the wall beside Pawn.

  I curl my hands into claws and begin to dig into the soft brain matter, shoveling it aside as fast as I can. Within seconds I’ve dug a hole large enough to fit my head, the cool wet slime collecting under my fingernails and caking in the cracks of my knuckles.

  Throwing up is not an option, I think over and over. Not an option. Not an option. Not an option.

  I’m dimly aware of Whey beside me, sobbing as usual, digging his own escape.

  “I hate to be the one to bust up your leisurely party,” Dose says, “But will you losers hurry the fuck up!”

  I turn around and throw a fistful of brain at his shimmering form. “When you can help, then you can complain!”

  “Help? You wanna see me help? How about suicide? Think that’ll help?”

  I frown, confused, and both Whey and Pawn stop their digging and turn as well. We watch, stunned, as Dose spins around and throws himself at the Sac-Man

  Dose’s body whirls into a blur, a phantom tornado, swirling around and around the Sac-Man, leaving the monster no choice but to focus his attention on Dose, flapping his hands in front of his face the way you would if hit by a thick blast of smoke.

  The Sac-Man, waving frantically, begins to cough, and I notice with some dismay that Dose is not only spinning around our enemy, but also being inhaled, sucked into the creature’s puckering wrinkled mouth.

  “He’s doing that on purpose, I hope,” I say, mostly to myself.

  “Keep digging,” Pawn shouts, ever the rational one.

  I turn back to the brain wall and resume working on my tunnel, doing my best to ignore the sounds behind me: the Sac-Man choking up whatever passes for a lung in his body and staggering around, flailing madly at the vapors trying to kill him.

  I start kicking at the wrinkled lobes of meat, sinking my foot into the wall up to the ankle. The sensation is one of the most disgusting I have ever known, as if I’m kicking at a wall of soft steaming shit.

  Biting back my gags, I throw my entire weight into the chore, arms buried in brain up to the shoulders now, head pushing through the wall as if I’m shoving myself through a clogged birth canal. We have no way of knowing how thick the wall is or even what is on the other side; we could very well be rushing into our deaths, but I can’t think about that.

  Face in brains, I gasp for air and suck the wretched goo into my mouth. It’s like a mouthful of salty gray-pink fat and I bend over and spit on my shoes, tears squirting from my eyes.

  From behind us comes a tremendous roar and I straighten up, thrashing until my hand hits something harder than just the brain matter. I dig faster, grab what feels like a long ropey tendon encased in the gore, closing my fist around it, and my teeth slam together with enough force to crack them and then…lights out.

  23

  The words I hear make no sense and fade in and out as if someone is twisting a radio dial.

  “…alive…”

  “…possessed…”

  “…fucking guitar.”

  Sentence fragments tease my ears, fluttering nearby like curious moths, before darting away into the dark…

  24

  “Ro!”

  My head rocks back and forth as if it rests on a swivel neck and I’m instantly aware that I’m going to throw up. I gag and someone pushes me over onto my side and I puke up bile and brains, dimly aware of people towering over me while someone—presumably Pawn—kneels beside me. Between heaves, I hear a yap yap yap sound and wonder who brought the dog.

  “Who brought the dog?” I croak hoarsely.

  I hear Dose snort but Pawn hushes him before he can say anything.

  “You were electrocuted,” she tells me, touching my shoulder.

  I nod, though I really have no idea what she’s talking about. “Electro…what?”

  She helps me sit up and asks how I’m feeling. “Not good,” I say, wrapping my arms around my legs and resting my forehead against my knees. Everything feels slippery and I realized my entire body is coated with brain jelly. Gross. My stomach wants to continue vomiting but I fight the urge, certain that any more puking will bring up my entire stomach and kill me.

  “You were electrocuted,” she repeats as if she’s talking to a severely retarded child.

  “I heard you. By what?”

  “My best guess is a nerve ending in the brain. They conduct electricity—”

  Another round of yapping interrupts her and makes me want
to cry. It’s so loud. “What is that?”

  “It’s your fucking guitar,” Dose says impatiently.

  I frown inside the dark cave of my arms. My stomach is starting to feel more settled but my head still feels as though it was clobbered with a bat. “Very funny,” I say. “You never hear me criticize your bass playing, Dose, so you really should just be quiet.”

  From somewhere over my shoulder, Whey says, “No, Ro, it really is your guitar.”

  Raising my head, I grimace at Pawn’s brain-gooed face. She gives me a confirming nod and a little shrug. It’s then that I realize I no longer have the weight of Nemesister on my back and for one panicked moment, think that I’ve lost her in the brain somewhere.

  I leap to my feet, oblivious of my surroundings, searching for my precious Sweet Tooth. When I finally spot it, it’s peeking out at me from behind a tree.

  “Yippee!” It squeals, disappearing out of sight.

  I rub my eyes. “That brain fried my brain.”

  “No,” Pawn says. “Your guitar is really alive.”

  “This is the most messed up thing yet,” Whey adds, nodding vigorously. “Well, beside Dose being fumes.”

  Not ready to fully grasp what my band mates are telling me, I look around, trying to ignore the yipping sound coming from the other side of a tree twenty feet away.

  We’re standing in a flat gray field scattered with scrawny trees, the stream of sewer sludge chugging sluggishly to our right. Behind us, the huge brain floats in the air, two ragged, man-sized holes punched violently through its side.

  I have to squint to see all of this however, because everything more than 10 yards away is shrouded in a thick soupy fog. Dose, completely invisible, can be heard mumbling curses somewhere in the distance.

  “And my guitar is alive,” I mutter, taking it all in with relative ease, I think. After the initial shock, of course.

  “Yeah, and it’s a fucking cry-baby!” Dose shouts from wherever he is. “A bigger cry-baby than Whey!”

  “How can that be?” I ask Pawn.

  She shakes her head, genuinely baffled.

  “What we need is a compass,” Whey says, seemingly to himself as he absently scratches his crotch.

  “Didn’t we already have that discussion?” Pawn asks mildly. “Yes, I think we did.”

  “Did we? Hmm.” Whey doesn’t seem convinced, but lets it go anyway.

  “What happened to the Sac-Man?” I ask.

  “Dose happened to it,” Whey says.

  “Yeah, I saved everyone’s asses yet again,” he says, his voice closer now. “I slipped inside the bag and expanded. Didn’t know I could do it until I did. It was cool as shit.”

  Still nauseous, I say, “Forget it. I don’t want to know.”

  “It wasn’t so bad, really,” Whey says. “Did you ever blow air into a paper bag and then pop it?”

  I don’t want to think about what he’s saying so I concentrate on wiping brain jelly off my body. As I wipe one hand down my arm, I’m distressed to see the actual color of my skin: gray. At first I think it’s just the slimy coating and rub harder but nope; gray is the actual color of my skin.

  Pawn, seeing the concern on my face, says, “I was hoping you wouldn’t notice.”

  “Notice what?” I ask, alarmed, but suspecting I already know the answer.

  “For some reason, when you got electrocuted you turned black and white.”

  “What?” I screech, unable to control myself. “Heavens to Betsy! How did that happen?”

  She and Whey can only look at me apologetically. I examine the rest of myself: dress, legs, shoes. All of it is varying shades of gray, as if I’ve just stepped live out of a 1930’s movie. I want to scream a swear word, but what comes out of my mouth is anything but. “This is poppycock!! I can’t stand it anymore!” I wonder briefly if we’re actually characters in a movie that’s been edited for television, but then Dose reminds me that we—or at least he—most definitely is not edited for anything.

  “It’s fucking ball-licking bullshit, is what it is. We have to get out of here!”

  “I agree,” Pawn says. “We have to keep following the sludge.”

  Whey touches my arm tenderly, looking at me with worried concern. “Come on, Ro. I’ll help you catch Nemesister.”

  25

  Catching Nemesister turns out to be easier than I expected, since the guitar, though very much alive and squirmy, still doesn’t have arms or legs with which to run away on.

  Propped against the tree where Whey left it, it can only sway slightly back and forth, which is what it does as we approach, one wide black doe eye blinking on the headstock.

  “Do you think it bites?” I ask Whey softly, as we both stand there staring at it.

  “How could it? I don’t think it has a mouth.”

  “What about where the pickups are? They could come together, open and close like jaws, probably.”

  Whey says nothing and together we watch the pickups carefully. Sure enough, they twitch and a high twang sounds. We exchange a glance and Whey shrugs. “Chances are, it doesn’t have teeth, right?”

  I stoop down beside the guitar, studying it carefully. Its red body no longer looks like just a slab of sparkly painted wood. Now it looks more like sparkly red leather, pliable and soft. It makes a crinkling sound when it moves.

  “Are you gonna grab it?” Whey asks.

  I straighten up, take a deep breath. “I don’t see why not. I mean, it seems harmless, right?”

  “Yeah, totally harmless,” Whey says but takes several steps back.

  I hesitate a moment, then take a deep breath and finally reach out my hand for the guitar’s neck. The guitar itself flinches away from my touch, but only a little. As if it is scared of my fear but not of me.

  My finger tips graze the neck at the first fret. The strings feel the same. Slowing, I close my hand around it, just beneath the headstock.

  The guitar doesn’t struggle at all. In fact, it seems to push forward slightly, away from the tree and into my hand, as if that’s where it wanted to be all along.

  The neck wiggles slightly in my palm, as if I’m holding a fat sleepy snake who is perfectly content to be held.

  Pawn joins us at the tree and says, “So, now that you two are re-acquainted, we should probably get going. There’s no telling how far we still have to travel.”

  I carefully pick up Nemesister by her strap—she wiggles excitedly, like a dog who knows he’s going for a ride in a car—and sling her over my shoulder with more tenderness than I’d ever shown a musical instrument before. I’ve never been in the habit of babying my guitars—in fact, have smashed quite a few in my day. But now it looks as if I’m going to be one of those poseur-punks. Like those rich guys who spend thousands on a factory “relic” guitar, made to look like it’s been played and abused for decades, and then only take it out of the case to show it off, never letting another living soul touch the thing, never mind play it.

  We all look around into the fog, which isn’t really fog at all. Nor is it a misty rain. It can only be described as a thick soupy grayness that has not descended onto this particular spot, but instead, it is this particular spot. Instinct tells us that if we were to stay here forever, it would never change. There would be no night, no day, no rain, no sun, no wind. There would only be this strange subdued gloom, always.

  I’m just as anxious to get out of there as anyone else, not to mention that putting that brain far behind us could only be a good thing.

  “Move out, people!” Dose yells, as if he’s a sergeant in the military.

  We follow the sound of his voice, ignoring the bossiness of it.

  The landscape’s only concession to change is the addition of huge boulders scattered throughout, large imposing companions to the spiny trees, some as large as school buses.

  We’re not particularly surprised to find one boulder placed directly in the center of sludge steam. Laws of gravity would have demanded that the stream break in two,
a fork that would probably reconvene on the far side of the rock. But here—wherever here is—the stream flows up and over the rock without pause, never even bothering to change speed, defying all laws of nature and physics.

  We barely give it a second glance, continuing on our way in silence.

  Nothing can surprise us now.

  26

  We have no way of knowing how long we’ve been moving through the soup. In a way it seems like days, but that could be because the landscape never really changes and none of us are saying anything. Lack of conversation drags the time as if it were a heavy thing in a body bag.

  On my back, Nemesister wriggles around like an antsy toddler in a backpack, periodically making high pitched whines or guttural groans. When she gets particularly squirmy, I reach behind me and stroke her silky neck, which seems to soothe her, at least temporarily.

  At some point, Whey starts to whine about having a belly ache.

  “You are a belly ache,” Dose sneers.

  “No, really,” Whey says. “I need to sit for a minute.”

  The rest of us sigh as he finds a suitable rock to sit on, doubled over, holding his gut.

  “We can’t stay here all day,” Dose says, making no attempt to hide the disdain in his voice.

  “No, we can’t,” I agree.

  “I know, I’m sorry,” Whey says, wincing. “But it really hurts.”

  “Is it a stitch in your side?” Pawn asks.

  “I think so, yeah,” he says, rocking back and forth, his eyes screwed shut.

  “This is retarded.” Dose can’t stop complaining to save his life. “I say we shoot him like a horse with a busted leg.”

  Whey whimpers and behind me, so does Nemesister.

  “Jiminy Cricket,” I say. “I don’t like this place. Whey, can’t you get up at all?”

  “She’s right,” Pawn says. “We really need to keep moving. I don’t get a good feeling here.”

  “You mean,” Dose says, “you got a good feeling in some other place we were in? The bar maybe? How about the brain? Was that a good time for you?”