Entropy in Bloom

by Jeremy Robert Johnson

  The thought of cereal reoriented Jake, and he padded up to the top of the stairs. He’d tell Dad about the light bulb later, and Dad would fix it because that’s all the light Jake got down there. Jake chose to live in the basement, even though it had no windows. To Jake it felt like a hideout, a secret dungeon, and it saved him from sharing a room with his two older brothers, Doug and Sean.

  Jake opened the door and stepped into the kitchen, which was also dark, though not jet black like his room. The kitchen was awash in the soft gray light that slipped in through the cracks of the curtains.

  He walked over to the light switch by the stove and flipped it. No result. He stood in the dim gray light, confused. He thought every light bulb in the house must have broken on the same day.

  He opened the fridge and a soft wave of cool air embraced him, causing goosebumps. He couldn’t believe what he saw inside. The fridge light was out too. It didn’t matter; he knew exactly where Mom kept the chocolate milk. He opened the flaps, and even though he knew it was trouble, started drinking right from the carton. He gulped back the thick chocolate milk with his lips pressed tight against the waxed cardboard, to keep from getting a brown moustache. He closed the carton and stuck it back in the fridge.

  With the sweet milk resting in his belly he became more curious than hungry, and wondered where his parents were. Either Mom or Dad usually waited around with him until Marcy showed up.

  Jake loved Marcy, the lady that took care of him during the summer while his parents and brothers worked. She smelled like cucumbers and brown sugar, and Mom said she was the only nanny in the county who knew sign language. She also knew where Mom hid the Tootsie Rolls, and when Jake figured something out Marcy would give him a handful. Jake only ate a couple of them a day, relishing the thick texture and the way they filled his senses as he chewed. The surplus Tootsie Rolls he saved were stashed in a brown paper bag that he hid at the bottom of his toy chest.

  Jake noticed that the house felt smaller in the dark. Mom said that the house was little and cheap since the Army used to keep soldiers in it. She said that when the base moved to the other side of town the old concrete soldier houses got fixed up and sold off. This made Jake feel safe, like he lived in a castle made for warriors. He thought maybe someday he’d be a soldier.

  He began to feel strange as he crept through the house, looking for someone, anyone. He wished, as he often did, that he could hear. He would just tune his ears in and follow the sound of his Mom or his Dad to the source, like he used to before he got sick and hot and the world became silent.

  Every room in the house was empty, and Jake began to worry, and figured that Marcy must be on her way. Otherwise his parents never would have left him alone.

  He walked into the living room and sat down in front of the television. He thought he’d watch some cartoons and before he knew it Marcy would be at the door, smelling like sugar.

  The TV wouldn’t work either, which was probably for the best. Mom and Dad didn’t let him watch any shows for the last couple of weeks. They said there was nothing on but the news anyway, and he got scared when he watched the news.

  Anxious, and a little worried, Jake crawled over to the window at the front of the house. He reached up and pressed his hand to the heavy, dark green velvet drapes. He pushed them to the left, looked outside, and understood what was going on.

  It was snowing, and in the middle of Summer no less! The electricity must not work when it gets cold in the Summer. Mom and Dad were probably outside, shoveling the driveway or the roof.

  Jake placed his right palm, open, against the glass of the window to see how cold it was. The glass was warm, almost hot, and Jake noticed his breath wasn’t freezing on it.

  The idea of a Summer snowstorm filled Jake with a sense of wonder and excitement. He thought for a second that maybe God was giving him this miracle to apologize for making him deaf, but he felt instantly guilty for thinking so.

  Jake stood up and walked to the front door. His hand reached to the doorknob and found it was warm. Overjoyed at the thought of this unexpected Winter he threw the front door open and ran outside.

  The snow was virgin, and rested a foot thick across the whole neighborhood. Clouds hung heavy and black across the sky, and Jake saw flashes of lightning trapped within them. He looked for the sun in every direction and saw only clouds, and the peculiar gray light that matched his pajamas. He wasn’t cold, and felt the shift of a warm breeze across his skin.

  Jake didn’t see a single person outside, including his parents, but the miracle of Summertime Winter had filled his mind and he didn’t worry. He was amazed by the storm. The gray snowflakes were coming down so thick he couldn’t see across the street.

  He held out his hands and caught some of the flakes in his palms. They would not melt, and when he blew his hot breath on them they didn’t turn to water. Instead they fell to pieces and swirled away.

  He trudged out to the center of his front yard and turned around, gazing at his house in the dusky light.

  He couldn’t believe his eyes. Someone had painted his whole house the darkest black he’d ever seen. On top of that, they’d painted people, beautiful, bright white people, on the front of his house. There were two people running, maybe playing, and standing closer to the door, near the front windows, the silhouettes of his parents stood with arms outstretched to the sky.

  Jake was laughing as he looked at the mural, a soft, rasping laugh that felt good in his throat. Wouldn’t Marcy be surprised when she saw the painting?

  Upon seeing the shapes of his parents, Jake was filled with a sense of their absence and couldn’t wait to see them after work. For now, he could play.

  He lay down on his back in the warm sheet of snow that blanketed his front yard and began to move his legs and arms slowly, rhythmically, up and down.

  As he packed the soft ground beneath him he felt the wind change directions, blowing fast and warm against the left side of his face.

  Jake perfected his snow angel and took a moment to appreciate what he had created. He breathed deeply, instilled with a sense of calm as his chest rose.

  Jake watched the snow drift down, blinking and laughing as it landed on his eyelashes.

  He let the hot wind flow over him. It soon filled the air with color, and Jake inhaled its lullaby deep into his body.

  He slept quiet in the arms of his angel, while the misplaced Winter stormed around him.

  When Susurras Stirs

  He tells me their life is the best thing going. He says that I need to imagine what it would be like to crawl into the plushest limousine I can imagine, to flop down into a deep, soft leather chair filled with downy feathers from giant geese, to turn the internal weather controls to “Perfect” and have a constantly changing range of scenery and a non-stop supply of food and fluids.

  Then he says, imagine that all you have to do is eat and make babies and watch your life roll by in luxuriant comfort. The American dream, but he’s a citizen of everywhere—he’s just naturally attained what we’re all shooting for. And it doesn’t matter how big you get, he says, because when you become too large, part of you just breaks off and becomes another you. No dating or mating required. No awkward social moments, never a viscous string of sticky spit running thick from tooth to tongue while you try to talk a woman of vague sexual persuasion into an allowance of simian grinding.

  Never a credit card bill in sight.

  And his kids, he says proudly, they all turn out just like him. The emergence of a misplaced chromosome is a non-option. Every little him is a perfect chip off the ancient block, and has been for eons.

  He doesn’t speak to me as an individual; I can feel that in his voice as it creeps through my nervous system and vibrates my tympanic membrane from the inside. The idea of “self” is impossible to him. When he speaks to me as “You” I can tell he’s addressing our whole species, every last human representing a potential host.

  “You are more fun than the elephants,” h
e says, “They didn’t drink enough water and always fed us the same things. You feed us the soft pieces, the animal bits. We spread faster now. We are everywhere. We are growing.”

  I picture Susurrus as a “him” because I don’t get along well with women. Always felt more comfortable around men. Can’t truck with the idea of a lady crawling around in my intestines, judging me, saying, “Look at how you’ve treated yourself here. Too much red meat residue in your upper GI, and your colon could become impacted at a second’s notice. How about some bran? Some heavy green tea? Something needs to be done. This place is a mess.”

  I named Susurrus after the analog “SSSSS” that accompanies his voice as it crawls around in my head. There’s always this hissing noise that precedes his speaking and hangs on afterwards, like an itch deep in my ear. Sometimes the echo stays with me for hours. Then I play jazz CDs through my headphones and it sounds like I’ve got old records running under the needle.

  Susurrus wasn’t always in my brain, but I’ve been cultivating him, making him more a part of me. When I meditate I imagine the fibers of my spinal cord stretching out towards him, like feelers. They sway and twitch and burrow into my belly and connect to him, linking us. His hiss slides up through my spine and connects with my slow-chanted mantra, my mumbled OMNAMA’s, until it’s all white noise and for a moment I’m inside him, inside myself, feeling his contentment as his mouths reach out and slurp away at acidy bits of the day’s meal, tiny snippets of sausage and soda-pop sugars and oil-soaked ciabatta breads.

  He is always at peace, a consumptive strand of nirvana.

  According to the last x-ray my radiologist took, he’s over fifty feet long, and still growing. My doctors have extracted pieces of him from my stool, pulsing egg sacs waiting to find water or flesh and keep the cycle of expansion in motion.

  They say he’s not a tapeworm, not a guinea worm, not anything they’re used to seeing. He doesn’t seem to affect my physiology in any negative way, although my grocery bill has ratcheted ever upwards. Still the doctors think I should have him removed. I tell them I’m a pacifist and it’s not in my nature to harm a creature, especially if it poses no threat. That gets me worried glances, furrowed brows. But they don’t protest much.

  I think they’re waiting for this thing to kill me so they can take me apart and extract his coiled body. Get a new species, name it after themselves, get published in the right journals, pull grant money.

  I’m a cash cow infestation case. On a ticking clock, they imagine. Especially since this thing is spreading. One end is snaking towards my genitals, they say, and the other is coiling its way around my spine, on the way to my brain. There are more mouths showing up, not just the ones that reside in my belly.

  “How did it get out of my stomach?” I ask them, not mentioning my meditation, the way Susurrus and I have bonded now. The way I’ve encouraged him to become part of me.

  “Well, we’re not exactly sure. It appears to exit through the duodenum as it heads toward your spine. There’s a sort of cystic calcification at the point of exit, where it pushed through the stomach tissue. That’s what keeps you from becoming toxic via your own acids. Again, this is all speculation. If you’d let us perform a more invasive . . .”

  “Nope. No can do, Doc. You say this thing’s not hurting me. What’re the odds that this procedure would kill it?”

  They don’t know. These guys really don’t know anything. Why should I open up my body, our bodies, to guesswork with scalpels?

  I THINK I KNOW where he came from, this new part of my life.

  Five months ago I was jogging, a beautiful run at dusk through the sloping, rolling green park near my house. I was sucking down deep lung-loads of air when I ran through a floating mire of gnats. They stuck to me, twitching in my sweat, their tiny bodies suddenly swept up in the forward surge of my run. A few were sucked right into my chest, surely now melting to atoms against my alveoli.

  But one of them . . . one of them stuck to the roof of my mouth. There was an itch, so close in sensation to the hiss of Susurrus, and I felt an immediate need to take a nap.

  So I did. I collapsed to the ground, mindless of the lactic acidosis that would haunt my muscles, curled there among the duck shit and crawling ants and crushed grass, and I fell into a slumber.

  When I awoke there was a tight bubble of tissue on the roof of my mouth, where the gnat had stuck. It hurt when I prodded it with my tongue, so I avoided it.

  Later that night the bubble had become even tighter, this small mound of swollen pink tissue with a whitish tip. I stared at it in the mirror, unable to look away from its grotesque new presence.

  I could feel my heartbeat inside the bump. There was no way I could sleep with this thing in my mouth. What if it kept expanding until I couldn’t breathe?

  I rubbed down my tweezers with benzyl alcohol and proceeded to poke and squeeze the bump until it bled. A thin rivulet of blood trickled down from the fleshy stalactite, and the harder I squeezed the more the blood thickened, grew darker. Soon the blood made way for a dense yellow fluid that carried with it the odor of rotten dairy in high heat. I pushed one pointed end of the tweezers directly into the spreading hole at the side of the bump.

  Then it ruptured.

  The relief of pressure was immediate. My mirror caught the worst of the spray, instantly shellacked with dead-cell soup in a spray pattern near arterial in its arc.

  Then the colors came. A thin drip from the open wound on the roof of my mouth, two drops like oil spilling out, swirling with shades I’d never quite seen before, just outside a spectrum my eyes could comprehend. The drops sat there in the curve of my tongue, merged together like quivering mercury.

  I’d never felt so intense a need to swallow something in my entire life.

  The sensation of the drops was not fluid. It felt as if they were crawling into me, too impatient for my peristaltic process.

  And again, almost immediately, I collapsed into slumber, this time dreaming of a sea of human tissue, all of it shifting and turning and surging, soft and hot and wanting to pull me under.

  I hadn’t had so explosive a wet dream since I was in junior high.

  And when I woke up, curled on the floor of my bathroom with my underwear stuck to me like soaked toilet paper, I was hungry as a newborn.

  FOUR MONTH’S TIME PASSED like nothing, our perception expanded to a broader sense. The human clock thinks small—within seventy-five year death limitations.

  We laugh at the idea of death. The upside of being We.

  And We are larger now. Eighty pounds heavier, abdomen distended, watermelon tight. One poke with a toothpick just below the bellybutton and we’d tear open like crepe paper. Neck swollen with a circular rash pattern that seeps clear fluids now crusting in the bony pockets of our shoulder-blades. White of the eyes yellowing, thickening. Hair falling out in clumps from soft-scalp surface.

  Our penis is heavier. Its skin shifts constantly; there are more veins, white beneath the surface. The head has bloomed from mushroom tip to flower; it is open, flayed, in rose-like petals, red, pulsing. We bandage it to keep it from seeping down our leg.

  We have stopped seeing the doctors. They whispered letters last time.

  CDC, they said.

  Our I-brain told us this means trouble. We cannot accept “trouble” so close to the next cycle. We force-fed the doctors the bits of us they stole from our excretions. So many of us in each segment that even their testing couldn’t ruin all the eggs. Our body was shaking then, sweating hands clutching an oily metal tool, eyes crying. It has stopped struggling since. Its feelings are soft echoes now, little more. Things are quiet.

  We are hiding. Hiding ends after the next sun-drop.

  Our I-brain is remembering passwords, using fat, purpled fingers to stroke language keys.

  We are feeling better as we see the screen before us change.

  Our tickets have been confirmed. The glowing box has thanked us for our purchase.

  “You
’re welcome,” we whisper. The rolling chair squeaks under our ever-shifting weight. We stand up with a grunt and feel that the bandages around our meat-sprout are wet again. Cleaning up is no longer important.

  We crawl on four bony-stems towards our meditation mat. Light the incense and try to assume the lotus position. Too much of us; our legs can’t fold into the space filled by our twitching belly.

  We lay back and stare at the ceiling. Our mantra has been replaced by a new noise. We push our tongue to the front of our teeth and start leaking air, a steady SSSSSS until our I-brain goes soft and quiet and we lie there in the dark room, shaking slightly from our constant eating and squirming. Much of the old us is empty now. Our new muscles, thousands of them, ropy and squeezing against each other, roll us onto our right side.

  At some point we insert our thumbs into our mouth and suck the meat clean from the bones.

  Anything to feed the new cycle.

  THE SEAT IN THE theater can barely hold us, but we are here and we are ready. It is after the most recent sun-drop, halfway through the dark period. We are wearing leather gloves (they barely fit except for the thumbs, which drape and look sharp) and a trench coat at the suggestion of the remnants of the I-brain.

  We sit at the rear of the room. No one sits near us but most of the rows in front of us are full. A bright light appears at the front of the room, large, shimmering.

  Our I-brain tells us this is a midnight movie, a Spanish film, one of the best. Hasn’t been shown in a while. We knew it would be packed. We see a couple of people have brought their children. There is a pained feeling from the old thoughts, but it fades.

  There are thin clouds of sweet white smoke floating in this room. We breathe it in deeply, pulling it with a whistling noise into our one un-collapsed lung.

  The show on the screen is strange, like the amusing dreams of our I-brain. The humans aren’t acting like humans. They are trapped inside a cave lit by a bonfire. They rub each other with burning metal staffs, men and women screaming, skin bubbling and bursting. They paint their eyes with black ashes. They pull a large creature from a cage at the back of the tunnel, many men struggling and falling as they drag the thing in on chains that run through its skin. Some of the fallen men collapse under it as it is dragged forward and it pulls them up into its fluid mass, absorbing them. The space where their bodies merged and melted in begins to ooze a thick white cream. Women ladle this cream from its skin, drinking it and dancing, circles around the fire, ever faster. The women fall to the ground and their chests open up, ribs turned to spongy soft nothing, hearts missing. Slugs ooze out between spread-wide breasts and crawl towards the creature, still just a shape, still cloaked in dark. The men sit before the fire and sweat black oil. Light glows at the top of their foreheads. The slugs turn their stalks to the lights on the men’s heads and shift away from the massive beast quivering in the dark. Then the slugs are on the men, long shining trails on shivering skin.