Sleep Disorder

by Jack Ketchum

  Jesus, Howard, she thought. You can't even make a decent exit.

  And now, musing as she douched out the sperm Johnny had left in her last night, she wondered how decent an exit he'd made out there in the Rain Forest.

  She wondered why she was even thinking about him when she could be thinking about Johnny. Johnny with the great tan and the runner's body. Whose I.Q. was probably close to his penis size—about a twelve.

  But who was counting?

  She appraised her nude body in the mirror—high breasts and puckered nipples, the dark-blonde pubic plot—but still her thoughts drifted.

  She refused to feel guilty about Howard. He'd been dead for over a week now and their relationship had been dead for over a month. She was sorry he was dead, naturally, but it really had nothing to do with her. Sometimes a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do, she thought.

  How dumb could a guy be? All those silly, drippy love letters he'd sent her from Brazil. As though she hadn't made herself perfectly clear that night.

  The schmuck had gone to his grave thinking they were still in love.

  I love you so much. The words drifted back. They were the last words he'd spoken to her. He'd called from the airport, just before his flight. She'd said nothing. Hung up.

  The Rain Forest was burning, its systematic destruction exposing new botanical phyla every day. The government had issued grants to get as many experts down there as possible. Every bionerd's dream, she thought. Howard was a mycologist, an expert on fungi of every category.

  She also considered what else he was, or had been. Kind. Considerate. Generous.

  Shit. There I go. Feeling guilty again.

  Okay, maybe she had led him on a little, said she loved him once or twice when the subject of marriage happened to come up, maybe even indicated a kind of enthusiasm for the idea.

  Hey, there was a lot of money involved. A lot to consider.

  And she'd been pretty damn good to him all told, hadn't she? For a while?

  She stepped naked into the bedroom. Her eyes went to the little box of letters on the bureau. Like a miniature coffin.

  Howard had been cremated. The letters were all that remained of him now. They made her feel suddenly sad.

  To hell with that, she thought.

  I sure hope Johnny calls.

  ~ * ~

  He was a drunk but he was gorgeous and at least he liked to dance. The more she tried to focus, though, away from Howard, the more precisely she envisioned the skinny, knob-kneed little nerd.

  It was happening to her a lot lately. She'd be lying in bed masturbating for god's sake, a kaleidoscope of sweat-sheened studs writhing and panting through her brain, plugging all three orifices at once...when in walks Howard.

  Jesus!

  She guessed she did feel a little guilty. Poor guy. All alone in the Rain Forest, with his mushrooms and his fungus, his sample bags and his mosquito nets. He'd died loving her...

  My god. She was about to start crying.

  Over Howard!

  The phone rang. She lunged for it.

  "Johnny!"

  The voice on the other end was loaded to the gills but she was still perfectly glad to hear it.

  "Go for a ride, babe? A little dancing maybe, then maybe a little...”

  “Get your gorgeous ass over here right now," she cooed.

  ~ * ~

  Approximately one month previous, Howard Moley, mycologist, botanical scholar, and jilted lover, looked down in dismay at the dead ocelot. Creek scum filmed the animal's fine spotted fur. It had crossed the river just east, which struck Howard as odd. Why? he wondered. Why did you cross the river?

  Ocelots were known to avoid water in all but life-threatening situations. This seemed strange. Stranger still were the dozens of bright and nearly blood-red bracki??? that studded the animal's hide. Most brackets or shelf fungi were saprophytic—they grew on stumps or dead trees. But this one clearly demonstrated a mammalian-capable mycelium, meaning that its food-support could be absorbed from dead animal tissue. This was very rare among stemless mushroom phyla.

  In fact Howard had never seen a shelf fungus like this. The bright scarlet color, the white gill-like sporaphores, the razor-sharp ridges. Another new genus, he realized.

  He'd already discovered several dozen unindexed thallophytesbodied fungus. Zoned polyphores, clitopili, tricholomas, rough-stemmed paneoli. The grid-by-grid burning of the forests was making passage to areas virtually unexplored. The collection teams were all going nuts—new insects, new reptiles, new birds, new plants. Everywhere. And lots of new fungi.

  Howard unslung his pack and knelt at the ocelot carcass, removing a specimen container. A cellulose gel lined each container to keep the specimen fed. Fungi didn't need sunlight. No chloroplasts. Instead they procured carbohydrates from dead plant matter. And sometimes dead animal matter. Vermilius Moleyus, Howard dubbed it, and with forceps withdrew one of the bright-red bracket scales from the ocelot's hide. But then—

  Clara, he thought quite suddenly.

  These days not even the distraction of discovery lasted. Even here, where stepping on the tiniest snake could mean death, where a wrong turn could leave you skinned alive by a Urueu-Wau-Wau tribe, all he could think of was Clara. Why hadn't she answered his letters?

  He sat on a stump and stared, his knobby knees sticking out. Sweat drenched his khakis. All around him the vegetation teemed—hopping, dripping, crawling with life.

  The enormity of the thought astonished him.

  I'm sitting in the middle of the Rondonian Rain Forest, walking where no human being has ever walked, seeing things no human being has seen, discovering fungi life we didn't even know existed a week ago, and all I can think of is Clara.

  Oh my god I love her so much.

  Surely by now she'd forgiven what he'd said in haste and anger that night. How could she not, knowing how much he loved her? Everybody had arguments. Everybody made up again.

  Why hadn't she written?

  He removed his jungle hat, wiped his brow.

  Even this far west of the Guapore Reserve he could smell the smoke.

  It seemed sheer madness to destroy all this for grazeland and tin mining. The only wood they took out of the forest was the cherry and mahogany. The rest they burned. It was easier. The World Bank teams were long gone and the FUNAI officials had all been paid off.

  No one cared.

  They're going to destroy all this, he thought, this treasure trove of life, because it's the easiest way to decongest the cities. Just that. Insane.

  He was a mycologist, not an activist. All he could do was what he knew best—isolate and identify any new thallophyte, acquire as much as he could before it was all gone. It was a pity but...

  What the...?

  He was staring down at the dead ocelot. It occurred to him now that the bright red brackets seemed to surround the animal.

  He flipped it over. The big red scales covered the other side too. Which meant...

  The implication couldn't be denied.

  The ocelot had been carrying the fungus.

  These things were growing on the ocelot while it was still alive. There were many types of fungi that lived parasitically on live animals—but only the lower orders. The mildews, yeasts and molds.

  An advanced shelf fungus like this had never been known to grow on a live mammal.

  Until now.

  Oh my god, he thought. Oh my god.

  Wait till I tell Clara!

  Clara rolled her eyes. After all these letters dripping with lovelorn drivel now this one arrives, full of botanical revelry.

  The boy she'd met at the bar last night was gone. The bed still smelled of his sweat. The young ones never last, she theorized. But at least this one had lasted four times.

  She lay back naked against the pillows and read.

  Dearest Clara,

  I've made an unbelievable find. I've discovered a new thallophyte classification that is absolutely remarkable.

&
nbsp; At first it appeared to be a typical deuteromycetic shelf fungus, unusual enough, though—and you will appreciate this—in that it possessed a mammalian parasitic propensity. I found it on the carcass of a dead ocelot that had crossed one of the tributaries of the Cautario River which cuts out of the nearly impenetrable Guapore Botanical Reserve. What, you may be thinking, could cause an ocelot to cross water through such a treacherous perimeter? I pondered the same, and fast realized the obvious. Of course! The animal was fleeing the northeast fires, and had no doubt picked up free spores during its trek.

  It grows at an incredible rate, Clara, with a strangely fibrous and unusually active mycelic network. And the evidence is clear—the fungus body was growing while the animal was still alive! Absolutely unheard of for a deuteromycetes! It's beautiful, too. Large, blood-red ridge bodies and bright white sporaphores. Gorgeous!

  I'm calling it Vermilius Moleyus. The journals will be bending over backward for the story. I'll be famous!

  More later. The Team Leader and I are about to autopsy the ocelot. Argh! Please write.

  I love you, Howard

  She tossed the letter aside, rolled her eyes again.

  He discovers some new shelf fungus and acts like it's the Holy Grail.

  Why did he even write at all? She'd deliberately answered none of his letters. When was he going to see the light? She was having too much fun now even to think about Howard. Too much fun and too much... God I'm insatiable! she thought.

  She reached for the phone. Just about anyone would do now, she realized, flipping through her address book.

  Anyone but Howard.

  The old professor's face thrust forward. "Do you know what you're saying?"

  All at once, then, Howard did.

  If it feels good, do it, thought Clara. And this felt incredible.

  She'd picked up Barney and David at Kaggie's, one of the more raucous off-campus dance clubs—and now they were playing a delightful game called "Sandwich."

  Clara was the cheese.

  She felt squeezed in a vise of lust. The bed shimmied; she thought of a truck driving over railroad ties. This definitely scratched her itch, relentless alternating thrusts drawing in and out of her... lower places. Yes, Clara was the cheese, all right...

  Her next orgasm went off like subsurface demolition.

  They lay there three abreast in bed, lolling on one another as their sweat cooled. Clara's perfect, tanned skin felt shellacked. And these two guys? Meat-rack jocks. Typical 1.9-average campus boneheads whose only genuine endeavor seemed to revolve around the perpetual emptying of their seminal vesicles. It was too bad the university didn't offer a B.A. in intercourse; they'd each put the proverbial blocks to her three times already, and it wasn't even midnight yet. They were, in other words, perfect male specimens as far as Clara was concerned.

  "Well," Barney said, "now that we've played Sandwich, how about we play another game?"

  "We could play doctor," Clara suggested, fully unabashed in her gleaming nakedness.

  "Sounds good to me," David offered, stroking his elephantine penis just as unabashedly. "And it just so happens that Dr. David has a first class proctoscope."

  "Let's play Ballgame instead," Barney countered.

  "Ballgame?"

  "Yeah, and tonight's a doubleheader. Get it?"

  Barney began to stroke himself too. "Or how about just a good old all-American game of Hide the Salami?"

  "Maybe I'm a vegetarian," Clara slyly remarked.

  "In that case, honey, I've got a summer squash that'll make your day!"

  Jock laughter erupted forth. Both their penises, hard yet again, bounced like springboards. But then Barney interjected:

  "Say, I wanted to ask you something. Is it true you date Howard Moley?"

  Jesus! Howard again! "Don't be ridiculous. We went out a few times, that's all. It was...an aberration..."

  "I heard you were gonna marry him," David added.

  "Howard Moley?" Clara lied. "Are you kidding?"

  "No, huh? So then what's this?"

  He reached over to the nightstand. Howard's latest love letter lay open there.

  Shit!

  "I noticed all the pretty postage on the envelope. Noticed it right away."

  She tried to grab at it. Her breasts bobbed in his face. He kissed the still-moist surface of one of them and held the letter out of reach, laughing. Turning to read.

  "Come on! Give me that!"

  "Hmmm. Sounds like things are still on to me."

  "Give me a break! He's nuts. It's not my fault. The guy...imagines things. He keeps writing me these crazy love letters! Like he's supposed to mean something to me. I haven't answered one of them. Doesn't matter. He just keeps on writing."

  David laughed. "So you want him to get the message and he won't. That it?"

  "Exactly."

  "Got a Polaroid?"

  Clara's brow creased. "Yeah. In the closet."

  David got up and went to the closet. She admired his muscled backside and then admired the rest of him when he turned around.

  "Loaded?"

  "I think so."

  "So let's send Howard some pix!"

  "Hey. Terrific idea!" said Barney.

  The smile blossomed on her face. "You guys are geniuses," she said. The mere idea, in fact, filled her more than plenteous bosom with wanton heat. More heat trickled elsewhere.

  She took on Barney first while David played close-up lensman. "Say hello to Peter," Barney introduced. "Peter likes to be talked to." The flash popped as her mouth engulfed his penis. "I'll bet you always wanted to be in pictures, huh?" David suggested. Another flash pop as Clara climbed over Barney and put it inside her. And then again as she rode him, his hands squeezing her breasts.

  David was using a lot of film but it didn't matter.

  There was another pack around there somewhere.

  ~ * ~

  The forest teemed with vibrant color. Insects buzzed the mosquito net. Strange birds whooped and cawed.

  The forest didn't care.

  Three of them were dead.

  Three of the team's five members. Howard and the elderly team leader lay in a field medical station in a grubby thatch-and-mud village called Alta Lidia, consuming IV Ampicillin. Tomorrow they'd be helicoptered to the hospital in Vilhena.

  "They're treating us like lepers!" the TL complained, noting that the sullen medics had roped their cots off at the far edge of the station, that they wouldn't come near them without rubber gloves and face masks.

  The TL looked like death already in his netted cot. Nevertheless he managed the energy to rail at Howard.

  "You goddamn idiot! We were breathing those spores for over a day! You and your rare fucking thallophyte. We're going to die, you asshole! Do you realize that?"

  Howard ignored him. It was a whole lot better and perhaps, even more profitable, to lie there thinking about Clara, to let her memory caress him like a sweet breeze from home. He remembered all the sweet things she'd said to him, the times she'd said she loved him, her promises of fidelity, their affectionate way of making love. In Clara he had something to live for—something real and strong. Providence would not allow him to die.

  It only remained to try to reassure the white-haired TL. He was obviously suffering.

  "Try to relax," Howard said. "Most spore infections are no different from any foreign bacterial invasion. Simple antibiotics will knock them out. We'll be fit as fiddles and back in the States in no time. Guaranteed."

  "Goddamn you, you goddamn asshole," the TL sputtered.

  And gurgled and died. Coughing up a gossamer mist of fine white spores.

  ~ * ~

  Clara felt kinda bad.

  Just because Howard was a dufus, she didn't suppose he deserved this.

  Dearest Clara,

  The entire Team is dead, save for yours truly. Vermilius Moleyus, it seems, possesses a highly activated replication mechanism, air-dispersible. We all inhaled the spores. I'm at the main hos
pital now in Alta Lidia, on an impressive array of antibiotics. Thank god the med unit arrived in time. Please don't worry, I'm going to be okay.

  Soon I'll be home and in your arms again, Clara.

  My love for you is stronger than ever. I can actually feel it growing every day. I close my eyes and see us walking hand in hand. I see us growing old together. There's just no room in me for depression or worry over this. I'm so full of you.

  My love always, Howard

  She sighed. The poor blind sap. Sick, lonely, holed up in some awful South American hospital—and still thinking she loved him.

  Well, her own letter would finally cure that.

  It made her feel a bit shitty, knowing he'd receive it bedridden, sick, a thousand miles away. All those pictures. All those positions.

  Her most recent pickup stirred beside her on the bed. Young, muscular, and very enduring. Nickname "Cucumber," and for a reason that was more than understandable. His eyes slitted open, his face half buried in the pillows. The monumental turgidity against Clara's thigh reassured her.

  "A little more cream for your kitty?" Cucumber inquired.

  Clara brazenly spread her legs.

  "Meow," she replied.

  ~ * ~

  The doctor's voice sounded muffled behind the baby-blue surgical mask. He was American, one of the last U.N. Assessment Group members, so at least he spoke English. At least Howard could understand the words, however grim.

  "I regret to say, Mr. Moley, that the blood tests don't look promising. The spores..."

  Howard coughed white dust, his throat aching like a strep infection even as he interrupted.

  "I don't get it. The spores are a simple unicellular gamete! Even the weakest antibiotics will kill them."

  The doctor's eyes were small and hard above the blue mask. "The blood-born mechanism of these particular spores, Mr. Moley, seems to be functioning identically to that of a lipid-aggregating virus. Once in the bloodstream they encloak themselves with medium- and low-density serum triglycerides, so they're able to protect themselves from all immune-system response and antibiotic therapy. In other words, Mr. Moley..."

  Howard waved him off. He didn't need to finish. Already Howard's body had fully broken out in the bright red ridges of the fungal shelf. Some were quite large, the size of coffee saucers cut in half. Because of the tough, fibrous mycelium which had grown through his body like a web of wires, they couldn't be removed. He could feel smaller ones growing in his mouth, in his nostrils, even at the edges of his eyelids.