Lesson One - a short story
Page 5
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The odd thing —
He spun around and marched purposefully toward Alberto, “Look, this is totally wrong, okay? Each time I die, I’m dying as me! It’s unbearable! And stupid! And — and absurd! I’m not a freakin’ bug that doesn’t really feel anything!”
Alberto looked thoughtful, but pointedly said nothing. Fred knew the onus of discovery was again on him.
“Okay, maybe they feel something, but —”
“Bingo, lad.”
“But it’s not the same! A bug is not the same as a human being!”
Alberto kept silent, even more pointedly.
Fred paled, “Oh come on, an ant or a spider does not experience Death the same as a human!”
“Actually, it does. A fundamental part of Lesson One, lad.”
“Jesus, Lesson One! Lesson One is ‘Don’t kill bugs?’”
“Well, you’re on the right road, lad, though it’s still a bit of a long one, I’m afraid.”
Fred nervously watched the sky for the great lens as he said, “Okay, okay I get it. I f’d up. I squashed bugs. I cooked a few of’em with a magnifying glass. Can I move on?”
Alberto said nothing. He’s eyes got that disconcerting sad and tired look again.
Fred pressed, “I said I get it, okay? I am so sorry that I killed bugs. Problem solved!”
Alberto sighed heavily, “But you don’t get it, do you? You know you don’t. You’re saying it, but you don’t believe it. In your heart you’re thinking, ‘That’s bloody ridiculous!’”
“I’m not!” Fred shouted, his voice cracking. But of course, he was.
A shadow came, but it was yet a different shadow. Fred was snatched skyward, a dizzying hundreds of feet, held by gargantuan fleshy surfaces. By now he could guess what they were. Fingers. His sweaty, unwashed, childhood fingers.
The fingers crushed him. Not hard enough to kill him. Only enough to break his back and snap some ribs. Then he was carried some incredible distance, whooshed this way and that through the skies — and finally dropped.
He prayed the fall would kill him, but of course it did not. He landed on sandy earth, in blinding pain, paralyzed from the waist down, every breath torturing his crushed chest cavity. A new smell overwhelmed him, acrid, pungent. Then he heard it.
Scuttling, chattering, clacking, it came.
An ant.
At least one quarter his size, the creature rose over a rise to his right, frenetically lurching this way and that, its antennae making bizarre bongo drum sounds as they tap-tap-tapped the sand.
Since he couldn’t move, inevitably, tap-tap-tap, the antennae brushed over him. The huge insect did an instant about face and clamped its drooling pincers into one of his legs. He cried out and punched weakly at its armored head, but that was all he could do.
The ant tried to pull him, but it was not strong enough. Almost immediately it left. He lay wheezing, his lacerated leg bleeding profusely. God, let me die! Have mercy! End this quickly, please!
But he did not die. 30 seconds passed. Then more ants, dozens of them, alerted by their scout, came for him. They swarmed over him, pincers slicing into him in a dozen places. They hunched up and pivoted their bulbous abdomens forward, plunging in their stingers. He felt their acidic venom dissolving his flesh from within. They stretched him as though on a rack, trying to pull him apart. Failing that, they worked together to drag him.
His vision was blurring, but he could still make out the entrance to their nest. As he was carried down into the odiferous dark, he was grateful that the ant venom seemed to be numbing some of the pain. He hoped it would not take too long to die.
When he was back on the beach, gasping, sobbing, it was, for the first time, Alberto who spoke first, “You were a creative little devil weren’t you? Feeding bugs to ants?”
“I was a little kid, for goddsake!” Fred rasped.
“But you knew the grasshopper didn’t want to die.” By now Alberto was confident that Fred remembered most of the deaths.
“I was curious, goddamn it! I just wanted to see what the ants would do, you know, if they found something.”
“Well, now you know.”
Barely had Fred time to contemplate that when the stony beach opened under his feet. He was in a stomach churning free-fall, hurtling down, down into a vast white crater, its walls smooth as porcelain. Walls he realized were, in fact, porcelain.
He landed in water. With a great roar, the water began to spin. He was whirled helplessly round and round the crater, drawn irresistibly toward the center. A whirlpool was forming there, sucking everything down. Sucking the whole world down! He fought wildly, knowing he fought in vain, against the ever-faster current, spinning ever deeper into the whirlpool’s maw. Sensing the moment he would be pulled under, he drew in a frantic last breath. Blackness swallowed him, but it was not the blackness of Death. He was in a lightless, watery void, careening along some soulless tunnel, brushing along its walls. His breath gave out. He coughed and sucked in choking water. He gagged and spasmed and retched, only to suck in more. Let me die! Let me die!
But he suddenly erupted from the water’s surface, gasping for air as he rode the still rushing torrent, arcing violently up the walls as the tunnel turned sharply right and left. Next he sailed over an unseen cataract, fell endlessly amid tons of water, and at last splashed to a landing.
The waterfall subsided. Silence came. Yet still, everything was pitch black dark. In addition, he was overwhelmed by a staggering stench of decay and excrement. He began to swim, searching, hoping to find an exit or, failing that, at least a dry spot.
He clambered over hunks of rotted things, over filth beyond imagining. At last he bumped blindly into a concrete wall and began to feel his way along it. Several times he came to corners, but in the unyielding dark he had no way of knowing how far he had gone, or if he was going in circles.
It would take him many days to die of wracking starvation in this abominably foul, sightless nightmare place. But die he finally did.