In this room, I keep my eyes down, away from the far wall and the posters I can read, because I don’t like what they say. My gaze is fixed to the floor. I haven’t seen tile like this since the hospital back in Baton Rouge, the first time I left the bayou and came to the city to watch my grandmother die with her mouth wide open, her tongue sticking out like a crushed bird. The tile there and the tile here is bluish gray and flecked with silver. It looks painted, but must have come raw from the ground like that, polished up and shipped to Southeast Louisiana and Southeast Asia to cover up the bloody dirt that lies beneath both places. Industrial tile. American tile. The fluorescent lights make the silver dance. Or maybe it’s just my eyes.
But how could it be? They’re just trapped sacs of fluid wired with the proper receptors and trailing nerves like a Portuguese man-o’-war. No, it’s my vision that’s different now. Peripheral is sharper and almost front-facing without moving my head. I’m a flatfish, a flounder squatting on the ocean floor, looking up and out in every direction at once as two orbs migrate into one. Eyes develop this clarity in ancillary vision when everything on every side is gunning to kill you. They can’t help but widen their perspective to take in more angles where death awaits. Survival of the barely fit demands a metamorphosis, and a deal is struck with nature without any consultation. Evolution doesn’t ask for permission first.
There is only one chair here, made of form-fitted plastic and painted metal that doesn’t make a sound regardless of how I move, and the waiting room is more of a hallway. It’s empty and clean, with people and machines humming on either side of it, behind closed doors, muttering and humming in unison with the engines that drive the entire base. There’s no water in these walls, because the River is gone.
Out of the corner of my new bottom-feeding eyes, I see it, crouching in the hallway corner at my five o’clock. It always waits in tight intersections of flat planes, as if angles provide it the proper geometry to spin a web to hold it fast for as long as it needs. Watching spider, if a spider is what it really is, which it isn’t. Not truly, not to me. I don’t dare glance at it. I’ve never done so, even when I’m in bed and it’s squatting on my heart and lungs. It’s changed now, this thing, adapted to its surroundings. Watching me, as it has the whole way back from the jungle, when I ran and fell and hid and killed to save whatever is inside me that makes me who I am. To keep this particular mass of atoms intact and shaped in this particular way that allows me to believe that I’m real. Mama’s boy. Grandma’s boy. Bayou boy.
I didn’t think it would follow me here, in this time before it found me with a million tons of military machines set up to protect a native son sent to murder strangers in a foreign land. But it follows me everywhere and every time. It knows what I knew, that I was just another screw in the engine that was easy to replace when I wore out. I was unprotected, never protected in that peculiar way that would do any good, and it knew it. They’d know how to protect me down in the bayou in this new war I was fighting. At least I still like to think that, but I never went back there after that day in the hospital, looking at my grandmother’s tongue. They took me away and my own tongue changed inside my mouth. A little bit every single day I was away from my home, reshaping my atoms based on a new latitude. After a while, seven years on, I shed my skin and was reborn just in time to be shipped out, shiny and new on the outside. All that Louisiana mud went with that final layer of skin, even though I wanted to keep as much of it as I could, but you don’t get to decide what stays the same when the transformation begins.
Didn’t matter anyway. I was holding on to lies and promises and half-remembered dreams. I was too southern for the north and then too northern for the south. Too backwater for one, too in the books for the other. I didn’t fit in anywhere anymore, so I enlisted. Second worst mistake of my goddamn life. The first was leaving the bayou. Allowing myself to be taken, then recast on the wheel. Mud to clay to brittle boy cooling from the oven. Lies or no, it was the last time I felt safe and alive. I can live a lie if I know I’m living. Being dead with truth means you just lost, fair and square.
But this thing in the corner is neither and it’s both. It’s dead and alive, and it wants to take me to where it dwells, somewhere between the two or maybe somewhere outside all of that mess. It wants to take me there and have its way with me. I’d live a lie if it meant staying away from that place, that thing, living with me where I can see it fully with all of my eyes. If I die, it’ll take me there, or find me there. It will be with me, mostly dead but also alive enough to feel every bit of it for as long as time has left. I’ve got to stay alive. Stay here or stay there but sure as shit stay. Harder still, I’ve got to stay awake, because the mind drifts close to death every time the body sleeps. I’ve become expert to this fact.
The door opens and the doctor stands in the doorway. I get up from the chair, and it makes no sound as I do. My hands don’t shake here, now, back then, but everything inside me does.
The man is a woman and is wearing a uniform, similar to mine but different in all those subtle ways that matter. No white coat, although I’m not sure if I expected that or not. I’ve never seen a psychiatrist outside of the funny papers, and funny papers didn’t matter for shit outside of the living room, away from the safety of threadbare rugs and bowls of melted ice cream saved for Saturday mornings because the local market sold it cheap to the early birds who got off the overnight shift. Everything I thought I knew about the outside turned out to be wrong the day I walked into the hospital and never saw my living room again.
The doctor is wearing glasses that reflect the light from the hallway, making it impossible to see her eyes behind the lenses. I wonder what those eyes have seen and how they’ve been altered since arriving in this dragon-scale land that beat back the bully by sheer force of chin, losing every fight but winning the war. Those round circles of glass could be hiding eyes just like mine, afraid to stay open but more afraid to close because of what happens when they do.
I walk past the woman without any eyes and enter the office. The door closes behind us and I wonder what’s still left in that hallway, waiting.
2. Up Country
The aquarium maneuvered slowly through an ocean, bumping along a sea floor of dark sand and green coral caverns deep enough to swallow a house. Shapes moved in the gray water, living things that remained unknown and unknowable to those forces that would catalog them, cage them, and open up their insides, studying something that needed no discovery by weak minds that couldn’t understand them anyway. An aquarium inside an ocean, a stage play trundling along in the shadow of the real thing.
Broussard watched from inside the metal and glass enclosure, wondering how long the lashed tarpaulin would hold back a trillion tons of angry water, jealous of every bit of dry land stolen from it by the never-ending creation game of plate tectonics.
On either side, kelp forests danced and bowed as they passed, not out of respect, but in a long-forgotten comedy that left them giggling as the two bony creatures bounced on by, sucking in air through lungs that could be filled and popped like year-old balloons left out in a summer sun. And still the water came, roaring and greedy, furious in a way that only eons of frustration can properly grow.
Broussard closed his eyes, feeling the weight of water waiting above him, wondering what it would feel like to be pulverized into mash by something normally so soft and harmless when it lacked organized marching orders.
“You ever seen rain like this?”