“You won’t get wet,” I promised Gloria. “I’ll put on a fresh Depends-they’re quite well designed, actually. I’ve been doing the Kegel exercises, I can feel a difference, and sometime soon-”
“Exactly,” Gloria said. “Sometime soon.” She held her face-shining with unabsorbed grease and protruding around the mouth like that of a beautiful buck-toothed ape-up to be kissed. Her eyes were shut; a little smile of expectancy on her pale lips anticipated my kiss, which descended upon her mouth like a hawk gliding down to take up a songbird or vole in its claws. Her face was a cold lake of grease, smelling medicinal.
“Sometime soon,” she promised, “we’ll do something. It’s good you want to; you’re getting better. But now go to your room, please. Take a pill if you don’t think you can sleep.”
I obeyed. It was pleasant enough in the guest room. The bed sheets were clean and cool, and the odd-angled shape in the far corner of the ceiling had acquired by now a guardian-angel quality, a boxed numen. I fell asleep upon the rumble of the eleven-ten train making the whole house quiver, woke once wet, and woke for good when the Times man swerved around the driveway. Dawn had yet to break, but a plump moon in the west bleached the bare November earth the white of a saint’s bone, a knuckle or splinter of scapula in its reliquary of chased electrum, burnished at the base by the hungry kisses of the worshipful.
v. The Dahlia
THIS PLANET supports but two life-forms- myself, and an immense fungus that has covered all but the stoniest of available land. The brownish, writhing, mounting formations aboveground are but a fraction of its mass, made up of microscopic hyphae that extend their network in all directions, knotting and interweaving into the mycelium that makes up the thallus, or undifferentiated body, of my immense companion in vitality. It does not speak, or visibly move, but it does undergo change, the telltale mark of an organism. Its protoplasm is in constant motion, streaming into the tips of the newer hyphae, draining from the older, which become vacuolated and turn pulpy and a darker, more velvety brown. Though the fungus is ultimately one substance, consistent and immortal, its hyphae do organize at times into compact masses that perform various functions-stromata, for instance, cushionlike forms that bear spores, and rhizoids, anchoring the thallus to the substrate, and septa, which more or less elaborately functior as valves controlling the flow of enzyme-liquefied starches sugars, celluloses, and lignins. Since the fungus possesses no chlorophyll, it depends for nutrition entirely upon the rotting organic matter in the substrate. Whence came this matter? Its particulars are a mystery, but one that certainly testifies to a deep prehistory upon the planet, deeper than the imagination can grasp. The ground beneath my feet is an abysmal well of time.
I move about and eat of the fungus, tearing it with my hands. Its white, tan-skinned, at places freckled flesh is generally bland, sometimes sweet, rarely bitter. When it is bitter, or sour, I spit it out, and rinse my mouth with a cupped handful of the H2O that is mercifully abundant. Thank God for pure water, I think; but are such thanks tautological, since without water I would not be here to offer them? Life exists amid benign conditions, inevitably, since conditions elsewhere, malign, would never have spawned it.
The fungus is everywhere, but not everywhere the same- far from it. In especially nutrition-rich stretches, it is mountainous, the hyphae so thickly interwoven as to have a leathery, though resilient, hardness underfoot, like a springy turf. In other, barer, colder regions, the fungus exists itself as a thin dry film across the rocks, in spots a mere stain, which a finger rubs off. I lick my finger then, for the fungus in this attenuated state is oddly tasty. There are grottoes, splotched and shadowy, where curved gills of a sweet, crisp mycelium form a cave of easeful comfort, and there are wind-troughed plains where rare upright conidiophores, brightly beaded with conidia, reward the wanderer with a pungent meat. A growth so vast and essentially amorphous at some point on its great surface folds and crests into every possible form- the stalked cauliflower of a tree, the flowing curves and protuberances of a reclining woman, the glimmering flatness of the sea. Everywhere, as I have said, it is edible, though my hands come away with broken fingernails from harvesting the stubborn delicacies in the crevices of rocks. The particularly delectable patches, wherein some secreted chemical such as lysergic acid induces a visionary sense of well-being, are maddeningly hard to distinguish, by outward appearance, from patches of the bland, somewhat rubbery daily fare. In general, one must either eat a great deal to arrive at a strikingly pleasurable mouthful, or else altogether refrain from eating until hunger renders any random handful delicious. The one promise the fungus makes is to be, however monotonously, there, day after day. Its evolution-the organic predecessors upon which its rhizoids feed-is mysterious, but not so basic a mystery, I dare say, as my own existence here, on this planet of all planets.
I often wonder if the fungus has a consciousness. Not like mine, of course (I am clearly more elaborately differentiated, from toenails to eyelashes), but in some diffuse way comparable, compatible with its endlessly repetitive structure-a dim awareness, like the light-sensors of blue-eyed scallops, that exists at the probing, searching tips of the tireless hyphae. Does it, moreover, like me, or is its patient feeding of me, day after day, an indifferent accident, a heartless largesse spilled from its own blind, entirely self-absorbed life? At times, curled beneath its soft beige gills of thallic matter, I feel a kind of vaporous breath that hints of love. The perpetual silence seems to develop an almost audible node in which an urgent benevolence is held as in a clenched fist. Sometimes I find in the convolutions of a folded outcropping some strikingly anthropomorphic set of ridges and vesicles-another man, about to stand forth!-and sense a joke, a thinking comment, a wry salute from my ubiquitous co-inhabitant. Certainly its vast body is warmer in some spots than others, and exudes a language of smells-punky, pungent, musty, faintly fruity-that is inflected as if by an inner consideration, a hope of achieving communion. At moments it even gives me back, as if out of an armpit or a groin, my own odor of stale male sweat.
John appeared today, in mid-afternoon in his green truck, to take his stand in the woods for a few hours. Hunting season has begun. Gloria was outside raking leaves. In my infirmity, she has to do it all herself this fall, except for the Saturdays when Jeremy can tear himself away from his computer classes and the aftermath of frat parties, including, he resentfully hints, a hungover and irritable girl in his bed. Gloria rakes up heaps of leaves and totes them off in bulging sheetfuls so heavy she staggers and stumbles in her slick-soled Wellingtons. She wears a red bandana and, when John pulled up, she put on a toothy smile that telegraphed happiness through the November drizzle even from my distant vantage at the guest-room window. Her face has a glow, from the vigorous exercise, as she puts down her burden and walks across the driveway to greet the gallant deerslayer. To me he seems, white-haired and stooped, with trembling hands, too old to warrant such a girlish greeting, but then I reflect that he is my age, if not-can it be?-a few years younger. Despite my post-prostatic discomfort, I put on trousers and shoes and a shirt and make my way downstairs. Steps down, I have discovered, are more painful than steps up.