I wake up in the top of another tree, shivering and not well rested.
The dogs came back last night. I managed to walk for a few hours in the dark. That is one advantage to there being such a clear path. I heard the yowling and yipping and climbed for shelter in the nearest tree top. They came on me quick and like the night before there was the one who was bigger and smarter than the others. He came up the branches like they were a set of stairs. When he was just below me he started snapping at my heels. I kicked down and landed a few good blows to his snout. Other dogs would have cried out. He didn't even flinch. I have a scratch on my leg where his teeth trailing along my pant-leg after a vicious kick had cut me as he tried a little too late to sink them into my flesh. The scratch itches like crazy and it's bright pink flesh looks infected for sure. If I was a doctor, I'd be prescribing some antibiotics and lots of water. After he realized he was gonna keep taking hits to the face unless he got out from under me he climbed to a long thick branch directly across from my position and at my level. Once again I parried with him around the tree trunk, and once again he disappeared silently off the end of a branch after a failed take down strike.
They circled below me, howling and making this awful strangled yelling sound while I hung tight, vigilantly focused on any other attacks they might attempt. A smaller dog came up the same way as the big one. He was quick and limber, but he was careless and weak and I landed a jab kick into his ribs. He cried and fell sideways and upside-down off the branch and landed with a small crash and a pitiable cry.
#
In my fevered dreams last night as I drifted in and out of a consciousness riddled with a type of mortal awareness, I found myself among a group drifting on an open sea. The sway of the vessel on the swell of the ocean. A vast undulating plain at night. The moonlight shattering into a trillion fractal shards. A dewdrop in a dewdrop in a dewdrop. I was the captain. I held the wheel in my grip, felt a pull and a tug. My men worked like ants. The creaking of the boards, the smell of salt and fish and a basket of limes, their flesh marked with brown spots from age. There was a sense of unrest. We drifted for days with nowhere to land.
Days turned into months. My sense of time dilated, though I kept making new notches in the mast every sunrise, another one always erased itself before I got to it. We were going to a place where it was warm and there was plenty of rum and casual sex with women. God knows how many of my crew were down below decks in furtive imaginative moments dressing up in straw skirts and coconut brassieres, lubing up each other's parts with chicken grease.
The months turned into years though, and I could see my beard turning gray as I turned it over in my sun browned salty fingers. There were bees that lived in my beard, and they drank the nectar from the flowers that grew in the crow’s nest and came back down and made honeycomb inside my head. Eventually they grew stronger than the crew. They developed a taste for meat and evolved into hornets driving the crew into the sea in lifeboats made of lemon rinds which quickly sank. The ocean was acid and dissolved their bones.
The bees and I sailed on for several lifetimes and still, there were no more islands, no more continents. It was as if the ocean had swallowed up all the land. I looked at the tattoos on my arms and chest and saw a story unfolding along biblical lines. Ancient knowledge, locked in libraries buried beneath a one world ocean, brought to life in my flesh. I knew that every book ever written or ever to be written could be found encoded in my DNA.
It was always night and the moon was always full. I would sit above the deck, twisted in the rigging as the hornets flew in and out of me without stinging. I pulled my ensnared arms and legs this way and that to adjust the sails like a little puppet controlling its master. The ship became an extension of my body and we drank the ocean. Whales beached themselves on the massive deck, which grew over the centuries as if it were alive or expanding with the universe so that the massive creatures jumping aboard barely made a sound and the deck boards barely flexed under their gargantuan weight. They were torn apart by the hornets who delivered their flesh to my tongue in my open mouth, my head now made of hexagonal chambers filled with squirming larvae.
One night, the only night since we started this journey a million aeons ago, while I gazed upon yet another gorgeous full-bellied full-blooded moon, a wave much bigger than the biggest. A wave so tall that it brushed the bottom of the lunar surface, wetting it, leaving the big blue cookie looking half dipped in milk, the milk of galaxies. This wave, so large and so slow but also so sudden, became the biggest thing in my world. My ship had grown to the size of a continent, but it was dwarfed by this wave that stood before me, so powerful it refused to break and held itself together on the force of the will of its size. How many water molecules? How many gallons seemed irrelevant, it would always take more. I knew it would continue to grow, no matter how long I watched it would never fall, but at the same time it was always overtaking me, crushing me, drowning me. I became like dust, amoeba, diatomic plankton, and I dispersed throughout the entire ocean. I dove with my eyeless sight down to the ancient cities from a billion years ago and entered the turnstiles of defunct subway stations where the skeletons of poor people had been reduced to calcium and nitrogen and swirled together in the spiral shells of giant mollusks which traversed the rotted rail tunnels like big stony rats. I saw the dead traffic lights, airfields scattered with aluminum air-frame skeletons, skinned by the chewing lips of parrotfish. Repopulated with brain coral and branches of sponge throbbing in the dark well of cold and salt and thoughtlessness.
I became bio-luminescent and formed trails around where the new ocean currents met and the turbulent flow of evolution mastered nothing and tried all. Sparks from me found their way back and up into that massive wave standing now in my glow like a lighthouse. And the hornets came and ate my brains.
#
I awake from this dream, shivering and with beads of sweat on my forehead. The sun has just breached the horizon, and for a minute I think it's another wave, come to swallow me up. I climb down from this one same damn tree. At the bottom, sitting in a wicker high back with an inverted compound bucket to prop his feet, is an old man. He doesn't seem to notice me, so I say, hello.
He turns his head, gazes slowly in my direction. Are you a spirit? he asks.
I don't think so, I say.
He grunts. Not a spirit, he says. Did you see the eagle this morning?
I say, I think I saw a hawk two mornings ago.
No, he says, this morning.
When?
Just before you came down. I thought you were part of the same sign.
Sorry to disappoint you.
Disappointed people have no curiosity. The mice will eat their shoes. They have no heart.
I swear that's what he says to me. I kinda just look at him. He doesn't appear to be waiting for an answer. I ask him, what are you doing out here? This seems like an unlikely place for...
He cuts me off, an unlikely place, he says, copying my words. Did you see the eagle just a few minutes ago? Now he repeats himself. I have a feeling that the conversation isn't going anywhere until he removes his feet from the bucket, slides it off from a package beneath it and produces a luncheon wrapped in butcher's paper and twine and a small table with slender wire legs that just fits inside the bucket.
You're full of surprises, I say.
Sur-pri-zez, he repeats. The mice will eat your shoes man.
Not if I don't take them off, I say.
He grunts again, as if everyone says that. Are you hungry? he asks.
I'm starving actually, I say. And I mean it. I haven't eaten since I've been out here. I can only assume that I ate about three days ago, if my former watch was correct. I'd been unconscious during the abduction for about twelve hours. My stomach hurts. My head is buzzing. I walk with the rhythm of a zombie. It is uncomfortable, but I know as long as I don't lose consciousness and get cooked to death in the sun, I can survive roughly two weeks without food and that water, which had been graciously provided for me by this robotic farm, would be my primary resource without which I would not last two days.
Have some food then, he says.
Thanks, I say and I sit in the dirt opposite him at his ridiculous looking picnic table with its three wire legs. I must be wondering aloud because I say, why aren't they out here picking the fruit?
Pandemic, says the old man. As if he had been making sense this whole time.
Oh, yeah, I say, I kinda forgot about the pandemic. They won't let this fruit just rot out here, will they?
How should I know, he says. His eyes bore into mine through cloudy blue irises. If the robot makes it, let the robot eat it. He veers back into oblique statements. Well, a half lucid old man with food is better than a maniac with a knife. He unties the twine carefully; his arthritic knuckles curved into talons picking at the knot which is not tied like a shoelace but like a pile of half-itches all pulled tight into a ball.
I say, would you like some help?
He says, mice will eat your shoes and points a crooked rheumatic wand in my face over the parcel.
Fine, I say, mice will eat my shoes. I watch him try to tickle the knot undone. He gives up on subtlety, and his face doesn't betray any frustration as he slips his wrinkled thumbs under the twine, makes two fists and pulls hard. The twine both snaps and cuts into the gnarled skin of his hands. He doesn't make any sound to indicate his injury.
Yes, he says as he unwraps the bundle. Sitting atop the table are three sandwiches looking like they were made in an expensive deli, each one cut into four triangles and pinned together with a flagged toothpick.
Flagged toothpicks always make me think of my uncle Milton. He told me this story of being at an airport restaurant in the nineteen eighties. This is back when air travel was still a cool thing to do and not an oppressive necessity. It was all a lot looser and more natural. Buy a ticket like you were hopping on a bus. It wasn't as stressful an event as it is today. He sat down and the waiter came over. What's good here? he asked.
The club sandwich is very popular, said the waiter.
Uncle Milton thought for a moment, do I like club sandwiches? I think I do, and he said, sounds good. Bacon and turkey?
Bacon and turkey on sourdough, said the waiter. This is back before sourdough had made its big comeback with the micro-bakeries and the resurgence of microbial food stuffs in general, so sourdough was kind of an interesting touch. Milton became more interested by the moment. Of course, he had sat down about half an hour before his flight, and how long can it take to make a sandwich. He was very hungry, so whether it really took twenty minutes or not is up to interpretation. Regardless of the functions of the universe around him and this sandwich and this waiter at the time of the event, the event that took place is undeniably visceral and certain. When that sandwich came out of the kitchen, and Milton eyed the waiter nervously, probably saying to himself, my god man, it's not like I ordered a Monte Cristo for Christ's sake, in perfect nineteen eighties secular heresy.
No sooner than he had put the plate down did Milton's face relax. Milton thanked him and grabbed a quartered piece of this salivation inducing wedge of flavor and slipped more than half of it past his teeth into his mouth to chomp down, not only into the layers of meat and cheese and vegetable stacked between three pieces of bread, but for the sandwich to bite him back. Apparently, those little flags are not ornamental. The toothpicks in Milton's sandwich did not bear any identifying insignia, and you could argue that his wanton carelessness is proof of the disintegration of western society. But you would lack compassion and jurisprudence. Very few other people I know, have pierced their palate. It's actually kind of difficult, mostly because of the amount of nerves there. It's not super solid, but generally the amount of pain it causes is enough warning for a reflective person to back off. Milton was a reflective person by nature, but he was distracted by the pressure of the moment. Starving in an airport lounge with five minutes to eat a ten-minute sandwich, and the bastard waiter hadn't even brought him a water to rinse this thing down with.
I can only speculate as to the amount of pain he was in. When he was describing it to me, his eyes teared up and turned red. He said that more blood gushed from that wound than he had ever seen come out of his own body. Did he make the flight? Of course he did, this was the early nineteen eighties, before that stupid bitch sued Dunkin Donuts over hot coffee and the world was still largely made up of natural men and women, not this fucking crowd of risk averse analysts self-cataloging every little cut and scrape they get in some hierarchy of value against a flow chart of dystopian insurance regime. He put down the sandwich, didn't even ask for his money back. Motioned for the waiter to bring him extra paper towels and a to go clamshell. And when he got on that plane with a mouth full of napkins soaked in crimson human liqueur, the check-in attendant told him he couldn't bring his sandwich on board. Without a second thought he tossed the thing in the garbage can at the gate before getting on the plane to fly 3000 miles across the country where at the other side he presumably sought minor medical attention.
The sandwiches which sat on the table in front of me had flags on their toothpicks, and honestly, I noticed, because ever since Milton told me that story I have made sure to note the position of every leave-in place kitchen implement on my plate. I once was feeding a girlfriend with a fork. I made the mistake of holding the fork wrong. It was perpendicular to the line of the lips instead of a flat parallel. She bit down as though she were going to take the end of the fork off, her teeth making this awful scraping sound which I can only imagine was a hundred times worse inside her head. She screamed and hit me. I felt bad, but honestly, you'd have to be stupid or unobservant to have bit down that hard to begin with. I never trust other people that blindly, especially when they are putting things near my face.
The old man hands me a slice of this magnificent sandwich. I hold it aloft like a toast and say, to the mice who will eat my shoes. He looks at me like I had just said the dumbest thing he's ever heard and picks up his piece and bites into it. I notice his teeth are in good shape for an old man, a little brown stained but solid. The sandwich tastes exactly like it should. Exactly like it looks. Strange thing is that it doesn't smell the same as it tastes. Maybe it isn't the sandwich. Maybe there is a corpse nearby under a tree that is wafting in my direction. Maybe it's my own body odor.
He shares half of each sandwich with me, and we eat mostly in silence. He watches me strangely though. A couple times I have to ask him, is everything alright? He just looks as though he has been contemplating a spiderweb or some insignificant but intricate pattern and then loosens his gaze back down into his sandwich. When we are done there are a jumbled pile of twelve flagged toothpicks with green cellophane shredded and wrapped in tatters around the tops of the sticks.
He reaches into a satchel beside his chair and pulls out what looks at first like a spyglass. I wonder if he will be navigating. He holds it to his eye and squints the other one shut tight, folds of a thousand-year-old face just keep disappearing into his eye socket. I wonder when it will stop. Will his whole head get sucked in there and pop he just subsumes himself into the spyglass? The compressing wrinkles stop. That eye is for sure shut now. Then he takes his free hand and turns the front end of the barrel as though bringing something into focus. I can hear little shards and trinkets rolling around inside the tube. Then I realize the end facing me is full of multi-colored panels. The old geezer is blissfully occupied by a kaleidoscope.
He says, you've got a lot of blood on your face. At first, I don't quite hear him. His words pass through me. Then I stop licking my lips and slowly reach up to touch my face. My cheeks are moist and slick. My fingertips play around on them in absent minded circles, sliding in spirals over the bones beneath my flesh. When I pull my hand down and look into it I see a dark brown patina obscuring my own flesh.
What is this? I ask. Thinking for sure that there was some explanation other than the obvious and horrible.
Mice are gonna eat your shoes, he says again, dropping the phony guru accent and sliding into a more colloquial tone.
I say, motherfucker, what the fuck did you do to me?
I'm not sure what you mean, he says. I shared what I had with you. He stands up while I am still stunned from the reveal that what I had seen as too perfect sandwiches is in fact the corpse of a dead dog, perhaps the one I had kicked from the branch the night before. The smell envelopes me. If you've never smelt dog blood, it smells like the dumpster behind a butcher shop. It is inside my face, all over my hands and chest. There is fur lodged in between my front teeth. It tickles the backs of my lips.
He walks behind the tree, taking his bucket and table with him. The wicker throne becomes a climbing rose planted in memorial of some field hand or farmer's dead child. I can't find him after that. I can't recall his features other than that receding eyeball and kaleidoscope. If he even had a face in the fevered waking dream space of that repugnant meal.
I must have swallowed a good amount of flesh. I stand up, then I retch hard. The writhing dog meat kicks hard at the back of my chest. It feels like a colony of mealworms rolling around in my stomach, twisting and wriggling and gnawing at me. I've trained for thirty years in full contact martial sports of many different lineages. I can take a punch to the gut. This is not something I had ever trained for. My body has taken over, and my mind is in revolt. I try to tell myself that people in other cultures have done this for millennia and that I am biologically no different than they are. It doesn't work. The smell of rotting hamburger mixes with the metallic tang of my own heaved up bile to create a cement of inescapable mental quagmire. I remember throwing up two days ago when I had found the water.
I look down and see water seeping up through the roots and soil below me and know it will be another four hours before the irrigation would spring again. I drop to my knees in my own pile of slippery puke and coyote entrails and spread the mess apart with my hands, like some psychopath cave painter filling in a bloody horizon acid etched into a limestone wall. I tear the dirt away feeling for strands of tubing. My fingertips catch on super light gauge PVC pipe. The black tubes I wrench loose from the soil and bite into them with my cursed teeth, feeling the gush of clear true life splash into the back of my throat once before the system goes limp in my grasp.