Worms - Part Three

Theo’s recovery was slow and painful, but it nevertheless progressed, despite what his physical therapist thought of as active rebellion on Theo’s part. He had no sensation on the outermost parts of about a quarter of his skin, mostly on the left side of his body, in patches that extended from his forehead to his thigh. He had been hit by a flaming branch, apparently, and had sustained a fair amount of bruising along with the burns. Bella had driven Theo out, sustaining only small burns and a restless night of coughing. The car had been less fortunate. Somehow, it managed to stay alive long enough to deliver Bella and Theo to the hospital, where it caught fire in the parking lot.

Once the bruises had cleared up, everyone agreed that Theo looked much better than he had done when he first arrived at the emergency room. Even Theo had to admit that his current state was slightly less nauseating than the photos of a black and purple pile of crispy skin and sizzled hair lying motionless in the hospital bed that his mother had shown him. But Theo still did not like seeing himself in the mirror. His skin stretched over his neck as if his chin was fused to his collarbone. He had no hair on parts of his head and none on the left side of his face, which made the scars pop out like white worms. And despite the lack of nerve endings in the top layers of skin for much of the area of his left side, pain still clung onto him below the surface. The ache never went away fully. Instead, it waxed and waned depending on the time of day, his mood, the temperature or humidity outside. Sometimes, a wave of nausea-pain would take him, and he could do nothing but endure it with gritted teeth and clenched fists. The waves would last for seconds, minutes, or on one horrible occasion, almost two hours.

After he had recovered enough to be able to talk and move around, albeit slowly and painfully, the doctors had released him to go home. His mother had arrived in her old Toyota Prius, given him a tight hug which Theo groaned through, and drove him back to her house, where he stayed for the next month.

There were few things about living at home again that brought Theo any relief from his newly inspired, irritated inner cynic. His patience had burned in the fire. Anything might set him off, causing a wave of searing nausea to boil through his body. More often than not, this would lead to a belted string of curses and insults launched at the nearest family member or the cat. His mother tried her best to help Theo with anything he might need for comfort, cooking for him and helping with his clothes when he couldn’t quite reach, but it didn’t stop Theo’s piercing glares and venomous words.

His room did not help. It was his childhood room, but it had been long since cleared out and packed away. Now it was the empty shell of his childhood, smaller than he remembered and drab. As the weeks went by it became more and more dank as Theo did not have the patience or physical energy to clean it. He became nocturnal, sleeping during the days, when his mother was out at work and Bella was at school and the house was quiet. He would wake up upon their return, slip out to greet Bella after she had done her homework, eat a bite of whatever his mother had cooked, and stay up late into the night exploring the internet, playing video games, or reading books.

He talked to people on the internet. At first he refused to socialize in any form, believing his psyche to have been twisted so far into its shell that he no longer craved social interaction. But at the end of the first week home, the crushing loneliness of his little gray cell forced his hand. He turned to the web.

He looked mainly for support groups for victims of natural disasters. There were a few different national ones, and he scrolled through endless pages of poorly written posts before finding anything he found interesting.

2:30 in the morning, rooted deeply into a depressive episode, Theo scrolled. He had read the same spiritually confused, contradictory, lovey-dovey bullshit for the last several hundred pages. As he was about to give up and head to bed, one finger resting on the power button, the title of the next post caught his eye. It read:

The words stirred something in Theo. He didn’t quite understand their meaning, but the author’s questions agitated him. His finger slipped from the power button to compose an exhausted, train-of-thought critique of the post in a direct message to the author’s account. His eyes stung by the end of the message and he blurrily smacked the enter key, sending off his sleep-deprived words before punching the power off and launching himself into bed.

He stared at his ceiling for another hour before sleeping, the words of his message and the post swirling in his mind. He tossed and turned, sweating, leaking. Awoke ragged and black. Someone moving outside his room.

He opened the door and went to the kitchen to make himself some coffee. His mother and sister had just left, and the house was empty. A note on a green post-it was stuck to the counter, asking him to please take the trash out in his mother’s loopy scrawl.

He crumpled the note up and threw it vaguely towards the trash bin. He slumped into a chair and nursed a steaming mug. Black clouds filled his head, thundering towards each other, building static. A sharp, high-pitched bark sounded from just outside the window. He looked to see a fat squirrel hanging onto his mother’s birdfeeder. It made it’s sharp bark again, piercing something within Theo. His storm struck lightning, and before he knew what he was doing, he was outside, barking back at the creature. It stared at him, unfazed. Theo grabbed a stick and threw it at the feeder. The squirrel jumped off just before the stick struck and snapped the chain on the feeder, sending birdseed everywhere. The wire mesh holding the seed crashed into a rock, badly denting it. The squirrel sat on the fence on the side of the house and barked again.

Then Theo saw his neighbor at the curb, watching the scene. Theo’s face flushed hot and he rushed inside. He paced the kitchen, his room, up and down the stairs. He checked his phone (nothing). His hands flexed wide and balled themselves into fists, in and out. Up and down. Tried to calm himself down. Sat in a chair, breathed in, out.

He checked his phone again. A message had appeared from ddville.

D: Why are you so angry? What about the post did you dislike?

Theo reread his message. Quite abrasive. Even rude. His obvious lack of self control made the blood surge like a scream in his ears. His hand tightened around his phone and he swung his arm back, ready to throw it through the kitchen window. He stopped himself, breathing hard. The family cat, Josephine, poked her head around the bedroom hallway and meowed.

He slumped down onto the ground, his back against a kitchen drawer. His breath caught, and he began sobbing.

Josephine turned and left.

After a minute, his ragged breathing calmed and he turned on his phone again, stared at the message from ddville. He typed out a somewhat apologetic reply, deleted it, tried again.

T: No reason. Your post makes no sense. It’s so vague.

A few minutes later his phone lit up with a reply from ddville.

D: There is always a reason. You have a reason to be talking to me now. My post was vague for a reason.

T: How can you know the reason? Sure, I am angry for reasons. I got burned for reasons. You are vague as fuck for some incomprehensible reason, but neither of us will ever know the reasons. There are too many reasons, infinite if you think about it, going back to the start of time. So it’s just how things are. No point trying to find the reason. Like predicting the future. Your post reads like you got all the answers and you don’t.

D: You can be a determinist without being a pedant.

T: I’m not a pedant. I’m just over it. I’ve stopped caring. I am a product of a certain evolutionary environment and that’s about all there is to it. I don’t see any reason to try and understand the world differently.

D: How depressing.

Theo was fuming again. His fingers flew over the buttons.

T: You know what I just did? I walked out of the house and threw a stick at a squirrel. I got so mad that I yelled at it and broke the bird feeder. Why did I do that, then? A combination of genes and a shitty hand played by mother nature to my left side, that’s why. A million tiny reasons. Infinity! It’s a fractal, see? There’s no getting to the bottom of it so stop fucking trying. I don’t really know why I did it. It’s embarrassing. And yet now I’m telling a stranger on the internet about it and WHY?

D: A strange emotion grips you and you see no meaning? Gaia shows her anger and you gain no insight that could lead you anywhere?

T: Meaning was made up by religions.

D: Religions were made up by people.

T: So you have faith then? How can you go about life believing in some wispy social construct? Don’t the contradictions get exhausting?

D: I’m not the one who yelled at a squirrel.

Theo stood up and kicked the drawer. Pain lanced up his leg and he cursed loudly. He caught a glimpse of a face in the small oval mirror hung up on the wall, crumpled into a hateful snarl. His face, he realized. A stranger. Theo typed a last message to ddville slowly, hitting each button with twice the force he needed to.

T: Fuck you. I’m going to kill myself.

He shoved the front door open and threw the phone as hard as he could. It smacked into the paved suburban road with a crunch. Leaving the door wide open, he began walking. He had no particular direction, but felt the roiling clouds to the west calling to him. His mind blackened in the outside sun and he squinted angrily at the world.

His feet carried him several miles through the criss cross of small town suburbia. The coastal breeze flung the red bath robe he had on about behind him. People stared as he passed and he stared back, meeting their eyes with the intensity of the eye of a hurricane. Every one looked away.

The coastal cliffs dropped off abruptly, across the street from the small shopping district. There was a path cut into the side of one of the cliffs, a steep climb down that was assisted by a rope tied to a concrete pillar at the top. Theo stumbled down, dropping his bare feet onto the sand below.

The wind whipped the sea into the air, spraying Theo’s face. His cheeks dappled pink from cold gusts.

But Theo didn’t mind the cold. The chilling numb of the wind was comforting, despite his body so used to the scorch of California summers. The roiling ocean spun itself into a furious froth at the edges of waves. White tongues of foam licked his sand-speckled feet. He let the cold seep in through his skin. Let the waves diffuse through the membrane and mix with his blood. Their wildness coursed through his veins and for a brief moment he felt the chaos of his tortured mind dissolve into the salt sea. Dried tears on his face were indistinguishable from the decomposing air, rock, and water of the seaside cliffs. His hands relaxed, no longer itching to tear his hairs from their follicles.

The cliff jutted up from the beach thirty or forty feet high. It dripped with ice plant and lichen clinging to rocks and dry golden brush. Wind raced up from the south along the cliffs and buffeted Theo’s back as he walked up the beach towards a section of rocky tidepools and broken cliff chunks that walled off the end of the stretch. His red bath robe fluttered in the wind behind him like a bloody flag.

When he neared the end of the beach, his knees buckled. The rocks jutted up like the teeth of an ancient skeleton around him. He lay on the sand and let the foamy water lap into his hands, swallowing them. How he wanted the waves to take him away. To lift him from his body and mind and let him travel the currents in bliss. He was not a man, he knew, not anymore. Eyes that beheld him understood him solely as a thing, a bitter and angry insect. An ugly scrap of shit to be flushed away. He had been castrated in the fire. His personhood had been stolen, and with it his will to be a person. He desired manhood no longer, now only desired the decomposition of his soul, and so made a silent prayer to Gaia to dissolve his mind in the foam that swirled in his hands.

The wind carried a strange rasp through the giant’s teeth. Its rhythm dragged Theo back from prayer. It was eerily familiar, and had an echoing quality to it that made all the hair on his body stand on end. Breathing.

Something twisted in his stomach. He had heard the sounds of an old, dying patient back in the hospital briefly as they were gurneyed past his room once. Its raspy echo had burrowed into his mind. Death rattle. Where had he heard that phrase? Maybe one of the nurses. He lifted his sopping body from the sand and stared at the boulders. He took several deep breaths, listening to the lung creaks, then set his jaw and walked forward, pulling himself up and on top of the lowest rock.

Theo almost fell over when he saw the dying thing laying in the tidepool. It was about twice the size of himself, from it’s head to the tips of its tail. Most of its body was covered in black and red scales. The tail looked like a cross between a dolphin’s tail and a sturgeon’s, with sharp ridges that lined its edges and contours. The shiny scales covered all of it’s back, the sides of its abdomen, and parts of its neck, head and arms, giving way to soft, dark brown skin on the belly, face, and hands, the most human-looking parts of it. It was clearly very injured, a sharp rock embedded into its flank had torn away a number of scales to reveal gray-blue flesh, and red blood was slowly seeping into the pool it lay in. The pool was dark with blood already from other cuts along its tail and chest, and the flesh on its back was mangled and white, but also blackened in parts as if it had been burned.

Theo’s cheeks flushed hot despite the wind at the sight of the charred flesh, and the impossibility of the scene made him dizzy. He had to do something, say something or he would fall out of himself. It looked dead, but the breathing…

“H-hello?” Theo croaked. The creature’s tail moved suddenly, throwing droplets of water in his direction. A drop landed between his eyes and he nearly fell backwards off of the boulder, but managed to catch himself on the rock shakily. The creature turned its head to stare right into Theo’s eyes, and he saw this was no costume. Its face lay bare a wound much deeper than the rock stuck through its side.

The two beings stared at each other. Each set of eyes poured into the other from across the tide pool. Beyond the wounds, the creature was beautiful. The black scales that began around the abdomen shimmered with greens, purples, and blues when the sun caught them. Bright red scales dotted a grooved belly, reminding Theo of an Amazonian fish he had seen in a documentary. A fin crested out where hair would have been, and an oblong face framed hard set, dilated eyes. It bared its teeth; long, sharp needles sprouted from full dark lips. There was a rawness in the expression, of pain and defiance, that sent a shiver down Theo’s spine. Then, in a grinding, alien voice, it spoke.

“What have you done to us?” It sputtered, barely audible over the wind. Its lips trembled violently. Chest heaved from the effort of speaking.

Theo stared back in shock. He tried to speak, but found his head empty of coherence. A sudden burst of rage from the creature sent him grasping at the rock once more.

“Why?!” The mermaid demanded. “What more do you need? You steal our food, our oceans! You kill us for the riches in our deep! They died at your hand. I died at your hand!”

Theo was paralyzed. He felt for this poor survivor, although he couldn’t fully understand why. He wanted to help it, and felt he deserved this. His eyes welled up with tears.

Kin. Plundered as he had been plundered. Sibling from the Deep.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“I have no use for your tears, I come from an ocean of them,” it rasped. “Return me to the sea to die.”

Theo didn’t move. He couldn’t. He fought back the tears.

“I will not beg,” it said as it lowered its head onto a rocky ledge. The scrape of vestigial, broken lungs winded down as Theo forced his body to move. Move forward, up, over and then down into the cool ripple of the reddening tidepool.

He would do as it asked. I’m dreaming, he thought. The mermaid's words reverberated around his skull. It was so far outside of anything he knew to be true, and the strangeness of it surged through him in a light headed spell that threatened to overwhelm him. Dreaming. He focused hard, controlled himself. Dream or not, the pain in his foot was real. A cut from the rocks. The tidepool swirled with two bloods now.

There it was, right in front of him, real as the rock that had sliced him. Its scales were slick and hard. Skin slippery and rough. Real, breathing raggedly in his arms as he gently coaxed its body off of the protruding rock and dragged it over the edge of the tidepool. Hands shook. Pajama pants soaked. His feet were slowly numbing. He waded out far enough where the creature would not be dragging against the sand. Their wake ran red in the waves behind them.

The creature was no longer moving. Theo turned it over, slowly. Its eyes rolled back limply, unblinking. Its mouth hung open exposing sharp rows of white teeth.

It was dead.

Theo felt cold for the first time since he had arrived at the beach. He let go of the body and let it drift into the waves that pushed and pulled around his waist. It floated just below the surface looking upwards through a red film. Theo felt a wild urge to plunge into the waves and follow it, to bring its body back to its kin, if it had any. To die in the salt sea and rot alongside it.

He turned and waded back to shore, shivering. He looked at his feet. They were red and raw. One was bleeding. Theo watched them as they jerked forward along the beach, climbed up the cliff, and trudged painfully across asphalt and concrete.

The walk passed in a daze. Nothing embedded itself into Theo’s memory. Only gray flashes of light and sound broke past the red film glazing his senses. He walked until his house rounded a corner and inflated into view. His mother’s car was parked in the driveway.

He stopped in front of the house, suddenly very aware of his environment. The imminence of his family screeched across the front lawn, giving Theo a start: the pile of birdseed where the feeder had been cleaned up, the movement in the kitchen, the car waiting for him. He would never have the words to describe the experience, and they wouldn’t believe him even if he did. He wasn’t particularly sure it had happened at all.

A pile of stuffed black trash bags sat fresh on the porch. He prodded one of them with his foot. Blood smeared on the black plastic.

The door opened. Theo couldn’t bring himself to look up into his mother’s face, instead stared at the crinkled bloody bag.

“You look awful,” Bella said. Not his mother. She leaned against the doorway looking older than Theo had ever seen her. There was pity in her face, and sadness. For that look, Theo regretting leaving that morning, regretting throwing the stick, regretting messaging ddville. He met Bella’s soft eyes and a tear seared in the corners of his own. He grimaced, feeling the pain in his joints and muscles, the stabbing in his foot and rawness of his heels.

“What are these?” Theo asked, nodding at the trash bags. His voice sounded as if he had left it on the beach.

“Mom’s kicking you out. You’ve been sick, Theo, but we can’t keep taking care of you like this. She rented you an apartment for a month, but after that it’s on you.”

Theo looked back at his feet in silence.

“I’m sorry…”

“What for, Theo? Do you even know what you’re doing?”

Theo shook his head.

“I guess you’ve gotta figure that out then.”

Part Four