You’re a rain forest.
You’re an environment. A world. A planet inhabited by life-forms more alien than anything invented in science fiction.
She threw the washcloth down and had to resist the urge to use her fingernails to scrape every inch of her skin.
It wouldn’t help. It would just create some new horror, ripping the trees from the soil, piling the dead skin in clumps, revealing blood-tinged undersoil, exciting the rise of lymphocytes rushing to close off contamination while bacteria propagated and viruses—thankfully they were too small to be seen even down at the nano—rushed to squeeze inside her, spread through her blood, and eat her alive.
She was panting, holding on to the sink with both hands and then wondering what the hell was growing on that sink. How would the cracked porcelain look down there, up close?
They’d retrieved her biot and put it back in cold storage. But she felt it still. Felt them both. Tiny windows would open in her field of vision, and she would see groggy biots barely moving, slowed by cold, on the pink plain of sterile medium.
She would have thrown up, but the thought of what might come out of her mouth …
Plath left the bathroom, shaky, mind turning back again and again and again, drawn back and never escaping the memories and the reality.
She opened the door to her room. Her cell.
She sat on the edge of her bed and tears came. She wanted to cry without thinking of giant waterfalls splashing over crawling demodex, of the tears briefly refreshing dead skin, carrying fungi and pollen and bacteria and—
“Just cry, goddamnit!” she told herself.
Cry for this miserable room.
Cry for the trap she’d stepped into.
Cry for the loss of simplicity, the loss of the simple notion that a boy’s blue eyes were blue because the sky wanted to be reflected in them, and not colorless and not a million miles deep through a dark tunnel ringed with spasming fibers and—
“Stop it!”
Suddenly she slapped herself. Hard. The fact that it hurt was almost a surprise. The giant hand with its agricultural furrows and bright beads of sweat had hurtled through the air to land on the surface of her face, and the result was a sting.
Sensations shooting through nerve endings, twitch-twitch-twitch, and hello, there: brain says someone slapped us in the face.
A knock. The door.
She knew it was him. She didn’t want to see him. But she couldn’t say no. How did you say no to someone who had spent the day crawling through the folds of your brain?
She opened the door. She didn’t try to hide the fact that she had been crying.
He didn’t try to hide the fact that he’d seen things he would never be able to get out of his mind. The eyes were too wide, the mouth too shocked. Hours had passed, and he still looked like a near-miss victim in a horror movie.
For a moment both of them seemed to forget that they had the power of speech. They just shared their trauma with a look.
And then something simply irresistible took hold of Plath, and she grabbed his head and pulled him to her. Waxed-paper lips on waxed-paper lips. Eyes closed. Fierce. Breathing onto each other’s face. Who knew what horrors on tongues that found each other within a Carlsbad of mouth, a vast, dark cave guarded by tombstone teeth.
And for a time measured only in seconds, they both forgot.
Their hearts accelerated. The blood surged through arteries, delivering it to parts where it might be needed. Diaphragms tightened. Hormones flooded. Fingers searched through hair without thinking of mites or of Seussian forests.
For those few seconds they forgot.
And then, with a shock they were apart.
They stood now with several feet between them. Panting. Staring at each other. Amazed. Bodies still telling them to take a step, to close that space again, to wrap an arm, touch, stroke, taste, stiffen, and open.
Still they said nothing. Way beyond words, the words would only confuse what they both knew at that moment. They had found the way to shut out the horror, at least for a time. A few seconds of time that might be stretched into minutes.
It was Plath who finally broke the silenc