Fantastic Metropolis

“Don’t be,” he said, “don’t be afraid,” scaring me even more. “It’s a function of diet. It’s a function of disguise. I haven’t changed. I’m still your brother. You are still my sister. All of this will wash away, I’ll have a good meal or two and all of this will fade. It’s just the layers added to me the past three months. I just need help scraping them off.”

I laughed. “You look like some kind of clown… some kind of mushroom clown.”

He took off his overcoat, let it fall to the floor. “I accept your ridicule. One must when one looks ridiculous.”

“But where have you been? How did… this happen?” I asked.

He put a finger to his lips. “I’ll answer your questions if you’ll help me first—get rid of this second skin. It itches. And it’s dying.”

So I helped him. It was not as simple as having him step out of his clothes because the mushrooms had eaten through his clothes and attached themselves to his poor pale skin. A madness of mushrooms, mottling his skin—no uniform shape or variety or size. Some pulsed a strobing pink-blue. Others radiated a dull, deep burgundy. A few hung from his waist like upside down wine glasses, translucent and hollow, the space inside filled with clusters of tiny button-shaped green-gold nodules that disintegrated at the slightest touch. Textures from rough to smooth to rippled to grainy to slick. Smells—the smells all ran together into an earthy, vaguely minty, but not unpleasant tang. The mushrooms even made noises if you listened carefully enough—a soft pough as they released spores, an intermittent whine when left alone, a pop as they became ghosts through my rough relocations.

“Remember BDD when you three had to wash all that oil and mud off of me?” he said as we both worked with scrubbing implements and towels in the bathroom. Of course I did. Duncan, his usual mad, exploring BDD self had managed to get stuck in a sewer pipe under our block and we had to pull him out after a frantic half-hour searching for the source of his pathetic, echoing voice. Then me, mom, and dad spent another three hours forcing the black-gray sludge off of him, finally standing back to observe the miracle we had wrought: a perfectly white Duncan, “probably as clean as he’s ever been,” as dad observed. Did he ever tell you these things, Mary, while the lights flickered outside his apartment’s windows?

BDD (Before Dad Died—that’s important). A grim little acronym meant to help us remember when we had been a happy family. If we had arguments or bouts of depression that threatened to get out of control, one of us would remind the others that we had all behaved differently BDD. We held BDD time in our minds as a sanctuary whenever our anger, our loss, became too great. ADD, Duncan became withdrawn, no longer explored his environment, but instead explored the inside of his own head.

Duncan’s remark made me laugh, and the task at hand no longer seemed so strange. I was just helping clean Duncan up after another BDD exploration mishap, while Duncan looked on half in relief, half in dismay, as the badges of his newly-gained experience fell away, revealed as transitory.

Me, I felt as if I were destroying a vast city, a community of souls. On one level I lived with the vague sense of guilt every Ambergrisian feels who can trace their family’s history back to the founding of Ambergris. For us, a mushroom signifies the genocide practiced by our forefathers, but also the Silence and our own corresponding loss. Can anyone not from Ambergris understand the fear, loss, guilt each of us feels when we eradicate mushrooms from the outsides of our apartments, houses, public buildings? The exact amount of each emotion in the pressure of my finger and thumb as I pulled them from their suction cup grip on Duncan’s skin.