Fantastic Metropolis

It took five hours, until my fingertips were red and my back ached terribly. Duncan looked not only exhausted but diminished by the ordeal. We had moved back to the livingroom, and there we sat, surrounded by the remains of a thousand mushrooms. It could have been a typical family scene—the aftermath of a hair cut—except that Duncan had left something more profound behind than just his hair. Already the red brightness had begun to fade from his eyes, his hands less rubbery, the half-moons of his fingernails light purple.

I had opened a window to get the smell of mushrooms out and now, by the wet, glistening outside lamps, I could see the beginning of a great, almost invisible, translucent migration—from the broken remains at our feet, from the burgundy bell-shaped fungus, from the inverted wine glasses, from the yellow-green nodules. Like ghosts, like spirits, a million tiny fruiting bodies—motes in the eye of God—in a thousand intricate shapes, like terrestial jellyfish oh what am I trying to say so badly except that they were beautiful, gorgeous, as they fled out the window, to be taken by the wind. In the faint light. Soundlessly. Like souls. (There’s no way I can capture it for you, Mary, no matter how hard I have tried, and maybe that is where the failure occurred. Not all experiences are universal, even if you’re in the same room when something miraculous occurred. Mary, couldn’t you have taken it on faith?)

In that instant, almost in tears from the combination of exhaustion, beauty, and fear of the unknown, I think I caught a glimpse of what Duncan saw. Of what had created the ecstasy I had seen in him when he had stumbled into my apartment five hours before. A hundred, a thousand years, before.

“Look…,” I said, pointing to the spores.

“I know,” my brother said. “I know, Janice.” Such regret in that voice, mixed with a last lingering joy. “I’m less than I was, but I’ve captured it all here.” He tapped his head, which still bore the scars of its invaders in the echo of color, in the scrubbed redness of it. “And the spores are part of the record. They will float back to where I’ve been, navigating by wind and rain and by ways we cannot even conceive of, and they will report to the gray caps, in their fragmented way. Who I was. Where I was. What I did. It will make it all the more dangerous next time.”

I sat upright in my chair. I looked across the room at him, dressed now in the rags of his picked-apart clothes, between us the wreckage of fungal life, and I realized I didn’t understand him. That I probably couldn’t ever understand him fully without going where he had gone.

“Yes, well, Duncan, it’s been a long night,” I started to say, upon which his eyes rolled up in their sockets and he fell to the soft floor, dead asleep. I had to drag his thrush-like frame to the couch. There he remained for two days, sleeping. I sent a message to my employer (an art gallery) that I was sick, went out only for food and to buy him some new clothes, and I watched over him while he slept. He slept peacefully, except for five or six times when he slipped into a nightmare that made him twitch, convulse, cry out in a strange language that sounded like birdsong. I remember staring down at his pale, pale face and thinking that he resembled in texture and in color nothing more or less than a mushroom.