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One Thousand Snakes

I

It always amazes me the elegance and blatant debauchery of fate and its incomprehensible machinations, the way it makes out our lives to be little more than chess pieces, to use that tired cliché. Fate, destiny, God, chance, it has a hundred names but it carries with it the same significance and enacts the same business. No need to change the nametag when everybody's concerned with what's in the suitcase.

He didn't see me as he passed me down the hallway between the infirmary and the barracks, his boots banging hard on the steel plating, but I saw him; I saw the proud tilt of his black muzzle, a familiar self-conscious grin cracking his face, his new navy jacket untucked and swaying lazily in the air with his arms. He was still six-foot-six, a California ranch hand who preferred the musty shadows and neon kaleidoscope of streets and alleyways, his arms and legs thin but sinewy with hidden muscle. It was so hard to tell under all that black fur. His eyes were bright green, jade defects in marble spheres, shimmering with a domineering spark, his arms and tail moving with a seductive, self-assured sway.

There used to be a series of earrings tracing the outer edge of both ears, but they were gone now, and his hair had been severely abridged. Nevertheless, I knew I was not, could not, be mistaken as to the wolf's identity. I knew him by every physical motion, his jauntiness, the smell of his body fused with budget deodorant heavy in the air.

Not a day goes by, or whatever passes for day down here five miles under the rakish blue surface of the Atlantic, that I do not wonder in what direction my life would have gone had I not met him. Things would have been different. Oh yes, things would have been a lot different.

When he passed me, his arm almost bumping into my clipboard, I could only stare at the man who had ruined my life. I watched him go, walking down the hall and into the conference room, the "brain room," as it is informally known; it was a noticeable contrast to have him going into a room with that moniker. Almost at once, memories that I didn't want to recall began to press into my mind, pushing against calcium walls with a zeal that bordered on wickedness. I headed back to the north lab, eager to get back to work, not really sure if I would be getting any work done.

I'm not one of the legion of scientists that had been hired aboard the Charybdis, I'm an electrician, a fact that many in the laboratories try to point out as often as possible. They can piss and moan, but without me they're precious work couldn't go on. It's cold down here, with tons upon tons of water pressing down on every square inch; a lot of things happen to the generators and motors down here, to the miles of cable and wiring, and being one of only five people to handle each and every issue that pops up is a serious job. They can complain, but when the lights go out I'd like to let them all beg for us to get to work.

If the lights go out, they wouldn't get the chance to complain, I thought with a chill. I slid my keycard through the recognition slot, then waved the barcode over the electric eye. A light above shone green and the door slid back with a mechanical whisper. I stepped into the airlock, the door hissing shut behind me, anticipating the explosive sound of depressurization, the rush of chemical agents being pumped down from ceiling pipes to eradicate any contaminants. That over, I stepped into the glaring artificial light of the north laboratory, to the annoyed glances of several of the assistants and technicians. I ignored them, fingering my clipboard as I went through my itinerary. Scientists are a funny breed; they always want to show the world the next new thing but when once confronted with the world they become distant and filled with contempt.

I listened to them as they studiously lapsed back into their circles. It's from them that I can glean the only bits and pieces of information that float in from the outside world, that world above where I presume there is still a sun. They talk about the war, but they don't talk about the casualties; they smile and chuckle over how informed we are now after the war with the Deep Ones--as they were so dramatically named by the vulturous media conglomerates--broke out twelve years ago. They fawn over the new samples of Megascylla Vulgaris, a gigantic thing that bore characteristics of sea anemones and squids, acting more like a carnivorous sponge. They comment on its fleshy, almost ethereal body and its curious markings, and they wonder over how it is capable of existing down here and how it can support its girth with an astoundingly low metabolism, neglecting to remind themselves of how many people might have died during its containment or by accidentally wandering into its path.

A funny breed.

It was the fourteenth today, mid-January; the moon would be waning tonight, a giant's rib bone cutting the sky. Fragments of Ymir. I would like to get some work done on my novel, barring any accidents that need my attention, but I doubt I'd make any headway.

After seeing Jake again, I wouldn't be making much headway in anything.

I finished up my routine, loitering around the switchboard so I could listen to the lab coat gossip. It was nothing of interest, a cycle of marriages and infatuations leading into a debate of whose relatives kept getting plastered. I almost laughed; they were reproving of the action, yet you could tell that they were fervently going to great lengths to make out their alcoholic relatives to be the one most direly in need of help. I eventually grew tired of the antiseptic sewing circle and headed back out into the hallway.

There was twenty minutes left on my shift, and I still had to check out the circuit breakers in the south-quadrant bathrooms and the recreation rooms, as well as the standby generators. Twenty minutes to do the work of an hour. I walked as quickly as I could, my shoes pounding and resounding through the octagonal hallway, my head starting to ache as memories crashed into each other like billiard balls.

The war was made official by President Cromwell in 2026, but the first whispers of conflict had already been rippling across the waters some time prior to that. I remember a special news report just breaking about a series of derelict ships and other watercraft disappearing as though into the mist all along the Atlantic Ocean, ruining trade and commerce, sending nations on edge. I didn't think much of it at the time, because this would be a few days before my divorce with Julie. The world and I began falling apart roughly the same time.

Like the rising Atlantic temple-cities, our marital issues had been long in coming, with the problem being an unspoken one. Indeed, we didn't talk a whole lot about anything in those final, nerve-racking days. There was a period when I had thought that the oceanic war would make both of us realize how inconsequential our problems were, how silly and stupid it would be to have an annulment at such a pivotal and terrifying time, and I often wondered if she felt the same way, but we were fading too far and too fast. Julie had taken the house and much of everything else, which I didn't much mind. She didn't once consider taking our son, Daniel.

I spend a lot of nights thinking about that, the expression on her face when I mentioned our son in that humid, uncooled courtroom in mid-August, looking at me as if just remembering we had a child.

I had little else apart from the two-floor in Montana and the Prius. Daniel and I moved to Minnesota, happily taken in by my sister Sara and her wife until I had enough to purchase a little place, almost as big as our Montana home. I could see how all of the moving around was affecting Daniel, the far-off look in his small grey eyes, but I tried to cloud that over by coming up with games, buying him books when I could. Sara tells me that he is already an avid reader at ten years old.

Ten years old, oh my god. I haven't seen him since his ninth birthday.

I knew children were their best during these years. Even though he looked more like his mother, the boy did come from my loins, and if he turned out to be anything like me I knew I had to instill some morality into him as soon as possible.

II

I yawned as I stepped heavily into my quarters, expelling a gust of weariness. I hadn't brushed my teeth in a while, a good long while, and I could taste the foul pathogenic cloud that wavered around my mouth. Ignoring them, I sat down on my bed and grabbed my laptop, sitting down in front of me as I sat cross-legged on the mattress.

There is little else to my room apart from the bed, a series of shelves lining most of the walls, and a writing desk. To decrease the risk of implosion, a phenomenon rather common five miles down, they had the portholes removed.

The writing desk was a foldout--they had to cut expenses somewhere if they wanted to keep the flow of torpedoes and mines and sonic artillery coming.

I turned on my laptop, struggled with the password I was given by one of the cyber spooks in top brass, and navigated through my documents until I reached the beginnings of my novel. I opened it up and stared at the title.

I'm calling it "One Thousand Snakes;" I had always had an infatuation with the old spaghetti westerns, the dime novels, the television shows, and the tall tales of sweat, blood, and sand that never stopped being added to and embellished over the years, stories of perilous mountain men and legends of the west, like a particle of sand slowly accruing calcium and nacre in the mantle of a clam. I loved the romantic ideals behind the stories, and the darker, disturbing secrets that townships have tried to keep hidden. Coming from a tiny mountain town, I understood that.

Which is why it bothered the hell out of me whenever I opened up the file and could only see the title, in size-fourteen Garamond font, underlined and emboldened, and the ocean of white beneath. I don't really know the story quite yet; all too often I'd have an idea for the plot, and I'd get all queued up to write it out and then, once my eyes look into the albino vastness, everything clouds over, pushed back into some dim region to be forgotten.

I thought of One Thousand Snakes, what it could mean, the literal, the metaphysical, and the slang denotations. I imagined a mass of serpents, a wave of adders coiling and flowing over one another as a whispering, grey-black wave, the degree of fear that that might cause to someone who had a phobia; an entire library could be devoted to a snake's affiliation with healing, rebirth, resurrection, the earth, immortality, fertility, sexuality, and wisdom; it's an animal that symbolizes the sexuality of both men and women--not long ago, Neolithic pottery had been found in Ukraine showing a pregnant woman surrounded by snakes, protecting her womb; the serpent is ambivalence incarnate, displaying roles of life and death; a thousand deities of the old ages past have chosen the snake as their personal symbol, or use them to some divine purpose; when Christianity came along, snakes became associated with Satan and Hell, violently demoting by affiliation the significance of women and the planet in society.

Carl Jung states that snakes are representations of the underworld (not to share the Christian terminology of that word), primordial matter, the dark, the unknown, the Earth, and the primal. The deepest secrets and eldritch mysteries of the universe are protected by snakes.

A snake is also a term to mean a liar, a conniving fiend. Jake's face surged to the front of my mind, his canine face pulled up in a cocky smile, the pupils of his jade eyes reptilian slits. I remembered those green eyes boring into me, the glint of his teeth before he leaned down to nip at my neck and my ears, the chime of his cowrie shell necklace, the damp heat of his tongue as it ran along my cheek, seeking out my lips. And every time he did that my hands would fly up to push him back, but they would almost immediately fall away, melting with whatever mental safeguards I had.

I think I loved him, I don't know. I hated him afterward.

I stared hard at the achromatic screen, feeling nothing coming to me. I kept seeing his face, his damn self-assured face, and nothing else. I clicked out of the document, shut the laptop, set it away under the cupboard, and lay on my back. I stared at the stiff piping that curved along the blue-steel ceiling, not really seeing it. I was tired, but I couldn't sleep; I was hungry, but I didn't really want to eat. I decided that a shower would be the best remedy.

My legs were the only things with any energy as I walked to the showers, nodding tiredly to other tech-heads and some of the navy guys who had enough courteousness to spare a sympathetic smile. The halls were musty and reeked with recycled air; if the filtration system didn't kick in soon, we'd all be breathing memories of each other's lunch, and it was bad enough the first time around.

I was greeted by the rush of a toilet being flushed, sewage suction in the pipes above as I entered the bathrooms, the showers sharing a separated area in the same room. It was nice to know that, between me and the black, unforgiving abyss of the ocean outside these walls, there was a layer of piss and shit constantly coursing through the ducts and snake-bowels. Our taxes are being put to some damn good use. I went to my locker, placed my clothes inside, and grabbed one of the complimentary towels--it was a shock of gladness and relief when my fingers felt it was dry.

I stepped into the showers, almost tripping over myself. There was nobody else in here except for me, and I liked that just fine. My day shift would begin in a mere ten hours, leaving not much room for frivolities--I stepped under one of the phallic faucets and twisted the knob beneath, sending a spray of mild water over my face. I cupped the water into my hands and splashed it over my face, running it through my hair as I tried to shut off my thoughts and just relax. Both Sara's wife Catherine and Dr. Voight, my part-time therapist, say I need to relax, an act that is far easier to talk about compared to doing it.

I let the water wash over me, cool bleeding into hot, my ears picking up stray slices of conversation from the lockers outside.

"This is it, man, this is gonna be it. The final fuckin' push, man! One more mission and we're going to win this thing." I recognized that voice as belonging to a navy Corporal named Bowes, with its overflowing enthusiasm. The other voice was calmer, more lethargic and quiet, and rife with the soul of a cynic.

"Sure about that, are you?"

"Yeah! We got a secret weapon they don't know about."

"There's more water than land on this planet, Flint. For every one secret weapon we've got, they've probably got a hundred."

"Doesn't matter. We know how the fish-people communicate, we know their social order, and we know where their orders are coming from; we don't just have a target, we have the target."

"And what is the target, pray tell?"

"That temple-city they call Yahn-Lohai. You know, the big one, with all those weird twisty walls and corners, all made up with that white gold of theirs?"

"You mean the one we've so wisely parked beside?"

"Hell yeah! Everything we've got is trained right on their ugly asses. Twelve hours from now--right _now--_there won't be a single thing living in that place. Shame to see all that gold go to waste, though."

"Hmph, don't worry about that. I don't doubt that somehow it'll find its way from the bottom of the sea to the bottom of some celebrity's fuckin' pockets."

"What's wrong with you today, Joe?"

The cynic named Joe mumbled something I could barely hear through the spray, something like "ran out of coffee." I tuned out the rest of what they had to say, couldn't be bothered with it. I really didn't give a damn about how the war was going, how far forward or back we are. It really didn't matter to me. I was just some electrician who hadn't seen his son in over a year, who was trying to secure funds for him--whatever I would get from my novel, if anything, would go directly into a bank account for him. I thought about what would happen if anything happened to me down here, and I knew that Sara and Catherine would take good care of him.

I thought about the last time we were together, at his birthday. There was a blank look on his face as he tried to remember who I was. For a moment, one moment too long, my son had forgotten his father.

I shook my head, the thought sliding out of my ears as I started rubbing the water into my fur. I heard the two men by the lockers give a hello to someone just entering, not caring. I heard the door shut as they left, the slam of a locker, naked footsteps on the shower's tiled floor.

The machinations of the universe are funny, as inscrutably funny as they are monstrous. I heard the spray of the shower next to mine, saw a shadow step underneath it, smelled the hot stench of his sweat and deodorant. Through the water coating my eyes I could see his naked body, the just noticeable shadow of abdominal muscles, level stomach, the brush of pubic fur failing to cover the pink flesh of his manhood.

"Hello, Jake," I said, the words sounding explosive in the bare room.

"Hi." There was a curious expression on his face. He couldn't remember me. He exemplified this by saying "Do I know you?"

I didn't look at him, just kept my eyes staring straight at the ugly tile wall, the color of dried vomit. Years of anger surged up into my chest and into my right arm; I wanted to grab him by the fur of his chest and hit him over and over again. But I remembered what he had done for me, the things he had said, the things we had done together driving down Van Nuys Boulevard and all around. I didn't want to look at him, needing his eyes.

"You used to call me 'Sugartail,' before you started calling me 'Blue Eyes.'"

There was a long pause, filled with the electric current of memory. "Holy shit," was all he said, didn't need to say more. I grabbed the soap and started running it over my chest, more to have something to do than anything.

"Well, how have you been?"

A dead smile made my lips curl back and up, the water brushing against my teeth. How have I been? If you only knew, you jackass.

"Could be better," I said.

"Damn, it must've been ten years since I've seen you--."

"Seven."

"Right, right. I'm sorry I didn't call."

That did it. The soap flew out of my hand, leaving frothy white streaks to run down my front, the water taking no prisoners, showing no mercy. I turned to look up at him, at this self-conscious prick who at one time I had feelings for. When I spoke, my voice was a growl, drawn from a well of hate that had been pooling for a long time.

"My life was ruined because you kept calling, you shit."

"Huh?"

"You mindless son of a bitch! Is there nobody but you in your universe? I had told you implicitly to stop calling me at home, but you kept doing it. Every fucking night! I told you that there would have been repercussions, I told you that somebody sooner or later would find out about us, and they did! My wife found out!

"Your w--you were married!?"

That stupefied look in his eyes, dumb expression again. I hated it then, and I hate it now.

"You _knew_I was! I told you I was...as if that matters anymore. I had to take my son and live with my sister for a few years, busting my ass--."

"Your what?"

"--to get enough money just to survive. Do you know what it's like to devote yourself to somebody and have that somebody take nearly everything away from you? Do you know what it's like to live day by day, hoping that you'll be alive for the next one, hoping that thousands of miles away your child still remembers who you fucking are!? Do you know what any of that's like? Is there no one in your goddamn universe but you!?"

My voice was like gunfire echoing along the walls, thunderclap vocalized. I didn't worry if anybody had heard me, just looked into the shocked expression of the big black wolf, hating him and hating the memories that assailed me like daggers behind my eyes. They were trying to rationalize everything, to put each event in my life into a contextually positive view, but that was impossible. Even if that happened, I wouldn't believe it.

He looked down at me, staring at me with those cracked jades of his. He shut off the spray above him, his eyes turning down to the floor, to the wall, back to the floor again.

"I'm sorry."

I couldn't think of any other words or phrases that held less import; anything more ineffectual would have been a lack of response. It never works, those two useless words, for any situation or occasion, like twigs trying to break stone. It didn't work when I told Julie those words, it didn't work when I told Daniel those words, and they would never work for anything. I only looked at him, daring him to do something, to react in some way, rather than imitate a statue.

"That's not good enough," I told him.

"Well, what the hell am I supposed to say? What happened had happened, it can't be fixed. Bad things happen to everybody, some worse than others. You just have to live through it and get on with things. The world isn't going to stop for one person. I'm sorry, but that's how things are. That's how they've always been, and that's not going to stop for you or anyone else."

I glared at him, rage building up and concentrating in my eyes, trickling down into my arms. There was a sound that was not unlike a switch being flicked, and I understood dimly that it was my knuckles cracking. My hands flew up to his face in a blur, my body acting on the merest impulses in my mind. Before he had brought up his arms to defend himself I already had my fingers locked around his neck. I couldn't have seen my face, but I don't doubt how I looked; my teeth bared, eyes wide and pupils pinched with endorphins. I followed him as he backed away, trying to retreat from my attack, the room mimicking the sounds we made.

I don't know which of us fell first, and it really didn't matter. My legs flew up from under me, we were in the air for a moment that felt longer than it should have been, and he struck the floor beneath me with a heavy, muffled sound. He grunted, blowing air in my face, forced out from his lungs. I didn't care anymore. I just kept my fingers gripping his neck, feeling something odd beneath the fur there. I ignored it, ignoring his hands grabbing at me, trying to disengage me.

Tears or shower water was falling out of my eyes. I looked into his face, scared and enraged, feeling the familiar heat on his body. I haven't seen him in so long.

"You fucker," I said before I kissed him. I put my mouth against his and let my tongue run against his teeth, tasting some kind of sandwich, peanut butter. I hadn't forgotten what he did to me, but I had forgotten this, his touch and his heat.

He probably thought I was trying to bite him; his hands pushed up against my chest, his knee jamming up into my stomach. The lurch of pain shot up into my throat, and I pulled away from him, needing too much.

I slid off of him, crept along the floor until I was sitting with my back against the wall. The water was slapping down on the floor, and for a second I had forgotten the shower was on; I thought the wall had sprung a leak and we were all going to die. Then I remembered that there wouldn't be just a little trickle if there was anything. This far down, a crack turns into a terminal fracture; the sudden pressure would make your skull cave in before you--.

"Hey."

I turned my head and the wolf was crouching beside me, giant shadow. He put a hand on my shoulder, making me flinch and want him just a little bit more. "Can't make up your mind?"

I chuckled, the laugh segueing quickly down into something that might have been stop-start weeping. How dare he take my seven years of scapegoating hate and miniaturize it into a joke. All at once, everything started to weigh down on me in one cloudy thought, the memories, the job and its perils, the state of the world, my wife, my son, all of it coalescing into a black fugue. There was no more uncertainty as to whether or not it was the water from the shower or my tears; I let the dam break, closing my eyes as I felt everything begin pushing down on me.

I felt his hands on my shoulders, remembering their touch. I wondered if he remembered how I liked being comforted, where he needed to put his hands to get me to calm down. He had forgotten, and I think I did, too.

Again, I am impressed by the wheelings and dealings of fate or whatever universal power that might exist in this reality. For the next twenty minutes, as long as it took for me to relax, to stand, to have Jake dry me off with his towel, and to return his embrace, the lockers and showers were not visited by anyone else. It was only us.

"I never really forgot you," he whispered into my ear, and I believed him. We held each other, leaning against the awful wall, I nuzzling the fur on his chest and he resting his chin on the top of my head. A while went by, time fading into a useless, inept concept as we held each other.

Enough time went by that I felt he needed to know the story.

III

After high school I had gone directly to university for a few years, carried by the false assumption and mass delusion that the legal world would really need my youth and charisma. I took electrical maintenance as a sideline, not thinking it would matter. Sometime during my studying for this or that exam I had succeeded in knocking up a wild, blonde-haired cougar from the country who, if I remember correctly, was studying to become a pathologist. She wasn't merely pretty or beautiful as those words are defined. They were dim, flickering flames compared to the actual magnificence of her body and mind. I married her perhaps two months after I had first met her.

Around the same time I met Julie, arguably some weeks before that, I had been frequenting various clubs along California. Among them was a tiny thing, more like something you'd find in the shadow of a real nightclub, a place whose name I can't remember, unimportant. Jake was a shadow in the darkness; I didn't know he was there, seated beneath the movie poster for Combat Shock and an advertisement for an upcoming concert, when I went over to the corner and slid into the booth beside him. It was an accident, and after a brief back and forth of politeness I stayed where I was and ordered a drink, which he bought. Time passed, alcohol was sampled, and we talked about each other, going as far as we wanted with strangers. He wanted to see me again, and I wanted to see him, too; he was cute, polite, but he seemed too aloof, too calm. I've always been suspicious of people who were too calm, but Jake was something else.

We met again about five times over a period of weeks, delving into different nightclubs and houses that posed as unofficial clubs. To me, Jake was somebody that showed me there was something other than laws and policies and worrying about grade point averages and being on time to presentations and lectures that, really, I gradually failed to see the point of. He made me realize how important _culture_was, the arts and life in general. He made me see the world, maybe not for what it was, but how he had seen it; just a big beautiful place. I told him I liked writing, and he slashed through my embarrassment, eager to tell me to start writing, to do whatever it took to live out my dreams.

Yes, I loved him, more than my future, some would argue. He was stronger than I was, mentally and physically. He was one of those people who stuck to something like super glue, not stopping until the task was totally finished, whereas I was one of those people who had an anxiety attack whenever the slightest problem made itself present.

Then Julie called to talk about the pregnancy test. With that one call, the adolescent in me aged by about a dozen years, forced into a world that suddenly became much larger than what he currently knew. I loved Jake, but Julie needed me; I married her and together we raised Daniel as best as we could. I didn't try to be a very good husband or a very good father, I just tried to be a husband and a father, but there were some days that were harder than others. Jake continued to call me, often at odd and inconvenient hours--my fault for giving him my cellphone number. But at uncommon intervals there would be times when I welcomed his voice, surviving just on its intonation. Sometimes I'd sneak out of the house to meet him at one of our usual haunts.

Then came the night Julie had caught me talking to Jake as we relayed private memories. The fight we had was incredible, my explanations faltering as the truth was laid out like a dissected insect under a biologist's microscope, exposed and scrutinized. Daniel was only three at the time, and the battle between his mother and father was made even more tempestuous because of his petulant wailing.

The courtroom was a swamp; I half-expected peat moss and fungi to start growing along the walls of the hot, humid courthouse. I remembered the blank expression on the judge's face, an older woman who undoubtedly had gone through a thousand cases like this; the feverish looks on each of our attorneys, each seeming like they had made bets on two children in a race. The papers were typed up and signed there, neither of us wanted to waste time. The expressionlessness of my wife's face when I mentioned our son...

I told Jake all of this and more, some things that had been lost in the shadowy cracks that I wouldn't tell anyone else, and he listened with all of his attention. I was impressed; something had happened to him in the past seven years, something that had extricated that distant quality of his and replaced it with perception and vigilance. His body was leaner, as well, trimmer and stronger. Well, he was wearing a navy uniform earlier...if that wasn't a big enough clue then I must have eyes like a shrimp.

"Do you have a picture of your kid?" he asked me, catching me off my guard. I said I did, and I dug into my locker for the wallet I had stuck into my pants pocket. I showed him the photo I had of Daniel, taken at his ninth birthday. He was sitting on my knee, an open book on the table in front of him, frosting smudging the corner of his smile. I had to remember to thank Sara for leaving my head out of frame. I had entirely forgotten about that.

I don't know why, but seeing my boy with my head missing out of shot filled me with a curious fusion of dread and gloom.

"Does he take more after his mother or you?"

"He looks more like Julie, yeah, but he's got my intellect."

"God help us."

I snickered at that, watching the smile on his face. I wondered about him, wondering if he had found someone over the course of seven long years. I didn't see a ring.

"What about you? Are you married?"

"No. I've never really had marriage on my mind. I used to see it as a big leash or an anchor, something to weigh you down and make sure you don't get anywhere."

"Used to?"

"This goddamn war, man. The media only ever talks about past victories and nothing else, which doesn't really surprise me; half of the shit we do is so backdoor that nobody's going to realize just how big this fight is until somebody finally discloses the information years from now. I just got back from Chicago, meeting some old friends. Half the people there don't even know a war is going on."

"What the hell are we doing here, then?"

"Hmph."

He looked at Daniel's photograph for a moment longer before handing it back to me, and our fingers touched. Maybe I imagined flinching, maybe I did it for real, but I felt something pass between us, a memory or perhaps a memory of a memory. I looked up into his eyes, jade flaws in marble, peridot spheres, seeing a spark of reminiscence deep in there. I grabbed his hand and leaned up to kiss him, and when my lips pressed against his he didn't push away or retreat. I felt his arms reach around me to rub against my back, feeling him pull me closer. "I'm sorry for what happened to you," he said, speaking into my hair.

I'm not, I wanted to say, but couldn't. I was too happy where I was.

When we pulled away, we looked at each other for a little bit longer. I wanted to tell him that I still loved him, but the words wouldn't come out, blocked by something. He probably knew anyway. We separated, threw our towels into the dirty laundry receptacle by the door and put our clothes back on. We exchanged information, our room and cellphone numbers. I asked him if he was doing anything and he laughed, saying he would be very busy over the next couple of days. He asked for a rain check and I nodded. We gave each other a brief hug, another look into each other's eyes, and he headed out the door. I watched him go, the colossal shadow that filled a red shirt and blue jeans, a tendril of fuzzy night swishing back and forth over his posterior.

Ten minutes later I was laying on my bed again, hands laced together behind my head, once more staring at the pipes that wound serpentine along the ceiling. I was tired, dead to the world, but I couldn't stop thinking about Jake. Too much had happened in the past few hours, too interwoven with the stain of memory and the sour hatred I'd been harboring for seven years to not think on it. It was like this monstrous weight, to use that old chestnut, had finally been removed from my chest and my mind.

I couldn't think of just the present, my parental mentality couldn't allow me to see through that small a lens anymore. I thought of what would happen after all of this, when the war is over--and wars do end, they always do--and I wondered where Jake would go afterward. I didn't ask him where he lived, if he still lived in California or somewhere else, if he was living with someone or not. It wasn't any of my business, but I hoped he wasn't.

I imagined what life would be like for Daniel having two dads.

Somewhere during the process, my mind had shut down, finally submitting to exhaustion and I fell asleep. I dreamed of whales and bigger things.

IV

When I woke up, I thought that a fragment of a nightmare had been stuck deep into my conscious reality, like a pathogenic splinter piercing skin. Some dreams don't want to be anything more than dreams, and you wake up with their effluence dripping down the walls of materiality, and that was what I thought this was. It was dark, the ceiling light burnt out or the power was dead, and klaxons were screaming from somewhere in the guts of the facility.

Do whales scream?

It hit me like a hard slap; I leapt up off the bed, my clothes slick and fragrant with sweat-stink. I knew by repetition of movement and position that the door was three feet away from the bed. When I threw open the door, it was like opening a door to hell; my room flooded with charnel light, the world screaming metallic-electric dystopia, people were running down the hallway and trying to shout over the siren. I shouted to a passing silhouette, someone who looked like a doctor out of his uniform, but he didn't stop, continued on his sprint to wherever he was going.

I didn't know what to do or where to go; the facility had become total fucking bedlam. In the knot of panic-thoughts that gibbered inside my head one came up to the front, a brighter glimpse than the others. I thought of the power, worried that something had happened and we were running on the standby, but this was automatic; the primary lights were designed to shut off in the case of an external emergency, replaced by the glaring blood-lights. Were this a generator issue, there would have been no siren.

Fear and something almost as primeval tore through me, driving away the memory of protocol, of what I was trained to do in this situation. I was an electrician, so what role did an electrician have in this case? Was I even given protocol for this?

I walked out of the darkness of my room and calmly shut the door behind me, locking it with my designated key. I started walking, feeling myself drawn into a force, a current of paranoia, as I followed several unidentifiable personnel, my pace speedily quickening into a trot, then a rapid jog. The men headed into the long, circular brain room, and I followed them. I didn't have the clearance to be here, and truth be told I didn't want to be here, but in the heat of the unknown I merely followed the vein of horror here. The man who held the door open did not notice my lack of uniform or keycards, surely believing that I, like dozens of others here, had been woken out of sleep into whatever madness this was.

I only hoped that it was a temporary madness, a brief seizure before a lasting tranquility.

But hope, like a lot of things, is a brittle, cracking thing; it disintegrates when you try to shift it or add too much to it. I stood in the back of the long, circular room, looking at all of the faces lit by a rainbow of colors that flashed or stayed solid on the series of three large screens mounted into the wall. Large, powerful desktop computers were also active, leading me to believe that this was where the majority of unmanned vehicles were operated. I could see tension on every face, eyes wide with adrenaline, and I know my face displayed the same feeling.

"What the hell's going on?"

A short, sturdily-built Labrador stalked into the room, a higher-ranking officer--I couldn't make out what rank he was exactly, his back was to me. His uniform swung loosely around him and his hat was askew, suggesting a pre-emptive, unexpected situation. A youngish lizard was seated at one of the desktops, his eyes glued to the screen. He answered the officer's question after clearing his throat, his voice high and edgy.

"Sir, stalkers one and two are reporting direct hits to target, five in total. The Deep Ones are already executing a counterattack."

"That didn't take 'em long," a voice said, male and gruff, trying to ice over the fear we all heard.

"They're panicked," a woman said in the far corner. "They don't know what's happened, so they're striking out at anything they can see, like ants after you've kicked in their house."

"Well, we certainly kicked the shit out of their house," the higher brass Labrador said, shades of Slim Pickens. "Let's hope we can reel our foot back in before we get it bitten off."

Moments crawled into minutes. Faces were staring intently at the screens above, voices muttering, questions being answered to fuel more questions. It was all military-tech jargon that I only half-understood, trying and failing to piece out the acronyms and numbers. Apparently, a joint attack had been laid down on the temple-city Yahn-Lohai, the national capital of the Deep Ones, from several fronts. I didn't need to ask what sort of weaponry had been deployed there. The most recent and ultraviolent addition to any developed country's arsenal; seismic bombs, heavily modified warheads mounted into special torpedoes designed for activity in such crushing depths. I realized now that that was what had set off the outside warning sensors, the collective blast from the geo-centric explosives created a shock wave that I was sure would be responsible for a number of recurring tsunamis in western Europe, Africa, and North America. God or whatever else help those who lived in the Caribbean Islands.

"Somebody shut that damn thing off!" roared the Labrador. One of the techs pattered away at the keyboard and the siren, thankfully, stopped.

The damage to the grand, Atlantic metropolis had been extensive, but like the woman's analogy, kicking in the anthill only made the ants swarm into a frothing fury. The screens were showing a wave of solid red, a color that films and video games had long held to represent the enemy, spreading outward from the crumbling cadaver of their city like a noxious fume. There were splotches of greens, bright blues, and pale yellows dotting the screen, assisted by a pair of numbers and a dotted box. These I assumed were friendlies, allies or something to that effect.

I felt like a voyeur; I tried to translate each of those little blips on the screen into a living individual, tried to collate the digital mess into a physical mess, but I couldn't, and part of me didn't really want to. I didn't have the heart for it.

I followed the course of the battle as best I could, the room filling with the static of multiple voices calling out, fading into a nervous silence in anticipation of the results of a given directive. Time was not measured in this room by seconds, minutes, or hours, but by order after order, one breathless pause preceding another. Someone had brought up video footage from the remotely operated vehicles, but because of the stygian darkness it was near useless. Light can only penetrate so far into the darkness; there were flashes of light, thundercracks underwater, displaying nothing of note. After given an order the techie changed through several lenses on the cameras, but after going through them all it was a general consensus that only the normal, high-intensity light was capable of showing the proceedings of the battle.

There were flashes of life, blinking mayhem; the ROV was flying through the water as was everything else. It was almost impossible to distinguish one thing from another, whether or not this was a torpedo or whether that was one of the grotesque Deep Ones. There were some things that were mere parts of larger things, detailed limbs or head-like protuberances that trailed off into the black. A gleam of whitish-gold metal caught the light, something angular and jagged in shape, which caused some of the viewers to mutter excitedly.

It had long been questioned whether or not the Deep Ones possessed vehicles, or anything resembling that definition. Some years after the start of the conflict, the few slices of footage that had been taken of the Deep Ones did not show them to have any propensity toward such things, or for that matter actual tools, leading some to argue that they were little more than beasts. There were some, however, particularly a large and well-funded group from Arkham in New England, which began a media campaign to "smarten up" the enemy. They were laughed out of the spotlight, until evidence eventually pointed towards the Deep Ones possessing a social order, the ability to communicate, and, more important to the masses, a city. A civilization had risen from the sea, and it wanted to drown the land.

The Arkhamers went into a frenzy after learning of the city, one not very far off from their own town. They wanted to study and learn, which conflicted with another primal urge that was our trademark; to destroy and take. The Arkhamers fought for the rights to documentation, fighting also, they claimed, for the rights of a people who had no voice. They were threatened with federal prosecution for willful sedition, which had shut them up for only so long. After a while of silence, they started cutting off their funding to various maritime establishments, showing just how far and how deep their reach was. To date, the federal government has not yet given the Arkhamers any leeway, but I suspect that's why they want to get this war over and done with; so the Arkhamers can sift through the wreckage, get their damned documentaries and scientific research, and finally relax the pinch they had on the vein of oceanic economics.

The battle raged on outside in a horror movie shaky-cam fashion. I watched as the multi-colored blips slowly began overtaking the vast cloud of red on the main screens, trying not to see the configuration as an old arcade game. I shifted nervously on my feet and tapped my pockets, wishing I was somewhere else, wishing I was with Daniel or Sara or, even more so, with Jake. Here in the high-strung dark I never wanted to feel his arms around me more.

I watched as a collection of blue and green dots converged on one point up on the screen, a small red dot at their center, and almost instantaneously they disappeared, electro-black.

"What just happened there?" one of the officers murmured, pointing at the incident with a finger. Nobody had an answer. Time went on, and even when it appeared our side was succeeding there was a pall of anxiety hanging over everyone like a funeral shroud. I could feel it, too; it was like having death somewhere in the room, and with only the screens providing light there were a lot of places in which it could hide.

"Sir, stalkers one and two are reporting large enemy casualties."

"Good, good," the Labrador muttered, wiping his brow with an old fashioned pocket handkerchief. "Tell them to keep at it, they're doing good."

Those words puzzled me. Did we have manned vehicles out there? Who was stupid enough to pilot one in this hellish abyss? I shook it out of my head, thinking about my family. I could see my son's face in the pixels on the screen, and I almost started to cry.

"Stalker two is down, sir," said one of the techs, sounding bored now that he was convinced his side would win.

"Did he activate his suit's emergency floatation system?"

"No, sir."

"Do it for him. The man deserves a land burial."

Eventually, the shouting faded away to expectant mutterings. The red was fading away bit by bit as the other colors swarmed the area, each pixel a digital representation of a life. It was almost funny. The fragments of red that remained on the screen appeared to be dispersing, scattering and radiating outward. On the surveillance footage, the water was shown to have a thick, bluish-green quality that wavered in the water; chunky pieces of what I thought were silt--and that's what I would tell myself years from now--were floating heavily all around the camera; there were stringy bits of organic detritus silkily suspended in the water, shimmering in the beams of light with an astral translucence. I heard one of the higher-ranking scientists heave a sigh as he watched the fragments of a thousand scientific discoveries floating lifeless in the malachite depths. They would in time settle to the bottom, becoming food for the eyeless, colorless crabs, shrimp, and whatever else lived down here. C'est la vie.

One of the officers made a comment I couldn't hear, and the group began clapping and letting out breaths that they didn't realize they had been holding. I was the subversive; I hadn't taken in a breath in what felt like an hour. As I filled my lungs with the communal scent of worry and trepidation I continued to look up at the screen. The group was still clapping and turning to each other, giving verbal high-fives and congratulatory claps on the back as though they had done something.

I'm sure I wasn't the first one to see it, I couldn't have been. The way fate has been recently playing around with me, though, I'm more inclined to believe I _was_granted that awful privilege. I watched as something red started to grow on the screen, a small sphere rapidly growing into a monstrous, spatially consuming object, my heartbeat accelerating as the object increased. "Hey," I said, my fear overriding my ability to camouflage into the corner, "What's that?"

All faces turned to me, the expressions on their face denoting their attempt to recognize me. I pointed up at the screen, and a dozen voices began muttering, another fearful panic-drone. The red expanded, a single blotch of cherry danger; the Labrador demanded a check to see if the sensors were malfunctioning. The tech said that nothing was wrong.

Were it not for the gigantic mass of something out there, I wouldn't have doubted the kid.

There was a low sound coming from outside the walls, the rush of a powerful current blowing around the facility. The sound of metal squealing against the friction made several people wince. The Labrador commanded everyone to calm down, pretending as though he were unfazed by these unexpected developments.

What happened immediately afterward was a thing I was certain would not falter in our memories for the rest of our lives. It would stay inside the blackest chasm of our minds, lurking and spinning its web and sleep when the sun was on the land and we go about our life as we do, but when that tenuous flame disappears and the night enshrouds us, it would crawl up from its lair and into our consciousness, opening the cellar door into deeper, vaster realms of horror and tempestuous winds of pandemonium. The directorial mutterings of the officers and techs had near-instantly ceased, and all eyes turned to the more shadowy corners of the room where the glare of artificial light could not reach.

There came from all around us the lowing of some great beast, a bellowing groan that began as a mere hum, growing slowly and steadily in decibel range. Eventually, the groan developed into a horrendous throaty moan, a murmur of a fallen god that seemed to make the very air dance and waver, as though one were looking at the world through gasoline spectacles.

The world shivered as the noise grew into a wail, the steel walls adding their own screams to the dissonance. I saw some of the men and women buckling under the pressure of the sound, their hands flying to their ears, and just as quickly the pressure had hit me as well; a light tingling sensation that slid into my eyes, ears, and mouth, shivering down into my bones and organs. The tingling grew in accordance with the volume into a crescendo of pain that I could not properly put to paper; even if I made the attempt I would not be satisfied with the description. It was an auditory hell to be experienced only, never explained or organized into something as demeaning as a summary. My bones felt like they were going to shake themselves to pieces, and my vital tissues would tumble without their cage. I knelt down onto the floor like everybody else, moaning in my terrified agony as I buried my palms against my ears, keeping my mouth shut, paying homage to the great something that was filling the ocean with its halloos.

It went on for an unbearable length of time, a long, memorable chunk out of life, before fading, falling in pitch into a murmur resembling the drone it made during its inception. I imagined that to be the sound of a thousand whales dying of collapsed lungs, of mountainous reefs and ridges falling apart and crumbling down into the eternal cold below, the sound of civilizations as they decayed through the mouth of centuries.

Then, the red splotch on the screen faded along with the sound, real-time death, and after a time, we all understood it to be the death rattle of the _something_out there. When we stood, we all held the same shocked, hurt expression. Was it from the pain of the entity's bellowing? Or were we experiencing psychological tremors of the death throes of a giant, a mental shotgun filled with regret and hurt cartridges? Was it the mountainous ridges of the seafloor falling in on itself from the seismic bombs, or had the Arkhamers been right all along, and there was some monster-demon-fish-god that had been swimming in these waters since the toxic Precambrian ages, unable to break the surface of the ocean save for special astronomical occurrences?

Maybe it was just something that had always been there, existing complacent in the aquatic world it had set for itself and, being the fatally curious people we are, found an enemy in the races encroaching on its domain. Maybe the opposite was true.

In the end, the navy, and everybody else aboard the Charybdis, opted for the seismic bomb theory. That was what we all agreed to, signed all those goddamn papers to, written testimony for an event that never happened--eyewitnesses to nothing.

The attack on Yahn-Lohai was like removing that one magic Jenga piece; following attacks on other temple-cities of the Deep Ones each resulted in success and little if any casualties. The enemy no longer fought with the skilled knowledge of a leader, but with the feverish, vicious zeal of street rats, of prisoners who no longer had anything to lose. Like cartel soldiers after the golden family is gone and everything is on fire. The navy turned each success into a media shark attack, upsetting the Arkhamers to no end.

Meanwhile, those of us on the Charybdis were relocated from the now-useless facility by way of submarine to the H.M.S. Vigor, an English destroyer that had been designed for this one war and had not once seen any action, its one role relegated to support and evacuation. When the hatch opened, it was like stepping into a dream; the Charybdis had been my life for so long that I had almost, almost, forgotten the taste of unfiltered air, the cool caress of the wind, the sting of sunlight. I had little more than a single black duffel bag slung over my shoulder and cradled under one protective arm, filled with my clothes compressed down to protect my laptop at the center. I had to sign some bullshit documents stating that my computer had to be totally wiped, erased, because it was military equipment. I told them to go ahead, but not before I put One Thousand Snakes into a flash drive, the burly navy goon behind my back keeping one ugly eye on me the entire time.

I knew it was silly to go through the trouble of saving a document that only amounted to three words--it's not like I'd forget it after leaving the ocean--but I felt compelled, writer's intuition. The big guy then did what he had to, leaving me in my room and coming back with my laptop five minutes later, saying nothing. He had gotten what he wanted, no need to say anything.

I stood on the deck of the Vigor with what seemed to be about ninety or so others, the majority of them soldiers. The Charybdis I realized was much more industrious than I had thought. I searched the deck for Jake, my eyes smarting from the Atlantic salt-wind sting and the brilliance of the sun. There was no cloud in the sky, only a blue brighter and seemingly more encompassing than the ocean. I looked around for the tall black wolf, mingling briefly with the groups that coalesced among the evacuees and the sailors of the Vigor, shouting his name in an effort to be heard over the orchestra of new post-war joy. I began walking the length of the deck, straining to look over everyone's heads and shoulders, glancing at the catwalk and stairs that lined the ship's conning tower. I felt a smile break over my face as well, fun and frivolity being the contagious things they were.

"Jake!" I continued to shout, trying to ignore the cheers of the crowd.

With a realization resembling being struck upside the head, I remembered I had his cellphone number. By association, I felt his touch, his heat, his kiss from the shower. I blushed, unheeded by the group. I dug into my pants pocket and tapped in the number on my phone.

For a long time, there was no answer. I held my breath and covered one ear with my free hand, waiting. Curiously, I thought I could hear the ringing of a phone; I looked around, trying to judge from what direction the ringing was coming from--.

It was right behind me. I stood there, now facing the Atlantic, my back to the crowd, and I watched as a hand grabbed at the deck's railing, the other towing behind it, carrying something heavy.

The blueprints written by fate, chance, the stars, or whatever are something beyond comprehension; they are inscrutable. I listened to the ringing, and I watched as a mouse and a badger heaved a long object from the water, carrying it up as they stepped onto the rails and placed it onto the deck, water dripping from it and them like fresh fish. I recognized the object as a new diving suit for marines, some fancy thing that had been getting special treatment in technological circles. There were fractures along the suit, deep cuts and abrasions, scars of battle. I followed the length of the object up to its tapering top, a helmet from which issued a pretty, bird-like fluting.

The mouse unclipped the pair of oxygen cables that snaked around the helmet, pressure-hiss telling their secrets. He removed the helmet, tossing it aside with a nonchalance that bordered on disrespect, and I saw the face of a tall black wolf staring up at the blue sky, seeing nothing, unable to see anything ever again in their greying depths. Through the milky murkiness I could make out a tinge of dull green, jade imperfections at the center of alabaster orbs.

The ringing continued to issue from the depths of the wolf's suit. The mouse looked around until he spotted me, my phone still petrified to my ear. He shook his head and stood up, the badger coughing as he threw a length of orange tarpaulin over Jake.

"Don't think he'll be answering," the mouse said with a rock-like disinterest, and by some miraculous feat of willpower, I held back the urge to punch him in the face, beat him until his face could not be distinguished from leftover chili, toss him into the brink for the sharks. I let my arm fall, dead weight, and I could only look at the bumps and lumps, shadowy crests made by the thing under the tarp. Behind me, the festivities were still going on, heedless of the death and carnage that had happened. Time passed, and the sun slowly drowned in the grey-blue waters as the Vigor began making its journey back to its birthplace of Cardiff, and from there we each would go back to our own stations, and from there, perhaps, back to our homes, R&R. Yeah, sure.

I never moved an inch from where I stood. One of the crewmembers had tried to bring me into the party belowdecks, bring me into their circle, but I silently refused. The night was so massive here on the ocean, so clear and wondrous and horrifying. The moon was beginning its phase as a new moon in the sky, massive silver dollar.

The man was lightly drunk, stinking of some soft alcohol fume, and he tried to haul me back to their stupid festivities. Without saying a word I drove my fist into his nose, hearing as much as feeling the shift of cartilage beneath. He fell into a heap on the deck, picking himself up and staring at me like I was some kind of monster. I didn't have any expression on my face, so why should he think that? I just looked back to Jake, hearing the man's boots scuff the steel beneath them, cursing loudly into the bright night. Time and again some of the staff would try to take Jake away, to place him in some cabin where he wouldn't be out in the open, but I would shoo them away, my rebuttals gradually evolving into intimidation. Maybe I'll let them take him away, later, but right now I wanted to be here with him, watching the night sky over the night waters, staring vapidly at celestial bodies.

Two weeks later (fifteen days and sixteen nights, rounded down), I walked through the door of my serene Minnesota home. It was quiet, dark, and cold, and in my head an echo of that monster-god's final anguish reeled through the shadows of the house, ruffling dust and darkness and the things they might have contained. Then I flicked on the light and everything was fine.

Daniel was with Sara and Catherine, and tomorrow I would visit them. Not right now, not until I've had a bath--I've always preferred baths to showers--and something to eat. Did I have anything in the fridge that wasn't spoiled, or was I lucky enough to have Sara stop by and share some of her groceries in anticipation of my return? Whatever, I'll check later. All of that needed to wait; I needed to sleep, needed to get rid of Jake's unseeing face. I saw it everywhere I went, even the backs of my eyelids. I couldn't remove it any more than I could the horrific lowing of that great something.

Tomorrow, I will knock on my sister's door, walk in, give Sara a kiss and a hug, repeat with Catherine, and hold my son as tightly as I dared. I'd try to forget Jake, knowing I never will, but I'd try. Like everything else, I would at least try.

I cried myself to sleep, falling into a dream where I was walking along the bright sands of California, wearing black swimming trunks. It was cloudless and sunny, and seagulls whirled and danced against the sapphire face. There was a warmth on my hand, fingers and mine entwined, and I looked beside me to see Jake smiling down at me, and together we walked down the beach, silent and happy.

I looked out to the sea and saw things moving under the transparent blue skin, things that called out to me with soft, muttering vocalizations and beckoned to me with limbs that were gnarled and pale and much too long. I stopped, curious, daring to step into the big blue, but Jake tugged on my hand, reminding me where I belonged.