The Fishbowl

The thing I remember most is the mud. It seemed alive, pulsing with a wet, festering heartbeat, sweating malice in the Florida heat. This mud could choke a body, pull you with grasping tentacles into a rotting and tepid grave. It wormed its way into the blisters on my heels as I walked, slick and unsympathetic beneath my calloused step.

Charlie, who at that time was still alive, walked next to me like he always did, his paws and legs mud-stained almost to the level of his mangy stomach. There used to be water waist-deep in this area, at least, teeming with legions of alligators, spoonbills, and cottonmouths. All gone now. Skeletal mangroves lined the shallow riverbank, roots stretching in aimless thirst. They surrounded us on all sides like a choking fist, white-knuckled and cruel.

At our feet were the remains of Fort Linford.

Linford was a makeshift military camp, once. It had housed a good fifty people, with bedrolls and weapons and rations besides. They had traps to get decent meat, they could stitch a wound or treat an infection… the last time I’d passed through, there were even a few kids. Kids are hard to keep alive these days.

The camp was all held together by a woman called Emerson, although I was never clear on whether the name was her first or her last. She was tattooed, well-muscled, and sported a buzzcut, and she was as quick to snap as she was to smile. Emerson made a living on the small luxuries of the wasteland: watercolors or pocket mirrors or little bags of butterscotches. She carried a pouch of unmarked pills at her hip. If you had something valuable on you, she’d give you a good deal on a trade.

Fort Linford felt like home if I didn’t think too hard. And that was nice for a while, with everyone bringing something to put in the stew and sitting around the weak fire eating out of foggy Tupperware. Charlie was always welcome to a bone or scrap of gristle, and we sang songs from when we were growing up, melodies we heard in church or on the jukebox before everything went south. Emerson played an old viola, low and longing, slightly out-of-tune. You were fine to stay there if you helped with laundry or took a shift on patrol.

But I always grew weary of the place, as I did every time I passed through, and I never lingered long.

At first glance, the plot of land that used to be Fort Linford simply seemed abandoned, and for a moment the sliver of me that still believed in God feared that the Rapture had come to collect the souls worth saving. But then I smelled it: rotting flesh on the thick, wet air.

The bodies were strewn across the dirt haphazardly, as if by a bored child. Their flesh seemed to curl in on itself, rippling with writhing, ravenous insects. I spotted Emerson almost instantly, her skin pale and alien beneath her tattoos. She appeared inexplicably heavy with the weight of her lifelessness, sinking into the ground as though taking to bed, tucking herself into the warm, rich earth like a pallid seed.

Charlie whimpered. Half-submerged in the mud, a handmade child’s doll stared at me, glassy-eyed and smiling.

I downed a handful of pills from Emerson’s pouch before searching the other bodies.

The sky, starless and forbidding above, was terrifying in its vastness, and I suddenly became aware of how much air there was and yet how little space, reminding me of carnival goldfish and their flimsy plastic bags and how they inevitably go belly-up within the week, bred to be owned but not kept. I still miss carnivals. I don’t miss the goldfish.

At that point, I hadn’t seen another person in three or four weeks and I was honestly starting to worry that I was the only one left. My exposed feet were not yet used to the mud or the cold; the Everglades didn't have much to offer in the way of winter, but the sun’s retreat was enough to make my skin go prickly and numb, like it wasn’t really mine and I was a coldblooded skeleton netted in a stranger’s nerves. That was the worst part – the way losing feeling in your body is somehow more terrible than any pain – and often I convinced myself I was dying, which in a way I was. I was alive but I was alone. My whole body ached with it.

When I was at my weakest, I dreamed of a woman hovering over me. She had a full face and an aquiline nose and long, long eyelashes. She floated above my body upside down, our foreheads almost touching, her legs moving in step with mine, like the sky was a mirror. In my mind, I named her Anna: Anna of the sleeping world, Anna who kept me from death and from flight, Anna who tethered my bare feet to the mud. I’d reach up to touch her, expecting to find the warmth of her cheek, only to wake cold and alone, fingers stretching towards something that was not there.

The last camp I ever visited, at the remains of St. Stella’s, was already falling apart. The people there had hollowed-out eyes and shrunken, desperate-looking mouths, the flesh of their brittle hands stretched across protruding knuckles. Around the campfire, the light bounced across their waxy skin like they were telling ghost stories, or like they were the ghosts themselves. Charlie curled himself into a knot and tucked his head beneath his tail.

The survivors at St. Stella’s had no guitar or fiddle, no tambourine, but they sang because they had no choice, because all people – almost by instinct – sing when faced with the end of the world. Their voices rasped, turning each melody into a dirge:

“Sometimes I live in the country

Sometimes I live in the town

Sometimes I take a great notion

To jump in the river and drown.”

It was an old folk song that I’d never heard before, but all of them knew it. The melody circled infinitely like a snake eating its own tail, like Prometheus and his eagles waiting for the end of a paradox. Scanning the faces in the circle, I saw the way each mouth moved automatically, pledging allegiance to a way of life that was long gone. I got the sense that they had sung this song many, many times before.

“Goodnight, Irene

Goodnight, Irene

I’ll see you in my dreams.”

The man next to me, a broad-shouldered former surgeon named Isaac, made a choking sound and I realized that he was sobbing hoarsely, stretching his cracked lips into a gaping, silent scream.

I don’t really know how to comfort people. It feels like a lie to ask someone what’s wrong when the answer feels so obvious, and there’s no way to fix it besides. Instead, I stared at Isaac and thought about how I couldn’t remember the last time I cried, and then I hid my face because I couldn’t look at him anymore. I chose a pale blue tablet from my pocket and let it fall down my throat.

“Stop your rambling

Stop your gambling

Stop your staying out so late at night

Go home to your wife and family

Stay there by the fireside bright.”

I watched my body and Isaac’s from above. Down on the ground, his back was shaking with silent pain and he was cupping his thin face with healer’s hands. He had saved lives. He had saved lives and I couldn’t even listen to him cry.

The apocalypse is indiscriminate, drawing straws and snipping lifelines. Everyone remembers who they were before the world fell apart. Everybody mourns the innumerable people they used to be, shed like snakeskin.

The reflection of the fire made Isaac’s tears look thick and golden, like his face had split open and light was pouring from it. 

“Goodnight Irene

Goodnight Irene

I’ll see you in my dreams.”

I didn’t find any more camps after that.

By that point, day and night had begun to blur. For a long time I had measured my life in people: my sojourns in and out of their lives, their hollow and inadequate kisses, and the anesthetics I bought from them for the price of my hair and my shoes and my coat – medicines traded for molars, wrenched from a skull full of bees. The world was grotesquely, torturously endless, and yet I had nowhere to go. The ghost of Isaac’s song tailed me, a silent assassin, his rasp repeating a vicious oath:

“I’ll see you in my dreams.”

There was a hollow in my head like an empty nest, long since abandoned by thought and faith and hope. That old melody hung between my ears, suspended on a tightrope of spider-silk, wavering its way through my thoughts. In my dreams, Anna cried gilded tears; they dripped down my face and pooled in my collarbones, turning dull and ashy, burning holes in my heathen skin.

Wherever the song and I went, the mud followed, and by the time my flasks and needles and pills failed me, I began to believe that I myself had become swampland, that the marsh was inside of me. I was surrounded by myself and leaving footprints in myself, my skin mossy and my veins brackish, and yet I was absent, floating out of my broken body and watching it drown in dirt, numb and only half-alive, unreceptive to Charlie’s whining and nudging.

“Goodnight Irene.”

The heavens were black like oil and disease, and I resented them because the only way to escape the mud’s grasping fingers was to fly above the mangroves and leave myself behind, lungs full of poison and salt, chest hollow and overgrown with fungi.

“Goodnight Irene.”

A dark and terrible ceiling was closing in above me and the world had become a tunnel, bending around my little bird body.

“Goodnight Irene

Goodnight Irene

Goodnight Irene

Goodnight –”

And suddenly Anna was holding me above the ground, somehow warm and familiar even though we were strangers, and her body was haloed by the golden glow of the sun, and suddenly the pain was real and vast and spectacular and suddenly it was morning again and I breathed real deep and her eyes were big and bright above me and all I could remember thinking was God, I wish I hadn’t sold my shoes.