Bottom Rock

At the bottom of the earth there’s a speaker. I couldn’t tell you where it is–believe me, I’ve looked–but what I do know is that it’s been playing the same NSYNC song for two years. Don’t get me wrong, NSYNC’s not bad by any means. But there’s two problems. First, it’s a song from their Christmas album, creating complications that should be self-evident. Second, the speaker’s junk. Justin Timberlake’s singing is great, but not when he’s being dragged kicking and screaming from the golden throne of high fidelity as the drummer scrapes his fingernails against tin cans. It’s starting to grow on me, though, so maybe I’ll be okay.

There’s a dense fog wrapping itself around me, so I look down as I walk to dodge the dull knives and silver forks protruding from the ground. Occasionally I’ll bump into someone, and as their heads are reeling from the collision I’ll sneak a glance at their faces. Their ears have usually been clawed off, leaving infected sacks of flesh to fester in their place, and their eyes have spilled down into the lower recesses of their bags. There’s not much I can do for them, I’m busy walking my own tightrope.

The air’s weird down here. It’s ashy volcano bile decorated with the fragrance of weed, but I don’t particularly mind it. Hell, I even smoke a draw myself once in a while. It’s hard not to when the world moves so fast. It makes everything real still, and you get to see how small everything is, and you laugh a little realizing that everyone except for you is stupid. And it never fails to do its job either. I’m not sure what would happen if it did.

But then I get a little hungry, and that’s when I go to Al’s pizza place. The guy that runs it always sets me straight. I get the meat lover’s pizza with sausage, pepperoni, and mushrooms and oh my god I’m dying.

I don’t know when I figured it out.

I swipe my card at the register. Insufficient funds send synapses scrambling over each other like dominoes, the past three years of my adult life collapsing into a singularity. But that was only the big bang. There was me getting fired in March two years ago. And then the breakup. And then the phone call I made to my mom asking for a bigger allowance. And then the subsequent call with my dad six months later where he curtailed it. And then a year of true, abject misery. The endless Futurama reruns. The electricity bill. The pizza boxes piling up in the corner. The electricity bill again. The clock on my desk rolling from minute to minute. The actual electrician coming to my apartment building for maintenance, whom I maintained strict non-eye-contact with.

I don’t know where in this timeline I actually realized and how long I’ve been lying to myself. But the weight of this profound thought was so earth-shattering, so cosmically terrifying that it instantly broke my mental defenses. My most deeply-rooted fear had come to light: I can’t live like this anymore.

I leave my card in the reader and storm out of Al’s, still hungry. I trip coming off the curb, my limbs scattering across the street. I scream for help as I pick them up, but oh right, their ears are gone. My legs sputter and spit as they come online, lifting me off the ground, but my first step sends a rusty fork straight through my foot. I howl in pain, really making it sound obnoxious because it doesn’t matter anyway. And then I hear Justin Timberlake say the word Christmas and I start running towards the source of the noise in a blind rage, like I’m gonna rip him and his stupid band right out of the speaker and sock him in the face. And then I realize the sound’s all around me, and I stop confused in the middle of the road before balling up along the wall of a building and putting my head in my hands.

Damn.

I look up at the building behind me, seeing a fortune-teller caricature with a turban orbiting his outstretched hands around a sparkly crystal ball. His face has been nearly torn off from taking the brunt of the sun for too long. In a raspy voice he tells me to come inside for the solution to all my problems; I am easily manipulated.

I swing open the door and pass through the red curtains stuck to the frame, my nose tearing up from the poignance of the lavender incense that had been churning in the room before my arrival. There’s a man hitting a massive drum with the same inflection and rhythm over and over as he looks to the sunset atop a snowy peak, his song running down the mountain face to my ears.

Bum… bum. Bum… bum.

I take a seat at the table. Previously obscured by purple haze is a crystal ball that calmly handles a mass of clouds. I try to make something out through the mist, but it’s too thick. So I wait for the seat at the other end of the table to be filled by my fortune teller.

…

…

I alternate between straightening my posture and slumping in my chair. I don’t want to look like an idiot when he shows up, but I also don’t care that much.

…

…

…Screw that. I’ve waited long enough. There’s no college degree for fortune telling, I’d bet I’m just as qualified as the guy in the turban. I’ll just do what he does.

So I close my eyes and wrap my hands around the crystal ball and start moving them around the surface, caressing the glass, carefully switching directions so as to not startle it. I delicately remove my palms, plucking my fingers away one by one. Once the final pointer finger is off, I open my eyes.

I can’t tell if my fingerprints made it worse or if it’s always been this cloudy. Clearly I’m missing a component here.

A strangely adolescent-sounding whisper calls out to me from the fog: “speak… make it malleable… what’s this say? Oh, uh, hands can clear the mist…” I ignore it, too lost in thought to pay attention.

Hmm….

Maybe I have to speak to it too, make it malleable so my hands can clear the mist. That’s gotta be it.

I close my eyes again and place my hands back on its exterior. This time, I let the thoughts flow instead of concentrating. The first thing that comes to mind is the stain on my bathroom mirror. It’s been there for months but I just can’t bring myself to clean it. And it’s really noticeable, too, it’s like right in the middle of the–

Breakthrough.

The ball shatters as a monumental beast crashes through the building, skidding along the ground until bringing one of its eyes to my face. It’s decorated like one of those sugar skulls, with flowers and embroidery laced into the shimmering white skin around the socket. But the eyeball itself is gone: thousands of glowing worms writhe in the hole, having devoured what was once there to make themselves an ecosystem. All that remains is a searingly bright blue light, almost like an LED, affixed to the end of a feeble nerve from deep within its skull dangling helplessly on the rim of the socket. As small as the bulb is, it’s still as big as my head.

Its voice rings from within my head.

“I am Whale. I have seen everything, and I am here to aid you in your time of need.” It’s very sleepy and earnest-sounding.

“Whale… uh, I have a questio–”

“You need vinegar solution…”

“N-no, not about the mirror.”

Its eyeball perks up like a dog’s tail.

“...Go on.”

“How do you stop being a loser?”

It stops breathing for a second.

“...I dunno.”

Then it begins to lift itself off the ground, dozens of sets of wings collectively strong-arming the air into spurring motion somewhere out of my view. The worms brace for launch, clamping down on the skin with their mouths.

I’m not satisfied with its answer, so I spring from my seat and scramble into Whale’s socket as the desiccated entrails of the building are further splayed by its leap into the stratosphere.

I’m being tossed around in its brain cavity. There’s worms in here too, wallowing in the sulci. The ones in here look more bulbous, probably from gorging themselves on gray matter. But it’s hard to tell if that’s just my false perception as my head’s turning to mush in the cockpit of my interstellar submarine.

As my vision goes red the elevator stops, easing to a halt. I crawl over to the porthole.

…There’s nothing to see but dead space. There’s a tear at the far end of my vision, but I can only see it in my peripheral: when I try to stare at it head on it cowers behind a black shower curtain as my eyes avert themselves.

“We’re at the edge of the universe,” Whale tells me. “No one has been here before but us.”

“There’s an edge?”

“...Before I answer, please remove the particularly fat worm behind you.”

It’s enveloping maybe an eighth of its brain, slobber dripping down its chin as it feverishly sucks memories straight from the carton. I warm up my hands, plant my feet on bone and grab it by the tail. It’s fighting, flailing, confused by the abrupt end to its immersion. Digging my fingers even deeper into its slimy hide, I sling its tail over my shoulder and pull. 

POP! Its suction breaks in an instant; its IV tube now detached, it flops like a fish out of water on the floor of the skull before meeting its demise.

“Apologies, he was inhibiting my thought,” Whale says. “It’s true that the universe doesn’t have any defined boundary visible or even tangible from within it. But since it’s always expanding, that means there has to be some kind of division between matter and no matter. So what you see is our eyes throwing up an illusion of a “border” as a way to make the sudden end of perceptible matter make sense. And if something’s real to our eyes it might as well be real to our brains, too. At least, that’s the way I see it.”

“You said there’s nothing from within. Is there a way to escape the universe?”

“I’m about to find out.”

“Well… good luck, man.”

“I’ll be fine,” it says. “My predecessors were.”

“Predecessors?”

“Yes. I’m not the first Whale, and I won’t be the last. We live for hundreds of thousands of years, accumulating mass knowledge as a means of solving a problem.”

“What problem?”

“The worms. They eat everything. If they could, they’d eat you, they’d eat your planet, they’d eat every single particle and atom before eating themselves at the end of it all. So my predecessors and I spend our lives playing cat and mouse with them in order to save everything else. They drown in our pool of knowledge, pecking at our eyes and brains and filing in through our lungs just to get a taste of our memory. It’s their nectar.”

“But eventually they become too much to bear,” it continues. “Once it reaches that point we take them to the only place where there’s nothing to destroy: just outside the periphery of the universe, where we all die together. And then, once the universe’s expansion catches up with our corpses, we are recycled. A new Whale is reborn from the stardust, in a race to gain new knowledge and add length to the fuse that ticks down to its death as new worms infect its body. This mission I have described to you, alongside spotty, damaged memories of previous lives, is the only thing that gets passed upon reincarnation.”

I look at its brain. It’s being whittled down and there’s nothing I can do about it.

“Why couldn’t you answer my question earlier?”

“...Because it was a stupid question. You already knew the answer, you were just testing me.”

“Uh, pretty sure I don’t. If I did I wouldn’t be living like shit anymore.”

“I rarely make misjudgements.”

We slow down. Its wings aren’t flapping as regularly as they were, the giant beast now lethargically coasting towards the finish line.

“Whale?”

“Hmm?”

“Did you enjoy your life? Like, can you look back and say ‘huh, I’m glad I was alive’?”

It thinks for a second.

“It’s hard,” it said. “I’m in constant pain, and every interaction I’ve had with the universe is stained by the subtext of saving it. I’ve never been ‘in the moment’ in my entire life. But the one thing that’s kept me going is seeing what is on the other side of this border. What I told you earlier about what happens on the other side is only my guess as to what happens. And I’m willing to go through the whole charade of life if it means getting the chance of being truly, pleasantly surprised at least once.”

The edge is tantalizingly close now. I start to sweat.

“Whale, please take me with you,” I beg.

“...What?”

“Take me with you. To the other side. I don’t wanna be here anymore. It’s hell down there, you’ve seen it.”

The worms are really tearing at it now, scrounging the last scraps of cognitive function in a free-for-all.

“I’m at rock bottom, Whale. There’s nothing left for me in this world.”

I could almost reach out and touch the border.

“You can’t come with me. I’m sorry.”

“W-why not? Please, just let me stay in here, and we–we can see what’s on the other side together, yeah?”

“I’m afraid neither of us have much of a choice. Another behavior of these worms: they don’t take kindly to predators attacking their young.”

The mother of all worms breaks through Whale’s skull, sending the roof crashing down on the jaw and crushing the brain. I’m trapped in a cave staring down a monster, and the only way to escape it is the way I came in.

Whale begins to fade into the other side. It tells me something out of the corner of its mouth as it disappears. 

“Besides, I heard the meat lover’s pizza is half off tomorrow.”

“...You’re right!”

And I fall.

I crash through suns without feeling their heat and steal the rings of planets with my own gravitational pull as my head spins, hurtling downwards without slowing down. 

Suddenly the world gets bigger, and bigger, and…

When I touch base with earth I find myself in the same chair as before. There’s a dropout sitting opposite from me behind the counter, scrolling on his phone. When he realizes I’m back, he tells me:

“Uh, that’ll be $20.99.”

I reach for my card, and damn it.

So I take the twenty-percent-off-your-next-psychic-reading coupon from the counter and run before he looks back up from his phone.

***

I take my bike to Al’s, pedaling faster and faster in an effort not to be late for my first day on the job.

The streets are dead as ever. I have to swerve frequently to avoid the zombies, since they can’t hear the bike bell and I can barely see them through the fog.

My tire gets punctured by a blade in the ground. I set the bike aside and walk the rest of the way with my head down as I always have.

There’s a new song on the intercom. It’s still from the same Christmas album, and it still sounds like shit, but it’s something new.

I smile as it comes on. Not much has changed–except for the fact that I can keep the lights on now. So that’s a start.

Somewhere in the stars a new creature opens its eyes. There’s a whole new world for it to discover. But most of all, it wonders what lies just beyond its border.