The Jungle Was Their Home - Weird Fiction

             Two things became apparent to Patricia Garland as she watched the ballet of inner-office politics play out through the boardroom window: The first was that she’d never felt a part of their whispers or jokes or after-hours soirées, even when they were bold enough to invite her. She was different. Always had been. Couldn’t change it. Never tried. The alienation brought memories of her mother seated by her lonely picture window, a gray sky in view over one boney shoulder, her wiry hair shaking back and forth like the tongue of a grandfather clock: Your father would be so disappointed. Your father knew the measure of people. He understood the way we use each other without meaning to. Your father could smile at the Devil and make him smile back. Words that at first she’d carried as a millstone to remind her of her brokenness, but which had since fused to her body like some hideous misshapen limb.

            The second realization was simpler.

            “I’m going to kill myself.” Her lips burnt upward in a smile as she said it. So she said it again, a little louder. “I’m going to—”

            But the door opened and the hive hum of human babble gushed into this sacred womb. They looked at her with deference before taking their seats around the conference table. The one named Michael, who’d made passes at every company gathering since her christening in upper management, leered across the table and smiled. The pump of his eyebrows seemed to suggest he wouldn’t mind using his teeth to peel strips from her.

            “Thank you for coming,” she began. Their eyes were just as disinterested as hers. She saw herself in all of them: the effete materialism; the subconscious mourning of psychic holes no downtown loft or auto lease could fill. “You’ve heard the rumors of our merge, I’m sure.”

            “Is it true?” Bernice asked. Every office had a Bernice, old and loyal to the company, quietly content with lateral moves through the gauntlet of middle-management. It was the Bernices of the world who were the first to get axed, and her cautious buffalo eyes seemed to know it.

            “It is.” Patricia was numb to the spectacle of disappointment that played out across the table. “ENGCON’s purchase contract is with Legal now. We’re expecting to be under new management by tomorrow.”

            “You’re making that sound like it’s bad news,” Annette said, young, black, with a gaze that cut through bullshit like a scalpel. “Should I start updating my résumé?” I and not we, Patricia noted. There was no sense of loyalty with these people. And why should there be, in a system whose main machinery saw them as little more than sprockets and springs?

            She was about to soothe them, to laugh it off and deflect inquiry with the signature stream of confusing information that had first put her on the radar with the The Brass. Then, because she no longer cared, she said, “Yes, that would be wise. All of you should update your résumés. They don’t care how long you’ve worked here.”

            “What the hell are we supposed to do?” Michael shared an outraged look with his peers. “Sit here and wait for our severance paperwork?”

            Patricia thought of telling them she was going to kill herself and almost laughed at the absurdity of that. These people saw their job as their life. In a way they were all killing themselves. The faces grew cold, and she realized she had laughed. Was still laughing. 

            “You think this is funny?” Annete asked. “My two babies eating from the .99 Cents store is funny to you?”

            Patricia pinched the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’m just laughing because it’s always been this way. Since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution it’s been this way. Has business ever cared about its workers? No. Never. Not once. Yet here you are, in expensive, uncomfortable clothes, fighting traffic to sit in a receptacle like happy rats. There’s not enough cheese for everyone. Did you expect the meal to last forever?”

            The shock in their eyes was all she needed to understand they believed her to be a kind of monster.            

            “You’re disgusting,” Annette said. She got up and left, two more following behind her.

            Michael was next. “We could have had something. I thought I liked you." His lip began to quiver. "I thought you were a good person." 

            “There’s no such thing, Michael. There are only bad people ... and terrible people.”

            He pushed away from the desk in his rolling chair, meaning for it to be dramatic, but affecting only a pathetic spectacle that lasted far too long and filled the conference room with high pitched squeaking.

            Patricia kept her eyes on the door for a moment after Michael slammed it, then turned them on who was left. Tom, Daryl, three Foreign transfers from the East-Indian Tech Foundation, and Bernice, of course. She did really look like a buffalo.

            “I don’t understand.” Bernice shook her head. “I’ve never been late. I’ve never been—”

            “The rest of you,” Patricia interrupted, “who are at least making a good show of hiding your hatred of me, would be wise to refuse the severance package.” When they made to object, Patricia raised her hand. “It looks big, but it’s designed to get you off the books. If I were you, I’d collect unemployment and join the class action that’ll be in motion a week after the merge goes public. ENGCORP has absorbed four of our largest competitors in the last three years, and has settled out of court for each. Check the public records if you don’t believe me. I’ve seen your salaries. Unemployment should cover two-thirds. Your portion at the end of the settlement will be ten times the severance—and that’s a conservative estimate.” She was amazed how the imparting of such uplifting news did nothing to warm her, how the inside of her chest was still packed with ice. “Just trust me.”

            “Why should we?” It was one of the Indians, a young pretty girl who, if not for the American Tech Boom, would most likely be married to a man she’d never met. “Why should we trust you?”

            “Because I have nothing to lose.” Patricia smiled, and this time, this time, her chest rippled with the heat of a dying star. “I don’t think I’ll be … staying around much longer.”

*

            The conference room was empty and she was in the womb again. The umbilicus of fantasy, of taking in her own hands the very animus bestowed by God and choking it, had withdrawn. She was curled in this make-believe place. She was dying. But wasn’t dying the point?

            She looked up, outside, through the tinted glass some lab had created to protect men from the radiant orb that once had been their God, and saw a ragged V of crows cut between the buildings. One of them appeared to have a maimed leg.

            “And yet it flies,” she whispered, wishing that could mean something.

            “They’re beautiful,” said a voice so loud in all that quiet she flexed her ribs to the point of fracture. She snapped her face up, felt the careful coif of professionally extended hair unspool and stick against her cheek. 

            The Indian girl was sitting on the other side of the table. Calm. Not the least perturbed by what Patricia knew must look like a woman on the brink of mental collapse. “What are you d—?” she began, and then the womb broke in a flood of dark water and she remembered the girl had come back after the meeting concluded. The girl had waited patiently at the door when Patricia had refused to let her in. The girl had smiled in a way oracles must have smiled while long ago men begged and bargained for a glimpse of the fate that was their memory, their blood. And then Patricia had let her sit with her in the conference room, before drifting into her waking dream. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember what we talked about.”

            “We haven’t talked. Not yet.”

            Patricia waited, unsure if she wanted to invite into the world what might be lurking behind those smiling teeth.

            “It doesn’t have to be this way.” She took Patricia’s hand across the table, the skin cold and oily, the fingers like wax. “It can change.”

            “I’m sure I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

            “You’re rotting.” The Indian let that sink in. “From the inside out. Your frontal cortex is too evolved for the triviality this world requires of it. You are an adept.”

            Patricia snatched her hand away. “Leave.”

            “As you wish.” The Indian stood and made for the door. “There are places available to people like you. A panacea to all ails. Imagine sights and sounds and tastes on a plain beyond the reach of ordinary senses. Monstrous beauty. That is what it means to be an adept.”

            And there, in her chest, a slight tug, as of a stitch being winkled from the meat. “Wait,” she said, as the Indian pulled the door open. “I was rude.”

            The Indian shut the door and turned, and something in her face, in the composite of her body, seemed to undergo a momentary molecular shift. As quickly as it came, so was it gone. “I won’t leave. But neither will you lie. Tell me the truth. What does your life mean to you?”

            Patricia waved a hand to reference the boardroom, but what she meant was the steel beams and drywall and tonnage of concrete, the men and women who’d bent their heads together in a synergistic genesis of profit psychosis; she meant God and wealth and posterity, the fictions promulgated since the first monkey had climbed from his tree and ventured into the grasslands to diversify his diet; she meant everything: a material pyogenesis of hulking steel phalluses choking the skyline of every city that had somehow become the earmark of progress and status in the eyes of a culture gone blind. “…It’s bullshit. It’s a lie. I’m a lie. You’re a lie. More and more I find myself asking: is there anything that’s real?”

            The Indian moved as kelp moves in gentle currents, seemed to break apart and reintegrate through the air. She bent to one knee before Patricia, took her hands in a cold plastic grip, and slid a spongy tube into her palm. “Nothing is real. Let me show you.”

            Patricia studied the thing, about the size of a D-cell battery, segmented in lumps that appeared to have been squished together. As she rolled it in her fingers, an address came into view. “What’s this?”

            She heard the unnatural echo of her voice and looked up.

            The boardroom was empty.

            She kicked the seat away from her and flung the door open. Only a janitor running a vacuum with his headphones on. She raced around him to the elevators, but the digital displays showed their current position in the lobby. She backed away slowly, felt a kind of electric potential gathering in the corners of the room, the hallway, the floor itself. The sensation wasn’t static—but alive. 

            “Are you still here?”

            She didn’t here the vacuum die, or the sound of approaching footsteps.

            “ARE YOU STILL HERE?” Patricia turned and saw a skinny kid with black scruff and a backwards maintenance cap looking at her the way she’d expected the Indian to be looking at her when first she’d woken from the dream. But had she woken?

            “Miss? You okay?”

            Had she really woken? It bored into her mind, burrowed, expanded, chewed into the bloodstream and diffused in throbbing streams. How far back did the dream stretch? How far forward would it reach?

            “Are you sick? Do you need me to call someone?” The janitor’s eyes dropped to her hand, and Patricia looked down with him.

            The spongy tube with the printed address protruded from her trembling fist. As she watched, the trembling subsided. She lifted it to her face, looked up at the janitor. “You can see this, too?”

            He backed away a step, then nodded uncertainly. “Of course I can.”

            “Good,” she said, and felt the great boulder inside her chest resettle itself along the cliff it had nearly descended. “That’s good.”

            “You sure your okay?”

            “I’m fine.”

            But she wasn’t fine.

            She was intrigued.

*

           

            The address on the spongy tube led to a warehouse in the industrial branch of the city. Besides a few parked International trucks, the street was empty and choked with trash. She felt, given the circumstances, there should have been rain or cataracts of lightning carving white meridians in the sky, but the atmosphere when she stepped outside of her leased Mercedes was humid and bitterly warm.

            The front of the building was chained shut, but there were lights on inside. She could see it through the high windows marching down the alley on either side in a row of sightless eyes. The low throb of machinery echoed from somewhere below the cement. Like a heartbeat, that sound.

            She waited there for an hour and must have fallen asleep, because the sound of a chain falling heavily made her jerk into a standing position and almost tumble down the stairs. She gripped the handrail and looked back.

            “I’m glad you came,” said the Indian, though now she seemed different, somehow beyond ethnicity. She stood in the open doorway, the chain lying in a tangle between them. “Come in.”

            Patricia looked at the chain, the open padlock, wanted to ask how she’d unlocked it from inside, then figured she’d probably stepped over her sleeping body and done it from the outside. She searched the street for a new car, a truck, something, and felt a cold hand on her wrist, tugging gently, then firmly, tugging like a thought that is not a thought but an intuition.

            She stepped inside a womb of light. Completely empty. A chain of saucer-shaped industrial halogens hung in two lines down the entire length of a room nearly planetary in size. She squinted and couldn’t see an end to anything. “Where are we?”

            The Indian slammed the door and locked it behind her. “We are at the beginning.”

            The beginning? The riddles and cryptic phrases hadn’t bothered her until now. “Tell me what the hell this is. What the hell an adept is. Who you are. How you disappeared from the conference room. You’re certainly not an intern from the East-Indian Tech Foundation.”

            “I’m not.”

            Patricia waited but that was all she’d say. “I’m not moving another step until you tell me what’s happening.”

            The Indian smiled. “This is something you created. All by yourself. That brain you have has been unfulfilled since the moment it looked into a mirror and understood the concept of separation. At that very moment it began to sing, and has been singing ever since.”

            “Singing?”

            “The song. Yes. We have heard it. This is your answer. What do you think humans did before discovering agriculture? Before they stopped wandering for their food? They sang to the Earth and she sang back. When man built cities, he built walls around his mind. He looked into the mirror and saw a confusion of himself. He conceptualized a fragmentary world and forgot the Great Truth of its wholeness.”

            “Is this a cult? Are you…”

            “Stop asking questions and listen to your mind. Not the mind they gave you—the one you were born with.” She leaned in close and her breath was an infusion of ash and dust and shamanic fires. “The one that sings.”

            The words entered her at precise pressures, depressing tissues in her body, her heart, clearing blockages so that a great white flow began to cycle. She felt the looseness, the uncertainty, reform itself to stone within her. And in the silence of this place, under lights that marched in forgotten constellations down the warehouse’s impossible length, she closed her eyes and listened.

            “I can’t hear anything.”

            “You can.”

            “I’m trying.”

            “Stop trying.”

            “How can I stop trying?”

            “How do you breathe? How do you pump your heart? How do you sleep or dream or digest your food? Surrender to the pattern. It’s already there. Accept it.”

            Patricia pinched her eyes tighter, saw the eyelids burn through with veins of fire that split into an ocean of sunlight. She felt the eyes themselves peel apart and surrender their liquid; felt the hot ashes of her body diffusing up in swollen patterns, in fireflies and locusts, in a thousand burning stars that had always watched above and yet also hidden themselves in the fabric of what she was, what everything was when so reduced to its pieces and its voids. She saw all of this in seconds before the vision collapsed and her body returned and she felt the coldness of cement, the coldness of fingers, the coldness of the voice.

            “You are not ready. But now you’ve seen.”

*

            Had it been days or weeks? She couldn’t remember, knew only one thing for certain: the abstraction of time had no authority in the warehouse. Patricia had sat with the Indian who never offered a name by which to address her. Names are distortions of the mirror. Names are traps. As of yet there had been no actual instruction, minimal conversation, and yet a firm unyielding purpose had begun to flower. She couldn’t remember eating, but knew by the fullness of her belly some kind of nourishment was being administered by this place. It made no sense, yet the longer she sat below the ceaseless lights, the less sense the world of her past began to make. She began to see her former position in relation to the position of others, the ancient tribal structure mutated and reformatted into modern business models, the Apex predators become Apex pundits, the hunt of prehistory traded for the conquest of groupthink, war, opinions buttressed like fortresses in which the weak and unquestioning might finally feel that sense of belonging robbed by the absence of the song. She felt the sureness of these realizations with the clarity of her own breathing. The society outside the warehouse did not miss her. They’d hardly known she was there.

           

*

           

            One day the door swung open with a shriek and Patricia sat up, sweating, shivering, for a moment somewhere else but then forgetting that dreamed place in the presence of the lights. The Indian watched her from the warehouse door, dragging a rolled blue tarp behind her. It crackled as she walked, each step making Patricia more curious, more afraid. The Indian made a low moaning sound, waved a hand at the entranceway, and the double iron push-doors sunk backwards as if into a pool of white mud, plaster rising then firming until there was nothing but a pale smooth slate.

            “How did you—?” Patricia began, and then her voice fell flat and the last of her sleep drained away and she remembered everything. “What is it?”

            “Meat,” the Indian said. She dragged it to where Patricia was sitting, then sat cross-legged beside her. “You take the song away and that’s all any of us are.”

            Patricia wrinkled her nose, could smell the blood, the corruption. 

            “When you were sitting up in that high rise, thinking about killing yourself, what did you see when you looked out the window?”

            Patricia could not stop staring at the tarp. “I saw buildings.”

            “And?”

            “People.”

            “And what did you think when you saw them?”

            Patricia looped her hair behind her ears, felt the grease coat her fingers. “That there were too many. That they must be holograms in the mind of some thoughtless machine. Nothing benevolent would allow such ... such infestation.”

            “What else?”

            “That it was a mistake. All of this. That maybe killing myself would be the bravest thing I could do.”

            “And what if there was a way to change it?”

            “Change it?

            “What if there was a way to pull the plug before the machine could start its dream.”

            Patricia felt her breath shortening, her muscles clamping. “How?” 

            “I'll show you.” The Indian smiled. “Now sing with me.”

            She arched her back and lifted her chin and the frequency that poured out of the Indian was more vibration than tone. Patricia felt it crawl across her skin, her bones, down the tight cave of her throat; but so too was there an echo, an inner resonance. Brightness spread through her core, rising high and fast and powerful. Her neck and shoulders oriented themselves on instinct, and the only thing she could think, as an even more powerful vibration flowed out and up and through the room, was that the song must have been there all along, waiting for the workman’s spade to free it from its grave.

            The lights above her bent and warped, became bubbled as if through a plate-glass sphere that grew, and grew, and grew.

            I’m singing, she thought. I’m really singing.

            That’s when the tarp jerked and the dog, which had most certainly been dead, dragged its mangled body into the warehouse lights and began to howl in rhythm to the song.

           

*

            When she woke, the Indian was watching her, no longer Indian or female or precisely human in Patricia’s eyes. A type of reduction had stripped descriptors from her mind. It had taken weeks, perhaps years. She no longer knew or cared. It was only the song that mattered.

            “It’s about to happen.” The Indian whispered. “We must go.”

            Patricia stood, expecting her bones to crack and finding no pain, no discomfort, beyond the use of her voice. "I'm afraid.”

            “Fear is a dead concept. Are you you ready?”

            “For what?”

            “To sing.”

            “I don’t know.”

            “The sacred fungus. You’re still holding it.” The Indian looked down. "Put it in your mouth." 

            And there in her hand was the spongy tube. Patricia lifted it to her nose, sniffed the bitterness, the fungus. “You want me to—”

            “Eat it. Now. It is the final piece. Believe me, Patricia. You’re ready. And if you're not, you will be soon.”

            Patricia put it in her mouth and chewed, as they began to walk. It tasted of air and water and earth and fire. The shift came over her within minutes. There was a moment when she thought they might be walking backwards, might be walking within, but the idea burnt away in wisps of blue light. She glanced at the high windows and saw endless colors, endless shapes, had a sense she was approaching the center of things, perhaps into the engine of nature itself.

            The warehouse was not limitless, after all. In the distance she saw a giant door, equal pieces wood and steel and bedrock. It stretched from the wall and curved into the ground at an angle that made her feel nauseated, didn't make sense. There were others encircling it, some clothed, some naked, some human, all gazing up at a giant keyhole wrought in glowing steel.

            “Can you hear it, Patricia?”

            “Yes,” she whispered. A rumble unlike any and yet exactly like them all. Thunder and earthquakes and calving ice, cyclones and pulsars and the earthcroak of calderas. She heard the death of planets and cries of children being born; whalesong and birdsong and the silicon grind of molecules.

            “Now open yourself.”

            Patricia tried and then remembered what the Indian had said about trying and so she limbered the flexed pieces of her mind and felt a great uprushing force take hold of everything. It was like being seized in the jaws of a great unthinking beast. Her feet left the ground and the air held her in a thousand biting sparks. She fluttered her eyes and looked down and saw the others had somehow ventured from the door, were gathered around her with vaulted arms, were pushing her without touching her. They sung, a low warbling glottal sound so much like every sound and yet like none of them. She understood distantly the song was a type of structure, a type of delivery system, carving itself into the air in hardening sluiceways of vibration.

            She was suddenly afraid, saw her car parked on the street outside this nexus disguising itself as a warehouse, saw her neighbors gossiping near the rooftop pool about her sudden disappearance, saw her picture in the paper and her bosses scratching their heads, all while she hid in this place, while she rotted in a corrosive stream made not of things, but an absence of things.

            Patricia screamed and felt the scream reform in her throat to join the warbling voices, felt something outside herself reach in and change it in her mouth. A lightning storm of pain erupted through her cells, her veins. New limbs separated themselves from her skeleton, cut through the meat, evolved her. She looked down in horror to see her body bending, the sudden jerk of muscles repositioning themselves. The song was changing her. Her legs broke upward at the knee and began to twist together with a sound like snapping twigs. Her ribs collapsed and her torso narrowed. Her arms lit aflame and tapered into ropes that spiraled along the new impossible length of her body, melting, tempering, fusing flesh to flesh. She tried to scream but could only sing.

            And there, the light, so much light, ahead.

            The keyhole.

            She looked down at the Indian but her eyes were closed. All of their eyes were closed. Her feet sunk into the glowing steel port, then her knees. She felt the pressure of the lock pins orienting across her new anatomy, understood at once that they had been waiting for her, all this time, waiting for a woman in upper management moments away from killing herself, because something in her mind, of her mind, was essential to something they needed in order to … in order to …

            The narrow deformity of her shoulders sunk into the keyhole with a clank. It shuddered through the fabric of existence. The high windows of the warehouse exploded in a dust storm of coruscating glass. She felt the weight of eternity press down on her, felt the door began to flex like a birth canal. Something was dilating. Something was pushing her, filling her with a phrase, three letters, a phrase so loud and large it devoured every memory, every word.

            And they sang, and sang, and sang…

*

            The ancient earth was hot. The ancient earth was changing. The ape knew this, not with thought, but with touch and taste and feeling. For weeks now he'd known this journey must be made. Today was the day we would make it. 
            He patted his sleeping young and climbed from his Home Tree, venturing through the browning vegetation, eating insects and fibers on his way. The food was scarce, was getting scarcer. He loped for days and nights, farther than he'd ever gone, until the jungle brim declined into a channel of scrubby brush the color of river sand. And there, in the distance, he saw a sweeping sea of grasses so vast it almost almost made him run. To think the world could be so big. 

            An immediate understanding that they must come here overwhelmed him. It passed through his chest, through his bloodline, the things with which he translated his environment. Just then a large creature broke from a distant stand of bushes. The ape hunched low and watched carefully, unsure if he should be afraid. The creature was hairy like himself, but bent forward so it walked on its arms as well as legs. Great bones punched upward from its skull like a frozen flower. The bones were dangerous, but with the right maneuvering could be avoided. Such a creature might house sustenance beneath the hair and bone. His mouth began to water. A rope of saliva dripped from a mouth not yet evolved with rending incisors.

            He must urge them, must bring the tribe before the jungle dried and withered. They would be afraid, as he was afraid. But fear, he began to gather, was not so unbearable. He turned to make his way back—

            But the sky tore itself in half above him and through it poured lights and screams not that different than his own. In the tear across the great blue above were things he could not understand, voices singing around a great flat structure from which a hairless, enraged face screamed and bled and shivered.

            The beast spat into the air with a hot wet slurp, slammed the grass five feet ahead with a body like many burnt and braided snakes. It writhed in pain or anger, screwed its head up until it met the ape's wide eyes. The ape scrambled back, screeching, beating at its chest, at the ground.

            Patricia Garland, unable to remember her name, her pain, her identity, a single word cycling through her mind, opened her mouth so wide the bones began to crack. “RUN! RUN! RUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!” 

            The ape ran screeching through the scrub brush, up across the low hills, to the safety of the browning jungle canopies. He ran and tripped and scrambled until his heart felt as if it would burst. At the edge of his home, he climbed a tree and looked back, panting, saw the rippling lights in the sky and heard the distant warble of voices, as the snake beast in the grass screamed and screamed and screamed. 

            He could not bring the tribe. Not ever.

            The jungle was their home.  

           

             

           

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