Nekton

 

            I nod when the janitor comes in.  He’s just swept the floor and left.  I wonder how much it annoys him that I come here all the time, a lifeless human contact, a stain on his clean floor, a shit in the bathroom.

            Hillyer, I hear you.  The light drones above me, slow, silent, and unsurpassable.  Do you think that’s a good adjective?

            Adjectives.  Sentences.  How many will I need before I get to the end of the story?  This story never ends and I can’t figure out if I really want it to.  I can’t figure out what’s gonna happen.  But it feels like it already did.

            Didn’t get a whole lot of work done today.  Read the chapters for Creative Writing.  Fell asleep for almost two hours.  The story on page eighty was good.

            But not as good as this one.  Tomorrow, I’m going to shine again with my brilliance.  I’ll conquer that essay.  I’ll get an A.  Dr. Mayer will give me an extra two points or so on the test for pointing out that I wasn’t technically wrong.  I’ve done it.

            I’ve become the capitalist nightmare, the drone.  I haven’t got any other choices that I can see – they put this stuff into my head already.  Not happy?  No problem.  Go out and conquer.  The big bucks are waiting.  Power is money is hunger (satisfied?) is love.

            Love isn’t good enough for me.  I guess not.  Cause there’s only one person I really want to love me.  Or do I?

            Really glad I got that new room.  Gonna have to try not to get too horny around the R.A. next door, but I can handle it.  I can handle anything.

            I’m a mutant creation.  I know it’s all planned out.  A loner feels sorry and rejected and then finally so rejected he (or she, actually) can’t take it anymore, so I say, “It’s time.”

            Time to buy into all that capitalist bullshit.  Become my own supremacist.  I’m moving up like the social Darwinists predicted.  I will come to power.

            Then it won’t matter that gay people don’t have equal rights or that the rainforest is burning down, that ‘Shh’ doesn’t love me.  They won’t hurt me anymore.  I won’t be their prey.

            When a jellyfish starts out its life, it’s just a little guy – plankton.  I was plankton once.  Now I’m a leviathan.  Soon my tentacles will be unstoppable and my venom incurable.

            You don’t now how I’ve waited to find the jelly inside me.  But I’ve got it now.  The Mayans call it my animal companion spirit.  I call it

            I can’t tell you what I call it.  Its power is inside me, illuminated by the rows of halogen bulbs and translucent so you can see the floor underneath me.

            Oh, God.

            A man, then a woman, once many entities, sometimes none.  My beliefs change with the minute as I suck in seawater and propel myself to where I want to go.

            The siphonophore is one of the world’s largest living organisms, like a deep-sea jelly.  It eats practically everything.  That’s what I need to become.  A hundred-foot long barrier, a living net.

            I’ll catch everything.  Even ‘Shh,’ if I find him again.

            I have to teach him what he taught me.  To treat people like the living trash they are, without caring.  I don’t care anymore, ‘Shh.’  I wouldn’t care if you gobbled me up.  All my friends now dwell in Apathy, where I live, where you sent me.

            I just don’t want to feel the pain anymore and I don’t feel like trying to kill myself.

            The current has come and it’s taking me out of here.  I got four A’s last semester.  Each day I bury myself at the library under tons and tons of bone-crushing water.  I would implode if I had any bones.

            The library closes early on Fridays and Saturdays, so I come here, to Hillyer.  Sometimes there are professors in their offices.  Usually not.  I have the whole place to myself except the janitors and the occasional public safety officer who makes me leave so they can lock up the building.

            Right now I’m in an empty classroom and I wouldn’t even be writing this if it wasn’t an assignment.  Short story.

            I was thinking of going fantasy, but my life is fantastic enough for that.

            I have to go to the bathroom.

            See, I’ve learned how to fake it.  The masks I wear change with the color of the water and the refuse.  It’s fun being a jellyfish.  You blend in everywhere.

            Well, maybe I don’t exactly blend in.  People still recognize me as a fag and an asshole – they don’t know what those words really mean.  Cause when you call someone a monster and treat them that way, that’s what they become.  That’s what I am.  A monster.  That’s why I hate everyone.  That’s why I wouldn’t mind if we all just exploded.

            Except that I know things shouldn’t be that way.

            It’s salty here.  And slimy.  No other jellyfish.  Just me and the millions of slippery fishtails.  Not even a shark can take me.

            But there are certain kinds of creatures that eat jellyfish.  Like sea turtles, even though they’re endangered.

            I met a sea turtle once and he didn’t like me.  I wanted to be his friend or just pour out my finless details.  But, see, I’m made of seawater.  I am the element I swim in.  He couldn’t understand me, so he went away.  Now I know why jellyfish hate sea turtles.  They breathe air.

            That’s okay.  We’ve been around a lot longer than they have.  We are the Ocean’s keepers.  They’re just visitors, come to mock us and steal our food.

            Everything is food to me, but I can’t get enough of it.

            I’ll see you at the bottom one day, ‘Shh.’  The detritus takes us all.  And when the benthos feed off your corpse, I’ll be there watching.  Even though I have no eyes.  I’ll see you.

            You’ll end.  But I’m always just beginning.

            Though maybe I’ll get over my anger, if you ever get over your prejudice, and I get over mine, that you gave me.

            Swim.

(Swim)

(swi)

(-m)

(  )

( )

By Christopher Dubey, CT

2003 KarMel Scholarship Entry