Fusiform

I woke up with an empty mind and I thought maybe it was just the fog, clouding things. I sat up and looked over the edge of the bed, where a roiling fog – so utterly opaque that not even the shape of my footstool showed through – was two feet thick across my bedroom floor. The fog in my room: this was unfamiliar to me. It moved so fluidly that as I looked into its depths, and we hypnotized each other, I became convinced that this fog, chasing its own ripples around my bedroom floor, had some kind of important message for me. It meant something. A harbinger, an omen...

I woke up with an empty mind, the same empty mind that I had wrapped cold arms around and spooned myself to sleep. An empty mind that slithers out from under me as soon as I am fast asleep – a mind that slips out at night to carry on in ways that I never would. Riding bareback on a pitch black Clydesdale under the bright equatorial sun. Tumbling through burning hoops with the seal boy in a three ring circus. It dances hard and sweaty at techno clubs in Minsk, it rescues the children just seconds before the treehouse falls, it samples the most incredible grilled octopus pasta at a seaside cafe and then always, always rushes home and slides, tightlipped, into the bed beside me.

I woke up with an empty mind but I knew that it hadn't been empty for long. There were stories, adventures, satires dripping with droll observations. There were stories and my empty mind was hiding them from me. I struggled to put words to the suggestions of memories, but they dissolved as my eyes began to focus. I thought maybe it was just the fog, clouding things. So I sat up and I looked over the side of the bed, but the fog was hypnotic. As I waited for the fog to clear, to reveal my secrets to me, it lulled me – flashing its strobe, counting backwards from ten. The fog was rising.

The footstool was already gone. Soon the fog had consumed the copper wastepaper bin, the hanging file basket with its rubberized casters, and the bottom two drawers of my writing desk, the ones where I keep the secret things I don't want anyone else to see. I sat, just sitting, and my mind stayed blank and the fog kept rising.

When the fog flooded over the top of my bed, its cool, slick surface seemed to dampen my fingers. But when I raised those fingers to the light from the east window, they were dry. The fog was cold, did not chill me. Did not stop enticing me with the notion that its deeper meaning was right in front of me, just out of reach. So many mornings I had awakened with no sense that there was a deeper meaning to be found. In anything. But on those mornings, there had never been an impenetrable fog, climbing.

So I stood up, as I do on most mornings. I stood up and waded to the writing desk, where I sat knee-deep in the fog surrounding my chair. I sat in front of an untouched writing tablet, fingering a pencil whose point, sharpened eleven days ago, had not yet been dulled. Time to break ground. Time to break new ground. Time to hoist my lead and scratch the surface.

Surrounded by the rising fog, my mind empty, I began to jitter the pencil across the page, hoping I could somehow capture those stories my unfaithful mind was keeping from me. And stories did begin to come: though I averted my eyes, looking into the fog rather than at the paper, I could feel the pages filling up. Time flew by. Or else it stood still. The sun hung steady or else it rose, set, and rose again. The fog

I had covered dozens, perhaps hundreds, of tablets with my frantic penciling. Should I have been elated? I remained uncertain, but eager. I had written so much, at last, after so little for so long. I should stop and read, certainly, clearly, I should read my work and finally unlock the secrets from my mind. I selected a tablet and opened it.

When I was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.

Curious, I thought. I knew that story. It was, perhaps, a coincidence? I flipped the tablet to somewhere in the middle and read on.

“Naw, we better wait till they get in, Atticus might not like it if he sees us,” said Jem.

The Maycomb County courthouse was faintly reminiscent of...

Now there was no question. This was unmistakably my handwriting but not, not, not my words. I pulled another tablet, and another, from the teetering stack.

The last time we saw Charlie he was riding high above his home town in the Great Glass Elevator. Only a short while before...

Coincidence?

In watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar.

Once there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids.

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before that had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.

On and on, tablet after tablet, I had written hundreds of stories that were not my own. And so I realized what I had to do. To clear the blockage, to open the floodgates. To lift the fog. I needed only to first write all the others, all the stories that came before. Once I did that, then the only stories left to tell would be the ones buried inside.

All throughout history, throughout those tablets, right outside my bedroom window:

Civilizations built themselves from the ashes, achieved greatness, succumbed to their own folly and crumbled back into the ashes again. Princesses vanished from their expansive four-poster beds, sending the whole kingdom into a panic, only to wind up in a nick-of-time rescue by the goodhearted peasant boy who nobody ever figured for a hero. Armies surged across war-ravaged continents, children grew up and came to terms with the challenges of adulthood or found clever ways to shirk responsibility, and always, always, spanning a thousand generations of changing values, men and women continued their endless dance around the topic of love – sometimes awkward, sometimes delicate, but always dancing.

The pencil never got dull, but now and then the stories did.

The fog was swarming with fish.

They swam just inches below the surface, their darting movements tracing waves and wakes around my submerged legs. They had been there all along, but they were much larger now, and I could see them. A thousand long novels ago, the fish were no bigger than thumbs. Many of the stories had involved fish. The one about the steadfast tin soldier. The one about the old man. They're always appearing in Mark Twain, and the Bible. Trout. Steelhead. Babelfish and bananafish. Fusiform is an adjective which describes an object shaped like a fish.

Fog, on the other hand, shows up less frequently in the stories. Furthermore, it usually describes atmospheric decoration on mountains, in valleys, and other land formations.

The thumb-sized fish had wriggled under the legs of my pajamas, up to my knees where the fog grew thin and they flicked their tiny tails back and forth, panicked, until they found their way down to my cuffs and freedom.

Their bodies, flapping against my legs, felt wet with slime. But a hand dipped into the fog could draw out a dozen of these fish, small and dry, their shapes indistinct and getting smaller all the time. They shriveled to grey seeds, fusiform grey seeds that rattled in my palm. Then lower the hand back into the fog and the seeds, plumping like sponges, would unfurl and swim away.

But oh, how they had grown. Like footballs now, knocking softly up against each other, far too big to fit in my pajama legs now. How much time had passed? The sun was in the same position. Or it was in the same position again. The fog had not risen any higher, but it was filling up. Filling with fish.

I had exhausted so many writing tablets that I could no longer keep track of where I was putting them. Faster and faster I would find myself trailing off the edge of the last page and then, before I knew what I had done, I was throwing open the cover of a new one, picking up exactly where I had ended. The fish grew fatter and longer, but the fog never even filled my lap.

When I finally finished writing every story that had ever been written, I closed the tablet and lay my pencil down. The point was even sharper than when I had begun. Folding my arms across the desk, I looked out the window and wondered if the sun might start moving now. That is if, in fact, it had actually stopped moving in the first place. Would the fog begin to rise again? Would the fog begin to clear?

From where I sat, at least, some time must have passed. My wrist was tired and my legs, massaged though they were by the fish, had grown stiff. I should be able to write my own words now, to get at the stories my mind had been up to while I slept, while I slept last night, libraries and libraries in the past. I should be able to write now because I was done, I had faced an insurmountable task and I was done. Somewhere in this cloudy room I could find a clean tablet and unlock the vault. But first I would stretch. I would stretch these tired legs.

I pushed the chair back from my writing desk and tried to stand. I extended a toe, probing, scattering the school of fish, the fish now the size of loaves of bread. I extended a toe but could not find the floor. Just the fish. More and more fish, and I stood, felt their numbers holding me aloft. The fog had not been rising, but it had been growing deeper, after all.

Below my feet, the fish were giving way. The fish were opening their innumerable ranks to allow me into their midst. I sank slowly, so slowly, and as I sank the sun seemed to go higher beyond the window. An illusion, I was sure.

I picked up my pencil, my sharpened pencil, and the writing tablet. The only tablet in the room. I opened the cover to write a note, to remind myself that sinking, slowly sinking down in front of a window, created the illusion, the optical illusion from the sun's position relative to the top of the window frame, that the sun was rising at a rate equivalent to my own descent.

But wait a moment, I thought, holding the pencil ready, pausing and sinking. Because that was wrong, was all wrong. For my position relative to the sun, and to the sill, was changing only insofar as I was sinking, and if the sun was steady in the sky then, from my perspective, the sun should seem to be getting closer to the bottom sill. As though it were setting.

Nevertheless, there it was, climbing higher and higher into the sky. So it must be rising. Rising furiously.

I should write this down, I knew, write it all down before it was too late. I opened the cover and saw that the first page in the tablet was blank. But the page before that, the page immediately prior to the first page in the tablet, contained every story that had ever been written.

On the first page, the blank page, I wrote that I was sinking. That I was sinking, that the sun was rising, that I was surrounded by fish.