I'm staring at the four by six photograph in its chrome frame perched atop my desk, the image of a slug on his wedding day. The mucous-green, slimy spineless body with black specks for eyes inside a pointed head is standing next to a fair, slender woman with red hair and freckles visible even the shoulders that the lacy white wedding dress has left bare. It isn't a pretty picture, at least not the sluggy half, but one should not ask for more of a slug and his wife.
I wasn't actually born as a slug. Or maybe for the last forty-seven years I was deceiving myself, believing I was human, like the Pink Elephant that thinks it can become an Olympic skier if only it practices hard enough. The elephant believes it, prances around the jungle in neon Gortex until eventually, it departs from the airport to the wild cheers of the secretly envious chimps and upon arrival at the Blank Mountain, immediately breaks its trunk on a tree during its first training run down the hill. That is when it realizes that it is a Pink Elephant and not an Olympic skier and no matter how hard it practices, how many fad diets it tries, how much Gortex it purchases, it finally realizes that its enormous legs would never fit into professional bindings.
In my case, the deception was worse. I looked in the mirror and clearly saw my ugliness, my worm-like shape, my bald head that the toupee never adequately disguised and the beady black eyes that saw little despite the inch of glass between myself and the world. I saw all this while simultaneously seeing the gold speckled butterfly that I would metamorphasize into. I never realized that I would flutter out of my cocoon instead as a grotesque winged slug.
I always thought there were choices. I could comb my toupee to the left or to the right. I could make my black specks blue, or brown, or purple. I thought I could enter that cocoon whenever I wanted and turn into anything I chose. I could stand to be a slug for as long as I wanted because I was already everything I could become. To be a slug or not to be a slug I thought was the question, but it wasn't. It was genetic. It was only a matter of time before I found my slugness and had to confront it.
That metamorphosis, from slug into slug, or more accurately, from the innocent slug preparing to become a butterfly, into the same slug that I always was, always will be and is aware of that fact could only take place in a silken cocoon. I was certain that cocoon would metamorphosize me into the golden butterfly that deep inside was my purest essence if only I were not kept from the entrance gate of Cocoon World due to my sluggish sliminess. As with all slugs, that silken cocoon where I longed to be trapped, never to emerge, where I could vomit up the sticky white morals that glued my slug life together was a woman's vagina. In my case, it was Stacey's vagina.
* * * * *
In my first glimpse of her, she was trotting through the office led by the executive editor. I was in the pit, lost underneath the ream of notes scattered helter-skelter around the word processor, across the desk, and even on the floor around me, like a slug inside its earthy home. I looked up to see a chestnut filly with a mane of blonde hair and brown eyes that filled her face. I stared at her and she smiled at me, a smile that said she would be my friend for life if I only fed her a carrot. Then she turned her gaze away and galloped out of our rat pit. No one knew who she was and no one found out. Not a very professional bunch of investigative reporters.
One day after I die, when the medical students slice open my pea embryo sized slug brain, they will see projected on the screen of my skull only one scene running continuously - the editor walking in front of her, his obese body obscuring the view of her blue print dress, her stockinged long legs encased in gray high heels, and the rose stem like fingers wrapped around a tan leather satchel. He was an out of breath, sweating pig, his hand on her back pushing her forward at me. He told me to take care of the new cub. I moved towards them, introducing myself, offering to show her the ropes, and basking in the warmth of her 500 watt halogen smile. I touched her hand and received a soft, comfortable handshake. Stacey, she said she was. Her perfume smelled vaguely of daisies and carrots and the musk of her skin. "Meet the slug," the editor said and I laughed and said it was "Doug," as the editor retreated to the relative safety of his air-conditioned office as if escaping from the first waves of the explosion to come. If she was a cub, I was a bear, a hungry, gritty, grizzly bear.
That afternoon, she accompanied me to the Governor's press conference where we were immediately surrounded by the other slugs drooling over my pony. The meeting was generic slop for the pigs who bother to read the paper or watch the news, mostly pigs who know that some animals are more equal than others and are only studying how to lie when it comes their turn to play Farmer. But on that day, even the Farmer himself stopped to admire the horse. Of course, both the Farmers and the pigs know the only purpose behind those huge brown eyes and glamorous mane is to be ridden, and everyone was plotting how to get their turn in the saddle.
I had been covering the governor since his reelection two years ago. It was a slug-brained but nominally important job and especially well suited to my slug nature. The governor's spokesman, the grand fishmonger himself, was my best friend. Although Richard feasted on fishes, he occasionally threw me a few of the bones before they were pummeled into official swill.
The governor's reign had been quiet save for the periodic natural disaster. It allowed me a comfortable life, a few drinks in the evening then home to my wife. However, it was the very quietness and efficiency of rule that was now making me busy. Farmers had been urging him to run in the upcoming Presidential election and now there were rumors that the Squatting-Duck himself would back the governor. Hence the need for a pony. Slugs can't move fast enough to keep up with a running candidate.
To break her in that first day, I let her write up the story. Then I took her to the Byline Bar down the street and let us be surrounded by the entire slew of slugs. The bar was dark and smoky, filled with atmosphere of angst of a hundred middle aged, balding men who came to the paper to break the next Watergate story and spend the evenings with the insatiable women of Deep Throat. After twenty years marching down the yellow brick boulevard, they had realized they were always to be the munchkins at best and the donut holes at worst, content to write pieces about Dorothy's trendy hairstyle as her husband met with the mysterious Wizard on the road from Congress to the White House. The bar had the atmosphere of a planet populated by men like me. We had come to the profession become American's leaders of morality, only to be sucked deep into the role of voyeur of our targets' fetishes.
After a couple, maybe more, probably six or seven drinks that evening I dragged Stacey away to a quiet table and started pointing at the fish. As a cub, I knew she was looking for that sparkling bass in the river of swill in which we swam. I knew I shouldn't say anything, but she looked so hungry, so willing to do anything for even a small fish. I never realized she was hungry enough to eat even a slow, old grizzly slug. In my drunken state, drunk more off her perfume than the alcohol, I told her where the fish were frolicking and watched her drool. I may be a slug, but I make my living spearing fish to add to the slop and I'm damn good at finding fish where others see only murky water. As a slug, the fish are unafraid to show themselves to me, take me into their muddy homes so that by now, I have a seventh sense about where the fish are playing.
Even before any official announcement, it was obvious that the governor was readying himself to become the Grand Poo-bah. He was already playing candidate, hop, skip and jumping across the United States. Traveling to New Hampshire then returning back home. Washington, New York, home. Iowa, home. California, home. New Hampshire, Texas, home. On each journey, Stacey and I flew with the governor, Richard, and the rest of the cast of hundreds. When we stayed overnight, which was becoming more and more frequent, it was in adjoining hotel rooms. We sat together everyday, we ate together, we drank together, we swam together, we slept apart. Whenever I finally stumbled back to my own house with the smell of daisies in my nostrils, I tried to imagine my wife a chestnut filly as I force fed her carrots.
No matter how hard I tried, it was difficult to imagine my wife as a horse. She was more of a walnut bookcase. Handsome. Solid. Well-polished. But if I put too many books on one side, she fell over with the weight that could crush an elephant's skull. I had spent the past fourteen years holding her up. It didn't require much strength, but with only a slug's size, it used up everything I had and my tiny muscles had become painful with cramps.
Stacey carried me away on her back. But when we were in town where the fish were known species, we stopped going to the Byline. Too many voyeurs' eyes watching us, too many mouths to talk about what wasn't happening yet. Instead, we met nightly at the Coconut Dream, only a few miles away but filled instead with the odor of lust and spilled frozen margaritas. Each evening, her eyes visible over the strawberry daiquiri raised to her strawberry lips, her mouth talked of ideals, of truth, of love. And of that record setting fish I had told her about that first day that she so desperately wanted to hook. She had become like Hemmingway's old man.
"We have to get proof," she whispered, her lips so close to my ear that I could almost feel her daiquiri sweetened tongue on my earlobe. But of course, there is no proof. If there were, it would eat all the fish that Richard grinded into the swill that we fed to the pigs in return for our slug chow. She didn't understand that logic, and suddenly, neither did I.
Eventually, I sensed that she had come to doubt me, began wondering if those glimmers of silver that I was pointing at were not the scales of a fifty-seven pound pregnant salmon but only a lazy sardine or even just discarded beer cans. The time had come to prove to her that I was truly a grizzly, even if I ate slug chow.
You have to understand my insanity. I had to have her. I dreamed only of running my antennae over every inch of her skin, inching my insect body over her mountainous scoops of ice cream, slimeing her waxed strawberry lips, and of course, sliding deep into her cocoon to metamorphosize into a brilliant, phosphorescent, fluttering toy to exist solely to amaze and amuse her through my life made immortal by her sweet ambrosia. This was my dream, this was my life, this was my only thought. But she kept that ambrosia in the cocoon whose entrance I could only open with my special key.
My secret key was that nuclear fish. It was a neutron bomb that left us all standing but hollowed-out like the rotten log where I slept. It would annihilate all of us. All but her. She was radiation proof. She thrived on the rays that wiped out the rest of us, thrived and multiplied. Now I can see that she is really a cockroach, a winged cockroach that sunbathes on the corona of the sun, but the most damn beautiful, tempting roach that ever existed.
That fish was nuclear. That was why I had never touched it before. That was why it was as large as Godzilla and visible even from its deep underwater cavern with the blue-green glow of its poisons. That was why everyone else closed their eyes when they faced it. The missile had black and yellow radiation stickers all over it. It required an amazing amount of planning, plotting, and coordinating to activate. But in the end, it was activated and there was a button and my finger, and though I knew it would neutronate my life and everyone else around me, my finger pressed that button. I longed to hear her smooth, professional voice whispering in my ear, commanding me to "press it!" but she never did. She only hinted of how this would transform our lives and our professional and personal relationship. But her hints were never subtle in letting me know that we had to be irradiated together before she'd be mine.
* * * * *
The key to arming the fish was Richard, the governor's press spokesman. He was the key because he was the one person who knew where that fish played. But the truly secret key was my wife, because she was the only one who could disarm Richard. I had no choice. I had to plug her into Richard. I understood the consequences, at least in that this would set me free to flutter for Stacey. There was no free will - my entire existence, my whole training was created for this moment and I realized that even my marriage had been an elaborate preparation to make possible what I was about to do. I was already high on the scent of the ambrosia waiting for me inside Stacey's locked cocoon.
A hydrogen bomb is detonated in three stages. First, a small detonation of standard explosives smashes hemispheres of plutonium together. The small detonation thrusts the two pieces into each other and when they collide, the nuclear chain reaction explodes with immense power. This energy is harnessed to force quadzillions of hydrogen atoms to mutate into helium and burst forth with the heat of a new sun. The whole process starts with a single spark and I held the matches.
The nuclear reaction would take place when the two hemispheres of plutonium collided with each other. One hemisphere was Richard. The other was my wife. They had always been two halves of the same whole with only the wall of my marriage separating them. When they collided, it would vaporize the hydrogen in which we all lived.
Everyone thought Richard was destined for greatness. He was handsome and came from a prominent San Francisco family. That is why when we graduated together with our journalism degrees, he headed straight for the local television station. He started backstage, writing the copy that the anchors read, and moved to reporter before being brought aboard by a promising gubernatorial candidate. I went instead to the newspaper where I thought the real stories were written. We were a strange pair of roommates in college and remained drinking buddies afterwards.
My eventual wife was his girlfriend during most of our college years. In fact, I was the person who introduced them, not because I want to, but because she asked me to. I liked her from the fist, but fell in love with her when I saw her together with Richard. But they were both nuclear and as soon as they were together, they would instantly explode apart again, Eventually, I was able to insert myself between them and hold them apart.
At first, it wasn't easy keeping them apart and I had to erect a scaffolding of lies and half-truths to prevent their natural attraction from crushing me in the middle. Eventually, I built up a solid structure in between and finally with marriage, poured concrete over the infrastructure through which the waves of attraction were weakened to where they were unable to overcome my barrier.
Of course, they were never physically further apart than the thickness of my marriage and my friendship with Richard. During the early days, Richard and I met nearly every day at one of the reporter hang-outs and it was my wife who found a wife for Richard. But I always knew those two would crash into each other as soon as the concrete crumbled.
My first step towards Stacey was therefore a series of small, simple explosions carefully placed and exquisitely timed to weaken the foundations of the barrier holding them apart. These explosions allowed the simmering waves of attraction to seep through the deepening cracks in the concrete and begin pulling the two halves inexorably towards each other.
I knew the explosions need not be large. In fact, if they were too powerful, they could have ripped either of the two perfect hemispheres to shreds, making it impossible for the two halves to unite and join. So it was with the utmost care that I began coming home later than usual, ignoring my wife's needs and dropping hints about the state of Richard's marriage. And it was with superb finesse that I began to confess to Richard about my attraction to another woman. I drew them closer so the gravity waves would reach through me. I invited my wife with me when I went drinking with Richard, and invited Richard often to dinner at our home. My wife thought she was there to comfort Richard and help him overcome his unmentioned, non-existent domestic problems. Richard thought he was along to aid support in my last ditch attempt to maintain my marriage.
Then, once the cracks had formed and grown, with a small, final detonation I forced the whole structure to crash to the ground. One evening, while Stacey and I prepared for the explosion that would shake our universe, I invited both Richard and my wife to meet me at a local restaurant. A nice restaurant. Italian. With good red wines. I asked them to start without me if I were a bit late. An hour past the appointed time, from the cellular phone in Stacey's car parked across the street from the restaurant, I left a message through the maitre 'd that I wouldn't be able to make it that evening. My apologies.
With the concrete exploded into rubble on the ground and the rest of the infrastructure corroded with age and the acid I had been pouring into it, there was little to do but wait as the gravity waves inexorably drew them together across the thin sliver of empty space separating them. Stacey sat in the car next to me, her fingers roving slowly across my thigh in time to the music on the radio.
Two and a half bottles of red wine later, they slunk out of the restaurant, bloated, drunk, and vaguely nervous that I might appear from nowhere as if I had been secretly watching them the entire time. It showed on their face as they looked around before furtively slipping into Richard's gold Lexus.
Stacey followed close behind them while I kept my head ducked down below the dashboard, my face deep in her lap, smelling the scent that wafted forth. I could almost taste her nectar through the fine mesh of the cotton weave of her dress.
We followed them through the darkness to a motel off the highway far enough outside the city where Richard was less afraid of being noticed. Once they were safe inside, I walked from the church parking lot across the street to their room, camera and spy microphone in hand. Through the thin gap between the two halves of the pleated curtains, I could see them, naked, lustful, lunging at each other with the force of a nuclear explosion. I could see them through the viewfinder, living as if they knew that tomorrow would bring the doom caused by the heat of their passions. There was only the button and my finger, and I pressed that button with glee and held it down, listening to the autowinder whip through the film one long shutter snap at a time.
Once I was satisfied that the emulsions had captured the essence of the spark that I needed to ignite the conflagration, I knew I should leave. But I couldn't move. I continued to watch and listen, immobilized. I watched Richard and my wife attacking each others' bodies as if ripping them apart would free their souls to be joined together. I watched the scene as if it were a virtual-reality porno-sex movie and grew harder, hornier for Stacey.
Finally, she drove into the parking lot, reached out and grabbed my arm, pulling me back into her car. I dropped the precious equipment onto the back seat. Though there was no reason anymore to hide, I kept my head down for the rest of the trip, my hands resting on her thighs, my face buried under her dress, licking the satiny fabric of her panties until we arrived at her apartment.
Inside her cave, we exploded the cork off a bottle of champagne that she had chilling in the refrigerator, waiting for this moment. After a few sips and a few bubbly kisses, she slid off my arms and into the bathroom. I carried the bottle and glasses into the bedroom. I undressed and crept under the covers, the cocoon from which I would soon be reborn. I sipped a few more long-stem glassfuls of my medicine while I waited in giddy anticipation for her to finish showering.
When she stepped into the bedroom, her golden mane damp and stringy, her body wrapped in a fuzzy, pink bath towel, I reached up and pulled her down into my hive. We punctuated each kiss with a sip of champagne. We had finished two bottles and moved on to the celebratory Chivas before I exploded the glasses against the concrete wall and engulfed her with my body and did to her everything I had watched Richard do to my wife.
* * * * *
When I awoke, the light filtering in through the curtains burned my eyes. I reached for Stacey but found myself alone inside the cocoon except for a note. "Went shopping. Be back soon," it read. Thank God it was Saturday. I pulled the covers over my head and went back into hibernation.
She still hadn't returned when I awoke again. I had no idea how much time had passed, but the light seemed vaguely more painful. I found a bottle of aspirin in between the cosmetics in her medicine cabinet and swallowed the last three pills while the hot water sprayed down over me from the shower head. Afterwards, I turned on the television and in the comfort of her bed, watched reruns of MASH and Murphy Brown. She never returned.
Eventually I grew worried. I wanted to make love to her one more time before we hurried off to the newspaper's labs to have our nuclear photos developed. I worried that we had been spotted the previous night and that she had been kidnapped in the morning by some foreign espionage organization anxious to use the photos for their own ends, or even worse, murdered by the agents of the nuclear industry, the governor, or the President himself in an attempt to preserve their own dark secrets. I staggered over to the entranceway where we had left the camera and microphone. They were gone.
I considered calling the newspaper to see if they had heard any news about Stacey, then realized it would seem suspicious. I thought about calling the police or the FBI, but if they weren't the perpetrators, I had nothing to report and if they were, they would come back after me. I called the newspaper.
"Where the hell have you been?" the editor screamed at me, his dank sweat and bad breath audible through the receiver. "Biggest damn story of the decade and on your own blasted beat as well. I called your home to drag your lazy fuckin' ass in here but your wife just said you weren't around. Where the hell have you been?"
I slammed the receiver onto its cradle. Then I picked up the unit and smashed it against the wall, watching the plastic shatter into pieces and the plaster explode. Then I picked up the pieces and slammed them into the wall again and again.
* * * * *
I stayed in her apartment all day. I had nowhere else to go and no way to get there. Finally, I switched on CNN to torture myself. They were showing highlights of the President's press conference. He was denying knowledge of everything. But he was sweating and his hands, instead of spinning about explaining his brilliance, were gripped in fear against the edges of the podium. The governor didn't even try to deny the allegations. Citing "an unfortunate incident" and "personal reasons," he simply resigned from the Presidential race and indicated he would step down from the governor's post as soon as his term was up. Pundits speculated if he would last even that long.
And finally, the network cut to an interview with Stacey, holding a copy of the morning edition of our paper that was the hydrogen bomb explosion itself. The headline
screamed "Governor Covers Up Nuclear Deaths," and below that "Top Pentagon Officials Involved."
Stacey, dressed in an unusually conservative suit, explained how her sources, deep in the governor's administration had confirmed the fact that the governor had allowed Pentagon contractors, large contributors to past campaigns, to store their nuclear waste in unauthorized underground sites. Most damning of all, he helped to cover up everything when all the villagers in a nearby town mysteriously died, officially of a virulent virus but in actuality, of radiation poisoning from contaminated well water.
Richard had obviously talked to Stacey. He talked because he had no choice. He talked because it was the truth and he couldn't deny it. He talked because Stacey promised him anonymity. He talked because Stacey promised to destroy the photos. He talked because he slept with my wife and didn't want me to know. He talked because our friendship was more important to him than his job, more important than the election campaign of the governor and the reputation through history of our President. And I never had any doubt that he would. I grabbed the empty champagne bottle and threw it at the television and watched it go nuclear, too. Then I lay down to wait for Stacey.
* * * * *
Stacey didn't return for two days. I waited in my cocoon, without food, without television. When she came back home and saw me still there, she would have ducked back out again if I hadn't slammed the door behind her and blocked her way out.
"Get out!" she ordered.
I reached out to touch her breasts. She stood there, expressionless. I cupped both breasts in the palms of my hands and rubbed them. "You used me," I whispered.
She grabbed my wrists and twisted them backwards. The pain ripped through my hands, through my arms and slammed into my skull. I screamed.
She let go of my wrists and took a step away from me. I reached for her pussy and she kicked me hard in the shins with her pointed pumps. I fell back against the door.
She turned her head and sneered. "You're pathetic."
I lunged at her, tackled her onto the floor and had her dress halfway up her leg before suddenly finding myself face up on the floor with her knee pressing down on my throat. I could barely breathe.
"I love you," I choked out.
For an instant, I saw an expression in her eye other than cold professionalism. It was different from the excited puppy expression she had modeled for me in the bars, hotels, and bed. This was an honest expression. I'll never know if it meant that she was feeling at that moment just the slightest iota of love, if it was pity, or the recognition of the rubble she had reduced my life to. But that cloudiness in her eye, the far-away glaze, the contemplative softness cleared in a second, and returned to her hard stare.
She lifted her knee from my throat, stood up and kicked me in the ribs. She opened the door, then kicked me again. I lay on the floor and sobbed, every inhalation a nuclear explosion in my gut.
Finally, she turned her back to me. "Just get the hell out of here, you miserable slug." She walked away from me and locked herself in the bathroom.
Grasping the door knob for support, I pulled myself upright. I could barely stand. With my arms wrapped around my chest, I staggered out of the apartment and closed the door behind me.
* * * * *
Now I'm staring at my wedding picture. My wife, actually Richard's wife now, is shimmering in her white dress. Stacey was right. I am a slug. I can see my slug essence in the photograph, the tiny eyes at the top of my head, the antennae, the slimy amorphous body. I wonder how I never recognized it before Stacey pointed it out. Stacey. While I am now writing the obituaries for our paper, she's with the New York Times, famous, respected and soon to be in your homes every night on the network news. I hope I have enough slime to coat her face on the television screen.
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Copyright 1986-2008 DC Palter. All rights reserved.