2
Jim regained consciousness deep underwater in a cocoon of dull pain. Falling into water from high dive height was painful. Falling into water from cloud height was just unfair.
A hot scrape between his shoulder blades joined in on the fun.
Jim swirled to find Mars clawing impatiently at his back, trying to save both their lives if Jim didn’t mind. Starved for oxygen, Jim’s brain ordered a heaping pile of it but instead pulled a lung-full of water. Yes, technically there was oxygen in the water, but only the hydrogen-obsessed kind of little respiratory interest.
His eyes found Mars’s and widened into “uh oh” size. Mars paddled in a direction that must have been up. Dogs could sense earthquakes ahead of time, maybe they had skill in avoiding drowning too. Jim swam after Mars as the water in his lungs impatiently pushed its way into surrounding cavities. Soon it would fill him entirely, and he would die, his waterlogged corpse sinking to the depths below. Whatever grand plans Oz had for him would go no further than a picked-clean skeleton crumpled on the sandbar like some cheap fish tank decoration. Jim’s eyes met with a dancing light he first mistook as some theatrical entrance to the afterlife. Only when he saw Mars’s butt floating nearby did he correctly recognize the ocean surface seen from below.
Jim surfaced, gasping greedily. Wonderful, full-bodied breaths of proper oxygen rippled through his shaking frame. The overwhelming relief at a primal level reminded Jim of holding his urine as long as he could when he was a kid, just to get the rush of endorphins when he finally peed. While a urologist might scoff at the practice out of consideration for the kidneys, to a poor, sibling-less child in rural Idaho it was free, reliable fun.
“This way!” a thin voice cracked with excitement.
Jim corkscrewed. The lifeboat he’d seen from the sky slowly approached, propelled by a scarecrow of a man paddling frantically with a cupped hand. Jim reached out his own hand for rescue, but the castaway didn’t take it, choosing instead to pull Jim up by his head. The man stared with a crazed look into Jim’s bewildered blue eyes. “God damnit!” he shrieked with a heavy accent, possibly French, before releasing Jim and falling back into the boat.
Jim dropped underwater briefly before resurfacing to the man’s tortured wails.
“Have you seen a dog?” Jim called as he clung to the side of the boat.
The wailing stopped.
“There is another?” The man popped back up and pushed Jim aside as he was apparently obscuring the ocean view. “Where? Where is the hound?”
As if on cue, a scratching sound came from the other side of the boat.
“Ah!” the head-puller cried. He hoisted Mars out of the water and stared into the dog’s eyes just as he’d done with Jim. Unlike Jim’s crummy blue eyes, Mars’s red ones elicited great exuberance. “Mooi! How wonderful!”
The man laughed with such joy that Jim strained to look at Mars’s face to see what he’d apparently missed. “What is it?” he sputtered, hands slipping on the slick rim of the boat.
“The eyes, you ingrate, look at the eyes! How is it said? They are cat’s pajamas!”
Mars’s eyes shut as he shook, releasing a vertical typhoon of sea spray that caught Jim full in the face as he climbed aboard.
The man busily petting Mars seemed entirely unconcerned that the new castaways had dropped clear out of the sky, or further, that Jim was entirely nude save for his socks. If the accent wasn’t a dead giveaway, the man’s European origin was all but confirmed by his casual reaction to nudity. Jim, a proper American, possessed enough shame to quickly cover his privates with his left sock. He laid the brother sock on the bench to dry like a strip of cotton jerky and studied the man petting Mars.
The strained and cracked face had been splashed with a glass of madness that pooled in the squinting olive eyes, ran past a strong and sensible nose, and dripped into the frayed brown beard below. The guy might have actually been handsome on whatever boat had sunk under his feet, but it must have been some time ago. Mars sniffed at his pale blue button up and khakis cut off about mid-shin in classic castaway fashion. Sea salt had caked his faded clothing almost entirely white.
The boat wasn’t much better off. Eggshell paint peeled back in long rolling curls revealing (sigh of relief) sturdy lumber underneath. Oak, or poplar even? Two men and a canine had plenty of elbow room as the craft was large enough to accommodate an entire offseason (and thus considerably paunchy) baseball team. Two single plank benches at either end provided just enough cover from the sun for something to try and stay alive. In between them, a water bucket rolled annoyingly with the motion of the waves.
Jim set the bucket on end and tucked it neatly under one of the benches. It had always been unclear to him whether he’d taken a job as a janitor because of a natural preference for cleanliness, or if the preference had come as a result of being a janitor. The true chicken/egg paradox of the custodian world. In either case, if Jim was in a space, it could be reasonably assumed things in that space were clean and orderly, including his own A+ hygiene (with special regard to his eyebrows). Aside from the whole tantric pee thing, Little Jim had another weird adolescent affect involving the attempt to make his genetically thin eyebrows more robust. Petrified that others wouldn’t be able read his emotions properly because of the follicle deficiency, Little Jim had almost melted his eyelids shut trying to give his face a perm and gotten a hearty whooping from his mother as a result. He then took the more reasoned comb-over approach of spreading the hair out with his fingers, a calming habit that continued into adulthood.
Jim sat on a plank bench and fanned his eyebrows.
A dangerous flare of thought ignited somewhere in his brain, threatening to spread like wildfire: Huh? He flexed his mental muscle and further specified.
Root beer. Puffy coat. Dikatharide olanzapine.
Oz interference. Improbable basement. Dog-pregnant mulberry tree.
Obelisk into the void. A crackers castaway in a lifeboat. And to top it all off, Jim’s entire outfit was now a sock that would have a real “you think that’s bad, guess what I had to do” story for the washing machine crowd.
Even though Jim was generally a cool customer regardless of the situation, this seemed like a big ask. Previously, the strangest thing that’d ever happened to him was finding a second prize in his box of Cheerios. The “robot monocle” ultimately turned out to be a loose factory widget that won Jim’s mother some of that sweet General Mills hush money. So maybe nothing exceedingly strange had ever happened to Jim after all. It was true there was an overabundance of noteworthy antics at St. Mili’s, but unless you counted the odd manic marriage proposal or lazy assassination attempt, none of the incredulous things happened to Jim directly.
Shaking his head, Jim forced himself to compartmentalize any presently useless analysis of the bigger picture. Priorities had shifted. Water, food, shelter. These things and how to acquire them were now shockingly important, without any thought as to why, beyond certain death. Jim allowed the gravity of his predicament to sink in, exhaled with birthday candle intensity, and tried to think objectively.
The only void-surviving-accessory (in a non-sock category) was the bag of ash, penduluming gently from its loop around his wrist.
Did my clothes not make it through the obelisk or did they come off in the water? Why do I still have my socks? Why are yellow lights—no. That doesn’t matter right now. Focus.
He opened the Asset, as Oz had called it, expecting to find some kind of magical instrument perfectly engineered to cure all one’s stranded-at-sea maladies. The powder sat inside, slightly crumbly from a bit of seawater that had gotten in, but otherwise unchanged.
“How’d you get out here? Are you uh . . . French?”
The stranger had lost none of his enthusiasm for Mars’s eyes, petting the dog rapidly as he mumbled compliments. “I am Belgian.”
Jim was spared from admitting he had not a single piece of Belgian knowledge to continue the conversation when Mars decided he had taken his fill of attention and trotted over to Jim’s side of the boat to lay in the shade of the bench. Freed from the furry distraction, the Belgian seemed to notice the unmissable ocean all around them for the first time. His eyes went “oh no” wide and he and dove to the floor of the boat. “I hate it! I hate it! I hate it!”
“The water?”
“No, no, no, no, no!” The man pounded the bottom of the boat so hard the sturdy wood emitted some worrisome crunches. “The color,” the Belgian growled in a demonic baritone.
“Blue?”
The man’s eyes sprang even wider, and he lunged at Jim with surprising speed. Mars immediately hell-no’d from his resting place, a suddenly toothy snout filling the space between the two men. The sun-dried Belgian fell backward, his forsaken attitude returning as if Jim’s unforgivable transgression had never occurred at all.
“I’m sorry, mister. I didn’t mean to . . . uh, I won’t say that word again. I’m Jim, I’m a janitor. That’s Mars, he’s a dog.” Jim said, somehow making the socked-crotch introduction even more awkward.
“Barnabus. I was a painter,” the man covered his eyes and rolled miserably under the bucket storage bench. “Once I had turtle blood to drink. It was such a lovely shade.” The shivering ball of painter began to self-soothe with his own personal lullaby. “Cerulean, copper, beige, gold, jade, ruby . . . ” On and on, color after color, covering every corner of the spectrum save the unmentionable as he rocked himself into a sleep that didn’t look restful in the slightest.
Jim crawled under the other bench with Mars.
Only the painter will get you back.
That’s what that marooning son of a bitch Oz had said. Mars nudged Jim’s hand affectionately with a nose that was already veering away from the wet and cold ideal. Jim scratched reassuringly behind his Companion’s ears, but inside he did a nervous collar pull.
If the hair trigger, color prejudiced ball of rags opposite them was a painter, then he was their only salvation, and getting back to Idaho might take some real doing.
* * *
Even with the Twentieth Century advancements of radar and standardized shipping lanes, shipwrecked survivors still died at sea, about as often as a freeway-adjacent squirrel has a good year: rare, but it happens. Before the Twentieth Century, castaways died as often as a freeway-adjacent squirrel meets a Goodyear: much, much more common. There are many heart-wrenching tales of terror to choose from, but the record for the absolute longest time stranded at sea goes to Giuseppe Marino, a Genoan merchant sailor who lived and died in the Seventeenth Century.
Giuseppe was returning from a fruitful trip to the Orient with a choice haul of rare spices, really primo stuff, when his ship was blown off course into the Pacific Ocean. After the rest of the crew divided into two groups: one who refused to participate in cannibalism on principal, and another that ate the principled, Giuseppe scooped an armful of goods and hightailed it in a lifeboat. Unfortunately for the Genoan, the only provision he’d managed to secure in his hasty exit was a bag of turmeric, not exactly a cornerstone of the yet to be invented Food Pyramid. The resourceful Italian tried to lure fish with his abundant stores of the spice, but as all educated people know, aquatic animals don’t care for the peppery taste. In fact, they outright hate it.
Rising above the turmeric gaffe, Giuseppe did brave and horrible things to survive, and a record four hundred days later, he washed up on the heavily wooded shore of what would come to be known as British Columbia (and not Giuseppeland, as was loudly declared). In an unlikely intersection of unwanted accomplishments, Giuseppe had landed in the territory of a grizzly who had just set a bear record for longest time without a meal. The slow motion battle between bear and man that followed featured competing styles of “try to eat” and “try not to be eaten,” respectively. The contest ended in a lose-lose when the exhausted grizzly collapsed on top of Giuseppe, denying both a chance to tell their miraculous story of near-survival. Neither was ever aware that the entire affair had been arranged by two men some might call demigods, Ozymandias and Nero, playing a secret, worldwide game of affect and influence.
Centuries later, non-belief in monsters by Canadians was challenged when a group of kayakers sought refuge from a storm on the very same beach, and the sturdy winds blew away layers of concealing sand, revealing the skeletal remains of an undeniably centauresque bear-man beneath.
* * *
Six.
Hot.
Weeks.
. . .
. . .
. . .
Passed.
A rare light rainfall would teasingly fill the water bucket enough to keep Jim, Mars, and Barnabus alive, but the sky was reliably cloudless on most occasions, leaving the dominant star above unchallenged in its barrage of scalding light. The old adage was true: “Bad for snow plow companies, bad for castaways.”
Jim sat with his back against the bench, long fingers tracing lines in the plentiful ocean water as he allowed himself to enjoy the cool reprieve it offered, despite the sinister assault of salt on skin.
His body had withered, skin shrunk tight atop sinewy muscle, both denied even the most basal levels of moisture. Mars was similarly skeletal, and his once shiny fur (now faded by the sun) had begun to fall out in clumps, leaving tiny black tumbleweeds to bounce around the belly of the ship until a strong gust of wind carried them out to sea.
Barnabus, already in iffy shape when they’d found him, didn’t look much worse physically, but his already questionable mental health seemed to be nearing a breaking point as evidenced by silence. A month ago, he would ramble on at length about the colors he missed, extolling the virtues of a lively and radiant chartreuse or the lusty majesty of a rich violet. Now he simply slept or stared at the side of the boat while lying flat, always careful to avoid the slightest glimpse of navy blue ocean below or sky blue sky above. The beautiful but elusive amber of dawn and dusk used to raise the forsaken Belgian from his place of hiding, but these days he remained paralyzed. One errant glimpse of the unmentionable would surely send him over the edge (or, if you asked Mars, further over the edge). He either had no memory of his past, or was stingy with the details, and all questions went unapologetically unanswered.
Nevertheless, Jim tried to stay positive, focused.
Only the painter will get you back. It’s on you to discover why I’ve made the connection.
That’s what Oz had said.
Bad attitudes didn’t last long in career sanitation workers. They couldn’t. Janitors, maids, cleaning ladies—any and all of the above needed to be able to reframe reality into something that wasn’t. The row of urinals that absolutely rejected the idea of not overflowing, the wily last line of crud that refused to be swept into the dustpan, brass and silver’s hopeless addiction to tarnishing. Dedicating one’s life to cleaning was dedicating it to futility, straightening things up and hosing them down for a brief moment of order and tidiness in a universe that always reverted back to disorder and chaos. Plus, lots of things smelled really bad.
So Jim’s glass was half full 98% of the time. Now though, he risked wandering into that realm of healthier milk, the 2%.
Oz had killed him. He’d shown Jim a few things miraculous and wonderful, then left him to die on a floating nut house. Every perspective Jim tried to look from still ended up with Oz being a murdering asshole.
Why couldn’t he have left me to die in the comfort of my marshmallow jacket?
Mars barked, dispersing the cloud of negative thoughts accumulating around Jim’s dome. Jim ruffled his Companion’s head in thanks and checked their fishing line. The white thread, unspooled from Jim’s non-crotch sock, actually worked from time to time. The balled-up string at the bottom of the line was surprisingly effective with the stupider, cotton-hungry fish. But the castaways’ good fortune was always spaced out by several days, and any fish they did manage to catch were tiny: maddeningly proportioned to tease hunger without ever fully removing it. Jim drew the sock string up and showed Mars the fishless end of the line. Barnabus couldn’t be bothered from his nap.
“How do you guys feel about skipping dinner?” Jim had hardly delivered the below-average joke when a massive tuna burst from the water and thudded onto one of the benches.
Jim and Mars looked at the fish, then at each other to confirm they weren’t hallucinating. Then the hunt was on, and what should have been an easy grab (the boat was basically a giant barrel after all) turned out to be anything but. Each time Jim lunged at the fish, it thrashed out of his grasp. Mars barked and snapped at the slippery invader, but he too was unable to subdue the tuna. After an exhausting thirty seconds of this vaudeville act, the fish flopped onto the bow of the boat where it balanced precariously, gasping for water.
Nobody moved.
Unseen to those on the boat, a huge flood of fish surged underneath. Fleeing from something . . .
Jim’s calf muscles retracted as he coiled into a pouncing position. Mars imitated the posture on four legs. They sprang into the air.
At the same moment, a tiny blue damselfish plopped out of the herd of speeding creatures below and landed on the tuna. The startled tuna gave one final buck and flipped out over the water, sending the damselfish careening into the boat.
The tuna soared tantalizingly close to safety when something totally unfair happened: a tusked tiger shark evacuated the water at the same instant, mouth agape. The tuna plummeted straight into the monstrous creature’s belly with a wet plop, and the pair, now one, crashed back into the water. Mars and Jim collided where the tuna had lain just a second before, but mercifully fell back into the boat.
The tiger shark circled below, slapping its massive tail against the sides of the lifeboat in frustration, despite the recent helping of tuna. This was no standard predator/prey deal. The shark was clearly after the tiny damselfish bouncing around the boat.
Jim recovered from his collision with Mars and marveled at the harassing predator, his natural fear of sharks exacerbated by the two unnatural black tusks protruding from the ends of the animal’s mouth. He was no shark scientist, few were, but the phrase “shark tusks” didn’t ring true. Even allowing the weirdness of some deep-sea creatures, this seemed excessive. There was something off about the black eyes as well. They had flat, geometric surfaces, like gemstones.
The damselfish flopped against Jim’s leg, zipping around the boat like a greased bottle rocket. Mars sniffed at the helpless creature then hopped back when he saw the fish’s eyes: sparkling emeralds stretched wide in the early stages of suffocation.
After only a moment of understandable hesitation, Jim dumped the quarter-full bucket of precious rainwater out and scooped up some saltwater, narrowly avoiding a pointed tusk as the tiger shark made another frenzied pass. He carefully picked up the now motionless fish with arcade-claw delicacy and set it into the bucket. Something told him this wasn’t a fish to eat.
After a moment of mild to low suspense, the damselfish resumed its standard fish protocol of swimming.
Then it did something very un-fish. It whispered.
“Thanks, boss.”
Mars cocked his head. Jim’s mouth dropped. The painter, roused by the commotion, took one look at the fish’s blue scales and did a Cold War duck and cover back under his bench.
Jim sat to catch his breath, spreading his eyebrow hair unconsciously in deep thought. “Did that fish just say ‘thank you’?” he finally asked the Belgian, knowing no answer would come.
The tiger shark’s head suddenly breached the side of the boat, ripping out a chunk of wood as it sunk back into the water. The two-thousand-plus pound predator definitely had an agenda.
Mars sprang forward, ready to attack, but Jim waved him off. “Let’s see if this stuff’s worth a damn.”
Jim crouched in the center of the boat and pulled a handful of powder from the winking bag. A thick pause ensued before the shark came again, latching onto the rim of the boat with its ample supply of teeth. Jim moved so quickly that he fell into the shark’s rubbery snout but he still managed to cram some powder into the predator’s gills. The shark’s opal eyes widened as a cloud of Jim’s dust, now golden-yellow, puffed through its gills. The beast slid back into the water as the peppery aroma of turmeric filled the air.
The tusked shark did not surface again.
Free from immediate harm, Jim and Mars sat watching the bucket until the sun sank below the horizon. The emerald-eyed damselfish did not speak again.
* * *
The next morning, the bucket was uninhabited.
A dragonfly perched daintily on the bow of the ship like a discount figurehead, the sun shining on its reflective purple abdomen, blood-red wings, and glittering emerald eyes. Barnabus woke from sleep and accidentally caught sight of the insect’s magnificent colors.
“Oh!” he bellowed, tripping on his feet as he scrambled to get closer.
Mocking laughter came from the bug as it took flight and hovered in front of the painter’s eyes. Barnabus gazed in pure delight at the sparkling colors. The dragonfly’s cheeks puffed up, and its emerald eyes squeezed shut. In a poof of smoke, its exoskeleton and wings all changed to a new, single color.
Denial bubbled on the painter’s face. “No,” he wailed, swiping madly at the now-blue bug. “NO!”
The dragonfly squeaked with delight and flew easily out of reach, leaving the painter to crash onto the floor after a desperate lunge. Barnabus coughed in pain before scrambling back under his bench.
Woken by the commotion, Jim squinted at the giggling, emerald-eyed dragonfly, then down at the empty bucket. Swift deductions took place. “You can change,” he marveled.
“My god, he’s a genius!” the dragonfly sang, flattening its freshly blue wings and diving straight at Jim’s face before veering off to strut along the edge of the boat. “So you’re Oz's replacement, huh?”
“You know Oz?”
“You mean the person I just mentioned? Yeah, I know him. Let me guess, this is your first task, huh?” The bug went silent, sizing Jim up a moment before letting loose a teeny whistle. “Heeeeey, nice sock though. Maybe you’re a smart one after all.”
“Are you, like . . . in cahoots with Oz?”
“Keeps his people in the dark, doesn’t he? I’m in the game but I sure as hell don’t work with him. But since you did me a solid yesterday, I’ll answer whatever you want.”
Jim sat on the bench and looked at Mars. “I’m talking to a bug.”
“He said to the dog. What’s your name?” the insect squeaked.
With all the crazy goings-on, Jim couldn’t let something as pedestrian as a talking dragonfly hold him up. “I’m Jim.”
“Glad we crossed paths, Jim. Name’s Whippet. Whip for short.”
“Whip,” Jim repeated for his own reasons. “Are you like . . . how . . . what are you?”
“Ah the newly initiated. So cute, so dumb. I am a jinn, Jim of the lifeboat. Creatures ancient and meddlesome since I’m sure you’re unfamiliar. An essential slice of Cryptofauna if I do say so myself. Who’s the head case?”
“Barnabus. He’s traumatized.”
“That doesn’t count as a personality,” Whip said.
Mars huffed and rubbed his snout against Jim’s leg.
“Oh, and this is Mars, my Companion. Are you someone’s Companion?” Jim asked.
Whip tumbled onto his back, tiny insect legs wriggling in the air as he wheezed with laughter. “I told you I’m a jinn. We pop in and out, here and there, from time to time.” He flipped back up into the air. “Mutty gets points for shitting outside the boat. Can he do this?”
Whip buzzed into the sky, and with a boom of smoke, changed into a blue whale.
Barnabus tucked even deeper under his bench with shirt pulled over head, lullabying different shades of green to ward off mental schism.
“Keep ‘em closed painter,” Jim advised.
Whip’s new wingless and heavy-as-hell form registered with gravity, and the superlatively large animal began to fall.
Jim took Mars in his arms and braced against his bench as the one hundred and fifty ton mass of blubber hit the water next to the boat. The resulting wave tossed the boat briefly airborne before shoving it, and all the castaways, deep underwater.
Jim’s horizon spun. He scrambled to find up. Then he saw the whale, amazingly, terribly huge in the water. Streams of bubbles hissed through cracks in baleen plates, the hundreds of hair-like teeth that spanned the whale’s ten foot smile as it watched Barnabus claw for the surface.
A familiar pain registered on Jim’s back. He spun around to see Mars paddling up. Things were so bad they now had a regular system to avoid drowning. Except this time was even worse. Beyond the dog, Jim could see another dark shape moving much more freely through the water. His first terrified thought was that it was the tiger shark. Unfortunately, this proved to be correct.
Jim let out a scream of air bubbles and kicked madly after Mars. He broke the surface, and something hit him hard in the back of the head. The boat had survived the wave intact, rocking in the still-choppy water. Jim boosted Mars back into the boat, using a surge of self-preservation brand adrenaline to launch himself in as well. Barnabus had made it back too, and was celebrating with an epileptic seizure.
For the painter, the plunge was coupled with a boundless terror that couldn’t be translated. The thing he hated most in the world had swallowed him up, blocking out all other reality as it tried to enter his body at any opportunity. No delirious soliloquy of colors came to soothe his brain as it redlined in fear and hatred. Clenched bear-trap tight, his teeth ground in jerks that released wisps of powdered enamel. Jim leaned in to render aid, but a particularly powerful spasm from Barnabus threw him hard against the bench with a sobering “Oof!”. His hands reached about for any kind of purchase . . . and closed on a lumpy pouch.
The Asset.
By now the painter’s face had turned Byzantium, a handsome shade of purple he would have loved to see.
“Hang in there Barnabus, uh . . . orange and yellow. Um . . . forest green. Mauve. Lots of mauve!” Jim pulled a handful of powder from the sack and pried the Belgian’s mouth open. It clamped shut almost immediately, nearly lopping off Jim’s pinky finger and its two closest neighbors. Without a better option, Jim again stuck his digits back in, prying the stubborn jaw open with great difficulty. “Jesus, take it easy will ya! Cerulean! Er . . . shit that’s no good. Burnt fucking sienna!”
As Jim felt the muscles in Barnabus’s jaw tense again, his other hand mobilized in what must have been consideration for its opposite brother. The powder sailed in a tight cloud before poofing into a gray haze as it hit the target. The painter stopped seizing and was overcome by a wheezing cough. Jim fell off of the man as he continued to sputter the remaining dust out of his lungs. With a final, Santa-landing-in-the-fireplace cough of ash, Barnabus fell flat on his butt, dazed.
Everyone took a moment to catch their breath. Mars stuck his head under the painter’s hand and was gratefully petted.
Barnabus gently grasped Jim’s wrist and did something he hadn’t done since pulling Jim’s head out of the water many weeks ago: he looked him in the eyes. Jim saw a glimpse of imprisoned sanity. A human huddled under the cloak of madness. All he needed was a wardrobe change. All he needed was to get away from the god damned blue ocean.
The painter’s powdery beard dipped as he executed a slight nod before crawling back under the bench. He didn’t curl up into a ball or mumble to himself. He simply lay down, away from the sky and water.
A thunderous splashing brought Jim’s attention back to the ocean. Whip was rolling and flapping his tail, displacing millions of gallons in an instant. Once the ballet was complete, he neared the boat.
“You trying to drown us?” Jim shouted, his frail body trembling from exertion. “He nearly had a heart attack!”
“Relax. Havi