3
“Cryptofauna. I wanna know what it is.”
Jim and Oz sat in the St. Mili’s cafeteria, the dirty overhead lights giving Oz a piss-colored halo, an unflattering image perfect for Jim’s impression of the man as some kind of second-rate deity.
“Answers, yes. But coffee first.” Oz, who had avoided Jim’s questions since his return a month ago, was apparently avoiding them a little longer. He quickly slipped into the commotion of an unruly breakfast crowd being kept at sub-riot levels by Nurse Gail, armed with a bullhorn and a squirt gun.
The shrewd administrator had seen through Oz’s forged note about Jim attending a family reunion two towns over almost immediately, given the higher than average number of spelling mistakes (a classic Oz giveaway) and a higher than average number of cherry stains on the paper (one). Luckily Oz was as good at story telling as he was bad at spelling, and when the rescued trio had showed up at the front door, he’d gone into fibbing overdrive.
“An impromptu vision quest gone wrong. There’s your extended absence. There’s the reason he looks like such shit. Plus remember, he wasn’t too handsome to begin with.”
“An impromptu vision quest?”
Nurse Gail sniffed the bait, but hadn’t yet bitten.
“Well sure. He’s becoming an adult, is he not? Every adult does weird stuff from time to time, right? The most normal guy in the office is never more than a bad haircut away from reevaluating his entire life and scrapping what is for what could be.”
“Yeah, I suppose that does happen sometimes.”
“Barnabus here is his long-lost uncle that also joined the vision quest after many years abroad in Belgium. Estranged is a tragic adjective for a nephew after all.”
“Mhm. And the dog?”
“A stray they picked up on the side of the road.”
Mars barked his resentment at the word choice, nearly blowing the whole charade. But, ever the team player, he quickly let the slur go, and adopted the best rescue look he could.
“Fine. Bedrest, thirty days, all three of you.” The sentence was given. Then it was literal gallons of Vaseline for the martyred skin of the men, and a daily bath of apple cider vinegar and egg whites for the faded fur of the dog.
An agitated voice rang out in the pancake line. Mrs. Phillips, a ninety-something Idaho native with a talent for irrational outbursts, was screaming at the kitchen staff about “meatloaf again” (despite the fact no meatloaf was being served).
A man behind her rested his hand on her shoulder and spoke in a tender voice. Phillips found whatever he said to be satisfactory, and with a “When you put it that way,” she accepted her pancakes in peace and shuffled off. The man looked over at Jim and gave a brilliant smile. Jim wasn’t the least bit surprised to smile back at Barnabus.
On the lifeboat, Jim had known Barnabus to have two speeds, catatonic or absolute frenzy, incommunicative in either case. But since his arrival and subsequent recovery at St. Mili’s, Barnabus had become a paragon of optimism, eager to engage with anyone about anything they felt the need to talk about. He cracked clean jokes with the lewd old men, diffused powder keg situations (e.g. the meatloaf incident), and retained a genuine enthusiasm for everything and everyone around him. Jim once had a kindergarten teacher who had a smile permanently set on her face. But the longer you looked at it, the more unnatural it felt, like a piece of fruit that stayed ripe for months on end. Barnabus was different: his smile matched his cheerful disposition, body constantly radiating what a hippie would identify as “good vibes.” His was a smile that could not lie, which, along with a closely trimmed beard and Oz-carved peg leg, earned him the nickname of “Friendly Pirate.”
Jim privately chalked Barnabus’s transformation up to something he termed “Pacific Refugee Syndrome.” Individuals afflicted with PRS had been through such gut-twisting tragedy and prolonged physical pain that they could call the cafeteria’s creamed corn “magically delicious” without any trace of facetiousness or winking reference to a popular breakfast cereal.
In true American fashion, the good folks at St. Mili’s wasted no time in truncating Barnabus’s name to its simplest form of Barney, and the Belgian loved it. Barney could remember parts of their ordeal at sea, but none of his life as a painter in Belgium. His accent had all but disappeared, zapped into oblivion by the PRS (one of the lesser known side effects). But it was out with the accent and in with the good looks, because as Jim had suspected, he was quite handsome underneath it all, even earning several of the manic marriage proposals that used to be reserved for Jim. But Vaseline, haircuts, and a name pruning did nothing to change the hatred for blue that had been branded permanently on Barney’s heart. One particularly alarming incident unfolded when a resident wore a ballroom gown of sapphire rhinestones down to breakfast. A switch flipped in Barney’s head and he bull-rushed the man with fork held high in stabbing position, scrambled eggs flying off the prongs like the smoke signature of a missile. The orderlies intervened, deflecting the attack and sending the almost-victim upstairs to change, all without too much fanfare (as attempted assaults were a daily occurrence at St. Mili’s). Breakfast food in particular seemed to fan the flames of rage in the residents, which no one could satisfactorily explain. Nurse Gail sent away for some mail order, green-lensed Aviator sunglasses for Barney, and the issue didn’t arise again.
Jim returned Barney’s warm smile. Barney sent it right on back with interest from behind his lime-tinted Ray Bans, and added the extra touch of an adorably genuine thumbs up.
Oz thudded down in his chair with two mugs and an entire pot of coffee. “This could take a while,” he explained the theft. Back at the coffee station, caffeine-junkie residents milled around the pot-less coffee machine like ants without a queen, asking one another “Seen the coffee? Seen the coffee?”
Oz poured two cups of St. Mili’s legendarily terrible brew. The aged giant adjusted his groin, cleared his throat, fluffed the lapels of his seafoam robe, and slid a mug to Jim. “Okay, go.”
“Cryptofauna.”
Oz hung his head. “I’m gonna put words into sentences to make you happy but keep your expectations reasonable. Crypto’s not exactly a hard-edged thing in pristine lighting but here we go.
“Cryptofauna is a game. The players are called Operators. Operators assemble a Combination, but unless you wanna sound like a dork, just call it a Combo. Each Operator has a Rival with his or her own Combo. Each Operator has a Companion and an Asset. After a time, Operators will select a Disciple, becoming a Mentor themselves, and thus spawning a new Rivalry for the next generation. None of these new words will help you in Scrabble by the way, no proper nouns allowed.”
“Who’s my Rival?” Jim sipped then gagged on the horrendous coffee. Oz refilled it immediately.
“You don’t need to know that yet. You’re still training. Every Disciple is given three tasks to complete, designed by their Mentor. You passed your first quite well. Flying colors, right?”
From somewhere nearby: “Seen the coffee?”
“How old are you?” Jim stayed focused, even though experience warned him the missing coffee thing would not end well.
“I arm-wrestled Isaac Newton. That should suffice.”
“Who won?”
“Limey prick had insider knowledge . . . ” As Oz mumbled something about Newton “wielding extra gravity,” he concealed the coffee pot under his robe to avoid confrontation with the caffeine scout that passed by their table. The spreading chants of “Seen the coffee?” took on an unnerving religious fervor.
“You’re not human?” Jim’s intended question sounded more like an accusation.
“Wrong. I am very much human. Had a ma, had a pa, hit puberty, and waged the noble crusade of living without knowing the reason why. I was selected for participation in Cryptofauna, as I have selected you, and at that point I became a touch less mortal. That doesn’t mean you should experiment by dropping a bowling ball on my head. I can still die. Just takes more than would kill most, and my aging is obviously . . . relaxed.”
“Okay so I need to know what’s real in all this. There are portals and monsters, what about time travel? What about, like, dragons?”
“Well I guess technically a dragon could be an offshoot of the monster genus but I’ve never seen one and let’s not get bogged down in semantics shall we? There is no time travel and thank the good lord for that. We can bounce around this little blue ball and mercifully that’s it. Important to have boundaries even if they’re expansive.” Oz drained his mug of coffee and winced. “Jesus, did Mars take a shit in the filter?”
“So but you’re like a god right? Wait, I’ve heard of Ozymandias, was he a god?”
“Ozymandias was a poem about a dick-measuring king and I’m neither of those things. Crypto’s a long game, people get bored with their names and change them from time to time. So you might come across an Isaac Newton, but he won’t be the same sneaky, no good, cheating arm-wrestler I met for real. I’m sure as shit not a god and neither are any of the other Operators, though some get the complex. None of us have infinite sight, just a wider gaze than most.”
The coalition of coffee seekers had elected a leader in Mrs. Phillips who explained the administrators must be hiding the coffee in the ceiling. The underlings found this reasonable enough and began to stack chairs to reach the hiding place.
Jim frowned at the growing structure, then frowned even deeper in dissatisfaction with Oz’s answer.
“I know, it’s weird,” the robed man consoled him. “Look, Operators are in some ways demigods I guess. Just think of them, me, us, as extremely capable individuals. Um . . . oh I got it!” Oz snapped his fingers so loud the chair tower nearly toppled. “Imagine an ant. Participant in the same nature we participate in. Coded with similar base pairs, subject to the same physical laws like gravity . . . that cheating sonofabitch . . . er . . . point being, both one-hundred percent legit, right? Now, to an ant, most of the things people do are incomprehensible. Composing a symphony, filing taxes, circumnavigating the globe in an airplane. These creatures struggle to move from one blade of grass to another, and we’re soaring through the stratosphere sipping on Bloody Marys and complaining about leg room. Now imagine people are ants. I, and eventually you, are whatever a person is to those ants.” He finished abruptly and gave a satisfied nod. “Thank god that’s over.”
“I still have a few more questions.”
“Christ, the point is to experience, not to be told.”
“You left me for dead and we’re having coffee together. I think I’ve been pretty cool about this whole thing. I just need to know what the hell I’m getting into.”
“You’re still upset about the first task?” Oz shook his head in disappointment.
“Well yeah! We barely made it back!”
“Lest we forget you nearly beat me to the punch with a can of innocent root beer! The best way to show a man the value of something is to take it away from him. Reasons to stick around usually come, I gave you something to push against in the meantime. The peril had to be real. You’re preparing for the big leagues here. Safety nets and training wheels are non fucking grata! This training, these tasks, are very, very important to get you ready. You’re still doughy in terms of character and fortitude, but less so after your trip to the Pacific.”
The chair-stacking minions had almost reached the ceiling, Mrs. Phillips beating a can of coffee beans like a Viking coxswain.
“Look I’ve got work to do,” Oz said. “You got more to ask, you do it rapid fire.”
“Whip.”
A rare frown stole cross Oz’s face. “Met Whip, did ya? He’s a jinn with zero cred. They’re like genies or demons, rudderless drop outs of a more æthereal realm that like to wear animal forms. Not Operators or officially associated with Cryptofauna, but they always seem to get involved one way or another. Something of reliable wild cards.”
“There was a shark, or jinn I guess. It had black tusks.”
“Ah, Bo Peep. That uh . . . could’ve gone bad. She’s about as nasty as they come. Whip’s a nuisance but Bo Peep’ll fuckin’ kill ya. Usually jinn just hang around to be entertained and muck things up, but she’s a scary one.”
Mrs. Phillips was shrieking at a hunchbacked woman for not helping with the tower, insisting that the woman wasn’t even a resident at St. Militrude’s and that she was “pure, pure evil.”
“Okay, so they can change shape. But Whip was a fish swimming away from her, then we kind of saved him and he was a dragonfly the next day. Why didn’t he just do that sooner?”
Oz dragged his hands down his face demonstrating tremendous fatigue with the questions. “A jinn’s ability to change is inversely related to how much they involve themselves and I wish Bo Peep the best of luck in nailing Whip. And I’m just gonna get out in front of your last questions ‘cause I really do have to go. You’re gonna want a common denominator in all this. You’re gonna ask if it’s religion or science or magic or maybe one of the residents just dosed your toothpaste with LSD. Those are always the usual suspects when people get clued into Cryptofauna but none are entirely satisfactory, though they’re not exactly wrong either. What matters is what gets you results whether it comes from praying or whispering spells or doing arithmetic on your fingers. And since there’s meat in that coconut of yours I bet you’ve also wondered why yellow lights are getting shorter. Well it’s a good puzzler but the answer will have to wait ‘cause I’m off to work on task two of three, and if you say one more thing with the tonal inflection of a question I’m gonna out you as the coffee thief.” Oz swept out of the cafeteria without another word.
A full-on wrestling match broke out between the orderlies and the coffee tower devotees. It didn’t take long for the inevitable as one of the orderlies was table-topped into a load bearing chair leg and the entire structure came crashing down. Muted asks of “Seen the coffee?” came from the rubble and Jim shuffled over to help, wondering what horrible fate the next task held for him and his friends.
* * *
Aside from his steak-and-cherry-only diet, Oz practiced another ritual that might have been considered strange were it performed outside the context of St. Mili’s. Months ago, the persuasive giant had used his slick cajolery to secure one of the only rooms in the facility equipped with its own bathtub. A man of seemingly endless skill, Oz had jerry-rigged St. Mili’s behemoth water heater to produce water at two hundred and eleven degrees Fahrenheit, just a notch below boiling point. Every night he’d fill his tub with the scalding water, add a sprinkling of a homemade spice mix (comprised principally of garlic and gunpowder), and slide his body in to cook. When the recipe was repurposed by one of the residents as a pork chop marinade, the resulting oven explosion saw Jim prying cloves of ballistic garlic out of the wall of the kitchen that, according to Mrs. Phillips, now smelled like a “wop funeral home.”
Next in the bath-time routine, Oz would switch on a tape player beside the tub (always Simon and Garfunkel, his “favorite group this century”) and position two speakers so that the diaphragms were just underwater. He insisted this was the only way to get the full effect.
“Just don’t fry yourself,” Nurse Gail had said before rushing off to put out another (literal) fire.
Oz would then light two giant cigars and sink below the surface, cigars sticking out of the steaming water like the guns of a sinking battleship. As Paul and Art got down to business, Oz soaked up the vibrations, breathing exclusively through cigars that were anything but Cubans, as he had an unresolved dispute with Castro over a pulled pork sandwich both claimed ownership of (Castro had eaten the sandwich after a successful ‘look behind you’ gag).
Hours would pass, and when Oz had smoked the cigars down to the water, they’d hiss in surrender and he’d know it was time to get out.
That Tuesday night, Oz was freshly entered into the brew, garlic cloves just starting to popcorn around the crackling gunpowder surface of the water, huge cigars (Nicaraguan this night) still as long as a baby’s forearm, The Sound of Silence only in its first verse. So it was that Oz, who usually had an eye, ear, and nose for trouble, failed to detect Nero’s undercover agent as she very slowly made her way toward Jim’s bedroom door.
* * *
Jim’s bedroom was just as unremarkable as he had left it pre-Pacific, the only trace of his suicide attempt being a root beer stain on one of the rug’s poorly reproduced hydrangeas. Oz had cleaned up the scene that same night before setting about forging Jim’s note to Nurse Gail, but when it came to the root beer he’d rubbed instead of blotted, so the stain remained the same.
Mars lifted his head from the spot at his sleeping Companion’s feet. Trouble.
Someone knocked on the door. Still mired in half-sleep, Jim didn’t react. The knock came again, more insistent.
Jim’s feet dropped out of bed into a pool of cold air and he Frankensteined his way to the door. There was no peephole to betray the identity of the caller, so he just made a fair assumption. “Oz, I swear to god . . .” he groaned, opening the door.
But it wasn’t Oz.
A humpbacked woman, probably in her eighties, stood in the hallway. “My name is Cassandra. May I come inside?” The woman helped herself to Jim’s room. “We must hurry, but I must first sit a minute.” Her accent was strange, something with lispy hints of Spain. “Chair me, boy.”
She started a sitting motion and Jim quickly shed his drowsiness to slide a chair under her in time. “You’re new here, right?” he asked. “Where did you come from?”
“Portugal,” Cassandra wheezed. “Alright, that’s enough.” She stood up.
“I saw you in the cafeteria today, with Mrs. Phillips.”
“Terrible woman,” Cassandra said and received no argument from Jim.
Mars had laid down just out of Cassandra’s reach and rested his head on his front paws, eyes narrowed into red hyphens of suspicion.
“You should probably put on some clothes,” she said.
Jim, who had adopted the sock-as-underwear lifeboat fashion into his sleeping routine, quickly pulled on a blanket. “What’s going on?”
“You listen to that old buffoon without question. Do the same for me,” she hissed, surveying Jim’s room with a look of disdain.
“Nurse Gail does more for you people than—”
“Not the fat disciplinarian. Oz!”
“You know Oz?”
“Yes, yes. I know him. I know who he is. Can we move along now?”
“I know Oz,” Jim shot back, crankiness making him bold. “I don’t know you. Does Nurse Gail know you’re out of bed?”
She huffed in disgust. “I am an associate of Oz’s, not a patient of this sanitarium!”
Jim didn’t move. Friend of Oz's or not, the hunchback could do with some tact.
She sighed. “We have business in the basement. Your . . . second task,” she said out of the corner of her mouth in a wink-wink nudge-nudge tone.
“Oh.” Jim relaxed a touch and fanned out his eyebrows. Sending an elderly courier in the dead of night wouldn’t be out of bounds for his Mentor’s odd brand of logic.
Jim emerged from his room a brief interval later dressed in his usual work clothes: blue jeans (neutralized for Barney by his Aviators) and a white long-underwear top (the kind with embossed waffle lines) underneath a gray janitorial services shirt stitched with a red and white ‘Jim’ nametag over the heart. Then of course were a pair of all-important socks and some steel-toed work boots, still home to a few feathers from the cleanup of a cock fighting ring some residents had been secretly running in St. Mili’s rarely-used library.
“No leash?” Cassandra asked, glaring at Mars.
“Mars isn’t really the leash type,” Jim said.
Mars trotted past Cassandra, grunting something that sounded awfully close to “bitch please.”
“Okay,” Cassandra said. “Let’s get the gimp.”
The hunchback wheezed as they climbed the stairs to the second floor where Nurse Gail had given Barney a spare broom closet just larger than Jim’s room. The soft melodies of folk rock wafted from somewhere down the hall.
“Bastard . . . damnit . . . shit . . . maldito merda.” Cassandra grumbled under her limited breath, sweat pouring down her craggy brow. As the woman attempted to negotiate the final step, her balance failed and she fell backward into Jim. He caught her and helped her to the landing above.
Something had moved in the hump on her back.
Cassandra spun on him. “Got something to say, mop-jockey?”
Sweet lord this was one unpleasant old woman. Jim opened his mouth to get sassy but manners pursed his lips. The more he cooperated the sooner he could quit the Portuguese’s company.
Mars’s mistrust of the woman was narrowing his eyes so much he could hardly see.
Barney was instantly friendly upon being woken up, his geniality apparently having no clock. “I met you earlier in the rec room,” he said, beaming at Cassandra. “Such a unique figure. Very endearing.” Someone not aware of the man’s unfailingly genuine nature could have only surmised he was being sarcastic.
“Meu Deus, keep your voice down. We would like to remain undisturbed downstairs.” Cassandra flicked a finger across her nose at Jim, in the way people slyly signal a mafia connection. Jim nodded but didn’t return her dumb smile.
Cassandra led the slow-moving party down the twisting staircases and dark corridors Jim had not been able to navigate even after his return.
They entered the basement through the unlocked seafoam door and Cassandra flicked the light switch. The fluorescents obeyed as best they could, revealing the magnificent black mulberry tree. Barney was so excited he could hardly stand. He ran his hands through the pristine lawn, mumbling something about chartreuse and malachite, then danced from object to object on the tree, marveling at each curiosity while keeping his hands in his pockets (per Cassandra’s instruction). Wariness of the surly hunchback overruled by his instinct to sniff around, Mars trotted from spot to spot, tail antenna-straight as he snorted loudly at apparently interesting scents. Jim felt for the winking bag on his belt—full as the day he had pulled it from the tree. Oz told him it would always refill provided he didn’t use it all at once. “Don’t go spend crazy and you should be fine. Stuff’s like a Band-Aid, it’s not gonna get you outta tight spots entirely, but it’ll get you to the next oasis if you’re smart about it. Time bought in the field is always valuable, second only maybe to a good pair of socks.”
“Where’s Oz?” Jim asked suddenly.
“He’s gone through already. That’s why I was told to fetch you,” Cassandra said. “We’re late as it is, so if you please . . .”
She gestured toward the obsidian obelisk standing at permanent attention, revealing nothing of its destination. Mars sniffed at the base and the fur in the middle of his back stood rigid. Jim saw the abaci were different from before.
“Gee, that’s a terrific black,” Barney admired the obelisk.
Mars continued to back away from the statue, head low and growling.
Jim was about to tell Barney not to touch it when his voice was drowned out by what sounded like thunder.
Footsteps.
Pounding down the hallways and stairwells above, drawing nearer with great urgency.
Oz.
Jim’s eyes widened as he moved for the winking dust, but Cassandra was quicker, grabbing his shirt with surprising strength and shoving him toward the obelisk. Jim started to pry her hands from his shirt when Cassandra’s hump deflated and a cascade of mud-colored salamanders scurried out of her sleeves. They swarmed Jim’s body, biting and scratching with a tenacity impressive for amphibians.
Mars abandoned his death stare with the obelisk and hustled over to the struggle taking place. A dozen salamanders flew from the folds of Cassandra’s clothes and began their assault on the dog. The hump on Cassandra’s back was now entirely gone, and as she gnashed her teeth with crazed energy, it became apparent her frail old lady condition had been greatly embellished.
Jim and Cassandra spun around and around, locked in a reluctant ballroom dance. Barney, who’d been standing paralyzed with shock in front of the obelisk, made a move to intervene. But after a swing of inertia, Cassandra let go of Jim’s shirt and he careened straight into Barney. Salamanders flew in every direction like an exploded amphibian piñata as the two off-balance men fell straight into the obelisk.
The mysterious statue performed its mysterious duty. Jim’s consciousness became formless, but lingered just long enough to see the aftermath in the basement: Mars diving at the obelisk to follow Jim and Barney, Oz bursting through the seafoam door and landing a punch on Cassandra’s cackling jaw. Then the scene evaporated.
Barney fell up, Jim fell down, and Mars fell sideways. Then came the familiar inversion before all three were propelled out of the darkness with champagne-cork enthusiasm.
Jim landed on top of Barney and spun around in time to catch a high-speed Mars rocketing out of thin air. Mars spit up a bit in Jim’s arms. They hadn’t had their mulberries this time and Jim too felt like his stomach had been tenderized by a heavyweight champ. Barney’s face bulged as he struggled to keep down his already gag-inducing dinner of St. Mili’s catfish stew (which most the residents knew to avoid because it contained both fish and cat).
They weren’t alone in their new location. Someone was waiting for them.
He looked to be about Jim’s age and similarly thin, though about a head shorter. His denim jacket was the same finish as his jeans, bulging with the beefy arms of a person whose entire workout vocabulary begins and ends with bicep curls. Atop the shoulders were tiny snowbanks of dandruff fallen from dirty orange hair the color and texture of high-traffic shag carpet. His wide sneer of stained and missing teeth alternated yellow and black like piano keys in an Old West saloon.
Then Jim saw the reason for the sneer.
Above the denim and dandruff, clutched in the guy’s raised right hand, was a prohibition-era billy club.
Still holding Mars, Jim could do nothing but watch as the club streaked straight for his head. Barney shouted “Hey be careful!” and Mars made a move to intercept, but the mouth-breathing redhead was too quick, and the janitor’s clock was promptly, and thoroughly, cleaned.