Swimmer
by Steven Mathes
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
They said that mind swimmers came from space, or a mutation, or terrorists, that their genetics made no sense. He knew that the great mystery was supposed to be big news, a big event for science, but he hadn’t paid much attention because, until the infection, he didn’t much care.
It lodged all-too-appropriately in his stomach even though it infested his mind. Why did he have to find out on a Friday? He wondered if he picked it up from sushi he ate at that place by Planet Fitness.
“There’s nothing we can do, Mr. Kay,” the doctor said. “I’m sorry.”
“Surgery?”
“I wouldn’t. The stomach surgery leaves you with half a mind. The people who get the surgery float in a fog that’s even worse. Nobody understands why.”
“Wow, a real mystery for medicine,” Kay said.
Even with half a mind, he could be sarcastic.
“Besides, insurance doesn’t cover it,” the doctor said. “It’s not technically a medical condition.”
Ah. The real problem. The doctor reached for the door with a sour nod.
“Wait,” Kay said. “What should I do? Can’t I do something? Anything?”
“A diet rich in whole grains. Avoid red meat and fried foods. Exercise. Weight gain is inevitable with the swimmer, but exercise will help a little. It won’t anger the swimmer.”
“I’m turning into a vegetable!”
“It’s not that bad. It’s just a mysterious parasite borrowing your synapses.”
“What if they put me in quarantine?”
“It’s not contagious.”
“I’m miserable!”
“You’ll adapt. Most swimmer victims live full, happy lives. Their weight stabilizes. They contribute to society. At a humbler level of function, of course.”
The doctor slipped out of the examination room, and the door closed gently but firmly.
On the way out, the administrative department collared him for paperwork even though they could have done it while he waited two hours or so to see the doctor. He couldn’t be sure about the passage of time anymore, but even in his state of reduced function the paperwork felt like another hour.
“Insurance needs to know if this qualifies as a previous condition,” he was told.
“I’m told it’s not technically a condition.”
“Then you’ll have to fill out this form, too,” he was told.
Through the fog the questions were very, very difficult. The swimmer relaxed its grip when Kay thought too hard, but only a little, like someone reluctantly sharing a bite of a delicious lunch.
He’d used up too much of a sick day. No way he’d be going back to the office. Should he wait until they found out at work? No! They could never be allowed to know.
Damn. At least it was Friday. He had a little time, time to try to deal with it. He could not control the trembling in his hands as he tried to press the icons on the “Your Wellness is Important to Us!” Condition Denial Appeal form.
It seemed so silly to worry about things like his job when he was possessed by an alien, but really, all he wanted was his day-to-day life. Even in this fog he knew it was the forgettable everyday stuff that was really important.
He got home and opened a beer, but one little gulp made him sick. He felt the swimmer move as soon as the beer hit his stomach, telling him it didn’t like to drink–at least not beer.
That did it. He drew the line at beer. Nobody warned him that it could communicate. He smelled the hops, the malt, and felt the fizz on his nose and thought about this excellent beer, a bomber full of beer he loved. Apparently, the swimmer had no objection to smell. Kay could really use this beer.
The place felt so empty without Janice. He should get rid of that bowl of hot peppers, just one thing they always fought about, one thing she wanted to throw away. Already feeling trapped by the alien’s opposition to drinking beer, he felt even more trapped looking at the peppers. They had been beautiful when they were fresh, bright, little red things called pequins, but they were faded now. Looking at them earned a little warning jolt from the alien.
Janice had left him, and now this swimmer was stealing his brain. Plus, he had a wedding to go to tomorrow. Go to a wedding without drinking beer? The wedding made his foggy thoughts return to Janice and what still having the peppers said about him. Little and dry and wrinkled. Dusty. Old. Janice left a year ago.
He chugged the opened beer, got two gulps down. When he finished throwing up, he felt mostly hungry and tired, untouched by the alcohol. Aside from the lump that was the swimmer, his stomach felt empty, in need.
He felt hungry? Why was he suddenly famished so soon after being sick? Desperate, he ransacked the fridge. He wolfed down half a cold pizza, a frozen cake, four glasses of milk. The swimmer went quiet. Kay went to bed feeling only half-full.
The swimmer must have wanted sleep because a moment later, Kay was late for the wedding. It was mid-afternoon, and his phone said Saturday. His brain-fog had thickened, so maybe he had only imagined he had the wedding to go to. Then he found the invitation, the gift he had bought, the directions.
Even though he was late, he took the time to drink a pot of coffee. The swimmer told him it liked coffee by feeding his caffeine craving. The fog stayed thick, but hunger took him again on the way to the wedding, so he bought three burgers with fries and a shake at a drive-through. And more coffee. He ate, drank, hardly chewed, swallowed fast, still felt empty. Probably dripped something onto his jacket and tie. He looked himself over but couldn’t concentrate.
The ceremony finished just as he arrived, just as the bride and groom were about to kiss. His old college roommate was the groom. He never liked that roommate, and the wedding would be a reunion, and everyone would ask about Janice. They would ask why and when they broke up. He couldn’t concentrate enough to remember how long it had been, but it had been a while. From the back of the chapel he scanned, looking for familiar faces. A woman he failed to recognize signaled. He moved to her.
“Hi, Joey!” she said, hugging him.
She was so much bigger. He recognized her only from the voice. A name floated up through the swimming fog of memory. She was not so heavy then.
“Elisabeth,” he said.
The gathering stood and clapped as the bride and groom went out, but when he stood with Elisabeth, she enfolded his head deep between her breasts. Perhaps she felt gratitude that someone recognized her through the enormity. Her skin was very smooth.
“Elisabeth,” he repeated.
She might recoil if she knew she hugged someone hosting a mind swimmer. Through the fog he allowed himself to become Elisabeth’s date, followed her out of the chapel toward the reception hall. The building specialized in weddings, with other weddings on other floors. People milled everywhere. He followed Elisabeth out of need, knowing that without her he would get lost, wind up at the wrong reception. But Elisabeth took him to where he was supposed to be.
Bulging mounds of food took up at least three tables, loading them with colors and textures. Yes, the swimmer agreed. These were nice, big tables, with big piles of food, and one corner of the room had a tiny stage for the band, and another had a dark alcove to the kitchen door.
A beeline: Elisabeth took his arm, gave him a plate, kept one. She piled food. He piled food. She poured herself a huge tumbler full of coffee, drank it quick, hot, poured another. He did the same, and then they scuttled to a back, dark table where they sat and ate. Most of the guests hadn’t yet gotten to the reception. The two ate and ate, and they went back for more. People arrived and looked at them.
“I have a secret,” Elisabeth said.
Kay didn’t dare hope that Elisabeth might be different also.
“I have a parasite,” Elisabeth said.
She sucked on her tumbler of coffee. Kay felt his swimmer do a flip. Another like him?
“Joey,” she said. “I have to tell someone. I think I can trust you. I have to trust someone.”
Kay said nothing. He looked at her.
“I have a mind swimmer,” she confessed. “I’m on disability. I lost my job.”
In both relief and now terror for his job, Kay said nothing. He ate; she ate. In silence. They were not thinkers, just people with things in their stomachs that must be fed. Animals without many thoughts, animals with biological needs. He must scheme, and he must trust nobody. But he trusted her. He got a third tumbler of coffee and brought an extra for Elisabeth. She grabbed his hand in thanks. She liked him.
“I like you, too,” he admitted.
She kissed him. A chaste peck but on the lips. His swimmer did another turn, but whether from elation or revulsion was unclear.
“Everyone’s here. Let’s go find another table,” Elisabeth said.
Their back table was covered in food waste, dishes. She helped him clean up, and then she used a napkin to clean his tie, his jacket. If she lived in a fog, she hid it. She held his hand and led him to the party. Thanks to her, they left behind very little wreckage. They joined a fresh table along with significant faces. Baldness, hardened eyes, and adult grooming disguised the familiar, but the combined impression moved Kay to pangs of longing. Those good, good, old times before the swimmer.
“Joey! Elisabeth! Nice of you to break up your orgy and join us!”
Kay struggled to know the faces gawking at him. Elisabeth helped him out by sitting first, then pulling him into the adjacent chair. Four sour faces already sat there, smirking, trying not to look like strangers. One man looked self-important, and a glamorous woman clung on him. The other man, who carried a slim frame, barely registered.
“Hickey?” Kay said, making a wild guess.
He guessed right. Hickey was the class computer genius in college. Kay looked at the others, who watched expectantly. Rescue came in the approaching form of the groom, his old roommate Jed, who was his friend once, even if they never really liked each other.
“Do you all know each other?” Jed said. “Do I know you?”
At first Kay chalked it up as a joke, but the fog failed to block the body language of Jed looking at him, looking at Elisabeth. Jed’s face registered nothing.
“Your old roommate,” Hickey prompted.
The dawning struggled toward Jed’s eyes. Finally, it rose up in full horror.
“Good God,” Jed said.
He stared, ogled.
“And Elisabeth?” he said.
His mouth stayed open. Jed had dated Elisabeth.
“Yes,” Elisabeth said. “We’ve put on weight. Sorry about that.”
The angry spin coming through her voice made him clear his throat as he looked at everyone but her.
“The band’s having some trouble with their equipment. We’re killing time until they’re ready.”
“You don’t say? Wireless mikes?” Hickey said.
“How did you know?”
Hickey glanced at Kay and then Elisabeth.
“Lots of radio interference?” he said.
“What are you talking about?” Jed said.
“Radio interference. Tell them to use wires. It happens more and more. They’ll understand.”
“Really?”
Hickey got up, then returned with some kind of gadget. Standing by their table, he aimed it around the room, looking at a meter. He fixed it at several targets, two of them Elisabeth and Kay.
“Mind swimmers,” he said. “Three in the building, two in this room. Spread-spectrum networking. That’s the interference.”
After his announcement, he kept his eyes on the others, pointedly away from the two infected ones. Even through the fog, Kay could see Hickey’s avoidance of them, and he had never been talented with the subtler people skills. Even through the fog, he understood that Hickey was anything but subtle.
Now, he had no talent except bodily function.
“How do they make interference?” he asked.
“They network with each other, like computers. They really jam it up. They borrow computing power from the brain, compute something, and send the results to their mind swimmer buddies. A wireless mesh. Nobody understands beyond that. The genetics are alien, although they could be synthetic, not necessarily alien from another planet. Supernatural, maybe? Nobody really knows.”
He gave Kay some sort of look.
“It’s a problem. Happens randomly. Bad luck, man.”
Kay’s stomach rumbled loud enough to make a couple of people chuckle, and he felt hungry again, but his guts signaled a different issue. Elisabeth’s stomach made a similar growl, louder and longer. She grabbed his hand.
“Excuse us for a minute,” she said.
The titters of their tablemates chased them as they fled the room. She led the way out of the reception.
“I planned for this, at least for me. The swimmers make you find a bathroom same time every day. Very punctual. Very easy. You benefit from my experience.”
Thery hurried toward the restrooms by the main lobby. She pushed him hard toward his and darted off toward hers, trotting. He understood but barely made it, dealing with the consequence of all those huge piles of food. His clothes escaped soiling.
They emerged together, in sync. Kay had spent a long time cleaning up. He had delayed as long as he could, hoping she had left. Most living things eat and defecate, no problem, but now, eating and defecating were his primary mission. The timing of this gastric emergency felt like more than coincidence. He sensed the connection between his swimmer and Elisabeth’s.
“They want us to be together,” she said.
“How do you feel about that?”
“They tend to get what they want. This time I’m cool with that,” she said.
“You knew about me all along?”
“We learn to spot our own kind. It’s a feeling that develops,” she said.
“We can get take-out,” Kay said.
“They like fried chicken.”
They went to his place but on the way got six big buckets of chicken, and he knew she would be grateful for the financial assistance. Disability. He felt for her, knew it might be him soon. He absolutely had to fight for his job!
“I have to figure out how to save my job,” he said through a mouth full of chicken.
“They don’t know about you?”
“No. I felt funny for a long time, but I ignored it. I found out yesterday. I’ve been getting heavier anyway. For years. It’s not a sudden change. I felt more and more foggy, but when it was bad I told them it was a flu. I thought it was the truth.”
“If there are others at your work with swimmers, they’ll know.”
“But they won’t tell?”
“We protect our own.”
They devoured chicken and drank coffee. Elisabeth invited herself over for the night. He could feel their connection more clearly now. He mentioned it. Elisabeth agreed.
“Some people send thoughts through their swimmers. Simple things, mostly feelings, but some real messages. After they’ve been together a long time.”
“Symbiosis,” Kay suggested.
“Sort of. The swimmers need for us to be in a good place.”
“They need to be the boss, too.”
“Yes,” Elisabeth agreed. “They make that very clear.”
She noticed the bowl of peppers sitting in its prominent place. She shivered with revulsion.
“Are they hot?” she asked.
“Very. They were beautiful before they dried up.”
“Never try to outsmart the swimmers. But still, you might be allowed to eat something spicy and ethnic, if it’s moderate.”
He salivated at the thought. He could still eat some good things.
“I trust you,” he said. “I mean beyond the swimmer.”
“I trust you because of it,” she said. “As long as you have the swimmer, you won’t betray me.”
“Betray you? We barely know each other.”
“I’ve been betrayed. I’ve been afraid to be with anyone since then.”
Next, they were together in his bed, and the bed collapsed without the benefit of any sex. Afterward, neither of them felt up for it. The humiliation of the collapsed bed wasn’t the problem. Both of them were used to humiliation. Kay couldn’t share his hesitation, the memories of his Janice, but Elisabeth seemed to understand, seemed to know. Maybe their swimmers gossiped.
“I need this fog to clear before I can do anything about my job,” he said.
“It gets worse before it gets better. It comes from fighting the swimmer. It clears quite a lot when you accept it.”
“Like being trained to a leash,” he said.
“Yes, actually.”
“Like being mind raped by a parasite,” he said.
“But there’s nothing you can do. We work for the swimmers. We have to survive. Survival means adaptation.”
He noticed her tears. Even in his fog. He wiped at them, kissed the wet cheeks. They cuddled, and then they slipped into the swimmer-induced long sleep.
Kay awakened first, still resistant, foggier than ever. He felt anger well up from a murky somewhere-else. The swimmer felt it. It forced a separation between him and his own feelings. Its effort to split him from himself set something off. The anger became rage, and for the first time in his life he knew the difference. He felt it swell, full of thickening fog. The swimmer fought the rage with its fog, thinking it could control Kay’s feelings, and he could feel it abandoning its “mesh network” to focus on wrangling against this rebellion.
He staggered up from the collapsed bed unable to see well. His thoughts, his vision, his senses all felt foggy. All fog but red with fury. The fury could not be taken from him!
But it was pointless.
He tried to relax, to accept what he couldn’t control.
“That’s the way it is,” he said.
His mind cleared a little. A feeling of joy was injected into him. With acceptance came hunger. A raging hunger. But the sensation reminded him of his desperation, and the real rage returned. And the fog.
But he hungered!
So, he found himself in the kitchen pouring cereal into a huge bowl even though he did not remember getting there, getting out the cereal. He poured milk. Plenty of milk. Blacked out like a drunkard, drunk on rage. Mind rape. Rage!
Next. He saw himself with the bowl tipped up at his mouth, gulping cereal. He gulped it down. Most of it. Plenty of it ran down his bare chest, then dripped off his belly. His boxers soaked through and stuck to him as he slopped and gulped. Greedy, but the greed was not his. The swimmer controlled hunger, and the swimmer ate. Why did it need his consent if it could already control his urges? Rage swelled again but stopped suddenly when his senses registered an unexpected flavor, and then he recognized the bowl. The peppers. The swimmer made him pour cereal, and in a blind rage, he got the bowls mixed up. And he poured milk into the wrong one. The sensation in his mouth was building.
Is heat a taste? He waited to die, waited for the swimmer’s revenge.
First in his mouth, then down his throat, descending, building, the fog cleared as the heat bloomed. Pain hit unbearably, and from its progress, Kay knew that he felt a mere preview. The swimmer flipped, thrashed. It writhed in panic, suddenly violent, caught in its own manipulation.
Kay barely made it to the toilet before the swimmer pushed the peppers up. The sickness after the beer was nothing compared to this. This new sickness felt like acid lava, and it continued. The heat got worse, the convulsions, worse. The rest of him weakened, but the convulsions got stronger. He heaved, and with each heave, the sickness magnified. He felt the end of his endurance.
He finally passed out. He dreamed for the first time in weeks. He regained consciousness in a small, expanding pool of blood, felt himself, felt his broken nose, felt inside his mouth, looked at his finger. No blood there. Just from his nose. He heard a noise in the toilet. A feeble splashing.
After a difficult minute, he got to his knees to look, and there it was, the mind swimmer. The size of a rat but weak and boneless, pink and translucent as a jellyfish. It thrashed, floating in a toilet full of toxic, soggy, milky peppers. Impossible? The doctor told him to avoid fried foods and meat. Peppers were left out of the prescription. Great advice.
Peppers? Science looks where it wants to. He collapsed back to the floor to rest.
“What have you done?” Elisabeth said.
He struggled up, stood by pulling on the sink. Elisabeth’s eyes mixed hope and horror. Her swimmer knew. She knew.
“It ate my peppers. It took control of me. It made a big mistake. A huge mistake. And so, I won!”
He felt like shouting it.
“I won…”
He did not shout. Instead, he staggered to her, leaned to peck her cheek, glanced at his own filth in the mirror, and merely smiled. He muttered an apology. So much no longer mattered. So much glowed on this Sunday, and it glowed with such clarity. To have a sickness and have it go away in an instant, like removing a splinter.
The fog had been so heavy, and now he felt so light, so clearheaded. So much no longer mattered except for Elizabeth, or at least the human part of her.
About Elisabeth… could he cure her? Would she stay?
That much had to matter. He wanted to clean up, take a long, slow shower. He wanted to start a diet.
“My swimmer’s scared,” Elisabeth said. “I’m scared.”
“Maybe the swimmer should be, I’m not sure. But I still like you.”
Would she still like him?
He gently pushed her out of the bathroom, closed the door. He tripped the flush on the toilet and watched the swimmer swirl away. Something noxious disappeared from sight. A token improvement in the universe.
He heard her sobbing outside the door and went to open it. He knew he would have to work to earn her trust. He already knew she needed love without condition. The option of betrayal loomed.
| EXHIBIT FOUR: Return to Gallery One: Barnacles and “Mama Bear“ | Proceed to the next Gallery Two: Leeches attraction, “Worryeater“ |