THE THING

THE THING

He was behind the house on the patio beside the pool.  The pool was empty, of course, and covered.  The morning sun reflected off the white canvas stretched over it.  All the patio furniture was gone, and everything behind the house had the air of being closed up and uninhabited.  The only sign that the house had been recently occupied was the flower garden, whose petunias and snap dragons were brightly illuminated.  He had the feeling that if he shouted, he’d hear an echo.  He didn’t shout, though. 

     It was a Saturday morning and his wife was away.  He was going to join her in a week.  He stayed behind to tie up loose ends around the house, getting it ready to sell.  He was no longer with the company, having already turned in his resignation.  That was a week ago, when his wife left.   The two weeks were supposed to be a fallow time.  When he joined his wife, they would take another month of vacation to settle into the new place, and then he would put his mind to the new work.  He was going into business as an independent Value Added Reseller of networking products, exploiting his relations with systems providers for his own profit instead of the company’s he formerly worked for.

     He didn’t like being alone.  The first few nights passed quickly enough, his neighbors and friends stopping by or calling, helping him fill the hours.  But time now was beginning to drag, and the evenings were becoming an ordeal.  Already, he had finished what he stayed behind to do.  He couldn’t join his wife any sooner, because she was involved in her own project, which is why she was away in the first place.  She wouldn’t be free for another week.  He had no choice but to wait out the time. 

The house was mostly empty, now.  All their personal things were in storage.  He kept out only the bed, one chair and the TV in the living room, and in the kitchen, one plate, a pan, a few utensils, the coffee pot and a cup and saucer, and a few items in the refrigerator.  The cupboards were empty.  The cleaning people had the floors all done, and arrangements were made to have the yard tended.  He had nothing to do now but store the last things the day before his departure, and he was bored, anxious to get out of there, and lonely. 

He put his hands in his pockets and wandered toward the flowers, leaving footprints in the dewy grass.  There was a birdbath there in a ring of dwarf zinnias bordered with alyssum.  He had an underground feed supplying the bath with water, and he had forgotten about it.  He wondered if he should just leave it on.  What harm could come of it?  As he thought about it, he noticed a red leaf half submerged in the water inside the bath.  He didn’t think anything of it except that the leaf was very red. 

He turned and began to retrace his steps, having decided to turn the water off, as there was no way of knowing how long the house would be untenanted after he left it.  The valve for the feed was in the basement, and he decided to go there and turn it off now so as not to forget later and then reproach himself for it.  As he neared the basement entrance, he stopped and stood still.  It was mid-July.  What had that leaf to do with being red?  He turned and looked at the trees.  Everything was, of course, mid-summer green.  Was it a leaf?  He shrugged.  As he reached for the basement door, however, he stopped and turned.   

There were no trees near the birdbath.  What was that thing he saw?  Curious, he walked back to the flower beds.  Standing outside the ring of alyssum, he looked at the thing.  It seemed to be a leaf.  He shrugged.  Just as he lost interest and was about to turn, however, it moved.  It was a very strange movement, like a muscle wrinkling under the skin.  It startled him for an instant, and as he wondered what it could be, it moved again, giving him the impression it was aware of him.  At first he was reluctant to step into the zinnias to get a closer look.  He didn't want to damage anything.  But the third time it moved, his curiosity got the better of him. 

He stepped into the flowers, careful not to crush any, and got up close to the birdbath.  The thing was bright red at its fringes with cream-colored blotches on a darker red, almost brown, color over the rest of its body.  In the light blotchy areas he could see thin tracings of capillaries under the skin.  The part that protruded from the water looked like the edge of a maple leaf.  He had no idea what it was.  It didn’t look like anything he had ever seen or read about, and it certainly was alive. 

Again, that wrinkle movement.  He looked more closely, trying to determine what its shape really was.  It didn’t appear to have a head or limbs of any sort.  He could see no eyes, either, nor any place where it might breathe or ingest food.  It was very strange.  He touched it with his index finger to see if it would scurry away.  But it didn’t move, except to send another shiver through its body. 

His touch did produce a change, though.  It began to pulse with that wrinkle motion.  It looked for all the world like a wave moving through it.  But the feel of it when he touched it was also strange.  It was cold, as cold as the water, and soft as a clam.  He wondered if he should call someone about it, maybe someone from a nearby university.  But it was Saturday, and he would have to disturb someone at home, so he decided not to.  He decided, instead, to find something he could use to turn it over, not wanting to do that with his bare hands.  After he had a look at its underside, he would just leave it or toss it into the flowers.  It was probably some species of slug, he thought, that just happened to crawl up the birdbath, not knowing where it was going.

He stepped carefully out of the flowers and looked under the trees for a twig.  He found something with leaves still attached to it.  Stripping it clean, he broke a six-inch piece off.  It seemed sturdy enough for the job.  As he bent over the birdbath again, the thing stopped pulsing and became very still.  He wondered if it had some way of knowing he was there.  “Perhaps it senses me electrically,” he thought.  It was not impossible.  The idea raised his curiosity. 

He gently pushed the twig under the thing and lifted it just a little.  He could see that it wasn’t much thicker than a leaf at its edges but that it thickened a little towards its center.  He pushed it up further and could see something underneath it.  It was a slight bulge.  “Ah,” he thought, “the missing parts.  Here are the orifices for breathing and eating.”  He pushed it up further still, and the soft body began to fold over the twig.  Quickly, he maneuvered it onto its back.  He wasn’t surprised to see that its underside was all the light color of the blotches on the reverse.

He was astonished, however, to see that in the center of the bulge was a cavity in which rested a horny beak, like that of a squid or an octopus.  “What in the world?” he said aloud.  He probed with the twig and was startled when the beak shot out and fastened to it.  “Damn,” he said aloud, lifting the thing right out of the water.  “What is it?”  He lifted it higher, and then higher, up to eye level.  Its body drooped and hung like a slimy wet rag, leaving its beak apparently fully extended.  He tapped it with his fingernail, and it was quite hard.  The gruesome thing was white at its base, where it was connected by cartilage and tissue to the inner portion of the bulge, and a yellowish brown darkening to black at the curved tip. 

“What am I going to do with you, fella?” he said.  “If I leave you here, some cat’s going to make a meal of you.  Which I suppose is none of my business.  Or vice versa.  You’d make a meal of some unsuspecting cat.  Which is still none of my business.” 

Seeing that the thing had a solid beak-hold on the twig, he walked with it back towards the house.  If it let loose and fell into the grass, he’d just leave it.  He half expected that to happen, but when he reached the pool, and the thing was still locked to the twig, he carried it inside the house, where he set it down on the counter in the kitchen.

“Well, here we are.  What about you, now?  What kind of creature are you?” 

The thing had not let go of the twig, but he contrived to rest it beak down, as he had found it in the birdbath, with the twig just protruding from under its leaf-like edge.  It did not, of course, respond to his questions.  It just rested there, rather like a jelly fish on the beach.  It differed from a jelly fish out of water by having more structure and definition, but it seemed to have no more capacity to move, except for that wave-like, wrinkle-like flexion of its body.

“What do you eat, I wonder?  Should we try something from the fridge?”

Opening it, he found a zip-lock sack with some ham in it.  So he took a little piece of ham to the counter, pulled it into smaller pieces, and set them on the counter in front of the thing.  Then he backed away and watched to see if there was any movement.  After a few moments, he could see there wouldn’t be.  So, losing his fear of the thing, he lifted one side of it with his fingers.  Seeing that the beak had retracted, he pulled the twig away and put a piece of ham in its place and let the thing down.  But there was no response.  After a few moments, he lifted it again, and seeing the ham still there, he removed it.

“Well,” he said, “I can see you don’t share a niche with pigs.  What can a creature like you eat?  Think of beaks, my man,” he said.  “What would that beak be good for in the wild, eh?” 

It was a problem.  Birds had beaks, but they also had wings.  This thing certainly couldn’t fly.  What good could that beak be to a creature like this that lived in gardens?  Worms?  Would a beak be needed to feed on worms?  “Perhaps,” he thought, “to dig them up, pull them out of the soil?”  Well, he’ll try worms.  Feeling like he had an obligation now, he grabbed a table spoon and went outside to the garden.  In a few moments he had a nice fat worm.

He put the worm under the beak and let the creature down and stepped back to watch.  Nothing happened.  He walked away, went outside, walked around the pool a bit, came back in, looked at it again, raised it up—nothing.  The worm was untouched.  He put the creature down and stepped back, feeling challenged to get it right, for the creature’s sake as well as for the sake of solving the problem.  But nothing he did that day produced a response—he tried beetles, moths, grubs, grasshoppers, just about every living thing he could find in the garden.  By mid-afternoon, he noticed that the thing’s coloring was beginning to fade, and its skin was getting scaly. 

“What’s this?” he said.  “Do you need to be in water?  Are you drying up or dying?  I’d better see to this.”

He filled the frying pan with water, then, thinking better of it, dumped it and washed it, cleaning out the butter from the morning’s egg.  Then he rinsed it good to make sure no detergent residue remained.  He filled it again, this time with filtered water, put it on the counter next to the creature, and, lifting it gently with both hands, set it down in the pan.  The thing sank to the bottom. 

“Well, well.  Does that feel good?”

It sat unmoving under the water.  After a few moments of watching it, he thought, “What if it drowns?”

Quickly, he lifted it out and put it back on the counter, then dumped the water from the pan.  He put the pan on the counter again near the creature, took his coffee-cup saucer and put it upside down in the pan.  Then he lifted the creature up again with both hands and set it down half on the saucer and half in the pan.  He poured water into the pan one cup at a time until the level rose enough to cover half its body. 

As he studied it, something amazing happened.  The leaf-like edge of the creature that was out of the water began to turn up, ever so slowly. 

“Amazing!” he thought.  “It looks for all the world like it’s enjoying the water!  Must be.  That’s exactly how I found it!”

He felt successful and the creature’s apparent contentment made him happy.  He was bonding with the thing.  Like a child who finds a turtle or a baby bird, he felt, through the hapless thing, a sort of wonderment in and connection to the mysteries.  He liked it.  It was so unusual and surprising a creature!  He looked at it, its ever-so-thin edge curling up in a gesture of sweet contentment, and felt responsible to it.  He had to discover what it ate if he was going to keep it alive.

Once again he returned to the garden.  He sat in the grass, letting himself take in the environment, trying to imagine the creature there.  If it had been his finger instead of the twig, that beak would have inflicted a nasty wound.  What could it use that horny beak for?  The more he thought about it, the more mysterious it seemed.  The creature looked for all the world like a big maple leaf in fall colors.  Why?  Mystery.  Mystery.  No such animal exists, he thought.  Not in this world of suburban homes and manicured lawns and flower gardens.  He crawled onto his belly and sank into the grass, letting his arms flop beside him.  But nothing came to him.

He drove to the supermarket and bought numerous things—a peach, a few cherries, a bag of celery, a bag of carrots, and, on a hunch, a can of clams and a can of sardines.  When he tried the produce items, none of them had any affect.  He opened the can of clams, and put a fleshy bit on the saucer.  He stepped back to watch, as he did with all the other items he placed there.  Almost imperceptibly, the creature reacted.  Ever so slowly, its outermost edge, raised into the air, folded down.  It was like watching the hands of a clock.  After a while, he was certain the creature had moved.  He couldn’t tell by what motion it slid toward the clam bit, but it had done so.  He was fascinated.  It took what seemed an eternity, but eventually, the creature had positioned itself over the morsel.  He drained the can then and put the whole thing in the frying pan, and left it there.  Coming back an hour later, he saw the creature had moved its body over the can and was making pulsing movements.  It was feeding!

His curiosity was so provoked that he went to the local library and looked up all the terrestrial invertebrates he could find.  He tried land crustaceans, he looked up slugs and snails, mollusks, but he could find nothing.  He tried lake and river animals, swamp and wetland creatures, again, nothing.  The effort only increased his sense of the mystery of the thing.  Returning, he looked in on it in its new home in the frying pan.  It was there, happy as could be, half on the saucer and half in the water, its one edge again curling up in that gesture of contentment. 

“Well,” he said to it, “you are a rare little monster, aren’t you?”  And in response, the thing stood happily still. 

“At the pace you move,” he said to it again, “you must have been traveling centuries to get to my birdbath.  I wonder where you came from?  I wonder why that birdbath?  And I wonder how the hell you got into it!”

All that evening he stayed in the kitchen talking to it.  The thing sometimes would send a wrinkle through its body, as though to acknowledge him, and so he took it.  Once in a while he would touch it.  He would run his finger across its back.  At first, it remained dead still.  But after a while it began to respond to his touch with a flex of its body, producing the wave-like wrinkle he had come to recognize as a mode of communication.  He was certain the thing was aware of him.

Once, when he stroked it, he felt a tingle in his fingertip.  It didn’t hurt, but it was strong enough to make him jerk his hand away.  Was there a voltage buildup in the thing that had just discharged at his touch?  It happened only once, but how could it be?  Was it an act of communication?  Was the thing trying to reach him?  It seemed endlessly interesting. 

“Are you a philosopher among animals?” he said to it.  “A cogitator?  One whose mind is pure energy?”  He laughed at himself.  But he looked seriously at the thing.  He found himself saying out loud things he never thought before.  He spoke of his love of networking whole groups of people into a mass mind, of his feelings for the ocean, of his desire for children, of beauty and his responsiveness to it.  He talked of these things as though he were just finding them out.  He looked at the creature, half in the water, half curling contentedly into the air, and felt a shadow tingling in his finger.  

He went to bed filled with wonder.  A dumb creature, a blob of protoplasm with a beak, something as new, apparently, in the chain of life as the first creatures—a clam eater that looked like a maple leaf—had managed by some mysterious means to find him, out of the vast billions who lived, ate, and multiplied, and to communicate with him.  He felt it was no accident.  Nature, ever fecund, ever devious, had conjoined them—with what mysterious and unforeseeable outcome he could not imagine.  He felt like a vehicle for some larger purpose which he was willing to give himself to.  He saw himself, from the vantage of eternity, as a link between two distinct realms—one ancient, the other new; one fully elaborated, the other just beginning the process.  He felt metaphysically distinguished.

He woke in the morning with the same scintillating feelings he had fallen asleep with.  He rose and went immediately to the kitchen.  The creature was still in the frying pan, half in and half out of the water, just as he left it last night.  He rubbed its back gently, and it convulsed with its one conversational response, the wrinkle occurring much more instantly to his touch than it did last night.  This surprised him and made him feel all the more connected to it.  How utterly and completely astonishing! he thought.  People spoke of men and dogs.  But this was something entirely new. 

A feeling of affection rose in him, completely spontaneously.  It did not occur to him that this feeling was a sign of insanity.  Instead, he wondered, after that can of clams yesterday, if it would be hungry again.  He thought he’d try the sardines and see.  But it had no interest in the fish, perhaps because they were oily.  Later, he would buy more clams.  He put up coffee for himself and began talking to the creature, which, again, like last night, responded occasionally with its only word.

He took the frying pan outside beside the pool, and set it in a shady spot.  He wanted it to have air, to know it could be outside, in the world it came from, in case it had any sense it was a captive.  That would be a false sense.  Besides, he had to leave in a few days.  He couldn’t take it with him.  He could leave it in its frying pan with a neighbor, with instructions on how to care for it, and come back for it after he got settled.  But that wouldn’t do.  He began thinking about the long term.  Reluctantly, he decided he would have to give it back to the world.  But not now.  He had a few more days.  When the time came, he would put it back in the birdbath.

The creature made an excellent companion during the time he had remaining.  In his own mind, at least, the connection between them was very real and deepened each day.  At last, on the day he had to load up the last things to haul to storage, he took it out to the birdbath and set it in as he had originally found it.  He had come to handle it without fear of its beak.  And now, stroking its back one last time, eliciting once more the customary response, he walked away.  Parting from it made him feel awful.  It was a feeling of disconnection accompanied by sadness—a feeling not unlike what he had when his wife left.

She would ask him about his fallow time and whether he felt reenergized to tackle business again, this time as an independent.  She would want to tell him about the progress made on her project.  She would want to talk politics. Somehow, he felt, he would find a way to evade talk of these things.  He didn’t know how long his condition would last—if it would fade relatively quickly, perhaps by the time he stepped off the plane.  He didn’t know.  He realized the thing had said more to him than he knew.  Realities beyond the scope of his learning opened to him, making his everyday world seem local and gray.  And like the creature, he could communicate this knowledge only with a shiver.  

“You seem distant,” she said.  “Were the two weeks hard on you?  Wait till you see the new house.  It’ll pick you up.”

“I left the water running in the birdbath,” he replied.