She whipped around, only to see the quick movement of something disappearing in the low brush behind the stacked couches, just a few dozen yards away from the lake. She was not sure what it was, but it was low to the ground and moved in swift but jerking motion, sending the branches that concealed it into spasmodic trembling. “Balshazaar,” Vimbai said.
Felix turned. “Where?”
Vimbai and Peb pointed at the bushes, and Felix took off toward them, with a speed Vimbai had not suspected in him.
Maya looked after him. “Poor Felix,” she said. “She chases this stupid thing like it means something.”
“Maybe it does mean something to him,” Vimbai answered. “I won’t pretend that I understand anything about Felix.”
Maya nodded her agreement. “He’s a strange one, that’s for sure. I wonder how it is, to have the remnant of a universe hovering around you?”
“Or rather hanging down from the remnant of a universe,” Vimbai said. “Still, do you know what happened to him? Where he was before, and how he came to be here? Can we even comprehend that?”
Maya shook her head. “No way. I don’t even think about that—once you start, you can’t stop, because then you start asking how come he speaks English and if everyone there does, and how was he able to get a New Jersey driver’s license, or even if he did get it—maybe he always had it or found it in his hair, and what is he even doing, existing like that, you know?”
“Yeah,” Vimbai said, and cradled Peb closer. “I’m just creeped out by Balshazaar, and Peb seems to imply that it was he who had taken his tongue.”
“Could be.” Maya walked up to the water’s edge and tried it with her toes. “Warm. Anyway, maybe Balshazaar is pissed at Felix and at the rest of us because we’re Felix’s friends. Maybe he likes the fish for whatever reason.”
“And the men in the medical trucks,” Vimbai added. At this, Peb stiffened in her arms but did not utter a sound. Vimbai decided to let him be for now.
“You keep saying that there are these guys in trucks.” Maya crouched down and splashed water with her hands. “But I haven’t seen them, and no one else did either. How do you know they are even here?”
“Oh, I know,” Vimbai said. “Sometimes you just do.”
Sometimes, you just did. Vimbai did not believe in ESP—rather, she trusted that human instincts, having evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, were better at picking up signals indicating danger than her rational mind would ever be. Sometimes, one had to trust the gut feeling, whether it came from quick but persistent observations that had not reached her conscious mind yet or from internalized knowledge, too old and too deep for words. She did not need to hear her mother’s voice or see her face to know that she was angry—the anger colored the air in the house, pumped it full of tension that Vimbai could feel as soon as she entered the house.
And just like that, she felt the electric charge in the air, she felt the unseen and unspoken menace—the men and their trucks, the sense of wazimamoto crouching nearby. She had developed this fear as a kid, and now it came in handy—or in any case, it felt more constructive than the blind childhood panic that made her dart to the bathroom at night, running so fast that her feet seemed to barely touch the cold hardwood floors. The same panic that forced her to take showers with her eyes open, fearful that the moment she closed them, she would feel the cold hand of wazimamoto on the inside of her elbow and feel a long needle go in, so deep, scraping against the bone.
Now, there was still fear and the long sucking sensation in her stomach, and the rising hairs on her arms at the thought of violent needles. She bit her lip and tossed her head back.
Vimbai considered Felix compared to Maya—he did not seem like the same kind of roommate. With Maya, they could bond and argue; with Felix, any illusion of understanding was aborted before it even had a chance to take hold, with just one look at his eyes and his hair—inhuman, inhuman. There was no chance of casual chat, of friendly bickering—as much as she had tried, all she could do now was to try to accept his presence and help him as much as she could; not out of friendship as she would do with Maya, but rather some generalized compassion, the ethical obligation one felt to help other creatures or at least to be reasonably nice to them in order to consider oneself a good person. Even Peb seemed more human: no matter how many phantom limbs it had attached to itself and no matter how many flowering branches it had absorbed, Vimbai could understand its suffering and its pain. She could relate to it. There was nothing to relate to in Felix. So she let him go, chasing after Balshazaar through the low scrub, and let him disappear from her mental landscape as soon as she looked back to the lake. It was not indifference, she decided, just the mind’s inability to hold onto something so incomprehensible and smooth like an egg, missing any angles her attention could snag in. Instead, she stood next to Maya, Peb in her arms, and waited for the man-fish.
The man-fish finally decided to show himself, when Vimbai was about to give up and suggest that maybe they should come back tomorrow, although that would certainly kill the momentum of her accumulated decisiveness and rage. He popped up among the reeds, his transparent fanned fins propping him up. He looked bigger now—so huge, big enough to swallow Peb whole with his thick-lipped fish mouth. He smiled a little bit, and Vimbai held her breath, as if afraid that the fish would suck her soul out with the next exhalation. It also gave her time to look over the fish.
The lips and the whiskers, she thought, were just like Vimbai remembered them—undoubtedly catfish, and yet suffused with very human sarcasm as the fish thrust out his lower lip and eyed Vimbai. The eyes, golden and cat-like, seemed to smirk and wink, a difficult feat without any eyebrows or eyelids. His flat head, mottled gray and brown like a stone, seemed too heavy for his weak fins—it wobbled, and the massive long body had to follow suit, tilting slightly from side to side, compensating for the head’s appearance of feebleness.
“Did you take Peb’s tongue?” Vimbai asked as sternly as she could.
Maya did not say anything, but her right fist gave a short, resonant punch to the open palm of her left hand. A simple but highly suggestive gesture, Vimbai thought, and smiled.
“No,” the man-fish said, studying Maya with some curiosity. “Don’t have any tongues, I really don’t. But I do wonder why are you threatening me—I’ve done nothing to either you or your despicable half-breed rats.”
“I’m not threatening,” Maya said. “But since you’ve mentioned doing things . . . you wouldn’t happen to have a few dozen horseshoe crab souls, would you?”
“Don’t be silly,” the man-fish said. “Crabs don’t have souls—even fish don’t, unless we swallow some drowned ones.”
“Is it true?” Maya whispered into Vimbai’s ear.
“Don’t know,” Vimbai whispered back. “But makes sense, sort of. Only those things I’ve seen in Felix’s head—what were they?”
“Apparitions,” said the man-fish, whose hearing turned out far superior to what one would expect from two holes on the sides of his head. “Accretions. Come closer, and I will show you.”
“Vimbai, don’t.” Maya’s hand wrapped around Vimbai’s forearm, the strong protective warmth of her fingers encircling like a sigil guarding from evil.
Vimbai gently freed her arm and handed Peb to Maya. “I’m just going to listen. Nothing will happen to me while you are watching over, right?”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Maya mumbled, and showed her fist to the man-fish. “Don’t make me cave your skull in, fishstick. And don’t you think this lake will protect you—my dogs will drink it dry if need be.”
The man-fish rolled his eyes. “I do not mean you harm—not at this very moment, at least. But perhaps once you understand what it is you’re defending you would be more inclined to leave me alone.”
“I won’t leave you alone until Peb has his tongue back, and the horseshoe crabs are whole again,” Vimbai said, and regretted it immediately—perhaps, this was not a good time for threats she could not really fulfill, especially not so close to the man-fish’s hypnotic gaze—he floated in the shallows now and she stood knee-deep in warm water, fat mud oozing between her toes, and wondered how she got here. Before she could verbalize her question, the man-fish bobbed up and down on the waves, and swam closer. “Do you even know what horseshoe crabs are?”
Arthropod and other assorted invertebrate classifications turned out to be irrelevant, and Vimbai almost regretted memorizing their mouthparts, tiny, numerous, and confusingly named. Mouthparts did not make the horseshoe crab—or at least this is what the man-fish said.
When something is as ancient as these crabs, when it lives on the bottom, scavenging, for so long, it is only a matter of time before spiritual accumulation becomes as significant as the chitinous growth of the shell. Tail spikes and fragile little legs, eyes hidden behind the spiked bumps of their armor—all this was just surface. But there were other shells, other eyes, built from things less tangible than chitin.
