Kelp

I laughed at the image of kelp as I entered the woman's kitchen. The wood-paneled walls were painted a shade of brown that suggested kelps combed from sublittoral kelp forests. Most people think kelps are a type of plant, but they're actually multicellular organisms that develop long blades with pneumatocysts and spores. The spores in turn develop their own slimy blades. It's disgusting. Marine protected areas, or MPAs, have been established to limit human activity in order to preserve natural resources like kelp, but that's because most people don't understand how sinister kelps are. Some kelps are invasive, such as Sargassum horneri which forms a giant biomass that has invaded parts of the Northern Pacific. Another horrible kelp is Laminaria hyperborea which can release a million zoospores over a period of a few weeks and live for fifteen years. Kelps have structures called pneumatocysts that are essentially bladders filled with gas that allow the individual blades or fronds of kelp to float toward the surface of the water.

Though I laughed, I tried not to think too much about kelp. I cradled the box with the woman's boots inside. Her instructions had been to leave the boots in the kitchen, but she hadn't said where. I left them in a corner near the door to the mudroom. Rich people have a mudroom in their houses. A housekeeper appeared briefly carrying pots of carnivorous plants and then vanished. It occurred to me that the room was filled with Them. They bubbled in the pot on the stove. They were the brown pigment that had been used to dye and waterproof the wood paneling. They multiplied in the housekeeper's stomach.

Then the lady of the house marched in. Blue plastic bags of groceries were thrown in a corner of the kitchen. She hadn't seen me. She'd tracked mud into the kitchen with her boots.

"What do you want?" she asked when she noticed me at last. She wasn't looking at me.

"I came to deliver your boots."

"Where are they then?"

"They're by the door to the mudroom."

"Well, that was nice of you. Bye."

I left the kitchen, but I about-faced to have another glance at the house before I darted into the car. Maybe the whole house was filled with Them. The woman ran right out of the house and to my car just as I was pulling away. She tapped the passenger-side window with her finger when she reached me. She said: "I'm sorry. What was your name?" I told her, and she said that she appreciated the delivery. She didn't have any cash, but could I return later for a tip? Then she returned to the kitchen where the housekeeper's pot of kelp boiled. I watched through the window as she lifted the lid of the smoldering pot and smiled at the sight and smell of Them. She'd stir Them with an enormous wooden spoon. She laughed when a pneumoatocyst popped and gas was released.

She was still laughing when I returned that night. She wore a red and blue tracksuit that made her appear agile enough to outrun a kelp attack if she needed to. She was chatty and asked me to guess her first name since I only knew her first initial from the package label. It was the letter T. "Come on, guess," she said.

"Terry."

"Nope."

"Teresa."

"Teresa is basically the same as Terry."

"Tatiana."

"No."

"Timberwolf."

"No." Then she said: "I'd invite you into the living room, but the couch is still covered in plastic. I just got a new couch."

So we stood in the kitchen. I never learned her first name. She reached into her coin purse and produced a twenty-dollar bill. She didn't hand it to me, but she waved it in my face and snatched it away playfully. She did that several times before she finally gave me the money.

"Guess what, I've already forgotten your name," she said.

"Adam," I told her.

"Why aren't you in college?"

"Maybe I am."

Then she led me to the basement because she had new classical music and didn't want to listen to it alone. Her brand-new knee-high boots stood by a fireplace because she hadn't put them in the walk-in closet with the others yet. She had a closet full of boots. Did I mind a fire, she wanted to know, and I said I didn't care. Then she sat on the edge of the couch she had down there, and I watched as she slipped her feet into the boots: first one pampered foot and then another. They weren't ordinary boots but riding boots that a competing equestrian would wear. She turned on the Bose sound system. She held her arms open for a waltz, taking the leading position. That meant her hand was at my waist while I had to put a hand on her shoulder. "Just remember one-two-three, one-two-three," she said. When we were done waltzing, she told me that she'd seen me before. She'd seen me making deliveries in town.

"Why didn't you say anything?"

"I didn't know you then. Why would I say anything?"

I told her I'd seen her before too. It was a recurring nightmare. I didn't realize the woman from my nightmare was real, so I'd been alarmed when I'd seen her in the kitchen that morning. She asked me what the dream was about, and I told her. It always involved her materializing in my apartment. In the most recent dream, she came into my bedroom when I was just waking up, only it wasn't her but a 130-pound mass of kelp masquerading as her. Kelps were known for doing things like that. She laughed and remarked that it was a stupid, stupid dream.

"No, it wasn't."

"It was. You dreamt that you saw me, but it wasn't me. It was a kelp colony."

"You don't get it. They're nasty. They're the evilest things. They can do whatever they want, and you wouldn't even notice. This entire house could secretly be kelp. When you wake up tomorrow, the house would be gone because they've moved off somewhere."

"And what's the name of the mental hospital you escaped from?"

"I actually graduated from college," I told her.

"That doesn't mean you're not a lunatic."

I told her that I'd always dreamt about kelp. I'd never escape them. There's no such thing as escape. Poor people who lived on islands used to eat kelp. She didn't know about that. Those poor people ate kelp because there was nothing else. There were no fish or there weren't enough fish so they had to subsist on something they hated and which hated them. "It's a terrible thing," I said. "Imagine being destitute and expecting someone to come and save you, but no one ever comes."

She didn't understand. She couldn't understand. A chasm separated us. She led me upstairs to her bedroom. The room had teeth. They bite. They scratch. They maul.

I'd chosen the part of the shore where I knew there'd be no seaweeds. It was the warmest day of the week. I wanted to be alone, but I wasn't mad when Jai showed up. He said the water was too cold to get into, but it was still sweet to sit on the beach. We took off our shoes and shouted when the water rushed to the shore and the sea foam fizzled against our feet. It was ice cold. "Let me show you something," Jai said. I followed him to another part of the beach: a wooded area where the trees billowed over the sand. He told me there were worms there, and his fingers dug into the water-choked sand.

"You won't find any worms here," I said.

"I will."

When he found one, he didn't remove the thing but dug the sand around it completely away so that the entire length of its body was revealed. It had a gargantuan brown head. "What you do is you pick it up by the back section here and you place it on your skin," he said. "Like your forearm, for example, but you can also do your thigh."

"What for?"

"You get a high. You ever get a high from a worm? It's like no high you've ever had."

I told him I wasn't interested in getting a high from a worm, but he said that I couldn't know that I wasn't interested until I tried. You'd have to be a special kind of moron to want a high from a worm that wasn't in the textbooks. That's what I told him.

"That's your problem," Jai said. "You're wound up like a mouse dangling over a cauldron. Just go flat with your back against the sand. Take off your shirt. I'll put a worm on your chest. Maybe a couple."

"No, just one."

"All right, just one."

I closed my eyes and tried to ignore the mealy squish of the worm. I didn't like it. The head was brown, but the body was jaundiced and sickening. When it was over, I sat up and saw that the ocean's waves had shortened their distance and had come very near. The ocean was clearing the shoreline of people. It didn't like us. Then I saw Them. They appeared in great, big clumps where the sand met the rushing waves. Their bodies shimmered and flashed in the waning sunlight. I stood up and turned my back to Them.

"It's just kelp," Jai said.

"I thought there wasn't any kelp here. You told me before there wasn't any kelp."

"What difference does it make? Hey, you still have a worm on your body."

"Goddamn it, get it off," and I flailed my arms, slapping angrily at my chest and legs.

I returned to T's house the next day only to find she wasn't home. I waited for an hour, but it was the housekeeper who appeared. She said that the woman had flown out of state for a conference and wouldn't be back for a week, maybe longer. I told her that couldn't be true as the woman had asked me to meet her at her place that very day. The housekeeper shrugged. All she could do was shrug her tired shoulders. She slapped the dirt from her hands and the thighs of her pants. She'd been cleaning. Her hands had been ravaged by the sun and had deep, devastating crevasses. These were her shackles. Leaving her, I walked from the front door to the side door where the kitchen was. I saw the chocolate brown walls and the blue plastic bags that still had groceries within. The perishables had been placed in the refrigerator, but the dry goods still sat in blue plastic bags.

My apartment was a personal hell. A low-wattage bulb flickered in the hall that led from the kitchen to my bedroom. The floor creaked and the malfunctioning fire alarm occasionally beeped for no reason at all. In the shower, I glanced down and saw the marks representing where the worms had sucked on me. Jai lied. He'd said he'd only put one on my chest, but there'd been at least two. Maybe more. I felt every jet of water as pokes, prods, bites. The water had teeth.

Then I was in bed where a tree lashed up and down against the window like a broom clearing all the unwanted people away. I heard the sound of feet scaling the wall. It was the regular sound of boot-shod steps against a wooden trellis. A hand pushed the window open, and a woman stepped into the bedroom: first one booted foot and then another. Her smile was carnivorous and hardly a smile at all. She said: "I just wanted you to know that I haven't forgotten you. I came to your room just like you wanted. I know I smell like saltwater and crofters' tears. Before long, you won't even notice." She wore a slimy brown dress and bits of her fell and slapped against the hardwood floor. She reached into her brown coin purse and produced a twenty-dollar bill. She waved it in my face, and when I reached for it, she snatched it silently away.