Reflections from the Black Lagoon

Before they came, I went about my business in pond muck, slurry, roiling soups of particulate matter and anaerobic nits and scooters. I'd been alone for somewhere between 250 million and 260 million years. I'd forgotten the exact date. Our prime had been the Devonian, and we'd been old news by the Permian. We'd become a joke by the Triassic and fish food by the Cretaceous. The Cenozoic had dragged by like the era it was. At some point, I'd looked around and everyone else was gone. I was still there, the spirit of a fish in the shape of a man. I breaststroked back and forth, parting underwater meadows with taloned mitts. I watched species come and go. I glided a lot, vain about my swimming, and not as fluid with my stroking as I would have liked to have been. I suffered from negative buoyancy. I was out of my element.

Out of the water, I gaped. In the 100 percent humidity it felt like I should be able to breathe. My mouth moved like I was testing a broken jaw. My gills flexed and extended to pull what I needed out of the impossible thinness of the air. The air felt elastic and warm at the entrance to my throat, as though it had breath behind it that never got through. The air was strands of warmth pulling apart, dissipating at my mouth.

My mouth was razored with shallow triangular teeth. I lived on fish I was poorly equipped to catch. I killed a tapir out of boredom and curiosity, but it tasted of dirt and parasites and dung. For regularity, I ate the occasional water cabbage. I'd evolved to crack open ammonites and rake the meat from trilobites. Instead, I flopped around after schools of fish that moved like light on leaves. They slipped away like memories. Every so often, a lucky swipe left one taloned.

How long had it been since I'd seen one of my own? We hadn't done well where we'd been, and our attempt at a diaspora had been a washout. I'd gotten pitying looks from the plesiosaurs. Was I so unique? In the rain forest, the common was rare and the rare was common.

The lagoon had changed over the years. It had snaked out in various directions and receded in others. Most recently it had become about nine times as long as it was wide. The northern end was not so deep and the southern end fell away farther than I'd ever needed to go. Something with bug eyes and fanlike dorsals had swum up out of there once 7500 years ago and hadn't been seen since.

Every so often the water tasted brackish or salty.

There was one crescent of sandy beach that came or went by the decade, depending on storms, a wearying expanse of reedy shoreline that flooded every spring (silverfish glided between the buttress roots, gathering seeds), and a shallow-bottomed plateau of saw grass that turned out to be perfect for watching swimmers from concealment. There was a minor amphitheater of a rocky outcrop suitable for setting oneself off against when being probed at night with searchlights (stagger up out of the waist-deep water, perform your blindness in the aggravating glare, swipe ineffectually at the beams). There were two seasonally roving schools of piranha with poor self-control, a swarm of unforgiving parasitic worms in a still-water cul-de-sac, five or six uninviting channels that led to danger and mystery, one occasionally blocked main artery in the bend of the Amazon, one secret underwater passageway that led to an oddly capacious and echoey chamber of stone, and a huge fallen stilt palm that seemed to be still growing despite its submarine status. From below, the water was the color of tea. From above, even on sunny days, the deeper levels looked black.

During the day, the air was humid and blood warm. In the morning, orchid-smelling mists surrounded columns buttressed with creepers. Lines of small hunting vireos moved like waves through the trees. Wrens sang antiphonally, alternating the opening notes and completing phrases with their mates.

Night fell in minutes. Bats replaced birds, moths replaced butterflies. In the close darkness, howler monkeys roared defiance. Nectar-gathering bats sideslipped through the clearings. Fishing bats gaffed cichlids and ate them in flight.

I didn't go far. I entertained dim memories of thickets of stinging insects, poisonous snakes and spiders, and the yellow-eyed gleams of jaguars. Away from the water, all trees looked the same and there were no clues to help with orientation. Everything considered me with a diffident neutrality: the bushmaster in the leaf litter, the army ants in the hollow tree, the millipede coiling into its defensive position. I chewed beans and fungi for the visions their hallucinogens provided. The visions stood in for insights.

One afternoon, after 470 million years of quiet, a boat chug-chugged into the lagoon. Old rubber tires hung over its side. It leaked black oil and something more pungent that spread small rainbows over the water. It made a lot of unnecessary and fish-scaring noise. Once it settled into quiet, I fingered its bottom from below with a talon, scraping lines in the soft slime.

Later, across the lagoon, I hovered in the black water, invisible in the sun's glare. The figures on the boat had my shape. Naturally, I was curious.

They spoke over one another in headlong squabbles and seemed to have divided their tasks in obscure ways. Just what they were doing was something I could not untangle. Had I found companions? Was I no longer completely alone? Had the universe singled me out for good fortune? My heart boomed terror.

I had not one single illusion about this group. Spears were unpacked. Nets. Other ominous-looking instruments. Nothing about any of this suggested diffident neutrality.

A smaller boat steadily brought minor hills of junk ashore. A canvas tent went up. Floating off by myself, savoring that illusory moment of coolness when I'd rise from the water in the early morning, I watched a bare-chested native lead a hurrying scientist in a Panama hat to an exposed bank of rock. They arrived to confront a conspicuous claw waving menacingly from the shale.

I paddled over for a listen.

"What was it, Doctor?" the native asked.

The doctor admitted he didn't know. He was fumbling with a cumbersome flash camera. He said he'd never seen anything like it before.

"Was it important?" the native wondered.

The doctor took pictures, his flash redundant in the sunlight. He said he thought it was. Very important. He set the camera aside and pickaxed the fossil arm right out of the rock. So much for the preciousness of the find.

He announced he was going to take it to the institute. Luis and his friend were to wait here for his return.

First, he said, he had to take some measurements. Then he fussed about for days.

There were four men: a figure with a hat who remained on the boat, and Luis, Andujar and the doctor on the shore, their sagging tent beside that still-water cul-de-sac with the swarm of parasitic worms.

The claw they kept in the tent in a box had some sentimental value for me. In the middle of the night at times I stood beside the open tent flaps, dripping, ruminating on whether to go in for it. The doctor's breathing was clogged and he sounded like a marine toad.

In the morning they made their waste down the end of a trail leading to a stand of young palms that turned from orange to green as they matured.

One day the foreclaw was gone; I could feel it. The doctor was gone with it. The boat was gone.

Luis and Andujar sang as they did their work. They didn't work often. They played a game with a sharp knife they used to hack down plants.

I watched them and learned their idiosyncrasies. I learned about camp stools and toilet paper. I learned about rifles. They enjoyed disassembling and oiling rifles. The procedure for loading rifles and killing animals with rifles was patiently walked through every morning, as though for the benefit of those creatures like myself watching interestedly from the bush. I was impressed with the rifles.

That night beside their camp I rose so slowly from the water that the meniscus distended before giving way. With my mouth still submerged, my eyes negotiated the glow of their lanterns. The tent canvas blocking the light was the color of embers. On a nearby hibiscus, the light refracted through an insect disguised as a water droplet.

I stood beside the tent in the darkness. One of them looked out and then withdrew his head.

Even with my scales glimmering moonlight and water seeping from my algae, I had a talent for invisibility, for sudden disappearance, the way blue butterflies in the canopy vanish when entering shade.

On the other side of the canvas Luis and Andujar nattered and thumped about. I waited as quietly as an upright bone. My chest was stirred by an obscurely homicidal restlessness.

They fell silent. This was more annoying than their noise. I stood before the closed flaps of the tent's entrance, spread a taloned claw and extended it slowly into the light. No response.

I pulled the flap aside. Luis gaped, goggled, brandished one of the lanterns, threw it. Andujar sprang from his cot swinging the big sharp knife. They weren't as much exercise as the tapir had been.

I enjoyed throwing them about. I (continued on page 142)Black Lagoon(continued from page 74) raked meat off the bone, lathed, splintered and shredded; wrung, wrenched, rooted and uprooted. I noted my lack of restraint. I opened them to the jungle. I unearthed their wet centers.

I sat outside the tent, not ready to return to the water. I held my claws away from my body. Space in the upper canopy turned blue and paled. Two tiny scarlet frogs wrestled beside me. Leaf litter beneath them slipped and scattered. Along the water, one set of noisemakers retired and the next took its place.

I swam off my murderousness. I floated on my back in the center of the lagoon. Fish nipped at my feet. I had even less appetite than usual.

Days passed. Luis and Andujar, slung across shredded cots and canvas, became festive gathering places. In the evenings, even a jaguarundi stopped by. In the opened chest cavities, beetles swarmed and tumbled over one another. Compact clouds of emerald-eyed flies lifted off and resettled.

The big boat came chug-chugging back into the lagoon.

I watched it come from out of the east. My head ached. The sunrise spiked my vision.

I dove to the bottom, corkscrewed around in the muck and startled some giant catfish.

I resurfaced. Once again, the boat stopped and settled into quiet. Once again, the smaller boat was loaded and sent to shore.

The doctor stood in the front. Three other men spread themselves across the back. They centered their attention on a slender figure between them that I could smell all the way across the water. She smelled like the center of bromeliads torn open, mixed with anteater musk and clay. Anteater musk for years had made me pace certain feeding trails, obscurely excited.

Female scent tented through the membranes in my skull. I gawped. I sounded. I hooted, their nightmare owl.

The group looked off in my direction, startled by the local color. The doctor called for Luis and Andujar. Luis and Andujar weren't answering. The boat rocked and pitched up onto the same muddy bank it had left. The doctor clambered out and marched off toward his tent. The men called the female Kay and helped her out and followed. I cruised over, a lazy trail of bubbles.

They made their discovery. I hovered nearby in the deeper water, stroking every so often to remain upright. A few of them picked up shattered objects and examined them. There were a number of urgent motions and decisive gestures. Kay was trundled back to the small boat and the entire group returned to the bigger one. On its deck, crates were wrenched open and still more rifles passed around. Rifles were exchanged and admired.

The sun toiled across the sky. Above the wavelets the steamy air was thick enough to eat. I dozed, watching them bustle.

The water cooled. The moon rose. Frogs made their early evening chucking noises. A giant damselfly pulled a big spider out of its web and bit it in half, dripping the head and legs and devouring the rest.

By the next day, the visitors were again anxiety free. In the morning they putt-putted back ashore in their small boat, and scooped and chipped away at the bank of rock. Fragments piled up and were sifted. The sifters complained.

Kay, reclining in the shade with her back to the work, looked entranced. "And I thought the Mississippi was something," she mused to her companions, who kept working, pouring sweat. In the afternoon, everyone returned to the bigger boat and slept like lizards on the deck in the heat, heads or arms sprawled over one another.

I decided to spend more time on the bottom of the lagoon. I was alternately appalled and bemused by my need to spy. I got the sulks. I kept my distance.

Over the years, I'd been taken aback by the ingenuity with which I disappoint myself.

I heard a splash.

Kay swam on her back away from the boat in my direction, cutting widening wake lines into the sunlight above her. I watched her cruise by. I left the bottom and swam on my back beneath her for a stretch, as if her reflection.

When she stopped, I sank lower into the murk. She turned, did somersaults; played, in some obscure way. Resting, she treaded water.

I ascended and drifted a talon into one of her kicking legs, which jerked upward. I dove. She dove. Vegetative murk billowed up around us. She surfaced and swam back to the boat. Suddenly ferocious, I followed. It was an exciting race, which I lost. She climbed a ladder out just ahead of my arrival.

Braced on the bottom in the ooze, I took the keel and uprooted it with both arms. Tons of displaced water surged and rocked. On the deck above, boxes slid and smashed and shinbones barked against the wheelhouse.

I climbed up a convenient rope to give them a look. They each produced individual noises of consternation. I made my peccary snarl and backhanded a lantern hanging on the rail into the water. Everyone held up their favorite rifle and I dove back in.

I surfaced on the other side of the boat. "The lantern must have frightened him," Kay said. In the middle of the afternoon.

Within minutes, two men came after me, with little masks on their faces and breathing tubes in their mouths. Bubbles bubbled from their heads. Back in the deep reeds, I watched them churn by overhead, a body's length away, and then swam off in the other direction. I backstroked through the weeds. They seemed to have trouble following. I did an underwater plié. They spotted me. Their legs thrashed and pounded inefficiently. More bubbles bubbled. This went on for some time.

And again the next day they went about their business.

I kept being drawn to them and their leaking hippo-belly of a boat.

This whole thing had affected me. My eye glands were secreting. I rubbed my face on tree bark. I urinated on my feet.

Normally for me, the geologic periods came and went, and normally I had the tender melancholic patience of a flood-plain. But with them in the lagoon, I found myself foolish and hopeful, carp-toothed. I was a creature of two minds, one of them as unteachable as the swamp. I wanted to make this signal event a signal event. I wanted to become something.

To them I was the unknown Amazon embodied--who knew what lay undiscovered in those hidden backwaters?--and still they lounged and chatted. They flirted. They acted as if they were home.

At midday, one wilted crew member stood guard. He exchanged vacant stares with a cotton-topped tamarin eating its stew of bugs and tree gum on a shoreline branch. The rest of the group squabbled below deck.

I hauled myself back up the rope--why didn't they just pull up the rope?--and schlumped past the porthole while they argued. I was dripping all over the planking. I grabbed the crew member by both sides of his head and toppled us over the rail.

His internal workings ran down on shore later that night. I sat with him with my elbows on my knees. Every so often he got his breath back. A yellow tree boa angled forward from a branch, but I waved it away. He called out to the boat. They called back.

They built a cage. Bamboo.

They rowed around in their smaller boat, dumping powder all over their section of the lagoon. It paralyzed the fish, which floated to the surface. A few eyed me dazedly on the way up.

While they worked, I waited under their larger boat. It seemed safer there.

That night they lined the deck stem to stern under their lanterns, their rifles nosed out toward the darkness. I bobbed under the curve of the bow. Off in the distance a giant tree fell, shearing its way through canyons of canopy, opening up new opportunities.

"Do you suppose he remembers being chased and intends to take revenge?" Kay asked.

"I've got a hunch this creature remembers the past and more," her favorite male answered. He watched his own arms whenever he moved, so I named him Baby Sloth.

I floated and listened while they tried to get under the rock of my primitive reasons. How sly was it possible I was? How instinctual? "Just what do you think we're dealing with here, doctor?" I heard Baby Sloth ask.

I cleared my throat. I cleaned bone bits from my talons. Hours passed. I listened to the quiet crunch of beetle larvae chewing through the boat's hull. One by one, talkers above me ran out of words and announced that they were going to sleep. There were dull, resonant sounds of them settling in below. I sank, my neck back, only my face above the dark water. For some reason I thought of scorpions, those brainless aggravations who went back as far as I did.

Back up into the night air tiptoed Kay, with Baby Sloth. They whispered. The sound carried. "How much more time do you think you'll need?" I heard her tease. "From where I'm sitting, a lifetime," I heard him answer. One more time, I hauled myself up the rope.

I slipped and tumbled over the railing, sending the shock of my greeting across the deck. Kay shrieked. She was within arm's reach. Baby Sloth swung, whonking me with his rifle butt. I knocked him overboard. Others came stumbling up from below. They ringed me as if everyone was ready to charge but no one harbored any unreasonable expectations.

I grabbed Kay and tilted us over the rope and into the water.

I surfaced to let her fill her lungs. There was splashing behind me. I dove and towed her through my secret underwater passageway. Particles of their powder were suspended in the water even at this depth and I could feel them befuddling me.

In my hidden cavern, I rose from the water and lugged her around. "Kay!" Baby Sloth called, hoarse from held breath. I splotched along in the shallow water puddling the rocks. "Kay!" he called again. I bellowed some response.

I had no stamina. Everything was too much work. I laid her out on a shelf and then, once he knelt next to her, surfaced from a convenient nearby pool. I approached him woozily, planning mayhem. He bounced a head-sized rock off my face. He stabbed at my chest. I lifted him up and started working my talons into his ribs. Gunshots, from all those rifles, made little fire tunnels through my back and shoulders. The others had found the land entrance to my lair. A headache came on. I put him down.

I turned from him. Kay gave another shriek, for someone's benefit. They all fired again. I staggered past them to the land entrance and out into the warmer air. "That's enough," I heard Baby Sloth tell the others. "Let him go."

Lianas patted and dabbed at my face. Day or night? I couldn't tell. I walked along bleeding and gaping. The path was greasy with mud. My feet were scuffling buckets filling with stones. I hallucinated friends. I could hear them all cautiously following. I headed for the lagoon.

What was less saddening, finally, than a narcissist's solitude? I'd been drawn to Kay the way insects singled out the younger shoots or leaves not yet toughened or toxic. I'd added nothing but judgment and violence to the world. If their law, like the lagoon's, was grim and casual, they at least took what they found and tried to make the best of it.

So they like to disassemble their surroundings and tinker with them. Was it such a shame they didn't save all the parts?

Once in the water, I sank to my knees down a slope, the muck giving way in clouds. I was happy they'd turned me out. I was rooting against me. I was less their shadow side than an oafish variant on a theme. Extinction was pouring over me like a warm flood, history swirling and eddying one last time before moving on, and I was like the pain of a needle frond in the foot: I filled the moment entirely and then vanished.

I drifted a talon into one of her kicking legs, which jerked upward. I dove. She dove.