I lost my job to a giant crane fly but I was unhappy so it was a blessing in disguise.
Along the coast I stood guard at the entrance to the Driftwood Cathedral, 400 years old and very historic. My job was to make sure no one desecrated the place.
Then one day I think last Thursday just before the sun fell, some ruffians came and asked me, “Who exactly do you think you are?”
I didn’t know the answer so mumbled something underneath my breath, not really words but like song notes in whisper key. I didn’t recognize the ruffians but they were nasty humans and they spit a lot.
“What are you? I can’t really tell. Are you anything?”
“Me? I guard the entrance to the Driftwood Cathedral by the Sea. I’m a person.”
“Yeah but what are you?”
“I guess I can’t really say.”
They laughed at me without noise but with eyebrow movements like a jaw dropping and teeth chattering, but that’s not illegal. So, they walked in and I didn’t stop them because they hadn’t yet desecrated anything. That’s the problem: I can’t see the future. Everyone can enter the Driftwood Cathedral unless they enter it with intentions to desecrate, but I cannot read minds. Besides, sometimes you walk into a room with no intention at all, but once there, a whole flood of intentions come a-bounding. For example, I told them not to spit inside and they said they had no intention to spit inside obviously. I reckon they had no intentions at all. But once they entered, some intention sneaked in with them and crawled into their bodies, and that intention was the intention to piss everywhere. Perhaps they entered with the intention to general mischief but I didn’t pick up on that and I’m not sure that’s an actionable offense.
As you may or may not know, nothing is inside the Cathedral but sand and some ornamental shells arranged on the curled pieces of bleached wood that make the cathedral’s walls, domes, and pinnacles. Sometimes there are piles of stone along the edges with seashells arranged in semi-circles around the piles of stone, but this changes over time. Sand crabs saunter in and knock over the stones and take the shells. They’re allowed to do this and this is not considered a desecration.
I don’t remember if there were any stones or sea-shells arranged in semi-circles around their vertiginous piles, but there was dry sand and no wet sand, because the Cathedral is well protected from outside waterworks, like rain and mist. Then suddenly there was wet sand, in lines and arcs and sprinkled little dots. I saw the ruffians pissing and laughing.
Laughing is allowed but pissing is definitely a desecration in these circumstances. There is a tree, mostly dead, somewhere in the forests north, up in their mountains, that a local village worships. They worship by pissing on it, so maybe these ruffians were from that village and they were just confused geographically. Everyone gets turned around after all. But it doesn’t matter. I was fired the next day and replaced by a giant crane fly named Smith.
Smith’s fine. I don’t begrudge Smith. She (I know the gender because of the ovipositor, not that I was staring) needed employment and has a reputation in these parts as a very responsible and diligent crane fly. I would have taken the job if I were her too; no use standing in solidarity in this isolated incident.
Some days after losing employment, I walked along the beach and followed a sandy path into a grassy wetland area where frogs croaked and other cranes, the bird kind, stood like sentry, gawking quietly. I did not realize this was an area of some danger—I learned only later there were many posted signs—and wandered over what appeared to be earth but was in fact very thick water, and so begun to slowly sink.
It was dusk. I’d spent most of the last few days sleeping or curled in bed, depressed that I’d let down my employers. It’s not as if the desecration wasn’t an easy fix! But that’s not the point. What if they had decided to burn the place down? What if they decided to just start kicking the walls until the Cathedral collapsed? Well then we’d all be dead and I wouldn’t have anything to worry about…. So I was thinking and sinking and then also thinking, maybe this is all for the best. But I didn’t really want to die, even though I’d spent the entire day in bed thinking, maybe I want to die. Not a big deal: often, when not working, I think about maybe dying. Singular consciousness obliterates, but not right away. I believe that it deteriorates just as the body does. Consciousness decay. Our immaterial consciousness is without time, and so the process of decay is not a temporal one, but still a process of decay, the self giving way to a multitude, until eventually I am one with the universe. But that’s a stupid way to put it. There is no I and there is only universe. Or something like that. I don’t really know because I haven’t died—whoops! not to give anything away!—but I’d like to find out someday and so sometimes I think about dying. I’m definitely going to die eventually, so sometimes I think, what’s the hurry, Murray?
We do not know if our questions will be answered but for that final one. The scary one.
I didn’t sink and die. A trunk wrapped around me and pulled me out. The trunk was attached to an elephant and I laughed, not because I was that surprised, but because it tickled.
As the elephant slowly rested me on solid ground, I said, “I heard you lived around here. I’m pretty pleased to see you!”
The weary eyed matron chuckled a quiet but full-bodied chuckle. “And I’m happy to have pulled you out. Sometimes, gas bubbles accumulate beneath the surface, especially when a living thing gets sucked down, and these gas bubbles explode and shoot skeletons everywhere, which is very unsettling. Anyway, we operate a bathhouse just over the hill. Have you been?”
“I’ve seen it in the distance but….”
“Would you like to come by sometime?”
“Am I allowed to go into the bathhouse? I don’t think I’m an elephant.”
“I’ll allow it.” She began walking down a well-designated path, solid ground winding through secret swampland. “Come now if you want.”
I hurried my little legs to keep up. “I have nothing to do.”
“Follow me.” After a few moments of walking, she peeked back at me curiously, thwacking flies between her shoulders. “Now, please forgive me for this but, what exactly are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”
I stammered. “I don’t know. No one ever told me.”
“Not even your family? The other people in your village? Not even the wild dogs? They tend to tell everyone everything that’s on their minds. Or the crows? Major gossips.”
I rested my hands in my pockets like an innocent scamp. “I daydream a lot and don’t know what other people are saying, so.... Maybe I went so long without knowing that I just sort of stopped being much of anything. I guess this has its advantages and disadvantages.”
As we walked down the winding path through the wetlands, we passed other elephants eating fruit from the wind-gnarled trees that grew from the sand. Some elephants waded in the thick water, large enough to stand tall even after sinking to the bottom. They hoisted themselves out by grabbing the strong bough of a tree with their trunk.
We ascended a hill and in the distance I saw the bathhouse glimmering in the setting sun, a massive palace of stone and glass.
“What are the advantages?” asked the elephant. It was a bit of a delayed reaction, but understand that, while wise, elephants do think a tad bit slower—though perhaps more deeply—than we do.
I dropped my head between my shoulders but I didn’t have a shell. “People tend to trust me I guess. They think I have no agenda.”
“Do you?”
“No. I don’t.”
“And so then, what are the disadvantages?”
“Well, I’m unable to do anything that requires filling out paperwork, and I can’t use telephones.”
“Is that really a disadvantage?” The elephant smiled.
We entered the bathhouse. The inside glowed a trembling blue, the light danced in watery slithers along the stone walls. Steps led down into the water, huge arches held the domed ceiling and framed the glass windows. I could see the sea and the horizon and the setting sun and even the pinnacles of the Driftwood Cathedral.
She gestured with her trunk and I followed its unfurling down into the bathhouse pool. The water was warm.
“It’s heated by geothermal activity,” the elephant said with only a little pride.
“Can I swim here again someday?” This is my personality sometimes. I’m nostalgic for a place before I’ve even left.
“The bathhouse is sacred to us,” she answered casually, pacing along the edges of the pool absently, gliding her trunk over its rippling waters, drawing a rippling line with its wake. “We call it the Bathhouse Blue. It’s built from the stones of the Blue Mountains. We carried them down ourselves. The trek takes weeks. You can see the gray rock is actually tinted a very subtle shade of blue. You can also see very faintly, if you look closely, veins of gold and silver coursing through the stone; this helps give the bathhouse its gauzy luster. We come here to swim but we also have other things to do, so we aren’t always here swimming. It’s very lonely when there is no one else. That’s not quite what we were going for here, so I’m in a pickle.”
“I find it peaceful,” I said, and waded out as the ground fell away from my feet.
“Would you like to work here? Elephants don’t believe in bureaucracy so there is no paperwork.”
“What would I do? I’m not a good guard and I can’t save the drowning.”
“Elephants don’t drown and we’ll allow fate to do the protecting. No, you just need to be here, alone, so that no one else has to be here, alone.”
“Hmm. What do I do if someone else comes and wants to be alone?”
“That won’t happen. We’ve a different bathhouse for that, just in the woods to the east. The Bathhouse Lonely. Only one elephant is allowed at a time. But this is the Bathhouse Blue and no one will come here expecting the Bathhouse Lonely.”
“Sometimes I’ll be here alone and I’ll be lonely. Is that okay?”
“Yes. Not to sound callous, but your loneliness is not my concern. You’re not an elephant.”
“I’m not? Are you sure?”
“No. I don't think you are. I don’t know what you are but I know what you’re not, though not everything that you’re not. You’re not a wolf of any kind, or a bird or an insect. You might be a lizard or a shellfish but I doubt you’re a shellfish and you’re definitely not a jelly-fish. You don’t look that pliable. You might be a crocodile or a monkey but I’m certain you’re not any kind of cat. We’ll figure it out, if that’s what you need, in addition to standard fair payment.”
I shrugged because I didn’t really care who I was. “I don’t mind being lonely anyway. I sort of enjoy it. It makes me sad but sad in a certain way that makes me think about interesting things like death.” I paused and then asked, “I can think about death, right?”
Her body rumbled in a minor chuckle and it was almost like a purr. “I would expect so, but don’t make a big thing of it.”
So I accepted the job and the elephant left and I swam until the sun was completely gone and all was a trembling blue darkness. I floated in the dark until my skin withered and then found the stone walls along the edges, followed them back to the steps that led out of the pool.
Was I to stay all night? All of the time? Do I sleep here?
I assumed so, and found a little nest of blankets tucked away in some alcove or crevice, and went to sleep.
One day the ruffians came to Bathhouse Blue. They stood just outside the entrance and peaked in with leering eyes and mouths wide open not in awe but like they were trying to eat everything they saw, swallow the very scene before their eyes. I was alone. They could see me—I was sitting against a wall and dangling my feet in the water, thinking about not death but the Big Bang—and so they shouted to me, “Hey there, do you know what you are yet?”
It was no longer my job to acknowledge them so I just went on thinking about the Big Bang. Then they yelled, “Can we come in and swim?”
Though not my job, I answered, “I don’t really know but I don’t think you’re really supposed to unless you're an elephant or invited by an elephant.”
“So does that make you an elephant?”
“No I’m not an elephant; I was invited into an elephant bathhouse. Not the same thing.”
“No, not the same thing at all. Well, we are elephants, so we’re going to come in. But we have no intention of peeing. By golly, we’re pretty sorry about all that, by the way.”
I didn’t respond because I’d grown bored enough to feel justified in thinking again about other things. So they stepped over the threshold to enter. Then their bodies disintegrated.
I think their minds disintegrated too, because in the dust, I could see a shimmer of something ethereal, like maybe remorse, descend in swirls and settle as particles onto stone. And as the wind from the open door shifted their ashes over the stone tile, I thought I could hear an apology, maybe, murmured by the vibrations of ash over the imperfection on the floor. I think even shuttling from the particular to the universal, these ruffians might have been generally mischievous, and so at least somewhat sarcastic in their apology. I’m not really sure.
Anyway, I’m often lonely here but not always, so it’s fine, and I’ve discovered other things to think about besides death, like entropy and madness. Don’t worry. Mostly I think about the Big Bang and kick my feet in the water, and I don’t die.