Lotus Bread

We hunt for shells, pretty ones, some are broken but we don’t care.  Farther up the beach the boy starts a small fire with driftwood and bits of a broken up picnic table.  Not that it’s cold, the boy just likes to stir the flames.  Dorothea and I have filled our pail with shells so I guess we both know we should go home.  I am hungry.  She likes to stand ankle-deep in the water, staring out at the ocean.  Her face and shoulders are bronze from our trips to the beach.  At night I love the taste of salt from the ocean and her sweat that has crystallized on her brow.  Her hair is longer, more blonde now, like the sprite of hair that has only recently sprung from my chin.  She stares out at the sea with the same unhooked intensity with which the boy looks at fire.

If I remember, tonight I’ll ask him his name.

We walk across the bridge as the sun sets.  There are a few other people heading back from shore.  Some families have fished all day and proudly show each other their catch.  I show some children my shells.  There are a few abandoned cars on the bridge.  One burned a few months ago, the blackened husk now a favorite roost to sea-birds, pelicans mostly, judging us with their absurdly large, constipated heads.  They preen their drying wings as we pass.  Dorothea trades the one sea urchin we found for a large sea bass, which is fine by me. 

Our house is a few blocks east of Highway Forty-One, past the high school.  Some kids are up on the roof of the high school, enjoying the sunset.  They wave to us and we wave back.  At home the power is still out.  Dorothea and the boy go into the backyard for some limes to cut for the fish.  I light candles and set the table.  Some neighbors come through our house.  I think I know the old man.  Without the crazy, uneven beard he might have been my dentist once.  The woman might be his wife.  They ask for some grapefruit.  I tell them we don’t have any, but gesture toward the backyard, toward the lime tree.  Their dirty, naked children rustle through our shells as Dorothea enters with a handful of shiny, emerald limes.  One of them takes the best of the conchs and holds it to her ear.  The ocean she hears must sound like the fire the boy likes to watch, the very ocean Dorothea commands when she stands in the water.  The dingy little girl makes me love Dorothea even more.  I tell her so.  She smiles and lights the stove. 

The boy has fallen asleep on the couch, cradling the other dirty child.  The sink in the kitchen has been giving brown water lately, so I take a pitcher into the bathroom to fill.  I sit at the table waiting for dinner.  The old man leaves with an armful of limes.  I don’t see his wife but they forgot the dirty child with the boy in our living room.

The fish was excellent.  Afterwards we sit cross-legged on the living room floor and share slices of lotus bread.  I let each slice dissolve on my tongue.  As always, I feel as if I am swallowing light.  Dorothea looks radiant.  We touch each other with our smiles.  The boy wakes up and takes some lotus bread.  Immediately he is entranced by the candles on the table.  He gropes for some more bread but he has already started to drool, so we don’t give him any more.

Dorothea and I go into my parent’s room and spread out on their bed.  I lick the salt from her shoulder as she pulls down my cut-offs.  The dirty child from the living room has followed us in and watches. 

In the morning some people are going through our kitchen.  I hope they don’t take the good knifes or the rest of the limes.  I find some stale cereal in one of the cupboards.  I listen to the portable radio.  The disgusting stations rant and scream.  One has beautiful music which I play loud.  The people in the kitchen dance.  One of them has a huge jar of lotus bread tea.  They offer me a sip and I gulp it down.  The boy is awake, too, so he drinks as well.  His long, red hair is wild.  Since he started living with us he has worn nothing but this one, long, greasy white t-shirt, like a dress.  I’ll have to give him some of my clothes.  The people with the tea leave.  Tea was a good idea so I go out into the yard to harvest the lotus bread. 

Lotus bread grows at night, clutching at the morning shadows beneath any tree or shady patch, spooned across blades of grass.  By noon the lotus bread will have dried in the sun and turned to dust. 

Since it’s still early the boy and I are able to gather nice, plump handfuls of the fungus.  In our yard the lotus bread comes up a dull gold, though near the beach I’ve seen it grow a bluish green.  I’ve heard up north there is even red lotus bread that is spindly, like coral.  I boil water for lotus bread tea for when Dorothea wakes.  We will probably spend the day at the beach.

I used to listen to the people on the radio scream.  When we had electricity I used to watch them shout and debate on television.  They are mad about the lotus bread.  The bread came with spring.  Housewives in slippers trampled it while fetching the dewy morning newspaper, kids cut through it on their bikes.  On the evening news scientists and professors were interviewed, some called it the new kudzu, some speculated global warming causes such changes, that this was not a new species, just newly prevalent.  Was it cyclical, harmful to lawns or crops?  I had done a diorama on global warming for school last year, made ice caps from Styrofoam coffee cups, so I was skeptical there.  Lately I’ve come to believe what Dorothea has been saying all along: that the lotus bread came when we needed it most.  Certainly it was not long after the appearance of the bread that someone somewhere ate a little bit.  Then the answer became obvious.  Lotus bread was from heaven.  Ubiquitous, the mold emerges overnight wherever grass grows, hugging the greenest blades in the calmest shade.  The sun dries it to powder, spreading the spores further for midnight incubation.  The high is mild, peaceful. Wonderful.  Children ate it off the playground; parents tenderly gathered it for morning tea.  No real taste.  No side effects.  No addiction.  Lotus bread was lotus bread, take it or leave it.  Most people took to it.  My parents did.  They left to pick up my brother from college, packing jars of strong lotus tea in a cooler.  That was a month ago and they have yet to come back.  Dorothea moved in shortly after they left.  She taught Latin at my high school.  I was in the tenth grade but I think she only taught seniors. 

So before the electricity went I loved to watch television.  The people screaming and debating were funny.  They just didn’t get it.  They wanted the National Guard to stop us from eating the lotus bread, planes to dust the towns with fungicides, poisons.  Impossible, I thought.  I laughed with a mouthful of lotus bread, wet crumbs bouncing off the television screen.  I laughed at the picture on the news of young soldiers shooting people as they bent in their own yards, gathering their serenity, bullets exploding heads like red dandelions.

In our town the only thing the police did was close the gas stations.  They were worried too many people would drive around high.  At night the news usually showed a plane crash burning in some suburb somewhere.  Before the electricity went there were lots of stories about plane crashes.  By the time they closed the schools I hadn’t bothered to attend for several weeks.

Now that I can’t watch television we go to the beach every day to watch the ocean.  I like this more.  The ocean rolls up strange treasures with one hand while eroding the sand beneath condominiums with another.  Last week the rotting carcass of a giant sea turtle washed up.  We thought about dragging it back to our house to scoop out the guts from its black, octagonal shell, a perfect cauldron to brew lotus tea.  The next day the sea had pulled it back out, though.  I wonder, when the ocean finally knocks down one of the condominiums if another wave will come along to prop it back up, if just for a moment, a shattered resurrection, the way it gives me so many beautiful, broken shells.

The boy doesn’t follow us to the beach.  Dorothea and I cross the bridge holding hands.  We are barefoot and the asphalt beneath our feet is hot, scolding us for not having already made it to the shore.  When the beach is in sight we break into a run and race toward the water, laughing, past lonely parking meters and empty cars.

The water is fine.  I like to hold my breath and lie underwater, close to shore.  I can hear how each wave plays the bits of shell like a metallic harp, the sound of a thousand broken bones thrown against the stained glass window of an underwater cathedral.  Before lotus bread I would have waded in slowly, worried the water was too cold.  Now any sense of discomfort is gone.  If a mosquito bites me I feel its needled probe slip into my skin with the same delight I feel when I slip myself into Dorothea.  Everything is the same on lotus bread.  Every wave-tumbled shell is a note in the symphony.  Those of us who don’t call it lotus bread call it Manna -Manna from Heaven, the symphony is celestial.

When I next look toward the shore I see Dorothea fucking some man over by the parking lot.  I can’t really see them too well, but with his beard he looks like the old dentist who was in our house.  I fish some lotus bread out of the picnic basket and place a large slice on my tongue and then go back in the water; the symphony of the day has only just begun.

Later Dorothea and the man swim next to me and we talk about tonight’s bonfire.  I hope someone brings another pig.  Every week the neighborhood gathers for a bonfire at the high school football field.  Two weeks ago someone drove up in a pick-up truck with a pig in the back.  I had never seen a live pig before.  They’re not pink.  Some boys my age killed the pig and started a smaller fire over which it was roasted.  The meat was so tender and sweet, rich, better than the salt on Dorothea’s brow.  That was the last time I had eaten meat, not counting fish.

After swimming we all walk up to the concession stand in the pavilion by the parking lot.  I use the women’s restroom with Dorothea; if I were to go into the men’s room I would end up having sex all day with the men who live there.  Since the man Dorothea met in the parking lot doesn’t return from the restroom, we root around the concession stand on our own.  Someone had pulled off the metal shutter awhile ago, so it’s not really worth our efforts to look there for food.  I suggest one of the hotels and Dorothea agrees.  We walk past the hotels closest to the pavilion as people probably live their now.  Further down the shore we walk into the lobby of one hotel.  A particularly high tide must have pushed through the lobby as everything was knocked over.  The stench of mildew fills the hallway.  We find a vending machine and break out the glass with a chair.  With a bed sheet from one of the rooms we fashion a huge sack, like Santa Claus, to drag our haul home.

Tonight there is another bonfire.  We go and the boy follows us.  Last week they drug desks from classrooms to burn.  Having run out of desks people have pulled apart the bleachers.  A huge pile of wood burns in the middle of the already scorched field.  For some reason, older people who eat lotus bread prefer to go naked.  I point this out to Dorothea and tell her I think they are uncomfortable being old.  Aging must feel like wearing a heavy, itchy suit.  She agrees.  I recognize an old lady as the school receptionist.  She’s naked, save for a pearl necklace and high heels.  Two naked old fat men with erections share a jar of lotus bread tea with her.  The children and teenagers have started to make masks.  One girl has propped the rotting skull of the last pig we cooked on her head, lopsided, like a construction worker’s hard hat.  Several boys have tucked tall palm fronds into improvised headbands of shoe string.  They run to the fire either naked or in their underwear and throw in whatever they think will burn.  Young children resurrect Halloween masks from their toy chests.  The boy has taken some antlers from above my father’s workbench in our garage and holds them above his head.  This is quickly abandoned to the fire once he realizes that full hands means jars of lotus bread tea will pass him by.

The next day at the beach we see a submarine.  It surfaces at the mouth of the bay.  At first, in the distance, I think it is a whale.  It hovers solidly at the surface for about an hour, a long, sleek black cylinder, impervious to the pull of the tide.  The silhouettes of men appear.  They walk about then disappear and the submarine submerges with a petulant blast of water.  Dorothea and I think about swimming out to the sailors, bringing them some tea.  I imagine they haven’t had any yet.  They must have put to sea two months ago, when the world was different, jagged and full of anger, concern.  They must feel so frustrated; their very vessel, their shell, was built out of an umbrage that has now been erased.  They must endlessly circle the seas, hoping their wake redraws the meaningless web of intrigue that defined their purpose, made their lives important.  One sip of our tea would let them know life is meaningless, but agreeably so.

The boy interrupts our meditation to point out a huge fan of smoke covering the horizon behind us; possibly the reason for the sub’s curiosity.

We head home then cross back over the bridge once the smoke in town gets too thick for us to see, much less breathe.  There hasn’t been any rain of late.  The Everglades must be on fire again.  This happened a few years ago.  Helicopters dropped sand on the flames when they came too close to town.  Now we will sleep on the beach and let the fires run their course.  We manage to bring the food we found at the hotel back with us plus some lotus bread.  Maybe we can go back to the same hotel and spend the night.  The fire won’t cross the bridge. 

We walk down the beach at dusk, all the way back to the same hotel.  We choose a room facing the town.  The sky is a quivering orange.  We feed each other wedges of the bread from our coffee can stash and stare at the sky.  The orange color is low and seems to pulsate behind the flat skyline of town, a humble assortment of office buildings and hotels and meager antennas.  The boy happily stayed behind, I guess to stir all of the flames with one big stick.

The hotel is hot and stuffy; the mildew smell from the lobby permeates our room.  With the balcony doors open I can smell the smoke.  As the lotus bread is absorbed into my bloodstream the orange in the sky throbs into a deep red.  I sense a symphony coming on, one of color where occasional starlight will ring through, piercing the smoke like drums.

We lean against the rail and savor those moments when the sea breeze is stronger than the one from town, delivering a respite of rich salty air.

We had dragged the mattress out onto the balcony, so the sun on my face woke me up.  The weight of Dorothea’s head on my chest feels so natural.  Noise from the rooms below us wakes her up.  Apparently a lot of people from town followed us up the beach; the hotel appears nearly full.  Some people just slept in the lobby while most others have taken over rooms.  No one seems particularly concerned about town, just breakfast.  On the beach the crabs that surface from their holes to scavenge become breakfast themselves.  After a daunting, leggy tap dance I catch only two, Dorothea none.  I think she was laughing too hard at me to really concentrate on the crabs.  A sand-smeared child proudly displays a bucket heavy with a dozen frustrated crabs.  We trade the child some candy bars and cook the crabs over a fire in a wastepaper basket on our balcony.  We stir up some cold instant coffee from the room’s mini-bar and spread the steaming white meat over crackers.  Desert, of course, is lotus bread.

After a week or so camping out in the hotel we wander back to town.  The hotel has begun to smell bad as even more as people leave refuse in the lobby, piss the stairwells and shit in the pool.

Late afternoon we cross the bridge and find a dead body.  The old man who might have been my dentist is curled up in the shade of the burned out car, his face black and pulpy.  Pelicans or gulls must have pecked at his eyes.  The old man’s leg is bent horribly.  He must have fallen in the rush to leave town during the fire.  I guess no one crossed the bridge those first days afterwards, leaving him to starve on the hot asphalt.  That or no one bothered to help him.

Our house is as we left it.  Most of the town has escaped damage, the fire must have changed course or burned out.  The boy is sleeping on the kitchen floor, shirt pulled up over his face, surrounded by upturned pots and pans strewn across the linoleum.  I check the radio but cannot find a station.

Tonight a large number of boys from my high school wear the shells of horseshoe crabs as masks.  The gray, sharp tails point down off their chins, the barbed edges of the shell cover all but their ears and unruly hair.  At the bonfire the masks make the naked teenagers servants of fire.  They ferry every offering of wood to the flames as if they were delivering infants, cradling the boards and bits of furniture brought to them with a religious reverence.  The heat makes their backs and buttocks slick and oily with soot and sweat, as if they had just risen from a primordial stew of reptilian essence.

The boy has taken some of my mother’s lipstick and drawn crude streaks of red flame across his cheeks and forehead.  He is welcomed solemnly by the older, crab-faced kids.  Communal tea bowls empty quickly as everyone is thirsty from the heat of the fire.  The fire is our largest yet.  As it reaches out to stroke the sky the kids behind the masks rush into the flames as one.  They emerge with burning embers and march toward the high school.  They set the high school on fire, throwing the burning bits of wood through some already broken windows.  It takes awhile for the high school to burn.  Smoldering secretly in their individual classrooms, with only hints of flame peeking from out the windows, the various small fires erupt in unison and the building begins to burn in earnest.

There is not enough lotus bread to make more tea, but everyone has some small morsel tucked away in a pocket or shoe.  The boy is wild about the building burning.  He keeps rushing into the building to feed more wood to the fire, though this really isn’t necessary.  The fire quickly grows so hot we have to watch it from across the street.  There is a loud explosion from the third floor chemistry labs.  The smoking bulk of an air conditioner sails over my head.  The fire from the third floor changes color, from orange to pink to blue.  Dorothea and I hold hands and sway with the rhythm of the flames.

The next morning the town again smells like smoke, though this time it is different.  I feel a sense of pride, as if the fire we made was better than the one that burned through the Everglades.  Ours was unique, a forceful stroke of a paintbrush and not the random arson of nature.  The sky is gray as smoke.  By the afternoon it begins to rain.

We have not had a rainstorm in weeks.  Occasional light afternoon showers have kept the grass green, typical for this time of year, but nothing close to a real storm had yet come in off the ocean.  At first we enjoy the rain, running through the streets, stooping to splash one another from puddles, making boats for children from whatever objects will float.

Dorothea and the boy had gathered lotus bread that morning, so after we are bored with the rain we are happy to just stay indoors and lay on the floor.  It rains through the night.  In the morning it is still raining with the same, steady persistence as the day before, beating a low mist off the haggard ground.  No lotus bread grew during the night.  What might have emerged during this deluge has surely drowned, pushed back into the soil.

The next morning I wake up and one of the horseshoe crab-faced kids is standing at the foot of our bed with a broken broomstick in his hand, rocking back and forth on his heels.  He is out of breath and panting rapidly.  His mask is pushed up slightly so I can see his open mouth, count his wild teeth.  A dirty erection parts the tatters of his loin cloth.  He looks at me then Dorothea then turns and leaves. 
  I put a plastic garbage bag over my head and go out to search the yard for lotus bread.  I look up and down my street and see several other desperate figures similarly squatting in their yards in the rain. 
  I wake Dorothea and tell her I couldn’t gather any bread and she just smiles.  She reminds me that before the big fire she had placed water and lotus bread in empty soda bottles, sealed them and placed them in the rafters of the attic above our bedroom.  Her idea was that after the lotus bread dissolved into the water we should let it sit and ferment, hopefully increasing the tea’s potency. 
  I stand on the bed and swat at the attic’s trap door pulley until I catch it.  Retrieving one of the three soda bottles we sit on the bed and sample our new, dark and muddy brew.  The boy climbs into bed with us and we all take long swigs from the soda bottle.  The taste is thicker, almost sweet, and the effect immediate and strong.  A flood of warmth spreads over us.  We feel, in unison, as if our bed is stamped by God to be his special place, a place where no sound is necessary, no movement. 
  Everything is understood.   
 
  Later, as this wonderment slowly falls away, I realize night has fallen and people are searching our house.  Dorothea follows me into the living room to find a group of people going through our kitchen cabinets.  It is dark and they have flashlights.  Someone had taken our candles.  The beams from the flashlights bounce around the room, reflecting crazy nebulas off the pots on the floor. The men and women are wearing more clothes than I’ve seen on anyone in a long time, pensive expressions screwed on their faces.  They have been without lotus bread for at least a day.  Clearly they don’t crave it, they miss it.

Once they realize we are home they rush out without a word.  Embarrassment, another sign they are without the bread.  Dorothea and I look at each other in the dark.  We decide to go to our neighbors homes and see if they have candles.  We go from house to house and find the same thing: confused, nervous people.  Our closest neighbor is pushing a dead vacuum cleaner around a dark dining room as we walk in the door.  She screams when she realizes people are in her house, strangers.  People have not been strangers since the bread came.  Dorothea laughs at the horrible face fear puts on the woman and screams back at her.

House after house we find people who did not know what to do without the bread.  Someone drives past us in a mad race up the street.  I haven’t seen someone drive a car in weeks.  At the next house we finally find one smart man who had immediately begun to drink some all-but-forgotten whiskey.  He is drunk enough to let us into his home as if it were natural.  Loud southern rock blares from a small portable tape player perched like a seesaw across his large stomach.  He doesn’t care that we take some candles and even offers us a drink.  Tastes better than rain, he laughs, raising a shot glass and knocking over the stereo.

By the time we make it back to our own dark house we are soaked, shaken and badly in need of lotus bread tea.  I light the candles so we can see.  The boy is sprawled on the bed, arms out, the other two soda bottles empty at his bare, blackened feet.  I grab one of the bottles and hold it above my lips.  Not a drop left.  I leap wildly for the cord to the attic door.  Searching the attic for another bottle, knowing there were only three, I jump back down onto the bed, defeated, wet and cold.  I watch the boy.  He purrs in his sleep, the R.E.M. beneath his eyelids a metronome of bliss.  So much bread races though his little body his jugular visibly thumps.  Dorothea is one thought ahead of me.

She returns from the kitchen with two large carving knives.  While I carry him to the bathtub she puts her hair in a bun, never taking her eyes off the boy.  I can’t find a stopper for the drain so I twist his filthy shirt into the black hole.  Dorothea has already made the initial cut at the boy’s neck.  With her finger she brings a drop of blood to her tongue.  The boy tightens his shut eyes in an angry squint and purrs louder, an insolent noise, as if his great sleep might be wrongly interrupted.

Dorothea is still for a moment.  Eyes closed she rocks back and forth slightly, this from one drop.  Shuddering with anticipation I widen the dark, plum hole in his neck with my finger and drink.  Hot wine gushes from his neck, his neck a fountain around which the world will surely dance.