A Lonely and Curious Country (32 page)

4.
Eco-feminism

Professor Oldstone ordinarily did not care to delve into “feminine” matters, as the drug store rubric had it. But he had to admit he was eager to get a peek inside the Women’s Health Center, newly and suspiciously staffed by an influx of Innsmouth women students. But he knew he could not come up with any plausible excuse for going there, much less investigating. He decided he must be satisfied with waiting to see what the stork might bring.             

              But as things turned out, he didn’t have to. Late one night, early in the new semester, he had a visitor to his office, attracted like a moth to the lone light visible. It was one of his students, one who had never said much in his class, specifically his Radical Reformation Theology course, but who had plenty to say now. This fellow was plainly Asian in origin, a diminutive but heavily muscled figure, with an oddly tinted complexion. He sported little hair, and his black eyes were squinting beads shadowed beneath beetling brows. Not unhandsome if one bracketed conventional Anglo movie star standards. The face and body followed their own authentic symmetry, and he was accordingly a prime sample of his kind. But what kind? Without thinking twice about it, Professor Oldstone took him for one of the Innsmouth students, of which there were yet more this semester. He should have noticed the fellow did not carry any of the handful of Innsmouth names: Gilman, Sargent, Shipman, Waite, etc. This man bore the tongue-twisting appellation of Ah-Poh Vankh-arek. It turned out that he was from Myanmar, or Burma, as one preferred, from the plateau region of Sung. His name, peculiar even for Burma, marked him as a Tcho-tcho tribesman. Not surprisingly, Oldstone had never heard of them.

              “I’m actually a Pre-Med student. I’m just taking your course as an elective. I wanted to get to know you. I thought you might be able to advise me, since you’ve dealt with these Innsmouth students. My girlfriend was an English major and an agnostic like me. I was raised in a tribal religion back home, worshipping gods you’d never have heard of. But a little scientific education from the missionary schools weaned me away from that. I came here to study Western medicine. We got along fine at first, even though our backgrounds couldn’t be more different. I was seriously thinking of popping the question. And then I found out she had gone with her room mates to a football team mixer last November. She slept with some jerk there, and now she’s pregnant. Obviously, it was over between us at that point. But it’s gotten so much worse that I feel I need to pursue the matter.”

              “What on earth happened?” Professor Oldstone shifted in his chair, almost failing to notice his leg drifting off to sleep, he was so intrigued by what his student was telling him.

              “Now she’s a different person. She’s involved with this Innsmouth guy, ugly son of a bitch named Bill Bacharach, and she’s even converted to his crazy religion.”

              “Ah, his religion!” Oldstone said, suddenly even more eager to hear what the young man had to say. “Can you tell me more about that?”

              “Not much, I’m afraid. I only know it seems kind of like the one I was raised in, which is pretty difficult for modern people to believe. I mean, I guess I can see how the native Innsmouthers believe in it. They must have been raised in it as part of their original Polynesian culture. That’s where they’re from, isn’t it?”

              “That’s my understanding,” the old scholar replied, in a tone which conveyed, “Your guess is as good as mine.”

              “Well, let me tell you, Professor, these people really believe it. That’s for sure. But what I saw with my own eyes, I’m not sure
I
believe!”

              “Saw? What? Where?”

              “I had to get access to their pregnancy clinic. That’s what it’s become, you know. And only for them. Everybody else’s been hustled out. There were a couple of protests, but the administration kowtows to the demands of the Innsmouthers. Thinks it owes them something. I knew I couldn’t just stroll by for a visit, but I knew there must be a way to get in and have a look for myself at what was really happening. It wasn’t hard to convince the late-night custodian that I was new on the staff and to let me switch shifts with him. These guys aren’t exactly Dean’s List. More like ‘Dean’s Corners List,’ if you know what I mean, sir.”

              “Damned if I don’t! Go on. This is fascinating! You’re a real researcher, by God!”

              “I did my best to mop the halls and tidy up, until I found a locked section. The place is bigger than it looks from outside; connects with what I thought was still part of the campus art museum adjacent to it. I thought I was stumped but then remembered that the janitor had given me his keys. I guess they just hand them off between shifts. So I went through key after key, figuring it would be the newest of the bunch, which it was. I started peeping into rooms, expecting to find the women asleep. I didn’t know if I wanted to see the girl I had been dating. But I just had to know. I did see it, but I still don’t know. What to make of it all, that is.”

              “Can you describe what you saw?”

              A distinct catch, a note of discomfort crept into the young man’s voice then. His beetling brow furrowed, which made him appear even more potentially menacing.

              “Well, at first, I thought each woman had a bed mate. Not a room mate, mind you, but someone right there with them in the same bed. But I brought my flashlight nearer, not wanting to shine it in anyone’s face and wake them up. The sheets had fallen to the floor on account of all the motion. Each girl appeared to be hooked up with some sort of bladder or translucent sack, and fluids were rapidly pulsing from it into the sleeping bodies of the pregnant women. Their abdomens had taken on a degree of the bladders’ translucency, and you could see the fetus right inside! You could see them receiving whatever the stuff was that was entering the womb from outside. And their little eyes were open, bulging. Intelligent, I would swear.
Watching
me, I swear!”

              Professor Oldstone really did not know how to react. The lad’s story was so outrageous as to cast doubt on his sanity. But somehow the piece, precisely for its crazy shape, seemed to fit the puzzle all the better. Something occurred to him.

              “Er, you do think those things you saw them connected with, do you think they might be
alive
?”

              “Um, I guess I’d have to say I just
hoped
they weren’t. Because… because, if they
were
, I, uh…”

              “Young fellow, did you ever hear of a
shoggoth
?” The other shook his head, in a bit of a daze brought on by his reflections. “Miskatonic’s Antarctic expedition of many years ago reported finding something on the order of fossilized bacteria, though on a much, much greater scale. There were also peculiar, cloudy objects frozen into solid blocks of primordial ice, easy to miss at first, as they possessed little more color than the ice itself. When thawed out, the material that constituted them, whatever it was, simply drained away, then sublimated. Our zoologists didn’t know what to make of it, but then, of all people, old Jenkins, long gone now, of the Medieval Metaphysics Department, said he had read of such entities in certain old books housed under lock and key in the Hoag Library. He said they were called ‘shoggoths,’ which sounds like it ought to be a Hebrew word or name but isn’t. Anyway, the same word came up again in certain interviews the federal authorities had with the Innsmouthers they placed in internment camps after 1928, the ancestors of the people that are making such a ruckus these days, and of the Innsmouth students we have on our campus.

              “If the outlandish things my nightmares are telling me about the Innsmouth crowd are true, I think that perhaps what you saw is a type of shoggoth, and that each one is set up to augment the genetic material passed on to these women by the Innsmouth boys they had sex with.”

              “Professor, I’ll have to say the explanation’s stranger than what it’s trying to explain, but I’m not ready to rule it out. When I got over the initial shock and disgust I felt, I shone my light around the sides of the bed and saw that these sacks of stuff weren’t connected to anything else. They couldn’t have been equipment, machinery. And they were connected to the women’s bodies organically. There were just some kind of stalks or limbs entering their mouths and vaginas. I’m guessing the one was injecting nourishment, the other genetic material. The fetuses didn’t all look the same—almost like different species, all more or less aquatic.”

              All of a sudden it looked as if an evening seminar had convened, for now the doorway was crowded with a group of the well-built Innsmouth athletes, the one in front leveling a gun, the next one holding up a rope as if on the point of binding something, or someone, with it. Ah-Poh recognized this one as Bacharach, his rival. One of their nearly indistinguishable voices piped up, in almost a croak, “That’s pretty good, both of you. I don’t know which of you is smarter. But neither of you is as smart as you think.”

              The professor spoke, sarcastically, heedless of the danger they were now obviously in: “And certainly not as smart as you, Mr. Sargent?” He spared a glance out his office window to see what he expected: a few more of the goons waiting just outside and below. Oldstone held out his wrists. “Well, where ever you are taking us, we might as well go. I have a class early in the morning.”

              “You’re not going to make it to class, professor. But don’t worry, we’ve got it covered.”

5.
Post-Colonialism

It was odd that Dr. Oldstone was not there patiently waiting for the classroom seats to be filled. Everyone had assembled, though that short, stocky Asian fellow seemed to be absent, too. After the usual remarks about how long one was obliged to wait for a full professor as opposed to an assistant, an associate, and so on down the line, serious voices were raised in concern. Something had to be wrong. But then a form filled the doorway, sat down on the desk, and addressed the class.

              “My friends, I have not seen you for many weeks, though I have shared classes with some of you. You may know me as Reverend Wasserman, chaplain on campus for the Order of Dagon. I have just come from speaking with our esteemed Professor Oldstone, and he bids me offer his apologies for his absence. He has suddenly taken ill, we don’t know how seriously, and he hopes to be back at the lectern soon indeed. In the meantime, though, he and I would like to extend an invitation to you. The campus Order of Dagon will this very evening be hosting a heritage festival, full of good fun and fellowship. We of Innsmouth, so grateful for the chance you have afforded us to live and move among you, want to enlighten you as to our proud culture and its implications for our common future. I know I’m making it sound like some kind of a civics lesson, but it will be great fun. I think some of you men here can testify to that, can’t you?”

              Several of the undergraduate athletes grunted an affirmative with knowing gusto. Everyone laughed. A few women blushed. Then Reverend Wasserman dismissed the class after a brief prayer for the quick recovery of Professor Oldstone. Then: “Who knows? You may see him there tonight!”

              Wasserman greeted several smiling faces with his own moon face as he hurried across campus to the Women’s Health Center. No doors were locked to him, and he strode right through to the back section, paying but little heed as all visible staff suddenly rose to their feet at his hurried passage. He walked on past the rooms which the Tcho-tcho Ah-Poh had searched a night or so previously. The young man’s visit had not gone unnoticed, and his eavesdropped narrative to his professor had only confirmed his guilt.

              Opening the door of a store room at the very back of the building, the chaplain greeted the bound and gagged forms of Professor Oldstone and his Burmese apprentice. “I hope you are not too uncomfortable, my friends, but you will not be in this predicament for long in any case. Tonight you will leave this confinement for good. You will join the festivities planned for this evening. There will be a traditional bonfire, and the general aspect of the event will be much like one of last semester’s pep rallies. But this time you two will be the stars of it. I am going to tell you what will happen to you and why. I do this for one single reason. Professor, you were fair and kind in your dealings with me, and for that I wanted to spare you your role in tonight’s ceremony, but my opinion did not carry the day. I felt, then, that I at least owed you an explanation.” The man he spoke to was eying him intently, his alertness inspired by genuine curiosity as much as by a desire to discover any details that might help him devise an escape.

              Wasserman took a quick survey of the room, then reached for Oldstone’s gag. “Nobody could hear you anyway. Er, have they taken you to the bathroom?”

              Oldstone worked his aching jaw, then said, “Yes, at gunpoint, but I’m not complaining about it.”

              “Good. And sorry.”

              “You know, Reverend, in some societies they used to fete the sacrifice as a king for a day, give him a banquet for a last meal.”

              “So you do surmise what is to happen tonight.” The Burmese’s eyes widened.