Matriculation

by Jason L. Corner

On Monday, only three students came to Gene’s class. This was many more than he was expecting, and out of curiosity, and because he never made his lesson plan on Wordsworth, he asked why they were there.

“Why shouldn’t I come?” a small, nervous female named Jackie said. “It’s Monday, isn’t it? 11:30 a.m., Monday. It’s right here on my schedule.” She held up a piece of paper. It fluttered like a hummingbird.

“Well, yes, Jackie, but,” Gene began, but Jackie slammed both hands down on her desk. “On my schedule.”

Gene turned to Robert, a stocky football player, who, on last class’s Blake quiz, had written “Bugs Bunny” as the answer for all the questions. Robert shrugged. “I didn’t know what else to do.”

He held his hand to the third student, Edith. Edith sat in the front row. She took assiduous notes. Her comments in class discussion were frequent and subtle. She wore black clothes and old fashioned glasses, and Gene had once or twice seen her outside of class reading a book that she probably didn’t have to. She reminded him of Kate.

Edith shrugged. “I don’t want to bore anybody.”

“It’s all right,” Gene said, sitting cross-legged on his desk and rocking back and forth, his hands around his ankles. “Feel free to take up all the valuable class time you like. Oh, and if anyone wants to smoke? Light ‘em up.”

Edith cocked her head to one side, then back again, and pursed her lips carefully, as if trying to conceal a specific amount of lip, before speaking.

“It’s not that I don’t feel what’s going on,” she said. “I feel it very deeply. I haven’t seen my roommate in three days. I haven’t called my parents because I just don’t want to know. They haven’t called me either; same reason, I guess.

“And it’s not that I think my life right now is so perfect that I can afford to just keep doing it, no matter what, like . . . Saint Francis? Who said he could just be working at his garden when God came?

“I just figured, if this is it, can’t Wordsworth help me? Or Tennyson? Isn’t that the point of being an English major? Authentic values?

Gene trembled and stood up. He wished now that he had made a lesson plan, but then again, he never did. He looked at his class of three in the eye and said:

“Quite right, Edith. Authentic values. Now, I don’t imagine this will make too much sense to you, but I’m thirty years old and I probably won’t be alive next year – calm down, Jackie, think of it as just an expression – and I would like to let the last few months of my life teach a lesson.

“I’m thirty years old. I never finished my dissertation, or indeed too much of anything I ever started in my life. And I’m not going to finish out this semester. But there was a girl, once, named Kate. We had a good time once, and I would have liked to see her again, but I never quite got around to it. Now, I figure, is my chance.

“Go now, and, if you like, read Wordsworth. Read Tennyson, as well, and perhaps Eliot. You don’t need to come to class anymore, although I am aware, Jackie, of what it says on your schedule. Don’t worry about the exam, either. An A+ for everyone.” Robert pumped his hands in the air.

Half an hour later, he was in a car and on the road. Years of wasted time were shaking off of him like so much dust.

—

It was a nice day, and there was no reason to obey a single law or even a sound principle, so he decided to talk on the phone while driving. He brought the James Madison University directory for just such an eventuality, and called Edith.

“Hello?” she said after three rings, sounding terrified.

“Found any authentic values yet?”

There was a chuckle that started slow but grew as it went along. “Is this Professor Farmer?”

“I told you, Edith, you need a doctorate to be a professor. It’s just Mr. Farmer, or Instructor Farmer. And since I’ve abandoned my post, it’s really just Gene. What’s up?”

“You really want to know? My roommate and I have been getting high, living on microwave popcorn, and sleeping on the roof every night to watch the stars and think deep thoughts.”

“Think deep thoughts? About those authentic values you were talking about?”

Her voice was softer. “I wasn’t kidding about that. I mean . . . it’s now or never, isn’t it?”

Gene thought hard. There had been many now-or-never moments in his life: when he graduated college, or when he turned twenty-five. These were all the moments when he was supposed to start that novel, to escape the orbit of school and clear out his own place in the world, to quit smoking, to devote himself to some program of world-improving activism.

As he reviewed each of these, he realized they had all ended up nevers.

“I’m going to have to think about that one, Edith. In the meantime, let me tell you about Kate Showalsky.”

Gene spared one eye just to watch the road roll by as he drove. The West Virginia turnpike had been a squirrelly experience – up and down and curving all the time, like a snake in zero gravity. But now he was in Ohio, and it was nothing but an uninterrupted line to the horizon.

“It was the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. I had just started driving, and I had gone out to a party at a friend’s house. She was a friend of some other friend and I met her in the kitchen. She . . . she asked me, out of the blue, if I would draw her picture. She’s funny like that; I never could quite predict her. Now, I can barely draw a stick figure, but I said yes, except we had to go and get my paint supplies.”
“Did you actually . . .”

“No, of course not. So we drove around for an hour, listening to the radio, until I took her to the silo on my grandparents’ farm.”  Gene sucked in his breath. “It was just one of those nights, Edith. It wasn’t even just that we did it, although we did. But it was as if it was the last night on earth. We told each other everything. You think back on that kind of thing and you assume that it was shallow, or it was adolescent, but I know it wasn’t. It was the greatest night of my life, and, except for a couple of really short run-ins later that year, I haven’t seen her since.”

“But Gene, if you were in high school, and if you’re thirty like you said you were in class, then that was more than ten years ago. Why would she remember you? And how do you even know where to find her?”

How to explain it? The one thing Gene had never been very good at was finishing what he started. The first two or three chapters of four unfinished novels, scattered in his car trunk, were the testament to that. Gene had sometimes tracked down her information with the intention of putting all the phone numbers and addresses of people he knew in some book or box of note cards; it all ended up on separate sheets of paper and five different files in five different folders on a computer whose guts were torn up like a shark attack victim. He couldn’t explain to Edith that he had hunted through every wastebasket in his house to see if he had ever scribbled her number on the back of a credit card receipt. He just couldn’t. So he skipped to the finish.

“There aren’t many families named Showalsky in my hometown,” he said. “So I took a chance on her parents still living there and they did, so I’m going to ask them.”

Gene spared one eye just to watch the road roll by as he drove. The West Virginia turnpike had been a squirrelly, dangerous experience – up and down and curving all the time, like a snake in zero gravity. But now he was in Ohio, and it was nothing but an uninterrupted line to the horizon.

And after all, if wasn’t as if there were any cars on the road. In fact, if there were more than a million people still alive on Earth, then Gene was eighteen feet tall, and he was five ten.

—

Six hours later, Gene arrived at Kate’s parents’ house in Columbus, Ohio, and knocked on the door.

There was no answer. Gene tried the doorknob. It turned as if it had been waiting for someone.

Inside, he found what was left of her parents. They were sitting on the couch, side by side, facing the television like good Americans. Both of their skulls were open like uncorked bottles, and huge, flat mushroom caps, piled up like unused vinyl albums, reached out of their heads.

Gene bit his lip and felt his muscles tense up of their own accord. He felt an overpowering desire to grab those stacks of fungus and crush them with one squeeze. But he wasn’t ready to die yet.

Instead, he walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There were some Tupperware containers, filled with moldy leftovers, and three or four cans of beer. Gene removed one, opened it and paused to hear the hard click, the fizz.

He sat down on the couch next to Kate’s parents and drank that beer and talked to them for a while.

Scenes like this, he was sure, had been happening all over the world. He could remember when he had first heard of the mushrooms, while watching TV instead of grading papers, as an unexplained plague in West Africa. He didn’t make anything of it at the time, and neither did anyone else.

When it started happening in Australia, everyone noticed. And then, within two weeks, having mastered the trick, the world started ending. It took three or four days for the major centers of activity to emerge, and seven or eight days for it to start spreading fast, to emerge in Moscow, go to Siberia, Poland and Rumania, to Mongolia, then to France and China and Alaska. Three or four days after that, it was everywhere in the world.

It was all too fast to fight and too swift for tears. People stood around helplessly and watch their wives and sons and employers to turn into grinning, dead mushroom trees in the middle of the day. You would go to sleep with a random hook-up (why worry?) and wake up next to a corpse. Some people prayed, some people went insane, and some went on as if nothing was happening. It was all futile. Gene finished his beer and considered, not for the first time, just letting himself die.

Then he searched the house until he found their cell phone, and called Kate using their speed dial.

—

“Kate!”

A pause. At first, Gene and everybody else had been scared of answering the phone. Who knew what kind of news you were going to get? Then it stopped mattering.

But Kate answered. “Yes? Who is this? Why are you calling on my parents’ phone?”

That was Kate’s voice. It was a little deep, a little husky, a little aged, a little scorched, a bit more record-scratchy and serious. But it was her. Gene would have known it deaf.

“I’m wondering if you’d like to go with me to get my paint set.”

He could hear her take two long breaths, then: “Gene Farmer?”

“I’m in from Virginia,” he said.

“Why are you calling on my parents’ phone? How are they?”

Gene didn’t say anything.

“Oh, God,” Kate said. Her voice moved farther away and then came back. “Oh, God. Don’t tell me. Don’t tell me.”

“Kate, are you all right? I mean are you –“

“I’m not growing anything on my body, if that’s what you mean.” Kate was growling. “What the . . . I mean, Gene Farmer. You’re calling me on the phone? You want to get coffee? Maybe get high? Is that why you’re calling me? Do you have any sense of proportion, Gene? Do you have any sense of decorum, of appropriateness, of fucking anything?”

The worst part was that there was nothing appropriate to say. There was nothing for Gene to apologize for, and there was no remorse he could offer that would not be both false (he had never met her parents) and wildly out of scale, because it wasn’t even about Kate’s parents but what they symbolized, and there weren’t words in the English language for that.

And yet, when somebody gets angry at you, you always want to make some gesture.

Unarmed, therefore, Gene did the only thing he could do.

“Kate, I don’t know exactly why I’m calling. Do you think I know what I’m doing? Do you think that I know what I want to do next? There isn’t any next for me, or you, or anyone we know. This whole thing – human history, life on Earth, me, you – is about to be cut off like, like, like . . .”

He grabbed a book that was lying, open with spine bent, on the coffee table. Opening it at random, he said:

“ ‘One day he.’ That’s the last sentence on this page. It continues on the next page, but on this page, it’s just ‘one day he.’ He what?” He threw the book and it thudded against the television.

“Kate, this is going to sound maudlin and manipulative and fuck-all whatever, but it’s the fucking truth. It’s all been ‘one day he.’ ‘One day he finished his dissertation’ – cut off in mid-sentence. Not ‘one day he balanced his checkbook,’ ‘one day he fed the hungry,’ ‘one day he wrote the epic poem of the twenty-first century.’ No, no, no. It’s all just ‘one day he.’

“Kate, I want to see you again. Where can I find you?”

Kate said, in a voice that would wither a garden, “I am not your fucking project.” And she hung up.

—

First, Gene sat down on the couch and turned on the television. Nothing was on, but it felt comforting even to have the warm waves of static washing over him with their gentle hum.

But fear – regular old mortal fear – moved him up. It was the bodies of Kate’s parents right next to him. Nobody knew how the mushrooms managed to attack a human body, but since they had first been seen in particular places – in Russia, in Australia, in El Salvador, in Zambia – and spread from there in widening circles, it stood to reason that they worked by contamination. Nobody knew exactly how, though, and it was of course much too late to find out.

Gene had no illusions. He was going to end up with his skull as an open air fungus garden one of these days. But he didn’t want it to happen now.

So he searched through the house until he found some mail with Kate’s address on it, and hopped back into the car. As he drove down the completely empty streets, he decided to give Edith another call.

“Things are going really well,” he said immediately.

My roommate’s dead,” she replied.

Gene placed the phone on his leg for a second and bit his lip.

“I’m sorry. A cliché, but true.”

“I didn’t think I was going to like her when I first moved in,” Edith said. “She had a bong that was taller than I was. I’d wake up and go to breakfast right when she was coming home with six or seven friends, and when I came back to study, they’d all be asleep in a pile on the floor. I called my parents crying a few times because I was worried I was never going to get to study. I guess she had the right idea.”

Gene drove on, past Route 70, past 71, listening to her silence.

“Do you think,” Edith said, “that they’re from outer space?”

“Probably. They did fall out of the sky, like meteors.”

“What do they want?”

“Is there any reason to think they want anything? They could be a weapon that somebody else is using, or they could be just . . . rain.”

“Rain?”

“Just a natural phenomenon. Totally meaningless.”

Edith sighed. “Maybe. But you know, I watched my roommate die. She asked me to stay in the room. She asked me to hold her hand and look into her eyes. She wasn’t scared. She smoked a fat blunt and looked into my eyes, and she just kept on smiling and smiling until the top of her head cracked open and they came out.

“I’ve been so scared, so scared for so long, like a mouse who’s all nerves and twitches. But there was something very sweet on her face when she died. There was a light in her eyes and she had this little smile, like everything was fine. I don’t know if they’re rain or if they’re moving in, but there’s something about them that’s not all bad.”

Edith yawned. “I’ve got to go to rest. Have you found her yet?”

“As a matter of fact, Edith,” he said, “I’m pulling up in her driveway right now.” He parked the car and opened the door.

“Great. Look, I really have to sleep now. But call me again. Please.”

Gene gave her a will-do and hopped up the steps to the white porch, poising his hand to knock on the door. Then he saw that there was a handwritten note taped there, flapping in the breeze. He pulled it off and read it:

Gene:

I am not interested in seeing you.

I thought you might drive out or something. So I’ve left for the day. You can’t go everywhere in Columbus, so I don’t think you’re going to find me.

Fuck you,

Kate

In his hand, the note flapped in the breeze, like a marching snare. He didn’t hear it.

—

There is, outside Columbus, a farm where the corn grows as tall as a man’s waist, and goes over a boy’s head. It is close to the road, and it is scouted by a grain silo, crimson with rust, about two stories tall, with a conical top like a pope’s cap.

Gene stood in his bare feet, leaning against the silo. On either side of him, about a foot away, was a large patch of mushrooms, barnacled to the side of the walls.

The wind blew his hair, coming over the cornstalks towards the road.  Gene remembered being a child and walking through the corn, the stalks towering above him on all sides, thinking that he could disappear into the field and never be found again.

More than twenty years later, he was wishing that again.

He swung the door to the silo open. There was a film of dust on the barren stone floor.

In that corner was where it all went down. That was where he and Kate had had sex (it was the first time for both of them, though they only found that out afterwards). There she had cried, and there they had kissed until dawn. There she had told him all her secrets: her first period, the unguessed meaning of the purple half-moon that sometimes appeared in her dreams; there he had told her his: his weirdly simultaneous fears of nuclear war and of losing his penis, his endless and Talmudic considerations of Conan versus Tarzan.

Gene stood there looking for a while, then left the silo and picked up the phone and dialed Edith’s number.

After five rings, it went to her voicemail.

“Edith,” he spoke into the phone. “I guess that we spoke for the last time yesterday. For all I know, Edith, I’m the only human being living on the planet. But I’m still telling you this, even if you can’t hear it. I just want you to know . . .”

He couldn’t finish “So goodbye, Edith. See you soon.”

Gene carefully closed his cell phone, turned it off, and placed it on the floor of the silo. He went outside. The air was fresh and the sun was warm on one side of his face.

Radio towers, but no more stations. Pornographic magazines, but no more masturbation. Hallmark cards, but no more love. The White House, but no more politics. Guitars and drums, but no more music. Churches, but no more religion.

He reached into one of the patches of mushrooms on the silo’s outer walls and pulled out a bunch. They were wet and warm. He smeared his face until every pore of his skin felt oily. Then he sat down cross-legged, his back resting on the wall, and faced the setting sun over the sea of corn.

And then he waited.

—

The sun set and the stars came out. All of them were there.

“The Big Dipper,” Gene said to himself. The world was absolutely quiet, except for the sound of his voice.

“Orion. Gemini. The Great Bear.”

He stopped for a second and clicked his tongue.

Since when did he know the constellations?

On his fourteenth birthday, his parents bought him a telescope. He had set out to become a great astronomer.  Within four weeks, the telescope had begun gathering dust in a corner of his room; he thought that perhaps he had identified the Big Differ, but he could never really tell.

But it was as clear to him that this was the belt of Orion, and that was the Gemini twins, as clear as it was that he had palms on one side of his hands.

Gene stood up. The wind had begun to grow cold. He put his hands on his arms as he shivered. Perhaps, he thought for a minute, the first symptom of mushroom death is total insanity. Perhaps that’s why Edith’s roommate smiled as she died; her mind was going.

But he knew he wasn’t crazy; knew it like he knew that two and two were four. He looked down at the grass, and made out each individual blade in the silver glow of the moon. He could tell what was going on around him. He could see and feel and hear everything. He just happened to know the secret map of the sky.

“Congratulations. At the moment of your death, you subconscious dredges up something you never bothered to learn consciously. And it’s something incredibly useless.”

He sat back down and leaned against the wall of the silo, returning to his posture of silent waiting. Threads of black cloud moved over the moon. He cried for a few minutes, then stopped.

A cow had entered the field. Its flanks moved slowly as it went, inch by inch, through the field, leaning down to a chew a leaf off of a cornstalk, then moving on.

Their eyes met. Gene felt a jolt of electricity start at the base of his spine and shoot through his neck to his head. His eyes watered, then cleared.

The cow said, “It’s important that you listen to what we have to tell you.”

—

Gene stood up and walked towards the cow. It was a regular cow, except that its body was entirely covered by brown mushrooms.

No, not brown. These were blue.

Gene turned around and looked at the mushrooms he had wiped on his face. They were blue too.

“They’re changing now,” the cow said. “The first phase is over.”

Gene faced the cow. It was so silent he could hear the moonlight hitting the corn. It sounded like rain inside a flute. And he could smell the corn growing. He held up his hands and blinked; he could see individual droplets of blood in his veins, and the spaces between them; cars on a crowded highway.

“Cows can’t talk.”

“We’re not the cow.”

Gene put his hands by his side. “You’re the mushrooms.”

“In a sense. We’re the program that dictates how they work. Something like your genetic code, as opposed to all of your chromosomes in a bucket.”

Should he be angry, he wondered? Instead, he was curious.

“Seventy million years ago,” the cow continued, “there was a species on a planet in another galaxy. They obtained intelligence. They found that intelligent life, whenever it emerges, will destroy itself. They proved it mathematically.”

In the distance, he heard that dial tone again, and a female voice. “Damn it,” it said. Gene got a strong sensation that it was coming from somewhere nearby.

He stood up and started peering around the cornfield.

“You’re probably feeling some unusual sensations,” the cow continued. “You’re beginning to be linked up to the whole system, the way this cow is. This first species designed the mushrooms – they’re not mushrooms, but they’ve gathered enough data to see that this is the word to use – to be observers, to corroborate their theoretical findings with evidence. Soon, they had been throughout the galaxy and other galaxies, traveling on the solar wind. And everywhere they went, they saw that intelligent life always does the same thing at a certain stage in development: it self-destructs.”

Gene got up and ran forward. The cornstalks whipped his arms as he ran through them, but he hardly noticed, his skin was so hot. He left the cow behind but he continued to hear its voice in his head.

“They still continue to journey through the universe, and whenever they find intelligent life, they land and download the complete memories of the entire species, killing them in the process. This way, each species will be preserved, at least as a memory, and will be spared the crime of their own destruction.

“At the end, the last consciousness alive serves as the conduit through which the total memory of the species will be stored in the system. “

Again, Gene half-saw one of those flash-images, fragments of knowledge he would be unable to make sense of on his own. He barely registered any of this. His limbs in a storm, he ran through the corn, drawn by the other voice, getting louder and louder as he ran. He heard it sigh, and he heard it weep, and he heard the music beneath it.

When he collided with Edith it didn’t even hurt. They fell into the dry ground together. When his chin hit her shoulder, though, he saw a small brown mushroom against her white hand, like a wedding ring.

—

The cow wandered over and eyed the two of them carefully.

“We always create a backup,” it said.

“Edith,” Gene said, “the mushrooms . . . they’re intelligent.  Like some kind of collective intelligence.  And they fly around the universe, and . . .”

“I know.”  Edith had pulled her knees up underneath her chin, and placed a hand on Gene’s shoulders.  “The tree outside town explained it to me.

“After I talked to you, I walked around campus until I realized I was all alone there.  I was probably all alone in the city.  I even found Jackie, from class?  She looked like she finally relaxed.  But I couldn’t stand it.  I knew I was going to die, but I couldn’t stand the idea of being alone.  I guess that’s why my roommate wanted me to look in her eyes; maybe that’s why she smiled, because dying with somebody else is the best you can do.

“So I remembered what you said, and I went to the address of the one Showalsky in Clintonville, and then I drove around, looking for farms in Byhalia with silos.  And I got lucky.”

She fell back and stared up at the sky.  “Please just stay here with me until it’s over.”

The cow made a whistling noise.  “It’s time to upload.”

Gene felt like a sponge, absorbing so much information that his texture was altered; he was soggy with knowledge.  He labored for hours in a southeast Asian sweatshop; he became the third wife of a local oil merchant; he gave birth to children in a Bangladeshi slum and watched them starve to death; he signed legislation altering the corporate tax code for the state of Utah; he played chess at the freezing top of a mountain in Andes against a shaman with a bird’s-face mask; he raged behind an immobile face as his sons and daughters removed his life-support; he was born a million times and he loved a million times and he hated a million times.  It took less than a second.

His head hurt, and he thought all the bodies he had seen and touched the top of his head.  Still intact.

Edith’s face had grown flushed.  “It’s happening to you,” she said.  “Not to me.”  She placed her head on his elbow and started to cry.  “We’re going to both be alone now, you with them and me . . . somewhere.”

Gene didn’t answer at once.  He had to fight to climb out from under the burgeoning mass of other lives, now pinning his head down.  When he did, he turned to the cow.

“Do we have to do this?  Couldn’t you just leave us alone?”

“More than ten thousand intelligent species have been observed.  In all cases, they destroyed themselves.”   The cow spoke in an even voice.

“Isn’t it possible . . . that we could be the exception?”  He squeezed Edith’s hand.

The cow seemed to think before it spoke, although Gene knew the cow was just a conduit.  “Think about the record of your species and tell me if that seems at all likely.”

Gene knew that it was futile, and again he could feel his ego drowning.  Edith’s was shaking with panic.

“But, but, but!”  He fought out from under the other selves again.  “Could you download . . . through both of us?  At the same time?  Instead of just me?  What harm could it do?”

The cow again thought for a long time.  “Agreed,” it said.

The process began again.  He and Edith locked hands and stared at each other, and he watched her face flush brilliant red, and then her eyes filled his eyes, and soon he wasn’t sure whose eyes he was looking out of.

“I can call you Professor Farmer now, I guess,” Edith said, laughing.  “I declare you fully matriculated.”  Then she looked serious.  “Kate . . . she’s in here too.  She felt badly about what she said to you; it’s just that she was so scared; she didn’t know what was going on.  But she thought about you often.  And she knew you didn’t have any paint box.”

Gene could no longer tell which one of them was speaking.  The last thing he knew was that he had finished one thing in his life.

He finished the world.

He passed his arm around Edith’s waist and squeezed.  He felt his head splitting open again, this time for real, and he let the white-hot pain engulf him and replace his thoughts.

A brown pillar rose out of his open skull.  It rose and rose and rose, into the blank and silent sky.  It reached to heaven.

—

Jason L. Corner lives in Richmond, Virginia with his wife and two children, and teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University. His short fiction has appeared in Abyss & Apex, Electric Spec, Nautilus Engine, Ideomancer, and Labyrinth Inhabitant. He enjoys many different kinds of mushrooms.