COLOR OF DEATH

World Travelers

      Recently I had another experience that finally drove me to find a way to communicate the things I’ve seen.  A friend of mine, Carol, had retired after a 38 year career.  She had not taken vacation or a sick day in years and years, so she had a $15,000 payout for all the hours her employer owed her.  She and Paul, her husband, decided to take that money and travel around the world, literally.  They chose to spend some time on every continent and touch the water of every ocean.  My wife and I took their vacation as a chance to go to Australia and Antarctica, two places I’ve wanted to go for years.  We all thought it would be cool to snorkel in the Great Barrier Reef in Australia, and go watch whales and penguins in Antarctica.

      My wife and I met Carol and Paul in Cairns, Australia.  They had been on the continent for three days already and were staying for another two days before we all departed for Alexander Island, by way of Cape Horn, for the whale and penguin watching.  Since we didn’t have fifteen grand, my wife and I were just going to spend two days in Australia and five days cruising to and from Antarctica. 

      The day we arrived in Cairns we went on the snorkeling trip.   It was me, my wife, Carol, Paul, another couple from Canada, and a single guy.  For all seven of us there were two guides.  One stayed in the boat while we swam, and the other did in water guiding.  We didn’t have to stay with the water guide, but if we chose to stay on our own there were particular stipulations we were supposed to follow.  First, we could not dive; you had to keep the tip of your snorkel above the water.  Second, we all had little nylon chords that tied to the boat.  As long as you were out on your own, you had to maintain control of that chord.  It was only about 25 meters long, so there wasn’t much space you could cover.

      In the beginning, everybody stayed around the boat, getting comfortable with the water and the snorkels.  Eventually my wife and I wanted to go out into the water, so us and the Canadians went out with the water guide.  The water guide didn’t make us hold onto his feet or anything.  Really, he let us go pretty far out on our own.  We had two and a half hours to play around in the water.  There were so many things to look at, I want to go back.  It seemed like you could spend forever looking at one big bunch of plants.

      We saw two different types of coral.  One was brain coral and I don’t know what the other one was called.  Even though it reminded me more of a maze, I understand why it is called brain coral.  It looked like a maze that had no start and no finish.  You could put your finger anywhere on the thing and get lost in the zigzagging channels.  There was no exit to the maze, so you could be lost forever.  The other coral looked like stiff and brittle, branches of a bush.  The branches looked like foggy glass that was poured into a giant snowflake mold.  They split and spanned from central trunks, and created new trunks for other sprouts to grown from. 

      The other thing I remember most clearly was the colors.  Schools of fish would swim by, they looked more like a living sheet of color than a bunch of fish.  I had never before, or since, seen anything under water with such clarity.  The sea flowers projected bright and rich colors, which illuminated the ocean.  Vivid bright colors bled out into the water and glowed brightly near the submerged surfaces.  A luminescent property emitted from everything in the sea. Lines of colors streaked out from fish and plants.  Sometimes they looked inviting and friendly, like Clownfish.  Sometimes they looked aggressive and violent, like the Ringed Octopus.

      When our time in the water was over, the guide started rounding everybody up and sending us back to the boat.  Once we were back at the boat, the guides took accountability.  Each of the three couples were in the boat, but the single guy, Michael was his name, was missing.  Each of the lead lines off the boat were accounted for, so he did not have his line back to the boat.  The guides made sure everyone stayed in the vessel and started searching.  After a few minutes of looking around with binoculars, and not spotting Michael, one of the guides made a radio call to some emergency service.  We started circling in the boat, looking for the lost swimmer, until a big yellow Coast Guard ship picked us up.  All of us tourists had to board the Coast Guard boat so they could bring us back to the shore. 

      A police unit was waiting for us when we got back to land.  The police took each one of us, individually, to provide a statement about what happened.  I had no idea what happened to the guy.  I told the cop that the last time I saw Michael was when we all got into the water.  The guide had formed us into a circle, where we all had to tread water, completely submerge ourselves into the water, come back up, and clear our snorkels.  After that, we all went about doing our own thing.  

      After the interviews, we were all told to call some number they gave us if we could think of anything else, and they took local contact information from everyone.  Some of us may have neglected to mention that we were leaving the country in the next day or so. 

      The four of us; my wife, me, Carol, and Paul, just sort of hung around being freaked out for the rest of the day.  It was sort of a bummer on the beginning of our trip and the end of the Australian leg of their world tour.  But, the next day we would be on our way to Antarctica.  We would be far away from this episode and moving on to enjoy penguins and whales.  And that’s what we all did, we left to find new and cold adventures.

      The plane ride to Cape Horn was long and uneventful.  We did have to take a little grasshopper plane to get to the cruise ship’s port.  I’m never too excited when I have to travel in a matchbox fired out of a slingshot.

      We went to the cruise liner as soon as we landed.  The sea excursion started at Cape Horn, traveled down the South America side of the Antarctica Peninsula, and stopped off the coast of Alexander Island for a short land expedition.  One of the pitches for the cruise was the nearly guaranteed opportunity to watch whales swimming, and blowing, and playing, and all that sort of thing.  I wasn’t very interested in the whales.  The big draw for me was Antarctica itself.  I don’t know why, but I’ve always wanted to touch Antarctica.  In fact, the only military decoration I ever wanted was the Antarctic Service Ribbon; there was no chance of me ever getting that. 

      The cruise was two straight days down to Alexander Island, then two days back.  No one saw a single whale the entire time down to Antarctica.  My wife was pissed.  Most of the people on the cruise were pissed.  They wanted to see wild life, by god.  I must admit that the ride there was pretty boring, even as excited as I was to be going to Antarctica.  For two days you were either eating or looking at flat cold water. There was neither bird in the sky, nor fish in the sea. When we came to the island, the cruise staff was surprised by the amount of wildlife on the land.  There were thousands and thousands of birds and penguins.  It seemed that all manners of uncommon Antarctic life teamed on the island. 

      Since there were so many animals on the island, someone started a rumor that the company was going to cancel the landing.  I was not going to have that.  In fact, not a single paying guest was going to put up with that, we were going to mutiny if we had to.  People paid to see animals from the ocean, and the cruise agency wanted to cheat us out of that. 

      Well, that was all overblown.  The company never planned to cancel the day trip.  They brought us onto the Southern Land Mass just as they said they would.

      It was great and gross all at the same time.  I loved being able to step on Antarctica. I loved having the ground of this continent beneath my feet. I dug out some patches of snow so I could feel the dirt; I ate some of the soil and snow.  I hugged a rock.  I wasn’t particularly ecstatic to be less than a dozen feet from some angry looking giant bird; I don’t care for birds.  There was animal crap everywhere and the entire area smelled like a boat load of dead fish.  It was fun though.  We walked around for an hour or two before we went back to the ship.

      Once we were onboard, we found an all-new commotion.  Turns out, we had one more passenger now than when we arrived.  The ship crew spotted some guy in the ocean and pulled him aboard.  He was in the infirmary and the doctor treated him for hypothermia and frostbite.  After a bit of listening, I found out there were no other ships in the region and there were no calls for man overboard anywhere around.  After a few hours of talking up a couple of the staff, I found out that the guy was reasonably coherent.  My curiosity got the best of me, I wanted to meet him and get his story on why he was out there.  On the way south, while everyone else was looking for giant sea mammals, I stayed in the warmth of the ship getting to know some of the crew.  My recently made acquaintances made it a little easier than is should have been to get into sickbay and give the new passenger some company.

Ocean Traveler

            “Oh man!”, the shock of seeing him was apparent in my voice, even I heard it. “Holy crap, how…what happened to you?”

      The last time I saw this man, he was blowing water out of a plastic tube a few miles east of the Australian coast. 

      “Hush.”, he told me.

      “What?”  I replied. “Man, you went missing while we were snorkeling.  The fake Coast Guard came and got everyone, we had to talk to police, there was a big ruckus.  Where did you go?  Did you get picked up by another boat?”

      “Shush.”, he said again.  He coolly continued, “I don’t have the patience right now for questions and conversation.”

      “Alright.”  I said with some attitude.  I wasn’t going to argue with this guy in a hospital bed, that’s like hitting a fella while he still had his glasses on.  Word would get around sooner or later about what his deal was.  I figured something like this would eventually be on the internet somewhere.  Screw him if he didn’t want to talk, but I still sat there for a minute.  I didn’t have anything to do, so I decided to be a jerk for a while.

      We sat there in silence.  Michael lay in his bed, looking at the ceiling.  I rocked on the back legs of my chair; it’s hard to look like a badass jerk when you almost fall over two or three times while sitting down.

      He started talking with what sounded more like a question than a statement, “While we were out swimming… the rest of you had gone off with the guide and I stayed closer to the boat.  I saw some impressive things around the boat and didn’t like the idea of swimming off into the middle of the ocean.” 

      He stopped talking.  The break wasn’t long enough for me to chime in, but longer than needed to digest and understand what he was saying.  I hate when people do that, stop and leave unnaturally long pauses in their rhythm of speech.  I was already getting annoyed with this guy.  If there were anywhere else to go I would leave.  This dude was incredibly agitating.  First, he doesn’t feel like talking.  Then he just starts yakking on out of nowhere, like Mavis at the hair shop.  Then he doesn’t know if he wants to keep telling the story or not.  I felt like I was trapped in a windowless room, in a windowless building, at the bottom of a pit, listening to a blind man describe the color of the sun. 

      He finally decided to go on, “I saw a small ray fish, a Sting Ray or a micro Manta Ray, and I started to swim over to it.  The ray started to get bigger as I got closer.  Not - just because I was getting closer to it, it was actually getting bigger.  It was growing.  I didn’t want anything to do with it anymore so I started to swim somewhere else.  I almost swam into a school of little tiny jellyfish.  When I turned to go the other way, there were more little jellies.  They weren’t there before I looked over to them, and every time I looked from side to side more and more little blobs showed up with their limp and painful thready legs dangling beneath them.”

      As he went on with his story I thought, “Where is he getting at?”

      “I surfaced and started treading water to try and see which direction I could go without having to swim through that stinging soup of pain and hate.  There were so many of them, they looked like algae in an old dilapidated hotel swimming pool.  The jellyfish bobbed and swayed around me.” 

      I didn’t like the way he said “bobbed”.  He drew out the “o” sound too long and made it sound like a sheep; “Bahhh-bbed”.

      “I thought maybe I could swim underneath them to get around; it was the only thing I could think of.  So, I dove downward to swim under them.  The jellies were above my head every time I tried to swim back up.  They were pushing me down to the bottom, towards the ray I saw earlier.  From my left and right, jellyfish started swimming down towards the ray.  They all went and landed on it.  That’s how it got bigger before.”

      I had to stop him and ask, “What?”

      He explained, “The volume of the ray increased every time a jelly landed on it.  The ray grew larger and larger, and begin to change shape.  It went from being a flat ray shape, to looking like two pyramids stuck to each other. This all happened so fast.  The ray grew to two or three times my size and started swimming up to meet me.  My lungs began to get hot and sting with pressure.  They felt like the were going to explode and collapse at the same time.  I had to breath, so I had to swim up through the jellyfish.  I started kicking to get up through the surface.  I was so afraid of drowning.  My chest began to flutter and pulse.  I thought I would start crying there underwater.  The water felt thicker than it had before. My legs moved slower, I wasn’t moving fast enough to outpace the big gooey jelly ray.”

      “I thought it was going to kill me, and eat me, like a shark…I was about to freak out under there, man.  I didn’t know if I would drown first or be eaten.  Then I felt a relaxing calm came over me.  My vision started to go too; I remember all the plant life turning a grayish green color.  You remember all the reds and yellows in the reef?”

      He surprised me with the question. 

      “Yeah.” I shot back at him.  “Everything in the water was colorful, not just the plants, the fish too.”

      “I know there were supposed to be fish.”, he said; he sounded a little confused as he spoke. “But there weren’t any around with all the jellyfish and the huge gelatinous octahedron floating around.  The colors of all the coral and plants faded to an uncolored ashy tone.”

      He went on with his story. “The Jelly Ray wrapped itself around me and raced off along the bottom of the reef.  I could see through the body of the beast, but it didn’t really matter.  The water outside the Ray was moving so fast, or we were moving so fast, that it looked like sheet of glass with a good heavy coat of grease.”

      “My chest kept burning the entire time I was wrapped up in the Jelly Ray, but it didn’t get any worse.  Even still, I thought I was on the brink of asphyxiation the entire time.  The calm I felt just before the Ray swallowed me also remained.  That strange peaceful sensation kept me from panicking.  I kept thinking of the old movie “The Blob”.  But the Jelly Ray wasn’t dissolving me; I just felt the same way as right before it cloaked me in its stiff mucus made body.  Even though we were ripping through the water so fast, it felt like I was floating in a warm pool of gelatin.  I felt like I was drifting through the ocean and shooting like a rocket through space at the same time.  My lungs stung, my head was thick, I was color blind, and I couldn’t move, but I felt relaxed and comfortable.  I felt like that until I became its puke and it dumped me out.”

      “I didn’t feel us slowing down at all, and I didn’t see us come up on any sort of building or surface from underneath the water.  Just, all of a sudden it was behind me and I was sliding onto a big rock bench.  At first, I thought I was disoriented and dizzy, I thought my vision was blurry, but the feeling it didn’t pass.  I never felt any different the whole time I was there.  I just sat for a few minutes; I didn’t know what had happened.  I mean, one minute I’m about to die from a million little jelly fish, then I’m zipping through the ocean in The Blob, then I’m sitting on a big moldy rock.  How can you even imagine that?”

      I answered his question, more to let him know I was listening than anything else. “It’s incredible”, I said. 

      He went on.  “So, after a minute or two, of just, astonished shock, I started to try and get my bearings about where I was.  I couldn’t really set focus on anything but the rock I was sitting on.  Everything I looked at just curved off into the distance.  My eyes felt like they were slipping off everything, I thought the room was trying not to be seen.  Nothing had a definite edge to it, it all just sort of, faded away into the horizon.  Even the things close to me, things that shouldn’t have had curves did.  Like the floor.  For every spot on the floor I looked at, it curved away on all side of my vision into a distant horizon, and just sort of faded away.  I thought I had fish eye goggles on.  I think it was the way the room was made that made me feel out of sorts.  It didn’t seem right.” 

      “The big table I sat on had all rounded edges, but they were at least edges.  The corners of the table looked worn away from wear, instead of the unnatural bending into infinity everything else did.  A slippery mildew covered my flat boulder.  If I squirmed or shifted my weight at all, I would slide around on the tabletop.  It was probably big enough for me to lie out on, but I didn’t much feel like lying down.”

      “I realized that I was breathing normally again, I wasn’t under water anymore.  My lungs no longer burned for breath, but my vision was still faded.  Everything was ash grey and pale green.  A bit of color caught my eye, and you wouldn’t believe what I saw when I looked over to my left.”

      “What’s that?” I asked, encouraging him to keep talking.

      Michael took a deep breath and let it out, “A girl was sitting over there, with her legs straight out, on a rock table like mine.  About fifteen feet away.  She had on an orange one piece bathing suit.”

      Michael’s lip began to quiver for just a second.  After a few more deep breaths, he went on.

      “She had her hands in her lap, and her head was jutting out from her shoulders; like a full body pout.  She looked just as scared and confused as I felt.  She just sort of, sat there, shivering with fear.  She was a lot younger looking than I am.  Her body looked like it had just started to develop.  She may have been eleven or twelve, maybe thirteen.  She looked Asian, Japanese or something, it was hard to tell.  I, I tried to buck up a little bit.  You know try to be reassuring a little bit if she saw me.  I don’t think I did a good job at it.  I don’t think she even noticed me there; she just looked straight ahead with her wet hair hanging over her face.”

      “It wasn’t until I heard a sound,” Michael continued, “that I realized that it was so quiet.  Then this super deep sound erupted from in front of us.  It wasn’t very loud, but I felt it send waves of air through my body.  If you’ve ever been near a big explosion, it felt like that sort of concussive force going through me.  I was so deep and low; it was almost more of an aural sensation than it was a sound.  It went on for a while too.  I didn’t really have a good grasp of the passing time, but if I had to I could measure time in increments of this moan.  It was longer than the swim to the room.  It lasted longer than any other thing while all this was going on.  The moan rumbled too, it was not just a smooth drone.  Sometimes it would shake and vibrate, other times it would pulsate.  Each time the sound would change it would throb like a heavy bag dropping onto my chest.  I was terrified.  I have never been so scared in my life, not even when I was drowning and being swallowed alive.”

      “When the moan stopped…”, Michael stopped for a moment.  He began to cry.  I sat there; I don’t usually know what to do in these situations. 

      “I have to finish.” He said between sniffles.

      After a few minutes, he started again.

      “It was, it was the most horrific thing I’ve ever seen.” Michael began to recite the incident like it had been seared into his sight. 

      “That little girl looked like she was screaming.  I couldn’t hear her, but she was screaming as loud as her lungs could push.  Her bathing suit popped into a white smoky flame and flowed off her like water running from a duck.  She tried to press her eyes shut; then she opened them as wide as a person could.  It looked like her eyeballs were trying to explode out of her skull, but they didn’t.  They were the first thing I saw collapse inward.  There was no blood or anything.  While her eyes were open, they just, caved in, into her head.  Her face and her hands started getting real tight and stretched.  Then they wrinkled and shrank like a grape turning into a raisin on a time-lapse camera.  The skin…her skin sank into her muscles.  It was as if the meat below her skin had pulled it underneath.  It looked like water soaking into a sponge.  The muscle and tendons went next.  The guts and organs in her abdomen began to fall limp and flopped out onto the table.  As the muscle and connective tissue were finally disappearing, I saw that everything was soaking into her bones.  Once everything holding up her bones was absorbed into them, her pale skeleton fell over, dead, on the table.  The clean internals, now lying out, began to fill and soften the previously brittle looking sticks that had once acted as her frail frame.  I saw then that the bones began to swell as they took up the stomach, and heart, and kidney’s and everything else that was there on the table.  All the flesh that made this little girl a thing was sucked up into her bones.”

      “They started to buck and expand.  The bones were puffing up.  They reminded me of how a fingertip puffs up after it someone slams it in a car door.  The pressure did not release until the soft saturated bones began to split and spill their contents back out onto the rock.  Her body had liquefied itself and dissolved into her marrow and blood, all mixed together in her bones like they were the cauldrons of the body.  All I could make out from where I was were pink and grey clots of broken bone and gore knotted up with her stringy black hair.  It began to stew about on the stone slab where she once sat.  Her body began to bubble and swirl, and none of her ran off or dripped from the stone.  She stayed there, swirling and steaming, smoking in a puddle of black coagulated tar as though she was held in place by an invisible shallow saucer.  The knotted blobs of pink and grey flesh had turned to the color of death while they dissolved into the festering stew.  The liquid that was this little girl in an orange one piece started to whirl on the rock table.  The angry and bitter looking smoke twisted above her puddle.  The sticky tar began to drain into a whirlpool of itself, sucking down the smoke with it as it drained through the solid stone slab it was on.”

      Michael went on, “There was nothing left of her. From where I sat, there was no indication of her ever having been there.  The mildew on the stone where the girl in orange sat was unaltered by the boiling sickness that was there an instant ago.  Fearing my own death by the agony I had just seen, I shut my eyes as tight as I could.”

      “That’s when I heard a voice,” he said, “The voice was saying ‘It’s alright buddy we got you.’ I had never heard it before in my life.”

      I assumed what it was, and said “It was the ship crew.”

      “Yes.” Michael replied. “It was the ship crew.  They were pulling me out of the water onto a little raft.  They brought me on this ship.  The ship doctor said I should recover from the frostbite.  But that doesn’t make any sense to me.  Anybody in that water longer than a few minutes wearing only swimming trunks should have much worst damage, than I do.”

      He paused for a moment, and then continued.

      “I don’t know how to explain it, but as soon as I closed my eyes on the table, they started pulling me out of the water.  It’s like I was instantly brought to the surface as soon as I closed my eyes.  But, I guess that’s not the least believable part of what happened.  Not by far.”

      I replied to Michael’s statement with the only thing I could.  I said the only thing that I thought was true.

“I believe you.”