Tonsure got parts of it right—the contractions of spaces, small to large, and how mysterious perspective becomes after long periods underground. The way the blackness picks up different hues and textures, transformed into anti-color, an anti-spectrum. The fetid closeness and vastness, the multitude of smells, from the soothing scent of something like mint to the putrid stench of rotting fungi, like a dead animal … and yet all my words make of me a liar. I struggle to express myself, and only feel myself moving further from the truth. No wonder Mary thinks me a fool. No wonder she looks at me as if I am much stranger than the strangest thing she has ever seen. I caught a glimpse of her soft white breast when she leaned down to pick up a book. I’d be rougher than nails to her skin. The thought of being close tantalizes and yet makes me sick with my own clumsiness.

That is one thing I prefer about the underground: the loss of self to your environment is almost as profound as orgasm or epiphany, your senses shattered, rippled, as fragmented and wide as the sky. Time releases its meaning. Space is just a subset of time. You cease to become mortal. Your heartbeat is no longer a motion or a moment, but a possibility that may someday arrive, and then pass, only to arrive again. It’s the most frightening loss of control imaginable.

For me it was still different than for Tonsure. He had no real protection, no real defenses, until he adapted. At least I had the clues Tonsure left behind. At least I knew how to make myself invisible to them, to lose myself but not become lost. To become as still as death but not dead. Sometimes this meant standing in one place for days. Sometimes it meant constant, manic movement, to emulate the frantic writhing of the cheraticaticals [no known translation].

I found the standing still worse than the walking and running. I could disguise myself from the gray caps, but not from their servants—the spores, the parasites, the tiny mushroom caps, fungi, and lichen. They found me and infiltrated me—I could feel their tendrils, their fleshy-dry-cold-warm pseudopods and cilia and strands slowly sliding up my skin, like a hundred tiny hands. They tried to remake me in their image. If it had been you, Mary, I would not have minded. If you had found me, I would have given up my identity as easily as a wisp of cloud.

I drifted and drifted, often so in trance that I did not have a single conscious thought for hours. I was a pair of eyes reporting to a brain that had ceased to police, to analyze, the incoming images. It all went through me and past, to some place other. In a way, it was a kind of release. Now, it makes me wonder if I had learned what it feels like to be a tree, or even, strike me dead, a gray cap. But, that cannot be so—the gray caps are always in motion, always thinking. You can see it in their eyes.

Once, as I stood in one of my motionless trances, a gray cap approached me. What did he do? Nothing. He sat in front of me and stared up at me for hours, for days. His eyes reflected the darkness. His eyes had a quality that held all of me entirely, held me against my will. Mary holds me, but not against my will—her eyes and my will are in accord. Her eyes: green, green, green. Greener than Ambergris. Greener than the greenest moss by a trickling stream.

After a time, I realized the gray cap had gone, but it took me weeks to return to the surface of my thoughts, and months to find the real surface, and with it the light. The light! A weak trickle of late afternoon gloom, presage of sunset, and yet it pierced my vision. I could not open my eyes until after dusk, fumbling my way along the Moth riverbank like some pathetic mole. The light burned into my closed eyelids. It seemed to crack my skin. It tried to kill me and birth me simultaneously. I lay gasping in the mud, writhing, afraid I would burn up.