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Chapters (48)
  1. Title Page
  2. Copyright Notice
  3. Epigraph
  4. 1. The Dream of the Blue Fox
  5. 1. THE DREAM OF THE BLUE FOX
  6. 2. THE THREE
  7. i.
  8. ii.
  9. iii.
  10. iv.
  11. v.
  12. vi.
  13. vii.
  14. viii.
  15. ix.
  16. x.
  17. xi.
  18. xii.
  19. xiii.
  20. xiv.
  21. xv.
  22. xvi.
  23. xvii.
  24. xviii.
  25. xix.
  26. xx.
  27. 3. Botch Behemoth
  28. 3. BOTCH BEHEMOTH
  29. 4. CAN’T REMEMBER
  30. 5. Leviathan
  31. 5. LEVIATHAN
  32. 6. THE BODY
  33. – 7 –
  34. 7. Corpse
  35. 7. CORPSE
  36. 8. The Dark Bird
  37. 8. THE DARK BIRD
  38. 9. CAN’T FORGET
  39. i.
  40. ii.
  41. iii.
  42. 10. The Dead Astronaut
  43. 10. THE DEAD ASTRONAUT
  44. 0. A Scrap of Paper Found in Chen’s Suit
  45. 0. A SCRAP OF PAPER FOUND IN CHEN’S SUIT
  46. Also by Jeff Vandermeer
  47. A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
  48. Newsletter Sign-up

I came to hate the mechanism of my departure, too. It was small at first. A small biomechanical creature. It mewled and wet the bed and at first I thought as it grew beside me, us connected by tubes, that it was my friend. Or a comrade in our distress. But it was the door being grown to attune to me, for this experiment. Strange dreams from that amniotic fluid. Strange dreams of the universe, of burrows with no end. With chambers as large as a world and stars trickling down the sides of stone. The wealth of smells the universe hid, that the door gave to me all unknowing! As I shared its dreams, translated into fox.

One day it would devour me and I would be someplace else.

There was left just the inconvenience of needles and grubs—all the biotech put in the fox that it learns to subvert and to hack. Because my torturers didn’t understand the fox mind, the fox body.

They gave me telescopic sight and made me hate them more that my world was no longer the richness of smell and taste and hearing, and now I must adjust to this cacophony of images, un-fox-like.

Or: I once saw a frog paralyzed by a spider and cocooned in its webbing. Numb and spiraling and slowly being eaten. Now I was the frog, but the cocoon was alive and devouring me. Then I became the cocoon.

You wouldn’t understand me even if I made sense. Before the wall of globes. There was just one globe against a vast wall and it wanted to eat me and I was in the globe and I was everywhere and I was nowhere, too. I was the one sent. Every time. It was on this side. It was alive. Sent out across time, space. Trying to destroy my mind. As side effect.

I plotted revenge. I cursed them silently: Let them be sent on journeys no one ever had. Let them be strapped to the gurney, needled and cut and scanned. Let them be filled with the sluggish liquid from syringes. Let them be filled with worms and beetles and dead leaves or the feeling of dead leaves crinkling and cracking to dust inside. Let them go forth as the experiment, curled up inside a globe, a globe, a globe pushed out across the face of the deep. Of many depths. Let them know the emptiness.

The battlefield that was my body.