His words come out as a sigh of relief: “Thank you.”

She pulls out her phone and calls up a photo of a prison cell, the floors and ceiling of which are dirtied with bloody ciphers. She sets it on the table and then removes a piece of paper from her pocket with something on it that he recognizes. He drew that. With a pen. The looping swirl of a design he dreamed about when he woke up in the driveway.

“This pattern. What am I looking at?” she says, prodding it with her finger. “What does it mean?”

“I think it’s mycelium,” he says, and she looks at him blankly. “It’s the fungal network. It’s their communication system, their infrastructure, their language. The instructions of the underworld.”

14

Going green. That’s what Peaches calls it when he lets the other part of himself take over. The symbiont.

A normal mind is like a mansion, one that’s always under construction, with a new wing or garage being added. Some of the rooms you visit regularly; others, not so much. Every room has dressers and cabinets and end tables, and all of them have drawers or shelves. There are things filed away in them, like papers and books and photos that aren’t referenced often and collect dust. You surprise yourself sometimes. You go down a hallway you forgot existed and visit a room threaded with cobwebs and remember the faint smells, textures, and faded voices that linger in the air.

And this is necessary. We need to compartmentalize. To categorize. To file. We have too many moments. We’ve eaten too many meals and had too many conversations. If we remembered it all—all the time and all at once—we’d go crazy.

Going green is a little like going crazy. Because the mind of the forest knows no limit. Imagine if every door of the mansion was blown open and every light flickered on and every drawer spilled its guts? And you could be in the master bath and the dining room and the garden at the same time?

He always has trouble cutting it off and coming back to the constraints and limitations of the present. It’s a little like waking up from a heavy nap or deboarding an international flight or pulling off a mask and tank after scuba-diving for several hours. You still feel the previous world clinging to you even as you engage with the new one.