One Story

Certain Days Can Never Be Recovered

Some of us are here because we don’t have a choice. Others of us are here because we want to be. And I’m definitely one of those two. Maybe even both, but I haven’t figured that part out yet and don’t know how.

200 feet underground the eels are writhing, never-ending loops of black, waiting for us in their vats. The elevator can fit two people at a time so me and Meira get inside the cage. The metal groans as Meira pushes the button dangling by her head, lowering us down into the depths.

“What did you do yesterday?” Meira wants to know. She is small in her silver suit. Big eyes and lots of hair, wadded up into a bun.

“Same thing you were doing, probably.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

I’m not looking at her but I can feel her smiling at me. The walls around us are a mosaic of purple and blue and white, the black light making the limestone come alive. It used to feel like something. The first time I came down here, years ago, I felt like maybe if I only saw this for the rest of my life that things could turn out okay. Now I can’t think of a worse place to be.

“Anyway,” Meira says. The elevator travels fast after the first 10 feet or so, and yet she doesn’t bother holding onto any of the handles. She’s even rocking back and forth on her heels, like she’s so relaxed she could start whistling even as we barrel down past the walls, all the colors melting into each other. “I’m wondering what you guys do for fun. After work and all of that.”

“You could talk to Darren if you want to have fun. Or Ada.”

“But I want to talk to you.”

I don’t know how to respond to that and don’t have to because as soon as she’s finished we’re at the bottom. The gates of the cage unlock and I lift the deadbolt. Around us is now the sound of dull sloshing, hollow and everywhere, inescapable.

I want to tell her to stop talking to me but instead I choose to ignore it, focus on the work. Meira’s footsteps are wet and stick to the ground behind me as we enter the Glacier.

The live map is waiting for us to make sense of it, help it do its job. I open the Glacier’s Head, tapping through the different vats lighting up its brain. “Group A and Z are ready to harvest. Group B needs 3 ml dopamine, Group D needs 2 ml domperidone.” I squint, swiping over to the tanks, where the newborns are. “We need to adjust the heat in the tank for Group C. And Group F…”

“I completed the light therapy earlier today.”

“You’re not supposed to do that. You have to follow the schedule.”

“I could tell they needed it.”

Meira smells like cloves, the scent permeating even through the suit. I try to stay calm, look away as I talk, but I can feel my arms shaking.

“You try to work outside of schedule one more time and I’ll make sure upstairs hears about it.”

“And what would they do to punish me? Send me to work down here?” She’s smug. Smiling because she knows I know she’s right.

“Just stay here and for the love of God don’t do anything stupid.”

I climb into a cart and it shuttles me through the maze of eels. The biggest ones gape at me, snapping at me through the glass. They’re the ones that fight the hardest when we pull them out, ten feet of flesh slapping against our bodies as we move them through the Glacier’s Digestive Tract. One of them follows me with its cloudy, blank eyes. A huge wave of electricity courses through the tank, and the cave is awash with light before it’s swallowed up through the wires.

Finally I reach the tanks located near the back. This is the sick group, the ones Ada’s been working with the past week. They don’t seem to be capable of producing anything. Don’t respond to treatment, either. Ada gets attached to the young ones especially. We’ve tried to take over for her, but she won’t let us. Sometimes, even after work hours she’ll come down here to talk to them. She doesn’t say as much but I can hear her, shuffling back into bed early in the morning right before our shifts start.

Around twenty babies are in there, shining like miniature ribbons made of glass ribbons. A couple of days ago we thought maybe we’d have to recycle them, tell the host’s families we’d have to start over. Little sores had started growing along their tails, like flecks of white mold. But now they’re all gone. They’re healthy, drawing toward my hand like magnets as I drop some pellets in the tank for them. They float for a second and I watch them sink before the eels devour them in an instant.

I think about what to say to Meira as I make my way back to the Glacier. Above me the white bones of the cave drip with water, plinking down into the cart. I think of frogs and rain in the springtime. Rainboots. Things like that. They’re nice enough images, but I can’t feel anything toward them, like they’re just scenes from someone else’s life. I look at my hands, want to look at my own skin. But I don’t see anything besides white gloves.

When I get back to the Glacier, Meira is playing with something inside of her hands. Knotting and unknotting, working quickly, but whatever it is I can’t see it. The sleeves of her suit are rolled up and I can see that there are burns stamped all over her forearms, welts shining like glazed fruit. She sees me looking, smiles.

“Guess which hand,” she says, closing them into fists.

I point to the right one.

She opens them. Meira’s skin is soft, her palm lines as deep as rivers. It might just be a trick of the lenses, but for some reason I can swear they’re glowing, mimicking the wet colors of the limestone.

“Nothing here,” she says, pulling her hands away from me. A familiar static forms in my head as she leans back in her chair, a live map of the babies I left pulled up in front of her. They carry on inside the water, endlessly circling the same four walls. In the cool glow of the screen she moves forward, extending a finger. Her hands are shaking, I realize, as she arches over their figures, tracing them. “Gotcha,” she whispers, then swallows, goes quiet.

*

There are two dreams that I have. The first is of me in a field with a bunch of other kids, holding a huge kite that joins with hundreds of other kites gathered in the air, butterflies and smiley faces and blue flowers. There’s a hand on my shoulder and I know its touch, but when I look up, I can’t make out her face. The second one is a conversation.

“You should know that the procedure’s changed in recent years,” the doctor says. Pink walls, pink uniform, pink little pills I swallow on command before I’m shuttered back off into my room, to have a light shined in my face.

How long have I been here? I ask when we line up for meds or when people came into my room, first a question then shouting.

That’s not important, everyone replies. What’s important is that you get better.

The brochure in my hand is for a version of therapy that involves electric shocks, sent up to your brain. For those who are unresponsive to “regular treatment”. I hand it back to her.

“I already said I’m not interested.”

She smiles, but I can tell there’s something underneath it, frustration and anger that I won’t just shut up and do what she tells me to.

“You’re considered one of the most eligible sub— patients that we have here. One of the ones for whom we consider this could be the most beneficial. And it’s all free.”

“How long have I been here?”

“Ely,” the doctor says, but her voice is different now. I feel something wet beneath my feet and see water seeping up from the floor, steadily climbing. When I look back toward the doctor her eyes are a milky white. Someone pounds violently at the door.

“Open it,” she commands. But the door swings open before I get there, a bouquet of eel heads bulging past, one after another, until I’m suffocating.

“You look like shit,” Darren says in the canteen. I woke up late, which I hate doing. You miss out on the good proteinkits and don’t have any time to yourself. The rest of the day is the same three people, the same eels. When I walked into the canteen earlier, Darren was just staring at the wall, proteinkit untouched before him. But I didn’t say anything about that, did I?

“I’m fine,” I say. I try to eat some of my proteinkit but it’s this muted yellow paste today. A smooth round shape sits in the middle, jiggles when I touch it. It won’t go down my throat and I know from past experiences I shouldn’t force it. He’s been here for longer than I have, Darren. Pretends to respect me but I know he’s just waiting for the right time. An image comes into my head of Darren gleefully harvesting diseased eels with a hammer, spreading their slime all over his arms and face as a trophy. I think we have a lot in common, Darren said the first time he ever saw me. We’ve both been through shit no one else has. I don’t want to know what he meant by that.

“I was reading through the notes for this week,” Darren says. “We got a new arrival scheduled for tomorrow. You see that?”

I blink. I tap into the Glacier’s Head, scan the schedule. But there’s nothing particularly exciting, just regular maintenance stuff and one or two harvests. I see the new arrival scheduled for tomorrow and zoom in, confused. Normally there’s only two of us, max, assigned to a tank, if the host is someone really important. Even then we’ve all been down here long enough to handle it ourselves. But for some reason, all four of us are assigned to this tank. I scroll through the notes but there’s nothing there about who the host is. It doesn’t even say their sizes. It makes me tired just looking at it.

I blink out of the Head. Darren’s got his hand on his knee, looking into my face as if he’s expecting me to explain. “Weird.”

He shrugs, goes back to picking around at his proteinkit. “You think it has anything to do with that Meira girl?” he asks, frowning. “She’s not like us, man.”

“I guess not.” I think about her intensity, trying so hard to get close to me. Almost demanding to be let in.

“I mean, how many years has it been since they added another person down here? Why now, all of the sudden? We don’t need her help. The three of us are just fine.”

He stops eating. A recycler wheels up, an old model that’s almost dead, lifting its arms to collect Darren’s proteinkit. Darren kicks it away. It lands in the corner, sparks emitting from its metal frame.

Darren places an arm on his thigh, leans in close.

“She’s sexy though. Yeah, I know you think so too. Don’t lie. Listen, if you don’t have dibs, maybe I could…”

“Ada’s having trouble with one of the eels in Group C,” a voice says and Darren pulls away. It’s Meira, standing by the door. Her voice is even, but as she looks at Darren I see a film of disgust forming on her face. “He won’t eat his pellets.”

“Good morning to you, too,” Darren says, and his body relaxes next to me a little but not enough. I push him away and he relents.

“I’ll come,” I say. I can feel Darren’s eyes on my back as Meira and I walk out of the canteen, until we hit the corner. Something moves in my vision and I see it’s Meira’s hands moving again, fingers twitching at her sides as we move past the Glacier, white and tomb-like and asleep until one of us walks in. We get into a cart.

“What are you doing?” I ask Meira.

“I’m counting out meters for sonnets,” she mumbles. She sees that I’m still confused and adds, “I memorized some, a while ago…” She stops talking. A deep rose color builds in her face and I realize I think that Meira is very pretty.

We get to Group C quickly. As we step out of the cart, I can smell there is something wrong. One of the eels is outside of the tank. Ada’s sitting on the ground, back against the glass, clutching an enormous eel to her chest. It isn’t resisting at all, coiled up around Ada’s body so that Ada looks like she’s floating inside of a black pool. As Meira and I get closer it ducks its face into Ada’s armpit, as if hiding from us.

“Shhh,” Ada says, petting its side, but it stays hidden. She looks up at us, annoyed. “What is it?”

“Meira told me that he wasn’t eating his pellets.”

“He’s doing fine,” Ada whines, and I know she’s lying. “He’s eating fine. Meira, why’d you tell him?”

Meira crouches down. It makes me confused, their closeness—like she already trusts her. She’s holding something in her hand, but they’re not pellets. She shakes the pink stuff around, places one on Ada’s leg. “Come on out, buddy,” she says. “I have something for you.”

A face, small and ugly as hell, ducks out. Tentatively, the eel’s head ducks down and begins to eat them up.

“You’re not supposed to feed them anything but pellets. It can mess up the transference process,” I say as Meira dusts her palms off on her suit legs.

“Ada’s been submitting falsified reports for two months now,” Meira says. I feel something cold shoot down my spine. Ada’s not paying attention, her black hair covering her face as she leans over, coochie-cooing at the eel as it wriggles around in her lap. “And you were the one who signed off on all of them.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I mumble. And then, childishly, “None of your business anyway.”

“I think you both are doing the right thing,” she says. She pulls out more of the pink flakes and upon looking closer I see they’re brine shrimp. The eel jumps out of Ada’s lap, mouth gaping at the shrimp. Ada squeals as Meira lets them go, falling like blossom petals onto the floor. “I wouldn’t want any of Edgar Convington's memories either. The guy who killed his kid, right?”

“Ethics aren’t part of this job,” I say, on autopilot all of a sudden. “Thinking about them will only make it harder.”

“You care, though.”

Before I can say anything, though, there’s a shriek from the floor. Ada is laughing as the eel rolls around on its back, back and forth, coiling up to form a curly que, circling around her head.

“I taught him some tricks,” she says. She puts a hand underneath of the eel’s chin, starts scratching. “Come on, Edgar, up!”

The eel starts swaying its neck in the air, like a snake. Meira’s laughing. From the ceiling the stalactites drip water down into the floor.

Meira is pretty. That’s a fact. But the rest of her, I’m not sure I like at all.

*

The kite I’m holding is shaped like an enormous octopus. It has large purple and white tentacles that flutter behind its head, way up in the sky. The sun inserts itself directly into the middle of its head, so that there’s a huge light-shaped brain in the middle. I have no shoes on, just trailing around my kite in bare feet. Someone comes up behind me and I turn around, but inside of her face is the doctor’s face. When I turn back to the sky, the sky is alive with eels, black squiggles in the air.

Ever since the incident with Ada I start watching them in the canteen. Darren and I are more likely to be eating by ourselves, taking our breaks only when we absolutely need to or else risk collapsing. But Meira and Ada take their breaks together, at 2 PM every day.

I finish administering the dopamine to Group B and follow behind them into the canteen, taking my time selecting my proteinkit, listening to them.

“I’ve always loved eels,” Ada is saying. “All marine creatures, really. I think they’re awesome.”

Ada waves her hands around, talking about eels and anglerfish and shrimp, her eyes shining as she talks about the different eels’ personalities. I try not to indulge her in these conversations. I figure it’ll only make things harder if I feed into it. But Meira eats it all up. Bits of protein get smeared on Ada’s face as she talks and eats at the same time. A piece of her hair catches on her lip and Meira leans over to pull it away.

“I mean, I don’t like the job. Because of the stuff we have to do to them,” Ada says. She frowns. “But if I just got to hang out with them forever I’d be super happy.”

“What was your job before you got here?” Meira asks.

Ada’s face caves. Inside of the void, Ada is trying to search for an answer. The more she thinks she starts clenching up, her body burrowing into itself. Where’s the answer? There has to be one, I know she’s thinking. What was I doing…

“Come on, Ada, you can tell me,” Meira says, reaching out to hold her hand, but Ada just keeps staring at the table. I can’t take it anymore and walk over, making a big deal of slamming the proteinkit on the table. Neither of them bother looking at me.

“Ada, you were a veterinarian. Remember?” I say, keeping my voice calm.

Ada blinks. A smoothness comes over her features but there’s some hollowness there, pressing up against her skull. She shakes her head, suddenly closed off.

“I think it’s time for my shift. I’ll talk to you later, guys,” she says. Before she leaves she gently passes her kit down to the recycler, gives it a kiss on the top of its head.

It’s not like it knows what a kiss means, it’s not like it understands the sentiment, I want to say. Just give up. I turn back to Meira, one eyebrow raised as she waits for me to speak.

“It’s cruel,” I say.

“What’s cruel? I was just making conversation.” She shrugs.

“Stop.”

“So it wasn’t true. Being a veterinarian.”

“She can’t handle it. Look, I don’t know what the fuck you’re trying to do but just leave Ada out of it.”

Meira shrugs again. “She could’ve gotten there. She was getting close. You can, too. With or without the eels.”

The static gets greedy inside my head, spreading over my thoughts.

“Maybe you just don’t want to,” she calls behind me, even though I’m running now, trying not to hear her. The sound of her voice echoes through the caves, mixing with a hundred eels going against their nature, doing all that humans want them to do.

*

This is what happens in the rest of the first dream. “You’re one of the most eligible subjects here,” the doctor says. “Ely, are you listening to me?”

Outside of the window there are blossoms on the trees, clotting with rain and falling down onto the ground in clumps. Below patients roam around the enclosed lawn, and the grass does feel good underneath your toes even when you know it’s fake. They even let you take your socks off during outside time.

The doctor finishes the yogurt that’s been sitting on her desk for an hour now, sucking on the spoon with lipstick-stained teeth. She pats her lips, then starts talking again. “Ely, you don’t have any family members waiting for you, do you? This hospital is quite an expensive stay.”

I’ve been hospitalized for four months. I fill out the forms right. I am not feeling suicidal, I am not having thoughts of hurting myself or others, I have a plan in place for ways to stay healthy upon release. But they won’t let me out. People come and go but I stay right here.

“What are you trying to say?” I finally ask.

She smiles. “You have the opportunity to be a part of a very exciting experiment. It could help us cure a myriad of different diseases. Depression, that’s one of them. But most importantly, it could—if it works—even cure dementia,” she says, and waits.

“I don’t have dementia,” I say.

She smiles again. Wan, cold, unfeeling. “Yes, I know that. I also know that you’re unable to pay for your stay here, correct?”

            On her desk, there’s a plaque that reads MARTHA KÖNING, DIRECTOR OF PRISM HEALTH.

“Luckily, we offer a work program available for those who are unable to afford their hospital visits. All we need is your memories, and only for a short time. You get them back unscathed after your work with us is complete.”

The patients outside on the lawn are now gathering up, lining up in the courtyard to go back inside. There’s a bald man with a bad sense of temper and a scar on his head, always looks like he’s mad at someone. Then a smaller woman with long black hair, so shy she starts crying when we line up for lunch. The only time she opens up is when she talks about animals. She’s like a child.

I want to be a veterinarian when I grow up, she said the other day, despite the fact she’s 30, despite the fact that growing up has already occurred: and you’re living in hell, honey, there are no dreams left for you out there. We were walking around the gym, a huge space filled with old, flat footballs and worn yoga mats. Besides us, the bald, angry guy was the only other patient in the room. It seemed that this had been happening a lot recently, the three of us getting grouped together, though I didn’t know why. Near the entrance, nurses observed us and jotted things down in their notepads from where they sat. What do you want to be when you grow up?

What do I want to be? Tell me, Ada, how do I find out?

“Sure,” I hear myself say. “Out of curiosity, how am I going to get them back though? My memories?”

“Oh, easily. Or maybe a little hard.” Director Köning smiles. There’s a fish tank behind her, with a couple of baby tadpoles in it, it looks like; long ones that shine underneath the light. She grabs some flakes from her desk and shakes them into their tank. “Tell me,” she says, and then here they come, the bouquet of eel heads blossoming out of the door, coming to swallow me whole. “How do you feel about seafood?”

*

The next day Darren, Ada, and Meira are all down in the cave below me. The Glacier murmurs as we gather inside, and we watch different parts of its brain flicker on.

The eels are assigned to three people. Like everything else down here they’re writhing, neverending lines that won’t go quiet. They look like they’re in pain, they look like they have no souls: just beasts like the rest of us are beasts. But oiled and scaled and with eyes that want you just as empty as they are.

Most of all, these ones in particular are enormous. Beside me, Ada gasps.

“How the fuck did they get so big?”

Twenty feet, maybe even larger. And instead of the normal clouded, blue eyes, these ones can see—their pupils dilate as electricity courses around them from the other groups. The Brain lights up our names, traveling behind the respective eel. The nervous-seeming one flitting toward the top is Ada’s. Darren’s lurks below, coiling around itself, weary and dangerous.

Mine is surprising. Flat-faced, like both of the others, spotted, but it looks lonelier. It keeps getting close to Darren’s before it pushes it away. It floats up to where Ada’s is, but she’s too anxious to pay attention. It can’t seem to understand that aloneness is its only option. It goes back and forth, over and over again, hoping that someone will let it in.

            Ten years pass by so quickly, down here in the dark. And Meira is the light that will set us all free.

            She’s turned around. Is she ashamed? Is she sorry for us? In her own way, I guess she was trying to avoid the inevitable. If only we could remember before this part, we could be free, but at the end of the day she has her job and we have ours. I’d like to admit this much: It feels nice to look at you, Meira, think maybe you liked me, even if I know you’re only doing this to relieve yourself of some of the grief. I watch her slowly pull up the schedules, brushing her tears away. And now we begin the slow process of transference with someone who we knew, one day would come.

I close my eyes, close out the condensation and dark to search again for the warm sun and the hand that knew me, cradling my shoulder. Soon, perhaps, I’ll know the rest of the day, surrounding the kite in the sky. The woman’s face is inside of it, that large and increasingly sad eel, flitting from one part of the tank into the other. But even when I go inside, digest its flesh, I know that something will still be missing. No one will be there as I knew them. I open my eyes again and see the eel is staring straight at me with something like pity; the knowledge that both of us will soon be swallowed up by the great mirage of time.

∩

Daisuke Shen is the author of the short story collection Vague Predictions and Prophecies (CLASH Books, 2024), and the novella Funeral (with Vi Khi Nao, KERNPUNKT Press, 2023). They live in New York City.