Swarm Behavior

The wedding hadn’t chased Greg’s doubts away and the honeymoon wasn’t doing much to change that. Not that he said anything about it. The last thing he could do was acknowledge this. He felt stupid, really. Greg loved his wife. He and Lauren had been together for a decade. The wedding was a formality, a party more than anything. So why did looking at her make his stomach flip?

And why here of all places? The Grand Mirror Lodge was gorgeous, all pine and hunter chic. Dozens of antlers formed chandeliers in the lobby and breakfast hall, a motif repeated throughout the wall sconces in each room. The design was so good that Greg hardly found the bones macabre.  And the whole place smelled like a campfire, sweet and smokey. He wanted the cozy resort to sweep him up, fill him with the love he knew (he knew!) he had for his wife. 

“Greg.” Lauren’s voice plucked him out of his thoughts. Brought him back to earth. Back to his seat across from her in the lodge’s dining room. It was breakfast on their third day.

“What?”

“I’m saying the smell is coming over the border, out of Canada. The wildfires up there.”

Greg let out a hollow laugh. “Wait, that’s what it’s been the whole time? That’s grim.”

A lanky teenager piped up from an adjacent table. “It smells nice, I know. My mom yelled at me when I said that. I guess it’s bad up there.”

“Well, tell her it makes for nice ambience,” Lauren said. 

The kid couldn’t tell if she was joking and turned back to his eggs, eyeing Lauren with suspicion. Greg caught the thin smile on her face, and for a moment his doubts slipped away. Then he glanced over and saw the kid’s mom looking their way with tight-lipped disapproval. He couldn’t handle anyone’s disapproval, not even a stranger’s. 

“Greg,” Lauren said. Again he started and looked up at her. “I said the rain’s going to hold off for another few hours. 

He nodded quickly. “You want to get that hike in?” 

“Yeah.”

“But what about the smoke?”

Lauren shrugged. “It’s mostly shooting over us, going further south,” 

He drained his coffee. “That’s crazy. Why?”

“It’s too complicated to explain.” 

The implication that it was too complicated to explain to him sat between them. For a moment, Greg considered acknowledging this. But doing that would mean acknowledging everything else he felt. So he nodded, overeager. 

The couple’s room sat on the edge of the hotel’s main building, their door spilling out into a field of fountains and winding paths. Beyond that, thick Adirondack forests sloped away from the grounds. In the winter, the wide swathes cut into the forest became ski trails. The fact that it was the height of summer was one of the only reasons Greg and Lauren could afford the lodge. He had been sure they couldn’t swing it, and they’d fought bitterly about it. The kind of fight that ended so far away from where it started that neither person even knew how it happened. In their furious makeup sex, Greg had felt closer to Lauren than he had in years. He needed to feel that way again. In the end, Lauren’s years of freelance work for American travel magazines got them the room. An old editor made a call and suddenly the newlyweds’ room was a hundred bucks cheaper.

The smell of cedar returned as they made their way through their screen door and through the pastoral grounds. Greg’s phone vibrated in his pocket and he stopped next to a gurgling fountain. 

“Shit,” he said, opening a link from his sister.

The Canadian wildfires, though still leaching some smoke onto the Adirondacks, had indeed propelled their ash southwards to New York and Philly. His phone showed a stretch of Center City with its skyscrapers completely shrouded in yellow smoke. Everything was burnt sepia. 

“We picked a good time to get out of town,” Greg said. 

“Can you imagine if we had the wedding this weekend?” Lauren gave him that thin smile again. “We would’ve been screwed, they’re canceling everything.”

Greg shook his head. 

A trail peaked out at the edge of the lodge’s property, offering a small window into the unbroken tree line. The couple set off along it, leaning their frames under a thick ceiling of leaves. The path wound uphill in a lazy arc.

They’d gone no more than a few feet into the woods, and already the lodge seemed completely gone. The damp forest swallowed up all sound in its sloughing floorboard. 

“It’s like faerie country or something,” Greg said.

“Like we’ll see the Huldufólk,” said Lauren.

Greg missed the reference, as he usually did when Lauren mentioned something esoteric. He liked Michael Crichton and 80s action movies; she was into the Latin American Boom and watched Bergman. He wore his emotions on his sleeve; she could draw her face into a blank. Until now, this had never bothered him. You needed both to build a relationship. Or at least he thought so.

Greg tried to empty his mind as they continued down the path. The trail was damp from days of drizzling rain, but the mud wasn’t out of control. He loved the squelch his feet made with each step. Lauren rubbed his palm the way she always did when she was excited. He tried to latch onto that feeling. Gripped her hand in response.

“Uphill, off we go!” Lauren called, and further uphill they went.

A fresh spat of rain started to fall, but he didn’t mind the cool mist. The woods looked all the more beautiful as pine and maple trees shed water. After a few more minutes, the rain calmed and a thick, amber fog welled through the forest. 

But Greg couldn’t stop thinking about the fundamental difference between him and his wife. It wasn’t that he was emotional, or that she was guarded. Nothing as simple as that. His vision grew weak in the gloom, barely registering an outcropping a few feet ahead. He took another step forward, ready for the rising ground to meet his foot, but his weight carried forward further than he expected. His boot clamped down into level earth and he almost toppled over. Lauren gripped his hand, helping him stay upright. 

He could just barely see her next to him, the ghostly orange fog flitting through her dark hair. His thoughts swirled with the fog. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her, that he was scared of being married. No, he resented her because she was comfortable in her skin. For weeks, he’d refused to acknowledge this because he couldn’t stand his own thoughts. It was as if the fog had blown away gauze that had been stretched over his brain.

The fog. It shifted slightly, let a few slivers of sunlight enter the swirling orange. Up ahead, he saw a clearing of trees strewn about in a semicircle. Was that a trick of the light, or was the flowing mist coming up from the ground there?

Greg shook his head. He didn’t care about that. Not with his blood suddenly running hot, relief pouring through him. He turned to his wife, ready to say ‘I’m sorry, I’ve only just understood this’ but he saw her eyes were sodden with tears. 

“Laur’, shit, are you okay?” he said.

“It’s just so beautiful.” Her mouth slackened, words coming out in a breathy drone. “Can’t you see?”

He squinted. Turned to take in his surroundings. Tried to see the trees, the strange hole in the ground.  Shifted his weight just slightly, leaning in to his wife. His boot skidded in the mud, giving him a vertiginous shock as his ankle gave way. He dropped Lauren’s hand, reached for a rain-slicked tree branch. His hand slid right off. He toppled over, the world suddenly summersaulting, and felt an ink-blot of pain balloon from his forehead as he smacked it on a stone.

As blackness encroached in on him, he dimly made out the stone for what it was. A statue. An insect several feet long, plunging out from the forest floor. He heard a great rustling and clicking around him as he blacked out.

Greg awoke in the hotel bathtub. Lauren was sponging mud from his shoulders.

“What?” he slurred.

“Shh it’s okay, you hit your head,” Lauren said. “Benny from the front desk is here. He helped carry you in.”

“You probably have a concussion,” said Benny from the front desk. 

Greg looked up at him.

“He used to be an EMT,” said Lauren.

“I checked your wound and you’re okay.” Benny spoke stiffly, like he was reading off cue cards. “It’s gonna leave a mark, though, and it’s gonna hurt. Just make sure you don’t sleep for more than a few minutes over the next eight hours or so. And no screens.”

Greg nodded. “Thank you, thanks,” he muttered. He felt like a child sitting in the tub.

“We’ve got ibuprofen, and maybe a line on something stronger if you need it,” Lauren sounded strange too. Impersonal. Or distant. Everything was jumbled, he couldn’t sort anything out.

Greg dimly heard Benny leaving, a soft thump indicating the door to their room closing.

“Thanks for not calling an ambulance,” he said. The bill would have eaten through everything they had left for the vacation. 

“Couldn’t have if I tried. The fog’s been coming in like crazy. They’re closing the roads down for the night.”

Greg looked down and a swarm of locusts covered his chest. New thoughts formed dimly in his mind, ones of clicking wings and descending proboscises. He looked up and saw an eye winking back through the fog, its lid rising to reveal a rusted pupil. It turned sluggishly, each second bringing it closer to Greg’s petrified vision. 

“Hey, wake up,” Lauren hissed. “You can’t sleep for too long, remember?”

“Shit,” he muttered. The warm water of the tub had lulled him to sleep. “What time is it?”

He pulled himself out of the bath and into a robe. He had no idea how long it had been since Benny left.

“It’s like 6:00 at night. You should come see this. It’s beautiful out there.” 

Greg followed her into the main room, and over to the back windows. What he took to be drawn blinds were in fact heavy carpets of the orange fog. He squinted, trying to picture the trailhead at the edge of the property. For a moment, he thought he saw the fog pouring out of it, sweeping out of the woods and onto the grounds. But he couldn’t see an inch past the windows. Whatever early evening sun shone behind the rainclouds was invisible, leaving the hotel wrapped in amber. He shivered as he realized how appropriate that word was. They were trapped like a bug frozen in amber.

“I, uh, I don’t know. It seems kind of scary, love. Why’s it orange?”

“It has to be.” She smiled and joined him by the window. 

He stared at her. Her tall, lean frame silhouetted by the swirling orange. What was she even talking about? An aching gap sat at the center of his thoughts. He knew that a realization came to him before he hit his head, something deep and thrilling. But when he thought about it, all he could picture was the stone bug on the forest floor. 

“I’m sorry I got a concussion on our fucking honeymoon,” Greg said.

Lauren let out a warm, genuine laugh. It shocked him. Felt like a different woman stood next to him, the one he’d been with all these years. Not whoever he had been talking to five minutes ago.

“That’s okay, dear,” she said. “It’s not like we can go outside anyways. And it’s very you.”

He pulled her close, burying his face in her hair. The edge of his forehead spasmed at the contact, and he gingerly touched the sore wound.

“Did you see anything out there, when I fell?” he said.

It was as if Lauren shifted as he said the words. Like her skin stretched against him.

“I saw the mist. The earth.”

“No, I mean the thing I hit my head on. The statue.”

His eyes blurred and Lauren guided him over to the bed. 

“How long until I can sleep?” Greg eased his body down.

“You’ve got a ways to go.”

“Keep me awake until then?”

Lauren didn’t respond, just nodded slightly, her hand running along his arm. It was strange to see her at a loss for words. She always had something to say. He lay back against the headboard and stared at her silhouette. There was the orange fog, the hotel bed, and his wife. If anything else existed in the world, he couldn’t think of it. He sat and waited until he could sleep.

Early the next morning, Greg woke to a rhythmic thumping on the wall. He had been dreaming of the locusts again. The eye above him moving forward, always forward. And with it something deep. New. Whatever it was had faded with the dream. 

The thumping continued against the window. He realized it was more of a tapping as he cast off the dream’s memory. A regular tap-tap-tapping at the window. He walked over to it, his head still throbbing with pain.

Greg leaned his forehead on the cold windowpane. Let the chilly glass soothe his head. Peered outwards. The fog hung just as thickly as the night before. And then something bounced off the glass, making him yelp and jump back. Looking out again, he understood why. The tapping came from a seemingly endless stream of insects bouncing against the window. They beat a steady, low rhythm against the glass.

“Laur’, you gotta see this,” he said, turning to face the bed. But was already up, her glowing phone bearing news of its own. She passed it to him soundlessly. 

Conditions were worse back in Philly. The news showed police in gas-masks patrolling empty streets. 

“They ordered a full lockdown,” Lauren said.

“Shit,” Greg said, scanning the article. “And it’s not a ‘shelter in place but you can go to the grocery store’ thing either.” The mandate was clear: do not leave your house, do not breathe the air.

Greg remembered Benny’s admonishment about screens. Read further anyway. The mayor had declared it an emergency, something that politicians up and down the eastern seaboard were doing. He paused in icy shock, staring at a picture of Baltimore Ave taken just blocks from their apartment. Somewhere in the blurry background, sitting underneath the overhang of a corner store, was a small stone statue of a locust.

“Fuck, we need to call our families,” Greg’s voice climbed up. He pulled out his own phone, furiously scrolling to his mom’s number. The line was dead. Service cut out.

“Lauren, let me see your phone,” he said. She handed it to him without a word. Again the call cut out. He flipped to the Philly Mag article she had just shown him. Blank. His neck muscles seized up.

“What. . . what’s happening?” The screen flashed white and cut out.

“They’ll be okay, you don’t need to worry.” Her tone came flat as static, her pale lips nearly smiling.

“What the fuck?” 

“Really, I mean it.” Her eyes moving back to the fogged windows. 

He took a breath. Closed his eyes. Told himself she was right. Service was down because of the fog. Things were bad back home, but really it wasn’t the end of the world. He heard a couple walking outside their room. Felt the contours of his feet on the hotel carpet. Smelled bacon coming from down the hall. 

“Okay, I guess it can’t be that bad, the hotel’s still serving breakfast.” A meal and a few cups of coffee. That would get him feeling right.

The breakfast hall was close to deserted, but the handful of families occupying the room reminded him of normalcy. They passed the kid from yesterday, sitting in silence with his parents. The staff made even less noise. They stood at the edge of the long hall, watching Greg and Lauren enter. An older waiter walked them to a table, gave a strange bow, and turned around. 

“What are we going to do?” Greg asked his wife. He took in the breakfast buffet’s meager provisions from their table.

Lauren’s eyes had found the bay windows at the end of the breakfast hall.

“Lauren?” he said.

“Hm?”

“I, I asked you what we’re going to do today?” He fought to keep his breathing slow.

Lauren nodded.

“We’ll hunker down and wait it out, darling,” she said with her thin, carnivorous smile.

Greg gawped as his wife calmly stood up and came from around the table. 

“It’s okay, Greg, I promise it’s okay,” Her tender voice didn’t match her suddenly sharp-lined face. “I didn’t think it would start so soon, I thought it would be another day. You’re just taking a little longer.”

As she closed the small gap between them, he saw with a jolt that her toes were sticking out of her shoes. The front lips had burst open, leaving her toes curling out. They looked longer somehow. Almost avian.

That was enough. He backed away. Saw the other people in the room stand and turn towards him. Heard a chorus of clicks from outside. Mind blank, he turned and barrelled out of the room. Benny stood in the hall outside, blocking the way to Greg’s room. The concierge’s suit split at the shoulders, letting out thin, long arms. Greg turned and sprinted in the opposite direction. Footsteps echoed down the corridor. He opened the first door he saw and tumbled outside. Into the fog. 

If yesterday’s forest had felt removed from the hotel, being out here now was like another planet. His lungs burned, and he remembered the wildfires and their smoke. Coughing, he felt around for the edge of the wall, the windowsill, the door. He touched nothing.

For a moment, Greg knew he was in another world. He was cut off, lost, adrift. Nothing around him, nothing up, nothing down. Everything was the same. All the same. It was like being lost at sea. A tiny buoy out in the middle of the Pacific. 

Something slim and boney brushed against his arm. He screwed his eyes shut, willing this fresh presence to leave him alone. Again it came, resting on his tightly coiled shoulders. Slowly, fastening his courage, he opened his eyes to confirm that it was Lauren’s hand. She stood outside behind him, seeming to tower upwards in the mist. For a sharp moment, Lauren appeared to grow far taller, dwarfing Greg below. He gaped at her and she shimmered. She reached out and he flinched backwards, losing his footing and falling over again. But he didn’t hit the grass. When he opened his eyes his head was nestled in the carpet of their hotel room. Lauren bent down above.

“Love, what, what are you doing to me?” His words were slurred. 

She looked down without comprehension.

“I’m doing nothing.”

He tried to pull himself upright and collapsed down, his head a hot air balloon tethered to his shoulders. Time seemed to stretch. He could see Lauren sitting next to him at a great distance. His vision strobed as her body seemed to extend. To grow. Then he was sure she had opened the door and disappeared into the fog. Its tendrils swept into the room. A flash of Lauren outside of the window, something descending from her mouth. No, not her mouth. That long ring wasn’t a mouth at all. And always the beating of the wings. The opening of the eye. 

The eye.

Lauren. 

The wings.

His vision cleared suddenly, the hotel room coming back into focus and his head emptying its pain. He had no idea how long he’d been out for. Hours? Days? The room around him was empty of anyone else. He stepped out into the hallway and found this empty too. When he reached the front desk and stood calling out for someone to hear him, nobody came. He went up to the bar, the breakfast hall. All were uninhabited.  

In the hall, a TV sprung to life in front of him. Images cycled through the screen, aerial shots of cities covered in sand and ash. He saw his own city, its skyscrapers buried halfway up. Everything was desiccated, sucked dry by great clouds of swarming insects. More mummified cities flitted by—Shanghai, Berlin, Cairo—before the screen cut to static. 

He stared at the static, waiting for terror to rise up inside him. But nothing came. He felt…nothing? No, not nothing. Greg felt peaceful. Relieved. His elbows itched, tugging at him. It almost felt like anticipation. 

The TV started its parade of images again, the same cities cycling through. He dimly recalled life before the past two days. It felt like a dream. Or somebody else’s life, certainly not his. His life was here, here in the dead hotel or out in the fog. Out amongst those new, transformed cities. He was reminded of the Cortázar story where a man dreams he is a Mesoamerican warrior, only to realize he is actually the warrior dreaming of a modern man. 

He shook himself upright. How had he thought of that story? He’d never read it. Lauren had. But “The Night Face Up” was lodged in his mind all the same. It was as if he’d read it a dozen times, just as she had. New memories sat within him, flashes of Lauren reading a tattered copy of Blow Up & Other Stories while her parents fought outside her bedroom door. A dog he had never met licked her hand. 

He smiled. 

He shared something new with his wife. 

Waves of happiness rolled through him as he thought about this new closeness. How could he have ever been in a rut with her? How could he have ever resented her? There was still so much for Greg to discover about her, to share with her. What a joy.

He walked back to their room and sat down on the bed. The fog was just as thick, but it had begun to look beautiful to him too. Those pulsing swirls of color, how had he ever thought it was just orange? Outside the kaleidoscope danced and cast their light on furniture that was now alien and useless to him.

A presence came down the hall, and he felt the whining creak of Lauren’s new, spindly body before she bent to enter the room. 

Had she always been this way? No, he told himself. She had been made into something new. She had not hidden her true form from him; she had undergone a metamorphosis.

He was reasonably sure of this. There were still parts of her that he couldn’t access. But that would come. Soon that would come and so much more with it.

And she loved him. He knew this was true. Could feel her emotions as strongly as his own. He felt the shifting of his organs, the cracking and growing of his new bones. None of it hurt, not with Lauren’s shining, rawboned face looking down on him. He was already forgetting the cruel loneliness of his old, stunted consciousness. 

She beckoned to him, and he rose, readying himself to walk on new limbs in a new world.