6. Deep Calls to Deep

The Watery Places

“What about the aquarium?” Ishmael proposed. 

It was one of the deep places that Ishamel used to go to, but which he hadn’t been to in over a year because something frightening had happened to him there. He was suggesting it now because he thought that it might make a suitable location for their cult of the vaginal mystery. It had some open spaces for them to erect the human-sized, labial entrance, and they might even have enough room to construct some kind of extended vaginal canal in which the initiates could crawl in darkness into the dark confinement of the womb, so that once in there, they might experience the “Mother” as both nourisher and protector and simultaneously as her contradiction of over-proximal smotherer.Ishmael wasn’t sure what the point of this would be yet, but he intuitively knew that contradiction was important for the “mystery” part of mystery cults. And, also, maybe, mystery cults didn’t need a point, maybe, their unreadable ambiguity was the point. 

“I thought that you said that that place had toxic algae blooms and toxic mold growing everywhere.” Julien said. 

The Aquarium had once been something that folks had come to see from all around, and therefore, it was the last public project to be abandoned. Well after most people had left the zone, the aquarium’s employees continued to drive back into the zone, which was a near suburb of the city, from whatever further out suburb they had moved to, to report to the mostly unattended tourist attraction. They knew that the end was inevitable after the strange insect situation proved intractable to science, but they had loyalty to the aquarium since many of them had been there from its genesis twenty years prior and had become something like a family to each other. They had bought into the mission of the aquarium of bringing the enchanting diversity of aquatic life to the Midwest in order to build a greater appreciation for it among the general population. The staff also developed an immediate affection for the fishthemselves, and they loved showing off those populations that were indigenous to the Great Lakes and its local tributaries. Having spent almost twenty years near large tanks of water and their tranquil, but vibrant residents, it was difficult to adjust to “civilian” life. Most of them would never feel significant or even valued at work again. 

“Yeah, but I think we’ll be able to clean at least one of the wings well enough to use it for the diorama. I found a huge stash of bleach the other day in a backroom of the library’s basement,” Gabriel said. 

The Aquarium, like the library, had been “guarded” by half-hearted security for a time after the building had been locked up. But as soon as they left, it became a target for urban-explorer Youtubers filming themselves for their “Ruin-Porn” channels. They got in easily and immediately and started posting videos. Most of the fish were still there and the giant aquariums were still running to the shock and amazement and delightful horror of social media. Dedicated workers must have been getting back in to maintain the place somehow since the utilities had been left on and the fish had never been moved.  

“We all have our masks with us since we were planning on exploring today, so let’s go check it out,” Joshua said. Even amid the difficulties with his phallus, he was still an enthusiastic team player. 

Directly after the first urban explorers posted their first videos, the hits on the “Eerie Abandoned Aquarium” posts were astronomical, which spawned a mad rush of other Youtubers breaking in, to film themselves next to the giant tanks and the mysterious, but native, bug populations of the zone. Soon poachers of exotic fish, crustations, mollusks, jellyfish, and amphibious reptiles came and looted them, including the larger ones like the midsized sharks and the giant flounders, sunfish, groupers, tuna, and marlin. No videos ever emerged of how that was done, but it must’ve involved diving gear, coordinated heavy lifting, and large equipment. There was apparently nothing any of the former workers could do to stop them without revealing themselves or putting themselves in danger. And maybe they thought that the fish would be better off going to whatever wealthy collector would buy them on the black market because they knew that they wouldn’t be able to keep things going at the aquarium indefinitely.  

One of the larger 12-foot sharks died during its extraction. The poachers left it to rot on the floor. It dried out in a weird way that sort of preserved it, sort of like how saints’ bodies don’t rot after they die, which incidentally gets to count as one of their three miracles. It seemed to be swimming along the floor in a menacing manner because of the dim lighting along the hall of tanks. It took some courage to walk up to it, and the terror wasn’t reduced any by seeing its harmlessness in death because for some reason its jaws and jagged teeth were extended beyond its mouth, so that it looked like it was either still dying in pain or ready to pounce on its prey. The gums were rancid with black rot and horrid with unending rage. It had been grimacing that way on the floor the second to last time that Ismael had been there. And it was inexplicably missing when he arrived on the day of his last visit, which made the long hall to the large central tank more ominous than usual. It seemed to Ismael that the creature may be lurking around somewhere waiting for its prey. 

“I thought you said that there was something in the main tank that terrified you ‘worse than any darkness you’ve ever entertained,’ and that you were never going back,” Gabriel said subtly mocking Ishmael’s melodramatic phraseology. 

“Yes, but I’ve got to face, whatever it was. It’s my White Whale.” Ishmael had clearly lost himself in the part again. 

“A little too on the nose there, don’t you think?” Gabriel sardonically wondered aloud, and Ishmael was instantly humiliated out of his oceanic fantasies and into new ones about drowning in self-loathing. 

The Aquarium's utilities were never shut off, except for the gas. But people stopped going there because the tanks were never emptied of their water, and the filtration systems broke, so they became cesspools of toxic sludge. The smell was unbearable, and Youtubers mostly stayed away after a certain point because it was thought that the miasma was not only awful, but that it was poisonous to breathe. So, by the time Gabriel had begun his regular visits, it was again abandoned. He dipped cotton swabs in Listerine and shoved them up his nose, and then immediately regretted it. The Listerine burned his sinuses and made him drunk on the fumes, so he had to switch them out for some unadulterated cotton and the respirator masks that they all wore when exploring buildings that might have noxious air trapped within. The odor was so strong that it still got through whatever barriers Ishmael erected, but it was bearable for the intervals that he stood in rapped awe of the main tank at the center of the facility each day prior to seeing the horrible obscurity that he thought he had seen moving behind the algae and general slime of the two million gallon, glass cylinder. 

“Okay, let’s check it out.” Michael said as if he was retroactively agreeing with them as they had already silently changed direction and were walking towards the Aquarium. 

Ishmael had seen the toxic mold growing in its variously colored colonies all over the carpet when he had visited by himself well over a year ago. With the bleach and the masks, and if they kept the doors open, maybe they could get some non-toxic air in there. They’d have to keep the doors open, at least when they were using the bleach, and that would certainly draw attention to their activities there. The trads would take note, but the cartel would have to take their stand somewhere. It didn’t really seem like secrecy was much of an option anywhere, so that part of the “mystery” of their mystery cult was not going to be able to be preserved. However, since they would no longer be quite such a direct, sex cult anymore, they could now be mysterious in a different direction. It was the indirection of abstract expression in their developing ritual practices that would thwart the trads’ perversion, and their own.  

“Could we start calling the vagina diorama the ‘alter’?” Ishmael asked the group seeming recovered from his fit of self-loathing. 

“It not really a sacrifice.” Gabriel replied. 

“Yes, it is. We’re sacrificing the phallus,” Michael said. 

“Well, I hope so,” Gabriel said pointedly. 

“No, we’re sacrificing the ‘Male Position’” Julien said. “But, yeah, we can call it an ‘alter.’” Julien said apparently speaking for the group as she often did.  

Julien then tried to clarify that the male position was the problem and not necessarily the phallus per se. She said, “The phallus is not a problem when it’s a penis. It’s only a problem when it’s the signifier of the male position. The male position imagines having the phallus as having it “All,” in the Lacanian sense of whole and complete. Even if the one in the male position is currently castrated, that one imagines that there are those who do have the phallus, and that, that one’s castration is only a temporary humiliation that can be overcome if the phallus were obtained.”  

Ismael farted. It was an accident. He had been trying to let it out slowly. He hoped that they would think it was something else or someone else.   

Julien only paused momentarily to discern what it was, and then she began again, “The Imaginary is the unavoidable illusion of wholeness necessary to have the impression of a complete object whether that be a phenomenal or a conceptual object. We must imagine the world as objects, or as wholes, with a “w,” to have a phenomenal world at all, but we forget that it is our own intention that makes objects from the relations of wholes and parts. The world is a continual process and like Heraclitus’s River, never self-identical, but we imagine flows as completed wholes to grasp them even as they are slipping through our fingers. Original sin is the necessary denial of lack implicit to the object. Objects that appear as whole, appear that way because retroactively they have frozen what is an ongoing becoming, and this ceaseless cascade of being is what forms the Lacanian Real’s resistance to symbolization or to concepts, and its resistance to thinking in general that Hegel’s called ‘Absolute Knowing’ or the ‘absolution’ of knowing, which you might think of as the retroactivity of knowing dissolving into the unknowable presence of the flow of becoming.” 

The group still wasn’t quite able to follow Julien’s reasoning. But they loved it when she spoke. They had kept walking when she started, but without communicating, they had simultaneously stopped and stared zombie-like at her as if she were casting a spell. But she wasn’t. She was trying to get some things clear for herself. Her magic was an accident, and she had a complicated relation to it. It was a miracle for them but not for her. 

It made her dislike them at times because at some point the illusion had been broken for her and she knew that someday it would for them as well. It didn’t please her any more to be adored in this way, but she used their adoration anyways as her unconscious authority to settle disputes among them and at times to reassure herself when she was falling apart. But their love for her, like every necessary illusion, was a double-edged sword. She used this same love to beat herself with as soon as she had gotten out of a rough internal turn. She cycled through using their love to build herself up and then beating herself up with its falsity when she felt that she had elevated herself too high. For those too thoughtful for their own good, like Julien, the psychosis of belief always redounded to the neurosis of self-loathing. 

This sort of disillusionment is something that can only happen to someone who knows they are revered and knows that this sort of idolatrous reverence is always false. Those who have never felt revered, will often imagine themselves disrespected and uncared for, and will cultivate a sort of psychotic belief in false forms of reverence and callow displays of love as a weak defense against the nihilism of self-loathing. But those who truly feel revered, if theirintelligence is overly acute, then they might see that reverence doesn’t work. It is the same way with all necessary illusions of wholeness, sometimes called the “phallus.” When the mystic dissolves her sense of wholeness, or of the “ego,” it is then that she sees the horror of the absolute incompleteness that resists all wholes, sometimes called the “The Dark Night.”  But this lack of wholeness, or lack of having the phallus, is neither self-loathing nor nihilism, but the allusive position of what Lacan called “Feminine Jouissance.” 

Julien had stopped speaking. But nobody spoke because the aura of their fantasies was still surrounding her. She looked magnificent clothed in nubile wisdom. They wanted to worship her and bed her. All this struggle to define a new way of being, they would’ve gladly handed it over to her. All that was missing within them had been projected onto her. Her radiant, mahogany skin; arched, blacked eyebrows; and deep brown, crescent-shaped eyes gleamedbehind her luxurious black lashes as she spoke. They were all beautiful from certain angles, in their own ways, but she was always and from every angle sublime, which was both gorgeous and terrifying to behold. Their creeping brokenness waxed and waned according to the concepts through which they were viewed, but her luminosity never seemed to wane. Unbeknownst to them this wasn’t love. 

In high school Julien had been aggressively encouraged to play basketball because she was tall and graceful, but she used her grace to dance instead. After she had joined the dance club, and the group gave a recital, the auditorium was uncharacteristically invaded by teenage boys. It didn’t flatter her because it was too much of the wrong kind of attention. She quit during her second recital. She had to talk herself into the second one saying, “I won’t be able to see their gaze when I'm under the lights and in the flow of my routine.” But she imagined it anyways, and it was too intrusive a thought to continue, so she walked off in the middle of her routine, much to the chagrin of her male gazers.  

It wasn’t that their gaze was the so called “Male Gaze” of the cinema in which the camera focused on its subject in such a way as to consume her. Julien did not feel that how they ogled her curvaceous body and sultry movements was a gaze of dominance or of patriarchal control over her. They did not imagine that they were entitled to her. She knew that they were looking at what was in her more than her, or at what wasn’t her at all, which was what they couldn’tpossess about her, but what she appeared to possess about them. She was terrified of this “control” because she saw herself as a child and a dancer, and not as whatever it was about her that enthralled them. She knew that they both relished and resented this the lack of control that they felt in themselves when they searched her body for whatever it was that possessed them about her. She didn’t know it consciously yet, but she knew intuitively that what they feltwas the same lack of self-mastery in themselves that made all callow men misogynists. Their pornographic stares imposed a salacious, internal gaze into her thoughts that sat like a blathering incubus in her head. 

Mariam spoke first after the strange interregnum of Julien’s silence. She thought she had understood something of what Julien had said in a new way.   

“We’ve never been in the feminine position. All this pretending at knowing is the masculine seeking after the phallus,” she said. “Even..., especially..., me. The healer is a masculine position, even though the Big Other associates it with women. I’ve internalized the role of the healer from the Big Other as my feminine phallus, not my feminine jouissance.” 

Johanna then surprised them again by joining the normally more exclusive conversations about theory. “Yes, I’ve been thinking about exactly this. What is feminine jouissance? It’s the enjoyment of not-having. Lacan used the female mystics to demonstrate feminine jouissance because they didn’t obtain anything from the Dark Night, it was a radical ‘not-having.’ They weren’t on Joseph Campbell’s ‘Hero’s Journey’ because they didn’t come back with a boonbut with a threat, the threat of lack of mastery, both over the self and of the Big Other over its subjects. And the Church knew it was a threat and suspected and condemned them because of the poverty or lack that they preached. Unlike the other medicants they couldn’t be taken into the structure of the Church because their poverty wasn’t a rejection of the Church per se but a sort of radical embrace of it that made the Church’s lack apparent.”  

Unexpectedly Joshua spoke, “But this sort of lack is such a precarious position to be in because it can easily slip into the phallus of not-having the phallus, like the ascetics who enjoyed not-having to the point of pride.” He seemed to gather himself and then said, “My phallus is a hedge against that particular peril. You all think that I take this strap on dildo as a phallus, but I don’t. It isn’t for you, but for how my unconscious has internalized your gaze. My unconscious made a choice about my gender before I knew what gender was because it was already imagining gender as a way in which others imagine themselves in relation to the others. My unconscious takes this strap on as what my gender is, which is both the failure of gender and the excess in me that is beyond gender. Of course, I still imagine how you see me with this thing. I imagine that you see me as either incredibly naive or psychotic, which is enjoyableand disparaging at the same time. But my unconscious needs a penis that fails to be a penis because it never fails, and what is better than a dildo for this failure of failure because it is always erect, and thus the perfect phallus. Like the mystics who undermined the Church by taking it too seriously, the dildo undermines the penis by its unfailing potency.” 

The twists of logic here were becoming fascinating and Joshua’s artful approach to his phallus was wonderful, but they also bemoaned the loss of Joshua’s previously perceived artless genuineness at the same time as theyappreciated his sardonic ingenuity.  

Not knowing what to make of Joshua’s disposition, but imagining that he might have discovered the true feminine jouissance of the dildo, Mariam began to say what she knew about the feminine jouissance of the middle ages without much of a transition, “The Beguines were single females who often took the roles of healers in their society's secular lives, like healthcare workers and domestic servants, but also other traditionally feminine roles like textile workers and tutors. Like me, except they weren’t using their feminine ‘not-having’ as a phallus.” She figured that the last part of what she said sort of tied in with whatever Josua had said about his phallus, so she said it again with additional pathos and clear regret for what she perceived to be her fall into the male position, “they weren’t using their feminine lack as a phallus.” 

“Who knows..., if they were human beings, they probably were using their self-concepts that way. We all have an Imaginary register. It is the necessary illusion of wholeness that we need to operate in the world. Be easy on yourself, my love,” Julien said. “Just know that, however it is that you imagine others imagine you, that is what pushes you into the “male position,” which I think was better named by Lacan as the “All” position because he thought that it was the pervert’s belief that one could have it all. But what is significant about this “all” is that it is always through representation that one signifies having it “all.” In the all position, one disavows the mediation of a performance or of the Symbolic and believes in their performance or however they representant wholeness as if it were immediately true.” 

“It’s a desperate sort of belief,” Mariam said. “You're always fighting against your doubt because you believe in the possibility of a perfect performance, so that when you inevitably fail, you blame yourself and never the lack within the Symbolic itself. I hated myself for my lack of self-mastery, but as it turns out self-mastery doesn’t exist because the Big Other doesn’t exist, except as the necessary illusion of the mastery of the Symbolic performance.” 

“Our wise and beautiful healer has become sublime by knowing what can’t be known, which is the gap of the Real between being and knowing, or being and ‘having,’ as Lacan put it,” Julien said. “It is your willingness to fall into this gap for the sake of love that will define our trip into the Dark Night. All shall be well..., all manner of things shall be well...,” Julien continued, “it’s alright to fall into the error of a phallic performance of identity. It’s a part of love’s journey into the Cloud of Unknowing for the sake of the Other. This unknowing, this failure of knowing is our freedom from the performance of identity and from the necessary illusion of the Big Other.” 

They began to walk again because it seemed like something had been resolved, but nobody knew what. As they walked Ishmael thought aloud saying, “We could empty the tanks of their putrid liquids with some of the tubes and pumps that I had seen lying around.” He knew how to empty the tanks because he had had to empty the pools at the abandoned Ramada Inn to skate it with his “other friends,” as the Cartel called them, and so he told them about how he had acquired his expertise. 

“Although it isn’t common in the Midwest,” Ishmael continued, “the Ramada has California-style pools, both indoor and outdoor, so their ten-foot deep, deep-ends have steep but skateable transitions,” he proclaimed without clearly making the connection between his knowledge of how to empty pools and how to skate in them. He could not recognize when he wanted them to think of him in a certain way yet. He did not know that he was telling the story of skating the Ramanda Inn’s pools because he desired their admiration of his athletic abilities and of his participation in the skater subculture, partially to make up for his constant sense of incompetency and partially because he just wanted them to think that he was cool.  

But they did know that. And they were annoyed by him as they traipsed down the street in the late midday heat caked in the sticky citronella mixture that amplified the sun and made it feel as though they were frying in cooking oil. Ishmael could not read their expressions even though he had developed the habit of excessively checking them for disapproval because of his many faux pas in the past. He had read that what he had developed was called “Rejection Sensitivity Dysphoria” by the “Psychology Industrial Complex.”  

But this hyper delicacy to disapproval didn’t help him to read others when he was caught up in his revelries, and so he continued, “We can’t drop in on shallow ends of either pool because they are pretty much straight vert, but you can use your momentum from the deep end to ride up the walls of the shallow ends if you hit them at an angle and not straight on,” he told the uninterested cartel. “You can keep a continuous figure eight line going for as long as you have the stamina.” He stopped finally realizing the disjunction between his interests and theirs.  

Not even kind-hearted Mariam pretended to care about his skating expeditions at the Ramada. Ishmael had really emptied the Ramada Inn’s pools and skated them with his skater friends, but it was still a fantasy, a fantasy that the others did not buy into. Fantasy was his default way of encountering the world because the so called “real world” did not yield the sort of satisfactions that he sought from it. The Cartel felt that he should have grown out of his youthful enthusiasms by now that he was in his mid-twenties, and Ishmael felt that too in longer and more frequent durations.  

What they did not know was that they were all caught up in fantasies of various kinds because their “real world” was made up of their fantasies and of the collisions of their fantasies with the Real’s resistance to their fantastical intentions, which was where their intentions fell into contradiction with each other’s and where their individual intentions fell into contradiction with themselves. For Ismael the Real was what mocked his desire for them to see him as a mystic, a prophet, and a cool skater guy. What was hard for him to see was that this failure was his freedom from any of those identities.  

He thought that if he stayed on guard, he wouldn’t slip. He wouldn’t fall into his strange reveries. He could have them imagine him the way that he indented them to. But he was wrong about that. His lack of self-mastery was from the Real within him that refused to fit into whatever identity he fantasied for himself, but there was nowhere for him to hide himself from the Real of his lack. Ishmael had internalized their disfavor, but their imagined admonishmentscame too late, only arriving after he had already overspilled himself, which was the way in which his lack was a lack of containment for his too-muchness. Their disapprobation had been absorbed but not in a way that served his desire for their love, but only for his barely hidden desire for their displeasure and for his own desire to be displeasing to himself, which was the freedom given by the failure that Freud called the “Death Drive.”  

Ishmael enjoyed the times when he could feel their various madnesses because it lessened the sting of how he usually imagined them as whole and complete. When they overspilled themselves in their psychotic commitment to one quixotic endeavor or another, it made him feel sane in comparison, and it temporarily relieved him of the impression of their authority.  

When Ismael had first breached the threshold of the Aquarium, it was winter outside, and it had been at least six months since anyone had gone it there, but he wasn’t sure if all the visitors had left for good. Sometimes folkssettled in weird places in the zone, and buildings that you’d expect to be abandoned could contain strange and often hostile inhabitants, many not human, like packs of feral dogs, cats, raccoons, possums, and of course, mice and rats. All of them were dangerous, especially if you surprised them, especially if they didn't want to be found. 

In the months that he had made his daily visits to the Aquarium to stare into the abyss, he had never seen anyone, but he suspected that there were others lurking behind the scenes. He went there because of the vast emptinesses contained in the tanks. Their waters were murky with incomprehensible machinic processes like the primordial, aquatic abyss of the young Earth. Their depths overflowed with too much potential to form any higher order possibilities..., yet. But he thought that the actual possibilities of the stagnant waters included prokaryotes, eukaryotes, and mycoplasmas because he had taken biology before his high school was closed. While the waters did not move, the occasional air flows and the sunlight from the huge glass dome that covered the main room and spread out through the corridors and their skylight tributaries brought in new flows of airborne, microbial intensities and of the chromatic energies of the sun producing simple but nonetheless living things in the possibility spaces of the watery abyss.  

Ishmael had thought of the teaching in the Bible in which Jesus talked about a man who had his demon cast out only to have that demon return with his friends because the demon had found his home swept clean. Maybe it is like that with all exorcisms, or “deterritorializations,” as Felix Guattari liked to call them. When bodies are made smooth, cancer blooms. Cancer’s evil is that it is an endless production of the same to the detriment of any other produce. And it’s like any parasite because cancer eventually runs out of whatever machinic flows it fed on, at which point something else blooms from the parasite’s corpse. And the question of toxicity is relative. Ismael thought about getting into the tank with all of those living poisons, but they were only poisons relative to him. He would die, and he would become like them, an oozing cascade of reterritorializing violence tearing apart what had become striated into the more basic flows of seeping things.  

When Ishmael had gazed into these constructed oceans of watery slime, he had imagined the actual possibilities of chains of molecules that had temporarily adopted life’s strategies of persistence within a boundary of some sort. He saw life as the production, reproduction, and maintenance of the boundaries of transient identities as he had been taught in biology about “Markov Blankets.” He knew that the maintenance of machinic processes within the boundaries of Markov Blankets was a futile game, but it was the futile game of life, which was the losing battle between an intention and its representation. Arthur Schopenhauer had taught that “Will” intends to be represented but that representation necessarily fails, and thus the meaning of the Universe is dissatisfaction. Ishmael knew that life was bound to fail to keep the boundaries of its identities because each individuated form of life would be torn apart by thedifferent intentions of other objects, and then finally by the ineluctable ultimacy of the second law of thermodynamics itself, which is the final intention of the Universe for self-annihilation. The productive, molecular relations contained within all possible “Markov Blankets” would dissipate into the expanding void. Whatever entropy’s “clumpy” distribution of matter had given, it would take away in the ever-growing distances between these clumps and between the clumps of matter’s most basic components.  

The bare life within the colorful but translucent boundaries of the vast tanks tore at each other to maintain their “high above equilibrium,” illusions of “steady states” by eating the machinic relations momentarily contained within other fleeting objects. This is what the Deep spoke to itself, and what Ishmael overheard in those disgusting possibility spaces. The Deep is a Deleuzian “Body without Organs,” but it grows its organs quickly and then discards them becoming “smooth” again. And when this smoothness becomes “striated” with the structures of other machinic processes some catastrophe will make it smooth again in unending cycles, until the possibility spaces of any possible possibility spaces are torn apart by the entropy that made them. 

The impending doom of the end of all possible bodies bloomed in his chest as the group neared the Aquarium, and he remembered how fear had gripped him whenever he had entered and had only increased throughout his visits in the past until he was forced by fear to flee. It was curiosity that had compelled him to enter and dread that had compelled him to leave. Why had he suggested that they come here? Why had they agreed to come? Something wanted them there. Or was it just the paranoia of his growing psychosis?  

When they finally arrived, it looked dark even though it was daytime. The trees were tall and full and blocked out the sun. As they came into the courtyard, the smell of the place presented itself as something heavy with organic decay and natural poisons. They put on their masks in unison without speaking. They knew these sorts of smells, but this one felt more powerful than any of the others because it was too thick and deep to be recognizable. They often thought that they knew what each other were thinking because they had spent so much time together, but now they were unsure. The unknowing was thick in this place to the point of numinousity. Well, this cloud of unknowing was either thick with numinousity, or it was heavy with the chemicals of deterritorialization. And this chemical terror pumped through their veins like drinking hard liquor on an empty stomach.  

The stone facade had blackened with filth and fungi and dark vines that somehow remained even as the looming trees had blocked out the sun. Because of the relatively recent construction of the aquarium complex, none of the windows had fallen out yet, but they were black with soot and seemed to want to deliberately hide whatever was going on in there. The translucent, fiber glass ceilings were also intact if the somewhat visible dome of the central atrium were any indication. But while the sophisticated, modern plastics of the sky-light ceilings and dome had done well, a yellow-green film coated their inside surfaces, and massive trees now partially obscured what had been the aquarium’s unobstructed place in the sun. 

The huge copper and glass doors were unchained and opened a crack. But not much was visible through them because of the inner darkness and black vines that covered them. But there was nothing that any of them could do about going in or not, it was a horror too beautiful to resist.