The Drowned Life by Jeffrey Ford Page A

kind you get for Chinese takeout, filled with tapioca pudding. He told me it was frog eyes, and I was young enough to believe it. I’d sit with him at the dining room table while he ate his heated-up leftovers. We’d sit in the dark in the dining room, and he’d say nothing. I’d eat the pudding slowly because as soon as I was done I was supposed to go to bed. One night, after he finished eating, he pushed back his plate, lit a cigarette, and told me, “I heard a radio show on the way home from work about ants.” I nodded. He said, “It was about these scientists who were studying a special kind of ant down in the Amazon jungle. They were interested in finding a queen ant to study, so they’d dig down into the ant burrows and find the queen’s nest. The queen is bigger than all the other ants, so she was easy to find. They then took the queen from this one nest and put it in their field box to take back to the lab they’d set up, which was a half mile away. But when they got back to the lab, they found the ant was not in the box. It had vanished. This happened to them three days in a row and they couldn’t figure out how the ant was escaping, since it was a plastic container with a snap-on lid that was always snapped shut when they’d go to open it. When they would go back to the ant hive the next day, they always found a new queen ant in the nest. Then one of the scientists got this crazy idea into his head that the queen ant they found every day was the same exact ant. Nobody believed him, so, when they collected the next queen, he marked it with a dot of blue dye. On the walk back to the lab, they checked the specimen box a couple times and the ant was inthere, but when they reached the lab, they opened the box and it was gone. The next day, back at the nest, they found a queen ant and it was marked with the blue dye. The only explanation they could come up with was that it had somehow teleported itself out of the box, passing through the plastic and across space and time, and reappeared in the nest. Eventually the local natives corroborated the fact that the queen of this type of ant had the power to disappear and appear wherever and whenever it wanted to.” My father looked at me and I nodded.
    â€œWhat do you think of that?” he asked.
    â€œHow?” I asked.
    â€œWell, the guy on the show said he thought it had developed this ability through evolution over millions of years as a defense mechanism.”
    â€œOh,” I said. I finished my pudding and went to bed.
    This is a very vivid recollection for me, and in later years I wondered what the hell this radio show was he’d been listening to. I remember that one other time when he came home and I waited up for him, he told me about a show he’d listened to where they spoke about the fact that Catholicism was actually based on a mushroom cult and that all the stuff in the Bible was a secret code for information and stories about sacred mushrooms.

UNDER THE BOTTOM OF THE LAKE
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    Under the bottom of the lake, in a grotto guarded by stalactites and stalagmites, like the half-open maw of a stone dragon, on a pedestal that’s a tall white mushroom, there sits a bubble of rose-colored glass, within which swirls a secret story, told once but never heard. It’s been there for so long that no one remembers its existence. I’m not even sure how I’m able to tell it, but then I’m not really remembering it, I’m making it up as I go, which allows me to know it all in the moment that it comes to me. Perhaps in the grotto of my imagination there was a glass bubble, containing a secret story, the story of, but not in, the bubble of rose-colored glass, and I have inadvertently knocked it over while groping blindly through my thoughts and now that story, the story about the grotto under the lake, has been released into my mind and I’m hearing the words of the tale now as I tell