Erik has made up his mind to not climb back into the cabin. He’ll stay right where he is until Beau lets him know what’s up.
He’s glad he’s not the kind of psychotic that gets unreasonably antsy during an episode.
“Are you kidding?” the other Erik asks him, as if he can read his thoughts. Since they’re sharing the same brain, he probably can. “We were antsy as fuck in the cabin.”
“So, it’s wearing off?” he asks.
“It’s better out here.”
He spits into the water, and squints at himself, asking, “Can we at least figure out what happened? What do you remember?”
“I told you, I remember yelling,” the other Erik says. “We need to talk to the rest of the crew to know for sure what it was, and they ain’t talkin’.”
Erik knows that by ‘the rest of the crew’ he’s not talking about the other people on the boat, he’s talking about the other Eriks.
“How do we get them to talk?” he asks.
The cuttlecrab in his lap speaks up. “Remember, we were witness. We can tell you what happened.”
“Oh, right!”
“Do you wish to know?”
“Yeah. I think I’m ready for it,” he replies.
“Where would you like us to start?”
He shrugs, and suggests, “Let’s just talk about today. I’ve got the broad strokes of the trip in my head. I just need a refresher on what went down today. What was the last straw?”
“What does ‘the last straw’ mean?” the cuttlecrab asks.
“You share my head, and you don’t know what that means?”
“We do not.”
“Huh,” he stares off at the shore for a moment. “Well, OK. The full saying is ‘the last straw that broke the camel’s back’. I think it’s a reference to a story about someone heaping straw on a camel’s back until the camel’s back breaks. Do you need to know what a camel is?”
“It is something with a back that can break,” it replies.
He nods, and explains, “The point is that while it’s all of the straw that broke the camel’s back, it’s really the last straw that mattered. If it had never been placed there, the camel’s back might never have broken.”
“Interesting.”
“I notice that you be saying that,” he looks down at the little creature.
“We wish to express that we are learning,” it says.
“Yeah. Makes sense. So, start with this morning. I’m not sure I have a clear image of that, or anything after,” he prompts it. “But, tell me what set me off, and then what set Beau off, if you can.”
“We will do so,” the cuttlecrab says, and then begins to describe what it saw through Erik’s eyes, and through the senses gifted to it by Phage. And Erik’s memories start to come back.
Or maybe he’s switched with the Erik who was there, and he’s a different person again.
—
There were five bodies on Trinity, and four full berths. Every morning before this, Erik had woken up across the aisle of the central part of the cabin from Beau. But with the extra bodies aboard, he got the smallest bed last night, the quarter berth in the back. Or aft.
Apparently, Beau had rigged the cushions to be removable, and a hatch could be added so that the space could be better used for storage – stowage? – on longer trips away from shore. Usually the boat was most comfortable with only two people in it, and if they eventually planned on taking Rräoha and the Murmuration around the world, they’d need every cubic inch they could get for rations.
But Beau hadn’t removed the cushions or added the hatch for this trip because they were just going up and down the West coast, and “it might be nice to have the extra sleeping space. You know, for guests.”
And low and behold, last night there’d been guests! And they’d stayed the night. And Erik, being the smallest, got to sleep in the cubby hole that was right behind the nav station.
Even for his small frame, getting into bed had been a mildly claustrophobic act for Erik, but he’d managed, telling himself he’d get to escape the situation in the morning.
And then he’d closed his eyes and imagined he was on the top deck instead, and had just been able to fall asleep that way. The slow gentle sway of the boat had, at least, been pleasant.
Being in a small place wasn’t really the problem. It was feeling stuck there, and the one nice thing about that sleeping cubby was that it was right next to the exit of the cabin. So, if he really needed to get some fresh air, it wasn’t all that far away.
And then, after strange dreams about running from birds on a sea shore, he awoke to the garlicky and buttery smell of breakfast being cooked.
Erik knew it was Beau.
Beau had been getting up first every day and making breakfast. Sometimes it had been oatmeal. Sometimes cold cereal and coffee. But this smelled like something having to do with eggs. And also coffee.
Eager to see the extent of it, Erik reached up to the upper edge of the cubby he was in and pulled himself out of it, carefully sitting up in the process to avoid bonking his head on the navigational console.
He looked over to see Beau tending to a big fat omelet in the largest pan he had on board. It might very well be enough for five stomachs all on its own.
“Hey, Handsome,” Beau said, glancing over and giving Erik a little smile. “How did you sleep in there?”
“Eh,” Erik managed to moan before looking about the cabin.
The navigation console blocked his view of half of it, but immediately visible was the skinny human burrito of Planks wrapped up on the port side berth. So, he leaned over and craned his neck to see if he could glimpse Meridian on the other bench.
He could see their feet propped up on the wall that separated the dining area from the bathroom, or ‘head’ as Beau kept calling it.
The table that took up the middle of the cabin was folded up to let people walk freely through the aisle to get to whatever part of the boat they needed to. Until it was unfolded, it formed a wide banister between the two benches that doubled as berths.
And on that table-become-banister were arrayed five paintbrushes.
It looked like besides Beau, Erik was the only one awake.
Murmur was up front in the V-berth, out of sight, which is also where Beau had slept, to give their guests the main cabin.
Hanging to the side of his cubby to lean outward, Erik stared at the brushes and wondered if they had some special sailor’s name for them, like everything else did. Beds were berths. Bathrooms were heads. Sails were yards. And those were the easier terms to remember. What were paint brushes, then?
Erik could tell Beau had been going light on the jargon, for the benefit of the landlubbers he’d accepted into his home, and that that was against his nature. It was obvious, especially with a few stuttered phrases, that Beau had a whole language he was used to using for the tall ship tours he did for a living that he was trying to keep from uttering here. But when it came to terms for parts of the boat, Beau insisted on the correct words.
Which made sense. That was OK. It was educational, if nothing else.
But the whole thing made Erik feel like he was now living with a completely different person than the one he’d met online and gotten to know in Portland.
And, of course, what did he expect? One of the reasons they’d clung so strongly to each other so fast was because Beau was plural, too.
Beau was a different person right then.
It was just a bit shocking to encounter the clearest evidence of his plurality in a setting where the other Beaus weren’t likely to resurface much for another month and a half.
Plurality worked differently for every system, and Erik knew that.
Murmur had over a hundred and fifty members now, many of them introjects and happy to remain below the surface except for when encountering their sources. Fictives, mostly, they’d come forward during movies or T.V. shows to recite their lines. Brock was one of their few that came forward and made an effort to become their own person, and had become sort of a celebrity in their system and plural safe social groups.
Sarah and Goreth were very similar, otherwise, in that they switched frequently, fluidly, and could seem to be obvious in who they were by voice and mannerisms. However, they were a very small system and had no fictives.
But, where Murmur had very little trouble with amnesia, it was clear that Sarah and Goreth were struck with pretty significant episodes of it on occasion, and had altered their daily habits to accommodate. They wrote a lot to their social media, often about the most mundane things or trivial thoughts. And then they could use comments and reactions to prompt them to revisit their old posts and piece together things they might have forgotten about.
They said they felt like they were co-conscious a lot of the time, and didn’t really have that much in the way of memory problems. However, it seemed obvious that what they perceived of their experiences and how those experiences shaped their lives were two very different things. They’d habitually accommodated themselves without realizing it.
Also, while Murmur had a lot of system members, they weren’t the ones with subsystems, groups of system members with something in common and a better sense of communication between them than with the rest of the system. Sarah and Goreth were. It’s just that those subsystems didn’t really show themselves until they’d started picking up new system members who then fell into them.
Oh, and where Sarah and Goreth’s system tended to switch frontrunners every few hours, maybe according to their social situation, but could bring individuals forward for seconds or minutes at a time to participate in a conversation or deal with a task they were particularly suited for, Murmur just kept fluidly shifting. You never knew who was going to talk next.
All of it, both of them, alien shit when it came to Erik.
Being blurry and basically a median system the vast majority of the time, and becoming fractured during his psychotic episodes, made Erik feel like he ultimately had very little in common with them both, when it came to plurality. But, they all shared the same lingo, and the same philosophies regarding consciousness, identity, and mental illness. So they were still some of the easiest people to be around that Erik had ever found.
And then there was Beau, who’d also known all the right words, and had some great insights into the plural experience, and how to apply that politically, even. But next to Erik, he really seemed like a singlet most of the time.
But now it was completely obvious.
Beau switched according to his environment. If he was in a coffee shop, or a bar, or visiting a friend’s house, he was one kind of Beau. And if he was on a boat, he was another kind of Beau. And, now that Erik thought about it, when Beau was driving a car, he was yet another kind of Beau.
Anyway, it was good to see this in his boyfriend now, and understand better how he worked.
But, not sharing a berth, and having to share this boat with three other bodies as well as his boyfriend, when it really was designed for four at most when at shore, and most comfortable for only two, had been kind of a big hit to his mood. Especially following the whole debacle regarding their miscommunications about the world tour.
Still, that should be small stuff. Temporary. They’d talked and come to a better understanding of how they should talk to each other about big things like that. Or, at least, Erik thought they had.
But, despite his best intentions, the sensory load of being on the boat, coupled with the complete disruption of any of his routines and comforts, was turning out to be a bigger burden than he’d reckoned for.
Possibly as a result of that, he’d felt something bad building in his core since setting sail. And that something had no outlet.
Trinity, the boat, was supposedly built to allow for solo sailing, and Beau had installed a few extra tools to help with that. But Beau, maybe on the grounds that they were training to make a cross ocean trip of some sort in the future, had insisted that they weren’t just passengers, but crew. And crew had work to do.
And with the brushes laid out as they were, it looked like he included guests in that assessment? Sure, they were both sailors as well, but, really?
He’d been assigning tasks like he was boss. And it was his boat, so his rules applied. But the work was hard, and new, and sometimes scary.
When they were tacking and the boom had to swing to a new position, Erik always became so tense.
And there were times the whole boat tipped way to the side and felt like it was going to fall completely over, and it was supposed to do that. But when it did that, they were all supposed to move to the upward side of the boat, for safety and to keep it balanced, and if they were supposed to do that too, maybe it wasn’t so safe.
So, there’d been some tense moments, and Beau had raised his voice. Maybe just to be heard over the wind and all that, but he’d sounded so pissed. And Erik still felt the shocking pain of being yelled at in his sternum.
It just wouldn’t go away.
Beau nearly screaming at one point, when the boat was tilted at its most precarious angle, “This is what sailing is!” certainly did not help at all.
It wouldn’t have mattered if it had been his boyfriend or not, anyone yelling at him would have caused that. It always triggered flashbacks that wracked his body. And if he’d been at home, he could have relaxed and let it go after a couple days. But here he was stuck on a boat with the man who’d yelled at him, and that man had been his boyfriend.
Today was supposed to be a day of rest and recuperation. He needed that. He was hoping he’d get a chance to just sit with Beau and learn how to relax around him again. If he had to do that with a couple of other admittedly very cool people on board, it would probably help, honestly.
But there were those paint brushes, just sitting there.
When he glanced back at Beau to check his demeanor, he caught a flicker of movement in the corner of his eye.
He knew that flicker as a sign, and if he did look it might be nothing. Or it might be a lurker hanging out where it shouldn’t be. And he really didn’t need to see that.
If that flickering kept up, he’d see them right in front of himself soon enough, anyway.
In and of themselves, they were harmless. The lurkers were. In a way, they were beneficial, as they were a warning of worse to come. But they were fucking creepy.
He’d known, intellectually, that psychosis at sea was a very real and very likely possibility for himself. He’d tried to prepare for it. He’d even had conversations with Beau about it long before setting sail. At least, he remembered doing so. He hoped he’d done so.
Now he wasn’t quite so sure about his memories or what he considered to be his knowledge.
There should be a plan in place. It should be OK.
All he had to do was let Beau know what was going on, and then ride it out. Beau would then let everyone else know to let Erik be, and to not worry about him. And if Beau wasn’t up for that, Murmur would be his backup, because Murmur was familiar with this.
“Hey, Beau?” Erik spoke up.
“What up?” Beau said, flipping the massive omelet and then cutting it into fifths with the spatula.
“Eh,” Erik vocalized as he suddenly felt the need to stretch all of his muscles and tried to figure out how to do that while half in the cubby. “Maybe don’t take this the wrong way, please? But I don’t think I can handle a paintbrush today.”
“Huh,” Beau grunted, looking over at the paintbrushes. “There’s work to be done, and we gotta do it, Erik. It’s past time to treat the topside teak, and today’s perfect for it. Sunny, low wind, terrible for sailing, perfect for keeping the ship in shape.”
“But it’s a boat, right?” Erik tried to clarify.
“She’s a boat, Erik,” Beau grumbled. “You know what I mean. Makes no difference, anyway. Work’s got to be done. Way it is. It’s light work, anyway, ‘specially with five bodies.”
“Aight,” Erik acknowledged. “But. I got the flickers this morning. And I been feeling off the whole trip. It’s gettin’ worse. It might be a good idea for me to stay in bed, regardless.”
“Well, let’s all eat breakfast first, ‘fore we get to that,” Beau replied, voice tense.
Erik sighed, maybe too audibly, and looked out the window nearest him, where the first flicker had been. And sure enough, there it was, bobbing on what waves there were, exaggerating the movements like a ridiculous, horrific weeble made of rags and dust. The lurker didn’t really have a face, so much as a smokey shadow that was vaguely in the shape of one. But it looked dour. Like it was in a bad mood. Neck bowed and shoulders hunched atop its tall frame of mist and darkness.
It looked like it was trying to remain perpendicular to the surface of the water that it rested on, moving up and down and every which way, but it wasn’t perfectly in sync with whatever it was that the water was doing.
“You’re gettin’ it wrong,” Erik mumbled at the apparition, and then pulled himself back into the bed, and rolled over.
“What was that?” Beau asked. But he didn’t push. He kept cooking. And a few seconds later, he declared loudly to the cabin, “Good morning, crew! Food’s ready!”
Maybe it was just a misinterpretation of the sounds of the Murmuration stirring, or Meridian or Planks waking up, but Erik could swear he felt someone climbing into bed in the cubby hole with him. The thin mattress on the wooden planks of the birth depressing as if it was a spring bed, and his blankets being pulled by the weight of whoever it was supposed to be. Even though there was absolutely no room for that kind of thing.
It was a comforting sensation, and he wished it was Beau. But he knew it wasn’t.
He groaned.
“Come on, Erik,” Beau said. “Food’s gonna get cold, and you’ll need the energy.”
Shit.
He started to pull himself back out of bed, because it’d just be best to go along with things, and he did need the energy. Food would be good, even if for some reason it wasn’t smelling right right now.
He could eat an omelet, at least. But it looked like he’d need to be more clear with Beau about what was going on. Just mentioning the flickers wasn’t getting through.
Meridian and Planks were a couple of Beau’s sailor friends, and not exactly a couple. The three of them had served on the Amistad under Captain Bill Pinkney, and had met each other there. Captain Pinkney had inspired Beau to go for his captain’s license. But Meridian and Planks preferred trading off duties as bosun and first mate, if they could land either job on whatever ship they worked. One would apply for one job and the other would take the other, and then they’d try to switch on the next tour. But they were pretty happy working as deck hands, too.
Meridian had taken their name when they’d come out as trans, claiming that it was both pretty and accurate. They were tall, but not as tall as Beau, and really good at navigational stuff. They could get their bearings faster and more accurately than most people. If their name had been a nickname, it probably would have stuck anyway, but since they’d legally changed it to Meridian and it was due to gender reasons, anyone who was respectful of them at all picked it up right away, and cheerfully.
Planks rivaled Erik for being the shortest person on board. And he had a sense of style that was like a lurker. Somehow, he could make a completely new T-shirt and a pair of shorts look like oily rags left under the bed for a decade. Not with actual grime, but just with the way his clothes hung from his body, and the way he moved about in them. The colors he chose didn’t seem to hurt the illusion, either, leaning toward dark grays, browns, and khakis.
Erik had no idea if Planks had chosen that name, or if it was a legal name or nickname. But at some point last night Planks had joked that his actual gender was flotsam, and Meridian had toasted him for it.
Maybe Planks was a cis man who had a pretty good sense of humor while sharing a boat with four trans people. Or, maybe he was trans, too.
It seemed like the ambiguity of that suited Planks just fine, but, when asked, he did insist his pronouns were ‘he/him’.
He did seem to have that sense of being younger than his actual age that a lot of other queer people had, at least.
Where-as Beau, who was definitely super queer, somehow managed to convey incredible professionalism and maturity at all times, even when he was being the funniest man in the room.
You never really could go by clues and stereotypes. And, of course, it really didn’t matter.
The best thing about Meridian and Planks is that they both did seem to lighten the atmosphere just by being present. And neither of them were white. Though, the subject of families or ethnicity had not come up in Erik’s memory. He’d ask Beau later, if he had to, just to get to know these new friends better.
Meridian was the first to reach for a bowl of omelet and a mug of coffee, and by the time they were doing that, Erik had pulled himself entirely out of the cubby and was crouched on the navigation seat that had also been the head of the bed. He had been short enough to sleep entirely in the cubby.
Bracing himself with both hands, he hopped down to the deck and straightened. Then he leaned outward to look at Meridian and say, “Good morning.”
Meridian tilted their head up and grinned, “Morning!”
And just as Meridian stepped backward into their nook to sit on their berth, Erik could swear he saw one of the paintbrushes up itself and flip over. But when he looked directly at it, it lay still.
Jesus Fucking Christ, his brain was active as fuck today.
He’d been hoping this inevitable episode would be a mild one, but the activity of the flickers, the bedfellow, the lurker just staring right at him, and the paintbrushes joining in so quickly indicated he wasn’t going to be so lucky.
He told himself to focus on eating the food, and making it through breakfast before putting his foot down about anything.
Let there be peace, first.
Typically, his episodes lasted two to four days, which was short compared to a lot of people’s. Shorter than clinically recognized psychosis, from what he’d read. But still, a long time while on a boat.
And even though his experiences were unusual and mild comparatively, they were no less real. In terms of the fact that he had them and they were very distracting and sometimes distressing, at least. He did have arguments to be made about the reality of his visions and thoughts, too, but that was another matter.
Smoothing things out now, as it was just getting started, would be important for the rest of the trip.
So, he stole himself to keep calm and quiet. And to figure out just what to say as he got his food and ate it.
The Murmuration had managed to get up and come back to the galley at just about the same time that Planks was ready to get up, so the two of them stumbled over each other briefly, trying to decide who could go first.
And while they were doing that, Beau offered Erik his portion of breakfast.
Erik held up his hand to ward off the coffee, though. He needed no extra anxiety juice this morning. It didn’t usually make things better or worse, but he already felt anxious and that was a good reason to lay off of it.
Also, that meant he could sit back down in the navigation nook without having to find a place to put the coffee, holding the bowl with one hand and the spork with the other, and not risk spilling anything on the console. He didn’t want to go further into the boat, for some reason. Something or someone in his mind was telling him that that would be a bad idea, even to pee if he needed that.
Another reason not to drink the coffee, because maybe he could hold what he had in his bladder now, but he sure couldn’t pee over the side of the boat like some people might be able to. Skill issue, really, but still.
The omelet had bacon, garlic, green bell peppers, and mushrooms in it, and Beau had had to have been prepping that for some time before Erik had first woken up. And the whole cabin reeked of it.
It should have smelled divine. But, either the briny odor of the sea mixing in or Erik’s balefully twisting neurology had warped it into an unappetizing stench.
Unlike popular stereotypes, Erik’s particular autistic traits allowed him to scarf the food down anyway. His ability to eat was completely detached from his senses. So he took advantage of that, and ate the omelet as quickly as he could. Still, the bad smell contributed to his sensory burden, and eating it despite the smell loaded his emotional burden.
It felt like the nutrients of the dish were already seeping into his bloodstream, and adding their warmth to his own, but they somehow didn’t touch that raw tension that had been growing in his chest. When he breathed, it felt like the atmosphere should be ragged and catching in his throat.
He opened his mouth to tell Beau what was wrong, in plain words, clearly and concisely, but then it all came down on him, and he couldn’t talk. He couldn’t even make any kind of sound. Not even an ‘urk!’ Just, mouth open, eyes wide with panic, and nothing.
He desperately needed to whirl around and throw himself back into his blankets, but he couldn’t do that with the cubby as it was, so he sort of flailed in his attempt to crawl back into it.
And in that mess of movement and jumbled coordination, his bowl ended up flying across the cabin, sailing past Beau, and crashing into the far corner of the galley, spork adding to the sudden clatter of it.
“Erik!” Beau hissed. “Shit, dude. What’s wrong?”
“Woah, damn!” Planks exclaimed.
Neither comment helped Erik to calm himself and figure out what he was trying to do. They were very distracting.
With his back turned, he couldn’t see anyone’s reactions, which might have been for the best, but it made him worried about what they might be. Worse than the words he’d heard?
The problem was that he couldn’t agree with himself over whether he should go headfirst into the cubby, or feet first. There were arguments for both methods, while those arguments were happening, other Eriks were attempting to force the decision by acting on one route or the other, and his body was attempting both.
He almost got stuck, and managed to plant his right hand against the bulkhead above the cubby, and say, “Stop.”
He stopped.
He really did need to go pee, dammit.
He very carefully straightened himself up and backed off the navigation bench. Then, taking a very deep breath, he turned to face everyone and point at the bathroom.
Beau slowly nodded, followed by Planks and then the Murmuration, who were both sitting on Planks’ bunk. Meridian couldn’t be seen from his position.
Composing himself carefully, he stepped out into the aisle and turned and walked toward the bathroom.
Meridian was on the other side of the still folded up table, pushed back into the corner of their bunk, upright, and clutching their bowl to their chest, watching Erik with indeterminately expressive eyes.
It wasn’t that Meridian was bad at making expressions. It was that Erik realized he was currently very bad at reading them.
He saw fear there, but he told himself that might not be real.
With each step, he felt doom closing in around him. And like with Meridian’s expression, Erik told himself that that sense of doom might just well be a delusion or paranoia. Ignorable.
This was a very seaworthy vessel, supposedly, made of beautiful, well taken care of teak, and metal, and other seaworthy materials. And Beau owned it, and clearly knew what he was doing with it.
And it wasn’t going anywhere.
And the others were friends, dammit. They were only concerned for him. And if they were concerned for him, they wouldn’t do anything like lock him in the bathroom.
They would not.
They really would not.
He opened the bathroom door and stepped inside the tiny space. He had a fleeting thought that it was probably good that Goreth and Sarah weren’t along on this trip, since he was pretty sure they wouldn’t fit in this small of a space. He had no trouble with it himself. It felt like it was made for him.
Once the door was closed he felt safe.
Which was good, because that allowed him to relax enough to pee.
He was still wearing his clothes from yesterday, which wasn’t great because he was also still wearing the binder he’d worn all day already. That wouldn’t be healthy. But this was not the space to take it off, either.
Ideally he’d do that in the forward area, behind the curtain there. Though, really, he only felt the need to hide his boobs from Planks, all things considered.
But, whatever. Just like how he hadn’t found the time to remove it before bed, it wasn’t going to happen this morning, either.
At least, not yet.
Shorts down and sitting on the toilet, he was calm enough to realize and remember just how tired he was from breathing against the binder, too.
He shook his head.
He’d be taking it off later today, after Planks and Meridian had left the boat to go home, and that was that.
He looked around the little boat’s tiny bathroom. It was the one place on the vessel that didn’t have any teak visible. It was all light colored fiberglass and metal. And, for some reason, that helped him to breathe a little easier, even if he was still straining against his own garments to do so.
He also realized that he couldn’t see any lurkers or animated brushes while he was in here, and that was a major relief.
Unless someone started knocking or calling his name, this was a good place for him to rest and take stock. And yes, while he thought he could hear the others mumbling to each other in tones of some sort, he told himself that that should be expected, regardless of what their feelings or intentions were, and that he should not obsess about it.
Of course, telling himself that triggered worrying thoughts that started to ruminate on the matter, but he told them under his breath, “You do that. You figure that out. I’ll consider the other scenarios, and plan for them, OK? OK.”
Probably the hardest thing to do next would be leaving the bathroom.
Stepping back out into that teak nightmare would be unpleasant, and facing whatever conversations might be awaiting him was not something he wanted to do, if he was honest with himselves.
But other people would have to use the bathroom, and he should leave it at some point.
Still, besides peeing, he was in here to think. Because he could think in here. So, what should he think about?
He’d just promised himselves that he’d think about “other scenarios”, so that was probably it.
But the chattering about worst cases in his head was distracting.
However, as he listened to it all, he heard another set of voices amongst his own.
It took him a little while to figure out who they were, even though he’d heard them before, and had OKed their addition to his system. Maybe he wasn’t thinking as clearly as he’d hoped. Or, his memory was just more muddled from it all.
The cuttlecrabs were participating!
That was delightful!
He loved listening to them.
They asked such innocent questions, as if they were toddlers who genuinely wanted to know how the world worked. But they also had an ancient, alien wisdom, with the experiences of hundreds of thousands of generations sharing the same hive mind. They couldn’t necessarily remember even a fraction of it all while in his system, though. There’d been some loss traveling here, but they had good instincts for certain things.
Not social things, exactly. Certainly not navigating any culture’s labyrinthine social norms and customs of politeness and expectations.
Oh, heck no, they were terrible for that.
But when it came to risk assessment and cooperative survival, they were unparalleled by anything or anyone Erik had ever encountered!
And, after a while, he noticed that their questions were very leading, very sneaky, and tended to draw the conversations they were having with his headmates away from their worries. Sort of disrupting their ruminations with the avid curiosity of bloodthirsty scavengers on an alien planet that might have food on it.
“What if we asked for more eggs?” one of the cuttlecrabs asked one of the other Eriks.
That Erik responded, “Beau says that we have to practice rationing the food.”
“Why?”
“Because, if we end up touring around the world, we have to learn how to make it last.”
“Why?”
“Because, if we don’t, we’ll run out of food before we can get more, and then we’d starve.”
“Why?”
“The ocean’s really big.”
And so on.
When an Erik tried to derail the line of questioning to get back on his own paranoid topic of what if Beau really hated him, the cuttlecrab talking to him would ask another question about food. Or about why they couldn’t catch birds or eat insects while they were sailing.
Some of the questions were so absurd, it was hard for an Erik to not answer them in detail, describing the differences between a human body and a cuttlecrab’s metabolism. Not that any of him knew how a cuttlecrab worked, but a lot could be inferred by the Collective’s questions.
Erik saw what was happening and started to chuckle to himself out loud.
Then he heard himself ask, “Hey, Erik?”
“Yeah?” He replied.
Looking around, he didn’t see anything weird. So, it was just an auditory hallucination, conveying the thoughts of one of his counterparts.
“I think we need a reality check,” his voice said.
“Dude, I’ve been doing that all morning,” he said.
“Just say ‘reality check’, please,” his voice insisted.
“That’s not how it works,” he pointed out.
“Just do it.”
He sighed and complied, because it couldn’t hurt.
“Hey, guys. Reality Check!” he said.
After a few moments, all his thoughts started to calm down.
“Thank you,” his voice said.
And he sat there for a bit going over how that was not how reality checks worked.
It was actually a kind of complicated, active skill you had to enact and work through, because you had to account for your own shifting sense of perspective and values.
A delusion could be subtle and get you thinking that logic worked differently than it does on a fundamental level, and you had to be prepared for that. And just saying ‘reality check’ out loud wasn’t… Well.
It was important to recognize when you needed one. And maybe his subconscious selves needed to be alerted that it was time to go through the motions. And a truly out loud declaration, vocalized with his vocal chords, was usually a good way to get something heard across his system.
OK.
Maybe, he thought, he should do his own, personal, procedural reality check.
Things he knew to usually be true from past experiences, assuming his memories were reliable.
One. His situation that he found himself in now was consistent with his memories. He was on a boat with his boyfriend, one of his best friends, and a couple of his boyfriend’s friends who seemed like pretty cool people. And he was there because he’d agreed to travel up and down the coast in this boat, as preparation for a world tour.
And it had been stressful. And now he was hallucinating and at least a little paranoid. Or some of him were.
That all tracked.
Two. He’d seen and heard some hallucinations, and had identified them clearly as such. The lurker and his own voice were things that only occurred doing full on episodes, so they were easy to recognize as hallucinations and verified that this was an episode.
Three. Up until this point, he could not remember having a fight with Beau. Beau was a really cool guy. He was plural, just like Erik. But in a different way than Erik. And even though he was sure he’d never interacted with this particular Beau before the sailing trip, he had just spent a month and a half with him having a lot of fun. More to the point, he’d been on the boat for a month and a half and had not been kicked off of it yet.
In fact, it should be reasonable to expect that if Beau, or anybody, had assumed that Erik would be up for treating the decks with a paintbrush today, then, logically, Erik had not yet given him reason to believe he couldn’t.
Did that make sense?
Maybe he’d worded it badly in his head.
He hadn’t fucked up yet, so Beau had not expected him to fuck up today. Which meant that, according to past logic, that Beau making breakfast for him and trusting him with a paintbrush meant that Beau trusted him. And if Beau trusted him, then he shouldn’t have reason to be malicious toward him.
Which suggested that all of the scenarios that his counterparts had been trying to entertain, where this trip was some sort of a trap, were unlikely.
OK.
OK.
He felt like he’d done a better job of this sort of thing in the past.
But four. No one was knocking on the door yet, or calling his name. So they were letting him be. Even his hallucinations were letting him be. And he’d never hallucinated the absence of a sound before. Though, maybe he’d dissociated through one and not noticed. But, they’d repeat the noise, and when he sat and listened intently nothing happened.
So, no one needed him now. They were being patient.
Or scheming. Preparing.
No!
Beau was meticulous and a good planner. But, again, this was not a trap. It never was a trap. Beau’s planning was always used to make things go smoothly, to make sure everyone was safe.
His past selves had been able to rely on that, otherwise he wouldn’t be on this boat in the first place.
OK.
Five. This was all familiar, even if the intensity was more than usual. So far, he’d been having visions, voices, and worried thoughts that were nothing new or surprising. So he felt he still had a pretty good idea of how to behave carefully in response.
He needed to be slow to react to anything. He needed to check with the others to make sure anything that seemed dangerous was true. Such as, if there was a fire, calmly asking if everyone else saw it would be the thing to do. No panicking.
When it came to things like animate paint brushes, he could ignore them until it was time to try to grab one. And then, if it took several tries to lay his hand on one, that would be OK. He’d still eventually grab a real paintbrush. And if he thought he saw a place he missed with his brushwork, re-treating it wouldn’t be bad. In theory.
Also, maybe the repetitive work of treating the topside teak would be soothing, actually. And he would be outside, instead of inside where the feelings of doom were.
Five was a good number of points. It kind of glowed. Kind of like how the paintbrushes had glowed.
And now that he felt ready to do what Beau was asking, he thought the rest of the day might be OK.
He wiped, got up, flushed the toilet, pulled his shorts up, and washed his hands.
As he was doing that, he thought he saw an incongruous movement in the mirror, and he winked at his own reflection in response.
Then he stepped out of the bathroom and said, “OK. Beau. I’m sorry for panicking and throwing the bowl. That was bad. I’m still having an episode, but it’s no meltdown now. I think I’m OK to work on the deck.”
Everyone had stopped what they were doing, and were staring at him now from the same places they’d been in when he’d entered the bathroom. Beau had cleaned up Erik’s bowl, done the dishes, and was now wiping the galley down with a rag.
“I’ve been consulting Human Resources,” Beau said, gesturing at Meridian and Planks with a little smirk. Erik suspected that that was a little joke. “And, I was thinking maybe we should put off the deck work. That R and R is far more important today. Would that be OK?”
Yes, that would be OK, Erik thought to himself. He’d just worked himself up for doing some manual labor in the sun and making the best of it. Shifting gears again would take some effort. But he knew it was the best idea to rest and relax.
But before he responded, he noticed that the feeling of doom was creeping back fast.
Why doom?
That was unusual for him.