Page 92 of Shroom for Improvement

“I have a secret,” I said, since we were already tiptoeing around bad news.

Claude said nothing. He stared at me and swallowed, like he was preparing himself for devastation.

“I have a proposal meeting with the editor-in-chief of EHK’s Society journal to talk about my most recent paper. Hopefully they’ll consider publishing me in their next edition.”

“Sonny, that’s amazing news!” Claude sat bolt upright, looming over me and blocking the early evening sun from my face.

“It is,” I agreed. “But the meeting’s on the twenty-first of June.”

“Oh,” he said.

“And she won’t do FaeTime, only an in-person meeting. I don’t know why. Some of these editors can be old school. Militant even.”

He nodded, then lifted his eyes up to the sunset.

“I haven’t decided what I’m going to do,” I said.

“No. You have to go. This is your career. This is... I mean, this transcends your career. It’s about everyone andeverything. You have a shot at making a difference to the entire planet. Why would you still be undecided?”

You. Because of you.I didn’t say those words out loud.

Regardless, Claude must have heard them in my silence. “I’ll be fine. I’m sure we’ll figure out what it is I’m supposed to do before then. I expect you’ll be back in Remy long before the twenty-first, anyway. What time is the meeting?”

“Two, I think, but I ought to double check.”

“Oh,” he said again, and I realised he was doing the mental calculations. Remy was a seventeen hour drive away. Even if I hired a Sleipnir taxi driver and demanded they decimate every single speed limit along the way, I wouldn’t be present for the sunrise at four a.m. in Agaricus and make it to my meeting in Remy at two p.m.

Claude lay down again. He didn’t speak for a while, but when he did, it wasn’t to me. “No, absolutely not, Jenny. We’ll talk about it later.” A pause. “Well, does he need to be here for the ritual... No? You’ll let him go then... No, you fucking won’t. I will quit right now if you do... What’s ‘into the ether?’ You still haven’t told me... Later, Jenny... Later!”

He turned to me. “It wants to stop you from going.”

Ah, like when I first arrived and I felt a physical force holding me back, stopping me from leaving.

“I won’t let it, though. This is bigger than the house. It’s bigger than me, or you, or us.”

I nodded. My gut churned. “This isn’t really the vibe we want going into the trip.” Not that I could feel much yet, but the edges of reality were beginning to both blur and sharpen at the same time.

“Okay, tell me something that will make me smile,” Claude said, with obvious forced calm in his voice.

I dug around in my memories. “When I was a boy, I had a worm farm. It took up three-quarters of my bedroom. Therewas my bed, and about a foot of space on the floor, and the rest was my hand-built tank... pool, I don’t know what you’d call it. My mum hated it. Said it made the house—and me—smell disgusting, and no one would want to hang out with a worm-stink boy.” I laughed, she never meant any malice, but retrospectively I could see how annoying it must have been for her and Dad.

“Worms smell like soil though,” Claude said.

“It was a long-standing joke in my family, Sonny the worm-stink boy, but I didn’t rehome all the worms until I moved out for uni. I had thousands of them at one point. Tried to keep track of them all in a little ledger. Gave most of them names, but in the end I started calling them all Jeff. Big Jeff, Medium Jeff, Teeny Jeff. I sold them too, and used the money to buy books about the Great Naga Forests of the Kingdom and, of course, mushrooms.”

I chanced a peek at Claude. He smiled, dreamlike. “That’s so stinking cute. I can picture it vividly. Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“Six sisters, no brothers. I’m the baby, so I was the last one to move out. Do you? What were you like as a kid?”

Claude sighed. “No, no siblings, just me and Mum. I guess it was kind of lonely. My childhood... I desperately wanted a brother or sister, but my parents did not split amicably, and there was no chance they’d ever get back together. Never really saw my dad. I knew about him, knew he was a famous explorer and that he owned a big house near Agaricus. That was it. I kept hoping one day he’d show up, like a knight in shiny armour, and take me to his castle and there’d be siblings. Friends. But obviously that never happened, and after a while that longing turned to resentment, and well, here we are.”

Fuck.

Fuck, fuck, fuck. Claude had abandonment issues, and there I was planning on leaving him at probably the most significant moment of his life.

But this was my career. This was the future of the planet. I repeated that over and over in my head.

“Do you feel anything yet?” Claude asked, when I didn’t respond to his memories. Maybe he’d assumed I’d spaced out.

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