Act I: The Rising

The swamp did not care whether Arthur Penhaligon was insane. It did not care whether he was sober or drunk, whether he remembered what had happened in France or whether the memories that haunted him were real or imagined or some impossible combination of both. The swamp in southern Louisiana was a place that operated on its own logic, a logic of decay and rebirth and the slow, patient conversion of death into life, and it treated men, insane and sane alike, with the same indifferent absorption.

Arthur had been in the swamp for three days, or perhaps three nights, and he had lost track of the distinction between day and night, which was fitting, because he had also lost track of the distinction between memory and dream, which was less fitting and more indicative of the cocktail of whiskey and shellfish poison and whatever chemical residue the swamp itself seemed to emit, a faint odour of methane and rotting vegetation that made his head feel like it was stuffed with wet cotton.

He had come to the swamp to die, or at least to drink himself into a state of oblivion that would simulate death well enough for the purposes of a man who had seen things in the Argonne that he did not want to see again. The war had ended in 1918, and Arthur had come home to a house in Lafourche Parish that his parents had not maintained during his absence and that had fallen into disrepair with the same swift indifference that the swamp had shown him. His father was dead, his mother had moved in with her sister in Houma, and the land that had belonged to the Penhaligon family for four generations was now owned by a sugar company that had bought it for a song and was now extracting what little value remained from soil that had been drained and planted and replanted until it was more mud than earth.

Arthur had served his country, or his country had used him, depending on which account you believed, and he had returned with a limp that he did not have before and a set of memories that he could not exorcise and a bottle of whiskey that he carried with him everywhere like a sacrament. He drank to forget, and the forgetting was temporary and imperfect, and the swamp had become his most recent refuge, a place where the only things that tried to kill him were natural and therefore comprehensible, as opposed to the men who had tried to kill him in France, who had been comprehensible only in their desire to see him dead.

On the third day, he saw the man.

He was sitting on the trunk of a cypress tree that was half-submerged in the black water, the bottle of whiskey empty in his hand, when he looked up and saw a figure moving through the cypress trunks at the edge of his vision. The figure was human, or human-shaped, but it moved with a wrongness that made Arthur's hand go to the pocket knife he carried out of habit rather than hope. The figure was tall and thin and wrapped in a cloak of some dark material that absorbed the swamp light rather than reflecting it, and it walked with a slow, deliberate pace that suggested it was not in a hurry to arrive wherever it was going.

Arthur watched as the figure emerged from the trees and came to the edge of the clearing where he sat, and he saw its face.

His first thought, because his brain was half-filled with whiskey and swamp gas and the memories of Ypres, was that it was a corpse. The face was disfigured, the skin blistered and peeling and discoloured in patches that made it look like it had been exposed to acid or fire or some combination of the two. The features were there, vaguely, the impression of eyes and nose and mouth beneath the damage, but they were distorted, stretched and pulled and melted in a way that made Arthur's stomach turn and his hand shake.

The man sat down beside him, without speaking, and took a small bundle from beneath his cloak and unwrapped it on his knee. Inside the bundle were several snakes, small and brightly coloured, the kind of copperheads and cottonmouths that lived in the swamp and were as much a part of its ecosystem as the cypress and the alligator and the moss that hung from the branches like old men's beards.

Arthur watched, his whiskey-addled brain struggling to process what he was seeing, as the disfigured man picked up a copperhead by the tail and held it to his mouth and bit down and swallowed, whole, the snake still alive, still struggling, and Arthur felt something in his mind snap, like a rope under too much tension, and he knew, with the certainty of a man who had already lost his grip on reality once before, that he was witnessing something that was either miraculous or mad, and he could not tell which.

Act II: The Undercurrent

The disfigured man ate three more snakes, a cottonmouth and a water moccasin and something small and black with yellow stripes that Arthur did not recognize and did not want to, and then he sat back on his haunches and breathed heavily, his disfigured face turned toward the grey sky, and Arthur, who had been watching from his position on the cypress trunk with a mixture of horror and fascination that he could not distinguish from one another, found himself speaking.

"What are you?" Arthur said, and his voice was rough from whiskey and disuse and it came out as a whisper that was almost lost in the sounds of the swamp: the croak of frogs, the splash of fish, the groaning of cypress trunks as the water level shifted imperceptibly with the tide.

The disfigured man did not answer. He did not look at Arthur. He simply sat there, breathing, his chest rising and falling with a rhythm that was almost meditative, and Arthur felt a rage build inside him, the kind of rage that men feel when they are witnessing something that they cannot understand and cannot explain and cannot, therefore, control.

"You think you're funny?" Arthur said, louder now, and he stood up, his limp making him stagger, and he pointed at the man and said, "You eat snakes and you show up here in my swamp and you think that makes you something special? I've seen things, you bastard, I've seen things that would turn your face inside out if you could only understand them, and you're sitting here playing some kind of trick and you think I'm going to just sit here and watch?"

The disfigured man turned his head slowly and looked at Arthur, and Arthur saw his eyes.

They were not the eyes of a madman. They were not the eyes of a miracle worker or a prophet or a saint or a demon or any of the things that Arthur's whiskey-soaked mind had briefly, frantically considered. They were the eyes of a man who had seen something and had been changed by it and had not yet finished being changed, and there was a sadness in those eyes so vast and so deep that Arthur felt his rage evaporate like dew in sunlight and be replaced by something that felt almost like empathy and almost like terror and was, in fact, both at once.

The disfigured man stood up and walked away, moving through the cypress trunks with a grace that contradicted the damage to his face and the apparent weakness of his body, and he was gone before Arthur could speak again, before Arthur could ask him where he had come from and what he had done and whether what Arthur had seen was real or whether his own mind, damaged by gas and shellfire and whiskey, was playing tricks on him one more time.

Arthur sat on the cypress trunk for a long time, the empty whiskey bottle in his hand, and he tried to decide. Was it real? Had he actually seen a man eat poisonous snakes and walk away with his face destroyed but his body intact? Or was it the product of a mind that had been broken in France and was now breaking itself in the swamp, constructing elaborate fantasies to fill the void that the war had left behind?

He did not know. He would never know. But something about what he had seen, something in the disfigured man's eyes, had reached into Arthur and touched something that he had thought was dead, some capacity for wonder or terror or both that had been buried under layers of whiskey and regret and memory, and he felt, for the first time in years, the uncomfortable sensation of being alive.

He finished the last dregs of whiskey from his canteen and stood up and limped back through the swamp, and that night, in the cabin that he rented from a man named Thibodeaux for twenty dollars a month and that smelled of mildew and old cooking and the faint, persistent odour of death, he did not drink. He sat at the table in the dark and he thought about the disfigured man and the snakes and the look in his eyes, and he did not drink, and it was the hardest thing he had ever done.

Act III: The Breaking

The anaconda appeared on a Sunday morning, and it was enormous, larger than anything that should have existed in the swamps of Louisiana, larger than anything that Arthur had ever seen in photographs or textbooks or the occasional travelling zoo that rolled through town with its cages of caged animals and its tents striped in faded red and white. It was green and brown and black, its scales shimmering in the morning light with an iridescence that made Arthur think of oil on water and the backs of beetles and the inside of a seashell held to the ear and the ocean's voice that sounded like silence and history combined.

It was in Thibodeaux's pond, or what passed for a pond in the swamp, a small body of stagnant water that Thibodeaux used to wash his clothes and that was surrounded by a ring of moss and cypress knees and broken bottles and the occasional rusted car that someone had dumped there because the swamp accepted everything and asked no questions.

The anaconda was coiled in the centre of the pond, its head raised and its tongue flicking in and out, tasting the air, and Arthur stood on the bank and looked at it and felt the same mixture of horror and fascination that he had felt when he saw the disfigured man eat the snakes, except now the mixture was joined by something else: a terrible, inescapable understanding that the two things he had witnessed were connected, that the disfigured man and the anaconda were part of the same story, a story that Arthur was only beginning to understand and would never fully comprehend.

He went to get Thibodeaux, and Thibodeaux came and looked at the anaconda and spat in the water and said, "That's a big one. It's been here a while. Don't go near it."

"I'm not going near it," Arthur said, and he was not sure if he was lying to Thibodeaux or to himself.

He walked to the edge of the pond and looked at the anaconda, and the anaconda looked at him, and its eyes were the same eyes he had seen in the disfigured man's face, the same vast and ancient sadness, the same knowledge of something that predated human concerns and would outlast them, and he understood, with a clarity that was itself a form of drowning, that this creature was not a threat. It was not a victim either. It was simply what it was, and it was asking nothing of him and offering nothing to him and expected nothing and could give nothing, and that was the most terrifying thing he had ever encountered.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out the pocket knife and walked into the water.

The mud sucked at his boots, and the water was cold and thick and smelled of decay and regeneration combined, and he moved toward the anaconda with the determination of a man who had made a decision that he could not take back. The anaconda did not move until he was within ten feet, and then it struck, its head moving with a speed that contradicted its size and its apparent lethargy, and Arthur raised his arms to protect his face, and the jaws closed around his right shoulder and his left arm and he felt teeth sink into flesh and bone and he felt the anaconda's muscles contract and squeeze and he felt the pocket knife in his hand and he drove it into the anaconda's head and he felt the creature shudder and release him and fall back into the water and he collapsed on the bank, bleeding and broken and alive, and he laughed, a sound that was half-sob and half-cackle and entirely unhinged, and he laughed until he could not laugh anymore and then he cried, and the cry was the first honest sound he had made since returning from France.

When he woke, he was in Thibodeaux's cabin, lying on the floor, and Thibodeaux was sitting in a chair beside him, smoking a pipe and watching him with an expression that was neither compassionate nor unkind, simply present.

"It was real," Arthur said, and his voice was barely a whisper, and he was not sure who he was speaking to or whether he was speaking to himself.

Thibodeaux nodded. "Everything in this swamp is real, boy. That's the problem."

Act IV: The Echo

Arthur never saw the disfigured man again. He did not look for him, and he did not try to forget him. He stayed in the swamp for another year, living in Thibodeaux's cabin, helping Thibodeaux with his washing, drinking less and less whiskey and thinking more and more about the anaconda and the disfigured man and the eyes that had been the same in both faces, those vast and ancient eyes that held the sadness of a world that did not care whether men lived or died or went insane or stayed sober or saw things that were real or imagined, because to the world, all of those things were the same, temporary and meaningless and beautiful in their meaninglessness.

He left the swamp in the spring, when the water levels dropped and the cypress knees emerged from the mud like fingers pointing at the sky, and he walked to Houma and he found his mother's sister, who took him in and fed him and cleaned his wounds and listened to his stories without believing them and without disbelieving them, which was perhaps the most generous thing anyone had ever done for him.

He lived with Aunt Marguerite for the rest of his life, and he never drank again, and he worked odd jobs around Houma, repairing boats and painting houses and cutting grass for the women who lived on the narrow streets that ran between the bayou and the sugar fields. He never married, and he had no children, and he died in 1957, at sixty-two, in a small room above a grocery store on Bayou Teche, and on his deathbed, he smiled, and the nurse who was with him said afterward that it was the strangest smile she had ever seen, as though he were looking at something she could not see and finding it both terrible and beautiful and utterly, devastatingly real.

They buried him in an unmarked grave in a cemetery that Marguerite said was good enough for a man who had carried too much and asked for too little, and the rain fell on his grave for three days, the kind of slow, indifferent rain that the swamp produced, and the earth absorbed him, slowly and completely, and he became part of the cycle that had always been turning, the conversion of death into life and life into death and both into the vast, indifferent beauty of a world that did not care whether you understood it or not.

And sometimes, on quiet nights when the bayou was still and the moss hung motionless from the cypress branches and the frogs had stopped croaking and the only sound was the slow, patient movement of water over mud, people who lived near the bayou swore they could see a man sitting on a trunk in the swamp, watching the water, his face disfigured and sad and beautiful, and they could not determine, and never would determine, whether he was real or whether he was a story that the swamp had told itself and then told them, a story about a man who had seen something that he could not understand and had been changed by the not-understanding, and had eaten fire and lived to tell about it, though whether he had told it to anyone or to himself or to the water or to the silence that lived beneath the water, no one could say.

--- OTMES v2 Objective Codes --- [OTMES] O:5 T:6 M:5 E:11 S:8 [Q] What did I really see in that swamp? [D] Southern Gothic unreliable narration: an alcoholic WWI veteran witnesses a disfigured man eat poisonous creatures and kill a giant anaconda, but cannot determine if it was real or madness. --- END OTMES ---