A weekend came when I couldn’t scrub the bathroom. I got wrapped up with my job, and after making breakfast I couldn’t drag myself away from the computer. They requested I take on an extra shift running the customer service chats because a coworker had a family emergency. I didn’t have any time during the week, either. Every day I’d stare at that nasty corner in the shower and feel sick, telling myself I needed to find the time to dispatch that yellow stain. I could barely make it out in what little light landed on the shower pan. The following Saturday, at last I donned my gym shorts, got out the spatula and cleaning supplies, and crouched down to start spraying the disinfectant. Seeing the fungus up-close, I was taken aback—its spherical polyps, yellowish, grew together with an unusual geometry like that of a beehive, sickly bunches of rotten grapes, vaguely familiar patterns speckling their surface. I decided to inspect them with the flashlight on my phone, only to discover that the pussy buboes were, in fact, tiny human heads made of something spongy, popping up with eyelids closed, cheeks, noses, and teeny eyes the size of peanuts. Their fat freckled faces had been swelling up all that time, unmoving, growing from the top of a thin white stalk. I gently touched one of their faces with the spatula. I opened its lips to find teeth. Nauseous, I got that feeling in my anus that I always do when something overwhelms me: people with deformities, open wounds, heights.
I ran to the kitchen for a knife, thinking I’d cut open one of the little heads to examine it further before returning to the shower. I handled them carefully as they jiggled, struck by their delicate, rubbery texture—one misstep and they’d be baby mash. I combed them from side to side with the knife, inspecting how the mycotic material had, to perfection, molded their ears and eyelids. Yet I was wary, worried one would burst open, spurt poisonous spores in my face and cause me harm. I tried to take photos with my phone, but they all came out too dark or blurry. I was dying to tell someone, but I had cut off everyone back in my home country. I didn’t know anyone here in the city except my coworkers—who certainly weren’t friends. I’d set my life up in such a way wherein I spent as much time as possible bunkered down at home, without needing to suffer the stress of relating to other humans. After reading about paleochristian monks during the Byzantine era, I came to see the romantic side of their lives—wandering the desert, living in mountainous monasteries, seeking out strict confinement and a silence that might lead them close to God.
Yes, those accursed fungiform heads were foul, but I felt a fondness for them, even compassion. Each one was just like a real person, a tiny baby stuffed with mycotic chub. Some were fused together, twins conjoined at the face, mouths dangling half-open in a tranquil doze. It was as if they had souls, breathing gentle, tender breaths. I thought about decapitating one of the mushrooms so I might take its head from the bathroom and inspect it by the light, but I felt that if I did so I’d be murdering someone and could end up in jail. How is it so easy to kill something so small, so bulbous? Coming again to my senses, I thought no—it’s just a fungus growing on my bathroom tiles. I gripped the knife tightly and severed one of the bald heads. It slid off smooth as butter, like scooping a ripe avocado from the shell. I put the baby head on a small plate and brought it to the window. Seeing it in the daylight, I felt the urge to squeeze the infant’s cherubic cheeks like a zit with my thumbs to see what might squirt out. Best to pop it quickly, precisely—it’ll hurt less. I opted instead for the knife, cutting the head smack-dab down the middle. It split like a grape, fit to share between two starving beggars. I brought the blade vertically through its forehead, dividing its nose, lips and chin in two. Inside, it was stuffed with a sort of black goo, chock-full of slimy, unripe seeds that spilled across the plate. I got so nauseous I ran to the living room. I paced about in circles, trying not to puke.
*
I left the little head in the sun to dry. At the very least, I’d confirmed it had no skeleton: inside was just that seed-ridden, ink-black, fleshy pulp. It smelled sweaty, fermented. All the same, I felt like I’d killed someone, that I might as well turn myself in to the cops. But no—no! I told myself again: they’re just mushrooms growing in between the poorly-sealed tiles of my bathroom.
That same night I decided to learn more about fungi. I read about mosses, lichens, and algae. I couldn’t find anything about organisms with human heads. I finally fell asleep at two in the morning after learning about the fungus kingdom’s main phylogenetic classifications. I dreamt of that itsy-bitsy head I’d carved in two. In my dream it was still whole, the size of a melon, resting on the cutting board. It looked at me peacefully, examining me, rolling its eyes around to explore my world. I caressed it, running my hands through its hair, fine as a baby’s. It was a someone, a someone I cared for. It started to mumble, so I got closer to hear what it had to say. It murmured my name in a gentle whisper.
*
That weekend I didn’t clean anything. When I went to shower on Monday, I couldn’t take my eyes off the hundreds of tiny papules, swelling as the hot water ran over them. I could barely scrub myself down. I was afraid of getting close to them again, of seeing their nasty little faces, deformed angels with flaccid cheeks. All day I couldn’t stop thinking about them. These intrusive thoughts kept interrupting me as I worked. Every time I started to respond to a question on the customer service chat, I’d freeze up and enter a fugue state, engrossed by their mycelial geometry. By Wednesday of that week the outbreak had branched all along the tiles’ grout, weaving its white veins and spherical buds into a tangle up the toilet and into the bowl, its fruit staining the porcelain on all sides like a spread of yellow caviar. Peeing there made me sick, but I did it anyway, directing my stream of urine right into their little faces. I watched them move their lips, their teeth, their tiny tongues. I dreamt of their heads for the rest of the week. They popped up where they didn’t belong. While blurry at first, they would soon occupy the foremost level of my mind, floating, sniffing me up and down as they surrounded me. The following Saturday, right as I readied myself to curl up in bed, I shone my phone light upon them—the little balls in the shower had started growing vertically, the stems growing thicker. That day I decided I wasn’t going to clean them. I wasn’t going to pay anyone else to, either. Observing and analyzing them was much too fascinating. I wanted to understand them, the way they grew, what would happen if I let them fully develop, show me what they really wanted to show me—maybe something would hatch. I thought about how sad it was that I couldn’t tell anyone else about what I’d discovered, about how weird it was that I couldn’t find anything like this type of mushroom at all on Wikipedia. Maybe it was a new species born from the Zipaquirá nuclear plant meltdown. In any case, it was there, growing with gusto in my windowless bathroom, bubbling in some kind of horrid, fertile stew. The head I’d lopped off the week before had dried out completely, turning into an empty shell of black skin and unidentifiable bits. The seeds, or spores, had turned to grey dust.
*
In just a few weeks the outbreak spread throughout the tiles, staining the stucco with vivid reds, aquamarines, glimmers of bedstraw yellow and fuchsia, like an eccentric painting by Jacanamijoy. The whole floor was an iridescent display of life. The dendrites had taken over the walls in a dense, tangled, interwoven, nodule-ridden dermis, the geometric patterns of a trypophobic nightmare. Now that they were all my babies, all the little shoots had bloomed. The eldest ones were already the size of cantaloupes, still growing. I could have been repulsed by all of this, but something had taken over me. I didn’t feel disgust anymore. I’d shower without my sandals, caress the pupae with my feet. Little by little I developed a clear feeling that the mushrooms could read my mind as I slept. They tramped around my memories, my brain, like they owned the place. The vision of an immense head floating over the city was a familiar one, like the face of an old friend. When it looked directly at me, its sparkling eyes gripped onto every corner of my psyche. Crustaceans and centipedes, the forms of my traumas incarnate, convulsed before it. I could make out that there was something beneath its skin that was utterly disproportionate. The head, in reality, was a structure that extended into a vacuum, into a network of dreams, of stars, forming a galaxy of scattered, purposeless, meaningless ideas.
The fungus took a firm hold once inside me. As soon as I closed my eyes, it seemed like they were growing and multiplying under my eyelids. In my dreams, the faces gave me wry smiles while creating stars, polyhedrons, spinning parallelograms of yellow faces. When I sat down on the toilet, when I took my eyes off the computer, every time I blinked, the mushrooms would reappear, a fervor of frenetic pupae burned into my retinas.
While the babies’ features had been generic before, they started turning into the faces of people I’d known when I was a child. The first time I witnessed this, I stared nearly half an hour at a cluster that had bloomed into the forms of my school friends. The faces had adopted their features. Among them were the bald versions of Gina Tatiana Segura, of Santiago Villamarín, carcinogenic copies of my elementary school playmates. One turned into the head of my grandmother, another my aunt Estela. Some of the heads collapsed just a few days after reaching full maturity. One took on the features of my father. With the same speed that his features solidified, they split asunder, melting and crumbling, black flesh oozing through a paranasal wound and a rotten eye.
Like a madman I searched for a scientific explanation. I had to figure out where the fungus came from, what had made it able to mimic, with such exactitude, the faces of those who populate my memories. They had their noses, their wrinkles, eyebrows, and uncomfortable smiles, even with their eyes still closed, slightly misshapen, stuffed with spores. They were sacks filled with something frothy, smooth to the touch. My every attempt of finding it on the internet failed, and the only explanation I could come up with was that the mushrooms had developed some type of neural cell network. Maybe it was a part of the fungus’s reproductive cycle to spend all that time exploring every detail of my psyche. Having established itself in my brain’s cavernous depths, it now nestled in my temporal lobe, where the process of facial recognition occurs. It copied faces unconsciously without even knowing what they were.
*
Once I finished my shift running the chatbots I finally found some solace. It was a relief to see and speak to familiar faces here, in a country far from my own. The blue-veined shafts that held the faces aloft throbbed like hard, lumpy cocks. I’d tell them, for example, about an irate woman who’d bought a phone she claimed didn’t work when, in actuality, she just didn’t know how to turn it on. I laughed as I told them the story. I hadn’t had fun like that in a long time. One day my sister, who’d died twelve years prior, appeared in the mushrooms, smiling. She was blooming happily, resuscitated among the pockmarked pupae. The sight of her nearly brought me to tears. I couldn’t stop myself from touching the skin of the mushroom, from whispering her name. It was irresistible. Sandra? It didn’t move its mouth or eyes. The fungiform pupae didn’t have brains. They were merely plushy, splotchy sacks of spores; spongy, like button mushrooms, lacking both brain and brawn. Delicate, jumbled rows of gray gills formed beneath her chin, forming a hymenium, just like those that undergird the caps of many other mushrooms. My sister’s face was spectacularly sculpted, the size of a ripe pumpkin. It gave the impression she was alive.
I held my sister’s head in my hands and remembered how she died. She was why I’d run away from everything, isolated myself in faraway countries where I didn’t know the language, unable to make friends. She was why. When we were little, she’d call me ugly, stupid. It was just kid stuff, but I never got over it. She’d smack me upside the head for no reason, tell me I was the ugliest person on the planet. When I started going through puberty, she’d make fun of my body hair, my armpits, my mustache, the size of my nose. She’d go at it in front of our family, my friends, our parents. She called me retarded, an ape, an orangutan, a weirdo. Other times she’d ignore me, act like I didn’t exist. Even at thirty I wasn’t over it. I couldn’t take my clothes off in front of anyone. I still had a stutter. I didn’t want anyone to look at me. A few days before she died, we had a serious talk. She was laid out on a hospital bed after a heart attack, but we spoke about me. I knew it wasn’t the time, but I told her flat-out that it was her fault my life was a wreck, that she was the reason why I was afraid of everyone. I called her every name in the book. She had another heart attack that night. I felt I’d been the one who killed her—at least indirectly. I loved her, and I think she loved me. She just did so in a way I could never understand.
The heads were larger than humans’ when they fully matured. I’d say some were bigger than Pilates balls, so heavy they buckled at the stem. They’d escaped from behind the bathroom door. Cheeks pressed against the hallway floor, they formed a wall, sealing the way to the bathroom. The mushroom with my sister’s face had gone purple, and Juanita’s—who’d been my best friend—was shriveled up and dark brown. Others lost their teeth as they ripened. Most of the heads were fat by now, eyes open, pupils dilated, smiles wide. I took care of them, watering them, cleaning them. I was afraid of losing them. I felt like a gardener, pruning them, removing the dead skin they shed every week as they grew bigger. I’d tell them about what happened at work. “I don’t know why I’m so afraid to admit I’m lonely.” My sister watched me from the floor with one eye ajar. “At home I was told it’s good to be alone, that I didn’t need anyone, but I didn’t want that . . . I don’t have the words to describe the level of loneliness I felt.” My sister stayed in the same position, bulging like a globe. “I want to tell you I miss you. I miss you so much. I didn’t know how to say it before, but now you’re here, it makes sense. I treated you so badly the last time we spoke. I want to apologize. Do you forgive me?”
After several sessions of venting, getting everything off my chest, my sister’s head showed up in my dreams, sparkling bright. I guessed that it was the telepathic power of the hivemind. I couldn’t leave the house. I’d stopped bathing and shaving entirely. I lost my job, I suppose because I stopped paying attention to the customer service chats. I stopped charging my phone. Instead, I spent hours on end embracing the black-and-blue bruised faces of my loved ones. I had groceries delivered and kept myself alive on canned food and instant ramen. God knows for how long. I only turned my computer on to read more about telepathic mushrooms. That’s how I found out that few articles had been published the week before—outbreaks like the one in my apartment had been popping up sporadically across the city. One of those who’d been affected was a biologist. He’d discovered that the mushrooms were related to giant puffballs, known locally as “wolf farts,” and that the outbreak had been spreading since last month. In another paper, published just a few days ago, researchers had shown that all the outbreaks were connected to one another via the city plumbing. Taking samples from different locations, they determined that all the mushrooms shared the same DNA. At first, they thought that they were clones, but later discovered that they were all the same organism—one immense mycelium. As of the date of the article, said organism already measured more than three hundred square kilometers in size, making it one of the largest living beings on the planet. One element tied the cases of those afflicted by the outbreak together: those who dwelled alongside the mushrooms related to them intimately. In an online forum, one woman wrote that the cephalomorphic mushrooms bore the face of Jesus. Others saw dead parents and soccer stars. All went crazy, cooped up in their homes, progressively more obsessed with their racemes of swollen heads. Seemingly authentic catatonics, many lost their jobs, drowning in neglect and psychosis.
The mushrooms’ psychic presence grew further, propagating in the apartment’s every nook and cranny: a deluge, flooding every drawer, every cupboard. Like a wave of emotion, they passed through my pores, hurled me to the ground. I hugged close those bloated heads of my beloveds, able only to mutter and shudder, a strong stench of rotten fruit hanging in the air. I thought of it like therapy, a painful process by which I could forgive my sister for all the shit she put me through, a silent quest to the rock bottom of my traumas to find the shapes, words, and actions that defined them. Shutting my eyes, I saw Sandra’s mammoth head. A miles-tall mass flew above the city suburbs, her sparkling eyes searching for me on every street. She always found me in these dreams. Rays shooting from her eyes to mine, she plugged herself into my mind—a psychic rape. Yet, once she did so, I could see the full constellation of her consciousness: a massive expanse of nerve endings stretching out for miles. She was a colossus, a Cyclopean god, watching me in silence. I suffered through the twin onslaughts of joy and hate I felt while gazing at those constellations. Gusts of euphoria spread throughout my body, my muscles writhing. With a rush of pleasure, I ejaculated in my pants, clearing up space for me to recall everything she was, everything she did. Sobbing inexplicably, my muscles finally relaxed. Then more fits of rage. There were times I couldn’t stop screaming and cussing her out. Half-dressed, I’d pace back and forth, grinding my teeth, sweaty from head to toe. I’d lost count of the days, stopped brushing my teeth, unable to sleep, pissing and shitting myself whilst cackling uncontrollably. At the apex of our telepathy, unable to control any muscle in my body, the mushroom spoke to me with the voice of a ghastly angel. She told me how much she’d suffered, that she’d treated me the way she did because our own mother had punished, mistreated, and neglected her. I wept. Pain breeds like an insect, laying its eggs first in one mind, then another. I fought with my own pig-headed self, night after night. I realized how I’d shut myself off by blaming Sandra for all my sorrows. I’d strung myself along, clung to her so I could excuse myself as the victim. I even enjoyed doing so. Now I could let all that go. The mushrooms oversaw this process with the determination of a spiritual guide, always attentive, their heads in a heap in the hallway with eyes wide-open, their gaze affixed on my heart.
*
Recently the heads started giving off a mouthwatering smell. Their voices woke me up as I reclined on my mound of mycotic heads. At first I thought there was someone else in the apartment. I then realized it was that same angelic voice I’d heard before inside my head. Maybe it was thanks to our mental back-and-forths that they recognized the features of human speech. Whatever it was, the mushrooms spoke to me in my own voice, demanding I eat them: “Eat us. Eat. Split me open and eat me.”
I severed Sandra’s tubby face in two with a kitchen knife in silence, bringing the sharp blade straight down from forehead to jaw, letting the black gunk spill out the middle like an infectious soup of ripe spores. I buried my whole face in the hollowed-out half of my sister’s head. My mouth full of black jelly, I tongued its gummy texture. Flavorless meat, like mushrooms dripping in drool. I savored it like dessert.
*
Chewing and swallowing, my head clears. The intense presence of the fungal mind begins to fade. The seeds are safe inside me now. They’ll pass through my excrement, then on to elsewhere where they’ll rise again. Enrapturing another human with the promise of free therapy, they’ll force them to eat their ripe flesh and disseminate their spores. This beautiful parasite has adapted to read the minds and conquer the hearts of humans. This is the only way it survives. I am but a single pupa in its chitin hyphae, a mere filament in the fructiferous macroscopic body of a mycelial god. I feel complete, happy, having finally come to peace with my sister’s death. I can leave the apartment now, find a new job, meet new people, take off my clothes without shame, live a life without fear of rejection. The psychotherapeutic mushrooms have shown me the complexity of their interactions with the medium they live in. They tell me all about it before they dry up in the bathroom. They leave behind busted plaster, broken tiles, and the wreckage of my past.
I open the door and step outside.
