EXPERIMENTAL TREATMENT

"When I was about ten or so, I swallowed seventeen packets of sea monkeys, all at once. It turned out my immune system was missing an antibody or two, and I had an undiagnosed fistula, so the pleura between my organs turned into a whole sea monkey circus." She spoke matter of factly, but was beaming all the while. "They had to fly me out to San Diego for emergency treatment, and injected a batch of jellyfish polyps into my belly, just underneath the ribcage." She pointed at the exact spot through her shirt for emphasis. "The idea was, they'd feed on the sea monkeys, then die out when there wasn't anything else left to eat. Then my lymph nodes would clean them out, and life would go back to normal."

I'd never heard of such a thing, but it wasn't a huge leap from using leeches for bloodletting. "What hospital had jellyfish at the ready to do that?"

"It was a research hospital. University of San Andreas Children's, in the hills out by Miramar. I don't remember a lot about it, but the doctors loved answering my questions. One of them told me, 'the human body is somewhere between a coral reef and a pinball machine, but yours is going to be more coral reef for a while.' Apparently they'd been testing to see if inner jellies worked as a treatment for fungal infestations like aspergillus, but they decided my case also warranted study. Back then, my parents were willing to try just about anything."

"Well, if you're here, I suppose it worked."

"As well as it could, just, not exactly the way they'd hoped. The sea monkey population got under control, but they were never fully exterminated, so I became a complete ecosystem. Treatment shifted to injecting nutrients for mitigation. And after a few years, one of the jellyfish grew to the adult stage, became a full medusa. She's getting really big, now. They recommended surgical removal, but I just couldn't do that to her."

"How big exactly is this jellyfish?"

"I grew pretty fond of her, you know? They kept showing me the scans, and, well. Here." She reached into her purse and unzipped a nested wallet, before handing me a delicate set of printed x-rays. Her bones formed opaque architecture onto which the creature's translucence clung tightly. There were rolling tentacles spooled about her ribs, and vague coils around faint outlines of organs. What might have been a wandering chandelier in more open waters was instead squeezed into any space her bodily cavities allowed. The two beings were tighlty bound together from within her abdomen. separate yet inseparable.

"Sometimes I wonder if this is what it's like to be a god, you know? To care for something that can never know you, and witness it become part of you. I've become her false ocean. We're made out of each other. Sometimes I put my hand where her I think her bell is and wonder if she senses any presence from something outside her universe. Probably not, but at least I know she's there. And honestly, I'm not sure we could medically survive without each other at this point. I just hope to keep her world alive as long as I can."

I handed the images back to her as delicately as I could. It felt like a violation of gnostic compact to have seen them, much too intimate. "Does she have a name?"

She giggled. "Yeah. I wish I'd have come up with something cooler, like Syrinx, or Gorgonzola. But I was still a kid when I named her, so she'll always be Noodles."