Goldmund woke in a mold of his own back made from grainy white sand, alone. The sky was grey and churning, just as it had been earlier. He stood up and stretched. Clotted sand fell from holes Goldmund was not accustomed to having. Over his shoulder he spied three long gashes down his back where the sand had sopped up the most blood. He shrugged, and flames shot up his back. So not an affliction he could just shrug off. A cry from the wilderness,
"You're awake! Finally!" another naked man bounded from the forest and embraced Goldmund, careful not to wrap his hands too tightly around his wounded backside.
Gregor held Goldmund by his triceps. "How can I ever thank you, my savior! I pledge my life to thee, anything you desire you will have, within my ability. Please, I beg of you, forgive me of deceiving you; you wouldn't have believed my situation if I had told you it."
"That may be," Goldmund said, "but what is your situation, exactly?"
"I woke up one day as a cockroach, many, many years ago. Only yesterday did I return to my true self, inexplicably."
"That explains the laughing… I suppose I can forgive your transgression, if you tell me your story, young man."
And so Gregor told Goldmund how he had woken up one day as a cockroach, and how his family reacted, and their alienation toward him, and his regression to a bug's mind state, and the incident with the three renters and his sister's music.
"At that point I felt it was best if I left my family. I slowed my metabolism to a hundredth of its normal pace and shut off most of my body. They bought my fraudulent death and threw me out unceremoniously. I stayed for a few weeks to see how their lives were unfolding and felt gratified. What happened was for the best."
"For you, as well?"
"I had been toiling, working nonstop for their sake for years, and being a cockroach really wasn't as bad as it sounds. Once the initial shock wore away, it felt natural."
"I can see how that could be true, though I could never imagine being in your position. What did you do after that?"
"I traveled to Africa, where the climate was more agreeable to my new body. I lived there for over fifty years, had quite a few urban legends made about me, and then I was captured by British government agents. They performed several experiments on me and spoke of me as if they understood my previous personhood. Eventually one of them, an old, ugly, bespectacled man with an etymology tracing roughly back to maggot had a long talk with me about controlling the past, future and present, and about under-fertilization of certain crops leading to their extinction, and then they put me in a machine and I woke up in a castle dungeon, which I escaped after mauling several guards. Since then I've been wandering around Europe. As a cockroach I had the ability to learn languages in minimal amounts of time, and from what I've overheard, we are living a few hundred years before my birth."
Goldmund's eyes widened. "You're from the future?"
"Yes."
Goldmund found this hard to believe, but he did, because the man who told him could turn into a giant cockroach, and if that was possible Goldmund could believe anything. He also recalled the flat piece of skin that had talked to him, what it had said.
"Gregor, I'm going to the other side of the world. You can choose to come with me if you wish."
"I'll go wherever you go, Goldmund, I owe my life to you. Could I ask why?"
"The cause of the destruction we witnessed yesterday is there, and I must find it and render it powerless."
"I shall come with you then. How are we getting to New Zealand, though? Will we be able to afford a boat?"
"What is New Zealand?"
Gregor and Goldmund slept on a great plain that night. The skies were baby blue and cloudless. The moon was full, and now regurgitated the sunlight it had eaten onto the treeless expanse, making it too bright to sleep without a cover over one's eyes. The two naked travelers snatched patches of grass from the ground and made nests over their closed eyelids, falling asleep soon after.
That evening they had discussed their travel plans, mapping out in the dirt how they would make their way through Transylvania, then ride the Ural River to the other side of the continent, and subsequently sail to the large island in the pacific Gregor called "New Zealand." The dirt was left undisturbed by the wind or any smothering feet.
Goldmund had known which berries to pick in the forest, and they had gorged themselves before leaving. This was apparent by the stains that had dried on their bare chests and chewed fruity flecks tangled in their unshaven beards. Neither of them bothered to point out the red rings around the other's mouth. The men looked savage and insane as they lay on their backs with interwoven spirals of grass sprouting from their eyes and what looked like blood covering them. An odd number of eyes observed this, and drew back into the wilderness.
It had been two days since Gregor or Goldmund had seen a soul, when they saw a fat man stumbling down a hillside adjacent to theirs. Each of his steps dug deep into the dirt, pushing forward the grass and minerals beneath so his tracks looked like horseshoes. No, not stumbling, the man was falling, and the craters left behind him did nothing to slow momentum. They were increasing in size down the hill, as if a foal had been born at its top and in its descent had grown to full maturity. The skintight flask of lard bounded across the valley and up the next hill a few steps, and then fell backwards. Goldmund and Gregor concurred that the fellow looked quite dead; there was a hole in his head that went straight through.
"Someone's jumbled his brains through that hole," Goldmund observed.
"What sort of tool could do something like that? And why would it be used to this end?"
"No," the presumed dead man startled them by speaking. "They jumbled my brains before they made the hole."
"What does that mean?"
Goldmund shrugged, and winced at the automatic pain he felt by doing so. "Remind me not to be so indecisive."
It was about this time that the warm air exhaled from the fat man's mouth reached the level of our heroes' noses. The breath stunk of rancid alcohol, the kind left in the sun all day and chugged and chucked up by curious children. Gregor turned around to dry heave and Goldmund drew his nonexistent shirt over his nose, cursing his nakedness and the lack of clothes lying about the plains and hillsides of the country.
"Should we bother questioning this corpse any longer?" Goldmund asked, tired of this distraction.
"Yes," Gregor said firmly. "I recognize his clothing."
To the horizontal party he asked, "Why are you here?"
"To fertilize certain crops that are endangered or extinct in my time," the man said as if reading from an Encyclopaedia, his eye crossing, hypnotized by something no longer in front of it. Thereafter he expired.
"His time," Goldmund repeated. "So he's like you, then."
"In one way, at least."
"Come on, we'll want to be far away from here when whoever put that hole in his head shows up looking for him, lest we want to find out what it's like to fertilize something men aren't usually accustomed to fertilizing."
"Lead the way."
By a stream Goldmund and Gregor met a boy covered in rashes. He was laid out upon a slab like a sacrifice. The boy looked at the roaming naked men and said, "Please kill me."
"To acquiesce would be to make me a child killer."
"I disagree. You would rank among the utmost respected caretakers, sir, for this pain I'm in makes one wish for death more than heartbreak, and if my mother knew how much pain I have suffered she would surely be much more devastated by that than news of a quick death."
"Why not kill yourself then, boy?"
"Eternal damnation, good sir, an infinite pain of this degree. There would be no difference, you see."
"I see. Come with us, boy, and we shall find a battlefield where you can venture into crossfire, therefore no one can bear your death on their conscious."
"Fine, I will come with you, but if three days pass, and we find no soldiers to accidently kill me, then you must take it upon yourself to do the deed."
"I agree to your terms, boy, now come with us and do not fall behind."
The boy grimaced and removed himself from the slab, and the journeyers went forward. Three days later, the boy's rashes had cleared up, and he left by his own will, them encountering no battles during the passage of time. Biding the boy farewell, Goldmund thanked the gods he was not forced to fulfill his promise.