I am a man who used to love bread. I loved it no matter how it came to me: wheat bread, corn bread, rye bread, seven-grain bread, garlic bread, French bread, Italian bread, pita bread and even that bleached flour white bread that most people like me turn up their noses at. They say that man cannot live by bread alone, but I came awfully darn close.
Of course, bread mold, good old Rhizopus nigricans, is the bane of bread lovers. I had a passionate hatred of the stuff. The slightest taste of it turned my stomach, so I was always very careful to inspect my bread before I ate it. First I would look at the bread. Then I would smell it. Then, if it passed these two tests, I would eat it.
One day I took a loaf of bread out of the refrigerator and I saw right away that it was moldy. But habit being what it is, I opened the plastic bag and took a deep whiff of the bread anyway. A big cloud of black spores puffed up into my face and up my nose. Gack! How could I have been so stupid? I was just so accustomed to looking and then sniffing!
That evening, I noticed that everything I ate and drank tasted like mold. I brushed my teeth and gargled with Listerine, swabbed out my nostrils and dosed my nose with nasal spray. It didn’t help. By the next day, everything not only tasted like mold, but even the air smelled like mold.
The day after that, I woke up with an agonizingly sore throat. I got a flashlight and looked down my gullet in the mirror, and to my horror, I saw that my throat was filled with a mat of fine white threads. The mold was growing in my body! I called in sick and went to the doctor.
The doctor examined me and said that he could see mold in my nose and ears, too. “Fungus infections are devilishly hard to treat,” he said. “You see, the fungi are actually more closely related to animals than to plants, and anything that hurts them also hurts the host.” He prescribed some medications for me, and I started taking them right away.
But by that evening, I could hardly breathe for all the fungus in my nose. I pulled a lot of it out with tweezers. It hurt as it pulled away from my skin. The fungus spread all over my tongue and lips, covering them with grey fuzz. That night I had to stick straws in my nose to breathe.
The next morning, I couldn’t open my eyes. I felt a mat of fuzz covering my eyes and I started tearing at it. The pain was excruciating, and even when I was able to open my eyes a crack, I still couldn’t really see anything. I stumbled to the bathroom to pee, but the pee didn’t come out. Reaching down, I felt fuzz all over the head of my penis. At that point I panicked and called 911.
The next few days were a haze of pain and tubes and terror. I lay semi-conscious in the hospital, feeling as if my body were on fire inside and out. On fire and itching! I couldn’t breathe or see or eat. My world felt and smelled and tasted like mold. I overheard someone say that I was going to die.
Then I woke up in the middle of the night feeling fine. I drew a deep breath, no problem. I could see just fine in the dim light of the room. I reached up and touched my face. No fuzz! The fungus appeared to be gone.
I sat up and looked around, and then I saw him. Or it? It was me. He was standing there in my room, looking at me with a gentle, loving smile on his face. His skin was gleaming a ghostly white in the dim light; even his hair was white, although mine is brown. He was naked, and slightly smaller than I am.
“What are you?” I whispered. “Are you a ghost?”
He came over to me and gently grasped my hand. His flesh was cold, slightly slippery, with a fibrous feel to it. He felt like…a mushroom.
“You’re the fungus!”
He nodded, smiling like an angel.
I suppose I should have destroyed it on the spot. But I didn’t have it in me to kill a thing that looked almost exactly like me, and was friendly besides.
Instead, I asked him if he could find his way to my house. He nodded and smiled, so I told him to go there, and to stay out of sight. Off he went, and the next day I was discharged by doctors who were baffled by my miraculous recovery.
My fungal double was waiting for me when I got home. He was like a new toy. I tried to feed him, but he wouldn’t eat anything, although he did drink a lot of water. He grew slightly bigger until he was my size or even larger, since I had lost some weight in the hospital.
I dressed him in my clothes. I tried to get him to talk, but he never did. I showed him pictures of naked women, but he didn’t respond in any way. So I showed him pictures of mushrooms and spores. That didn’t turn him on either. “What does a female mushroom look like, anyway?” I asked him. He smiled.
I realized after a few days that I had been avoiding my favorite food, bread. When I had gotten home from the hospital, the first thing I had done was to throw away all the bread in the house without even looking at it. The food that I wanted was meat. I ate lots of meat.
I thought about this. Bread no longer seemed appetizing to me, and this bothered me. My interest in bread was more than gustatory. It was also a hobby, even a passion, and part of my identity. I couldn’t just give it up. I decided that I had to force myself to eat bread again. Like they say, if you fall off a horse, the thing to do is to get right back on and ride again.
I took the mold man with me to the bakery. He was rather conspicuous with that gleaming skin, so I put a coat, hat and sunglasses on him to make him less noticeable.
We walked in and were hit with the sweet smell of bread. Bread was all around us.
My fungal twin uttered a hoarse, ululating cry, the only sound I ever heard him make. Before my eyes, and the eyes of the horrified bakers, he began to writhe and struggle. Off flew the hat, the sunglasses, the coat and the clothes underneath. His body began to darken visibly, and his shape began to lose definition. Soon he was a black, fuzzy, liquidy shapeless mass. “Oh, my God, he’s sporulating!” I cried. He, or rather, it, pulsated a couple of times and then exploded with an audible puff. The air was black with spores.
Every damn loaf of bread in the bakery got moldy on the spot. It was that fast. Then, all the bakers got sick the way I had. Later they came after me to make me pay for their hospital bills and all that moldy bread, so I had to leave town in a hurry.
I still wonder what the bakers did with their mold doubles.