Plumbing the Depths of Gabino Iglesias' "Beyond the Reef"
“We all fear otherness on some level, some primal response to things we don’t know…”
-Gabino Iglesias
There is otherness to be found within ourselves, in nature, and in the supernatural. The trouble with humans is the inherent impulse to destroy it all. Beyond the Reef by Gabino Iglesias is a short story found within the anthology Lullabies for Suffering: Tales of Addiction Horror edited by Mark Matthews. This story takes humanity’s tendency to sabotage themselves and others to a supernatural level.
The main character Adam introduces the reader into his own personal hell with the first line, “Being a parent and being a junkie are almost the same thing.” What a statement. Parenting can come about out of choice or happen by accident, and as upsetting as the comparison is, becoming a junkie occurs in the same vein. Delving deeper into Adam’s world, there is a great deal of time spent discussing how a person’s life can change and revolve around getting their next fix, regardless of their job, status, or home life.
We learn that Adam went to college, fell in love, had a daughter, and then fell into a deeper love with substances that encompassed every aspect of his life like a deceptively warm bubble. This is where self-sabotage becomes central within the story, although we are still within the realm of normal at this point. “It was poison, but it felt like medicine, a magic elixir that unveiled the splendors and beauty of life.”
As Adam begins to work in more criminal occupations to pay for his family and drug addiction, things begin to trickle into the supernatural. Adam looks for an easier way to make money and visits a rundown neighborhood with the intention of robbing someone at an ATM. He explains a local legend pertaining to the neighborhood: “Rumor has it a young boy riding his bike was run over by a lady leaving the bank and students who live in the apartment complexes nearby claim they often see the kid, whose arms are missing, wandering the parking lot. Los Dismembrados, they called it, wandering spirits killed in car accidents who are missing their limbs.” An interesting cultural reference, but also a metaphor for what Adam is becoming. As he continues his life of crime, his self-sabotage is essentially removing his own limbs and disabling him against the world and the problems he wishes to escape. “Desperation changes people, and never into something better.”
Adam is deep within some criminal shit at this point. He agrees to help his drug dealer so that he can get some extra money. He thinks it will be a simple ordeal of bringing some drugs to a customer and taking the money. The dealer he accompanies, Ronny, then explains to Adam that he will have to carry a shotgun and look menacing while Ronny does all the talking. It already sounds like it’s going to go terribly.
They arrive at the beach where the meeting is to take place and immediately encounter the strange clients. “The combination of rocks, darkness, and waves made the place feel forbidden, like nature had built its own barbed wire barrier.” The noting of a barrier is vital to this part, because we learn that the clients are not people, but creatures from the sea who have become regular customers to the drug dealers inadvertently.
The original drug dealers of the area had once been tying people (frequently junkies) to boats in the water to die so that their enemies would see their corpses and fear them. The bodies would disappear because they were being eaten by the creatures below. Unintentionally, the beings became addicted to heroin from eating the bodies of the heroin-laced junkies.
At this point, humanity has taken its tendency towards addiction and its need to sabotage over the barrier between land and sea-dwellers. These creatures are dressed in clothing, but that is as far as their humanity goes. It is but a guise to get them their batch of heroin, return to their home in the depths of the sea, and get fucked up. The terror comes when one of the beings speak, “His voice sounded horrible. Imagine a fat man with emphysema choking on pancake syrup and you have an idea of what he sounded like.” He tells Ronny that the last batch was bad, that it made them sick, and reveals a weeping lesion under his giant, milky-membraned eye that exposes underlying bone. Ronny tries to apologize and make things right, but it gets out of hand and Adam and Ronny are forced to use their guns on the organisms. They run, but not before they see another one emerging from the sea with determined movements.
“Something strange happens to your brain when the impossible becomes real. It shuts down. It cracks a little under the weight of a new truth that had previously been inconceivable.” Adam could barely handle every-day reality without a fix and is now mentally buckling under this supernatural addition to his life. “Still, even with the evidence in front of me, a part of my brain was screaming No! This isn’t real!” The irony here is that Adam’s drug-use is a form of rejecting his own reality and trying to make a newer, softer, more enjoyable one. He says, “If you’re high, it’s like you’re hovering above the moment at all times.” As humans, we want to be in control of what is real and what is not. Adam has been faced with a reality he couldn’t handle, even sober, and his reaction is to want to destroy it.
The drug dealers who began dealing with these creatures were also afraid of the ‘otherness’ and subconsciously were aware that they could begin to control these unknown creatures by maintaining and feeding their addiction to heroin, which inevitably would lead to their destruction.
Adam learns more about legends around the world pertaining to the sightings of such beings and that their existence is nothing new and does not seem to be able to be eradicated. He is upset by the fact that people move about their business while these creatures just exist along with us. “Just like me, until the previous night, they all ignored the monsters with which we share our space.” The metaphor here is an ingrained hatred for the ‘other.’ Every other person or creature that does not match our perception of reality is unwelcome and perceived as probably wanting to hurt us.
Adam also learns that hundreds of years ago, the US Government bombed the shit out of a coastal town in Massachusetts, seemingly because of the appearance of these creatures. The government also made the people who saw them disappear. This further exemplifies that the fear of otherness persists throughout humanity’s history in wars with other peoples and inside ourselves. There has always been a need to dampen the pain and discomfort that life can bring with addictive habits and destructive behavior. Sometimes ignorance is also an addictive habit and acceptance is the hardest medicine to swallow. “You will learn that privilege is basically the idea that something isn’t a damn problem because it doesn’t affect you personally.”
As the story concludes, Adam learns of revenge being taken on the drug dealers by the sea-people for their being wronged and ripped-off. The description of each body found is a metaphor for what addiction and drugs do to a person. One guy’s head was ripped off and never found: one loses their mental reasoning and logic in favor of how to get their next fix. Two other guys had their organs removed and toothy little tadpoles are found swimming within them devouring their insides: what happens to our bodies when we poison them constantly? The substance essentially eats away at our insides until they rot away.
Adam writes a letter for his young daughter to find to explain his addiction, the things beyond the reef, and how his final act will be to kill as many as he can until they get him. “You can fear a lion or snake, but they are animals and you can kill both of them. When they die, so does your fear.” Except the fear doesn’t really die, it just moves on to the next thing you don’t understand. Adam tells his daughter in the letter, “I did my last bit of dope, and once it’s gone, it’s gone for good,” which sounds like a line every relapsed junkie has used before.
This story is riddled with the consequences of hatred for others and ourselves. The hatred that stems from fear and the inability to try to understand a new and difficult concept. The notion that tools of our own self-destruction might end up destroying non-human beings who didn’t have that tendency to begin with, is ever-present here and terrifying. What if our destructive, addictive behavior starts creeping into the rest of the world and become the addictions of plants, animals, and supernatural entities around us? What will happen to our biosphere then? Gabino Iglesias weaves an intricate connection between self-destruction evolving into the devastation of everything around us, including supernatural entities. There is a great and unique horror in knowing our selfish behavior could plumb the depths of the sea and transcend the realm of the supernatural.
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