by Neil Gaiman
Mallon had touched a dying child, the Master said, yet had he restored it to health? Even if he had, was the healing truly his work? Mere belief could heal as successfully as other forces, temporarily. Was Mallon well schooled in the sutras? How great was his knowledge of Buddhist teachings?
Urdang replied that Mallon was not a Buddhist.
“Then why have you come?”
Mallon spoke from his heart. “I come for your blessing, dear Master.”
“You cannot have my blessing. I ask for yours instead.” The holy man spoke as if to an ancient enemy.
“My blessing?” Mallon asked.
“Render it unto me as you did to the child.”
Confused and irritated, Mallon scooted forward and extended a hand. Almost, he wished to withhold his blessing, as had the yogi, but he could not behave so childishly in front of Urdang. The holy man leaned forward and permitted his brow to be brushed. If any molten particle of energy flew from his hand into the yogi’s brain pan, Mallon did not feel its passage.
The Master’s face contracted, no mean trick, and for a moment he closed his eyes.
“Well?” Mallon said. Urdang gasped at his rudeness.
“It is very much as I thought,” said the Master, opening his eyes. “I cannot be responsible for your Spencer Mallon, and you must not request any more of me. I see it all very clearly. Already, this most peculiar, this most dangerously peculiar man has awakened disorder within our village. He must leave Sankwal immediately, and you who brought him here, Urdang, you must leave with him.”
“If that is your wish, Master,” Urdang said. “But perhaps-”
“No. No more. You would be wise to separate yourself from this student as soon as you can do so honorably. And as for you, young man…”
He turned his sorrowful eyes upon Mallon, and Mallon could feel his spirit hovering near, irate and fearful.
“I advise you to take great, great care in everything you do. But it would be wisest if you did nothing at all.”
“Master, why are you afraid of me?” Mallon asked. “I want only to love you.” In truth, he had wished to love the Master before he met him. Now, he wanted only to leave the village and its frightened, envious yogi far behind him. And, he realized, if Urdang wanted to leave him, that would be fine, too.
“I am grateful you do not,” the Master said. “You will go from my village now, both of you.”
When Urdang opened the gates, the lanes were empty. The villagers had fled back to their homes. The air darkened, and rain began to fall. Before they reached open ground, the earth had been churned to mud. A loud cry came from the hut of the poor man with the sick child, whether of joy or pain they could not say.
Lawrence Block. CATCH AND RELEASE
WHEN YOU SPENT ENOUGH TIME FISHING, you got so you knew the waters. You had certain spots that had worked for you over the years, and you went to them at certain times of the day in certain seasons of the year. You chose the tackle appropriate to the circumstances, picked the right bait or lure, and tried your luck.
If they weren’t biting, you moved on. Picked another spot.
HE WAS CRUISING THE interstate, staying in the right-hand lane, keeping the big SUV a steady five miles an hour below the speed limit. As he passed each exit, he let up on the gas pedal while he kept an eye out for hitchhikers. There was a string of four exits where they were apt to queue up, college students looking to thumb their way home, or to another campus, or wherever they felt a need to go. There were so many of them, and they were always going someplace, and it hardly mattered where or why.
He drove north, passed four exits, took the fifth, crossed over and got on the southbound entrance ramp. Four more exits, then off again and on again and he was once more heading north.
Taking his time.
There were hitchhikers at each exit, but his foot never touched the brake pedal. It would hover there, but he always saw something that made him drive on. There were plenty of girls out there today, some of them especially alluring in tight jeans and braless T-shirts, but they all seemed to have boys or other girls as companions. The only solitary hitchhikers he saw were male. And he was not interested in boys. He wanted a girl, a girl all by herself.
LUKE 5:5. LORD, WE finished all night and caught nothing.
Sometimes you could drive all day, and the only reason you’d have to stop was to fill the gas tank. But the true fisherman could fish all night and catch nothing and not regard the time as ill spent. A true fisherman was patient, and while he waited he gave his mind over to the recollection of other days at the water’s edge. He’d let himself remember in detail how a particular quarry had risen to the bait and taken the hook. And put up a game fight.
And sizzled in the pan.
WHEN HE STOPPED FOR her, she picked up her backpack and trotted up to the car. He rolled down the window and asked her where she was headed, and she hesitated long enough to have a look at him and decide he was okay. She named a town fifty or sixty miles up the road.
“No problem,” he said. “I can just about take you to your front door.”
She tossed her pack in the back, then got in front beside him. Closed the door, fastened her seat belt.
She said something about how grateful she was, and he said something appropriate, and he joined the stream of cars heading north. What, he wondered, had she seen in that quick appraising glance? What was it that had assured her he was all right?
His face was an unmemorable one. The features were regular and average and, well, ordinary. Nothing stuck out.
Once, years ago, he’d grown a mustache. He had thought it might give his face some character, but all it did was look out of place. What was it doing there on his lip? He kept it there, waiting to get used to it, and one day he realized that wasn’t going to happen, and shaved it off.
And went back to his forgettable face. Unremarkable, unthreatening. Safe.
“A FISHERMAN,” SHE SAID. “My dad likes to go fishing. Once, twice a year he’ll go away for the weekend with a couple of his buddies and come back with an ice chest full of fish. And my mom gets stuck with cleaning them, and for a week the house totally smells of fish.”
“Well, that’s a problem I’m spared,” he told her. “I’m what they call a catch-and-release fisherman.”
“You don’t come home with a full ice chest?”
“I don’t even have an ice chest. Oh, I used to. But what I found over time was that it was the sport I enjoyed, and it was a lot simpler and easier if the game ended with the fish removed from the hook and slipped gently back into the water.”
She was silent for a moment. Then she asked if he thought they enjoyed it.
“The fish? Now that’s an interesting question. It’s hard to know what a fish does or doesn’t enjoy, or even if the word enjoy can be applied to a fish. You could make the case that a fish fighting for its life gets to be intensely alive in a way it otherwise doesn’t, but is that good or bad from the fish’s point of view?” He smiled. “When they swim away,” he said, “I get the sense that they’re glad to be alive. But I may just be trying to put myself in their position. I can’t really know what it’s like for them.”
“I guess not.”
“One thing I can’t help but wonder,” he said, “is if they learn anything from the experience. Are they warier the next time around? Or will they take the hook just as readily for the next fisherman who comes along?”
She thought about it. “I guess they’re just fish,” she said.
“Well now,” he said. “I guess they are.”
SHE WAS A PRETTY THING. A business major, she told him, taking most of her elective courses in English because she’d always like to read. Her hair was brown with auburn highlights, and she had a good figure, with large breasts and wide hips. Built for childbearing, he thought, and she’d bear three or four of them, and she’d gain weight with each pregnancy and never quite manage to lose all of it. And her face, already a little chubby, would broade
n and turn bovine, and the sparkle would fade out of her eyes.
There was a time when he’d have been inclined to spare her all that.
“REALLY,” SHE SAID, “YOU could have just dropped me at the exit. I mean, this is taking you way out of your way.”
“Less so than you’d think. Is that your street coming up?”
“Uh-huh. If you want to drop me at the corner-”
But he drove her to the door of her suburban house. He waited while she retrieved her backpack, then let her get halfway up the path to her door before he called her back.
“You know,” he said, “I was going to ask you something earlier, but I didn’t want to upset you.”
“Oh?”
“Aren’t you nervous hitching rides with strangers? Don’t you think it’s dangerous?”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, you know, everybody does it.”
“I see.”
“And I’ve always been okay so far.”
“A young woman alone-”
“Well, I usually team up with somebody. A boy, or at least another girl. But this time, well…”
“You figured you’d take a chance.”
She flashed a smile. “It worked out okay, didn’t it?”
He was silent for a moment, but held her with his eyes. Then he said, “Remember the fish we were talking about?”
“The fish?”
“How it feels when it slips back into the water. And whether it learns anything from the experience.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Not everyone is a catch-and-release fisherman,” he said. “That’s probably something you ought to keep in mind.”
She was still standing there, looking puzzled, while he put the SUV in gear and pulled away.
HE DROVE HOME, FEELING fulfilled. He had never moved from the house he was born in, and it had been his alone ever since his mother’s death ten years ago.
He checked the mail, which yielded half a dozen envelopes with checks in them. He had a mail-order business, selling fishing lures, and he spent the better part of an hour preparing the checks for deposit and packing the orders for shipment. He’d make more money if he put his business online and let people pay with credit cards, but he didn’t need much money, and he found it easier to let things remain as they were. He ran the same ads every month in the same magazines, and his old customers reordered, and enough new customers turned up to keep him going.
He cooked some pasta, heated some meat sauce, chopped some lettuce for a salad, drizzled a little olive oil over it. He ate at the kitchen table, washed the dishes, watched the TV news. When it ended he left the picture on but muted the sound, and thought about the girl.
Now, though, he gave himself over to the fantasy she inspired. A lonely road. A piece of tape across her mouth. A struggle ending with her arms broken.
Stripping her. Piercing each of her openings in turn. Giving her physical pain to keep her terror company.
And finishing her with a knife. No, with his hands, strangling her. No, better yet, with his forearm across her throat, and his weight pressing down, throttling her.
Ah, the joy of it, the thrill of it, the sweet release of it. And now it was almost as real to him as if it had happened.
But it hadn’t happened. He’d left her at her door, untouched, with only a hint of what might have been. And, because it hadn’t happened, there was no ice chest full of fish to clean--no body to dispose of, no evidence to get rid of, not even that feeling of regret that had undercut his pleasure on so many otherwise perfect occasions.
Catch and release. That was the ticket, catch and release.
THE ROADHOUSE HAD A name, Toddle Inn, but nobody ever called it anything but Roy’s, after the man who’d owned it for close to fifty years until his liver quit on him.
That was something he would probably never have to worry about, as he’d never been much of a drinker. Tonight, three days after he’d dropped the young hitchhiker at her door, he’d had the impulse to go barhopping, and Roy’s was his fourth stop. He’d ordered a beer at the first place and drank two sips of it, left the second bar without ordering anything, and drank most of the Coke he ordered at bar number three.
Roy’s had beer on draft, and he stood at the bar and ordered a glass of it. There was an English song he’d heard once, of which he recalled only one verse:
The man who buys a pint of beer
Gets half a pint of water;
The only thing the landlord’s got
That’s any good’s his daughter.
The beer was watery, to be sure, but it didn’t matter because he didn’t care about beer, good or bad. But the bar held something to interest him, the very thing he’d come out for.
She was two stools away from him, and she was drinking something in a stemmed glass, with an orange slice in it. At first glance she looked like the hitchhiker, or like her older sister, the one who’d gone wrong. Her blouse was a size too small, and she’d tried to cope by unbuttoning an extra button. The lipstick was smeared on her full-lipped mouth, and her nail polish was chipped.
She picked up her drink and was surprised to find that she’d finished it. She shook her head, as if wondering how to contend with this unanticipated development, and while she was working it out he lifted a hand to catch the barman’s eye, then pointed at the girl’s empty glass.
She waited until the fresh drink was in front of her, then picked it up and turned toward her benefactor. “Thank you,” she said, “you’re a gentleman.”
He closed the distance between them. “And a fisherman,” he said.
SOMETIMES IT DIDN’T MATTER what you had on your hook. Sometimes it wasn’t even necessary to wet a line. Sometimes all you had to do was sit there and they’d jump right into the boat.
She’d had several drinks before the one he’d bought her, and she didn’t really need the two others he bought her after that. But she thought she did, and he didn’t mind spending the money or sitting there while she drank them.
Her name, she told him repeatedly, was Marni. He was in no danger of forgetting that fact, nor did she seem to be in any danger of remembering his name, which she kept asking him over and over. He’d said it was Jack-it wasn’t-and she kept apologizing for her inability to retain that information. “I’m Marni,” she’d say on each occasion. “With an i,” she added, more often than not.
He found himself remembering a woman he’d picked up years ago in a bar with much the same ambience. She’d been a very different sort of drunk, although she’d been punishing the Harvey Wallbangers as industriously as Marni was knocking back the gandy dancers. She’d grown quieter and quieter, and her eyes went glassy, and by the time he’d driven them to the place he’d selected in advance, she was out cold. He’d had some very interesting plans for her, and here she was, the next thing to comatose, and wholly incapable of knowing what was being done to her.
So he’d let himself imagine that she was dead, and took her that way, and kept waiting for her to wake up, but she didn’t. And it was exciting, more exciting than he’d have guessed, but at the end he held himself back.
And paused for a moment to consider the situation, and then very deliberately broke her neck. And then took her again, imagining that she was only sleeping.
And that was good, too.
“AT LEAST I GOT the house,” she was saying. “My ex took the kids away from me, can you imagine that? Got some lawyer saying I was an un-t mother. Can you imagine that?”
The house her ex-husband had let her keep certainly looked like a drunk lived in it. It wasn’t filthy, just remarkably untidy. She grabbed him by the hand and led him up a flight of stairs and into her bedroom, which was no neater than the rest of the place, then turned and threw herself into his arms.
He disengaged, and she seemed puzzled. He asked if there was anything in the house to drink, and she said there was beer in the fridge, and there might be some vodka in the freezer. He said he’d be right back.
“Catch and release,” he said, and left her there.
FISHING WAS NOT JUST a metaphor. A couple of days later he walked out his front door into a cool autumn morning. The sky was overcast, the humidity lower than it had been. The breeze was out of the west.
It was just the day for it. He got his gear together, made his choices, and drove to the bank of a creek that was always good on this kind of day. He fished the spot for an hour, and by the time he left he had hooked and landed three trout. Each had put up a good fight, and as he released them he might have observed that they’d earned their freedom, that each deserved another chance at life.
But what did that mean, really? Could a fish be said to earn or deserve anything? Could anyone? And did a desperate effort to remain alive somehow entitle one to live?
Consider the humble flounder. He was a saltwater fish, a bottom fish, and when you hooked him he rarely did much more than flop around a little while you reeled him in. Did this make him the trout’s moral inferior? Did he have less right to live because of his genetically prescribed behavior?
He stopped on the way home, had a hamburger and a side of well-done fries. Drank a cup of coffee. Read the paper.
Back home, he cleaned and sorted his tackle and put everything away where it belonged.
THAT NIGHT IT RAINED, and did so off and on for the next three days. He stayed close to home, watched a little television.
Nights, he’d lean back in his recliner and close his eyes, letting himself remember. Once, a few months back, he’d tried to count. He’d been doing this for years, long before his mother died, and in the early years his appetite had been ravenous. It was, he sometimes thought, a miracle he hadn’t been caught. Back then he’d left DNA all over the place, along with God knew what else in the way of trace evidence.