City Fishing

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  And his vision at those times—he could see dark animals at the banks, and black flowers with gigantic blooms. He saw things which might have been demons, or angels, if there was a difference. He wasn’t sure. The fish leapt greedily beneath his shadow, snapping at the flies crawling across his belly.

  His back spasmed; the muscles writhed, as if trying to escape his shoulder blades. It had never been this bad before. He could sense the dark shadows leaning forward and back, trying to catch him by surprise, making it almost impossible for his back to adjust to the enormous shifting weight. Like wings flapping, pounding, attempting to take off into the night with him.

  He sank further into the mattress, and was suddenly afraid he would no longer be able to breathe. The weight put a claw into his heart, and he began to choke.

  Panicked, he began to push upward. Using those two good arms. The back began to rock, the muscles to split before he knew what was happening. He thought of the bird and its scratching as the shadowy things begin to scatter out of his flesh. For the first time he could turn his face to look up into the dark.

  To see his wife staring down at him, her feet well-planted in his flesh, her eyes widening as she realized what was happening. His two children clutched her, and above them was his father, and his grandfather, his great-grandfather, and all the other tired, frightened faces, too numerous to count.

  They were too exhausted to scream when the entire structure toppled. But just before his ears stopped working, he could hear them, and himself, weeping.

  EGGS

  Go To The Shores the washed-out billboard had ordered. Scott wondered why they hadn’t repainted the sign, or torn it down. As is, it made a poor advertisement for a vacation spot. He could detect traces of successive layers of advertising, the latest being a dark-haired woman in a bikini, lounging on the sand, her red lips pouting at passing drivers. Her lips were the only part of her still bright, blood-like in comparison to the rest. Her skin had faded into a series of pale, rough blotches. Her black hair had receded into grayish cobwebs, her bikini merely a sketch that made her more hideous than seductive. Her eyes had been torn out.

  Other things were revealed by tattered windows in this top layer of billboard: a piece of thick rope, part of an ancient vessel, a darkened tentacle of squid or octopus. There were letters and words as well, peeking through the torn spaces or leaking into the thin top layers of paper, but they appeared backwards, part of some foreign alphabet he did not recognize.

  It’s like a dream of the beach, he had thought, but someone else’s dream and not your own. He wondered at the peculiar perception. The dream of someone much like himself who never went to the beach, who knew it only from movies and guidebooks or ancient, crumbling billboards erected in weedy lots too far off the interstate to be inviting. In the dream there is no sensation of sand between the toes, clinging to the back, the gritty feel of it inside wet swimming trunks, because the dreamer has not walked in sand for a very long time now, not since he was eight, and there had been that last trip to a broken-down seedy pier a few weeks before his parents’ divorce.

  In the dream the beach is wide and hot, brilliantly overlie in the way dreams can be when something essential is about to occur. The heated glare makes the faces of his fellow swimmers almost impossible to see, and in any case he knows he would avert his eyes if a viewing seemed imminent.

  Now and then someone wades offshore and does not return, but no one else appears to be alarmed.

  The blue of the water is an unnatural blue, a neon blue, and he lets it ease up over his feet without protest, and does not object even when it begins to lick away at his ankles, or lap up over his knees, tendrils of it exploring his swim trunks and rising up over each vertebrae of his spinal column. Only when it pulls him does he become alarmed, and he sees that the water is suddenly a deep, stagnant green, and he struggles back toward the shore, but his feet slip on the scummy surface of the submerged sand, and he is pulled farther away from the beach and from the bathers with their brilliant, formless faces, and soon he is no longer a part of that life, which is receding rapidly, as if it never was.

  His marriage ended when Scott decided now would be a good time to have children.

  “We never, ever, wanted to have children,” Eileen said fiercely, as if he needed to be told, as if he was a crazy person now and had to be periodically reminded of the realities of life.

  “Well, we never really agreed …” he began, weakly, knowing she would think it was just like a man to introduce irrelevant legalities. He used to think men and women were very much alike, that any perceived differences were simply a matter of sexual politics. He’d been naive.

  “We didn’t have to agree. It’s always been so obvious to both of us, from the very beginning.”

  “But things change. A lot of things have changed, and now I think I want children. You’re only twenty-nine; it’s not too late.”

  “Scott, I’ve stood by you. You can’t say I haven’t.”

  “And I’m grateful. I think children would be good for the both of us. They’ll make us look forward.”

  “My god … Scott …”

  “They’ll make us look at things more positively. We’re woefully short on positive outlook around here.”

  “My god, Scott. You have cancer. You want me to have kids, and then raise them by myself?”

  He stared at her. She’d just told him he was going to die. Well, everyone was going to die, why was he being such a kid about it? She’d never acknowledged it before, not even when he himself had spoken it out loud. But she didn’t know. Nobody knew. “No,” he replied. “No” to every notion passing through her head. Then he’d left the room, and their marriage. It had been an unreasonable response on his part, but chaos had passed into his body, and he did not believe it would ever leave.

  Infiltration, carcinoma … The men and women in their white coats had used the words so elegantly, as if reciting deeply felt poetry, or intoning prayers in some rare dialect before a congregation anxious for enlightenment. Metastatic, diffusely spreading, degree of penetration, invasion. Surgical resection with regional lymphadenectomy was the treatment of choice for stage two gastric cancer. He decided to forego the clinical trials, pretending to family and friends a cure had taken place.

  And maybe it had. Who could know? Strangeness ran through his body, and in madness his body had begun to eat itself, but who could say that the strangeness would always be alien to him?

  They continued to live together. She traveled with him to doctors, shopping, the occasional movie. She was loyal to the end, and it pained him that that wasn’t enough. He’d left her in his head, and could not find his way back. And he wasn’t even sure she knew.

  Then this vacation together. She thought it would do him some good. She didn’t say it would do “us” some good because he knew she wasn’t really looking forward to spending time out in public with her dying husband. She was a good person; she was genuinely concerned about his welfare. She should get away before he poisoned her.

  There’d been no warning. Symptoms had been insignificant. Sometimes a slight pain when he ate a little too much, but who hadn’t felt that at one time or other? Now and then a little difficulty swallowing, but he’d always been too emotional, always on the verge of having that lump in his throat. Later on he thought he had an ulcer—he didn’t relax enough. But who could relax, the way the world was?

  And the way the world was, was indifferent.

  He’d never brought up having children again. He knew it was the selfish urge of someone who was dying. No good for her, or for any potential children for that matter. What would he do with children anyway? What would they do?

  They would watch him die. That, he realized, was what he wanted. The young bear witness to the passing of the old. That was the way it happened the world over.

  And beyond that, there was this flesh of his that would continue to walk the careless and uncaring world. Egocentric reasoning, perhaps. After he�
��d been diagnosed, an elderly neighbor had dropped by to discuss his own terminal illness. He wanted Scott to know that things never really ended, that they simply changed into something else. “There is a reality beyond the everyday,” the man had said. “We are all part of something larger. We are each one face of that which has many faces. What we see today, in this life, is only part of the story, no more than an illusion of the truth.” Instead of being reassured, however, Scott had been terrified. Flesh of my flesh, flesh of my flesh, a voice had intoned in his evening’s dream. Scott had never sought to be a part of anything.

  The fear was a bad reason to have kids, but he couldn’t quite let it go.

  A child wasn’t going to happen, but he could still imagine it—how it would look, the sound of its voice. There would be a strangeness about it, surely, but in this child the strangeness would be beautiful. In this child the strangeness would not be a frightening thing.

  There had been no reason for him to get sick, no reason at all. He had done nothing wrong. He had exercised; he had watched what he ate. He’d been so careful with everything put into his mouth Eileen often said he appeared to be taking the sacrament. You just never could tell what they put into food these days. Some of it was never even meant to be food. Not for normal people. Now Eileen cooked with soy and they ate as much fish as possible, but he never could feel comfortable eating fish, wondering from what depths they came.

  Every night at the Shores he would look out over the ocean, gaze down where the water lapped and drifted back, half-expecting some child to emerge from the waves after its long swim home.

  “Beautiful … beautiful,” he would say.

  Then came the night she caught him during his admiration, heard him call the boggy green expanse beautiful. “That’s crazy, Scott. Look at it—it’s like floating rot. You can’t swim in it—you can’t even walk through it.”

  He turned to her with a small smile, the largest he could muster in these times. “Then maybe you can walk on it,” he said, hoping to make her even angrier. “I see you’ve decided not to enjoy our little vacation after all.”

  She ran back into the room, crying. He still smiled—he couldn’t get the smile off his face. But he felt terrible. He was a jerk, she should leave him. Why wasn’t she leaving him?

  He turned back to the great, dark, crumbling shore, the slow-moving tide a deep greenish-brown even in moonlight. Fertile, abundant with life, eating itself and eating itself until one day there would be no more. He wondered when Nature had stopped having rules.

  The next morning he found the body of a large dog washed up on the shore, a sizable piece chewed out of its side. Another morning it was a syringe placed upright in the sand like a crucifix. Still another day something long and serpentine had wriggled its way up and down the beach, leaving patterns like words, a drawn-out nyarlathhhh… followed by extended obliterations. He didn’t show Eileen any of this. She stayed locked in their bedroom, crying. She loved him, and he no longer deserved her. He was worried about how he might treat her in the future—there seemed to be no rules for behavior anymore.

  Finally one morning she came out for breakfast, her eyes red but dry. She brought along the morning newspaper, again The Shores. “It says here that the towns along this section of coast have had an unusually high birthrate over the past five years. Nobody can explain it.”

  He stared at her. The eggs in his mouth tasted funny, but most food did these days. He wasn’t even sure he should be eating eggs. He’d paid little attention to the diet they’d handed him. Eileen would know, but now she was proffering up some sort of conversational gambit. He owed her a reply. “Any details about these births … um …” The egg clung to the inside of his mouth and would not go down. “Anomalies, that sort of thing?”

  She seemed to be staring at his mouth. He wondered if she understood his problem with the bit of egg. It felt mobile against his tongue, as if alive. He thought he felt a vestige of pseudopod, tried to wrest the thought from his mind.

  “What … what do you mean?” She stammered slightly, but was still in control. Obviously the wrong thing for him to say. But now he was stuck having to explain himself.

  “Um … congenital malformations,” said awkwardly about the egg. “Birth …” a hard swallow and it was down. “ … defects.”

  “Oh,” she said quietly, staring at him. He could feel the cold sweat trickling down his forehead. “There’s nothing about that sort of thing at all.”

  “Then …” He took a quick swallow of juice, acid burn all the way down the esophagus, whatever his stomach had become in flames. God, he thought, ordinary food is poison to me now. “The babies … they all turned out normal.”

  She smiled a little, and now it was he doing the staring. It was the first smile he’d seen on her in days—and it looked good. “Well, as normal as any of us can turn out, I suppose. I mean, the article didn’t mention birth defect incidence, any of that … I, well it’s been making me think—I’ve been thinking—oh, Scott, I’ve just decided you’re right, we should have a child, we should have it now.”

  He should have refused, of course. People don’t change their minds about something so important so quickly. But if he’d learned anything in recent months it was that intention mattered little, and desire mattered less. He smiled at her, and then looked for something to do. He picked up his fork and played with the remains of the egg but could not bring himself to eat any more. He couldn’t even touch the glass containing the yellow acid. Finally his hand rested on the newspaper she’d left folded on the table. He picked it up. “You’re sure?” he asked, opening it.

  “Well, I’m a little scared about it, I admit. I mean, who wouldn’t be? A decision like this.” She twisted her napkin, not quite able to meet his eyes. “But I’m … scared a lot of the time. I guess we both are.”

  He could tell she was waiting for confirmation from him. He wanted to help her out, but he just couldn’t. “You’ve made me very happy,” he said, and it seemed strangely false, formal. He covered by fussing with the paper. After an indecent pause, he said, “It says here there was another fish kill off Innsmouth.”

  He waited for her to say something. He kept his eyes on the paper. Finally, “Innsmouth?”

  “You know, a few miles up the shore? We passed it on the way down here. It was the last city before the big billboard.”

  “I don’t remember a billboard.”

  “Well, I thought I pointed it out. I meant to.”

  “Do they say what killed the fish?” He could hear the strain in her voice, but he couldn’t take his eyes from the paper. There was a two-page spread on the fish kill, which seemed odd—they were just fish, after all. But there were a number of pictures: the dark corpses piled up like in those W.W.II newsreels, stretched out on the sand with all their wedge-shaped heads in a row, one old man holding a large fish in his lap as if it were his drowned child. In the background, in the sand, a filigree of dark lettering.

  “No … no. Says here it’s a mystery. ‘Local biologists stumped,’ it says. Hey,” he smiled and looked up. “So how many places have their own, local biologist?”

  “I … I don’t know,” she said softly. “Do you think we should let him swim?”

  “Come again?”

  “The baby, should we let him near the water?”

  Eileen had wanted to leave their “filthy” city for years. Actually it was “those filthy people” she’d wanted to leave. Ironic that she insisted they remain at The Shores to have the baby, where the water was so polluted she was afraid to walk closer than fifty feet or so, and even then she held her swollen belly protectively and averted her face. After coming to this decision so reluctantly, she had no intention of going anywhere until it had come to completion. Scott supposed it was some sort of nesting instinct, but he found it completely unexpected from her. He himself didn’t want her to walk there, but he would have been hard-pressed to explain why.

  Even though Scott couldn’t work, or cou
ldn’t bring himself to, they still had some savings, and Eileen had inheritance from her parents, so they’d be okay for at least a year or so. Scott couldn’t imagine living much past the baby’s birth. Not that he was sure he was going to die—he just couldn’t imagine living.

  The Shores was a lonely place past the tourist season. People they did business with every day—the grocer, the pharmacist, the manager of the beachfront cabin they’d moved to—had grown noticeably less friendly once Scott and Eileen revealed their plans. “Gets pretty cold and windy, especially if you’re not used to it, especially if you’re pregnant,” the pharmacist had said when filling Scott’s prescription of painkillers. “Don’t know that I’d want to put my wife through that.”

  “We’re not likely to have everything you’re going to need,” the grocer had added several hours later. “See, I order in limited quantity, because I usually know who my customers are going to be.”

  Only the withered and palsied doctor they’d found to guide Eileen through the pregnancy seemed friendly at all, but his garrulousness seemed to have more to do with Eileen’s forthcoming “miracle of birth” than with the patient herself. “The cells, they’re dividing, multiplying even as we speak. Amazing, isn’t it!” He touched her exposed belly with thin fingers that shook and skittered about like a spider’s legs on glass. “Right about now the little one has a webbed-looking hand, no different from what a pig’s foot looks like, about this stage. And imagine, a few weeks back they both had fins.” Scott watched anxiously as the doctor poked and prodded some more, then suddenly thrust his wrinkled ear up to Eileen’s belly. “You can almost hear the little fellow say, ‘I’m no pig, Doctor Linden! At least I don’t think I am!” He laughed. “Actually, he has no idea what he is right now, and who knows, maybe he’ll fool us all!”

  “Well, I hardly think so,” Eileen offered, gently easing herself away from the doctor’s head.