by Rio Youers
“Not for a long time,” I said. My heart was beating so hard that I felt its vibration in the aluminum frame of my wheelchair. Plag meen, I thought, and saw Kelvin Fish’s eye flashing open and closed. I saw an endless run of ones and zeros, and the word MAMA in faded letters, hanging in the pale light like a ghost.
“We live in a time where anything is possible,” Hollywood said, and there was such conviction in his words that I dared to believe him. “Limitations are created only by the individual, so I’ll ask you now … do you want to ditch that goddamn wheelchair?”
“What?” I gasped. It felt like my brain had crystallized, and each smooth facet was an emotion. I didn’t know what to think or feel.
“Do you want to walk again?” Hollywood asked. “Do you want run into infinity with your family by your side?”
Hallelujah, I thought. He sounded like a faith healer. I expected him to press his palm to my forehead and perform some divine wonder. I nodded stupidly, feeling my brain harden and crack, and yet I cast my hopes at him with all my stricken heart.
“Do you want to tear down the walls of limitation?” he asked.
Can you say hallelujah? I thought, but said, “It’s impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible,” he said. “Let me help you.”
I was dazed—dazzled. “You’re speaking in metaphors, right? You mean to help me with spiritual enlightenment?”
He looked at me without answering, and his dynamo must have been purring fast because his eyes were brighter than ever. He turned and gestured to the waitress to bring the check, and I allowed myself to float away. I glimpsed a thousand fantasies, all involving a complete body. I loved and raged. I danced on the ruins of limitation with my wife in my arms.
Hollywood flipped the waitress his credit card, then looked at me. “You’re crying,” he said.
I felt the tears rushing down my face. I didn’t wipe them away.
“You want to be helped,” he said.
“Stop this,” I said. “Please.” But still, as I spoke, I threw myself at him, trusting his perfection, wanting to feel his light.
“I can help you,” he said. “I’ll be waiting for you.”
The waitress returned with Hollywood’s credit card and a receipt—two pieces of paper: the original and a duplicate. Hollywood added a tip and signed the original, then took the duplicate and wrote his address on the back.
“Impossible,” I said again.
He showed me his perfect smile, and I couldn’t keep from reaching for him, like a plant in the forest reaching for the light. He scrawled two more words beneath his address, but folded the receipt before I could read them. As he got to his feet, he leaned over and dropped the square of folded paper into my shirt pocket.
“I’ll be waiting for you,” he said again, and held out his hand. I took it, and felt the fierce energy running through him. Some shimmering facet of my brain expected my legs to kick suddenly into life.
My hand fell away from his. It had never seemed so frail.
Hollywood nodded. He took three or four cowboy steps toward the lobby, and then turned back.
“You know, the technology is more advanced than it used to be,” he said. “The world has turned into a machine, and its axis is made of binary codes and microprocessors and integrated circuits. Everybody is wired-in these days. Everybody. Technology is a twenty-first century god. It’s a monster.”
One more beautiful smile, and then I watched him walk across the bright lobby, and out through the main doors.
“Impossible,” I said yet again—the limited vocabulary of my crystallized brain. I felt the cold weight of the piece of paper in my pocket, daring me to believe.
I sat in the bar for another fifteen minutes, alone, waiting for the strength to move, listening to the endless commercials on TV.
Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
— Henry Louis Mencken
Belief is coupled with the soul, so it stands to reason that if the soul is eternal, so too is belief. But this is not the case; age generates wisdom, and wisdom engulfs belief. With every morsel of fact or reality, our soul loses its shine. We die inside.
A brilliant but soulless man once said that every action has an equal and opposite reaction. The same is true here: every time our perception of reality is tested, our soul shines. We become eternal.
To put it simply, seeing is believing.
And so we come to Mama Fish.
I was drawn, again, to the beautiful house with its canary yellow siding and white trim, its elegant sounds: the wind chimes breathing through their multiple, tubular lungs; the fountain singing, the way a child will sing for the first time, with delicate, testing notes that are altogether wonderful. I studied the windows in the tower, looking for some fraction of movement, remembering the rake-thin shape I had seen floating there the day before. The windows were dark now, reflecting a swollen November sky. Maybe it is simply the nature of memory, but I am sure the clouds were roiling sacks, black and purple, occasionally lit from within by veins of lightning.
My eyes were sore and tired; I’d hardly slept since the accident on Columbus Boulevard. Two nights of turning and whimpering beneath my sheets, seeing those improbable shapes every time I closed my eyes. I thought I was losing my mind.
“I have to know,” I said. The house looked empty. Every window was dark, but the Mercedes-Benz was parked in the driveway, and I was going to knock—keep knocking—until I got an answer.
I started across the driveway. I heard the apple trees rustling their naked branches with agitation. The clouds boiled and shuddered, bruising the light. My heart took its signal to beat harder, but I never faltered … until, that is, a pale blue light flicked on in the basement, seeping through the shutters like mist.
Someone was home.
I had an image of that rake-thin being moving spider-like through the pale light. Or maybe it was Mama Fish: grotesque, slugging along, leaving ooze on the basement floor. Every other window in the house was dark, so whatever they were doing—Mama Fish, Mr. Bones, or the whole of the mysterious Fish clan—they were doing it in the basement.
Don’t look, I thought. I remembered my daydreams, the castles in the sky I built to get through wearisome classes: decomposing bodies; dribbling, mutant children; prisoners chained to the walls. You don’t want to see what’s down there.
My legs moved me backward until I bumped against the Mercedes-Benz. I’d done a good job of spooking myself. My heart boomed like hail on a tin roof, and all I wanted was to run away—back to my house, where I would suffer the improbable shapes until I went insane … but even that would be better than peeping through the shutters and seeing Mama Fish clinging to the basement wall like a piece of bloated cannelloni. The sounds kept me grounded, though: the fountain and the wind chimes—proof of delicacy. I closed my eyes, battled with the shapes (the driver weeping, holding the size thirteen shoe; noom boolan), and tried to concentrate on the soothing sounds. When I opened my eyes, the sky was darker but my heart had settled to an easy canter. The trees gossiped and trembled. Shadows disturbed the blue light reaching through the basement shutters.
I was torn three ways: I could go home and trust that time would provide resolve, I could knock on the door until somebody answered, or I could skulk onto the lawn and peek through a gap in the shutters.
“I have to know,” I said again, scratching out the first option. I looked at the front door and again had a Scrooge-like vision of the brass knocker transforming into a likeness of Kelvin Fish. Take a peepsie through the window, it said. Just a quick look. PLAG MEEN. You know you want to.
Another beat of uncertainty, and then I moved. My intention, I know, was to spring up the porch steps and hammer on the door—four bangs, firm and crisp (in my mind, I felt the vibration of the knocker in the small bones in my hand, and heard the neighbor’s dog barking again), but my legs took me in the other direction … off the driveway an
d onto the lawn. I crouched immediately, moving from shrub to bush, and then to the first basement window. I dropped to my hands and knees and tried to find a suitable gap in the shutters. They were the louver kind, cut to fit the smaller windows, and I noticed they’d been nailed closed. Whoever had fit the shutters had never intended them to be opened.
The slats were angled in such a way that I could not see into the basement. I got low to the ground and pressed close to the window, but all I saw was the pale blue light and a glimpse of the ceiling.
“Come on,” I gasped. I joggled a few of the slats but they were firmly in place. I moved, still on hands and knees, to the next window. It was the same. I sighed and ran a trembling hand across my brow, thinking I would revert to my original plan of knocking on the door until somebody answered. There was movement in the basement. Shadow swept across the shutters like a cloud. I held my breath and heard a voice, too quiet to define individual words, but something in its timbre put me in mind of creaky doors and winter days. I heard footsteps, then the vibrant whirr of a machine coming to life. The lights flickered. Something buzzed. I heard the creaky-door voice again and crawled to the rear of the house.
The healthy part of my mind screamed at me to stop, throwing words like TRESPASSING and POLICE at me, using them to mask my real fears—that I would succeed in looking into the basement, and see all the things I didn’t want to: blind prisoners in chains, dead bodies heaped in the corner, Mama Fish sitting at a sewing machine making clothes out of human skin. Or worse still, that they were waiting for me. The rake-thin man—Mr. Bones—had been watching me from the windows in the tower, and was now waiting in the gloom. I would feel his skeleton hand on my shoulder any moment, and hear his creaky-door voice: Mama Feeeeesh … iza gots me some fresh meeeeeeeeat.
But I didn’t stop—couldn’t stop. The need to know fueled me. As I sneaked among the shadows at the side of the house, I considered the fact that I hadn’t slept for two nights, and that my mind felt like a piece of frayed fabric. I remembered—although it had never left my thoughts—the speeding car thumping into Kelvin Fish, his body slamming into the windshield and thrown, rag-like, into the air. I needed something, anything, to counterbalance these images. Otherwise, I would never sleep again. It would wear at me, making holes in the fabric of my sanity, until there was nothing left.
I scrambled through a cluster of bushes to the rear of the house. The sky flashed and sagged, and I saw a raised deck covering the rear basement windows. Pale blue light streamed through the lattice that masked the gap between the deck boards and the ground, and I knew that there were no shutters on the windows. All I had to do was crawl beneath the deck and peer in.
I scattered around, looking for a gap in the lattice. Diamonds of light rippled over me, painting me like a snake. I scratched and pulled at the little strips of wood, hoping to find a weakness, but, like the shutters, they were nailed firmly in place. I tested every section and felt for gaps beneath. There was nothing. I looked, at last, at the wooden steps leading down from the deck, at the spaces between the risers. Not much, maybe eight inches. I heard my father’s voice: Eat your chow, boy. You’re as thin as a rail. I nodded, crept toward the steps, and slipped between them as easily as the wind.
The pale light illuminated the space beneath the deck, showing drifts of mustard-colored leaves and an assortment of debris swept in by the wind. I tried to conceal myself by collecting the leaves around me and smearing my face with dirt, but I still felt exposed. I knew that if Mr. Bones should happen to glance out the window, he would see me, belly down and wide-eyed. His crane-fly legs would scamper up the stairs and onto the deck. He would reach me before I had managed to turn around. I would be Fish food.
“What am I doing?” I whispered, but I was too close to turn back now. The windows beckoned me: naked squares of light peering down on the basement. I rubbed a spitball into the backs of several leaves and pressed them to my face (a camouflage tip I had picked up from some crappy old war movie), and began to crawl, softly-softly, toward the nearest window.
I heard the workings of machinery, and even felt it buzzing through the ground. The part of my brain that provides clear thinking (which I had pretty much ignored up until now) suggested that it was probably the furnace or the laundry pair—I would look through the window and see Mama Fish neatly folding Mr. Bones’s long-leggedy pants or Kelvin Fish’s tighty whities. But there was something … alien about the sounds that offset this idea. There were inconsistent ticks and clicks, a bubbling sound that reminded me of ripping off a fart in the bathtub, and the sonar-like ping that you would hear in a submarine.
The creaky-door voice again. I heard the words, but they meant nothing … spoken in some European language. Dutch or German.
I crawled slowly, moving through the leaves and the trash like a small animal. I saw part of the basement wall. Dreary white paint. I heard footsteps and froze. My heart started to lurch instead of beat. A long shadow fell against the section of wall I could see. His voice again, foreign words. Ping! More footsteps, then the bathtub-fart sound: flubbalubb. The shadow retracted and I let out a long sigh that seemed to come from my feet and work upward, rippling through my body like a breeze through a windsock.
Take a quick look and let’s haul ass, I thought. I crept another inch—I was less than three feet from the window—and felt something scamper across the back of my neck. I counted its legs in jester-time, all eight of them, and my hand moved as if the middle frames of animation were missing. I slapped down and felt it wriggling in my hand. I squelched and felt it struggle and break. I unfolded my fingers and let out a little gasp when I saw the dead spider stuck to my palm, multiple legs shattered, a trail of goop oozing from its fat brown body.
“Uggggh-shit,” I said, but I had spoken too loud and now I heard the footsteps again, coming toward the window. He heard me, I thought. Mr. Bones is coming. I buried my face in the leaves, hiding the panicked whites of my eyes, and held my breath to keep my body perfectly still. I had no idea how much he would see. There could clearly be a boy lying face down beneath the deck, white Nikes flashing, ass in the air. Then again, the camouflage might be perfect … a scatter of leaves and trash in the gloom. I concentrated on the latter, trying to make myself invisible. I thought of those leaf-shaped insects in the jungles of South America. That’s me, I thought. I’m a leaf-bug, and you can’t see me.
I sensed him, pressing his face against the window, looking out.
Every beat of my heart felt like a muscle cramp.
I heard the tips of his fingers squeaking across the glass.
Something else was crawling up my leg. It had more legs than the spider.
Flubbalubb.
And then, blessedly, footsteps away … his voice again, creaking and strange.
I looked up, praying I wouldn’t see his skeletal face peering at me. There was nothing—only pale blue light and a patch of wall. I exhaled deeply, gratefully. The bug had crept all the way to my thigh. I reached down and joyfully squished it through my Levi’s, feeling its soft shell crunch and bleed.
“Let’s do this,” I breathed. “And quick.”
I slithered the rest of the way, soundless, approaching the window at an angle. I braced myself, one hand on the wall, the other in the dirt. Another deep breath … and then I looked into the basement.
I saw everything at once, and for all my afternoon daydreams and fantastic vignettes, I could never have imagined this:
There were banks of machinery covered with blinking lights, dials, and gauges. It looked like the NASA Mission Control Center. Several screens flashed numbers, all ones and zeros, rippling through eternal combinations with a twirling effect, like a barber’s pole. Each machine was connected to the next by ropes of cable, and all seemed to serve the central computer—the mother computer. It (she) was huge, the size of three refrigerators. She gasped and shuddered, cables shaking as information poured through them. Her multiple screens spewed their sequence of ones and
zeros. There was a sign on top of her casing. One word, faded white letters that appeared to float in the pale light:
MAMA
There were terminal blocks and insulators, transistors, diodes, and jars of colored liquid that gurgled and steamed. Mr. Bones was there (Papa Fish, I assumed), moving from one machine to the next. He was a gangling creature, his legs as thin as his arms. Pronounced cheekbones pressed through his papery skin. I could count the ridges around his eye sockets and see the little disc of cartilage where his jaw was hinged. He walked with a stoop, his pendulous head bouncing ahead of him like a ball bearing on a spring. Wisps of cobweb-hair floated from his translucent scalp. Purple veins throbbed in his temples, shaped like tadpoles.
“Oh, God,” I said. He was ghastly, but not the worst of it. Not by far.
Kelvin Fish was suspended from a gantry in the middle of the room. He was buck-ass naked, his arms and legs hanging limply, like wet clothes. There was a fat orange cable plugged into a terminal between his shoulder blades. It thrummed and buzzed, filling his body with nerve-like tics and shivers (I imagined his odd teeth click-clacking like dice in a cup). Tiny sparks flew from his nostrils and ears.
Jesus no I can’t be seeing that it can’t be real it—
I pressed a hand to my mouth (there was still spider-goop on it but I didn’t care), trying to suppress the piercing scream that wanted to rip from me.
Oh Jesus Jesus Jesus—
The orange cable looped from his back (I was sitting behind Kelvin Fish in math, and I saw something moving under his shirt. Something on his back), through the gantry, across the floor (flexing, jerking), and back to MAMA.