North American Lake Monsters

by Nathan Ballingrud

  Apparently it was a beautiful day.

  The kettle began to hiss, and he returned to his rote tasks. Pour the water into the press. Stir the contents. Fit the lid into place and wait for the contents to steep. He fetched a single mug from the cabinet and waited at the counter.

  He heard something move behind him, the soft pad of a foot on the linoleum, the staccato tap of dripping water. He turned and saw his wife standing at the kitchen’s threshold, the nightgown still soaked through and clinging intimately to her body, streams of water running from the gown and from her hair, which hung in a thick black sheet, and pooling brightly around her.

  A sound escaped him, a syllable shot like a hard pellet, high-pitched and meaningless. His body jerked as though yanked by some invisible cord and the coffee mug launched from his hand and shattered on the floor between them. Kate sat down in the nook; the first time she’d sat there in almost a year. She did not look at him, or react to the smashed mug. Water pit-patted from her hair and her clothes, onto the table. “Where’s mine?” she said.

  “Kate? What?”

  “Where’s my coffee? I want coffee. I’m cold. You forgot mine.”

  He worked his jaw, trying to coax some sound. Finally he said, “All right.” His voice was weak and undirected. “All right,” he said again. He opened the cabinet and fetched two mugs.

  She’d had a bad dream. It was the only thing that made sense. She was cold and wet and something in her brain tried to arrange it into a logical shape. She remembered seeing Sean’s face through a veil of water. Watching it recede from her. She felt a buckle of nausea at the memory. She took a drink from the coffee and felt the heat course through her body. It only made her feel worse.

  She rubbed her hands at her temples.

  “Why am I all wet?” she said. “I don’t feel right. Something’s wrong with me. Something’s really wrong.”

  Sean guided her upstairs. She reacted to his gentle guidance, but did not seem to be acting under any will of her own; except when he tried to steer her into the bathroom. She resisted then, turning to stone in the hallway. “No,” she said. Her eyes were hard and bright with fear. She turned her head away from the door. He took her wrist to pull her, but she resisted. His fingers inadvertently slid over the incision there, and he jerked his hand away.

  “Honey. We need to fix you up.”

  “No.”

  He relented, taking her to the bedroom instead, where he removed her wet nightgown. It struck him that he had not seen her like this, standing naked in the plain light of day, for a long time. They had been married for over twenty years, and they’d lost interest in each other’s bodies long ago. When she was naked in front of him now he barely noticed. Her body was part of the furniture of their marriage, utilized but ignored, with occasional benign observations from them both about its declining condition.

  In a sudden resurgence of his feelings of the previous night, he became achingly aware of her physicality. She was so pale: the marble white of statues, or of sunbleached bones. Her flesh hung loosely on her body, the extra weight suddenly obvious, as though she had no muscle tone remaining at all. Her breasts, her stomach, her unshaven hair: the human frailty of her, the beauty of a lived-in body, which he knew was reflected in his own body, called up a surge of tenderness and sympathy.

  “Let’s put some clothes on,” he said, turning away from her.

  He helped her step into her underwear, found a bra and hooked her into it. He found some comfortable, loose-fitting clothes for her, things he knew she liked to wear when she had nowhere special to go. It was not until he was fitting her old college reunion T-shirt over her head that he allowed himself to look at her wrist for the first time, and the sight of it made him step back and clasp a hand over his mouth.

  Her left arm bore a long incision from wrist to elbow. The flesh puckered like lips, and as she bent her arm into the shirt he was afforded a glimpse at the awful depth of the wound. It was easily deep enough to affect its purpose, and as bloodless as the belly of a gutted fish.

  “Katie,” he said, and brought her wrist to his lips. “What’s happening to you?” He pressed his fingers to her cheek; they were cool, and limp. “Are you okay?” It was the stupidest question of his life. But he didn’t know what else to ask. “Katie?”

  She turned her face to him, and after a few moments he could see her eyes begin to focus on him, as though she had to travel a terrible span to find him there. “I don’t know,” she said. “Something doesn’t feel right.”

  “Do you want to lie down?”

  “I guess.”

  He eased her toward her side of the bed, which was smooth and untroubled: she had slept underwater last night; not here. He laid her there like folded laundry.

  He sat beside her as she drifted off. Her eyes remained open, but she seemed gone; she seemed truly dead. Maybe, this time, she was.

  Does she remember? he thought. Does she remember that I left her? He stretched himself out beside her and ran his hand through her hair, repetitively, a kind of prayer.

  Oh my God, he thought, what have I done? What is happening to me?

  Eventually she wanted to go outside. Not at first, because she was scared, and the world did not make any sense to her. The air tasted strange on her tongue, and her body felt heavy and foreign—she felt very much like a thought wrapped in meat. She spent a few days drifting through the house in a lethargic haze, trying to shed the feeling of unease which she had woken with the morning after her bath, and which had stayed rooted in her throat and in her gut the whole time since. Sean came and went to work. He was solicitous and kind; he was always extra attentive after she tried to kill herself, though; and although she welcomed the attention, she had learned to distrust it. She knew it would fade, once the nearness of death receded.

  She watched the world through the window. It was like a moving picture in a frame; the details did not change, but the wind blew through the grass and the trees and the neighbors came and went in their cars, giving the scene the illusion of reality. Once, in the late afternoon before Sean came home, she was seen. The older man who lived across the street, whose cat she fed when he went out of town and who was a friend to them both, caught sight of her as he stepped out of his car and waved. She only stared back. After a moment, the man turned from her and disappeared into his own house.

  The outside world was a dream of another place. She found herself wondering if she would fit better there.

  On the evening of the third day, while they were sitting at dinner—something wretched and cooling that Sean had picked up on his way home—she told him.

  “I want to go outside.”

  Sean kept eating as though he didn’t hear her.

  This was not new. He’d been behaving with an almost manic enthusiasm around her, as though he could convince her that their lives were unskewed and smooth through sheer force of will. But he would not look at her face; when he looked at her at all, he would focus on her cheek, or her shoulder, or her hairline. He would almost look at her. But not quite.

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” he said at last. He ate ferociously, forking more into his mouth before he was finished with the last bite.

  “Why not?”

  He paused, his eyes lifting briefly to the salt and pepper shakers in the middle of the table. “You still don’t seem . . . I don’t know. Yourself.”

  “And what would that be like?” She had not touched her food, except to prod it the way a child pokes a stick at roadkill. It cooled on the plate in front of her, congealing cheese and oils. It made her sick.

  His mood swung abruptly into something more withdrawn and depressed; she could watch his face and see it happen. This made her feel better. This was more like the man she had known for the past several years of their marriage.

 
“Am I a prisoner here?”

  He finally looked at her, shocked and hurt. “What? How could you even say that?”

  She said nothing. She just held his gaze.

  He looked terrified. “I’m just worried about you, babe. You don’t—you’re not—”

  “You mean this?” She raised her left arm and slipped her finger into the open wound. It was as clean and bloodless as rubber.

  Sean lowered his face. “Don’t do that.”

  “If you’re really worried about me, why don’t you take me to the hospital? Why didn’t you call an ambulance? I’ve been sleeping so much the past few days. But you just go on to work like everything’s fine.”

  “Everything is fine.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He was looking out the window now. The sun was going down and the light was thick and golden. Their garden was flowering, and a light dusting of pollen coated the left side of their car in the driveway. Sean’s eyes were unblinking and reflective as water. He stared at it all. “There’s nothing wrong with you,” he said.

  Silence filled the space between them as they each sat still in their own thoughts. The refrigerator hummed to life. Katie finally pushed herself away from the table and headed toward the door, scooping up the car keys on her way.

  “I’m going out,” she said.

  “Where?” His voice was thick with resignation.

  “Maybe to the store. Maybe nowhere. I’ll be back soon.”

  He moved to stand. “I’ll come with.”

  “No thanks,” she said, and he slumped back into his chair.

  Once, she would have felt guilty for that. She would have chastised herself for failing to take into account his wishes or his fears, for failing to protect his fragile ego. He was a delicate man, though he did not know it, and she had long considered it part of her obligation to the marriage to accommodate that frailty of spirit.

  But she felt a separation from that now. And from him, too, though she remembered loving him once. If anything inspired guilt, it was that she could not seem to find that love anymore. He was a good man, and deserved to be loved. She wondered if the ghost of a feeling could substitute for the feeling itself.

  But worse than all of that was the separation she felt from herself. She’d felt like a passenger in her own body the last three days, the pilot of some arcane machine. She watched from a remove as the flesh of her hand tightened around the doorknob and rotated it clockwise, setting into motion the mechanical process which would free the door from its jamb and allow it to swing open, freeing her avenue of escape. The flesh was a mechanism, too, a contracting of muscle and ligament, an exertion of pull.

  There’s nothing wrong with you, he’d said.

  She opened the door.

  The light was like ground glass in her eyes. It was the most astonishing pain she had ever experienced. She screamed, dropped to the floor, and curled into herself. Very distantly she heard something heavy fall over, followed by crashing footsteps which thrummed the floor beneath her head, and then the door slammed shut. Her husband’s hands fell on her and she twisted away from them. The light was a paste on her eyes; she couldn’t seem to claw it off of them. It bled into her skull and filled it like a poisonous radiation. She lurched to her feet, shouldering Sean aside, and ran away from the door and into the living room, where she tripped over the carpet and landed hard on her side. Her husband’s hysterical voice followed her, a blast of panic. She pushed her body forward with her feet, wedged her face into the space beneath the couch, the cool darkness there, and tried to claw away the astounding misery of the light.

  That night she would not come to bed. They’d been sleeping beside each other since the suicide, though he was careful to keep space between them, and had taken to wearing pajamas to bed. She slept fitfully at night, seeming to rest better in the daylight, and this troubled his own sleep, too. She would be as still as stone and then struggle elaborately with the sheets for a few moments before settling into stillness again, like a drowning woman. He turned his head toward the wall when this happened. And then he would remember that he’d turned away from her that night, too. And he would stay awake into the small hours, feeling her struggle, knowing that he’d missed his chance to help her.

  The incident at the door had galvanized him, though. Her pain was terrifying in its intensity, and it was his fault. He would not let his guilt or his shame prevent him from doing whatever was necessary to keep her safe and comfortable from now on. Love still lived in him, like some hibernating serpent, and it stirred now. It tasted the air with its tongue.

  It took her some time to calm down. He fixed her a martini and brought it to her, watched her sip it disinterestedly as she sat on the couch and stared at the floor, her voice breaking every once in a while in small hiccups of distress. Long nail marks scored her skin; her right eye seemed jostled in its orbit, angled fractionally lower than the other. He had drawn the curtains and pulled the blinds, though by now the sun had sunk and the world outside was blue and cool. He turned off all but a few lights in the house, filling it with shadows. Whether it was this, or the vodka, or something else that did it, she finally settled into a fraught silence.

  He eased himself onto the couch beside her, and he took her chin in his fingers and turned her face toward him. An echo of his thought from the night of the suicide passed through his mind: She will never get better.

  He felt his throat constrict, and heat gathered in his eyes.

  “Katie?” He put his hand on her knee. “Talk to me, babe.”

  She was motionless. He didn’t even know if she could hear him.

  “Are you all right? Are you in any pain?”

  After a long moment, she said, “It was in my head.”

  “What was?”

  “The light. I couldn’t get it out.”

  He nodded, trying to figure out what this meant. “Well. It’s dark now.”

  “Thank you,” she said.

  This small gratitude caused an absurd swelling in his heart, and he cupped her cheek in his hand. “Oh baby,” he said. “I was so scared. I don’t know what’s going on. I don’t know what to do for you.”

  She put her own hand over his, and pressed her cheek into his palm. Her eyes remained unfocused though, one askew, almost as if this was a learned reaction. A muscle memory. Nothing more.

  “I don’t understand anything anymore,” she said. “Everything is strange.”

  “I know.”

  She seemed to consider something for a moment. “I should go somewhere else,” she said.

  “No,” Sean said. A violence moved inside him, the idea of her leaving calling forth an animal fury, aimless and electric. “No, Katie. You don’t understand. They’ll take you away from me. If I take you somewhere, if I take you to see someone, they will not let you come back. You just stay here. You’re safe here. We’ll keep things dark, like you like it. We’ll do whatever it takes. Okay?”

  She looked at him. The lamplight from the other room reflected from her irises, giving them a creamy whiteness that looked warm and soft, incongruous in her torn face, like saucers of milk left out after the end of the world. “Why?”

  The question shamed him. “Because I love you, Katie. Jesus Christ. You’re my wife. I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” she said, and like pressing her cheek into his hand, this response seemed an automatic action. A programmed response. He ignored this, though, and chose to accept what she said as truth—perhaps because this was the first time she’d said it to him since the suicide, when her body had stopped behaving in the way it was meant to and conformed to a new logic, a biology he did not recognize and could not understand and which made a mystery of her again. It had been so long since she’d been a mystery to him. He knew every detail of her life, every dull complaint and
every stillborn dream, and she knew his; but now he knew nothing. Every nerve ending in his body was turned in her direction, like flowers bending to the sun.

  Or perhaps he only accepted it because the light was soft, and it exalted her.

  His free hand found her breast. She did not react in any way. He squeezed it gently in his hand, his thumb rolling over her nipple, still soft under her shirt. She allowed all of this, but her face was empty. He pulled away from her. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said.

  He rose and, taking her hand, moved to help her to her feet. She resisted.

  “Katie, come on. Let’s go to bed.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “But don’t you . . .” He took her hand and pressed it against his cock, stiff in his pants. “Can you feel that? Can you feel what you do to me?”

  “I don’t want to go upstairs. The light will come in in the morning. I want to sleep in the cellar.”

  He released her hand, and it dropped to her side. He thought for a minute. The cellar was used for storage, and was in a chaotic state. But there was room for a mattress down there, and tomorrow he could move things around, make some arrangements, and make it livable. It did not occur to him to argue with her. This was part of the mystery, and it excited him. He was like a high school boy with a mad new crush, prepared to go to any length.

  “Okay,” he said. “Give me a few minutes. I’ll make it nice for you.”

  He left her sitting in the dark, his heart pounding, red and strong.

  He fucked her with the ardor one brings to a new lover, sliding into the surprising coolness of her, tangling his fingers into her hair and biting her neck, her chin, her ears. He wanted to devour her, to breathe her like an atmosphere. He hadn’t been so hard in years; his body moved like a piston, and he felt he could go on for hours. He slid his arms beneath her and held her shoulders from behind as he powered into her, the mattress silent beneath them, the darkness of the cellar as gentle and welcoming as a mother’s heart. At first she wrapped her legs around his back, put her arms over his shoulders, but by the time he finished she had abandoned the pretense and simply lay still beneath him, one eye focused on the underbeams of the ceiling, one eye peering into the black.