That was all before the living death came to the island.
It moved across the world, place by place, until it owned every last soul and had corrupted anything that walked, flew, crawled, or swam.
Before that, there were good days, the old man could remember when he would come back in the evening with his skiff, and the boy would be waiting for him. Very often, the old man did not have a fish, but the boy was certain that he would the next day. They would sit out on the terrace where the other fishermen gathered. The shark men, tuna men and the marlin runners would make fun of the old man for not having caught a fish and the old man would only smile. The boy did not like it. The older fishermen would have sad eyes, because they knew the old man was indeed a great fisherman, even though it had been some time since he had landed a great fish.
“But you will,” the boy would say with complete confidence. “You will land the greatest fish of all. I have faith.”
That would make the old man smile and feel not quite as old.
Yes, even those empty days with an empty skiff were good days. He had not seen the boy in some time now. The last time he had seen him and the time before that, the boy had been with the others, marching slowly up the brick roads of the town, that hunger in his eyes. They would march ceaselessly, until they found something to eat, which was quite often each other. The old man would watch them from the trees. He liked to watch the boy and remember who and what the boy had been. The old man was always careful that they did not see him, because that would not be a good thing.
Some three months since he had hooked his last living fish, the old man beached his skiff yet again, and went back to the shack. Lying in his narrow bed, he felt the tropical heat, listening to the buzzing flies and the sound of the sea washing at the strand. Then he closed his eyes, but he did not dream.
He knew there was nothing left to dream about. Dreaming was for those with full lives. His life was empty, a seamless gray rinse without borders or incident. Such lives do not inspire dreams. There had been a time, when he dreamed of women, fights and fish, violent storms and suffocating sea fogs, of yellow-eyed things with many arms that waited down in the salty depths. But no more. He did not even dream of the boy or his long-dead wife whose eyes had been like wet jade.
In the morning, when he opened his eyes, he knew it would be a special day. He wished the old fisherman were down at the pier, so he could talk with them about wind and weather, drifts and depths, but they were gone. The emptiness of the pier now made the old man feel ice in his heart.
He took his wooden box down to the skiff and watched the sea. Its waters were calm, flat, nary a ripple to be seen. It would be a good day, he knew it, even if there was no wind, and he would have to row. He wrapped his squirming baits in yellow newspaper, stuffed them in the bait box, and made ready.
“You will land the greatest fish of all,” the boy said.
The old man heard it so distinctly that he nearly cried out, thinking perhaps that the boy was behind him. That would be a bad thing, because the boy hungered like the others. However, the old man soon forgot about it, as he rowed out into the sea, through the mouth of the harbor, and into the open ocean where the fishing would be done.
Far from land, he saw sea birds flying overhead, the sun shining through holes in their bodies. They paid him no mind. He saw schools of dead squid and skeleton fish, all moving off to some destiny; he could not, and did not want to know. He remembered when there were others boats going out and the fishermen would call to one another, wishing each other luck. Now, no boats were there, and the only voices he ever heard, were screams in the night.
It was not night now; it was early morning. The sun was already hot, and he could feel it blistering his leathery skin, as it had on days beyond count. The flying fish leaped out of the water in silver plumes. They had very little flesh on them and flew even higher now that they were nothing but bones, scales and spiny fins. The old man did know why there was life in them. Once, he had thought it obscene, but he no longer thought about such things. An hour out into the immensity of the dead sea, a gigantic and blubbery creature surfaced. It was a whale of some type, maybe a gray or a finback. It bobbed to the surface, floating there like a great island of blubber that was bleached white. It did not move. An amazing variety of fish showed to nibble on it. Birds clustered on its flanks, pecking away at it and pulling out stringy sea worms that had infested it. The old man had seen the leviathans do that before. It was some kind of perverse symbiosis—the living dead whales would become so riddled with worms at the bottom that they would come up so the birds could pick them clean. Maybe fifteen minutes after the whale had surfaced, the old man rowed around the greasy slick spreading out from the beast, and the first sharks arrived.
“You damn whores,” the old man said. “Are you never satisfied?”
Of course they weren’t. They were sharks. They were swimming mouths, and alive or undead, they understood only eating. They knew nothing else and were interested in nothing else. There was a time when the old man had certain empathy for the sharks. They were driven to do what they did. It was not of their making. They did what sharks were designed to do. Now…no, he had no empathy for them. They had been bad enough in life. Now they were worse; gluttons, whores, demons.
The old man kept rowing, hoping for a breeze to fill his sail, but none came. The sharks concerned him. They would attack anything; bite anything. He did not want them coming after the boat. A few did, but thank goodness, they were smaller blues and white tips. When he had distanced himself far from the whale carcass, and it was gone from sight, he baited his hooks and dropped them deep where the big fish lived. Each was set with a float that would dip under the surface if anything bit onto it and the old man was hopeful that today something would; the last living fish. He was confident that it would happen and he waited for it.
An hour into it, he saw a great shadow pass beneath the skiff. He could not be certain that he had seen it, until it came again. Then he knew it was not his eyes playing tricks, it was a real thing and he did not like it. The way the shadow moved concerned him, because there was only one thing that moved like that. Maybe thirty minutes later, the shadow came again, but this time it sidled up to the skiff and bumped it with its squarish snout. It was a large shark, larger than the skiff itself. Its flesh was a dirty ochre-brown and horribly scarred from fighting. Had it been alive, it would have been a beautiful creature, but now it was just an abomination, as it swam with its belly split open and its guts trailing along like white confetti.
“Go away, you bastard,” the old man told it “Don’t you see this is the day, I have waited for?”
The shark cut wide circles around the skiff, nudging the lines, but not biting into them, which was a good thing because its jaws had the strength to shear them. It was a huge animal and if it decided to, it could easily overturn the skiff. The old man did not want to be in the water with such a thing. The shark did not go away, but neither did it attack. It seemed curious, which was odd for such a creature.
However, the sea was a strange girl and these days, much stranger than ever before, because it was a sea of the dead.
As the old man tended his lines and kept an eye on that big evil shark, he remembered many years ago when he was a young man on a boat in the Sea of Cortez. It was the dark of the night and the mate was jigging for squid. He had an unusual contraption of light bulbs with weights to pull them under. He said the squid would come to see the lights and bite his baited hook which dangled beneath. After several hours, no squid had come. The mate asked him to tend the line while he slept for an hour or two. The old man did. About the time his own eyes were beginning to close from staring at the glowing lights just beneath the surface, he saw green phosphorescence in the water. It was an eye. An immense eye like a serving platter. A green eye that looked like the eye of a giant. On that, he was right, because it was the eye of a giant squid. The light reflected the green depths of its eye, which was very much lik
e the eye of a man. At first, he was afraid of the creature, but when it did not attack, he just watched it. It stayed next to the boat for an hour, just watching the light, and then it left.
The old man thought of that squid now, wondering if the shark was merely curious, too. Maybe it was. After a time, it swam off.
Like the old man himself, the shark was of a solitary species. It shunned the company of other fish, unless it was hungry. Almost hourly, some days, it would engulf fish. On others days it would not eat unless something was especially tantalizing. It had gone weeks between meals or mere minutes. Its serrated jutting teeth were as razor sharp as any fine surgical instrument. Those teeth had ripped many things. Countless fish, mollusks, marine mammals, even other sharks. It had once eaten an electric guitar dropped by a drunken man from a passing cruise ship (the rusted steel strings of which were still in its stomach). It had ingested planking from a sunken ship, a lifejacket (no occupant), a lost fishing rod, a pair of discarded rubber waders, a truck tire, several small fishing nets, two lobster pots, a lost rowboat oar, and an entire full-grown Doberman Pincher in one gulp. Once, off Key West, it had bitten off the foot of a diver. Then, for reasons known only to itself, found it unpalatable and vomited it back up along with the diver’s spear gun and a transistor radio that it had swallowed the day before.
In life, it would eat almost anything. In death, it was even more voracious. It had no concept that it had once been alive, but was now dead. It did what it was designed by evolutionary mechanisms to do; it swam and it ate. Even in death, there was nothing else.
The old man was just glad that it was gone. He did not want trouble with a big shark today. Not this day. As he thought that, he saw one of the floats dip beneath the surface. Is that you, fish? He wondered. Have you come finally? The float stayed under the water. It was no inconsequential nibbling, but a biting. That was good and it made the old man feel, as he hadn’t in many months now. He gripped the line, feeling the tension on it. Yes, down there, far below, the bait was being consumed almost greedily. He hoped it was not the shark. Please, let it be the fish, I’ve been waiting for and not that damn shark, he thought.
Carefully, he removed the float so there was nothing between his hands and the great fish below. “Keep eating it,” he said. “Fill yourself and get hooked, so that I can tow you up and finish you with my harpoon.”
The old man was patient, feeling the line moving in his hands. He did not know what was going on down there in the cold depths, but his hands told him all the same. When the time came to begin pulling, he would know. His fingers would tell him. He waited. Waited some more.
“Do it now,” he whispered.
He jerked the line; feeling how firmly hooked was the fish. He yanked and pulled until perspiration beaded his brow and rolled down his spine. The sweat was on his face. He could taste the salt of the sweat on his lips. The fish fought, trying to run far below. The old man played him very carefully, giving him room to run, to tire himself, but never too much. Too much was not a good thing. He knew the fish was happy now. It was fighting, and he was fighting, and only the strongest would survive. The fish wanted the old man to give its death meaning.
“Yes,” the old man said. “I will honor you.”
The fish ran again, towing the skiff behind it. But with each run, it rose closer to the surface, as if the strength to keep it down deeper was fading now and the old man was winning the struggle. That is what the old man told himself. He was winning and the great fish was losing. However, if that was true, then it was not an easy battle. It went on for many hours, until the old man’s arms were numb from pulling, and needles pierced his back. Still, it did not end. The fish would play possum, it would sink itself like dead weight, and then when the old man began pulling it up, it would suddenly run with more vigor than ever before.
The line in his hand and that great living fish connected to it and to him, the old man did not feel as alone as he had through these many months. He felt that he and the fish were brothers, mighty brothers. He respected the fish and he believed the fish respected him.
As he thought that way, he began to feel pity for the fish. The fish was probably very old like himself. It had fought many battles and seen many lives end while it still swam on. Maybe, in the way of fish, it was wise. It must have been. How many sharks had it out-swam and how many baited hooks had it spit out? Too many to count, thought the old man. It saved itself for this very moment, so that its death would have meaning, great meaning, and a thing of legend that might be remembered as it battled a fisherman that was as great as it was a fish. So as much as he pitied the fish, the old man did not underestimate it.
The fight went on through the day, until the old man felt he could take no more. His hands were cramped, his head dizzy and every muscle in his body ached. Then the fish rose. He had been pulling on it steadily for so long, he could not seem to remember a time, when he had not been pulling on it. With the last of his strength, he tried to get the fish up when his hands told him it could be no more than twenty feet beneath the skiff. But it would not come. The fish was not ready and no matter how much the old man pulled, he could not make the fish be ready. Then, about the time he had given up, the fish came up on its own. It surfaced, almost gently, swimming around the skiff. The old man was amazed at its size. It was nearly as big as the tiger shark he had seen earlier, which was immense for a swordfish. The old man watched it swim. He knew he must harpoon it. It was giving him the opportunity. Yet, he could only watch and feel the great fish in his heart and in his soul.
“You are wonderful,” he told it.
Waiting no more, the old man let his harpoon fly and it pierced the fish’s belly, spearing its heart. The fish rose up out of the water, silvery and frilled, flapping in the air, before crashing back into the water and dying. The old man felt sadness in his heart, but did what he had to do. He towed the fish to the skiff and lashed it alongside, reaching down into the bloody water to run the line through the fish’s gills and out its mouth to the bitt in the bow. After some exertion, it was done. He had caught the last living fish. Setting his sail, the old man pointed the skiff back to the coastline.
The breeze was weak, but it carried the skiff along slowly, and not an hour after its death, the fish began to move again.
“Oh no,” the old man said. “Not you, great fish. Do not be like the others. Die and stay dead.”
But the fish would not. It had awakened in death like all others in the sea of the dead. Though it was firmly lashed, it began to flap its great tail and thud its bill against the side of the skiff. The skiff jarred with each impact, threatening to capsize. The old man knew, he must put his harpoon through the fish’s brain, but the very idea pained him. However, if he did not, it would mean he did not respect the life of the fish. As he made to spear it, its violent thrashing made him slip. His arm went into the water too near the bill of the living dead fish and it speared him in the forearm. The old man cried out, sinking his harpoon in the fish’s skull with great anger that was brought on by pain.
The fish stopped moving.
The old man’s arm bled profusely. He bandaged it with strips of cloth cut from his shirt and that staved the flow. However, he was old and tired from the fight, weak and confused. He felt every year of his age. Then the shark came, as he knew it would. It came from great killing depths and surfaced. The old man moaned in his throat at the size and ferocity of it. It was the same tiger shark as before. A huge and ragged carcass whose bones showed through its hide like the ribs of a ghost ship. It was dead, but it did not know it. It only knew hunger. There was nothing but hunger, and there never could be anything but hunger.
The old man did not know it, but the shark had been trailing him all day, as sharks will. Although, it was an undead thing, its sensory receptors were still functioning quite well. It sensed movement in the water. Frantic motion as if from a fish in distress. Vibrations everywhere. It smelled blood in the water and zeroed in on it. It could ta
ste the blood and it wanted to fill itself with that flavor. Swimming faster, hungry for the great fish, it zeroed in on the skiff with great side-to-side swooshes of its long, pointed tail fin.
The old man saw it coming and said, “Why can’t you go elsewhere, you whore? The sea is full of things for you to bite and chew. Why must you come after my fish?”
Its streamlined fins erect, the shark swam with sculling undulations of its caudal fin, cruising easily, if not swiftly through the murky waters of late afternoon. It swam slowly, effortlessly, until it was within range, then put out a great burst of speed and hit the lashed fish, biting a great chunk of bloodless meat from its flanks.
“No!” the old man said.
He stabbed viciously at it with the harpoon. However, harpooning an undead shark was pointless. Unless he struck its head, it would keep biting and feeding. Maybe it would get angry, capsize the skiff, and then feed on him. That’s all that could come of such a thing. It was like stabbing a beefsteak. It had no more effect. The old man knew it. But in his rage he could not see it. He sank the harpoon into the huge shark again and again, but it did not stop the shark from biting out great chunks of flesh from the fish. Maybe, I should have left the fish alive in its death, he thought. For surely, it would have fought. Now, it can do nothing but be eaten.
He felt bad that he had taken the fish.
The shark came again and tore at the fish, biting its midsection right down to the bones. The old man did not bother harpooning it. Not then. The breeze was picking up, he adjusted his sheet, and the skiff began to move away faster. Still, the shark followed. In its stupidity, it had been confused by the escape of the skiff. Now it came again. It tore into the tail fin, devouring it with a series of chomping motions of his lethal jaws. It kept coming and coming. The old man tried to control his temper. He knew he was not thinking right. He felt sick low down in his belly and his blood felt old and tired. It was the excitement and the exertion of battling the great fish. He was too old for such a contest. That is what he told himself and he believed it.
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