“Jim. Can you hear me?”
Jim said: “No … No … No. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me.”
Jim looked like someone asleep, but having a terrible nightmare—someone you are afraid to shake, because he will wake disoriented and confused. His head rolled heavily from side to side.
“What’s a ghillie suit?”
“It’s what he’s wearing. It’s deep camouflage. Hunters and snipers wear them.”
Audrey kneeled on the ground beside him and touched his face.
“Jim,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
She fingered the material of the ghillie suit. All the long, shaggy hairs were made of shredded brown twine.
“Will he be OK?”
“How much does he weigh?”
“I don’t know. Like, two hundred pounds, maybe?”
“He should be fine. The tranq was ketamine. Hard to overdose on. What in the hell was he doing standing in the road out there?”
“I don’t know.”
Jim wasn’t fully asleep. Dragged to his feet, he was just conscious enough to walk with Bill and Audrey supporting him, one on each side, holding his arms around their shoulders, drunken sailor at dawn. They walked with him—Jim dragging his feet and stumbling, tripping on his own feet, the heavy weight of his lifeless arm on her shoulder—along the ditch under the road, hoping for a place where the embankment was shallow enough to get him up it and then over the guardrail. And so, when they finally found a way to drag him up and over and onto the road—an old, fat man and a seventeen-year-old girl trying to move an able-bodied and nearly unconscious man in his twenties—they had to walk this way with him a good while up the shoulder of the road with the snowfall coming down faster and the temperature sinking, fearing that a car might not see the three of them around the sharply curving, dark, narrow mountain road, all the while Jim muttering, “No, no, no,” and “Don’t hurt me.”
At last they saw the pulsing orange glow of the hazard lights flashing, and came to the van, still parked in the middle of the right lane of the road with the engine on and the tailpipe panting smoke into the cold air. Both of them exhausted under Jim’s weight, Bill managed to get the back doors of the van open, and they maneuvered him into it until his body found the mattress on the floor and sank into its contours at once, like a baseball into the palm of a well-worn glove. He was asleep almost instantly. Feeling comfortable while barely conscious in unfamiliar beds in strange places was one of Jim’s few skills.
“Well, then. Are you going to put this in your article?” said Bill.
“No,” she said.
But she did not also say that there would be no article. Audrey knew she would not write the article, because to omit this incident from the evening would be untruthful, and she could not have that, and her mother would self-immolate from embarrassment if anyone heard about this, and she could not have that, either. “This”—whatever this was. It was unclear what Jim had been doing that night—the best she could guess was that it might have been some ludicrous plot to try to make money somehow from orchestrating fake Black Rock Monster sightings. (Listen to yourself—“fake” Black Rock Monster sightings?) It was probably something he’d cooked up together with Duncan Hodges. She would never ask him. She pretended it had never happened, and either Jim did the same, or he didn’t remember it. She maybe would have asked him if they’d gotten out years distant from it, but she wouldn’t get the chance, as Jim would only live for another year or so after that night. Later that night, Bill would help Audrey smuggle Jim into the hotel through a side door. Audrey would steal a key to a vacant room from the pegboard behind the front desk, and they would lay him on top of the starchy white bed, the shredded twine of his ghillie suit rustling and fanning out around his body. He would look like an enormous sheepdog asleep atop the sheets. The following morning, he would be gone, and any evidence of his being there—footprints in the snow—would be rapidly snowed over.
And Audrey would never tell anyone about what happened until much later in her life. The journalist Warren P. Murray, when once asked why as a reporter for The New York Times during the Korean War, he had knowingly suppressed certain information that might have been useful to China and the Soviet Union had it been in print, answered: “Sometimes it is hard to be both a good newspaperman and a good American. When in doubt, my allegiance was to my country first.” When Audrey had read that, she balked at it, appalled at Murray’s attitude. A country is an artificial, imaginary construction—one’s allegiance ought always to be first to the truth. Transparency before all else. News is something someone wants suppressed. Everything else is just advertising. This late encounter with her brother had put Audrey, for the first time she would really remember, in the position of being the someone who wants something suppressed. Was the truth so sacred that it was worth embarrassing her own family? No. Is something sacred by degrees, then, sacred at all?
Bill slammed the back doors of the van shut. And then he stood there, bracing himself against the back of the van with his hands spread palms out on the doors. He shook his head, looking down at the ground, down at his boots on the road. Audrey began to move toward the passenger door of the van, but when Bill didn’t move, she stopped, turned back, and looked at him.
It is an arresting thing to see deeply felt emotion unhidden in the face of a grown man—well, deeply felt emotions other than anger, that is. Audrey’s heart had gone lightly into her tagalong on Bill’s hunt that night. Her heart was not light now, but for reasons that had nothing to do with the Black Rock Monster. She had not expected to see the Black Rock Monster. She had not expected to see anything at all. But looking at Bill now, she saw that he was embarrassed—humiliated—and, more so, disappointed. He had the look of a man who’d gathered the whole town to watch him fly with his wax wings, taken his leap into the void, and promptly fallen off the building. She stood behind the van, her hands sunk awkwardly in her coat pockets, waiting for this grown man to collect himself. She wondered if she should say something to him. She wondered if it would be best to leave him alone awhile with his thwarted yearning for the impossible, if she should go sit quietly in the passenger seat, or walk far enough away from the van for him to feel alone. She wondered if she should try to comfort him—put a hand on his back or something, pat it. There, there. There, there.
But why should she comfort him? It was her brother who was a drunk: broke, stupid, homeless, hopeless, insane, wearing a ghillie suit, sleeping off the effects of a tranquilizer dart meant for Bigfoot on a mattress in the back of a van. It was her brother who was beyond saving. It was her brother who would commit suicide one year later. It was her brother who would park his car in the dirt lot in front of the Rattlesnake Gulch Trailhead, the trail that leads to the ruins of the Tabor Hotel, where she did not believe Duncan Hodges had seen the Black Rock Monster. It was her brother who would inject a lethal dose of heroin, put his head in a plastic bag, roll a rubber band over it, recline the driver’s seat all the way, lie back, and go to sleep. It was her brother who would do this in the middle of the night on the night before Thanksgiving, which would be Audrey’s first visit home from her freshman year of college. It was her brother who would not show up for the meal, but this would cause no special alarm, as his not showing up to things was not and would not be anything new. That is why her family would go most of the day before they knew what her brother had done. And once they, and the town, knew what he had done, all would offer her family their sympathy, but none would be too surprised.
So why should she be the one to comfort Bill, who seemed to be suffering an attack of existential despair because he hadn’t discovered Bigfoot—again. Oh, excuse me—“the Sasquatch.”
But anyway, she didn’t. She didn’t comfort him. She didn’t try to say anything to him. She just stood behind him on the shoulder of the road, shivering, practically feeling the mercury drop in the thermom
eter, with her hands in the pockets of her coat, wishing to be inside the van with the heater on. A car passed: It slowed down in curiosity, whoever was inside it looking in passing at the van parked in the middle of the other lane, an older man and a teenage girl standing around behind it. Audrey was afraid of the story whoever was in the car might be telling themselves about what they were seeing. The headlights swept fast across the trees and left them standing in the dark again.
Bill Burns walked to the edge of the woods. His boots crunched arrhythmically on the gravel as he crossed the road, and then he simply stood in front of the guardrail, the place where the forest had been cut down to clear the way for the road, and seemed to stare into the woods beyond the road. She didn’t know if he was staring—his back was to her—but what else could he have been doing? Was he staring, or looking? He still actually believed there was something out there.
After all this—long after Bill Burns, summertime baboon expert and Bigfoot hunter in autumn, packed his van, checked out of the hotel, and drove back home to Washington the next day—wait—no—it wasn’t the next day, because the town got snowed in that night, and they closed the roads: So it must have been the day after that when he left—Audrey would think back on him fondly, although she never saw, heard, or spoke to him again. He had made her feel something disquieting but not unpleasant: a desire to believe in something that has not been proven. It was that indescribable tingling sensation in her stomach. It was a foolish, childish feeling, wonderful to feel. It was almost religious. This man really believed that there were still mysteries left. He really believed there were unknown things still possible to discover. Not just on other planets, or up in the canopies of rain forests, or down at the bottom of the ocean, but right here, in North America, in Colorado. His world was vast, and his curiosity excessively generous. He was a grown-up little boy, who did not fear monsters in the woods so much as he loved them and wanted to get close enough to throw a rock at them. He was naive, but he did not mind being seen as naive. Audrey liked people who do not mind being seen as naive, and always would. Bill’s fault was a mind that was too open. Is it worse to have a mind that’s too closed, or one that’s too open? Was Audrey’s conviction that skepticism is better than faith a kind of faith itself, and therefore hypocrisy? If he’d asked her, Bill Burns would have been the only person in her life to make her hesitate before answering: no.
Snow had begun to fall in earnest. The heavy snow fell in silence. Not a silence of cunning or fear, but of listening.
She could feel that it would be a big storm. She could see it in the sky. It was the middle of November (if anything, they were long overdue already for the first big storm of the season), and lately it had been getting colder and colder, until today, which had been unseasonably warm. Audrey did not know the meteorological reason for this—something to do with fronts and barometric pressure—but she knew a warm day in winter was the prelude to a snowstorm. The milky ceiling of clouds had sunk low enough to hide the peaks of the mountains. The weatherman was predicting at least twelve, possibly up to twenty inches that night. And that, she knew, watching fat, wet snowflakes drift across the high, dark forest, was good for business.
* She didn’t like the idea of her seventeen-year-old daughter in a bar—even though Audrey appeared to her eyes about as sexual a being as an eggplant: always in her snow boots and her drab, bulky sweaters; no makeup; that saggy, colorless knit hat she wore everywhere. She had once asked Audrey if she had “a crush on any boys at school,” and received in return a look that was as if she’d asked if Audrey knew anyone who’d been eaten by rats lately. Another time, after that, Audrey’s mother had begun to tell her that she and Audrey’s father would love her unconditionally, no matter what course her life should take, before Audrey stopped her cold with another “Please don’t” stare. All she’d accomplished in worrying about her daughter’s seemingly vacant sexuality was to let Audrey know her mother thought she might be a lesbian. Thereafter, she dropped the subject.
Fishmaker
Evelyn Hampton
Then I made fish.
I was living in the bank of a river. I’d found a small den and outfitted it simply.
I needed only a few things: work to do, a place where I could do it, and rest.
First I would decide on a design for a fish, then prepare the parts from a supply of materials I kept on shelves I’d built of wood dragged from the river.
The lining of a fish is a form of electricity.
A fish’s brain can be made of almost anything as long as it’s small enough to fit inside the skull. A fish’s skull can be made from windshield-wiper-fluid caps. These could be found in the river.
My favorite was plunging my hand into the sack of dry fish-eye lenses. The little pink ovals felt like sun-warm sand on a beach, a day of no worries. I knew the delight of a chef when finally her pantry is stocked only with the best ingredients—she can taste and touch and look at them, content that everything she makes will be delicious.
Brain stems are small white rods that become translucent as soon as they are attached to the lining.
When I ground the seeds for the paste I would cast teeth from, I added a pinch of white pepper from the shaker on my table.
On the basis of its ingredients, life shouldn’t exist.
Making the eyes was a most delicate process. Sometimes, anticipating the demands of the work before me, my hands would shake so much, I wouldn’t be able to take the rubber band off the bag of irises. They looked like brown mustard seeds and would take on the consistency of tapioca pearls when I placed them in eye fluid. I used a tweezers for this, after my hands had steadied.
For the blood I would make a kind of jelly. The stuff would visibly hiss when I added the final ingredient, a dash of sea salt I’d brought with me from the city.
I had lived so many different lives in so many different places, the sight of the salt shaker, this little container of crystals, gave me such comfort—seeing it day after day on its shelf was like seeing the face of a dear one who had aged gently beside me.
I liked to think of that hiss as the fish’s first breath. It wasn’t a sound of relief but of shock and discomfort. Life must be surprised to be so suddenly embodied.
I am old, let it be no mystery. I’m older than walls and most days I feel stiffer than a brick.
Something I learned making fish is that life isn’t very good at living— it has to be coaxed and prodded to take to its next body.
And then even after it has taken and gives every sign of being a success, life tends to remain limp and dormant.
Anyone who has lived in a winter climate and watched snow falling on the first day of May knows how very far away life can get from the ones craving it.
I am so old now, I keep my skin in a zipped bag in the refrigerator. It stays fresher longer; when I put it on, I like how cool I feel, almost as if I am young again. The coolness of my skin during those first minutes out of the refrigerator reminds me of the walls of the den. Those were happy days, making fish. Even my shadow was content.
In the outer wall, I’d made a hatch to throw finished fish out of, into the river. The hatch also functioned as a window for me. I liked a certain kind of light.
It would frighten me to look into a fish’s eyes the moment before I threw it out of the hatch. I would see there a dilating terror that encompassed everything. Was it knowledge?
How had knowledge gotten into the fish? I hadn’t put it there. Knowledge wasn’t one of the ingredients. Consciousness, never.
Usually there would be a tomcat crouched in the hatch. The look in a fish’s eyes told me it already knew this cat, had seen it a hundred times, had been caught and eaten by it in lifetimes past. Please don’t throw me out of that hatch!, its eyes were pleading.
But I always threw the fish out. I wasn’t going to spare them from what they knew was coming. I had made the
m—I was much worse than that tomcat.
They should have been relieved to be tossed out of the hatch. To escape their maker—their death.
At first I resented that tomcat gobbling up my careful handiwork.
But when I watched with an attitude a little more detached than disdainful, I noticed that not every fish got caught. Only the ones life hadn’t really taken to were gobbled. The ones in which life was vigorous thrashed their tails and flipped their bodies and managed to evade old Tomcat.
These fish made it into the river, where other perils worse than Tomcat awaited. The other fish, the weak ones Tomcat caught, would not have survived anyway. They were pretty fish, and exacting to make, but they were not hardy enough to be real.
In time I considered Tomcat my cocreator. His job was to test the final product.
I mentioned I liked a certain kind of light.
Indirect, reflected. The hatch let in sunlight reflected by the river. On my ceiling I could see the water’s surface eddying and flowing its shadows.
Lucky me. Nobody from my old lives knew where to find me. I called myself Lucky.
Old lovers, old loves; debts and family: They had exhausted all my old haunts. I was relieved to have finally been forgotten.
Being alive is mostly a matter of believing you’re alive.
Once their eyes were attached to the lining, the fish could see. Once they could see, they could believe. They blinked and blinked.
The air in my den was cool and damp, excellent for naps.
Before I became Lucky, I was no good at sleeping. I just couldn’t find the right time or position. I wandered restlessly, searching for relief.
When you’re happy, sleeping is easy. Counterintuitive maybe, but when you’re happy, it’s easier to leave your life. Relaxed, you can slip right out of it. You can always come back to it later, and if you can’t, no big deal.
Conjunctions 64: Natural Causes Page 13