Love and Hydrogen

by Jim Shepard

  “Shouldn’t we come down, then?” she said again.

  LIAR, he thought to himself. LI—AR.

  “Sssh,” his mother said. She went back to listening.

  “All right,” she said. She hit the Talk button again and tossed the phone onto the cushions.

  “Did you really clean up upstairs?” she asked.

  “I will,” Anson said.

  She sniffled. She cleared her throat.

  “How’s Johnny?” Anson said.

  “Your father doesn’t think he should leave,” she said. “You know how he loves that dog.”

  He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. “Is he dying?” he asked.

  “He might be. They’ll know in a little while,” she said.

  “Is that what the vet said?” he asked.

  His mother shrugged. She put her chin in her palm and slapped her cheek a few times with her fingers. “You find it?” she asked, gesturing at the videotape.

  He loaded it in and hit Play and then Fast Forward so he could watch it fly by. He passed the Phantom’s shadow against the wall while he’s listening to the beautiful Christine. He passed his bringing the chandelier down on everybody’s heads. He passed Christine’s telling her boyfriend that the Phantom had a voice like an angel. The shock when they realize that the way to the Phantom’s lair is through the mirror. He hit Play when Christine got to the other side, the secret side, of the opera house.

  They watched the Phantom escorting her on horseback, farther and farther down through aqueduct-like tunnels, and then by gondola, her white veil trailing in the water.

  “If we get a digital receiver we could run all three of the inputs through it,” his mother said.

  She chuckled at the Phantom standing at the end of the gondola and leaning over the black water, poling them along.

  “It could just be me and you if it had to be,” Anson told her.

  “I’ve done everything I know to keep him around,” his mother answered. “It doesn’t seem to be working.”

  The Phantom was following Christine around the bedchamber he’d made for her. The intertitle read, So that which is good within me, aroused by your purity, might plead for your love. They must’ve missed something.

  When his father called again his mother didn’t say hello, but said “Okay,” before she hung up. “Johnny might die,” she said. “They think he ate something like antifreeze. They said we should go see him.”

  Getting dressed in his room, Anson thought, Could my dog die? He remembered the times the dog had just stood around him, wanting to be with him. The mess on the rug smelled.

  “C’mon,” his mother called.

  “He would’ve told me,” she said to herself, during the drive to the animal hospital.

  But when his father came to the lighted front doors, they could see Jeanne behind him in the examining room.

  His mother said something he couldn’t hear. “Don’t start,” his father said.

  He led them both into the examining room. “I’m sorry,” Jeanne said to Anson’s mother. The dog was strapped to the table with two flat elastic straps. He was panting and seemed to recognize them. Nobody said anything.

  “Hi, Anson,” Jeanne said.

  “What’s wrong with him?” Anson asked.

  “We think he was poisoned,” Jeanne said. “Poisoned himself.”

  His dad was over by the sink. His mom was close to the table, facing her. “He’s gonna die?” he asked.

  “I’m worried he might,” Jeanne said. “I thought you’d want to say good-bye.”

  His father blew out air. He was looking at the dog.

  But the dog didn’t die. They waited, and he panted, and hung on. He didn’t get any worse.

  His mother was getting teary and looking at the table.

  “Why don’t you all go back,” Jeanne finally said. “I’ll call if there’s a change.”

  It smelled like wet dog even though Shitface was dry. There was a syringe filled with something on the counter but it didn’t have a needle screwed onto it. His hands were cold.

  “You lose your gloves again?” Jeanne asked.

  His mother turned to him. She left the table.

  How was he going to explain? How was he going to explain? He followed her past the reception counter and out the main doors. He didn’t have to run, but he had to walk fast. “Mom,” he called.

  She got in her side of the car and he got in his. She backed it out and bumped over the frozen ruts to the main road. How was he going to explain? She looked both ways and pulled out after a fishtailing truck.

  He started crying. “I shoulda told you,” he said. He was whining. His mom was like there was nobody else in the car.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He’d seen a picture of himself crying once. Crooked teeth, everything scrunched: the worst thing he’d ever seen.

  “Please,” he said.

  “Nothing to be sorry about,” his mother said.

  “Yes there is,” he said.

  She didn’t say anything else until they got home. Then she said, “Take your boots off.” She dropped her coat on the table and went into the TV room. One of the bows was a knot and he wrestled with it before he could get it off and follow her.

  She had the Phantom back on. She was reading the intertitle: If you turn the Scorpion—you have said “Yes” and spared de Chagny. The Phantom pointed into a wooden chest. Turn the Grasshopper—and the opera house is blown to a thousand bits!

  “I need a drink,” his mother said. She didn’t get up.

  They heard his father’s car in the garage.

  “Tell her you feel bad,” Anson cried when he heard the back door shut.

  “Can I get my coat off here?” his father called.

  “Tell her you feel bad,” Anson said.

  “I feel bad,” his father said.

  There was some clinking and then his dad came in with two drinks and gave his mom one. He wedged himself on the sofa between her and Anson.

  They watched the movie go by. The Phantom on the roof of the opera house, his cape billowing in the wind. His escape in the carriage, the horses’ too-sharp turn, the carriage going over. His holding off the mob by pretending to have a bomb, and then his opening his hand, voluntarily, to show that he didn’t.

  “Look at that,” his father said.

  He was looking out the deck doors at a shape in the yard. It was black and the snow was blue. It was the Airedale that played with Shitface. The wind was blowing the snow around, but the Airedale’s fur was barely moving.

  “It’s gotta be twenty below,” his father said.

  The dog lowered itself to the snow. It took the sphinx position.

  Anson slapped himself. He slapped himself again. His father grabbed his hand.

  “Geoff,” his mother said. She was crying. He stopped trying to twist his hand out of his dad’s grip. What they didn’t get was this: He didn’t blame himself for what happened. He blamed himself for who he was. He blamed himself for who he’d be. Someday he’d take himself into the woods and run his head into a tree. He wasn’t going to make things harder. He was going to make things work. And that was the most selfish thing of all.

  THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON

  Before they came, I went about my business in pond muck, slurry, roiling soups and thermoclines of particulate matter and anaerobiotic nits and scooters. I’d been alone for somewhere between 250 and 260 million years. I’d forgotten the exact date. Our prime had been the Devonian, and we’d been old news by the Permian. We’d become a joke by the Triassic and fish food by the Cretaceous. The Cenozoic had dragged by like the eon it was. At some point I’d looked around and everyone else was gone. I was still there, the spirit of a fish in the shape of a man. I breaststroked back and forth, parting underwater meadows with taloned mitts. I watched species come and go. I glided a lot, vain about my swimming, and not as fluid with my stroking as I would have liked to have been. I suffered from negative buoyancy. I was
out of my element.

  Out of the water, I gaped. In the hundred percent humidity it felt like I should be able to breathe. My mouth moved like I was testing a broken jaw. My gills flexed and extended, to pull what I needed out of the impossible thinness of the air. The air felt elastic and warm at the entrance to my throat, as though it had breath behind it that never got through. The air was strands of warmth pulling apart, dissipating at my mouth.

  My mouth was razored with shallow triangular teeth. I lived on fish that I was poorly equipped to catch. I killed a tapir out of boredom or curiosity but it tasted of dirt and parasites and dung. For regularity I ate the occasional water cabbage. I’d evolved to crack open ammonites and rake the meat from trilobites. Instead I flopped around after schools of fish that moved like light on leaves. They slipped away like memories. Every so often a lucky swipe left one taloned.

  How long had it been since I’d seen one of my own? We hadn’t done well where we’d been, and our attempt at a diaspora had been a washout.

  I’d gotten pitying looks from the plesiosaurs.

  Was I so unique? In the rain forest, the common was rare and the rare was common.

  The lagoon changed over the years. It snaked out in various directions and receded in others. Most recently it had become about nine times as long as it was wide. The northern end was not so deep and the southern end fell away farther than I’d ever needed to go. Something with bug eyes and fanlike dorsals had swum up out of there once seventy-five hundred years ago, and hadn’t been seen since.

  Every so often the water tasted brackish or salty.

  There was one crescent of sandy beach that came or went by the decade, depending on storms, a wearying expanse of reedy shoreline that flooded every spring (silver fish glided between the buttress-roots, gathering seeds), and a shallow-bottomed plateau of thickly cloaking sawgrass that turned out to be perfect for watching swimmers from concealment. There was a minor amphitheater of a rocky outcrop suitable for setting oneself off against when being probed for at night with searchlights (stagger up out of the waist-deep water, perform your blindness in the aggravating glare, swipe ineffectually at the beams). There were two seasonally roving schools of piranha with poor self-control, a swarm of unforgiving parasitic worms in a still water cul-de-sac, five or six uninviting channels that led to danger and mystery, one occasionally blocked main artery in from the bend of the Amazon, one secret underwater passageway which led to an oddly capacious and echoey chamber of stone, and a gargantuan fallen stilt palm which seemed to be still growing despite its submarine status. From below, the water was the color of tea. From above, even on sunny days, the deeper levels looked black.

  During the day, the air was humid and blood-warm. In the morning, orchid-smelling mists surrounded columns buttressed with creepers. Lines of small hunting vireos moved like waves through the trees. Wrens sang antiphonally, alternating the opening notes and completing phrases with their mates.

  Night fell in minutes. Bats replaced birds, moths replaced butterflies. In the close darkness, howler monkeys roared defiance. Nectar-gathering bats sideslipped through the clearings. Fishing bats gaffed pickerel and ate them in flight.

  I didn’t go far. I entertained dim memories of thickets of stinging insects, poisonous snakes and spiders, and the yellow-eyed gleams of jaguars. Away from the water, all trees looked the same and there were no clues to help with orientation. Everything considered me with a diffident neutrality: the bushmaster in the leaf-litter, the army ants in the hollow tree, the millipede spiraled into its defensive position. I chewed leguminous beans and certain fungi for the visions their hallucinogens provided. The visions stood in for insights.

  One afternoon after 470 million years of quiet, a boat chug-chugged into the lagoon. Old rubber tires hung over its side. It leaked black oil and something more pungent that spread small rainbows over the water. It made a lot of unnecessary and fish-scaring noise. Once it settled into quiet, I fingered its bottom from below with a talon, scraping lines in the soft slime.

  Later, across the lagoon, I hovered in the black water, invisible in the sun’s glare. The figures on the boat had my shape. Naturally, I was curious.

  They spoke over one another in headlong squabbles and seemed to have divided their tasks in obscure ways. Just what they were doing was something I could not untangle. Had I found Companions? Was I no longer completely alone? Had the universe singled me out for good fortune? My heart boomed terror.

  I had not one single illusion about this group. Spears were unpacked. Nets. Other ominous-looking instruments. Nothing about any of this suggested diffident neutrality.

  A smaller boat steadily brought minor hills of junk ashore. A canvas tent went up. Floating off by myself, savoring that moment of illusory coolness when I’d rise from the water in the early, early morning, I watched a bare-chested native lead a hurrying scientist in a Panama hat to an exposed bank of rock. They arrived to confront a conspicuous claw waving menacingly from the shale.

  I paddled over for a listen.

  What was it, Doctor? the native asked.

  The Doctor admitted he didn’t know. He was fumbling with a cumbersome flash camera. He said he’d never seen anything like it before.

  Was it important? the native wondered.

  The Doctor took pictures, his flash redundant in the sunlight. He said he thought it was. Very important. He set the camera aside and pickaxed the fossil arm right out of the rock. So much for the preciousness of the find.

  He announced he was going to take it to the Institute. Luis and his friend were to wait here for his return.

  First, he said, he had to make some Measurements. Then he fussed about for days.

  There were four men: a figure with a hat who remained on the boat, and Luis, Andujar, and the Doctor on the shore, their sagging tent beside that still water cul-de-sac with the swarm of parasitic worms.

  The foreclaw that they kept in the center of the tent in a box had some sentimental value for me. In the middle of the night at times I stood beside the open tent flaps, dripping, ruminating on whether or not to go in for it. The Doctor’s breathing was clogged and he sounded like a marine toad.

  In the morning they made their waste down the end of a trail leading to a stand of young palms that turned from orange to green as they matured.

  One day the foreclaw was gone; I could feel it. The Doctor was gone with it. The boat was gone.

  LUIS AND ANDUJAR SANG as they worked. They didn’t work often. They played a game with a sharp knife they used to hack down plants.

  I watched them and learned their idiosyncrasies. I learned about camp stools and toilet paper. I learned about rifles. They enjoyed disassembling and oiling rifles. The procedure for loading rifles and killing animals with rifles was patiently walked through every morning, as though for the benefit of those creatures like myself watching interestedly from the bush. I was impressed with the rifles.

  THAT NIGHT BESIDE THEIR CAMP I rose so slowly from the water that the surface meniscus distended before giving way. With my mouth still submerged, my eyes negotiated the glow of their lanterns. The tent canvas blocking the light was the color of embers. On a nearby hibiscus, the light refracted through an insect disguised as a water droplet.

  I stood beside their tent in the darkness. One of them looked out and then withdrew his head.

  Even with my scales glimmering moonlight and water seeping from my algae, I had a talent for invisibility, for sudden disappearance, the way blue butterflies in the canopy vanished when entering shade.

  On the other side of the canvas Luis and Andujar nattered and thumped about. I waited as quietly as an upright bone. My chest was stirred by an obscurely homicidal restlessness.

  They fell silent. This was more annoying than their noise. I stood before the closed flaps of the tent’s entrance, spread a taloned claw, and extended it slowly into the light. No response.

  I pulled the flap aside. Luis gaped, goggled, brandished one of the lanterns;
threw it. Andujar sprang from his cot swinging the big sharp knife. They weren’t as much exercise as the tapir.

  I ENJOYED THROWING THEM about. I raked meat off the bone, lathed, splintered, and shredded; wrung, wrenched, rooted, and uprooted. I noted my lack of restraint. I opened them to the jungles. I unearthed their wet centers.

  I sat outside the tent, not ready to return to the water. I held my claws away from my body. Space in the upper canopy turned blue and paled. Two tiny scarlet frogs wrestled beside me. Leaf-litter beneath them slipped and scattered. Along the water, one set of noisemakers retired and the next took its place.

  I swam off my murderousness. I floated on my back in the center of the lagoon. Fish nipped at my feet. I had even less appetite than usual.

  Days passed. Luis and Andujar, slung across shredded cots and canvas, became festive gathering places. In the evenings, even a jaguarundi stopped by. In the opened chest cavities, beetles swarmed and tumbled over one another. Compact clouds of emerald-eyed flies lifted off and resettled.

  The big boat came chug-chugging back into the lagoon.

  I watched it come from out of the east. My head ached. The sunrise spiked my vision.

  I dove to the bottom, corkscrewed around in the muck, and startled some giant catfish.

  I resurfaced. Once again, the boat stopped and settled into quiet. Once again there was oblique activity back and forth on deck. Once again the smaller boat was loaded and sent to shore.

  The Doctor stood in the front. Three other men spread themselves across the back. They centered their attention on a slender figure between them that I could smell all the way across the water. She smelled like the center of bromeliads torn open, mixed with anteater musk and clay. Anteater musk for years had made me pace certain feeding trails, obscurely excited.

  Female scent tented through the membranes in my skull. I gawped. I sounded. I hooted, their nightmare owl.

  The group looked off in my direction, startled by the local color. The Doctor called for Luis and Andujar. Luis and Andujar weren’t answering. The boat rocked and pitched and scuffed up onto the same muddy bank it had left. The Doctor clambered out and marched off toward his tent. The men called the female Kay and helped her out and followed.