Love and Hydrogen

by Jim Shepard

  My father’s response to our mulish and heroic refusal to acquire common sense is a darkly comic and highly obscene mixture of epithets and despairing interrogation that’s often metrically pleasing—What goes through your fucking head? Your brains stuck up your ass?—and we can see, in the aftermath of one of our catastrophic exercises of free will, the physical toll it takes on him: for days afterward, he’s exhausted, tentative in his steps, fractionally hesitant when lowering himself into a recliner. He’s too old for this. He ages, while we watch.

  Of course, in some ways he brings it on himself. We act up, he acts out. He loves us, he loves us, we think when the shouting subsides. We go to bed pleased, and entertained, besides.

  Shep, don’t get excited, Ida says, while he throws Tom Collins glasses against the side of the garage. At times like that—when the boys have shown yet again that they have the collective reasoning power of a squirrel—Ida placates, and assumes a long-view perspective, as if to suggest that we’ll all chuckle over such shenanigans a few years down the road.

  But Shep is a long way from Big Picture serenity. On the day of his first heart attack, he’s in a chaise lounge in the backyard, recovering from the revelation that my brother and I have been running around the summer streets at three and four in the morning, potting streetlights with our BB gun, naked. The police have delivered this revelation in the middle of the night after having picked us up. We’re without explanation as far as the naked part goes. Our MO is to leave our clothes on one corner or another and retrieve them on the way home.

  The heart attack arrives long after the verbal abuse has subsided and all is relatively calm. My brother and I have gone to the beach. My mother is in the kitchen browning meat for a sauce.

  All morning long, as far as Shep’s concerned, he doesn’t feel exactly right. Ida lends a sympathetic ear but her capacity for alarm is muffled by her sense of his slight hypochondria. A burning, parenthesis-shaped pain spreads beneath his sternum. Anxiety builds up, conjuring all sorts of scenarios. He resists jumping to conclusions.

  When he leans forward, the pain lances upward to the base of his throat. This is cause for concern. He has trouble breathing. He calls Ida. The grease from the beef is making a racket in the bottom of the pan and he has to call her again.

  He works at Avco Lycoming Industries, marketing helicopter engines, and so just as a basic business strategy always affects a formality with strangers whom he considers to be better educated. He tells the Emergency Room intern that he’s “experiencing chest difficulties.”

  Blood is taken, an EKG is hooked up, and medication is fed into him intravenously before we get word down at the beach. Ida thinks to call a neighbor, who trots the five blocks to tell us, and then is nice enough to drive us to the hospital to boot. It’s the same guy who found us on his roof.

  When we come into the room, Ida’s sitting there holding his hand, and he’s chatting with the intern. He’s saying, “Once you know it is your heart, there’s a certain anxiety that takes over, and that affects the whole goddamn thing too, you know—” and then we interrupt. We take turns bending over and putting our hands behind his shoulders, the quasi hug for the bedridden.

  He lies there for a while while we ask various questions and joke. Ida’s eyes mist up every so often. My brother asks how he’s feeling and he answers, “Not so good. I had a heart attack.”

  After his diagnosis, he’s given stuff to stabilize his arrhythmia. In 1970 heart medicine is turning a corner from the Tertiary to the Quaternary, and tests are not as sophisticated as they are today. Certain predilections, certain hidden weaknesses, are missed. After a few days of observation, the little plastic bracelet is snipped off his wrist and he’s sent home with medication. After a prudent interval, stress tests are administered. The problem of arterial blockage is addressed.

  But Shep’s heart, that big shaky flatbed trundling us down the hill, is not all right. It goes on about its business quietly, while we go on about ours. But its business involves preparing to blow up on Shep two more times.

  As a family we resolve, with a minimum of discussion, to take it easy. No more battling of the sort that would only add to his strain. Israel and the Palestinians agree to be good. The Protestants and the Catholics decide to Just Try Peace in Northern Ireland.

  Because we love him so much and because we cannot do without him, our resolution holds up for a month and a half. Opportunities for strife come and go daily, unpursued. In the den one evening after four hours of uneventful television watching, Shep expresses his gratitude. It’s not the kind of thing that comes easily to him, and his family is genuinely touched.

  In early October the party comes to an end. My brother is sent home from the shitty public high school he attends for having let his hair get too long—shoulder-length, in the back—and I come home from the same educational sinkhole two hours later in an equally black mood. My brother accuses me, even before I set a foot into my room, of having played his Elvin Bishop album. His tone is not interrogatory. I offer to let him kiss my ass. He throws me down the stairs.

  This time Shep is in the hospital for four days longer than we expect. His face, when we visit, is gray. He talks hoarsely, when he talks at all. The intravenous seems to be pulling stuff out of him rather than putting stuff in. The three of us—Ida, my brother, and myself—are frozen with fear.

  Between visits, our personal grooming habits decay. Our meals are cold cereal or tuna forked from the can at the kitchen table, our expressions ashen.

  We were all raised Catholic. My mother prays. When my brother and I watch movies late into the night, she’s audible in her bedroom next to the den, her smoker’s voice quavering through the rosary. When I finally go to bed—school is temporarily out, as far as we’re concerned, for the duration of the crisis—I open negotiations with God. Even at fourteen I feel the need to explain my previous lack of interest, and I do so by proposing that it be viewed not so much as hypocrisy as a desire not to bother Him over every petty little thing.

  When I’m at my most honest, my formulations all express the same terror: I can’t live without him. I can’t live without him. I can’t live without him.

  Has God listened? Is He affected? In that early morning delirium before sleep, I’m oddly confident. Shep always did. Shep always was.

  A specialist is consulted. It turns out that he doesn’t like the look of things. We start bringing as gifts hefty biographies instead of magazines. Back home, nobody sleeps much. There’s a lot of rendezvousing in the kitchen in the predawn hours. In the tossing and turning that goes on before that, I try to kick-start my sense of my own good fortune and gratitude. I make an effort to wax nostalgic about things my father taught me, without as much success as I would like. The problem is that I remember few Andy-and-Judge-Hardy-type sessions involving either me sitting still for patient instruction or him sitting still to give it. I am able to list for myself, though, some things I picked up, more or less incompletely, by keeping an eye on him:

  How to build, and paint, monster models. How to go easy on the glue. How to enhance the effect of the blood by limiting its splatter. Before Shep, my monsters were like last-stage Ebola victims.

  The isolating pleasures, in general, of all sorts of absorbed, small-detail work. Shep has the most appealing tuneless hum in the neighborhood. It sounds like the Bridgeport version of something Tibetan. The closest facsimile I’ve encountered is a shtick played entirely for comedy: W. C. Fields, as ever henpecked and harassed in a service capacity, keeps some barely restrained customer waiting while humming, just audibly, Grubbing grubbing grubbing grubbing grubbing grubbing grubbing. We watched it together, Shep and I. He hummed as he watched, and to my delight, never made the connection.

  We want to bring in other specialists, at this specialist’s suggestion. Shep is unimpressed with the idea. How much more poking and prodding do they need? Is this a convention? This is good enough for me.

  Just before Halloween, it looks like he
’s finally going to be released. Somewhere in all the information and for their own private reasons the doctors have noted Progress. But on the morning of the big day, having shuffled over to the tiled bathroom rolling his IV stand beside him, his family’s arrival an hour away, Shep knows something is wrong. His head is a helium balloon. His chest has been invaded by a plank. Sweat soaks his hospital gown before he becomes aware that he’s sweating.

  The nurses. The doctors. He needs reinforcements. He needs to sit. As far as whatever hope he’s entertaining, the bottom falls out and fear’s what’s waiting there behind it, all the way down.

  He tries the toilet but the lid’s slippery, and he tumbles and folds up like a camp stool. I try to imagine his next moments. I try to imagine his next moments, alone on the floor of that actionably narrow bathroom, and something in me upheaves and rebels and inverts itself; something in me that’s fundamentally cowardly refuses the engagement. Thirty years have passed and I’m still a timorous figure navigating a makeshift and narrow life. Thirty years have passed without my having addressed my ambition to shape myself into an admirable figure, in his image. My mother has lost the use of her personality. My brother’s weeping has stabilized as a form of raging at himself and us. My own inventory—a meticulous examination of the barn door now that the barn is empty— reminds me that I didn’t even do my best to love, whatever my best was. When exactly did their It’s good enough for me become our I need more? Why did we let it happen?

  Twenty-two years after my father hit the flush tank and then the tile, I fell in love and got married. My wife, a good woman, believes I’m a good man. My children, seven and four, repair my emotions every chance they get. They’re both boys. They sprawl. They tumble. They raise hell. They love me. I can see it.

  We had our luck and our luck ran out. We got the news when we arrived at the front desk of the hospital. My mother’s knees stopped working before either of us could catch her. My brother swept his arms into the air and brought them down and cleared everything from the nurse’s station counter in front of us. I gripped the counter with two hands like it was time to steer this lobby somewhere else and thought what I still think now, that all along my father was right: we could fuck up Paradise. We did. We have.

  ASTOUNDING STORIES

  He’d brought some books with him on the way out, but had lost the lot of them on the transfer to the smaller boat. One of the lifting pallets had upset and spilled the crate down the side of the ship. His almanac had been saved, for which he was thankful.

  Among the losses had been his Simpson and his Eldredge; his Osteology and Relationships of Chondrichthyans; his Boys’ Book of Songs, Balfour’s Development of Elasmobranch Fishes, and, thrown in from his childhood, his Beadle’s Boy’s Library, including Wide Awake Ned: The Boy Wizard.

  Above his head, interstellar space was impossibly black. That night he wrote in his almanac, Velvet set with piercing bits of light. There seemed to be, spread above him, some kind of galactic cloud arrangement. Stars arced up over one horizon and down the other. The water nearest the ice seemed disturbingly calm. Little wavelets lapped the prow of the nearest kayak. The cold was like a wind from the stars.

  Thirty-three-year-old Roy Henry Tedford and his little pile of provisions were braced on the lee side of a talus slope on a speck of an island at somewhere around degree of longitude 146 and degree of latitude 58, seven hundred miles from Adélie Land on the Antarctic Coast and four hundred from the nearest landfall on any official map: the unprepossessing dot of Macquarie Island to the east. It was a fine midsummer night in 1923.

  His island, one of three ice-covered rocks huddled together in a quarter-mile chain, existed only on the hand-drawn chart that had brought him here, far from those few shipping lanes and fishing waters this far south. The chart was entitled, in Heuvelmans’s barbed-wire handwriting alongside his approximation of the location, The Islands of the Dead. Under that Heuvelmans had printed in block letters the aboriginal word Kadimakara, or Animals of the Dreamtime.

  Tedford’s provisions included twenty-one pounds of hardtack, two tins of biscuit flour, a sack of sweets, a bag of dried fruit, a camp-stove, an oilskin wrap for his almanac, two small reading-lanterns, four jerry cans of kerosene, a waterproofed one-man tent, a bedroll, a spare coat and gloves, a spare set of Wellington boots, a knife, a small tool set, waterproofed and double-wrapped packets of matches, a box camera in a specially made mahogany case in an oilskin pouch, a revolver, and a Bland’s .577 axite express. He’d fired the Bland’s twice, and both times been knocked onto his back by the recoil. The sportsman in Melbourne who’d sold it to him had assured him that it was the closest thing to field artillery that a man could put to his shoulder.

  He was now four hundred miles from sharing a wish, or a word, or a memory. If all went well, it might be two months before he again saw a friendly face. Until she’d stopped writing, his mother had informed him regularly that it took a powerful perversity of spirit to send an otherwise intelligent young man voluntarily into such a life.

  His plan looked excellent on paper. He’d already left another kayak, with an accompanying supply depot, on the third or westernmost island, in the event bad weather or high seas prevented his return to this one.

  He’d started as a student of J. H. Tate’s in Adelaide. Tate had assured himself of volunteers for his fieldwork by making a keg of beer part of his collection kit, and had introduced Tedford to evolutionism and paleontology, enlivening the occasional dinner party by belting out, to the tune of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”:

  It’s a long way from Amphioxus,

  It’s a long way to us;

  It’s a long way from Amphioxus

  To the meanest human cuss.

  Farewell, fins and gill slits,

  Welcome, teeth and hair—

  It’s a long long way from Amphioxus,

  But we all came from there!

  Tedford had been an eager acolyte for two years and then had watched his enthusiasm stall in the face of the remoteness of the sites, the lack of monetary support, and the meagerness of the finds. Three months for an old tooth, as old Tate used to put it. Tedford had taken a job as a clerk for the local land surveyor and his duties had exposed him to a panoply of local tales, whispered stories, and bizarre sightings. He’d found himself investigating each, in his free time, in search of animals known to local populations but not to the world at large. His mode was analysis, logical dissection, and reassembly, when it came to the stories. His tools were perseverance, an appetite for observation, a tolerance for extended discomfort, and his aunt’s trust fund. He’d spent a winter month looking for bunyips, which he’d been told inhabited the deep water-holes and roamed the billabongs at night. He’d found only a few fossilized bones of some enormous marsupials. He’d been fascinated by the paringmal, the “birds taller than the mountains,” but had uncovered them only in rock paintings. He’d spent a summer baking on a blistering hardpan awaiting the appearance of the legendary cadimurka.

  All that knocking about had become focused on the day that a fisherman had shown him a tooth he’d dredged up with a deep-sea net. The thing had revealed itself to be a huge whitish triangle, thick as a scone, the root rough, the blade enamel-polished and edged with twenty or so serrations per centimeter. The heft had been remarkable: That single tooth had weighed nearly a pound.

  Tedford had come across teeth like it before, in Miocene limestone beds. They belonged, Tate had assured him, to a creature science had identified as Carcharodon Megalodon, or Great Tooth, a recent ancestor of the great white shark, but nearly three times as large: a monster shark with a stout, oversized head and jaws within which a tall man could stand without stooping. But the tooth that Tedford held in his hand was white, which meant it came from an animal either quite recently extinct, or not extinct at all.

  He’d written up the find in the Tasmanian Journal of Natural Science. The editor had accepted the piece but refused its inflammatory title.

>   A year later nearly to the day his eye had been caught by a newspaper account of the Warrnambool Sea Monster, christened for the home port of eleven fisherman and a boy in three tuna boats who had refused to go to sea for several days. They’d been at work at certain far-off fishing grounds that only they had discovered, which lay beside a shelf plunging down into very deep water, when an immense shark, of unbelievable proportions, had surfaced among them, taking nets, one of the boats, and a ship’s dog back down with it. The boy in the boat that had capsized had called out, “Is that the fin of a great fish?” and then everything had gone topsy-turvy. Everyone had been saved from the vortex except the dog. They’d been unanimous that the beast had been something the like of which they’d never seen. In interviews conducted in the presence of both the local Fisheries Inspector and one B. Heuvelmans, dentist and naturalist, the men had been questioned very closely and had all agreed upon the details, even down to the creature’s length, which seemed absurd: at least sixty-five feet. They’d agreed that it was at least the length of the wharf shed back at their bay. The account made clear that these were men used to the sea and to all sorts of weather and to all sorts of sharks, besides. They had seen whale sharks and basking sharks. They recounted the way the sea had boiled over from the thing’s surfacing and its subsequent submersion. This was no whale, they’d insisted; they’d seen its terrible head. They’d agreed on everything: the size of its dorsal, the creatures’s staggering width, its ghostly whitish color. What seemed most to their credit, in terms of their credibility, was their flat refusal to return to the sea for nearly a week, despite the loss of wages involved: a loss they could ill afford, as their wives, also present for the interviews, pointed out.