CATCH AND RELEASE
“My dad used to take me there all the time when I was young.”
“Oh, this one again.”
“I’m not making it up.”
“Of course not. My dad used to take me to magic fishing holes all the time when I was kid, too. It’s part of growing up, isn’t it?”
“This was real.”
“I’m sure it was. To you.”
“I’m going to find it again.”
“It’s out there, it’s out there.”
“Sure, make fun.”
“Listen. You miss your dad, I get that. And don’t take this wrong. But there aren’t any places that good. Never were.”
“Except I was there.”
“Look, he’s getting all dreamy again.”
“All you need is a light. They come right to it. Every time. It’s like they can’t help themselves.”
“‘It’s like they wanted to get caught . . . ’ Any of them ever just climb in on their own?”
“They would have, yeah. It’s like—like we were saving them. You could see it in their eyes.”
“You can see what you want to see. I believe that.”
“Yeah, okay. But, serious, it was like they were thinking. Like they were trying so hard to think. Like they were just almost there.”
“And then they saw you.”
“They were so helpless, you know?”
“How could they serve your god-complex if they weren’t?”
“No, it’s like they wanted to trust us. It would be kind of perfect at first, one of them looking at me. Me looking right at it. But then their bodies would take over. Their natural responses. From not breathing, I guess.”
“You guess?”
“What do we look like to them, you think?”
“You talking about what do we look like to your made-up ones, or to real ones?”
“I don’t even know why I talk to you.”
“No, I’m with you here. All the way. I mean, no, of course no place like that really ever actually existed, we’d have all heard about it, but—”
“I think it’s where my dad wrecked.”
“He said dourly.”
“Sorry. His ship, though—you know how he was. One more run.”
“Without you.”
“He probably knew it was going to leak. That it might. So he didn’t wake me up to go with him.”
“Then good for him, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he went to that perfect fishing hole in the sky, and he got to stay.”
“No. I mean, it was good fishing, yeah. The best. But we never dipped down too low. He said if we fell in, that was it, it was over, done. They’d eat us alive.”
“Eat?”
“As in destroy, infect, I don’t know.”
“What’d you use for bait?”
“The light was good to draw them in, like I was saying. They must not have enough of it or something. Or not the good kind. But we used all different stuff, I guess. My dad had one lure that looked like—I don’t know what you’d call it. It had parts, was like a ship, I guess, but it only went on the ground, in a mostly straight line. If you left one just sitting there, though, it was like they couldn’t help themselves.”
“So they weren’t thinkers, then. Good, good. Go on.”
“Shut up.”
“Serious. I want to hear. Regale me.”
“Sometimes we’d use their . . . whatever they called them down there. The other ones like them but weren’t them, that were bigger and slower. I think they grew them to eat them, maybe.”
“Come on. If you’re going to lie, then make it big. Entertain me.”
“We’d find one of those and hollow it out, make it real dry, then just drop it down and wait.”
“You tried that particular trick anywhere else since then?”
“Nowhere else has those to try with.”
“But how would you reel them in, then?”
“That was the easy part. Just shift to the heavy light. It tranced them out or something. They’d just look up and up into it. And they didn’t know how to phase—”
“I was almost believing you there.”
“They didn’t know. They don’t.”
“Then they’d be dead before they even started living. No species can survive without phasing. You’d just be locked in one view, right? I’d be trying to climb into your ship, too.”
“I don’t know, they found some way to keep on living. Maybe they didn’t even know, thought what they could see, that that was everything. Like—just a lower level of existing, moment to moment, in one direction. And then it’s over just all at once.”
“So you were a god to them. For delivering them from that.”
“Dad said that was what made them so special to catch. Pulling them up into the ship for an orbit or two, it made their lives so much bigger. At least for then.”
“What do you mean?”
“They can’t phase? When we’d lower them the other way through the light, time would go backwards for them, and it was like they couldn’t even remember us.”
“Now I know you’re lying.”
“It was sad. Dad said maybe if I marked them they could hold on to us some. I mean, in their heads.”
“They’re strictly organic, you’re saying?”
“Exactly. The first few I marked—well. You know how it goes.”
“They’re fragile. Built to die. Sounds like they were already practically dead.”
“I know. I was a kid, though, right? Dad, you know how he was, he could slap them against the wall when they made too much noise, easy as that. Not even think twice. Their heads were so delicate.”
“A planet for every kind.”
“We never told anybody about it, either. Everybody would have come, ruined it.”
“But how’d you mark them if they came apart so easy?”
“I’d just stuff random bits from our toolbox in them. The natural openings. Just wherever I could, wherever it looked like something might fit.”
“You didn’t keep one, did you? Is that where this is going?”
“You can’t eat them.”
“Well.”
“You could, okay. But believe me, you wouldn’t want to.”
“Especially when you got done with them.”
“It wasn’t on purpose. I was just playing.”
“I’m joking, I’m joking. But you really think your dad went back in a leaky ship?”
“Whenever he’d be reeling one in, he’d always have me to watch the gravity for him, make sure we didn’t fall in. I wasn’t there for the last time, though. He probably hooked a big one, but there was nobody there to watch the panel. He would have crashed.”
“Into the middle of a bunch of them. All with junk stuffed in them by his kid.”
“I wonder if they remembered him then. Made the connection.”
“‘A magic place. They come right up to you. And they never remember, just keep coming back for more and more.’”
“I shouldn’t have told you.”
“Everybody likes a good lie.”
“My dad didn’t crashland into a lie.”
“Just into a place without phasing. A place you can fish forever, reeling the same ones up, and they never know it.”
“Okay.”
“What?”
“This. Shh.”
“What? It’s all shriveled and black—oh, oh. It’s one of them?”
“Part. It fell off.”
“Hunh. Almost looks like a hand, except for those five . . . whatever they are.”
“They use them as natural as anything, I swear.”
“And I’m supposed to believe this is what they run their magical perfect planet with?”
“You can take them off and they don’t die right away. Maybe because they come with an extra. Like a back-up.”
“An extra?”
“They’re bilateral.”
“Oh, of course, of course. This is getting better and better. You should have stopped with stuffing your little pieces of junk into them.”
“When we’d have them on the ship, some of them would use these—see, the five things kind of spread open? They would . . . I don’t know what they were doing. But it looked like they were trying to reach for us somehow. Like they wanted to touch us. See if we were real.”
“Defense mechanism. Probably a stinger or something in the middle, if you get too close.”
“That’s what Dad said.”
“Listen, I am sorry. About him. I really hope he’s out there still, just floating on their—you say they’re breathers?”
“There’s an atmosphere.”
“I hope he’s there, just dropping his light through it over and over, pulling them in and throwing them back as fast as he can.”
“You know he is.”
“Long live secret fishing holes.”
“And fathers.”
“And sons.”
“And breathers who can’t phase.”
“And breathers who can’t remember.”
“And fishermen who do.”
SUBMITTED FOR YOUR APPROVAL
It starts with a man walking back from the kitchen to his couch, a bowl of dry cereal in his hand, his other hand in the bowl, fingering out a bite or two. It’s not that he doesn’t have milk, just that he could hear the opening credits—his own sultry sly voice—and suddenly didn’t have time for milk anymore. Again. This is maybe four years after production stopped, the Show already looped into the afterlife of syndication. And this man, this man with the dry cereal pinched halfway to his mouth, is none other than Mr. Rod Serling, no suit, no tie, but still, him, alone enough this evening to forego milk altogether, just sit back on the couch and try to resist touching his hair when he sees himself on the television set, touching it as if to fix it.
This evening, however, he only makes it halfway across the living room.
He lowers his hand from his mouth, doesn’t chew the cereal because it’s dry, would crunch, and he has to hear.
Someone on the porch?
Maybe.
In the moment before he moves to the door, the bowl of cereal balanced on the tall back cushion of the couch, he notes the curtains over the front window, open, and pictures somebody hunched over there, watching him watch the Show. He wonders what kind of thrill that would be—wonders if he would do that himself, and what the difference would be between watching himself on television and watching himself watching himself on television—and like that another Episode flashes across his mind, of a man stepping into a public bathroom, getting caught in the continually diminishing reflection of the mirrors to either side of him, until the reflection breaks down and, at five-eighths of an inch tall, he becomes someone else, someone independent of himself, smiling.
They had a good run, though. Even without touching on every possible script. He’s learned to tell himself these things, anyway.
In two steps, then, he’s at the door, is stepping out onto the wooden porch, into the twilit night. No one; nobody. Not even the neighbors, standing on their porches too, waiting for the aliens to land or not land. For a man to run silent down the street, his jacket on fire.
But—the sound, the noise, that distinctive shuffle of leather on wood planks.
Mr. Rod Serling closes the door, locks it, and only then does it register: leather. Leather soles. Dress shoes.
He looks to the side as he approaches his dry cereal, trying to build a man up from the bottom, from a pair of shoes, but can’t, so just looks back once to the door, then across the room, to the Show, the cereal crunching now in his inner ear, his socked feet crossed on the coffee table.
Every night should be like this, he thinks. A good night.
He smiles, covers it with his cereal hand, and finds himself looking at the front window again, lowering his brow suggestively, comparing it and the television screen. One is color, though, the other washed out black and white. But maybe there are more colors, right? More than just red and green and whatever that third one is . . . indigo?
Forget it.
He draws the curtains in his mind, sparing himself the indignity or rising to actually do it, as if he were scared, and then makes himself look back to the Show. It’s just now starting—he’s just now tilting his head forward, into the camera, asking the audience a question, all his weight already on the balls of his feet, so he can open his body up, step aside, let the Episode unfold, only, only—
The actors behind him, they’re not in a living room or a laboratory or a spaceship, or scrabbling around in the rubble of a lost world, they’re at Plymouth Rock. Not in the studio’s estimation of Pilgrim garb, either, but in Viking leather, their flatboat bobbing in the shallows behind them.
One of the History Episodes. One of the ones that doesn’t make the audience question where they’re going, but where they’re from. One of the episodes that pulls the figurative carpet out from under their figurative selves.
And the actors, Mr. Rod Serling almost recognizes them, almost remembers them from other shows, side bits in movies, guest appearances, commercials, but can’t quite attach a name to them, or anything said out in the parking lot, about cigarettes or weather or life or the Show, even, what an honor it is, etc.
That’s not what makes him sit up, though, Mr. Rod Serling. There are lots of names he already can’t remember. What makes him sit up, lowering his feet to the ground, his cereal spilling into the cushions, forgotten, buried in the ash of a thousand cigarettes, is the question he’s asking at least five years ago: What if somebody got there before Columbus?
The emphasis on ‘before,’ too, it’s perfect, just how Mr. Rod Serling would have said it, if he’d ever said it, but the thing is, he never had.
This episode had never been written, shot, aired, thought of.
Yet there he was, leading the audience into it.
On his couch, Mr. Rod Serling leans forward, across the coffee table, to touch the screen, but then, at the last instant, doesn’t.
During the commercial break, Rod Serling watches the rest of the episode then walks upstairs as if through a fog, sits on his bed in his slippers with his eyes narrowed at the floor, trying to remember having ever said those words.
Ten minutes later, he says them aloud as best he can recall them, and hits ‘before’ just the same, but can no longer tease apart influence and memory—whether he’s saying it like that because he just heard himself say it like that, or if he’s saying it like that because he practiced it in his office one morning, looking into a hand mirror held down in the deep drawer he was supposed to keep files in.
He doesn’t even know the name of the episode—1492?—or its season.
And then the commercial break is over and it’s morning, and he’s driving to the studio, pulling up to the gate. The security guard recognizes him of course, acts scared like he presumably always used to, then holds Mr. Rod Serling up longer than Mr. Rod Serling really wants to be held up, only delivering his one important line as Mr. Rod Serling is pulling away: “You barely missed him.”
The clutch goes back in; the car rolls back, the brake lights flaring.
“Mr. Albright,” the security guard flashes, like a question. When Mr. Rod Serling doesn’t disagree, the security guard explains how Mr. Albright was shooting all night, just left ten minutes ago.
Mr. Rod Serling jots down the address the guard gives him and goes there, and by the size of the house it’s obvious Mr. Albright is a director, a producer—that, in all likelihood, the Show was what made him too. Meaning they should have that to share.
“Rod Rod Rod,” Mr. Albright says, at the door, stepping aside, and Mr. Rod Serling walks in, taking his sunglasses off just as he steps over the threshold, a private superstition, but, all the same, one that’s never let him down.
The conversation starts out casual, just talk about the old days—how many takes it took to g
et that little girl to quit crying that time, how the star they brought in had to be fed each line, word by word—but then Mr. Rod Serling leans back into the chair he’s in, both hands holding the armrests.
Mr. Albright’s wearing a kimono and sunglasses, of course. Drink in hand.
Mr. Rod Serling asks him if he saw the Episode last night, and Mr. Albright says—in his shrugging, distracted way—“Not last night, no.”
It’s funny, true, maybe even clever, and more importantly, it gives Mr. Rod Serling a chance to smile like none of this matters. The cuticles around his fingernails are bone white, though. He shrugs as if just compelled to finish the query, now, says it was that one about the Indians, he guesses, and when Mr. Albright tips his head back, spanning the distance between his chin and nose with the thumb and forefinger of one hand, Mr. Rod Serling sketches it for him: the one where the Indian’s chasing a deer through the woods, missing it with arrow after arrow, until he’s lost, bursting out of the woods onto a beach. Only there’s Vikings there, tasting the sand. The Indian and the Vikings lock eyes, and, after a great chase, the Vikings haul the Indian onto their flatboat, where a Franciscan priest—“Bede?” Mr. Rod Serling suggests—where a Franciscan priest with absolute marbles for eyes tells the Indian—”
“In English, he says this?” Mr. Albright interrupts.
Yes. In English this priest tells the Indian of these white skins in their boats, and then, as a parting gift, the Vikings give the Indian a primitive black powder gun, the barrel scrimshawed with Chinese ideograms, and tells him there, there, on the beach, stand guard, shoot the first white man that steps out of his boat, and the Indian nods, his mouth in a frown already, and then stands there for hours and hours with the gun he knows how to use now, until he’s still enough that the deer he was chasing steps lightly out onto the sand.
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