by Jerome Gold
Oh, Those Prankster Angels
Some people say you should always trust your spirit guides from the Other Side, that they have your interests at heart. I say no. They may, but they may not. They are tricksters. They lie. You can’t trust them. Look at what happened to a publisher I know and an author he admired.
Susan wrote a book—a wonderful book, both a love story and a spiritual quest written to capture the hearts and yearnings of as many people as possible—and eventually found a publisher. I say “eventually” because finding a publisher, even for a book as wonderful as Susan’s, is no easy thing. But enough about that. The point is that she did find a publisher.
He did not have a lot of money, but he hoped that Susan’s book would make it for him. He published only a few books a year and had never had a hit. Oh, occasionally he garnered a minor profit from a book, but he’d never published one that was a smash-down, balls-to-the-wall, go-for-the-moon financial success. But enough about old dreams.
While the book was being edited, Susan and her publisher had many conversations about it and about the assurances she was getting from her guides, who were not yet known—to Susan and her publisher, at least—to be pranksters. Her guides, Susan said, were telling her her book was going to be a roaring success. In fact, the marketing person for Susan’s book was herself convinced that, with the right nudging, the book indeed could make some money. (The marketing person also believed in guidance from the Other Side and, unknown to Susan and her publisher, believed, too, that everything written in the National Enquirer was true.) Susan made plans to give up her job in real estate.
The publisher, a man of some experience in the publishing world, was less sanguine. His experience with authors who said they would do anything to promote their book was that, once the book was in print, they usually wouldn’t. Oh, they believed it when they said it, but then there were a thousand reasons not to do this or that. Some even denied having made that commitment. Still, the publisher could not help being swayed by Susan’s enthusiasm, and sometimes he actually found himself asking her, “What do your people on the Other Side say?” Susan consistently reported that her guides were as enthusiastic as she herself was. The publisher decided to increase the print run by a factor of three. Susan gave notice.
The book came out just as the United States invaded Iraq. Public attention was on things Arabic, on things Middle Eastern, on things military and presidential. Two wholesalers who specialized in spiritual books gave up the ghost, so to speak. At the same time, the two most influential magazines that reviewed books concerned with matters of the spirit also went under. The marketing person reported that the producers of radio shows that had always been interested in metaphysics and paranormal phenomena were not returning her calls.
The book sold two hundred copies.
Susan was out of work.
Her publisher, ridden with debt, stopped publishing and began looking for a job.
The marketing person was out of work.
Sometimes, at four in the morning, the publisher woke up, alert to the merest nuance of sound and shadow, and wondered whether or not his life had meaning. At other times, falling into and out of sleep after going to bed, he was certain he heard Susan’s guides laughing maliciously.
He called Susan and left her a message asking what she thought of her guides. She delayed responding, but finally did, informing him that her guides had assured her that all had happened as it was meant to. All she could think, she said, was that her book was meant to fall into the hands of someone it would benefit, although her guides had not told her this. Not precisely. Not, in fact, in any way. Sometimes, she said, the Other Side worked this way. It did something ostensibly to affect one person, but really to benefit someone else.
But she was happy that her book had been published and, incidentally, she did not accept that it had sold only two hundred copies, and her attorney would be contacting the publisher next week. In the meantime, he would be happy to know that she had found another job, one she thought her talents were more suited to, as an insurance agent. So things had worked out, although not in the way she had anticipated.
Nor in the way the publisher had anticipated. He had no doubt Susan’s book had benefited someone—books do that, after all; in this, he had faith—but was the benefit to this unknown reader worth the disaster to him, the publisher? If someone’s life was at risk, couldn’t the Other Side have saved it in a way that was less catastrophic to him and to all those authors he would not be publishing, no longer having a publishing company to do this?
Ultimately he decided that Susan’s guides had indeed achieved what they intended. But what they intended was to entertain themselves by destroying his life. He heard them laughing every night now, preventing him from sleeping. The only way he found to silence them was to concentrate on how he would word his résumé.
Runaway
for Leah
I left Seattle because my friends were dying.
Nathan O.D.’d.
Rebel drove into a wall.
Pale Mary suicided down
in California.
Krystal got killed in front of the Jack in the Box.
That was where Lindsey was shot the year before.
Mia—everybody knows about Mia.
Nathan O.D.’d. We were sitting around.
We watched him shoot. He knew he was doing
too much. We knew, too. But none of us
said anything, and Nathan...he knew what he
was doing. He was smiling, and then he
fell over. The needle was still in his arm.
That was it, really. That was what told me to
get out of Seattle.
What happened to Mia, too. Everybody knows
what happened to Mia.
My mother thinks I ran because somebody
molested me, or worse. Maybe
somebody in the family. Maybe my uncle or my cousin.
That never happened.
I ran because my friends were dying.
Portland’s O.K.
I Stepped in Some Shit
for G.W. Bush
I stepped in some shit. It was round, not like
a cow’s or a buffalo’s, but like a
bear’s, or a human being’s. It wasn’t
like a dog’s. It was too thick, too perfectly
round, round without seam. It had too much heft
to be a dog’s. Or so it appeared.
It could have been a human’s, or a bear’s.
It was about a foot long and, as I say,
almost perfectly round. There were no
wrinkles, no indentations. There were
no imperfections, none to be seen on the
surface, at least. The coloring was
uniform, a rich brown.
I was out walking. Taking a stroll
following my afternoon coffee.
It was a nearly glorious day: sun,
large, white clouds to make you think sailing
ships and the sea, a breeze with the
occasional gust to say, six knots.
Light-jacket weather; a thin windbreaker.
And there it was, on the sidewalk. (It was
probably not a bear’s.) I saw it.
I stepped in it.
The Divers
Harry went into the water a mile east of Alki Beach. Twenty years earlier there had been an abandoned cannery here, its windows broken, the green paint on it sides worn past flaking and slowly disappearing under pressure of rain and sun. Divers called it the ugliest building in Seattle and used it as a point of reference, as in: “Go out toward Alki. Look for the ugliest building in Seattle. I’ll meet you just to the left of it and we’ll go in there.”
Now, instead of the cannery, there was a park. Grass, sun shelter, rest rooms. Visually an improvement, but it brought people. Harry did not like to be around people he did not know well. He would look at them and guess what they were capable of, but he
didn’t know what they would do, or when. He was a rehabilitation counselor in a prison for children.
Today he was diving without a partner. When he dived alone he preferred to go to a place he knew, where he was familiar with the currents and was not likely to run into discarded fishing line. Fifteen years ago, maybe more, he had gotten tangled in line near the Fauntleroy ferry dock while swimming through a kelp bed and had to rely on his partner to cut him out of it. He had been snagged before he knew it. Still, if there were no fish to attract fishermen, there was little to attract him. Fauntleroy was not a place he would dive alone now. In any event, there was only a vestige of the kelp bed that had been there. Most of it had been torn away by a gale a few years back.
The day had started out clear but by the time he got in the water a thin layer of cloud concealed not only the sun but the entire sky, so that what he could see beneath the surface was negligible. There was a small school of striped perch and he had a glimpse of a dogfish in the murk at the edge of visibility. He was out of the water after thirty minutes, though he had air enough for another fifteen.
He went out again a few days later, this time to the pilings at Edmonds. He was with Bruce. The pilings were what remained after Chevron took out the oil pipeline and dismantled the dock where the tankers used to put in. Though it was the beginning of winter, there had been several warm, sunny days and the algae bloom was so thick they could hardly see their hands until they got down to thirty feet. At the bottom they saw a large cabezon, some tube worms attached to the pilings, and a sponge that Bruce picked up and used in the pretense of washing his armpits. He often played the clown and his silliness as often made Harry laugh.
When they came out of the water Harry found that the fin strap behind his left ankle had been cut through so that only a narrow strip of rubber held it together. When he looked closely he saw serrations, like tooth marks, at the edges of the cut. He remembered then that as he had settled himself on his belly to observe the cabezon, he had pushed his foot back and something had hit him. He had thought a piece of trash had fallen on him, maybe a bit of rotting timber. It didn’t hurt so he didn’t think more of it, but now he thought it must have been a wolf eel. He had seen one here before, in ten feet of water, eating a rock crab.
The next week they went to the same place. It had gotten cold again and Bruce wanted to see what he could see with good visibility. Harry had a bad feeling even before they went in the water and he was tired in a way he couldn’t explain. His sense that something was wrong intensified and halfway to the end of the pilings, while they were still on the surface, he told Bruce he wanted to turn back.
There was a lot of chop accompanied by tidal swells and they decided to submerge and swim back to the beach under water. When Harry took his first breath his regulator went into free-flow. He couldn’t stop it; air was gushing through his mouthpiece too fast to breathe it in. He went to the surface, Bruce following, and inflated his buoyancy compensator and asked Bruce to turn off his air. They snorkeled back to the beach.
Harry had his tank refilled at the dive shop beside the small marina a quarter mile from the pilings and rented a regulator there. They had decided to do a night dive in the underwater park north of the ferry terminal. They were into winter now and they had only an hour to wait until the gray northern light was gone. They sat over coffee at the Skipper’s near the terminal.
Bruce had recently separated from a woman he had lived with for four years. Harry had always enjoyed diving with him and Bruce was eager to get into it again. Janice had convinced him to give it up, he said, after they started talking about getting married. It wasn’t the risk, he thought, because he had taken up mountaineering after he stopped diving and she hadn’t said anything about that.
Harry knew Janice and it did not make sense to him that she had insisted Bruce quit diving; the three of them used to dive together. But it was true she hadn’t gone out in a while when he gave it up. Maybe there had been an agreement: he gives up something, she gives up something. Each sacrifices something for the marriage. Harry had known other couples to do this. In any case, he liked Bruce and was glad to be diving with him again.
Setting his cup down, Bruce said he thought he and Janice had made a mistake by getting engaged when they were just fine living together. He hoped they would remain close, or become close again after her anger had lost some of its bite.
“She’s hurt,” Harry said.
“Well, yeah.” Bruce laughed ruefully. “She’s kind of unpleasant to be around right now.”
“Are you still seeing each other?”
“We’re trying to. It’s not like it was, but maybe it will be.”
Harry didn’t say anything.
“She’ll never forgive me.” He gave that laugh again.
Harry didn’t say anything.
“I wish I hadn’t asked her to marry me. I wish I hadn’t broken off the engagement.” A grim smile. No laugh.
“Do you still want to marry her?”
“I never did. I mean if I wanted to get married, I’d want to marry her. But I don’t want to get married. Not now, anyway. Maybe not ever. I’ll be like you.”
“I was married once.”
“Yeah? I never knew that.” Bruce looked at him. “What else don’t I know about you? Are you keeping secrets?”
Harry laughed.
“How’s the work?” Bruce asked.
Harry shrugged. He said, “We had a suicide. Not my unit, one of the girls’ cottages. Hanged herself in the shower. I didn’t know her, fortunately.”
“Jesus,” Bruce said. “What do you do in a situation like that?”
“I wasn’t there. I was in my own cottage when it happened. We locked down. All the cottages locked down while Security dealt with it. Oh, you mean personally?” Harry thought for a moment. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I do. I try to help the kids deal with it. There are always some who feel responsible even if they didn’t know her. As if there was something they could have done to prevent it.”
“There’ve been others?”
“This is the third since I started there. There have been dozens of attempts. It’s a pretty unhappy place.”
“I don’t know how you do it.”
Harry pushed back from the table. “Ready to get wet?”
“I owe you an explanation,” Harry said. They were in the car. “About why I wanted to turn back.”
“At the pilings? You had a premonition, didn’t you?”
“How did you know that?”
“It was pretty obvious. You said you wanted to abort and then your regulator fell apart. It doesn’t take a genius to put that together. Plus, you’ve had them before, haven’t you? Didn’t you used to get them when you were parachuting?”
“Once, yeah. I forgot I told you about that.”
“And you were right again. I trust you, old man. We’ve always had that agreement, remember? If one of us doesn’t feel good about it, we abort the dive. Right?”
“Right.”
“Okay then. How do you feel about this one?”
“It’s going to be something to behold.”
“My feeling exactly.”
They were in the parking lot and Harry pulled into a space. Two other cars were in the lot but no one was on the beach except for an elderly woman walking a terrier. They changed into their wet suits in the rest room at the far end of the park. It was cold and their suits were still wet from the afternoon. Both of them were shivering. By the time Harry got his tank on he wanted only to get in the water and get moving.
The visibility was good and they submerged about twenty minutes from the beach. He could see Bruce eight or ten feet ahead, swimming toward the wreck. There were two wrecks actually, and they passed the remains of the first, about the size of a dory, and went for the one nearer the ferry dock. They were sailing along the bottom—that was how it felt, as though he were sailing with the wind behind him, so effortless was the swim in the cold, almost still wa
ter—and found the boat at forty feet. Bruce gestured and they went up over the top of it and started down toward its deck.
To Harry’s right, out of the gloom, a small lingcod swam into the beam of his lamp, turned and swam back into the dark. As he approached the deck, the fish came again, mouth agape, teeth screening the pit, and again was gone. It was young, twelve or fifteen pounds. Harry pressed air into his b.c. and hung in the water, motionless, waiting for it to come a third time. When it did, he saw a gray film where its right eye should have been, and that it always swam away to its left, following its good eye.
He trailed his light after it, saw its shadow run along the ruined boat deck, saw it turn again toward the light, now fully in the beam, now gone. Bruce was resting on his knees on the deck. As the fish passed, its blind eye to him, he put his hand out, then pulled it back before the fish ran into it.
How had it happened? Had it been hooked, then the hook torn out? Had it been attacked? What would have attacked it? Whatever happened, it must have happened here. It could not have found its way here half-blind. It would never find its way anywhere else now. Circle after circle, it would swim until it was no longer able. What was it Harry saw in its good eye? Madness? Rage? Did it know it followed only itself? Be careful, Harry told himself. What are you giving it and what is there without you? He hung in the water, his lamp in his hand. The fish followed itself into light, into darkness, into light…
Harry checked his air. He had seven hundred pounds left. How long had he been hanging here? He kicked down to where Bruce was and showed him an open hand and two fingers from the other one. Bruce checked his gauge, then showed it to him. He had a little less than Harry. Bruce jabbed his thumb toward the surface and they ascended.
Harry took his regulator out of his mouth. “Wow.”
“Right.” Bruce looked around as though to get his bearings. “Look.” Perched on a resting raft less than five meters away, a cormorant was staring at them. It took off, almost belly flopping into the water before it caught air. It was about the size of a herring gull and a half again.
