City Fishing

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  When that other Blake—poet and renowned schizophrenic—was four years old, he’d seen God’s face at his window. Once he’d found the prophet Ezekiel in the fields near his home. One afternoon in his tenth year, he’d gone out into the woods and discovered a tree full of angels. He’d seen the spirit of his brother Robert fly away immediately after his death. I look through it and not with it. Behind each object in the real world Blake had imagined a spirit of which the visible object was only the symbol.

  When this Blake—equally ill-at-ease with the way the world is commonly presented—had been in college he used to stare at the bark of trees until he’d imagined he could see the vibration of individual cells, and the light that flowed up out of roots and finally circulated to individual buds and leaves. For a brief time the world had opened up like a Van Gogh painting, but eventually the experience had frightened him so much he’d stopped looking.

  Now Blake turned his back on the assembled mourners and attempted to make his way to where he’d last seen the old man. It was good timing in that the minister had begun to speak of Charlie’s wife in those general and ritualistic phrases reserved for dead strangers.

  The baby had started up again, sounding more distressed than ever. Perhaps in that mysterious way babies seemed to have it knew something sad was happening, something highly emotional. Or, the baby might be lost, ill, or in some real danger. Blake should have been doing something about that, alerting others to the existence of this distressed infant, in the unlikely event they hadn’t already noticed. But he didn’t do anything. The baby probably had mom and dad close at hand, and if Blake didn’t leave now, he’d never find that old man.

  Blake wondered if Ellie had seen him leave and that in turn generated concern that she might think he was running away from Charlie when the man needed him most. And that unaccountably led to his imagining how he would feel if he were in Charlie’s shoes and it was Ellie who had died in that terrible secret way which might take anyone, anytime.

  He supposed for some people divorce permitted escape from that kind of grief, but he had never stopped loving Ellie. She just couldn’t deal with the things he saw in the world and he certainly could accept that. Has my soul fainted with these views of death…

  “Hey, wait up!” The old man paused within a small grove of trees under whose shelter lay a number of ancient white headstones splotched black and gray with mildew. They appeared to be collected here, the spacing too slight for grave markers.

  “They’ve lost their graves—it happens,” the old man said as if reading his mind. “Sometimes the old maps get misplaced, burial records destroyed, and these smaller stones are tempting for children to move. I don’t suppose the administrators mind—it allows them to reuse the plots.”

  “Who the hell are you?” Blake’s nerves seemed to have gone liquid, dripping down his arms and legs. Then he realized it had begun to sprinkle. He moved closer to the old man under the trees, although he still couldn’t see his face. Rain mumbled in the leaves overhead.

  “I’m just an old man who goes to a lot of funerals. I’m sure you’ve heard before about fellows like me: old men, and all these funerals. Gives you something to do, a way to pass the time. And of course it never stops.”

  The baby screamed, cries exploding with ragged breath. Blake gazed around in panic. He had to do something. Somebody had to do something.

  The rain answered with increased intensity. Here and there it got through the leaves and struck the stones, darkening them with its touches. Blake turned around to find the party, wondering if he could trust Ellie to get his girls out of the weather, was immediately embarrassed by his doubt. They seemed still to be standing out there, however, their images broken by the downpour. “I’d best be getting back,” he said, but made no movement. After all, there was nowhere to go just now, not with the rain, and this old man standing closer to him now, and Blake not knowing when the old man had moved, or why.

  “ ‘Shadows of Eternal death sit in the leaden air,’ ” the old man whispered.

  “What?” Blake turned, and saw movement in the other’s face, and could not bring himself to look more closely, but followed the yellowing eyes to a sky lowered by thunderheads. “Oh, the sky. It’s coming down pretty good now, isn’t it? I hope Ellie …” He stopped.

  “The Four Zoas. I trust I quoted the poet correctly?”

  “Well, yes. Yes, you did.” Something showed itself in the old man’s right cheek. For a moment it was like gazing into rapidly changing clouds: an eye, a hand, a mouth silently shrieking.

  The baby answered with cries of its own. In forests of eternal death, shrieking in hollow trees.

  “I have to get back,” Blake said, but did not move.

  “We all say we have to get back, we must return. And yet most of us never leave—we are already there. The next day comes, and then the next, but it’s all another yesterday. Nothing has changed. We cannot bring ourselves to move, to go on to the new day. Why is that, Blake?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” he snapped, turning away quickly, for he was sure he saw an arm caught in the old man’s face, reaching from just under the left side of the neck, rising up through the cheekbone and across the muscled forehead, rough fingers resting by the right ear.

  In the rain-dimmed glow of the afternoon, leaves and bark had become discarded flesh seeking a body.

  “No need to look if it troubles you,” came the soft voice behind him.

  “There’s just … so much of it.”

  “ ‘How terrible then is the field of death.’ Odd how he, too, seemed to see it everywhere, and yet seeing brought him so much pleasure. William Blake gloried in the seeing, didn’t he?”

  “Yes, he certainly did. But when I look around me …”

  “Not around you. Inside … what do you see inside?”

  “Food becomes painful to eat, as if some change has made everything a poison the acids from my gut have to burn away. And when I get up every morning these new, constant adjustments to gravity exhaust me. There’s been blood in my stool for weeks, and every errant thought threatens a headache.”

  “Go see a doctor.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “There’s no cure for that. ‘Talking with death, answering his hard demands!’ You should have learned that much from your poet. It’s a continuous conversation we all must have. There may be glories in the imagination, but it’s still a rotting, vegetable universe where we perform all this dreaming.”

  But the rain had slackened, and in the distance through steam rising like smoke off the tombstones—and how many times had a glimpse of smoke reminded him of someone lost to memory?—Blake could see that the funeral had ended, the party breaking up, his beautiful girls with their mother, and he should have been there. The baby’s cries had softened to a distant, choked sobbing, but he could hear them all the same. He imagined he would always hear them, whatever the circumstance.

  He ran from under the trees and between stones through tides of wet, dissolving earth, permitting himself to see what had always been too terrible to allow: how the flesh of his own newborn babies just out of their mother’s blood had reminded him so much of mud, their heads, their tiny brains just clumps of mud, and so temporary, so mortal, however profound the miracle of their sudden appearance in the world. How excrement in all its forms opened a door for him into the concentration camps, led by chains of teeth and arms and leg bones, chains of intestine, chains of love for the shuffling Muselmanner forced to cannibalize, to eat their own waste, left behind to drown in the tides of history. How the cemeteries could not possibly hold all those who had died. How the hills and shallows of every battlefield had come to resemble the human form. How the ground was filling with bodies and heads with their endless hair and silent tongues. How weeds of death have wrapd around my limbs in the hoary deeps. How like a dark lamp, Eternal death haunts all my expectation. How there were eggs and snakes and faces buried under each step he took from the day his parents snapped p
ictures of his early crawling until what would be his final faltering steps into his last bed. How he had no answer to what bound him to these dead bodies and this thriving earth, or who was left for him to kiss.

  He fell to his knees at the gravesite among broken flowers and discarded prayers scribbled hastily on the backs of party napkins. A soft crying led him to folds of artificial turf laid out to disguise the freshly-turned ground. The baby who had been abandoned there wailed with eyes squeezed shut against the sky. Blake could not believe someone could have done such a thing. The baby’s cries did not mask its perfection, and Blake thought it possessed much the same beauty as his own children when they’d come into the world. He scooped up the child, his arms throbbing with pain. “When the body loses its order so goes the world,” he said softly.

  The baby had skin as soft as mud. The baby had a head too large for its body and a mind too large for its head. The baby peeled back its translucent lids, and the world grew eyes to witness its own terror.

  TRICKSTER

  The giant green lizard with the hideous yellow tongue lapped greedily at our Volkswagen windshield. Marcie shouted and covered her face, her hand grazing the horn as she jumped.

  Then she looked up again, laughing nervously. “That’s quite a costume!” she said, and I agreed. The crowd of Halloween revelers on Fisherman’s Wharf walked around our car, laughing, pointing, some of them grabbing the lizard’s tail and giving it a shake. The lizard thrashed its head and roared.

  “How do you think he does that trick with the tongue?” Marcie asked. “It looks so real.”

  “I don’t know. He’s pretty good, almost as good as my brother was …” The man in the lizard costume was staring at me through the eyeholes. I could almost feel his gaze. Pressing closer to the windshield, I looked into his eyes. And I swear to you … they were my brother’s eyes. My dead brother’s eyes.

  I shouted something and the lizard leaped off the hood of the car and strolled casually into the crowd. I opened the door quickly and ran after him. I heard Marcie yelling, but I ignored her. I was close now; I couldn’t let him get away.

  Halloween, the great witch night, was a favorite holiday for my brother Alex and me, although for different reasons. For me it was a somber time, a day and a night to dwell on those people I’d known who had died. I believed that in some way they would come back—and not necessarily as ordinary ghosts. Maybe as a shadow, a phrase in a letter that strikes you oddly, an old toy. But I was always the serious one, the thinker, never more than half child. My brother was the joker; Halloween for him was an excuse for the most outrageous kind of macabre jokes and theatrics. Bright red hair, luminous gray eyes, that grin. Our mother used to say he was “purely half devil.”

  For me, the spirits always seemed closer on Halloween night. For him the souls of the dead were actually walking.

  He’d been gone a year; a year ago someone crushed his skull with a pipe. It happened in a side street in the Castro, gay turf in San Francisco. About three in the morning, the investigating officers said. The killer, or killers, had worked on him until the clown mask he’d been wearing became virtually a part of his face; at first the cops thought he’d just passed out drunk, until one of them bent down and touched what they thought was part of the glistening clown paint. My brother loved being a clown.

  At first I didn’t believe he was really dead. Why should I? It wasn’t the first time. Three years ago I found him in a bathtub in his apartment, a smoke-blackened heater in the water with him, his face pale, beginning to turn blue. I squeezed back into the corner behind the sink, too terrified to touch him. Then he calmly stood up in the water and asked me for a towel.

  He’d always been a trickster—even as a child. Not content to be a mere practical joker, he played with death.

  It started with snakes and spiders, the usual thing, dropping them down girls’ dresses and laughing when the girls went squealing to the teacher. But after a time he began adding a trick or two of his own: eating the spiders while the girls withered before him, carrying dead lizards around in his pockets for days in the hot summers. He was fascinated by such things, and even more fascinated by people’s reactions to them.

  I remember once when the family was on a picnic, having a good time. We heard him screaming and looked up just in time to see him toppling off the edge of the Powell River Bridge. I thought our mother was going to die of fright. We ran over and found him hanging on a cable under the bridge, laughing at us.

  Another time, he built an electric chair. It was an old barber’s chair I’d helped him haul from the dump. He rigged it up with all sorts of fake electrical gear: glass insulators and broken meters and the like. Then he turned a steel bowl into a helmet and asked me to wear it while he snapped a picture. He strapped me into the chair with some old belts … to make it look more authentic, he said. After I was in place he suddenly pulled out a live wire from behind the chair and moved to insert it into a clip he had attached to the top of the steel helmet. I squirmed and screamed, almost hysterical. I really believed he was going to do it. He had maneuvered behind me; I couldn’t see what he was doing. Then he came around in front of me with the wire again, and slid it into the clip.

  Nothing. He had switched the wires. He held up the severed end of the wire he’d inserted into my helmet and grinned. He didn’t laugh, didn’t even chuckle. He just grinned. I’ll never forget it. One tooth missing, and his eyes crinkling like those of some demented fairy.

  Finally, when he was fourteen, Alex went too far. One of my mother’s cousins, her husband, and new baby came to visit. We knew about a week ahead of time and Alex spent most of that week complaining about how he didn’t want to see them and that he hated babies. He said that, if they came, something terrible would happen, said it in a threatening tone. That got him sent to his room. He obviously didn’t mind; he had work to do there.

  When her cousin’s family arrived, Mother just couldn’t stop fussing over the baby—how cute it was, how contented it looked. Alex sulked and made several rude remarks that almost got him sent to his room again. But he knew just when to stop.

  They left the baby in the spare bedroom for a nap and the rest of us gathered for dinner. Except Alex. Mother called and called, but he didn’t answer. Dad looked as if he were ready to strangle him if he ever showed up.

  Then we heard the baby crying.

  Dad took one look at my mother and bolted from his chair. The rest of us followed. When we got to the bedroom door, it was locked. We all could hear my brother laughing on the other side of the door.

  I’d never seen such fear on my father’s face. He made me afraid too. For the first time I realized he really didn’t trust my brother. He really thought Alex was capable of anything.

  It was the baby’s father who broke the door down.

  We crowded through the doorway. Alex was there by the bassinet, grinning that weird grin of his. He was holding a knife. There was blood on it.

  Mom’s cousin ran to the bassinet. And screamed. I could see it from where I was standing. There was blood all over the blanket.

  Her husband was the first to move. He leaped across the room and before anyone knew it had my brother on the floor, punching the daylights out of him. Dad and I tried to pull him off, but he wouldn’t let Alex go until my brother’s face was covered with blood. He still has—or had—a couple of scars and a slightly lopsided nose as a reminder of that day.

  It was another joke, of course. Dad picked up the doll Alex had painted so gorily and flung it on the floor.

  I stared at that doll for a long time. I was amazed. My brother had done a wonderful job—it looked so real. In an odd way, I found myself envying him.

  They did send my brother away that time. For a month. He wasn’t much different when he got back.

  I couldn’t run through the crowd of costumed figures—the sidewalks were packed. It was like wading through the images in some overcrowded dream brought on by too much drugs and alcohol. Demons
and fairies and cowboys and giant bumblebees, talking pumpkins and Mr. Peanut. Three Mr. Peanuts, actually, maneuvering away from each other angrily. I couldn’t find the green lizard anywhere.

  I ducked into Ripley’s Believe It or Not. It was a hunch, but not a farfetched one. My brother had loved that sort of thing—oddities, deformities. I could hear Marcie’s voice somewhere behind me, but I couldn’t stop.

  There weren’t too many people in there. I suppose there were enough oddities out on the sidewalk for them.

  I saw it almost immediately. It was as if I had been drawn to it.

  The doll my brother had made in his fourteenth year. Good as new, the fake blood glistening wetly beneath the bright lights. I had to stick my fingers in it; I couldn’t help it. No, not quite the same. This time the blood was real.

  I never really understood why I bothered with him, why I was so obsessed with him. I was always pulling him out of scrapes, bailing him out of jail, making excuses for him—to my parents, friends, everyone. Not that he cared for me—I don’t remember him ever showing the slightest sign of affection, despite all that I’d done for him. One of his jokes cost me a job—he’d drugged me and driven me to work at the chemical plant, acting hysterical and telling my boss that the poisons we were making had finally gotten to me, and how he was going to make sure the plant was closed down. I can imagine the scene: all those men I worked with trying to get my dead body away from my crazed brother, and him finally pulling a loaded gun to hold them off. They never believed I had nothing to do with it.

  But I still thrilled to his audacious exploits. I was the dull one, the careful one, the one easily embarrassed. I had trouble speaking my mind about most things. I was afraid to do anything out of the ordinary. He could act out things I could only feel. And secretly, I cheered him on.

  “Come on now, you hate it when Dad drags us hunting!” Alex grinned his grin. Like a mask—it prevented you from seeing what he was really feeling.

  “I know … but we … you can’t do this.”