City Fishing

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  If he stayed far enough away from his wife and children maybe they wouldn’t hear his teeth gnash.

  He puttered around the back yard, trying to undo the damage the neighbors’ dog had done. Carol couldn’t understand why he hadn’t complained. He couldn’t explain it to her.

  Every few minutes he’d be compelled to drop to his knees and sniff the earth, try to get his lungs full of the raw, wet dirt. He wondered whether thrusting his teeth into the earth, biting a mouthful, sinking the itching bone into cool ground, would cool the urge and stop his pain. But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. Instead, he sat on the ground and raked at the sod with his fingernails.

  Saturday night he slept on the couch. He pretended to have fallen asleep watching television. He was aware of Carol walking through the living room several times during the night to check on him. He kept his face turned, and his back rigid to hide the spasms. He could feel a wetness on his chin—he’d tried to bind his lower face with an old towel. After she’d left the room he crawled over to the night light by the bedroom door and rubbed some of the liquid off onto his hand: a viscous yellow and blood mixture.

  He went back to the couch and lay down. He wanted to go see Carol, crawl into bed with her. He wanted to see his children. He wanted to bite.

  He woke up Sunday morning unable to breathe through his mouth. He ran into the bathroom and locked the door. His teeth appeared to be locked. He watched himself in the mirror, trying to pry his strained lips off his teeth, as if this were someone else struggling with his own face.

  He was finally able to lift one corner of his upper lip. The flesh underneath was bleeding, the teeth had thickened and grown long, curved, segmented like bamboo. He let go of the lip.

  After that Mike started drinking. At first it required forcing a straw between his lips and past his locked teeth so he could get to the liquor, but the first pint loosened things up so that he could push his lips around the opening.

  By one o’clock he was relaxed enough that he could sit out on the patio and watch his kids play touch football. He was aware of them looking him over, as if surprised to see him out in plain view. That made sense, he supposed—God knows what they must be thinking. It made him feel bad. His beautiful children. He wasn’t being much of a father. But he was protecting them. They weren’t allowed to play tackle without adult supervision. That’s what he was doing. He was protecting them from himself.

  He could feel his teeth moving against the bottle, gliding up and down the glass like a caress. Tapping rhythmically against the slim neck as he drank. He began to laugh, and his teeth laughed with him, clattering and dancing.

  Normally, he didn’t like to drink. He didn’t like the feeling of being out of control. But this, of course, was not a normal time. He laughed again. The laugh sounded strange to him, and his children appeared to have stopped playing, and were staring at him, but he found he couldn’t quite put his finger on the problem.

  He ran out into the yard, stumbling, almost falling, when he crossed the walk. He tackled his oldest son Bill, and a neighbor kid. They squealed with delight. Someone yelled “tackle!” and suddenly the yard was alive with scrambling kids.

  Mike was surrounded by brightly-sweatered young bodies. He kept his mouth clamped shut and tried to let his arms carry his feelings. He turned each tackle into an embrace. He wrapped his arms to full extension around the tiny forms, both skinny and plump. He tried to be delicate with his caresses, but his need to hold was so surprising and so poorly understood that sometimes he squeezed too hard and grabbed the children too suddenly. Sometimes he could see the distress in their little faces and he would lean over to kiss that distress away, but his teeth were clamped, his lips a taut and mottled membrane over those tools of destruction, and his kisses became a bumping, bruising thing that left the children even more distressed than before.

  Then he found himself clutching his youngest son Allen, little Allen, almost desperately and of course desperation is far too much for such a young child, and he went to kiss the desperation away from the sweet child’s face but his bruising kisses were too much for such a young child. And Allen began to cry.

  It was all too much. Mike heard himself making an odd sound. He tried to make out its nature, but he was too upset. The children were running away from him.

  His mouth was open and he was biting the air. His upper teeth kept missing his lower, gnawing at the already bleeding flesh of his lower lip.

  “They’re just small children. I don’t see how they could have given you such a nasty cut.” Carol peered curiously at the layers of heavy bandage Mike had wrapped around the bottom half of his face. “My God, Mike. You look like you’ve had major surgery.”

  She said it as if she suspected him of something crazy, some bizarre manifestation of hypochondria. Well, better that she thought he complained too much, Mike thought. He wondered what the children had told her, if anything.

  “Do you want to go to the doctor?”

  “No. I just got a small kick,” he mumbled through the bandage. “There really wasn’t that much blood.”

  “Well, then, come to bed.”

  “Not right yet, Carol. I don’t think I could sleep.”

  Carol approached him slowly. He started to back up, but he was up against the back of the couch. She rubbed up against him, moving her cheek against his rough bandage. “We don’t have to sleep, you know.”

  Mike could feel his teeth rubbing against the bandage, reaching for the folds, the borders between the layers of gauze, beginning to snag the cloth.

  “I can’t, Carol. Not now.”

  “Then you go to hell. I told you not to play rough with the kids. They’re afraid of you—I can tell. I’m a little afraid of you myself.” She slammed the bedroom door behind her.

  Sleep didn’t come easy, but even his need to bite could not shrug off the exhaustion accumulated from several days of too little rest. The last thing he remembered was his teeth still probing, worrying the bandages.

  Mike awakened with his teeth shredding cloth. At first he thought it was just his bandage come loose, but when he opened his eyes he found his face pressed against the back of the couch, stuffing and material strewn about, much of that stained with his own blood.

  He stood up. Carol was by the front door, her face ashen. She clutched at their two sons, pulling them behind her. Mike’s teeth made him grin.

  “We’re leaving, Mike,” she said, edging toward the door. “I … something’s wrong!” A high quaver distorted her voice in a way that chilled him. She had her arms over the boys’ shoulders.

  Mike wanted to go to them, hold them. He wanted to tell them about all the things he did not understand.

  He wanted to bite them. He wanted to chew, and then devour them. And fill the emptiness with teeth.

  He opened his mouth to speak, raising his hand toward them, when his teeth reached up and began doing things to his face.

  His bones felt like rotted teeth moving in their sockets. He had emptied himself. His fluids stained the carpet, which, he saw as he gazed down, had been ripped to threads, clear through the padding to the underlying layers of plywood.

  He could not stop his mouth from running; his lips and tongue had been ripped out. They lay in a bloody pool by the ravaged skeleton of couch, along with the skin from his nose, his ears, his penis. Shredded bits of his skin husk were smeared about the room. Some had dried and felt like dead vegetation when he touched them.

  He wanted to bite. He wanted to eat. But he saw nothing left in the room which might tempt his appetite. He wanted to embrace, if only a piece of furniture. But his arms had grown too hard and raw to touch.

  But still his teeth continued to snap at the air, to bite at the little flesh that remained. And still his teeth continued to grow, to bond one to the other, to force bone into bone until joint and tissue had almost faded and the biting hardness was all of one piece. Until it was his teeth screaming from the emptiness, his teeth struggling t
o think clearly, to remember the names of wife and children.

  Somewhere, he knew, he was crying. But the sound of his voice was obliterated by the roar of his bite.

  HOOKS

  Sometimes, during black hot nights in mid-summer, Brian could hear the hooks actually singing in the still air. A sound like metal angels. So faint at first he’d have thought he was imagining them if he hadn’t heard their concerts so many times before. Then louder and louder until the screeching made him feel as if the outer layers of his brain tissue were flaking off. Then steadily fainter again until the metallic singing was almost a lullaby, a soft memory of childhood’s sweeter pains. Any pain that remained after their concerts was so ambiguous and indefinable most might mistake it for heartache or longing. Metal glancing against metal. Cool metal slipping through layers of heated air. It’s like rehearsals, Brian thought. Hooks had to practice. With no flesh to find, hooks hooked the air, trawled through deep pools of night, fished along eddies and tides of city street wind.

  And Brian had always been one of the grandest fish, one of the plumpest prizes the hooks could find. He didn’t know why. He just knew. Ever since he’d first realized those hooks were there, they’d been able to find him. And did. Once they got you broken in, hooks liked to come back for a return ride.

  The loading dock was far from the best job he’d ever had, but at least it paid enough to buy a cheap hotel room. Since he’d left home he’d lived on the streets mostly. And the hooks seemed to find you easiest when you were in the streets.

  On the loading dock he didn’t think much. The hooks had been leaving him alone.

  “That first stack goes into the St. Louis truck. Hold the rest until tomorrow.” The supervisor wasn’t much for conversation—all he wanted in this life was for everything to be on the right truck. Brian grabbed the first crate, starter motors, and waddled toward the truck in berth B.

  Mack, the other loader, grabbed a lighter piece. “Hey, Brian. You gonna bust a gut that way.”

  “My gut.”

  Mack didn’t say anything. Brian had let him know the first week when he didn’t want to talk. It wasn’t hard—most people he met on the street avoided him after their first contact. It was as if he had one of the hooks jutting out of his face for all to see, piercing his nose and scratching away at an eyeball.

  Brian grabbed another case of starter motors off the top of the stack, let it drop with a painful jerk on his shoulder joints. He really ought to be using a lift for the heavier crates, but the supervisor didn’t care, and the strain kept Brian’s mind off other things, like singing metal, like serenading pain.

  “What say a drink after the shift?” For some reason, Mack always wanted to make friends. Brian had been immediately suspicious; no one wanted to be his friend. But Mack seemed harmless enough.

  “I’d say yes, I guess.”

  “All right …” Mack replied with his usual lunatic enthusiasm.

  Brian moved the crates into the truck one at a time, listening carefully to the night air. Oh, he could hear them humming all right, out there in the dark beyond the dock, glancing off each other as if they were hungry, but they hadn’t come any closer for a long time. Maybe they just wanted to reassure him that they were still there.

  “Daddy …” The sound was metal.

  “Daddeeee …” Definitely metal. A metallic crying in the darkness beyond the loading dock. But it sounded so much like his little girl Jackie, gone away and lost from him. He set the crate down, stepped off the dock, and walked toward the sound.

  “Hey, Brian! Where you goin’? You know what Belkin will do if he comes out!”

  But Brian ignored him. He knew he could never go back. The hooks had found him again.

  “Brian! What about that drink!”

  A dozen or so hooks were on him in an instant—small ones, like stinging, biting insects. They drove him away from the dock and into the night.

  “Brian!”

  He heard Mack leaping off the dock behind him, running. But he couldn’t go back. If he went back to that job he knew his kids would be there out in the darkness every night crying again, not really wanting him exactly, just letting him know how lost and hurting they were. And every time that happened he would lose still more of his flesh to the hooks.

  “Hey, Brian. Why you walking so funny?” Mack said beside him.

  “Got a little pain, that’s all. Guess I pulled something.” Another hook hit behind his left ear, tore down through his scalp and twisted, embedded itself in his ear lobe.

  “Hey, I know something’ll fix that right up. You need a drink, my man.”

  The hooks moved through his muscle in a jagged dance. Now and then they hit a nerve and the dance grew electric. Maybe he could use a drink. “What about Belkins? He’ll fire you, too.”

  “Screw ’im. I was gonna quit anyway. I got better things to do. Like going drinking with my buddies.”

  Brian felt sorry for him: there was such desperation in the man. “Then let’s do some serious drinking,” he said.

  Brian chose a dark bar. He knew where to find all the darkest bars. But even after eight or nine drinks the hooks inside him were sharp and active.

  “Be a man,” Mack was saying, his eyes getting slightly greenish the more he drank. “My daddy always said that was the best way to handle a wife and kids. You gotta take ’em or leave ’em on your terms, not theirs. That way they won’t get to you so bad.”

  Brian threw back another drink, almost choking on it. He felt a sudden, lingering tear in his side, as if a foreign object incredibly slick and unbelievably cold had just been slipped through the epidermis, through layers of muscle—quickly, as if with no resistance—right into the vacancies inside him, filling them with pain. He bit into his lip trying to hold back the tears, feeling helpless, unable to drink any more, the hope dribbling out of him as if his body were some nasty, leaking sack.

  “You let yourself care too much, you just make it harder on yourself,” Mack said, crouching over his empty glass as if searching for more liquor.

  “When’s the last time you saw your family, Mack?” Brian felt cruel asking it—Mack had never mentioned having a family before—but at the moment Brian didn’t really mind being a little cruel.

  Mack jumped a little. As if he’s just been landed, Brian thought. As if he’d just been hooked. “Four years,” Mack said quietly between gritted teeth. There was an ever-so-slight grimace on Mack’s face, well contained, as if he were almost used to it by now, as if it were some routine unpleasantness like heartburn. Mack stood abruptly, weaving. “ ’Nother bottle,” he said, and staggered off toward the bar.

  Be a man. Brian’s daddy used to say that all the time. Brian had grown up along the riverbank and his daddy, trying to raise the boy by himself, would take him fishing every summer when he wasn’t working, which was most of the time. Brian’s dad made him collect the fish hooks the other fishermen had lost along the bank. “Save us some money, boy.”

  But the hooks would catch Brian’s skin. The barbs would snag and then his daddy would yank them out with a pair of rusted pliers.

  “Daddeeeeee!” The pain seemed so much larger than himself. Brian had always imagined it must be an adult’s pain it was so big.

  “Be a man, son. Be a man. Don’t care about it, and it won’t matter.”

  His daddy would drink more and more as the summer wore on.

  Finally Brian learned he could put all the old rusted hooks in a jar he hid inside his shirt and tell his daddy he couldn’t find any more, and his daddy would be too drunk to care.

  At the end of the summer he’d bury all the jars, dozens of them, and then he’d stop caring about them.

  Mack brought back one bottle after another from the bar. He drank until the muscles in his belly and back stopped their visible jumping and he didn’t look like a hooked fish anymore. Just a dead fish. “So how long’s it been since you seen your wife and kids?”

  Brian thought he detected a smile
on Mack’s drunken lips. “Eight years,” he replied.

  “Welcome to the club,” Mack managed to say, and passed out.

  “Thank you.” Brian reached for the remaining half-empty bottle. The hooks inside him began their soft singing. Brian thought to drown out the sound. One might think he hated the hooks. But he didn’t. They’d been around so long, it was hard to imagine his life without them.

  “I just don’t love you anymore, that’s all. I’m not sure I ever did.” Eight years ago, and Brian could still see his wife’s face, and the way she’d said each word. He had seen that final speech coming for a long time. Once she’d started, she’d kept going as if she couldn’t stop talking. He had just stared at her with that hook in the back of his brain. He had felt it: hard and so very long he had thought it must end somewhere just back of his eyeballs. The hook had found him when she’d first said she was leaving him—it had gone in so quickly it hadn’t even hurt at first. But she had kept on talking, even as he silently begged her to stop, and the hook had wiggled, tearing up the soft inner tissue of the brain, and began to yank up and down as if whatever had hooked him wanted to pull him up through the ceiling. Then the pain had intensified: closing his eyes he had seen the silver flames dancing on his nerve-ends.

  “This is my home,” he’d finally managed between clenched teeth. “Those are my kids. What am I supposed to do?”

  Darla had given him one of her oh you poor bastard looks, but she would never indulge in the faintest hint of profanity. “I’m not asking for your money, you know. You can keep your money, what there is of it. The kids and me will move in with the folks. Dad’ll love to have me back.”

  “This is my family! I said what am I supposed to do?” He’d known it would sound stupid to her. Pitiably weak. Maybe it was. He could feel the strain in his neck muscles as the hook lifted up on his hamburger brain.