“The kids listen to me, remember? They don’t listen to you. They’ve never respected you. Things get a little sticky with them and you get one of your famous headaches. It’s always been that way.” Darla had turned her back on him and continued packing the suitcase. For just a moment he’d thought of ripping that hook out of his brain—maybe tearing out a piece of the brain with it, it didn’t matter—and slapping it right through her chest. It was the first time he’d ever thought of hitting her and the image made him shudder.
“I love the kids,” he’d said quietly.
Darla had turned then, and for the first time that evening looked a little sad. “I know you do. And maybe they love you too. Some. I just don’t know anymore, Brian. I honestly don’t.” Then she’d returned to her packing.
He hadn’t actually seen the hook, just felt it, felt the shape of it in his head. Even before then he’d felt some of the effects of those hidden, serenading hooks. Even before then there’d be nights, when maybe something had happened to clue him in that the marriage was bound to end. Something that let him know that his children were hers, and always would be.
Eight years ago, the day after his wife and kids had cleared out of the house, he’d spent most of the hours pacing the empty rooms, studying them, going through the closet where Jackie had kept her collection of stuffed animals, finding the stack of crayon-decorated “Adoption Certificates” she’d made up for each one, handling each piece of construction paper as if were some rare and fragile print.
About mid-day, after he’d found one of Will’s tiny toy cars and a bottle of Darla’s favorite perfume to add to the collection spreading across the kitchen table, it had started to rain. He’d heard it starting slowly, a soft tapping at the roof and windows requesting entrance. But he’d been too busy with his own thoughts to notice much—too busy trying to shield himself from the pain and yet still think about them.
When the rain’s strength and clamor had increased significantly he had turned to look out the kitchen windows. Silver streaks had beaten on the glass, but without leaving moisture trails.
He’d gone up to the window. Tiny metal hooks had thrown themselves at the pane.
He’d retreated to the center of the kitchen and listened to the assault against his home. The sound of the thousands upon thousands of tiny hits had seemed metallic. He’d walked slowly to his front door. Above the mat, where the door bottom didn’t quite reach the threshold, hundreds of tiny hooks had been pulling themselves through like one-legged insects. Brian had run to the coat closet for a pile of coats to throw over the advancing hooks. The hooks and coats had wedged tightly against the door, stopping the flood.
After a few minutes the rain of hooks had increased to an ear-shattering roar. Brian had collapsed to the floor. He’d wedged the heels of his hands against his ears to keep out the sound. Once he began screaming, the metallic rain had abruptly stopped.
That had been the first time Brian had recognized the hooks for what they were.
Brian left Mack behind at the bar. His head spun, but he couldn’t hear the hooks singing to him. He was climbing the stairs up from the subway, thinking again about that first time, when the memory guided one of the hooks to him again.
He could feel it coming. A distant singing, followed by a slight change in temperature, then a sudden change in air pressure. Sometimes, if the hook was big enough, his ears would pop. Sometimes it would just feel like the beginnings of a headache. What happened to his back wasn’t exactly painful. The hooks seldom caused any pain as they entered you. It was inside that they did their damage. Inside, the hooks found themselves a stream to work in. Then they went with that stream wherever it took them. No doubt some of the same streams of pain and fear that ran sharp and cold through his flesh had flooded the Neanderthals as well. Made them killers. Told them when to run.
The hook that had entered Brian’s back was drawn smoothly into his streams of pain. Soon he could feel it snagging on a lung, looking for food. He began to run, looking for some dark doorway to hide in, or at least to hide his pain from whoever might be watching. He thought about getting a hotel room somewhere and hiding under half-washed linen, but he knew the hooks would find him anyway. Besides, he had only a few dollars left from his job at the loading dock. He and Mack had drunk up all his room money.
And now once again his friends the hooks were back. The hook that entered his back tore its way up through his throat and out his mouth. He tried not to cry out, but when a hook departed that way—tearing out through your mouth, stretching it until it cracked and bled—it hooked on your vocal chords as well, and then to whatever part of your brain it was that sent up the anguish flags. And you couldn’t help but let the sound go. A long, low cry like a partly anesthetized cat slowly being torn apart.
Daddy … The voice was so soft, Brian didn’t know if it was Jackie or Will. He didn’t want to know.
Brian listened to the dark night air.
Daddeeee … A hook sang past his ear.
Brian stumbled into an alley, tiny hooks just catching the top layer of skin on his exposed hands, his bare ankles. Now and then he’d feel a brief snag on his face. Sweat, or blood, trickled down inside his clothes, making them stick to his flesh. Even as he ran he grabbed at his shirt and tried to pull it away from his body, trying to get some cloth and air between him and the hooks. Every place the cloth adhered the hooks seemed to target, driving through the cloth directly into the skin.
Brian dove into a pile of garbage that filled one corner of the alley. He dug furiously, throwing rotted tomatoes and banana peels and sour mush back at the hooks which now filled the night air like rain, shimmering silver under the bright mercury street lamps. He buried himself until he could feel at least a foot of damp, foul trash between him and the air above. The hooks rained on the mess above him for a few seconds more and then stopped. After several minutes he fell into an exhausted sleep.
In his sleep he thought he could hear his children singing, but he had only two children, and yet there were so many voices. He could see a multitude of mouths swimming through the dark air, mouths singing with passion and pain, black fish with their silver-bright mouths swimming frantically, singing, trying desperately to evade the hooks.
When he woke up he’d forgotten where he was. Rough paper had dried against his face, and there was a vaguely familiar stench. He wondered what hotel he’d stumbled into last night. He had a hazy memory of a room so bad he’d had to vomit out his disgust before he could fall asleep.
He stirred and pulled himself up, scraping a dried scum away from his face and neck. He thought the smell might be rotting fish. He opened his eyes and found himself chest-high in garbage. He pushed and kicked it away from him, getting his fingers slimy in the process. He rubbed at his eyes with the relatively clean parts of his shirt. In the dim light dark shadows traveled his way.
“There’s no need to do this alone, you know,” came a graveled voice out of the darkness.
Brian stood and looked around for an escape.
“Ours is a select club,” came another voice: softer, but as tired as the first. “But we grow and grow. All the time.”
The first figure shambled out of the darkness. The man was naked except for an old pair of shorts. Tiny silver things moved in and out of his flesh, several to the square inch, covering his skin with a constant activity. As the man came closer Brian could see that the tiny things were hooks, flexible metal hooks that moved and twisted like thin silver worms, darting in and out of his skin like needles sewing, like worms feeding. They covered his cheeks, his eyelids, his lips, his arms, his hands, his legs. A constant frenzy, singing out now and then with the accidental contact of the metal.
“I miss my children.” It seemed to be all Brian could say.
“Then sh-you sshhould have done sh-ssomething,” another figure said, but the words were slurred. Then the fellow’s red face loomed out of the shadows, his tongue protruding, dozens of hooks embedded there, trapp
ed, writhing.
“But that matters little now,” said another figure. Bare from the waist up, the man’s skin seemed to be moving, stretching. Brian stared at the chest as the hooks inside stretched against the skin as if attempting escape, zigzagging down the chest, occasionally poking through to form a thin trail of blood, cutting out smiles and gills as they moved back and forth, travelling all the way down to the man’s belly button.
“Join us,” another said.
And still another, “There really is little choice at this point.”
Brian made just a nod, the slightest, virtually involuntary descent of a head too weary to do anything else. He could feel the tiny pricks, and his skin beginning to distort, his features stretching in impossible ways. So he threw his arms out for an embrace, singing his children’s names, as the hooks came and came and came.
CARNAL HOUSE
Gene’s phone rang again, the third time that evening.
“Yes?” he asked again, as if the very ring were his name.
“Are you coming over, Gene? Could you come over?” He held back any immediate reaction. He didn’t want her to hear him sigh, or groan. He didn’t want her to hear the catch he knew was waiting in his throat.
“Ruth,” he said.
“Who else would it be?” she said, as if in accusation.
For just a second he felt like defying her, telling her about Jennie. The impulse chilled him. She couldn’t know about Jennie. Not ever. “No other woman,” he finally said.
She was silent for a time, but he knew she was still there. He could hear the wind worrying at the yellowed window shade in her bedroom. Her window would be closed, he knew, but it would leak badly. There would be a draft that went right through the skin. But none of that would bother her.
“Come over, Gene,” she finally said.
“Okay. I’ll be there.”
“I’ll wait,” she said, as if there were a choice. He hung up the phone.
The house was at the end of a long back street on the west end of town. It was one of the oldest in the area, its lines ornate, archaic, and free of the various remodeling fads that had passed through this neighborhood over the years. Gene had always appreciated the dignity of the Victorian style.
But he also knew that Victorians could be extraordinarily ugly, and this house was a perfect representative of that type. The exterior color seemed to be a mix of dark blue, dark green, and gray, which resulted in a burnt stew of a shade, a rotting vegetable porridge. The paint had been thickly applied, splatters and drips of it so complicating the porch lines and filigreed braces under the roof that they looked like dark, coated spider webs. The windows and doors were shadowed rectangles; he couldn’t make out their details from the street.
All but a few of the houses along this tree-shadowed lane were abandoned. Some were boarded up, some burned out, some so overgrown with wild bushes and vines and weeds they were virtually impenetrable. Here and there a few houses had been torn down, the lots given over to bramble gardens or refuse heaps. And in the occasional house a light burned behind a yellowed shade, its tenders hidden.
Gene stood on the porch of her house for a very long time. He could feel Ruth inside that dark place, perhaps lying quietly on stiff white sheets, perhaps sitting up, motionless, listening. He imagined her listening a great deal these days, her entire body focused on the heartbeats of the mice in the corners, the night birds outside in the crooked trees. He imagined that focus broadening to include the systemic pulse of the moths beating against the dim bulb of the lone streetlight on the corner, the roaches crawling over the linoleum next door, his own nervous tics as he stood on this porch, hesitant to go in.
He imagined Jennie in a dark house like this, at the end of some other god-forsaken street, waiting, her eyes forced open, waiting for him. And he hated himself for imagining it.
At first he had been so pleased that Jennie had kicked the habit. He’d seen it as a cleansing when she’d gone through the house in a rage, looking for needles, spoons, all that other paraphernalia she’d always carefully kept hidden. But now she’d been ill for months. She wouldn’t tell him what it was; she didn’t have to. She would no longer make love to him. Last night she had refused to kiss him. And cleanliness to the point of sterility had become an obsession. They didn’t talk about it.
Now, standing on this darkened porch in a shunned neighborhood, he could imagine it was Jennie he was visiting, not Ruth at all.
He was staring at the brown, flaking screen door when it lightened briefly. Pale skin pressed into the mesh from the other side. The lips, endlessly bisected, were almost as pale as the rest of the flesh, but with a hint of silver in their curves. “Coming in?” the lips said, in an almost toneless question.
As Gene stepped forward the pale flesh backed away, leaving the mesh as dark and empty as before. The hinges were oddly silent when he moved them, as if perfectly greased, but that seemed so unlikely his hand shook slightly before he let go of the greenish brass knob. The door fell back against the frame without sound.
The staircase climbed out of the dark burgundy well of the entrance hall into the smoky shadows of the second story. The paneled doors to the parlor on his left and the rooms ahead of him were closed, as they had been every time he had been here.
The woman standing on the staircase was nude, her flesh pasty, her face so pale and features so blurred that in the darkness Gene didn’t know if it was Ruth or one of her companions. Her breasts were high and full, catching the available light on their upper curves. The nipples were shadows, as if half-remembered and only vaguely applied. Her pubic hair was so thick, so dark, that in this dimness it looked as if someone had blown a hole through her groin, and it was a triangular window on the dark staircase behind her he was seeing instead.
Her black hair suddenly moved across the pale shoulders like a snake. “Hurry,” she whispered huskily in Ruth’s voice. She turned and moved up the stairs, so effortlessly that her buttocks remained smooth and firm throughout the movement. After a moment he followed, his hands ahead of him, suddenly too anxious to stay trapped in his pockets. They groped and pawed their way through the darkness. Not for the first time he wished he could tell someone about all this. Anyone. He wished he had someone here with him, to tell him whether what he was seeing was real. He thought how, after all this time, he had so few friends.
That dwindling of friendships had all started in college. There had been Ruth, but she hadn’t really been a friend, just the woman he’d always been pursuing. He had known Jennie back then, but only distantly. She had dated the friend of a friend and he remembered her as someone always desperate for fun, as if she didn’t have a serious thought in her skull.
First he had pursued Ruth, and then he had pursued Jennie. There had never been any time to make friends.
“Kiss me,” Ruth whispered, and Gene moved his lips slowly over hers. “Now bite,” she said, and his teeth gently prodded her unyielding flesh.
Making love to her was strange. Making love to her was like a cutting, a notching of her hard, white, translucent flesh. Each time required more effort on his part before she could feel anything.
“There … there,” she said. “I felt … something.”
He rubbed against her rhythmically, slowly at first and then faster, but it felt less like a making of love than like a sandpapering, an attempt to wear away the old, dull skin in order to expose fresh nerves, in order to feel something.
He had a sudden urge to strike her unresponsive flesh, slap and pinch it, anything to bring it awake. He knew Ruth wouldn’t mind. But he would.
He could not look into Ruth’s eyes when he made love to her. He could not bear that faraway stare. He continued to scrape himself against her, cut into her, and her body felt like a pair of scissors squeezing him, cutting through flesh and nerves and bone.
Her odor was sour and animal-like. Her flesh seemed to melt into the stark white sheets. He had a sudden skirmish with the thick tangle of her
hair, the twisted sheets, and came up gasping for air, thinking of Jennie.
Ruth stared up at him from her resting place (had he ever imagined her anywhere else?), looking as if she could read his mind.
When he left before dawn Ruth stayed in her bed. Not sleeping, really. And yet not fully awake. This was the usual way. In the other upstairs rooms he thought Ruth’s companions must be similarly greeting the departures of their lovers.
A shadow moved suddenly into the hall, staggering. The man raised his white face, eyes dark and hooded with fatigue. The man, as if embarrassed, turned his head away again and made his way quickly down the stairs.
As Gene walked off the porch the rest of the neighborhood seemed suddenly to burn into a new life. He turned back around to look at the house. Its windows stayed dark and shaded, the sun doing little to lighten its colors.
Jennie was still in bed when he got back to the apartment, only her head outside the sheet, the flesh drawn so tightly at temples and chin that her face looked hard, carved from wood. The bedroom shade was drawn to keep the morning light out.
“Jennie …” he whispered, but nothing came in reply.
The apartment was a mess. He could see the nest she must have made in front of the TV the night before. A U-shaped wall of firm cushions in front of the couch, the firmer the better to hold up her back and neck, the open space filled with blankets and pillows. Like the living room castles he used to build as a kid. A phalanx of overflowing ashtrays and snack trays had been arranged around the castle, but the food had been barely nibbled. Jennie always seemed to be consumed by this aimless hunger, and yet nothing would satisfy her. At times she could hardly eat anything at all. And yet the hunger still gnawed at her, and she kept loading up on the junk food, trying to find something she would eat.
Gene could picture her sitting here wrapped up in her blankets, her small face peering out at the TV, her nervous hands grabbing for cigarettes and snacks she would not eat. She seemed smaller with each passing day, more vulnerable, more and more like a kid. Less like a woman. He hated himself for thinking that way. As if Ruth were more than that.
City Fishing Page 24
