City Fishing

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  Inside him there was a kind of brightness, but not the blinding light he had expected and yearned for. Most of it he recognized from the model of the visible man and the transparencies from his childhood. Even though he hadn’t believed in them, they had been of great import to him. Much as a child might memorize a particular fairy tale because of some peculiar personal significance it seems to have, he had long ago memorized the mythical inner workings of the human form.

  His great dark liver flew out of his body like some huge bird with lopsided wings. It circled the room twice, maneuvering awkwardly as it splattered the flowered wallpaper with its birth fluids, before finally perching on the overhead swag lamp. The pale green gall bladder hung from its middle like a foppish ornament. His troublesome stomach had seemed reluctant to see the liver go, and the mirror had shown how stubbornly the stomach had at first adhered to that big, clumsy liver, before releasing it with a sad, resigned plopping.

  The encasing omentum dropped away in pieces like cheap packing material, sliding down his legs and off his knees to the now quite-damp carpet. This left the remains of his digestive system nicely exposed.

  There was a loud sucking sound, and he felt an enormous inner pull, as the transverse colon lifted itself out of his abdominal cavity, pushing aside the pancreas and mesenteric artery and veins, which dangled like wires pulled from a distributor cap. In the mirror it looked like a garland for a Christmas tree, or a lei about to be dropped around his neck by some Hawaiian maiden.

  He gazed, fascinated, as his colon danced, the transverse colon slowly drawing out the ascending colon, whose cecum wagged like the buttocks of a hula girl, then turned itself around, the appendix tickling his face like some sassy tongue. Then the descending colon worked itself out of his cavity, the sigmoid bend straightening, then stretching, pulling on his rectum to free it from the desperate, choking sphincter muscles. Finally the rectum pulled loose with a maneuver which seemed to pull his buttocks up inside the resulting absence. He felt as if he were collapsing, beginning to turn inside out, as ileum and pancreas and stomach and dark red kidneys dangled out and broke away, swimming around his head like aquatic sprites. His lungs beat gracefully upwards, fluttering like an angel above the watchful liver.

  His heart pounded rapidly, as if alone and afraid. But for the life of him, he could not see love residing there, or hate.

  At least in this one thing, his theories appeared to have been correct.

  The colon stretched up like a snake preparing to strike, its head the rectum, whose foul mouth now seemed to be mocking his disbelief. The colon weaved back and forth in front of his eyes, as if to hypnotize.

  Suddenly his eyes pulled out of their sockets, dragging and straining all that interior softness within his skull out through the two small eyeholes. His thoughts grew very narrow, then ranged impossibly wide.

  Tissues turned and spread. Bones warped and rearranged themselves. All his discarded parts flew back to join him in their new, somehow more significant, more mythic locations. If his tongue had still worked as before, if words had had anything resembling their previous meanings, he would have attempted to describe the countenance which now greeted him in his bedroom mirror. He would have talked of its ancient lineage. He would have marveled over both its amazing efficiency and its terrible transience. He would have puzzled over its ugly, animal beauty. He would have sung to us, finally, of the impossibility of it all. He would have described to us the face of a god.

  GHOST IN THE MACHINE

  “This really, this really has to stop,” Carter said to no one in particular. He suspected that there was someone listening; he just didn’t know who. Things happened for a reason, he’d always believed—and his family had reinforced this—and usually there was some sort of agency, some relationship, involved in this happening. For didn’t reason imply agency? Carter’s father had always insisted on this. “Someone did this, didn’t they?” he’d say upon finding a shattered lamp on the living room floor, Carter and his brothers standing dumbly, feigning ignorance. “Someone did this,” his father would repeat. “So they must have had their reasons!” Reasons and agency, Carter’s life had revolved around these two concepts. When his father died of a hit-and-run, knocked a hundred feet down the street in front of their house, Carter had asked for the reason, for the agency, but there had been no one to tell him.

  “I mean really, this must stop,” Carter said somewhat plaintively. The blue and green striped walls of his apartment paid him sober attention. He would never have chosen such wallpaper—it had been put up by the previous tenant. Up until now he had not considered that he had the right to change the wallpaper. “I really can’t deal with this anymore,” he said, but his walls and furnishings appeared to have lost interest.

  Off in a corner his television murmured to itself, although he had unplugged it days ago. He’d read briefly in electronics manuals, of units called capacitors designed for storing an electric charge. He wondered if the explanation for his lively television lay in some new development in capacitor technology. And yet he knew this was unlikely—the explanation was surely part of some other science.

  The screen remained blank, a grayish-green, but the soft murmur was steady, rhythmical, as if his television were reciting some meditative chant to itself. He had vague recollections of religious movements, especially during the late sixties and early seventies, which had centered around chanting, some phrase or series of sounds which, if repeated enough times, led to enlightenment. Quite appropriate for an appliance’s prayer, he supposed.

  Carter ran into the john (he should be on a first name basis with all the rooms of his apartment, he thought) and dropped to his knees. He vomited up chips and resistors, half-formed bits of circuit board, then mouthful after mouthful of the varieties of capacitors he had once seen in a Radio Shack catalog (Carter had always been an avid reader of catalogs).

  Later, he consumed an entire bottle of mouthwash attempting both to rid himself of the taste of warm plastic and to soothe the cuts that lined his throat and crisscrossed his lips.

  His neighbor Mr. Williams was quite pleased to get Carter’s slightly used television for such a good price.

  Carter leaned back in his Lazy Boy recliner and stared contentedly at the empty space which had once been filled by the heavy console TV. The thick rug still bore the rectangular footprint of the set. This depression made him vaguely uncomfortable, but he had no idea how such carpet depressions might be removed, except through the passage of years. His mother could have told him, but his mother was dead. She’d suffered a stroke several years before while sitting in front of a comparably priced television set. The picture tube had burnt out by the time they discovered her body. He would always wonder what show she had watched during those final minutes of her life.

  Carter was tired, and soon fell asleep while staring at the rectangular depression in the carpet. An indeterminate amount of time had passed (indeterminate since all the clocks in his apartment ran either fast or slow) when he awakened to discover his old television set back in its spot. The Jack Benny Show flickered black and white abstractions across his retinas, creating nervous pulsations in his eyelids, and causing him to remember a childhood some part of him was sure he had never had.

  Carter got unsteadily to his feet, confused by the black and whiteness, the silvery grayness, of his living room. He staggered to the light switch by his front door, but flipping it up or down had no effect on the quality of light and darkness in the room. He staggered out to his neighbor’s door, his apartment strobing painfully behind him.

  Mr. Williams was in his green pajamas. Carter rubbed his eyes and the pajamas changed color. He decided he wouldn’t pay any more attention to his eyes—obviously they’d broken—so he closed them and asked of the warm, close darkness, “Why’d you bring my TV back?”

  “Whadayamean? It’s right there in the living room.” Carter opened his eyes. Williams was all red muscle and layers of fat, his skin evaporated. His jaw
worked back and forth grotesquely as he spoke. “You been drinkin’, Carter? Your eyes are pretty damn red.”

  Without speaking Carter pushed past Williams into the man’s living room. His old set sat in the middle of the room, a recliner similar to his, pushed (too close!) to the screen. The television prattled merrily, but normally, to itself. The Home Shopping Channel rattled off a litany of prices and features with the kind of rhythm which promised heaven. “But I just saw it,” he said softly.

  Williams chuckled behind him. “It’s like my dead wife. You get so used to seein’ her all the time, you see her even when she ain’t there. Like a damn ghost or somethin’. Say, maybe you need another drink?”

  Carter didn’t watch as Williams went into the kitchen. But he could hear the sound of the refrigerator door opening. It made a noise like a lion roaring, and then there was the instant stench of rotting meat. Carter ran back across the hall into the now-manic black-and-white flicker of his apartment. As he closed the door he could hear Williams barking like a dog in an Alpo commercial (Real Meat Flavor!) then the question, “Is your phone working? I could call the repair guy for you!”

  The nonexistent television glowed as if filled with milky electricity. He walked over to the slick black telephone and picked up the receiver. It was rank. He stared at the holes in the round earpiece. It looked and smelled like a sewer grate.

  He decided to ignore the phone while using it. After all, it was simply an instrument, an agency, a device for communicating with the manager. The phone stuck a tongue in his ear, but he remained calm as he talked to the building manager, struggling not to be too specific with his complaint for fear the man wouldn’t send anyone to his aid.

  The repairman sent by the building manager arrived a few hours later with a large metal toolbox and several suitcases. “What seems to be the problem?”

  Carter felt suddenly empty of all understanding. He struggled for the right words but nothing seemed to come except a string of broken syllables, a chant, an appeal to God. Finally, with much effort, all that would come out was, “Things just haven’t been the same since my mother died.” He made a broad gesture to indicate his whole apartment, his entire life.

  The repairman stared at him, and then made a subtle nod. “We all love our mothers,” he said, then set the cases down on the rug and opened his toolbox. He pulled out a stiff, heavy brush and began brushing vigorously at the carpet where the television had once stood, but which was now gone again. “Do this a few times to pull up the fibers, and you’d never guess that the television had ever been there.”

  Suddenly the lights buzzed, smoked, flickered, and went out. The dark apartment smelled strongly of cooking, greasy meat. Then Carter started seeing sparks in the corners of his eyes, which elongated into ribbons of brilliance leading from one glowing node after another, crossing, joining, splitting, until finally he realized it was a glowing diagram of the electrical wiring within his apartment walls.

  “I haven’t been able to find your set yet,” the repairman said. He smelled of rapid decay—otherwise Carter wouldn’t have known where he was. “It’s so dark in here.”

  “I gave my television set to my neighbor,” Carter said.

  “Yeah, I know what you mean,” the repairman replied out of the darkness. “Sometimes you get so used to them being there, you feel more comfortable with them than you do with your wife, or any of your living friends. You see them even after you’ve given them away.”

  “It was a good set. I should have kept it.”

  The television floated up out of the darkness, a ghostly sketch of light, a white outline of electricity. “There. That’s better,” the repairman said. “It explains a lot. Some of these old sets get so charged up with the years of electricity firing through them, well, it’s a little technical, but a kind of residue builds up in the air …”

  Carter tuned out his voice, intent on watching the ghost of the television, whose screen depicted the pale, electrified face of his mother, who appeared to be sleeping peacefully. “When I was a little boy, I never believed she would die. Mommas and daddies don’t die. Mommas and daddies aren’t like cats smeared across the highway or beef roasting in a pot or bloody hamburger rotting out in a garbage can.”

  “These old sets, they last forever,” the repairman said. “A damn sight longer than you or me. They don’t make them like they used to. Hell, they don’t make us like they used to, do they?”

  “She wasn’t made like I dreamed she was made,” Carter said. “She wasn’t my dream after all.”

  “Oh, it is a dream machine, all right,” the repairman said. “Just look at the quality of that picture!”

  Carter stared at the ghost of his television, at the image of his mother whose clarity improved steadily, so that the screen expanded until it had taken into it his mother’s entire apartment, and then his apartment, filling his eyes and his world with its brilliant, televised light.

  Carter opened his untrustworthy eyes and saw his apartment as if transformed within a dream. The walls glowed with a whiteness he hadn’t thought possible. The carpet was as smooth and featureless as a photograph of a carpet. In the background kitchen appliances hummed their distant, distracted tunes. The warm scent of cooking vegetables stirred the hairs in his nose. And before him his old television glowed with a soft, gray light. His mother’s soft-focus smile, her pewter eyes.

  “You do good work,” he complimented the vanished repairman.

  The repairman’s two suitcases rested by Carter’s reclining chair.

  He opened the first: clocks and gears, handfuls of capacitors, resistors, integrated chips and miscellaneous wiring, folders full of blueprints and foolproof instructions.

  A thick redness had seeped out of the bottom of the second suitcase and was now spreading through the loose, porous fibers of the carpet. He opened this suitcase: mounds of decaying meat fell out, grayed and runny, eventually recognizable as his mother’s heart and head, his father’s torso, hands, legs.

  The instructions were difficult to follow, although highly specific. He spent hours wrapping the gooey meat around the various electronic components, embedding the workings carefully so that no trace of them might be found.

  Now the apartment filled with the smells of cooking meat. The brilliant walls splattered with equally brilliant blood and the carpet became a sticky, gray slough as Carter worked through the night, worked through the day and his neighbor’s drunken pleading, his neighbor’s beating on the door, working to restore his parents to the life he had dreamed for them.

  FAIRY TALES

  He made his living writing fairy tales. Not the traditional sort like “The Three Billy Goats Gruff,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” or “Jack and the Beanstalk.” He’d studied the originals and thought them far too disturbing for young children. Children required reassurances, and that’s exactly what his stories were designed to provide. His were tales about how everything will turn out just fine, if you’ll only try hard enough. Tales of strong, loving parents and rosy-cheeked infants, bright-eyed moppets and pets minus teeth and claws. Weren’t there enough real terrors in the world?

  He was extremely careful about what he read to his own children, even more careful about what he permitted them to see on television. Alice was four now, the twins Joey and Tom nine, and growing so fast it was getting harder and harder to hold the line with them. They wanted the monster movies their friends saw. He kept telling them they’d get to see them when they were older, but when they demanded a specific age he couldn’t come up with an answer. He didn’t know what that magical, safe age would be. At least Alice was young enough to trust him completely; she never questioned anything he said. His one, true, fairy tale child.

  But the boys were hard. The real problem was, although he’d written and lectured extensively on the subject, crusading when it seemed necessary, and received numerous prestigious awards for his children’s fiction, he really had no idea what stories or images were or were not damaging
to a child. It might be argued, he supposed, that just because the idea of his children hearing certain stories greatly disturbed him, personally, it didn’t necessarily mean that those stories were, in fact, damaging. But what father could take such a risk?

  As his children were born and grew he’d become more or less comfortable with his position on these matters. He wrote and told them only those stories he was convinced would be good for them to hear. That satisfied him well. Except for the fact that the most gruesome stories he knew were the nightmares they told him as he sat holding them in their car-and flower-shaped little beds, his heart racing after a long jaunt down the hallway in response to some high-pitched, terror-choked scream.

  And so his secret notebook began, the one that might have been entitled “Tales I Can Never Read to My Children,” even though fully half the stories had been inspired by their middle-of-the-night, sobbed-out tellings.

  The other half were wholly his own: some his personal, childhood fairymares trawled out of the silt of some long-ago sleepless nights, and some as narration for his frightful visions of what might await his own children.

  THE KING IN EXILE

  By

  Jack Johannsen

  The king in exile has his morning coffee, served perfunctorily by the surly hotel maid in this, his hopefully temporary refuge.

  He offers her a ruby in exchange and she snarls at him.

  The king in exile rings for his morning paper but a call from the management reveals that the municipal union of pressmen is currently on strike.