City Fishing

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  “What I’m saying, dear lady, is that the little one’s body is in flux right now. If you were to observe this new face closely you would see a countenance of barely controlled chaos, fiercely set against the imposed orders of our everyday world. The nose must migrate from somewhere atop the head. The mouth and jaws travel out of the branchial arches. The eyes lie at the sides of his head like his cousin’s, the fish. They creep up front in stealth, as if ashamed to declare their difference. The ears, why, who knows what songs they hear, songs that we …”

  “Is she healthy, doctor?” Scott interrupted.

  “Well, I can’t say now if it’s a she or a he, but perhaps with the ultrasound …”

  “My wife, doctor. Is my wife okay?”

  Dr. Linden looked up at Eileen’s face quizzically, as if seeing it for the first time. “Oh, I imagine she is,” he replied.

  They always walked back from the doctor’s office through the small street of shops, because Eileen insisted that some exercise was good for her pregnancy. Scott was doubtful; she looked pale, especially against this backdrop of dark, burnt-looking wooden structures, but she would not be dissuaded. Nor would she pause by any structure for a breather. Now and then they would see someone—usually a fisherman in his rubber slicker—but this was increasingly rare. There were no “closed” or “open” signs in any of the doors, although Scott sometimes could detect yellowish light in the distant recesses of a shop or two. He supposed the locals just knew, and strangers had to find out.

  By midafternoon each day an artificial twilight had set in, due to cloud cover rolling in from the bay. He hurried her along as fast as he thought safe. Once the clouds came in, everything smelled like rotting fish.

  Around her sixth month of pregnancy, they started finding the eggs. “Eggs” was what Eileen called them, and that was what she’d convinced herself they were, but Scott had serious doubts. They seemed too large, and too deliberate. “Someone makes these things, honey, or several someones do. Look, that one has a signature on it.” He tugged on the object, jarring it loose from the sandy stretch in front of their cabin where they’d discovered it the previous day. It was heavier than it looked, another detail convincing him they were either carved or manufactured, perhaps part of some local festival. No doubt the locals worked on these things all year, in their garages and basements, bringing them out at a preordained time, planting them like the objects of a giant’s Easter egg hunt. He’d ask the manager of the cabins for confirmation, if he could ever find the fellow—they hadn’t seen him in weeks.

  The egg-shaped object had an odd center of gravity. It shifted under his hands and he had to struggle to control it. Dangerously off-balance, he bumped into Eileen, almost knocking her down. “God, I’m sorry.” He wheezed, and ridiculously felt on the verge of tears. “There, see? A signature.” He played his fingers over the back of the egg where a line of squiggles had been pressed into its surface.

  “Are you sure that’s a signature, hon? It’s pretty hard to read.”

  “You saw Dr. Linden’s handwriting on your prescription didn’t you? No better than this. In fact it looks damned similar, if you ask me. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one he made.”

  “If you’re right about the local celebration.”

  “Well, celebration or not, someone is making these things. Now look at that one over there.” He led her over to a bend in the gravel and shell road that wound through the spare trees behind the cabins. “Look at all that decorative filigree. You can’t tell me that’s random chance at work. Besides this one’s a little bigger, and shaped a bit differently.” He bent and placed her hand on the pattern. She jerked back as if shocked.

  “It feels weird,” she said, looking around nervously. “I see a few more over by those trees. I wonder how many of these things there are, anyway.”

  “Just a few, I think. I mean, how many locals can there be? Full-time residents of The Shores? Not more than three dozen, I would think.”

  But the number of “eggs” they found around the cabin and especially on their daily walks down the beach doubled, doubled again, and doubled again. Eileen stopped mentioning them, and after a while even stopped looking at them as far as Scott could tell.

  Scott could look at little else. The round tops of the eggs made a knobbed carpet from the back of the beach up the grassy slope to the rocks beyond, and he could see a scattering wedged precariously on the high cliffs above. Sometimes they had to veer out of the way of some glacier-like encroachment of eggs onto the beach, stepping into the mossy edges of the water more than once. He did so with trepidation; Eileen simply marched on with no change in expression.

  Eileen was changing: her breasts swelling, her belly dropping lower, hips and pelvis spreading. Now and then he could see blotches, broken blood vessels in her face. She looked into the mirror with distaste; often she didn’t look into the mirror at all. She was gorgeous. But if he looked only at her belly: the high, tight roundness of it all, he could think only of the eggs filling the landscape around them, and he had to look away as well.

  Eileen had gone from asking him about his own health, his own pains and sensations, his own feelings from several times a day to once, to every week or two, to not at all. He thought it just as well. There was painful activity going on inside which his pills only vaguely and intermittently assuaged.

  One evening he watched as the dark green tide drifted out of the bay and over the sand, farther than it ever had before, covering the grass and lower rocks, seeping through old abandoned beachfront structures whose torn walls were like shredded wounds, creeping almost all the way up to the access road to their cabin. The next morning he was still there on the deck, watching as the tide rolled out, leaving thousands upon thousands of new eggs behind.

  “I can’t leave. The baby will be here any day,” she said. “I have to get ready.”

  “Eileen, look what’s happening here. We have to get out!”

  She held on to each side of her belly, swollen like an overripe fruit, extending her palms as if to shield the baby’s ears from the argument. “I don’t know what’s happening here, Scott, and neither do you. I haven’t known what was happening since you got the cancer. A lot of things are happening that are just completely out of our control, things we don’t seem to be able to do one thing about. But I can control how I carry this baby, and I’m not going to risk leaving now. You don’t know what those things out there are, anyway.”

  “They’re eggs, just like you said in the first place. Huge eggs, an enormous multitude of them. They’ll be filling the roads soon, and then there’ll be no way out of here.”

  “All the more reason not to risk the travel. Besides, what makes you think they’ll harm us in any way? They’re eggs, Scott. Just like this baby used to be. And now this big belly of mine is as firm and tight as one of those shells. Maybe you’re feeling you’re not quite ready for this—I can certainly understand that. But this baby is going to happen, Scott.”

  They hashed it over a couple more times before he gave up and left. He didn’t want to upset her by pushing too hard. He was already upset enough for the both of them. His pain had increased over the last several days—there was this enormous pressure, and he’d been able to eat hardly a thing. Eileen’s appetite, of course, had grown prodigious. He didn’t think she’d even noticed when he hadn’t touched his own food.

  He was running into the little village to find the doctor, hoping maybe he could talk some sense into her. She’d always paid attention to doctors—she’d hung on every word his own doctors had said, treating them as if they were priests. He bounded onto the darkened sidewalk, running full speed into a tall figure in a damp raincoat.

  The odor coming off the figure was old and stale. Scott peered up into the damp face of his landlord, whose nostrils widened at his proximity. The man’s eyes appeared oddly wide and filmy, and his face had grayed since Scott had seen him last. Flecks of dry skin layered his cheeks. “Eileen,” Scott began
anxiously. “My wife, I can’t get her to leave.”

  The man’s voice was blubbery, a frothy translation. “No … one … asked you …”

  “You’re local, that might have some sort of authority with her. You can tell her about the eggs, what they really are.”

  “No … one … asked you … to stay …”

  “But our child …”

  “But … our … chil … dren …” His landlord pushed away.

  The doctor’s office was locked, though through the glass door Scott saw a bare bulb glowing yellow in the waiting room ceiling. Shadows slithered across the back wall that led to the examining rooms. He began to shout, then beat on the pane until it splintered. No response, and the shadows continued their distant dance. Cardboard file boxes were stacked around the room. One had spilled, the cascade of papers left to drift across the center rug. Ultrasounds. Curved shapes, vague, radiating lines. Faces and almost faces in the thousands.

  Scott turned away from the doctor’s door and began beating on the door of the next shop in the row. After almost an hour Scott had been unable to rouse anyone out of any of the dark little shops. If anyone had heard him, they obviously didn’t care to help. As he headed back toward the cabin he had to sidestep a number of eggs which had not been in his path before. He kicked one out of the way, just for the hell of it. Heavy as stone. He yelped and stumbled, watching the egg rock back and forth before settling itself onto its broad side. Cloud cover had filled in every gap of sky since his departure. Distant lightning illuminated edges of thunderhead. As far as he could see before him a tide of eggs rose and fell over the hills and pastures, gathering beneath and climbing to the lower boughs of trees. Growing, developing, dividing and complicating in ways unimaginable, a chaos of life uncaring, far beyond anything he might possibly comprehend. Infiltrating carcinoma, diffusely spreading metastases … Sometimes knowing the truth was not better. Sometimes the truth made an irrelevance of our lives.

  When it began raining he tried to walk a little faster, but a road to walk on became increasingly rare. Egg pushed against egg until all repositioned and spread from horizon to horizon until half the visible world had been filled in. Lightning flashes showed off the innate luster of the shells, as increasing downpour made the curves change, lengthen and soften. He stepped up on their backs gingerly at first, going from egg to egg as if crossing a stream on oily round stones.

  Then he heard Eileen’s voice calling through the slam of rain and he stepped hard and smashed and pushed forward with shoes caught in the breaking shells. He fell again and again with hands in goo and fierce activity snapping at his fingers but no matter because Eileen was screaming now against the crash of the shores and sky.

  Pain ripped through his belly so completely infiltrated now he could not distinguish between stomach and pain, pain and colon and esophagus in a confusion of cells. Around him seethed an ocean of the newborn, sliding easily through shell wall, eye and claw-foot and tentacle, and all of them different, all of them distinguishable, a thousand faces of the thousand forms.

  “Scott!” She screamed and he saw her rise up in tatters, their child but one more child who would never know or understand or care who its parents had been.

  But still he ran and smashed and bled to hold these tatters of her in awe. He closed his eyes in a last pathetic attempt to shut out the truth as around him the chaos that was the true face of the world turned and ate of itself again and again, the new bearing but brief witness to the old as their flesh grows thin, thinner still, and dissolves.

  THE SADNESS OF ANGELS

  Carter stared into the eggs adorning the breakfast plate. He’d never liked them sunny side up, the way they looked. Although these tasted good enough: a consistency in his mouth somewhere between solid and liquid. Then he found himself thinking “fetus skin,” and spat out the whole yellow mess. No one in the dilapidated diner bothered to look up, too busy eating themselves out of their hangovers. He glanced at the next table: a young girl bent over her pancakes, but with one hand caressing the small bust of the Madonna she wore around her neck. Caressed so insistently, apparently, that she’d worn the face down: the Madonna had no nose.

  He looked at the girl more carefully: something wrong with her face. Just enough asymmetry to draw his attention. People would call her ugly, he supposed. But he would not. Then watching her hand rubbing the Madonna: only three fingers there. But still such a beautiful, smooth hand. A petite body, face like an angel.

  He looked at the other patrons: crosses around their necks, tiny warped figures in their shirt pockets. Rubbing, caressing, muttering under their breath. And in each face some mistake, some slight aberration, eyes too wide apart, nose too short, jaw twisted, skull warped under the hair, mark of the devil some might say. But not him. Heads bowed over their food. Angels praying.

  Carter pushed the plate away, buried his face in his hands, rubbed his eyes a bit too vigorously as if trying to rid himself of the images of embryo and fetus and congenital transformation. He pulled back his chair and ambled into the small bathroom, filled the greasy sink with water and began tossing handfuls of the tepid fluid over his face, until his collar and the top two inches of his shirt were soaking wet, clinging to his chest like flesh that wouldn’t quite fit the bone.

  Without thinking, he stared at himself in the streaked and soap-mottled mirror. A good ten years since he’d really looked, let himself examine himself. He winced at the image: pale, doughy face, hair thin and gray and wet, slicked back. Head like a bird’s, too large for the scrawny neck. Tired and old looking. Sometimes it seemed to him that the older you got the more like a baby you appeared. So that eventually you might resemble a fetus, before it declares itself to be human. He had seen numerous pictures of various types of fetuses, sometimes the text challenging you to pick the one that was human out of a selection that included a dog, a pig, a horse. Invariably, he selected the fetus that was in fact a pig.

  But what had impressed him was how they had all looked the same, how at some level, perhaps, they were the same. Pigs and babies. Horses and cows. All the same. Such a narrow window, a few short decades of having this individual face to show the world, and then you’re a fetus again, this ancient structure of changeable bone and skin, and you could be anything, a pig, a horse, or a cow, an angel or a devil.

  For the most part, Carter had stopped looking for himself in mirrors a decade ago.

  He still used them—to comb his hair, to shave—but he managed to do so without really looking, aware only that this was someone’s face he was grooming, but the activity had little to do with him personally. If asked to describe his perception at that moment he might have said it was like preparing a dummy’s head for some realistic museum display. But of course no one ever knew to ask.

  Ten years ago when he had last looked at his face in the mirror, really looked at his face, the experience had been so disconcerting that he had continued the examination for a long time: prodding, stretching his pale skin, noting the way the flesh was slow to recover its shape, the way the hair had seemingly changed color overnight, washing out to a color not quite gray and not quite white, a dirty translucence, like a body soaked overnight.

  He did not recognize the face in the mirror. It resembled only vaguely the face he struggled to keep in his head: his face, the face he had been born with.

  He had already experienced the shock of seeing old classmates he wouldn’t have recognized if they hadn’t spoken to him first. Did he look that old? Until recently he’d imagined he looked much the same as he always had. At least in his mind his face was the same. And in his dreams.

  But obviously he was regressing, his face losing resolution, losing form. And as his perception of this loss of form strengthened he discovered he had less sense of himself as an individual personality as well. What did he want? He had no idea. He’d lost his daughter and lost his wife—there was nothing to do. He felt like some aborted or incompletely formed child. Without all his fingers and to
es, without fully functioning eyes, without a fully formed brain, his dreams capable only of mud, and water, and wind.

  Sometimes he thought that it would have been better if he hadn’t been born. It pained him to think in such terms. They were his father’s terms—his father frequently had referred to the congenitally weak, the disfigured, as creatures who were mistakes, who should never have been born. Having a granddaughter like that must have really plagued him.

  Addie’s lungs had never completely formed. Not that you could tell from the outside—from the outside she was more than perfect to Carter’s eyes. But somehow that made it worse. Nature’s joke on them all. She looked perfect—a beautiful and luminous, spiritual creature—but it was her incompleteness that began killing her the day she was born and continued for the next seven years.

  Perhaps the malformed wished they hadn’t been born as well. Who could know? Who asked such questions? Perhaps the sadness of angels was that they had been born at all. Their fantastic shapes such clear reminders of the deeper mysteries of life—perhaps more than anything they would have liked to have remained part of the great unconscious world.

  After Addie’s death had come his encounter with the mirror, when his features failed to resolve themselves into a comfortable recognition, and he had turned away from the mirror as self-reference, he thought forever.

  When he came out of the bathroom an elderly Hispanic woman was standing by the window, watching the dark clouds roll in from across the distant mountains. She turned and looked at him. Around her neck was one of the largest crucifixes Carter had ever seen anyone wear. He stepped closer, her eyes steady on his face. What was she seeing in him anyway? When he was within a step or two she reached out and touched his face. He didn’t react—he was too busy examining the crucifix. What he had thought was a depiction of a rock mass the crucifix grew out of was in fact a crowd of small figures, grasping and scratching at the base of the cross. Creatures begging of their creator, collapsed in awe and desperation. He stepped closer. She grasped his chin, turning his head slightly for a better look. He tried to make out the figures: horse people, dog people, creatures from the Island of Dr. Moreau. “Los Angelos?” he asked her.