Everyone at some time or other has entertained the possibility that he or she might attract the sustained attention of others, and we prepare for this day. We act out scenes from movies, television shows, particularly compelling dreams, against the possibility that someone might be watching. We believe this makes us seem “real,” enables us to live the authentic life. We wonder what it might mean to act differently, but we are too terrified to make the attempt.
Until now. Ethan did a funny dance, he stepped awkwardly, and he grinned at all the watchers, all the spies who were attempting to interpret what he was doing, wondering furiously what he was up to. He said nonsense aloud to himself. He made faces at the storefront windows he passed. When he approached strangers he made a pretense of grabbing at them, perhaps with the intention of executing a kiss.
But whatever he did, habit soon forced his patterns back to “normal,” back into the act he’d been forced to learn so well. He made the attempt to move his hands, legs, from out of the norm, but they obeyed reluctantly.
He gazed into a nearby window growing noisy with the clicking of cameras behind the glass. As he pressed his face closer, he could see the vague outline of the huge, window-filling lens. He pushed closer, to shout madly, inarticulately into the glass. He could see the outline of his face in the lens. Closer, closer still, he could almost see himself falling in. He jerked back in alarm.
Out in the street, someone reached to help him up. Frightened, Ethan stared into the man’s face. Something wrong with it, but he wasn’t sure what. A bit too red, he thought, too much blood. It was not an unfamiliar perception. He’d discovered over the years that, if you look into a person’s face long enough or under the right circumstances, you see the animal bits, the raw meat and bloody fur and parasitic infestations that give form to the ragged animal thought.
“My hand has become a gun,” the man said. And pointed it at Ethan, the barrel long and bluish under the harsh streetlights.
“Then drop it,” Ethan answered shakily, and the man sloughed off his heavy coat to expose his bare arm, and the dark metal that grew out of the end of his arm, with the long barrel but with no visible trigger.
Then Ethan saw the trigger in the man’s eyes.
He backed away as the man staggered toward him, the gun barrel obviously too heavy for the rest of him. “I’ve studied all the martial arts,” the man said, “the methods of offense and defense. I learned to make of my hands a club, a knife, an axe. But the gun is better, the gun makes things happen,” he said, and the trigger in his eyes pulled, and bullets pounded the pavement around Ethan’s head as Ethan screamed and screamed and screamed.
When the shooting stopped, Ethan opened his eyes and saw that the man with the hand that was a gun had gone. He picked himself up and again proceeded in the direction where he thought he’d find his bus stop. The pavement was slick with a substance that had the coppery scent of blood but the color and consistency of oil. He thought about what he might have shared with such a person. Fear and anger certainly, perhaps little else. He couldn’t be sure. What did he share with other people and what was completely private? If he only knew the answer to that question he might not awaken to visions of his soiled underwear hanging like decaying viscera from the trees every morning.
The familiar had become strange and the strange familiar. Had he made this one up? It sounded to him like the summary line of a news story. But a news story of the future, perhaps following some apocalyptic event. Who would be left to hear such a line?
“The world has planted knives to cut us with,” a woman said at the next corner. And Ethan could see them in the planter boxes that lined the sidewalks, gleaming blades thrusting up among tall green sheaths of foliage. “I keep them well-exposed by trimming the foliage, but in most places they are well-hidden, lying in wait to prick and slash.” She stepped closer to one of the plantings and exposed her arm. She squeezed along the edges of one of the numerous deep slashes that crisscrossed her arms and the blood began to flow, dripping copiously onto the blades below. Greedily they twisted and gleamed.
Suddenly the knives were flowering, the taller blades exploding into sunbursts of smaller, sharper blades, lengthening at a prodigious rate, the sharp-edged foliage closing in while Ethan pulled back to avoid them. He walked briskly past the woman singing to her blades, and then began running again.
Around the next corner he could see his bus stop in the distance, but a huge crowd had gathered, blocking his way. He looked around for a particularly bad accident or a street fair of some sort. But he could discern no obvious reason for the crowd. It made him uncomfortable, but he pushed his way into it anyway, fearful that he might miss the last bus of the day. The crowd’s odor was strong, the accumulation of it something beyond the personal. He wondered if this is what the inside of a herd of cattle might smell like, or the odor at the heart of an army where thousands of lives have suddenly and dramatically dissolved.
He tried to look into the faces of the people he pushed past, seeking any spark of humanity which might ease his apprehensions. But after a few minutes he came to the conclusion that this was no crowd of human beings. They would not look at him—each one he passed stared beyond him into some impersonal nothing. Was he proceeding in the right direction? He was sure the bus stop was right over here, but when he finally stepped out of the crowd, like a splinter ejected from a wall of swollen flesh, he couldn’t find the stop, could recognize nothing about this street at all.
“This place has gotten so filthy, we’ll never get it clean!” a man said beside him.
Ethan had to agree. Hair clotted the sewer grates and the gutters ran with a thick soup that resembled blood and lumps of some unidentifiable flesh. The stench of it filled his throat and burned his eyes.
Willing the fullness in his throat to stay down, he started to step over the rivulet of filth, his hand on his mouth. The dirty tide rose so quickly it was already lapping at his ankles. Splintered bones and viscera drifted past, the corpses of small animals, their severed heads and stiffened torsos.
“I can’t,” he said, and turned away. To face a vast wall of discarded filth, flesh and fluid mingled with garbage and soil. He opened his mouth to scream, but sadness flooded him, rendering him mute.
As I break, so breaks the world.
“We covet one another’s openings,” a voice whispered conspiratorially. Ethan examined the wall, finally finding the disembodied mouth struggling with speech. Most of the words were spat out past an uncooperative tongue. “We get so sick of our own thoughts and feelings we want to climb into other people’s cavities and hide.”
Like some hideous birth, the rest of the creature’s body attempted to issue itself from the revolting wall. First a hand webbed in gristle and vein, and then an elbow of spongy ruin, a knee skinned to bone, a gnawed ear, hair a mucous drip that parted around huge, bruised eyes. Ethan forced his own eyes shut, then opened them again as the man with skin layered in an intricate weave of lacerations put one arm around his shoulders and continued to talk to him. The man’s voice was raw, as if he had been talking without rest for years.
“Most of what we see, most of what we think of as alive, is in fact dead,” the man’s bleeding voice said. “The best we can do is exercise our imaginations to breathe some life into the world.”
Children had come out of the crowd to watch, overripe maggots dropping out of their hair. A blond child opened his mouth to laugh and his dried tongue tumbled out onto the grass.
An old woman chased her withered intestines past Ethan.
“They were talking, just a few minutes ago. I heard the children singing,” Ethan said.
The man laughed. “The dead talk all the time—sample conversation at random then tell me this is not the talk of dead people! Even a dead man will fake laughter if the joke is a good one.”
“Stop this!” Ethan shouted. “This is all a lie!” He closed his eyes and repeated himself, then repeated himself again until the man’s voice went a
way.
Ethan climbed the steps out of his wet-smelling garden-level apartment, opened the outside door, and found himself confronted by hundreds of pairs of his stained underwear hanging from every available bush and tree. He blinked and waited for some significant change. There was none.
Not an auspicious start to a new millennium, he thought. At least some of the soiled and bloody undergarments hanging from the trees, gathered along the rooftops, sprawled senseless in the streets were not his own, but some other poor soul’s. It was all a lie, of course, a preposterous dream, but at least it was his dream. Why live in terror of insanity? The mouth inside his flesh said. Lie about who you are and what you see—that is what we all do. That is what we all must do. Lie yourself into being. At least then you will be alive.
And Ethan felt at last a relaxation on its way to him, traveling from some great distance. Knowing that to be alive was to lie, and the only way to tell some truth.
Table of Contents
CITY FISHING
LICENSE NOTES
Meet the Author
DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS
CITY FISHING
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
DEDICATION
INTRODUCTION:
FINDING THE SECRET HISTORY
CITY FISHING
THE PAINTERS ARE COMING TODAY
A MASK IN MY SACK
THE POOR
PREPARATIONS FOR THE GAME
HIDEY HOLE
THE OVERCOAT
BUZZ
PAREIDOLIA
TRICKSTER
WHEN COYOTE TAKES BACK THE WORLD
SAFE HOUSE
THE BATTERING
LITTLE CRUELTIES
THE WOMAN ON THE CORNER
THE MEN AND WOMEN OF RIVENDALE
TAKING DOWN THE TREE
AFTER WORK
A HUNDRED WICKED LITTLE WITCHES
BROOMS WELCOME THE DUST
ANGEL COMBS
FATHER’S DAY
BRUTES
BITE
HOOKS
CARNAL HOUSE
THE VISIBLE MAN
GHOST IN THE MACHINE
FAIRY TALES
THRUMM
BOXER
HUNGRY
MOUTHS
THE BURDENS
EGGS
THE SADNESS OF ANGELS
THE RAINS
DERANGEMENT
City Fishing Page 37
