Mama Fish

by Rio Youers

  She was feeding him.

  It got worse: his stomach was open—a rectangular flap of skin peeled back and secured to his chest with pushpins. I saw lights flashing inside him, illuminating circuitry and wires and a section of pipe that looked like the U-bend behind our toilet. His left foot was missing. Correction … it wasn’t missing; I could see it on a table at the other end of the basement, wired into a smaller computer. The toes were wiggling.

  “Sweet Jesus,” I said.

  Flubbalubb.

  The pale blue light shone on his synthetic skin. His right eye opened and closed, and every time it flicked open, it fixed on me.

  I couldn’t keep it in any longer. I screamed.

  Mr. Bones wheeled around and clattered toward the window on legs like jointed stilts. His long neck unfolded, like a waking swan, and he pressed his hands and face to the glass. I scrambled backward in a flurry of dead leaves, crying out as his bulbous eyes jerked in their sockets and tracked me down. His jaw dropped. I caught a glimpse of his pale gums and long brown teeth, and then the glass fogged as he barked foreign expletives. I screamed again, twisting and scurrying around to face the steps and make my escape.

  The shouting stopped and for one cold, dead moment there was only the sound of Mama Fish, whirring and ticking. I clawed through the leaves and the dirt, pulling myself forward. I reached the steps just as I heard the window latches snapping open. Everything inside me turned cold. My heart stopped beating. I dared a glance over my shoulder and saw the window pushed wide … and there was Mr. Bones, crawling up and into the space beneath the deck. His long limbs made the passage simple.

  He whispered something exotic, very soft, very near. I heard the leaves shifting as he scurried forward.

  “I was only trying to help,” I screamed, crying and spitting. I grabbed one of the steps and hoisted myself forward. My legs dragged behind me, cold, vulnerable. I imagined one of his bony hands skittering toward my foot like a crab.

  I eased my upper body into the gap between the risers and chanced another looked over my shoulder.

  Mr. Bones’s chest was pressed flat to the dirt, his legs bent like those of a grasshopper. He grinned hideously, head bobbing, and his eyes shimmered in the pale light. He said something else—I barely heard it beneath my own excited gasps—and scurried closer.

  “Trying … help.” Big tears crashed through the grime and leaves stuck to my face. I pulled my body between the risers, but it wasn’t easy. I kicked and panicked …

  I heard Mr. Bones, his creaky-door voice, his quick movement through the leaves.

  Help me, God. My trembling arms heaved with the last of their strength. I pulled and squirmed … and then I was through. Safe, I thought. I rolled onto the lawn and scampered backward. Mr. Bones’s skull-face peered at me through the risers. His wide eyes gleamed.

  “I only wanted to help,” I said again.

  His hand flashed out and snagged my left ankle.

  “NOOOOOO!”

  His grip was strong and he pulled me toward him. I struggled and fought, pulling up huge clods of turf as my hands scrambled for something to hold onto. I saw his long teeth gnashing, spittle bouncing from his lips as he struggled to hold on. His eyes narrowed to dime-thin slots.

  No, you son of a bitch, I thought. Emotion swelled inside me: a black-crested wave of fear, confusion, and anger. I roared and wrenched myself free—leaving my sneaker behind, but I didn’t care. I was on my feet in a heartbeat and running fast. I have a half-memory of looking back and seeing Mr. Bones slipping through the risers and giving chase, but I may have imagined this … a residue of the fear. Either way, I didn’t stop running.

  The clouds rolled in shades of black and purple. I’m sure they did.

  Wearing only one shoe, crying and scared (just like Kelvin Fish before me), I ran all the way home.

  We moved to San Francisco eight months later, in July of ’87. The move west proved to be a remedy, although it didn’t happen at once. I suffered another three years of sleepless nights and confusion, holding onto my secret as I bounced between counselors and psychologists. At the age of seventeen I was popping sixty milligrams of fluoxetine a day. Now that’s living.

  I never told anybody what I had seen. I couldn’t. The only time I came close was on a fishing trip with my father when, on a bass boat in the middle of Lake Del Valle, he had asked if I was gay.

  “No, Dad. Jesus Christ.”

  He was tying a lure onto his line. He rarely made eye contact when he was having one of his “serious” talks. Not with me, not with my mother, and not with any of his business associates. It was one of his loveable idiosyncrasies. He never raised his voice, but if he wasn’t looking at you—if he appeared more interested in something else—you knew he meant business.

  “Well, there’s something going on in that head of yours.” He secured the lure, gave a satisfied nod, and then cast out. “I just want you to know that you can talk to your mother and me about anything. Anything.”

  “I know.”

  “I don’t think you do, Patrick.” I was grateful he wasn’t looking at me; I didn’t care to see the gravity in his deep blue eyes—eyes the same as mine. He reeled tension into his line and gave the tip of the rod a couple of flicks, making the lure jump through the water like something living.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” I lied.

  His lips made the slightest smile shape. He could cut you apart by not looking at you, but he could make your heart sing, too. “Just know that we love you. Very much.”

  “I know,” I said again. My voice carried no emotion, but inside I was breaking and I came close—so close—to telling him everything. Whether he believed me or not, it didn’t matter. He loved me.

  “I’m sure it will get easier,” I said.

  My father looked at the place where his line met the still water. “I’m sure you’re right.”

  I was right. Time is a great healer, it’s true, and the three thousand miles between me and Kelvin Fish also helped. The psychologists (three of them in a four-year period) tried to chase out my problem, with all their clever design, waving trickery like red flags. They didn’t help me at all. I started to counsel myself, looking in the mirror for hours at a time, facing the only person who knew what had happened—the only person who knew how I was feeling. I denied the reality (not a traditional psychiatric method, but then I wasn’t a traditional psychiatrist). I began to think of Harlequin as a movie I’d seen, one that had lasted sixteen years and was filled with some very peculiar characters. I convinced myself that none of it was real, and before long was able to get on with the things that needed getting on with. My memories of Harlequin—of Mama Fish and Mr. Bones—became thin in my mind, and then all but disappeared.

  Despite switching high schools, and what the shrinks referred to as my “inveterate disorder,” I graduated with a 3.15 grade point average and went on to study business at Fresno State. I played baseball. I played it well. My old man bought me a car (it was a hunk o’ crap ’82 Dodge Aries, but I wasn’t complaining). I dated girls. I even made a few friends.

  It took time. It took medication. But I got there in the end.

  Although the Harlequin movie became indistinct, like sun-bleached curtains with all the detail drained from them, its main star, Kelvin Fish, continued to make cameo appearances. He drifted into my thoughts over the years, often trailing a cloudy tarpaulin that threatened to shroud my state of mind. I forced him back into the wings with a mantra: Movie star, quite bizarre, this is the deal, you’re not even real. And away he went, dragging the tarp behind him. He rarely appeared as the unfortunate, galumphing child with a lazy left eye, or even—thank God—as the grotesque I’d seen wired into Mama Fish, with sparks blasting from his nostrils and his stomach peeled open like the lid on a Tupperware container. More often than not, I remembered Kelvin Fish how he was afterward … when he returned to school following the Thanksgiving Break.

  He had changed. He wa
s improved.

  Kelvin Fish v. 2.0.

  I tried to avoid him, of course (I no longer felt the urge to befriend him—go figure). I sat as far from him as possible in the classes we shared, and angled my body so that I didn’t have to look at him. Out of sight, out of mind. Or so I hoped, but this never proved to be the case, particularly when he was sitting behind me (I imagined his android eyes scanning the back of my skull, his processor beeping and whirring as data was displayed—all ones and zeros—like Arnold Schwarzenegger in The Terminator). I turned the other way if I saw him in the halls, and I never missed phys. ed., not even after I twisted my ankle playing flag football. I limped and struggled through subsequent classes, preferring extreme pain to being made to clean the storeroom with Kelvin Fish.

  It was impossible to avoid him completely. Our paths inevitably crossed, and it always gave me a little shock, like seeing an ex-lover with their new partner. I registered the improvements within seconds. The slouch was history; he walked straight, shoulders square and eyes forward—both eyes, which brings me to his next upgrade: his left eye … no longer hanging loose in its socket like an old marionette with busted strings, but fixed front and center (I imagined Mr. Bones making the adjustments with a jeweler’s screwdriver and a soldering iron). His skin was clear and his hair was different. The Elton John weave had been replaced by something more current, long on top, swept back, short at the sides. His smile revealed clean white teeth.

  Have you seen Kelvin Fish lately? Call me crazy, but I think I have a crush on him.

  Mr. Bones had been shopping, too; Kelvin Fish had some slick new threads—Lacoste shirts and 501s. He was also more active in class, raising his hand to answer questions, even cracking wise on occasion.

  I have to say, v. 2.0 was a stark improvement.

  Kelvin Fish looks totally different. Isn’t it amazing what new clothes and a good haircut can do?

  Oh yeah, and isn’t it amazing what a zillion dollars’ worth of machinery and a European genius called Mr. Bones can do?

  I remember his hand on my shoulder—our single interaction in the months before I left for the West Coast, and knew it was him before he had even turned me around; there was something … metallic about the way his fingers pressed into the muscle of my shoulder. The image that came immediately to mind was of placing my hand on his chest as he lay in the middle of Columbus Boulevard, and how his heart had thumped and buzzed, like an insect in a jar.

  “Hello, Kelvin,” I said. My body had turned cold. I felt nothing.

  “Hello, Patrick,” he said, displaying his engineered smile. His hand slipped from my shoulder. I imagined wires and circuits buzzing behind his synthetic skin. “I just wanted to thank you for helping me that day after school. I won’t forget it.”

  “Neither will I.” My mouth was dry. My words were like dust. I looked into his eyes a second longer—it was all I could stand—and then walked away. It occurred to me (feeling his Terminator gaze following me, computing data) that his eyes had changed color, too. I had always known them to be a dull, muddy brown. Heaven knows, I had looked into them often enough, trying to read him … to find out what made his clock tick. But they weren’t dull anymore. They shone. They were alive.

  Another change. Another improvement.

  Kelvin Fish’s eyes were green. Bright green.

  “Boston?” Darlene had said. “That’s twice in three weeks. A little unusual, isn’t it?”

  “Unfinished business,” I said, which was the truth.

  I didn’t tell her I was going back to Harlequin.

  A five-hour flight to Logan International. I rented the same car with hand controls and drove north, popping Vicodin to help with the pain, hoping they would blunt the agitation in my soul. They didn’t. I was in two pieces, physically and mentally. My emotion mirrored my body: partly firm and resolute, partly numb. Fear chased through me like a wild dog. I drove with the car radio as loud as it would go—tuned to some ear-shattering rock station—hoping to envelop the sounds of snarling and thrashing. My fear was louder. It howled inside me. I could hear the forcible snap of its jaws.

  I stopped at a service area on I-95, but didn’t get out of the car. I gripped the steering wheel. My knuckles were as gray as the sky.

  “Don’t do this,” I said. The music was so loud that I couldn’t hear my voice. All I felt was the vibration of my larynx. “Turn around. This is a mistake.”

  I had the receipt in my shirt pocket, still folded into a neat square. I had kept it for the two words he had written beneath his address, and had looked at them frequently over the last three weeks—every time my belief faltered, in fact. Two simple words that made everything real, and anything possible:

  Friends help

  They were more remarkable than his name (printed on the receipt when his credit card was processed: FISH/KELVIN). More remarkable, I think, because he remembered what I had told him as he lay in the road with his circuits fried (his eggs scrambled). Twenty-one years had passed, but his computer had not let him down.

  “Turn around. Now.”

  I started the car and continued north. I passed the sign that welcomed me to Harlequin twenty-three minutes later.

  I didn’t need the address; I knew where I was going.

  You were talking in your sleep, too.

  What did I say?

  I pulled up outside his house. Canary yellow siding with white trim, a fountain tinkling in the garden, wind chimes on the porch. It had hardly changed. The Mercedes-Benz had been replaced by a glimmering new BMW Convertible (it was easy to imagine Kelvin Fish behind the wheel, some dazzling starlet riding shotgun, so much beautiful hair rippling in the wind). I wondered if the driver of the Mercedes-Benz—Mr. Bones—was gone, too.

  There was another change—a sign, perhaps, that I was expected: a long ramp had been built leading onto the porch.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I said, unfolding the receipt and looking at those two words again. I remembered how my heart had beat so hard the last time I was here—a nervous, inquisitive kid who could run like a train—and wasn’t at all surprised that it was thumping just as hard now. Sweat rolled into my eyes. The receipt was beginning to fray along the folds, like an old map. I killed the ignition and the world was suddenly, painfully, silent.

  “It’s not too late to turn around. You can still—”

  Darlene floated into my mind with a soft, swaying motion. I reached for her and felt the impasse at T12 yielding. She smiled and pulled me to my feet.

  You were talking in your sleep, too.

  I opened the door, reached behind my seat, and pulled out my wheelchair.

  What did I say?

  I unfolded it with clumsy hands and transferred. The house stared at me through its dark window-eyes and I looked—as I had twenty-one years before—for some sign of life. Although its façade seemed without spirit, there was yet a quality about it, an energy that was subtly different. Kinder, almost. Even so, my wheels locked at the threshold of the driveway, and my heart made its mad music. I looked at the two words scrawled on the receipt again and dared to believe that this wasn’t just part of a cool-light coma … that it was real.

  The gray sky made a deep, mourning sound. I gripped the hand rims and pushed forward, past the fountain, past the BMW, and toward the ramp. I glanced at the basement windows, remembering the pale blue light that had crept through the shutters in even strips. I pushed on … through recollections of Mama Fish and Mr. Bones, and, of course, the naked boy with the orange cable plugged into his back.

  My fear growled and snapped. Tears burst from my eyes.

  I imagined Darlene holding out her hand, smiling. I felt Jayson in my arms, his thin body pressed close to my chest. I could see Kennedy (Are you ready, old man?) pulling on a worn catcher’s mitt. The wind chimes were the perfect melody for my tears.

  I rolled up the long ramp toward the front door. The sky moaned again and my heart rushed in my chest. The brass knocker was the same
one I had hammered on twenty-one years before. I reached for it, drifting in an ocean of hopes and memories, and then pulled back. I waited for the knocker to change into Kelvin Fish’s perfect face. The technology is more advanced than it used to be, he would say. Everybody is wired-in these days. I pressed a hand to my heart. The nerve-pain in my body caused my useless legs to tremble.

  You were talking in your sleep, too.

  What did I say?

  I smiled and wiped the tears from my eyes.

  You said …

  “Plag meen,” I whispered, and knocked on the door.

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