The Drowned Life

by Jeffrey Ford

  “I didn’t know you went under.”

  “Sure, like a fuckin’ stone.”

  “When?” asked Hatch.

  “Three, four months ago. Peggy’d been porking some guy from over in Larchdale. You know, I got depressed, laid off the bailing, lost the house, and then eventually I just threw in the pail.”

  “How do you like it here?”

  “Really good,” said Bob and his words rang loud in Hatch’s brain, but then he quickly leaned close and these words came in a whisper: “It sucks.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Hatch, keeping his voice low.

  Bob’s smile deflated. “Everything’s fine,” he said, casting a glance at the lobster tank. He nodded to Hatch. “Gotta go, bud.”

  He watched Bob bound away against a mild current. By the time Hatch reached the deli counter, it was closed. In fact, with the exception of Bob, he’d seen no one in the entire store. An old black phone with a rotary dial sat atop the counter. Propped next to it was a sign that read: FREE PAY PHONE. NOT TO BE USED IN PRIVACY!

  Hatch looked over his shoulder. There was no one around. Stepping forward he reached for the receiver, and just as his hand closed on it, the thing rang. He felt the vibration before he heard the sound. He let it go and stepped back. It continued to ring, and he was torn between answering it and fleeing. Finally, he picked it up and said, “Hello.”

  At first he thought the line was dead, but then a familiar voice sounded. “Hatch,” it said, and he knew it was Ned, his younger son. Both of his boys had called him Hatch since they were toddlers. “You gotta come pick me up.”

  “Where are you?” asked Hatch.

  “I’m at a house party behind the 7-Eleven. It’s starting to get crazy.”

  “What do you mean it’s starting to get crazy?”

  “You coming?”

  “I’ll be there,” said Hatch, and the line went dead.

  He stood at the door to the basement of his brain and turned the knob, but before he could open it, he saw, way over on the other side of the store, one of the silver sharks, cruising above the aisles up near the ceiling. Dropping the receiver, he scurried behind the deli counter and then through an opening that led down a hall to a door.

  • FOUR •

  Hatch was out of breath from walking, searching for someone who might be able to help him. For ten city blocks he thought about Ned needing a ride. He pictured the boy, hair tied back, baggy shorts, and shoes like slippers, running from the police. “Good grief,” said Hatch and pushed forward. He’d made a promise to Ned years earlier that he would always come and get him if he needed a ride, no matter what. How could he tell him now, “Sorry kid, I’m sunk.” Hatch thought of all the things that could happen in the time it would take him to return to dry land and pick Ned up at the party. Scores of tragic scenarios exploded behind his eyes. “I might as well be bailing,” he said to the empty street.

  He heard the crowd before he saw it, faint squeaks and blips in his ears that eventually became distant voices and music. Rounding a corner, he came in sight of a huge vacant lot between two six-story brownstones. As he approached, he could make out some kind of attraction at the back of the lot, and twenty or so Drowned Towners floated in a crowd around it. Organ music blared from a speaker on a tall wooden pole. Hatch crossed the street and joined the audience.

  Up against the back wall of the lot was an enormous golden octopus. Its flesh glistened and its tentacles curled, unfurled, created fleeting symbols dispersed by schools of tiny angel fish continually circling it like a halo. The creature’s sucker disks were flat black as was its beak, its eyes red, and there was a heavy, rusted metal collar squeezing the base of its lumpen head as if it had shoulders and a neck. Standing next to it was a young woman, obviously part fish. She had gills and her eyes were pure black like a shark’s. Her teeth were sharp. There were scales surrounding her face and her hair was some kind of fine green seaweed. She wore a clamshell brassiere and a black thong. At the backs of her heels were fan-like fins. “My name is Clementine,” she said to the assembled onlookers, “and this beauty beside me is Madame Mutandis. She is a remarkable specimen of the Midas Octopus, so named for the radiant golden aura of her skin. You see the collar on Madame and you miss the chain. Notice, it is attached to my left ankle. Contrary to what you all might believe, it is I who belong to her and not she to me.”

  Hatch looked around the crowd he was now part of—an equal mixture of men and women, some more bleached than blue, some less intact than others. The man next to him held his mouth open, and an eel’s head peered out as if having risen from the man’s bowels to check the young fish-woman’s performance.

  “With cephalopod brilliance, nonvertebrate intuition, Madame Mutandis will answer one question for each of you. No question is out of bounds. She thinks like the very sea itself. Who’ll be first?”

  The man next to Hatch immediately stepped forward before anyone else. “And what is your question?” asked the fish-woman. The man put his hands into his coat pockets and then raised his head. His message was horribly muddled, but by his third repetition Hatch as well as the octopus got it: “How does one remove an eel?” Madame Mutandis shook her head sac as if in disdain while two of her tentacles unfurled in the man’s direction. One swiftly wrapped around his throat, lurching him forward, and the other dove into his mouth. A second later, Madame released his throat and drew from between his lips a three-foot-long eel, wriggling wildly in her suctioned grasp. The long arm swept the eel to her beak, and she pierced it at a spot just behind the head, rendering it lifeless. With a free tentacle, she waved forward the next questioner, while, with another, she gently brushed away the man now sighing with relief.

  Hatch came to and was about to step forward, but a woman from behind him wearing a kerchief and carrying a beige pocketbook passed by, already asking, “Where are the good sales?” He wasn’t able to see her face, but the questioner, from her posture and clothing, seemed middle-aged, somewhat younger than himself.

  Clementine repeated the woman’s question for the octopus. “Where are the good sales?” she said.

  “Shoes,” added the woman with the kerchief. “I’m looking for shoes.”

  Madame Mutandis wrapped a tentacle around the woman’s left arm and turned her to face the crowd. Hatch reared back at the sudden sight of a face rotted almost perfectly down the middle, skull showing through on one side. Another of the octopus’s tentacles slid up the woman’s skirt between her legs. With the dexterity of a hand, it drew down the questioner’s underwear, leaving it gathered around her ankles. Then, wriggling like the eel it had removed from the first man’s mouth, the tentacle slithered along her right thigh only to disappear again beneath the skirt.

  Hatch was repulsed and fascinated as the woman trembled and the tentacle wiggled out of sight. She turned her skeletal profile to the crowd, and that bone grin widened with pleasure, grimaced in pain, gaped with passion. Little spasms of sound escaped her open mouth. The crowd methodically applauded until finally the object of the Madame’s attentions screamed and fell to the sand, the long tentacle retracting. The fish-woman moved to the end of her chain and helped the questioner up. “Is that what you were looking for?” she asked. The woman with the beige pocketbook nodded and adjusted her kerchief before floating to the back of the crowd.

  “Ladies and gentlemen?” said the fish-woman.

  Hatch noticed that no one was too ready to step forth after the creature’s last answer, including himself. His mind was racing, trying to connect a search for a shoe sale with the resultant…what? Rape? Or was what he witnessed consensual? He was still befuddled by the spectacle. The gruesome state of the woman’s face wrapped in ecstasy hung like a chandelier of ice on the main floor of his brain. At that moment, he realized he had to escape from Drowned Town. Shifting his glance right and left, he noticed his fellow drownees were still as stone.

  The fish-woman’s chain must have stretched, because she floated over and put h
er hand on his back. Gently, she led him forward. “She can tell you anything,” came Clementine’s voice, a whisper that made him think of Rose and Ned and Will, even the stupid dog with bad ears. He hadn’t felt his feet move, but he was there, standing before the shining perpetual motion of Madame’s eight arms. Her black parrot beak opened, and he thought he heard her laughing.

  “Your question?” asked Clementine, still close by his side.

  “My kid’s stuck at a party that’s getting crazy,” blurted Hatch. “How do I get back to dry land?”

  He heard murmuring from the crowd behind him. One voice said, “No.” Another said, “Asshole.” At first he thought they were predicting the next answer from Madame Mutandis, but then he realized they were referring to him. It dawned on him that wanting to leave Drowned Town was unpopular.

  “Watch the ink,” said Clementine.

  Hatch looked down and saw a dark plume exuding from beneath the octopus. It rose in a mushroom cloud, and then spiraled into a long black string at the top. The end of the string whipped leisurely through the air, drawing more of itself from the cloud until the cloud had vanished and what remained was the phrase “322 Bleeter Street” in perfect, looping script. The address floated there for a moment, Hatch repeating it, before the angel fish veered out of orbit around the fleshy golden sac and dashed through it, dispersing the ink.

  The fish-woman led Hatch away and called, “Next.” He headed back along the alley toward the street, repeating the address under his breath. At the rear of the crowd, which had grown, a woman turned to him as he passed and said, “Leaving town?”

  “My kid…,” Hatch began, but she snickered at him. From somewhere in the last row, he heard, “Jerk,” and “Pussy.” When he reached the street, he realized that the words of the drowned had pushed the street number from his thoughts. He remembered Bleeter Street and said it six times, but the number…. Leaping forward, he assumed the flying position, and flapping his arms, cruised down the street, checking the street signs at corners, and keeping an eye out for sharks. He remembered the address had a three in it, and then for blocks he thought of nothing at all but that last woman’s contempt.

  • FIVE •

  Eventually, he grew too tired to fly and resumed walking, sometimes catching the current and drifting in the flow. He’d seen so many street signs—presidents’ names, different kinds of fish, famous actors and sunken ships, types of clouds, waves, flowers, slugs. None of them was Bleeter. He passed by so many storefronts and apartment steps and not a soul in sight. At one point a storm of tiny starfish fell like rain all over town, littering the streets and filling the awnings.

  Hatch had just stepped out of a weakening current and was moving under his own steam when he noticed a phone booth wedged into a narrow alley between two stores. Pushing off, he swam to it and squeezed himself into the glass enclosure. As the door closed, a light went on above him. He lifted the receiver, placing it next to his ear. There was a dial tone. He dialed and it rang. Something shifted in his chest and his pulse quickened. Suffering the length of each long ring, he waited for someone to pick up.

  “Hello?” he heard; a voice at a great distance.

  “Rose, it’s me,” he screamed against the water.

  “Hatch,” she said. “I can hardly hear you. Where are you?”

  “I’m stuck in Drowned Town,” he yelled.

  “What do you mean? Where is it?”

  Hatch had a hard time saying it. “I went under, Rose. I’m sunk.”

  There was nothing on the line. He feared he’d lost the connection, but he stayed with it.

  “Jesus, Hatch…What the hell are you doing?”

  “I gave up on the bailing,” he said.

  She groaned. “You shit. How am I supposed to do this alone?”

  “I’m sorry, Rose,” he said. “I don’t know what happened. I love you.”

  He could hear her exhale. “Okay,” she said. “Give me an address. I have to have something to put into MapQuest.”

  “Do you know where I am?” he asked.

  “No, I don’t fucking know where you are. That’s why I need the address.”

  It came to him all at once. “322 Bleeter Street, Drowned Town,” he said. “I’ll meet you there.”

  “It’s going to take a while,” she said.

  “Rose?”

  “What?”

  “I love you,” he said. He listened to the silence on the receiver until he noticed in the reflection of his face in the phone-booth glass a blue spot on his nose and one blooming on his forehead. “Shit,” he said and hung up. “I can take care of that with some ointment when I get back,” he thought. He scratched at the spot on his forehead and blue skin sloughed off. He put his face closer to the glass, and then there came a pounding on the door behind him.

  Turning, he almost screamed at the sight of the half-gone face of the woman who’d been goosed by the octopus. He opened the door and slid past her. Her Jolly Roger profile was none too jolly. As he spoke the words, he surprised himself by doing so—“Do you know where Bleeter Street is?” She jostled him aside in her rush to get to the phone. Before closing the door, she called over her shoulder, “You’re on it.”

  “Things are looking up,” thought Hatch as he retreated. Standing in the middle of the street, he looked up one side and down the other. Only one building, a darkened storefront with a plate-glass window behind which was displayed a single pair of sunglasses on a pedestal, had a street number—621. It came to him that he would have to travel in one direction, try to find another address and see which way the numbers ran. Then, if he found they were increasing, he’d have to turn around and head in the opposite direction, but at least he would know. Thrilled at his sense of purpose, he swept a clump of drifting seaweed out of his way and moved forward. He could be certain Rose would come for him. After thirty years of marriage they’d grown close in subterranean ways.

  Darkness was beginning to fall on Drowned Town. Angle-jawed fish with needle teeth, a perpetual scowl, and sad eyes, came from the alleyways and through open apartment windows, and each had a small phosphorescent jewel dangling from a downward curving stalk that issued from its head. They drifted the shadowy street like fireflies, and although Hatch had still to see another building number, he stopped in his tracks to mark their beautiful effect. It was precisely then that he saw Financial Ruin appear from over the rooftops down the street. Before he could even think to flee, the shark swooped down in his direction.

  Hatch turned, kicked his feet up, and started flapping. As he approached the first corner and was about to turn, he almost collided with someone just stepping out onto Bleeter Street. To his utter confusion, it was a deep-sea diver, a man inside a heavy rubber suit with a glass bubble of a helmet and a giant nautilus shell strapped to his back, which fed air through two arching tubes into his suit. The sudden appearance of the diver wasn’t what made him stop, though. It was the huge gun in his hands with a barbed spear head as wide as a fence post jutting from the barrel. The diver waved Hatch behind him as the shark came into view. It hurtled toward them with a dagger-toothed lunge, a widening cavern, speeding like a runaway train. The diver pulled the trigger. There was a zip of tiny bubbles, and Financial Ruin curled up, thrashing madly with the spear piercing its upper palate and poking out the back of its head. Billows of blood began to spread, staining the watery atmosphere. The man in the suit lowered the gun and approached Hatch.

  “Hurry,” he said, “before the other sharks smell the blood.”

  • SIX •

  Hatch and his savior sat in a carpeted parlor on cushioned chairs facing each other across a low coffee table with a tea service on it. The remarkable fact was that they were both dry, breathing air instead of brine, and speaking in normal tones. When they’d both entered the foyer of the stranger’s building, he had hit a button on the wall. A sheet of steel slid down to cover the street door, and within seconds the sea water began to exit the compartment through a drain in
the floor. Hatch had had to drown into the air and that was much more uncomfortable than simply going under, but after some extended wheezing, choking, and spitting up, he drew in a huge breath with ease. The diver had unscrewed the glass globe that covered his head and held it beneath one arm. “Isaac Munro,” he’d said and nodded.

  Now dressed in a maroon smoking jacket and green pajamas, moccasins on his feet, the silver-haired man with a drooping mustache sipped his tea and held forth on his situation. Hatch, in dry clothes the older man had given him, was willing to listen, almost certain Munro knew the way back to dry land.

  “I’m in Drowned Town, but not of it. Do you understand?” he said.

  Hatch nodded, and noticed what a relief it was to have the pressure of the sea off him.

  Isaac Munro lowered his gaze and said, as if making a confession, “My wife, Rotzy, went under some years ago. There was nothing I could do to prevent it. She came down here, and on the day she left me, I determined I would find the means to follow her and rescue her from Drowned Town. My imagination, fired by the desire to simply hold her again, gave birth to all these many inventions that allow me to keep from getting my feet wet, so to speak.” He chuckled and then made a face as if he were admonishing himself.

  Hatch smiled. “How long have you been looking for her?”

  “Years,” said Munro, placing his teacup on the table.

  “I’m trying to get back. My wife, Rose, is coming for me in the car.”

  “Yes, your old neighbor Bob Gordon told me you might be looking for an out,” said the older man. “I was on the prowl for you when we encountered that cutpurse leviathan.”

  “You know Bob?”

  “He does some legwork for me from time to time.”

  “I saw him at the grocery today.”

  “He has a bizarre fascination with that lobster tank. In any event, your wife won’t make it through, I’m sorry to say. Not with a car.”