The Drowned Life

by Jeffrey Ford

  “How can I get out?” asked Hatch. “I can’t offer you a lot of money, but something else perhaps.”

  “Perish the thought,” said Munro, waving a hand in the air. “I have an escape hatch back to the surface in case of emergencies. You’re welcome to use it if you’ll just observe some cautionary measures.”

  “Absolutely,” said Hatch and moved to the edge of his chair.

  “I take it you’d like to leave immediately?”

  Both men stood and Hatch followed Munro along a hallway lined with framed photographs that opened into a large space, like an old ballroom, with peeling flowered wallpaper. Crossing the warped wooden floor scratched and littered with, of all things, old leaves and pages of a newspaper, they came to a door. When Munro turned around, Hatch noticed that the older man was holding one of the photos from the hallway wall.

  “Here she is,” said Isaac. “This is Rotzy.”

  Hatch leaned down for a better look at the portrait. He gave only the slightest grunt of surprise and hoped his host hadn’t noticed, but Rotzy was the woman he’d last seen at the phone booth, the half-faced horror who’d been mishandled by Madame Mutandis.

  “You haven’t seen her, have you?” asked Munro.

  Hatch knew he should try to help the old man, but he thought only of escape and didn’t want to complicate things. He sensed the door in front of him was his portal back. “No,” he said.

  Munro nodded resignedly and then reached into the side pocket of his jacket and retrieved an old-fashioned key. He held it in the air, but did not place it in Hatch’s outstretched palm. “Listen carefully,” he said. “You will pass through a series of rooms. Upon entering each room, you must lock the door behind you with this key before opening the next door to exit into the following room. Once you’ve started you can’t turn back. The key works only to open doors forward and lock doors backward. A new door cannot be opened without the previous door being locked. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  Munro placed the key in Hatch’s hand. “Then be on your way and Godspeed. Kiss the sky for me when you arrive.”

  “I will.”

  Munro opened the door and Hatch stepped through. The door closed and he locked it behind him. He crossed the room in a hurry, unlocked the next door and then, passing through, locked it behind him. This process went on for twenty minutes before Hatch noticed that it took fewer and fewer steps to traverse each succeeding room to the next door. One of the rooms had a window, and he paused to look out on some watery side street falling into night. The loneliness of the scene spurred him forward. In the following room he had to duck down so as not to skin his head against the ceiling. He locked its door and moved forward into a room where he had to duck even lower.

  Eventually, he was forced to crawl from room to room, and there wasn’t much space for turning around to lock the door behind him. As each door swept open before him, he thought he might see the sky or feel a breeze in his face. There was always another door, but there was also hope. That is, until he entered a compartment so small, he couldn’t turn around to use the key but had to do it with his hands behind his back, his chin pressed against his chest. “This has got to be the last one,” he thought, unsure if he could squeeze his shoulders through the next opening. Before he could insert the key into the lock on the tiny door before him, a steel plate fell and blocked access to it. He heard a swoosh and a bang behind him and knew another metal plate had covered the door going back.

  “How are you doing, Mr. Hatch?” he heard Munro’s voice say.

  By dipping one shoulder Hatch was able to turn his head and see a speaker built into the wall. “How do I get through these last rooms?” he yelled. “They’re too small and metal guards have fallen in front of the doors.”

  “That’s the point,” called Munro. “You don’t. You, my friend, are trapped, and will remain trapped forever in that tight uncomfortable place.”

  “What are you talking about? Why?” Hatch was frantic. He tried to lunge his body against the walls but there was nowhere for it to go.

  “My wife, Rotzy. You know how she went under? What sank her? She was ill, Mr. Hatch. She was seriously ill but her health insurance denied her coverage. You, Mr. Hatch, personally said no.”

  This time what flared before Hatch’s inner eye was not his life, but all the many pleading, frustrated, angry voices that had traveled in one of his ears and out the other in his service to the HMO. “I’m not responsible” was all he could think to say in his defense.

  “My wife used to tell me, ‘Isaac, we’re all responsible.’ Now you can wait, as she waited for relief, for what was rightly due her. You’ll wait forever, Hatch.”

  There was a period where he struggled. He couldn’t tell how long it lasted, but nothing came of it, so he closed his eyes, made his breathing more steady and shallow, and went into his brain, across the first floor to the basement door. He opened it and could smell the scent of the dark wood wafting up the steps. Locking the door behind him, he descended into the dark.

  • SEVEN •

  The woods were frightening, but he’d take anything over the claustrophobia of Munro’s trap. Each dim lightbulb he came to was a godsend, and he put his hands up to it for the little warmth it offered against the wind. He noticed that strange creatures prowled around the bulbs like antelopes around waterholes. They darted behind the trees, spying on him, pale specters whose faces were masks made of bone. He was sure that one was his cousin Martin, a malevolent boy who’d cut the head off a kitten. He’d not seen him in more than thirty years. He also spotted his mother-in-law, who was his mother-in-law with no hair and short tusks. She grunted orders to him from the shadows. He kept moving and tried to ignore them.

  When Hatch couldn’t walk any farther, he came to a clearing in the forest. There, in the middle of nowhere, in the basement of his brain, sat twenty yards of street with a brownstone situated behind a wide sidewalk. There were steps leading up to twin doors and an electric light glowed next to the entrance. As he drew near, he could make out the address in brass numerals at the base of the steps—322.

  He stumbled over to the bottom step and dropped down onto it. Hatch leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his hands covering his face. He tried to weep till his eyes closed out of exhaustion. What seemed a second later, he heard a car horn and looked up.

  “There’s no crying in baseball, asshole,” said Rose. She was leaning her head out the driver’s side window of their SUV. There was a light on in the car and he could see both their sons were in the backseat, pointing at him.

  “How’d you find me?” he asked.

  “The Internet,” said Rose. “Will showed me MapQuest has this new feature where you don’t need the address anymore, just a person’s name, and it gives you directions to wherever they are in the continental United States.”

  “Oh my God,” he said and walked toward Rose to give her a hug.

  “Not now Barnacle Bill, there’re some pale creeps coming this way. We just passed them and one lunged for the car. Get in.”

  Hatch got in the front passenger seat and turned toward his sons. He wanted to hug them but they motioned for him to hurry and shut the door. As soon as he did, Rose pulled away from the curb.

  “So, Hatch, you went under?” asked his older son, Will.

  Hatch wished he could explain but couldn’t find the words.

  “What a pile,” said Ned.

  “Yeah,” said Will.

  “Don’t do it again, Hatch,” said Rose. “Next time we’re not coming for you.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I love you all.”

  Rose wasn’t one to admonish more than once. She turned on the radio and changed the subject. “We had the directions, but they were a bitch to follow. At one point I had to cut across two lanes of traffic in the middle of the Holland Tunnel and take a left down a side tunnel that for more than a mile was the pitchest pitch-black.”

  “Listen to this, Hatch,”
said Ned and leaned into the front seat to turn up the radio.

  “Oh, they’ve been playing this all day,” said Rose. “This young woman soldier was captured by insurgents and they made a video of them cutting her head off.”

  “On the radio, you only get the screams, though,” said Will. “Check it out.”

  The sound, at first, was like from a musical instrument, and then it became human—steady, piercing shrieks in desperate bursts that ended in the gurgle of someone going under.

  Rose changed the channel and the screams came from the new station. She hit the button again and still the same screaming. Hatch turned to look at his family. Their eyes were slightly droopy and they were very pale. Their shoulders were somehow out of whack and their grins were vacant. Rose had a big bump on her forehead and a rash across her neck.

  “Watch for the sign for the Holland Tunnel,” she said amid the dying soldier’s screams as they drove on into the dark. Hatch kept careful watch, knowing they’d never find it.

  ARIADNE’S MOTHER

  Her name was Ariadne. She was in her early twenties, and she sat, tilted in her wheelchair, her arms folded up at the elbows and wrists like she was a praying mantis. No matter what happened, she wore an expression of surprise—mouth an “O,” eyes wide, nostrils flaring for air. There was a white diaper on the tray of her chair to be used to wipe the drool from her chin. When I first met her, I asked her to tell me about her writing. A short time passed and then there came a series of breathy and brief high-pitched squeals like some kind of machine giving a warning. I couldn’t make out a word. Her mother, who came with her every week to class, always spoke for her. She told me that Ariadne had been a brilliant writer in high school, had gotten a scholarship to college, and then took ill. I never found out what the disease was. The mother proposed that they sit in the back of the classroom, that the girl dictate to her the essays and stories, and that she would type them for her onto the computer. What could I say? Whenever the girl made noises, I tried to parse out the words but never could. Not so the mother—she nodded at Ariadne’s bird song, typing like mad. And the papers, when they were done, were ingenious and grammatically perfect. One was a languorous ghost story in which the spirits of the departed, a mother and daughter, lived a quiet life in an abandoned mansion. By mid-semester, I was certain the girl wasn’t actually speaking at all.

  THE NIGHT WHISKEY

  All summer long, on Wednesday and Friday evenings after checking out from my job at the gas station, I practiced with old man Witzer looking over my shoulder. When I’d send a dummy toppling perfectly onto the pile of mattresses in the bed of his pickup, he’d wheeze like it was his last breath (I think he was laughing), and pat me on the back, but when one fell awkwardly or hit the metal side of the truck bed or went really awry and ended sprawled on the ground, he’d spit tobacco and say either one of two things: “That there’s a cracked melon” or “Get me a wet-vac.” He was a patient teacher, never rushed, never raising his voice or showing the least exasperation in the face of my errors. After we’d felled the last of the eight dummies we’d earlier placed in the lower branches of the trees at the edge of town, he’d open a little cooler he kept in the cab of his truck and fetch two beers, one for himself and one for me. “You did good today, boy,” he’d say, no matter if I did or not, and we’d sit in the truck with the windows open, pretty much in silence, and watch the fireflies signal in the gathering dark.

  As the old man had said, “There’s an art to dropping drunks.” The main tools of the trade were a set of three long bamboo poles—a ten-foot, a fifteen-foot, and a twenty-foot. Each had a rubber ball attached to one end that was wrapped in chamois cloth and tied tight with a leather lanyard. These poles were called prods. Choosing the right prod after considering how high the branches were in which the drunk was nestled…crucial. Too short a one would cause you to go on tiptoes and lose accuracy, while the excess length of too long a one would get in the way and throw you off balance. The first step was always to take a few minutes and carefully assess the situation. You had to ask yourself, “How might this body fall if I were to prod the shoulders first, or the back, or the left leg?” The old man had taught me that generally there was a kind of physics to it but that sometimes intuition had to override logic. “Don’t think of them as falling but think of them as flying,” said Witzer, and only when I was actually out under the trees and trying to hit the mark in the center of the pickup bed did I know what he meant. “You ultimately want them to fall, turn in the air, and land flat on the back,” he’d told me. “That’s a ten-pointer.” There were other important aspects of the job as well. The positioning of the truck was critical as was the manner with which you woke them after they had safely landed. Calling them back by shouting in their ears would leave them dazed for a week, but, as the natives had done, breaking a thin twig a few inches from the ear worked like a charm—a gentle reminder that life was waiting to be lived.

  When his long-time fellow harvester, Mr. Bo Elliott, passed on, the town council had left it to Witzer to find a replacement. It had been his determination to pick someone young, and so he came to the high school and carefully observed each of us fifteen students in the graduating class. It was a wonder he could see anything through the thick, scratched lenses of his glasses and those perpetually squinted eyes, but after long deliberation, which involved the rubbing of his stubbled chin and the scratching of his fallow scalp, he singled me out for the honor. An honor it was, too, as he’d told me, “You know that because you don’t get paid anything for it.” He assured me that I had the talent hidden inside of me, that he’d seen it like an aura of pink light, and that he’d help me develop it over the summer. To be an apprentice in the Drunk Harvest was a kind of exalted position for one as young as me, and it brought me some special credit with my friends and neighbors, because it meant that I was being initiated into an ancient tradition that went back further than the time when our ancestors settled that remote piece of country. My father beamed with pride, my mother got teary-eyed, my girlfriend, Darlene, let me get to third base and partway home.

  Our town was one of those places you pass but never stop at while on the way to a vacation in some national park; out in the sticks, up in the mountains—places where the population is rendered in three figures on a board by the side of the road; the first numeral no more than a four and the last with a hand-painted slash through it and replaced with one of lesser value beneath. The people in our town were pretty much like people everywhere, only the remoteness of the locale had insulated us against the relentless tide of change and the judgment of the wider world. We had radios and televisions and telephones, and as these things came in, what they promised lured a few of our number away. But for those who stayed in Gatchfield, progress moved like a tortoise dragging a ball and chain. The old ways hung on with more tenacity than Relletta Clome, who was 110 years old and had died and been revived by Dr. Kvench eight times in ten years. We had our little ways and customs that were like the exotic beasts of Tasmania, isolated in their evolution to become completely singular. The strangest of these traditions was the Drunk Harvest.

  The Harvest centered on an odd little berry that, as far as I know, grows nowhere else in the world. The natives had called it vachimi atatsi, but because of its shiny black hue and the nature of its growth, the settlers had renamed it the deathberry. It didn’t grow in the meadows or bogs as do blueberries and cranberries, no, this berry grew only out of the partially decayed carcasses of animals left to lie where they’d fallen. If you were out hunting in the woods and you came across say, a dead deer, which had not been touched by coyotes or wolves, you could be certain that the deceased creature would eventually sprout a small hedge from its rotted gut before autumn and that the long thin branches would be thick with juicy black berries. Predators knew somehow that these fallen beasts had the seeds of the deathberry bush within them, because although it went against their nature not to devour fresh meat, they wouldn’t go near
these particular carcasses. It wasn’t just wild creatures either; even livestock that died in the field and was left untouched could be counted on to serve as host for the parasitic plant. Instances of this weren’t common but I’d seen it firsthand a couple of times in my youth—a rotting body, head maybe already turning to skull, and out of the belly like a green explosion, a wild spray of long thin branches tipped with atoms of black like tiny marbles, bobbing in the breeze. It was a frightening sight to behold for the first time, and as I overheard Lester Bildab, a man who foraged for the deathberry, tell my father once, “No matter how many times I see it, I still get a little chill in the backbone.”

  Lester and his son, a dim-witted boy in my class at school, Lester II, would head out at the start of each August across the fields and through the woods and swamps searching for fallen creatures hosting the hideous flora. Bildab had learned from his father about gathering the fruit, as Bildab’s father had learned from his father, and so on all the way back to the settlers and the natives from whom they’d learned.

  You can’t eat the berries; they’ll make you violently ill. But you can ferment them and make a drink, like a thick black brandy, that had come to be called Night Whiskey and supposedly had the sweetest taste on earth. I didn’t know the process, as only a select few did, but from berry to glass I knew it took about a month. Lester and his son would gather all the berries they could find and usually returned from their foraging with three good-size grocery sacks full. Then they’d take them over to the Blind Ghost Bar and Grill and sell them to Mr. and Mrs. Bocean, who knew the process for making the liquor and kept the recipe in a little safe with a combination lock. The recipe had been given to our town forefathers as a gift by the natives, who, two years after giving it, with no provocation and having gotten along peacefully with the settlers for more than a decade, vanished without a trace, leaving behind an empty village on an island out in the swamp…or so the story goes.