Monster

by William Young

I'm sitting on an large chunk of ice in this ice floe staring into the mist. I can't see anywhere, the fog is both thick and wispy, floating around like small effervescent ghosts where it's not too close to me and forming an impenetrable wall just a dozen yards away. The ice chunks around me are small, each the size of a VW Beetle, and they bob up and down with the motion of the water. But it's not cold, which is weird. The chunk of ice beneath me feels like plastic, as if I'm on a sound stage filming a scene for a 1940s disaster epic, only without the camera crew set up nearby. In my hand there's a narrow cylindrical container made of plastic, a straw sticking of the top. Inside is a golden liquid that oozes slowly when I tilt the container.

  I can't remember where I've seen this place before, but I can remember a debate on the quality of the fog: is it as thick as peanut butter or pea soup? I can't hear anybody having this conversation, I can't hear anything but the rhythmic lapping of the water against the edges of the ice chunks and a weird, irregular splashing sound that resembles a forceful "swish."

  I put my hand in the water: it's warm. When I pull my hand back out and touch the ice, the water dripping from my finger tips beads up without melting the ice or freezing to it. I slip into the water and clutch the container to my chest as I kick through the water. I open my eyes and I can see dozens, hundreds, of ice chunks floating above me, all of them separated by channels of water. The water is murky yet translucent, the kind of deep blue you get when a camera crew is trying to let the audience see the action underneath the surface but still trying to give the impression the people in the water can't see very clearly. I can see clearly, but not more than a twenty or thirty feet. I'm almost to the next ice chunk when I feel it in the water, an arrow of terror jetting directly at me from somewhere in the murk. I quickly and pop out of the water and scrabble onto the next section of ice.

  In the water near where I had just been, a dorsal fin streams by, cutting the surface of the water into a thin white foam before it slips beneath the surface. I take a sip on the straw, drawing in so deeply that my cheeks collapse, and am rewarded with a small amount of honey. Just then a splash erupts from the water and a large shark slips onto an ice chunk about ten feet from me. It sits there basking and doesn't seem to notice me.

  I sit on the ice chunk for a long time, staring into the fog and trying to make something out of the misty wraiths that separate from the surface of the water and float into the indistinguishable background. Hours pass. Or minutes. Who knows? The shark is sleeping, so I slip back into the water and swim quickly to the next ice chunk, popping out of the water onto it just seconds after leaving my prior spot. The shark hasn't moved. I have another taste of honey and slip back into the water.

  There's an explosion under the water. I can hear it behind me, a muffled kersplunk that sends fear though every pore in my body. I kick furiously and slip up onto the next ice chunk just as a large gray shape arcs past the spot where I had been only seconds earlier. I take another long draw on the straw for honey. Where did they tell me to take this container? I can't remember. Somewhere.

  The shark pops back out of the water onto a nearby ice chunk and rolls an eye in my direction. It's staring at me as if sizing me up, as if I were different than it expected. Maybe it didn't expect me to have a container of honey. Maybe it wants the honey.

  And then it talks to me in my brain.

  "I only eat seals, you know," it says, it's gills ruffling slightly. "I don't eat people."

  I stare at the shark and say nothing.

  "You don't have to be afraid. You can swim in the water if you want," it says in my head.

  And I'm in the water quickly, kicking and pulling with my free hand for the next ice chunk. I reach out of the water and grab it just as I hear another loud splash. I'm out and on the ice, heaving mightily, as the dorsal fin slices by and sinks beneath the water. I suck more honey and stare into the murk above me. The shark pops onto another ice floe and looks at me as if it were only kidding.

  "Sorry if I scared you," echoes from within my head.

  "I'm not scared," I say quietly. I'm not scared, which is odd. I should be. And where am I taking this honey?

  "Nick, Nick, what are you doing?"

  Nick looked up into the blazing light above and saw Sarah towering above him, her hair tucked behind her ears and her bathrobe drawn tightly around her waist.

  "What do you ... What?" Nick asked. He was on the bathroom floor lying on his back, his legs twisted to the side and jammed against the toilet bowl and the shower tub.

  "Are you sick? Did you throw up?" Sarah asked. She stood tall with her arms folded below her breasts.

  Nick shook his head and fumbled around on the floor. His left foot had fallen asleep and tingled when he put pressure on it.

  "Obviously, you didn't go to work already," she said, her voice sour. "How long have you been in here?"

  Nick swallowed and sat on the edge of the tub. "I don't know."

  Sarah clenched her jaw. "Do you even remember when you came in here?"

  Nick looked up at her but didn't move anything other than his eyes.

  "Well, get out of here. I have to shower. I'm not going to be late for work over this," Sarah said, her posture still tall and angry.

  Nick stood up and went to the kitchen, made coffee, and sat in the living room waiting for Sarah. She strode down the hall in her work clothes and into the kitchen, made a commotion of filling a travel cup with coffee, and returned to the living room. Nick sat up and pulled a throw pillow over his legs. Sarah shook her head once.

  "We're going to have to talk when I get home. This has got to end, Nick," she said, looking into his eyes for a moment and then through the window behind him. "I don't know what the fuck's wrong with you, but I don't want to put up with it any more. There's no goddamn reason for you to drink yourself unconscious every night and then stumble around the apartment in your sleep."

  She fumbled her keys out of a pocket on the blazer she wore and clenched them in her fist. "Just, please, don't do anything until we've talked. We've got to straighten this out. Okay?"

  Nick nodded and watched as Sarah turned and left.

  By noon, Nick had let the answering machine pick up four messages from his editor and one from Cap. He had spent the morning draining a pot of coffee and filling an ashtray as he thought about what would happen at five-thirty when Sarah came back through the door. There was no way to explain this. None. Just after noon, he pulled the unfinished bottle of whiskey from a kitchen cabinet and had a drink. Then another, until the afternoon had transformed his worry into a sense of melancholy. Funny, he thought, how whiskey can erase a day.

  "Well," he said to the empty room as he stubbed out a cigarette. "No use sitting here all day."

  He went to the bedroom and dressed. As he finished tying on his shoes there was a knock on the door. He sat up on the edge of the bed' and scratched his stubble, puzzling over who would be visiting at this time of day.

  "Mordechai, I should have guessed it would be you," Nick said as he pulled the doorway partly open.

  "Listen, Nick, I need to explain something to you," Mordechai said flatly.

  "I told you 'no'," Nick said.

  Mordechai cocked an eyebrow: "You've been drinking, Nick. Are you sure you're alright?"

  "Mordechai, get out of here, I don't have time for this," Nick said. And then Nick saw someone move off to Mordechai's side and he stuck his head part-way into the opening to look. There were two other people there, Officer Claypool and Kara from the bar. "What's going on?"

  "Nick, please, just let us talk to you. You'll understand," Mordechai said.

  Claypool stepped forward as Mordechai stepped sideways. Nick slammed the door shut. A second later, the door shuddered in its frame.

  "Nick, open the door," Mordechai said loudly as the door banged loudly with another thrust from outside.

  "Shit," Nick whispered as he leaned against the door, drunkenly fumbling for the deadbolt knob.

  He was t
oo late. The third try threw the door open and Nick stumbled backward while Claypool tumbled to the floor and struck his head on the coffee table. Mordechai stood on the other side of the threshold for a second and gave Nick a flat, passive look before stepping into the room. Nick ran down the hall and slammed the door to the bedroom shut as he ran around the bed, lifted up the window and floundered through the frame onto the fire escape. He banged his elbow against the iron railing and looked in through the window as Claypool pushed open the door and ran into the bedroom.

  Nick took the fire escape in bounds, praying he wouldn't miss a step, slip to the bottom and crack his skull. At the bottom he took a glance up and saw Claypool struggling through the frame. Nick turned and sprinted across the backyard, the metal fire escape ringing loudly behind him under Claypool's weight as Nick turned down the alley behind his apartment. He glanced over his shoulder quickly as he paused at a cross street for a bus to lumber by and saw Claypool pumping his arms madly as he ran, Kara coming along behind him. The bus whooshed by and Nick was across the street in a full run, his lungs burning and the back of his head throbbing. He tore through backyards and across flower gardens, ignoring the occasional housewife or group of children that stared wide-eyed at him; the cop behind him would soon fill in their imagination with the appropriate answers.

  He burst through a low hedgerow and headed directly for the cemetery gates across the street. Once inside, he dashed for the nearest group of headstones and slid to a stop on the ground, quickly rolling onto his belly and crawling behind a granite tombstone, his head whirling with alcohol accelerated through his system by exertion, the world whirling madly. It was only seconds later when Claypool hurdled the hedges and came to a quick stop in the middle of the street, his head moving in a slow arc as he looked from one side of the street to the other. A moment later Kara rounded a nearby corner and came to a stop alongside Claypool and they began talking quickly as they scanned the area.

  Nick's heart beat loudly in his ears and he sucked the thick saliva from the inside of his cheeks and tried to swallow, afraid to spit. Something had gone wrong somewhere in his dealings with Mordechai, but Nick couldn't figure out how it had come to this, how he ended up on his stomach in a cemetery while a cop searched for him. It couldn't be because of symbionts: Mordechai couldn't have gotten a cop to come to his house for that. Not unless Claypool believed Mordechai's story, which didn't seem to make sense. Claypool had always seemed like a guy with his head on straight. And what about Kara? How did she fit in?

  But it couldn't be the art ring had caught on to him. Not unless they were far more devious than Nick had even imagined, and he hadn't spent too much time imagining what kind of sub-plots they might be capable of running. From his position behind the tombstone, it didn't make too much sense: An international art theft ring concocts a story about beings that live in the human body, employ a seemingly eccentric ex-symphony violinist to use the story to obstruct the reporter's efforts to find out about the story and, just to be sure they're safe, manage to have one of their members seduce him. If that were true, what were they doing to the law enforcement personnel investigating them?

  Nick took deep breaths to calm his breathing and watched as Kara and Claypool split apart and walked in opposite directions. Claypool disappeared behind a house more than a block away while Kara strode quickly down the street and away from him. Nick waited a few more minutes before getting up and quickly walking deeper into the cemetery, pausing to look over his shoulder for a sudden appearance by one of his pursuers. He paused in the middle of the cemetery and sat down to think out a plan. He had to call Sarah and let her know what happened. He had to call Tagget to get some help. He wished he had been more receptive to Mordechai so things might not have arrived at this stage. He wished he were thirty and married and living a normal life in a small home snuggled somewhere in the comfortable suburbs, complaining of rush-hour traffic and inviting married friends over for dinner and Trivial Pursuit on Saturday nights.

  He started back through the cemetery. Twenty minutes had passed and he was sure Mordechai would be gone from his apartment by now. A hand grabbed his shoulder and turned him around quickly and his other shoulder exploded in pain as he crumpled to his knees. Kara stood above him and grimaced as she drew her right hand back into a fist. He lurched forward into her knees and rolled quickly away from her as she stumbled and fell onto her back. Sharp pain erupted on the back of his head as his hair was pulled. He swung his left arm madly, the back of his hand slapping her face loudly. He spun quickly and grabbed her forearm and squeezed tightly to make her release his hair. She did, and kicked him in the side of his chest.

  He crab walked quickly backwards as she jumped to her feet and came toward him. He bumped into a grave marker and rolled away from it onto his feet just as jumped at him. She caught him unevenly, her shoulder brushing past his thigh as she spun by; he punched downward into the small of her back. As she tried to stop, her shoe skidded on the grass and her legs slipped upward into the air. For a moment, she was suspended in the air, arms and legs splayed wide in an X, but soon she fell, her head clipping the edge of a tombstone and she fell to the ground unconscious.

  Nick looked wildly around for Claypool or Mordechai, certain one of them had to be nearby. There was nobody. Nick began running through the cemetery, dodging tombstones and sprinting down the car path toward the cemetery's gates. He slowed as he got to the sidewalk and began a brisk walk down several side streets, quickly looking over his shoulder every dozen steps to see if he was being followed. He found a cab letting an elderly woman out in front of an apartment building, let her pay her fare and slipped into the backseat.

  Nick sat in a bar near Cap's apartment the rest of the afternoon, sipping beers and trying to stay sober while hoping he would get drunk, pass out and awake to find this had been just another dream. There had only been unemployed middle-aged men and retired mill workers in the bar as the day slipped by, and none of them had pried their attention from the baseball game on the televisions at both ends of the bar. His mind had raced for answers all afternoon: repeated calls to Sarah's office and Detective Tagget had gone unanswered. Doubtlessly, both of them had by now called his apartment and his office trying to track him down and were wondering what was going on. At least, he was sure that was what Sarah would have done by now. Tagget, well, that could be a different story.

  After the work day ended, Nick left the bar and walked the few blocks to Cap's apartment, buzzed him and looked over his shoulder. There was nobody there.

  "Well, Nick, you must be in a pretty bad fight with Sarah," Cap said as Nick walked in through the door.

  "Why?" Nick asked.

  "She left a message on my machine telling me to tell you to call your machine. She sounded really pissed. Did she kick you out of the apartment?"

  Nick slumped his shoulders. "Probably. I don't know."

  "What's going on?"

  Nick shook his head. "I wish I could say. She's been pretty pissed at me the last month or so."

  "About getting married and all that?"

  Nick nodded. "Partly. Mostly. I don't know. It's just been tense. She was really pissed off this morning before she left for work."

  "How did you get grass stains all over your pants?" Cap asked, taking a few steps back and looking at Nick. "Are you alright?"

  Nick looked down at his knees and the large green and brown smudges ground into them. "Bad fall."

  Cap shrugged. "You're not drunk, are you?"

  Nick shook his head. "No, but I think I need to be. Things are just way out of control," Nick said as he walked across the room to the phone.

  The message she left for him to retrieve was short and angry. She didn't want to know the reason he had toppled over the coffee table and knocked the mattress off the bed, but she was sure it was because he had spent the afternoon getting drunk and was afraid to be around when she got home. She was also sure he'd show up at Cap's and that he should stay there until she
called him. And then there was this: "Nick, I don't know what's happening to you all of the sudden; you're not the same person you used to be. I think you really need to see someone if you want this relationship to continue. You're drinking too much and you need to get yourself back together."

  Nick hung up the phone and rubbed the tingling in his lower right side. He looked up as Cap loosened his tie.

  "I think it's time to get drunk," Nick said.

  They had sat quietly through the first drink, Cap sipping a beer while Nick tipped large swallows of whiskey into his mouth. Confusion reigned.

  "So, what's going on with you and Sarah?" Cap asked as Nick motioned to the bartender for more drinks.

  Nick shrugged. "I think she's having an affair."

  "Sarah? No way," Cap said. "With who?"

  "Whom," Nick said.

  "Whom, then?"

  "Some painter."

  "You sure about that?"

  Nick shrugged and shook his head. "Not a hundred percent ..*. maybe not even fifty percent. It just seems like it."

  "That's why you're having problems, lately?" Cap said and flipped a few bills onto the bar toward the bartender.

  Nick stared up at the ceiling and shrugged. They said nothing for a while.

  "Can you be touched in a dream?" Nick asked as he slid his empty tumbler across the bar.

  "What do you mean?" Cap asked. "While you're dreaming or in your dream?"

  "Can you feel someone touch you in a dream?"

  Cap shrugged. "No. It's just a dream," Cap said. "I don't think I've ever been touched. It probably has something to do with not being able to die in your own dream. If you do, you're supposedly going to die in your sleep. Being touched probably has something to do with that, like a corollary or something."

  Nick slid some money across the bar when the bartender put a full drink in front of him. He sipped it and pursed his lips.

  "So, what would it mean if you were touched in a dream?"

  "I don't know. Nothing, probably. How would... you feel a touch in a dream? It's all virtual reality in there, only it's super-definition 3-D with color graphics," Cap said. "I don't even think you dream in first person, I think you just get to watch someone who looks like you do what you want them to do, like you're moving a joystick or something."

  Nick swallowed deeply and lit a cigarette. "I was touched when I was about four or five," Nick said, drawing deeply on his cigarette, "by a witch."

  "Huh?"

  Nick nodded. "I was little, I dreamt a witch opened the window to the trailer my family lived in, crawled through the window and knelt beside my bed. I can remember staring at her while pretending my eyes were closed -- I was too scared to open them -- and she reached out and pinched my cheek right here," Nick said and touched his face.

  "You felt yourself get pinched?"

  "Yeah. I got in trouble the next morning because I wet the bed. I was supposed to be over that, that's why I'm sure it was a real pinch ]I felt."

  "Only in a dream?"

  "Yeah."

  "I don't know, man, that was a long time ago. You could be getting things mixed up. Maybe you were remembering being pinched by a person in a witch costume on some Halloween when you were little and you're getting it mixed up with something else from back then," Cap said. "You can't expect to remember anything from when you were that young. It's almost like you didn't exist, then, nobody remembers their childhood very well. And if you really think it was a dream, well, who the fuck knows, then?"

  Nick drew smoke from the cigarette. "Are you saying that the what I remember isn't real?"

  "Yeah, basically."

  "What about yesterday? Doesn't yesterday exist the way I remember it?"

  "Can you remember every second of it? What about all the seconds that so closely resembled other seconds in your life you ignored them, like brushing your teeth or something? Do you remember every time you brushed your teeth, or is your memory just using stock footage of tooth brushing whenever you think about the last time you brushed?" Cap asked and raised his glass for the bartender to see it was empty. "And just because you remember brushing your teeth doesn't mean you did it, either. You've done it so many times you just expect yourself to have done it the night before, even if you can't prove you'd did."

  Nick downed his whiskey and slid the empty glass to the bartender. "So, reality is whatever you think it is at any given moment, unverifiable and forever open for argument?"

  "For argument's sake, yeah," Cap said and shrugged. "Dreams and memories are similar, it's your word against yourself, only it's the presence of other real people who can verify your memories that make them real."

  "And you don't think you can be touched in a dream?"

  Cap took a sip from his freshly arrived beer. "No. Why would your subconscious need to feel something?"

  "But you can touch a paralyzed guy's leg and he won't feel it, even though you're actually touching it. Just because he doesn't feel it doesn't mean his leg's not being touched," Nick said.

  "It does if his eyes are closed."

  Nick swallowed half his whiskey and grimaced.

  TWENTY-SEVEN