Elizabeth Hand - Generation Loss

I nodded. “I saw something back there by Gryffin’s place. In those woods leading up to the house, those pine trees? There was an animal up in one of them.”

“Did it look like Robert?”

“No. Really. I never saw anything like it before. It was about this big—” I held out my hands. “Dark brown fur. Kind of a long fuzzy tail. It was fierce . I thought it was going to attack me. It growled, and I could see its teeth, these white sharp teeth—it was mean.”

Suze frowned. “That’s weird.”

“I think it was a fisher. Toby told me about them—the ones that eat all the cats.”

“A fisher?” She slid my Jack Daniel’s into a bag and handed it to me. “If you were over in Burnt Harbor, yeah. But not here. Fishers never leave the mainland.”

“Toby said they can swim.”

“Technically, maybe. But they’re pretty big, and their fur is so heavy that if they swim, it just weighs them down. I know, ‘cause one of my uncles used to trap them. You take a rooster and cut its throat and hang it from a tree, alongside a steel trap. It’s illegal now. My uncle, he once saw one on the ground and it jumped, like, twenty feet. From here—”

She pointed to a far corner of the room. “—to there. Bang, like that. Jumped right into the tree. Those things are vicious as a wolverine. What you saw, that was probably somebody’s cat. Was it gray? Maybe it was Smoky.”

“This was big,” I said. “And it wasn’t a cat.”

“Well, maybe. But I doubt it was a fisher. I’ve been here my whole life, and I never heard of a fisher here. There’s nothing for them to eat—no rabbits or porcupines or anything.”

“That’s why it ate Smoky.” I picked up my bag. I was getting pissed off; I definitely needed something to slow me down a little. “Is Toby around? I need to talk to him about a ride back to Burnt Harbor.”

“He’s probably still in bed.” She peered down at the harbor. “Yeah, his boat’s there. You know where he lives, right? Just go round back and knock real loud. He’ll be bummed about Aphrodite—not for her, for Gryff. They’re good buds.”

I stuck the bourbon into my pocket and said, “Gryffin was telling me about that guy Denny Ahearn. He seems kind of weird. To me, anyway. Like, if this was the United States of America, Homeland Security or someone would be asking him questions about this girl, and not me.”

“Denny?” Suze smiled. “Nah. He’s pretty harmless.”

“Do you know him?”

“Sure. I used to hang out with all those guys when I was sixteen, seventeen. Denny was really charismatic. Plus, he always had the best dope.”

She laughed. “He was fucking crazy! The mirror game, that was one of his big things. When you were tripping. Some people totally freaked over that shit. I always thought it was fun. For a while, anyway. Then some sad shit came down, Denny’s girlfriend died. He never really got over that.”

“How’d she die?”

“Car accident.”

The door banged open and the same woman with two small kids barged in. “Listen,” I said quickly to Suze. “You have a phone I could borrow? It’s long distance, but I really need to make a call down to New York. Here—”

I started to pull out my wallet, but Suze stopped me.

“Don’t worry about it.” The kids started smacking the ice-cream cooler as Suze handed me a phone. “Here, go upstairs, it’s quieter.”

I hurried up to the second floor and dialed Phil’s cell phone. It rang, I heard the noise of downtown street traffic, then his voice.

“Phil Cohen Enterprises.”

“Phil, it’s Cass—”

“Hey hey! Cassandra Android! How’s it going up there?”

“Not good.” I paced the room nervously. “You sent me here. Why?”

“Why?” His voice edged up defensively. “Whaddya mean, Cassie?”

“I mean you told me that Aphrodite wanted me—that she specifically wanted me to come up here to interview her. Then I got here and she says she never fucking heard of me. Or you.”

“No shit.” The background noise grew louder. Phil shouted at someone, then said, “Well jeez, Cass, I—”

“Don’t fuck with me, Phil.” I leaned against the wall and wiped sweat from my cheeks. “She had no clue about any of this. She never even knew there was an interview.”

“I—”

“You said there was some guy up here you knew.”

Silence. Car engines droned into the bass thump of a radio.

“Phil! Who was it? ”

“The guy I used to do business with,” he said at last. “Guy named Denny Ahearn.”

“Denny Ahearn.” I stared across the room at the shelf with the bowling trophy and the turtle shell. “Did you ever talk to her at all? Aphrodite?”

Another silence.

Then, “No. I mean, I couldn’t, I didn’t have her number or anything. I emailed Denny, we went back and forth a few times. We started batting around names of people who might go up there to see her, and I mentioned I knew you, and suddenly he got all hepped up. So I figured I’d do you a favor.”

“Goddam it, Phil! Why’d you fucking lie to me?”

“Listen, Cassie.” He sounded aggrieved. “I woulda suggested you anyway—”

“I don’t care about that! I don’t know who this guy is! Why did he ask for me? What did he say?”

Phil sighed. “Well, okay, let me think. He said he liked your book—he said you were very simpatico. I guess he’s an artist or something these days. And he knows her—Aphrodite. He just wanted you, that’s all. I thought he was like doing you a favor, huh? He said he wanted you to see his work. He said he thought you’d see eye to eye.”

Eye to eye .

“Fuck,” I said. I hung up.

“Hey, Cass?” I turned and saw Suze’s face framed in the doorway. “You okay? I need the phone.”

“Yeah, sure.” I handed it to her. “I’ll be right down.”

She left. I dug out the Jack Daniel’s and drank until my hands steadied, walked over and picked up the turtle shell.

S.P.O.T. That crudely carved eye.

And, on the other side, the letters ICU.

Not a set of initials, not the intensive care unit.

“I see you too,” I whispered, and put it back.

I went downstairs. Suze was alone again.

“Why doesn’t he go off that island?” I knew I sounded wired and drunk, but I didn’t care. “Denny. And how would anyone know if he did or not?”

Suze stared at me curiously. “I hardly see him. Once or twice a year, he’ll come over to get supplies. Toby always brings him. Toby says he’s gotten kind of, I dunno, just weird, I guess. Like an agoraphobe. And he and Aphrodite, they kind of hate each other. So in a place as small as this, you just keep your distance, you know? But I don’t think Denny could hurt someone.”

“I have one word for you, Suze: Unabomber.”

“Really, that’s not Denny.” She sounded pissed off. “He’s more like—”

“Charles Manson? John Wayne Gacy?”

“No! He’s more—well, spiritual. The commune, it wasn’t just smoking dope and stuff. After it busted up, I was, what, sixteen? Denny organized this guerrilla street theater, we’d go around and protest. Down to Bath Iron Works where they built those battleships; we threw pig blood on them and got on TV. After that Denny really got into the mystical shit. He was reading all these books, eating a lot of acid. You’re about my age, you remember what it was like, right? He was playing the mirror game once, he thought he had a vision or something. Like a vision quest.”

She turned to shove a carton of cigarettes onto a shelf. “So then we all had to get spirit guides. Totem animals. We made these beautiful masks out of papier-mâché—they were amazing. I still have mine, up there—”