John Langan - The Fisherman

Then she opened her eyes. I whimpered, that’s the only word for it, this high-pitched noise that forced its way out of my mouth. Marie’s eyes, her warm, brown eyes, which had held so much of passion and kindness, were gone, replaced by flat, yellow-gold disks, by the dull dead eyes of a fish. As she stared impassively up at me, I was suddenly seized by the conviction that, if I were to haul her out of the raging stream, I would find the rest of her similarly transformed, her lovely body given over to rows of slime-crusted scales and sharp fins. My arms and legs, and everything in between, were shaking so badly it was all I could do to keep standing where I was.

Her lips parted, and Marie spoke. When she did, it was faint, as if she were simultaneously calling to me from across a vast distance and whispering in my ear. “Abe,” she said, in what I recognized straight away as her voice, but her voice with a difference, as if it were coming from a throat that wasn’t used to it anymore.

I nodded to her, my tongue dumb in my mouth, and she went on in that same distant-close way. “He’s a fisherman, too.” Her words were slurred, from the hook piercing her lip.

Again, I nodded, unsure whom she was referring to. Dan?

“Some streams run deep,” Marie said.

My lips trembling, I mumbled, “M-M-Marie?”

“Deep and dark,” she said.

“Honey?” I said.

“He waits,” she went on.

“Who?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

I couldn’t understand her answer, a word the hook tugging her lip wouldn’t let her get her mouth around. The word, or name, collapsed in the saying, a mess of syllables that I thought sounded German, or Dutch. “There fissure”? That was what it sounded like. Before I could ask her to repeat it, Marie said, “What’s lost is lost, Abe.”

“The who?” I said, still trying to piece together those syllables.

“What’s lost is lost,” Marie said. “What’s lost is lost.”

From the spot where my lure pierced her lip, a deep gash raced up her face into her hair, splitting her skin. As I watched, horrified, the edges of it peeled away from each other, revealing something shining and scaled underneath. I cried out, stumbling backwards, and without a backward glance Marie dove beneath the rushing white stream. The fishing line, locked in place, tightened, pulling me headlong toward the water, my hands unable to release their grip on the rod. A half-dozen lurching steps, and I was at the water’s edge, which bubbled and danced like a thing alive. I knew, with dream-certainty, that under no circumstances did I want to venture any nearer that stream. I was dizzy with fear, of Marie, of whatever was in there with her, of the very water itself, which chuckled and laughed at my desperate struggle to avoid it. I fought furiously, digging my heels into the sand as I was dragged forward. For a moment, the line relaxed and, fool that I am, so did I. This meant that when the next big tug came, I flew headlong into the white water and open mouths full of white teeth, rows and rows of white teeth in white water, and beyond them—

Sitting bolt upright on the living room couch, I woke, mouth dry, heart pounding.

With the benefit of hindsight, I find it difficult not to see that dream as an omen. To be honest, I can’t see now how I could have taken it for anything else. That’s the problem with telling stories, though, isn’t it? After the dust has settled, when you sit down to piece together what happened, and maybe more importantly how it happened, so you might have some hope of knowing why it happened, there are moments, like the dream, that forecast subsequent events with such accuracy you wonder how you possibly could have been deaf to their message. Thing is, it’s only once what they were anticipating has come to pass that you’re able to recognize their significance. The morning after I’d had that dream, while the sight of that raging stream, Marie’s face opening up, were more than fresh in my memory, if you’d asked me what I thought the dream signified, I imagine I would’ve said it was expressing my fear that I’d replaced my wife with fishing. I reckon we’ve all seen enough pop psychologists on this TV program or that for a lot of us to be able to offer convincing interpretations of their dreams. Had you asked me if I thought the dream a caution, a prophecy like you read about in the Bible, I’d most likely have given you one of the looks we give to characters we’re pretty sure are pulling our legs and asked you what you’d been drinking. After all, even if I were the kind of person who believes that dreams can tap into what’s waiting for us down the road, what was there for me to fear in fishing?

On top of that, the dream never recurred, and isn’t that what those psychic warnings are supposed to do, don’t they repeat themselves to prove their seriousness? I suppose it remained sufficiently clear in my memory not to need repeating; if I pondered it at all, however, it was as a curiosity of my own psyche, a peculiarity my mind had thrown up from its depths. I’d been a bit lax in visiting Marie’s grave that winter. I assumed the dream had more to do with that than any real place, or person. Nor, for what it’s worth, did I connect my dream of Marie with her visits to me while I was fishing; the thought never even occurred to me.

Dan’s appearance, his state of mind, that Sunday night were the first signs of a change that overtook him during the next couple of months. To this day, I’m not sure exactly what triggered it, but his grief, kept at bay so long, found a way to tunnel under Dan’s defenses, and, while he was otherwise distracted, seized the moment and fell on him, burying its dirty teeth deep in his gut and refusing to let go. Dan wore the same suit and tie for days at a time. A scraggly beard surged and ebbed across his face. His hair, longer still, frequently jutted out in strange configurations. His hours at work became erratic, to say the least. Some mornings he wouldn’t show up until nine or nine thirty; others, he’d be at his desk by quarter to seven. Even on those days he was in well ahead of the rest of us, he’d spend most of his time staring at the screen of the computer he hadn’t switched on yet. His stare, that look that I had felt wanted to pierce through you, worsened to the point it was next to impossible to hold any kind of conversation with him. He didn’t appear to be listening to anything you were saying, just boring into you with those eyes that had been turned all the way up, blowtorch bright. He never left work later than the rest of us, and it wasn’t unusual to walk by his office at the end of the day and find it empty.

Before long, his job was in serious jeopardy. He’d been team leader on a pair of important projects, one of which demoted him, while the other dropped him outright. The company had changed. This was not, as management had started trumpeting, your father’s IBM, which I guess meant it wasn’t my IBM. The notion of a corporate family that took care of its own and in so doing earned their loyalty was on the way out, evicted by simple greed. What this meant practically speaking was that Dan could not be assured of the same understanding and indulgence I had received more than a decade prior. That he didn’t much care if he kept his job or not at this moment didn’t mean he wouldn’t feel differently in the future, and I did my best to make him see this. He wasn’t much interested in what I had to say. His grief had taken him far into a country whose borders are all most folks ever see, and from where he was, caught up in that dark land’s customs and concerns, what I was worrying over sounded so foreign I might as well have been speaking another language.

If you’d asked me, after my second try at speaking to him, whether I thought Dan would be around when fishing season started that spring, I’d have told you flat-out, “No.” Frank Block had been unceremoniously let go the previous month, escorted from the building by a pair of security goons when he started to yell that this wasn’t right, he deserved better than this. My own manager, a young fellow whose chief qualification for his position must have been his smarminess, since it was the only quality he possessed in abundance — my manager had taken to dropping none-too-subtle hints that the company was offering exceedingly generous severance packages to those who were wise enough to take them. It wasn’t just the night of the long knives. Up and down the corridors of our building, it was days and weeks and months of management given leave to slice down to the bone and keep going. And in the midst of this carnage, here was Dan, laying his head on the chopping block and holding out the axe for anyone who was interested. I’d have been wrong in my prediction, though. Somehow, Dan held onto his job. No matter what shape he was in, Dan was a bright guy — graduated near top of his class at M.I.T. — and I guess he must have contributed enough for it to have been worth more to keep him on board than it was to throw him to the sharks.