John Langan - The Fisherman

Rainer runs in the door. As he’s drawn closer to home, the conviction has been growing in him that whatever has happened to Lottie is the direct result of his experiments the previous night, what he had hinted at to Italo. The look on Clara’s face as he stops, panting, in the kitchen, is confirmation that his recent activity has not gone unnoticed. On hearing that Helen has visited his daughter, Rainer is distraught. Despite Clara’s assertion that the girl has been through enough excitement for one day, and she needs her rest, Rainer insists on seeing her. He swears he’ll be quiet, but when he sees her lying in her bed, still faintly sobbing, a kind of strangled noise forces its way out of his mouth. Clara whispering, “Come back!” he crosses to the bed Lottie usually shares with her sisters and sits down on the edge of it. His daughter does not waken. Rainer places his hand on Lottie’s forehead, and snatches it back, as if he’s been burned. He looks down at the floor, his shoulders sagging, and mutters something Clara can’t hear from her position at the door. Lottie inhales sharply, sniffles, sobs once, twice, and falls quiet. Rainer stands and walks quickly out of the room.

“What is it?” Clara asks when they’ve closed the door. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s sick,” Rainer answers. “That woman — that thing has done something to her.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” Rainer says, “but she has been poisoned.”

“Poisoned?” Clara says.

“Yes,” Rainer says. “Her soul is sick, very sick.”

Clara glares at him, trying to control her frustration. “Her soul,” she says. “So has she really been poisoned, or are you speaking in metaphors?”

“Both,” Rainer says. “That woman has done violence to a part of Lottie we cannot see or touch. But it is a crucial part of her all the same, and the wound to it has sickened the Lottie we can see and touch.”

“Can she be cured?” Clara asks.

“I have given her a blessing,” Rainer says, “which will help a little.”

“Should we send for Reverend Gross?”

“The minister?” Rainer snorts the word. “What does a minister know about any of this? They spend all their days worrying about who might be thinking impure thoughts — who might be thinking at all. You might as well ask Gretchen or Christina for help.”

“Who, then?” Clara asks, “Who is going to help our daughter?” Before Rainer can answer, she adds, “Surely the books say something about this kind of thing? It’s all connected, isn’t it? This maybe- Schwarzkunstler , the dead woman, Lottie’s sickness, they’re like links in the same chain. Understand the one and you will understand the others.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?” Clara says.

“Because it isn’t like links on a chain,” Rainer says. “The relations among these things are more subtle, more complex. It’s like the relations of the sun and the planets, the planets and their moons — it’s like the relations of those moons to the sun.”

“You’re saying it’s beyond you,” Clara says.

Rainer stiffens. “I didn’t say that. I’m among the few men alive who understands even a fraction of it.”

“But not enough,” Clara snaps. “Not enough to put that woman back where she belongs, and not enough to help your daughter.”

“It’s complex,” Rainer says. “Half of what the books tell makes no sense, and the other half is close to madness.”

“Mad as a woman who should be dead poisoning your child?”

“Worse,” Rainer says, “far worse.”

“I don’t care,” Clara says. “If the books can help Lottie, you will find out how and do what has to be done. No excuses. I don’t want you wasting time worrying if this word means ‘a’ or ‘one.’ You should have done this by now, and then none of this would have happened. No more waiting. You act now.”

Although ten years will elapse before Clara relates this conversation to Lottie, she’ll still remember the fury she sees raging in her husband’s eyes. There isn’t much Rainer is proud about any more. In coming to America, he’s had to eat a tableful of humble pie, and he’s learned it goes down best with a smile. He’s accepted his sister-in-law’s snide reproofs in her bakery. He’s accepted his co-workers criticisms of his masonry. He’s even accepted his children’s corrections of his English. Throughout it all, he’s treasured his scholarship as the one place no one dares intrude, the kingdom in which he still reigns. Prior to the start of this mad affair, he managed to steal a few minutes every night with one book or another. Clara pretended not to see his lips moving soundlessly, his finger leaping from word to word, as he delivered an imaginary lecture. Though he’s never voiced any such hope to her, Clara knows that he secretly dreams of finding a position at an American university, re-establishing the career he was forced to abandon. For her to attack him here, the last bastion of his pride and self-respect, is the kind of betrayal of which only someone you love is capable. It’s thin ice to be skating onto, and Clara is aware of her danger. As Rainer struggles to find a reply, she says, “I have sent Gretchen and Christina to stay with the Oliveris. I’m going over to help them. That poor woman already has all she can do with her own children and those others. Help your daughter,” she says, and leaves.

Since Clara isn’t there to see what Rainer does, and since Lottie is unconscious, I can only speculate as to what happens next. No doubt Rainer thought of the perfect reply to Clara’s accusations the second the door closed behind her. You know how that is. Maybe he walked around the kitchen, trying to bring his anger under control. Eventually, though, he fetched his books from wherever he concealed them and spread them out onto the kitchen table. Years ago, when they were in Germany, just before the storm broke over Rainer, Lottie saw one of the books. At the time, she didn’t know what she was looking at. It was only in talking to Reverend Mapple that she stumbled across the memory and finally understood its significance. She was spying on her father, peering through the keyhole in his study door for no other reason than that he’d strictly forbidden her and her sisters to disturb him while he was in it with the door shut. Lottie observed him unlock one of his glass-doored bookcases with a key strung on his watch chain. From the bookcase’s highest shelf, he reached down a tall, narrow volume. Bound between plain gray covers, it was secured with a lock, which Rainer opened with a second key on his watch chain. He sat down at his desk, turning back the book’s cover. Lottie swore the room darkened, as if the air in her father’s study had filled with particles of minute blackness, making it difficult for her to distinguish Rainer. Because of this, she couldn’t say for sure if what she saw next was accurate, but the pages of the book appeared to be giving off a black light, dimming her father’s face. Lottie bolted, ran from what she seemed to be seeing, heedless of Rainer hearing her. For the better part of the week that followed, she kept as much distance between herself and Rainer as reasonably possible. When there was no escape, when she had to embrace him, she had all she could do keeping herself from shuddering at the tiny flakes of blackness she could see clinging to his cheek, like the flecks of shaving foam he missed. For years after, she woke gasping from nightmares in which her father looked up from his desk to show her no face, only a black emptiness.

So I imagine Rainer bathing his eyes in the black light that spills off the pages of those books and clots the very air. A few streets over, Clara makes small talk with Italo and Regina, the three of them doing their combined best to talk around the strangeness squatting in their midst like an enormous toad. Lottie tries to escape from the black ocean, where her dreams have returned her. There’s no giant mouth rising to devour her. There’s only the face of her other-self and that unceasing monologue. Sometimes the speech returns to familiar ground — fantasies of her father’s friend, loathing of her sisters — other times, it ranges over new territory — fantasies of her father himself, loathing of her mother. Lottie has never heard anything like this, but it isn’t the shock of the language her other-self spits out that’s so disturbing. It isn’t even the sheer strangeness of confronting another her. What is truly bad, in a way that pumps fresh meaning into that deflated word, returning to it all the force it possessed when her parents used it on her when she was a child — what is bad is that each vile chapter in the other-Lottie’s fantasy of degradation evokes a response in her beyond simple revulsion. Every ugly assertion makes a part of Lottie jump with recognition. She’s no liar, this blank face. She’s telling the truth, giving voice to impulses Lottie hasn’t wanted to be aware she has. She’s tried to make of her soul a garden, so to speak, but the other-her’s words dig into the soil and overturn it, exposing what is wet and wriggling there to the light of day.