John Langan - The Fisherman

My next attempts were no more successful. The drive to and from whatever point on the map I’d selected presented no difficulty. To a certain extent, neither did sitting beside whatever stream or river I’d chosen. Any effort I made to approach the water for purposes of fishing sent me straight to the truck, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. There was no particular emotion associated with it, no upwelling of panic, or terror; my body simply refused to entertain, much less obey, my brain’s commands.

The panic and terror were reserved for my dreams, which would replay and remix the images and actions of that Saturday for years to come. My lost fishing rod in my hands, I reeled in the large fish Marie had called a nymph; only, when I hauled it out of the water this time, its front end encased not a skull, but Dan’s head, his eyes gone, his mouth open in a bloody scream. A traffic light hanging amidst the trees overhead, Marie’s feet rose from the forest floor, her skin peeling off in ribbons and streamers, her hair streaming around her head like water grass. His face rigid with anger, Dan lifted a rock that through some trick of perspective was also the boulder to which the Fisherman was tied and brought it crashing down on my head. The vast eye of the Fisherman’s catch opened, and black water spilled from the great crack of its pupil in a flood. If I slept during the day, in the sunlight, I found the dreams weren’t quite as bad, so I spent much of each night channel surfing and paging through whatever books I’d checked out of the library, trying to keep myself awake until the eastern sky began to forecast the sun’s arrival.

When I wasn’t trapped in terrifying dreams of him, I grieved for Dan; though my grief, as you might expect, was a somewhat complicated affair. I fancied I understood the desperation that had led Dan to Dutchman’s Creek, and the Fisherman, and whatever the exact deal he’d struck with that being. I knew first-hand the exhilaration of finding your dearly departed — or a nearly perfect approximation — waiting for you, and I could appreciate what a motivation Sophie and the boys must have been for Dan. As bad a state as I’d witnessed him in at work — and as he’d confessed himself to be, circling his maelstrom — he must have felt as if he’d been thrown a life-preserver, pulled back from ruin by the very figures whose deaths had spun him towards it.

The problem was, there must have been a moment when Dan had seen Sophie and the boys for what they were, had glimpsed their true faces, if only for a second. He must have realized that, even if these creatures were what remained of his wife and children, they had been changed, transformed by their passage out of this life into something else, something fundamentally different from him. He must have known that he was buying into a scenario that was, on some level, a lie, and he had been willing to sacrifice the reality of friendship, however mundane, in favor of that lie. I reckon I shouldn’t sound as surprised as I’m sure I do; the world’s full of folks who’ve done the same, if not in as dramatic a fashion. It’s just, you think all those hours sitting beside one another, watching the water of this stream or that slide by, waiting for a fish to take our bait, making small talk and occasionally bigger talk — you think all of that would count for something, that the fact of it would weigh against the fantasy that tempted him.

But I guess it didn’t. Not enough, anyway. I missed Dan’s company, and the memory of his end filled me with horror, but no matter how kind or generous my recollections of Dan Drescher were, a certain bitterness flavored them. To be honest, the week Dan’s cousins were around to dispose of his house and possessions, I was nervous they might request a visit with me, which I didn’t see how I could refuse, but which I couldn’t imagine how I could go through with — at least, in a way that didn’t leave them confused and angry. Fortunately, the phone never rang.

The years that unwound after this, I spent trying to occupy myself. Earlier in my life, if you’d asked me how I envisioned spending my retirement, my answer would have centered on Marie, the children I projected us having. Maybe we would drop in on them at their colleges, or tour some distant country, like India, or do one of those stereotypically old-people things, like board a cruise to Alaska. Later, after she was gone, I would have pictured post-employment taken up by fishing, with Dan, once he started to accompany me. Absent Marie, Dan, and fishing, I cast about for things to do. I visited family, met former co-workers from IBM out for a beer and a burger. I saw a lot of Frank Block when his wife left him for their dentist, but those meals were more therapy sessions for him than actual conversations, and they tapered off pretty soon after he took up with one of his neighbors. I did what I could to renew my interest in live music, driving into Huguenot or up to Woodstock to listen to whoever was playing the local clubs. Most of what I heard was earnest, if unexciting, but every now and again, a singer would lean into the mic, draw her fingers down the strings of her guitar, open her mouth, and I would lean forward in my chair, attentive. I hadn’t anticipated my retirement consisting of this much empty time to fill; though I chalked that up to my having entered it at least a decade ahead of schedule, and in pretty good health, too.

As for everything I’d seen, heard, touched — everything I’d learned, or thought I’d learned — on that last fishing trip: most of the time, I didn’t dwell on it. It was there, the great mass of it was always there, wherever I was, whatever I was doing, but short of returning to Dutchman’s Creek to see if I could find my way back to the black ocean, there wasn’t much for me to do about it. On and off, I did a little bit of digging around, opening the family Bible, rereading portions of Genesis and Job , checking books on comparative mythology out of the library, but none of it added up to anything resembling sense. When the internet became widely available, I put it to work interpreting my experience, but the only site that looked as if it might be of use crashed each time I consulted it. The problem was, my desire to know did not exceed my desire to allow sleeping dogs to enjoy their dreams. Could be, if there had been any hope of such information serving a practical purpose, such as easing my nightmares, my sentiments might have been different. But it was hard to conceive how the things I’d witnessed could have been salved by anything I might learn about them, so in the end, I let my investigations, such as they were, stop.

Something similar, a kind of parallel process, returned me to fishing. About three years ago, now, a young family moved into the house next to mine. Father, mother, and two girls, one fifteen, the other ten and every bit the outdoorswoman. Within a day or two of their arrival, I saw the younger girl, Sadie, striking out across her backyard, a fishing rod in one hand, a tacklebox in the other. A quarter-mile or so in back of both our properties, there’s a small stream that descends from Frenchman’s Mountain and winds its way to the Svartkil. I guessed this was Sadie’s destination, and while I wasn’t sure how wise it was for a child her age to go tramping off into the woods on her won, I was more sure how it would appear were her older male neighbor to run after her. I had a pair of binoculars Marie had used for bird watching in its case in the hall closet; I dug them out and used them to keep a discrete eye on Sadie for the couple of hours she spent at the stream.

Later that night, I made sure to be out wheeling my garbage can to the end of the driveway when Sadie’s dad, Oliver, was setting out his trash. I’d already introduced myself to the family, offered what assistance was mine to give should they require it. I called hello to Oliver, asked him how he and his family were settling in. Pretty well, he answered, which gave me the opening I needed to remark that I thought I’d noted one of his daughters with her fishing rod out. He laughed and said I must’ve seen Sadie, on her way to check the stream behind the house. Oh, I said, did he fish, too? Not as much as he used to, Oliver said, but Sadie more than made up for him. His younger girl was obsessed with fishing. Is that so? I said. I used to do a little fishing, myself, from time to time. If he or his daughter had any questions as to what they might catch where, I’d be happy to share what I knew. Oliver thanked me, but with a reserve that suggested maybe I’d overplayed my hand.