John Langan - The Fisherman

“I’ll let you in on a little secret, too. Looking at the light doesn’t help in the slightest. I don’t think, Well, at least some good has come out of this terrible tragedy . The intersection’s just another place to be. I can’t escape it. I can’t escape any of it. Myself am hell, right? So I might as well be at the spot where I took the plunge, so to speak, the place where I was cast out. I do feel calmer there. Strange, huh? I have the strangest thoughts lately. I swear I do. When I look at things — when I look at people — I think, None of it’s real. It’s all just a mask, like those papier-mâché masks we made for one of our school plays when I was a kid. What play was that? It seems like it must have been Alice in Wonderland , but I can’t remember. I wish I could remember that play. I wish I could. All a mask, Abe, and the million-dollar question is, What’s underneath the mask? If I could break through the mask, if I could make a fist and punch a hole in it,” his hand slammed the table, rattling the dishes, “what would I find? Just flesh? Or would there be something more? Would I find those things the minister talked about at the funerals? You weren’t there, were you? I guess we didn’t know each other so well then. Beauty, the minister said, the three of them were in a place of beauty, beauty beyond our ability to know. Joy, too, it’s a place of unending joy. If I could punch a hole through the mask, would I see beauty and joy? You would think, either it’s got to be heaven, because that’s what we’re talking about, right? Or it’s what it is, the mask is everything. But I’ll tell you, when I’m sitting at that intersection, watching the light go through its cycles, I think of other — other possibilities. Maybe whoever, or whatever, is running the show isn’t so nice. Maybe he’s evil, or mad, or bored, disinterested. Maybe we’ve got everything completely wrong, everything, and if we could look through the mask, what we’d see would destroy us. You ever feel that way?”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“That’s all right,” Dan said and, leaning back in his chair, promptly fell asleep.

Recalling Dan’s words now, it’s hard for me not to shudder, to wonder, How did he know? They say extreme states of mind can push you to — a visionary state, I guess you’d call it. Could be that’s what happened to him. Then again, I have to remind myself that what transpired that day at Dutchman’s Creek: what we heard; what we saw; God help me, what we touched; that all of that doesn’t necessarily bear out Dan’s words. It feels a lot like special pleading to say that, though. Actually, it feels more like flat-out, Pollyanna, pie-in-the-sky denial. But there are some things, no matter if they’re true, you can’t live with them. You have to refuse them. You turn your eyes away from whatever’s squatting right there in front of you and not only pretend it isn’t there now, but that you never saw it in the first place. You do so because your soul is a frail thing that can’t stand the blast-furnace heat of revelation, and truth be damned. What else can a body do?

Since he wasn’t in any shape to drive home, I gave Dan my bed and I took the couch. It was no fun trying to get him out of that chair, maneuver him through the living room and down the hall, and guide him into the bedroom. He kept wanting to stop and lie down, and it’s no small task convincing a big man drunk on wine and exhaustion not to decamp in the middle of the hallway. Despite everything Dan had said, I had no trouble sleeping. Later that night — technically speaking, it must have been the next morning — I had a nightmare, the first since Marie died. As a rule, my dreams had been of the mundane, this-is-what-I-did-today variety. Seldom, if ever, did my mind conjure any strange, exotic dreams, any dream-like dreams. I’ve always been this way. Truth to tell, I used to sort of envy those folks who dreamed they were on great adventures, or having passionate love affairs, or dining with famous people. To me, those dreams seemed like starring in your own private movie. This dream was no happy Hollywood extravaganza. It was the kind of film you want to turn off but can’t, because switching it off would mean standing up from the couch and crossing the living room, and you’re literally too scared to do that. It seems like a tremendous risk. But that’s not all, no. You’re fascinated, too. So you sit there, unable to stop watching, knowing full well you’ll regret your failure to change the channel later, when you’ve pulled the bedclothes up over your head and are praying that the creak you heard outside the bedroom door was the house settling, not a footstep.

In the dream, I was fishing. I want to say it started out normally enough, except that isn’t true. I was standing beside this narrow, winding, fast-moving stream. When I say it was fast-moving, I mean the water was frothing, the way it does after a torrential storm. I couldn’t see into it at all. To my left, the stream descended from a steep hill. To my right, it foamed on level for a dozen yards before dropping away. In front of me, across the stream, the other shore rose steeply to a dense line of evergreens. Behind me, the ground also sloped up to a heavy cluster of trees. Overhead, the sky was pure blue, the sun dazzling. Despite the sunlight, the trees across from me — not only the spaces between them, but the trees themselves — were dark, not simply in shadow, but truly dark, as if they’d been shaped out of night itself. Standing there at the edge of that raging stream, rod in hands, line cast, I could not take my eyes from those trees, those dark trees, even though looking at them gave me the most intense vertigo, as if in looking over at them I were looking down a great distance, into a deep chasm. What was worse, I could feel myself being watched, could feel the eyes of things at the edge of the trees, and of things much farther in, which I somehow knew were bigger, much bigger — I say I could feel those eyes, their gaze, like a swarm of insects crawling all over me. A scream was building in my throat. I was on the verge of tossing my gear and bolting, when something took my line.

The rod bowed with the force of it. Line started to run out, and run out fast, faster than I’d ever seen, making the furious sound you hear on one of those shows about deep-sea fishing, when a marlin or a swordfish takes the bait. It ran out fast, and it ran out long, as if the fish I’d hooked had decided to dive straight down, down much deeper than I thought a stream this size could be. Afraid to grab the handle in case the line snapped, (and wondering if that would be such a bad thing), I held the rod. My catch dove ever-deeper; the line sizzled out. Abruptly, whatever I’d hooked stopped dead. I hesitated, waiting to see if it was only pausing. Nothing. I started turning the handle. For what seemed like hours, I wound that line back in, drawing in more of it than I could have had. Even in the depths of the dream, I knew this. Apart from a brief tug, which immediately stilled my hand, until I’d determined I wasn’t going to have a fight on my hands, and went back to winding the reel, my catch was limp, passive. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what kind of fish I’d caught. I’m no expert, not by a long shot, but I’d never heard tell of a fish that took your line, dove straight down with it until, apparently, it exhausted itself, then allowed you to draw it in with no further struggle. For the matter, I’d no idea what stream this was, that let my mystery fish dive so deep. The landscape resembled the Catskills, but where in the mountains, I didn’t recognize.

I can’t say how exactly I knew what I’d hooked was drawing closer, since I couldn’t see through the seething water, but know I did, and along with that knowledge came the sense that all those things in the trees around me were holding their collective breath, eager, anticipating what, I didn’t know. As what was on the other end of my line broke the water’s froth, time slowed. I saw something dark, swirling in the water like so many snakes. No, not snakes, more like some kind of plant, seaweed. No, not seaweed, more like hair, like a headful of hair. It was hair, thick and brown, soaking, hopelessly tangled. The hair parted to either side of a high, pale forehead, and long, narrow eyebrows arching over closed eyes. I knew, at that moment, even before I saw her high cheekbones, her sharp, almost pointed nose, her mouth that was the only feature out of proportion on her face — two sizes too small, I’d teased her — her mouth, through whose upper lip the barbed hook of the fly had slid and from which my fishing line now dangled. There was no blood. Instead, black, viscous liquid smeared the wound. I stood there, looking at my wife, at my poor, dead Marie — I still knew she was gone from me — I stood on the side of that dream-stream holding onto that rod tightly, desperately, because I couldn’t think what else to do. Half of me was so terrified I wanted to fling that rod away and run, no matter if it meant finding out what was waiting in those evergreens. Half of me was so heartbroke I wanted to fling myself into the stream and grab her, hold her before she could slip back to wherever she’d risen from. I might as well have lost her five minutes ago, the pain was that sharp. Hot tears poured down my face like there was no tomorrow.