David Means: The Secret Goldfish

The story—and the way she told it to me, early in the morning, just before dawn—as both of us slid down from our highs, our bodies tingling and half asleep, turned me on in a grotesque way. To get a hard-on based on a story of abuse seemed wrong, but it happened, and we made love to each other again for the second time, and we both came wildly and lay there for a while until she made her confession.—I made that up, completely. I never knew a drifter named Charlene from Canada, and I certainly wouldn’t sleep with a fuckface reject like that. No way. I just felt like telling a story. I felt like making one up for you. I thought it would be interesting and maybe shed some light on the world. The idea—the angelic girl, the perfect girl, the one with perfect beauty getting all mashed up like that. That’s something I think about a lot. She sat up, smoking a cigarette, stretching her legs out. Dawn was breaking outside. I imagined the light plunging through the trees, and the log trucks roaring past. For a minute I felt like knocking her on the head. I imagined pinning her down and giving her face a go with a meat hammer. But I found it easy to forgive her because the story she made up had sparked wild and fanciful sex. I kissed her and looked into her eyes and noticed that they were sad and didn’t move away from mine (but that’s not what I noticed). What did I notice? I can’t put words to it except to say she had an elegiac sadness there, and an unearned calm, and that something had been stolen from her pupils.—You weren’t making that up, I said.—You couldn’t make that shit up, she responded, holding her voice flat and cold.—So it was all true.—I didn’t say that. I just said you couldn’t make that shit up.

—We’re gonna get nailed for what we did, she said, later, as we ate breakfast. Around us truckers in their long-billed caps leaned into plates of food, clinking the heavy silverware, devouring eggs in communal silence. A waitress was dropping dirty dishes into the slop sink, lifting each of them up and letting them fall, as if to test the durability of high-grade, restaurant-quality plates.—We’re gonna get nailed, I agreed. I wasn’t up for an argument about it. The fact was, our stream of luck would go on flowing for a while longer. Then I’d lose Marsha and start searching for a Charlene. For its part, the world could devour plenty of Ernies; each day they vaporized into the country’s huge horizon.—He’s probably dead. He knew how to swim, but he didn’t look too confident in his stroke.—Yeah, I agreed. Ernie had bobbed up to the surface shouting profanities and striking out in our direction with a weird sidestroke. His lashing hands sustained just his upper body. The rest was sunken out of sight and opened us up to speculation as to whether his boots were on or off. After he was tossed from the boat, he stayed under a long, long time. When he bobbed up, his face had a wrinkled, babyish look of betrayal. He blew water at us, cleared his lips, and in a firm voice said,—You’re dead, man, both of you. Then he cursed my mother and father and the day they were born, Marsha’s cunt and her ass and her mother and father and God and the elements and the ice-cold water of the seaway and the ship, which was about four hundred yards away (—come on, motherfuckers, save my ass). He kept shouting like this until a mouth full of water gagged him. We were swinging around, opening it up full-throttle, looping around, sending a wake in his direction and heading in. When we got to the breakwall we turned and saw that he was still out there, splashing, barely visible. The ship loomed stupidly in the background, oblivious to his situation. A single gull spiraled overhead, providing us with an omen to talk about later. (Gulls are God’s death searchers, Marsha told me. Don’t be fooled by their white feathers or any of that shit. Gulls are best at finding the dead.) We got back in Tull’s truck and headed through town and out, just following roads north toward Houghton, leaving Ernie to whatever destiny he had as one more aberration adrift in the St. Lawrence Seaway system. For a long time we didn’t say a word. We just drove. The radio was playing a Neil Young song. We turned it up, and then up some more, and left it loud like that, until it was just so much rattling noise, a high nasal twang caught in a cyclone of distortion.

I went right up to him and took his elbow, not even asking him if I should because he was heading hellfire for the first step, not seeing—because how could he?—that step, flashing his red-tipped cane around in the air (in the air, I stress). What else could I do except grab him? Others might have gone for his hand or shoulder, but having been trained in the proprieties of guiding the blind, I took the back of his elbow, which he jerked quickly away before stating, flatly, in a firm, resolute manner, with a slight accent—British or mock British, at least Harvard—back off. Back off, he says, and I let go and then he tumbles all the way down to the bottom of the stairs, doing this cartwheel motion, head over heels. He had a firm grasp on the acrobatics of his tumble, I think, and when it slowed down in my mind it was very much like those folks up in space goofing off, showing the schmucks down on earth, poor souls, the delights of zero-G. This blind guy took a prim and proper control of his body in relation to gravity and went down those stairs with wild agility, not a bone broken or a ligament torn in this version of events. Across the street people looked wild-eyed at the scene. One gentleman—in an elegant suit coat and tie—I noticed specifically, a witness, who would back up my claim (or so I thought at the time) that I was only trying to assist this blind guy in getting down the stairs. This man made a beeline across the street and stepped over the moaning blind man and came right up and began to shout. He had a ruddy face, up close, with pockmarks, a drinker’s face, my father would say, and this face ruined the suit coat. Up close it was stained with glossy streaks of what look like melted butter. This quick assessment made me realize that he was a derelict who, along with one other guy in town, slept in doorways, copped a buck here and there, and so on and so forth. I realized that he didn’t witness the fall, and was yelling at me about something else, had me pegged for someone else, apparently, and was yelling,—Marvin, you’re going to have to spare me this kind of aggravation, you bastard, because for God’s sake, Mary is not going to leave you for me, or me for you, or any of that. I didn’t see the blind guy at all before he hit that first step, until he was already falling. I was in the bank shuffling through my withdrawal—new twenties, still crisp and unbroken and therefore impossible to get apart. I was trying to part them and walk at the same time—around me the hollow cacophony of the marble, real marble from the days of real banks—when out of the edge of my eye, not the corner, through the bright front doors, bathed in midday light, really, really bright, I saw the blind guy (I had noticed him ahead of me in the line and wondered how he might find his way to the proper window, or the exact place in front of the window, noting that the cashier gave him slight directions, a bit to your right, a bit to your left, sir—until lined up in the correct trajectory, he moved forward), but then I was beckoned to my window and went up and put the check into the little metal throat and forgot about the blind guy until I was back by the door counting the cash and saw him take that step into what must have been, surprisingly, empty space. His heels went skyward, rubber tennis shoes, those white clunking sneakers you see old folks wearing, and then he was out of my vision and I had a moment’s pause: in that moment I recollected that the blind man was named Harrington and that he was made blind (is that the proper term?) in a freak flash fire on his yacht when he was spreading sealing putty and the vapors ignited. He was owner of the boatyard down the river and had an estate near there, too. When I got out to the steps a crowd was gathering around, stepping carefully to avoid the pool of dark blood around his head. For some reason I stood unwilling to commit myself to going down the steps, and in that moment a girl—maybe fourteen or twenty (it’s hard for me to differentiate between ages of these kids)—glanced at me. Our eyes met, as they say. Hers were hazy and dark, maybe hazel-colored. She drew forth her hand and pointed her finger like a pistol and said, loudly, He pushed him. I saw that fucker push the guy. That asshole shoved the blind man down the stairs. Before I could move I was beset upon from behind by two burly men, both with security guard uniforms and fake sheriff badges. They put me into a proper headlock and secured my wrists with cuffs.