Zombie Sharks with Metal Teeth (12 page)

“Would you just hold it for a moment, Jim? Please?”

“Men don’t carry purses.”

“Keep your elbow straight. Hold it as far away from you as possible. That’ll tell anybody looking that you’re a manly man. That you watch football and drink beer and play poker and smoke cigars all at once.”

“How much is the check for?”

“This is just like when you call me from work. Brent’s crying now, okay?”

“What’s that he’s wearing anyway? Is that a shirt or a dress?”

Margaret cries too much, really, Jim suspects. And draws far too many suicide-pictures. In one series of them she’s hanging from a bouquet of balloons by the neck, floating away dead (eyes X’d) from Jim, lying on the floor with a kitchen knife in his eye. These pictures were all before the dog food day, too, before the hospital night. Jim says it wasn’t coincidence,
can’t
be. His therapist is inclined to agree.

T
HE CONVERSATION
J
IM HAD WITH HIS THERAPIST ON THE WAY HOME FROM WORK:

“I’m in traffic, see? That was just a real, live honking horn.”

“Are they honking at you, Jim?”

“Do you have to say my name so much,
doctor
? Is there like somebody else on the other line, is that it? You just trying to keep us straight or something?”

“One question at a time, Jim. You know the rule.”

“Okay then,
doctor
. Your honest, expert opinion now. Do I have a chance?”

“Of making the team?”

“Yes.”

“You’re thirty-four years old, Jim.”

“I’m in good shape, though. Hear that? That’s how my stomach sounds when I hit it. I can pick which calf muscle to push the accelerator with.”

“And you’re not really enrolled in high school, either. That might be the big thing.”

“But if I was?”

“You’re not, though, Jim.”

“Then why does he watch me?”

“Why do
you
think he watches you?”

“You’re trying to make this about my eye, aren’t you?”

“Which one, Jim?”

Jim hung up with his thumb. He knew why his new neighbor was watching him: nostalgia, for what never was—him and Jim, coach and player, sweeping state two years in a row, Jim’s junior and senior years, the time of his life he never had. That neither of them ever had.

Jim held the wheel with both hands and misjudged the light, pulled a half car-length into the intersection and held his place, making everyone go around him.

T
HE SHORT CONVERSATION
J
IM HAD WITH HIS FAMILY OVER DINNER (CHICKEN):

“Is that dog food in your okra?”

Jim looked to Brent to see if Brent had heard this accusation from mother to father. Brent had; his fork was stopped halfway up for the rest of his childhood. Jim turned back to Margaret.

“Have you been looking at my food again?”

“I can smell it, Jim.”

“Jim? What about
dear
,
heart
,
love of my life
,
father of my only son
?”

“Jim.”

“Yes, okay. It’s dog food. It’s perfectly nutritional.”

“Does Tad know?”

This was Brent in a small voice, peering up.

Jim closed his one good eye.

No, Tad didn’t know. Jim had distracted him with an open gate and a fake meow then sneaked a pocketful. It was therapy. Nobody was supposed to know, though.

T
HE CONVERSATION
J
IM HAD WITH
L
ARRY WHEN HE ASKED HIM OVER TO PLAY BASKETBALL AFTER DINNER:

“You really want me to
wear
this thing?”

The extra eye patch.

“Yes.”

“This going to get kinky?”

Jim shook his head no.

“It’s just to even things up some. You can play without depth perception, you know.”

“Should I give myself a quick frontal lobotomy too, captain? Develop some peculiar neuroses? What about those shoes, though. Did you buy them just for this?”

“I needed new shoes. Don’t look at them please.”

“
Pret
-ty.”

In the kitchen window Brent and Margaret were receding in Jim’s vision, small like at the end of a telescope.

Across the street a set of blinds fingered open.

Jim smiled, bounced the ball to Larry.

“To eleven. Make it take it.”

Larry dribbled the ball once with both hands, testing it, and smiled.

“Like always,” he said, pulling it back by his waist, his triple threat position.

Jim nodded and crouched over in his defensive stance, palms up, and spread his finger, waiting.

T
HE CONVERSATION
J
IM HAD WITH
K
ATE AGAIN
T
UESDAY MORNING:

“So what happened now?”

“Nothing.”

“But you used to have teeth, didn’t you? I think I remember teeth, definitely.”

“It was a last second shot. A buzzer beater.”

“And your ankle. It didn’t used to have all that stuff on it, did it?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I hope you won, at least?” and Jim grinned into Kate’s cubicle, told her some truth: that Brent had been watching. That of course he had won. His new neighbor had even come out onto his lawn to watch at the end, and then flag down the ambulance.

“He told me I made the team,” Jim whispered. “That I was good enough.”

“You were bleeding, though. You still are.”

“And I stayed awake until the paramedics—” but then he could hear the tears forming in her eyes and had to look away, hold his breath against the salty smell. The office wasn’t the place for that kind of emotion. Smithson had warned him about it, even, but still, hobbling away from her with a noisy grin Jim felt the tears on his
own
face—on
both
sides—and finally breathed in, made his office in two great vaults of his crutches, then only leaned on them for a moment with his head down before reaching for the phone, to ask Margaret if she’d ever heard of a human eye growing back. Because he could feel it in there like a pearl, perfect and unborn.

CATCH AND RELEASE

“My dad used to take me there all the time when I was young.”

“Oh, this one again.”

“I’m not making it up.”

“Of course not. My dad used to take me to magic fishing holes all the time when I was kid, too. It’s part of growing up, isn’t it?”

“This was real.”

“I’m sure it was. To you.”

“I’m going to find it again.”

“It’s out there, it’s out there.”

“Sure, make fun.”

“Listen. You miss your dad, I get that. And don’t take this wrong. But there aren’t any places that good. Never were.”

“Except I was there.”

“Look, he’s getting all dreamy again.”

“All you need is a light. They come right to it. Every time. It’s like they can’t help themselves.”

“‘It’s like they
wanted
to get caught . . . ’ Any of them ever just climb in on their own?”

“They would have, yeah. It’s like—like we were saving them. You could see it in their eyes.”

“You can see what you want to see. I believe that.”

“Yeah, okay. But, serious, it was like they were thinking. Like they were trying so hard to think. Like they were just almost there.”

“And then they saw you.”

“They were so helpless, you know?”

“How could they serve your god-complex if they weren’t?”

“No, it’s like they wanted to trust us. It would be kind of perfect at first, one of them looking at me. Me looking right at it. But then their bodies would take over. Their natural responses. From not breathing, I guess.”

“You
guess
?”

“What do we look like to them, you think?”

“You talking about what do we look like to your made-up ones, or to real ones?”

“I don’t even know why I talk to you.”

“No, I’m with you here. All the way. I mean, no, of course no place like that really ever actually
existed
, we’d have all heard about it, but—”

“I think it’s where my dad wrecked.”

“He said dourly.”

“Sorry. His ship, though—you know how he was. One more run.”

“Without you.”

“He probably knew it was going to leak. That it might. So he didn’t wake me up to go with him.”

“Then good for him, right?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean he went to that perfect fishing hole in the sky, and he got to
stay
.”

“No. I mean, it was good fishing, yeah. The best. But we never dipped down too low. He said if we fell in, that was it, it was over, done. They’d eat us alive.”

“Eat?”

“As in destroy, infect, I don’t know.”

“What’d you use for bait?”

“The light was good to draw them in, like I was saying. They must not have enough of it or something. Or not the good kind. But we used all different stuff, I guess. My dad had one lure that looked like—I don’t know what you’d call it. It had parts, was like a ship, I guess, but it only went on the ground, in a mostly straight line. If you left one just sitting there, though, it was like they couldn’t help themselves.”

“So they weren’t thinkers, then. Good, good. Go on.”

“Shut up.”

“Serious. I want to hear. Regale me.”

“Sometimes we’d use their . . . whatever they called them down there. The other ones like them but weren’t them, that were bigger and slower. I think they grew them to eat them, maybe.”

“Come on. If you’re going to lie, then make it big. Entertain me.”

“We’d find one of those and hollow it out, make it real dry, then just drop it down and wait.”

“You tried that particular trick anywhere else since then?”

“Nowhere else has those to try with.”

“But how would you reel them in, then?”

“That was the easy part. Just shift to the heavy light. It tranced them out or something. They’d just look up and up into it. And they didn’t know how to phase—”

“I was almost believing you there.”

“They didn’t know. They don’t.”

“Then they’d be dead before they even started living. No species can survive without phasing. You’d just be locked in one view, right? I’d be trying to climb into your ship, too.”

“I don’t know, they found some way to keep on living. Maybe they didn’t even know, thought what they could see, that that was everything. Like—just a lower level of existing, moment to moment, in one direction. And then it’s over just all at once.”

“So you
were
a god to them. For delivering them from that.”

“Dad said that was what made them so special to catch. Pulling them up into the ship for an orbit or two, it made their lives so much bigger. At least for then.”

“What do you mean?”

“They can’t phase? When we’d lower them the
other
way through the light, time would go backwards for them, and it was like they couldn’t even remember us.”

“Now I know you’re lying.”

“It was sad. Dad said maybe if I marked them they could hold on to us some. I mean, in their heads.”

“They’re strictly organic, you’re saying?”

“Exactly. The first few I marked—well. You know how it goes.”

“They’re fragile. Built to die. Sounds like they were already practically dead.”

“I know. I was a kid, though, right? Dad, you know how he was, he could slap them against the wall when they made too much noise, easy as that. Not even think twice. Their heads were so delicate.”

“A planet for every kind.”

“We never told anybody about it, either. Everybody would have come, ruined it.”

“But how’d you mark them if they came apart so easy?”

“I’d just stuff random bits from our toolbox in them. The natural openings. Just wherever I could, wherever it looked like something might fit.”

“You didn’t keep one, did you? Is that where this is going?”

“You can’t eat them.”

“Well.”

“You
could
, okay. But believe me, you wouldn’t want to.”

“Especially when
you
got done with them.”

“It wasn’t on purpose. I was just playing.”

“I’m joking, I’m joking. But you really think your dad went back in a leaky ship?”

“Whenever he’d be reeling one in, he’d always have me to watch the gravity for him, make sure we didn’t fall in. I wasn’t there for the last time, though. He probably hooked a big one, but there was nobody there to watch the panel. He would have crashed.”

“Into the middle of a bunch of them. All with junk stuffed in them by his kid.”

“I wonder if they remembered him then. Made the connection.”

“‘A magic place. They come right up to you. And they never remember, just keep coming back for more and more.’”

“I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Everybody likes a good lie.”

“My dad didn’t crashland into a lie.”

“Just into a place without phasing. A place you can fish forever, reeling the same ones up, and they never know it.”

“Okay.”

“What?”

“This. Shh.”

“What? It’s all shriveled and black—oh, oh. It’s one of them?”

“Part. It fell off.”

“Hunh. Almost looks like a hand, except for those five . . . whatever they are.”

“They use them as natural as anything, I swear.”

“And I’m supposed to believe this is what they run their magical perfect planet with?”

“You can take them off and they don’t die right away. Maybe because they come with an extra. Like a back-up.”

“An extra?”

“They’re bilateral.”

“Oh, of course, of course. This is getting better and better. You should have stopped with stuffing your little pieces of junk into them.”

“When we’d have them on the ship, some of them would use these—see, the five things kind of spread open? They would . . . I don’t know what they were doing. But it looked like they were trying to reach for us somehow. Like they wanted to touch us. See if we were real.”