The End of the End of Everything Page 5

  “I’m not swimming.”

  “So don’t swim.”

  A train rumbled past, kicking up dust. I closed my eyes. Jimmy prodded me with his foot.

  “Get up.”

  “Fine. Okay.”

  “C’mon, man,” he said, “It’ll be fun.”

  I opened my eyes, and let him heave me to my feet. Seduced again. What I think about that summer now is how often Jimmy used some variation of those words—

  —it’ll be fun—

  —to entice me into doing things I would never have considered when Mom had been alive: smoking Marlboros on his front stoop, lifting a six of Schlitz at the 7-Eleven, sneaking into the Lavon Theater. I could name half a dozen other cases. And the Bluehole, of course, that most of all. I told my first wife about it once, the way he lured me down there, the way I was helpless to resist him. “Sounds like you were in love,” she told me, and I suppose I was. So I tagged along. I could name the boys who had drowned there—Milton Childs, Sam Procter, and Loyal Brown—and though I had said that I would not swim, I knew that Jimmy would coax me into the water. It was the water that I thought of most of all: the Bluehole itself, how cold and dark it was, how deep.

  “People have drowned there, you know.”

  “People have drowned in their bathtubs. You gotta go in.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Sure you do. This hot? You gotta be kidding me.”

  “I’m not kidding.”

  We turned aside from the tracks, slipping down through the undergrowth, past the derelict caboose, and into the jungle of brush and stunted pine beyond. Jimmy bushwhacked through the bracken ahead of me, skidding now and then. The lake glimmered through the foliage, a flat, poisonous blue, flashing diamonds of light when the sun caught it. I could smell it, a rich organic funk of rot and regeneration, and when we emerged panting on the shore, the stench grew stronger, almost overpowering. The Bluehole lay before us, still, opaque, the far shore lost in a haze of humidity. Dragonflies darned the air, setting off concentric ripples whenever they settled to the dark water. Cattails stood in the shallows, unmoving in the windless afternoon. Down here in the woods, the racket of the cicadas was louder still, shot through with those complex polyrhythms. It sounded beautiful to me then, God’s music raining down upon the planet, and maybe that was the last turning point in that summer of turning points, maybe everything would have been different if I hadn’t been overwhelmed with the stoned beauty of the place, the lake and the cloudless sky, and Jimmy beside me in the grass, his knees pulled up to his chest. We could have stripped down and splashed around in the shallows. Instead I pulled out the second joint.

  “Now you’re talking,” Jimmy said, and we sat in the grass, looking out over the lake, and smoked it. Occasionally, I stole glances at Jimmy. He too had taken on an ethereal beauty: his blue eyes, and his blond hair, and the way the light fired the tiny beads of perspiration along his jaw, so that his whole face glowed with that particular quality of light you see in impressionist paintings. I thought then—I still think—that he was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. When I leaned toward him to flip the roach into the water our faces were maybe six inches apart, and what I thought of then was the girl on the bus from the World’s Fair—Nina, her name was Nina, it comes back to me after all these years. What I thought of was Nina, her determined little tongue probing at the closed rank of my teeth. I don’t believe I thought at all about what I did next. It seemed to happen of its own accord. My hand came up and I brushed Jimmy’s face with the tips of my fingers. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at me out of those pale blue eyes, and then my face moved closer and my lips grazed his. They were chapped and peeling from the sun, I remember that, and I remember that he neither moved toward me nor pulled away. Everything was very still: the lake and the air and the tiny rustlings in the weeds. Even the cicadas seemed to have gone silent.

  Then the moment was over.

  I pulled away, I could feel the heat rising in my face. But Jimmy only stared at me. We sat like that for a long time, just staring at one another. There was no apprehension in those blue eyes of his, no judgment, no shock, no welcome. Just a flat blankness. The world resumed turning once again. Something splashed at the verge of the lake. The cicada song sprang suddenly into the air, a flat featureless drone. Somewhere in the thirty seconds between the kiss and the heartbeat that followed, all that beauty had drained out of the world. I was my old self again, stunted, dark, and unlovely, riven with desires I could neither name nor fulfill. Doomed.

  “Jimmy—” I said.

  “Let’s swim the lake,” he said.

  Milton Childs. Sam Procter. Loyal Brown.

  The names rang in my head as I waded into the waters of the Bluehole. The ground underfoot was weedy and slick. Icy hands climbed my legs—ankles, calves, thighs. I gasped when they seized my crotch and I felt my nuts retract into the heat of my body—what remained of it—like hard little stones.

  Laughing, Jimmy ducked his head. “C’mon,” he said, “You’ll feel better.”

  But when I lowered myself into the water, I felt only another icy shock—and then, abruptly, he was right. The water was still cold—painfully cold—but no longer intolerable. I waded deeper. The water rose chest high, then shoulder, until finally it lapped at my chin—and the old terror reasserted itself: the divers, the three boys, the rumors of something out there in the deep waters.

  “Jimmy,” I said, “people have died swimming the lake. Seriously. Three kids I know of for sure—”

  “We’re not going to die.”

  “I just think—”

  “Don’t think,” he said

  And he dove. He surfaced ten feet farther out.

  “C’mon,” he said, and I came.

  One step, two steps, three—and the bottom dropped out beneath me. I went down, flailing, water filling my nose. I kicked toward the sun, a dim blur through the greenish water. Exhilaration seized me when I broke the surface, and I thought even at the time that this was what it must be like to be Jimmy, this constant surge of reckless confidence. A sliver of envy pierced my heart in that moment, a shard of hatred so bright and hard that it might have killed me. I recalled the feel of his flesh, the touch of his lips, peeling and chapped from the heat, tasting slightly of salt.

  “C’mon, pussy,” he called from twenty feet farther out, and with that shard sawing at my heart, I struck out after him. He waited for me, flinging water from his hair as I drew near.

  “C’mon,” he said again, and with that he struck off into the deep water.

  I followed. Dear God, I followed.

  He drew slowly away from me—five feet, then ten, swimming smoothly, his hands slicing the water. My own arms hacked at the surface. My breath burned in my lungs. My legs already felt leaden. I could feel the terrible gravity of the abyss dragging me down.

  And then—the near shore was but a distant line at our back, our destination still lost in haze before us—then it happened. There in the sweltering heat of an early August afternoon, with the sun beating down on the iridescent blue water and the song of the cicadas ringing in my ears, I watched my best friend die.

  It happened fast.

  Jimmy was maybe thirty yards ahead of me, gliding through the water, when something came out of the icy depths below. I glimpsed it in a single strobic flash—ten seconds or so, that’s all—a deeper shadow against the dark as it streaked below me, twenty feet long or longer. There and gone again, passing bullet-like thirty or forty feet down, trailing a violent churning wake that swayed me in the water, so alien that I might have imagined it, that I thought I had imagined it, and then, for the space of a breath, a heartbeat, nothing more, it was gone.

  The water was still.

  You have to understand how quickly it all happened. I screamed at Jimmy—I don’t remember the words to this day—and he turned, treading water, as I hurled myself thrashing through the water toward him. I reached out to him, and he shrugged me
away.

  “I want to swim the lake.”

  “Jimmy—”

  “What?” And then: “Did you want to kiss me again?”

  It was like a blade sliding between my ribs.

  And then the thing took him. I smelled it, a deep animal reek, like the reek of the lake itself, but I barely saw it—a black tentacle, rolling languidly above the surface to encircle Jimmy’s chest. Nothing more.

  The sound of the cicadas boomed across the lake.

  “Jeremy—” Jimmy cried. He reached out for me, grasping, tearing at my flesh, and, God help me, I clawed at him like an animal, gouging furrows of blood down his cheeks. I drove my feet deep into his belly—I heard the plosive gasp as air exploded from his lungs—and I saw him go down. I remember it like it was yesterday—his arms outstretched to me, his mouth frozen in a silent scream, bubbles trailing up as he went under. I dove then, and swam as deep and far as I could, until my breath screamed in my lungs, and when I burst through the water at last, I looked back, helpless not to, Lot’s wife. The lake was placid and still.

  All my life I’ve been a pillar of salt.

  In the years since, I’ve given those moments a lot of thought. Sometimes it seems like I’ve thought of little else. The thing that took Jimmy was too big—no lake the size of the Bluehole could sustain a breeding population for long. Not enough food. Not enough water. And if it did, sooner or later one of the things would wash up dead on shore.

  But the countervailing evidence speaks for itself: that animal reek, that glimpse of black flesh rolling up through the water. Milton Childs, Sam Procter, Loyal Brown. Most of all maybe, the diver who died in Weston State Hospital, raving about monsters—if he even existed at all.

  Maybe I’ve read too much science fiction. Maybe I’ve written too much.

  But I wonder.

  Maybe there really are thousands of realities, pressed close against each other like bubbles. Maybe there are thin places in the membranes between. Maybe something sometimes breaks through.

  Speculation, of course, but speculation is my trade.

  Maybe.

  I told them nothing of the sort, of course. I told them he drowned.

  I pulled on my clothes and pelted back toward the tracks, yanking myself up-hill by the weeds and the stunted saplings and the sticky, sickly looking pines. I remember the way the brush seemed to come alive around me. The way it seized at me and dragged me back, the way it clutched at my ankles and drew stinging lines across my face.

  And then I was free, still pulling on my shirt as I raced toward the Stone Bridge.

  I leapt in front of the first car I saw, waving my arms, and when the man inside yanked open the door—

  “What the hell, kid?”

  —I fell upon him, weeping.

  After that I don’t remember much. Just fragments. The first of the police to arrive, old Charlie Bevins, who used to drink beer with my dad in those days, and then Dad himself, thin lipped and grim. He embraced me; I’ll always remember that, the scent of cigarettes on his clothes and the flash of the wedding ring upon his hand. He walked beside me as I led them back down the tracks, past the abandoned caboose, to the shore of the Bluehole. Jimmy’s clothes were still piled in the weeds. One of his sneakers lay turned on its side, a black high-top Chuck Taylor, the laces dangling. I remember that. It’s funny the things you remember.

  The men just stood there, looking out over the water.

  There was nothing they could do. He was gone. There was nothing anyone could do.

  They didn’t drag the lake. I didn’t like to think about it anyway, those curved hooks scraping the bottom until they dislodged a body; I didn’t like to think of Jimmy bobbing to the surface and peering out at me from his death-glazed eyes. I didn’t want to see the accusation reflected there.

  So here I am, thirty-four years gone, camped in a dingy motel with threadbare sheets, writing out the past in a composition book that I purchased at Finnaker’s Drug, or what is left of it. The lunch counter is gone, most of the newsstand, the spinner rack of paperbacks near the checkout counter. It’s just a drugstore now; the Run is just another dying town.

  Time slips away from you. The world changes. These days, looking at the Run is like looking at a palimpsest, the town I knew as a kid just barely visible beyond the shell it has become. Woolworths is gone. So is Loudon’s Hardware. And the company houses on Maple Street have been cleared away for trailers and prefabs.

  But the Stone Bridge is still there. Yesterday, I hiked out the railroad tracks that run beneath it. The cicadas sang me on my way, and time slipped its sprocket, the way it does sometimes. For the space of a breath or two, I was a boy, my best friend tramping along beside me; the past erased itself, and it all lay before me once again, the whole world. Then the moment collapsed. History will have its way: I was pushing fifty, paunchy, panting in the heat. Three or four miles later, I glimpsed a spangle of sunlight far down among the trees. I pushed through the brush and stood on an embankment two hundred steep, overgrown yards above the water. It was still there, all right, poison blue and depthless, stretching its length alongside the tracks for miles. The far shore was invisible in the haze.

  I stood there for a long time, just looking at it.

  The Creature Recants

  During breaks in shooting, the Creature from the Black Lagoon usually rests in a pond on the studio back lot and dreams of home. The pond isn’t much even as ponds go. It’s maybe four feet deep at its deepest point and a hundred yards or so around, an abandoned set carved out of the scorched southern California earth for some forgotten film or other: cattails and reeds and occasionally a little arrow of ripples when a dry breeze skates across the surface. Not even a fish if he’s feeling peckish. Which he often is. The catering is suspect at the best of times, and it’s even more so when you’re accustomed to a diet of raw fish and turtle flesh prized living from the shell.

  This is Hollywood.

  “Don’t expect too much,” Karloff had advised him over sushi not long after he’d arrived, full of ambition and optimism, and Lugosi, strung out on morphine and methadone by the time the Creature made the scene, had been even more blunt. “They vill fuck you every time,” he’d said in that thick Hungarian accent. The both of them typecast by their most famous roles. The Creature had assumed he could beat the odds, but on those blazing afternoons in the pond, now and again scooping up handfuls of water to moisten his gills, he’d begun to reconsider. The water was unkind, perpetually casting his reflection back at him: the bald, barnacle-encrusted skull, the eyes sunk beneath shelves of armored bone, the frills of tissue encasing the gills around his neck. Not what you would call leading-man material.

  To think, he’d once been the king of his little world—the vast, dark Lagoon, overhung with the boughs of enormous trees, and the mighty Amazon itself, where anacondas slithered through the algae-clotted water, caiman slid into the flood without a splash, their tails lashing, and catfish the size of Chevrolets trolled the mossy bottom. Not to mention the jungle, humid, rank, and festering, clamorous with the chitinous roar of millions of insects. And here he was in southern California instead, spending his days in waist-deep water and sleeping his nights in an oversized bathtub in a crummy apartment.

  Such are the Creature’s thoughts when a member of the crew—it’s Bill, a gopher who’s trying to break into the biz as a lighting tech—walks down to the pond to tell him that Jack’s finished setting up the next shot. It’s time for the Creature to come back up to the set and stagger around the deck of the Rita—not even a real boat, just a cheap mock-up in one of the soundstages on the Universal lot—and menace Julie Adams for another hour or so. She’s a real scream queen, Julie, the genuine article, but she’s nice enough in real life; she even walks down to the pond to chat once in a while between set-ups.

  They’re all nice enough. Even Jack’s okay, though he’s always badgering the Creature to focus on his motivation when the Creature has enough trouble just hittin
g his marks. To tell the truth, the Creature’s heart isn’t in it anymore, but he’s signed a deal with Universal, and his agent—who rarely returns his calls anyway—tells him there’s no way to break the contract.

  So the Creature hauls himself out of the pond, and tramps back up to the soundstage, trying not to think about the fact that he could decapitate Bill with a single stroke of his taloned hand. Trying not to think that at some level he wants to.

  It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

  You never know happiness until it’s gone, that’s the way the Creature figures it. The present always seems like a mess. It was only once he left the Lagoon that he realized how good he’d had it there. In Hollywood, he recalls its dark waters with longing. Sometimes at night, his head pillowed on the bottom of his brimming bathtub and his webbed feet slung over either side to brush the peeling vinyl floor, he even dreams of it. How perfect it seems now, the murky bottom where he’d nested for hours among the drifting fronds of plants he cannot name and the hidden channel that led to his rocky underground lair. Armored with scales and impervious to jaguar and piranha alike, the Creature had hunted both the overgrown shores and the black fathoms, snatching spider monkeys screaming from their roosts and feasting on the great fish that slipped through the Lagoon’s sulfurous depths. He recalls even his isolation with melancholy regret. What had seemed like loneliness—he’d never known another of his kind—now seemed like autonomy, and when the boat that spelled his expulsion from paradise had first steamed into the lagoon he had approached it with a curiosity that now seemed like folly.

  He hadn’t planned to leave the Black Lagoon, but life always takes the unexpected turn: caiman poachers in this case, though he hadn’t known that then. It had been the boat, anchored in a sun-dappled inlet, that fascinated him. He’d taken it for some kind of novel creature, and because no denizen of the Amazon posed a threat to him—because he pined for novelty in those days—he hadn’t given a second thought to approaching the thing. He’d been backstroking along, his face turned to the sun, when it came chugging into the Lagoon, stinking of gasoline. When he saw it, the Creature dove into the sun-spangled water, surfaced in the shadow of the boat, and dragged a talon along its rusting keel. He hadn’t seen the net until it was too late. He found himself entangled. Panicked, he began to claw at it. He’d have freed himself had the poachers not reacted so quickly, winching him out of the water even as his talons tore long rents in the ropy mesh.