The Fisherman

by John Langan

Don’t call me Abraham: call me Abe.

Some things are so bad that just to have been near them taints you, leaves a spot of badness in your soul like a bare patch in the forest where nothing will grow.

Can a story haunt you? Possess you? There are times I think recounting the events of that Saturday in June is just an excuse for those more distant events to make their way out into the world once more.

all of it was like some strange play I’d been cast in, but for which no one had provided me the script. I guess I did all right; however you judge such things.

So there I was, in, I don’t mind saying, a bad place, my wife gone and me doing what I could to join her. It was, you might say, a cold February in my soul.

Sitting on the couch or lying in bed thinking of Marie, I felt as bad as I ever had, maybe worse, because each day that passed was another reminder of how far away I was from her.

With each year that passed, I came to ask myself if Marie might not have gone out of this world so much as gone more deeply into it. From being wrapped up in earth, maybe she’d made her way out into it, into the soil, the water, until she was part of things. Maybe she’d found a way to lead me back to her.

It’s hard to hold onto any tragedies that aren’t your own for very long.

After red comes green, then yellow. Buzz, clunk. Buzz, clunk. Gates opening and shutting, Abe. Gates opening and shutting.

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?

“He’s a fisherman, too.” Her words were slurred, from the hook piercing her lip.

“Some streams run deep,” Marie said. My lips trembling, I mumbled, “M-M-Marie?” “Deep and dark,” she said. “Honey?” I said. “He waits,” she went on.

Marie said, “What’s lost is lost, Abe.” “The who?” I said, still trying to piece together those syllables. “What’s lost is lost,” Marie said. “What’s lost is lost.”

The notion of a corporate family that took care of its own and in so doing earned their loyalty was on the way out, evicted by simple greed.

His grief had taken him far into a country whose borders are all most folks ever see, and from where he was, caught up in that dark land’s customs and concerns, what I was worrying over sounded so foreign I might as well have been speaking another language.

He nodded at the diner, but for us, still empty. Caitlin and Liz sat together at a booth, Caitlin smoking, Liz reading the paper. “Strange, for a Saturday. Even with the rain, there’s usually some folks come in for breakfast.” He shrugged. “Almost like I’m supposed to tell it to you fellows, isn’t it?”

For her to attack him here, the last bastion of his pride and self-respect, is the kind of betrayal of which only someone you love is capable.

She lost him to light the color of the full moon, of the froth on top of a wave, of a burial shroud.

Most everyone, I suppose, has felt the gaze of someone whose burden of experience renders their regard a tangible thing.