The Secret Goldfish. David Means

sounded in her ears when she tried to smile. When she laughed too hard, her mouth would clamp up and she’d hear a chiming sound, high in pitch, like bells, and then the sound of windswept rain, or wind in a shell, or wind through guy wires, or a dry, dusty windswept street, or the rustling of tissue paper, or a sizzling like a single slice of bacon in a pan, or a dial tone endlessly unwinding in her eardrum. Forever she was up over herself looking down, watching King go at her, the two guys holding on to her shoulders, her legs scissor-kicking, the flash of the hammer until it was impossible to know what was going on beneath the blood. When Marsha met her again—a year or so later, in the break room at Wal-Mart—she had this weirdly deranged face; the out-of-place features demanded some thought to put straight. I mean it was a mess, Marsha said. Her nose was folded over. The Detroit team of plastic and oral surgeons just couldn’t put poor Charlene back together again. A total Humpty Dumpty. No one was going to spend large amounts of money on a face of a drifter, anyway. Marsha forced herself to look. Then Charlene told her the story of King, the reasons for the damage, and the whole time Marsha didn’t remove her eyes from the nose, the warped cheeks, the fishlike mouth. She tried as hard as she could to see where the beauty had gone and what Charlene must’ve been like before King mashed her face, the angelic part, because she kind of doubted her on that aspect of the story. As far as she could remember, from their nights together getting stoned outside the airport fence, Charlene had been, well, just a normal-looking kid. But listening to her talk, she put the pieces together and saw that, yeah, yeah, yeah, maybe this mishmash of features had once been beautiful. Her eyes were certainly bright blue, and wide, and she had pale milky skin. That night after work they decided to go out together, not to a bar where she’d get hassled but just to buy some beer and go to Charlene’s apartment and drink. She had some little pills she called goners, good God goners, something like that. So they went to her apartment, took the pills, drank some beer, and decided to watch Blue Velvet. Whatever transpired next, according to Marsha, was amazing and incredibly sensual; they were stoned together, watching the movie, and suddenly between them there grew a hugely powerful sense of closeness; when Marsha looked down at her on the couch, Charlene appeared to her too gorgeous not to kiss (that’s how she put it, exactly). Her mouth was funny because her teeth were out, so it was just softness and nothing else and then, somehow, they undressed—I mean it wasn’t like a first for either of us, Marsha said—and she fell down between Charlene’s knees, and drove her to come, and then they spent the night together. A few days later, Charlene quit her job and split for Canada, back over the bridge, and then the next thing Marsha heard she was up north at this hotel with some guys and then she ODed.

      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.

       IT COUNTS AS SEEING

      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