Creature
By David Ryan
I’d taken up smoking again. I knew I was better than this, but there it was, the red and white pack on the table, the pale blue lighter, a yellow tarred smell on my fingers and breath and staining my hair.
I was better, too, than to let the goldfish die, and I know you’ll assume I’d overfed the fish but I hadn’t. The fish might have died of old age for all I know. We are all going to die. It was just another act of God, a material fact, like the pack of cigarettes on the table.
Losing the dog, sure, that’s on me. I should have known, and could have been better about that. The owner said Martin liked to run, liked to escape. Martin, he had a good nature but was a little mindless. The door was open, and Martin did what was natural.
The demons in the wall, yeah, well. Those are on me too. Or, they’re beyond me, bigger than me. I’ve been pacing this room, staring at the hole they’ve made—that I’ve made—trying to understand what went wrong. It looks like a round-screen television, one of those old glass screens, swarming with faces and voices flickering. I was sitting Baddha Konasana on the floor and thought I’d used the right words in the incantation, but I hadn’t. I got the mantra wrong and the living room wall opened a hole, and now it wouldn’t close. No matter what I said: I even tried the mantra backwards. But there it was: this wide opening swarming with their calm, vital eyes, the bodies circulating, flecks of ash floating blown around by some incomprehensible intelligence.
I read somewhere that each moment of our lives has a hidden goal. Not some momentary goal you think, not one you can see. Like an invisible force, pressing against you and resisting you at once. For instance, the hidden goal of lighting a cigarette, it might indicate silently the desire to hold a child in your arms. Or to take back some great loss and hold it in your lungs.
The book likened the hidden goal to a living creature.
Try this: look deeply to see if you can dislodge the creature. Pick a shadow, any shadow. The theory goes, there are signs of recovery in that creature. It’s what the book said. Hope is a creature, but so is despair. Creatures born of surprise, the book claimed—floating up from some incidental abyss. I don’t remember the name of the book.
This summer house was a two-week job. The owner, my dad’s friend, Jerry. He and his girlfriend were in some second or third vacation house. They were in Mallorca. It was supposed to be an easy gig, a nice couple of weeks here on the beach. Feed the fish, walk the dog, get some sun, relax.
But I’d been anxious because after this housesitting gig, I didn’t have anywhere to go. Jeremy and I had fallen out and I lost the video editing job, and with that, eventually, the apartment in the city. I got the sense Jeremy had blocked me on his phone. Over the years, most of our friends had moved out, married, started actual lives. I was telling myself signs would come soon—a real job, a real place to stay after this summer house gig, a real life—these were all just around the bend. I was thinking about the creature a lot. Did it mean I wasn’t here, did I even exist, if one never came? I started to think I should call someone.
I needed to find the dog. Martin. I was hoping the replacement fish I’d gotten in town, darting now around in the knotted plastic bag, would go unnoticed when my dad’s friends came back. Inside the bag, loose translucent orange flecks of skin floated in exotic ashes, discharged from the fish’s gills and elaborate fins and scales; its bulb eyes gazed out from the golden red body, the little body like a flux, like a piece of the water itself. The fish could see the demons, the hole in the wall, the white flakes of noise, the glaring eyes, the demons, and their pulsing shadows, and began thrusting against the inside membrane of the plastic. The fish bag began to roll forward on the counter so I picked it up and set it on the coffee table, out of sight of the demons. And the fish calmed as if forgetting the hole.
I pulled apart the knot in the bag and poured the fish into the aquarium. The new fish was getting a feel for the water. I’m Alice, I said to the reflection, and the fog of my breath said nothing back. And I thought again about what I’d read. It said, that despair and hope are the same creature. That only the light shining on their energy was different.
It was on me to find the dog. I was already a little bit tipsy. This is untrue, I was more than that. But I was glad the fish situation was good, even if it was an imposter. I named the fish, Fishy, and it felt good, it felt like I was establishing something. I stepped out front with a cigarette and lit it. I inhaled and soon the smoke poured something like clarity into me. The Ketel One was in the freezer. In the refrigerator, a new grapefruit juice concentrate had thawed. I felt time fracture in my cold throat, then made another drink. I returned to the living room, switched on the fish tank light and the deep-sea diver glowed like a ghost over the iridescent pebbles. The fish looked okay. I tapped a little food—just a little—in. There you go, Fishy. The clock on the wall claimed somehow a half hour had passed. I tried not to look at the hole and the demons. I figured every few minutes Martin was a little farther away. But maybe he was closer, he’d just wandered and knew where he was, knew how to get home.
The daylight seemed much brighter when I stepped into it, I moved down the path through the sawgrasses, then the taller grasses, and then the sand came up and I saw animal tracks. But who knew whose they were? When I called out Martin! the breeze grabbed the name and carried it off like a kite. Townies on surfboards beyond the deeper dunes flickered and hissed from the water. I was holding the frozen bottle in my hand. My feet made stamping sounds in my lungs. I stepped onto the harder boardwalk cement where the skin of sand had delicate imprints of bird feet.
The daylight got confusing. Like the day had been drugged, and I was in it, in the drug, being swallowed by the day. I wondered if it was because of the demons, that maybe they’d put a spell on me. A unique confusion, which made it all the more so. So I was looking for Martin as the paw tracks that had turned into bird prints turned to paper wrappers and bags and Styrofoam cups. The glass neck of the bottle was warm now in my hand. There was maybe a finger left and I drank it. Gulls were beating up a pizza box, hovering aerodynamically, then darting down into it. One lifted a slice of pizza out and rose high. The other gulls screamed as this gull hovered, released the slice, as if dropping a clamshell to crack open on the concrete below.
I stood under a street lamp. The bottle I’d had in my hand was gone. My hand without the bottle, I observed, felt light, as if it wasn’t real anymore. As if it had left me with the bottle and left in its place this image of a hand or some prosthetic. I recalled the demons in the wall. I felt light, all of me. The curb’s decorative trees had little wrought-iron cages. The t-shirt shops and surf shops and clam shacks were closed. The opening I’d left in the wall of the beach house kept sliding in front of my face, and I was mouthing words, a new incantation, a maybe-right incantation. The package store would be open until ten. I called out, Martin! Here buddy! I stopped at a window. An audience of dolls faced me: little antique dolls, international dolls costumed in many colors. They each looked like something was wrong with them, maybe it was just that they were old, they were dolls that I saw had outlived the children who once cared about them. Martin! Here boy! I called.
With Jeremy it was like this: he’d grown super careful around me. As if, after the—what to call it? the unspeakable? yes, after this, I’d gone dangerous. Our relationship grew economical over the next few days, maybe a week or two, with careful new boundaries, like our skin had turned inside out and required a new kind of touch. But even after the surprise and pain faded, we’d gotten used to the boundaries. And then one day we were in bed, we were moving together, and this too had become economical, this goal to achieve a desired effect as efficiently as possible, as if to remove the chance of memory from the act—to move quickly before Memory saw us there. My mind was moving too. It rose over the bed. I was on a viaduct. Trucks and cars roared beneath. There was a guy and a girl there—the girl’s shirt was off. She looked like I did when I was thirteen, she had the same birthmark above her navel, and the guy I recognized, but couldn’t recall his name. What’s your name? the girl said. And now my eyes and mind were hers. No longer watching, I was just there, being. We were smoking cigarettes and he held a broken mirror. A cluster of white brambles were stuck to my socks and I was picking them off me. Check this out, the guy said. A big truck was coming toward the overpass. Okay watch this, he said. He had a small tattoo of the German letter ß on his neck, where I could see his jugular pulse. High above, something was falling; like ash or a twig descending in the blue sky, but then it flapped its wings and a red-black bird swooped and tagged the guy’s hair and he said ouch! and the truck shot braying below us and the overpass shuddered. The red-black bird was gone. And I returned to the room and Jeremy was shuddering, on top of me.
And then it was just the two of us panting in the quiet.
Hey, he said. Hey. Is everything okay? But he was the one who was crying.
I stood to my waist in the bay. Time, it was true, had been fracturing, that’s how it felt. And maybe Time, too, Time was on me, I was causing it to break apart, like its stairs were missing, and now I was stepping over them, but getting to where I needed to be, despite the gaps. A pulling light pulsed red in my ribs. Hair metal was playing from the PA tower by the concessions and arcade—Night Ranger’s Sister Christian jointed the breeze between bursts of static. Dreadlocks of seaweed grabbed at the distant tiers, the wood eaten by salt and murk and freakish clusters of mollusks. I felt the demons in the beach house in my throat murmuring like a machine, the prayer, the earlier bad incantation that had opened up in the wall. The flakes of fine demons in the opening. Gulls were bending in the sky, the sun stitching slivers like their shadows inverted into the water. I heard a dog barking, it was coming from the P.A. over by the beach. Martin! I called, but the dog in the P.A. seemed to run off. Bay water splashed my thighs. Thousands of silver minnows swarmed the clear water at my feet. The pack of cigarettes was wet, but I got one out and managed to light it. I took a deep wet drag. I let the smoke kiss my face.
This is when I saw it coming—the creature, like a pale arm under the water. Approaching in the smooth clear current, cutting through the thousands of silver fish. I closed my eyes, imagined it would return me to the place where I once felt okay. Before. Try this, I thought, and drew from my wet cigarette. I counted from ten down, anticipating it coming closer and closer. Synapses sparked stars in the oxygen and carbon monoxide behind my eyes.
And then I felt it grab.
David Ryan is the author of Animals in Motion: Stories (Roundabout Press). His stories appear in the 2022 and 2023 O. Henry Prize anthologies and most recently in Ploughshares, Hopkins Review, The Pinch, The Common, Puerto del Sol, Conjunctions, Chicago Quarterly, Florida Review, and elsewhere. He teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and in the low-residency program at New England College. There’s more about him at www.davidwryan.com.