Damned If I Do (17 page)

“A fish spoke to me,” he tells his wife the next morning, watching her tie her running shoes, a foot up on the stool in the kitchen.

“Very nice,” she says.

“No, really, a fish said a word to me.”

She looks at him.

“I’m not joking, Barbara.”

Barbara laughs.

“I’m scared. A fish—a big fish talked to me.”

“And what did this fish say?”

“He said ‘epigenesis.’ I saw its lips move. I heard it.”

“Epigenesis,” she repeats.

Turing nods.

“And you weren’t drinking?”

“No.”

“No drugs?”

“Barbara, I’m serious.” He pauses, leans back against the wall by the door. “Never mind.”

“Fine,” she says, looking at her watch, standing, looking out the window at the road, “I’ll be back in forty minutes.”

He watches her run out of the yard and down the street. She thought he was joking. He guesses that’s better than her believing him to be crazy.

The rain falls harder while Alan Turing sits behind the wheel, switching on the wipers to slap away at the spitting sky, pulling away from the gravel and mud. Turing struggles with remembering his name, recalling lessons from grade school instead, lines of silly poems, word problems of sheep and shingles and there is his name, burned into his mind along with a fish-voice,
“epigenesis.”
Goddamn the beast, so big, and why hadn’t he brought it home, but instead took pity or obeyed that giant, sad, milk-glass eye?

Alan Turing goes back to the creek, sits on the bank, and looks at the spot where the hole that shouldn’t have been there, was. The water is still, un-moving there. He recalls the day JFK was killed, how when the news came over the loudspeaker his second-grade teacher, Miss Young, had put her hands over her ears and run out of the room; he recalls her slip was showing below her navy skirt. He recalls when he awoke during the night on a family car trip and saw the burning cross of a KKK rally and how his father had stepped on the gas to get them away and how they had to load up on food because there was no place for them to stop and eat on the road; the Temptations were playing on the radio. He remembers how Kathy Wilson had let him touch her pubic hair and had kissed his tongue with hers, then told him they had to stop. He remembers how she hadn’t told Reggie Davis to stop. So went Reggie Davis’s story and Alan Turing, thirteen, believed it.

He tosses a rock into the creek, hoping the trout will show himself. He will not tell this to his wife again. He will not tell anyone that a fish has spoken to him. He will keep it inside his head. He will keep it next to the fact that lately he has not enjoyed sex with his wife. He will keep it next to his fear of escalators. He will keep it next to the fact that he hated the way his uncle hugged him just a little too long.

Another rock breaks the face of the creek and still no trout shows. Turing once had to beat a deer to death with a bat. The animal had been hit by a car and was suffering badly at the side of the road. It was dusk. Alan Turing had no gun. The deer looked at him with big, pathetic eyes and begged for peace. But the animal’s life had been stubborn and it took six swings to end it.

The water in the hole begins to roil. And there on the surface of the water, the light through the boughs reflecting off its smooth sides, is the giant trout, floating up as if dead, one glassy eye aimed at Alan Turing. Alan Turing stands and takes a step, water sloshing over his shoe and ankle as he breaks the face of the stream. Another long step and he is just feet from the fish, his breath catching in his chest as he hears the fish say, “I knew you would come back.”

“You’re real. I thought I had gone mad,” Alan Turing says. “My wife thinks I’m crazy.”

“You’re not happy,” the fish says.

Alan Turing shakes his head. “The world has changed. My wife has changed. And I’m afraid I’ve stayed the same.” He looked upstream and then down. “I told her about you this morning and she thought I was joking.”

“Take me home with you,” the fish says.

“How?”

“Just put me in your car.”

So, Alan Turing wraps his arms around the big fish, the slime of its sides staining his shirt, and he hauls it to the bank, pausing and resting there and then starting up the trail. The fish is silent on the trail, its gills heaving just under Alan Turing’s chin, the opercula opening and closing, flashing red. At the trailhead, Alan Turing pauses, reconsidering, looking back over his tracks in the direction of the creek and the fish flops in his arms, says, “Put me in the car.”

The trout fills the passenger seat. Its head presses against the armrest of the door. Its tail brushes against Alan Turing’s thigh. Its eye is pointed toward the roof.

“Tell me about your wife,” the trout says.

Alan Turing drives with both hands on the steering wheel, leaning slightly forward. His fingers are stiffening from the work of driving and so he reaches over to turn on the heat.

“What are you doing?” the trout asks.

“I’m turning on the heat.”

“Leave it off.”

Alan Turing does. “My wife is very smart,” he says. He doesn’t look at the fish while he speaks. “She’s intense and I sometimes wonder what she sees in me.” Alan Turing smiles sadly. “Lately, I’ve been distant and, I guess, not very responsive. I don’t know why. Anyway, I became distant and she became distant and the whole thing just kind of snowballed. I’ve been working a lot lately. But that’s not really it. I mean, it hasn’t been work. I’ve been—how can I put it—lost, sick, stupid. I’m simply not happy with life.” Alan Turing glances at the trout. The fish looks bored. “I know it sounds dumb. Midlife shit and all that. But now I’m afraid I’ve pushed Barbara far enough away that she’s looking for someone else.”

The trout seems to struggle with a breath, flops its tail against the fabric of Alan Turing’s trousers.

“We still have sex, but that’s all it is, I think. Sex. It feels so empty. It never felt like I had to search for the feeling before. I’m so scared. We don’t even argue. We’re just creating a gentle, uncrossable distance. And then I get mad and I want to tell her to go away.” Alan Turing is crying. “It’s life, too, you know. It’s this day-to-day stuff. I don’t know why I do anything. I do my research, but it’s for shit. I read the news and it goes in one eye and out the other. I haven’t heard a good joke in years. And my wife is sleeping with someone else and still fucking me.”

The fish says nothing.

Alan Turing pulls into his driveway and turns off his car’s engine. He gives the trout a look and says, “Wait here.” He gets out and walks across the yard, the grass of the lawn he hates so much feeling soft and moist under his feet. His hands are shaking. He enters the house and stands inside the foyer. He calls out for his wife. “Barbara!” There is an urgency in his voice that he hears, that at some other time he might seek to control, but not at this moment. “Barbara!”

Barbara comes down the stairs. She is wearing a robe, a towel wrapped around her head. “What is it?”

“Why do we do this?” Alan Turing asks.

“What’s wrong?”

“Everything’s wrong, Barbara. Look at us. Look at us.”

Barbara clutches her robe closed.

“Yeah, close up. Heaven forbid I should see you naked in the light. It might lead to lovemaking instead of fucking.”

“Alan,” she complains.

Alan Turing is pacing. He stops and stares at her. “What’s happened to us? To everything?” Inside his head, reality seems far away and unreachable. “Come outside with me. I want to show you something.”

“I’m not dressed.”

“It doesn’t matter. Come on. Come on!”

Barbara flinches.

“Come on,” Alan Turing says more gently.

“Alan, you’re scaring me.”

“I’m scared, too.”

“What do you want to show me?” she asks.

“Just come with me. Please?”

Barbara nods and steps through the door he is holding open for her. She follows him across the yard. He leads her to his car in the driveway. He turns and watches her look across the street for neighbors.

At the car, he looks in and the big trout is not there. There is a very little minnow dead on the passenger seat of his car. He feels near to fainting and turns, squares his shoulders to Barbara.

“What is it?” she says.

Alan Turing looks at his wife’s eyes, tries to hold them, tries to memorize them. He looks at her lips and her ears and her nose. He touches her hair.

“What is it, Alan?”

He says, “I love you.”

The Devolution of Nuclear Associability

We are all too familiar with Saussure’s

and likewise all too familiar with the notion that the
line
separating the signifier and signified is somehow sliding or shifting. And finally, we are as familiar with the instructional icon:

As elementary as these concepts might now seem, I begin with them as Semiotics begins with them.

So, I ask you to imagine a character,
Adam.
Adam is deficient in a singular linguistic way. He is never quite able to say what he means. Adam often gets very close, but never realizes his intention. Adam might attempt to explain the Pythagorean Theorem, but can only manage to get across that the sum of the squares of two sides of a triangle equals the square of the third side, being unable to make clear that the third side is the hypotenuse. Likewise, if Adam means to draw our attention to a right angle, he can only manage
triangle.
So, that space or gap between the signified and the signifier is never quite crossed. We get:

Since nature abhors a vacuum, something must fill that space. To say that it is nothing merely begs the question. For if Adam, with his peculiar problem, were to intend to mean triangle, he would only be able to convey
geometric shape.
We have then: