The Fighter (30 page)

Max
the Interventionist opened his mouth to interject. Paul shut it with a look.

"I
think of her limited world blowing up in those new unknowable depths," he
went on, "the strange fish and new waters and her not even having a
concept of those depths, not knowing the language of any whale pods she might
meet. That sudden, violent explosion of her world, lawless, lacking the
parameters that had governed her existence: just bubbles and seaweed and
storms and freighters and volumes of blue water that went on and on forever. A
tuna boat found her floating near a wharf. She was drawn to sounds she
understood: machinery, motors, human voices. Her belly was slashed open. She
got chewed by a boat's rotor blades, or maybe killed by other whales—or by
creatures much smaller than her. Her tongue and lower jaw had been eaten.

"They
winched the body in and buried it in a whale-sized casket. Over a thousand
people at her funeral. A picture in the paper: a giant half-moon-shaped coffin
lowered into the ground. The caption went,
Noble burial for
a noble creature
."
Paul laughed, a brittle hack. "Burying a whale. How unnatural is
that?"

"Paul—"
Singleton said.

"Shut
up and let me finish. I think about the whale and wonder—who's to blame? The
amusement park for keeping her penned up all those years? The protesters for
freeing her? The more I think about it, the more I come back to the idea that
it was
nobody's
fault. The whale was born in captivity, the trainers loved and cared for her,
the protesters were doing what they thought was right. Everybody's heart in the
right place. But the reality is this poor whale adrift in a place she doesn't
understand, scared shitless and so fucking
witless
she didn't last a week on her
own. But what if she'd been given a chance to strengthen herself so that she
might survive?"

"Paul,"
Singleton said, "all these fears and regrets can be worked through in
therapy."

"Jesus
Christ," Paul said, "did you hear a word I said? I don't have any
regrets!"

"But
first you need to admit you need help," Singleton overrode him. "Will
you do that, Paul—admit you need help? Will you let us
help
you?"

"You
knew the answer to that the minute I walked in here."

Singleton
nodded. "I'd like you to set your credit and bank cards on the
table."

"Why?"

"Your
bank account's been frozen." Jack Harris looked impossibly weary: a man
crossing a desert on a mission whose purpose he could not recall. "The
cards are in my name."

Barb's
needless clarification: "They aren't yours, Paul."

"They
aren't, are they? I can't lay claim to any of it. Nothing stands in my name.
None of it's mine."

He
fished the cards from his wallet and laid them on the glass- topped coffee
table.

"They're
yours again," said Singleton. "Anytime you'd like. Just let us
help."

Paul
looked at his father and mother sitting on the couch, hopeless and confused.
"Why didn't you ever let me suffer?" he said. "Just once, let me
struggle?"

"We're
your parents," Barb said. "We love you. How could we let you
suffer?"

He
went to his bedroom to gather a few things. The room smelled musty and
tomblike, a scent peculiar to places long absent of human habitation.

His
mother poked her head through the door.

"Is
it okay?"

"Come
on in."

Barbara
sat on the edge of the bed. "Was it really so bad, Paul? The life you—the
lives we had together?"

"It
wasn't bad," Paul told her, "just fake and empty. All the people I
knew, guys I went to school with—what stories did we have? You and

Dad,
Grandma and Grandpa, their parents and on back—you have stories."

"You
really believe that, don't you? That everyone who came before had it rough.
Sorry to tell you, kiddo, but it didn't happen that way. I was a farmer's
daughter, your dad a farmer's son. Our parents weren't rich but there was
always enough. Christmases, birthdays ... god, I had a
pony.
And my dad fought in the war, yes, but with no choice. Was he courageous? I'd
like to think so—but he was courageous because the situation called for it.
Circumstance can make a hero out of anyone."

"Or
a coward."

She
smiled sadly. "Is it worth it, Paul—to suffer your whole life just to
prove you can?"

Paul
could not tell her his deepest fear: that his suffering would always be
insufficient and never enough to ensure any lasting happiness. "Do you
ever think of the old house we lived in, before Dad bulldozed it? You ever
think, what if we'd lived there forever?"

"Sometimes
I do," Barb admitted. "But our life ... we've moved on." She
fixed her hair and said, "We could get you counseling, Paul. You could
stay here with us, or we could rent you a place, and you could see a therapist.
I've heard Prozac—"

"Mom,
I love you and I love that you're trying to understand what I'm going through,
but..." He hugged her, kissed her cheek, held her at arm's length with his
hands on her shoulders.

Barb
reached into her skirt pocket and produced a tinfoil packet. "Hold out
your hand."

She
dropped two small objects into his palm. Whitish yellow, the size of corn
kernels, each tapering to a pair of reddened tips.

"I
called Faith, the girl you were out with," she said, "the night...
that night. She told me the bar you'd been at. I went the next day and hunted
around for hours until I found them."

Paul
picked one up, rolled it between his fingers.

"Mom,
is this—are these—my
teeth?"

She
nodded, her entire being swollen with hope. Did she really think it would be
that easy? Like his teeth were the wave of some magic wand and—
poof!
—everything
went back the way it was? Paul turned them over in the light, realizing, with
dawning awareness...

"Oh
my god—these aren't
my
teeth!"

"Sure
they are," Barb said quickly. "Who else's?"

"No,
they aren't," he insisted. "They're too ... big, or something. Too
yellow. This one's practically
brown
." He saw the tiny lead
plug. "It's got a filling! I never had a cavity in my life!"

"Maybe
you did," his mother reasoned. "Maybe you forgot."

"How
do you forget that?"

"You've
been hit in the head a lot lately."

But
they were obviously not his teeth, which brought up the obvious question:

"Mom,
who the hell's teeth
are
these? Where in god's name do
you find
teeth
!
'
Paul's mind reeled. He saw his mother rummaging through Dumpsters behind the
dental clinic. Creeping through windows to snatch molars from beneath sleeping
children's pillows. "Did you buy them? How much does a tooth
go for
in today's market?"

Barb
was weeping now, sniffling and holding her head.

"I
thought..." Her chest hitched. "Thought maybe ..."

"Hey,
calm down." He laughed a little—getting over the initial shock, he saw it
was the craziest, most impetuous thing his mother had done in years. He was
oddly touched.

"What
are you laughing at?"

"Nothing."
He stifled another chuckle. "It's nice, really. A very ... nice
gesture."

But
his mom was not to be consoled. Tears turned to sobs. She sat on the bed,
rocking.

"Oh,
come on. Really, I love them. Look."

He
selected a tooth—an incisor by the looks of it—and jammed the pointy root ends
into a gap in his gum line. The prongs pierced the soft skin; Paul shoved hard
with the pad of his thumb, socking it into the pocket of flesh. It looked like
a fang.

"See?"
he said. "Peachy. Good as new."

He
grabbed another tooth—a canine?—grasped firmly, and drove it into his lower
gums. He caught a glimpse of himself in the dresser mirror: the tooth, large
and brown as a Spanish peanut, jutted from his mouth at a coarse angle. This
one looked like a tusk.

"I
vant
to suck your
BLOOD
!
"
he bellowed in his best Nosferatu accent. "Blah!
Blah
!
Blaaaaaah
!
"

Paul
collapsed into uncontrollable giggles with blood bubbling over his lips. He
found the whole scene uproariously funny.

He
wiped tears from his eyes. Barb regarded him with an expression of stunned,
horrified awe. The room was silent save the pitty-pat of blood on the
floorboards.

"I'm
sorry," he said. "I thought maybe ..."

But
Barb was already up, running to the door and slamming it behind her. Paul heard
her stockinged feet thumping down the staircase, ungainly in flight.

He
spat another mouthful of blood and wiped his lips on the pillowcase. On the
dresser sat a framed photo of himself on the afternoon of his high school
graduation. He smiled under his mortarboard, as did his folks on either side
of him. Paul struggled to recall himself at that age, that boy's dreams and
needs and fears. He wondered how his then-self might've reacted had his
now-self shown up on that sunny afternoon years ago, crashed the graduation
ceremony all cut and bruised and bloody. Would then-Paul have been sickened
and ashamed—or fascinated? Perhaps he would've viewed his future self as a
different species of creature altogether, one whose life bore no resemblance to
his own.

Paul
waited while the whore—her name, she said, was Adele—paid for the room. The A-l
Motel: owing to a string of dead neon, the marquee read simply
a motel
. Niagara Falls, the red-light
corridor. Streetlights along the quay cast their brightness upon the frozen
Niagara River, a blue-gray sheet stretching to the rocky escarpment of New York
State.

He
lacked any clear recollection of how he'd gotten here. He'd borrowed five
hundred dollars from his father's dresser before leaving the house, but since
he had no means or intention of repaying it,
stolen
was the more accurate term.

Adele
came out dangling a key from its plastic diamond-shaped fob. She was young and
skinny as a guitar string.
I've seen more
meat on a butcher's blade,
Lou Cobb might've said. She led him up a rusted staircase to a small clean room
on the second floor and sat him on the bed.

"I
got to say you're not looking so hot, cowboy." She drew a circle around
her lips. "Your teeth are all shot to hell. Couple of them look too
big."