The Fighter (39 page)

"What
are you smiling at?"

"Nothing.
They look awful, Tully. A busted jigsaw puzzle."

"You're
still smiling."

"I
know I am. I'm sorry. I don't know why."

Rob
found himself smiling as well. Still in shock, he figured. He glanced at Tommy
and wondered what he might make of all this, were he awake. Then he thought of
them in their little house on 16th Street. Sitting on the porch with his uncle
on a warm summer's night: a cold soda, the fireflies and stars. Brief, sure,
but then the good times always seemed too brief. Who was he to ask for any of
it over?

"Do
you want me to get you anything?" Kate asked.

"Just
sit with me, okay?"

His
hands were blazing. He heard the whisper of Tommy's breath. He sat with his
uncle, each man in his own place.

Both
of them waiting.

Paul
drove the QEW north toward Toronto. He'd taken his father's Corvette
Stingray—why the hell not? The highway was empty and quiet; Lake Ontario swept
off to the east and nightlong valleys twisted west to the escarpment. Over the
Burlington Skyway, past Stelco smokestacks pumping effluvia into the charcoal
sky. He tuned the radio to NEWS 640:
Earlier
tonight, an explosion rocked the InoDyne Animal Testing Center in midtown
Toronto, leaving four dead. A rogue animal rights group has claimed
responsibility for the blast....

He
felt queasy and pulled over, jerking the door open in time to puke a stream of
yellow gruel over the breakdown lane. Three great heaves from the gut. For
thirty seconds he stayed that way, his body leaning out over the dirty slush,
but that was it. He was empty.

The
Corvette skirted the city on the Gardiner Expressway. The slender spike of the
CN Tower, the bleached bubble of the SkyDome. Three o'clock in the a.m.; spider
legs of pale pre-dawn light skittered over the horizon.

Pearson
airport sprawled across a flattened scrim on the city's western edge.
Shark-colored planes eased down on gentle trajectories to meet halogen-lit
runways.

Paul
parked in the short-term lot and killed the engine. He grabbed his father's
suit off the passenger seat, tossed the keys under the seat,
and
set off toward the international
terminal.

Once
inside he made a beeline for the nearest restroom. He shucked his clothes and
donned the button-down shirt, trousers, and flared jacket. He stuffed his old
clothes in a trash can and kept only his sneakers, rinsing them under the tap
to wash away the blood.

He
considered himself in the mirror. The suit made him look like he'd wandered off
from a Captain & Tennille theme party.

He
grabbed a handful of toilet paper, wet it, and wiped his face. The paper
clumped and shredded; bits snagged on his stitches. When he finished he looked,
if not presentable, then at least human. Grabbing the stacks of money off the
countertop and stuffing one into each pocket, he headed into the terminal.

The
departure board loomed above the ticket counters. Destinations ticked past: Beijing,
Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, London, Moscow, Barcelona, Sao Paulo, Caracas, Monterrey.

Eenie, meenie,
minie, moe, catch a tiger by the
toe
...

Edinburgh.

...
if it hollers
...

Cairo.

...
let...it...go
...

Napoli.

...
eenie
...

Tokyo.

...
meenie
...

Rome.

...
minie
...

Kabul.

...
moe
.

The
girl behind the Thai Airways counter clocked his approach with a mixture of
professional decorum and abject horror: a wretched ghost in a cast-off leisure
suit who wouldn't have looked out of place haunting an abandoned discotheque.

"I'd
like a ticket to Bangkok. Your earliest possible departure."

The
ticket agent cleared her throat
and
asked mildly, "Will that be
round trip?"

"One
way."

Her
lacquered fingernails tapped the keyboard. "Our next flight departs in one
and a half hours. Business or personal, sir? The Customs officials will need to
know."

"Ever
seen a guy more in need of a vacation?"

The
ticket cost $3,400. He paid cash and headed toward the departure gates.

"Sir?"
"Hmm?"

"You're
bleeding a little."

The
terminal was deserted. A janitor guided a miniature Zamboni across the floor,
leaving strips of wetly polished tile. Through soaring plate-glass windows he
saw mail jets and freight carriers taxi into lit bays. A family dressed in Hawaiian
beach finery was sprawled over some padded benches. Paul wondered whether he'd
be allowed through airport security. He was a little beat-up, sure, but it
didn't make him a flight risk—did it?

He
lay out on a bench and slipped into an exhausted sleep and dreamed he was on a
trawler.

It
was nighttime; penlight stars winked. He stood on the gunwale but could see no
horizon, no line where water gave way to sky. The water was shiny as patent
leather and so depthless he felt a touch of vertigo.

"There
you are."

A
man clambered up a ladder from the engine compartment. His face was squarish,
knotted, weather-roughed. White powder had dried to a crust around his eyes.

"You
were expecting me?"

"I
was, eventually," the captain told him. "Wasn't sure what you'd look
like—it's tough to tell from the inside."

"I'm
sorry—inside what?"

The
captain walked to a boom jutting off the starboard side. He picked up a tin
bucket and dipped it over the side. When he set it on deck Paul knew at once
that it wasn't water in the bucket. Too dark, syrupy, and red.

"Inside
of you," the captain told him. "Your heart."

The
vista reconfigured to fit this understanding. No horizon: only the curved rim
of Paul's aortic chamber. What he'd mistaken for stars were gleaming white
nodules lodged in the meat of his atrial walls. The opening and closing of his
pulmonary valves created soft waves. Like being in a massive undersea cavern.

Paul
placed his hand on his chest: not the slightest tremor.

"My
own heart." There was no reason to doubt it. "Am I dead?"

The
captain considered it, then shook his head. "Neither you nor I would be
here, that was the case."

"How
long have you
been ... ?"

"As
long as you've been," the captain said, simply.

"And
are there others like you," Paul asked, "in... other parts of
me?"

He
shrugged, as if Paul had tendered the prospect of life on remote planets. He
bit the end off a cigar, spat the stub overboard, and lit it with a wooden
match.

"I'd
really rather you didn't," said Paul.

"This?"
The captain indicated the cigar. "My friend, it's the least of your
worries."

A
winch was attached to the boom and the captain cranked it; wet rope wound over
a metal drum. He cut Paul an exasperated look. "Pair a broken arms?"

Paul
took hold of the winch. The currents were stiff; he was sweating before long.

"What
are you fishing for?"

"Not
fishing," the captain told him. "Dredging."

A
net rose from the dark bottom of Paul's heart; the captain swung the boom and
spilled the catch over the deck. Amidst the pulpy tissue and clotted blood
monstrous shapes flapped and heaved. They were white, whatever they were,
whiter than the nodule-stars, eyeless, faceless, boneless as jellyfish. It
wrecked Paul to know such things existed somewhere within him.

"What,"
he struggled, "what are they?"

The
captain's features creased with disappointment. "Hoping you'd be able to
tell me."

They
held no universal shape, no unifying properties at all. Some were large, others
quite small. If anything, they resembled shreds of animate blubber. Paul
imagined a huge formless mass rotting in a lightless cavern of his heart.

"Nothing
you'd want to eat," the captain said. "No nourishment at all."
He lowered his boot onto one. A wet
squitch.
"They're not at all hardy
and happy enough to die. Hell, seem only grudgingly alive in the first
place."

"And ...
this is what you do?"

"All
my life." He peered down at the abominations. "All my life."

"I'm
sorry," was all Paul could think to say.

"I've
been hauling up a lot less lately. Used to, I'd bring up four or five nets. Now,
only one and it's not even quite full."

"Do
you think that's a good thing?"

He
gave Paul a warm smile. "Makes my job a helluva lot easier,
leastways."

The
creatures died quickly. Some melted; others calcified
and
sifted into powder; the rest
turned to flakes that blew away over the gunnels. Soon there was no indication
they'd ever existed.

Paul
woke up on the terminal floor. The family dressed in Hawaiian shirts was
looking at him strangely
and
Paul wondered if he'd been
screaming in his sleep. Then he remembered the dream, those flapping
blubber-creatures, and felt sick in his own skin.

He
found a restroom on the terminal's south side. A few stitches had popped; blood
wept through the Dermabond seal. Stripped to the waist, he blotted his face
with toilet paper. He blotted too hard and popped another stitch. He leaned
over the sink
and
let himself drain.