Mama Fish Read online

  The moment was broken when Kelvin Fish spoke. I have no idea what he said. It sounded like, “farra-hooo,” which could translate, I suppose, to, thank you. Or even, fuck you. He rolled his shoulders, still jerking and snapping. “Farra-hooo,” he said again, and then turned on his clumpy heels and broke toward Columbus Boulevard.

  My head cleared in an instant. I knew what was going to happen. I could see it in my mind—a Technicolor premonition that filled me with coldness.

  I screamed at him to stop, but he didn’t. He crashed blindly through the trees and into the flow of traffic.

  Things were about to go from bad to worse.

  I was always a good runner. I played centerfield for the Harlequin Rockets—stole forty-one bases in a single season, a record that held up for eleven years. I also broke a few high school track records, which, when I look at myself now, seems dreamlike and infinitely sad. But despite my speed, I was not quick enough to catch Kelvin Fish as he lumbered blindly onto Columbus Boulevard and out into the road.

  The adrenaline must have been surging through his system and affecting his brain, because he limped into the road—and into the path of a speeding Cutlass Cruiser—without heeding any of the road safety rules that are drilled into us as children. The driver didn’t have time to think about braking. He smashed into Kelvin Fish with terrible force. I watched from the sidewalk in jaw-hanging horror—saw him bounce off the hood, into the windshield, and over the roof. Dreadful sounds filled the cold afternoon: shrieking brakes and crunching metal, breaking glass. It was the music of impact. I was sure I heard Kelvin Fish’s body being broken into loose pieces.

  He was thrown high into the air, floppy and lifeless, like a piece of rope. I saw one of his clumpy old shoes come off and spin in a different direction. I wanted to look away but couldn’t. I saw the miserable way he hit the ground. There was no suggestion of adjusting his body … using his arms or legs to break the fall; Kelvin Fish hit the blacktop like a bag of sand. His body bent backward in an unnatural way, and momentum carried him, skipping and boneless, onto the median strip.

  The car following the Cutlass Cruiser had no time to brake, either. A last-gasp crank of the wheel steered him (or her, I never saw the driver) around Kelvin Fish as he flopped and scraped across the road. Its rear end bounced back and clipped the station wagon’s buckled fender, but the driver sped away without stopping to assess the damage to either car or child. Given the terrible way in which the child had crumpled to the road, I found I could hardly blame him.

  All this happened in less than three seconds, but time is a jester, as I have already intimated, and it seemed much longer.

  I stood sealed to the sidewalk for another interminable second, during which I looked from Kelvin Fish’s prone, lifeless body, to the station wagon. The damage was substantial: the hood had been lifted in a distorted V-shape and the windshield was pushed in. Fluid dripped and pale rags of steam fluttered in the air. The front wheel had been twisted on its axle, and the car sagged on that side, like a dog with a broken paw.

  Kelvin Fish’s shoe lay in the road ten yards in front of the car. It was probably a size twelve or thirteen (Frankenstein’s monster could have slipped it on comfortably), but at that moment it looked exactly like a child’s shoe. It was terrible.

  “Call an ambulance,” I said quietly, perhaps to myself, and the world slipped back into real time. The driver of the station wagon pushed open his door and staggered into the road. His glasses had broken at the bridge and were hanging off his ears in identical pieces. His nose was bleeding. I guess the Cutlass Cruiser didn’t come standard with airbags back then, and he’d whacked his face on the steering wheel. He gazed at me for a moment—I read the terrible confusion in his eyes—then at the front of his car. He pointed at nothing in particular and started to cry.

  “Call an ambulance!” I screamed at him, or at anybody who was listening and could help. My legs jumped into life. I dashed across to the median and crouched at Kelvin Fish’s side. The traffic had slowed to a rubberneck crawl. People were rolling down their windows to get an eyeful of the damage.

  “CALL AN AMBULANCE!” I shouted at them all, not even sure if the words were articulate. They could have been one scared, breathless rush of sound: KARRLANBANNZ. Tears burst from my eyes. Instinct instructed me to grab Kelvin Fish’s wrist and feel for a pulse, but I didn’t need to do that to know that he was dead.

  “Kelvin,” I whispered. I think it was the first time I had used only his first name, like a friend. I took his hand and squeezed it lightly. I was aware that people were getting out of their cars, approaching slowly, curiously. “Karrlanbannz,” I shouted at them again, but with less energy. The driver of the station wagon was shaking his head, still looking at his car. He didn’t want to look at the dead kid.

  I squeezed his hand tighter. It occurred to me that, if I hadn’t intervened … if I had taken the school bus home just like any other day, Kelvin Fish would be getting beaten up instead of lying dead in the road. My fault. The notion was ghastly, unreal. How could doing the right thing turn out so wrong?

  “I wanted to help you,” I said, and tears splashed down my face. The cold fall wind lifted my hair and riffled my jacket. “I needed a friend.”

  And there it was—the reason I wanted to get close to Kelvin Fish. I’d always been afraid to admit it, but it was true. You never saw Kelvin Fish goofing-off with the guys outside his locker, cracking funnies, or wolf-whistling the girls, but you never saw me doing those things, either. Sure, I interacted with other children; I was a member of the speech and debate team and I played for the Harlequin Rockets, but when the meetings were over, when the game was done … I was on my own.

  I was a square peg, too.

  “Friends help,” I said. It seemed like a stupid thing to say. Two broken words as pointless as the size thirteen shoe lying in the road.

  Kelvin Fish squeezed my hand.

  There followed another stretch of jester-time—four or five seconds that felt as long as any history class—during which I tried to comprehend what had just happened. I could see Kelvin Fish’s fingers moving, squeezing my hand, but my brain struggled to analyze the information. “Dead kid” and “movement” did not want to compute.

  “Kelvin,” I said again. His good eye popped open and closed. I imagined him getting glimpses of my stricken face. The pressure in his hand increased and I noticed the toes on his left foot wiggling through his dirty black sock. I turned to the people that had gotten out of their cars and were clustered four or five yards away, unsure how to help, or scared to.

  “He’s still alive,” I said, and my voice was improbably cool. I wasn’t sure how he could be alive, given the way he had bounced off the windshield and been tossed into the air, and the awful, boneless way he had flopped to the ground. I looked at the car that had hit him, its front end hissing and ruined. I could smell radiator fluid and coolant. Kelvin Fish, on the other hand, appeared unscathed. I knew that couldn’t be so. He had surely suffered massive internal injury, but I was amazed there was no blood.

  “My husband went to call an ambulance,” one of the onlookers informed me, and her voice was kind and warm and exactly what I wanted to hear. “Help is on the way.”

  “You hear that, Kelvin?” I said. “Help is on the way. You’re going to be fine.”

  I gave his hand a reassuring squeeze. His eye opened and closed with a small clicking sound and his right leg suddenly kicked out, reminding me of the hypnic jerks you sometimes have on the cusp of sleep.

  “Whoa, buddy,” I said, placing a gentle hand on his chest. “Try to stay still. The ambulance is on its way.”

  He responded by reeling off a string of gibberish: “Dowamma elb. Noom boolan. Plag meen, plag meen.” Both legs were kicking now. His dull brown eye looked at me, and then closed, and then looked at me again. “Noom boolan. Plag meen.”

  I sensed a couple of the onlookers backing away, as if Kelvin Fish were possessed by the devil and about
to spray them all with green vomit. One of them said, “He’s having an episode, by God. Secure his head.”

  I didn’t know what to do. Tears were still rolling from my eyes, I was trembling, and my mind was overflowing with wild thoughts and images. I was a kid, for Christ’s sake—fifteen years old. Why weren’t the adults helping?

  I looked at the driver of the Cutlass Cruiser. He stared at Kelvin Fish’s shoe (the broken pieces of his glasses still dangling from his ears), as if trying to absorb the reality one piece at a time.

  “Secure his head,” the onlooker said again, his voice further away now. “He’ll knock himself daffy.”

  “Noom boolan,” Kelvin Fish said, suggesting that “daffy” had already occurred, and that he was working toward out-and-out lunacy. “Plag meen. PLAG MEEN!”

  I still had my hand on his chest and could feel his heart moving. There was something irregular about it that I couldn’t place at the time, but later—lying in the warmth of my bed and replaying the terrible events of the day—I would think that his heart felt like an insect in a jar, stupidly knocking itself against the glass. It thumped and buzzed, but it did not beat.

  I heard the ambulance, its siren a blissful sound, like the trumpeting of angels, but still too far away.

  “Can you hear that?” I said to Kelvin Fish, trying to soothe him. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  “Mama,” he said. It was the first coherent word I had ever heard him speak. His eye stopped flashing. It focused on me and softened. “Plag meen … Mama Feeeesh.”

  All of a sudden he sat up, looked around, and got to his feet. I slapped my hands to the sides of my face like an old dame who has been mooned by a carload of teenagers. My mouth fell open and my eyes expanded in their sockets to fully absorb the shock. I must have looked like that painting by Edvard Munch, The Scream. Two minutes ago, I was sure he was dead, and now he was on his feet. A small voice in my mind tried to reason that it wasn’t as bad as it initially appeared—the car had just clipped him, he’d been damned lucky. Then I remembered the way he had crunched into the windshield and been thrown into the air … the sound of his body breaking … his floppy-doll fall to the asphalt. The car had not just clipped him; it had smoked him. I had seen it with my own eyes. I had heard it. As if I needed to assure myself of this fact—and that I wasn’t going daffy—I looked at the car again. Its front end was folded in so that the headlights almost faced each other. The windshield was a sagging web of safety glass. The engine bubbled and steamed. The only way that car was leaving Columbus Boulevard was by way of a wrecker.

  “Mama,” Kelvin Fish said again. He rolled his head like a man cricking his neck in the morning.

  “You gotta hold him still,” another onlooker said. “Keep him from moving.”

  “Yeah … thanks.” I got to my feet and touched Kelvin Fish’s arm. He jerked and looked at me, his eye flashing again.

  “Mama-Mama.”

  “We’ll get your mom, Kelvin.” I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Noom boolan. Mama Feeeeeeesh.”

  I was convinced he was hurt, that the damage was all on the inside. He was obviously in shock, and scared, which explained why he was on his feet, twitching and spouting nonsense. But the guy was right. I had to keep him from moving around too much. If the damage to his internal organs—his brain—was as bad as I suspected, jumping and jerking would only make it worse.

  “Try not to move,” I said, holding his upper arm and feeling the powerful jolt of his muscle. “Just be cool.”

  “Feeeeeeeeeeesh!”

  The sirens were louder now, splitting the cold October air, and I can’t recall a sound I welcomed more. I thought about the families in their homes, preparing for Halloween just as they did every year. I imagined them hearing the ambulance and wondering what had happened (a siren could only mean that it was something bad). I should have been at home with my family, preparing for Halloween, too, but instead I was standing in the road as the light ran from the sky … at the center of the incident, at the heart of something bad.

  Kelvin Fish’s eye flicked between open and closed. He cocked his head to the left, as if listening for the ambulance. I was about to try to soothe him again when, unbelievably, he squealed: “Noom Boolan!” and ran away.

  More jester-time. It took Kelvin Fish less than two seconds to cross to the other side of Columbus Boulevard (once again, he failed to observe any road rules, but fortunately the rubberneckers were still crawling), and I stood locked to the spot in a state of disbelief. My head was a display of conflicting images. I saw what was, and what could not be. It felt like God had lied to me.

  “Somebody stop that boy,” another of the onlookers said. “His eggs have been scrambled.”

  I thought: I looked over and saw a spider crawl out of Kelvin Fish’s nose.

  And: Kelvin Fish farted in social studies. And the stink! Oh Jeeeeez …

  I saw him hit Ripsaw Griggs—two hundred and twenty pounds of steroid-grown ugliness. I saw Ripsaw’s head snap back as if his cervical vertebrae had been replaced by Polly-O string cheese. His feet left terra firma as though he’d been fired from a cannon.

  I was sitting behind Kelvin Fish in math, and I saw something moving under his shirt. Something on his back.

  I looked at the ruined car again. Still steaming, still bubbling. The siren whooped behind me. I turned and saw the ambulance snaking through traffic, lights flashing.

  Did you see that brown stuff growing in Kelvin Fish’s ears?

  I directed my gaze to the other side of the street and saw Kelvin Fish running—trying to run—away. He was dragging his left leg, shoulders hunched.

  … saw a spider crawl out of …

  … something moving under his shirt …

  … and the stink! Oh Jeeeeez …

  Jester-time: all of this in just a few seconds … impossible imagery tumbling through my head in massive, odd-shaped pieces. Tumbling slowly. Things that could never be: God hiding behind His hands.

  His eggs have been scrambled.

  “Where are you going, Kelvin Fish?” I asked, but I knew the answer. He was going home. He was going back to Mama.

  Once again, I decided to follow him.

  It was Jayson’s birthday last week. He’s my youngest son—just turned eight. He has all of his mother’s beauty and none of my failings. He should go far. We took him to the mall so that he could buy the video game he’s been asking for. The kid was hopping with excitement, and I was happy for him, but the mall was the last place I wanted to be. Five years ago, it took me ten minutes to get to the mall. Now it takes twenty. Every store is crowded. Even the walkways are starting to get crammed with kiosks selling useless items like cell phone covers and novelty T-shirts. But it was Jayson’s birthday, and he lights my life. I was sure I could endure an hour at the mall for him.

  “Whoa, Dad, look at those graphics!” Jayson was pointing at the window of the video game store, where a monstrous high-definition television showed an incredibly lifelike soldier firing lifelike bullets into lifelike enemies.

  “That’s a video game?” I asked.

  “Oh, man!” Jayson pressed his face against the glass. “Oh, man … that looks totally tight!”

  His eyes widened with delight as an enemy’s polygonal brains were dashed against a pixel-shaded wall.

  I looked at my wife. “Tell me that’s not the game he’s buying.”

  Darlene smiled. “That’s not the game he’s buying.”

  “I wish,” Jayson said, his breath fogging the glass. “It’s totally sick.”

  “You got that right, champ,” I said. “Whatever happened to Pac-Man?”

  Darlene laughed. She did the Pac-Man thing with her hand and chomped the tip of my nose. “You coming in the store, old man? Or are you going to wait out here?”

  I looked inside and saw mayhem: more high-definition TVs, each one blaring insane colors and sounds, and a mass of delirious children. There were several adults c
aught in the vortex, all of whom looked about one megabyte away from losing control.

  “I’ll wait out here,” I said, and gave Darlene’s fingers a comforting squeeze. “Semper Fi.”

  They threw themselves, bravely, into the breech, and I retreated to a spot in the walkway that wasn’t too crowded. I watched the video game playing in the store window for a few moments, dumbfounded by the level of detail, until my attention was diverted by a man in his forties who appeared to be talking to himself.

  “We’re on for the second, Luke,” he barked to no one that I could see. He paused, and then laughed. “PIN me the details, you ass—and I need that Global Tech promo, for Christ’s sake. Do it yesterday! Save it as a .gif and send it to my BlackBerry.”

  Five years ago, there wouldn’t be one person on Planet Earth who could tell you what he was talking about, but times change. They change quickly.

  The man turned around and I saw the Bluetooth headset plugged into his right ear, its little light flashing. He wasn’t talking to himself, after all; he was talking to Luke, hands-free. Cyborg, I thought with a chill, and remembered something that a friend of mine had told me a couple of weeks before: Everybody is wired-in these days, he had said. Technology is a twenty-first century god. It’s a monster.