“A wonderful fish! With a wide and mournful mouth—like you see in certain kinds of dogs. Beautiful and ugly and it moved like a leviathan. On land, no less! It could breathe air. I loved that it could breathe air. I gave it wonderful eyes, too: veined with emerald and gold.”
I had heard this part before, but as much as Wick went on about the fish, the depths of his feelings weren’t about the fish. Not really. As time passed and the stars above began to slow, to reorganize along familiar constellations, most of his emotions were focused on people from the Company: the old friend who had abandoned him, or whom he had abandoned, and the new employee who had betrayed him. The supervisor who had overseen the fish project. All of these people he had let into his life, and who had turned against him. Or had changed. Or had simply been acting to their nature, and Wick had come into focus for them for a time and then drifted out of focus again.
I didn’t know them, and Wick never gave enough context to make me care. But also I couldn’t remember as an adult when I had trusted three people at the same time. That Wick had once trusted so many seemed silly and irresponsible: an old-world indulgence. That he might have trusted them more than he trusted me I didn’t want to think about.
I wondered, too, if Wick’s view of the Company, his willingness to forgive, could ever be reconciled with my own view. To me, the Company was the white engorged tick on the city’s flank, the place that had robbed us of resources and created chaos. The place that, it was rumored, had sent its finished products out by underground tunnels to far-distant places and left us with the dregs at the holding ponds.
Sometimes I met rare older scavengers who would spin me tales of the richness of the city before the Company’s appearance, and their faces would shine with an inner light that almost made me change my mind about memory beetles. Almost. What they told me could not be the whole truth, the same as when we speak of the recently deceased and tell only the good stories. That was the beauty of the Company—how it won no matter what. How it had attached itself to the history of our city, even when it no longer existed here except as a husk, a ghost, or a giant, murderous bear.
“Someone killed it, showed it to me through a camera embedded in one of my spy beetles.” Except, later on Wick said that another person had killed it.
Yet another version: that it had been wounded and lingered on for a time in the holding ponds outside the Company building. In this version, the fish had survived for almost a year—longer than it should have, in part because Wick had fed it. The creature had become a terror of that place: the monster with the human face that rose from the depths to devour. Although the human face was dead almost from the start, nibbled at and gnawed on by lesser creatures in the water, became waterlogged and misshapen in its decay, and no one would have recognized who it once was, nor could the rest of the fish ever recover from the death it carried atop its head.
In a fourth version, Wick hinted that the fish might linger there still, deep under the water. Wick telling versions. Wick hurt. Wick falling back into angst—Wick recounting how he had been forced out of the Company when his fish project was sabotaged, the Company sliding into anarchy, out of contact with its headquarters, and he having to live his life without the protection to which he’d grown accustomed. Turned him into a drug dealer, a survivalist, a man so thin and translucent he wouldn’t have looked out of place in a row of creatures from a cave or the deep ocean.
In my darker moments, when I doubted my own true self and betrayed that self by framing my attraction to Wick as a kind of antidote, I knew that what Wick was really admitting was that in his past he had helped to create a weapon so deadly that not even its extreme beauty could justify its use.
The truth that Wick conveniently left out of most of his memories but was explicit in the notes on the diagram in his apartment: The purpose of his monstrous fish had been to serve as enforcer and crowd control, to instill fear, and perhaps to kill. In some remote place, a government still had had, at the time, the authority or the stability to restore order, was invested in restoring it.
And then, that night on the balcony, for the first and only time, another monster entered Wick’s rambling discourse about the Company. “Mord knew about the fish project. Mord showed me what I was.”
I didn’t know how to take that. Had Wick coexisted with Mord in the Company? When Mord was smaller, when Mord couldn’t fly? But whenever I sensed Wick had let slip something important, he would stop abruptly, as if reading my sudden interest, and fall silent. That silence was no natural end.
It was more like a cutting-off point, the border beyond which Wick could not venture.
WHAT I DID TO OTHERS AND WHAT OTHERS DID TO ME
In the city, the line between nightmare and reality was fluid, just as the context of the words killer and death had shifted over time. Perhaps Mord was responsible. Perhaps we all were.
A killer was someone who killed for reasons other than survival. A killer was a madman or madwoman, not a person just trying to get through another day. Once, I hit a woman with a rock. We encountered each other while out scavenging on the same deserted street on the west side of the city. I had found a smooth piece of metal being absorbed by a glistening red piece of fleshlike plant. I didn’t know if Wick would find it useful, but I had never seen anything like it before.
As I turned a corner holding my prize, I came upon a woman walking. She was about fifty, wiry in the way survivors often are, gray hair hanging in a sheet, clothing a patchwork of gray and black.
She saw me and smiled. Then she saw what I held and her smile went away. “Give me that. That’s mine.” Maybe she meant “That’s going to be mine.”
I didn’t wait for her to get close enough to grapple with me. I knelt and picked up a rock with my free hand. As she rushed toward me from the middle of the street, I threw it at her, catching her in the forehead. She went limp, fell onto her side, breathing heavily. Then she got up and I threw another rock, catching her in the head again.
This time she staggered back, put her hands on her knees as she hunched down. I could see the bright red pooling from her head to the ground. She sat heavily in the rubble and put a hand to her head, stared at me as I dropped the third rock I’d picked up.
“I just wanted to look at it,” she said, puzzled as she kept putting a hand to her wound and taking it away again. Her eyes began to glaze over. “Just a look is all I wanted.”
I didn’t stay to help her or hurt her. I left.
Did she die? Did I kill her, and if I did, am I a murderer?
*