The Fisherman by John Langan Read Free Book Online Page B

Dan never heard.
    He told me this over the course of dinner, which was spaghetti and meatballs with garlic bread and salad, in answer to my asking, “So, Dan, how are you?” I didn’t interrupt him, confining myself to making sympathetic grunts. This was the most he’d spoken to me at one time, and the most about the subject of his loss, and once he’d started I knew better than to derail him. He took most of dinner to unburden himself, during which time he ate little—some garlic bread was all—but managed four full glasses from the bottle of red wine I’d set on the table. This was sufficient to start him swaying ever-so-slightly, and to pull his eyelids lower. Once I thought he was finished talking, I said, “Now, don’t take this the wrong way, but maybe you should talk to someone, you know, professional. Maybe that’d be a help to you.”
    His voice slurring, Dan said, “No offense taken, Abe—Abraham. You want to know what helps? I’ll tell you. At about four in the morning, when I’m lying on my bed with my eyes wide open, staring at the ceiling, which is kind of like a movie screen hanging there above me, because it’s white, and because I can see everything that happened played out there on it, again and again—when it gets to be four in the morning, and I think, I’m going to get up in an hour and a half anyway, why not now? I haul myself out of bed, throw on some clothes, doesn’t matter what, make myself a cup of coffee to go—can’t miss my morning cup of coffee—and I go, take the car and drive out to the corner of Morris Road and 299. Morris has a wide shoulder there, so it’s no problem for me to pull off onto it and sit drinking my morning cup of coffee. There’s a traffic light there now, did you know that? Did you?”
    “Yeah,” I said, “I did.”
    “Of course you did: who doesn’t? It marks the spot where the Drescher family—where we—where the happy family of one Daniel Anthony Drescher was forever reduced . I sit at that spot—that historic spot, coffee in hand, and I look at that traffic light. I study it. I contemplate it. I watch its three glass eyes trade off commands. If it’s warm enough, or if it isn’t, I open my window and listen to it. Let’s say the light starts off green. There’s a buzzing, almost like an alarm clock, which is followed by a clunk, and the light is yellow. Another buzzing, another clunk, and it’s red. It’s like gates being opened and shut, like prison gates. The light stays red the longest, did you know that? I’ve timed it. This is looking at it from Morris. From 299, it stays green the longest. After red comes green, then yellow. Buzz, clunk. Buzz, clunk. Gates opening and shutting, Abe. Gates opening and shutting.
    “I’ll let you in on a little secret, too. Looking at the light doesn’t help in the slightest. I don’t think, Well, at least some good has come out of this terrible tragedy . The intersection’s just another place to be. I can’t escape it. I can’t escape any of it. Myself am hell, right? So I might as well be at the spot where I took the plunge, so to speak, the place where I was cast out. I do feel calmer there. Strange, huh? I have the strangest thoughts lately. I swear I do. When I look at things—when I look at people—I think, None of it’s real. It’s all just a mask, like those papier-mâché masks we made for one of our school plays when I was a kid. What play was that? It seems like it must have been Alice in Wonderland , but I can’t remember. I wish I could remember that play. I wish I could. All a mask, Abe, and the million-dollar question is, What’s underneath the mask? If I could break through the mask, if I could make a fist and punch a hole in it,” his hand slammed the table, rattling the dishes, “what would I find? Just flesh? Or would there be something more? Would I find those things the minister talked about at the funerals? You weren’t there, were you? I guess we didn’t