You Think That's Bad by Jim Shepard Read Free Book Online

runts weighing in at two tons and the alphas like tylosaur a stupefying sixty feet. Under the surface, they’re U-boats with crocodiles’ heads. Pliosaurs in their hunting echelons, competing to see who’s the more viciously ill-tempered. Kronosaurs whose jaws provide the kind of leverage that can snap whales’ spines. Thalassomedons, the biggest of the elasmosaurs, with twenty-foot watersnake necks that allow the Venus-flytrap teeth to be everywhere at once. Dakosaurs gliding through the murk of fish parts spewed by their initial thrashing attacks.
    And rising out of the blue gloom like the ridged bottom itself easing up to meet you, Lipleurodon, holdover from the Jurassic, the biggest predator that ever lived. Families could live in its skull. On the move it’s like the continental shelf taking a trip. It feedseverywhere, even in shallow water with the surf breaking over it like a sandbar. Its earth-moving front flippers keep it from stranding. If some of the bigger land predators stand around the shallows trolling for what floats in, that’s their mistake. It takes them off their feet like fruit off a tree.
    This is the Tethys Ocean, huge, shallow, and warmed by its position locked between the world’s two giant supercontinents. This is the place where the
prey
could kill a sperm whale. This is all this one guy’s bed. This guy—we’ll call him Conroy, because that’s his fucking name—whose insomnia every night is beyond debilitating, teeming, epic with hostile energy, oceanic. What’s his problem? Well, where to begin? Kick your feet and watch something else surface from below. He’s been a crappy son, a shitty brother, a lousy father, a lazy helpmate, a wreck of a husband. As a pet owner he’s gotten two dogs and a parakeet killed. Some turtles and two other dogs died without his help.
    His daughter won’t speak and wears a ski hat in the house and writes stories in which family members are eviscerated as the narrator laughs. She’s an isolate, watched but not approached.
We don’t want to make the problem into more than it is
. His brother’s alone in Florida, an older version of the same pain, just a phone call away. Whenever Conroy makes his hangup indications in their once-in-a-blue-moon conversations, his brother says it was great talking to him. His father’s ignoring the doctor’s advice—most of that advice having to do with meds, his Dilantin, his Prozac, his everything else—and going downhill because of it, and still they rehearse the same conversational rituals, as though time is standing still instead of vortexing down a drain. His career involves assuring people he’s got the answers and he’s got their back when he doesn’t have the answers and he’s all about craven self-interest: he’s part of the team rolling out a major new pharmaceutical, one of the accomplished tyros vouching for one of the eminences who did the science, and in that capacity he didn’t so much invent his data as cherry-pick it. Will it kill anyone? He hopes not. Because he
means
well.
    He always
means
well. He tells himself this, treading water in bed.
    The good news is who’s in this bed with him. His wife, the person he loves most in the world. Here’s the thing about his wife: she travels a lot, in her role as headhunter for the Center for American Progress, and she’s concerned about him, and the conversational form her concern has lately taken has been to suggest, half-jokingly and half-kindly, that he should have a fling. And to him this sounds like “You should get yourself some tenderness somewhere. Because you ain’t getting it here.”
    He could
ask
if that’s what she means. But he’s the kind of guy given to building tall towers of self-pity and then watching them sway. So he speculates instead.
    In bed he hints around. His wife is all psychological acuity and knows him like