Dagger Key and Other Stories

The men bring you food. Cookies, potato chips, sandwiches, ice cream. They also bring meds and provide you with a wheelchair. Desperation fades beneath an onslaught of calories, drugs, and soap operas. Now and then you try to come up with a plan, but you can’t walk and the men, who station themselves in the front room, check on you frequently, so you can’t shout or wave out a window or toss down messages into the parking lot. You begin to tell time by what’s on TV. It’s half past The Amazing Race or a quarter to the Guiding Light. You drowse, eat, fall asleep watching a movie on the SciFi Channel, eat, wake to Sportscenter, develop an interest in Law and Order reruns, in celebrity. You think Oprah’s a beast no matter how many pounds she loses; and you decide that although Donald Trump serves the Evil One, he’s just an enormously powerful nerd; you hope the blond girl wins on American Idol and you can’t wait for the new season of Battlestar Galactica. You speculate that it might be possible to conduct a conversation upon any subject by limiting yourself to the career of John Travolta as a metaphorical construction. The only things that undergo a change in your environment are your weight—you’re getting fat—and the aquarium, in which a number of white sporelike things, perhaps a hundred of them, are floating.

The appearance of the spores, if that’s what they are, causes a renewal of desperation. Since they were bred in water removed from Abi’s belly, you’re forced to accept that they well may be her children…and yours. This notion kindles dread in you and, when next they bring food, you beg one of the men for help. His head swivels toward you and for an instant the lineaments of a disfigured face surface from the turbulent flow of dark matter. He makes a noise like static heard underwater, a faint seething, and leaves you quaking and alone amid a pile of fried fruit pies and doughnuts and potato chips…Maui Sweet Onion chips, you see on picking up the bag. Excellent!

Your fear abates the next day, your attention captivated by an X-Files marathon, and it abates still more when you realize that the number of spores has diminished. Some of them are turning into tadpoles that eat the remaining spores. Once the spores are gone, a process that occupies about two weeks, the tadpoles begin to eat each other, until finally a single white fish, the exact shade of white as Abi’s skin, circulates in the tank. Mike and Rem feed it daily and it grows fatter and more active while you fatten and grow sluggish. You become accustomed to its presence. That it may be your child amuses you. Boy or girl?, you wonder. You decide it’s a boy and name your son Gerald. Despite your amusement, there’s a horrific tinge to these thoughts, but the men have increased the strength of your meds and you can’t take anything seriously.

You sleep most of the days, waked by an internal alarm clock in time to catch your favorite shows, and when you manage to think at all, you think about Abi. You miss her. Not the inhuman Abi, the vessel you filled, but the Abi you imagined her to be. You miss her so very much that you weep at the slightest emotional cue. You remember the good times, kissing in the rain, making love, listening to her disparage diners in restaurants, passers-by, people on TV…you even miss the massage technique that left you a cripple. You take to watching the Lifetime Movie Channel because it enlists these same emotions, and you sob in sympathy with the plight of battered wives, rape victims, girls on the run from lustful dads, women with deceitful lovers and abducted children.

One morning you wake to discover that Gerald’s not in his tank. A large damp spot stains the carpeting beneath the tank, and a trail of wetness leads toward the foot of your bed. You try to sit up, wanting to learn if Gerald’s still alive, but Mike and Rem have increased your meds again—you can barely lift your head. You shout out to them, you want them to save Gerald, to restore him to the tank, but no one responds. They haven’t been in to check on you for two days now and Gerald must be starving. No wonder he hurled himself onto the floor. The bedspread tightens convulsively down by your feet, as if it’s being tugged, and the next thing you know, Gerald heaves up onto the bottom of the bed. His fins have developed into primitive hands, and he’s half-wriggling, half-hauling himself along, moving past your ankle. He’s even bigger than you thought, he must weigh nearly three pounds. His face is an obscene caricature of the human, a squashed, round, dolorous face gashed by a wide mouth that sports rows of barracuda-like teeth. A chill apprehension steals over you. With another heave, he succeeds in flopping up onto your pelvis, where he snoots at the spread overlying your genitals. His glabrous skin shows a tracery of blue subcutaneous veins, like Abi’s breasts. He has your eyes…