The Uncanny Reader (69 page)

“Keep looking,” he snarls, water dripping off his face.

*   *   *

On the fifth night of our search, I see a plesiosaur. It is a megawatt behemoth, bronze and blue-white, streaking across the sea floor like a torpid comet. Watching it, I get this primordial déjà vu, like I'm watching a dream return to my body. It wings toward me with a slow, avian grace. Its long neck is arced in an S-shaped curve; its lizard body is the size of Granana's carport. Each of its ghost flippers pinwheels colored light. I try to swim out of its path, but the thing's too big to avoid. That Leviathan fin, it shivers right through me. It's a light in my belly, cold and familiar. And I flash back to a snippet from school, a line from a poem or a science book, I can't remember which:

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

*   *   *

I wake up from one of those naps which leach the strength from your bones to a lightning storm. I must have fallen asleep in the crab sled. Otherworldly light goes roiling through an eerie blue froth of clouds.

Wallow is standing at the prow of the sled. Each flash of lightning limns his bared teeth, the hollows of his eyes. It's as if somebody up there were taking an X-ray of grief, again and again.

“I just want to tell her that I'm sorry,” Wallow says softly. He doesn't know that I'm awake. He's talking to himself, or maybe to the ocean. There's not a trace of fear in his voice. And it's clear then that Wallow is a better brother than I could ever hope to be.

We have rowed almost all the way around the island. In a quarter of an hour, we'll be back at Gannon's Boat Graveyard. Thank merciful Christ. Our parents are coming back tomorrow, and I can go back to playing video games and feeling dry and blameless.

Then the lighthouse beacon sweeps out again. It bounces off an outcropping of rocks that we didn't notice on our first expedition. White sequins of light pop along the water.

“Did you see that? That's it!” Wallow says excitedly. “That's gotta be it!”

“Oh. Excellent.”

We paddle the rest of the way out in silence. I row the crab sled like a condemned man. The current keeps pushing us back, but we make a quiet kind of progress. I keep praying that the crags will turn out to be low, heaped clouds, or else a seamless mass of stone. Instead, you can tell that they are pocked with dozens of holes. For a second, I'm relieved—nobody, not even string-beany Olivia, could swim into such narrow openings. Wallow's eyes dart around wildly.

“There has to be an entrance,” he mutters. “Look!”

Sure enough, there is a muted glow coming from the far end of a salt-eaten overhang, like light from under a door.

“No way can I fit through there,” I gasp, knowing immediately that I can. And that the crab sled can't, of course. Which means I'll be going in to meet her alone.

What if the light, I am thinking, is Olivia?

“It's just worms, bro,” Wallow says, as if reading my mind. But there's this inscrutable sadness on his face. His muddy eyes swallow up the light and give nothing back.

I look over my shoulder. We're less than half a mile out from shore, could skip a stone to the mangrove islets; and yet the land draws back like a fat swimmer's chimera, impossibly far away.

“Ready?” He grabs at the scruff of my neck and pushes me toward the water. “Set?”

“No!” Staring at the unlit spaces in the crags, I am choked with horror. I fumble the goggles off my face. “Do your own detective work!” I dangle the goggles over the edge of the sled. “I quit.”

Wallow lunges forward and pins me against the side of the boat. He tries to spatula me overboard with his one good arm, but I limbo under his cast.

“Don't do it, Timothy,” he cautions, but it is too late.

“This is what I think of your diabolical goggles!” I howl. I hoist the goggles over my head and, with all the force in my puny arms, hurl them to the floor of the crab sled.

This proves to be pretty anticlimactic. Naturally, the goggles remain intact. There's not even a hairline fracture. Stupid scratchproof lenses.

The worst part is that Wallow just watches me impassively, his cast held aloft in the air, as if he were patiently waiting to ask the universe a question. He nudges the goggles toward me with his foot.

“You finished?”

“Wally!” I blubber, a last-ditch plea. “This is crazy. What if something happens to me in there and you can't come in after me? Let's go back.”

“What?” Wallow barks, disgusted. “And leave Olivia here for dead? Is that what you want?”

“Bingo!” That is exactly what I want. Maybe Granana is slightly off target when it comes to the Food Pyramid, but she has the right idea about death. I want my parents to stop sailing around taking pictures of Sudanese leper colonies. I want Wallow to row back to shore and sleep through the night. I want everybody in the goddam family to leave Olivia here for dead.

But there's my brother. Struggling with his own repugnance, like an entomologist who has just discovered a loathsome new species of beetle.

“What did you say?”

“I said I'll go,” I mumble, not meeting his eyes. I position myself on the edge of the boat. “I'll go.”

So that's what it comes down to, then. I'd rather drown in Olivia's ghost than have him look at me that way.

*   *   *

To enter the grotto, you have to slide in on your back, like a letter through a mail slot. Something scrapes my coccyx bone on the way in. There's a polar chill in the water tonight. No outside light can wiggle its way inside.

But, sure enough, phosphorescent dots spangle the domed roof of the grotto. It's like a radiant checkerboard of shit. You can't impose any mental pictures on it—it's too uniform. It defies the mind's desire to constellate randomness. The Glowworm Grotto is nothing like the night sky. The stars here are all equally bright and evenly spaced, like a better-ordered cosmos.

“Olivia?”

The grotto smells like salt and blood and bat shit. Shadows web the walls. I try and fail to touch the bottom.

“Oliviaaa?”

Her name echoes around the cave. After a while, there is only rippled water again, and the gonged absence of sound. Ten more minutes, I think. I could splash around here for ten more minutes and be done with this. I could take off the goggles, even. I could leave without ever looking below the surface of the water, and Wallow would never know.

“Oli—”

I take a deep breath, and dive.

Below me, tiny fish are rising out of golden cylinders of coral. It looks like an undersea calliope, piping a song that you can see instead of hear. One of the fish swims right up and taps against my scratchproof lenses. It's just a regular blue fish, solid and alive. It taps and taps, oblivious of the thick glass. My eyes cross, trying to keep it in focus.

The fish swims off to the beat of some subaqueous music. Everything down here is dancing—the worms' green light and the undulant walls and the leopard-spotted polyps. Everything. And following this fish is like trying to work backward from the dance to the song. I can't hear it, though; I can't remember a single note of it. It fills me with a hitching sort of sadness.

I trail the fish at an embarrassed distance, feeling warm-blooded and ridiculous in my rubbery flippers, marooned in this clumsy body. Like I'm an impostor, an imperfect monster.

I look for my sister, but it's hopeless. The goggles are all fogged up. Every fish burns lantern-bright, and I can't tell the living from the dead. It's all just blurry light, light smeared like some celestial fingerprint all over the rocks and the reef and the sunken garbage. Olivia could be everywhere.

 

NOTES

Note: The page numbers have been removed for the eBook edition.

The list of definitions of “uncanny” and “canny”:
Dictionary of the Scots Language
http://www.dsl.ac.uk/

general uncanny ugliness and horror and pain
: Henry James.
The Turn of the Screw
(London: Henry James, Everyman, J.M. Dent, 1993): 4.

beautiful hand
: ibid: 4.

utmost price
: ibid: 3.

transforming the concerns of art, literature, film
: Nicholas Royle.
The Uncanny
(New York: Routledge, 2003): 27.

belonging to the house
: Sigmund Freud, translated by David McClintock. “The Uncanny” in
The Uncanny
(New York: Penguin Group USA, 2003): 126.

private
: ibid: 130.

secret
: ibid: 130.

concealed
: ibid: 129.

the uncanny is a ‘province' still before us
: Nicholas Royle.
The Uncanny
(New York: Routledge, 2003): 27.

When something that should have remained hidden … foreign to ourselves: these are not exact quotes, but paraphrased and compiled from:

Nicholas Royle.
The Uncanny
(New York: Routledge, 2003): 1–2.

In a sense, then, [the fiction writer] betrays us
: ibid: 157.

little box … of no remarkable character
: Edgar Allan Poe. “Berenice,”
Complete Tales and Poems
(New York: Vintage, 1975): 647.

To make strange, to defamiliarize. Paraphrased from Victor Shklovsky, translated by Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. “Art as Technique” in
Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965): 13.

devouring blaze of lights
: Edith Wharton. “Pomegranate Seed” in
The Ghost Stories of Edith Wharton
(New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973): 200.

the uncertain hold of a ship
: Franz Kafka, translated by Michael Hofmann. “The Stoker,” in
Metamorphosis and Other Stories
(Penguin Group, 2007): 58.

If you wish to guess what our ancestors felt
: Virginia Wolff. “The Supernatural in Fiction,” in
Granite and Rainbow: Essays
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovitch, 1975): 63.

ruins, or moonlight, or ghosts
: ibid: 63.

But what is it that we are afraid of?
: ibid: 63.

against the kingdom of the quotidian
: Bruno Schulz, translated by Jerzy Ficowski.
The Street of Crocodiles
(New York: Penguin USA, 1997): 21.

 

COPYRIGHT ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

“The Sand-man,” by E. T. A. Hoffmann, translated by J. T. Bealby,
Weird Tales
, Vol. 1, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1885.

“On the Water,” by Guy de Maupassant. English translation copyright © Edward Gauvin 2014. Used by permission of the translator.

“Oysters,” by Anton Chekhov. English translation copyright © 1922 by Constance Garnett. Reprinted by permission of A P Watt at United Agents on behalf of the Executor of the Estate of Constance Garnett.

“Pomegranate Seed,” by Edith Whaston. Copyright © 1931 by The Curtis Publishing Company. Reprinted by permission of the estate of Edith Wharton and the Watkins/Loomis Agency.

“The Stoker,” from
Metamorphosis and Other Stories
by Franz Kafka. English translation copyright © 2007 by Michael Hofmann. Used by permission of Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) LLC, and Penguin Books Ltd.

“Decay,” by Marjorie Bowen. Copyright © 1923. Used by permission of the Estate of Gabrielle Long.

“The Music of Erich Zann,” by Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Originally published in
National Amateur
in 1922. Copyright © 1922 the Estate of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Used by permission of Arkham Publishing House, Inc.

“The Birds,” by Bruno Schulz. English translation copyright © 2013 by John Curran Davis. Used by permission of the translator.

“The Usher,” by Felisberto Hernández, from
Piano Stories.
Copyright © 1993, 2014 by the heirs of Felisberto Hernández; “
El acomodador,” NADIE ENCENDÍA LAS LÁMPARAS,
copyright © 2013 by the heirs of Felisberto Hernández. Translation copyright © 1993 by Luis Harss. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.

“The Waiting Room,” by Robert Aickman. Copyright © Estate of Robert Aickman c/o Artellus Limited,
www.artellusltd.co.uk
. Used by permission of Faber and Faber, Ltd., and Artellus Limited.

“Paranoia,” by Shirley Jackson. First published in
The New Yorker,
August 5, 2013. Copyright © 2013 by Laurence Hyman, on behalf of the copyright proprietors, successors-in-interest of the author, Shirley Jackson. Used by permission.

“The Helper,” by Joan Aiken. From
The Monkey's Wedding and Other Stories.
Copyright © 1979 by Joan Aiken Enterprises, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Small Beer Press.

“The Jesters,” by Joyce Carol Oates. Copyright © 2013
The Ontario Review,
reprinted by permission of John Hawkins and Associates, Inc.

“The Devil and Dr. Tuberose,” by John Herdman, from
Imelda and Other Stories
. Copyright © 1993 by John Herdman. Reprinted by permission of the author.

“Phantoms,” by Steven Millhauser. Copyright © 2010 by Steven Millhauser. Used by Permission. All rights reserved.

“On Jacob's Ladder,” by Steve Stern, from
The Book of Mischief: New and Selected Stories
. Copyright © 2012 by Steve Stern. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc., on behalf of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota,
www.graywolfpress.org
.