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But I can’t be an old man.
I can’t be a man at all.
The kids are looking out the window at him, adoring, hoping for miracles.
“Who are you?” he says. “What right have you to ask me to do anything? You and they will be dead by the time I’ve had my lunch. You want me to do anything for you? You want me to care about you? That’s going to hurt me, and it won’t help you or them.”
“You have no idea what you can do, do you?”
He knows what he can’t do.
“Then I’ve given you your wish, Green Man,” she says. “You are dead. You care about nothing. You are a rock. A stone. An old man fishing until the end of the world.”
I can’t, he thinks. I don’t have the talent for that either.
“Then let’s try something else,” she says.
SHE could book a flight on her magic phone, but she doesn’t. She makes him zip them across the Atlantic in a glowing green saucer a hundred feet long. She tells him he can make it invisible to radar and infrared and light, can’t he? The kids scream and giggle and bounce around the inside of the flying saucer and ask him to turn off the gravity inside, which he does. The kids fly. He’s a terrified protector, afraid of the villagers, helping them from a distance, a watchdog and not a man. He is bony ribs around the kids’ beating hearts. He feels like someone in an airplane, speeding along too fast, cradled by something he can’t control.
They land on the Mars-rocky shore of the loch, between the pines and the peaty water, Lan and Green and a luminous flying saucer full of giggling, flying teenage Japanese shape-changers. “Make it a submarine now,” the kids tell him. He thinks about recirculators, scrubbers; he pushes molecules around. They sink into the brown darkness like into moving loam.
“Can you—” Lan says.
But he holds up his hand. He has been here.
Ice fishing: the seldom-seen, magical moment when the water under the ice is clear, when the fish can see light from a distance. When they gather. When, in the light, the fisherman sees muscular dark bodies turning. When the fish looks at the fisherman, curious, and the fisherman looks at the fish.
What can you do? Who are you?
He does like he did with the dirt on the floor, like at Lake Musky seining for the kids, but tinier, tiny. He sends out into the water nets that are no stronger than metaphors, trawling for the smallest pieces of drowned bark and leaf, gathering them together, dodging around any fish or eel or water snake. He thinks about Brownian motion. Why did they need Atom’s light? The water clears. The water clears, leaving worms and little fish wriggling, surprised. The darkness recedes around them; a bigger fish bullets by, mouth open, and the small fry streak for safety in the blackness below them. Green globes light around the kids, and around them the fish gather, as if they are all in one great dark place under the ice together, with one flashlight to draw them.
The kitten-girl gives a little breathy scream.
Out of the blackness, out of the depths, She comes. She strikes at the glow, but Green thinks slipperiness and the ball that holds them spins past her teeth. She mouths a man-sized fish and flips her body round, whirls around them, thrashing, stretching out her neck, trying to catch them. She is too big to see whole. Riffles of gills, a great round flat eye like a target, scarred scales.
He plays her. Green is the worm; Green is the net, the line, the hook. The great She-Fish worries at the green ball-light, her teeth an inch away from them, and he and Lan and the kids bounce away from her. She wraps her long neck and tail around them. He feints and slides away.
And then suddenly it is a dance. He knows what she wants. He morphs the ball in which they all float into a mirror-monster of her, a ghost monster of green and light. She rears back. He shapes the green fish to match her motion. And for a moment the two of them hang there, in the water clear as glass, a monster fish like ebony and a monster fish like emerald, and she is still, still, still, and she reaches out her long neck, sniffing, opening her mouth to taste the water with her tongue, tilting her head so she sees him out of one enormous eye. Are you like me, her outstretched neck says, her tongue licks, and Green’s heart beats loud in his ears, Are you like me?
But she throws her head back with a cry of loneliness and disappears into the deep.
When they are back on dry land, the kids say nothing. They stand on the rocky shore, each of them alone for a minute. Then the boy goes from one to the other, touching them on the shoulder, bringing them together into a protective hug. They reach out for the two older men, for Lan. She reaches out for him. Green stands with them, embracing them and embraced.
Tonight he has done new things. Of all of them, that silent lonely hug is the hardest, and it’s what he will remember, that and Nessie’s tongue tasting the green monster made of force and silt, hoping she could find something like herself.
HE takes everyone back to Japan in his invisible force-field UFO. They’re quiet on the trip. Over Japan, the trees are pink and green with springtime. At the big Tokyo train station, the kids and the older men shake hands with him and Lan. Then the Japanese Talents wander away, down escalators. The station is a big mall, open in the center. Green and Lan can still see the group, past the escalator, two levels below them. The kids stand in front of a game store, huddling together.
“Guess they thought they’d be happier when the heroics happened,” Green says. “Guess they thought they’d figure something out.”
“They’ve seen monsters,” Lan says.
He nods.
“We went fishing,” he says. “Four of us. We were so jazzed about being Talents. That was the age of Talents. We thought we had it made. We were kings of the world. We were like each other. But Atom got sick, Astounding was going to get himself blown up someday and he did, I stole my wife from Iguana and pretended to be human. We went fishing and we caught loneliness. I can’t help the kids, Lan. Badgers and cats don’t live more than a few years. Someday there’ll be only one of them left. And it’ll see something it thinks is like itself or its friends, but the smell will be wrong and the taste will be wrong, and it’ll know it’s the only one of itself in the world. Being the one there’s only one of, that’s being a monster.”
“I’ll buy you a present,” Lan says.
She makes him wait outside a shop full of statues of every description, from Buddha to the Virgin Mary. Here in Planet Tokyo you buy Buddhas in a train station. She comes out with a little box. Not far away from them there’s something like a food court with little tables. They take a table with pink plastic flowers embedded in its top. “Open your present now.” She goes away and comes back with two drinks, something chewy and sweet with barley in it.
Green’s present is eight little plastic statues in a row on a plastic base.
“The Eight Immortals.” She touches their small heads one by one. “Immortal Woman He, whose lotus flower gives health. Royal Uncle Cao, whose jade tablet purifies the world. Iron-Crutch Li, who protects the needy.” She takes the next one off the stand, a slim Chinese boy or girl with a woven basket and a flute, and stands it by her purse. Through the woven material of the purse he can see the outline of that long flute. “Lu Dongbin, whose sword dispels evil spirits. Philosopher Han Xiang, whose flute gives life. Elder Zhang Guo, master of clowns, winemaking, and Qigong kung fu. Zhongli Quan, whose fan revives the dead.”
Green picks up the statue with the basket and flute, and looks a question at her.
“Immortal Woman runs a health food store in New Jersey. The Philosopher and Quan are dead, I think. The Philosopher’s flute came to me in the mail one day. I saw Zhang Guo on the beach in Monterey but he wouldn’t talk to me. Lu, Li, Cao, I don’t know. Immortal Woman frightens me most. She didn’t want to be a monster. She wanted friends and neighbors. She made herself forget she was immortal. I go in there once a year or so, and she says nothing but trivial things, How do you like those Dodgers? She never stops talking. She bores everyone and forgets to charge for newspapers. But she isn’t a monster.”