Wild Thing: A Novel (3 page)

For a moment I think he’s been sitting in the dark, waiting for the light to go on, but then I realize that’s too stupid: it’s just that the cube has gone from opaque to transparent. Liquid crystal in the glass or something.

As the man comes out of the office and walks toward me, more spotlights come on to light his path. He’s late forties, with a gym body and a ponytail. Blazer, untucked shirt, designer jeans, wedge-toe loafers: the full douchebag tuxedo, though I decide to suspend judgment when I see his face. It’s been lined by something that looks a lot like pain. Incised by it, more like.

At the moment, though, he’s smiling. “What do you think?” he says to me. “Real or fake?”

I have no idea what he’s talking about. Between the light-up office and Calamity Jane back in the car, I wonder if he’s trying to hypnotize me with weirdness, like Milton Erickson was supposedly able to do. Then I notice he’s looking at an oil painting on a freestanding white wall beside me.

It’s a city-under-starry-night kind of thing in the style of van Gogh. In fact it’s signed
“Vincent.”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“Guess.”

“Can I touch it?”

“Go ahead.”

I put my palm on the chunky paint. “It’s fake.”

“How can you tell?”

“You let me touch it.”

“Fair point,” he says. “Although it cost almost as much as the original.”

He keeps frowning at it, so eventually I say “Why?”

“It was done by a computer. The idea was to use MRI to figure out the order and content of the brushstrokes. But next to the
original it looks like shit. One of my materials guys thinks it’s because the original has too many false starts and corrections.”

“Next time you should copy someone who could paint.”

“Ha,” the man says. “I’m Rec Bill.”
^*

“Lionel Azimuth.”

“I know. Come into my office.”

“I think I’m going to show you the DVD first,” he says. He’s behind his glass desk. The only things on it are a small pink-and-gold ashtray with a facedown business card in it and a white padded envelope that’s been cut open rather than torn.

“Get you something to drink?” he says.

“No, thanks.” If Rec Bill wants my fingerprints, he can send someone to the fucking ship.

If
he does.

I don’t know what he wants, because I don’t know who he thinks I am. Professor Marmoset would never have told him the truth about me, but I assume anyone this rich would have run a background check.
^*
And Lionel Azimuth barely has a background.

“What has Dr. Hurst told you?” he says.

“Nothing.”

“Good. I want to see how you react to this.”

Rec Bill swipes and taps some not-obviously-marked spots on his desk, and a part of one wall lights up as a monitor.

Something else he does dims the lights.

The video starts silently. For a while it’s just photographs, mostly sepia and black-and-white, run together with the “Ken Burns” feature of somebody’s editing software. Woods and lakes. Native Americans posing in suede. Some bearded men in flannel outside a mine entrance. In sudden Kodachrome, so that it looks like the 1970s, a family in a canoe. Then back to black-and-white for more woods and lakes.

Eventually something artful happens: there’s a color shot of a rock wall at the edge of a lake, apparently taken from the water. Then a closer shot from the same perspective, and an even closer one. At which point you can see that the rock has a primitive-looking drawing on it.

It’s a moose face-to-face with a much larger animal that’s curving up from below it, like a serpent or a giant seahorse. The creature has horns and a snout. The moose’s lower jaw hangs open in comical surprise. A bunch of smaller animals lie around looking dead, on their backs with their feet in the air.

The image freezes. An amateurishly boomy male announcer voice with a hiss behind it says
“The knowledge that a mysterious creature exists in the waters of White Lake has been known for centuries. Numerous Native American tribes, including the Chippewa and others of the Anishinaabe peoples, tell legends of the Creature that recede to the depths of time. Mysterious disappearances of dogs, livestock, and other animals have been recorded for four hundred years or more
.

“And what of the present? Many residents of the modern-day town of Ford, the nearest town to White Lake, say they have actually seen the monster. Several say they have observed it on multiple occasions.”

There’s some handheld modern video of a bunch of people
with their backs to the outside of a convenience store. A voice, maybe the announcer’s but weak in the open air, says “Who here has seen the monster?”

Everybody in the group raises their hands. “Twice,” one woman says.

The video abruptly switches to a teenage girl in a hiking outfit and wraparound sunglasses, walking away as the camera pursues her along the front of some woods. It’s a bit like a slasher movie.

The voice says “Young lady, have you seen a monster in White Lake?”

“Please don’t videotape me,” she says.

“Just yes or no.”

“Yes, okay?”

The screen goes black as the voice returns to announcer-style.
“Some have managed to photograph it.”

There’s a multicolor jag, and the image turns into what seems to be handheld video of an old television playing a videotape. The television’s screen bulges outward, so a lot of what’s going on is obscured by glare. You can barely read the pixelated text along the bottom:
“THE DR. McQUILLEN TAPE.”
Whoever’s doing the filming zooms in on the upper-right corner of the television screen, and the image turns into almost pure grain. But just as you’re starting to wonder whether there’s a store out there that exists only to rent shitty, ancient video equipment to people making hoax movies, you realize you’re watching a duck floating on some water.

Then the water explodes, and the duck is gone.

It gives me a hitch in my chest. The ferocity and speed of the attack, along with the thrash out of calm water, remind me of a shark.

I don’t like sharks. I haven’t since I spent a bad night in an aquarium eleven years ago.

A voice on the video says “Hold on a sec,” and the image on the television freezes, then rewinds in fast motion, then stops and starts to play again frame by frame.

Now I’m sweating.

The duck. The water. Something rising out of the water, dark but hidden by the splashing, then blotting out the duck entirely. The something gone, and the duck with it, no way to tell what it was.

There’s a flash, and suddenly Rec Bill and I are watching relatively high-quality modern video again, this time of a bleak-faced old man standing in front of a pier.

The announcer voice, with its hiss, comes back long enough to say
“Some even say they have tangled with it.”

“Happened some years ago,” the old man says.

Then he just stands there looking forlorn.

Someone off camera asks him a question you can’t quite hear.

“Oh, I can remember it,” he says. “I can remember it like it was yesterday.”

“Okay,” Rec Bill says to me. “Check it out. This is where it gets interesting.”

Lake Garner, Minnesota

19 Years Ago
^*

It’s nine a.m.—late to get a line down, like Charlie Brisson gives a fuck. He’s not out on this bullshit lake in the middle of the fucking woods to fish. He’s here to get shitfaced and forget that his wife is fucking his fucking shift manager.

The shitfaced part is working, at least. Brisson woke up half out of his tent, frozen, his face bit to shit by mosquitoes. But what he woke up picturing was Lisa getting cornholed by Robin.

He’s
still
picturing it. There aren’t exactly a lot of distractions around here. Maybe Brisson should have thought about that
before he came out to the woods. Maybe he shouldn’t be such a fucking, fucking idiot.

He just can’t accept it. It’s like some new Lisa has taken the place of the one Brisson loved. Good Lisa would never have done this to him.

Brisson knows that’s bullshit, and Good Lisa never existed in the first place, but
fuck
—he just misses her so much.

The sobs break out of him in a
Heh-heh-heh
pattern.

He leans forward so the sun will stop fucking him in the eyes, his legs out in front of him on the bottom of the canoe. Drooping farther and farther forward until suddenly it feels like he’s spinning and he jerks upright, almost tipping the boat.

After that he tries to pay attention to the line. Like that helps. The line just sits there. The whole lake’s laughing at him. It’s as empty as Brisson’s motherfucking life.

Heh-heh-heh
.

Fuck crappie. Fuck fucking walleye. After Brisson found out Lisa was fucking Robin, Lisa swore to him they never fucked in the section office of the mine while Brisson was down-shaft.

Of
course
they fucked in the section office of the mine while Brisson was down-shaft. Why not? No safer place. Brisson stuck twenty-eight stories underground, no way back to the surface except by calling the fucking
section office
for the elevator.

Sorry to fucking
interrupt you!

Brisson cries away. Covers his itching, spasming face with his hands.

Which after a while strikes him as interesting, because it means he’s no longer holding his fishing rod.

He looks around for it. Scorch scorch scorch from the reflected sunlight, and another hit of vertigo.

The rod’s not in the boat. It’s not floating, either, at least not
nearby. Brisson can’t remember whether it’s the kind that’s meant to float. Or whether he’s got a spare back at the campsite.

He has a panicked moment where he thinks he might have lost the oar, too, but then he finds it by his feet, thank you, Jesus. Yanks it loose to row for shore, where fuck it—fuck all of it—he can start drinking again.

Back at the campsite, though, Brisson is confused.

No fucking way did he drink all that beer. Brisson only drinks beer as a chaser. Other than when his wife turns out to be an evil lying whore, he’s not that much of a drinker in the first place. And he’s still got plenty of Jim Beam.