It came trickling in over the transom at first, but Hatch's bailing technique had grown rusty. The skies were dark with daily news of a pointless war and genocide in Africa, poverty, AIDS, desperate millions in migration. The hot air of the commander in chief met the stone-cold bullshit of Congress and spawned water spouts, towering gyres of deadly ineptitude. A steady rain of increasing gas prices, grocery prices, medical costs, drove down hard like a fall of needles. At times the mist was so thick it baffled the mind. Somewhere in a back room, Liberty, Goddess of the Sea, was tied up and blind-folded—wires leading out from under her toga and hooked to a car battery. You could smell her burning, an acid stink that rode the fierce winds, turning the surface of the water brown.
Closer by, three sharks circled in the swells, their fins visible above chocolate waves. Each one of those slippery machines of Eden stood for a catastrophe in the secret symbolic nature of this story. One was Financial Ruin, I can tell you that—a stainless steel beauty whose sharp maw made Hatch's knees literally tremble like in a cartoon. In between the bouts of bailing, he walked a tightrope. At one end of his balancing pole was the weight of the bills, a mortgage like a Hydra, whose head grew back each month, for a house too tall and too shallow, taxes out the ass, failing appliances, car payments. At the other end was his job at an HMO, denying payment to people with legitimate claims. Each conversation with each claimant was harrowing for him, but he was in no position to quit. What else would he do? Each poor sop denied howled with indignation and unallied pain at the injustice of it all. Hatch's practiced façade, his dry "Sorry," hid indigestion, headaches, sweat, and his constant, subconscious reiteration of Darwin's law of survival as if it were some golden rule.
Beyond that, the dog had a chronic ear infection, his younger son, Ned, had recently been picked up by the police for smoking pot, and the older one, Will, who had a severe case of athlete's foot, rear ended a car on route 70. "Just a tap. Not a scratch," he'd claimed, and then the woman called with her dizzying estimate. Hatch's wife, Rose, who worked twelve hours a day, treating the people at a hospital whose claims he would eventually turn down, demanded a vacation, with tears in her eyes. "Just a week, somewhere warm," she said. He shook his head and laughed as if she were kidding. It was rough seas between his ears and rougher still in his heart. Each time he laughed, it was in lieu of puking.
Storm Warning was a phrase that made surprise visits to his consciousness while he sat in front of a blank computer screen at work, or hid in the garage at home late at night smoking one of the Captain Blacks he'd supposedly quit, or stared listlessly at Celebrity Fit Club on the television. It became increasingly difficult for him to remember births, first steps, intimate hours with Rose, family jokes, vacations in packed cars, holidays with extended family. One day Hatch did less bailing. "Fuck that bailing," he thought. The next day he did even less.
As if he'd just awakened to it, he was suddenly standing in water up to his shins and the rain was beating down on a strong southwester. The boat was bobbing like the bottom lip of a crone on Thorozine as he struggled to keep his footing. In his hands was a small plastic garbage can, the same one he'd used to bail his clam boat when at eighteen he worked the Great South Bay. The problem was Hatch wasn't eighteen anymore, and though now he was spurred to bail again with everything he had, he didn't have much. His heart hadn't worked so hard since his twenty-fifth anniversary when Rose made him climb a mountain in Montana. Even though the view at the top was gorgeous—a basin lake and a breeze out of heaven—his t-shirt jumped with each beat. The boat was going down. He chucked the garbage can out into the sea and Financial Ruin and its partners tore into it. Reaching for his shirt pocket, he took out his smokes and lit one.
The cold brown water was just creeping up around Hatch's balls as he took his first puff. He noticed the dark silhouette of Captree Bridge in the distance. "Back on the bay," he said, amazed to be sinking into the waters of his youth, and then, like a struck wooden match, the entire story of his life flared and died behind his eyes.
Going under was easy. No struggle, but a change in temperature. Just beneath the dark surface, the water got wonderfully clear. All the stale air came out of him at once—a satisfying burp followed by a large translucent globe that stretched his jaw with its birth. He reached for its spinning brightness but sank too fast to grab it. His feet were still lightly touching the deck as the boat fell slowly beneath him. He looked up and saw the sharks still chewing plastic. "This is it," thought Hatch, "not with a bang but a bubble." He herded all of his regrets into the basement of his brain, an indoor oak forest with intermittent dim light bulbs and dirt floor. The trees were columns that held the ceiling and amid and among them skittered pale, disfigured doppelgängers of his friends and family. As he stood at the top of the steps and shut the door on them, he felt a subtle tearing in his solar plexus. The boat touched down on the sandy bottom and his sneakers came to rest on the deck. Without thinking, he gave a little jump and sailed in a lazy arc ten feet away, landing, with a puff of sand, next to a toppled marble column.
His every step was a graceful bound, and he floated. Once on the slow descent of his arc, he put his arms out at his sides and lifted his feet behind him so as to fly. Hatch found that if he flapped his arms, he could glide along a couple of feet above the bottom, and he did, passing over coral pipes and red seaweed rippling like human hair in a breeze. There were creatures scuttling over rocks and through the sand—long antennae and armored plating, tiny eyes on sharp stalks, and claws continuously practicing on nothing. As his shoes touched the sand again, a school of striped fish swept past his right shoulder, their blue glowing like neon, and he followed their flight.
He came upon the rest of the sunken temple, its columns pitted and cracked, broken like the tusks of dead elephants. Green vines netted the destruction—two wide marble steps there, here a piece of roof, a tilted mosaic floor depicting the Goddess of the Sea suffering a rash of missing tiles, a headless marble statue of a man holding his penis.
Hatch floated down the long empty avenues of Drowned Town, a shabby, but quiet city in a lime green sea. Every so often, he'd pass one of the citizens, bloated and blue, in various stages of decomposition, and say, "Hi." Two gentlemen in suits swept by but didn't return his greeting. A drowned mother and child, bugling eyes dissolving in trails of tiny bubbles, dressed in little more than rags, didn't acknowledge him. One old woman stopped, though, and said, "Hello."
"I'm new here," he told her.
"The less you think about it the better," she said, and drifted on her way.
Hatch tried to remember where he was going. He was sure there was a reason that he was in town, but it eluded him. "I'll call, Rose," he thought. "She always knows what I'm supposed to be doing." He started looking up and down the streets for a pay phone. After three blocks without luck, he saw a man heading toward him. The fellow wore a business suit and an overcoat torn to shreds, a black hat with a bullet hole in it, a closed umbrella hooked on a skeletal wrist. Hatch waited for the man to draw near, but as the fellow stepped into the street to cross to the next block, a swift gleaming vision flew from behind a building and with a sudden clang of steel teeth meeting took him in its jaws. Financial Ruin was hungry and loose in Drowned Town. Hatch cowered backward, breast stroking to a nearby dumpster to hide, but the shark was already gone with its catch.
On the next block up, he found a bar that was open. He didn't see a name on it, but there were people inside, the door was ajar, and there was the muffled sound of music. The place was cramped and narrowed the further back you went, ending in a corner. Wood paneling, mirror behind the bottles, spinning seats, low lighting, and three dead beats—two on one side of the bar and one on the other.
"Got a pay phone?" asked Hatch.
All three men looked at him. The two customers smiled at each other. The bartender with a red bow tie, wiped his rotted nose on a handkerchief, and then slowly lifted an arm to point. "Go down to the grocery store. They got a pay phone at the Deli counter."
Hatch had missed it when the old lady spoke to him, but he realized now that he heard the bartender's voice in his head, not with his ears. The old man moved his mouth, but all that came out were vague farts of words flattened by water pressure. He sat down on one of the bar stools.
"Give me something dry," he said to the bartender. He knew he had to compose himself, get his thoughts together.
The bartender shook his head, scratched a spot of coral growth on his scalp, and opened his mouth to let a minnow out. "I could make you a Jenny Diver . . .pink or blue?"
"No, Sal, make him one of those things with the dirt bomb in it . . . they're the driest," said the closer customer. The short man turned his flat face and stretched a grin like a soggy old doll with swirling hair. Behind the clear lenses of his eyes, shadows moved, something swimming through his head.
"You mean a Dry Reach. That's one dusty drink," said the other customer, a very pale, skeletal old man in a brimmed hat and dark glasses. "Remember the day I got stupid on those? Your asshole'll make hell seem like a backyard barbecue if you drink too many of them, my friend."
"I'll try one," said Hatch.
"Your wish is my command," said the bartender, but he moved none too swiftly. Still, Hatch was content to sit and think for a minute. He thought that maybe the drink would help him remember. For all of its smallness, the place had a nice relaxing current flowing through it. He folded his arms on the bar and rested his head down for a moment. It finally came to him that the music he'd heard since entering was Frank Sinatra. "'The Way You Look Tonight,'" he whispered, naming the current song. He pictured Rose, naked, in bed back in their first apartment, and with that realization, the music went off.
Hatch looked up and saw that the bartender had turned on the television. The two customers, heads tilted back, stared into the glow. On the screen there was a news show without sound but the caption announced News From The War. A small seahorse swam behind the glass of the screen but in front of the black and white imagery. The story was about a ward in a makeshift field hospital where army doctors treated the wounded children of the area. Cute little faces stared up from pillows, tiny arms with casts listlessly waved, but as the report obviously went on, the wounds got more serious. There were children with missing limbs, and then open wounds, great gashes in the head, the chest, and missing eyes, and then a gaping hole with intestines spilling out, the little legs trembling and the chest heaving wildly.
"There's only one term for this war," said the old man with the sunglasses. "Clusterfuck. Cluster as in cluster and fuck as in fuck. No more need be said."
The short man turned to Hatch and, still grinning, said, "There was a woman in here yesterday, saying that we're all responsible."
"We are," said the bartender. "Drink up." He set Hatch's drink on the bar. "One Dry Reach," he said. It came in a big martini glass—clear liquid with a brown lump at the bottom.
Hatch reached for his wallet, but the bartender waved for him not to bother. "You must be new," he said.
Hatch nodded.
"Nobody messes with money down here. This is Drowned Town . . .think about it. Drink up, and I'll make you three more."
"Could you put Sinatra back on," Hatch asked sheepishly. "This news is bumming me out."
"As you wish," said the bartender. He pressed a red button under the bar. Instantly, the television went off, and the two men turned back to their drinks. Sinatra sang, "Let's take it nice and easy," and Hatch thought, "Free booze." He sipped his drink and could definitely distinguish its tang from the briny seawater. Whether he liked the taste or not, he'd decide later, but for now he drank it as quickly as he could.
The customer further from Hatch stepped around his friend and approached. "You're in for a real treat, man," he said. "You see that little island in the stream there." He pointed at the brown lump in the glass.
Hatch nodded.
"A bit of terra firma, a little taste of the world you left behind upstairs. Remember throwing dirt bombs when you were a kid? Like the powdery lumps in homemade brownies? Oh, and the way they'd explode against the heads of your victims. Well you've got a dollop of high-grade dirt there. You bite into it, and you'll taste your life left behind—bright sun and blue skies."
"Calm down," said the short man to his fellow customer. "Give him some room."
Hatch finished the drink and let the lump roll out of the bottom of the glass into his mouth. He bit it with his molars but found it had nothing to do with dirt. It was mushy and tasted terrible, more like a sodden meatball of decay than a memory of the sun. He spit the mess out and it darkened the water in front of his face. He waved his hand to disperse the brown cloud. A violet fish with a lazy tail swam down from the ceiling to snatch what was left of the disintegrating nugget.
The two customers and the bartender laughed, and Hatch heard it like a party in his brain. "You got the tootsie roll," said the short fellow, and tried to slap the bar, but his arm moved too slowly through the water.
"Don't take it personally," said the old man. "It's a Drowned Town tradition." His right ear came off just then and floated away, his glasses slipping down on that side.
Hatch felt a sudden burst of anger. He'd never liked playing the fool.
"Sorry, fella," said the bartender, "but it's a ritual. On your first Dry Reach, you get the tootsie roll."
"What's the tootsie roll?" asked Hatch, still trying to get the taste out of his mouth.
"Well, for starters, it ain't a tootsie roll," said the man with the outlandish grin.
Hatch marveled at the myriad shapes and colors of seaweed in the grocery's produce section. The lovely wavering of their leaves, strands, tentacles, in the flow soothed him. Although he stood on the sandy bottom, hanging from the ceiling were rows of fluorescent lights, every third or fourth one working. The place was a vast concrete bunker, set up in long aisles of shelves like at the Super Shopper he'd trudged through innumerable times back in his dry life.
"No money needed," he thought. "And free booze, but then why the coverage of the war? For that matter why the tootsie roll? Financial Ruin has free reign in Drowned Town. Nobody seems particularly happy. It doesn't add up." Hatch left the produce section, passed a display of starfish, some as big as his head, and drifted off, in search of the Deli counter.
The place was enormous, row upon row of shelved dead fish, their snouts sticking into the aisle, silver and pink and brown. Here and there a gill still quivered, a fin twitched. "A lot of fish," thought Hatch. Along the way, he saw a special glass case that held frozen food that had sunk from the world above. The hot dog tempted him, even though a good quarter had gone green. There was a piece of a cupcake with melted sprinkles, three French fries, a black Twizzler, and a red and white Chinese take-out bag with two gnarled rib ends sticking out. He hadn't had any lunch, and his stomach growled in the presence of the delicacies, but he was thinking of Rose and wanted to talk to her.
Hatch found a familiar face at the lobster tank. He could hardly believe it, Bob Gordon from up the block. Bob looked none the worse for wear for being sunk, save for his yellow complexion. He smoked a damp cigarette and stared into the tank as if staring through it.
"Bob," said Hatch.
Bob turned and adjusted his glasses. "Hatch, what's up?"
"I didn't know you went under."
"Sure, like a fuckin' stone."
"When?" asked Hatch.
"Three, four weeks ago. Peggy'd been porking some guy from over in Larchdale. You know, I got depressed, laid off the bailing, lost the house, and then eventually I just threw in the pail."
"How do you like it here?"
"Really good," said Bob, and his words rang loud in Hatch's brain, but then he quickly leaned close and these words came in a whisper, "It sucks."
"What do you mean?" asked Hatch, keeping his voice low.
Bob's smile deflated. "Everything's fine," he said, casting a glance to the lobster tank. He nodded to Hatch. "Gotta go, bud."
He watched Bob bound away against a mild current. By the time Hatch reached the Deli counter, it was closed. In fact, with the exception of Bob, he'd seen no one in the entire store. An old black phone with a rotary dial sat atop the counter with a sign next to it that read: Free Pay Phone. NOT TO BE USED IN PRIVACY!
Hatch looked over his shoulder. There was no one around. Stepping forward he reached for the receiver, and just as his hand closed on it, the thing rang. He felt the vibration before he heard the sound. He let it go and stepped back. It continued to ring, and he was torn between answering it and fleeing. Finally, he picked it up and said, "Hello."
At first he thought the line was dead, but then a familiar voice sounded. "Hatch," it said, and he knew it was Ned, his younger son. Both of his boys had called him Hatch since they were toddlers. "You gotta come pick me up."
"Where are you?" asked Hatch.
"I'm at a house party behind the 7-11. It's starting to get crazy."
"What do you mean it's starting to get crazy?"
"You coming?"
"I'll be there," said Hatch, and then the line went dead.
He stood at the door to the basement of his brain and turned the knob, but before he could open it, he saw way over on the other side of the store, one of the silver sharks, cruising above the aisles up near the ceiling. Dropping the phone, he scurried behind the Deli counter, and then through an opening that led down a hall to a door.
Hatch was out of breath from walking, searching for someone who might be able to help him. For ten city blocks he thought about Ned needing a ride. He pictured the boy, hair tied back, baggy shorts, and shoes like slippers, running from the police. "Good grief," said Hatch, and pushed forward. He'd made a promise to Ned years earlier that he would always come and get him if he needed a ride, no matter what. How could he tell him now, "Sorry kid, I'm sunk." Hatch thought of all the things that could happen in the time it would take him to return to land and pick Ned up at the party. Scores of tragic scenarios exploded behind his eyes. "I might as well be bailing," he said to the empty street.
He heard the crowd before he saw it, faint squeaks and blips in his ears and eventually they became distant voices and music. Rounding a corner, he came in sight of a huge vacant lot between two six-story brownstones. As he approached, he could make out there was some kind of attraction at the back of the lot, and twenty or so Drowned Towners floated in a crowd around it. Organ music blared from a speaker on a tall wooden pole. Hatch crossed the street and joined the audience.
Up against the back wall of the lot, there was an enormous golden octopus. Its flesh glistened and its tentacles curled, unfurled, created fleeting symbols dispersed by schools of tiny angel fish constantly circling it like a halo. The creature's sucker disks were flat black as was its beak, its eyes red, and there was a heavy, rusted metal collar squeezing the base of its lumpen head as if it had shoulders and a neck. Standing next to it was a young woman, obviously part fish. She had gills and her eyes were pure black like a shark's. Her teeth were sharp. There were scales surrounding her face and her hair was some kind of fine green seaweed. She wore a clamshell brassiere and a black thong. At the backs of her heels were fanlike fins. "My name is Clementine," she said, "and this is Madame Mutandis. She is a remarkable specimen of the Midas Octopus, so named for the beautiful golden aura of her skin. You see the collar on the Madame and you miss the chain. Notice, it is attached to my left ankle. Contrary to what you all might believe, it is I who belong to her and not she to me."
Hatch looked up and down the crowd he was part of—an equal mixture of men and women, some more bleached than blue, some less intact. The man next to him held his mouth open, and an eel's head peered out as if having come from the bowels to check the young fish-woman's performance.
"With cephalopod brilliance, non-vertebrate intuition, Madame Mutandis will answer one question for each of you. No question is out of bounds. She thinks like the very sea itself. Who'll be first?"
The man next to Hatch stepped immediately forward before anyone else. "And what is your question?" asked the fish-woman. The man put his hands into his coat pockets and then raised his head. His message was horribly muddled, but by his third repetition Hatch as well as the octopus got it—"How does one remove an eel?" Madame Mutandis shook her head sac as if in disdain while two of her tentacles unfurled in the man's direction. One swiftly wrapped around his throat, lurching him forward, and the other dove into his mouth. A second later, the Madame released his throat and drew from between his lips a three-foot eel, wriggling wildly in her suctioned grasp. The long arm swept the eel to her beak, and she pierced it at a spot just behind the head, rendering it lifeless. With a free tentacle, she waved forward the next questioner, while brushing gently away the man now sighing with relief.
Hatch came to and was about to step forward, but a woman from behind him wearing a kerchief and carrying a beige pocketbook passed by, already asking, "Where are the good sales?" He wasn't able to see her face, but the woman with the question, from her posture and clothing, seemed middle-aged, somewhat younger than himself.
Clementine repeated the woman's question for the octopus. "Where are the good sales?" she said.
"Shoes," said the woman with the kerchief. "I'm looking for shoes."
Madame Mutandis wrapped a tentacle around the woman's left arm and turned her to face the crowd. Hatch reared back at the sudden sight of a face rotted almost perfectly down the middle, skull showing through on one side. Another of the octopus's tentacles slid up the woman's skirt between her legs. With the dexterity of a hand, it drew down the questioner's underwear, leaving them gathered around her ankles. Then, wriggling like the eel it removed from the first man's mouth, that tentacle slithered along her right thigh only to disappear again beneath the skirt.
Hatch was repulsed, fascinated, aroused, as the woman trembled and the tentacle wiggled out of sight. She turned her skeletal profile to the crowd, and that bone grin widened with pleasure, grimaced in pain, gaped with passion. Little spasms of sound escaped her open mouth. The crowd methodically applauded until finally the object of the Madame's attentions screamed and fell to the sand, the long tentacle retracting. The fish-woman moved to the end of her chain and helped the questioner up. "Is that what you were looking for?" she asked. The woman with the beige pocketbook nodded and adjusted her kerchief before floating to the back of the crowd.
"Ladies and gentleman?" said the fish-woman.
Hatch noticed that no one was too ready to step forth after the creature's last answer, including himself. His mind was racing, trying to connect a search for a shoe sale with the resultant . . . What? Rape? Or was what he witnessed consensual? He was still befuddled by the spectacle. The gruesome state of the woman's face wrapped in ecstasy hung like a chandelier of ice on the main floor of his brain. At that moment, he realized he had to escape from Drowned Town. Shifting his glance right and left, he noticed his fellow drownees were still as stone.
The fish-woman's chain must have stretched, because she floated over and put her hand on his back. Gently, she led him forward. "She can tell you anything," came Clementine's voice, a whisper that made him think of Rose and Ned and Will, even the stupid dog with bad ears. He hadn't felt his feet move, but he was there, standing before the shining perpetual motion of the Madame's eight arms. Her black parrot-beak opened, and he thought he heard her laughing.
"You're question?" asked Clementine, still close by his side.
"My kid's stuck at a party that's getting crazy," blurted Hatch. "How do I get back to dry land?"
He heard murmuring from the crowd behind him. One voice said, "No." Another two said, "Asshole." At first he thought they were predicting the next answer from Madame Mutandis, but then he realized they were referring to him. It dawned that wanting to leave Drowned Town was unpopular.
"Watch the ink," said Clementine.
Hatch looked down and saw a dark plume exuding from beneath the octopus. It rose in a mushroom cloud, and then turned into a long black string at the top. The end of that string whipped leisurely through the air, drawing more of itself from the cloud until the cloud had vanished and what remained was the phrase 322 Bleeter Street in perfect, looping script. The address floated there for a moment, Hatch repeating it, before the angel fish veered out of orbit around the fleshy golden sac and dashed through it, dispersing the ink.
The fish-woman led Hatch away and called, "Next." He headed for the street, repeating the address under his breath. At the back of the crowd, which had grown, a woman turned to him as he passed and said, "Leaving town?"
"My kid . . ." Hatch began, but she snickered at him. From somewhere down the back row, he heard "Jerk," and "Pussy." When he reached the street, he realized that the words of the drowned had crowded the street number out of his thoughts. He remembered Bleeter Street and said it six times, but the number . . . Leaping forward, he assumed the flying position, and flapping his arms, cruised down the street, checking the street signs at the corners and keeping an eye out for sharks. He remembered the number had a 3, and then for blocks he thought of nothing but that last woman's contempt.
Eventually, he grew too tired to fly and resumed walking, sometimes catching the current and drifting in the flow. He'd seen so many street signs—presidents' names, different kinds of fish, famous actors and sunken ships, types of clouds, waves, flowers, slugs. None of them was Bleeter. So many storefronts and apartment steps passed by and not a soul in sight. At one point, tiny starfish fell like rain all over town, littering the streets and filling the awnings.
Hatch had just stepped out of a weakening current and was moving under his own volition when he noticed a phone booth wedged into an alley between two stores. Pushing off, he swam to it and squeezed himself into the glass enclosure. As the door closed, a light went on above him. He lifted the receiver, placing it next to his ear. There was a dial tone. He dialed and it rang. Something shifted in his chest and his pulse quickened. Suffering the length of each long ring, he waited for someone to pick up.
"Hello?" he heard; a voice at a great distance.
"Rose, it's me," he screamed against the water.
"Hatch," she said. "I can hardly hear you. Where are you?"
"I'm stuck in Drowned Town," he yelled.
"What do you mean? Where is it?"
Hatch had a hard time saying it. "I went under, Rose. I'm sunk."
There was nothing on the line. He feared he'd lost the connection, but he stayed with it.
"Jesus, Hatch . . . What the hell are you doing?"
"I gave up on the bailing," he said.
She groaned. "You shit. How am I supposed to do this alone?"
"I'm sorry, Rose," he said. "I don't know what happened. I love you."
He could hear her exhale. "OK," she said. "Give me an address. I have to have something to put into MapQuest."
"Do you know where I am?" he asked.
"No, I don't fucking know where you are. That's why I need the address."
It came to him all at once. "322 Bleeter Street, Drowned Town," he said. "I'll meet you there."
"It's going to take a while," she said.
"Rose?"
"What?"
"I love you," he said. He listened to the silence on the receiver until he noticed in the reflection of his face in the phone booth glass a blue spot on his nose and one on his forehead. "Shit," he said, and hung up. "I can take care of that with some ointment when I get back," he thought. He scratched at the spot on his forehead and blue skin sloughed off. He put his face closer to the glass, and then there came a pounding on the door behind him.
Turning, he almost screamed at the sight of the half-gone face of that woman who'd been goosed by the octopus for her shoe sale query. He opened the door and slid past her. Her Jolly Roger profile was none too jolly, he noticed. As he spoke the words, he surprised himself with doing so—"Do you know where Bleeter Street is?" She jostled him aside in her rush to get to the phone. Before closing the door, she called over her shoulder, "You're on it."
"Things are looking up," thought Hatch as he retreated. Standing in the middle of the street, he looked up one side and down the other. Only one building, a darkened storefront with a plate glass window behind which was displayed a single pair of sunglasses on a pedestal, had a street number—621. It came to him that he would have to travel in one direction, try to find another address, and see which way the numbers ran. Then, if he found they were increasing, he'd have to turn around and head in the other direction, but at least he would know. Thrilled at the sense of purpose, he swept a clump of drifting seaweed out of his way, and moved forward. He could be certain Rose would come for him. After thirty years of marriage they'd grown close in subterranean ways.
Darkness was beginning to fall on Drowned Town. Angle-jawed fish with needle teeth, a perpetual scowl, and sad eyes came from the alleyways and through the open windows of the apartments. Each had a small phosphorescent jewel dangling from a downward curving stalk that issued from the head. They drifted the shadowy street like fireflies, and although Hatch had still to see another address, he stopped in his tracks to mark their beautiful effect. It was precisely then that he saw Financial Ruin appear from over the rooftops down the street. Before he could even think to flee, he saw the shark swoop down in his direction.
Hatch turned, kicked his feet up, and started flapping. As he approached the first corner, and was about to turn, he almost collided with someone just stepping out onto Bleeter Street. To his utter confusion, it was a deep-sea diver, a man inside a heavy rubber suit with a glass bubble of a helmet and a giant nautilus shell strapped to his back feeding air through two arching tubes into his suit. The sudden appearance of the diver wasn't what made him stop, though. It was the huge chrome gun in his hands with a barbed spearhead as wide as a fence post jutting from the barrel. The diver waved Hatch behind him as the shark came into view. Then it was a dagger-toothed lunge, a widening cavern with the speed of a speeding car. The diver pulled the trigger. There was a zip of tiny bubbles, and Financial Ruin curled up, thrashing madly with the spear piercing its upper pallet and poking out the back of its head. Billows of blood began to spread. The man in the suit dropped the gun and approached Hatch.
"Hurry," he said, "before the other sharks smell the blood."
Hatch and his savior sat in a carpeted parlor on cushioned chairs facing each other across a low coffee table with a tea service on it. The remarkable fact was that they were both dry, breathing air instead of brine, and speaking at a normal tone. When they'd entered the foyer of the stranger's building, he hit a button on the wall. A sheet of steel slid down to cover the door, and within seconds the seawater began to exit the compartment through a drain in the floor. Hatch had had to drown into the air and that was much more uncomfortable than simply going under, but after some extended wheezing, choking, and spitting up, he drew in a huge breath with ease. The diver had unscrewed the glass globe that covered his head and held it beneath one arm. "Isaac Munro," he'd said, and nodded.
Dressed in a maroon smoking jacket and green pajamas, moccasins on his feet, the silver-haired man with drooping mustache sipped his tea and now held forth on his situation. Hatch, in dry clothes the older man had given him, was willing to listen, almost certain Munro knew the way back to dry land.
"I'm in Drowned Town, but not of it. Do you understand?" he said.
Hatch nodded, and noticed what a relief it was to have the pressure of the sea off him.
Isaac Munro lowered his gaze and said, as if making a confession, "My wife Rotzy went under some years ago. There was nothing I could do to prevent it. She came down here, and on the day she left me, I determined I would find the means to follow her and rescue her from Drowned Town. My imagination, fired by the desire to simply hold her again, gave birth to all these many inventions that allow me to keep from getting my feet wet, so to speak." He chuckled, and then made a face as if he were admonishing himself.
Hatch smiled. "How long have you been looking for her?"
"Years," said Munro, placing his teacup on the table.
"I'm trying to get back. My wife Rose is coming for me in the car."
"Yes, your old neighbor Bob Gordon told me you might be looking for an out," said the older man. "I was on the prowl for you when we encountered that cutpurse Leviathan."
"You know Bob?"
"He does some legwork for me from time to time."
"I saw him at the grocery today."
"He has a bizarre fascination with that lobster tank. In any event, your wife won't make it through, I'm sorry to say. Not with a car."
"How can I get out?" asked Hatch. "I can't offer you a lot of money, but something else perhaps?"
"Perish the thought," said Munro. "I have an escape hatch back to the surface in case of emergencies. You're welcome to use it if you'll just observe some cautionary measures."
"Absolutely," said Hatch, and moved to the edge of his chair.
"I take it you'd like to leave immediately?"
Both men stood and Hatch followed through a hallway lined with framed photographs, which opened into a larger space; an old ballroom with peeling flowered wallpaper. Across the vast wooden floor, scratched and littered with, of all things, old leaves and pages of a newspaper, they came to a door. When Munro turned around, Hatch noticed that the older man had taken one of the photos off the wall in the hallway.
"Here she is," said Isaac. "This is Rotzy."
Hatch leaned down for a better look at the portrait. He gave only the slightest grunt of surprise and hoped his host hadn't noticed, but Rotzy was the woman at the phone booth, the half-faced horror mishandled by Madame Mutandis.
"You haven't seen her, have you?" asked Munro.
Hatch knew he should have tried to help the old man, but he thought only of escape and didn't want to complicate things. He felt that the door in front of him was to be the portal back. "No," he said.
Munro nodded and then reached into the side pocket of his jacket and retrieved an old-fashioned key. He held it in the air but did not place it in Hatch's outstretched palm. "Listen carefully," he said. "You will pass through a series of rooms. Upon entering each room, you must lock the door behind you with this key before opening the next door to exit into the following room. Once you've started you can't turn back. The key only works to open doors forward and lock doors backward. A door can not be opened without a door being locked. Do you understand?"
"Yes."
Munro placed the key in Hatch's hand. "Then be on your way and Godspeed. Kiss the sky for me when you arrive."
"I will."
Isaac opened the door and Hatch stepped through. The door closed and he locked it behind him. He crossed the room in a hurry, unlocked the next door and then passing through, locked it behind him. This process went on for twenty minutes before Hatch noticed that it took less and less steps to traverse each room to the next door. One of the rooms had a window, and he paused to look out on some watery side street falling into night. The loneliness of the scene spurred him forward. In the following room he had to duck down so as not to skin his head against the ceiling. He locked its door and moved forward into a room where he had to duck even lower.
Eventually, he was forced to crawl from room to room, and there wasn't much room for turning around to lock the door behind him. As each door swept open before him, he thought he might see the sky or feel a breeze in his face. There was always another door but there was also hope. That is until he entered a compartment so small, he couldn't turn around to use the key but had to do it with his hands behind his back. His chin against his chest. "This has got to be the last one," he thought, unsure if he could squeeze his shoulders through the next opening. Before he could insert the key into the lock on the tiny door before him, a steel plate fell and blocked access to it. He heard a swoosh and a bang behind him and knew another metal plate had covered the door going back. He was trapped.
"How are you doing, Mr. Hatch?" he heard Munro's voice say. By dipping one shoulder he was able to turn his head and see a speaker built into the wall.
"How do I get through these last rooms?" Hatch yelled. "They're too small and metal guards have fallen in front of the doors."
"That's the point," called Munro, "you don't. You, my friend, are trapped, and will remain trapped forever in that tight uncomfortable place."
"What are you talking about? Why?" Hatch was frantic. He tried to lunge his body against the walls but there was nowhere for it to go.
"My wife, Rotzy. You know how she went under? What sunk her? She was ill, Mr. Hatch. She was seriously ill but her health insurance denied her coverage. You, Mr. Hatch, personally said No."
This time what flared before Hatch's inner eye was not his life, but all the many pleading, frustrating, angry voices that had traveled in one of his ears and out the other in his service to the HMO. "I'm not responsible," was all he could think to say in his defense.
"My wife used to tell me, 'Isaac, we're all responsible.' Now you can wait, as she waited for relief, for what was rightly due her. You'll wait forever, Hatch."
There was a period where he struggled. He couldn't tell how long it lasted, but nothing came of it, so he closed his eyes, made his breathing more steady and shallow, and went into his brain, across the first floor to the basement door. He opened it and could smell the scent of the dark wood wafting up the steps. Locking the door behind him, he descended into the dark.
Seven
The woods were frightening, but he'd take anything over the claustrophobia of Munro's trap. Each dim light bulb he came to was a godsend, and he put his hands up to it for the little warmth it offered against the wind. He noticed that the creatures prowled around the bulbs like waterholes. They darted behind the trees, spying on him, pale specters whose faces were like masks made of bone. One he was sure was his cousin Martin, a malevolent boy who'd cut the head off a kitten. He'd not seen him in over thirty years. He also spotted his mother-in-law, who was his mother-in-law with no hair and short tusks. She grunted orders to him from the shadows. He kept moving and tried to ignore them.
When Hatch couldn't walk any further, he came to a clearing in the forest. There, in the middle of nowhere, in the basement of his brain, sat twenty yards of street with a brownstone situated behind a wide sidewalk. There were steps leading up to twin doors and an electric light glowed next to the entrance. As he drew near, he could make out the address in brass numerals on the base of the banister that led up the right side of the front steps.
He stumbled over to the bottom step and dropped down onto it. Hatch leaned forward, his elbows on his knees and his hands covering his face. "That's not me," he said, "it's not me," and he tried to weep till his eyes closed out of exhaustion. What seemed a second later, he heard a car horn and looked up.
"There's no crying in baseball, asshole," said Rose. She was leaning her head out the driver's side window of their SUV. There was a light on in the car and he could see both their sons were in the back seat, laughing and pointing at Hatch.
"How'd you find me?" he asked.
"The internet," said Rose. "Will showed me MapQuest has this new feature where you don't need the address anymore, just a person's name, and it gives you directions to wherever they are in the continental United States."
"Oh, my god," he said, and walked toward Rose to give her a hug.
"Not now Barnacle Bill, there's some pale creeps coming this way. We just passed them and one lunged for the car. Get in, Mr. Drowned Town."
Hatch got in and saw his sons. He wanted to hug them but they motioned for him to hurry and shut the door. As soon as he did, Rose pulled away from the curb.
"So, Hatch, you went under?" asked his older son, Will.
Hatch wished he could explain but couldn't find the words.
"What a pile," said Ned.
"Yeah," said Will.
"Don't do it again, Hatch," said Rose. "Next time we're not coming for you."
"I'm sorry," he said. "I love you all."
Rose wasn't one to admonish more than once. She turned on the radio and changed the subject. "We had the directions, but they were a bitch to follow. At one point I had to cut across two lanes of traffic in the middle of the Holland Tunnel and take a left down a side tunnel that for more than a mile was the pitchest pitch-black."
"Listen to this, Hatch," said Ned, and leaned into the front seat to turn up the radio.
"Oh, they've been playing this all day," said Rose. "This young woman soldier was captured by insurgents and they made a video of them cutting her head off."
"On the radio, you only get the screams, though," said Will. "Check it out."
The sound, at first, was like from a musical instrument, and then it became human—steady, piercing shrieks in desperate bursts that ended in the gurgle of someone going under.
Rose changed the channel and the screams came from the new station. She hit the button again, and the same screaming. Hatch turned to look at his family. Their eyes were slightly droopy and they were very pale. Their shoulders were somehow out of whack and their grins were vacant. Rose had a big bump on her forehead and a rash across her neck, but at least they were together.
"Watch for the sign for the Holland Tunnel," she said amid the dying soldier's screams as they drove on into the dark. Hatch kept careful watch, knowing they'd never find it.