The Gill-man receives a letter from a retired ichthyologist. Only recently did she learn of what happened so many years ago on her colleagues’ expedition to the black lagoon at the upper reaches of the Amazon: the misunderstandings, the maulings, the gunfire. She is so sorry. She would like to apologize on behalf of her species.
Perhaps one day the Gill-man will visit her?
The Gill-man contemplates his lair — a dank, murky cave. He owns little: a boulder, a puddle of fish offal, some chewed-up crocodile bones.
He has always wanted to visit Florida.
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The ichthyologist, Brenda, looks surprised when the creature shows up at her front door. An email would have been nice, or a phone call. She wasn’t expecting the Gill-man.
The Gill-man stifles a growl. Didn’t she invite him? He lives in a primeval lagoon for Chrissakes. He just swam the Amazon River, and the better part of the Caribbean Sea.
“Well, never mind,” says Brenda. “Please, come in.”
Brenda shows him around her bungalow, which is tidy, full of houseplants and handwoven South American rugs. NPR plays quietly on a radio.
Later, she prepares dinner, sweet potatoes and roasted kale. Brenda is a vegetarian.
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Brenda takes the Gill-man sightseeing. They visit picturesque lighthouses and The Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum. She buys him a souvenir baseball cap, seafoam teal with an embroidered marlin on its brim. Also, a copy of The Sun Also Rises.
On the way home, they drive past a beach thronged with spring breakers — college students in bikinis. The Gill-man gestures with a webbed claw. Can they stop?
Brenda pretends not to notice.
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The Gill-man helps out. He oils the push mower and trims the grass. He replaces the batteries in the smoke detectors. On a Saturday, he helps Brenda carry produce back from a farmer’s market.
It’s nice, having the Gill-man around.
Brenda presents him with a proposition. He can stay rent-free in exchange for his assistance. Nothing too arduous: running errands, simple home repairs. There is a rundown carriage house, a garage, at the end of Brenda’s crushed-shell driveway, tucked amid a grove of overgrown palms. He can fix it up — convert it into an apartment.
Brenda does have a few rules. Quiet hours. No overnight guests. Also, the Gill-man really must start wearing clothes.
They visit a thrift store in the basement of a church. The Gill-man struggles to pull trousers over his fins. Brenda buys him plaid shorts and sweater vests. The clothes smell like deli meat.
“Well, aren’t you dapper?” she says.
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Two years later, Brenda dies of leukemia. She bequeaths her home and possessions to the Gill-man.
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At first, the Gill-man is happy. Brenda was kindly, yes, but some of her rules were serious bullshit.
He plays his favorite records from her collection as loud as he wants, mostly Air Supply’s Greatest Hits.
Also, no one should be forced to eat that much kale. He stocks the cupboards with Pepperidge Farm cookies and Strawberry Quik.
Finally, no more hand-me-downs.
The Gill-man scours trendy websites and orders lightweight sweaters in citrusy colors. He knots the sleeves loosely around his neck and hangs out at the college students’ beach. Surely, someone will notice him.
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Bills gather in the mailbox. The Gill-man earns pocket money by mowing elderly neighbors’ lawns. It does not cover his expenses.
None of the college students have approached him, even though he has invested heavily in Oakley sunglasses and Axe body spray.
He needs another source of income. Maybe he could lease his old apartment? He places an ad in a newspaper.
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To free up space, the Gill-man rents a dumpster. He intends to convert Brenda’s first-floor study into a spare bedroom. He will sleep upstairs, in her old bedroom. Then he can lease the study and the carriage house apartment.
He piles Brenda’s possessions in the dumpster. Jade plants with snaky limbs. Colorful Peruvian rugs. Yellowing photographs, mostly of lungfish, but a few of Brenda and an older sister, Linda, who died young, in her twenties.
The Gill-man finds diplomas, silk scarves, a glass pitcher of sand dollars, a sewing basket full of rubber-banded wads of plane ticket stubs.
The sight of the belongings fills him with a strange feeling, like a pocket with a hole in its seams. He thinks of what the scientist-explorers called him: an evolutionary dead-end.
One by one, he retrieves Brenda’s possessions, carries them upstairs, and heaps them around her bed. It reminds him of a nest, only one made of memories rather than twigs. Maybe some will rub off in his sleep.
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The Gill-man interviews roommates. He settles on Enrique, a twenty-two-year-old studying graphic design at a community college. Enrique works at an electronics retailer, Smart Gear Solutions. His job requires him to wear nothing but polos and khaki pants.
It is a win-win, says Enrique. He no longer wastes money on clothes.
Sure enough, Enrique does not own a dresser. He stores his clothes in milk crates. One for khakis. One for polos.
Mostly, he owns many boxes of imported DVDs, Japanese anime, and a staggering collection of plastic figurines, schoolgirls with cat ears and samurai swords.
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Enrique cobbles bookshelves out of two-by-fours and cement blocks. He painstakingly arranges his figurines. There is no space for his Xbox or his giant flatscreen TV.
These he erects in Brenda’s living room.
He teaches the Gill-man to play a game about streetfighters who engage in hand-to-hand combat with mythical beasts. The Gill-man struggles to grip the controller. He chooses a minotaur. Enrique selects a burly luchador in a black leather mask. Every time Enrique upcuts his minotaur, the wrestler yells “Mucho Muchacho!” in a bossy voice.
“Mucho Muchacho!”
“Mucho Muchacho!”
“Yo, Gilman, you suck, bro,” says Enrique.
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Gilman reads in a men’s grooming magazine that women are attracted to tight-fitting suits. It is a proven scientific fact. Something about how tight suits make hands appear larger — how evolution has programmed women to see large hands as signs of fertility.
He contemplates his claws.
He orders ten seersuckers from Men’s Wearhouse.
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Some days it is a struggle, not killing Enrique. It’s a goddam chore.
Enrique rarely washes his dishes. Half-finished bowls of cereal abound, mold spots flowering on soured milk. His beard trimmings carpet the downstairs bathroom sink. Sometimes, he forgets to flush, then tries to pass it off as an eco-friendly choice.
“If it’s yellow, let it mellow, bro,” he says.
One weekend, Enrique invites coworkers over for a marathon-length Magic: The Gathering tournament. They talk in fake British accents. Their voices keep Gilman up all night.
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New roommates move into the carriage house. Their names are Josh and Destiny.
At first, Josh and Destiny live in a repurposed school bus, plastered in spiritually uplifting bumper stickers, which they park in the driveway, venturing out only to cook meals and to use the apartment’s washroom.
Sometimes, they have loud sex in the bus.
Josh majored in finance. He is white but wears his blonde hair in dreadlocks. He purchased the bus to road trip across the United States during a gap year after college.
Destiny is nineteen, a high school dropout from Joplin, MO, whom Josh met at a block party in Vail, CO, and who stole a minifridge’s worth of marijuana from an ex-boyfriend to finance her inclusion in Josh’s road trip.
Sometimes Josh disappears for days, drives off in the bus to sell weed to college students at Florida State University or to visit his parents and to ask them for money.
Destiny waits on the stoop outside the garage apartment.
She is tall with pale skin and red hair. She smokes clove cigarettes and crafts beaded jewelry, which she sells on a blanket at the farmers market on the weekends.
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Gilman spends a lot of time watching Destiny from his bedroom window.
He dreams up scenarios in which they fall in love. For example, somehow the boulder from his lair ends up in Brenda’s backyard. He imagines himself showing it off.
So, this is my rock. Sometimes I lift it. I mean, I can bench, like, eight hundred pounds…
Other times, he pictures himself straight up asking Destiny out.
In his fantasy, he assures her that he is not really asking her out. Oh gosh no. Do not get the wrong idea! He just wants to be able to brag that he once had an honest-to-god date with destiny. Ha ha ha.
Then, in the next scene, there is candlelight and violin music, and witty banter in which Gilman displays a commanding knowledge of French wines.
There are problems with these fantasies.
One: Gilman cannot talk. Mostly, he gurgles. Sometimes, when overexcited, he squeals like a wild pig.
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One day, Gilman returns home to find Enrique playing the fighting game with Josh.
Enrique is his usual fighter, the burly luchador.
Josh has selected a street dancer turned kickboxer named “Roozter McCool.” Every time Enrique’s luchador tries to land an uppercut, Roozter slaps it aside with a spinning backhand.
“Uh uh uh,” he says.
Roozter’s signature move is a combination butterfly kick to the solar plexus that staggers his opponents followed by a rising dragon punch that lifts them off the ground.
“Twenty-first century, baby!” he shouts as he launches himself into the air.
“Uh uh uh.”
“Twenty-first century, baby!”
After his fifth loss, Enrique stomps off to his bedroom to sulk.
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Later, standing at the kitchen window, Gilman watches Josh and Destiny toss a frisbee in the backyard. Dusk falls. Their voices are murmurs. Destiny, barefoot, laughs shyly each time she drops the frisbee.
“Yo, Gilman, you should evict those hippies.” Enrique cranes his head into the refrigerator, rummages through the freezer for Hot Pockets.
Gilman shrugs. Enrique wears white socks with flip flops. Perhaps he is not to be trusted.
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Gilman waits for Josh to disappear with the bus, and for Destiny to spread her jewelry tools on the garage’s stoop: wire cutters and pliers, glazed ceramic beads and spools of thread.
Then, he stands in the center of the yard and pretends to read The Sun Also Rises. He selects tastefully preppy attire, a crisp white button-down and chinos, and rounded tortoise shell glasses, one of the top ten sexiest things a guy can wear according to GQ.
Destiny works quietly, hums to herself as she threads beads. The morning is calm, almost soporific. An ocean breeze feathers the lawn. The grass under Gilman’s feet is dry and bristly, shallow-rooted; the soil is gritty, tinged with sand. Tiny lizards scuttle.
At lunchtime, Destiny prepares finger sandwiches — cucumbers, humus, and sprouts on multigrain. She offers a plate to Gilman. “Is that book any good?” she asks. She hauls a wayward bang from her eyes.
Gilman shrugs, though he tries to infuse the gesture with intimations of an erudite mind, wise to literary greatness, loathe to dole out praise. Admittedly, he has not read a page. Something about bullfights and life’s purposelessness?
He hands the book to Destiny. Keep it. Please.
“Thanks,” she says.
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Josh returns a few days later. To Gilman’s surprise, he and Destiny quarrel, a noisy row that has Gilman wondering if he should dial 9-1-1.
Summer will end soon. Josh’s gap year will be over.
He does not see a future with Destiny.
They are on different paths.
Someday, she is going to make someone very happy.
Destiny hurls obscenities and whatever else she and Josh store in their apartment.
Josh decides to sleep in the bus.
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Enrique offers to help Gilman improve his odds with Destiny. He lets Gilman borrow his phone for a selfie; then Enrique uploads the photo to an anonymous message board where embittered celibate young men post scathing appraisals of each other’s physiognomies.
They offer tips: recommended surgeries and facial bone fractures.
Their ruling is swift and unanimous.
“Sorry, bro,” says Enrique. “You will never be loved.”
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How can Gilman communicate his feelings? Grocery store carnations will not suffice.
On an online message board, he reads testimonials by women describing the most romantic gift they ever received. One tells how her boyfriend, after a spat, gathered fireflies so she could wake to flickering constellations adrift in their hotel room.
Gilman swims to a bay where luminescent plankton gather in ghost-blue blooms. He returns slathered in their jelly — leaves paw prints in fanciful patterns on the driveway and on Josh and Destiny’s bus — like bottle rocket explosions, only quiet and serene, trickling rivulets of neon, flowering and dwindling into nothing.
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The next morning, he finds Josh and Enrique in the driveway, eying the bus with puzzled expressions. The planktons’ goo is a vomit pink in daylight, and crusty in spots. A briny stink assails the air.
“Yo, Gilman, something shit all over the driveway, bro,” says Enrique.
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The doorbell rings. It is Destiny. She is returning The Sun Also Rises. Her eyes are glassy with tears. “Thank you so much,” she says.
It was wonderful. Really. All that pointless love?
“Oh Jake, we could have had such a damn good time together,” she quotes. “Yes, isn’t it pretty to think so?”
She hands the book to Gilman like it is a warm loaf of bread, or a baby she found floating in a basket down a river.
After she leaves, he inhales its scent. Sweet-spicy odor of cloves sieves his gills. Tucked among the pages, he finds a make-do bookmark, a sprig of morning glory.
Its petals stain a page.
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He is in love. No ifs, ands, or buts. Gilman’s heart is a motherfucking beauteous flower, swelled by summer’s ripening breath. Like a rose. Or something.
He retrieves Air Supply’s Greatest Hits from the clutter around Brenda’s bed, carefully places it on her old turntable, and sings along to his favorite tracks.
His vocal cords are not made for song but Gilman howls to the best of his ability — wet gurgling wails. Alone in Brenda’s living room, eyes pinched, arms flung out, he listens to the quiet as the song winds down, hemmed in staticky crackles and pops, the turntable’s needle scraping beyond the song’s end.
He opens his eyes.
He is not alone.
Enrique slouches in the living room’s door frame, phone hoisted, recording him.
“Dude, what the shit was that?” he asks.
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Gilman surveys the mess. The fleecy remnants of sofa stuffing? The shambles of Enrique’s TV? Is Gilman responsible for all this debris?
He would prefer not to use a word like “bloodbath.” He does not want to dwell on how Enrique’s windpipe snapped as he lifted him off the ground.
Call it a lapse of judgment.
Oopsies, he thinks.
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The smell, after a few days, reminds Gilman of his cave, the fish offal. Every so often, Enrique’s phone rings. Coworkers from Smart Gear Solutions calling to ask, why has he not returned to work?
What should Gillman do?
The creature in him advises mauling Josh, then hauling Destiny off to a lair.
Which lair?
Surely not Brenda’s home. Gilman cannot imagine abducting Destiny without the neighbors phoning the police. He recalls what it was like last time — being riddled by the surviving explorers’ gunfire.
No, thank you.
Also, he would like to think he is more civilized, Enrique’s recent disembowelment notwithstanding. Has he not mastered the foundations of a solid wardrobe? Does he not know which buttons on a blazer should always remain unbuttoned?
He eyes himself in the bathroom mirror: Aren’t we a little wiser?
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The bus is gone. At first, Gilman thinks Josh must be off selling marijuana, only, when he visits, he finds Josh, not Destiny, loitering on the stoop, dribbling a hacky sack all by his lonesome.
Gilman gestures at the driveway. The bus? Where is it?
“Bitch stole it,” Josh says.
Probably, Destiny is halfway to Vail, or Joplin, or fuck-knows-where.
Josh has reported its theft. The police are on their way. They need to ask a few questions.
Also, Josh explains that he will be moving out. His gap year is over. An MBA is calling. A bright future awaits him. Gilman will need to find another source of income.
“Sorry dude,” Josh says.
Woopsie, Gilman thinks.
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Before he flees, the Gill-man lets himself sift through Brenda’s belongings one last time.
It surprises him — how little he anticipates missing all his fine clothes.
Also, The Sun Also Rises? Its petal-stained pages cannot possibly survive the swim back to the Amazon. Yet abandoning it hardly stings.
It is Brenda’s leavings he wishes he could take. He unwraps the plane ticket stubs and contemplates their destinations. Wonders: What tempted Brenda to them?
Ponders, too, the photographs of Brenda and her sister. Brenda as a child, draped through a tire swing, her sister steadying the rope, serious-faced. Brenda and her sister idling in a meadow full of windswept wildflowers. Brenda in the background, clambering up a tumbledown stone wall; her sister in the foreground, graven, a stranger glaring through time.
Neither married. The Gill-man thinks of himself, unmated.
He pictures evolutionary timelines spearing across a graph, the void beyond their arrow points, dark as silt. Already, he anticipates swimming home, limbs parting currents.Gills breathing.
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