When I first came here, they took my blood pressure. The blood pressure machine closed around my arm like a killing snake. The pressure was great. It hurt a little, tight and strange, but it was the closest I had come to being held since the on-set of the disease.
Then the machine began to ease off. Soon the screen flashed. My numbers read:
Systollic pressure, 100.
Diastollic pressure, 53.
Pulse rate, 0.
Nurse made a joke about me being dead. He turned to the doctor and said, “Pulse Reader’s jammed again.” He spoke in a way that made me imagine him chewing a toothpick. He didn’t seem like a nurse at all. I wonder what shape his mouth made under the gruesome gray surgical mask that he wore. That they all wear.
Doctor wrote down 100, 53, Not Applicable.
Nurse shone a light into my eye through a small plastic funnel. Then shone the same light into my ears, pausing only to change the tip in order to ensure sterility. Then down my throat. Nurse left and Doctor got out a clipboard. Started to ask me about all manner of sins. Do you drink? Do you smoke? How often? What about marijuana? Street drugs? Needle use?
And then there’s the how’s your sex life section.
And so on.
I knew the drill. I answered an emotionless stream of mostly ‘no’s, a ‘yes’ thrown in here or there for variety. After that we moved on to more specific questions, questions targeted at what the doctor called “my unique condition.”
Not that glow is even remotely unique, these days.
Doctor asked when, how, and by whom I had first encountered glow.
I said it was Green’s fault. I said it in those words.
“What’s green?”
“Lots of things,” I snapped; “But what you mean is who’s Green.”
“Alright. Who then?”
“He’s Green. That’s all. That’s not his real name, though. My mother made me call him that when we were little, because we couldn’t say his real name right. He’s Japanese.”
“And this man was sick?”
“No,” I said. Then: “He took me fishing.”
Doctor set her clipboard on her knees to look at me. “Tell me,” she said.
So I did.
About how Green was a family friend, the son of a colleague of my father’s. Green was an angular man, with more corners than a tetrahedron. I thought he was terribly brilliant, which I had once commented on to my mother when I was quite young. She had pursed her lips and replied, “Funny how that doesn’t make you trust him.” At the time her reply had mystified me, but in later years I grew--unfortunately-- to know exactly what she meant.
He was six years older than me, enough of a difference to make him exotic while still maintaining the appealing familiarity of being a ‘young’ man. When my father would go to Japan to visit Green’s father, I would come along. For the ride, for the “cultural experience”, for the smell of salt in the streets leading up to the sea--and, in no small way, for Green.
He humored me. I liked that. Once I asked him if we could go down to the water, and he said yes. I was fifteen and I’d never been fishing before. I’m not sure I’d ever eaten fish before, to be perfectly honest. My dad had told me when I was a child about how if moisture gets into food you are keeping in the fridge it will grow mold, and that that’s why ziplock bags were invented. I’d thought for years that that meant that all fish were moldy, because they’re food and they’re in water. Obviously I didn’t think that anymore when I was fifteen, but by the time I had realized years earlier how flawed my theory was, I had already avoided seafood for so long that it had been solidly established as something disgusting.
But that day I wanted to go fishing, and Green said I could. He gathered bait and rods and took me down to the docks, and we sat on the edge with our feet dangling into the water. I was fascinated with the delicacy of the fishermen’s implement of death. My fishing rod was long and limber and lithe. The fishing line was thin and tight as a tendon, and it was so translucent that against the water, it disappeared. There seemed something almost sensual, even sexual, about the way the rod bent, buckled, held. About the tautness of the line. About the held-breath still of the waiting. And then: the jerk. The pull. The tenuous test of tug-of-war. The shiny body flying through the air. Gills flexing under my fingers. Blank little eyes. Lips like cartilage with a new little tear, the perfect kind, it seemed, for a lip ring to slip through.
I wasn’t familiar with death. (Yet.) I wanted to throw my fish back into the water instead. I liked the way his skin changed from yellow to green to gray depending on which way you looked at him. But Green said no, that he was big and healthy and we were hungry and that to not eat the meat would be such a waste as to be criminal.
“But I don’t even like fish,” I said.
“Should have thought about that before you asked to go fishing.”
Green’s own bucket was as full of jumping bodies as a dance floor. He dropped my fish in with the others, gestured as if to recast his line, but then caught some weakness in my eyes and stopped.
“This is plenty,” he said, “Let’s go home.”
I loved him for that.
It was when we were gathering up our supplies to head out that the big boat came. It had been looming on the horizon for quite some time, but suddenly it was there. It rolled towards shore and the whole world trembled with its approach. Green squinted at it uneasily. “That’s funny,” he said, in a voice that held no humor at all, “Shrimp boat. Not supposed to dock here.”
Even I could have told you that. A boat that size needed something monumental and modern to hitch to. The dock we were on looked like a toy dock next to the shrimp boat. Even our fish looked like toy fish. I imagine that Green and I looked like toy people.
“Do you think something went wrong?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Green said. This was the only time I had ever heard Green say those words in my whole life. It terrified me. “Don’t think a storm’s coming,” he added.
Men began to get off the boat. They were shouting in Japanese and making wild gestures with their arms.
“What are they saying?” I asked.
“Something about angels.”
I couldn’t think of a single more ominous answer that Green could have given. “Is someone dead?”
“Halos...” Green frowned, then shook his head. “I have no idea what they’re talking about.”
On the deck, other men were pulling ropes and dragging a great net into the air. The net was filled with a mass of something that I knew to be hundreds and hundreds of shrimp, although their numbers and their distance from me made them look entirely alien. As we watched, the net was lowered onto the land. The men from the boat began to swarm around it, still waving their arms, still shouting.
I saw it.
The shrimp were on fire.
“What the--” I said.
Green grabbed my arm to stop me from running to them. Hard. Later there would be marks on my biceps, but at the time I didn’t even feel his fingers there.
I stared. I didn’t understand what I was seeing. How was this even possible? Fires couldn’t happen on a fishing boat, but there couldn’t be any other explanation for what I was seeing. All throughout the net were points of light. Embers or sparks or something, I figured. It looked like the fishermen had been raiding the skies instead of the seas, and had brought home stars instead of shrimp.
Green watched for a while longer, then looked down at me and started upon seeing his hand around my arm. It was as if he had forgotten it was there. He let go and said, “It’s a bacteria, I think. I’ve seen this before.”
I studied the net once more. After Green’s word of explanation, the light I was seeing did seem to be more of a glow than a burn, but I still wasn’t entirely sure I believed him. “There’s bacteria that do that?” I asked. “Glow, I mean?”
Green nodded. “Looks like they lost the whole crop,” he said, almost indifferent now. I couldn’t believe how little the strangeness before us was affecting him. “That’s a shame.”
He bent down and picked up his bucket of fish. Then he turned and began towards home. For a moment longer, I stood by myself, letting the glow map itself across my retinas. I felt tingly and clammy and excited. I believed that what I was seeing was of the utmost importance.
Now how I long that I was wrong.
I didn’t tell Doctor about how Green had taken me down to the docks at night when no one was there and first split me open like a fish to be cleaned and gutted. The same wet, the same writhing, the same insertions. It was the simplicity of the procedure that surprised me most. Green bent my knees up under his chest. “It’s like origami,” he said; “There’s an art in the folding.”
So the whole time I was thinking about fortune tellers. Bring the corners in to the center. Bring them in again. Flip it over. Bring those corners in.
No, Green wasn’t sick. Green was strong.
There were other things the matter with Green, but glow wasn’t the one.
