The Monsters of Templeton (45 page)

"You," he huffed at my mother through his peals, "are a remarkable woman, Vivienne. You set his porch on fire."

I looked at my mother, and said, "Well, this bodes well. To be honest, I didn't think he was capable of laughter."

She raised an eyebrow back at me. "You think I'd let myself be stuck with a sourpuss for the rest of my life?"

Clarissa seemed as if she was about to say something, her mouth twisted wryly and looking at me in her old ironic way, when she thought better of it and said, "You? Living with a sourpuss? Never, Vi." And there was either a speck in her eye or she winked at my mother, but I pretended not to notice. Instead, I watched Milky wipe his face and chuckle into the bowl of his hand, then I reached over and gave him a clap on the shoulder.

"Frankly, Milky," I told him, "you just warmed the cockles of my heart. You may be okay for my mother."

"Oh, goody," he said. And this set him off again.

Chapter
33

Teratology: Or, of Monsters in Paint; in Teeth; in Wood; in Sheet-Iron; in Stone; in Mountains; in Stars

The image clings to my mind like a growth. I sense some riddle in it.

--JOHN GARDNER, Grendel

THE WEEKS AFTER the monster died, it faded from our memories. The film crews slowly slipped away, two by two; the divers went down and came up shrugging; the deep-sea pods circled the murky depths and found no vestige of the monster, no lair, no offspring, nothing; even the children forgot their fears of the water and zipped around on their tiny water skis and in their luffing Sunfish. In the raveling days of late August and early September, Templeton seemed normal, if quieter this summer.

Then, suddenly, when we had begun to forget the sweet monster, it blasted up through the darkness again. Doctor Herman Kwan, he of the blooming sweat-roses on the evening news, put out a sixty-three-page article in the same exact issue of Nature as my--Dwyer's--own article. Kwan et al.'s "A New Species, Genus, Family? What We Know about Templetonia Portentum" ended two pages before Dr. Dwyer and twenty-one coauthors' "Archaeological Evidence of Alaskan Human Migration More Than 25,000 BCE."1

Head-to-head scientific sensationalism, like dueling banjos.

By far the more interesting was the Templeton Monster's. Cutting through the murkiness of scientific argot and syntax--why, I always wonder, do scientists believe that unintelligibility equals intelligence?--the Kwan article basically stated that the monster of our lake was a unique animal in the history of the world, and went on to list the reasons why.

As it is always good to have an image in mind when discussing abstractions, here is a picture from that report:

An "artist's" rendition of Glimmey. Sadly, the only "artist" that lives in Templeton is a seventy-five-year-old collagist named Milton Witherbee, who never quite got over his Ernst-inspired surrealism, and creates "art" like this rendition of Glimmey that, let's be frank, has very little to do with the Glimmerglass Lake Monster as he actually appeared. Two weeks after the production of this work, Witherbee set fire to his studio, weeping, and retired to Hawaii, saying, "It is a false art that cannot survive a monster."

ON GLIMMEY, THE LAKE GLIMMERGLASS MONSTER, OR TEMPLETONIA PORTENTUM

THE MONSTER OF our lake, the report said, was found by DNA analysis to be a placental mammal of the superorder Cetariodactyla, the same order that gave rise to even-toed ungulates (pigs, hippos, deer) and cetacea (whales and dolphins).2 But this is where the similarity ended between pigs, deer, and whales, as our monster was apparently a synchronous hermaphrodite,3 and self-fertilizing, at that. The only other animal known to self-fertilize is a fish called the killifish, so the discovery of a mammal that could do such things was enough to shock the scientific community out of its pants.

Bone analysis found our monster to be over two hundred years old, and the tiny fetus of a fertilized baby deep within its cavernous body found the gestation period to be about twenty years. Twenty years! The little fetus was about ten years into its development and still didn't have eyes: it was the size of a six-year-old child, and, despite its tail and superlong neck, its potbelly and clenched fists were so uncannily human that one of the researchers, the mother of an autistic boy, wept when they pulled it from the raw belly of the beast. From what evidence the researchers found, it was hypothesized that the monster had already given birth at least once. Thrilled calls were made, and the next day the scuba divers tried to touch the bottom of the lake and failed. They called in the ocean-diving equipment, all to no avail. That's when they found Glimmey's nipples were largely ornamental, as there were no milk sacs behind them: Potemkin nipples.

In addition, the monster had rock-hard black teeth, flat, not pointed, and in rungs of three for better chewing the fish and lakeweed that made up its diet. It had huge reservoirlike lungs that held up to three months' worth of oxygen, so that it only ever had to come up four times a year to breathe. It also had such dense fat that sperm whales were comparative lightweights; one ounce of pure Glimmey fat, the researchers found, would burn for fifteen hours, and the small amount of smoke that it let off smelled curious, fresh, like pine and lake water. It must have needed such dense fat, for the winters were terrible under the thick ice of Lake Glimmerglass, and there was a lot of bulk to keep warm.

Glimmey also had four legs and curiously articulated hands, exactly like human ones, but without thumbs. In fact, they were so delicate and beautiful that the artist hired to draw every part of the beast snuck in late after all the scientists went home for a nap and made furtive plaster casts of the hands for further study, using a bulldozer to put them in the back of his truck. Though the monster was never seen out of the lake, it was, apparently, easily able to walk on dry land, though the researchers believe that after a certain point--100 or 150 years of its life--it would have been far too difficult to move such a vast body in the air, and so the monster stayed exclusively in the more buoyant water.

Also, unlike a whale, Glimmey had an unfused malleus in its ear, and such exquisite inner-ear makeup that the researchers hypothesized the monster had the purest, most intricate sense of underwater hearing of any animal in the world. This was what had allowed the shy creature to remain undetected for so long: it could hear with great sensitivity if a human was even within sighting distance, and would, presumably, come up only during the darkest or foggiest nights to fill its vast lungs.

Here is the image that popped before me when I read the article on Glimmey. I was in my pink little girl's room in Averell Cottage in the twilight, my bags packed all around me, my ghost in a light violet protective ring, and I saw, clearly and in my mind's eye, the monster in a cold cement warehouse, split open like a fruit. I saw cranes digging among the dead flesh, humans crawling on scaffolding around the corpse like Lilliputians across the body of poor shipwrecked Gulliver, the head bent back so the mouth flopped open and three rungs of shining black teeth bared to the ceiling. Offal extracted and studied and photographed, the creamy skin turning black at the wounds' edges.

It was such a terrible image, in such tremendous contrast to the idea I'd held of the monster--the silky white of the beast swimming in the black depths of Lake Glimmerglass, the happiness of limb through water, the joy of the wondering eyes, the hands grasping for a fish--that I put down the journal, and I couldn't keep my eyes from overspilling.

Wilhelmina Sunshine UptonAs a baby. And at her college graduation, briefly and insanely blond, for some reason she still doesn't quite understand. The day after her graduation, she will awaken and scare herself so badly in the bathroom mirror that she will promptly and forevermore dye her hair back to its natural color.

Chapter
34

On Leaving

THE DAY I left Templeton, I took my father out to lunch. He didn't know he was my father yet and had sounded mildly surprised when I called him up the day before. I waited in the dark, cool cave of Cartwright Cafe, sipping my iced tea and trying to will the furious flush from my cheeks.

When Sol Falconer arrived it was in definite date attire, a very expensive dress shirt and nice slacks, as if it were natural that a girl half his age would chase after him, and the least he could do was to dress up for her. Apparently, I wasn't the first. I stood, and patted my own dark dress down. I held out my hand, and he looked at it, grinning.

"Ah," he said, shaking it. We had the same hands, I noticed, long nail beds, long fingers, a thumb twisted more to the side than normal. "You're breaking an old man's heart, Willie. I didn't realize this was going to be about business." He folded his great height into his chair, and smiled at me.

"Business?" I said. "Depends on what you call business."

By now, the waitress was standing over us, tapping the eraser of her pencil against the notepad and sighing. She had been a few years behind me in high school, and kept from that era her great garish swoops of green shadow above her eyes, and the gold hoops dangling from her ears to her shoulders. She pretended to not know who I was. "Abner sandwich, please," I said without looking at her. "Side salad, with balsamic on the side. Iced tea with lots of lemon."

He blinked and frowned a little. "Exactly the same," he said to the waitress, and handed her the menus we hadn't bothered to look at. "That's exactly what I always get," he said.

"Makes sense," I said.

"What makes sense?" he said.

"You'll see," I said.

He unfolded his napkin and spread it across his lap. Then he leaned over the table. "All right," he said. "The drama is unbearable. Could you explain the mystery, please, Willie?" he said. "Is this about the college loan? If it is, you know you don't have to worry about it."

I looked around the restaurant to see if anyone could overhear, but it was an hour before the lunch rush, and the only patrons were at one long table, a baseball family all in Mets jerseys, save for one little iconoclast who obstinately sported a Yankees pinstripe. I caught his eye and gave him a little wink. He winked back, and a piece of his hamburger fell out of his mouth.

"All right," I said to Sol Falconer. "There's a story I think I want to tell you."

"Tell away," he said.

"Once upon a time," I said, "there was a young girl who came home to her hometown. She was an orphan, all alone in the world. One day, a very good-looking young prince stopped by, and they began to drink some wine, and one thing led to where such things generally lead if the parties are drunk and young enough. Unbeknownst to the prince, a child was born. That child, at last grown up, decided one day to find her unwitting father." I waited, expectantly, looking at Sol, but I have always been a rococo storyteller, and this story only confused him.

He blinked. "What?" he said. "Prince? Child? Where?" and he craned his head around and saw the waitress leaning over the baseball family. "The waitress?" he said, turning back. "Is she some secret heiress or something? This is a very strange story. Why are you telling me this, Willie?"

"No. Duh," I said. "Sol. Dad."

His eyes opened very wide, and seemed to drink my face in. The cheekbones that must have seemed familiar, the height, the eye color, the smile. He passed a hand over his face, and gave a shuddery sigh. "Willie? I just," he said. "I just don't understand."

"Tell me about it," I said.

"But I can't have kids," he said. "Three marriages broke up because I couldn't have kids. This just isn't possible."

"Apparently it is," I said. "I'm living proof. Pinch me." It was a joke, but he did, and I sported twin plums on my arm for a week afterward.

"But," he said, "nobody told me. Nobody said anything. I cheered for you at all your soccer games and track meets in high school and I didn't even know."

"I didn't know," I said. "Not until last night. My mother told me last night."

"But I never did anything with your mother. I swear I didn't."

"Hm," I said. "Well, if that were true, we'd all be miracles. But, sadly, it's not."

"But I didn't," he said.

"But you did," I said. "Just think back. Remember one fine almost-spring day with buds on the trees. Tomato salad. Wine."

I watched as his face (my face) turned red as his fine nose (my nose) caught scent of something deep and troubling. He began to blink, and then he sat back in his chair.

"Wait a minute," he said. "Something's creeping back."

"I have all the time in the world. Dad," I said, smiling so widely my face felt as if it were cracking at the seams.

Solomon Falconer rubbed his hands over his face and gave a little twist of his lips. "Oh my God, that's right. This is so, excuse me, bizarre. I didn't even know what happened that night with Vivienne. Your mother. I woke up in that house hungover and half-naked. I panicked. If she ever found out, my fiancee would kill me, I thought, and I left, and just avoided your mother for a long, long time. Put it out of my mind. I didn't even know what happened. Holy shit."

"Holy shit," I agreed, "absolutely."

He sat back in his chair and folded his hands above his head. His hair had thinned and grown gray even since I was in high school, when he wore it in wild, gingery curls over his head. Now, he kept it clipped short. It looked nice.