Death's Excellent Vacation

The Boys Go Fishing SARAH SMITH

Sarah Smith’s YA ghost thriller, The Other Side of Dark, will be published in November 2010 by Atheneum. She has written the modern stand-alone Chasing Shakespeares, about the Shakespeare authorship controversy, and three historical mysteries: The Vanished Child, The Knowledge of Water, and A Citizen of the Country. Two of her books were named New York Times Notable Books of the Year. They have been published in twelve languages and have reached bestseller status in the United States and abroad. She is working on a novel about the Titanic and another YA thriller, A Boy on Every Corner.

for Yuki Miuma

TIME could lie lightly on Mr. Green. He could choose to be young, his face smooth, his hair black. He could catch an explosion in a force-field container. But under the weight of loneliness he is just another old man.

His friends have gone. Robin grew up, came out, moved to San Francisco, he’s in politics now. The Bat retreated into “scientific experiments.” The last time Green saw him, the Cave smelled and the Bat looked like Howard Hughes: long fingernails, dirty beard. Iguana’s dead. Atom, dead. Thunderbolt, dead.

And Lana. His girl, his only girl. He remembers every moment they spent together, but the good times are fading. They’re places he’s gone to in his mind so often he can’t see them anymore. The bad times don’t fade at all, the sonsabitches. Toward the last, when she could barely speak, he visited her in the hospital, changed his face and hair back to what he’d been, changed into the costume, the whole thing, the mask, the green cloak. “I remember you,” she whispered. But she really didn’t know him.

Sometimes it isn’t worth getting up in the morning.

“I need your help,” says the red-haired girl.

Her knocking wakes him. He squints out the door of his cabin into early-morning sunlight, sees a face that reminds him of girls in old comics. The sultry Chinese villainess. But the sultry Chinese villainess would wear a red silk dress cut up the side and she’d have black hair. This one has hennaed hair, cut spiky, and is wearing a parka from L.L. Bean.

The Thompson brothers’ rental SUV from town is parked by the fence. Whatever she wants from him, she drove forty miles on logging roads in the snow to get here.

Which means she’s trouble.

“Whatever it is, I don’t do it anymore.”

“Hi, I’m from Worldwide Travel? I left you voice mail?”

He doesn’t check his voice mail.

“I have a job for you. From some special fans.”

Special has only one meaning for him now. “I don’t do hospitals.” Never hospitals.

“Not that kind of special.”

“Or comic book conventions. Or”—he curves quotes with a finger—“ ‘media conferences.’ And I don’t talk with people who use the word special. Or supernatural powers or superhero. Town’s back there, you can get going.”

“You take people fishing,” she says. “They just want to go fishing.”

It’s been his cover for the past forty years: ice fishing. Up here, northern Maine, the lakes region. He doesn’t do summers, never joined the Ice Fishing Association, doesn’t have a Web site. People hire him, they don’t, it’s all the same to him.

Back when Lana was alive, he pissed clients off regularly, so none of the fishermen kept coming long enough to notice that Lana got old and he stayed young. Now he pisses folks off out of habit.

“They want to go fishing with you.”

He stands in the doorway, keeping her outside.

“They’re Talents,” she says.

“No, they aren’t. Those days are gone.”

“They are real Talents.”

“What do they do?” he jeers.

“They don’t know.”

This tugs at him. He knows about that kind of talent. Strength and special powers don’t cure AIDS or end a war, and they don’t keep a woman from dying. What does a Talent do, these years?

“I heard the story,” she says. “I heard about you and the other superheroes going fishing, once.”

For a moment he visits a worn old place in his perfect memory. He’s among old friends, laughing friends. Let’s go fishing like superheroes, boys. And they did, for the only fish worth having.

“Yeah? So?”

“They’ve heard, too,” she says.

“We were showing off.”

“Talents were heroes once,” she says. “Talents knew what to do with their powers.”

Super cleanliness isn’t one of his talents. He points back into the cabin at the pile of gear in the corner. “Auger,” he says. “Ice adze. Ice saw. That thing in the box, portable cabin. The ice gets thick. Fisherman bores holes in the ice. Cuts a bigger hole. Shines a flashlight through the hole. Waits for a fish to come investigate. Ice fishing. Boringest thing known to man unless you fall through the ice. ’S what I do now. That’s what I know to do with myself. They want to go ice fishing? I’ll take ’em ice fishing.”

She crosses her arms, purses her lips a little, disappointed.

“No,” he says. “They want pow, bang, thump. Big fights with big fish. Superhero fishing. There’s no fishing like that anymore.”

“Let’s just say they want pointers,” she says. “They’re looking for advice.”

“I don’t give advice.”

“What’s your rate?” she asks.

“For Talents? There’s a special rate.”

She nods. “They have money.”

“Not money,” he says. He knows what he wants. It’s what Atom got, the Captain. What Lana got.

“I want somebody to kill me.”

The little cabin gets airless. She opens her mouth to protest. Shakes her head. Closes her mouth.

“All right,” she says. “It’s a deal.”

He pads over to the stove, leaving her at the door. Pours cold coffee, scratches his bristly chin with his white china diner mug. (What does the last superhero drink his coffee out of? A diner mug. They really are unbreakable.)

“Yeah?” he says.

“I promise you. You will die.”

“Who’ll do it?”

“Me,” she says.

He figures he has a foot of height on her, a hundred pounds, a thousand years.

“You and who else?”

“Me.”

“How?”

She shakes her head. “No proof until it happens.”

He figures he’s being scammed.

Life is a scam.

Remembers his manners belatedly.

“You want coffee?”

“Do you have tea?”

“Nope.”

She looks around. The back ends of her hennaed hair waterfall to her shoulders. Green eyes, strange for Chinese, a green that reminds him of the color of the cloak gathering dust in his closet. He becomes suddenly conscious of dirty laundry on the sofa back and a winter’s worth of mud on the floor. He moves molecules, sorting for dirt, inching it toward a corner. He wonders where he put the laundry basket.

Special powers. Hah.

THE Fort Kent airport has the welcoming charm of a VA hospital morgue. She’s set up a chartered plane for them. The engines chatter like false teeth. They’re alone in the passenger cabin.

“So where do you fit in this?”

“I’m their travel agent.”

“Talents need travel agents?”

“It’s not a full-time job.”

“You fly up on this?” he says. He’s asking if she can fly.

She smiles and shakes her head. “Yes, I took the plane.” No, she can’t fly.

“Hope it’s safer than it looks.”

Green eyes and red hair: Back then, if she wasn’t the Oriental villainess, she would have been the sort of girl he’d have rescued from an airplane crash. Back then, he’d have cradled the plane in a force field, smiled for the cameras, never worried about air traffic controllers or incident reports or finding another identity someplace even farther off the map than the unincorporated townships.

Back then, he wouldn’t have been in the plane. He hates flying.

“So what’s your Talent?” he asks.

“Nothing really.”

He waits.

“Organization.”

He makes a noncommittal noise. Her cheeks go a little rosy.

“You try parking a tour bus outside Rockefeller Center at noon. Organization helps.”

“Helps to kill me?”

“Maybe.”

“You do lots of tour buses?”

He thinks about tour buses parked at the end of the driveway and shudders. See Mr. Green at home. See Mr. Green do his laundry. See Mr. Green tie one on.

She can’t help him. But she could blow his cover. “One thing straight,” he says. “It’s—”

“Only this once,” she says. “Right? You do this one thing, and even if I can’t help you, except I can, I never bother you again. That’s OK. There won’t be any more kids like these.” She reaches into her purse, brings out a compact, powders her nose. He can’t remember the last time he saw a girl do that; no call for powder in the townships. She smiles up at him. “Organization is the ability to foresee the future. Just a little.”

“I foresee they’ll be bored and you’ll be pissed off and I’ll be cheated.”

Her eyes turn from green to the color of smoke over the woods in fire season: dangerous, challenging.

“Do you want a real foreseeing?”

Out of the purse—it’s a little purse—she pulls a wooden flute. An old flute, dark and smooth with fingering, so long and thin and curved it looks like a piece of the edge of the world. Too big to fit in the purse. She puts it to her lips and begins to play. He looks out the scratched green plane window, out at the snowy fields. Barren lines of black. Dark and sparse like her music. The landscape of loneliness.

“Stop that,” he says.

But she keeps playing. The flute song changes, creeps around him like green tendrils.

“Stop.”

She takes the flute away from her lips.

“I won’t cheat you,” she says.

“GIRLS?”

“Young women,” she says.

There are eight of them. Foreigners. Japanese. And five of them are teenaged girls. There are two older men, one tall with a mustache and long hair, one round and dense and lazy. One of the kids is a boy, he guesses, though the kid has a long pigtail down his back. The rest are wearing pink ribbons and plaid skirts, and they’re giggling and nudging each other and pointing at him. They all look alike. Spiked hair. Pointed faces like foxes.

They’re tiny. It’d take two of them to haul in a minnow.

“Talents?” he hisses.

“You’ll see.”

One of the older men comes forward and bows and says a name Mr. Green doesn’t catch and says he’s honored and all that, or something. Languages aren’t one of Mr. Green’s skills. “I am head of dojo ‘Do Anything Martial Arts.’ These my students. Also are my daughters.”

The five girls giggle. High school at best. One of the girls curtsies and begins flailing around with a set of pink ribbons. “Flying Beauty Martial Arts!” she chirps. One of them has a pink backpack with a picture of a white cat and the words Hello Kitty. Hello Kitty Martial Arts? The girl blinks at him with big eyes and twitches her nose speechlessly. The other three try to hide behind each other. The boy preens like the only rooster in the henyard.

“We are very honor for you take us fishing,” says the lazy man. He’s wearing a too-loose Red Sox cap turned backward and a Red Sox jacket much too big for him. The effect is oddly dangerous, as if he’s about to spring back to a much bigger size.

They gaze at him as if he’s supposed to say something. Pointers, he thinks. I’m supposed to give them pointers. Advice. They all have big eyes. It’s like being surrounded by black-velvet pictures of kittens.

They look at him.

He looks back. The only advice he can think of is Don’t eat yellow snow.

He clears his throat. “Come on. You’re going fishing. Don’t fall in.”

They all giggle. Aargh.

“Come get baggage,” the tall man tells the kids, and he and the compressed man trundle off toward the baggage carousel. The kids follow him in a whispering herd, looking back at Mr. Green.

The girl with the pink ribbons whispers to the boy-rooster.

“Secret-u identity,” the boy whispers back.

Good, they’re disappointed. Mr. Green scowls at the red-haired travel agent, prickly-proud of himself.

“Guess they expected—”

“Green mask and cloak, glowing force field—”

“I can finish my own sentences.” They expected the Green Force, Atom, Astounding, the Bat, Iguana, all grinning with perfect teeth and washboard abs. They expected to go fishing for the Fish, the Monster. Not a weather-beaten old fisherman in a plaid shirt and jeans with a bucket full of farm-raised trout. “What do they do? Giggle the villains to death?”

“Please,” she says.

He clears his throat, looking at the strutting boy trying to take all the heaviest luggage himself. “That boy and all the girls? I’m not having hijinks.”

She looks at him like she’s about to burst into laughter. There’s something sad behind it. “Throw cold water over him,” she says.

The kids and the men come back, lugging the gross national product of Japan on wheels.

In the plane, on the way up to the lake, the red-haired Chinese girl gets them all singing old songs. He watches her. Red-haired like a flame, short-lived as a match. To care about humans is to care about leaves, about the frost on the glass in the morning. Breathe and it’s gone.

Still, he surreptitiously cradles the overloaded plane.

THERE is ice on the lake, thick, hard ice, no fog. The kids wrap themselves up like packages in parkas, hats, mittens. Mr. Green takes the girls out back and gets them to make a shelter. He does something he hasn’t done in years, gestures a hemisphere of glowing green. “Pile snow over that.” “Oooh,” the kids go. “Ano ne!” When they cover it with snow, there’s nothing but an igloo glowing faintly like a neon light in a snowstorm.

Advice: “Anyone know why we cover it up? You protect your secret identity. You don’t want to advertise.”

They bob their heads in agreement.

“People laugh,” says the kid with the long braid bitterly, slouching out from the cabin. He has a butterfly on his jeans. Probably gay.

“No. Not just people laugh. Your enemies find you. People who are going to hurt you find you.”

The kid considers.

“Same thing. Laugh. Hurt.”

The kid knows nothing.

The boy and the men get settled down in the clients’ loft, and the girls giggle in the new igloo.

The red-haired travel agent gets the spare room in the cabin. She uses the shower until the mirror is steamy. He showers after she’s finished and smells lavender soap, woman smells. It’s been twenty years since Lana died. It’s been forever since he was a human man with Lana. He feels bothered and self-conscious with so many people in his privacy.

He pads out in socks to find the red-haired girl in front of the fire, toweling her wet hair from mahogany back to flame. She’s wearing a green sweater that goes too well with her hair and jeans that fit her like a thin coat of paint. He realizes, embarrassingly, there’s a question he hasn’t asked.

“My name is Lan,” she says.

He winces.

“I know,” she says. “Your wife’s name. I am sorry. My name is just Lan.”

He pulls herself together. “That’s your Talent name?”

She shakes her head, smiling. “Just my name.”

“Funny name.”

“Not as funny as the Green Force.”

“Green,” he says. “Bill. Bill was the name my foster parents gave me. The last name changes, but I’m always Bill.”

He looks into the fire, remembering streams of fire, falling, falling, gravity screaming around him, catching and shaping it in his pudgy hands, turning it into a cradle—

“Bill,” she says. “Nice. Why do you want to die, Bill?”

She’s probably twenty, twenty-five. Before he gets to know her, she’ll be dead.

He’s told his own story a hundred times, seen it in the comics, until he almost believes that Mom baked pies for church socials and Dad drove a tractor round the farm. But he remembers the First World War and the Civil War and the Revolution, and before his name was Bill it was Will and Gwillhem and Willa-helm, and his parents were Mutti and Dadu.

Demon, the villagers called him. The villagers tried to burn him, drown him, stone him. Fire flowed around him. When they threw him into the pond, he shaped air in a bubble around him. He is your angel, the priest said. Call him Willa-helm, Protector. Do not be afraid of him.

For a long time he protected them from a distance, like a guard dog, half-angel, half-wolf.

Then he got involved.

He had friends.

He fell in love.

Now he fishes.

“Death is what people do.” Not so long ago, a moment ago in his long life, the other Talents showed up. Each of them unique, wild, strange. Together, a gang. Friends. And Lana. He thought he was people. They proved he was wrong.

“What do those kids have for talents?” he asks.

“Oh, one thing, another. They look after each other,” she says. “That’s talent enough.”

Yeah. “They got long life?” he asks. “Is that one of their Talents?”

She sits with the towel on her knees, looking into the fire. “No. I’ve known lots like them. The others are dead.”

“What’s their story? Born with Talent? Made?”

“Made.”

“How?” Atom, an atomic explosion. Poor Elastic, a vat of chemicals. Himself falling like a star.

And he has touched something. The Chinese girl stares into the fire, her eyes dead black and her mouth widening into a grimace. Her hands tighten around the towel.

“I made them,” she says. “I cursed them. Me.”

And she gets up abruptly and leaves.

FOUR of them went on that long-ago fishing trip: Iguana Man, Astounding, Atom, and the Green Force, who kept the mortals safe and dry. In ordinary ice fishing you shine a light into the murk under the ice. At the bottom of the water, they shone Atom. They could barely see past the yellow ball of light that Atom threw. They were all wasted, laughing so hard they were falling down. Suddenly scales turned in the murk like ragged hands and a single dark eye glared at them before it flashed away into darkness. The world’s last monster, trapped in her lake.

“Shit, boys,” Iguana said.

“It’d be bad to be like that,” Atom said soberly.

“No,” the Green Force said. “Not us. We won’t be like that.”

He thought there was an us. They’d all live forever. There would always be big, colorful villains to fight, Nazis and Yellow Perils, and beings like himself to fight them. He had seen something but it took him years to know it: the Great Fish, trapped in her size and strength, with no path out; too big to get out; without the talent to die.

IT’S two days into an endless fishing trip before he finds out what their talents are.

As far as he can tell, they’re normal annoying teenagers. They bundle themselves up in parkas, stare into the ice hole for fifteen minutes, get bored, and move the light around so they scare the fish. They forget to watch the flags. They play with Game Boys and plug their ears with iPods. They giggle and bicker, and kick and punch, and yell “Pow! Wham!” like they are making up their own soundtrack. The boy with the long braid farts like an elephant; nothing worse than the smell of teenage boy. The fathers are polite and heat endless hot water for tea.

It’s clear what Lan’s talents are. She makes popcorn and sushi, cleans the trout they occasionally catch, braids pigtails, dries little-girl tears.

On the afternoon of the second day the fog comes in.

“We aren’t going fishing today,” Mr. Green says. “Probably not tomorrow. You can play with your Game Boys in the cabin.”

They give him the big-eyed stare.

“Ice is dangerous. Can be a foot thick one step, two inches thick the next. Worse when there’s a thaw. Where the Muskeag comes into the lake, the river water’s eating the ice from below. Where the ice got broken up by our old fishing holes, where the fish gather, where there’s a lot of weed, the ice is thinning out and not healing yet. By the shore the level of the water goes up and down and the ice breaks. But it’s foggy, so you’re not thinking about that, just trying to find your way to the shore. Unless you know to respect the ice, and you kids don’t, you don’t fish.”

The kids mutter in Japanese.

He and Lan go outside, and she checks the weather report on her magic phone. “Above freezing for the next two days,” she points out.

“You foresaw that, right? So it’s your problem.”

“Come on. They could have a more interesting time.”

Their boots slush through the runny snow.

“You could do for them what you did,” she says. “You and the others. Back then.”

“That’s what you want for your kids? Bam, pow, monster? I don’t do that anymore.”

“They can’t even go out in this,” she says.

“Just can’t fish.”

“They can’t. No. I mean they don’t want to go out in this. It sets them off. Their Talents.”

“Which are?” he says.

“They’re shape-changers.”

He waits for more. She doesn’t say anything.

“You did it to them?” he prompts. He’s given her plenty of chances to talk about it. They’ve been fishing from the same ice hole for two days. She hasn’t said a word.

She doesn’t say a word now.

“You cursed them?”

He doesn’t believe in personal curses.

“None of my business, I guess,” he says finally.

She turns away from him, looking off into the trees.

“What do they change into? Werewolves? Bats?”

“Various things,” she says, turning back toward him, blinking. “Shortlived things. One of them changes into a cat. She’ll live ten years.”

Ten years is a moment.

“I did that to them,” she says. “And I’m sorry. I want to help them.”

“What are you looking for from me?” he says. “How not to die? That’s the kind of advice you want?”

“How to live!” she shouts at him. “Yes!”

“I move things. Air toward me, water and fire away from me. But I don’t know why I keep on living.”

“Teach me how you live,” she says, “so I can teach them. And I’ll find out how you can die.”

WHEN they get back to the cabin, the kids are gone.

She says something under her breath and starts running down the path toward the lake, her boots wallowing in the snow. He begins to run too.

It’s three-quarters of a mile to the lake, and the footing is horrible, slushy snow over mud over frozen earth. For years he’s made his body into an old man’s. He slips and his arms windmill as he catches up to her.

“—foresaw this?” he pants.

She turns back to him, furious. “Are you a Talent? Does it always work for you? I was talking to you! And if you can push fire away, why can’t you push earth and just fly?”

“I don’t fly—”

He is a man. Men don’t fly. He is a man, like others; he had friends; he had a wife; he was in love. He is Mr. Green, Bill Green. He is not something fallen from the sky, doomed to be alone. He doesn’t fly.

He was mankind’s Protector once, and he is too lonely to go back to that lonely place. A Protector flies. A man doesn’t.

He hears screaming from the lake.

And he flies. Nothing superhero-like, rocketlike; he just pushes the force of gravity away. He’s awkward, rising, wobbling. Too far at first; he thinks he’ll be spotted and spends too much time scanning the sky for a plane. He ducks down into the trees, gets tangled and caught in a pine, flails at branches. He bullies his way through the treetops like a bear through shrubs, sticky with pine sap, whipped by branches.

There’s light in front of him, a plain that looks like a wide white field.

The lake is smoking with fog. He can’t see anything. He drops downward, shouting for her, for them, looking for the shore. In the fog, somewhere, they’re shouting for him.

When he hits the ice, it tilts.

Broken ice. Open water. He runs across them both, light as a skater. He’s never lost anyone on the ice, and he’s not going to start now. The ice bobs under his feet, and suddenly, out of the fog ahead of him, he sees the kids. They’re stupidly huddled all together by the edge of a fractured black hole, and thrashing in the water he sees two of them, the boy with the long hair and his father. Lan is already out on the ice, flattened on it, her red hair a shock in the grayness, holding her hands out to the boy. “I’ve got you,” Green shouts at her. “It’ll hold.”

But it doesn’t. He tries to extend a cradle of force all the way across the ice, over the hole, without trapping the boy and his father. But there are too many of them, the kids all together are too heavy on all that tipping ice, it’s too far, it’s been too long.

The ice cracks; she slips and flails and is gone. One by one the kids slide in after her and in a moment the ice is empty.

His giant invisible hands of force reach out and tilt the ice back, find a struggling body here, a furry parka there. His giant invisible fingers sieve the black water, hunting the kids. He shapes a globe of air and shoves a drowning kitten into it. A bear is grabbing at the ice, breaking more chunks away. A Red Sox hat, a Hello Kitty backpack, but no flaming red hair—

He touches something, touches her. Pulls Lan out of the water, her hair a river of blood down her back, her face blue. Throws her down onto the bank. How to get water out of lungs? He makes up something, moving air, moving water. Feels something in her dark and alien as death. Then feels her retching cough.

“What am I looking for?” he yells at her. Another part of him is a net, dredging. “Help me find them!”

In the end he recognizes them only because there are the same number of them as before. There were five girls, one boy, two men; now, one girl, a snake, a great brown bear, five little beasts. A bedraggled kitten stares up at him, a sobbing round badger clutches a girl’s glasses in one wet paw. The girl has a long braid. The bear has a Red Sox cap.

They look at him with adoration, as if he could solve all their problems, and their superhero is so lonely he could howl.

HE and Lan have sent the kids back to the cabin to bathe, and they stand outside to give the kids privacy. Lan says they want privacy. Lan’s changed her clothes, but she’s still shivering. He warms the air around her, moving it gently. Protector. They watch through the windows. Through the steamy glass he sees them, bedraggled, silt-smeared animals filing into his shower, little girls coming out wrapped in his towels. A kittenish girl, a round brown girl with a tilted chin and pointed nose. The bear has the lazy man’s lumbering, rolling walk, the boy has a girl’s shy smile.

“Cold water makes them—change. They change their shape. Hot water turns them back into human,” Lan says, her teeth chattering still.

“How did you do that to them?”

“I don’t know! As if I knew!”

“There’s got to be some way to undo it.”

“There was another spring. It’s gone.”

It’s another kind of Talent from anything he knows. “I don’t believe in this. It’s magic.”

“But you can fly,” she says, half laughing and half shivering.

“I don’t have to believe in myself.”

She watches the kids through the window. “Maybe all kinds of magic exist. Somewhere, in a cave, a family of werewolves is reading old Green Force comics and saying, ‘Of course he isn’t real.’ Ghosts are reading Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and saying what you’re a metaphor for. And the bats sleep through the day and dream of all of us.”

He thinks of the Bat in his Cave. “And we’d all rather be human.”

“I thought you could make them human again. Or at least give them time. You don’t get old—”

“No,” he says sharply. “No.”

When his parents began to get old, he thought about fixing their aging bodies. “There are stories about things I did. Humans getting old but not able to die. People turning into trees. They weren’t trees. You don’t want me messing with those kids.”

I want to die. I want to get old and older and oldest and die, and turn into a tree, into a rock. I’ve been a man.

She shudders, cold or dispirited. “What can you do, then?”

“When my wife got old, I did nothing. That’s what I could do for her. I did nothing.”

“No.” She turns toward him. In the half dark where they are watching, her eyes have turned dark as prophecy. “What can you do?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Move the light,” she says. “Move the light from the window. Can you do that?”

He moves it an inch to the right. Parlor trick.

“You can move light. But you got the kids to cover up the igloo because you were worried about satellites. You moved the water out of my lungs, but you didn’t move the fog off the lake. You heated the air for me, but you didn’t cool it for them. Here we are standing out in the cold. What can you do? I mean, have you ever thought about it? In an organized way?”

She’s shouting at him. I can get old, he thinks. I can be old like a bitter old man. I can be bitter.

But I can’t be an old man.

I can’t be a man at all.

The kids are looking out the window at him, adoring, hoping for miracles.

“Who are you?” he says. “What right have you to ask me to do anything? You and they will be dead by the time I’ve had my lunch. You want me to do anything for you? You want me to care about you? That’s going to hurt me, and it won’t help you or them.”

“You have no idea what you can do, do you?”

He knows what he can’t do.

“Then I’ve given you your wish, Green Man,” she says. “You are dead. You care about nothing. You are a rock. A stone. An old man fishing until the end of the world.”

I can’t, he thinks. I don’t have the talent for that either.

“Then let’s try something else,” she says.

SHE could book a flight on her magic phone, but she doesn’t. She makes him zip them across the Atlantic in a glowing green saucer a hundred feet long. She tells him he can make it invisible to radar and infrared and light, can’t he? The kids scream and giggle and bounce around the inside of the flying saucer and ask him to turn off the gravity inside, which he does. The kids fly. He’s a terrified protector, afraid of the villagers, helping them from a distance, a watchdog and not a man. He is bony ribs around the kids’ beating hearts. He feels like someone in an airplane, speeding along too fast, cradled by something he can’t control.

They land on the Mars-rocky shore of the loch, between the pines and the peaty water, Lan and Green and a luminous flying saucer full of giggling, flying teenage Japanese shape-changers. “Make it a submarine now,” the kids tell him. He thinks about recirculators, scrubbers; he pushes molecules around. They sink into the brown darkness like into moving loam.

“Can you—” Lan says.

But he holds up his hand. He has been here.

Ice fishing: the seldom-seen, magical moment when the water under the ice is clear, when the fish can see light from a distance. When they gather. When, in the light, the fisherman sees muscular dark bodies turning. When the fish looks at the fisherman, curious, and the fisherman looks at the fish.

What can you do? Who are you?

He does like he did with the dirt on the floor, like at Lake Musky seining for the kids, but tinier, tiny. He sends out into the water nets that are no stronger than metaphors, trawling for the smallest pieces of drowned bark and leaf, gathering them together, dodging around any fish or eel or water snake. He thinks about Brownian motion. Why did they need Atom’s light? The water clears. The water clears, leaving worms and little fish wriggling, surprised. The darkness recedes around them; a bigger fish bullets by, mouth open, and the small fry streak for safety in the blackness below them. Green globes light around the kids, and around them the fish gather, as if they are all in one great dark place under the ice together, with one flashlight to draw them.

The kitten-girl gives a little breathy scream.

Out of the blackness, out of the depths, She comes. She strikes at the glow, but Green thinks slipperiness and the ball that holds them spins past her teeth. She mouths a man-sized fish and flips her body round, whirls around them, thrashing, stretching out her neck, trying to catch them. She is too big to see whole. Riffles of gills, a great round flat eye like a target, scarred scales.

He plays her. Green is the worm; Green is the net, the line, the hook. The great She-Fish worries at the green ball-light, her teeth an inch away from them, and he and Lan and the kids bounce away from her. She wraps her long neck and tail around them. He feints and slides away.

And then suddenly it is a dance. He knows what she wants. He morphs the ball in which they all float into a mirror-monster of her, a ghost monster of green and light. She rears back. He shapes the green fish to match her motion. And for a moment the two of them hang there, in the water clear as glass, a monster fish like ebony and a monster fish like emerald, and she is still, still, still, and she reaches out her long neck, sniffing, opening her mouth to taste the water with her tongue, tilting her head so she sees him out of one enormous eye. Are you like me, her outstretched neck says, her tongue licks, and Green’s heart beats loud in his ears, Are you like me?

But she throws her head back with a cry of loneliness and disappears into the deep.

When they are back on dry land, the kids say nothing. They stand on the rocky shore, each of them alone for a minute. Then the boy goes from one to the other, touching them on the shoulder, bringing them together into a protective hug. They reach out for the two older men, for Lan. She reaches out for him. Green stands with them, embracing them and embraced.

Tonight he has done new things. Of all of them, that silent lonely hug is the hardest, and it’s what he will remember, that and Nessie’s tongue tasting the green monster made of force and silt, hoping she could find something like herself.

HE takes everyone back to Japan in his invisible force-field UFO. They’re quiet on the trip. Over Japan, the trees are pink and green with springtime. At the big Tokyo train station, the kids and the older men shake hands with him and Lan. Then the Japanese Talents wander away, down escalators. The station is a big mall, open in the center. Green and Lan can still see the group, past the escalator, two levels below them. The kids stand in front of a game store, huddling together.

“Guess they thought they’d be happier when the heroics happened,” Green says. “Guess they thought they’d figure something out.”

“They’ve seen monsters,” Lan says.

He nods.

“We went fishing,” he says. “Four of us. We were so jazzed about being Talents. That was the age of Talents. We thought we had it made. We were kings of the world. We were like each other. But Atom got sick, Astounding was going to get himself blown up someday and he did, I stole my wife from Iguana and pretended to be human. We went fishing and we caught loneliness. I can’t help the kids, Lan. Badgers and cats don’t live more than a few years. Someday there’ll be only one of them left. And it’ll see something it thinks is like itself or its friends, but the smell will be wrong and the taste will be wrong, and it’ll know it’s the only one of itself in the world. Being the one there’s only one of, that’s being a monster.”

“I’ll buy you a present,” Lan says.

She makes him wait outside a shop full of statues of every description, from Buddha to the Virgin Mary. Here in Planet Tokyo you buy Buddhas in a train station. She comes out with a little box. Not far away from them there’s something like a food court with little tables. They take a table with pink plastic flowers embedded in its top. “Open your present now.” She goes away and comes back with two drinks, something chewy and sweet with barley in it.

Green’s present is eight little plastic statues in a row on a plastic base.

“The Eight Immortals.” She touches their small heads one by one. “Immortal Woman He, whose lotus flower gives health. Royal Uncle Cao, whose jade tablet purifies the world. Iron-Crutch Li, who protects the needy.” She takes the next one off the stand, a slim Chinese boy or girl with a woven basket and a flute, and stands it by her purse. Through the woven material of the purse he can see the outline of that long flute. “Lu Dongbin, whose sword dispels evil spirits. Philosopher Han Xiang, whose flute gives life. Elder Zhang Guo, master of clowns, winemaking, and Qigong kung fu. Zhongli Quan, whose fan revives the dead.”

Green picks up the statue with the basket and flute, and looks a question at her.

“Immortal Woman runs a health food store in New Jersey. The Philosopher and Quan are dead, I think. The Philosopher’s flute came to me in the mail one day. I saw Zhang Guo on the beach in Monterey but he wouldn’t talk to me. Lu, Li, Cao, I don’t know. Immortal Woman frightens me most. She didn’t want to be a monster. She wanted friends and neighbors. She made herself forget she was immortal. I go in there once a year or so, and she says nothing but trivial things, How do you like those Dodgers? She never stops talking. She bores everyone and forgets to charge for newspapers. But she isn’t a monster.”

“You want to be lonely?” Green says. “You want to be alone?”

She touches the statue he has picked up, which means she touches his hand. “Lan Caixe. The shape-changer, the mysterious one. The minstrel whose songs foretell the future. No,” Lan says, “I didn’t want to be a monster. So I made other shape-changers, and I thought they would be like me.”

“Yeah,” Green says.

“Which made me a monster.”

He doesn’t move his hand, though he agrees with her. Her fingers stay lightly on his, ready to be rejected.

“I thought you could help,” she says. “You would make me not a monster anymore.”

“Wish I could have.” Still their hands touch, in midair, but he doesn’t pull away, until it’s awkward, or meaningful, or something, but neither of them pulls away.

“What are we if we aren’t humans or heroes? Are we always monsters?” she asks.

No. We are, he thinks. We just are.

Immortal? Enduring. Like a rock, like an old man fishing—?

“Organized, maybe,” he says to her.

“Not very.” But she smiles.

“You more than me.”

“It’s a talent.”

The kids could use help. Not that he can give it. He has failed at being a Protector and failed at being a man. But maybe she can think of something he can do. Maybe together they can—

He wonders if she’s foreseeing he’ll think that.

He wonders what she’s foreseeing.

That might bother him, her foreseeing him.

“I owe them,” she says. “Thanks.”

But maybe it won’t bother him much.

“S’pose we go back to my place; we can have some coffee and talk about stuff.”

“You don’t have any tea?” says his red-haired Chinese immortal hopefully.

Nope, he’s about to say; but here he is in Shinjuku Station, in Japan, on another planet, and it is spring. Nothing will bring back Mutti and Dadu, nothing will bring back his lost wife or his old friends. Even if Lan is one of the Eight Immortals, there are no guarantees. And nothing will make him a man.

But perhaps to be superhuman you need to have been human once, and failed.

Here is what I’d say to you, he thinks to those little Japanese kids he will probably meet again, here’s the advice I’d give. You little bits of frost, you falling leaves, you mortals? You’re doing the important thing right. Keep hold of each other as long as you can. Hug each other and hang around together.

Nothing lasts forever. But Atom and Astounding and the Iguana and me?

We had a great time fishing.

“This is Japan. I bet we can buy us some tea.”