Hooked by Jack Kamm

“We create monsters and then we can’t control them.” –Joel Coen

Looking back through the window of memory with all its scratches, I’m driven to tell my story not to frighten but to enlighten because in the end—that cocky, inescapable end—-it’s truth, not reality, that transforms us. According to Dr. Hornsby, the men shuffling cards at my kitchen table that December at 3 in the morning were part of what he called my ongoing childhood fantasy— except that, unlike all the other fantasies, this one was the first that could be fatal. 

“It’s called paracosm, Peter,” he informed me.  “None of it is real.”

None of it?  It must be nice for people like Hornsby to snuggle into the warm bath of such certainty. In truth, could anybody—including my father, a certified pragmatist—truly identify the intersection between reality and fantasy?  Who’s to say that, behind us in the mirror, the flash of a sneering face for just that sliver of a second wasn’t real, wasn’t outside the frame of our imagination?

The strangers playing cards in my home were as real as

the eyes of whoever’s reading these words right now. That night, the first time I heard the flapping of the cards on the other side of my bedroom wall, I got off the bed and tiptoed across the cold wooden floor. Brave or stupid? You choose.

Even feet from the open doorway, the reek of fish hit me, the one food besides eggs that had revolted me all my life.  Yet, baited by curiosity, I stepped closer for a peek. Three men wearing olive fishing hats, chartreuse multi-zippered vests and high black boots were shuffling a deck of cards with the surety of fingers strong enough to snap my ten-year-old neck. 

Was I puzzled?  Shocked?  Not really.  I knew why the men were there.

Maybe, just before breakfast the first time, it was my parents’ awakening and flushing of the toilet that scared the men off, but they returned, as I knew they would, evening after evening.  Not wanting to incite my father’s temper yet needing to convince him, I searched for proof, which I found beneath the table cloth in the odor of fish baked into the shiny wooden surface of the table.     

 “I don’t smell a thing but I understand how you would,” my father said, his tone nasty and mocking, after he sniffed along the table too, perhaps to humor me or perhaps to quell a spasm of doubt in his own mind, an embarrassment if confessed.

He was a taller version of Popeye, with a thick, squarish jawbone, flattened nose (from his early Golden Glove days) and burly forearms. Crash into him and you felt the bruising impact of granite. He grabbed my hand, his palm pocked with calluses hard as grommets that had sprung up from all the pipes he’d twisted under kitchen and bathroom sinks. 

“It’s a goddamn kitchen table, Peter, for Chrissakes. Your mother served fish on it dozens of times, so naturally you— you in particular— would discover a fish smell on the wood.”

Stepping toward him ever so solicitously, my mother touched his arm, her smile a cautious simper. She and I shared a softness, physically and emotionally, that had made us assailable, especially in a predatory and unpredictable world where trespassers break in to play cards in the middle of the night at your kitchen table.

Glaring at me, my father said, “It’s time to take the rubber sheets off the bed, Peter, because you can walk to the bathroom. And do you know why you can walk to the bathroom?” He snarled.  “Because there’s nobody playing cards AT THREE O’CLOCK IN THE DAMN MORNING AT THIS GODDAMN KITCHEN TABLE!”

When his fist bashed the wood, the polyester heads of the daisies bobbled in the vase.  From the loud knuckle-crunching sound, I thought the table had cracked in half. 

“Jimmy, please!” my mother cried.  “Your ulcer.”

He stared at the fingers of his hand opening and clenching, his knuckles red.  “I don’t care.”

By then I was crying pretty hard. When she hugged me, her heart beat against my chest. She was a perfumed woman with crimson nail polish, never chipped, and feathers of black hair tucked behind the ears. Her arms around my body—despite their tremulousness—had  become a shield against my father, and he let them remain a shield because he loved her.

He pressed a fist into his stomach, tossed a Nexium into his mouth and washed it down with a cup of water at the sink. Since birth my senses were heightened, so I experienced sounds and smells often with harsh amplification. Even eight feet away from the faucet, I smelled chlorine and magnesium in the cloudy discharge.

And I sniffed his ulcer too.

The next day, Dr. Hornsby’s office was warm and dry despite the rain outside. As always, he waited for me to volunteer something about the latest drama because if he initiated an inquiry about the men, he’d be acknowledging their existence. 

My chin out, I asked defiantly, “So how come I was gagging if the smell of fish wasn’t real?”

“The smell was real in your head.”

That response was so old all I could do was stare at him and feel my neck and shoulders stiffen. He was a child psychologist in his forties, gentle and cordial, blonde hair wispy as coconut fibers. His grasped my shoulder. “Look, Peter, the fact is people with hyperesthesia smell or hear things that aren’t there.” Then he said, “Now’s the perfect time to talk more about what happened in the fish store.”

“No!” I screamed, never again wanting to think about that Saturday morning when I went shopping with my mother. It was my first time in Gruber’s market. I approached the stone tank and, just out of curiosity, peered down at the fishes swimming in the dark water while at the same time knocking over the long fishnet, which to my ears hit the water with the loud splash a boulder would make.

The roar came at me the way, I suppose, a lion roars charging his prey. It was Gruber himself, a jowly man wearing a blood smeared apron and blue baseball cap. On reaching me, he bellowed, “What did you do, you stupid little kid,” and with that pronouncement, his fingers twisted my ear, sending a shock of pain ripping through my skull. 

“We can’t move on until we resolve this, Peter,” Hornsby repeated, his face sorrowful, his voice softer than the patter of rain against the windows.

“How?”

“By seeing what you did simply as an accident, like dropping a glass or a pencil. It happens to all of us.  But you think what you did was so terrible, especially when your mother, as well, seemed horrified.  So the men you imagine at your table are…well, they’re people you created simply to mete out your punishment.”

“My punishment?”

“You believe you need to pay for pushing that net into the tank.” His forehead wrinkled. “And, yes. What Mr. Gruber did to you was over the top.  He should never have put his hands on you. Maybe he was having a bad day.  Or maybe he’s just a violent man.  But your father did avenge you.” 

“So, what will the men do to me?”

His laugh came out as a protest.  “Nothing.  Nothing at all…because they’re not there.”  And then he repeated his favorite refrain: “They’re not real.”

In silence we watched the sky darkening and cold rain lash against the window. “They’re gonna throw me into that tank with the fishes,” I said. “I know it. And then they’re gonna reel me in with a sharp hook.”

“Maybe a simple apology to Mr. Gruber can prevent that. At least in your head.  Give you some peace, Peter.”

I hated Gruber but chose to apologize if the gesture would make the men leave my kitchen. The next day—which was gray and gusty—I went with my mother back into the fish store. Standing behind the counter, he spotted us.  The black eye my father had given him looked like a patch of purple ink on his cheek.  But it was his white apron splotched with lumps of fish-gut that sent me retching.  I bolted and vomited into the wind outside.

So much for apologies.

At the next session, Hornsby asked me why the men were playing cards.

 “Because the winner is the one who gets to reel me in.”

“So you’re…the prize?”

“I guess.”

The wheels of the chair he dragged HHllLHover squeaked.  He sat in it, exhaled and looked at me, his hands flat on his lap. To his credit, not even a flicker of a smile tweaked his lips.  Staring back at him, I said, “Then they’ll slice me up and fry me in a pan with butter and all my skin would sizzle off.”

This time he smiled. He informed me that certain traumatic events—like my knocking over the fish net—could mold our fantasy world the way a sculptor molded clay. He added, “And like clay, Peter, our fantasies harden. What we don’t want is for them to harden so much that we can’t remold them without snapping off a piece.”

I listened and nodded and hated myself for letting my father spend his hard-earned money on wasted sessions like this one…wasted because I didn’t need Hornsby, with his pink lips and perfect white teeth to tell me that the fishermen were yet another fantasy. All I wanted from him was knowing the way to get the men out of my house. 

He told me that, as part of therapy, I needed to get out of my head and touch physical things in the real world.  He called it concretizing. Take up acrylic painting, he suggested, so that I could experience the tangibility of the brush in my hand and feel the sensation of bristles spreading creamy paints across the canvas.  “Copy as many things as you can,” he instructed me.  “Objects at home or in school.  Small or large. Just make sure you can physically touch them before you paint them.”

I placed the set of acrylic paints and canvas my father bought me on a small table at the living room window and copied the wooden bench standing snow-patched in our front yard. 

Looking at the misshapen result, my mother–all red cheeked and giggly with excitement–thought she had given birth to the next Picasso. By contrast, my father saw the distortion not as cubistic but as the face of his son’s mental breakdown.

“Are you going to send me away?” I asked Hornsby at our next session.

“Send you away where?”

“You know, to one of those hospitals where they put you in a straight jacket and tie you into a chair all day.”

He blinked. “Why in the world would I do that, Peter?”

“Because I’ve been coming to all these stupid sessions for almost 3 years now and you and my father both think I’m still nuts.”

He reminded me that before the men came, my “fantasies” (as he called them) were about my classmate Jolene, who played hide and seek with me in the woods before we went searching for chipmunks.

I didn’t reply.

“But she had died, Peter.  Jolene died from leukemia.  That’s why her seat next to yours in class was empty.”

“I know that. I’m not stupid. But don’t you see? She came back to see me.  I made her laugh.  Call her a ghost.  I don’t care.  But when she and I ran in the woods, she touched me and her fingers were cold.”

I knew that Hornsby didn’t believe me—would never believe me—so I pretended all kinds of illnesses, including stomach ache or sore throat, in order to avoid the sessions, which my father forced me to attend anyway.

It was raining on the last session.  Delicate as a child’s finger-paint, a mini rainbow bled down the corner of a windowpane in Hornby’s office.  Watching it, I started shivering. When Hornsby put a blanket around me, I rushed out of the office into the elevator into the lobby into my mother’s arms.

 That night he called my parents on the phone to inform them that my blood pressure had jumped very high and expressed his concern about my physical well-being. In very rare cases, he reported, a person in my condition years later could have a heart attack or a stroke brought on by what he called “…a culminating hallucination.”

Several nights later, as I tumbled into a deep sleep, something clutched my shoulder and shook me. I blinked at my parents staring down at me in the semi-darkness.  Jogging my shoulder, my father said, “Get up, Peter.  I want to introduce you to your card players.”

The red numbers on the clock showed two in the morning.  I looked at my mother, who, in her housecoat, remained grim and silent.

I sat up.  I yanked my hand out of his grip. I pleaded and cried but, clutching my elbow, he dragged me into the kitchen, which was bright with light.  He wore a T shirt and pajama bottoms and stood in bare feet.  My mother, silent, clutched the collar of her housecoat, her eyes darting from his to mine. He pointed to the window, which was partially opened despite the wind because my mother feared gas leaks. To my ears the portion of shade below the sill snapped loudly as a bullwhip.

My father’s hand was chilly on the back of my neck. Every one of his fingers tightened.  “These are your cardplayers, Peter.  This is what you’ve been afraid of.  A goddamn window shade.”

Having pondered the whole thing, after a few days I reached the following conclusions.  One: the men played cards while the window shade flapped, so the sounds were indistinguishable. Two: On nights the men chose not to come, the shade still flapped and sounded like cards snapping at the table.  Three: On the night or two that, for whatever reason, the window was closed the men still played cards.

Who was right? Who was wrong? I wanted an answer.

The next night I walked to the bathroom.  When I came out, they pounced.  One growled; the other two yipped like hyenas roused for a kill. One guy’s fingers were crushing my throat. Despite the speed of the attack, my brain recorded the clarity of every detail, every sound, the overwhelming dazzle of precise smells—from the pond-scum leather of their boots to the ammonia coming from the worms, which were still cold from the refrigerator but now boxed and wriggling in the zippered compartments of the men’s vests. 

As one of the men charged at me, just as Gruber had done, he raised a fish bat, which was long and hard as the legs on my kitchen table.  Striking the side of my head, the weapon produced a gurgling scream, which I thought had come from my attacker, but soon realized it was the eruption of my own voice.

I screamed, “HELP ME!  PULEEEEZE!  DADDY!”

When I tried crawling away, one of the fishermen grabbed me under the arms and yanked me up.  My legs swung free right into the hands of another fisherman who grasped my feet. The two men yanked at me in a tug of war, a grotesque dance to the convulsive rhythm of my own shrieks. Just as my legs were about to be plucked out of their sockets, something with the might of a winch tore me away. 

First, I heard my father say, “Peter!” then, “Hey, who the hell are you…?”

A cacophony of voices exploded in the brawl that followed.  My father launched into the men with the repellent sound of fists cracking bone, only one of his arms free to strike. The other clutched me against his chest.

The men snarled—ejaculations of pain and outrage—the fury of creatures who had lost their alphabet only to discover, in its place, a bestial roar that deepened their hunger for slaughter.

With every one-arm punch, my father’s body shuddered with all that it gave out. There was a final patois of howls, the mighty beasts in agony. The Doppler of their retreat became a scarlet flame crackling through the darkness in my skull. Seconds passed with my father clutching me; his mouth next to my ears, he wheezed louder than a monsoon wind.     

After the men retreated, the after-play of their voices shivered to the floor like a veil. My mother was sobbing as my father hugged me. The next day I saw the plum-colored bruises on his cheeks but none of us, then or anytime thereafter, addressed the source of those bruises.

After the fight, my father had changed. A subtle shriveling happened; a grayness chalked his face and his gait had lost its surety. For the next fourteen years, I grew up experiencing the kind of misbalance one feels trying to stand in a small boat battered by waves. But, somehow, I managed.    

After my master’s degree in psychology from Stanford, I went on to become a journalist interviewing people and writing about para-normalcy–unexplained happenings or unusual sightings of somebody or something that had once died. I attended courses in parapsychology in universities, both in America and abroad. I’d also interviewed people who had lived all their lives, like me, with paracosm and hyperesthesia.

I even married one of them.  

Fearing another of my father’s beatings, the men didn’t return, but they stayed close. Regardless of my quarters, their whispers buzzed into my brain like large winged bugs that violated the boundaries of darkness.  Consequently, I slept no more than four or five hours a night, but always with the lights on.  By then, my wife Ellen and I had separated.

Now, having reached the ripe old age of 42, I know many possibilities but only one certainty: It’s death that gives value to life. The brawl between my father and the men? It happened—-regardless of its shape or manifestation.   

As long as my father was alive, I was safe. Three weeks ago, his ulcer perforated, and he died on the operating table. The fishermen, inexorable in their hunt, found me here—in a rented villa on Via Dante in Milan, not far from the university that had commissioned my book on Fantasy Prone Personalities. 

The men have just thudded off the bottom step several yards behind me. Their feet squish in the high boots. The odor of the fish-bats they’re carrying is ripe…but I’m going to keep tapping away on these keys. Won’t even turn around. Why give these brutes the courtesy of a greeting? So come on, you fuckers. Come and ge—

Jack Kamm

Image by gepharts3d from Pixabay – A deck of playing cards jumbled together showing the ace of hearts and the corner of a King.