McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales - Michael Chabon [6]
Tedford had been found a month after the accident, asleep in the road with a mouthful of raw onion, and a paring knife in his hand.
No one had ever talked to him about his brother’s refusal to see him. And until his brother had died, he would have said that his life story had been the story of a nuisance.
Dawn came like a split along the horizon. The first night had gone well, he thought, peering out of his tent flap. He’d even slept. While he pulled on his over-clothes the walls of the tent bucked and filled in the wind. His arms and back ached from the previous day’s paddling. Cold damp air filled his sleeves and the back of his shirt.
The night before it had occurred to him, the moment he’d extinguished his reading-lantern, that for the next two months he would be as far from human aid as he would be on the moon. If he ran into serious mishap, only his own qualities would save him.
Old Tate had used to remark, often after having noted some particularly odd behavior on Tedford’s part, that there were as many different kinds of men in the world as there were mothers to bear them and experiences to shape them, and in the same wind, each gave out a different tune. Tedford had slowly discovered himself to be unfit for life in the land-surveyor’s office as he had gradually come to understand his inability to express to anyone else the awful resiliency the image of Carcharodon Megalodon had taken on in his psyche.
The creature inhabited dreams that did not even feature marine settings. He’d once pronounced its name in church services. As far as Carcharodon Megalodon was concerned, he was still a caveman, squatting on his haunches and bewitched by the magic-conjuring representation he himself had drawn on the wall.
But if he was acting like a schoolboy, at least he’d resolved to address the problem, and see Life as it was, for its own sake, prepared to take the consequences. Lacing up his boots, he reasoned to himself that he wanted to see the animal itself, and not his fear and delight in it.
Fifteen million years ago, such monsters had been the lords of creation, the lords of time; then they’d remained nearly unchanged throughout the ages, carrying on until there were only a few stragglers hanging on the very edge of annihilation. Life had gone on around them, leaving them behind. The monsters science knew about, and the ones it didn’t. The formation of the northern ice caps and the extension of the southern during the Pleistocene had resulted in the drastic lowering of the sea level, exposing the continental shelves around Australia and Antarctica and trapping all sorts of marine life in the deep pockets of isolated water. Tedford was convinced that in a few of those deep pockets—adjacent to the cold, nutrient-rich bottom current that seemed to originate along the edge of Antarctica, to flow north to all the other continents of the world—his quarry resided, surfacing every so often in the same remote feeding-zones.
What percentage of the sea’s surface had been explored? (Never mind its abyssal depths.) And meanwhile, dunderheads who plowed back and forth across the same sea-lanes with their roaring engines announced with certainty that there was nothing unusual to see in the ocean. Outside of those narrow water-lanes, upon which everyone traveled, it was all darkness. He was in an unexplored area the size of Europe. He was in a region of astounding stories. And he had always lived for astounding stories.
His first day of searching came up a bust when a cresting wave swamped his kayak a few feet from camp. He spent the bulk of the afternoon shivering and beating his arms and having to disassemble and examine the camera for