Caligula and the Remora
It was already an established story. The Emperor and the sharksucker. A time of omens — returning from Gaul, stopped dead in the ocean despite 400 rowers. 400 strong Roman backs. Who dove from the side? Who would go, even at the order of an Emperor, willingly over the side of the galley into the waters beneath? Waters in which something swam that was capable of stopping a quinquereme fast. Stop 400 rowers. 400 strong Roman backs.
What was the sea like that day, as the remainder of his fleet kept on? Perhaps the sharksucker is a metaphor. After all, Gaul was no successful campaign, no expansion, and half the reports correlate the 'capturing of seashells', of which Caligula's troops were charged, with a simple code for ‘visits to brothels’. Why not then a fish, six inches long, with a very particular skeletal development — something like the mark of a halved fruit — be just a metaphor too?
I can't shake the reality. I still see the Roman Emperor stalled at sea, his men with pockets full of British seashells, looking about. Looking across the bent, heaving shoulders of his men, then scanning the broad horizon, the moving clouds, the drifting sun, the gulls splitting from ram to command post. Watching his other ships sail on. I can’t shake his dread. It was a time of omens.
Perhaps they only had to pull up the tiller to see the strange sharksucker. Had they read their Aristotle? Did they know these seas were full of the creature and hope the wise man's blessing was true? That now, for a time anyway, they were blessed in love? Or was this forgotten, never learned — was it just a horror, a writhing creature still gripped tight to the tiller's wood until it could be got off with spear or sword?
It had to be got off or let go in order for Caligula to get home, so it must’ve.
Those remaining leagues to Rome, knowing your country-crushing galley had been stalled by a six-inch fish, a curious mutant. To have that story spread through the galley, each man eying the next, leaning down amid rower’s chant to whisper it to the next.
To have that whisper pass 1,980 years to me, now.
Well.
Some fish.
Four months after he returned, Caligula was assassinated, the notoriously cruel emperor.
Some blame the fish. Others likely celebrate it.
This story’s rigged to my mind like a remorah, but leapt to the front when I received an unaddressed letter from my old colleague Mack. My old partner. He doesn’t write often and his handwriting is bent with drink so the fact that there was so little to make out worried me. But I could see a couple references to ‘that thing’.
Neither one of us had been fishing long. I'd done some research on fishing for profit and believed research at least provided us enough to get started. Mack was more practical and visited his grandfather for a three-week training camp, then taught me in two trips far more about the boat than picking through diagrams could have ever done. (Thank you, Mack, wherever you are.)
We'd settled on the shallows of a NW estuary you may be familiar with, somewhat north of Cannon Beach. Haystack Rock of course, tremendous in the sunset — north north from there to where Indian Beach ends — there’re several creeks that branch from there and make turbulent but manageable passage for a Lund A14 like ours.
I find it wickedly coincidental, that this letter and story come to mind tonight, though I have a suspicion I'd rather not voice being that I'm sitting hundreds of miles away from all this in a very safe place, but still. I can smell the reed and moss that run the embankments of the little creek, and still feel the olive-skinned slickness of the thing we dragged aboard. Shake my head a little bit now; I'm sorry. I still don't know how to name it.
We'd been casting and catching for about three hours. Mack was drinking another beer he said was necessary — he'd missed netting two hard-fought broadfish that I'd brought near, one after another. I have never been one to stop him, sadly, from his vices. He began to tell me a story of a woman he'd gone to bed with two nights prior. He'd mentioned it offhand when we'd driven to the put-in, giving little hints for me to grab on when we'd driven past Lazy Susan’s Cafe on the main drag. I enjoy hearing stories of sex, but not told by men. Whatever my disposition is, they don't often go into great detail. The way Mack spoke about this woman, I realized there was nothing to learn — he was simply and crassly proud, and so (Mack, hope you never read this), I just stopped listening and turned on the motor.
Or tried to.
Everything had been working fine before, no problem. It was a carbureted two stroke, so had been fussy, particularly for me, but I thought I had it down. Tilt her down, squeeze that primer bulb, throttle down to 2/3s, turn the key. Turn the key.
Key wouldn't turn.
I turned. Mack was looking down in the water, net and beer in one hand, urinating with the other. I sucked in through my teeth and tried again.
Looking down into the water, I saw this strange coiling, like the engine were starting, but way too slow.
It's been four months since I saw that coiling. That's it. My superstition. Feels good to admit. It's been four months to the day. July 1st, 2021, 1,980 years after the assassination of Emperor Caligula by his Praetorian Guard, Mack and I fished out the strangest creature I'd ever seen from the juncture of Resident Creek and the sea. I thought it was a bed of eels and I said so when I called Mack over to have a look.
They were easy enough to get our casting net around, but when we got the creature up and over, Mack practically fell into the front of the boat because he was holding the net's shaft. The eels were actually sucked onto a neck and head, and there was only that. No body — just an olive-skinned head and neck, thick with seawater, the way bodies get.
It took us ten minutes to stop throwing up, honestly — we got to the edges of our little silver vessel and littered the water and tried not to look back, but we did eventually and the things had started to fall away and kept doing so a few at a time, to reveal a rather delicate living face, a man of about twenty five years, who stared up at the sky as though he were both in incredible pain and also just born, if the two can exist simultaneously in a man's face.
Incredibly, he cried out and words came out — he said — What will I say, after all this time, for surely as they fall away, they take with them my life! To have sunk and followed these strange currents without knowledge, unsure I'd see the sun forever is to have been both immortal Neptune and death at once! Mother! he yelled. Callela! The Emperor has betrayed us! Has betrayed your trust. His men, we men, bring him where he wishes and he wishes only to lay in beds of flesh and writhe like a sensuous worm. I would not go! I did not choose to go, Mother. I do not wish to go!
There are a few things in life you remember exactly as they happened. Very few, but a few. This was one.
Cleaning the boat, ourselves, jettisoning the lifeless head and the tiny lifeless creatures which had fallen about the boat, closing down our venture, selling the boat, moving far away — these are much blurrier to me now, hazier and rightfully so.
this is one of my favorite pieces by Eric. I highly recommend it.
eesh. 'the way bodies get.' this is excellent.