Story Excerpt

The Origami Man
by Doug Franklin

Something about the water ahead of us was off. The waves were subdued, as if weighted by a blanket that absorbed the afternoon rain with no rebounding spikes. An oil spill, maybe, or a ghost net. Nothing we wanted to troll through, so I wheeled Arctic Rose ten degrees to port and grabbed the binoculars from the dashboard clutter.

An object floated in the middle of the preternaturally still patch of water. At first I thought it was a sea otter, then a bird of some sort. It looked like a raven, through the haze of rain, but what was a raven doing this far out from land? Then the sea otter dove, and the raven took flight, leaving behind a low rounded shape that looked unpleasantly like a human body.

I eased the throttle back to idle.

“What’s wrong?” JR asked, alert to the change in the engine’s vibration. He was sitting at the galley table, drawing bugs. His mother had given him a sketchbook for his eighth birthday, and the pages were filled with ants and starfish and really just about everything but people. People need not apply to JR’s sketchbook.

“Keep us on this heading, boyo,” I said, tapping the compass. JR jumped up eagerly and nearly fell, a consequence of Batten disease. I grabbed his arm and guided him to the wheel. He wasn’t much of a people person, but he loved driving the boat. I scooped his watch cap off the table—one of my old ones, and hence too large—and dropped it on his head. Then I put on my float coat and went on deck, where my half-brother Nevin was tending the lines.

“What’s going on, Jerry?” he asked. Nevin was ten years younger than me, in his mid-twenties, with our Tlingit mother’s glossy black hair and deep brown eyes. I pointed at the lump in the water, close enough now that you did not need binoculars to see what it was.

“Got a floater.”

“Christ. Did you call the Coasties?”

“They’re going to ask us to make sure it’s a body and make sure it’s dead. So let’s just check those boxes off first.”

The raven circled overhead, calling raucously while we got Rose’s inflatable dinghy in the water. We made a wide circle around the outriggers and motored out to the body. I was concerned that whatever was on the water would foul its outboard, but the oily sheen had contracted to a patch not much bigger than the body at its center, which was exactly the opposite of what oil slicks normally do.

“Damn,” Nevin said as we came alongside. The body (check) was face down in the water (check). The flesh on its back was translucent grey, almost floating off.

“Never seen a drowning? Careful getting it in, they come apart pretty easy when they’ve been in the water this long.”

It took both of us to haul the body over the rounded rubber flank of the dinghy. It did not come apart, probably because it was embedded in a thick mat of slick algae that held it together. It all came over in a rolling slosh.

Nevin wiped spray off his cheek in disgust. “Why is he naked?”

“Suicide, maybe? Just be grateful he still has hands and feet. Those are usually the first to go.”

“And eyeballs.”

“Well yeah.” I hadn’t looked too closely, having in fact seen a drowning before. There are things you do not need stuck in your head. But now I did. The eyes were blank, no iris or pupil, just a solid off-white ball.

The corpse twitched. Nevin nearly jumped off the side of the dinghy. “Shit! Was that you?”

I shook my head. “Something must have gotten inside.”

“Oh Jesus. I think I’m going to . . .” And then he did, but at least it went over the side. The dinghy was going to be hard enough to clean up as it was.

I nudged the body with the toe of my rubber boot. The necrotic flesh seemed to shrink from contact. And then I realized that the mat of algae, or whatever it was, had disappeared, like it had been pulled up inside the body.

Another thing I didn’t need to see. “Let’s get back to Rose.”

 

Nevin secured the dinghy while I got the Coast Guard on my phone’s Channel 16 app, squinting up through the windshield as if I could see the satellite it was talking to. The last update had removed the ability to track charges, so there was no telling how much debt I was racking up trying to do the right thing.

“No, I don’t want to take him in to port.”

“No, there’s no ID. He’s naked.”

“Look, I’m trying to make a living out here, and I’ve got a corpse in my dinghy. Just come get it.”

Nevin stuck his head in the cabin. “Jerry, you better take a look at this.”

I followed him aft. The dinghy was bobbing up and down in the gentle swell off our stern. The corpse was draped over one of the pontoons like it was trying to get back in the water. A wave must have hit it just right, I thought, but the water was nearly flat, sprinkled with rain.

I grabbed a gaff and reached out over the railing. The corpse twitched when the gaff’s hook bit into its shoulder. I gave it a yank, and it slid back down into the bottom of the dinghy. The body had tightened up somehow, contracted, filmy layers of flesh packing down into a close approximation of a living human. Or at least a recently dead one.

“Is it just me, or has it . . . changed?” Nevin asked.

Living: the corpse levered itself over onto its back and sat up, eyes rolling down until grey irises came to rest on us. Having grown up on a standard U.S. media diet featuring various types of undead, my first thought was of the break-action shotgun we kept onboard for dispatching big halibut before we brought them aboard.

“Nevin,” I said calmly, “get the snake charmer.”

“But . . .”

“Now would be good.” I pushed the dinghy away from the boat with the blunt end of the gaff. The raven who had been following us landed on the boat’s radar arch. It shook rainwater from its wings and croaked like a black, feathered bell. A hundred yards to port, a sea otter bobbed on the surface.

Nevin came back with the shotgun and a handful of .410 shotshells. JR trailed behind him, eyes wide, watch cap askew.

“JR, get back in the cabin,” I said. I took the shotgun and broke it open. The shell dropped into the chamber with a satisfying “thok.” I snapped the action shut.

“Shouldn’t we help him?” JR asked. “He looks cold.”

I stared at the revivified corpse. It had been dead; of that I had no doubt. But now it was not. Which made absolutely no sense and seemed worthy of a few choice obscenities, but I had promised JR’s mom that I would not be a bad influence, so instead I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Right you are, boyo. We should help. But I need you to keep your distance, all right? He might be sick.” Or undead, which according to the movies was transmissible in a variety of horrible ways, most of which could only be prevented by removing its head. With a shotgun, for instance. But the former corpse did not appear to be an imminent threat, which meant shooting it would be frowned upon at the very least. And would definitely, permanently, put me on the list of bad influences.

There followed another conversation with the Coast Guard, wherein they made it clear to me and everyone else listening to Channel 16—basically Sitka’s entire fishing fleet—that only an idiot would mistake the living for the dead, and if the not-dead person was not about to die, then it was not their problem.

 

On a good day, a troller like Arctic Rose could pull in hundreds of silver salmon. This was not a good day. By nightfall we’d put a dozen in the freezer, and they were all on the small side, no more than eight pounds. A couple had malformed fins that I furtively cut so they looked injured instead of ill. The haul was bad enough without having to put up with complaints from the processors. The rest of the catch was mid-latitude invasives that went right back over the side, mostly dead or dying bonitos and wahoos. It made me sick, but the regs were clear, and the omnicam slung beneath the boat’s radar arch was there to make sure I followed them.

Our drowning victim watched from where he sat on a cooler, wrapped in a ratty old blanket, spare life vest on top. Hapless as a newborn, he had neither resisted nor helped our efforts to dress him. So far he had not spoken a word of English, though he did a convincing imitation of the raven that was tailing us. This delighted JR, who had a habit of talking to birds, and was especially fond of ravens. So the three of them croaked and cawed at each other while Nevin and I worked the lines.

“Remember those stories Mom used to tell about kushtakas?” Nevin asked.

I shook my head. “After my time, probably.”

My father had left our mother a few years after Nevin was born, when—my father told me—it became apparent the child wasn’t his, collateral damage of a genetic test. He took me with him, so Nevin and I had very different childhoods, mine largely functional, his largely not.

“Lucky you!” Nevin said. “She used to scare the crap out of me. ‘Don’t go out after dark, the kushtakas will get you!’ They lure fishermen to their deaths by taking the appearance of people they know. And if they don’t kill them, they turn them into kushtakas.”

“You think the floater is a kushtaka?” I was careful not to put any weight on that. Just a question.

“I think stories come from somewhere. You saw him change. And they like to eat children.” He gave me a significant look, as if JR’s being on the boat was a deciding factor.

“I think stories about children getting eaten are a good way to keep them in line,” I said, “whether you’re Tlingit or White. Kushtakas, Little Red Riding Hood; same-same.”

That got a one-sided shrug. “Maybe. You got a better idea?”

“I’d have to go with The Thing.”

“Let me guess: one of your dad’s old movies.”

“Haven’t seen it?” I asked without looking up, my hands busy sorting lures into bins.

“Nope.” Which made sense; Mom told him old Tlingit stories, Dad watched sci-fi movies with me.

“It’s about an alien shapeshifter that absorbs people.”

“Doesn’t sound much different from one of Mom’s stories.”

My turn to shrug. “So how do you kill a kushtaka?”

“Mostly you don’t; it just makes things worse. But fire works. What about an alien shapeshifter?”

“Fire,” I said.

 

I ran some numbers while Nevin made a pot of kelp spaghetti and meat-textured mushrooms for dinner. The kushtaka-thing was outside on the foredeck where we could keep an eye on him. JR sat across from me, doodling in his sketchbook. We had been out five days and not even covered the cost of fuel, never mind Nevin’s wages, slip fees, and all the rest.

“I don’t know how people make a living at this anymore.” I crumpled the paper I’d been working on into a ball and threw it in the general direction of the trash bin. It bounced onto the floor next to JR. He picked it up, flattened it back out, and slipped it into his sketchbook beneath a cartoonish drawing of a raven in a blanket and a lifejacket.

“Word is that even the Chinese trawlers are going home empty,” Nevin said sagely from the galley.

“Good,” I said. The Chinese fishing fleet was larger than the rest of the world’s combined and had a nasty habit of bullying whoever got in their way. If we were going to play a zero-sum game with the global food supply, I far preferred they starved than the people I lived with. Same went for the people rioting over the price of protein down in the lower forty-eight states.

“Mom says we need to stop hunting fish and start farming them,” JR piped up.

“Mmm,” I said. This was a source of friction between me and his mother for several reasons. The most important to me, and least to her, was that when cancer was turning every cell in my father’s body into a malignant version of itself, I’d promised him I wouldn’t let family tradition die with him. The Coopers had been fishermen since we sailed across the Atlantic to the Labrador coast in the late eighteen hundreds, and fishermen we would remain. “Any other Mom wisdom you want to share?”

“She says it’s no different than when we killed all the buffalo.”

“That sounds like something she’d say. But we eat fish instead of killing them for their skins. So it’s at least a little different. We have to eat something, boyo.” Which was slim justification for participating in the sixth great extinction, but what do you do with systemic failure when you’re part of the system?

“This spaghetti is really good Uncle Nevin!” JR said, raising greenish noodles in salute to the chef. The kid knew how to make a point.

“We could try farther north,” Nevin said, diplomatically ignoring our little father-son bonding moment. “Word is that’s where the salmon are, looking for cold water.”

“We’d be throwing good money after bad, what with the price of diesel. Not to mention our unexpected guest.” Who I didn’t trust at all, which was problematic if we were going to stay out. “I hate to say it, but it’s time to go home.”

 

I took the first watch on Rose’s flying bridge. Nevin and JR were inside, with instructions to stick together. The kushtaka-thing sat cross-legged on the foredeck below me, basking in the evening sun, a plate of uneaten spaghetti on the deck beside him. His blanket ruffled in the breeze of our passage. A person would have been cold, but he didn’t seem to care.

The winds had laid down for the night, so driving was easy. We made our way south at a steady ten knots to the beat of Lenny Kravitz, who was more my Dad’s generation than mine, but the boat wasn’t the only thing he’d passed on to me after I’d abandoned a physics degree to take care of him.

Sunset takes hours in Alaska. Plenty of time to think about fathers and sons, estranged wives, kushtakas. Stuff. To port, the rugged coast of Chichagof Island slowly faded to a silhouette before slipping into darkness around eleven.

Late August was my favorite time of year, a balance between temperature and light: warm enough to be outside without a coat, dark enough to be able to see the stars. The night before I’d seen a meteor, a big one pulling a bright orange tail across the sky. I had not thought much about it at the time, other than taking in the cosmic fireworks and feeling vaguely self-congratulatory for being in the right place at the right time. Good job, me! But now I wondered.

Let’s say you were an alien visitor of classic Newtonian means. Nothing fancy, no warp drive or any of that Star Trek bullshit. Just the physics, ma’am. Say you wanted to get down to the surface of a populated planet without anybody noticing. What better way to disguise yourself—and you would want to disguise yourself, if you’d been paying any attention at all and didn’t want to spend the rest of your life in a cage—what better way down than in one of the biggest meteor showers of the year?

Looking up at the starry sky from Rose’s flying bridge, I was having a hard time seeing that meteor as a coincidence, all my mom’s stories aside. It was absurd to think that of those billions and billions of stars, the vast majority of which had planets, many in the habitable zone, none harbored life. That’s one thing Star Trek got right. There’s life out there. I could practically feel it staring down at us. But there was no reason I could think of, looking up at those unblinking stars, why it would care about us.

 

A few days after we got back, I took JR to Mt. Edgecumbe Medical Center to visit the kushtaka-thing, who had become a bit of a celebrity after an ambulance whisked him off Arctic Rose. How had he come to be in the ocean hundreds of miles from any port, with no trace of wreckage or reports of a man overboard? How had he survived until we found him? On top of those mysteries he was a blank slate, no fingerprints, baffling retinal scans, and no more able to tell his story than a toddler.

Back before the federal government became a hollowed-out kleptocracy, there might have been some kind of investigation. But if the fabled agents from Men in Black ever really existed, they were gone now, swallowed by unaccountable greed as surely as Agent Kay by the Bug. We were on our own.

Even more reason to take the kushtaka-thing out to the landfill and incinerate it, so far as I was concerned. But that opportunity passed when I failed to mention it was a shapeshifter to the pretty young journalist who interviewed us about the rescue. It seemed better in that moment to be a benevolent hero than a raving lunatic.

In theory, the boat’s omnicam could have corroborated my story, but like much of America, the thing was a privatized black hole for data and money. The footage went straight into some kleptocrat’s pet AI, and so far as I could tell, the only thing that ever came back out was a fine.

So the community rallied behind the kushtaka-thing instead of burning him at the stake. Medical expenses were paid. Clothes were donated. And schoolteachers set their students to folding origami cranes for him.

“To help him get better,” JR said, sitting beside me in the truck with a paper grocery bag full of the things. “If you make a thousand of them. That’s how the story goes.”

“That’s a lot of origami cranes,” I said.

He frowned, rummaging through the bag. “We only made three hundred and forty.”

“That’s good effort, boyo.”

“It’s only a bit more than a third.”

“I bet he’ll be happy to be a third of the way closer to getting out of the hospital.”

“It didn’t work out that way for the girl in the story. My teacher said she didn’t fold a thousand and she died.”

“Is that so,” I said, making a mental note to talk to his teacher. That was pretty grim stuff for a second-grader with an invariably fatal genetic condition.

I swung the truck into an open spot next to my wife’s ancient salt-rusted Subaru. Its back window was plastered with stickers including a crossed-out KSM Mine, “Our Fish Our Future,” and “Alaska Mariculture Alliance.” The last felt like a cheap shot, given the animosity between mariculture and traditional fishing. But her job with the Alliance provided insurance for JR, which was more than I could do. And she loved the lab work. So kudos to her for making it happen, and I kept my bitterness at being unnecessary to myself.

The plan was for us to meet inside, and she’d take JR for the next week. It had become a familiar rhythm since I’d moved out half a year ago, but I found myself staring out the windshield, reluctant to take the next step, afraid that the familiar would change underfoot and never be the same again.

“Don’t you want to see him?” JR asked.

No, I did not say. I don’t want to see him. I had tried not to even think about him, though our encounter was never far from mind. Like when JR did his inevitable deep dive into origami, and we learned courtesy of the internet that it was mathematically possible to fold a flat sheet of paper into any shape. There was even software to model the folds, and JR helpfully picked a human figure for it to demonstrate the process.

“Don’t be mad,” JR said softly, snapping me out of my funk.

“I’m not mad, boyo! Just stuck in my head is all. Come on, let’s go in.”

Rain dotted his paper bag as we crossed the parking lot. A raven perched atop a nearby streetlamp raised its wings and cawed. JR waved and cawed back.

 

The guy working the front desk gave us a friendly smile, so instead of acting like I belonged there and walking on by, I stopped and asked where the John Doe was.

“You mean Tom Doe?” he asked.

I must have looked puzzled.

“The Origami Man,” he said, nodding at JR and his bag of cranes. Evidently not the first to visit. “T—O—M, get it?”

“Got it. Yeah, him. Tom.” I could not bring myself to sound even a little sincere, because by then origami implied something entirely different to me. I kept seeing how the oil slick had contracted into the kushtaka-thing’s body like a sheet of paper being folded into human form.

“Transitional care,” he pointed down a hallway, no longer smiling.

We followed scuffed linoleum and the sound of conversation to the transitional care wing. My wife and a nurse with a brightly colored Band-Aid on her forearm were busily violating patient confidentiality outside Tom the kushtaka-thing’s door.

“. . . and then he bricked our MRI when we checked for brain damage. I’ve never seen anything like it. Like putting a metal cup in a microwave, sparks and all. I don’t know if we’ll be able to repair it; it’s so old most of it was made in China. And we sure can’t afford a new one made in the States.”

“Mom!” JR threw himself into a hug that made me wonder if crushed origami cranes counted toward the goal.

“Becca,” I said coolly, angling for a view past her and the nurse into Tom’s room. It could have been a motel: cramped, bad furniture, impersonal but for the garland of origami cranes draped in front of its single window. Tom was sitting in one of the room’s two chairs, watching television. Or at least staring in the direction of the screen; his eyes were not moving enough to be watching anything.

His head swiveled like a bird’s when I crossed the threshold. I hadn’t noticed what color his hair was when we found him. Maybe no color at all. But now it was glossy black, with the same sheen as a raven’s feathers. He had high cheekbones, dark skin, darker eyes. His gaze was unnervingly steady. He looked an awful lot like Nevin.

“Mind you, he’s a biter,” the nurse said behind me. Which explained the Band-Aid.

“I’m Jerry Cooper. From the fishing boat that found you . . . ?”

His expression did not change.

JR stepped around me. “Hi Tom! It’s me, JR. My class made some origami cranes for you.” He pulled a childishly misshapen paper crane out of the bag and held it up for inspection. “This one could be better.”

He unfolded it like a puzzle until he was holding a creased square of paper. That got Tom’s attention. He held out his hand.

“You want to try?” JR asked.

Tom took the square by one corner and studied it for a moment. Then he refolded the square into a perfect crane. He held it out to JR.

“Crane.” The word came out as an alarmingly inhuman croak.

“Crane!” JR agreed happily. “It’s for you, to get better.”

“To get better,” Tom said, and this time he sounded just like JR, which made it much worse. Then he took JR by the arm and licked him with a long, grey tongue that left an angry red welt.

JR yanked back with a cry. Adrenaline did its thing, which gave me plenty of time to step between them and wrap one hand around Tom’s throat. Something about his neck felt wrong, as if his windpipe were a snake trying to wriggle out of my grasp.

Someone was holding back my fist. Time snapped into gear, and the nurse was shouting, and one of Becca’s arms was around my chest while the other was hooked around my elbow.

“Honey,” she said in my ear. “JR’s safe. He’s out of the room.”

I let go of Tom’s throat and took a step back. He looked at me like a raven sizing up a meal. There was no indication of any fear, much less remorse. I wiped my hand on my jacket, trying to remove the greasy feel of his skin.

“You have to go,” the nurse said in a tone that implied this was all my fault, which did nothing for my anger. “You and him both. I’ve had enough of this kushtaka in my ward.”

“He’s a biter!” Tom said brightly in a perfect imitation of her voice.

“We should go,” Becca said as if we were at one of JR’s basketball games and there was ice cream in the immediate future. “Come on you two. Let’s go!”