• Nicholas Hayme cast out into deeper water and began to think seriously about his motivation. Down at his lakeside cabin, separated from the greater world by miles of pine forest, there was little else to do but fish and think. Nick was an actor, a good one, and for a decade that had been enough to get him through. Now, on the first Monday morning of the new stage season, he was not reading scripts or talking to directors or attending rehearsals. No, he was at his hideaway in the middle of nowhere, with a rod in his hand. Something in his life clearly had shifted, but Nick could not fathom what it was.
    So much thought without result eventually caused Nick’s migraine to kick in. As the nearest bottle of aspirin was ten miles down a long dusty road, Nick was forced to rely on less quantifiable methods for relief. He began a series of deep-breathing exercises he had learned while researching an old role as the mystical swami friend of the romantic lead in Thanks for Berating. He remembered one of his lines from that forgotten production: “Let your mind skip across your thoughts like a stone skips across the ripples of a pond.” So Nick did, and perceived, in strobelike flashes, the meandering course that had led him to this point. Nick had loved acting before he really understood what it was, back when he was an OshKosh-wearing youngster sitting between his parents at the community playhouse, mesmerized by two people onstage dressed as farm animals. He grew up without meaning to, as most people do, and spent his school years holding on to his image of that ersatz barnyard. Eventually school was done, and Nick had realized his dream: he was an animal. His first paying gig was as the mascot of a cable access kiddie show, Lumpy Mallow the Happy Bear. That didn’t last; soon he was in Europe, apprenticing at the feet of the Shakespearean masters, hoping beyond hope for his break. It came to him sooner than anyone expected, but the old dream was belied by dismal reality. For the last ten years Broadway had been his office. Nick’s memories of that decade were general, disjointed fragments of business: agent meetings, insurance forms, fee breakdowns, call times – all important things, in their ways, but all somehow beside the point. It was all rather like the results of his fishing expedition thus far. Nick had been out on the dock for three hours, at least, and had not gotten so much as a nibble. It wasn’t that the lake was barren, for Nick could see taunting silhouettes dance beneath the ripples. The fish were there, but just out of reach; and with cast after failed cast Nick grew closer to despair.
    He was preparing to just drop the rod and head back to town when it jerked viciously in his hand. He had a bite at last, and from the kick of the thing, it was Leviathan himself! It was only then that Nick realized he didn’t know what to do. It had been years since he had spent any real time at the lake, and his angling skills had demonstrably suffered. He could cast like a pro, but whatever else was in fishing besides had been lost to him. So Nick did what any good actor in his situation would do, and improvised. First he tried an exercise in Taoist logic, attempting to conquer the fish by not conquering it, allowing the fish to conquer itself. In this, Nick’s foe demonstrated an annoying contrariety, for whenever way Nick methodically guided the line towards the clarity of the shallows, the fish insistently preferred the danker depths. Soon Nick gave up the contemplative approach and resorted to brute ursine strength. Knees, back, shoulders, arms, elbows all strained against the opposing will. For all the effort, though, Nick might well have tried to raise the lakebed itself. He became desperate to the point of tears, and began channeling the rage of Mark Antony kneeling beside Caesar’s corpse. He cursed the fish, damned it to hell, threatened it with dogs of war and carrion men. The fish seemed quite unimpressed. Finally, when all effort had been spent in vain, and Nick was no longer a guru or a bear or Antonius or anything besides his own worn down self fighting desperately just to keep upright, he pulled the line once more. And the fish came, bursting out of the water in foam and fury. Then Nick found himself on his knees, staring at the thing at the end of his line.
    He had caught a catfish -- an ugly, stinking filth-beslimed catfish – and just then Nick remembered why he had given up fishing. He hated the sight, and the smell, and the feel of live fish. His urge was to tear the thing from the hook, unmindful of the beast’s animal pain, and toss it back into watery oblivion. He could not do so now. The catfish was too big, too solid, too alive to cast away like garbage. Grappling with the luminous haze that often accompanies exhaustion, Nick felt his conscious self sucked out of his physicality, somehow, and placed beside the catfish in a contemplative orbit. He marveled at the likeness he perceived. The antiseptic slime that covered its scales glistened in the sunshine like the sweat on Nick’s own skin. Its gills beat a staccato tattoo in the alien ocean of air, accompanied in chorus by Nick’s own ragged gasps. Its bulbous body flailed with the passion of death’s foreknowledge, and Nick’s own hands shook alongside in the grasp of anaerobic trauma. With no intermission Nick found himself back in his own body. He acted quickly. A knife, its finish dulled with the progression of years, flashed in his hand. It sliced effortlessly through the nylon line, and the catfish returned to its lakebed home with an undignified but oddly exhilarating plop.
    Nick watched the slow trail of bubbles rise to the surface until they were lost in the lengthening shadows of mid-afternoon. Then he tied a new hook to the end of his line and cast again. He needed the experience of another fish – a trout, a walleye, even a pumpkinseed – anything to prove that this familiar energy that now engulfed him was not an illusion. Nick’s joints still throbbed from the exertion of the fight, but he welcomed the discomfort with an open heart. His was a good pain, a genuine pain, and Nick welcomed it back into his life like the old friend that it was, returning for a long afternoon visit by the lakeside as the birds sang and the wind whistled through the conifer trees.