I guess I was eleven the summer Jaws came out. I'd read it. We all had; it'd got passed around at Camp Fire Girls; and what I remember about the book was that Mrs. Brody's thighs stuck to the naugahyde of the booth and she wanted to move them up and down but didn't, didn't want to spoil the moment. When the movie hit at last, I was relieved that they hadn't wasted time on the extramarital nonsense between Ellen and Hooper. For one thing, according to the morality of popular fiction at the time, the affair ensured a future as fish-food for Hooper, who was much more likable in the film and I would have been loathe to watch him perish.
Anyway, I read the book. I learned new words like "femoral artery" and "Carcharadon Megalodon", and it was pretty scary, but it was nothing, a mere indulgence, compared to the movie.
We went to see it right away, as soon as it hit the Varsity. And there it was, from that very first attack: with the camera angles, the clanging of the buoy, the excruciating vulnerability of that naked, stoned girl alone at night in the water, and that fucking music, for God's sake, that music. It was genius. Not like Einstein but like Frankenstein: cackling, "It's Alive!", mad-scientist kind of genius. I went back and saw it three times, maybe more.
That's the background. This is what happened.
I don't remember how long after I saw the film it was, or what sparked it. What I remember is lying in the dark in my bed at the Taylor Street house. The house is quiet, everyone is asleep, and I somehow become absolutely convinced that there are sharks swimming around my bed, teeming, that the floor is not a floor at all but a silent ocean which is so thick with sharks you wouldn't fall into it if you went over the edge, your flesh would scrape open on the sharp scales and the frenzy would begin, with you barely in the water, barely out of the air.
The creepiest part was the silence of it. That such a transformation could have happened in my own bedroom, a room where I'd slept for four years, and that it happened without a sound, not one sound. If I were to throw a hand over the side, I'd be handless in an instant. Of course there was the voice of the left brain scoffing: rubbish, of course there are no sharks, of course the bedroom floor is just wood with a dust-ridden rag-rug tossed over it, same as yesterday and the day before, but the very monstrousness of the uncertainty overwhelmed the rational. Just because something's never happened to you before doesn't mean it won't. Some things happen unexpectedly, and some things happen just once. Like death, just one time, but to everyone, sometimes suddenly and without warning or congruity.
Stand up, I told myself. Stand up, turn on the light. Once the light is on, all will be as it always was. The trouble was I had no light at my bedside. To turn it on I had to jump down on the floor and run to the door. My light switch had a blue owl covering over it. It was just above my dresser. I could see it in my mind.
I stood on the edge of the bed, I don't know how long, listening, waiting for the sharks to give themselves away with a sound, but there was nothing. It was several minutes, anyway, shivering in my little-girl blue polyester nightie, shifting back and forth on my feet, shaking, picturing it: I could make it in one step. One single, well-placed step and I'd be at the door, my hand on the light. But whenever I pictured that I pictured the other thing, too: the foot falling not on wood and cloth but against hard, viscid scales, no way to reach the light, swallowed in an instant by salt-water and sharkflesh, torn apart at their leisure, helpless, screams choked and silent.
Eventually I did jump down, one well-placed step. It took no more than a fraction of a second and the light was on, and my bedroom was the same, same furniture, same dust, same posters of kittens and Narnia on the walls, but something was different. The air was different. Maybe I'd ionized it with the intensity of my fear. Anyway, it didn't feel like my room anymore. It felt like while I'd lain there shivering in my existential ferment someone had torn my old room down and built an exact replica in its place, a quiet, grinning imposter.
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