From my vantage point of near-omniscience, I can give a clear account of what went wrong. You see, I accidentally discovered something about her that ought to have remained hidden in the dirty folds of her private self.

Her name is Meg. I can barely think of my mouth releasing that syllable without feeling a tremor of the heart. Yet I wouldn’t call it love. There is an undercurrent of disgust and fear and shame that accompanies this tremor and makes it unpleasant. Still, I am thinking “Meg,” right this very minute.

I am working through a way to explain it all to her while I walk this crumbling sidewalk that my feet have known for two years. I am unflinchingly narrow-minded. I am a selfish man. I am walking to her office carrying a bunch of daisies and I am going to apologize. It is quite a story, if you care to hear it.

 

After sex one Sunday morning, not so many weeks ago, she went to the bakery across the street from our place. She went to get me a birthday bagel and weekend paper that we liked only for the crossword. She answered the literature questions and the political stuff; I got the pop culture ones and the history. We cheated on the rest, but we still felt as though we accomplished something by filling in all the neat, intersecting blocks. Together. Moments like this—all our poignant acts of domesticity—they reminded me that I could have sex with her at (nearly) any time I wanted, and this made me blissfully happy. Plus, we did not argue about anything and we had enough money to survive and have this little bit of excess for the paper and pastries and other random things that help to pass the time. We were at the point in the movie where things are too perfect and something needs to happen in order for the plot to progress, in order for the hero to be challenged, and this is always good fodder for a story.

The catalyst for our conflict came in the guise of what I thought at first was a moldy cookie left over from Halloween. It was a porous, crusty-looking black triangle of a thing that I found under the guestroom bed as I was looking for her diary. It was almost too heavy to be a cookie, although I am no good at judging these things and it felt more like a doorstop than a cookie. I did know Meg to be a rotten baker, and a too-dense cookie was a likely outcome of one of her kitchen endeavors. The thing was wrapped in tissue paper and tucked into a shoebox, though; this was not really a place where a stray cookie might have disappeared to, but certainly a place where a diary would have been.

That was as far as I got with my investigation. I was on my knees with her cookie when she found me.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I found this,” I told her.

“I mean why are you looking here? Why would you look in my box?”

“Why do you have an old cookie in a shoebox?”

“That’s not the fucking point. I don’t look in your shoeboxes.” She flipped her silky hair over her shoulder in a gesture reminiscent of a bull pawing the ground. A charge was imminent.

“I don’t have any shoeboxes with weird trash in them,” I said. Women are often very illogical when they want to argue. I think that maybe men’s cool reasoning might make them feel a little bit inadequate. To soothe her, I said, “You can look at my things. It’s okay.”

She took the cookie away. “I don’t want to see your shit. I want you to respect my privacy.”

“You didn’t tell me that the cookie in your shoebox was private.” I have had these discussions before, or similar ones, with my sister when we were children. It was unnerving to be in the same situation with my lover.

“It’s not a cookie. Okay? Just go eat your damn bagel.”

“Okay, so it’s not a cookie. Good. That would have been weird. What is it?”

“It’s none of your business. Get out.”

“How about you get out. Maybe I want to eat my bagel in my own guest room on my birthday. You get out.”

She did what I asked. She was easy to get along with in this way.

I didn’t see her again until that night, right before dinner. She came in and got dressed so we could meet some friends at our favorite café, but she didn’t say much while she did it. She put on her blue pants with the black pinstripes that make her ass look phenomenal. She also wore her gray sweater that her ex bought her one Christmas. I thought it might be a good time to ask about the non-cookie.

“So what is it, if it’s not a cookie?”

She started to cry. “God, I don’t understand you at all.”

“The thing. In the box. That looks like an old cookie.” I said it very slowly.

“Fine. You want to know? Fine.”

And so she told me. Her dad was a paleontologist, which I knew, but I didn’t know that he had worked at the Natural History Museum as the head of the Marine Vertebrates for eleven years, which I didn’t care too much about, but I saw where this was going so I listened relatively closely. The non-cookie was actually a Megalodon tooth that he had stolen from the museum before she was born, as a souvenir of his obsession with the giant prehistoric shark. It was a big fucking tooth from a big shark, fifty feet long. He had talked about it constantly when she was a girl. He was known back then as a sort of Ahab of the museum; he had gone so far as to spend most of the small inheritance from his dead mother to fund an expedition to find an intact fossilized skeleton of the beast, and he nearly accomplished his task, finding the entire torso and lower jaw near a fishing village in Greenland. I lost all interest after discovering that the thing was a tooth. That was really all she had to say: “It’s a tooth.”

“Okay,” I said. “Are you ready to go?”

“That’s not why I had it in the box. Not just because my dad was really into these sharks.”

“Okay.” I thought maybe I should wear a blazer, since she looked so nice.

She sat on the bed.

“We’re going to be late.” I pulled my navy blazer off its hanger.

“I was named after it. The Megalodon. It’s on my birth certificate. It’s my name.”

“Huh.”

“Really.”

“What’s your middle name, Tyrannosaurus?”

She opened her purse and handed me her ID. Megalodon Elizabeth Murphy. “He named me that because when I was born, I had a tail and a fin. A caudal appendage and a benign schwannoma. They’re just normal medical things that, you know, happen, and they take them off. No big deal.

“They didn’t show mom. Just him. Like it was some big scientific joke, that Doctor Murphy would have a fish baby because he was so crazy about the friggin’ sharks.” She blushed like a virgin, not looking at me.

“He told his colleagues. That’s all. He told my mom that the little scars were from small lesions that had to be removed. And then he told me when I was in high school that I wasn’t just named after a creepy giant fish, I was one.”

I thought about having that name in school. I couldn’t get past that at first. “Did they tease you about your name at school? Did they do the shark movie music?” I do it for her. I hum the theme from JAWS.

She doesn’t laugh, which makes me want to snicker.

“Nobody knew. They called me Meg. Mom never put my real name on anything but my birth certificate. She hated my father for it, the stupid fucking name, but she never fought him on it. I didn’t care. It’s no big deal, really.”

If it wasn’t a big deal, there would be no cookie-looking monster shark shrine under the guestroom bed. I was polite enough not to say as much right then. I did the boyfriend thing that you do when your girl looks fat in her dress, you ignore it and try to forget about it. Fah-gedda-boudit, you know, like Al Pacino would say.

“Right,” I said. “Well, I’ll keep calling you Meg, then. Let’s go.” Quick peck on cheek, coats on, out the door, under-rug-swept.

 

Okay, so she had some growths. Some cells that went a little haywire. I was telling myself it was nothing all through dinner, trying not to picture her with a giant gray fin and feral, pointy teeth while I watched her get drunk in the candlelight. But once we got home and she passed out, I snuck off into the bathroom with the laptop and checked out some stuff.

When you Google Megalodon, this movie poster picture comes up of a giant shark eating a submarine, like Jaws on steroids. Of course, I wrote the name of the flick down for later, just to fuel my growing sicko fascination with this new information about Meg. Megalodon. I looked up ‘caudal appendage’ and ‘schwannoma’, and despite my poor estimation of the spelling, I found what I wanted.

They are not typical infant problems. They are rare. And nowhere in the eleven pages that Google brought up has there ever been a case of both occurring on one child, except for one in 1978 in Brooktown, Ohio: a little girl named Meg Elizabeth Murphy. There is a medical paper on her. Seriously. But there were no pictures of her freakish growths aside from the ones that were materializing in my mind.

At this point I was giddy with the new perspective I had gotten on my girlfriend. I wished that she had never told me, that I had never asked about the cookie, and that instead I had pulled back the curtain myself and revealed a circus sideshow of freaks in their little formaldehyde jars—the two-headed babies and mermaid children that were too weird to survive in the world.

Needless to say, I rented the movie and watched it at my friend Evan’s place two days later. Imagine a Great White’s beady eye coolly appraising you, and then triple the size. It is not an M&M, but the lens of a camera; it is the glowing eye of HAL, the murderous machine in space. It is a black hole.

The film itself was campy, but, fueled by the evidence I had seen that this creature had once existed—did exist in my own apartment in some small way, in a giant hunk of a fossilized tooth—I was spellbound.

At home that afternoon I decided to skip giving my last lecture and instead I lay on the guestroom bed fondling the tooth. I drifted in and out of a heavy doze and I dreamed of making love to Meg, running my hands over her slippery skin, kissing her salty neck. In the surreal brightness of my fantasy she began to writhe like a fish, jerking her torso right and left. A lithe mermaid struggling to get back to the ocean. Of course, this turned me on. There is nothing like a helpless beautiful creature thrashing against you—two slick, hot bodies working to get whatever it is that they want from one another. Then the wet hotness turned almost too slippery, and when I looked down at my chest we were both covered in blood and I saw that she had little, ridged fins sprouting from her upper body. They were digging into me like when you try to catch a fish in your hands and rub the fins the wrong way. I pushed away from her and she opened her mouth to protest, but when her lips pulled back from her face there were rows and rows of little black-cookie shark teeth, each one glistening with saliva, and now my sex dream was a horror movie and I was going to be consumed in a purely undesirable way.

“What are you doing?” I heard Meg’s voice, sharp with reality.

I woke up. There she was, watching me. With her eyes. They were a dark brown—how could I not have noticed it before?—almost black. Almost beady and predatory.

“I—I was resting,” I said.

“With my tooth?”

“Well.”

“What is your sick fascination with that thing?”

“My sick fascination? I’m not the one who hid it in a treasure box.” I put the tooth behind my back as though I could hide it from her.

“Look. You know that it has a sentimental meaning in my life. That’s all. Just—you’re creeping me out now with it. I wish I hadn’t told you.”

“Me too.”

She scowled and her scrunched eyebrows emphasized those eyes. The JAWS theme started up in my head.

“You were the one rifling through my stuff! I’m the one who should be upset, not you! What the hell is your problem? You don’t like my name? Fuck you!”

She lunged towards me and made a grab for the tooth, but I held it up out of her reach. She jumped onto me, panther-like, in a squat position. She used her sexy legs to thrust herself upwards like a superhero and I thought for a moment she might go airborne but she just leapt up and snatched the tooth from my hand.

I knocked her onto the bed and tried to pin her with my weight, but she was writhing around and it was just like my dream. I was scared. This was a woman that I didn’t know. There are things about her that I might never know. Maybe she was a terrorist spy or maybe if we got married she would lose her job at the marketing firm and get fat and surly. I didn’t know any of this, any of what might happen, and then she had the tooth and she was standing above me holding the damn thing up in the air like a torch, like she was the Statue of Liberty, beautiful and aloof and powerful, and there I was sprawled on the bed, defeated, deflated.

I grabbed the first thing my hand touched on the nightstand. Unfortunately, it was a soapstone sculpture of an elephant, one that no doubt her father had given her, because it was just the kind of thing he was always getting her and she put his crap all over the apartment even though she hated it all. I threw it at her head, crack.

It hit her forehead and landed on the wood floor. Slivers of the fragile stone exploded in every direction. The tooth fell from her hand. Her hand drifted down to her side and she fell slowly sideways and onto the floor. She was out cold and I thought, shit, she could be dead and then I would have had to hide her body, and then I realized the sickness of what I had just thought and then I thought for an instant that maybe I wasn’t the center of the universe for anyone but myself.

She was a Megalodon. She could devour me.

I scrambled off the bed and knelt beside her to see if she was, indeed, dead, but she groaned and moved her head left and right. There was a gash on her forehead an inch or so across that was bleeding like a horror-movie stab wound, and my heart was pounding like I was in some Edgar Allan Poe story.

“Fuck you,” she mumbled, and I was so pleased that she was alive and that I hadn’t killed her that I said, “Thank God.”

“Get out.”

“You’re bleeding,” I pointed out.

“You threw a fucking rock at my head.”

“It was that elephant sculpture. You hated it anyway, admit it.”

She began to cry. “My dad gave it to me,” she said in a loud voice.

“What is it with you and your damned father?” I yelled at her.

“Don’t yell at me!” she yelled. “Get out!”

So I got up off the floor, snuck the tooth into one of the pockets of my cargo pants, and left.

I have been at Evan’s ever since. She hasn’t called me and she hasn’t called the cops. While I was at work, she dropped off my favorite duffel bag filled with all the things I need: my razor, my lecture notes, clothes, deodorant, my meds, and the book I had been reading that is by my favorite author in the world. And she packed my mail. My God, she is so wonderful. Who would do that—who would be so thoughtful when I had stolen her most prized possession and tried to kill her?

This morning I was drinking Evan’s over-roasted, muddy coffee and looking at the tooth, and I thought maybe it wasn’t so bad that she was named after an extinct, colossal, predatory shark. And of course she loved me, how could she not?

I am somewhat recovered from my attack of self-awareness that was precipitated by that fight only a week ago. I feel bold enough to be here, now, walking my own Trail of Tears to her office, but I am not crying because I do not cry.

I am distraught enough that I would cry, though, if I were a woman. I want her back desperately, enough to go back and try to explain myself to her, to apologize.

In the pocket of my coat is her tooth, all wrapped up in newspaper. I can feel its satisfying weight by my side and it is like our child now. This thing is bigger than the both of us; we have to stay together for the sake of the kid.

I walk through the door of her office and she looks up at me from behind her desk. She is wearing the brown suit I got her last fall. She does not look devastated; I do. I am scruffy with the bloodshot eyes of a wino and the breath of an old dog that licks itself too much.

“You,” she says. “You took it.”

“Hi,” I say. I show her the pitiful flowers, but I know instantly that it is not enough.

“Get out.” She does not look at me.

“You say that to me a lot”

She doesn’t answer or even look at me.

“Nice stitches,” I say. “They make you look like you don’t take any shit.”

“I don’t.” She stands up and then leans forward on her desk, showing off the ragged row of black cat intestine holding her damaged skin together. Now she looks at me.

“Right.” I take out the tooth and lay it gently in front of her. It peeks out of its newsprint blanket, the black point aimed accusingly at me.

She starts to cry a little, and I would, too, if I weren’t a man. Instead, I touch her hand, just the fingers.

“If you come back to the apartment, I might kill you,” she says.

“That’s better than being at Evan’s place.”

She scowls and pulls her fingers away. “Why the hell are you even here?”

This is where I should say how sorry I am, how I never meant to hurt her and all those other things men say when they really screwed up, but these are just not things I would say, ever. “I don’t know,” I tell her. It’s the truth. “I need to be around you.”

“I still might call the cops,” she says.

I nod at her, defeated for the first time, and not interested in running away.

Her scowl becomes a little less dark. “I was gonna have lunch before I decide what to do with you. You want some pizza?” she asks. She sniffles.

“Okay.”

“Three-cheese?”

“Whatever you want.”

“That’s your favorite,” she says.

“Just no anchovies,” I say. “I’m done with fish. Little ones, anyway.”

She laughs. So do I. Her teeth are in me fast.