Monsters Take Manhattan by Darren Aronofsky

Author:Darren Aronofsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2023-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

20

Phase Two

Neptune

King Neptune does one final lap around the nurse sharks, concluding his midnight swim, before climbing out of the tank and down the ladder, toweling himself off, ready to focus on his art.

He walks down the brightly lit corridor between two other tanks teeming with sea life, water still dripping off his body, until he arrives at his collection.

His shells.

They’re lined up in rows in a towering glass cabinet.

Thousands of them.

It’s a collection that dates back to when he was small, walking on the beach with his mother while Dad was at work.

“How do I know which ones to pick up?” he remembers asking.

“You pick up the ones that sing to you,” his mother said.

“I’ll actually hear the shells singing?”

“No,” she said, giving his hand a squeeze. “But you’ll feel them.”

Neptune loved that time with his mother more than anything. Collecting shells, examining the creatures that washed up in the tide, feeling loved. He’d thought then that her love for him would always keep him safe.

But no. In the end, his father was stronger than that love.

What really wrecked King Neptune was that, even after his father died a decade later, his mom still didn’t reach out. Too ashamed of how they’d treated him, perhaps.

He, of course, could have reached out to her, but he wasn’t going to do that. And risk being rejected yet again? No, thank you.

It was only once his mother died, when King Neptune was forty-one years old, that he realized she might have been happy to hear from him. In her will, she’d passed to him the family’s commercial real estate business along with various other properties she and her husband had owned, including this penthouse atop the Woolworth Building that he’s standing in right now.

He was moved, yet also crushed by regret.

And though he was proud, he did not reject her offering. The business was a tool he could use for his own ends. And this historic building he owns a piece of has become the nexus of his final plan.

Neptune’s fingers run along the shells on the third row from the bottom, coming to rest on a large clamshell close to the wall. He delicately pulls it off the shelf with both hands, cradling it like a newborn. The most precious shell in his collection.

With a sudden and almost violent twist of his wrists, he turns the shell’s top and bottom in opposite directions, producing a satisfying click.

This shell is more than just a shell.

He turns the two halves again. Another click.

It’s a stainless steel puzzle box fused together with his favorite shell that he’d collected with his mother. (Oh, how that shell had sung!) He’d commissioned an engineer to make the box for him soon after the arrival of his surprise inheritance.

King Neptune turns the halves once more, in the reverse direction, before sliding a fingernail into the crack in the clamshell—the mouth pops opens wide, revealing its contents:

A magic marker and a pen.

To those who don’t know any better, securing these items would likely seem ridiculous.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.