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I remember the first time I ever hit someone in the face. I was thirteen years old, and it surprised me how good it felt. In goading me to fight, this kid had pushed me past the point of consciousness—I was all fury and flashing motion, completely reflexive, without thought, even as I was aware that the boy who stood across from me was poised, controlled, hands held perfectly … and eating my fists. They came from every angle, and he seemed incapable of avoiding them; certainly I was wide open to any reasonable counterattack but he could mount none. When someone finally intervened to stop it I was breathing heavily, but it was the boy across from me who was sweating, red faced, bearing slap and fist marks across his cheeks and a trickle of blood from his nose, embarrassed, wishing he could disappear. That moment taught me the power of fury over reason.

I'm sure Sunny Lee would be able to explain what I'd felt then and continue to feel with each pounding footfall and grunted exertion—my endorphins' natural opiates released in response to the physical activity of running, serotonin neurotransmitters firing with increased vascular traffic, the brain's frontal lobes aglow with blood-fueled activity; the dripping sweat that reminds me of sex, another activity without logic or thought, only feeling, intellect sublimated to reptilian brain.

Who says you can't get high on life?
Sunny would begin.
You can, as long as your life's on fast-forward!
She'd cite hospital studies and university research, lab mice and macaque monkeys, exercise intensity and brain signals and happiness ratings … she'd make an
atrophy / a trophy
pun, tell us
why gray matter matters,
and sum up with
Think of it as a two-for-one pass at your gym—you do the work, and your brain gets a free workout.

*   *   *

By the time I arrive at work my blood-engorged brain is primed for the task of counting fish, which actually isn't as difficult as it sounds. It's not as though you stand on the riverbank and try to spot fish from one end to the other as—simultaneously—three splash through on the far bank while two scoot in front of you and somewhere in the middle a small school passes undetected. You don't count fish from above; you go to where the fish are: underwater.

Each of us is assigned a small underground room with an underwater window. (It's like Doctor Who's TARDIS, somehow bigger on the inside.) The window overlooks a fish ladder, a series of boards that allow water to pass through but funnel fish through a single chute. The fish counter's job is to identify the upstream-migrating fish as they pass the window. (It's the difference between trying to count every car in Manhattan or waiting for rush hour and catching them as they pass through the Lincoln Tunnel, but without the horn-honking and swearing.) We enter that data into a system using a specialized keyboard and computer program. (What happens next is outside the area of my responsibility, or interest.) There are two shifts of fish counters who count real-time passage fifty minutes of every hour for sixteen hours a day, from 5:00
A.M.
to 9:00
P.M.
(In consideration of the absurd idea that I might be up at three in the morning to get to work by five—with or without time travel—I take the late shift.) There's also some video counting of fish passage recorded late at night, but if I wanted to watch grainy video of soggy flesh struggling against nature, I'd go back to the Loading Zone's wet T-shirt tapes.

Still, the murkiness of the water further stirred by passing fish—not all of them
Acipenser pseudoboscis
—can make spotting them a challenge. My first day I counted only eleven—which, without knowing what to anticipate other than that as “endangered” there must not be very many of them, sounded like a fine number. However, Percy, stationed at a downstream ladder from me, and Lilith upstream, both counted thirty, indicating that I missed nearly twice as many as I'd counted. The only logical thing for me to do was to engage Percy at the end of the day in casual conversation about his count before reporting mine, which worked fine at first since Percy seemed blissfully unaccustomed to being the subject of another human's interest. But I soon ran out of variations of “Pretty good day, wouldn't you say?” and “So, how'd you do?” and, when he started to catch on, “Just tell me how many fucking fish you saw!” drove him away for good. Upstream, Lilith was a clam and wouldn't reveal her counts under waterboarding.

“You're easily distracted,” Lilith observes at the end of a workday, and I nearly miss the rest of what she says distracted by the grandness of her nose. “That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's just bad for counting fish.”

“I have a lot on my mind.”

“I could do the same thing for hours. Watch for fish. Build a birdhouse. Play the violin.”

“I've never been good at that,” I lament. “I'm more likely to quit in the middle of building a birdhouse for fish.”

She laughs, flashing teeth that draw my attention from nose and tits, proving her point.

“Did you say you play the violin?”

“Yes. Do you like music?”

She says it exactly the way she once asked
Do you like fish?,
and having been around Lilith for more than a week now, I understand the necessity for directness.

“Yes. Yes, I do, a great deal. I'd like to hear you play.”

She shrugs. “I don't have my violin here.”

“Then maybe,” I suggest directly, “we can go to where it is.”

Back at her small, immaculate apartment, Lilith plays the violin for me, “The Lark Ascending” (and yes, over in the corner is evidence of the birdhouse she's building). It's lovely and transcendent and she loses herself in it completely, only adding to her odd allure. I find myself swept away in thoughts of seeing her naked body and tucking my nose against hers while kissing that oversized mouth. I can imagine, in the throes of passion and OCD, Lilith counting how many times I thrust myself into her, and I hope I can manage an impressive number in the upper-double digits. This is after all why she invited me here, and my heart thrums with anticipation of having sex for the first time since my accident, especially with this strangely appealing creature. Then she's finished, her final note hanging in the air like tinnitus. She sets her violin carefully in its case and snaps it shut, turning her dark eyes on me, staring, which I take for an invitation and step forward. She parts her lips, revealing those teeth once again, and says simply:

“See you tomorrow, then.”

*   *   *

While masturbating furiously in the attic, it strikes me that my problem focusing at work may be drug-related: I'm not taking enough. Emboldened by my caveman fitness regimen, I've cut back on pot and pills dramatically (although I haven't stopped altogether). Recalling the pinpoint focus four Vicodins has helped me achieve in the past, I'm certain that dosage coupled with a hyperalert strain of marijuana will boost my success rate considerably.

After a couple of days of experimentation I discover just the right blend of drugs and pot to set my synapses to alert-level RED: four morning Vicodins (and four more at lunch) and hourly bowls of Hocus-Focus have me zoned in. I'm capable of scanning the window like a bar code reader, registering each passing blue paddle snout, unmissable as black-light posters to my efficiently stoned self. As the days and fish pass, my counts routinely matched Lilith's and when both of ours exceeded Percy's, he looked violated. Eventually my counts became the standard for the day's final tally up and down the river. The more I counted the less ugly they looked, all flat-headed grace as they beat on, fins against the current, borne back ceaselessly into extinction.

That's when out of sheer boredom I start counting the other fish: brook lampreys, sunfish, darters, and three varieties of redhorse—silver, shorthead, and greater—each difficult at a glance to tell from the other but for me as distinct as traffic lights. Sharing this superfluous information at the end of the day is met with a mix of bemused astonishment. We sometimes gather on the riverbank before work while I call out fish species darting down the river, those struggling up too easy to spy in their slowness (although I'll occasionally announce one long past us without turning my head).

When I emerge at the end of my shift, Lilith is waiting for me.

“That was very impressive this afternoon.”

“What can I say? I've gotten to love the little guys—all of them, with their thrashing tails and finny perseverance.”

Her gaze is different now; instead of a dead stare, it feels alive with intent. But I've misinterpreted her motives before.

“Would you like to hear me play the violin?”

*   *   *

The sex is clumsy, awkward, wonderful. With the arm gone that I'd once used to prop myself upright while the other one had groped my partner, I could either prop up or grope but not both. Of course I choose “grope,” but with an inability to support myself it makes for the clumsy lovemaking of a schoolboy until Lilith relieves me of command, expertly flipping me onto my back like a fish she's about to tag. She doesn't take off her top but I'm not disappointed for too long as she straddles me, sliding me inside her and grinding her hips into mine. Instinctively I begin to count but reach only five before I'm distracted by the big cartoon fish head on her T-shirt, so that instead of looking at Lilith I stare into the cartoon fish's dead eyes until both she and I come, I don't know how many thrusts later, and she falls off me as if shot by a sniper.

We lie there a long time without speaking. The pre-accident version of me would already be listening for the steady breathing of sleep that would portend a clean getaway. The younger version of me would ponder what this meant to her, to me, to us, if we were now “us” at all—
God, I hope she's not crazy like the others
. The much younger first-time me would pray not to have impregnated her or gotten an STD, but neither of those concerns would have been enough to wipe the smirk off my face. Inexplicably, current me says this:

“What are you thinking?”

“I need more cedar for my birdhouse.”

“Cedar?”

“Wood,” she explains. “Cedar doesn't decay. It breathes, and insulates. It's not too thin—anything less than an inch will build up heat, not good for the birds, especially young ones. And you don't have to paint or stain it. The fumes would be harmful, and the paint is toxic if they peck at it. You shouldn't paint them anyway. Bright colors attract predators.”

In the face of the least romantic postcoital glow in the history of human interaction, I say nothing. Without further prodding, Lilith also falls silent. In the quiet I wonder if this strange, wonderful encounter with this woman of many prominent features is a portent of my sexual destiny, my dating pool reduced to women whose emotional peculiarity matches my physical one. I'm pondering just how many women like Lilith I'm likely to encounter when she sits up on the edge of the bed and looks down at my stump.

“You should get that looked at,” she says, and I follow her gaze to see that one of my sea serpent's eyes has gone red and puffy.

Less concerned than embarrassed, I wiggle into my T-shirt and swallow another Vicodin as she scrambles past me. She sits at her table and works intently on her birdhouse. I struggle into my pants and slip on my shoes, and then sit and watch her work for a full minute. When I get up and kiss her on the back of the neck she jumps, as if she's already forgotten I was there, and I let myself out.

*   *   *

Sex with Lilith is an event that never happens again, and we never speak of it. When I'd subsequently ask if she is “busy” or wants to “do something after work” (granted, not exactly irresistible seduction attempts), Lilith politely declines in a way that seems to deny any sexual encounter had ever happened and makes me wonder if I imagined it. Then one day she wears the fish T-shirt to work and I stare so unabashedly into its eyes—and her tits—that she slaps me across the face, and I'm relieved to know it did.

Most of my day is spent deep inside my submerged workstation alone with my thoughts which, owing to pot breaks at the fifty-minute mark of every hour (a routine difficult to manage in another work venue) are mostly focused on the hard-fought journey of each passing fish. Beyond all reason they struggle against technology (the dam), aided by crappier technology (the fish ladder) to do what nature tells them. It's a microcosm of our human existence, programmed to hunt and gather and live communally but instead struggling through a techno-world our cave-dwelling ancestors would find inexplicable, aided by the crappier technology of cars, cell phones, tablets, and commercials designed to sell us all those things. Yet never reaching the place nature had in mind for us. (Advantage: fish.) But here, solitary and untouchable and very stoned, I commune with nature, momentarily useful. It's a comforting, smoky womb from which I emerge each day ready to be slapped by life.

I make it a point to begin and end my workday observing the river from above lest I grow too accustomed to viewing the fish in the narrow purview of a small glass square. Here in the vast outdoors the river rushes down and the fish, somewhere below, rush up. It's the difference between a home aquarium and deep-sea fishing. The overflow weirs atop the fishing ladders catch the occasional finny passerby, and I'm struck breathless when a pair of blue paddle snout leap in tandem, passing across what appears to be my own reflection in the water—
must
be, for the simple fact that it's an armless man. The only problem is he's on the other side of the river.

I gaze across to the opposite bank to see the figure casting that reflection gazing back at me; he waves his good left arm in universal greeting, and I match him with my right as he disappears upriver like one of our fish wiggling past in an effort to preserve itself for another generation.