Fishbowl (11 page)

And so, just one drop in the torrential downpour of fish rainings, Ian continues his descent. However, what started off as a leisurely tumble through the air has quickly become a more harrowing and dreadful experience. Having passed through the strata of Connor Radley’s thesis, he has no further aesthetically pleasing distractions like those peaceful pages still fluttering around above him. Ian catches glimpses of the pages up there, flickering on and off as they waft in the breezeless, failing afternoon light. It’s a peaceful image that’s in stark contrast to the feel of the wind shear buffeting Ian’s lateral line, the pinstripe of sensory epithelial cells that runs down the length of every fish’s body.

The lateral line is, firstly, a physiological adaptation to sense changes in water turbulence and aid in schooling with fellow fish. Coincidentally, and still unbeknownst to science, it’s also a means to judge airspeed. The feeling of the wind on his lateral line is not unpleasant. It’s akin to being in the middle of a big school of fellow fish. A warm feeling of brotherhood and camaraderie floods through Ian’s mind, and if his musculature were equipped to smile, he would. While incapable of higher thought, Ian is reactionary on a base level, and the feeling of friendship and family is something he understands.

Presently, Ian twists sidelong to the ground. By the nature of his physiology, this leaves one eye staring at the wide-open sky, with its fluttering pages and balconies passing by, and the other eye on his destination, the hard ground below. In turn, this leaves his brain conflicted. Is he to be calmed by the peaceful enormity of the crystal-blue sky and the beautifully clear day? If this is the case, Ian wishes he had eyelids to squint against the brilliance of the late-afternoon sun. Alternately, is he to be in absolute terror of the approaching sidewalk? If this is the case, Ian wishes he had eyelids to close in fright against the impending doom. Ian isn’t sure which he is supposed to feel. The result is a middling emotional state, that fine point between absolute panicked fear and complete transcendental calm.

Seven stories have passed since Ian began his descent, and already he is moving at quite a speed. He has fallen roughly a quarter the distance between his bowl and the pavement. Rounding up by a few milliseconds, that is roughly one second into his fall. In this short distance, he has already reached a speed of twenty-two miles per hour. To this point, there’s a steadily building headwind, which Ian finds increasingly uncomfortable, primarily due to its drying qualities. Again, he finds his lack of eyelids and tear ducts to be quite a disadvantage.

In the manic shaking and trembling of his vision induced by the fall, his earthbound eye registers something interesting far below on the street. It offers a welcome distraction from the gumbo of confusing sensations he experiences. Ian sees flashing red lights strobing the building-shadowed street below.

When did that get there? he wonders. Has it always been there, or did it just arrive?

The lights are attached to a little box with large black numbers painted on the roof. An ambulance has pulled to the curb in front of the Seville. Traffic on Roxy has slowed in response, clotting up as it approaches the vehicle and then freeing up afterward. The aesthetic grips Ian’s mind for the moment. The perspective of it fascinates him. From this height, there’s a reassurance from a vehicle that indicates dire trouble, attesting to the fact that, from a distance, even a disaster can look peaceful.

The bustle below has slowed, calmed in the presence of the emergency vehicle, creating a coursing, multicolored thread of cars free to flow once past the ambulance. Somewhere, there’s an injured person or some other crisis. Viewed from up here, the spinning bank of red lights is tranquil, rhythmically flashing off the shadowed metal and glass and concrete and all the other hard surfaces below. They say that help has arrived. Cars slow to a crawl, and the little specks of people walking the sidewalk mill about. They stop in groups and wonder what is going on.

Ian can see the clusters of them. He wishes that Troy the snail were with him to share the sight. Even though Troy is infuriatingly dim-witted, Ian feels that he would have liked to see this and would have enjoyed the experience.

Ian is torn from the scene when, as he falls past the eighteenth floor, he discovers the final betrayal of his body. His instinct for freedom has led to several such revelations so far. Even in the short second of his flight, the experience has been more edifying than the months he spent in his bowl. He not only has found that he can’t breathe in this atmosphere but also that eyelids are handy devices and evolution has left him ill prepared for flight. Now he learns that the aerodynamic nature of his body, which allows him to slice through water so effortlessly, with the right amount of wind shear transforms him into a streamlined, nose-down golden rocket. It pushes his tail to the sky and forces his head ground-ward. The turbulence compels his body to wiggle in a fashion not dissimilar to swimming in a strong current. No longer does he tumble. His descent becomes much more sinister and direct through the shrieking air.

He can no longer see the bright-blue sky or the milling, growing crowd below him. He’s bracketed by buildings, towers of concrete, metal, and glass screaming by, and can’t see anything save the blurred and rhythmic tick-tick of the balconies and windows passing by from nose to tail. With the speed and determination of a bomb, he plummets past the seventeenth floor into another, terrifying cycle of his memory.

In this cycle, Ian thinks, Now … what was I doing?

He will again realize that he’s falling, and within moments, he will meet the sidewalk at the building’s entrance.

19

In Which Our Heroine Katie Finds the Magic of Love in the Cleaning Supply Room Under the Stairs

Life and all the sounds associated with it are muffled and distorted in the stairwell. The concrete walls act to trap the noises in and keep all the other life noises out. Katie thinks of her heart in the same way. It lets in the love and the pain, and it doesn’t let anything else through. She has never truly gotten over her past heartbreaks. Every time, her heart just cracks a little more. It never heals; it’s something she has just learned to live with.

She met Connor during his office hours in his tiny, shared office under the stairs in the anthropology department. It was a dusty old building built more than a century ago, a collage of crumbling honey-colored brick, rippled glass windows, and the incongruous modernity of air-conditioning units and energy-efficient lighting.

Connor’s office was tucked in a ground-floor corner of the building. There were two desks, one crammed under the sloping rise of the underbelly of the staircase and the other wedged between a couple of vertical pipes. One pipe consistently radiated heat, and the other made trickling sounds whenever someone flushed a toilet or ran a tap in the men’s washroom on the floor above.

There were books stacked on every flat surface, photocopied papers piled on the floor, and coffee cups scattered in a random constellation around the room. It was stuffy and musty with the smells of dust and old paper. The lighting was dim and yellow, cast from two desk lamps and a weak, naked bulb overhead. There was no number or name emblazoned on the office door, just the worn stenciled words “Cleaning Supplies.”

The door was open, but Katie still knocked.

Connor spun in his seat to face her. “Welcome.” His eyes lit up when they fell upon her. “Come in.”

“Your office is hard to find,” Katie said and took a step into the cramped room. Connor smiled and stood, crouching slightly because his height exceeded that of the ceiling. He took her proffered hand and shook it when Katie introduced herself.

He said, “I know who you are.”

It felt good that he knew her because there were more than three hundred students in the class. It made her feel less lonely in the crowd. They stood closer than strangers normally do because of the cramped quarters. They stood close enough that she could feel his breath on her skin. It smelled like spearmint, or perhaps it was bubble mint, Katie thought.

“Yep, crammed under the stairs. An obscure space for two obscure grad students working on obscure projects,” he said and smiled again, his lips a perfect bow backed by straight white teeth. “They don’t know where to put me, so here I am, tucked out of sight with Lonnie.”

He gestured with his chin at the guy sitting at the desk wedged under the lowest part of the stairs. Katie hadn’t noticed he was there, working silently in the laptop-screen glow. Her eyes had been on Connor the whole time. Connor still held her hand.

Lonnie looked like he had been at that computer for days without even taking a break for a shower. He behaved as if she and Connor weren’t there, to the point he passed gas in the tiny space. It could only have been Lonnie. Katie knew from Connor’s reaction it wasn’t him. Lonnie carried on pecking at the keyboard as if nothing was amiss.

With a wince at the fouled air, Connor asked, “Do you want to go somewhere else? Maybe I can buy you a coffee?” And with those words, so began Katie’s next adventure in love.

Katie slips from her reverie when the Seville stairwell goes dark. It’s as pitch as only a windowless concrete column can be. In the dark, she refuses to now think of Connor as her next downfall, her next failed relationship. She will not wind up at her mother’s house, sitting late into the night, sobbing out vague, monosyllabic questions like “Why?” and “How?”—questions to which she knows there are no answers.

No, there is every possibility that Connor will say, “I love you,” back to her. It isn’t out of the realm of reason that he has been repressing the expression of his feelings. Some people are so in love they can’t say it because they’re afraid to scare off the objects of their affection with the intensity of their emotions. Some people are timid about sharing themselves, as if it makes them weak or vulnerable. Maybe Connor is that guy, vulnerable and shy.

The stairwell lights come back on.

Katie sighs at the sign in front of her. “Floor 8.” She takes the next flight of stairs two at a time, the plastic bag from the pharmacy swinging from her hand. There are noises, people moving above her in the stairwell. She leans over the railing and peers up, the spiral of railing ascending into a fuzzy space far overhead.

They had gone off campus for a coffee. Katie had asked all her questions about the upcoming exam on the short walk to the coffee shop. Connor had answered her diligently and attentively, seeming to want to help her more than anything. By the time they had settled into their chairs with steaming cups resting on the table between them, the sun was setting and the shop was bustling with the dinner crowd.

“I loved that dog,” Connor said, his voice raised over the clamor of other conversations. “And when he got hit by the bus, I cried for, shit, must have been a week at least.”

Katie made a sympathetic mewling even though she was smiling. She reached a hand across the table and put it on his.

Connor looked at Katie and chuckled. “Why are you laughing? It was really traumatic.”

“No, no,” she said but still couldn’t wipe the smile from her face. “It’s not that. It’s just so horrible. And to get hit by the school bus. I can see you, little kid Connor, all sad and alone. It’s terrible.”

“That was the loneliest summer of my life. There really weren’t any other kids in the neighborhood my age. Mostly just old folks. My parents had me late in their lives. I was a surprise. That’s how my mom put it. That word doesn’t have the same connotations as ‘accident’ does.”

“You poor guy,” Katie remembers saying. “And your parents didn’t get you another dog.”

“Nope,” Connor said. “They saw how hard it was for me to get over Ian, and I think they thought I couldn’t survive the death of another pet. They were probably right.”

She went back to Connor’s apartment that night. After they had writhed together, after he had fallen asleep, she lay awake with her hand on his head, his soft hair sprouting between her fingers, and thought she might fall in love with him. And she did. How could she not? He seemed perfect. He was handsome and seemed to have a great heart. A good guy, a little down-and-out but so willing to give his all for her to make her happy. That’s how it seemed then, but as time passed, she has craved a more concrete affirmation of her affection.

Connor doesn’t have much, but he does what he can with it. The fact that he gives so completely and willingly when he has very little to give makes it seem so much more significant. Just last night, she brought a bottle of wine, and they stayed up drinking and talking into the night. Then, with some soft music playing in the apartment, they dragged his mattress across the floor and positioned it in front of the balcony door.

“I want us to do it among the stars,” he told her. “This is the best I can do halfway between the ground and the sky.”

It was romantic. He seemed ashamed he couldn’t offer more, but what he did offer was more than enough. There, held aloft by the Seville on Roxy like an offering to the sky, they made love. Afterward, she noticed that the city lights were too bright and she couldn’t see the stars. It didn’t matter though; they lay in each other’s arms and looked out over the twinkling city instead.

“I love you,” she said. Her heart tumbled, nervous in her chest. She wanted to hear the words back. After all they had shared, there was no reason he shouldn’t be able to say the words.

Connor grunted a satisfied and unconscious noise. It seemed, though he had been awake a moment before, now he was deep asleep.

20

In Which the Villain Connor Radley Sees the Signs and They Are Everywhere

Connor watches Faye wander down the hall. She seems unsteady on her feet, like she’s distracted, dreamy, or drunk. He likes the way her ass fills her jeans, how it moves with her unsteady gait. He especially likes the crease in the material at the base of her buttocks. He sighs before taking two steps backward into his apartment and closing the door.

Connor takes a deep breath and turns to confront the mess in the apartment. He picks up a wandering path of dog-eared pornography, errant clothes, and miscellaneous garbage from the apartment door to the balcony door. By the time he gets there, he has a garland of unopened condoms draped over his arm, a bundle of clothes tucked between his elbow and his hip, and a bouquet of tissues wadded up in his hand.