Fishbowl (15 page)

With the mysterious call from the lobby door still playing in her mind, she huffs and drinks the half balloon of wine down in one gulp. A phone call this afternoon, bizarre, she thinks. I’ve had only two calls in total through the past week. And both of those were from Mom. Those calls had been scheduled, normal, and social. They were “Hi, honey. How was your week?” and “Lovely weather and the forecast looks good for the rest of the week.” None of this weirdness. What did it mean? “Gotcha, kiddo.” Claire shakes her head, grabs the bottle, and glugs her wineglass full again. She takes another liberal swig from it.

The stove clock ticks backward, the green numbers slipping past the ten-minute mark. Less than ten minutes until the temperature has to be reduced. The quiche is starting to talk, a peaceful sound like a lethargic rain on wet ground as it bubbles behind the oven door.

Claire taps the keyboard on her laptop and the screen flashes to life. The call-manager program from work is still open. Her last call is recorded there. Pig, she thinks back on it. What was his real name? Jason, she recalls. Two minutes and thirty-eight seconds. That was how long she spent on the phone with him. Poor guy. She blushes remembering how she told him to finish himself off for once. The job often calls for doling out a little humiliation, but Claire tries never to be judgmental or cruel, and what she said to Jason was just mean.

She recognized his voice from past calls, a few a week at the least, one a day at the most. She couldn’t remember exactly. With one hand cupped around the bell of the wineglass, Claire uses the other to casually scroll back through her call log. Nine calls in the three hours since her lunch break and five calls in the two hours before that. Fourteen lonely guys today. One hour and fifty-one minutes of dirty talking. A light-traffic day. Even so, Claire tries to do the best job she can, and it can be exhausting coming up with creative ways to get guys off. It is a cerebral challenge with a physical payoff that often leaves her completely spent.

Claire glances at the oven clock, seven minutes and thirty-nine seconds left and counting. She leans a cheek on the palm of her hand and pokes at her computer with the fingers of the other.

Fourteen guys, Claire thinks, in a five-hour day. She thinks about the nine other women working for the PartyBox and figures, if they take a similar volume through their shifts, that’s one hundred and forty calls daily. A light-traffic day though … carry that out through the year. Claire clicks open the computer’s calculator and starts multiplying lonely guys by time … That’s more than fifty-one thousand calls in a year.

That is one lonely city. Claire swirls her wine and holds it to her nose. She inhales and then takes a shallow sip. She tilts her head in contemplation. Blowsy, foxy, and hard. Cinnamon, leather, and tobacco. She looks over the rim of the bell, out at the buildings across the street from her apartment. Nobody is home, not from the windows she can see through and what she can see in them. She takes another sip and sighs. The oven clock counts down past the four-minute mark.

Claire yawns, clinks the wineglass onto the counter, and turns her attention back to the computer.

So, given there are just over a million people in the city and roughly half of them are guys, if every guy called the line once, her company could cycle through the city’s entire population of men in ten years. So, in the long run, she will have whispered sexual fantasies into the ears of thousands of men every year. She knows the assumptions of her exercise are absurd to the point that the result is utterly inaccurate, but still she can’t help but feel a little dirty. She had never thought of the numbers. Then there are many other companies offering to service this city, and she knows not every guy calls.

Still, something so seemingly simple as human companionship is really quite the opposite. It should be easy to find each other, yet her job indicates it’s not. The number of people having trouble making that connection is staggering. This is one lonely city on a very lonely planet.

The timer on the oven chimes and startles Claire from her reverie. The warm, savory aroma is growing stronger, starting to fill her apartment. Claire smiles as it blankets her. She has a sip of wine and then takes a momentary hiatus from the kitchen island to turn the oven’s heat down to three hundred degrees.

She resets the timer for half an hour.

Claire can’t help but flick on the oven light and peer in. Under the pale-yellow light, through the spotless oven window, sits the quiche. The top has taken on a custard consistency, and the crust is starting to tan nicely. Tiny bubbles start to jewel the sliver of space where the crust meets the pan. Claire smiles at herself for becoming so enamored with the pie. For Claire, food is something so visceral and magical that she can’t help herself. It’s the perfect intersection of all the senses, and her body consistently quivers when she immerses herself in the acts of cooking and eating.

Claire thinks it odd that humans, those talking dirty on the phone and stumbling heartbreakingly through paid interpersonal interactions, would be the same animals to create such a thing. In her college career, she took an anthropology class that defined humans above all other animals as the ones that use tools. Then it was discovered that chimpanzees use sticks to pull termites from their mounds.

Claire’s quiche, in her mind, is the defining characteristic of humankind. That ability to combine ingredients into other nourishing and wholly satisfying culinary creations. A mixture to stimulate smell, touch, taste, and sight all at once. Spending time collecting and assembling all the ingredients is beyond simple survival. Monkeys don’t do it. Bears just eat their berries and rotty dead things. Birds peck at whatever is around, and dogs like meat from the bone. And on and on and on. Not one other animal could create a quiche, so, Claire thinks with a smile, it’s through quiche that human beings are defined.

The computer chimes that she has received email.

Claire peeks in the oven once more before returning to her seat in front of the computer screen. There are two emails awaiting her attention. She clicks on the first—it’s from her grocery delivery company. It details her order for tomorrow and asks her to confirm or change the items. She scans through the list, deletes a bag of oatmeal and the almond milk. In their place she adds a half dozen eggs and some organic orange juice before sending it back to the grocer.

The second is from Gabby, Claire’s boss at the PartyBox. The email is addressed to her and the other nine women working the phones. Gabby starts off by apologizing and then writes that everyone is fired.

Claire sighs and reads on.

Of course, there is the mandatory two weeks’ notice in which Gabby will happily give them the contact information for a placement agency that can help them find alternate, gainful employment. She apologizes to everyone again and then explains that the franchise has been under fiscal review and it is prudent to centralize the call center and outsource the phone-sex trade. All future call volume will be handled by a company in Manila. She informs everyone that, currently, the new call center employees are undergoing extensive training for the job. The last paragraph thanks them for their hard work and for their efforts making the last few years as successful as they have been. She ends the email with “Regards, Gabby.”

Claire blinks, takes a sip of wine, and scans the email again.

“Fuck.”

26

In Which Homeschooled Herman Witnesses His First Life-Altering Moment

Herman spotted his grandpa in the audience, smiling and clapping quietly. Grandpa struggled his way to his feet, from a chair one row back from the front and set a little to stage left. The stage lights dimmed, and the floor lights came up in a dramatic sweep. The room was packed to the walls. People stood at the back and sat on the stairs bracketing the bank of seats. Every seat was occupied, and the constant cough or sniffle jumping around the room attested to the capacity crowd.

Other than that roaming, intermittent human noise, the theater was still. There was also the quiet shuffling sound of Grandpa’s dry hands clapping softly together. Grandpa’s fingers were gnarled at the joints and painful with arthritis. For him, the noise he made was a resounding applause to go with his standing ovation.

Herman looked out over the rows of uninterested faces. He had lip-synched the best he could to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” He had given it his all. He had thrown his hands out in front of himself, curled his splayed fingers into tightly grasped fists in all the right places. He raised them, pleading to the lights in all the right places. He shook bodily at all the right times, when the cannons fired about halfway through his performance. He moved his whole body and used the entire stage throughout his performance. He worked hard to just let emotion take over, and when it did, he flowed with the power of it. By the end of the seven-minute epic, when he stood to receive his applause, his chest was heaving from the exertion. He had become so immersed in the song that tears streamed from his eyes when the falsetto voice at the end swelled. He hoped that no one could see him cry under the bright stage lights.

It would not be enough to win the competition, however. Darrin Jespersen won for lip-synching some Nickelback song. It must have been his air guitar, Herman thought and had to admit it had been pretty good. While Herman’s efforts would not be enough to garner any more than Grandpa’s raspy-clap standing ovation and the uninterested looks of dozens of parents who were only there to support their own kids, it would earn him the beating near the bike racks that would eventually cause Grandpa to withdraw him from school.

*   *   *

Herman has vague recollections of the stairwell door opening, of being in the stairwell. The shadows stick like thick black honey in the corners, and there are dark scuffs on the walls. The railing is painted pale blue on the underside and worn to a shiny silver from years of caresses. Years of soft touches could wear away even the hardest surface. Herman floats as much as falls down the stairs. He’s not sure how long he’s in the stairwell because time doesn’t matter when one disengages from it and moves independent of its control.

As if in a dream, time stretches out above and below him, a column he can easily move through and get off at any time. Flights of runs and risers twisting back on themselves, time becomes a serrated corkscrew edge heading up into the future and down into the past. The elevator jumps between the two, slipping the column from the beginning to the end, stopping on demand or randomly at any floor in between. Time is dog’s years versus tortoise’s years. Time is always happening, all at once.

If you live half as long, is the time you spend twice as important?

Herman knows it is.

Dogs know it too.

And if you have too much of it, you get tired of it. It loses meaning.

Herman drifts through a door, not even sure if he opens it or just passes through it, not even sure where it leads, and then he sees a new terror. A woman staggers toward him. She speaks a cottony noise at him, but he can’t figure out what she says. One of her arms is propped against the wall, and the other reaches out for him, fingers splayed, grasping. She walks stiff-legged, like the dead if they could walk. It’s all too much to process. Herman’s vision slides opaque and turns sideways.

*   *   *

Grandpa slid a piece of paper in front of Herman. It was a blank white page except for two dots that Grandpa had marked on opposite corners.

“How far apart are these dots?” he asked. “Tell me but don’t measure the distance—you don’t need to.”

They had been working on a trigonometry lesson together, and Herman’s mind had been keenly tuned to the beauty of Pythagoras’s numbers for the past twenty minutes. Grandpa was always innovative with his lessons. It was a standard 8.5-by-11 sheet of paper, so, Herman reasoned, it was not a question of how far apart the dots were; it was a question of what was the hypotenuse of a triangularly bisected sheet of standard letter paper. Herman scribbled out an equation and completed it.

“Those two dots are approximately 13.9 inches apart,” Herman said, a proud smile on his face.

“That’s one answer,” Grandpa said. “What’s another?”

Herman was puzzled. Grandpa smiled encouragingly at him.

The math was absolute, Herman thought. There were no two ways to add or square a number; there was only one way. “There’s only one answer.” He checked his sums again while Grandpa watched. There could only be one answer. “They’re 13.9 inches apart.”

“That’s true—there’s nothing wrong with your arithmetic. There’s something wrong with how you see the question.”

Herman stared at the page, his eyes dancing between the two dots and tracing imagined lines back and forth across the blank white page. He frowned.

Grandpa patted him on the shoulder, stood, and said, “I’ll leave you to it.” As he walked to the door, he said, “The distance between the two is variable. Those two dots can be the same dot, or they can be anywhere up to fourteen inches apart, like you think. Now tell me how that could be.” Grandpa left Herman’s room.

Herman put the eraser on the end of the pencil in his mouth and sunk his teeth into its flesh. Time passed and the kettle wailed in the kitchen. Herman furrowed his brow, trying to make sense of the distance between the dots. Grandpa shuffled around the apartment. A short while later, Herman heard the rustle of the newspaper from the living room.

*   *   *

And then, Herman was in the car, watching to make sure his sister didn’t cross the invisible line demarcating his side from hers on the seat between them. She was sneaky. She thought it was funny to cross the line, and it kind of was for some reason Herman couldn’t pinpoint.

Her strategy was to wait until he looked out the window at a motorbike or a big truck, and then she’d slip her fingers across. By the time he looked, they would be back on her side, but the remnant contraction of her arm would tell the history of her intrusion. He tried to slap her hand whenever it crossed over. He never slapped too hard though, just enough to shock but not enough to hurt. Most of the time she got away with it and giggled at her cunning evasiveness. He pretended to be mad, but she knew he wasn’t, that he was just playing. When he did get her, she squealed in surprise and Mom or Dad glanced in the rearview mirror or turned around to tell them to behave.