Fishbowl (16 page)

The radio was on, playing some song Herman didn’t know and didn’t think about as anything more than background noise. The tune mixed with the white hiss of the air passing by the car and the sound of the tires on the road. They were traveling the highway.

They were on vacation, touring the coast and zigzagging inland to sightsee and visit friends, here and there along the way. They had camped on a beach last night. As the sun set, Dad struck up a fire and they cooked hotdogs on sticks they had cut from willow branches near the shore. They had sticky fingers from roasting marshmallows for dessert.

Over the water, the sky turned shades of bruise and apricot. The reflection of the water made it look like the sky had melted to the horizon. The wind picked up as the sun dropped below the horizon and the fire flared sideways and roared for a while. Then it was calm again, there was sand in Herman’s marshmallow, and the sky grew a deep indigo before black. He looked up to see the stars. Then they had slept in a tent, which Herman thought was uncivilized. He didn’t sleep well because of the sound of the water and the ripples from the breeze stroking the nylon walls.

The next morning, they stopped at a drive-through for juice, breakfast sandwiches, and hash browns. Dad passed the orders out from the driver’s seat, and when everyone was settled and satisfied, they merged back onto the highway.

The next stop was the city to visit Grandpa in his apartment. Herman had been here before, in the past, in this car driving this road with the blurred green of the pine trees running a dynamic backdrop to the roadside litter and ditch puddles. The pale blue-gray of the hot summer sky was the same now as it had been then. The songs that played on the radio were the same.

The DJ babbled mindlessly.

Herman slapped at his sister’s hand and then grew sad because he knew what was going to happen.

Dad slumped forward against the chest strap of his seat belt. His hands slid from the steering wheel and the cruise control kept the car moving at a steady speed. Mom looked up from the crossword she was doing. Then, she looked at Dad as the car drifted across the yellow centerline.

The paint on the pavement did nothing to stop them from drifting into the lanes of oncoming traffic.

27

In Which Ian the Goldfish Realizes He Is Falling

There comes a point in every goldfish’s descent when he realizes he’s falling—again. In fact, there come several points in a goldfish’s descent when this revelation is had.

Ian is at this point once again as he whizzes past the seventeenth-floor balcony. There’s a bikini-clad lady sitting on a plastic folding chair on the safe side of the railing. A book in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, and the sun warming her gym-firmed tummy. Her face is blissfully calm. Her eyes trace the lines of text in her book. She enjoys the warmth of the waning afternoon light, and she relishes the racy nature of the smutty prose she reads. The book cover is adorned with a curvy vixen in a billowy pink gown parted seductively to expose her cleavage, in the embrace of a be-six-packed man-stallion. One of her knees is drawn up to his waist. She clings to him like he clings to the rope of a timber tall ship. The woman on the balcony is so engrossed in the words she doesn’t see Ian, at best a mere blip in her peripheral vision, at worst a rocketing inch and a half of fish flesh passing by unnoticed, in the span of a blink.

What Ian takes from the scene is the peaceful escape within a novel’s pages. Even though the calm of the woman is in sharp contrast to the near constant terror that threatens Ian, the goldfish shares a fleeting moment of camaraderie with her. Her escape through the words on a page is akin to his plight, though a lot safer. Ian didn’t have the choices for adventure and exploration that the woman sunning herself does. Ian can’t read Dee-Dee Drake’s
Love’s Secret Sniper
. Ian can’t imagine, and Ian had no one to talk to in his bowl save for Troy. And while the goldfish and the snail were friends through circumstance of geography, Troy was not a good communicator. Ian usually just wound up nipping at his shell for hours to amuse himself, trying to pull Troy from the glass, dislodging him from his algae dinner. There was the odd time that Troy became unseated, and Ian felt an immense satisfaction when he did.

Within a few hours though, Troy would be back on the wall of the bowl, slurping up the vegetation. Indeed, Ian found Troy to be a wholly disappointing roommate, though this was not a revelation by any stretch given Troy’s brain was composed of a mere few ganglia.

Now firmly below the woman on the balcony, Ian glances into the apartment as he flashes past the sixteenth floor. Nobody is home, and Ian, for a moment, thinks about how sad an empty home is. An empty home is a lonely box awaiting life to bring it to its full potential. The coffee cups sit in the cupboard; Ian thinks and then stops himself. It would be clich
é
and erroneous to say “collecting dust” because the verb is an active one and the cups are inert.

The tap drip-drip-drips into the sink. Given a thousand years, it will erode a hole through the stainless steel with its soft but persistent caresses. The milk in the fridge moves, second by second, toward its “best before” date. It is an inevitable reminder of time passing and how, through the very act of existence, the unmarred, unspoiled purpose of things moves inexorably toward expiration.

Ian thinks of his fishbowl, now empty save for the algae, the pink plastic castle, and Troy slipping across the glass with his interminable munching. Ian thinks of what a lonely thing Troy’s shell would be without the chewy organic mass of Troy to inhabit it. Ian won’t miss the sound of Troy eating. He won’t miss the constant slurping and sucking noises, the ripping noise Troy makes day and night as he sucks the algae from the walls. He won’t miss that chiefly because his fishbowl is no longer even a memory for him.

Ian is distracted from his thoughts by something he spies through the dust-streaked glass of the balcony sliding door to the apartment he passes on the fifteenth floor. In the fraction of a second it takes, his mind captures a still life of the goings-on inside.

There’s a gangly boy standing in the background, framed by the light of the kitchen behind him. He has knobby arms and a skinny neck, seemingly too fragile for the weight of the head it’s forced to support. The boy stands, slump-shouldered, in shadowed contrast to the light reflecting off the white cabinets and the white appliances behind him. There’s a reading lamp in the foreground, its stem curved like a question mark and its apex casting a cone of amber light upon the slack arm of an old man sitting in an armchair.

The old man wears a blue knit cardigan and has a crocheted blanket draped across his lap. He sits, askew to one side as if sleeping carelessly, slumping with an arm slung over the armrest. The old man’s knuckles are swollen with arthritis, and his fingers are warped from a lifetime of use. A newspaper has fallen across his knee; a sheaf remains draped there, and others have fallen to a disheveled pile on the floor. The pile has created a scruffy paper volcano on the carpet. It looks rugged in the lamp’s light, with crumpled crevasses and jutting ridges. The space between the boy and the old man seems vast for some reason, and the feeling of that space is mirrored in the expression on the boy’s face. It’s a look of loss and helplessness. It’s as if the distance across the small living room is a space too large for him to cross, as if there is something so fundamentally awry in the apartment that the boy can’t close the gap between them even if he should want to.

The boy’s expression shifts in a flash when he sees Ian passing in a vertical line in front of the sliding balcony door. Before Ian slips below the level of the balcony, the boy’s body convulses in a nascent sprint toward the window. In his speedy descent, Ian only sees the start of a step before he’s out of eyeshot. And then the boy is gone, the old man is gone, and the moment is gone. It was a singular instant never to be repeated. Ian does not have the mental capacity to recognize the honor of witnessing the intimate scene within the apartment on the fifteenth floor. The time and space will never again align into that moment, ever.

Ian carries on downward past the fourteenth floor.

Now, he thinks, what was I doing?

28

In Which Our Heroine Katie Is Lifted Heavenward, but Only a Short Part of theTotal Distance

Katie pauses on the tenth-floor landing. She pulls a sharp breath into her lungs and puts her hands on her hips to do a shallow back bend. Her brow is starting to bead with perspiration from the effort of the climb. Katie is in good shape—she jogs three times a week and swims every weekend—but the vertical exertion is enough to raise her heart rate.

She glances at the sign on the wall.

Seventeen floors to go, she thinks.

Connor is up there waiting for her. Resolution for her desire is up there waiting. Katie doesn’t pause for long, just three shallow back bends and a few deep, forced breaths. Her purpose of mind drives her to continue upward, moving closer to the sky.

“I want us to be closer to the sky,” Connor told her last night in his apartment. “I want us to do it among the stars.”

Then, once they were spent, Katie said it, “I love you,” to a sleeping Connor in a dark night apartment.

On their first date, they had wandered from the coffee shop near the university to his apartment. The evening was beautiful and warm. They had taken a meandering route while the shadows grew longer, down the hill from the university, through a park with fountains and laughing children, and into the city. Their shadows pivoted and gyrated on the pavement as they walked under the street lamps or whenever car headlights swept their bodies. Katie and Connor didn’t notice any of this. Their gazes alternated from each other’s eyes to their feet, from each other’s eyes to the traffic passing by. Their voices ebbed and flowed against the city’s nighttime murmur.

The sun had set, but the air was still hot and would remain so throughout the night. It was a heat that robbed sleep and forced people from their apartments and town houses. They sat on their front steps or balconies, some smoking cigarettes or just reclining in the dark, some drinking beers. All of them talking quietly to shadowed companions, a burbling sigh in the dark.

And Katie laughed when Connor joked.

And Connor listened when Katie told of her parents’ forty years of marriage.

They suffered together through an awkward sweetness in front of the Seville on Roxy when Connor asked her up to his apartment. In hindsight, those heart-pounding, uncomfortable seconds of daring and acceptance were tragically short. It could only happen once in a relationship, that exhilarating instant of reward or rejection, a gamble that grew less thrilling as the heart grew complacent with experience.

They rode the elevator and didn’t speak again, both silent in anticipation of what was to come and committed to the intent of the visit. Not a word was said until they were in Connor’s apartment with the door closed to the hallway behind them. Outside, a sweeping view of the honey-colored patchwork of city lights in the night.

“It’s beautiful,” Katie whispered, looking to the window.

Connor left the apartment lights off that first night, and their bodies melded in the dark. Their fingers read each other’s skin like braille, beautifully together even up until last night.

They both crossed the small space to the balcony door.

“I want us to be closer to the sky,” he said and wrapped himself around her from behind, his arms around her waist and his chin on her shoulder. “But the best I can do is this, here, halfway between the ground and the sky.”

His breath tickled her neck like his words did her ears. She thought those words romantic. He seemed ashamed he couldn’t offer her more than a nice view and a tiny bachelor apartment, but for Katie, it was more than enough. Impossible promises were only made sweeter by the sincerity of their intent followed by wholehearted failures of their attainment. She didn’t need him to be rich or successful or to steal the stars from the sky for her. She needed him to do stuff like this.

“We’re just a little bit closer to heaven,” he said.

She thought it a heartwarmingly cheesy thing to say. Even so, she was grateful that he was trying. Katie had thought to tell him that it was corny, to laugh and make a joke of it, but she couldn’t bring herself to belittle his efforts. They were embarrassingly cute and the firmness of his body behind hers was irresistible. She could feel his heart beat where his chest was pressed against her shoulder blades, and the warmth between them became a dampness from the heat of their shared skins.

In the dull amber glow of the city outside, they each grabbed a corner of the mattress and slid it across the apartment to the balcony doors. Katie’s mind raced, the taste of wine sweet on her tongue. She was in love with him. She knew it and it was overwhelming. It was this piled on top of all his other attentions, this last thing, this beautiful notion, the gesture of him wanting to make things perfect for her, to do something special for her.

He was readjusting the sheets over the mattress, pulling the edges taut and tucking them under, when Katie pinched the hem of her shirt and slowly lifted the fabric. She watched him as she did; his body, a silhouette haloed by light from the city, stopped fussing and watched her reveal herself to him. At first, Katie felt self-conscious and she stood covering her stomach with her hands. Then, she saw his face, its expression outlined by the city lights, and she saw that blissful look of desire. She lifted her arms behind her and released the clasp of her bra. Slowly, she pulled it from her shoulders and slid it down her arms, letting gravity take it to the floor. And then he removed his shirt and slid his pants from his hips, then his underwear. They stood at opposite ends of the bed, neither speaking, each naked for the other in the soft glow coming through the balcony door.

“I want to see you,” he said and flipped on a light.

Katie thought to protest but was flattered from it by the look of sheer admiration on Connor’s face. That, and by the detail of his body that the light now afforded her. A warmth spread between her legs, and her heart pounded relentlessly with anticipation.