Fishbowl (2 page)

All of this is a flash, an inert moment as Ian passes the twenty-fifth floor on his approach to terminal velocity. With a goldfish’s sensibility, Ian cannot fathom the oddly divine nature of the existence of this constant velocity. If he could, Ian would wonder on the beautiful and quantifiable order that gravity imposes on the chaos of the world, the harmony of a marriage between a constant acceleration and an ultimate speed that all objects in free fall reach but don’t breach. Is this universal number divine or simply physics, and if it’s the latter, could it be the work of the former?

Having very little control over his descent, Ian tumbles freely and catches sight of the expansive pale-blue sky above and hundreds of fluttering white sheets of paper, twisting gracefully through the air, graciously flitting and swooping after him like a flock of seabirds to a trawler. Around Ian, swirling in the wind, are exactly two hundred and thirty-two pages of a dissertation in progress. One of these floating sheets is the title page, the first to fall and now teetering on a breeze below all the others, upon which is printed in a bold font “A Late Pleistocene and Holocene Phytolith Record of the Lower Salmon River Canyon, Idaho,” under which is an italicized “by Connor Radley.”

Their descent is much more delicate than the clumsy, corklike plummeting of a goldfish, which evolution has left ill prepared to pass a rapidly decreasing number of floors of a downtown high-rise. Indeed, evolution did not intend for goldfish to fly. Neither did God, if that’s what you believe. It really doesn’t matter. Ian can neither comprehend nor believe in either, and the result of this inability is the same. The cause is irrelevant at the moment because the effect is irrevocable.

As his world pitches and spins, Ian catches flashing glimpses of pavement, horizon, open sky, and the gently swirling leaves of paper. Poor Ian doesn’t think how unfortunate it is that he isn’t an ant, a creature known to be able to fall a thousand times its body length and still hexaped on its merry way. He doesn’t lament the fact that he wasn’t born a bird, something that is obviously lamentable at present. Ian has never been particularly introspective or melancholic. It’s not in his nature to contemplate or to lament. The core of Ian’s character is a simple amalgam of carpe diem, laissez-faire, and
Namaste
.

“Less thinking, more doing” is the goldfish’s philosophy.

“Having a plan is the first step toward failure,” he would say if he could speak.

Ian is a bon vivant, and given the capacity to ponder, he would have found it a statement of the language’s character that English has no equivalent descriptor and had to steal it from French. He’s always been happy as a goldfish. It doesn’t dawn on him that, with the passing of another twenty-five floors, unless something drastically unpredictable and miraculous happens, he’ll meet the pavement at considerable speed.

In some ways, Ian is blessed with the underanalyzing mind of a goldfish. The troubles associated with deeper thought are replaced with basic instinct and a memory that spans a fraction of a second. He’s more reactionary than plotting or planning. He doesn’t dwell or ponder at length about anything. Just as he realizes his predicament, it blissfully slips from his mind in time to be rediscovered. He sleeps well because of this; there are no worries, and there is no racing mind.

Alternately, physiologically, the repeated realization of the terror of falling is quite draining on a body. It’s the rapid-fire release of adrenaline, the repetitive pokes in his flight response, that stresses this gold-encased nugget of fishy flesh.

“Now, what was I doing? Oh my, I can’t breathe. Oh shit, I’m falling off a high-rise! Now … what was I doing? Oh my…”

Blessed indeed are the thoughtless.

But, as was pointed out earlier, when he was tumbling from the twenty-seventh-floor balcony, before he got here to the twenty-fifth, our story doesn’t begin with Ian.

3

In Which Katie Approaches the Seville on Roxy on a Vital Mission

Our story begins about half an hour before Ian takes the plunge. It starts with Katie, Connor Radley’s girlfriend. That’s her standing at a pharmacy door two blocks up the street from the Seville on Roxy, looking out at the late-afternoon sun. She rests one hand on the handle, but instead of opening the door and leaving the store, she looks up Roxy. The sidewalk bustles with shoulder-to-shoulder pedestrians, and the road is clogged, bumper to bumper, with the mounting rush hour traffic.

There’s a construction site next to the pharmacy, in front of which a billboard reads, “The Future Home of the Baineston on Roxy, 180 luxury suites now selling.” A clean line drawing shows a boxy glass high-rise building bracketed by green trees, with people walking by the front. The trees and people are abstract sketches compared with the clarity with which the building is depicted. A sticker splashes across one corner of the billboard. It reads, “40% Sold.” It peels and curls a bit at the edge, which makes Katie wonder how long it has been up there. Her eyes are drawn to the people in the sketch, anonymous and blurred with movement, bodies filling space more than people living lives.

The construction site had been busy with gawking workers wearing hard hats when she entered the pharmacy ten minutes ago. The air smelled like burning diesel and concrete dust. She ignored their gazes. She could hear them talking but only caught enough lewd snippets of their conversation to inform her that she was their topic. It was enough to make her feel uncomfortable but not enough to inspire her to confront the pack of them about their impropriety, had she been able to muster the courage.

The site is now deserted, and the machines are all quiet. A solitary figure stands at the chain-link gate. He wears a blue uniform that has a “Griffin Security” patch on one shoulder and the name “Ahmed” stitched on the chest. There’s a chair beside him with prolapsed orange sponge billowing through a rip in the covering.

Katie is a beautiful young woman with short brown hair, kohl-encircled pale-blue eyes, and a sharp chin. She hasn’t been contemplating the street as much as waiting for the workers to grab their lunch boxes and leave. She pushes the pharmacy door open and steps into the street, her petite frame encountering the soft, round one of a mountain named Garth.

Garth is a scruffy, unshaven man who wears concrete-smeared work pants and a hard hat. He smells of physical labor, of sweat and work and dust. Garth has a backpack strapped to his shoulders, and he carries a bulging black plastic bag in one hand. With the other hand he reaches out to steady Katie as she takes an uncertain step back, ricocheting off his bulk.

“Sorry,” Katie mumbles. She’s slightly embarrassed, but her mind is elsewhere. She’s distracted by her task at hand to the exclusion of the world around her.

Garth smiles. He’s ever conscious of his size and how intimidating he seems to those who don’t know him. His default reaction is to try to defuse any ideas that he’s a threat.

“It’s okay,” he says and stands in an awkward silence for a moment, seeing if Katie will say anything else. When she doesn’t, he nods to her and carries on his way.

Katie watches Garth cross the street against the light, dodging the cars merging into traffic. He moves up Roxy in the direction of the Seville, his shuffling steps hurried. She waits in front of the buzzing neon pharmacy sign, not wanting to seem like she’s following him and not questioning why she cares if it would appear that way. She mills about long enough to make Ahmed from Griffin Security eye her suspiciously. Katie doesn’t notice Ahmed finger his walkie-talkie and drop his hand to his utility belt, resting it on his holstered 240 Lumen Guard Dog Tactical Flashlight. Indeed, Katie doesn’t even know a flashlight could be tactical or what would make it so.

Standing in the traffic noise washing over the street, Katie thinks of Connor. She thinks of when they first met at the university. He was the teaching assistant for a class she was taking, and she had attended his office hours with questions about an upcoming exam. They went for coffee afterward and talked about everything but the class. Connor is handsome and charming, and she was flattered at being the center of his attention. He seemed so interested in her mind and thoughts. She immediately felt a connection with him, a chemistry that made her wonder if love at first sight could be real. It still seemed unbelievable that it could actually exist when all this time she had suspected it may just happen in romantic comedies and novels. Katie then thinks of the physicality of their relationship over the past three months, less a few days. Katie told him that she loved him, and lying in the tangle of sheets after a heated bout of lovemaking, he had merely grunted and was seemingly asleep.

In hindsight, beyond their first coffee together, there have been exactly two homemade dinners, three movie dates, and eight binge-drinking bar nights of booze and dancing (unlike most men, Connor is an amazingly sensual dancer, his body seeming to respond to her feelings). The rest of their time together has consisted of a near nightly rooting in Connor’s apartment.

Katie is aware of her affliction of falling in love more quickly and for fewer reasons than most need. It’s not that she doesn’t realize the heartbreak this has caused in her life, but she refuses to quell her romantic heart because it brings her joy as well. She thinks back to the string of men she has happily introduced to her family, having them over to dinner to meet her parents and her sister. She remembers the immersive, warm comfort of everyone talking, everyone laughing around the table. Then she remembers the number of subsequent family dinners she has attended alone, either having called it off for one shortcoming or another or having been told that it was not her, it was him. These end in quiet conversations with her mom and sister, late in the night, tending to her broken heart while her dad sleeps in his chair in the living room. Above their quiet whispers around the kitchen table, they could hear TV proclamations from the living room, from “Jesus is the answer” to “Call the PartyBox now, hundreds of beautiful singles are on the line waiting for you.”

Katie’s sure there are other people in the world with her ability to fall in love. She sees her affliction as a good thing and refuses to become jaded by her many rejections. Her belief is that love doesn’t make one weak; it does the opposite. She thinks that falling in love is her superpower. It makes her strong.

Today, she’s intent on finding out if Connor Radley loves her back.

A horn bleats from the traffic on Roxy and jolts Katie from her reverie. She blinks, looks up the street, and doesn’t see Garth lumbering anywhere amid the herd of pedestrians. She decides that she has waited long enough. It’s time for reckoning. She will either get reciprocation of her feelings or go back to her apartment alone, eat the junk food she has just prepurchased in the pharmacy, purge Connor Radley from her thoughts, and start fresh tomorrow. With this firmed resolve, Katie sets off along the crowded sidewalk. At the corner, she waits for the light to turn in her favor and then crosses the street.

Ahmed of Griffin Security lets his muscles relax now that the threat has passed. There’s a tinge of sadness that he didn’t get to try out the moves he practiced with his tactical flashlight while standing shirtless in front of his bedroom mirror. He removes his hand from the flashlight’s holster, and his fingertip slides from the corrugated plastic surface of the walkie-talkie button.

Katie cranes her neck and looks up at the twenty-seven floors of the Seville as she approaches.

He’s up there, she thinks, in the concrete box at the top.

She can see the underside of his balcony and the little glass square of his apartment window. Then, too soon, she stands before the intercom keypad at the front doors. The doors are locked against vagrants, and beyond the street reflected in the glass stretches the lobby. It’s dimly lit by rows of fluorescent lights and looks sad and empty.

Katie presses four buttons on the apartment intercom and waits while it rings. A few seconds pass before the speaker pops to life. There’s a trembling inhalation, and then a timid voice comes through.

“Hello?”

Katie’s distracted by a little boy bumping into her thigh. She looks into his surprised face until a man runs up and grabs the child under the arms.

“Gotcha, kiddo,” he says and the child squeals and laughs at his dad. They carry on down the sidewalk.

Katie turns back to the intercom panel and hangs up. Wrong apartment number. She checks the directory. She had dialed Ridgestone, C., by accident, just one digit off and one line under Connor’s. She runs her index finger across the names to double-check his buzzer number and then pokes the four numbers for Radley, C. The intercom rings twice before an answer comes through.

“Yep,” Connor’s voice crackles within the small grated speaker in the intercom box.

“It’s me,” Katie says.

There’s a burst of static and then silence. Connor’s voice blares through the speaker, much louder than before. “Who?”

“It’s Katie.”

There’s another burst of static. It sounds like something being dragged over the mouthpiece on the other end.

The door buzzes, and the lock clicks.

4

In Which We Meet the Villain Connor Radley and the Evil Seductress Faye

Connor sits on his balcony wearing only his sweatpants. The concrete is cool under his bare feet, the soles of which are coated with a layer of dust and sand. It’s a refreshing feeling, moderating the warm afternoon air. The plastic lawn chair in which he sits is sticky with sweat, so he peels his back from it by leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees.

One hundred and twenty pages are stacked in his lap, and a ballpoint pen hangs from between his lips. One hundred and twelve pages have been stacked atop Ian’s fishbowl and weighted down with a half-full coffee cup to fend off any errant breezes. Ian’s bowl, in turn, rests on a folding card table, which is sidled up against the railing in the corner of the balcony. All of these items combined, coffee mug on paper pile on fishbowl on folding table on top-floor balcony, form a quiet shrine to the origin story of their being.