Fishbowl (21 page)

There was no reply from the living room.

He contemplated the equations scrawled across the paper, some crossed out and others circled. The pencil strokes were clear and magnified; viewed from so close they were pock-marked, thick graphite lines striking out across the fibrous expanse of paper. The tip of the pencil was a waxy moon rock from this magnified perspective.

The quiet apartment was unsettling. Herman knew something was wrong. He could feel it. His body knew too. This silence often came before the blackness.

There was silence. The usual noises of the apartment were gone. The only sounds came from inside Herman, his heart beating a thump-thump to push his blood around. Herman breathing. His own voice in the silence of his apartment, sounding muffled in the flesh and bone of his head, calling out after a moment’s ponderance.

“Grandpa,” it said.

Herman stood, waiting.

There was no reply.

“Grandpa? Are you there?” he called out again.

*   *   *

Then, there is blackness and commotion and a persistent tugging at his leg. He hears voices, watery and far away.

“He’s here, just lying here on the carpet. Not doing much more than that and breathing,” a woman’s voice says. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him, he just passed out. Please, Claire, help.”

36

In Which Things Below Are Rapidly Growing Larger from Ian’s Perspective

Ian doesn’t know it, but for a moment of time so short it is barely measurable, he passes the halfway point of his descent. Ian is starting to feel the physical stress of being airborne for so long. He gasps, his mouth gaping in an atmosphere too thin for him to process any oxygen. He can’t get his gills to flare, no matter how hard he tries. The wind blasting by his body forces them to remain shut. The current is much too strong for the delicate mechanism to function.

For a moment, he wonders, Now … what was I doing? Then he realizes he’s falling.

As he passes the thirteenth floor, he slips across a line drawn in the sky, out of the late-afternoon light and into the shadows cast by the surrounding buildings. It’s a strong contrast to the light, and when the last glint sparks off his golden scales, he finds his mood is dampened. The once brilliant reflections off the glass and steel of the surrounding buildings become muted with a gloomy light. Everything that was once there and so clear is now a dimmed version of itself. All the details are diminished; the former clarity of the day grows muddy. The building alongside which he falls is less vibrant and the air itself seems to become more subdued. A deep sense of foreboding sprouts within him, as if he has passed around the dark side of the moon. He’s alone in an alien environment, and the elation of his escape feels less certain now, more a chipped veneer covering something threatening and dangerous.

The thirteenth-floor apartment is pink, as a state of being as much as it is a color. The walls are painted pink, the furniture is pink, and the floor lamp has a gauzy Pepto piece of fabric draped over it. To Ian, it’s a streak of late-sunset pink, the kind that shows itself moments after the sun drops below the horizon. The color is drawn into a vertical streak as he zips past.

Ian doesn’t know it, but that apartment is rented by Raquel the bartender and Fontaine, her flight attendant roommate. They aren’t home at the moment, but so many moments of their lives are still in there, between the walls, the ceiling, and the floor. Raquel and Fontaine split the rent, all the bills, and they get along famously. They’ve kissed each other a couple of times in a way friends typically don’t: once when they were drunk at a New Year’s Eve party and got a little carried away, and once at a party where a hot guy became creepy and Fontaine needed a way to flee his advances. Social lesbianism has always been a great escape. It simultaneously titillated the creepy guy and freed Fontaine from any obligations he perceived. Neither of them identifies as queer, but both think the kisses were really nice. They have never told each other as much, however.

Ian can’t see the future, but Fontaine is two years away from meeting the love of her life on a charter flight to Mexico. She has a twenty-four-hour layover, and he’s booked into an all-inclusive resort for a week. She stays with him the whole time she’s there, and they date often when he returns. At first their marriage is a dream, but by the end of the fifth year, both of them have become heavy drinkers. They attend couples’ counseling groups and spend thousands of dollars on individual therapy. For some reason they’re never quite sure of, they enable each other’s worst tendencies. There are a few happy years and many hard ones.

Their marriage lasts eight years and four months. In the end, there’re no kids to share, no dog to fight over, just a mortgage and a joint bank account to sort out when they separate. They don’t talk after the split, and neither remarries. Fontaine quits drinking, but her ex-husband doesn’t and prematurely loses most of his teeth.

Raquel keeps in touch with Fontaine. She’s there for support, and they are even roommates again for a short while when Fontaine leaves her husband.

Raquel never gets married and she’s okay with that.

Now … what was I doing?

Ian’s perspective changes along with the light. The ground is much closer and more portentous than it once was. It was so far away mere moments ago, way down there in the shadows, so innocuous that it was possible to ignore it without effort. But what was once a distant backdrop to his life has become a definite and dangerous player in his fate. The finality of his journey is approaching, and with it comes a foreboding that was not felt at the start. Initially, fresh with the excitement of adventure, he was blinded to the near certain outcome of his fall. Presently, the only control in his life is the constant pull gravity exerts. Were he capable of contemplating it, he might realize that this gravity is no different from the constant pull time wields against all things.

Ian enters one of the last cycles of his memory before he reaches the ground, one in which the realization of death lurks as he zips past an empty twelfth-floor apartment.

Ian doesn’t know it, but the previous occupants of the twelfth-floor apartment moved out two days ago. They were well liked by their neighbors, a handsome newlywed couple with a lovely disposition. The few times they threw a party, they remembered to turn the music down at ten o’clock as stipulated in the building’s rules. They would keep an eye on their neighbors’ apartments when they went on vacation, collect the mail, feed the cat, and water the plants.

He was a salesman for new condos, and she was an engineer. Their sex was ordinary, but they had it often, quietly, and to the satisfaction of each. However, she was always mildly annoyed by his need to have a shower within minutes of them coming. She felt it implied that she was dirty or their sex was dirty, neither of which she believed to be true.

When they moved, they packed their dishes with newspaper between each bowl and plate. They labeled the boxes well and courteously packed their books in small boxes that weren’t overly heavy for the movers. And then they moved out to their suburban house in a blissful new community called Burnt Timber Acres. Now, they have a yard and a fence and property taxes and furnace cleanings to schedule every couple of years.

Ian can’t see the future for them, but there are two babies there, not so far away, one girl and one boy. Not everything is blissful, of course. There are several fights and some yelling. One of them leaves the other for a short while over money and trust issues, but they reconcile quickly and are evermore in love.

When he dies after forty-eight years of marriage, she grows lonely and follows him a year later. Both children speak at the funerals and give touching eulogies. The younger one deems himself a poet and reads a heart-wrenchingly awkward poem. Most mourners are brought to tears, even those who rarely cry. It’s less for the poem’s performance and more for its ill-executed potency.

And what Ian wouldn’t do for the ability to generate tears. His eyes, burning from dryness, flit from the twelfth-floor apartment to the street below. A second ambulance pulls up to the curb. As with the first, the strobing lights remain on even as both doors open. The cars on the street continue their crawl by, a sluggish mechanical millipede. The bustle below seems so slow because of the speed of his descent. It seems to take an eternity for the ambulance doors to open, and by the time the paramedics emerge, Ian is staring sidelong and head down through the eleventh-floor window.

37

In Which Our Heroine Katie Encounters the Evil Seductress Faye

There’s no mistaking her pink nightshirt. This woman, paused in her descent half a flight of stairs away, is wearing Katie’s nightshirt. It’s wrinkled and stained and it’s on some other woman, but it’s definitely hers.

There’s no mistaking where this woman got it from, and there’s no mistaking why she is wearing it. It’s simple to connect one thing to the other, especially since they’re presented together right in front of her. It’s abundantly clear now.

Katie left the nightshirt at Connor’s a few days ago. She had gotten into the habit of leaving behind something on every visit. She wanted it to remind Connor of her. She had the romantic notion that he would smile when he saw the nightshirt. She even conjured beautiful visions of Connor snuggling up with it in bed, falling into a peaceful sleep with the soft cotton under his cheek and the lingering smell of her skin a subtle fragrance in his nose.

There’s no mistaking what this woman is doing in the stairwell, just as there’s now no mistaking the hesitation in Connor’s voice that she heard before he buzzed her through the lobby door a few minutes ago. He told this other woman to take the stairs, assuming that she was coming up in the elevator. There’s another woman in Connor’s life whom Katie didn’t know about, and this is her, in the flesh and a few stairs away.

Katie stands for a moment, dumbfounded by these cascading revelations. They happen so quickly that she reels with each one; each layer reasoned out falls into place upon the previous one to build a picture of that which she did not know mere seconds ago. That old world she was in is gone. This is a new one in which this other woman exists.

And now, reason is done, revelation has been had, and reaction can reign.

Katie thinks to punch this other woman and even thinks specifically where she would punch her, right in the snatch. Katie thinks to scream at this woman wearing her nightshirt, becoming a raving and ranting banshee, waving her arms and backing this other woman against a wall and accusing her of sabotaging her love. Then again, maybe this woman doesn’t even know of her existence. Is it her fault that she’s the other woman, or is it Connor’s? Before her mind even frames the question, she turns all her hurt and rage toward Connor, somewhere up there, thirteen floors above their heads, still thinking she is ignorant to his harem.

This other woman stares at Katie, who can do nothing under her gaze but choke back a sob of confusion, brush past her, and run up the stairs. Once she’s out of sight, Katie’s vision is a jarring and twisting one of the stairwell leading her upward toward him. It’s his fault more than it’s hers, she reasons through the blurring rush of emotion. It’s Connor who had the ability to say no, not to pursue, not to hurt. And he had chosen to do it all.

Or is it my fault? Katie wonders. Is it something I did or didn’t do? What need does Connor have that I’m not fulfilling? Am I expecting too much of him too soon?

They have only known each other for three months, she reasons, actually, less than three months by only a few days. Still, things have been so good between them. They have never strained to talk to each other and have never been uncomfortable in each other’s company. Katie had pictured them together a year from now. She saw them beyond that too, going to a movie or having a morning coffee and reading the paper together. She hadn’t yet pictured them married or with kids or old together, but surely, that was only a matter of time too.

The sign reading “Floor 21” bounces by.

Exhaustion sets into Katie’s body. She’s drained, but she panics that she can’t get to him soon enough, to stand in front of him and make him explain himself. She begins to doubt what she saw five floors below.

Had she been too quick to judge, or had she seen what she suspected of him instead of the truth? Maybe it wasn’t her nightshirt. Maybe it’s all a coincidence and that woman shops at the same store she does and bought the same nightshirt she has. Maybe it’s all a mistake and Connor will be there waiting for her, none the wiser about the woman in the stairwell, just like he doesn’t know the elevator’s broken.

He would be confused by the raving maniac she has become. He would smile at her and explain that he didn’t know what she was talking about. He would calm her fears and she would believe him and then everything would go back to normal.

That has to be the truth, Katie thinks. Please let it be the truth. It’s all an unfortunate coincidence and he’s waiting for me and he’ll take me into his arms and, after a few moments, he will tell me that he loves me.

He will say, “Katie, I have never known anyone like you, and even though we have only been together for three months, less a few days, I know you’re the one for me. All the things I thought were so important until now don’t matter anymore and I’m scared because of that. You’ve changed everything for me, so completely and so definitely. Even though I’m terrified by how consuming my feelings for you are, I’m also excited by the thought of spending the rest of my life with you.”

And she wouldn’t say a word because she wouldn’t have to. She would just bury her face in his chest, and his chin would rest on the top of her head. There would be something between them that was so strong and complete that it wouldn’t have to be spoken; it could just be felt there, between their bodies. It would be so much stronger than any words she could say.

Everything can still work out. There’s no way it can’t this time. Even though she had stood in front of the other woman sneaking down the stairwell, and even though Connor had been caught, she so strongly doesn’t want it to be true that she feels herself willing to be lied to just to make everything she’s thinking about go away.