Fishbowl (6 page)

Also, by extension, when other kids push Herman into the lockers or jeer when they see him, it is not truly him they are at odds with. It is more a comprehensive dislike for all that is different. This dislike is centered not with Herman but with a deeper, more primal fear of the unknown and a base-level animal hatred of the outlier.

Nobody likes a time traveler, Herman reasons. Why would they? He knows the past and has seen the future and is therefore a threat. They are trapped, stumbling around the three dimensions of geography, shackled by time and jealous that he is free to roam.

Really, they all time travel at a constant rate of one day, every day. But for Herman, the velocity of time can change, as can its direction. Herman has researched it. If they knew the things that Herman does, if they could manipulate the last, greatest dimension, they would also be considered a threat to the present.

It is just like that time I teleported, Herman thinks. Nobody but Grandpa believed me. I blacked out on the playground and woke up alone in the nurse’s office. Everyone else just wanted me to prove it, that I could teleport.

“Do it again,” they said. “Right now, dorkwad.”

But it didn’t work like that.

Oh, Herman thinks, if only it could be controlled, the time I would go to would be far away from this one.

The other kids are scared of Herman, and this fear is perceived as a threat, which is what Darrin Jespersen, in particular, was struggling with a year ago when he punched Herman in the ribs. They were clustered near the bike racks at school, just after the bell rang to signal the end of the day’s classes. Darrin and his group of cronies backed Herman up against the rack. Darrin didn’t say anything. He just punched Herman three times, and three ribs broke—well, two broke and one was just fractured, but it was all done in fear.

Darrin was scared of anything different, and Herman terrified him.

Herman has a habit of passing out in stressful situations. Herman knows it’s a defense mechanism that stems from some early evolution. He researched it and found there are goats that pass out from confrontation. Some dogs and other animals do it too, like opossums. Playing dead decreases the instinctual drive of pursuing predators. That dark figure chasing Herman—sometimes his name is Darrin or Charlie, and once it was named Gail—that predator becomes uninterested when he falls unconscious. That hoary figure chasing him is hidden by the lack of rearward vision, and Herman knows that shadowed beast could fall upon him at any second and there’s never time to glance back in the panic of the moment. So, sometimes a body that forces itself to collapse is the best defensive mechanism to have.

Without prey there’s nothing to prey upon.

Quite often, Herman’s bouts of blacking out are filled with vivid visions, which he doesn’t remember because they are also followed by a span of memory loss. More accurately, they are bracketed with the loss of minutes and sometimes hours before and after collapsing, so like the memories, the traumas are also forgotten.

Sometimes the memories return in fits and starts, and sometimes they remain lost to his mind. If they do return, they are often in fragments and from perspectives not normally seen in the regular human experience. The memories return as details viewed from a great distance or, alternately, from microscopically close up. Rarely are they experienced from a safe or normal distance. Sounds are often missing or distorted into warped and folded tones. If words are heard, they’re rarely discernible.

For example, at the bike racks, Herman collapsed after Darrin landed his first punch. The subsequent two impacts were not felt because Herman fell unconscious to the gravel. After that first blow, Herman knew only blackness. Darrin grew tired of punching an inert sack of meat, his primal mind became distracted by some other kid’s movement on the playground, and off he went. His pack of minions followed.

“Herman,” a voice came through the black. “Herman, are you okay?”

It was Grandpa’s voice, disembodied in the dark unconscious, floating somewhere to the left of Herman’s head.

Grandpa had been sitting in his car across the road, waiting to give Herman a ride home. He knew of Herman’s idiosyncrasies, of his time travel and his singular bout of teleportation, and that he would never be the popular classmate. Grandpa had suffered similarly as a youth, but he had not known the extent of Herman’s victimization by the other children until the day he witnessed what happened at the bike racks. Herman’s grandpa, in reality more than a disembodied voice, saw the whole incident.

The following day, he demanded a meeting with the principal and, dissatisfied with the results of their meeting, withdrew Herman from the school. Herman’s grandpa opted to teach Herman at home, to teach him as he had once been taught, passing on wisdom and ideas in the time-honored way, which was how Herman became Homeschooled Herman.

*   *   *

Presently, Herman wakes facedown on a cool tile floor. He likes the first moments of consciousness—he always does. It’s a floating feeling of the blackness dissipating and the world drifting in peacefully from a distance. The entire trauma that caused him to black out will return slowly, in a more manageable form than that in which it originally presented itself. However, for this peaceful span, Herman enjoys the calm of reality returning. Everything before this moment is gone. He isn’t sure how he came to be prone and can’t recall how he wound up here, wherever here is. He doesn’t panic though because this is not an uncommon experience.

Those moments pass slowly. Herman admires the simple perspective of the grout line grid retreating from his eyes into a hazy distance. Slowly, sound comes back. The fluorescent lights above hum a hypnotic tone, and he can hear the soft sigh of the air moving, though he can’t feel it move on his skin.

After a time, Herman pushes himself to a kneeling position. He sits on his heels. Then, a short while later, he stands.

Herman recognizes the tiny room. It’s the elevator in his building. The mirrors all around reflect a version of himself, ever shrinking in every direction into an emerald-tinged infinity. He thinks for a minute to try to count how many Hermans are reflected but deems the task too monumental and entirely pointless.

Infinity is infinity, he thinks. It’s not my business to try quantifying it, just to accept it.

The elevator is stationary, so Herman pushes the button to open the doors and they comply.

When he steps out, he sees the big superintendent watering the plants. There’s a patch sewn to the super’s bowling shirt that reads “Jimenez” in a swirly, cursive font.

“Where’s my place?” Herman asks. He decides not to point out the plants the man waters are fake.

“Use the stairs, kid. Elevator’s broke,” Jimenez tells him, a look of confusion crossing his face.

Herman looks around and realizes he’s still on the main floor of the Seville on Roxy. He makes his way across the lobby to the staircase.

The first fragments of the trauma that caused his blackout begin to return. Nothing concrete, nothing in sequence, just the feeling that something is very wrong. He pushes his way through the stairwell door and starts to ascend. His steps turn into a lope, which turn into a flat-out sprint as each memory starts layering upon the previous one.

10

In Which We Rejoin Ian the Goldfish in His Perilous Plunge That Has Yet to Begin

Like an angel thrust down from heaven, like a meteorite rocketing through the troposphere, we left Ian a few hundred feet in the air, two floors down from where he once resided in the fishbowl on the balcony and twenty-five floors up from the sun-warmed, impossibly hard concrete of the sidewalk that runs in front of the Seville on Roxy.

“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?”

For as long as he can remember, Ian has yearned for freedom. As previously discussed, Ian is equipped with a goldfish brain and “as long as he can remember” covers a slender ribbon spanning only a fraction of a second. That being said, the desire for freedom is always there, suggesting it is deeper than a memory. It’s embedded under his orange scales, residing deep in his cold, pink flesh and comprising an important facet of his essential character. Like dogs chase cats, like cats chase birds, fish long to fall. It’s an instinct so deep in the roots of Ian’s family tree that all goldfish have this yearning encoded by some long-ago ancestor.

Indeed, this need to move and explore new territory has been long entrenched in aquatic animals, and their successes have been documented in hundreds of events where they’ve fallen like heavy raindrops from the sky. There are thousands more such events that have not been witnessed by human eyes. Ian is not aware of this history beyond the drive in his muscles. History to Ian is the fishbowl he just left, the pink plastic castle sitting in the gravel, and his dim-witted, slightly annoying, but mostly lovable bowlmate, Troy the snail.

Regardless of Ian’s perspective on time, from before the advent of the written word, recorded in ocher and charcoal on a cliff face, through the biblical scourges to just last year, there has been a long history of fish raining. It has occurred much too frequently and for far too long to be attributed to chance or fate or freak acts of nature. Be they frogs, toads, fish, or the occasional tentacled cephalopod, aquatic species have it in their nature to fall great distances onto far-flung locales. They often perish in the fall or from lack of water. They have expressed their longing for freedom as individuals, as in the case of Ian, or as schools of tens of thousands, as in the case of the more torrential fish rains.

Ian is not abnormal in his desire and should not be considered an anomaly.

The best minds of marine biology, when turned to the terrestrial endeavors of these fish, postulate the only logical explanation is one that has been dubbed the Dorothy complex, alternately the “No Place Like Home” hypothesis. To these researchers, it’s obvious that a water funnel has sucked up these fish and transported them through the air over great distances in winds reaching upward of several hundred miles an hour to deposit them, intact and alive, inland.

It’s obvious.

Calcutta, September 1839. Charles Tomlinson, in his book
The Rain-Cloud and the Snow-Storm: An Account of the Nature, Formation, Properties, Dangers, and Uses of Rain and Snow,
recounts a day when, around two o’clock in the afternoon, there was a rain shower with which descended a large number of live fish, all about three inches in length. It’s stated that those that fell onto hard surfaces died on impact, but those landing in the grass of a nearby field survived and were quite lively. The fish came down with the rain, and it has been hypothesized that a waterspout sucked them up, only to deposit them on the village. If this were the case, why was only one species recorded?

Ian hasn’t read the book, but he knows the answer. The fish were exploring. A vehicle of exploration, like a Soyuz rocket, is a use of rain clouds overlooked in Mr. Tomlinson’s book. The oversight of this ingenuity is staggering.

It’s obvious.

Two things Ian found particularly annoying about Troy the snail was his willing acceptance of his ecological niche and geographic restrictions. Troy was content to suck algae, day and night, with no grander thoughts than filling his seemingly bottomless radula and remaining oblivious to the wonders of the larger world outside the safety of the glass bowl.

Singapore, February 22, 1861. Thousands of
Clarias batrachus
fell from the sky onto a village. The villagers said it sounded like old women beating their hut roofs with sticks. The villagers ate well for three days, harvesting fish from the streets, plucking them from ditches and puddles and trees, filling baskets as if picking berries from a bush, gorging themselves.

Were the fish sucked up in a water funnel as well? Were they magically transported by the rip-rending power of the funnel and later dumped inland, intact? Where were all the other kinds of sea creatures? There was not one snail or scrap of seaweed to be found.

Ian knows the answer even though he has never heard of the Singapore fish rain. It was a tragic end to an advanced scouting party looking for a new world. It was a dangerous endeavor the fish undertook.

One thing that Troy the snail got right is that an unadventurous life will secure one an impressively long life. But was it worth never leaving the gallon bowl for fear of the unknown? Ian doesn’t think so. An entire life devoted to a fishbowl will make one die an old fish with not one adventure had.

Now, Rhode Island—that would have been something to see.

Rhode Island, May 1900, was the site of two exploratory fish expeditions. Perch and bullspouts fell from the sky in two separate thunderstorms. There are thousands of species in the northwestern Atlantic aquatic region. There are all kinds of fish and invertebrates and plants and crustaceans but only two species were present in the Rhode Island fish rain. Was it another selective and gentle waterspout, or were two species teaming up to search for a new territory?

Through the decades and up until this year, India, the southeastern United States, the Northern Territory of Australia, and the Philippines all have had their share of raining fish. And the list goes on. Scientists can posit their windstorms and water funnels and extreme weather as the vehicle, but they have forgotten how clever nature is.

It’s obvious.

Let it be said that a fish will strive to find the highest point available in order to fall from it in an attempt to land somewhere else. They’re noble explorers limited only by water, an atmosphere that always settles to the lowest spots, and though their souls strain toward the heights, it’s for those low elevations that their bodies yearn. They are fearless adventurers caged by aquariums or restrained in bowls. They are repressed free spirits in search of the edge of the world, in pursuit of the unknown, and are predisposed to falling from great heights at much personal peril in order to find new territories.