Fishbowl (27 page)

Katie looks at Connor’s hand grasping her elbow, his skin on her skin, him touching her, controlling her. Then she looks at Connor, who withdraws as if she were a searing heat.

Unblinking in his gaze, Katie asks, “You’ll do anything?”

“Please. Yes, I’ll do anything,” Connor pleads. “Just give me another chance.”

Katie glances over the balcony railing at the cement twenty-seven floors below. The people walking down there are so small. She watches the flickering sunlight reflecting off the hundreds of sheets of paper cascading and twisting through the breeze below. There are two ambulances parked in front of the building. A small crowd has gathered around the entrance.

“There is one thing you can do,” she says and brings her eyes back to hold his. “There’s one thing you can do to get me back.”

Connor mouths the word “Anything.” His face contorts with emotion, his eyes begging her and his eyebrows arched in the hope he can make it all better. His hands are held in front of him, wrists together as if bound by invisible handcuffs.

Katie jerks her chin in the direction of his hands. Connor looks down confusedly and realizes he still holds the wadded-up panties. She can’t stand the sight of them just like she can’t stand the sight of him. He throws them over the edge of the balcony and then holds out his empty hands, palms up, to show her.

Katie nods and then continues, “Here’s what you can do. You can figure out how to travel back in time. Go back three months. When you’re there, convince your former dog-self that the current, reformed Connor is the man he should be. And then, when I show up at your office with questions about the exam, ask the former naive me out for a coffee. Ask her on a date and to dinner and to go to a movie and to join you in your bed. Treat her well, every day, like she’s the only woman for you, ever. Tell her early that you love her and mean it. It’s all she wants to hear. You’ll make her so happy. Treat the former naive me like a fucking queen for the rest of her life because you’ve wrecked this me, the one that’s here right now.”

“That’s impossible,” Connor murmurs.

Katie shrugs. “That’s the only chance you have. Until then, take care of Ian and get out of my way.”

Katie storms past Connor and into the apartment.

47

In Which the Villain Connor Radley Discovers the Impossibility and Certainty of True Love

Connor watches the final pages of his thesis unfold into the void. He doesn’t even care that the pages, covered with scrawling ink, are the only copy of his supervisor’s comments. He’ll never recover them, and it doesn’t matter to him now.

Connor follows Katie back into the apartment. The air inside still smells musty and stale. Everything seems so dark compared with the bright sunlight out on the balcony. Connor’s also struck by what a pathetic hovel his apartment seems: the scatter of dirty dishes on the counter and clothes strewn across the floor, the rumpled sheets on the bed and stains on the carpet.

Katie heads for the apartment door. Connor rushes past her, putting himself between her and the door just as she reaches for the handle. Connor turns his back to the door and his face to Katie. He flinches, scared she will push right through him, but she doesn’t; she stops inches from him.

She’s stopped, he thinks, she’s listening. That means I still have a chance.

“Nothing’s changed, not since you said I could keep trying,” he says. “Those panties weren’t yours. Okay, I get it. But they are no one’s now. I don’t really know whose they are. I get that too. But you said it yourself, I was a former dog-self …
former
. That’s the thing that’s changed, and it’ll be my only purpose from now on, to prove that to you. Even if it takes until we are old and gray and dying, you’ve given me purpose.”

“Stop talking, Connor.”

“No, Katie.” He puts his hand on her shoulder, and her muscles tense under his palm. “Please, just hear me out. There was a Faye and there was a Deb—I can’t change that. But there aren’t anymore. Not after this minute. There isn’t anyone else but you. I admit it, I made a horrible mistake, but I see that now and I’m different. I know you don’t trust me and you think I’m an asshole. I can see why, because I broke your trust and I
am
an asshole. But knowing that now, I can be so much better, so much more faithful.”

Katie sighs, shrugs Connor’s hand off her shoulder, and pushes him into the corner behind the door. She opens the door just enough to get through and steps out into the hallway. Connor follows her up the hall toward the elevator.

“You still don’t get it,” she growls at him without looking back. “You can’t be ‘more faithful.’ It’s an absolute, not a scale. You are faithful, or you’re not. Once you’re not, you can never be again.”

“I can learn,” he said. “I want to do whatever it takes.”

Katie stops at the elevator and jabs the button a few times. Then she remembers it isn’t working. She looks at Connor, dejected and beautiful beside her.

“You don’t get it. Love is a choice, one you have to make every day. It isn’t magic, but it is magical.” She pauses. “I can’t stand the sight of you.”

“I’m going to make it better. I have to,” he says. “I love you.”

“I don’t want to ever see you again.”

She turns and storms back down the hallway to the stairwell door. Connor doesn’t follow her this time. He watches her go through the door and stays watching until the door hisses shut behind her. The latch catching sounds like a gunshot in the quiet of the hall. A few seconds later, the elevator dings and the door slides open. It’s empty and waiting. Connor thinks to go and call to Katie that the elevator has come. Connor thinks maybe he should take it down to the lobby and beg her some more, make her see he has changed, but then the doors slide closed again and he thinks better of it.

Defeated, Connor turns back to his apartment. Once inside he gently closes the door and rests his forehead against it for a moment, the paint cool and smooth under his skin. Then he goes into the kitchen and picks up the cordless phone. He speed-dials the first number, and a woman answers after the first ring.

“Hello?”

“Faye?”

“No. It’s Deb. Who’s this?”

“Oh, sorry. Deb, it’s Connor. We can’t see each other anymore.”

“Oh,” the voice says. “Who’s Faye?”

“No one.” Connor hangs up the phone even though Deb is starting to say something else.

He speed-dials the second number. The phone rings a few times before it’s answered.

“Hey, Connor.”

“Faye. We can’t see each other anymore.”

“I kind of figured this would happen,” Faye says. “I’m just leaving the building, and it’s raining paper out here. It’s beautiful.”

“Faye, I love Katie. She knows about you now and she hates me.”

“Oh. That’s a tough spot to be in,” Faye says. “I’m okay with it. I hope she gives you a second chance. You’re not all that bad. Don’t delete my number, okay?”

“I’m sorry. I have to.”

“You never know when you’ll need it.” She giggles. “Hey, Connor?”

“Yeah.”

“If you find my panties, could you let me know? I think I left them—”

The earpiece goes quiet save for some background traffic noise.

“Hello?” Connor says.

“Yeah, sorry. Don’t worry about it. I just found my panties,” she says. “Keep my number, okay? Just in case.”

“I won’t. Bye, Faye.”

“Bye, Connor.”

Connor hangs up, and before he can speed-dial the next number, his eyes are drawn to the balcony. He drops the phone, which bounces off the counter and clatters to silence in the sink. He sprints to the balcony and squints in the sunlight.

The thesis is gone, sure, but worse, the fishbowl is empty; just the snail is left.

Ian is gone.

Connor leans over the balcony railing and scans the scene below. Far below, the last few pieces of paper settle to the sidewalk. From his vantage his thesis looks like tiny squares of confetti spread across Roxy. Every time a car passes or the breeze blows, the pages move into a new configuration. He doesn’t see Ian anywhere, but after a certain distance, his tiny orange body would be indiscernible from everything else.

Connor takes a step back from the railing and cringes at a sharp stab of pain from his foot. He hops backward a step and lets himself fall heavily onto his lawn chair. He crosses his ankle over his knee and sees a splinter of his coffee mug protruding from his foot. A thin bead of blood wells from one side of the wound and trickles a line across the ball of his foot. With trembling fingers, he pulls a long shard of ceramic from the sheath it has made in his skin. He drops the shard to the balcony and presses the wound with his thumb to quell the bleeding.

Connor looks out on the city while he sits, waiting for the flow of blood to stop. He doesn’t know what to do. He has never felt so alone. Katie has left him. Faye and Deb are gone. Even Ian has fled. Thinking of all those apartments out there, the homes of every person he can see and all that he can’t, he contemplates the idea of finding Katie in all of it and then feels the hollowness of losing her.

Why did it have to be Katie?

Surely there isn’t just one true love, one person and one person alone in the whole wide world that he’s meant to be with. Surely that kind of love has to be an impossibility. But then again, maybe the certainty of it is what makes it love. There is only Katie and he found her and fell in love with her.

But why did it have to be Katie?

And Faye?

And Deb?

48

In Which the Evil Seductress Faye Receives a Call from Guy #2 and Experiences Panties from Heaven

Faye pauses in the doorframe of the stairwell and contemplates the scene unfolding on the sidewalk in front of the building.

Across the highly polished tile, beyond the silk plant forest, and on the other side of the lobby door, there is a mass of movement and lights. All noises are blocked by the doors, but the visual cacophony on the opposite side of the glass takes her eyes a moment to sort through. The lobby flashes in the white and red lights, coming in from where they spin atop an ambulance that has parked on the sidewalk. A smattering of people linger in front of the building, milling about, talking through moving mouths, though no sounds come to Faye’s ears. Traffic is at a crawl on Roxy, a slow-moving ticker backdrop to everything going on, and from above, hundreds of sheets of paper are twisting, falling down on the scene like leaves from a tree.

Then a low, faraway siren reports through the lobby’s silence. As she passes the elevator on her way to the front door, Faye figures the siren is growing louder. By the time she reaches the lobby door, a second ambulance is jolting slowly from side to side as it mounts the curb and pulls onto the sidewalk behind the first. The siren goes quiet, but the lights atop still twirl frantically.

Faye stops with her hand on the door handle and watches two paramedics scramble out of the second ambulance. The people on the sidewalk part and watch them from a safe distance, pointing and chatting to one another. The paramedics open the back doors and pull out a gurney. One of them loads a blue duffel bag onto it. They slam the doors closed again.

Faye lets her hand fall from the door handle, unscrews the lid from her water bottle, and takes a gulp. A trickle of water runs down her chin from the corner of her mouth. She wipes it with the back of her hand, all the while watching the paramedics make a quick check of their equipment. One of them talks into his radio and nods.

For a moment, she wonders if this is the result of Connor getting caught by his girlfriend. It’s a quick thought. Maybe Connor missed something when he was cleaning up his mess of an apartment and she noticed. Maybe he missed hiding a tube of lipstick that wasn’t hers and she finally put two and two together and this was the outcome, two ambulances at the front door. It’s an amusing thought, but Faye knows, even if Connor confesses his infidelities, it will probably just result in a bunch of yelling and crying. Maybe there will be some stuff thrown around his apartment, but an ambulance would be an unlikely necessity.

This is way too quick a response anyway.

The paramedics rush to the lobby door, scowls of concentration on their faces. Faye pushes the door open and holds it for them as they race past. They offer her a quick nod of thanks but are too focused on their task for much else. She watches them pull up to the elevator and press the button, their hustle forced to a halt by the wait.

Faye steps out into the street noises, the people wondering aloud; the cars passing by are all overwhelmingly loud from the sidewalk when compared with the peace inside the lobby. Sheets of paper still fall from the sky. They swoop gracefully from side to side, teetering on the breeze as they float with a near weightless grace to the ground. Faye looks up and sees the top of the cloud of paper. The highest sheets of paper are still several stories up, rocking back and forth with clear skies above. She holds out her arms to either side and smiles at the exquisite peculiarity of it. There’s an odd beauty in the two silent ambulances, a group of strangers, and hundreds of pages twisting all around them in the flashing lights.

Faye takes another swig from her water bottle as sheets of paper drift across the sidewalk in a wave with the breeze. Just as she’s about to screw the lid on and wander off down the street, her cell phone vibrates. She pulls it from her front pocket.

The call display shows “Guy #2.” She thinks for a moment about which one that is and commits herself to clarifying her contact list, perhaps putting in a few real names to these mnemonic pseudonyms she always punches in when people give her their number. Really, it should have been done after that embarrassing “Daddy” mix-up last week, when it really was her father calling and not that older guy she met at the Laundromat. Had she known, she would have answered the call more appropriately.

She remembers “Guy #2” is Connor.

Faye brings the phone to her ear and says, “Hey, Connor.”

“Faye. We can’t see each other anymore.” His voice is subdued.

It’s what she was expecting really. As she reasoned in her hike down the stairs, the difference in Connor’s behavior toward her and the girlfriend told her this was coming. She knew Connor was close to realizing his stupidity. She could see it in the vague recognition on his face when she left him, and his actions spoke to something his brain hadn’t realized yet. He loves his girlfriend, and these infidelities were a gross mistake.