Fishbowl (31 page)

The stairwell door’s hydraulic arm hisses itself toward closed while Herman stands in the hallway that leads to Grandpa’s apartment. He spends a moment there, contemplating how perspective shrinks the hallway the farther it gets away from him. Grandpa’s apartment door is three down from the stairwell and much smaller than those closer to him.

When the stairwell door clicks shut and when the only notable sound is the hallway’s blower unit exhaling, Herman walks toward the apartment. He doesn’t bother pulling his key from the shoelace looped around his neck. The door is still unlocked. He knows this because he has never felt as grounded as he does now, so rooted in this place and this time. He opens the door and walks into the apartment. The light from outside has faded since he left, so he flips the kitchen switch as he walks past it to the living room. There’s still some light coming in from outside, but it’s weak and shadowed by the surrounding buildings.

Herman stands in the silence of the living room. It’s an actual quiet, a real silence, not the false one that comes when he’s about to lose consciousness. The room seems expansive as it stretches before him, Grandpa’s chair in one corner and Herman standing in the doorway in the opposite corner.

Herman’s arms weigh heavily, exhausted and dragging his shoulders to curve with their unwieldiness.

With all that has happened, he feels small and out of control. Life’s taking him in its own direction, at its own speed, and for its own purposes. It’s an anchor for him, and though he wishes to flee, he knows he can’t. Not this time. There’s no guide and no force of will, or if these things exist, they’re an out-of-date map and a weak whisper of a force. Herman resigns himself to be this one of an infinity of Hermans and observes the scene before him. The distance between him and Grandpa’s recliner seems grand even though it isn’t.

Herman thinks, If I could go back, if I could make this outcome different, I would. I know how to resuscitate someone. I’ve studied how to. I know where his medication is. I know how to give it to him. I could have brought him back to life. This is my fault.

Herman watches Grandpa’s inert body. Grandpa’s inert body doesn’t return the honor. While his eyes are open, they don’t see anything. The biology is gone, the blood has expired, and he is over. Grandpa is no longer there. The thing that used to be him wears a blue knit cardigan and has his favorite crocheted blanket draped across his lap. But he’s gone, and Herman knows that resuscitation and medication can’t stop what has to happen. It’s nobody’s fault but time’s. Grandpa leans to the side and slumps forward a bit from the chair back. One arm hangs over the armrest. The teacup on the side table doesn’t send steam into the air anymore. It has long since cooled. A section of the newspaper is draped across his knee, and the rest has slid to a cone-shaped pile on the floor.

And, like at the birth of Lavender, Herman sees his grandpa as an infant in the dark night of the farm where he was born. Grandpa told him so much about the farm Herman knows it as his own. He sees Grandpa as a kid standing on the gravel road to the house, surrounded by tawny fields of late-summer wheat. His knobby arms fire rocks at the wood posts, but his aim is off, taking the rocks wide of their mark a lot of the time. Grandpa’s skinny neck, seemingly too fragile to support the weight of the head it’s forced to support, still manages to move through its seemingly impossible tasks with delicacy.

Herman feels the elation Grandpa felt when he met Grandma at the community’s little wooden church. They are teenagers and married at nineteen. Together they see the coming of electricity, the wonder of the telephone, the magic of the automobile, and the impossibility of space flight. There was so much more. Herman sees them smile at each other with the birth of their daughter. He imagines everything in between then and now, and like the dots Grandpa put on the page, that beginning and this ending are the same thing when the corners of the page are folded to touch. And so it all starts again.

“Bye, Grandpa,” Herman says, and the room only responds with silence.

Herman is shocked from his reverie by a golden streak passing from top to bottom, just outside the window. His eyes track the movement, but his brain isn’t quick enough to make sense of the image. On instinct, Herman sprints across the living room toward the window. By the first step, the golden flash is gone from sight, below the bottom edge of the window. Herman rushes past the recliner. By the time he reaches the window and presses himself flat against it to look down, all he can see is a milling crowd on the sidewalk below and two ambulances parked at the curb.

That one would be for Grandpa, Herman thinks. The paramedics are somewhere in the building right now, coming up to this lonely apartment.

The golden streak is gone.

54

In Which Ian Begins and Concludes His Perilous Plunge

And this is where it all begins, here at the end with the goldfish in his bowl. The snail is here too, sucking algae off the glass.

Ian swims his fishbowl from one end to the other, gyrating around the circumference in clockwise circles. He slices through the water, cleaves it to either side of his body, and momentarily imagines himself a predatory fish, perhaps a shark or a barracuda.

Ian swims past Troy.

Troy munches on algae.

Ian looks out at the city, a wavering and aqueous vision of buildings in front of buildings behind other buildings in the bright afternoon light. The sun has started setting on the lower stories. The ninth floor slips into a premature twilight.

Then Ian gets a little confused and finds himself swimming counterclockwise for a while where he had once been doing so clockwise. He ponders how this came to be. Surely, one would notice a complete bodily reversal, Ian thinks, if I was even swimming in the other direction to start with. He cannot remember, and then he forgets that it was confusing.

Now, he thinks, what was I doing?

In the center of the bowl, regardless of the direction he swims, is the plastic castle. It is nestled in a geology of pink and blue pebbles. The castle’s drawbridge is down, the portcullis is open, and the barbican is broad and sturdy. There are four bastions with arrow loops. There are even tiny bartizans and corbels and embrasures. The detail is impressive. The pink bricks etched in the battlements are tinted with a frosting of purple along the edges to give it extra depth and a shade of realism. It’s the most realistic neon-pink castle Ian has ever seen, and he counts himself lucky to call it his home. It beats a sunken galleon or bubbling treasure chest, even though those would be more fitting in his nautical-themed world.

Kitschy tchotchkes, Ian thinks.

He swims past Troy the snail.

Now, he thinks, what was I doing?

It’s that incessant munching that could drive a fish crazy, really. The subtle, gravelly noise of Troy’s crop grinding away at his harvest day and night makes it hard to concentrate. The frequency travels through the water, textures it with a noise he can feel in his flesh.

Ian pecks at Troy.

Troy doesn’t notice and keeps munching.

It’s everywhere, that sound—dry, like pulling apart a cotton ball, like two stones rubbing together.

Ian pecks at Troy some more and, after some effort, dislodges him from the glass. All becomes quiet as Troy drifts like a leaf, swinging back and forth in gentle arcs, down through the water, seesawing until he lands at the bottom of the fishbowl. The silence is absolute but not permanent. It’s only a matter of time before Troy slips back up the glass and starts again.

Ian circles the bowl.

He doesn’t remember when the yelling started. He’s discovering all the new areas of his fishbowl all over again when it comes to his attention though. He doesn’t remember what is said, but he can feel it. The meaning of the words is lost on him, but he feels tension in the frequency of their sounds; it climbs and the oscillation tightens. Vibrations set to the wavelength of anxiety and conflict course through the water. They agitate Ian for a moment.

He sees ripples of movement through the water, things on the other side of the glass, big things. Through the sliding patio door, two aqueous bodies flash by the opening, first in one direction and then in the other. Then they are through the door and standing on the balcony. Their bodies are close, leaning into one another and gesticulating furiously. Ian watches and then grows tired of the long seconds of drama viewed through this watery filter. He turns his tail on the balcony door, turns his back on the couple.

Before him stretches the city, beautiful and so big. There’s so much more to it than this little corner of the balcony. So much more to see than this gallon of water, so many possibilities and opportunities outside of his little bubble. Ian yearns to see it all, to be immersed in it, to be more than a tiny fixture in the middle of it but looking upon it from the outside.

Ian’s startled from his train of thought when the vibrations become much stronger. He spins on the spot. One of the figures, a quivering blur of light and color, moves swiftly and close. Ian’s scared, but there is nowhere to flee to in a gallon of water. There’s the crack as the coffee cup breaks against the balcony. Ian watches the paper, page by page, unfold in the breeze, and suddenly, the bowl becomes brighter. The thesis that blocked the mouth of his bowl is gone; the exit is revealed. It takes Ian some time to realize the bowl is no longer covered—how long he doesn’t know because he has no concept of time. When he does notice though, he grasps the opportunity.

He circles the bowl once to gain momentum, and then, with a flick of his tail and short wriggle of effort, he propels himself upward. Ian breaks the surface of the water and is free. He easily clears the rim of the bowl and, rather unexpectedly, watches the balcony railing pass by underneath. There wasn’t a plan beyond leaving the bowl, but had there been one, it wouldn’t have involved the surprise of being twenty-seven floors above the concrete. It’s an odd sensation, a full-body shiver and shock. It’s not that Ian has a plan, just a strong instinct for freedom. That is how Ian finds himself passing through the fluttering strata of thesis pages, gaining speed.

It takes a goldfish less than four seconds to fall the distance between the twenty-seventh floor and the sidewalk below. A flash. It’s the span of time it takes to unlock the front door of your house. The time it takes to read a sentence or two. For Ian, it’s a lifetime of wonder.

At first there’s this new world that he has entered into. Everything is foreign to his mind, the beauty of being cast out amid the fluttering thesis pages, the feeling of, for the first time, being free of the constraints of any bowl or aquarium or plastic bag. There was a world beyond the rim this whole time. And up until this moment, he only saw it as a quivering backdrop to his life. Now here it is, crystal clear and interactive.

Like a skydiver without a parachute, like a sunburned cosmonaut rocketing back to earth from orbit, Ian is dragged toward the ground. The initial elation fades, and his uncontrolled descent is realized. The only certainties are the direction he travels and the velocity mounting with each passing second. The lack of control is at once exhilarating and terrifying. It’s hard to maintain any trust in this, this being pushed from the sky to the earth. There’s also no turning back, no returning. The only surety in the journey is that the end is there, below, and that is it. The only certainty is the downward direction and the inevitability that he will be face-to-face with the concrete sidewalk in a moment.

The fall passes with ever increasing speed and confusion. As it matures, it happens with less control where it seems there should be more. Ian watches the end approach, the hard concrete below growing bigger and quickly dominating the entirety of his field of vision. Ian watches it approach, not with a fatalist’s resignation but with a pragmatist’s acceptance.

Ian sees the Roxy’s door opening, Faye stepping out of the building, taking a swig of water from her wide-neck sport bottle. Faye is on her phone and doesn’t notice Ian slip into the water bottle with a plop. He hits his head on the bottom of the container, causing stars to float in his vision and a headache that will last the day, but luckily there isn’t much brain to damage.

Ian takes several deep breaths. The water passes by his gills.

Faye screws the lid onto her bottle, unaware of her stowaway.

With the lid secure, Ian is plunged into an absolute darkness.

Now, he thinks, what was I doing?

55

In Which We Conclude Our Journey and Say Farewell to the Fine Residents of the Seville on Roxy

This has been a glimpse into the box. And time marches on and lives are shoved along in tiny, second-long increments. The box fills up with infinitely thin layers of experience. With each halting movement of the clock’s hand, one falls atop the previous. These layers are so fine and the experiences so fleeting that it will never become full. The layers just lie one atop the other, compiling over time, becoming something bigger but never becoming something that will be complete or finished. The remnants of experience float and twist like sheaves of cellophane in the breezes caused by the custodians walking past and in the breaths of their living and dying.

Less than thirty minutes have passed since Katie stepped out of the pharmacy two blocks up the road from the Seville on Roxy. In that time, Danny and Garth ogled her and then, shortly after, parted ways. Danny went for a beer, and Petunia Delilah’s baby decided it wanted in on the world and went through a rather difficult passage to get here. Herman woke up and passed out a few times, which is in keeping with Herman’s life on the more stressful days. In that fifteenth-floor apartment, a life ended peacefully. Grandpa had a full and happy time there, but the organics of him grew tired and stopped moving. Everything else about Grandpa just carried on without his body, transforming into a different kind of life, one lived in memory.

It’s been less than thirty minutes since Jimenez left his little yellow office near the boiler room in the basement of the Seville. He faced malfunctioning equipment, darkness, immolation, and leaky plumbing and survived all these with grace. He’ll do it again tomorrow because someone has to keep the building running smoothly.