Fishbowl (8 page)

Faye smiles, nods, and is two steps toward the stairwell door when he calls after her. She stops, smiles to herself, and spins on a heel to face him. The hallway lights flicker off, leaving her illuminated by the sunshine coming through the apartment door and him as an angular silhouette in the light.

“Faye, baby. Here,” Connor says. The lights come on again, and he’s holding the plastic shopping bag full of garbage out to her. The sticky sour-apple condom is pressed, flat and wet, against the opaque plastic.

“Could you drop this in the garbage chute on your way?” he asks.

13

In Which Jimenez Dares to Disconnect the Blue Wire but Leaves the Red Wire Attached

There’s a distant, repetitive clicking. It sounds like some agitated desert insect has wound up behind the elevator wall. Jimenez blows on the exposed end of a fine copper wire sheathed in black plastic and cocks his head to one side, listening and wondering if an insect infestation will be the next task scribbled on a service request and skewered on the metal spike on his desk tomorrow morning. He ponders the noise for a moment and then bends the end of the wire into a hook by curling it over the shaft of a screwdriver. He loops the hook over the thread of a screw in the elevator’s service panel and tightens it until the wire makes contact.

The current flows, the gears grind, and the elevator doors slide open. The clicking noise stops, and Jimenez looks up from the panel to see Katie standing there, a gun finger pointing at the elevator button, hovering before the next poke of the up arrow.

Jimenez knows Katie, not conversationally or as a friend but he has seen her around and has always liked her. There were the times they passed in the lobby and said “Hi,” and there was the time she locked herself out of the apartment and came to him, wearing only a pink nightshirt. Jimenez had averted his eyes to afford her privacy, but it had been hard not to gawk. He is fond of her, not in a romantic way but in wanting to protect her from the world. She’s very pretty and always greets him when she passes him watering the plants in the lobby.

What she’s doing with the
pendejo
from the twenty-seventh floor, he can’t guess. Yes, that guy is tall and lithe and handsome and has straight, very white teeth, but it’s obvious he doesn’t love her—that and Marty has sent Jimenez to his door, twice in the past six months, to collect on bounced rent checks. Jimenez has also watched him cross the lobby with other girls. Jimenez saw how he touched their lower backs, an open palm at the base of their spines, just north of where the swell of their buttocks waned. There was no mistaking his intent, no way to misinterpret how he leaned in to talk to them, arching his body to whisper something sweet in their ears, the soft press of his breath against their skin, goose bumps rising from the sensual tickle of his words, more felt than heard. Probably the same words for each girl. Probably the same ones he used to trick the affections of this poor one now poking at the elevator button.

Jimenez thinks of loneliness and how it seems to harbor in good people like himself and this girl at the elevator door, this girl who’s destined to find out the truth about her
pendejo
boyfriend and all the other women he’s had up to that apartment at the top of the building.

Jimenez doesn’t really know if Katie’s lonely, but if she continues investing herself in guys like the one on the twenty-seventh floor, she will wind up there. There’s such a fragile, thin veneer of illusion between the words “together” and “alone.”

This girl is looking for her boyfriend and looking for the elevator to take her to him.

“Elevators are broke, lady,” Jimenez says and thinks how, if he were younger and more handsome, he would ask her out for a coffee. Then, holding her hand across the table, a flaky pastry pushed to one side, he’d tell her everything about that
pendejo
and comfort her when she cried. He would buy her another pastry to make her feel better. There’d be crumbs in the corners of her mouth and tears in the corners of her eyes when he told her of the tough fibers of the heart and how they could grow so thin and ache without another. As she licked the icing from the fork, he would tell her how wonderfully those fibers thrum when they do finally find another who is like-hearted.

Instead of all this, he says, “They ain’t going up or down. You gotta use the stairs.”

Sometimes he curses his fumbling English. Sometimes he curses other people who can’t understand the beauty of his Spanish when he speaks it, how eloquent and romantic his mind can be. Instead, he has to settle for this stumbling grammar and these inadequate words. Even though Jimenez speaks it well, he feels his ideas become trapped in a cage of English. He finds the language very practical, but it’s not made for the same beauty as his mother tongue.

“Oh,” Katie says. Her face falls, and Jimenez’s heart falls with it. He can see this is a compounding hurt, and instead of sheltering her as he wanted to, he has inflicted more. She’s not disproportionally upset that the elevators aren’t working. He can see that it’s just one more thing piled on the others, making the weight of her problems an ever-growing burden.

“Sorry” is all he can offer.

“Not your fault,” she says and waves a dismissive hand at the thought. “Thanks, I’ll take the stairs.”

He watches her go toward the stairwell entrance before the elevator doors slide closed, blocking out the world of the lobby. Jimenez stands for a moment, sighs, rolls his shoulders, and then looks at himself in the mirrors on either side of the elevator. They reflect him back and forth into a murky green infinity, reminding him that he’s the only one in that depth of forever. He’s alone in the mirror. He wonders if any of those other Jimenezes are unconditionally happy. With one last glance at the infinity of Jimenezes fading into an immeasurable distance, he turns his attention back to the elevator panel.

So it’s not the black wire, Jimenez thinks, and his eyes stroll from one border of the service panel to the opposite one. There must be fifty wires here. None look loose, overloaded, or compromised in any way. All these tiny components work together toward making the elevator function, but when one fails, the whole thing screams to a halt. Jimenez scratches his head at how the simplest failure of one part could keep the whole complex machine from working.

That’s if the problem is even here amid this nest of copper and plastic, he thinks.

The blue wire next, Jimenez thinks. If I go through each of them, one by one, I can rule out those that are live from the one that has a fault. It may take the rest of the afternoon and evening, but what else is there to do? Go up to my lonely apartment with its single bed, pull a frozen dinner out, and microwave it to an edible temperature? Then, leaving the lights off, sit in the strengthening darkness and watch the city lights flicking on as the sun fails, each illuminated window with someone behind it, eating supper or getting ready to do it all over again tomorrow?

I’ve got nowhere to be, he thinks. There’re only fifty wires.

Jimenez unscrews the blue wire and pulls it from its connector. The elevator goes dark. Jimenez stands in the blackness for a moment before pulling his flashlight from his tool belt. He switches it on. The elevator is lit in a dull amber glow for a few seconds before it falls into darkness again. He shakes the flashlight, and it rattles a response. A dim beam flickers twice. The batteries are dead.

Jimenez pokes blindly at a few buttons on the panel, aiming for where he thinks the button to open the door is. Nothing happens. He systematically pokes his way through each button on the panel. Nothing happens. He gropes at the doors and tries prying the two sliding slabs by wedging his fingers in the gap and pulling them apart. He strains. They budge a bit, allowing a faint fingernail of light to break through from the lobby. Jimenez strains again. His fingers slip, and the doors slap shut. They are locked tight, and the darkness is complete again.

Jimenez curses under his breath and then draws his fingers slowly along the panel, feeling for the screw he removed the blue wire from. Once, his fingertip snags on a sharp metal edge, and then he thinks he finds it, the connector screw. He places the blue wire against it and there’s a blinding flash of light and an electric snap. Jimenez jolts, his arm snaps tight in a contraction, and he drops the wire.

A single yellow spark flares, and the panel catches fire.

14

In Which Garth Finds the Center of Unadulterated Loneliness in the Stairwell

Garth keys himself through the doors and into the lobby of the Seville. He bustles across the gleaming tile floor and up to the elevator doors. He draws up short and contemplates a small square of paper taped to the metal that reads, “It don’t work. Fixed soon. Use the stairs.” Garth looks around for someone to share this inconvenience with, a comrade to roll his eyes and shake his head with, but the lobby’s empty. People pass by outside, a stroboscopic light flickering between their bodies as they move about their day.

Garth wishes he hadn’t rented on the twenty-fifth floor. That’s a lot of stairs to climb. Ground floor seems fine in this situation.

Then again, the climb will do me good, Garth thinks, trying to convince himself that this is okay. Not like I have anything else going on, and not like I can’t do with the exercise.

And so, he makes his way to the stairwell, pushes through the door into the dimly lit column of stairs, and begins his ascent.

Garth climbs a flight and switches back, moving up the ascending zigzag, his backpack slung over one shoulder and the package wedged under his arm. He holds the handrail as he climbs, then pauses for a moment at the sign on the stairwell wall. It’s a plastic sheet bolted to the cinder block under a bulbous, yellowed light covered by a wire cage. The light flickers off, plunging the stairwell into darkness. A scrabbling ruckus echoes up from the dark below. It’s a panicked sound from somewhere farther down the stairwell.

The lights pop on again. Hazy, weak, and jaundiced at first, the shadows dance as they stutter to life.

The sign on the wall reads that it’s the sixth floor. Nineteen to go. Garth puffs, shifts the package from under one arm to the other. The chore of climbing the building has taken a bit of the excitement out of the contents. No, Garth thinks. It just heightens the anticipation of his eager fingers fumbling with the tape that seals it closed to the world, revealing it slowly, peeling back one corner of the paper at a time. The anticipation is half of the excitement, he reasons.

And Garth carries onward, upward.

The shuffling, scraping noise from below grows louder and Garth pauses midflight to see what it’s about. A kid goes sprinting by, springing up two steps at a time on skinny, coiled legs. He shoots the space between Garth and the opposite wall, narrowly missing both in the maneuver. He doesn’t slow down or look back. He doesn’t excuse himself or apologize.

“Easy there, kid,” Garth calls, but the kid keeps running, disappearing around the next landing, out of sight and becoming only echoing noises of huffing breath, footfalls slapping, and the occasional grunt. He hears a door open and then latch shut, and again the stairwell falls silent. Garth absorbs the stillness for a moment.

After the explosive presence of the kid, the absence of movement in his wake strikes Garth with a deep hollow of loneliness. In the middle of a city, on a bustling street full of life, here alone in a concrete shaft encased by a building filled with people, a creeping sense of insignificance leaches into his mood as he renews his ascent. In every direction from where he passes the sign for the eighth floor, there are people. He’s gift wrapped in a building of them. They walk above his head, sit below his feet, nap to his left, and pour a cup of tea to his right. Hundreds of them in every direction, yet he knows none of them. He knows nothing of their lives, and he knows none of their names. They’re all strangers to him. Outside of this wrapping is a city full of them, a city spilling over with people, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of them. From his apartment window, he can see the buildings, lights stretching to the horizon as the sunsets, all those little dwellings so alone and stacked together, making up this city. Too many people to know and none know him.

This stairwell, he thinks, it’s the center of unadulterated loneliness, and I’m in the middle of it.

How is it possible to barely know anyone in a world full of people? Garth wonders. How is it that no one really knows me after thirty-seven years? The paper package crinkles in the bag as he shifts it again from under one arm to the other.

That kid, he thinks, he just came and went. All I know is his skinny little legs and his red Cushes, and then he is gone. And what am I to him? A fat guy in a stairwell blocking the way to his computer games or his supper with his mom or wherever he was rushing to.

And then I’m gone.

Like I was never even here in the first place.

Garth draws a deep breath to steady his heart and gives the package a squeeze, pinching it between the crook of his arm and his torso. It gives a reassuring crackle in return. He takes it in both hands and gives it another squeeze. The softness compresses to a point, and then he can feel something solid and hard in the middle. He repeats the motion and decides he has to run up the remaining flights. He needs to move through this horrible space as quickly as he can. He needs to get to his apartment and recapture the full excitement he had felt before the stairwell sucked it out of him.

He runs.

A city full of people and a world full of billions, and this is who I am. How could there be only one me?

Who could I be if I weren’t me? Garth wonders as he hoofs up the stairs. Who in these walls, who in the city but myself? Nobody knows this Garth, so what is to say the story would be any different for another Garth?

That little kid who ran by me a few seconds ago? That little kid is just starting out and getting to know the world. I could be just starting out again, learning of all the wonders and monotony and thrills and fears.