Fishbowl: A Novel Read online

  “It’s okay,” he says and stands in an awkward silence for a moment, seeing if Katie will say anything else. When she doesn’t, he nods to her and carries on his way.

  Katie watches Garth cross the street against the light, dodging the cars merging into traffic. He moves up Roxy in the direction of the Seville, his shuffling steps hurried. She waits in front of the buzzing neon pharmacy sign, not wanting to seem like she’s following him and not questioning why she cares if it would appear that way. She mills about long enough to make Ahmed from Griffin Security eye her suspiciously. Katie doesn’t notice Ahmed finger his walkie-talkie and drop his hand to his utility belt, resting it on his holstered 240 Lumen Guard Dog Tactical Flashlight. Indeed, Katie doesn’t even know a flashlight could be tactical or what would make it so.

  Standing in the traffic noise washing over the street, Katie thinks of Connor. She thinks of when they first met at the university. He was the teaching assistant for a class she was taking, and she had attended his office hours with questions about an upcoming exam. They went for coffee afterward and talked about everything but the class. Connor is handsome and charming, and she was flattered at being the center of his attention. He seemed so interested in her mind and thoughts. She immediately felt a connection with him, a chemistry that made her wonder if love at first sight could be real. It still seemed unbelievable that it could actually exist when all this time she had suspected it may just happen in romantic comedies and novels. Katie then thinks of the physicality of their relationship over the past three months, less a few days. Katie told him that she loved him, and lying in the tangle of sheets after a heated bout of lovemaking, he had merely grunted and was seemingly asleep.

  In hindsight, beyond their first coffee together, there have been exactly two homemade dinners, three movie dates, and eight binge-drinking bar nights of booze and dancing (unlike most men, Connor is an amazingly sensual dancer, his body seeming to respond to her feelings). The rest of their time together has consisted of a near nightly rooting in Connor’s apartment.

  Katie is aware of her affliction of falling in love more quickly and for fewer reasons than most need. It’s not that she doesn’t realize the heartbreak this has caused in her life, but she refuses to quell her romantic heart because it brings her joy as well. She thinks back to the string of men she has happily introduced to her family, having them over to dinner to meet her parents and her sister. She remembers the immersive, warm comfort of everyone talking, everyone laughing around the table. Then she remembers the number of subsequent family dinners she has attended alone, either having called it off for one shortcoming or another or having been told that it was not her, it was him. These end in quiet conversations with her mom and sister, late in the night, tending to her broken heart while her dad sleeps in his chair in the living room. Above their quiet whispers around the kitchen table, they could hear TV proclamations from the living room, from “Jesus is the answer” to “Call the PartyBox now, hundreds of beautiful singles are on the line waiting for you.”

  Katie’s sure there are other people in the world with her ability to fall in love. She sees her affliction as a good thing and refuses to become jaded by her many rejections. Her belief is that love doesn’t make one weak; it does the opposite. She thinks that falling in love is her superpower. It makes her strong.

  Today, she’s intent on finding out if Connor Radley loves her back.

  A horn bleats from the traffic on Roxy and jolts Katie from her reverie. She blinks, looks up the street, and doesn’t see Garth lumbering anywhere amid the herd of pedestrians. She decides that she has waited long enough. It’s time for reckoning. She will either get reciprocation of her feelings or go back to her apartment alone, eat the junk food she has just prepurchased in the pharmacy, purge Connor Radley from her thoughts, and start fresh tomorrow. With this firmed resolve, Katie sets off along the crowded sidewalk. At the corner, she waits for the light to turn in her favor and then crosses the street.

  Ahmed of Griffin Security lets his muscles relax now that the threat has passed. There’s a tinge of sadness that he didn’t get to try out the moves he practiced with his tactical flashlight while standing shirtless in front of his bedroom mirror. He removes his hand from the flashlight’s holster, and his fingertip slides from the corrugated plastic surface of the walkie-talkie button.

  Katie cranes her neck and looks up at the twenty-seven floors of the Seville as she approaches.

  He’s up there, she thinks, in the concrete box at the top.

  She can see the underside of his balcony and the little glass square of his apartment window. Then, too soon, she stands before the intercom keypad at the front doors. The doors are locked against vagrants, and beyond the street reflected in the glass stretches the lobby. It’s dimly lit by rows of fluorescent lights and looks sad and empty.

  Katie presses four buttons on the apartment intercom and waits while it rings. A few seconds pass before the speaker pops to life. There’s a trembling inhalation, and then a timid voice comes through.

  “Hello?”

  Katie’s distracted by a little boy bumping into her thigh. She looks into his surprised face until a man runs up and grabs the child under the arms.

  “Gotcha, kiddo,” he says and the child squeals and laughs at his dad. They carry on down the sidewalk.

  Katie turns back to the intercom panel and hangs up. Wrong apartment number. She checks the directory. She had dialed Ridgestone, C., by accident, just one digit off and one line under Connor’s. She runs her index finger across the names to double-check his buzzer number and then pokes the four numbers for Radley, C. The intercom rings twice before an answer comes through.

  “Yep,” Connor’s voice crackles within the small grated speaker in the intercom box.

  “It’s me,” Katie says.

  There’s a burst of static and then silence. Connor’s voice blares through the speaker, much louder than before. “Who?”

  “It’s Katie.”

  There’s another burst of static. It sounds like something being dragged over the mouthpiece on the other end.

  The door buzzes, and the lock clicks.

  4

  In Which We Meet the Villain Connor Radley and the Evil Seductress Faye

  Connor sits on his balcony wearing only his sweatpants. The concrete is cool under his bare feet, the soles of which are coated with a layer of dust and sand. It’s a refreshing feeling, moderating the warm afternoon air. The plastic lawn chair in which he sits is sticky with sweat, so he peels his back from it by leaning forward and resting his elbows on his knees.

  One hundred and twenty pages are stacked in his lap, and a ballpoint pen hangs from between his lips. One hundred and twelve pages have been stacked atop Ian’s fishbowl and weighted down with a half-full coffee cup to fend off any errant breezes. Ian’s bowl, in turn, rests on a folding card table, which is sidled up against the railing in the corner of the balcony. All of these items combined, coffee mug on paper pile on fishbowl on folding table on top-floor balcony, form a quiet shrine to the origin story of their being.

  Connor is on the balcony because, in his small studio apartment, he feels the walls stifle his ability to edit. The place is too small for his thoughts. He’s working through the first round of comments on his thesis, which he received from his adviser, and he’s on a self-imposed deadline to finish as quickly as possible and get the hell out of grad school. Connor finds it easier to think in the open air overlooking the expansive views offered to him from the balcony, so it has become his office. He has his lawn chair, a garage sale find and throwback to the seventies. It’s made of hundreds of brown, burnt-almond, and dusty-green plastic tubes woven over an aluminum frame. He has his splintery, weathered card table, and he has Ian. Oh, and he has his coffee cup that reads “Paleoclimatologists do it in the dirt.” A clever gift from Faye … or was it Deb who got it for him? Maybe Katie?

  Connor glares at the page in front of him.

  Each print
ed letter is a simple symbol meaning nothing on its own. Combined, the letters make words that also mean little without their neighbors. All of these words together, however, convey a greater meaning, detailing the assumptions of the statistical analysis used in his research. On its own, the section is interesting, as noted by the jottings of his adviser in the margins, but it grows more meaningful when considered in the larger context of the thesis. Likewise, without context in world prehistory, the findings of Connor’s study, about the impacts of paleoclimatic fluctuations on the ancient human inhabitants of Idaho, would be less interesting than they inherently are.

  But right now, Connor isn’t thinking in such economies of perspective; he’s busily learning more about less, losing the context of the big picture by trying to figure out what his supervisor had scrawled diagonally across an equation. His brow furrows. He thinks it reads, “Awkward. Do better.” He ponders what such a vaguely savage statement could mean.

  It’s math. Math can’t be awkward and, by its nature, is either right or wrong, so how could he do better? Connor chews on the end of his pen and shoots a glance past Ian to the buildings beyond.

  Ian doesn’t ponder any of this. He doesn’t have the capacity to. He resides permanently in his bowl on the folding table overlooking the city for a reason. Connor tends to become bimaniacal when working on his thesis. His attentions focus to an unhealthy degree on editing and satisfying a chafingly powerful desire for sexual satisfaction. Connor feels embarrassed to be naked in front of the fish and definitely can’t perform under his unblinking stare. For Ian’s part, he’s uninterested in Connor either way, clothed or naked, masturbating or copulating.

  The cordless phone rings. Connor hears it, and Ian feels it as a frequency through the water.

  Connor retrieves it from beside Ian’s bowl, pokes the talk button, and holds it to his ear.

  “Yep,” Connor says into the receiver.

  “It’s me,” comes a hollow voice, the static indicative of someone standing at the building’s front door.

  Connor isn’t expecting anyone, and he can’t place the voice. It’s a female voice. It’s definitely coming from the front door. The traffic noise rising to the balcony and that coming through the phone, the noisy motorcycle Dopplering past and the horn honking, all reach his ears in relative synchronicity.

  “Who?” he asks.

  “It’s Katie.”

  Connor clasps his hand over the mouthpiece and says, “Shit.”

  Then he presses “9” on the cordless to release the lobby door and hangs up the phone.

  Connor straightens the papers in his lap and then adds them to the stack atop Ian’s bowl. He replaces the coffee-mug paperweight, less fearful of a smearing coffee ring stain than of a freak breeze kicking up and blowing the papers over the balcony railing. He stands and hikes up his sweatpants.

  “Sit,” Connor tells Ian as if he were a dog and not a goldfish.

  Connor always wanted another dog. He grew up in the suburbs, a lonely boy in a neighborhood populated primarily by retirees, so his dog, Ian, had been his best friend. They had spent long, idle summers together, hanging out in the backyard or playing in the culvert that ran through a green space behind the house. Ian always waited for Connor after school. He seemingly knew what time the bell would ring. He occasionally misjudged it, however, and Connor would see him through the school window, sitting by the bike racks, sometimes waiting for hours.

  Then, one morning, the school bus ran Ian over. Connor had been so devastated his parents didn’t risk buying him another dog because they weren’t sure he would survive its eventual death. So through the rest of his summers, Connor had read comics in the backyard or halfheartedly played in the culvert alone.

  Connor had told Katie this story. She made that sympathetic smile that said “You poor thing” and “That’s so cute” and “I feel for you” all at once. Then she bought him the goldfish Ian as a companion, to temper the memory of his traumatic loss.

  “Here’s someone to share your time with when I’m not here,” she said, smiling her beautiful smile and presenting him with the plastic bag containing Ian.

  Deep down, subconsciously, Connor has grown to believe that Ian the goldfish is spiritually linked to Ian the dog, perhaps even to the extent that the fish is the dog reincarnate.

  The Seville on Roxy doesn’t allow dogs or cats or Katie would have bought him one, he is sure. Pets are only permitted with the approval of the building superintendent, a globe of a man named Jimenez. And Jimenez never approves pets except for single fish in small bowls. He believes that animals don’t belong inside, all pets are unclean, and large fish tanks pose too great a threat of leakage to the building and its occupants. Hence the limit of a one-gallon bowl.

  Connor grabs the cordless phone and slides the balcony door open. He steps into the apartment. It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust from the sunshine. The air feels cool on his back where it had been sweating against the lawn chair.

  After a few moments, he looks to the crumpled heap of pillows and sheets that crown his mattress and says, “You have to go. Right now. My girlfriend is coming up.”

  Connor crosses the room, trips on a beer bottle on the way, staggers a bit, and then recovers. He shakes the bed. “Get your stuff and go. I’ll call you later.” He waits a moment before whipping the sheets from the bed and dropping them to the floor.

  Faye moans and rolls onto her back. She lies before him on the mattress, unashamedly naked, unabashedly exposed, and unbelievably sexy. She blinks at Connor in the bright afternoon light.

  5

  In Which the Stoic Jimenez Tries to Fix the Elevator Despite Being Completely Unqualified to Do So

  Jimenez leans back in his chair and sighs. He pushes the front two legs from the floor, leaving it to totter on the rear two. The chair creaks a loud response to his shifting weight. The little room that serves as his office is hot and loud and white, lit by old fluorescent tubes that hum overhead. There’s a plastic placard embossed with the word “Maintenance” on the door, which is open, though it does nothing to freshen the stagnant air.

  In the next room, the massive boiler burner sparks and roars to life every fifteen minutes or so. Behind its rusted metal grille, a blue jet of natural gas flame heats a vat of water for the occupants of the Seville on Roxy. The jet ignites with a pop and whomp. The noise can be heard through the painted cinder block walls, and it reverberates within the vent that runs between the two rooms.

  Jimenez finds the sound of the mechanical monster next door both comforting and marvelous, a clockwork dragon heating a cauldron for the masses.

  That machine is the heart, pumping blood through the building. It provides unquestioningly and is overlooked by all but Jimenez. The hot water travels through the radiator pipes that send waves of heat into everyone’s apartment on the cool fall evenings. That water comes streaming out of the showerhead in the morning when tenants wash up for work and in the evenings when they clean themselves before bed. It washes their dishes and their clothes. It fills their buckets when they mop their floors on weekends. It’s in the room with them when they have friends over, and it sits quietly in the pipes while they sleep, waiting for the next time it is called to use. It’s a civilized and forgotten servant.

  Like the boiler, the Seville on Roxy would slowly become decrepit and fall apart if not for the attentions of the stoic Jimenez. Like the boiler, Jimenez is an essential and oft-ignored component of the building’s civility, without whom it would devolve swiftly and without recourse. Both reside in the basement, and both are heartbreakingly lonely.

  At the moment of listening to the boiler ignite, Jimenez folds his meaty hands, hairy fingers interlocking. He stretches his arms over his head, exposing the musky smell of his armpits, to which he gives a quick sniff in a matter-of-fact fashion. If anyone had been with him, watching in his small office, his manner is one that says, “Yes, I did just sniff my armpits, and the results are mixed. On one hand, I smell
. On the other, I worked hard all day and deserve to stink a little.”

  There are just two service requests left, each written on a little square of paper and skewered on a metal spike that sits by the old rotary phone on the corner of Jimenez’s desk. Even though his workday technically ended an hour ago, Jimenez is not one to leave service requests unattended. Also, he loves the order he brings to the building. Like the boiler, his work goes unnoticed and unappreciated, but he takes pride in everything working smoothly, in making every resident’s life a little easier.

  He lets the chair drop back to all four legs and pulls the last two service requests from the spike.

  The first one reads, “Leak under kitchen sink. Apartment 2507.” He stuffs that one in his pocket. The other he crumples and throws into the garbage can. He knows what it says. He has been putting it off all day, and now its time has come.

  With a sigh, he stands and grabs his tool belt from its hook near the door. He straps the belt on as he walks down an ashen-walled, dimly lit basement hallway and pushes his way through the stairwell door.

  As he trudges up the stairs, amid the jangling clatter of the tools hanging from his belt, Jimenez ruminates on why he doesn’t mind working late. Often, he stays in his basement office late into the evening, hours longer than he’s bound to by his job description. In exchange for his work, Jimenez receives a modest salary and a subsidized apartment on the third floor. Over the years, he has more than earned his balcony over the parking garage entrance, his view of the alley, and the summertime smells emanating from the Dumpster that sits under his bedroom window.

  He knows the answer. He works so hard because he’s lonely. There’s no one to go home to and no reason he shouldn’t stay late. Here, he feels needed. Here, he feels important, though few think of him when he isn’t fixing their leaking faucet or mopping up the overflow from a clogged toilet.

  I would only be missed if I wasn’t here, Jimenez thinks. People would ask, “Where’s that guy who always fixes stuff?” and, “Where’s the super at? My sink is backing up with stuff that smells like old milk.”