Fishbowl: A Novel Read online

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  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 water
spout, 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.

  In the hairbreadth of time it takes him to span the gap between the twenty-fourth and twentieth floors, Ian knows this. Even as the memory of Troy and the pink plastic castle and his fishbowl fade, this one certainty remains embedded and true. His basic desire to explore, the very reason for his existence, has hung him in the sky.

  Let boredom be to the snails!

  And so Ian plummets toward the pavement.

  11

  In Which Katie Demands Satisfaction from the Elevator Button

  The foyer door closes quietly behind Katie. The little hydraulic arm flexes, and the noise from cars passing by on the street outside becomes muted by a layer of glass and steel. As Katie crosses the lobby, she doesn’t notice that the wilted brown potted plants have been replaced by a lush silk terrarium, nor does she notice how well the new silk plants have been watered. She doesn’t notice how the tile has been polished to a high, reflective gloss and how there’s not a scuff mark to be seen. However, the lingering smell of lemons, bleach, and vinegar in the air can’t be missed.

  Katie arrives at the elevators and presses the button with the arrow that once pointed at the ceiling but now misses it because, over time, it has become skewed about thirty degrees from vertical. The button now points to a sconce to the top right of the elevator door, and it clicks audibly when Katie pokes it. Katie waits in a silence that should be filled by the distant mechanical hum of the elevator moving. She glares at the button and then pokes it again. Waits. Then pokes it vigorously and repeatedly, the button sounding like an agitated cricket in the calm of the lobby.

  The first press is to summon the elevator, wherever it hangs in the twenty-seven-story blackness of the shaft that vaults from here into the sky. The second press is because the button failed to illuminate from the first. It’s a finicky thing. The opaque plastic lights up with a creamy glow from that second push. The last presses are frustration-induced jabs, violent pokings that eventually cause fingertip numbness.

  Katie’s emotions are all backed up, and she wants to get this over with. While the severe poking she subjects the button to does little to speed up the elevator’s descent, it does vent a tiny toot of malcontentedness. She wants to be standing in front of Connor. She’s impatient to confront him, have her resolution, and then move on with life. The afternoon has taken its time, slow seconds passing by to make up a minute and those minutes dripping by even more painfully to make an hour. All of them building to an end of her shift at the grocery store where she works, and each of them marking her passage from there to here. She didn’t have the frame of mind to marvel how each second, on its own, was a useless freeze frame, but all of them compiled made something much more coherent.

  Her finger jabs.

  The first joint flexes backward, and the pink skin under her fingernail flashes white with each stab. It’s a pacifying action, one that gives the same false sense of command over a helpless situation that floating seat cushions do on passenger jets crossing the frigid Atlantic at forty thousand feet. Those cushions won’t do much in a five-hundred-mile-per-hour nosedive into the roiling ocean water. Even if, by some miracle, anyone survives, those cushions won’t do much against the hypothermia and numbing freezing death that awaits the survivors. But it’s comforting to know they’re there, just in case. It’s just like how, if Katie pictures the button being Connor’s chest, she knows jabbing it won’t change anything, but each word punctuated by a poke brings an elevated level of calm with it.

  “You’ve”—jab—“neglected”—jab—“my”—jab—“feelings”—jab—“for”—jab—“too”—jab—“long.” Sob. “I need to know you love me back.” Jab.

  Katie imagines Connor’s smooth, deep voice stuttering out an answer. She pictures the stupid look on his handsome face, a look of surprise. It’s the look of a trapped animal. His square jaw slack, the bow of his perfectly kissable lips hangs open. His voice, halting and hesitant, says, “Baby, uh, you know I do, uh, you’re the greatest.” Pause. “I think you’re really great, uh.”

  She needs to hear him say the actual words, and she will tell him so.

  “I love you. There are two things you can say right now.” Jab. “Pick one and say it. I’ll know if you’re lying.”

  Katie doesn’t know what he’ll say, but she’ll watch for that quick twitch or that momentary aversion of gaze signifying lying or avoidance. If he says the words back to her and if he really means them, she will make love to him right then. If he hesitates at the wrong spot, she will know. If he lies or can’t say it back, she will take her toothbrush, her favorite coffee mug, and her pink nightshirt and go. She’ll slam his apartment door as hard as she can on her way out. Damn the neighbors too.

  The elevator chimes Katie’s thoughts back to the lobby. The doors slowly part, revealing Jimenez standing there like the world’s least appealing peep show dancer. He holds a screwdriver in one meaty fist and has a tiny golden screw cupped in the other. His tool belt has slipped off his hips and taken his pants down slightly as well. The smallest glimpse of his belly can be had, exposed from under his bowling shirt. Katie tries not to let her eye be drawn to the lobe of flesh, but she finds it hard to resist the spectacle.

  Katie isn’t sure what Jimenez’s first name is. She’s seen him around the building on occasion and knows his surname from his seemingly unending wardrobe of bowling shirts with the name “Jimenez” embroidered on an oval patch and sewn on the breast pocket. They’ve said a few words in passing and always share a smile or a nod when they see each other. He seems like a nice man.

  Jimenez and Katie stare at each other for a moment, Jimenez with his eyebrows lifted and his forehead wrinkled, Katie with her finger still extended like a gunslinger’s hip shot aimed at the elevator button. Each is seemingly surprised by the other’s presence.

  “Elevators are broke, lady,” Jimenez says. “They ain’t going up or down. You gotta use the stairs.”

  The stairs, Katie thinks. I have to hike up hundreds of stairs to the twenty-seventh floor. Then, most likely, have my heart broken, and then have to hike back down hundreds of stairs again, listening to the sounds of my own crying echoing back at me from the heights of the stairwell. Katie’s emotions oscillate between self-pity and rage at Connor, a heady and unstable mix that leaves her uncertain of how much control she will be able to exert over herself.

  Katie’s stomach clenches when she thinks, Twenty-seven floors of hearing myself cry.

  She feels like bawling right there, just to get it over with. The sooner she starts, the sooner she’ll find catharsis, and then, done with it, her emotions will be free to heal as much as they can and move on. Instead, she stands with dry eyes, embarrassed and exposed in front of the building superintendent. Her upper lip wobbles into an unsteady smile, and she sighs. Her chin puckers once before she pulls herself together.

  She will be strong.

  She is prepared.

  “Sorry,” Jimenez says.

  Katie realizes that there was a long and very awkward
moment while she had been thinking, staring wordlessly at Jimenez.

  Jimenez, the poor man, she thinks. I’m making this so hard on him. He’s not to blame. He’s such a nice guy too. He always says “Hi.”

  “Not your fault,” Katie says and takes a moment to construct a more believable smile. “Thanks, I’ll take the stairs.”

  Why did I thank him? Katie wonders as she crosses the lobby to the stairwell. He didn’t do anything wrong, but he didn’t do anything right either. He hadn’t brought her good news.

  She hears the elevator doors bing and slide closed again. Without looking back, she pushes through the stairwell door and starts her ascent.

  12

  In Which the Evil Seductress Faye Bids Adieu to the Villain Connor Radley

  Faye rolls onto her side. The mattress whispers under her. It doesn’t creak or moan; it’s just a mattress on the floor. The sheets feel amazing against her skin, a feather-soft embrace of her entire body that makes her achingly aware of every inch of naked flesh. A bead of sweat tickles a path from her armpit down the side of her breast. She shivers from the sensation and lets out a quivering breath at its touch. Her body is horribly spent but still beautifully charged.

  The little studio apartment that crowns the Seville on Roxy is stiflingly hot. The air is stale and damp, like every breath of it has been used a hundred times. The late-afternoon sun streams through the balcony door, which is why she pulls the sheets up over her head, an attempt to fend off the light. She looks up, through the wrinkled tunnel of fabric, and she sees Connor Radley, barefoot and shirtless, his knobby spine curved, working on the pile of papers stacked on his lap. Just that glimpse of him is enough to spark her, a seed of desire to mount him mercilessly and ride him again until he’s completely drained.