Fishbowl: A Novel Page 8

  The oven chimes that it’s preheated. Then the power flickers, the lights go off, and the oven dies. As quickly as it happened, it hums back to life and the oven chimes again. The clock flashes a row of eights, and Claire starts poking buttons to reset it.

  She and Matt were so young. The country he asked her to visit was Gabon. She looked it up. They never went to Gabon together. They didn’t talk about it again. Instead, they went to different colleges in different parts of the country and drifted apart. Their geography just didn’t work.

  Then there were the uniformed men who followed. All wonderful in their own right, but none was Matt. None was as young or so captivating, and with each passing day, she found it harder to reclaim that immersion she had found in him. Claire realized it was a change in herself. She loved with less ease and more caution as the days passed by. She would no longer go to Gabon as she once would have when casually asked the question.

  There was Peter, the ice cream guy with his gaily striped red-and-white uniform. His hands were always cool, and his eyes were full of light, as if he were a child. Ming, the mailman, sported a regal deep-blue uniform. He would leave before sunup and be home by noon. He had amazing calves, solid like rocks, and a lilting voice she could listen to for hours. Chuck, the hospital janitor, wore a stark, crisp white button-down shirt and linen pants. Claire loved the way he smelled. His skin like almonds, always fresh like after a shower.

  And there was Ahmed, the security guard. His uniform was a sleek, tailored black. Ahmed made her nervous in a way she liked, but for only a short time. It was the way he would practice hand-to-hand combat in the mirror, shirtless, swinging his flashlight around like a baton and clubbing invisible assailants. Ahmed’s violence had never transposed itself onto Claire, but she grew increasingly untrusting of its presence in the apartment. He did not take it well when she left.

  Claire shakes Ahmed from her thoughts and glances at the phone. She thinks back on the strange call from the front door and tries to ignore the unease that settles over her.

  “Gotcha, kiddo,” the voice said just before the fast static noise that sounded like violence. Surely it was a misdialed number, but even so, it was from the front door, so close to home that she can’t help but think that someone in her building was in obvious and serious trouble. It is unsettling, the thought of that so close to her. But what can she do?

  The oven chimes again, reminding her that it’s preheated to four hundred degrees Fahrenheit and awaiting a quiche.

  17

  In Which Homeschooled Herman Makes a Startling Discovery

  Herman’s heart hammers against his chest, battering against his rib cage with both fists. His shoe squeaks like a startled bird as he spins on the ball of his foot. The small plastic sign riveted to the cinder block wall reads “Floor 6.” The lights blink off, the stairwell goes dark, and the sign blacks out of sight. Herman stumbles on a stair, and a thought flashes through his mind: Has it happened again? Am I still here? He grabs for the railing and finds it in the dark but not before grazing his shin on a concrete riser.

  No, he thinks, I’m still here. The pain tells me so. He draws a quick breath through his teeth to fight off a yelp from his injured shin.

  The lights flash on again, and with them, a mountain of a man blinks into existence half a flight ahead of him. The big man stops, leans on the railing, and then looks over his shoulder. He’s huffing from the exertion of his climb. There are damp moats under his arms and a sweaty V shape between his shoulder blades. There’s a gap between him and the wall, and without breaking his stride, Herman slides through that space between flesh and concrete. Herman’s vision is jaunty with movement, but his mind is smooth with autonomic motion. It feels like he’s floating, moving without thought, just pure action.

  “Easy there, kid,” the man says.

  The voice fades to echoes behind Herman as he rounds the next landing and launches up another flight of stairs.

  Herman knows he has to slow down soon. He isn’t fit enough to be sprinting up stairs for too long. His attentions have always been geared toward the academic at the expense of the physical. This has left him weedy and weak. He always has believed the body to be an appendix, an organ that society has outgrown and civilization has now rendered useless in favor of the brain. He realizes now that this deduction was a mistake.

  How could I have been so blind to sit out of every gym class? he thinks. Was “social dance” really too strenuous? He realizes now that one never knows when one needs strong legs.

  Ten more floors, two flights of stairs each, twenty in total, Herman thinks, vaulting up the next flight. The distance isn’t that far, but he feels like he can’t cover it fast enough. His legs burn with exertion. His lungs strain to provide oxygen to his muscles. Herman knows something is wrong in his apartment.

  Don’t let it be true, his thoughts beg. A tear streams from the corner of his eye and traces a glistening arc over the curve of his cheek.

  He can’t remember the last time he felt such fear and anxiety. He wills his body not to collapse. He wills his mind to focus, cursing it as useless at this crucial point when it was needed more than ever.

  As it often does, his mind starts releasing contorted images and filling in the gaps of time and place from his recent blackout. They filter back in disjointed bits and pieces, a puzzle he has to construct an image from. Herman remembers being upstairs, in the apartment. Grandpa was there, sitting in the living room, reading the paper. A cup of tea sat on the side table, releasing a wispy thread of steam into the late-afternoon light.

  Herman was working on a trigonometry assignment Grandpa had given him. The calculations of angles and lengths flash through his mind as a series of numbers on a page. The memory of his desk, the page on it, the equations scrawled across the paper, some crossed out and others circled. The pencil strokes were clear and magnified, viewed from so close they were pock-marked, thick graphite lines striking out across the fibrous expanse of paper. The tip of the pencil was a waxy moon rock from this magnified perspective.

  There was silence. The ticking clock in the living room, the street noise crawling into the apartment from outside, the whirring of the fridge’s compressor from the kitchen, all those usual noises that the brain typically ignored, they were absent. It was all quiet outside. The only sounds came from inside Herman. Herman breathing. Herman’s blood rushing in pulsing fits through his body. Herman inhaling as he pushed his chair back from the desk and stood. Herman huffing and rasping his way up one flight and to the next. The sound of his breathing is exaggerated by the close spaces of the stairwell, reverberating off the hard surfaces. The sound of his pulse deafens his ears.

  There are voices in the stairwell, coming from above or below he can’t tell. What they’re saying, he can’t tell. Echoes contort the sounds. Voices bounce off the walls so many times that they become garbled and unclear. Voices thick in the air all around, his memory drags one out of the din and into clarity. It’s his own voice in the silence of his apartment, sounding muffled in the flesh and bone of his own head, calling out after a moment’s pondering.

  “Grandpa,” it said. Herman stood, waiting for a response that didn’t come.

  The quiet in the apartment was unsettling. All the sounds in the world had been turned off. The automatic sounds of the apartment, the clock, the bustle of the lady in the apartment next door, the ticking of the radiator, all were absent. Herman knew something was wrong. His body knew too. This breed of silence often came before the blackness.

  “Grandpa? Are you there?” His voice was small.

  Another moment passed.

  Again, no response.

  Herman dropped his pencil to the desk. It rolled across the piece of paper, tracking a kaleidoscope of scribbled equations before falling to the floor. It didn’t emit the clatter it should have, just the motion. Herman heard his breathing, felt the friction of his chest, the constriction of the air passing through the hollows of his body.

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  The sign on the wall reads “Floor 15.” Herman pushes the bar on the door, depressing the latch to release the bolt to shoulder the door and fly through the frame into the hallway. The lights are dim and the carpet is dark. Apartment numbers, brass numerals tacked to the doors, tick by his vision. As he runs up the hall, he grabs at his shoelace necklace and pulls the apartment key from under his shirt. The metal is warmed to body temperature, courtesy of its resting against his chest.

  Herman wonders how he wound up in the elevator, how it had come to rest on the lobby floor, and, most important, why both of these things came to be. Those were the significant gaps in his recollection. The method and purpose of his movements during his blackout are still lost to him. However, he suspects he will find the reasons when he opens the apartment door.

  The elevator.

  He remembers the elevator didn’t come when he pressed the button. He had wanted to take it to the lobby, but there were no sounds, no machinery noises in the elevator shaft, no wheels running or cables grinding behind the steel doors when he summoned it. Yet he was in the elevator on the lobby level when he awoke.

  Herman remembers the apartment door isn’t locked as he reaches for the handle. He left without locking it. That part he remembers as he flings open the door. Herman runs past the hallway closet, past the kitchen, and into the living room.

  Grandpa’s reading light is on. Steam no longer rises from the teacup sitting on the side table. At that moment, his fragmented memory and his reality merge. He has been here in this place at this specific time before. He has traveled back in time to the point of his discovery.

  Grandpa sits in his recliner, his newspaper in his lap and his arm draped over the side of the armrest. Anyone fresh upon the scene would see an old man who has fallen asleep reading the paper in his favorite chair. Herman has been here before though, and the reading lamp casts Grandpa’s slack mouth and stubble-covered chin in a high-contrast, wrinkly death mask.

  Grandpa’s dead, Herman remembers. And it’s my fault.

  Herman blacks out. His body hits the floor with the carelessness of the completely unconscious.

  18

  In Which Ian Learns of the Final Betrayal of His Body

  We left the little nugget of Ian’s body pinned perilously to the sky, hanging somewhere in the nothingness alongside the twentieth floor of the Seville on Roxy. We left him contemplating, in the fleeting way that only a goldfish can, his species’ desire for freedom and the golden era of that quest for new territory, the early days of fish rainings. We also left him stoutly resolute that jumping from the balcony was a sound and reasonable choice for a goldfish to make.

  And so, just one drop in the torrential downpour of fish rainings, Ian continues his descent. However, what started off as a leisurely tumble through the air has quickly become a more harrowing and dreadful experience. Having passed through the strata of Connor Radley’s thesis, he has no further aesthetically pleasing distractions like those peaceful pages still fluttering around above him. Ian catches glimpses of the pages up there, flickering on and off as they waft in the breezeless, failing afternoon light. It’s a peaceful image that’s in stark contrast to the feel of the wind shear buffeting Ian’s lateral line, the pinstripe of sensory epithelial cells that runs down the length of every fish’s body.

  The lateral line is, firstly, a physiological adaptation to sense changes in water turbulence and aid in schooling with fellow fish. Coincidentally, and still unbeknownst to science, it’s also a means to judge airspeed. The feeling of the wind on his lateral line is not unpleasant. It’s akin to being in the middle of a big school of fellow fish. A warm feeling of brotherhood and camaraderie floods through Ian’s mind, and if his musculature were equipped to smile, he would. While incapable of higher thought, Ian is reactionary on a base level, and the feeling of friendship and family is something he understands.

  Presently, Ian twists sidelong to the ground. By the nature of his physiology, this leaves one eye staring at the wide-open sky, with its fluttering pages and balconies passing by, and the other eye on his destination, the hard ground below. In turn, this leaves his brain conflicted. Is he to be calmed by the peaceful enormity of the crystal-blue sky and the beautifully clear day? If this is the case, Ian wishes he had eyelids to squint against the brilliance of the late-afternoon sun. Alternately, is he to be in absolute terror of the approaching sidewalk? If this is the case, Ian wishes he had eyelids to close in fright against the impending doom. Ian isn’t sure which he is supposed to feel. The result is a middling emotional state, that fine point between absolute panicked fear and complete transcendental calm.

  Seven stories have passed since Ian began his descent, and already he is moving at quite a speed. He has fallen roughly a quarter the distance between his bowl and the pavement. Rounding up by a few milliseconds, that is roughly one second into his fall. In this short distance, he has already reached a speed of twenty-two miles per hour. To this point, there’s a steadily building headwind, which Ian finds increasingly uncomfortable, primarily due to its drying qualities. Again, he finds his lack of eyelids and tear ducts to be quite a disadvantage.

  In the manic shaking and trembling of his vision induced by the fall, his earthbound eye registers something interesting far below on the street. It offers a welcome distraction from the gumbo of confusing sensations he experiences. Ian sees flashing red lights strobing the building-shadowed street below.

  When did that get there? he wonders. Has it always been there, or did it just arrive?

  The lights are attached to a little box with large black numbers painted on the roof. An ambulance has pulled to the curb in front of the Seville. Traffic on Roxy has slowed in response, clotting up as it approaches the vehicle and then freeing up afterward. The aesthetic grips Ian’s mind for the moment. The perspective of it fascinates him. From this height, there’s a reassurance from a vehicle that indicates dire trouble, attesting to the fact that, from a distance, even a disaster can look peaceful.

  The bustle below has slowed, calmed in the presence of the emergency vehicle, creating a coursing, multicolored thread of cars free to flow once past the ambulance. Somewhere, there’s an injured person or some other crisis. Viewed from up here, the spinning bank of red lights is tranquil, rhythmically flashing off the shadowed metal and glass and concrete and all the other hard surfaces below. They say that help has arrived. Cars slow to a crawl, and the little specks of people walking the sidewalk mill about. They stop in groups and wonder what is going on.

  Ian can see the clusters of them. He wishes that Troy the snail were with him to share the sight. Even though Troy is infuriatingly dim-witted, Ian feels that he would have liked to see this and would have enjoyed the experience.

  Ian is torn from the scene when, as he falls past the eighteenth floor, he discovers the final betrayal of his body. His instinct for freedom has led to several such revelations so far. Even in the short second of his flight, the experience has been more edifying than the months he spent in his bowl. He not only has found that he can’t breathe in this atmosphere but also that eyelids are handy devices and evolution has left him ill prepared for flight. Now he learns that the aerodynamic nature of his body, which allows him to slice through water so effortlessly, with the right amount of wind shear transforms him into a streamlined, nose-down golden rocket. It pushes his tail to the sky and forces his head ground-ward. The turbulence compels his body to wiggle in a fashion not dissimilar to swimming in a strong current. No longer does he tumble. His descent becomes much more sinister and direct through the shrieking air.

  He can no longer see the bright-blue sky or the milling, growing crowd below him. He’s bracketed by buildings, towers of concrete, metal, and glass screaming by, and can’t see anything save the blurred and rhythmic tick-tick of the balconies and windows passing by from nose to tail. With the speed and determination of a bomb, he plummets past the seventeenth floor into another, terrifying cycle of his memo
ry.

  In this cycle, Ian thinks, Now … what was I doing?

  He will again realize that he’s falling, and within moments, he will meet the sidewalk at the building’s entrance.

  19

  In Which Our Heroine Katie Finds the Magic of Love in the Cleaning Supply Room Under the Stairs

  Life and all the sounds associated with it are muffled and distorted in the stairwell. The concrete walls act to trap the noises in and keep all the other life noises out. Katie thinks of her heart in the same way. It lets in the love and the pain, and it doesn’t let anything else through. She has never truly gotten over her past heartbreaks. Every time, her heart just cracks a little more. It never heals; it’s something she has just learned to live with.

  She met Connor during his office hours in his tiny, shared office under the stairs in the anthropology department. It was a dusty old building built more than a century ago, a collage of crumbling honey-colored brick, rippled glass windows, and the incongruous modernity of air-conditioning units and energy-efficient lighting.

  Connor’s office was tucked in a ground-floor corner of the building. There were two desks, one crammed under the sloping rise of the underbelly of the staircase and the other wedged between a couple of vertical pipes. One pipe consistently radiated heat, and the other made trickling sounds whenever someone flushed a toilet or ran a tap in the men’s washroom on the floor above.

  There were books stacked on every flat surface, photocopied papers piled on the floor, and coffee cups scattered in a random constellation around the room. It was stuffy and musty with the smells of dust and old paper. The lighting was dim and yellow, cast from two desk lamps and a weak, naked bulb overhead. There was no number or name emblazoned on the office door, just the worn stenciled words “Cleaning Supplies.”