Fishbowl (10 page)

She watched Matt for hours across the kitchen from her chicken station. His wiry forearms, cables of muscle wrapped in smooth skin, rippled when he pulled patties from the burger steamer. She watched when he spun to put an order under the heat lamp. The way the poly-cotton-blend trousers stretched tight across the muscle of his buttocks when he twisted at the waist drew her eyes like quick movements draw those of a predator.

Claire looks at her arms. A fine dusting of flour and salt is caught in the sparse fuzz of blond hair. She stirs the ingredients in a large bowl, mixing it thoroughly and thinking about the span of time that has passed since Matt and how she looks older now even though it feels like not a week has passed. A twinge of melancholy catches in her stomach. The time has passed, she realizes. Every hour of it. Has Matt grown fat, lost his hair, or lost his tan?

Matt’s tan was beautiful, accentuated by the tangerine glow of the heat lamp near the burger steamer. Claire pictured him, his tan in perfect contrast to the pale skin underneath his clothes. His visor and shirt lay crumpled on her bedroom floor. Those poly-cotton-blend trousers, a patty-smelling grease stain on the hip from where he always wiped his hand, were draped over the corner of the nightstand. He held his boxers in one hand, the musky scent of his heat-lamp sweat clinging to the fabric, and she just watched him. She would have him stand there, turn one way and then angle the other, so she could see him differently in the light streaming through her bedroom window. The way the light played across the bends and curves of his body was entrancing.

All she had to do was close her eyes and there he was, in uniform, placing a burger in the rack. His left forearm, the one he let hang out the car window when he drove, was a darker shade of bronze.

They had dated. They had taken their meals and breaks together, huddled in the tiny staff area near the back door with the sound of the cooler fan running behind their talking. One summer night, when they had propped open the door to the parking lot to try to cool down the kitchen, Matt sat on a plastic crate across from her, coloring a kid’s meal place mat with crayons. It was a thick-lined map of the world. Matt shaded some African country orange.

“What country is that?” Claire asked.

“Don’t know.” Matt continued to color. Without looking up he asked, “Want to go there with me?”

Claire said she did and, because of her youth, it was easy to mean it. She would have gone with him. He drove her home after work that night. They kissed in front of her house. They felt each other’s bodies through their uniforms, which still carried the smell of fast food, the scent of canola oil from the deep fryer.

Canola oil, Claire thinks. That’s the other trick. Never use canola oil for the crust. A quarter cup of olive oil. It’s a heavier, more brutish oil, but it brings a palette with it that the blank-canvas taste of the dainty canola oil lacks. Also, the fragrance of olive oil doesn’t carry the same memories that the thin golden canola does.

It doesn’t remind her of the string of unfulfilling men in uniform who followed Matt, nor does it remind her of how much time has passed since she felt that … thing inside her chest that she felt for Matt. She worries that the giddy, overpowering feeling of Matt has blackened, shriveled up, and blown away into dust.

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.

*   *   *

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.