Don't Clean the Aquarium!

by Osier, Jeffrey

  And then there were only the five of us. My mother, still shouting at the retreating crowd, so choked by her own tears that I couldn’t understand a word she said. That gray, angry old man, still leaning on a cane and staring at his own knuckles. Next to him stood the giant who’d saved the little girl. He was glowering at the final figure in that tableau: a pale, ragged man kneeling on the floor, his tussled hair almost touching the pool of blood and vomit that spread outward from his knees.

  My father. At first he seemed not much bigger than me, and so weighted down that he would never be able to unfold himself, never stand upright, never walk away. Never escape the grip that man’s stare had on him.

  No one would look at the old giant—not my mother, not the man next to him, and of course not my father. Only me. I could not look away from those glittering blue eyes, the wing-like sweep of white hair across those brow ridges, cheeks so ancient, their lines so deep they resembled the bark on the tree next to him. And that deep, diagonal gash across his face, not so much a scar as a fissure from which he hurled his contempt at my father.

  When he turned his gaze toward me, his expression softened, his lips parting into something that may have been meant as a smile.

  My father was on his feet when I turned to him again. My mother was quiet, trying to walk alongside him, but she held back when he refused to acknowledge her. He stooped to pick up a pair of suitcases while my mother took the third. Neither spared a look for me. Only the old giant—and now his companion—had eyes for me. I unleashed my most fearsome four-year-old’s scowl, then gave a tentative glance to the pool my father had left behind, and then began following my parents towards the set of double doors that led from the Hive to the outside.

  Doors I had not seen opened all summer.

  There were moments when he seemed to have no idea where the door was, or what was straight ahead, or up, or down. My mother rushed on ahead of him to open the door. As she propped the door open with her suitcase, she saw me as though for the first time, and motioned for me to hurry.

  I ran out onto the Hive’s dilapidated porch but stopped dead when I saw the clouds drifting across the gray sky, the forest blanketing the horizon, and the sickly translucence of my father’s skin as he dropped the suitcases and fell to his knees, sobbing in humiliation. He looked up, meaning to shout something at my mother, but saw me first. He looked so sad and alone. I could not imagine what they had done to him, or why. It was only by living my summer in that Hive, and seeing the expression on that old giant’s face, that I could believe the world capable of shaming my father into such a state. His expression spanned so wildly that I thought it was the wind, battering his features about in a cruel game, just for their amusement. Or perhaps for my amusement. Look, there he is again. Let’s see if we can make him laugh!

  Father grabbed my wrist and pulled me to him, hugging me desperately, while my mother called out his name, my name. Our name.

  He smelled terrible. Protruding from the side of his neck was a bloody, thumb-sized splinter.

  ~ * ~

  RADIO GLOSSOLALIA

  It had nothing to do with the world outside his apartment or the darkness beyond the borders of his reading lamp. It wasn't the irritation or disillusionment he was beginning to feel over the promotional package he was putting together for a film entitled 'Your Urinary System and You' (third edition). And in the end, it wasn't even the realization that he was beginning to detest every piece of music he encountered along the radio dial. He stopped there, he dropped everything from his lap, he turned up the volume and just sat there, mouth open and brow tensed, because of what it was, all the things it could not be mistaken for, because somewhere deeper than he'd ever known, it was possible to reach inside of himself, he recognized it.

  For just an instant Eddie mistook it for a late night evangelist's sermon. There was something to the resonance and cadences of that voice that made him think of the scornful, embittered religious services of his youth. But it wasn’t a language he recognized. In fact, it resembled nothing he'd ever heard in his life. The mixture of quick, clipped, and then long, rolling phonemes, and the strange inevitability with which they succeeded each other, seemed almost to hypnotize him. At times the long tones followed one after another, each one sustaining longer than the last, and the voice began to swell into an almost unbearable drone. Occasionally a weak, timid chorus would reply during a pause, or would synchronize with a long, complex passage. Sometimes it fell silent altogether. But it always returned.

  For over an hour he sat, concentrating on this chanting, sometimes waiting for it to end so that an announcer would come on and explain what it was, sometimes trying to guess the language, but most of the time just lost within the rhythms and timbres of that Voice, watching as the light around him intensified and the darkness beyond it deepened, and feeling the forms and odors and ideas awaken and squirm in the pit of his being—not ready to rise into his thoughts just yet, but reminding his blood and muscles and bones of their existence.

  Eventually the static ate its way through the signal and no amount of fiddling with the dial could bring it back. He sat there for a while, lost, while the room around him came back to life and the vague, primeval hum inside of him faded to silence.

  It wasn't until three days later that he even recalled the incident. He couldn't remember where on the radio dial he'd even found it. A vague recognition of the hypnotic excitement those sounds had stirred in him resurfaced, but he dismissed it and moved on to more immediate matters, such as the classroom guide for the video version of 'The Story of the Spleen.'

  He found it again, under almost identical circumstances, a month later. It was the same voice, the same . . . words. He wondered ifit might be a rebroadcast of some kind of avant-garde performance. He decided to wait until its conclusion and find out just exactly what it was, and then remembered how elusiveand irretrievable the signal had grown the last time.

  He popped a tape into the cassette deck and began recording. He wrote down the frequency at the top of the page on which he was composing his text and then sat back to listen.

  It was so irritating, so monotonous, that at first he wondered what had drawn him into it so completely the first time. He turned down the volume and got back to work. But even then, even at a whisper, the Voice was persistent. And it was speaking to him. Eventually the legal pad and his Xeroxed notes were pushed aside and he raised the volume . . . and then raised it again. Finally, he fell back into his chair and the world beyond his lamplight receded into an unfocused distance.

  The sound of the tape clicking off jolted him out of those weightless, limitless distances. The signal remained strong and clear and the fury of the Voice was intensifying. He flipped the tape over, hit record and sat back pensively, shutting his eyes, trying to recreate a state that had enveloped him only a minute before but which now seemed to have dissipated entirely. The spell was broken.

  As a last, desperate resort, he shut off the light.

  Where did the black world of his living room, the radio and the Voice end, and where did sleep, with its strange, disturbing dreams begin?

  Eddie sat up in the chair at 6:30 AM, looked about the room and listened to the sounds of early morning outside his windows. Inside his head he grabbed at a vocabulary and an encyclopedia of visions that slithered into his unconscious while he was in the very act of trying to recall them. They just . . . disappeared.

  Down there.

  There was nothing but static at that frequency on the FM dial. He popped out the tape and grimaced when he realized that he'd just erased his all-time favorite jazz tape: Coltrane's 'A Love Supreme' and Miles Davis' 'In a Silent Way' for the sake of . . . what?

  Something that . . .

  For just a moment something seemed to tug at him: a whisper, an aspect to this room he'd never noticed before. It disappeared with an urgent crack. Reality asserted itself; he looked down at the tape label one last time before peeling it off and tossing the tape into his br
iefcase.

  That morning he gave the tape to Claire, the company's International Marketing Manager, and asked her to listen to it at her leisure, find out what language it was, if she could, and figure out what it all meant.

  She had it back that afternoon. She had this look on her face when she handed it back to him, and at first he took it as a sign of recognition.

  "What is it? Any idea?"

  "Well, it isn't any language I know. It doesn't really sound like a language at all. It's like . . . glossolalia."

  "What?"

  "Glossolalia. Speaking in tongues. You know . . . like a kind of ecstatic prattle . . ."

  He nodded. The expression on her face was severe and . . . suspicious.

  "Eddie? Are you all right? What's this all about?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean, why'd you do it? And then ask me to tell you what language it was in. Did you really think you were—"

  "Wait a second. Do you think that's me? I recorded that off the radio. Off of . . . um . . . look, 94.5 FM."

  "It's your voice, Eddie. It's you. Don't tell me you got it off the radio. Is this some kind of prank or something?"

  He stood suddenly. "Some kind of prank?" He could feel the rage tightening his face.

  As Claire backed out of his office, he noted a look of fear, even revulsion, in her eyes. He paced the tiny office, trying to think through what had just happened. Finally, he packed up and left, even though it was only 3:15.

  When he got home he made a brief recording of his voice and played it back. Then he listened to the tape he'd made the night before.

  It was his voice. How could he have not recognized his own voice? He listened to every syllable, every shout and whisper, and heard himself. Even the weak background voices sounded like him. He shut it off. He pulled the loop of tape out and began disemboweling it into the trash bin, shouting and swearing as the thin strands of recording tape began to accumulate atop the food scraps and crumpled paper, until the things escaping his mouth no longer sounded like words, and the unwinding vision beneath him ceased to resemble a trash bin full of cassette tape. The tape was alive and squirming with fear as it plunged down the infinite depths of a thorned, segmented gullet, screaming an agonized, pleading reply to the seething stream of glossolalia from Eddie's clenched, frothing mouth.

  He stopped, dead silent, and backed away.

  That was it. No more! This had to stop, and it would stop. Now.

  When he dared to open his mouth again and speak, he recognized the words as, "There, are we all right now?" He looked into the trash bin. Just trash: food, paper and an unraveled cassette.

  He stopped listening to the radio after that. He'd play tapes at night, or just let the TV murmur in the background. Once, however, he did check out 94.5 FM. Nothing but static.

  Eddie realized that, whatever had happened on these two, no, three occasions, he'd been on the brink of something catastrophic—a breakdown without precedent. He backed off, embraced routine, embraced boredom. He severed what limited, tenuous social contact he had with the outside world. He focused all of his strength on preparing the guides and promotions for an endless, numbing string of educational films and videos.

  But even these precautions seemed inadequate. Because nothing was harder to secure than silence and light. The world was a cacophony of voices and machines and music, even the weather had a voice. The most he could hope for was to shut out that cacophony, and even then it was all there—an inviting hum just beyond his windows. And amid all the sunlight and room light there were always shadows, some of them pure black slivers in which anything could appear, leaking out towards the edges of the light, threatening to swallow the world.

  But the fears and suspicions appeared ungrounded, and after a few weeks, the brief, flickering movements in the darkness disappeared and he no longer feared, no longer thought about the Voice.

  Once again, the real world asserted itself, and he felt its reassuring grip over him, over the sights and sounds that homed in on his eyes and ears. And so he was left friendless and isolated, enmeshed in the minutiae of a job he detested.

  And then, one night the following winter, while passing through the nearly deserted tunnel that connected the Dearborn to the State Street subways, there was a blind black man in tattered winter wear, beating out a rhythm with his cup of coins and singing a wordless, blue-noted lament. The glossolalia episode was no more than a harmless memory now, like a long-ago bout of pneumonia, and he hadn't thought about it in some time. Now he stopped and listened to the rich, gravely voice echo down the tiled walls of the tunnel, carefully trying to connect each and every phoneme, to either make out the words or else . . . what?

  The man quieted down and nodded a greeting at Eddie. Embarrassed that he'd been noticed, he stepped forward, grabbing at the loose change in his pocket as the singing resumed. And as he heard the coins crash and the voice twisting in rhythm to it, a certain, almost recognizable succession of phonemes passes. Chilled, he backed away.

  He listened to the singer's echo all the rest of the way down the tunnel, and that vague recognition passed. He reminded himself how nice it was to use this shortcut late at night, away from the crowds, away from the Singing Troll, the obnoxious folksinger who seemed to roost there during every morning and evening rush hour.

  Later, while listening to a radio broadcast of the Hindemith Violin Concerto, he began to notice a mumbling static building up from underneath. He tried to readjust the dial but no matter what he did, the interference grew stronger, until finally it overwhelmed and obliterated the music, replacing it with a voice, not his own, but similar to the voice of the blind singer, crying out an ecstatic chant. He turned the dial to a nearby rock station, but within minutes, the glossolalia totally overwhelmed it.

  He shut off the radio.

  From that point on, the glossolalia asserted its grip on reality just as he'd feared it might the summer before—a whisper or a crackle or a roar that could appear at any time from any source—from a radio, from a passing siren, from the voice of a colleague or television personality, or even the leafless, frozen trees above him. During daylight hours, out in public, the Voice never lasted more than a few seconds, but it was always distinct and unmistakable. At night, in solitude, it was continuous and impossible to escape.

  Soon he surrendered himself to the nightly attack. The glossolalia followed him across the radio dial, and he continued to lead it, never trying to escape, just testing the limits of its power over him. It was overwhelming in its persistence.

  And yet . . . something was missing. He'd concentrate on the nightly broadcasts, stop beneath the whispering trees, eavesdrop on subway conversations that suddenly seemed to degenerate—apparently without anyone else noticing it—into that familiar pattern of sounds. As the winter progressed, he grew fascinated with the way it seemed to be eating away at the world. But it did not have the hypnotic, hallucinogenic effect it had once had on him.

  One night, as he was laying in bed in the dark, listening to the Voice, his thoughts retreated to the previous summer, to the vision within the trash bin, and realized that this memory, once so fearful, had suddenly become a source of great yearning. The screams of that unwinding strand of tape had been something more than fear. He recognized that the unseen depths within that pit were the focus of this intense but apparently unquenchable yearning.

  He had been opened up for just a few shadowy moments to something vast and monstrous coiled in his core, something that had threatened to explode forth into an all-consuming landscape and population—the reflection of a million years of fear and horror, all filtered through him. The glossolalia was the key to that world. That key burned in his hands and he'd fled from it, afraid to think that he might have to confront and flee from it again.

  But all that was changed now. The world itself was now the interference pattern, an overwhelming barrage of visual and aural clutter that had been drowning out the glossolalia for his entire life. A
nd now, nothing more than a withdrawn madman, he could only listen as the glossolalia leaked through the conversations and clattering and hissing that filled his ears, indecipherable descriptions of a world he was too blind to see.

  One morning he left the apartment and heard the Voice somewhere above him. It moved through the trees over his head and he could hear, underpinning the whispered chanting, the rustling of cold, bare branches. It teased him like this every morning.

  But today, as he crossed the street, the Voice deepened into a roar. He whirled around and saw, peering from that corner tree, the face of a creature formed from the twisted, intertwining branches, its red eyes and mouth gaping, its knotted arms thrashing against the branches. The arms reached out to him . . .

  There was a screech. He whirled again and saw a car bearing down on him, skidding into a diagonal. He jumped out of the way, landing along the curb. When he looked up he was no more than a few feet from the driver's window. The driver thrust his head out—his face contorted and purple with rage—and began screaming at him. And the Voice . . .

  He stood slowly, his face blank as the glossolalia poured out of the wrinkled, thorny plates of flesh that extended from the crackling trunk that had once been a neck. The mouth blossomed red and filled his entire field of vision for just an instant and the deafening Voice poured out of the glistening concentric rings that seemed to extend for miles into the depths of that cavity. The mouth snapped shut and he caught a glimpse of the man's “real” face as the car sped away.

  He looked around, eyes wide and ears sensitive to every facet of the city-drone filling the air. Everything was normal. There was no tree creature, no chanting, and when he opened his mouth, the only word that emerged was a long, quavering "Shit!"

  But the girl in the seat next to him on the train had on a cheap pair of headphones and it was easy to make out the chants that hissed out of her ears. It seemed to have no effect on her, but as he listened, he looked out the window, down at the girders that formed the skeletal structure that elevated the train, and at the darkness beneath them and at the huge, glistening forms that swam down there, some of them looking up with disproportionately small, cold faces.