Don't Clean the Aquarium!

by Osier, Jeffrey

  He shut his eyes, afraid, embarrassed. He opened them just in time to see the train descend into the dark tunnels, which roared back at him in long, slow, deep tones. He was going home. He didn't know what to do. He looked up at all the impassive, silent faces.

  Couldn't they hear? Didn't they know? What were they doing here, anyway?

  He got off at Jackson and took the stairs down to the tunnel leading to the State Street trains and once again, the chanting filled his ears. The jostling crowds muttered it; the blind man with the clanging cup transformed it into a deep, resonant, melodic song.

  The echoing tiles twisted and smiled and sweat.

  No one seemed to notice; no one seemed the least bit surprised by the sounds emerging from their mouths. In their coats, their suits, their dresses, with their straight backs and impassive faces, they seemed diminished by their own Voices, by the shivering and breathing of the wall tiles.

  The blind man screamed from within the shimmering infestations of his rags, with no face except for a huge, snaggle-toothed mouth. The cup in his hand sang harmony, its own silver mouth curling and smirking at the passing crowd.

  He moved on. The people around him were no more than phantoms, slowly withering away around him. He was going home.

  But what was this?

  It was the pudgy folksinger who seemed to be there every morning and evening rush hour, the singer he referred to as the Singing Troll. He was rasping out some old Jim Croce song, accompanying himself with perfunctory chunks of harmony on an out-of-tune guitar.

  The glossolalia that had been resonating, encompassing and reshaping the entire world, suddenly collapsed under this heartfelt whining and strumming. He stopped directly in front of the Singing Troll.

  He felt nudges and gusts of warm air as the crowd of phantoms passed through him. But the longer he stood there, the more solid they became, until they began shoving him and yelling at him. The tiles were settled, flat and dry.

  "Shut up!" he screamed at the Singing Troll.

  The man glanced in his direction for just an instant, just a little disturbed, perhaps, but more concerned about not missing a line or a chord change.

  He took a step towards the folksinger and bumped into the guy's guitar case. He began to mutter, to speak, to growl. The Voice came spilling out. He screamed into the folksinger's face until the man stopped singing, blinked, and began backing down the wall.

  Eddie cut him off and grabbed the guitar out of his hand. He took a broad swing with it, and the body of the guitar crashed against the folksinger's head. The second blow broke through the back of the guitar's body. The fourth blow, which caught him as he was slithering to the floor, shattered the guitar's body altogether. He pounded on the whimpering, curled-up form on the floor with the neck of the guitar.

  This last vestige, this intrusive, fleshy, raspy voiced chunk of interference began to spread across the floor, a thick stew of blood, corduroy, and fat, while slithering things began to rise through that stew, singing out in wordless liberation.

  He tossed away the splintered neck. The tunnel was empty. The glossolalia was deafening. The tunnel undulated, pulling him forward on peristaltic waves, so he moved on, as the tiles buckled and breathed. The roaring emerged from the walls—from the scales that had once been tiles, from the breathing spaces between them, but especially from the vast, flickering pit towards which he was now headed.

  Ages passed and his walk had weakened into off-balanced staggering, when the chanting quieted to a hush and a hunched figure appeared on the floor ahead of him. He was layered in rages and gave off an overwhelming stench. Eddie stepped in front of this mound of festering rags, saw the one crooked, skeletal leg twisting out from underneath and watched as the blue, folded mound of flesh at the rag mound's peak swelled and lifted and something like a face looked up at him.

  Its eyes were bulging and blind white, its nose was a jagged-lipped cavern at the center of its face, and its upper jaw was a long, tusked ridge. Underneath it, two lower jaws danced gracefully as they locked alternately in and out of position beneath that ridge. Each lower jaw was twisted and toothless, and each had its own serpentine tongue. It was the dance of these tongues and the steady outpouring of air from that flesh-fringed hole of a nose that generated the chant, now little more than a whisper. It was beautiful, full of things longer and shorter and far more potent and ancient than . . . words.

  The face looked at him. He recognized his own face in there somewhere, and recognized the entreaty. He began to chant along. The walls were lined with faces that had once been scales that had once been tiles. They too were chanting now. An ooze spread across the floor, flowing ahead and downward into a watery depth where a thousand long-necked, short-necked, no-necked faces protruded from the ceiling, the walls, the bubbling liquid floor. But of course this cramped, slithering, screaming morass into which he now stepped was not a confinement, it was an opening, it was the real, external world now, unbounded and with room for an infinite number of faces, an infinite number of voices . . .

  . . . and all the faces and allthe voices were his and all spoke the simple, unfathomable, and inescapable truth, and that truth was that all the faces and all the voices were his and all spoke the simple, unfathomable, and inescapable truth, and that truth was...

  SNOWLIGHT

  My father was dead. Freshly dead. My family was reeling with an unpalatable and unpredictable mixture of shock, grief, and resentment. More and more I tried to keep away from them, just as more and more of them kept piling off of planes and trains and I began to realize just what a big, monstrous brood my family really was. Relatives who remembered me only as a baby—if at all—were suddenly scrutinizing me, correcting me, reproaching me and just measuring me all the way around, wondering how this scrawny, sullen twelve-year-old was going to be anything but a hindrance to his poor, grief-stricken mother.

  Beyond that, my father's death was something that officially had very little to do with me. It was talked about all the time in my presence, but I never entered into these talks. His death, my mother's difficult situation, even the problem of… me; it was as though they were speaking a language I wasn't supposed to understand.

  And so no one noticed the disease, the cavity opening in my mind—no one except my mother, who in several instances seemed to recognize a malevolence in the emptiness of my eyes. She never did anything about it—didn't talk to me about it, didn't even talk around it. It was as if she refused to acknowledge it.

  Within two weeks of my father's death a dozen blackheads erupted on my face, I got my first gray hair, and I had one of my molars shattered in a schoolyard fight. I could feel an ugly momentum building in me, and I saw nothing in my path to hinder its acceleration. The moment I surrendered to it, I realized I actually liked it. Preferred it, in fact.

  It was 1967, the winter of the big snow that paralyzed all of Chicagoland and turned the children's world into a vast alien wasteland of snowdrifts and abandoned cars. My friends and I basked in the pain and the glory of the big snow. We shoplifted from the barren stores in the mall, skitched, and pelted houses, cars, and helpless adults with snowballs.

  On January 27th, we scaled the drift-slopes at the edge of the mall parking lot up onto a deserted, drift-covered Eisenhower Expressway, where we waved our arms in defiance, smoked Marlboros with the filters broken off, and talked about what we'd do if we caught a car struggling through the drifts.

  My own suggestion was to torture and kill the occupants, cook them in the blaze of their ignited automobile, eat them, make jewelry and weapons from their bones, and use the wreckage as a barricade for our next victims. I was just kidding. It was the kind of thing a kid like me, with my reading and TV habits, would consider a joke. But my friends, constantly reveling in their fantasies of sex, vandalism, and street-fighting, were appalled by my suggestion and let me know it in no uncertain terms.

  Normally I'd have been considered far too weird to be part of that gang, though I'd been moving
along its fringes for the last year or so. But lately my stock seemed to have risen considerably. I was morbid, I was ferocious, I hated almost everybody, and my whole bell jar childhood of comic books and science fiction films had just crumbled around me, leaving behind something nervous and desperate and doomed to explode at any moment. They let me tag along because they wanted to be there when I finally went off. They kicked me around, and yet… somehow, just as my mother was, they were afraid of me. They knew that sooner or later, I'd do something.

  As I surely would have, sooner or later…

  That weekend three of us had been hauled in for skitching on the back of an unmarked police car. I was supposed to be grounded for the next five weeks. On Tuesday night I found out that my brother and sister and their families, plus a few of my least favorite aunts and uncles were all coming over for the evening. I balked. I went hysterical and stormed out of the house. There was no way I was going to spend an entire evening listening to them lecture me on the importance of not mumbling and above all having good eye contact when I talked to people.

  So I hooked up with Bob Ritchie and Jimmy Bugella over on the corner by Jimmy's house. They were going to go smoke cigarettes in an unoccupied house Jimmy's brother had recently broken into. I was far too jittery for that and said so, suggesting that we go up on the ridge over O'Neill Road and pulverize passing cars with snowballs.

  Bob groaned and spit into the snow at my feet. "Man, we've been snowballing cars since first grade and we're getting pretty fucking sick of it. Besides, you can get in more trouble if you're caught breaking into a house than you can throwing snowballs at cars."

  "Come on, Pickett, my brother says the place is really safe."

  So I was pushed and badgered into going to the abandoned house. It was fairly remote, set far back from the road and surrounded by trees. From the outside it looked perfectly normal. In the months to follow, the interior and finally the exterior of that house would be trashed, and a week before the end of the school year it would be burnt to the ground. As we approached we could hear yelling and crashing coming from inside.

  We saw Larry Lorazo out front. He told us that Jimmy's brother was in there with two of his friends, and they were arguing with two big greasers from the Cozy Club. He told us it wouldn't be too cool to go in there and Bob and Jimmy agreed. We stood around, listening to the five of them screaming at each other while we smoked Chesterfields from a pack Larry had stolen from his mom.

  "Let's snowball cars," I muttered under my breath, just trying to annoy them.

  "Yeah, man," Larry beamed, "Let's do it! I'd love to nail my stepfather's car with iceballs, drive the son of a bitch off the road and—BAM! Into a fuckin' tree! Let's do it!"

  Bob and Jimmy grunted and mumbled, looked back at the house but made no move one way or another. We just smoked and listened to the escalating noise inside.

  "Those Cozys sound really pissed off," Bob whispered. "Shouldn't we do something?"

  “What? Call the cops?"

  "Naaah. Hey man, I'm just thinking about your brother."

  "Fuck my brother! I hope they shoot the jagoff!"

  They all laughed. Had I thought Jimmy really meant it, I might have laughed, too.

  Time for my refrain: "Let's snowball cars!"

  There was a unanimous cry as we trudged off through the snow. Every step was an effort as we pulled our legs out of one drift only to plunge into another, never knowing when we'd sink up to our waists into some inconspicuous snow trap. I just tagged along behind, listening to every stupid remark, smoking twice as many cigarettes as any of them, and thinking about all my relatives in my mom’s living room, everyone bad-mouthing me, and her just listening and nodding, and I wondered, was she thinking of me now? Did she wonder, imagine, worry where I might be?

  I coughed up a gob and flicked my cigarette into the snow. Besides these escapades with my friends, what did I really have to live for? You look at the emptiness, the madness, at the circumstances that seem inevitable in your life, and it frightens and sickens you, watching it from the outside like that. And then one day you realize that it doesn't bother you the way it once did and that it's no longer some dreaded inevitability. It's become the routine, and the horror has instead become a kind of emptiness. My own emptiness refueled me now, and I refilled that emptiness with my rage, and thus filled, found for myself a nice, quiet equilibrium. I could die now, I thought. I could die and just...not be anymore...and not fret, not cry or worry about it. There was nothing but the edge—whatever edge I could grope up to, and then, the easy business of being dead afterwards.

  Charlie Frantantian (a kid we all hated because his older brother Rick had beat up Bob's big sister and raped her back when we were in kindergarten) lived in a house with a side yard that edged right out to a peak that stood about ten feet over O'Neill Road. There was a large maple tree there, roots exposed by erosion along the edge of the road. It was a perfect place to set up our firing nest, with good visibility and plenty of cover, far enough from the Frantantian house that we could smoke and yell all we wanted without getting the cops called on us. As for Charlie Frantantian, he was the toughest kid in the seventh grade, as well as the oldest, but he didn't have many friends, and the four of us as a group—especially with Jimmy Bugella, who was possibly the third or fourth toughest kid in the seventh grade—were more than a match for him.

  It was obvious why Bob and Jimmy were so weary of nailing cars like this. It was possibly the world's best vantage point for this kind of game, and it was just too easy to get a good shot or get away if someone had the urge to come after us. It was a busy one-way street without another side street to turn on for almost a quarter mile. And the truth was that there was just too much snow. Too many drifts and too many new snowfalls. People trudged through snow, drove through it, and lately were even growing immune to being pelted with it.

  So it became a matter of temperament. Larry Lorazo could easily imagine that every car was his stepfather's and get fresh satisfaction out of every projectile thumping against the hood or exploding across the windshield. And I could pretend it was...who? My hatred was too congested and all too much a thing, an obstruction in itself. It was every snowball I threw, just as it was every car I hit and, to an even more extreme degree, it was every car I missed.

  But Bob Ritchie and Jimmy Bugella were already real hoods whose role models were their tough brothers in high school. Throwing snowballs at cars was just too petty and childish a way of causing trouble, not when you could bust a kid up, break his parents' windows, spray paint their...well, anything, steal stuff bigger than what you could just slip easily into your pockets, cop feels from girls in your class and persist until one day one of them spread her legs for you....

  In the vast scheme of things, snowballing cars was just short of nothing.

  The highlight was a station wagon with ten little kids and two grandparenty types in the front seat. The four of us must have hit it at least a dozen times. When the guy tried slamming on his brakes he began to spin out, thought better of it, and kept going.

  I let loose my last snowball.

  "Aww, man, see the way I nailed his license plate?" I cried.

  "Pickett, you fucking palsy!" Larry growled. "I hit that plate!"

  Larry Lorazo was about my height, about ten pounds heavier than me; a kid who'd given me a lot of grief back in third, fourth grades. We both remembered that, even though we tolerated each other reasonably well because we hung out with most of the same guys. But Larry still made occasional attempts to assert his place above me in the pecking order. This was just one more example. He'd let loose his last snowball before the station wagon had begun to spin, and we all knew it.

  It wasn't a matter of pride. It wasn't even me retargeting my anger. I don't know why I hit him. It stunned everyone so much that I managed to hit him twice more, a second time in the nose and then in the rib cage, before anyone said or did a thing. Larry punched me and elbowed me in the face before I got to him
again, kneeing him in the face, throwing him down and sitting on his chest, feeding him snow.

  I was pulled off and thrown to the ground as Jimmy and Bob picked him up and walked him away, trying to calm him. When they neared the curb I could hear Larry screaming how he'd "Kill the fucker!" with Bob and Jimmy talking away, too quiet for me to hear. Whatever they were saying to him was calming him down. The three of them continued to talk for a while, and I began to hear sobbing. And then, Larry's broken voice rising again: "I'll kill the fucker!" I stepped away from the tree, trying to catch their words without letting them see me, and suddenly realized that I wasn't the fucker. Not at all. Not anymore. It was his stepfather. And I could hear the consoling tones in their voices as they talked to him, and I remembered those first few days after my dad died, and the stern, protective air they had towards me.

  When they came back, Larry wasn't with them.

  "Way to go, Pickett. Beatin' up one of your own, for no reason."

  "Hey, what do you mean? You hear what he called me? I hit that license plate. I…"

  "So what?" Jimmy snapped. "Jesus, you are a fucking palsy! So you pick out someone you know you can take, and you beat him up just 'cause he called you a fucking name. You asshole. You been acting like a jerk ever since your old man died!"

  "Larry's old man beat him up tonight. And then he gets punched out by a scrawny shit like you!" Bob flicked a still-smoldering cigarette butt at my jacket. It bounced off and hissed a tunnel through the snow.

  "We've known Larry since second grade, man. Who the hell were you back then? What makes you think we want you with us here? Huh?"