Girl in a Fishbowl (Crowbar Book 1)

by Thomas A. Gilly

  Nose put a finger on the edge of his nose hole and tapped it as he thought. “Hmmm . . . I don’t think so. Maybe he went to the Hotel Vienna. That’s where most people go. He might have gone there.”

  “The Hotel Vienna?” Conrad said with interest. “Where is that?”

  “It’s Downtown. You don’t want to go there. I used to stay at the Hotel Vienna. Let’s go to my house and play Risk! We have three people, that’s a good number for Risk. Not as good as four. Four is the best number.”

  Conrad said, “Could we go to the Hotel Vienna first? Then we can play Risk after. We’re really concerned about the person we are looking for. He’s my father and we want to make sure he’s alright. Is that okay?”

  “It’s starting to get late,” Nose said, now looking apprehensive. “Let’s go to my house. It’s time for dinner. I’ll open the Spam. You like Spam, right? I want to play green. Is that okay? Bobbi can be pink.” He looked at Terri. “You want to be pink, right?”

  “Can you hold on for one minute?” Conrad said to Nose. “I need to talk to Ter-. To Bobbi, for a minute. You don’t mind waiting out here, do you?”

  “I’ll wait,” Nose said. Conrad nodded and slowly closed the door. He then turned to Terri and whispered, “I don’t want to lose this guy. I want to find out what this Hotel Vienna is. I think we should humor him and play Risk. What do you think?”

  Terri smirked. “You know what I’m thinking? I’m thinking about what Mom and Natalya are wondering I’m doing. The last thing they know about my whereabouts is that I went to your place. It must be close to dark now. Everyone is going to think I’m spending the night with you.”

  Conrad smiled. “Is that so bad?”

  Terri shrugged. “I don’t think they’re going to believe it if I told them we just played Risk.”

  “So you think we should go back?”

  “No, like you said, this guy might help us find your dad. Let’s do it.”

  Conrad opened the door. “Risk it is!”

  Nose grinned ear to ear.

  Chapter 35

  They walked down the middle of the empty street, the white lights from above casting multiple faint shadows that surrounded their feet like ghostly flower petals. The trees that lined this residential neighborhood were completely bare of leaves and bark—skeletal remains that reached plaintively to the blackened sky.

  “How long have you been living here Nose?” Terri asked.

  “Hehe, oh . . . hehe. How long? Heh. Long time. Hard to measure time in here. I’ve forgotten that time exists. Heh. Do they still use, heh, dates and names of days and things out there?”

  He seemed completely serious. “Yeah, we still use dates and days.”

  “What day is it?”

  “It’s Wednesday, the 24th of May.”

  “Do they still use years?”

  “Yes, it’s 2066.”

  “Oh, hehe. Really? 2066, you don’t say.”

  Conrad asked, “What year was it when you first came to live here?”

  “Heh, what year. Heh, it wasn’t 2066, that’s for sure. Nope, it was a different year than that. Heh, there was no six in that year, that’s for sure.”

  “Do you remember what year?” Conrad pressed.

  “Yeah, when I came down . . . it was definitely during a year . . . yeah.”

  “Do you remember what the year was?”

  “Yeah, heheh, there was this one show on then, and it was pretty funny. It had this talking bug . . . heheh.”

  Conrad decided on a different tack. “So what’s up with this Hotel Vienna? Are there a lot of people there?”

  “Sometimes, it depends what’s going on. If there’s a big shindig there could be a lot of people. Like twenty people. Twenty is a lot. Those are the clients, not the staff. I was part of the staff, the permanent staff. We didn’t see all of the other staff. Some were kept on different floors. Some you never saw at all, you just heard about them. You heard the clients talk about them, using their handles. And you’d think, ‘Boy, I would like to meet her, she sounds nice,’ but you knew you wouldn’t, because she was on the fourteenth floor. You weren’t allowed on the fourteenth floor.”

  Terri looked at Conrad and he saw that she didn’t like the sound of the Hotel Vienna.

  “You said you were part of the staff,” Terri said. “What did you do there?”

  “I was a cage fighter,” Nose said. “The clients would bet money on me. I’m fast, really fast. I’m really good at parkour. That’s why I first snuck in here, to do parkour. All these abandoned buildings you can do whatever you want. Jump from rooftop to rooftop with no one giving a darn. No cops. I was also into martial arts. So one day Bob says, ‘Hey, you want to make some money?’ And I said ‘Sure, I want to make some money.’ Next thing you know I’m in a cage fight.”

  “Bob?”

  “Yeah, Bob. Heheh. Not you Bob, another Bob. I used to leave the Bergs and go outside, spend my money. That’s what Bob used to say, ‘Good job Nose, now go out and spend your money.’ Heheh, Bob didn’t call me Nose then, I had a different handle. They called me Nose later, after I lost my nose.”

  “Yeah, about that,” Terri said. “How did you lose your…nose…Nose?”

  “Dr. Mangler took it off. He said I got into one fight too many. He said that, heheh, after each one of my last thirty fights. ‘One fight too many Nose.’ Heheh, he should have said ‘Thirty fights too many Nose.’ Dr. Mangler wasn’t his first handle, he was originally called Dr. Mengele, which wasn’t his real name either. So Dr. Mangler is really the handle of a handle. Dr. Mangler cut off my nose—but I asked him to. My nose was all messed up. Broke it about thirty times, you know, thirty fights too many. Heheh. Couldn’t really breathe out of it. So I said, ‘Cut me Mangler. Cut me. Cut my nose off.’ And he did. He said he was going to get me a new one, you know, a fake nose. But you know, I kind of like it like this. No problems breathing. No snoring, heheh. I just gotta tape this cloth on here to keep the bugs out.”

  “Dr. Mangler,” Conrad said, looking at Terri. Behind Nose, Terri silently mouthed “Oh my God.”

  “Dr. Mangler,” Nose repeated. “And that’s when they started calling me Nose, which is funny, because I don’t have one. And here we are!”

  They stopped in front of a modest two-story cape with a one car garage. It looked like it might be brown, but it was difficult to distinguish colors in the spectral white light under the Bergs. It might have been dark blue for all they could tell. Nose led them up the driveway. He then said, “Wait right here! I’m going to turn on the generator. I think tonight we can splurge with some electricity!”

  They waited in the driveway as Nose went around to the side of the house. After a few minutes they saw lights come on through the windows. Nose returned and led them to the front door. He took a key out of his pocket and unlocked it.

  The house looked perfectly normal. Conrad hadn’t been sure what to expect—mannequins arranged in family settings or rats on meat hooks or something else crazy. Instead they walked into clean, furnished living room with the scent of potpourri. This living room also had a wide screen television on the wall, although this one was connected to a DVD player. A bookshelf full of DVDs was against the wall next to it.

  “We should do a movie marathon!” Nose said excitedly. “I have lots of movies here. We can watch Star Wars or Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter . . . “

  “We like Harry Potter,” Terri said, looking at Conrad. “I’ve never watched them all at once.”

  “Harry Potter! Okay, first I’ll make dinner. I’ll cook the Spam on the gas grill. I have TV trays! Then we’ll play Risk!”

  Dinner was grilled Spam, instant mashed potatoes and canned peas. The beverages were cans of Mountain Dew. Conrad was starving and had to admit Spam tasted better grilled than fried, like he usually had it. Then a thought came to him as they finished eating halfway through Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

  “Hey Nose, how old is this Spam?”
r />   Nose was clearing away the TV trays. “It’s in cans, it lasts forever.”

  “Yeah but, did you bring this in here or did you find it?”

  “There’s a grocery store,” he said, a little sheepishly. “Lots of Spam there.”

  Conrad looked at Terri. “I think we just ate Spam that came from real animals.”

  “Did Spam ever come from real animals?” Terri asked.

  “I’m not so sure now. I always thought Spam tasted the way it did because it was cultured meat. But what we just ate tasted exactly like normal Spam.”

  “Hm,” Terri said as Nose took away her plate.

  “That would mean,” Conrad said, “that when they switched from real meat to cultured meat they actually intentionally made it taste the way it does.”

  “I kind of like Spam,” Terri said.

  “Me too,” Nose said, carrying the plates into the kitchen.

  “I wonder how many man-hours it took to make cultured meat taste like Spam?”

  Nose returned with the boxed Risk game and started setting it up on the coffee table. They all sat on the floor around it.

  “I like to play with a neutral army,” Nose said as he passed out the cards, putting one set aside for neutral. “Black is the neutral country. We take turns playing neutral, but they don’t attack. We should agree to take out the neutral before attacking each other. Okay?”

  Conrad and Terri agreed. Conrad had played Risk with his dad when he was a kid but Terri had never played, so he and Nose explained the rules as they went along.

  By the end of Chamber of Secrets the black neutral army had been eliminated from the board. Conrad looked down at the positions of the armies and said, “Hey, our armies are configured like the countries from the book 1984. I have Oceania, Nose has Eurasia, and Bobbi has East Asia. Although I would have to take Great Britain from Nose to get all of Oceania.”

  “You have North America and South America,” Nose said. “There is no Oceania.”

  “No, it’s from a book called 1984. The world was split up into three countries, kind of like our map is now.”

  “I think Australia was part of Oceania,” Terri said. She had Australia.

  “Are you sure?” Conrad said.

  “Pretty sure.”

  “Bummer, I can’t get there to make Oceania complete.”

  Nose eventually conquered Australia. After getting Terri’s cards he was able to sweep all of Africa and take out the Americas through Brazil. They decided to play one more game.

  Nose dominated the next game as well. They played slowly, taking long breaks to watch the movies. During The Goblet of Fire Conrad looked at the TV, then looked at Nose and said, “You know, you sort of resemble Voldemort.”

  “What?” Nose said, visibly perplexed.

  “You know, Lord Voldemort. You look . . . a little like him.”

  “I don’t see the resemblance,” Nose said.

  “Yeah, me neither,” Terri said, smirking. “Nothing alike at all.”

  Nose gave side-long glances at both of them and then said with a near perfect Ralph Fiennes impersonation, “I’ll get you Harry Potter! The boy who lived! Ha! I’ll get you!”

  Conrad couldn’t help but laugh. He was having fun—he was actually having fun in this surreal place with the most unusual person he had ever met in this life. But most of all he was with Terri—with her away from the insane outer world which he was starting to think was a crazier place than this radioactive land of perpetual twilight.

  At the end of Goblet of Fire Nose suddenly declared that he was tired and it was well past his bedtime. While he was outside turning off the generator Terri said to Conrad, “I like him.”

  “I like him too. But I don’t like the sound of this Hotel Vienna. It sounds like illegal gladiatorial games. Dad wouldn’t have anything to do with a place like that.”

  “Dr. Mangler.”

  “I know! It’s just too crazy.”

  “Do you think we should go?” she asked.

  “I do want to at least take a look. If there are other people in here, they might know something about Dad.”

  The lights went out. They both took out their flashlights and turned them on.

  Terri said, “I’m just worried that this doesn’t sound very legal. They might not want a couple of kids poking around their private Death Match Arena.”

  Conrad said in a funny voice, “I would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for you pesky kids.”

  That made Terri laugh. Conrad loved the sound.

  Nose entered the front door. “Oh good, you have flashlights. Come on upstairs, you two can have the bunk beds. Which one of you likes the top?”

  “That’s kind of personal,” Terri said out of the side of her mouth to Conrad.

  “What was that?” Nose said.

  “I’ll take top,” Terri said.

  The upstairs bedroom had a bunk bed against one wall and a twin bed on the other. Seen only by the beams of their flashlights, Conrad and Terri could make out that this room had been furnished for children, with cartoon animals painted on the walls.

  “I’m going to put my pajamas on. Do you guys want to borrow pajamas?” Nose asked.

  “I’m just going to sleep in my clothes,” Terri said.

  “Me too,” said Conrad.

  Nose shrugged. “That doesn’t sound comfortable.” He went out into the next room.

  Terri climbed up to the top bunk as Conrad sat on his bed. He heard the creak of the bunk above him and saw the curve of her body as she lay herself down. He had to bend his knees to fit on the bed. Nose came in wearing plaid flannel pajama tops and bottoms. “Everyone comfy?”

  “All comfy,” Terri said.

  Nose knelt down at the side of his bed, clasped his hand together, and bowed his head.

  “Now I lay be down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before I wake, I pray to God my soul to take. God bless Bob and Bobbi. Amen.”

  He then climbed into his bed, pulled the covers over himself, and curled into a fetal position facing the wall. Within minutes Conrad heard the steady sound of Nose’s sleeping breath through the fabric over his nose-hole.

  Chapter 36

  Four Years Earlier

  Conrad was anxious. The projection room of the old Starlight Theatre was as cluttered as a closet, dimly lit and dominated by an ancient movie projector that looked like a prop from a steampunk game. It was a stark contrast to the extravagant art deco of the rest of the theater that had been restored in the early 21st century to its early 20th century glory. He was seated in one of two folding chairs, to his left was a rack filled with large circular reels of film arrayed in the order that he was supposed to feed into the projector. Dad had entrusted him with the midnight Halloween showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The movie reels were part of Dad’s extensive collection of analog media. This was the only time per year that the Starlight showed The Rocky Horror Picture Show and it had a devoted following—the theater was almost completely full. Through the square opening in the projection room wall Conrad could see the flamboyantly dressed audience—fish net stockings and sequined top hats and maid outfits—and a few brave men wearing gold speedos. Conrad was dressed like Brad Majors, with a tan jacket over a button-downed sweater vest. On his face he wore old-fashioned thick-framed glasses with the lenses removed.

  He heard the door open. He turned around quickly but was disappointed when it was just his father. Dad was dressed as Riff Raff, he had on an old beat-up tuxedo jacket with a pillow underneath for the hump and bald cap on his head, letting his natural stringy hair flow out from underneath it. He had even shaved his beard for the occasion.

  “You all set?” Dad asked.

  Conrad had watched Dad run the projector on Halloween for the last three years. Running the projector wouldn’t be a problem, and he was fairly certain he knew when to change the reels.

  “All set,” Conrad said.

  “Where’s your girlfriend?”
>
  Conrad rolled his eyes. “She’s not my girlfriend. She’s just a friend.”

  “Well, she’s a girl and she’s your friend, so she’s your girlfriend.”

  Conrad rolled his eyes again, he was sick of Dad saying that. “If you let me get on the internet I’d know where she is now.”

  Dad just shook his head once, advising him not to go there. “Just make sure you’re ready.”

  “Yeah, I’m ready.”

  “Good. I’ve been looking forward to enjoying this show from the audience for once. I do appreciate you taking over for me. And don’t worry,” Dad smiled. “I’m sure she’ll be here soon.”

  Conrad made a “Hrumph” sound and looked back down at the audience.

  “Good luck,” Dad said, and Conrad heard the door close.

  Ten minutes to midnight. Conrad placed the first reel into the projector. It was short, the concession stand classic ad Let’s All Go to The Lobby with cartoon popcorn containers and soda cups telling people to get something to eat. The projector could hold two reels at a time, but the projectionist had to be ready to feed the second reel when the first was almost done. The second reel was another cartoon message, this one telling everyone not to smoke and to be quiet during the picture. That always got a big laugh from the audience. It only lasted a minute, so Conrad wouldn’t have much time changing that reel to the first reel of the main attraction.

  The concession reel was just ending when the door behind him opened and Terri quickly came in. “I’m so sorry I’m late, I had to get out of Natalya’s party and—” she stopped when she saw that Conrad was busy. She was dressed as Janet Weiss with a knee length pink dress, a white cardigan sweater and white barrettes in her hair. She stood silently as he changed the reels. The projector shutter strobed the light in the room. When she saw he was done she walked over to the folding chair next to his and sat down.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she whispered. “Natalya really didn’t want me to go, she said her party was just starting to get good.”

  Conrad handed her the concession reel. “Can you put this on the top shelf?”