“Linksys 9000.”
“That’s the same one we use,” Jason says excitedly. “You should apply. I can put in a good word for you.”
“Surely I don’t have the education.”
“You have call experience. That’s the big one. You’re good under pressure, I can vouch for that. Ideally, they like some related postsecondary education like criminology or nursing or something, but they do most of the training on the job.”
“I have a diploma in Theoretical Human Anatomy with a minor in Managerial Accounting for Non-Accountants,” Claire says.
“Perfect,” Jason says. “Email me your résumé and I’ll turn it in to HR. If you get an interview, you’ll have to come here to the call center though.”
“I know.”
“Can you do that?”
“Maybe.”
Claire watches the paramedics secure Petunia Delilah and her baby onto the gurney. They cover her with a blanket, and one of the paramedics looks at Claire and gives a quick wave. She waves back as they wheel out of the apartment. The other paramedic pops his head back through the door and mouths a “Thank you.” Then he’s gone, closing the door gently behind him.
“What else, Claire?”
Claire’s emotions wane for the moment. She thinks it odd to unload her thoughts on her past client and grows a bit uncomfortable.
“Nothing, Jason. Thanks for listening.”
“Claire, I hope this isn’t too out of line, but I’d like to get to know you better. If I won’t be able to call you anymore, I don’t know what I’m going to do. And I wouldn’t forgive myself if I didn’t ask,” Jason says. “Can we grab a coffee or something sometime?”
“Well…” Claire pauses. She closes her eyes. Her hand shakes. The receiver quivers in front of her mouth, and she draws a deep breath. “When do you get off of work?”
“My shift ends in fifteen minutes.”
“Do you like quiche?” Claire asks.
“I do,” Jason says.
“Would you like to come over to my place for some quiche?” Claire asks and then rushes to say, “I know it’s short notice. If you can’t, if you’ve already got plans, that’s okay, I get it, we can chat some other day or something,” she says and then adds, “if you want.”
“I would love to join you for quiche,” Jason says. “But I should go home and change out of my uniform first.”
“No,” Claire says. “That’s all right. You don’t have to.” She glances at the stove clock ticking backward. “The quiche will be done in four minutes. Then it has to sit for ten minutes before it’s ready.”
“It’ll probably be closer to forty-five minutes or so before I can get there,” Jason says. “I can’t leave early. If I could, I would, but we’re pretty short staffed.”
“No, that’s okay. It’s good warm or cold,” Claire says.
She looks around her apartment. Petunia Delilah’s afterbirth has stained the foyer with goo. There’s a sodden pile of linens. The paramedics didn’t take off their shoes, and while they looked relatively clean, they did come in from outside. Nothing is as it was, not even from five minutes ago, and Claire wonders if she’ll ever feel the complacent comfort she once did. Then she realizes that she shouldn’t ever feel that again.
Her voice wavers when she says, “That’s perfect, Jason. I have to clean up a bit around the place anyhow. You know the address?”
“Yes. It’s in the system here.” Jason laughs. “I can stop and get a bottle of wine, if you like.”
“That would be nice … Pig,” Claire says and smiles.
53
In Which One of an Infinity of Homeschooled Hermans Bids Farewell to His Grandpa
The elevator chimes down the hall as Herman leaves Apartment 805. It’s a quiet and faraway noise in his mind.
What was once broken is fixed, Herman thinks, remembering his earlier misadventures in the elevator. And so it begins all over again.
The elevator door slides open, and two paramedics bustle out into the hallway. The first stumbles because of the misalignment of the floors. He points and warns the other. Navy-blue pants whisper with movement, and the ripples of their pressed blue shirts make the fabric look liquid. One talks in a radio attached to his shoulder, and the other drags a gurney burdened with equipment in his wake. Both of their heads swivel, trying to get their bearings in their new surroundings. Both sport intense looks of determination in their eyes. They spot him.
“Hey, kid,” one calls. “Where’s Apartment 805?”
Without looking back, Herman points over his shoulder to the door he just left. Then, he opens the door to the stairwell and passes through.
The stairwell lights are dim and yellow, casting the space in a hue like an antique photo. The air smells ancient too, trapped in the column that falls below and rises above him, like it has been stuck in there since the building was built. Herman has seven floors to go up and he isn’t in a hurry. His apartment will be there just as it has been in the past and as it always will be in the future. He takes his steps, measured and one by one. There’s no need to run, like he had earlier. Herman isn’t sure he can run anymore even if he should want to. His legs are leaden and his body exhausted from his journey. He uses the handrail as leverage to help out his tired legs.
“Think of that space between the dots as time,” Grandpa said, “not distance.”
I don’t have far to go, just a short time to go, Herman thinks.
It seems an eternity ago, running up these steps from the lobby where he had woken in the elevator. He really doesn’t know if that just happened and he’s still in the stairs, ascending from where he had lain on the tile floor. Everything that has occurred is jumbled up and out of place in his mind. He remembers standing up in the elevator with his reflections fading a million times into the deep infinity all around him, his image bouncing forever, back and forth between mirrors.
Which one of them is me? Herman wonders.
Then he knows the answer: all of them are.
The paper has folded to touch Herman to Herman, and they are one and the same. And as they track his movements, mimicking him as he leaves the elevator, they all step out of different elevators into different lobbies. An infinity of Hermans go their separate ways once they are out of his sight and he is out of theirs.
* * *
There’s a jumble of noises a few flights of stairs above him. The clamor grows louder as it comes his way. As he passes the sign bolted to the stairwell that reads “Floor 11,” he’s shoved to the side by an explosion of crying woman. He bounces against the wall and stays there as it seems to be the only solid thing around.
The woman rushes past him, blubbering hysterically, neglecting to acknowledge his presence, oblivious of him to the point that Herman wonders if he’s even there. He leans against the wall and watches her stumble around the landing below and then out of sight. He continues upward, the sounds of her crying fading by the time he reaches the sign that reads “Floor 14,” and by the time he pushes the bar to release the lock to shoulder through the door by the sign that reads “Floor 15,” he can no longer hear her at all.
The stairwell door’s hydraulic arm hisses itself toward closed while Herman stands in the hallway that leads to Grandpa’s apartment. He spends a moment there, contemplating how perspective shrinks the hallway the farther it gets away from him. Grandpa’s apartment door is three down from the stairwell and much smaller than those closer to him.
When the stairwell door clicks shut and when the only notable sound is the hallway’s blower unit exhaling, Herman walks toward the apartment. He doesn’t bother pulling his key from the shoelace looped around his neck. The door is still unlocked. He knows this because he has never felt as grounded as he does now, so rooted in this place and this time. He opens the door and walks into the apartment. The light from outside has faded since he left, so he flips the kitchen switch as he walks past it to the living room. There’s still some light coming in from outside, but it’s weak and shado
wed by the surrounding buildings.
Herman stands in the silence of the living room. It’s an actual quiet, a real silence, not the false one that comes when he’s about to lose consciousness. The room seems expansive as it stretches before him, Grandpa’s chair in one corner and Herman standing in the doorway in the opposite corner.
Herman’s arms weigh heavily, exhausted and dragging his shoulders to curve with their unwieldiness.
With all that has happened, he feels small and out of control. Life’s taking him in its own direction, at its own speed, and for its own purposes. It’s an anchor for him, and though he wishes to flee, he knows he can’t. Not this time. There’s no guide and no force of will, or if these things exist, they’re an out-of-date map and a weak whisper of a force. Herman resigns himself to be this one of an infinity of Hermans and observes the scene before him. The distance between him and Grandpa’s recliner seems grand even though it isn’t.
Herman thinks, If I could go back, if I could make this outcome different, I would. I know how to resuscitate someone. I’ve studied how to. I know where his medication is. I know how to give it to him. I could have brought him back to life. This is my fault.
Herman watches Grandpa’s inert body. Grandpa’s inert body doesn’t return the honor. While his eyes are open, they don’t see anything. The biology is gone, the blood has expired, and he is over. Grandpa is no longer there. The thing that used to be him wears a blue knit cardigan and has his favorite crocheted blanket draped across his lap. But he’s gone, and Herman knows that resuscitation and medication can’t stop what has to happen. It’s nobody’s fault but time’s. Grandpa leans to the side and slumps forward a bit from the chair back. One arm hangs over the armrest. The teacup on the side table doesn’t send steam into the air anymore. It has long since cooled. A section of the newspaper is draped across his knee, and the rest has slid to a cone-shaped pile on the floor.
And, like at the birth of Lavender, Herman sees his grandpa as an infant in the dark night of the farm where he was born. Grandpa told him so much about the farm Herman knows it as his own. He sees Grandpa as a kid standing on the gravel road to the house, surrounded by tawny fields of late-summer wheat. His knobby arms fire rocks at the wood posts, but his aim is off, taking the rocks wide of their mark a lot of the time. Grandpa’s skinny neck, seemingly too fragile to support the weight of the head it’s forced to support, still manages to move through its seemingly impossible tasks with delicacy.
Herman feels the elation Grandpa felt when he met Grandma at the community’s little wooden church. They are teenagers and married at nineteen. Together they see the coming of electricity, the wonder of the telephone, the magic of the automobile, and the impossibility of space flight. There was so much more. Herman sees them smile at each other with the birth of their daughter. He imagines everything in between then and now, and like the dots Grandpa put on the page, that beginning and this ending are the same thing when the corners of the page are folded to touch. And so it all starts again.
“Bye, Grandpa,” Herman says, and the room only responds with silence.
Herman is shocked from his reverie by a golden streak passing from top to bottom, just outside the window. His eyes track the movement, but his brain isn’t quick enough to make sense of the image. On instinct, Herman sprints across the living room toward the window. By the first step, the golden flash is gone from sight, below the bottom edge of the window. Herman rushes past the recliner. By the time he reaches the window and presses himself flat against it to look down, all he can see is a milling crowd on the sidewalk below and two ambulances parked at the curb.
That one would be for Grandpa, Herman thinks. The paramedics are somewhere in the building right now, coming up to this lonely apartment.
The golden streak is gone.
54
In Which Ian Begins and Concludes His Perilous Plunge
And this is where it all begins, here at the end with the goldfish in his bowl. The snail is here too, sucking algae off the glass.
Ian swims his fishbowl from one end to the other, gyrating around the circumference in clockwise circles. He slices through the water, cleaves it to either side of his body, and momentarily imagines himself a predatory fish, perhaps a shark or a barracuda.
Ian swims past Troy.
Troy munches on algae.
Ian looks out at the city, a wavering and aqueous vision of buildings in front of buildings behind other buildings in the bright afternoon light. The sun has started setting on the lower stories. The ninth floor slips into a premature twilight.
Then Ian gets a little confused and finds himself swimming counterclockwise for a while where he had once been doing so clockwise. He ponders how this came to be. Surely, one would notice a complete bodily reversal, Ian thinks, if I was even swimming in the other direction to start with. He cannot remember, and then he forgets that it was confusing.
Now, he thinks, what was I doing?
In the center of the bowl, regardless of the direction he swims, is the plastic castle. It is nestled in a geology of pink and blue pebbles. The castle’s drawbridge is down, the portcullis is open, and the barbican is broad and sturdy. There are four bastions with arrow loops. There are even tiny bartizans and corbels and embrasures. The detail is impressive. The pink bricks etched in the battlements are tinted with a frosting of purple along the edges to give it extra depth and a shade of realism. It’s the most realistic neon-pink castle Ian has ever seen, and he counts himself lucky to call it his home. It beats a sunken galleon or bubbling treasure chest, even though those would be more fitting in his nautical-themed world.
Kitschy tchotchkes, Ian thinks.
He swims past Troy the snail.
Now, he thinks, what was I doing?
It’s that incessant munching that could drive a fish crazy, really. The subtle, gravelly noise of Troy’s crop grinding away at his harvest day and night makes it hard to concentrate. The frequency travels through the water, textures it with a noise he can feel in his flesh.
Ian pecks at Troy.
Troy doesn’t notice and keeps munching.
It’s everywhere, that sound—dry, like pulling apart a cotton ball, like two stones rubbing together.
Ian pecks at Troy some more and, after some effort, dislodges him from the glass. All becomes quiet as Troy drifts like a leaf, swinging back and forth in gentle arcs, down through the water, seesawing until he lands at the bottom of the fishbowl. The silence is absolute but not permanent. It’s only a matter of time before Troy slips back up the glass and starts again.
Ian circles the bowl.
He doesn’t remember when the yelling started. He’s discovering all the new areas of his fishbowl all over again when it comes to his attention though. He doesn’t remember what is said, but he can feel it. The meaning of the words is lost on him, but he feels tension in the frequency of their sounds; it climbs and the oscillation tightens. Vibrations set to the wavelength of anxiety and conflict course through the water. They agitate Ian for a moment.
He sees ripples of movement through the water, things on the other side of the glass, big things. Through the sliding patio door, two aqueous bodies flash by the opening, first in one direction and then in the other. Then they are through the door and standing on the balcony. Their bodies are close, leaning into one another and gesticulating furiously. Ian watches and then grows tired of the long seconds of drama viewed through this watery filter. He turns his tail on the balcony door, turns his back on the couple.
Before him stretches the city, beautiful and so big. There’s so much more to it than this little corner of the balcony. So much more to see than this gallon of water, so many possibilities and opportunities outside of his little bubble. Ian yearns to see it all, to be immersed in it, to be more than a tiny fixture in the middle of it but looking upon it from the outside.
Ian’s startled from his train of thought when the vibrations become much stronger. He spins on the spot. One of the
figures, a quivering blur of light and color, moves swiftly and close. Ian’s scared, but there is nowhere to flee to in a gallon of water. There’s the crack as the coffee cup breaks against the balcony. Ian watches the paper, page by page, unfold in the breeze, and suddenly, the bowl becomes brighter. The thesis that blocked the mouth of his bowl is gone; the exit is revealed. It takes Ian some time to realize the bowl is no longer covered—how long he doesn’t know because he has no concept of time. When he does notice though, he grasps the opportunity.
He circles the bowl once to gain momentum, and then, with a flick of his tail and short wriggle of effort, he propels himself upward. Ian breaks the surface of the water and is free. He easily clears the rim of the bowl and, rather unexpectedly, watches the balcony railing pass by underneath. There wasn’t a plan beyond leaving the bowl, but had there been one, it wouldn’t have involved the surprise of being twenty-seven floors above the concrete. It’s an odd sensation, a full-body shiver and shock. It’s not that Ian has a plan, just a strong instinct for freedom. That is how Ian finds himself passing through the fluttering strata of thesis pages, gaining speed.
It takes a goldfish less than four seconds to fall the distance between the twenty-seventh floor and the sidewalk below. A flash. It’s the span of time it takes to unlock the front door of your house. The time it takes to read a sentence or two. For Ian, it’s a lifetime of wonder.
At first there’s this new world that he has entered into. Everything is foreign to his mind, the beauty of being cast out amid the fluttering thesis pages, the feeling of, for the first time, being free of the constraints of any bowl or aquarium or plastic bag. There was a world beyond the rim this whole time. And up until this moment, he only saw it as a quivering backdrop to his life. Now here it is, crystal clear and interactive.
Like a skydiver without a parachute, like a sunburned cosmonaut rocketing back to earth from orbit, Ian is dragged toward the ground. The initial elation fades, and his uncontrolled descent is realized. The only certainties are the direction he travels and the velocity mounting with each passing second. The lack of control is at once exhilarating and terrifying. It’s hard to maintain any trust in this, this being pushed from the sky to the earth. There’s also no turning back, no returning. The only surety in the journey is that the end is there, below, and that is it. The only certainty is the downward direction and the inevitability that he will be face-to-face with the concrete sidewalk in a moment.
Fishbowl: A Novel Page 24