She resets the timer for half an hour.
Claire can’t help but flick on the oven light and peer in. Under the pale-yellow light, through the spotless oven window, sits the quiche. The top has taken on a custard consistency, and the crust is starting to tan nicely. Tiny bubbles start to jewel the sliver of space where the crust meets the pan. Claire smiles at herself for becoming so enamored with the pie. For Claire, food is something so visceral and magical that she can’t help herself. It’s the perfect intersection of all the senses, and her body consistently quivers when she immerses herself in the acts of cooking and eating.
Claire thinks it odd that humans, those talking dirty on the phone and stumbling heartbreakingly through paid interpersonal interactions, would be the same animals to create such a thing. In her college career, she took an anthropology class that defined humans above all other animals as the ones that use tools. Then it was discovered that chimpanzees use sticks to pull termites from their mounds.
Claire’s quiche, in her mind, is the defining characteristic of humankind. That ability to combine ingredients into other nourishing and wholly satisfying culinary creations. A mixture to stimulate smell, touch, taste, and sight all at once. Spending time collecting and assembling all the ingredients is beyond simple survival. Monkeys don’t do it. Bears just eat their berries and rotty dead things. Birds peck at whatever is around, and dogs like meat from the bone. And on and on and on. Not one other animal could create a quiche, so, Claire thinks with a smile, it’s through quiche that human beings are defined.
The computer chimes that she has received email.
Claire peeks in the oven once more before returning to her seat in front of the computer screen. There are two emails awaiting her attention. She clicks on the first—it’s from her grocery delivery company. It details her order for tomorrow and asks her to confirm or change the items. She scans through the list, deletes a bag of oatmeal and the almond milk. In their place she adds a half dozen eggs and some organic orange juice before sending it back to the grocer.
The second is from Gabby, Claire’s boss at the PartyBox. The email is addressed to her and the other nine women working the phones. Gabby starts off by apologizing and then writes that everyone is fired.
Claire sighs and reads on.
Of course, there is the mandatory two weeks’ notice in which Gabby will happily give them the contact information for a placement agency that can help them find alternate, gainful employment. She apologizes to everyone again and then explains that the franchise has been under fiscal review and it is prudent to centralize the call center and outsource the phone-sex trade. All future call volume will be handled by a company in Manila. She informs everyone that, currently, the new call center employees are undergoing extensive training for the job. The last paragraph thanks them for their hard work and for their efforts making the last few years as successful as they have been. She ends the email with “Regards, Gabby.”
Claire blinks, takes a sip of wine, and scans the email again.
“Fuck.”
26
In Which Homeschooled Herman Witnesses His First Life-Altering Moment
Herman spotted his grandpa in the audience, smiling and clapping quietly. Grandpa struggled his way to his feet, from a chair one row back from the front and set a little to stage left. The stage lights dimmed, and the floor lights came up in a dramatic sweep. The room was packed to the walls. People stood at the back and sat on the stairs bracketing the bank of seats. Every seat was occupied, and the constant cough or sniffle jumping around the room attested to the capacity crowd.
Other than that roaming, intermittent human noise, the theater was still. There was also the quiet shuffling sound of Grandpa’s dry hands clapping softly together. Grandpa’s fingers were gnarled at the joints and painful with arthritis. For him, the noise he made was a resounding applause to go with his standing ovation.
Herman looked out over the rows of uninterested faces. He had lip-synched the best he could to Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” He had given it his all. He had thrown his hands out in front of himself, curled his splayed fingers into tightly grasped fists in all the right places. He raised them, pleading to the lights in all the right places. He shook bodily at all the right times, when the cannons fired about halfway through his performance. He moved his whole body and used the entire stage throughout his performance. He worked hard to just let emotion take over, and when it did, he flowed with the power of it. By the end of the seven-minute epic, when he stood to receive his applause, his chest was heaving from the exertion. He had become so immersed in the song that tears streamed from his eyes when the falsetto voice at the end swelled. He hoped that no one could see him cry under the bright stage lights.
It would not be enough to win the competition, however. Darrin Jespersen won for lip-synching some Nickelback song. It must have been his air guitar, Herman thought and had to admit it had been pretty good. While Herman’s efforts would not be enough to garner any more than Grandpa’s raspy-clap standing ovation and the uninterested looks of dozens of parents who were only there to support their own kids, it would earn him the beating near the bike racks that would eventually cause Grandpa to withdraw him from school.
* * *
Herman has vague recollections of the stairwell door opening, of being in the stairwell. The shadows stick like thick black honey in the corners, and there are dark scuffs on the walls. The railing is painted pale blue on the underside and worn to a shiny silver from years of caresses. Years of soft touches could wear away even the hardest surface. Herman floats as much as falls down the stairs. He’s not sure how long he’s in the stairwell because time doesn’t matter when one disengages from it and moves independent of its control.
As if in a dream, time stretches out above and below him, a column he can easily move through and get off at any time. Flights of runs and risers twisting back on themselves, time becomes a serrated corkscrew edge heading up into the future and down into the past. The elevator jumps between the two, slipping the column from the beginning to the end, stopping on demand or randomly at any floor in between. Time is dog’s years versus tortoise’s years. Time is always happening, all at once.
If you live half as long, is the time you spend twice as important?
Herman knows it is.
Dogs know it too.
And if you have too much of it, you get tired of it. It loses meaning.
Herman drifts through a door, not even sure if he opens it or just passes through it, not even sure where it leads, and then he sees a new terror. A woman staggers toward him. She speaks a cottony noise at him, but he can’t figure out what she says. One of her arms is propped against the wall, and the other reaches out for him, fingers splayed, grasping. She walks stiff-legged, like the dead if they could walk. It’s all too much to process. Herman’s vision slides opaque and turns sideways.
* * *
Grandpa slid a piece of paper in front of Herman. It was a blank white page except for two dots that Grandpa had marked on opposite corners.
“How far apart are these dots?” he asked. “Tell me but don’t measure the distance—you don’t need to.”
They had been working on a trigonometry lesson together, and Herman’s mind had been keenly tuned to the beauty of Pythagoras’s numbers for the past twenty minutes. Grandpa was always innovative with his lessons. It was a standard 8.5-by-11 sheet of paper, so, Herman reasoned, it was not a question of how far apart the dots were; it was a question of what was the hypotenuse of a triangularly bisected sheet of standard letter paper. Herman scribbled out an equation and completed it.
“Those two dots are approximately 13.9 inches apart,” Herman said, a proud smile on his face.
“That’s one answer,” Grandpa said. “What’s another?”
Herman was puzzled. Grandpa smiled encouragingly at him.
The math was absolute, Herman thought. There were no two ways to add or square a number; there
was only one way. “There’s only one answer.” He checked his sums again while Grandpa watched. There could only be one answer. “They’re 13.9 inches apart.”
“That’s true—there’s nothing wrong with your arithmetic. There’s something wrong with how you see the question.”
Herman stared at the page, his eyes dancing between the two dots and tracing imagined lines back and forth across the blank white page. He frowned.
Grandpa patted him on the shoulder, stood, and said, “I’ll leave you to it.” As he walked to the door, he said, “The distance between the two is variable. Those two dots can be the same dot, or they can be anywhere up to fourteen inches apart, like you think. Now tell me how that could be.” Grandpa left Herman’s room.
Herman put the eraser on the end of the pencil in his mouth and sunk his teeth into its flesh. Time passed and the kettle wailed in the kitchen. Herman furrowed his brow, trying to make sense of the distance between the dots. Grandpa shuffled around the apartment. A short while later, Herman heard the rustle of the newspaper from the living room.
* * *
And then, Herman was in the car, watching to make sure his sister didn’t cross the invisible line demarcating his side from hers on the seat between them. She was sneaky. She thought it was funny to cross the line, and it kind of was for some reason Herman couldn’t pinpoint.
Her strategy was to wait until he looked out the window at a motorbike or a big truck, and then she’d slip her fingers across. By the time he looked, they would be back on her side, but the remnant contraction of her arm would tell the history of her intrusion. He tried to slap her hand whenever it crossed over. He never slapped too hard though, just enough to shock but not enough to hurt. Most of the time she got away with it and giggled at her cunning evasiveness. He pretended to be mad, but she knew he wasn’t, that he was just playing. When he did get her, she squealed in surprise and Mom or Dad glanced in the rearview mirror or turned around to tell them to behave.
The radio was on, playing some song Herman didn’t know and didn’t think about as anything more than background noise. The tune mixed with the white hiss of the air passing by the car and the sound of the tires on the road. They were traveling the highway.
They were on vacation, touring the coast and zigzagging inland to sightsee and visit friends, here and there along the way. They had camped on a beach last night. As the sun set, Dad struck up a fire and they cooked hotdogs on sticks they had cut from willow branches near the shore. They had sticky fingers from roasting marshmallows for dessert.
Over the water, the sky turned shades of bruise and apricot. The reflection of the water made it look like the sky had melted to the horizon. The wind picked up as the sun dropped below the horizon and the fire flared sideways and roared for a while. Then it was calm again, there was sand in Herman’s marshmallow, and the sky grew a deep indigo before black. He looked up to see the stars. Then they had slept in a tent, which Herman thought was uncivilized. He didn’t sleep well because of the sound of the water and the ripples from the breeze stroking the nylon walls.
The next morning, they stopped at a drive-through for juice, breakfast sandwiches, and hash browns. Dad passed the orders out from the driver’s seat, and when everyone was settled and satisfied, they merged back onto the highway.
The next stop was the city to visit Grandpa in his apartment. Herman had been here before, in the past, in this car driving this road with the blurred green of the pine trees running a dynamic backdrop to the roadside litter and ditch puddles. The pale blue-gray of the hot summer sky was the same now as it had been then. The songs that played on the radio were the same.
The DJ babbled mindlessly.
Herman slapped at his sister’s hand and then grew sad because he knew what was going to happen.
Dad slumped forward against the chest strap of his seat belt. His hands slid from the steering wheel and the cruise control kept the car moving at a steady speed. Mom looked up from the crossword she was doing. Then, she looked at Dad as the car drifted across the yellow centerline.
The paint on the pavement did nothing to stop them from drifting into the lanes of oncoming traffic.
27
In Which Ian the Goldfish Realizes He Is Falling
There comes a point in every goldfish’s descent when he realizes he’s falling—again. In fact, there come several points in a goldfish’s descent when this revelation is had.
Ian is at this point once again as he whizzes past the seventeenth-floor balcony. There’s a bikini-clad lady sitting on a plastic folding chair on the safe side of the railing. A book in one hand, a cup of coffee in the other, and the sun warming her gym-firmed tummy. Her face is blissfully calm. Her eyes trace the lines of text in her book. She enjoys the warmth of the waning afternoon light, and she relishes the racy nature of the smutty prose she reads. The book cover is adorned with a curvy vixen in a billowy pink gown parted seductively to expose her cleavage, in the embrace of a be-six-packed man-stallion. One of her knees is drawn up to his waist. She clings to him like he clings to the rope of a timber tall ship. The woman on the balcony is so engrossed in the words she doesn’t see Ian, at best a mere blip in her peripheral vision, at worst a rocketing inch and a half of fish flesh passing by unnoticed, in the span of a blink.
What Ian takes from the scene is the peaceful escape within a novel’s pages. Even though the calm of the woman is in sharp contrast to the near constant terror that threatens Ian, the goldfish shares a fleeting moment of camaraderie with her. Her escape through the words on a page is akin to his plight, though a lot safer. Ian didn’t have the choices for adventure and exploration that the woman sunning herself does. Ian can’t read Dee-Dee Drake’s Love’s Secret Sniper. Ian can’t imagine, and Ian had no one to talk to in his bowl save for Troy. And while the goldfish and the snail were friends through circumstance of geography, Troy was not a good communicator. Ian usually just wound up nipping at his shell for hours to amuse himself, trying to pull Troy from the glass, dislodging him from his algae dinner. There was the odd time that Troy became unseated, and Ian felt an immense satisfaction when he did.
Within a few hours though, Troy would be back on the wall of the bowl, slurping up the vegetation. Indeed, Ian found Troy to be a wholly disappointing roommate, though this was not a revelation by any stretch given Troy’s brain was composed of a mere few ganglia.
Now firmly below the woman on the balcony, Ian glances into the apartment as he flashes past the sixteenth floor. Nobody is home, and Ian, for a moment, thinks about how sad an empty home is. An empty home is a lonely box awaiting life to bring it to its full potential. The coffee cups sit in the cupboard; Ian thinks and then stops himself. It would be cliché and erroneous to say “collecting dust” because the verb is an active one and the cups are inert.
The tap drip-drip-drips into the sink. Given a thousand years, it will erode a hole through the stainless steel with its soft but persistent caresses. The milk in the fridge moves, second by second, toward its “best before” date. It is an inevitable reminder of time passing and how, through the very act of existence, the unmarred, unspoiled purpose of things moves inexorably toward expiration.
Ian thinks of his fishbowl, now empty save for the algae, the pink plastic castle, and Troy slipping across the glass with his interminable munching. Ian thinks of what a lonely thing Troy’s shell would be without the chewy organic mass of Troy to inhabit it. Ian won’t miss the sound of Troy eating. He won’t miss the constant slurping and sucking noises, the ripping noise Troy makes day and night as he sucks the algae from the walls. He won’t miss that chiefly because his fishbowl is no longer even a memory for him.
Ian is distracted from his thoughts by something he spies through the dust-streaked glass of the balcony sliding door to the apartment he passes on the fifteenth floor. In the fraction of a second it takes, his mind captures a still life of the goings-on inside.
There’s a gangly boy standing in the background, framed
by the light of the kitchen behind him. He has knobby arms and a skinny neck, seemingly too fragile for the weight of the head it’s forced to support. The boy stands, slump-shouldered, in shadowed contrast to the light reflecting off the white cabinets and the white appliances behind him. There’s a reading lamp in the foreground, its stem curved like a question mark and its apex casting a cone of amber light upon the slack arm of an old man sitting in an armchair.
The old man wears a blue knit cardigan and has a crocheted blanket draped across his lap. He sits, askew to one side as if sleeping carelessly, slumping with an arm slung over the armrest. The old man’s knuckles are swollen with arthritis, and his fingers are warped from a lifetime of use. A newspaper has fallen across his knee; a sheaf remains draped there, and others have fallen to a disheveled pile on the floor. The pile has created a scruffy paper volcano on the carpet. It looks rugged in the lamp’s light, with crumpled crevasses and jutting ridges. The space between the boy and the old man seems vast for some reason, and the feeling of that space is mirrored in the expression on the boy’s face. It’s a look of loss and helplessness. It’s as if the distance across the small living room is a space too large for him to cross, as if there is something so fundamentally awry in the apartment that the boy can’t close the gap between them even if he should want to.
The boy’s expression shifts in a flash when he sees Ian passing in a vertical line in front of the sliding balcony door. Before Ian slips below the level of the balcony, the boy’s body convulses in a nascent sprint toward the window. In his speedy descent, Ian only sees the start of a step before he’s out of eyeshot. And then the boy is gone, the old man is gone, and the moment is gone. It was a singular instant never to be repeated. Ian does not have the mental capacity to recognize the honor of witnessing the intimate scene within the apartment on the fifteenth floor. The time and space will never again align into that moment, ever.
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