Fishbowl

by Somer, Bradley

  “There’re no arms,” Herman says to Claire. He looks to her for direction and asks, “How do I get the arms out of her?”

  Claire relays this through the phone and then tells him, “Gently turn the baby from one side and then to the other. You should be able to see them, and when you do, you can gently pull them out.”

  Herman takes a deep, grounding breath and holds it. Then, cupping the tiny torso between his palms, he twists it to one side. The crook of an elbow pops out. Herman hooks a finger there and uses a gentle tug to help free the arm. Then he repeats the motion, twisting the baby slowly to the other side. As he does, Petunia Delilah screams through another contraction, which pushes the other arm out unaided.

  The neighbor bangs on the wall again, more forcefully now.

  Herman lets his breath out and smiles at the result of his work.

  “I’ve got them,” he says excitedly. “They’re both out now.” Herman turns the baby chest-down again and then looks to Claire for more instructions.

  Claire peers at them from the other side of the island, craning her neck to better see what’s going on. She gives him a thumbs-up.

  “Arms are out,” she says into the receiver. “Now what?” She listens and nods at the response.

  “This is the hardest part,” she tells Herman. “Baby’s got a big head, so we all have to work together to get it out. Petunia Delilah, are you ready?”

  “Get this fucking thing out of me,” she growls through clenched teeth.

  Claire turns her attention back to Herman. “Can you reach up in there a bit? From underneath? Put the baby’s body on your forearm and reach under. Feel for the baby’s chin—don’t block her mouth though. Put your fingers on either side of it.” Claire holds her hand to her mouth, her fingers splayed into a V shape in demonstration.

  Herman nods, so completely fascinated now he doesn’t even feel scared. He drapes the baby on his forearm and pushes his fingers into Petunia Delilah. There isn’t any room there, so he has to work against the resistance until he feels the baby’s jawline. He can’t figure out where the mouth is due to the pressure exerted by the compressed tube of flesh. He makes a guess and decides that will have to suffice.

  “Okay,” he says. “Her head’s wedged up in there pretty tight though. Now what?”

  Claire listens to the phone and then says, “Now put your other arm along the baby’s spine. Wrap your index finger around one shoulder and your ring finger around the other. Run your middle finger straight up the back of her neck for support.”

  Herman does as he’s instructed. The baby lies limp, pinned between his forearms.

  “She’s not breathing,” he says in a panic.

  “It’s okay,” Claire says. “She will. She has to come out first.”

  Herman nods, and Claire continues.

  “Petunia Delilah, in a moment, you’re going to give a big push. Herman, when she does, keep the baby sandwiched between your arms and lift upward, the baby’s whole body flat like a plank and in one motion. You have to support her neck while you do it. You got it?”

  Herman finds he can’t speak, so he just nods. There’s a life in his hands. He feels his mind focus like it never has before. Any threat of blacking out is gone. He isn’t going anywhere but here, and he isn’t doing anything but bringing this little baby into the room.

  When Petunia Delilah pushes, she growls from deep in her chest. Her eyes close with the exertion, and her lips curl back from her teeth. Herman’s spindly arms strain to keep the baby flat, like a board held between his forearms. He starts to lift the body and for a moment nothing happens.

  “Push,” Claire yells at them.

  The neighbor pounds, rattling the pictures on the wall.

  Petunia Delilah lets out one last, agonized scream.

  With a smooth motion, the baby’s free. The umbilical cord snakes out, attaching her from her belly button to her mother’s insides. Herman falls back onto his bum, his feet flat on the floor and his knees touching Petunia Delilah’s. Petunia Delilah lets out a groan and pants. Her body goes limp. Herman looks at the baby in his arms. She’s covered with a wet wax that smears onto his arms and shirt. Herman grabs a tea towel from the pile on the floor and wraps it around the little girl.

  “She’s still not breathing,” he says to Claire.

  Claire relays the message to the phone and then tells him, “Wait a sec. Rub her body. See if she starts on her own.”

  Time is slow. It’s not a surprise to Herman because he has experienced the sensation many times before. He keeps calm and looks down on the little girl’s face, waiting for it to break to life. He rubs her body with the towel and holds his breath, willing her to start breathing.

  “Check her mouth,” Claire says.

  With a thumb on her chin, Herman gently pries the baby’s mouth open.

  Petunia Delilah moans, rolls her head to the side, and asks with an anxious voice, “What’s happening? How’s my baby?”

  “Her mouth is full of stuff,” Herman tells Claire.

  “It’s full of stuff,” Claire tells the phone and listens. Then she relays to Herman, “You’re going to have to suck it out. Just a very gentle suck.”

  “What’s happening to my baby?” Petunia Delilah’s manic voice fills the apartment.

  “I have to what?” Herman asks Claire and then looks at the glistening baby with her mouth full of gelatinous goop.

  “Your lips go over the baby’s mouth and then gently suck the stuff out.”

  Herman steels his nerves for a moment and thinks how he doesn’t really have a choice. He leans forward and encircles the baby’s mouth with his lips. He sucks gently, as if the baby is a straw. A dollop of jelly slips into his mouth, which causes Herman to gag at the sensation. He turns his head and spits the glob on the floor.

  “Don’t spit on the floor,” Claire yells. “On the towel, keep it all on the towel. Christ—”

  And then the baby starts to gurgle and cry. All of her limbs start to gyrate as she sputters and wails to life.

  Herman spits again, this time onto the towel. He wipes the back of his arm across his lips. Herman realizes he’s sitting between Petunia Delilah’s legs and quickly grows uncomfortable with the familiarity of her exposure, the intimacy of their touching knees. He rearranges himself into a kneeling position and, with the baby girl cradled carefully, uses a free hand to take the remaining towel from the floor and cover Petunia Delilah. Herman then shuffles on his knees to her side.

  The baby girl, swaddled in the towel and cradled in his arms, gurgles and yawns. Her eyes are so big that Herman finds himself lost in them. He can see her. How can she be so tiny yet hold so much? She’s frail but strong with the potential she has. Herman can see her growing up, learning to walk and learning the words to express her thoughts, playing on the street with friends. She picks dandelions for her mother and paints paintings with her fingers that will be stuck on the fridge by letter-shaped magnets. At the playground, she will push her best friend off the teeter-totter and learn what regret is. She will both make mistakes and learn to live right.

  “She’s so little,” Herman whispers.

  Petunia Delilah reaches out to him and rests her hand on his forearm.

  Herman sees the little girl going to school and studying and making friends. She grows up and goes to college. She plays guitar and writes bad, rhyming ballads. She cheats on a university test and feels awful about it so never does it again. She does things both good and bad. She falls in love with a boy and becomes a social worker. Later, they have babies together. She lives to see her children grow and have babies of their own, and she cares for her grandchildren so fully and happily. And when she dies, she is remembered as a mother and a grandmother, and she lasts so long in the memory of the people who loved her that her lifespan is tripled.

  Herman watches it all.

  And here she is, just beginning, nothing more than a tiny thing in his arms and nothing less than a brand-new life.


  Then Herman remembers Grandpa, his arm draped down the side of his easy chair and the pile of newspaper on the floor. He’s still there in their apartment.

  “You probably want to hold your daughter,” Herman says. He can’t take his eyes from the everything he holds in his hands. She’s all those things he saw and none of them. That’s the root of wonder he felt. He can’t plot her course and won’t know it all. These things are unknown to anyone.

  “I do,” Petunia Delilah says. “But whenever you’re ready.” She sounds so grateful.

  Herman takes one last, deep look and then hands the little girl to Petunia Delilah.

  Petunia Delilah’s happiness is infectious. Her eyes lock on her daughter, and Herman can’t help but smile along with her. Herman and Petunia Delilah sit side by side. In the quiet that follows the birth, they hear Claire talking. She’s still on the phone, thanking the emergency operator.

  “You know my name,” Claire says. “I don’t know yours.”

  Claire listens to the phone for a moment.

  “Jason?” she asks. “Pig? It’s you?”

  45

  In Which Ian’s Plummetous Descent Continues Past the Eighth Floor

  By the eleventh floor, Ian is physically exhausted, desperate for breath, and mentally drained. It has been a tense few seconds for our little golden explorer since he vaulted from the comforts of home. There have been stresses and revelations and terrors to last a lifetime, and his fall is not yet at its conclusion. Since the halfway mark of his journey, the tedium of travel has deepened within him. There’s no longer the thrill of starting the journey. The dream of the possibilities that the adventure holds has waned. What remains is the anticipation of the destination and the impatience for just arriving and being done with the whole escapade. The trip has grown tiresome, and Ian longs for a rest.

  He takes a momentary assessment of his body. The fine webs of his fins are plastered to his sides. Even his dorsal fin, usually flaunted erect and proud, is lying flat from the wind shear. His lungs are wanting for breath but not yet desperate enough for his brain to lose consciousness. A dryness has crept into his scales and into the jelly-filled discs of his eyes. His throat is parched, and his tail riffles uncomfortably in the wind with such vigor that he worries the delicate membrane may begin to tear. There’s a heady sensation in his stomach and a nauseating sensation in his head.

  And then there’s the feeling of falling, the wind buffeting his sides and baffling his lateral line. The act of plummeting is often likened to being weightless, which is a gross misrepresentation as weightiness is entirely the problem. To be weightless would be a welcomed absolution from the incessant pull of gravity. Ian knows the difference between the two, for living a life in water is more akin to weightlessness than falling.

  The eleventh floor slips by, a flash past the eye, and then it’s an unsteady memory. The tenth is gone in the span of time it takes him to realize the previous floor has passed. So much else is gone.

  Ian doesn’t remember the cramped aquarium at the pet store where Katie pointed at him and traced the meandering path of his swim with her finger, picking him out of the crowd of a hundred other identical goldfish at the shop. He doesn’t remember the sign taped on the tank, scrawled with clumsy felt marker lines that read, “Feeder Goldfish: 99 cents.” Nor does he remember the tiny plastic bag or the odd sensation of that bubble of water jostling around as Katie carried him up Roxy toward Connor’s apartment.

  Ian doesn’t remember the lazy afternoons and evenings in his bowl on the balcony, watching the city as dazzling reflections of brilliant sunlight turned into the twinkling of office lights in the dark. Ian doesn’t remember sleeping late into the morning, inside the pink castle, and Ian doesn’t remember the easy company of Troy the snail, who never complained or demanded or crabbed about anything. An entire lifetime has been forgotten and exchanged for the immediacy of the plummet.

  Ian doesn’t remember how he got here, outside the ninth-floor window with that fat, naked guy sitting on the couch, watching television and eating chips right out of the bag. That fat, naked guy, absorbed by flickering images and calories, doesn’t see Ian flash by the window. Even if he did, he may have mistaken him for bird poop or something of the sort. He’s oblivious to the two ambulances parked at the base of the building. He’s vigorously scratching under his balls, that pair of nubbly walnuts in a saggy flesh sack draped casually over the back of his hand as he roots around beneath them. He licks chip salt from the fingers of the other. His eyes are locked on the television set.

  And, thankfully, the naked guy is gone as quickly as he appeared.

  Naked fat guy nut-scratcher’s private offense is no more in Ian’s sight, though Ian does not judge him. Ian has seen many a thing when people thought they weren’t being watched. All goldfish are privy to a secret world where how one acts in private is at odds with one’s conduct under scrutiny. Most people don’t recognize the unblinking eye of their pet fish, but Ian’s owner did. That is why Ian was on the balcony of the twenty-seventh-floor apartment in the first place.

  Connor had been partaking in a nasty bit of the nasty with a busty brunette when he had noticed Ian staring at them. Connor had lost his erection almost immediately, and the woman he was pinning smirked. Then Ian was on the balcony. Ian was not aroused or judgmental in any way. He had simply been attracted to the motion of her tits swinging back and forth, just the movement, nothing more. It was the same way his eye was locked on Connor’s dangling member as he took the bowl out to the old card table on the balcony. The motion attracted the eye, not the subject. To Ian, human copulation was a mere novelty, and having no external reproductive organs of his own, he was not one to offer opinions on Connor’s member. Indeed, their activities didn’t even register as a logical act in the fish’s mind.

  Naked fat guy nut-scratcher is not alone in the world even though he is alone in his apartment, observed fleetingly and then left to root around under his balls.

  The eighth-floor window offers a sight beyond that of the ninth floor. In the shadows of the surrounding buildings, even in the late-afternoon light, this apartment shines like a beacon. Every light is on, and every surface gleams. The glow blasts through the windows to fight back the late-afternoon shadows.

  Inside lies a woman on her back on the floor; her legs are bent at the knees, and her knees are spread akimbo. Another woman stands in the kitchen, stooping to look in the stove. Her head, cocked to one side, pinches a phone between her shoulder and her ear. The apartment door is open to the hall, and two men in blue uniforms bustle in, one shoving past the other. One kneels beside the woman on the floor, placing a hand on her shoulder and looking into her eyes. He talks constantly, and the woman on the floor nods. The other paramedic steps over them and places a large toolbox on the island in the kitchen.

  The woman at the stove stands up and glances over her shoulder at the bustle. She says something into the receiver and smiles in a shy, cutesy sort of way, as if flirting. The movement and the lights are dazzling to Ian’s goldfish brain and so much more engaging than the view into the ninth-floor window. He is almost sad when he passes by the scene.

  The seventh floor is black, the windows dark. The air becomes cooler as Ian approaches the concrete … the concrete below that has grown so close. It’s spotty with people mingling around the ambulances. The few dawdlers look at the building, not upward. He can see a few of the larger cracks in the pavement, their dark and jagged lightning strikes across the sidewalk’s surface.

  Ian can also see the dark splotches of spat-out and trod-upon gum, their shapes similar to what he imagines a splattered fish making.

  46

  In Which Our Heroine Katie Assaults the Crockery and Defends Her Heart

  “What?” Connor says, lowering the bunched panties from his face and exhaling the breath he had drawn through them. He looks at the wad of purple fabric in his hand.

  “Those aren’t mine,” Katie says again.

&nb
sp; She shakes her head, and Connor doesn’t raise his eyes from the handful of wadded-up material. She wonders how anyone could be so clueless but doesn’t pursue the thought too far considering she was duped by him. She doesn’t want to contemplate how clueless she has been to be fooled by the foolish.

  “Faye’s panties?” Katie asks.

  Connor furrows his brow at them. He holds them like a lavender-colored bouquet, the fabric folds setting the light in deep contrast.

  Katie can tell he isn’t sure whose they are. It’s a moment of honesty in his face, and to his credit, he doesn’t try to hide it.

  “There’re others?”

  “Maybe they’re Deb’s,” Connor mumbles to his chest.

  “Maybe?” Katie slumps, exhausted by him.

  He looks up at her. His eyes are streaming tears again, and she can tell he exhausts himself as well. There’s a blunt look into which she reads, I’m so tired of myself, I’m so sick with what I’ve done to you, and I love you, I really do.

  Katie winds her arm back and then punches him in the shoulder as hard as she can. It makes a flat smacking sound, and a shock of pain races through her fist, radiating up her arm and spreading into her shoulder.

  Connor’s body jolts back with the impact, and he grunts. Instinctively, he raises his hand to his shoulder.

  It hurt them both.

  “I can’t—” Connor stutters, rubbing his shoulder. “I don’t—”

  “Shut it,” Katie says. “You’re done talking.”

  She grabs the plastic bag full of her things, spins on her heel, and storms toward the balcony door. Connor blinks once at the panties and then follows her.

  “Katie, wait,” Connor calls. “You can’t— They’re just an artifact. Leftovers from the past. It will never happen again.”

  Katie steps one foot over the doorsill and onto the balcony. She spins to face him, raising a finger in his direction. Connor freezes at the threat of her and then takes a step backward so he’s just out of striking distance. Just when he thinks she isn’t going to say anything, she does.