Authors: Bradley Somer
Fishbowl
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For B. Tyler
In Which the Essence of Life and Everything Else Is Illuminated
There’s a box that contains life and everything else.
This is not a figurative box of lore. It’s not a box of paper sheets that have been captured, bound, and filled with the inkings of faith, chronicling the foibles and contradictions of the human species. It doesn’t sport the musty smell of ancient wisdom and moldering paper. It isn’t a microscopic box of C, G, A, or T, residing within cell walls and containing traces of everything that ever lived, from today back through the astral dust of the Big Bang itself to whatever existed before time began. It can’t be spliced or recombined or subjected to therapy. It’s not the work of any god or the evolution of Darwin. It’s not a thousand other ideas, however concrete or abstract they may be, that could fill the pages of this book. It’s not one of these things, but it’s all of them combined and more.
Now we know what it isn’t, let’s focus on what it is. It’s a box containing the perpetual presence of life itself. Living things move within it, and at some point, it will have been around long enough to have contained absolutely everything. Not all at once, but over the years, building infinite layer upon infinite layer, it will all wind up there. Time will compile these experiences, stacking them on top of each other, and while the moments themselves are fleeting, their visceral memory is everlasting. The passing of a particular moment can’t erase the fact that it was once present.
In this way, the box reaches beyond the organic to the ethereal. The heartbreaking sweetness of love, the rending hatred, the slippery lust, the sorrow of losing a family member, the pain of loneliness, all thoughts that were ever thought, every word ever said and even those which were not, the joys of birth and the sorrows of death and everything else will be experienced here in this one vessel. The air is thick with the anticipation of it all. After it’s all done, the air will be heavy with everything that has passed.
It’s a box constructed by human hands and, yes, if your beliefs trend that way, by extension, the hands of God. Regardless of its origin, its purpose is the same and its structure reflects its purpose. The box is partitioned into little compartments in which all of these experiences of time are stored, though there’s no order to their place or chronological happening.
There are compartments stacked twenty-seven high, three wide, and two deep that house this jumble of everything. Melvil Dewey, the patron saint of librarians, would cringe at the mere thought of trying to catalog the details of these one hundred and sixty-two compartments. There’s no way to arrange or structure what happens here, no way to exert control over it or systematize it. It just has to be left a mess.
A pair of elevators connects all of these compartments. Themselves little boxes, each with a capacity of ten people or 4,000 lb./1,814 kg., whichever comes first. Each with a little plaque attached to the mirrored wall near the panel that says it’s so. The irritating pitch of the alarm that sounds when there’s too much weight inside also says it’s so. The elevators trundle tirelessly up and down their dingy shafts, diligently delivering artifacts and their custodians to the different levels. Day and night, they shuttle to one floor and then to the next and then back to the lobby. There’s a staircase too, in case of fire or power outage, so the custodians can grab the artifacts most dear to them and safely exit the box.
The box is a building, yes. More specifically it’s an apartment building. It sits there, an actual place in an actual city. It has a street address so people who are unfamiliar with the area can find it. It also has a series of numbers so lawyers and city surveyors can find it too. It’s classified in many ways. To the city it’s an orange rectangle with black crosshatching on the zoning map. “Multi-Residential, High-Density High-Rise,” the legend reads. To many occupants it’s a “one-bedroom apartment for rent, with underground parking and coin laundry facilities.” To some it was “an unbelievably affordable way to experience the convenience and excitement of downtown living. This two-bedroom, one-bathroom condo with uninterrupted city views must be seen to be believed,” and is now home. For a few, it’s a place to work on the weekdays. For others, it’s a place to visit friends on the weekends.
The building was constructed in 1976 and has hobbled through time ever since. When it was still new, it was the tallest building on the street. Now that it’s older, there are three taller ones. Soon there will be a fourth. For the time, it was an elegant and stately building. Now it seems dated, belonging to a period in architectural history that has its own name, a name that was not known at the time it was built but is applied knowingly in hindsight.
The building was renovated recently because it was in much need. The concrete was painted to hide the spalling cracks and compiled graffiti. The drafty windows and gappy doors to the balconies were replaced to keep the evening chill outside and the temperate air in. Last year, the boiler was upgraded to provide adequate hot water for washing up. The electrical was updated because building codes have changed. It was once a building entirely full of renters. Now, it is a condominium where most people own but others still choose to rent out their suites to offset other investment risks, to “diversify their portfolios.”
The building fulfills an Arcensian mission of carrying everything mentioned thus far, housing the spirit and the chaos of life and those beings in which they reside, through the floods and to safety every time the water recedes. Depending on where you live, this box may be just up the street. It may even be within walking distance from where you read these words. You may drive past it on the way home from work if you work downtown but live in the suburbs. Or you may even live there.
If you see this building, pause for a second to ponder what a marvelous arcanum it is. It will sit there long after you turn the last page in this book and long after we are dead and these words have been forgotten. The beginning and end of time will happen there within those walls, between the roof and the parking garage. But for now, only a handful of decades old, it’s a growing marvel in its nascent days and this book is a short chronicle of its youth.
Spelled out above the front door, bolted to the brick in weeping, rusty black metal lettering, is the name of the building: the Seville on Roxy.
2
In Which Our Protagonist, Ian, Takes a Dreadful Fall
Our story doesn’t begin with a goldfish named Ian’s perilous plunge from his bowl on the twenty-seventh-floor balcony where he, for as much as he can comprehend, has been enjoying the view of the downtown skyline.
In the long shadows of the late-afternoon sun, the city is a picket fence of buildings. There are dusty-rose glass ones, reflecting a Martian sun. Others are gunmetal-blue mirrors, and still others are simple brick-and-concrete blocks. There are office tower thrones proudly wearing corporate logo crowns, and there are hotels and apartment buildings, prickly with balconies ribbing every side of their vertical space. All of them have been shoved into the ground, into a grid that brings some order to their apparent incongruity.
Ian looks out over this megalithic flower garden of skyscrapers and sees only as much wonder as his mind can muster. He’s a goldfish with a bird’s-eye view of the world. A goldfish held aloft on a concrete platform with a god’s perspective, one that’s lost on a brain that can’t fathom what it is looking at, but by that fact, the view is made even more wondrous.
Ian doesn’t take his plunge from the balcony until chapter 54, when a dreadful series of events culminates in an opportunity for Ian to escape his watery prison. But we start with Ian for a few reasons, the first being that he’s a vital thread that ties humanity together. The second is, with a fish’s brain capacity, time and place mean little because both are constantly being rediscovered. Whether he takes his fall now, fifteen minutes from now, or fifteen minutes ago doesn’t matter because Ian can neither comprehend place and time nor comprehend the order that each imposes on the other.
Ian’s world is a pastiche of events with no sequence, no past and no future.
For example, just now, at the beginning of his career as a Cypriniforme skydiver, Ian remembers that his watery home still sits there on a thrift-store folding table with flaking green paint. His bowl is empty now, save for a few pebbles, a little pink plastic castle, a fog of algae on the glass, and his roommate, Troy the snail. A rapidly growing length of empty air spans the distance between the bowl and its former resident. It doesn’t matter to Ian that this event doesn’t actually happen until chapter 54 because he already forgets how it came to be. Soon he will forget the bowl he spent months living in. He will forget the ludicrous pink castle. With time, the insufferable Troy will not just fade to a memory; he will disappear from Ian’s experience all together. It will be as if he never existed at all.
While falling past a twenty-fifth-floor window, Ian catches a glimpse of a middle-aged woman of considerable size taking a step across the living room. The glimpse, a fleeting flash in the mind of a creature with no memory, has the woman wearing a beautiful gown, her movements as elegant and graceful as the drape and flow of the fine material she wears. The gown is a stunning shade of red. He would call it carmine if he knew the word for it. The woman’s back is to Ian, who admires the tailored cut of the gown and how it accentuates her voluptuous form and the valley of her spine between her muscular shoulder blades. She’s in the process of stepping around a coffee table. The way she moves betrays a level of shyness and a hint of terror. Her toes point slightly inward, her knees touch lightly together. Her hands are clasped on one side, one arm held apologetically across her belly and the other resting on her hip. Her fingers are knotted into a nest.
There’s also a round hulk of a man in the center of the living room. The man has an arm outstretched to her, thick hair on his thick forearms, sporting a blissful look in his eyes. His face is calm, which is in contrast to the anxiety shown by the woman. A hint of a smile curves his lips. He wears the look of how a loved one’s embrace feels.