Which is when I remembered the dinner where Cathy and Robert asked each of us what we wanted to be when we grew up. Chip said aerospace engineer. Tyler said, “A judge for children.” After some questioning, we figured out that Tyler wanted to be a child advocate attorney. When it came to me, I shrugged, took a big bite of potatoes, but Robert pressed. The English teacher liked me, said I had a gift for essays, kept leaving books on my desk. “Writer,” I said on an impulse. “Screenplays. I don’t know.” It sufficed. And then everyone went back to their barbecued chicken.
On Christmas, after receiving the notebook, I ran out and bought Tyler a pack of cigarettes because he was always smoking “secretly” in the alley behind the garage. Bought Chip a bottle of General Tso’s sauce because he said it was his favorite American food, and it seemed wrong—creepy—to buy a gift for Tyler alone. Wrote Merry Xmas in Sharpie on the front of both. Left them outside their doors in the basement. Fled the scene.
But despite all that, life with Cathy and Robert never felt realer than a video game to me. Despite their natural clove mouthwash, Robert’s mustache trim in the sink, the classical station they played while they cleaned, their tendency to purchase too many condiments, the growth on Cathy’s eyelid—despite all this proof of them, I never believed in them, or the parrots, or myself. Definitely not Tyler or Chip, who only stayed for two years. I believed in Anna while we were fucking, but otherwise she was unreal, too. I spent six years between the same walls as Cathy and Robert, and still we were strangers. I had a recurring dream that I stood in front of a burning house, and I knew they were inside, and I felt nothing. If I was evil, I had no one to blame.
As I carried the dead fish back to the Rabbit Hutch, I was coming to terms with all this. Well, I thought, it’s settled. It turns out I’m the kind of guy who’ll pluck a dying fish from the mud to make his friends feel crappy about themselves. I’m officially fucked up, and no one can tell me why.
The fish was super-dead by the time I reached our door. I was starting to doubt my choices, but the uncertainty made me double down. When I walked inside, the apartment was cloudy, and I noticed the smoke detector gutted on the counter. Malik was sitting at the ping-pong table, which doubled as a dining table. He’d set it with a sad stubby candle, napkins, two glasses of blue Gatorade, and two plates of food. I’d been gone about half an hour.
“Where the hell did you get cloth napkins?” I asked.
Staring at Blandine’s door, his posture was stiff, his expression bewildered and hurt. The expression that all widely adored men wear when they get rejected for the first time. Malik was no virgin. Everywhere he went, he charmed girl after girl. It’s important for a charismatic, handsome, lucky person to catch a glimpse of normal life every now and then. It’s like when celebrities have to use public transit. I’d never seen such a desperate look on his face—Malik is the one who keeps people waiting. Todd was still watching television. Todd hadn’t moved. In all our time living together, I can’t recall him blinking, not even once. I know that’s not possible. I’m just telling you what I remember.
I held up the fish. “Killed it.”
“A fish,” said Malik, no life in his voice. “That’s the best you got?”
“Told you I’d kill for her,” I said, losing my nerve.
Malik stress-rubbed his eyes. “Fuck if I care.”
“Sleepwalker could kill a fish,” added Todd. “Baby could kill a fish. Cucumber could kill a fish. That’s not impressive, Jack. Are you impressed, Malik?”
“I am not, Todd,” said Malik, his attention still bound to Blandine’s door.
“Just proving I’d do it, is all,” I said defensively. “Told you I would.”
Todd changed the channel, glancing at Malik for approval. “Whoop-de-fuckin’-do, Jack.”
For a moment, Malik studied the fish in my hand, his eyes unblinking and unfocused, then he got up from the table and marched over to Blandine’s room. He banged on the door. Real macho knocks. “Blandine? Yo, Blandine? You there? I made you something. I know you said you weren’t hungry, but I just—I made too much food, and I thought we could maybe—”
“Not hungry,” came her low voice behind the door.
“Maybe if you just saw it, you’d get hungry, or—”
“Not hungry,” she said, a few notches louder.
“Or just smelled it,” he pressed. “You know how that happens? You think you’re not hungry, or that you don’t have to piss, but then you smell some popcorn shrimp, or you hear a fountain, and you realize—”
“I’m going to bed good night,” she said in one breath.
Malik’s back flexed. Todd had muted the television. Malik turned to us, head down. “Whatever,” he mumbled.
He sat back down and slowly cut through strips of bacon, through the steak, which was burnt on the outside and bloody on the inside, the whole thing sprinkled with little green flakes. To tell you the truth, the little green flakes sort of broke my heart. But then I remembered that Malik was the enemy. A stack of depressing pancakes—“They’re not pancakes,” Malik snapped when I commented on them—drooped in yellow sauce next to the meat. Malik chewed like somebody rationed his bites.
I didn’t really know what to do with the fish, hadn’t thought that far ahead, so I just stood there, watching Malik and Todd and the muted television for who knows how long, trying to remember the point of all this. Everyone on-screen was a shirt to me. For a second, I recalled grabbing the fish out of the river with my bare hands and smacking it to death against the bark of a tree. Beating my chest and howling at the moon. Shit I’d never done.
I didn’t expect Blandine to come out of her room, but at some point, her door opened. White hair tied in a mess on her head, scrawny body looking even scrawnier in baggy shorts and a basketball jersey. As she left her private world and entered ours, Malik half stood, then froze. Blandine didn’t look at us as she made her way toward the bathroom, but I stepped in front of her, fish clutched behind my back.
“What?” she asked, irritated. “What now?”
“I’ve got something for you.”
“I’m not in the mood for this, all right? Any of it, with any of you, so quit playing. I’m tired and I want to brush my stupid teeth.”
Malik stopped chewing. He was crouched over the ping-pong table, a stance that was awkward to witness, and I felt embarrassed on his behalf.
Slowly, I brought the fish between me and Blandine, dangling its slimy tail. Fish don’t have eyelids, which I didn’t plan for. You don’t want a dead body to look you in the eye.
Blandine observed the fish for a moment, her striking face blank.
“Got a—got a bouquet for you.” I could feel my heart in my brain and my blood in my eyes.
And then something miraculous happened: she laughed. Laughed. Laughed and laughed, doubled over, crossed her arms over her stomach and squeezed her eyes shut until tears slipped out the creases, and when she finally caught her breath, she put her real hand on my real chest—the first time she’d touched me since the love hit—and I finally understood the phrase time stopped. “Oh God,” she gasped. “That’s a good one.” She touched my chest one more time, and I felt her everywhere. I tugged my shirt over my pants, grinning like an idiot. She walked to the bathroom, sighing a few leftover laughs. “You clown.” As she shut the door behind her, I saw that she was smiling.
A hot and happy silence.
“Are you,” Malik began, face murderous, still crouching, “fucking kidding me.”
Todd had finally looked up from the screen, his vision now attached to the brown scales in my hand.
I smiled big, then walked over to Malik, dropping the dead fish on the plate he’d fixed for Blandine. It sagged on her food, eyes open.
“I would,” I said. “I did.”
Chemical Hazard
Sometimes, Moses Robert Blitz—only child of Elsie Jane McLoughlin Blitz—paints his entire body with the liquid of broken glow sticks, forcibly enters the house of an enemy, and wakes the enemy. Then he flails around in the dark, naked and aglow.
He doesn’t mean any real harm. He just likes to fiddle with people.
In the cover of glow, Moses finds relief and control. He feels seen on his own terms. The formication—the fibers, the bugs, the creeping, maddening activity beneath his skin—quiets until Moses removes the chemicals. He thinks the glow is somehow bad for the fibers, which makes him love it like a medicine, or a parent. He is fifty-three years old.