…Later, a cold plastic cup of beer sweats condensation in your hand. You sit on your friend’s bed, watching his fish as it swims back and forth only on the left wall of its enormous aquarium. The story goes, and you have no idea if it’s true, that your friend dropped a hit of liquid acid in the tank once and the fish freaked out for days—swimming at three and four times its normal speed—and now has settled into an aquatic psychosis where it would never venture to the right side of the tank where the drug had been dropped. As far as the fish seems to be concerned, the right side of the tank is where VERY BAD SHIT once happened, and there isn’t anything that is going to get him to go BACK there. If this is true, that fish, that brainless cartilage-knuckle full of prehistoric DNA flip-flopping a slow glide on the left side of the tank is, in its way, smarter than you, who returns and returns and returns and keeps returning in various ways to where the very bad shit will happen for the next 20 years of your life.
You sit drunk and tripping, thinking about that little fish, and your girlfriend Jane, having changed her plans for some reason unknown to you, walks into your friend’s bedroom. Except for the party noise swelling and receding with the opening and the closing of the bedroom door, her entrance to the room is lost on you.
She is screaming your name.
It’s the first time you’ve heard your name, but she’s saying it with the intensity and annoyance of someone who has had to repeat herself several times, so logic dictates that you missed her first few attempts at her communicating.
She grabs your head and forces you to look up at her and screams your name again.
Her beautiful face is full-mooned into your line of vision so that all you can see are her probing eyes that look (as you have already sadly seen and will sadly later see again and, more sadly, have to see a few more times) much like loved ones and paramedics and doctors look into your eyes when you overdose.
“Hey,” you say.
“What’s wrong with you?” she says.
A valid question, to be sure. But one you are not really capable of taking on.
“I thought you were in Rhode Island?” you say.
“What the fuck is wrong with your eyes?” she says.
“I think my eyes are ok,” you say, then start to get scared. You feel for your eyes, half expecting them to be gone or bloodied and dangling, but they feel normal. You blink fast a few times. “What’s wrong with my eyes?”
“You are so fucked up,” she says.
You point to the aquarium. “That fish can only swim on one side of the tank.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’ve been studying it.”
She shakes her head. There is no way you can articulate it or explain your desperate desire to not let her down or hurt her again, but it seems, whether you can talk or not, that her disappointment is on a train that has already pulled out of the station and no matter how much you chase it, it’s beyond your reach. You want to say to her “don’t leave.” Or, “I’m surprised and happy to see you.” Or, even, of course, “I love you.” But these may as well be phrases from a foreign language phrase book, for all the access you have to them at the time. She is beautiful, smart, funny and talented. She is, in short, everything you think you are not and will go on thinking you’re not for over twenty years. The only thing you can find wrong with Jane is her taste—that she loves you is a blot on her otherwise spotless record in your mind, but you are soon to fix that problem.
There are few worse feelings than watching someone you love, who loves you, deeply, come to the realization that she or he can no longer love you for fear of their own survival. This is a lesson, like many others, you will have to learn a couple hundred times before it sinks in that it is not at all cool or good to be the drowning man who made others, repeatedly, decide to go down with him, or leave him to whatever the world might have for him.
by Rob Roberge
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