hum a hypnotic tone, and he can hear the soft sigh of the air moving, though he can’t feel it move on his skin.
After a time, Herman pushes himself to a kneeling position. He sits on his heels. Then, a short while later, he stands.
Herman recognizes the tiny room. It’s the elevator in his building. The mirrors all around reflect a version of himself, ever shrinking in every direction into an emerald-tinged infinity. He thinks for a minute to try to count how many Hermans are reflected but deems the task too monumental and entirely pointless.
Infinity is infinity, he thinks. It’s not my business to try quantifying it, just to accept it.
The elevator is stationary, so Herman pushes the button to open the doors and they comply.
When he steps out, he sees the big superintendent watering the plants. There’s a patch sewn to the super’s bowling shirt that reads “Jimenez” in a swirly, cursive font.
“Where’s my place?” Herman asks. He decides not to point out the plants the man waters are fake.
“Use the stairs, kid. Elevator’s broke,” Jimenez tells him, a look of confusion crossing his face.
Herman looks around and realizes he’s still on the main floor of the Seville on Roxy. He makes his way across the lobby to the staircase.
The first fragments of the trauma that caused his blackout begin to return. Nothing concrete, nothing in sequence, just the feeling that something is very wrong. He pushes his way through the stairwell door and starts to ascend. His steps turn into a lope, which turn into a flat-out sprint as each memory starts layering upon the previous one.
10
In Which We Rejoin Ian the Goldfish in His Perilous Plunge That Has Yet to Begin
Like an angel thrust down from heaven, like a meteorite rocketing through the troposphere, we left Ian a few hundred feet in the air, two floors down from where he once resided in the fishbowl on the balcony and twenty-five floors up from the sun-warmed, impossibly hard concrete of the sidewalk that runs in front of the Seville on Roxy.
“Now, what was I doing? Oh my, I can’t breathe. Oh shit, I’m falling off a high-rise! Now … what was I doing?”
For as long as he can remember, Ian has yearned for freedom. As previously discussed, Ian is equipped with a goldfish brain and “as long as he can remember” covers a slender ribbon spanning only a fraction of a second. That being said, the desire for freedom is always there, suggesting it is deeper than a memory. It’s embedded under his orange scales, residing deep in his cold, pink flesh and comprising an important facet of his essential character. Like dogs chase cats, like cats chase birds, fish long to fall. It’s an instinct so deep in the roots of Ian’s family tree that all goldfish have this yearning encoded by some long-ago ancestor.
Indeed, this need to move and explore new territory has been long entrenched in aquatic animals, and their successes have been documented in hundreds of events where they’ve fallen like heavy raindrops from the sky. There are thousands more such events that have not been witnessed by human eyes. Ian is not aware of this history beyond the drive in his muscles. History to Ian is the fishbowl he just left, the pink plastic castle sitting in the gravel, and his dim-witted, slightly annoying, but mostly lovable bowlmate, Troy the snail.
Regardless of Ian’s perspective on time, from before the advent of the written word, recorded in ocher and charcoal on a cliff face, through the biblical scourges to just last year, there has been a long history of fish raining. It has occurred much too frequently and for far too long to be attributed to chance or fate or freak acts of nature. Be they frogs, toads, fish, or the occasional tentacled cephalopod, aquatic species have it in their nature to fall great distances onto far-flung locales. They often perish in the fall or from lack of water. They have expressed their longing for freedom as individuals, as in
After a time, Herman pushes himself to a kneeling position. He sits on his heels. Then, a short while later, he stands.
Herman recognizes the tiny room. It’s the elevator in his building. The mirrors all around reflect a version of himself, ever shrinking in every direction into an emerald-tinged infinity. He thinks for a minute to try to count how many Hermans are reflected but deems the task too monumental and entirely pointless.
Infinity is infinity, he thinks. It’s not my business to try quantifying it, just to accept it.
The elevator is stationary, so Herman pushes the button to open the doors and they comply.
When he steps out, he sees the big superintendent watering the plants. There’s a patch sewn to the super’s bowling shirt that reads “Jimenez” in a swirly, cursive font.
“Where’s my place?” Herman asks. He decides not to point out the plants the man waters are fake.
“Use the stairs, kid. Elevator’s broke,” Jimenez tells him, a look of confusion crossing his face.
Herman looks around and realizes he’s still on the main floor of the Seville on Roxy. He makes his way across the lobby to the staircase.
The first fragments of the trauma that caused his blackout begin to return. Nothing concrete, nothing in sequence, just the feeling that something is very wrong. He pushes his way through the stairwell door and starts to ascend. His steps turn into a lope, which turn into a flat-out sprint as each memory starts layering upon the previous one.
10
In Which We Rejoin Ian the Goldfish in His Perilous Plunge That Has Yet to Begin
Like an angel thrust down from heaven, like a meteorite rocketing through the troposphere, we left Ian a few hundred feet in the air, two floors down from where he once resided in the fishbowl on the balcony and twenty-five floors up from the sun-warmed, impossibly hard concrete of the sidewalk that runs in front of the Seville on Roxy.
“Now, what was I doing? Oh my, I can’t breathe. Oh shit, I’m falling off a high-rise! Now … what was I doing?”
For as long as he can remember, Ian has yearned for freedom. As previously discussed, Ian is equipped with a goldfish brain and “as long as he can remember” covers a slender ribbon spanning only a fraction of a second. That being said, the desire for freedom is always there, suggesting it is deeper than a memory. It’s embedded under his orange scales, residing deep in his cold, pink flesh and comprising an important facet of his essential character. Like dogs chase cats, like cats chase birds, fish long to fall. It’s an instinct so deep in the roots of Ian’s family tree that all goldfish have this yearning encoded by some long-ago ancestor.
Indeed, this need to move and explore new territory has been long entrenched in aquatic animals, and their successes have been documented in hundreds of events where they’ve fallen like heavy raindrops from the sky. There are thousands more such events that have not been witnessed by human eyes. Ian is not aware of this history beyond the drive in his muscles. History to Ian is the fishbowl he just left, the pink plastic castle sitting in the gravel, and his dim-witted, slightly annoying, but mostly lovable bowlmate, Troy the snail.
Regardless of Ian’s perspective on time, from before the advent of the written word, recorded in ocher and charcoal on a cliff face, through the biblical scourges to just last year, there has been a long history of fish raining. It has occurred much too frequently and for far too long to be attributed to chance or fate or freak acts of nature. Be they frogs, toads, fish, or the occasional tentacled cephalopod, aquatic species have it in their nature to fall great distances onto far-flung locales. They often perish in the fall or from lack of water. They have expressed their longing for freedom as individuals, as in
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