We Live in Water by Jess Walter Page B

pole. Ken cast it.
    Half-hour later, Ken reeled in a dull catfish, yellow-eyed and spiny. No fight in it. Almost like it didn’t mind.
    Ken held it up. —Well I will be got-damned.
    Tommy released the fish. It just sort of sank.
    He dropped the old man at the front gate of the prison, his breathing already shallow. Rusty. He was so weak Tommy had to reach over and pop his door again.
    —Hey that wadn’t a bad got-damn fish. All things considered. His eyes were filming over already. —We should go again Tuesday.
    —We gonna start playin’ catch now, too? Tommy asked.
    Ken laughed.
    Tommy watched the old man pass through the metal gate. The fucker.

Virgo
    YOU ALL SAY the same thing. You suits, you cops, you shrinks, you all sound alike: tell us what happened. Give us your side of the story. My side of the story. My side. As if truth were a box that you could flip over when you want another side, another version. Well, there are no sides, no box, maybe no truth.
    You don’t really want my side of the story. You don’t want to understand me, know me, to crawl inside my head. You don’t want to feel the things I’ve felt. You just want to know that one thing: why.
    Fine. Here’s why: Her. I did it all for her.
    THIS ALL began in late October. We’d had the same old fight, with the same stale grievances Tanya had been lobbing at me for three months, almost since the day I moved in: Blah, blah, stalled relationship; blah, blah, stunted growth; blah, blah, I worry that you’re a psychopath .
    I said I’d try harder, but she was in a mood: “No, Trent. I want you out of here. Now.” So I gathered my things. Four loads of clothes, shoes, CDs, action figures, and trading cards I carried to my car. I was about to drive away when I saw . . . him. Mark Aikens, Tanya’s missing-link ex-boyfriend, was loping up Twenty-first like some kind of predator, like a fat coyote talking on a cell phone. She had moved to Portland for this loser, even though she made twice as much as he did. She requested a transfer from the Palo Alto software company where she worked and found a small condo in the Pearl District, but she wasn’t in town six months before he’d slept with someone else and she tossed him out. Mark Aikens was a cheating shit.
    He swung around a light pole and skipped up the steps of our old building. She buzzed him up. Mark Aikens was a sous chef at Il Pattio, one of those jerkoffs who acts like cooking is an art. She always said he was sensitive, a good listener. Now he was up in our old condo, listening his sensitive, cheating ass off. For two hours I sat in my car down the block while this guy . . . listened. It grew dark outside. From the street, our condo glowed. I knew exactly which light was on—the upright living room lamp. She got it at Pottery Barn. Through our old third-floor corner window I could see shadows move across the ceiling from that light and I tried to imagine what was happening by the subtle changes in cast: She’s going to the kitchen to get him a beer; he’s going to the bathroom. How many fall nights had I snuck home early from work and looked up to see the glow from that very light? It had been my comfort.
    But now that light felt unbearably cold and far away, like an astronomer’s faint discovery, a flicker from across the universe and the icy beginning of time. I might have gone crazy had I stared at that light much longer. In fact, I’d just decided to ring the buzzer and run when the unimaginable happened.
    The light went out.
    I sat there, breathless, waiting for Mark Aikens to come down. But he didn’t. My eyes shot to the bedroom window. Also dark. That meant she was . . . they were . . .
    I tooled around the Pearl having conversations with her in my head, begging, yelling, until finally I crossed the bridge and drove toward my father’s little duplex in Northeast. I parked on the dirt strip in front and beat on his door. I could hear him clumping around inside. My dad had lost